Deception

by Claire Lorrimer

Genres: Romance

Synopsis

Charlotte had resigned herself to a life of poverty and drudgery in London after her father's imprisonment for fraud. But then Charlotte's childhood friend, Verity Conniston, rescues her from her miserable London existence and takes her to live on the beautiful Conniston estate. How long can this idyllic life last before her family's past returns to haunt her? Perhaps there are still some dreams that she can never hope to come true.

Release date: February 13, 2014

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 256

Sample

1882

The oil lamp on the leather-topped desk had been turned down. Half a dozen sealed letters ready for posting were propped up in the letter rack. In the semi-darkness Charlotte could see the figure of her father hunched over the blotter. The silence was palpable, broken suddenly by the bracket clock on the mantelshelf striking twice. Filled with a nameless anxiety, she raised the skirt of her white ballgown and took a step forward.

‘Papa! Are you asleep? Are you ill?’

Horatio Wyndham’s head rose sharply as his hands shot forward to cover the object in front of him. He turned in horror to look at the unexpected figure of his seventeen-year-old daughter.

‘Charlotte! What are you doing here? You should be in bed.’ His voice was hoarse, barely audible.

‘I have only just returned from the ball, Papa. When Thomas told me you were still up, I came to say goodnight.’

As Charlotte took another step towards him, his hands rose as if to ward her off and now she could see what they had been concealing. Her anxiety intensified as she caught sight of the small, engraved gold-plated pistol her father had bought to protect himself against thieves when he travelled.

‘Papa? Has there been an intruder? You’re not hurt, are you?’

She hurried across the room to his chair and her eye caught sight of the writing on the envelope propped up in front of him.

LAST WILL & TESTAMENT

of

HORATIO DARIUS WYNDHAM

 

It was a full minute before the significance of the official-looking document filled her with an icy feeling of fear. The lateness of the hour, the darkness of the room, the empty brandy decanter, the letters – and not least the pistol which he had attempted to conceal – left her in little doubt about his intentions.

‘Oh, Papa, tell me you were not …’ She broke off, unable to voice the degree of consternation that was causing her to tremble violently. She tried to disbelieve the evidence of her own eyes but was unable to do so. The father she adored, revered above all others, who was the most important person in the world to her, had been on the point of ending his life.

‘No, Papa, no!’ she whispered.

With a strangled cry, Horatio Wyndham turned his head and buried his face in his daughter’s skirts. To her horror she felt and heard his sobs, tearing from his throat in great, painful gasps. Charlotte felt an urgent longing to question him but instinctively she knew she must let this storm of weeping pass.

Perhaps, she thought, he’d had bad news from the doctor about her mother, who had been a semi-invalid for many years now. Charlotte knew how much her father loved his wife. Were her mother to die, he would be broken-hearted. That could be the only feasible explanation for his behaviour – that his burden of grief had become too much for him and he intended to take his own life. It was the only explanation for his tears.

Her mind working furiously, Charlotte found her own explanation hard to believe. Even had her father been out of his mind with grief, surely he would not have departed this world leaving her mother and herself alone and unprotected? There were few Wyndham relatives surviving and those who did lived in remote parts of the Empire.

Although now and again Horatio Wyndham still choked on his tears, he began to recover himself and, pulling a handkerchief from his pocket, he dabbed furiously at his eyes and cheeks.

‘Forgive me, my darling. The last thing in the world I wanted was for you … for you to know what kind of man I really am. One of my great joys in life has been to bask in your total belief in me as a good and honourable person …’

‘Which indeed you are – and always will be, Papa!’ Charlotte cried, close to tears herself, so shocked was she by her father’s emotional outburst.

‘No, my darling, I am afraid that’s not so.’

The colour flared in Charlotte’s cheeks. ‘I shall never believe otherwise!’ she declared, bending over to hug him.

The man gave a long, shuddering sigh. ‘Then I am obliged to disabuse you, my darling child. I had hoped … Somehow I had hoped that … that you and your mother … that if I were to end my life, you and your mother would be spared the disgrace. Charlotte, dear child, even now I cannot bring myself to tell you.’

For a moment Charlotte was totally silenced by the implication of his stuttered sentence. If I were to end my life. Horrified by the realization that, but for her timely intervention her father had indeed intended to kill himself, she held him even more tightly in her embrace.

‘You must tell me what is wrong, Papa. I’m not a child any longer. Whatever has happened, I will help you put it right. You have always taught me that if wrongdoing is freely admitted, then it can be rectified.’

