A Dangerous Fortune (49 page)

Am I just making excuses, he wondered? Is all this no more than a specious justification for giving in to a desire I know to be wrong?

He felt torn in two.

He tried to consider the practicalities. He had no grounds for divorce, but he felt sure that Nora would be willing to divorce him, if she were offered enough money. However, the Pilasters would ask him to resign from the bank: the social stigma of divorce was too great to allow him to continue as a partner. He could get another job but no respectable people in London would entertain him and Maisie as a couple even after they married. They would almost certainly have to go abroad. But that prospect attracted him and he felt it would appeal to Maisie too. He could return to Boston or, better still, go to New York. He might never be a millionaire but what was that balanced against the joy of being with the woman he had always loved?

He found himself outside his own house. It was part of an elegant new red-brick terrace in Kensington, half a mile from his aunt Augusta’s much more extravagant place at Kensington Gore. Nora would be in her overdecorated
bedroom, dressing for lunch. What was to stop him walking in and announcing that he was leaving her?

That was what he wanted to do, he knew that now. But was it right?

It was the child that made the difference. It would be wrong to leave Nora for Maisie; but it was right to leave Nora for the sake of Bertie.

He wondered what Nora would say when he told her, and his imagination gave him the answer. He pictured her face set in lines of hard determination, and he heard the unpleasant edge to her voice, and he could guess the exact words she would use: “It will cost you every penny you’ve got.”

Oddly enough, that decided him. If he had pictured her bursting into tears of sadness he would have been unable to go through with it, but he knew his first intuition was right.

He went into the house and ran up the stairs.

She was in front of the mirror, putting on the pendant he had given her. It was a bitter reminder that he had to buy her jewelry to persuade her to make love.

She spoke before he did. “I’ve got some news,” she said.

“Never mind that now—”

But she would not be put off. She had an odd expression on her face: half triumphant, half sulky. “You’ll have to stay out of my bed for a while, anyway.”

He saw that he was hot going to be allowed to speak until she had had her say. “What on earth are you talking about?” he said impatiently.

“The inevitable has happened.”

Suddenly Hugh guessed. He felt as if he had been hit by a train. It was too late: he could never leave her now. He felt revulsion, and the pain of loss: loss of Maisie, loss of his son.

He looked into her eyes. There was defiance there,
almost as if she had guessed what he had been planning. Perhaps she had.

He forced himself to smile. “The inevitable?”

Then she said it. “I’m going to have a baby.”

 PART III

1890  

 CHAPTER ONE

SEPTEMBER  

1

JOSEPH PILASTER DIED
in September 1890, having been Senior Partner of Pilasters Bank for seventeen years. During that period Britain had grown steadily richer, and so had the Pilasters. They were now almost as rich as the Greenbournes. Joseph’s estate came to more than two million pounds, including his collection of sixty-five antique jeweled snuffboxes—one for each year of his life—which was worth a hundred thousand pounds on its own, and which he left to his son Edward.

All the family kept all their capital invested in the business, which paid them an infallible five percent interest when ordinary depositors were getting about one and a half percent on their money most of the time. The partners got even more. As well as five percent on their invested capital they shared out the profits between them, according to complicated formulas. After a decade of such profit shares, Hugh was halfway to being a millionaire.

On the morning of the funeral Hugh inspected his face in his shaving mirror, looking for signs of mortality. He was thirty-seven years old. His hair was going gray, but the stubble he was scraping off his face was still black. Curly moustaches were fashionable and he wondered whether he should grow one to make himself look younger.

Uncle Joseph had been lucky, Hugh thought. During his tenure as Senior Partner the financial world had been stable. There had been only two minor crises: the failure of the City of Glasgow Bank in 1878 and the crash of the French bank Union Générate in 1882. In both cases the Bank of England had contained the crisis by raising interest rates briefly to six percent, which was still a long way below panic level. In Hugh’s opinion, Uncle Joseph had committed the bank much too heavily to investment in South America—but the crash which Hugh constantly feared had not come, and as far as Uncle Joseph was concerned it now never would. However, having risky investments was like owning a tumbledown house and renting it to tenants: the rent would keep coming in until the very end, but when the house finally fell down there would be no more rent and no more house either. Now that Joseph was gone Hugh wanted to put the bank on a sounder footing by selling or repairing some of those tumbledown South American investments.

