Lady of Fortune (28 page)

‘But you have to tell me! How can I help you if you won't tell me?'

Fiona Watson took out a small lace handkerchief and delicately wiped at her nose. ‘Effie,' she said, ‘it's nothing that you can do anything about. I know how much you enjoy meddling in other people's affairs. But this can only be solved by Jamie and myself, and nobody else. We were aware of the risks we were taking when we first started walking out together, and now we have to face up to what we've done.'

She lowered her head. The sun, brimming from a half-open window on the corner of Lothian Road, blurred the silhouette of her face, and glittered in the agates that depended from her earrings as if they were crystallised tears. Effie suddenly realised how quiet it was, here in Edinburgh, with nothing but the grating of the carriage-wheels, and the brisk clipping of the horses.

‘Father's not found out?' asked Effie.

‘No, but that's the threat. It's young Gavin McFee. You remember the boy we met when you went visiting with me and Jamie to the Lands? Yes, that crowlin' billie. Well, he's been threatening to tell your father, unless he's paid a pound every week, and he warns that it soon may be two.'

‘But that's
blackmail
,' said Effie. ‘Surely you can have him arrested?'

‘And have to reveal my liaison with Jamie McFarlane to everybody in Edinburgh society? I couldn't do it. Not to myself, not to your father, not to you. We may get rid of Gavin McFee, but at what a price! Your father's bank would probably collapse, and Jamie would lose his job, and none of my friends would ever speak to me again.'

‘You care so much for those things?' asked Effie. ‘Even more than you care for yourself?'

Fiona stroked her daughter's hair. ‘When I was your age, and unattached, I might not have cared at all, either about money or about myself. Of course, when you're so young, you can never tell what love is really going to be like. You can start off by not caring for a boy in the slightest, and then
suddenly find one morning that you wake up, and you can't see enough of him, if there are twenty-five hours in the day. Jamie's so different. He's kind, and humorous, and bright. I should have married him, or somebody very much like him; but I didn't, and what I have to do is to protect what I have, and those who depend on me. I'm in love, but I don't want your father's bank to collapse because of that love. Nor do I wish to see Jamie out on the street, looking for a job as a social worker. And most of all, I don't want to lose my friends, which I most certainly would do if this affair were to be declared public.'

There was a long silence between them as the coach turned into Charlotte Square. ‘Are you going to go on paying the money?' asked Effie. ‘Surely, just by paying it, you're admitting that you and Jamie –'

‘I had considered that,' said Fiona. She brushed back a fraying strand of hair. ‘But the house is on a knife-edge at the moment. Father's annoyed that Dougal has gone off to London, and is apparently making five different varieties of whoopee, without caring for the long-term prospects for the bank. He should be putting the trust department into order – not spending all day dreaming about one big coup, the way he usually does. Then there's Robert, who seems to think he's a Rothschild, thinking of building himself a huge local-stone mansion at Traquair. Then there's you gone for so long, and not in Putney, either. Things are difficult.'

Effie grasped her hand. ‘I'm sorry. We seem to be all such a burden to you. Your own children.'

‘I'm a grown-up lady, Effie. I can take care of myself if needs be.'

They were crossing the west end of Charlotte Square now. Effie said, gently, ‘There's something you have to know, before we get out of the carriage.'

Fiona frowned at her. ‘Is it you? Is it anything – well, no man has touched you, has he, while you've been in London?'

Effie said, ‘No, mother, it's not that. It's Dougal. He's left Watson's Bank; and he's gone to America.'

The carriage reached their house, and Russell applied the brake. He opened the door for them, and let down the steps, but Fiona stayed where she was, her mouth slightly open in shock, her blue eyes wide.

‘Effie,' she said, ‘I don't understand what you mean. He's
gone to
America?
Without even telling us? But why?'

Effie looked away, and then she said, choosing her words carefully, ‘You must promise me that you won't tell father; but there was some trouble at the bank. Dougal was an innocent party, but he was deceived into helping some of the other staff in a fraud that might have cost Watson's more than a million pounds. Mr Cockburn dealt with everybody involved, as far as I know. I begged him not to report Dougal to the police. In the end, he agreed not to, as long as Dougal left Watson's, and London, immediately. So that is what he did. He's sailing to the Mediterranean with the American financier, Henry Baeklander. You've heard of him? Yes – and then he's going to go to America to work for the Baeklander Trust.'