‘Oh Charlotte, my darling, I wish that were always true!’ he said as he rose wearily from his chair and led her over to the leather-covered sofa by the window. He took her warm hand and held it between his own cold ones as if to draw heat from her. Exhausted as he was, he knew deep in his heart that he should not burden this young girl with his confession. Yet part of him longed to explain to one other human being why he must, for his family’s sake, take his own life. He did not want people to think he died a coward. Somehow, he must make Charlotte understand that for him to die was the only way left for him to protect her and her mother.

It had been close to midnight when he had realized that this was the only possible solution to the terrible mess he had made of his life. His butler, Thomas, had brought him his usual brandy nightcap and, due to his feelings of utter helplessness, he had probably overindulged. He had completely forgotten that, far from having retired for the night, his daughter was attending the last of the Season’s balls with her friend, Verity, chaperoned by her mother, Madame Duprés. When writing his farewell letters to his wife, his solicitor and other associates, and when taking the pistol from the drawer of his desk, the very last person he’d thought might interrupt him at two in the morning was his beloved only daughter. Owing to his wife’s invalidity, he had been both mother and father to Charlotte. He had raised her more as a son than a daughter, as a result of which she was not only gentle, sweet-natured and intelligent, but also courageous, resourceful and unusually self-sufficient. Not only did she resemble him in looks, but they were also as close as any two companions could be. He loved her very dearly and the thought of falling from the pinnacle she had put him on appalled him anew.

‘Papa!’ Her voice dragged him back from his thoughts. ‘I will not believe we are unable to put right what is wrong unless you convince me it is hopeless.’

Again, the man drew a deep sigh. ‘Then you have to believe what I tell you, Charlotte. I have stepped a long way down from that pedestal on which you chose to place me. I have committed the error – the total folly – of using the gambling tables in an attempt to regain my former income. It was not insubstantial. My father – your grandfather – had invested nearly all his capital in the railways in the thirties and forties. It kept your mother and me in a very agreeable financial position – one you yourself have enjoyed since birth.’

‘Indeed, yes, Papa. I have lacked for nothing!’ Charlotte murmured.

‘But a year ago, almost overnight, a company I had backed went into receivership and my shares became worthless. Your mother needed constant medical care; you and your little friend, the Duprés child, were planning your coming out the following year; I had a mountain of minor debts piling up – the new brougham as yet unpaid for, my tailor, repairs made to the roof the previous winter, new carpeting your mother wanted for the stairs … Endless bills, Charlotte, which I just could not pay.’

He stood up and began to pace back and forth, his words pouring from his lips as if he could no longer control them, or as if he had forgotten the listener was his young, innocent daughter.

‘Sometimes – very rarely – I won at the gaming tables. That gave me hope for the next time I played. But the more I needed to win, the less I did. I became worried lest my friends began to suspect the trouble I was in. Then, three months ago, I persuaded the bank to increase my loan, although that only half solved my financial problems. For hours, days on end, I tried to think of some other way to raise funds. I knew how shocked and horrified your mother would be if she knew of my debts. Finally I decided that we must go abroad – Switzerland, perhaps, or Austria – so I could find cheap lodgings and we could avoid the social disgrace of my bankruptcy which would so distress her. I would go before your season started, arrange to sell the house to pay off as many as possible of the remaining debts, and we would move at the end of your Season.’

‘Oh, Papa, surely you knew I would not have had a Season at all had I been aware of your financial troubles?’

He paused to give her a sad smile. ‘I don’t doubt you would have forgone it, my darling, but I wanted you to have this last chance of fun, dances and outings, for I knew your future abroad would lack all those things.’

‘So did you find somewhere for us to go?’ Charlotte asked, forgetting for the moment what she had seen on her father’s desk.

He shook his head. ‘You may recall that in March I was supposed to have gone on a business trip lasting three weeks? And that I returned within one? Like every other mistake I had made, I now compounded my gambling follies. On the train travelling through France to Switzerland, I met a fellow traveller – a charming American who was seated at a table playing patience. We exchanged greetings and, to my subsequent downfall, he enquired if I played any card games – vingt-et-un, bezique – and before long we were, by agreement, playing for quite high stakes. I thought if I could only win … but that is the downfall of all gamblers. Before my companion and I reached the frontier, I had lost all that I had with me. I no longer had the means to pay a deposit on whatever lodgings I might have found for us in Austria.’ He sat down heavily beside Charlotte and buried his head in his hands. ‘You see now how weak your father is, Charlotte. I should have stopped playing, or indeed, have refused to play at all. But I convinced myself my luck would change, instead of which I lost everything. So I offered my new acquaintance a promissory note, which I had no right to do as I had no means of honouring it.’