When he had washed and shaved he put on his dressing gown and went into Nora’s room. She was expecting him: they always made love on Friday mornings. He had long ago accepted her once-a-week rule. She had become very plump, and her face was rounder than ever, but as a result she had very few lines, and she still looked pretty.

All the same, as he made love to her he closed his eyes and imagined he was with Maisie.

Sometimes he felt like giving up altogether. But these Friday-morning sessions had so far given him three sons whom he loved to distraction: Tobias, named for Hugh’s father; Samuel, for his uncle; and Solomon, for Solly Greenbourne. Toby, the eldest, would start at Windfield School next year. Nora produced babies with little difficulty but once they were born she lost interest in them, and Hugh gave them a lot of attention to compensate for their mother’s coldness.

Hugh’s secret child, Maisie’s son Bertie, now sixteen, had been at Windfield for years, and was a prizewinning scholar and star of the cricket team. Hugh paid his fees, visited the school on Speech Day, and generally acted like a godfather. Perhaps this led a few cynical people to suspect that he was Bertie’s real father. But he had been Solly’s friend, and everyone knew that Solly’s father refused to support the boy, so most people assumed he was simply being generously faithful to the memory of Solly.

As he rolled off Nora she said: “What time is the ceremony?”

“Eleven o’clock at Kensington Methodist Hall. And lunch afterwards at Whitehaven House.”

Hugh and Nora still lived in Kensington, but they had moved to a bigger house when the boys started coming. Hugh had left the choice to Nora, and she had picked a big house in the same ornate, vaguely Flemish style as Augusta’s—a style that had become the height of fashion, or at any rate the height of suburban fashion, since Augusta built her place.

Augusta had never been satisfied with Whitehaven House. She wanted a Piccadilly palace like the Greenbournes. But there was still a measure of Methodist puritanism in the Pilasters, and Joseph had insisted that Whitehaven House was enough luxury for anyone, no matter how rich. Now the house belonged to Edward. Perhaps Augusta would persuade him to sell it and buy her something grander.

When Hugh went down to breakfast his mother was already there. She and Dotty had come up from Folkestone yesterday. Hugh kissed his mother and sat down, and she said without preamble: “Do you think he really loves her, Hugh?”

Hugh did not have to ask whom she was talking about. Dotty, now twenty-three, was engaged to Lord Ipswich, eldest son of the duke of Norwich. Nick Ipswich was heir to a bankrupt dukedom, and Mama was afraid
he only wanted Dotty for her money, or rather her brother’s money.

Hugh looked fondly at his mother. She still wore black, twenty-four years after the death of his father. Her hair was now white, but in his eyes she was as beautiful as ever. “He loves her, Mama,” he said.

As Dotty did not have a father, Nick had come to Hugh to ask formal permission to marry her. In such cases it was usual for the lawyers on both sides to draw up the marriage settlement before the engagement was confirmed, but Nick had insisted on doing things the other way around. “I’ve told Miss Pilaster that I’m a poor man,” he had said to Hugh. “She says she has known both affluence and poverty, and she thinks happiness comes from the people you are with, not the money you have.” It was all very idealistic, and Hugh would certainly give his sister a generous dowry; but he was happy to know that Nick genuinely loved her for richer or poorer.

Augusta was enraged that Dotty was marrying so well. When Nick’s father died, Dotty would be a duchess, which was far superior to a countess.

Dotty came down a few minutes later. She had grown up in a way Hugh would never have expected. The shy, giggly little girl had become a sultry woman, dark-haired and sensual, strong-willed and quick-tempered. Hugh guessed that quite a lot of young men were intimidated by her, which was probably why she had reached the age of twenty-three without getting married. But Nick Ipswich had a quiet strength that did not need the prop of a compliant wife. Hugh thought they would have a passionate, quarrelsome marriage, quite the opposite of his own.

