Louise Allen - Regency Pleasures and Sins Part 1

‘How can we be?’ Somehow she could not get to her feet, her knees felt like jelly. She stayed there by his side, the wetness from his tears soaking the front of her old blue dimity gown. ‘You said you had won at the races, you said you had won at cards and we could pay off that money you borrowed and everything would be all right.’

He buried his face in his hands. She caught the muffled words, ‘Lost it again. Payment due.’

‘What? All of it?’ Philip was beyond listening to her, so she twisted to look up at Arthur. ‘Arthur, what is he saying?’

‘He went to a new hell in Pickering Place last night. Said I’d meet him there, but by the time I arrived most of the money was gone.’ The young man shot her a look of mingled shame and apology. ‘I couldn’t get him to leave, Katherine, he was drunk as a judge, convinced it would only take one more throw of the bones.’ He bit his lip, his eyes shifting under her horrified gaze. ‘I did get him out eventually, before he actually wrote any vowels.’

‘Small mercy,’ she said bitterly. ‘They would have joined all the other debts and the tradesmen’s bills. But thank you for trying, Arthur. Where have you been today?’

‘To the moneylender, to see if he could get an extension on the loan, some more money. But the old bloodsucker just laughed in his face, said he’d give him two weeks’ grace, then send the bailiffs round.’

‘Merciful heaven.’ Katherine sank back on her heels, her fingers pressed to her lips. ‘Philip!’ She shook his arm. ‘How much do you owe them?’

‘Five,’ he muttered, head averted.

‘Five hundred … Let me think, what is left we can sell …?’

Arthur cleared his throat. ‘Er, no, Katherine. Five thousand.’

The room swam. Surely she had misheard him? ‘Five thousand?’ she whispered. ‘Five thousand pounds?’

Philip nodded mutely.

‘And there are all the other debts and bills.’ Her stomach seemed to have risen so she could not breathe, would be sick at any moment. Katherine gulped air and clenched her hands until the nails bit into her palms. When she could speak, she said flatly, ‘We must sell the house and the furniture, it is all we have left that even approaches that sum.’

‘Can’t.’ The single word was choked out of Philip. Like an old, sick man he dragged himself upright in the chair and passed a trembling hand across his face. ‘I’ve already sold them.’

‘What?’ Arthur’s exclamation cut across hers. ‘You’ve sold the house? How could you do that and Katherine not know?’

‘Did it the month before Christmas when she went to stay with Great-Aunt Gwendoline, just before she died. Waste of time and effort that was,’ he added. ‘Never left us a brass farthing.’

‘Philip, how could you?’ Katherine shook her head, too buffeted at the rest of his news to scold him for his callousness as he deserved.

He shrugged. ‘Anyway, sold it then. And the furniture. Man I sold it to agreed to rent it back furnished. I paid off the worst of my gaming debts and kept some back for the rent, but that’s gone now too.’

Katherine tried to get to her feet and found Arthur’s hand under her elbow. ‘Here, better sit down. Shall I ring for some tea?’

‘Yes, thank you, Arthur. I think Jenny is in the kitchen.’

They sat in silence, all unable to find words. Mercifully Arthur showed no sign of wanting to leave, although Katherine realised he must wish himself anywhere but in the centre of this family crisis. She shot him a grateful look. Goodness knows how she could cope with Philip without his help.

Jenny, once Katherine’s maid and now, since all but one of the other servants had left, their maid, cook and housekeeper rolled into one, put her head round the door. ‘You rang, Miss Katherine?’ Katherine swallowed, trying to get her tongue around a simple order for refreshment. Jenny took one look at their faces, said simply, ‘Tea. Yes, Miss Katherine', and went out.

The silence stretched on. Philip scrubbed his handkerchief over his face and sat cutting and recutting a pack of cards that lay on his desk. Arthur simply waited, studying his clasped hands, and Katherine forced herself to try and make a plan, find some way out of this trap. But all she could see were doors slamming in her face however much her mind twisted and turned.

Jenny returned with the tea tray, put it down and left. Somehow the simple presence of this symbol of everyday social life woke Katherine from her trance. She poured tea, passed cups, insisted Philip drank, then began to ask the questions that were beating on those locked doors in her mind.

‘What will the moneylender do if you do not repay him?’

‘Send the bailiffs like he threatened,’ Philip said dismally.

‘But there is nothing to take. You say the house and furniture are sold, what is left?’

‘The kitchen utensils, the china and silver, your clothes.’ Arthur spoke when Philip lapsed into silence again.

‘The very clothes off our backs? But none of that will make up five thousand pounds? What can they do?’

‘Debtors’ prison,’ Philip choked out.

‘Prison? No, oh, no, Phil, I cannot bear it if you go to prison!’ Katherine stared white-faced at Arthur. ‘Arthur, you must know how to stop that happening?’

‘Nothing I can do.’ He shook his head. ‘And the moneylenders will soon find out who else money is owed to. They’ll all see to it that it’ll be prison until the debt is paid in full. They have a perfect right to do it.’

‘But how can Arthur earn money to pay off the debt if he is in prison? And nothing I can do could ever hope to approach that amount.’ Katherine felt sick again, sick and despairing. Then the quality of the silence that filled the room penetrated her frantic thoughts. ‘What is it?’ she demanded of the two young men. ‘What are you not telling me? What can be worse than Philip going to prison?’

Philip buried his face in his hands again, tipping over the tea cup so the dregs spilled across the polished wood. Arthur got up and knelt by Katherine’s chair, taking her hands in his. ‘It is not Philip who would go to prison, it is you.’

‘Me? Why should I go to prison?’ It was some ludicrous, ill-timed jest. Some misplaced effort by Arthur to lighten the atmosphere.

‘Because you signed the papers for the loan,’ he said gently.

‘No! I witnessed some papers for Philip, that is all.’ Katherine got to her feet and took two rapid steps across the room. She wanted to wrench open the door and run, but her own reflection in the glass overmantel stopped her dead.

This morning she had got up and dressed in the old dimity gown, which was now still blotched with Philip’s tears. She had arranged her heavy honey blonde hair in a simple knot and spared no more than a glance for her face. Now the big pansy-brown eyes were wide and drenched with unshed tears, her full lower lip caught in her teeth and her heart-shaped face white and strained. She had strayed into a nightmare and the nightmare was real.

Philip stood up and tentatively put his hands on her shoulders. She could see him in the glass; the features that were so feminine in her face merely showed the weakness on his. ‘They would not lend me any more,’ he explained. ‘They seemed to feel you would be more reliable.’

‘You tricked me into signing?’ She spun round so she was facing him, his hands still on her shoulders. ‘You lied to me?’

‘I thought you might not quite like it …’

‘I would have refused and you knew it!’ Katherine had spent much of her twenty-four years excusing her younger brother, picking up after him, managing as best she could on their increasingly straitened means since the death of their parents. She had never let her occasional anger with him overwhelm her affection; now anger surged like a tidal wave, unstoppable.