He now looked directly at Charlotte, hollow-eyed, his face haggard as he continued his confession. ‘Quite naturally, my companion asked in the politest fashion for some proof of recognition. I was, after all, a total stranger to him. In my card case I had a number of my own visiting cards and was on the point of withdrawing one when another card slipped out. It was that of a London businessman I had met on the ferry – no one I knew – but he was a genial fellow who advised me he was chairman of a shipping line, and he had given me his card. I don’t know what overcame me, Charlotte, but God forgive me – I didn’t even hesitate – I handed my American travelling companion this fellow’s card. He never doubted it was mine and we continued playing for a further two hours. By that time I had to write him another IOU for a thousand pounds.’

‘Oh, Papa!’ Charlotte whispered. She was deeply shocked, as much by this confession of her father’s weakness of character as by the extent of his debt and his terrible predicament. ‘So you came straight home?’ she whispered. Her father nodded. ‘I had my return ticket, which was as well since I did not even have a sovereign to pay for a meal. It was during the journey home that I realized the enormity of what I had done – I had committed fraud. That is a criminal offence, Charlotte. I could only pray that when presented with my promissory notes, the chairman would not remember to whom he had so recently given his card.’

‘Could you not have gone to see him?’ Charlotte asked. ‘You could have paid him back the money—’

‘With what?’ her father broke in. ‘In any event, the American had already discovered who I was. When we disembarked from the train at Geneva he had noticed the label on my valise and, although his suspicions were aroused, he said nothing to me at the time. A week or two later when the promissory notes were presented to and disclaimed by the chairman he put two and two together and at once wrote to me. A week ago, I received his second letter saying that unless I returned the full amount I owed him, he would hand the matter over to the law.’

He drew a long shuddering breath as he relived the horror of the situation. ‘As you know, I could not repay what I owed. I was already hopelessly overdrawn at the bank, who were threatening to bankrupt me. It was the end of the road, Charlotte. All I wanted was for you to complete your Season, as you have done tonight. Yesterday I signed the sale documents for the furniture and furnishings. I have enough money put by for you to pay off the staff and buy passage abroad for you and your mother after I am gone. It’s not much, I know, but your mother does have the few bonds her father left her, and some valuable jewellery. I …’

‘Papa! What are you saying?’ Charlotte stood up, the colour flaring in her cheeks. ‘You can’t really believe Mama and I would go abroad without you?’ She broke off, the truth suddenly smiting her like a physical blow. It was true. Her father had been and was still intending to kill himself; that was why he had the pistol. But for her unexpected entry to bid him goodnight he might now be lying across his desk, beyond hope. ‘I don’t believe you really think this mad scheme would solve all your problems, Papa,’ she said, not angrily but firmly. ‘Do you honestly think it would help us for you to have … to have taken such a way out? What would Mama have felt? What would I? The staff? Our friends?’

Once more, Horatio Wyndham drew his daughter back to the sofa and imprisoned her hands. ‘You have still not understood, child. It is no longer just the disgrace of my bankruptcy. It is only a matter of time before my criminal action becomes known – if not immediately, then when I am summoned to court for my trial. I will be found guilty and I will be sent to prison. I happen to know that, although in normal circumstances ordinary debtors are not sent to prison these days, my offence is not my indebtedness but the crime of fraud. What do you think that would do to your mother, Charlotte? To you?’

‘Anything would be better than you leaving us in such a manner!’ Charlotte cried emphatically. ‘Mama would say the same. You cannot do this, Papa. I won’t allow it. Mama and I will face whatever is to come. If you have to go to prison, I will look after her. I will find work. There must be something I can do to earn money.’

Her father’s face was a picture of abject misery. ‘My darling, you know little of the world outside your home. You are not trained for work; nor accustomed to hardship, poverty. Don’t you see, if I die by my own hand there will have to be a coroner’s report, but there would be no case against me for fraud; no reportage since I am neither titled nor famous. A dead man is not answerable for the crime of fraud, and if you and your mother went away immediately after my funeral, it would be thought that you had left as a result of my sudden death.’

Charlotte stood up, her cheeks bright with angry red splotches, her eyes flashing. ‘Then you should understand this, Papa. For you to shoot yourself would be the action of a coward – it would be escaping. Even were you imprisoned, don’t you think Mama and I would prefer that to being in this world without you? Well, I for one would never revere you again; nor would I believe that you had any faith in me. If you did, you would know that if you were imprisoned, somehow I would find a way to take care of Mama as well as myself. If you went to prison I would visit you there. As for society, if Mama and I left London I think it highly unlikely our friends would feel more than a moment or two’s curiosity as to where we had gone. Perhaps the members of your club …’

‘No, not them. I resigned my membership as soon as I realized I was virtually bankrupt.’