Nick called, by appointment, at ten, while they were still sitting around the breakfast table. Hugh had asked him to come. Nick sat next to Dotty and took a cup of coffee. He was an intelligent young man, twenty-two years old, just down from Oxford where, unlike most
young aristocrats, he had actually sat examinations and got a degree. He had typically English good looks, fair hair and blue eyes and regular features, and Dotty looked at him as if she wanted to eat him with a spoon. Hugh envied their simple, lustful love.

Hugh felt too young to be playing the role of head of the family, but he had asked for this meeting, so he plunged right in. “Dotty, your fiance and I have had several long discussions about money.”

Mama got up to leave, but Hugh stopped her. “Women are supposed to understand money nowadays, Mama—it’s the modern way.” She smiled at him as if he were being a foolish boy, but she sat down again.

Hugh went on: “As you all know, Nick had been planning a professional career, and thinking of reading for the bar, as the dukedom no longer provides a living.” As a banker Hugh understood exactly how Nick’s father had lost everything. The duke had been a progressive landowner, and in the agricultural boom of the midcentury he had borrowed money to finance improvements: drainage schemes, the grubbing up of miles of hedges, and expensive steam-powered machinery for threshing, mowing and reaping. Then in the 1870s had come the great agricultural depression which was still going on now in 1890. The price of farmland had slumped and the duke’s lands were worth less than the mortgages he had taken on them.

“However, if Nick could get rid of the mortgages that hang around his neck, and rationalize the dukedom, it could still generate a very considerable income. It just needs to be managed well, like any enterprise.”

Nick added: “I’m going to sell quite a lot of outlying farms and miscellaneous property, and concentrate on making the most of what’s left. And I’m going to build houses on the land we own at Sydenham in south London.”

Hugh said: “We’ve worked out that the finances of
the dukedom can be transformed, permanently, with about a hundred thousand pounds. So that is what I’m going to give you as a dowry.”

Dotty gasped, and Mama burst into tears. Nick, who had known the figure in advance, said: “It is remarkably generous of you.” Dotty threw her arms around her fiance and kissed him, then came around the table and kissed Hugh. Hugh felt a little awkward, but all the same he was glad to be able to make them so happy. And he was confident that Nick would use the money well and provide a secure home for Dotty.

Nora came down dressed for the funeral in purple-and-black bombazine. She had taken breakfast in her room, as always. “Where are those boys?” she said irritably, looking at the clock. “I told that wretched governess to have them ready—”

She was interrupted by the arrival of the governess and the children: eleven-year-old Toby; Sam, who was six; and Sol, four. They were all in black morning coats and black ties and carried miniature top hats. Hugh felt a glow of pride. “My little soldiers,” he said. “What was the Bank of England’s discount rate last night, Toby?”

“Unchanged at two and a half percent, sir,” said Tobias, who had to look it up in
The Times
every morning.

Sam, the middle one, was bursting with news. “Mamma, I’ve got a pet,” he said excitedly.

The governess looked anxious. “You didn’t tell me….”

Sam took a matchbox from his pocket, held it out to his mother, and opened it. “Bill the spider!” he said proudly.

Nora screamed, knocked the box from his hand, and jumped away. “Horrible boy!” she yelled.

Sam scrabbled on the floor for the box. “Bill’s gone!” he cried, and burst into tears.

Nora turned on the governess. “How could you let him do such a thing!” she yelled.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know—”

Hugh intervened. “There’s no harm done,” he said, trying to cool the temperature. He put an arm around Nora’s shoulders. “You were taken by surprise, that’s all.” He ushered her out into the hall. “Come on, everyone, it’s time to leave.”

As they left the house he put a hand on Sam’s shoulder. “Now, Sam, I hope you’ve learned that you must always take care not to frighten ladies.”

“I lost my pet,” Sam said miserably.

“Spiders don’t really like living in matchboxes anyway. Perhaps you should have a different kind of pet. What about a canary?”

He brightened immediately. “Could I?”

“You’d have to make sure it was fed and watered regularly, or it would die.”