Fiona Watson said nothing. She glanced out of the open door of the carriage, and saw that Russell was waiting patiently for them. She glanced back at Effie.

‘Did he write, before he left? Is there a message?'

‘There wasn't time,' said Effie. ‘In any event, I don't think he would have known what to say.'

Fiona Watson licked her lips. Her face was as pale as separated milk, and her freckles looked like a powdering of cinnamon. ‘Well,' she said, ‘we'll have to talk about this later,' and then she gathered up her skirts, alighted from the carriage, and went up the steps to the front door.

Effie followed her. She couldn't think of a single reassuring thing to say, and so she simply walked behind her mother along the hallway, which still smelled of lavender-wax and dried-rose pot-pourri and paregoric. At the end of the hallway, though, Fiona Watson turned, and said, ‘He's well, though?' He's not suffering from anything untoward?'

‘No,' said Effie. She could picture Dougal's face now, after she had woken him up on Tuesday evening. He had been lying on his back in his red-striped nightshirt, his mouth open, with a copy of
The Economist
spread open on his chest at an article headed, ‘Investment Opportunities After The Boxer Uprising – New Indemnities Will Encourage China To Seek Greater Loans Of Foreign Currency.' She had shaken his shoulder gently, and he had opened his eyes and stared at her as if he couldn't recognise her. Perhaps he had been dreaming of Prudence Cutting. But then he had said, ‘Effie – what's wrong? What time is it?'

‘Nearly twelve,' she had told him.

‘Is anything the matter? God, I feel terrible. I feel like I've been sleeping in a midden-hole.'

‘Dougal,' she had whispered, ‘you're going to have to leave London tomorrow.'

‘Leave London? What on earth are you talking about?'

‘Mr Cockburn's found out about the East African Railway.'

‘Well, so? It's too late now, the papers are all signed.'

‘Dougal, he's going to call the police. He suspects this East African Railway might be nothing more than a fraud. A hoax, just to get money out of the bank.'

Dougal had rubbed his eyes. ‘And how come you know so much about it.?'

‘He told me. He wanted me to warn you. He doesn't want you to get mixed up in any arrests or trials, especially since you're the son of the bank's owner. It would reflect awfully badly if you did.'

‘But I don't want to go back to Scotland yet,' Dougal had protested. ‘I've only been here a week or two, and I'm just starting to get into my stride. I couldn't bear to go back to Edinburgh.'

‘You won't be. Henry Baeklander had offered you a job with the Baeklander Trust in New York. He sails tomorrow, on the first tide, whenever that is. You'll have to find out, and make sure that you're on that ship when it leaves.

‘Effie, I won't go! This is preposterous! I'm a Watson, one of the heirs to Watson Bank! What would I be doing snooving off to New York?'

‘You'd be avoiding arrest, Dougal, and that's the most important thing. Do you not think so? I was surprised you believed Jack Cutting to begin with, but didn't you want to be the fiery new banker, changing the course of the whole world? Well, the fire was too hot for comfort, Dougal. London is all birnie-ground to you now, and you shouldn't come back until you've made your mark in America.'

Dougal had punched his pillows into shape, and sat up. ‘Does father know about this?' he had asked.

Effie had shaken her head.

‘Cockburn, eh?' Dougal had mused. ‘And I wonder how
he
came to hear of it?'

‘This is a great bank, Dougal. There are two hundred people working at Cornhill alone. Any one of them could have found out, and passed the information along to somebody who was willing to pay for it.'

‘You think Cockburn bribes his employees for secret information?'

‘If you were in his shoes, wouldn't you?'

‘Well, I suppose I would,' Dougal had admitted, shifting his weight on to one elbow. ‘Half of the staff seem to work for almost everybody else except Watson's Bank … a little bit of private investment here, a little bit of stock manipulation there … and those that
do
devote their energies to the bank seem to make sure that they lend money only to those people and those governments who are liable to pay them a wee backhander or two. Mind you, I'm not sure if Cockburn keeps such a close eye on things because he wants to discourage sharp banking practice, or because he wants to make sure that he gets his cut.'

‘All the same, Dougal,' Effie had told him, ‘you're going to have to leave. I'm sorry for it, but I can't see any other way. The bank could have lost a million pounds, and father certainly wouldn't have patted your topknot for that. He probably would have made you pay it back, one way or another.'