Charlotte nodded. ‘Then that leaves only the Duprés family, who might well have searched for me but, as you know, Monsieur and Madame Duprés are leaving for Canada shortly. My dearest friend, Verity, and her fiancé, Guy Conniston, will be going there on honeymoon after their wedding. Even were you to be sent to prison for fraud, Papa, I doubt our small family is of such importance that the daily journals will give much reportage to your trial.’

She paused to place her hands on his shoulders and forced him to look at her before she continued in a low, intense tone of voice. ‘Papa, you must listen to me. I may only be seventeen but I am in good health and do not lack for confidence or determination. You must promise me upon your solemn oath that you will not carry out such a dreadful deed, for that and that alone would have the power to ruin the rest of my life, if not Mama’s, too. If you died in such a fashion, I should never recover from it; if you go to prison, then I shall know that you have not lacked for courage after all.’

Overcome with emotion, Horatio Wyndham sat motionless as he watched his young daughter walk across the room to the desk. Carefully, she picked up the pistol and put it in the empty drawer. Without turning to look at him, she locked it, opened the window and threw the small brass key out into the night where it vanished in the dark shadows of the trees.

January 1887

Madame Hortense ran a perfectly manicured finger down the page of her appointments book and smiled at the young girl waiting patiently beside her. ‘My next client will not be here until three o’clock, Charlotte, so if you are agreeable, my dear, we will go through to the showroom. I have a small favour to ask of you.’

‘Of course, Madame! I am in no hurry!’

Nevertheless, as Charlotte followed her employer from the workshop to the elegant salon that fronted Madame Hortense’s exclusive dressmaking premises in Hill Street, Mayfair, she hoped the favour would indeed be a small one and not take up too much of her precious time. At home there was a large pile of sewing that must be completed before the weekend, quite apart from the three gowns she now carried which Madame Hortense wanted within one week ‘at the very latest’. One beautiful satin ballgown needed only a hem of pleated flounces lifted, but the circumference of the garment was twelve yards and the material slippery to handle, thus requiring more time than might at first seem necessary.

Not that Charlotte was complaining. She needed the work and considered she had been extremely fortunate to be given regular employment by the woman who had once made gowns for her late mother and for Charlotte herself. When financial misfortune had overtaken her family five years previously, Charlotte had no single qualification which would enable a seventeen-year-old girl of her upbringing to earn a living. Even had she been considered old enough to be a governess she could not have left her mother, who had been a semi-invalid and unable to leave their spartan lodgings. Fortunately for Charlotte, her childhood French governess had taught her to emulate her own talent for exquisite needlework, if little else in the academic line, and now Charlotte was continuing to survive albeit in impecunious circumstances.

For the first two years of her father’s imprisonment for fraud, she and her mother had just about managed to exist on her mother’s meagre inheritance. The increasing medical bills as her mother’s health deteriorated had been met by the sale of her jewellery. Her own limited earnings from taking in sewing paid for little but her cab visits to Pentonville prison to visit her father, and for the gifts of food and tobacco she had determined to take him. Ill though she could afford such tiny luxuries, and limited as they were, she knew it gave him the comforting illusion that his wife and daughter were not entirely penniless.

When he was released and discovered the true extent of their poverty, he tried without success to find work. His wife’s health finally failed and when she died, he, too, lost the will to live and succumbed to the influenza epidemic the following winter.

Now alone in the world and without even her mother’s legacy, which had ceased on her death, Charlotte moved to even cheaper lodgings in Clerkenwell and managed to obtain more regular work by taking in sewing from the couturier in Hill Street known as the Maison Hortense. It was to this establishment she had just returned with finished garments and to collect some of the work which always awaited her.

As she and Madame Hortense entered the salon, Charlotte’s eyes were drawn to a beautiful bronze velvet and silk evening gown spread out over the chaise longue.

‘What a lovely dress!’ she cried out involuntarily, unable to hide the wistful note of longing in her voice. It was not so very many years since she might have had such a dress made for herself and she knew it would become her wonderfully well with her russet-coloured hair and hazel brown eyes.

Madame Hortense looked pleased by her praise. ‘I thought you would like it, my dear!’ she said. ‘Which brings me to that little favour I asked you to grant me. Would you consider wearing that dress for a short while? That is to say, when my client arrives? I am well aware that it would not normally be your wish to model a gown for … well, for a young lady such as you once were, if you understand my meaning. But as it happens, I made this dress for Lady Hermitage using the very best silk velvet, and to this somewhat unusual design that her ladyship professed she wanted. Yesterday she came for a final fitting and, to my dismay, decided that it was a great mistake; that the colour did not suit her and – to put it in a nutshell – she no longer wanted it.’ She sniffed disapprovingly.

Charlotte’s smooth forehead creased into a frown. ‘But that is unethical, surely, Madame? Did she not offer to recompense you, at least for the material?’

The dressmaker drew a deep sigh, her ample bosom lifting and falling beneath her black bombazine dress. ‘I regret to say I have had to learn in the course of my life not to take ethical behaviour by aristocrats as a matter of course, my dear. I sometimes wonder if it ever enters the heads of such wealthy people that there are others to whom a few guineas are the difference between survival and penury! No doubt you, poor child, understand only too well what I am talking about. However, let us not dwell on the vagaries of the rich. What I am hoping is that my next client will be persuaded to buy the gown even though it was not designed for her. I think it will suit you to perfection, and seen with life and movement the colour and material will be much enhanced. Would you do this for me, my dear?’

Charlotte let out the breath that she had only just realized she had been holding. To act as a model did not seem too difficult a task, and as for the social implications, she had long since given up any pretence to being a young lady of ‘good’ family. She was now nothing more than a working girl, no different from any of the other seamstresses Madame Hortense employed.

The last five years had taught her many things, not least that she could no longer hope to have a husband and children and the security of a suitable marriage. No man of good family would consider marrying her, even were she to meet such a person in her present surroundings. The most she could aspire to in the future, she had realized, was to save enough money to open her own dressmaking establishment. To this end she sometimes managed to save a shilling or even two in a week. Madame Hortense was a not ungenerous employer and she, Charlotte, was pleased to have an opportunity to do her this favour costing no more than a few minutes of her time.

Madame was delighted to hear it and beamed at Charlotte as, behind the Chinese screen she helped her to remove her plain grey wool dress and ease the soft bronze velvet gown over her head.

‘I have here some amber beads for you to wear,’ the dressmaker told Charlotte. ‘How well the dress fits you, my dear! You look quite lovely in it!’

For a moment, the older woman felt choked by a variety of unexpected emotions. Born plain Doris Briggs and raised in the east end of London, she had dragged herself out of the slums and, over three decades, had transformed the Cockney girl she had been into a ‘French’ couturier patronized by the rich and titled. Years ago, Charlotte’s mother had ordered clothes from her and had sometimes brought her pretty little dark-haired daughter along to the fittings. These last few years, seeing Charlotte in her drab, patched garments, her fingers pricked by needles and her face thin, white and drawn with fatigue, Doris had more or less forgotten Charlotte’s upper class origins and treated her as the working girl she had perforce become. Now, seeing Charlotte standing there, cool, poised, elegant in the bronze gown, Doris Briggs was filled both with admiration and pity, for was this young woman not the very opposite of herself?

‘Stand just there so that the back of the gown can be seen as well as the front,’ she said, rearranging the shining pleated chignon and black bow holding back Charlotte’s hair. ‘It is a pity you are so pale, but never mind! The overall effect is enchanting. There is no need for you to talk, my dear. I will handle the client myself. You can give a half smile, perhaps, as if to indicate that you are happy with the way the dress becomes you!’

‘Indeed, I am quite overcome, Madame!’ Charlotte said, smiling. ‘I have not worn anything so beautiful in a long while. I am sure you—’

She broke off as the jangle of the doorbell interrupted her. A moment later, Madame’s maid opened the door of the salon. ‘Mrs Conniston, Madame,’ she announced, ‘for her three o’clock appointment.’

Madame Hortense swept forward, her bulk hiding the new arrival from Charlotte’s gaze. ‘Dear Mrs Conniston!’ she said in her best French accent. ‘Enchantée de vous voir.’ She dismissed the maid and took the client’s fur-trimmed dolman, hat and gloves. As she put them on the gilt chair beside the door, Charlotte and the newcomer were suddenly brought face to face.

‘Charlotte! Can it really be you? Oh, my dearest, dearest friend. What a wonderful surprise!’

Wordless, Charlotte stared at the young woman in front of her. Her first thought was that Verity Duprés had hardly changed at all from the golden-haired, violet-eyed, sweet-natured friend of her teenage years. She was exquisitely dressed in a gown of pale blue silk. It had an elaborately pleated and frilled overskirt in a deeper shade of blue. As well as the diamond rings on her fingers, there was a silver filigree locket round her neck. Her hair was dressed fashionably high in a looped pleat.

Impulsively, Verity Conniston stepped forward and flung her arms around Charlotte’s waist. ‘I’m so very happy to have found you, dearest, after all this time!’ she cried, planting moist kisses on Charlo. . .