Dougal said glumly, ‘So, it seems that you were right. It was Lord Rethesdale.'

‘I don't see how I can ever be sure. But I think he must have been.'

‘A crookback in a park. Well, I suppose it all has a kind of poetic tragedy to it.'

Effie had said nothing. ‘I'd best be getting to bed now. But I'll wake you in the morning, so that you won't miss the
Excelsior
. Hungerford pier, downriver side. You can't miss her.'

Dougal had slowly unfolded one finger and pointed at her. ‘It was you, wasn't it, who told Cockburn?'

Effie had pressed one hand to her breast, but then she had let it drop again when she realised how mock-theatrical she looked. ‘Me? How can you say that?'

Dougal had stood up, and walked over to the bureau, where he kept his silver-backed hairbrushes. Stiffly, with quick jerky motions, he had brushed down his curls. ‘As a matter of fact, Effie,' he had said, ‘I am not at all sure if it
was
you or not. But you've never been above a little dabbling in other people's affairs, ever since you were wee, and I wouldn't put it past you now.'

Effie had smiled vaguely. ‘You'll make such a fortune for yourself in America, I know you will.'

Dougal had laid down his brushes and stared at her. ‘You really think I'm going to go? You really think I'm going to leave, just because of this? I don't want to leave Prudence, for one thing.'

‘Aye,' said Effie. ‘But I suppose you could always send for her, in good time.'

‘You'll be the death of me,' Dougal had told her.

Five months later, in the height of an unusually hot Scottish summer, the Watsons received their first letter from Dougal. He had arrived in New York in early April, after a tour of the Mediterranean that had seduced him beyond words. He had stayed for three misty days in Tangiers, in the palace of a Moroccan prince, and seen below the hillside the mysterious black brothers of the Aissoua moving through the fog in their long dark robes, while he sat baffled on a balcony and sipped mint tea. In the Medina, on the third night, he had watched a woman in a trance swallowing live toads, dancing and rolling her eyes as they jumped about in her stomach. The next morning, he had opened the pierced and decorated shutters of his room to find that the mist had vanished in the night, and that the Rock of Gibraltar was rearing up, grey and strange, only a few miles away from him.

The
Excelsior
had sailed to Naples; to Crete; and to the Greek islands. Henry Baeklander had been silent and withdrawn, rarely appearing on deck, except for his breakfast; and even then he had worn a white sola topee and tiny purple-lensed sunglasses, and so it had been impossible to guess what he was looking at or what he was thinking. Occasionally he had waved to Dougal, and Dougal had hesitantly waved back. In Cairo, some very young Egyptian girls in veils and sequins were brought aboard, five or six of them, and the
Excelsior
had remained at anchor for three days while neither Henry Baeklander nor any of the girls emerged from his stateroom. Dougal had eaten alone, in the magnificent Louis XIV dining-room, spooning up his cold asparagus soup under
a circulating fan that did nothing to relieve the stuffiness. One evening he had been disturbed, while reading in his cabin, by light footsteps outside. It had been one of the girls passing his door; and he only managed to catch a glimpse of her before she disappeared around the corner of the starboard lifeboat housing. She had appeared to be quite naked, and quite oddly, she had appeared to have had a long sweeping tail, like a female centaur. It was only weeks later, when they were in mid-Atlantic on their way to New York, and Henry had called Dougal to his stateroom to talk about loans to Japan and Germany, that Dougal had noticed on the side of Henry's desk a long horsehair fly-whisk, of the kind used by East Africans, with a knobby seven-inch ivory handle.

Now he was in New York itself, staying in a suite of rooms in a spacious Federal house on Bleecker Street, with his own private bathroom. New York, he said was ‘bracing', although the stock market was highly unstable, and bankers were generally regarded in the United States with deep suspicion. In the newer states of Iowa, Arkansas, Oregon, the California, banks had only been legal since the middle of the century, and in Texas they were still prohibited. American states had issued scores of bonds to try to raise money, and had become internationally notorious for defaulting on their debts. Mississippi was the worst, although Louisiana and Philadelphia were almost as unreliable, and had once led Sydney Smith to write in the London Morning
Post
that ‘there really should be lunatic asylums for nations as well as individuals', since America was ‘a nation with whom no contract can be made, because none will be kept; unstable in the very foundations of social life, deficient in the elements of good faith.'