Princess Daisy (46 page)

“I know, I know, you can’t fault that, but everybody’s growing, Ham. These are fat years for certain kinds of businesses and Supracorp’s in a lot of them. What worries me so much is the downside risk, and Ham, you know as well as I do that there is
always
a downside risk. Shannon takes chances he doesn’t
have
to take—and I don’t like that. He’s not involved in safety and I am. And so should you be, my friend.” The banker paused. “Ham, just why do you ask?”

“No real reason, Reggie, just curiosity.”

By now. Ham Short knew for certain that he wasn’t going to have anything to do with a business that not only had a downside risk but was a business in which the seepage rate of baby piss was treated as a matter of life or death. He had enough plumbing problems in his life as it was … and sewage disposal problems as well—to get involved with dirty diapers. He was too old and he was too rich. He didn’t need these complications. Maybe Pat Shannon could live with the shadow of the stockholders hovering over his daily life, but Ham Short didn’t intend to ever have to report to anybody. Not even to Topsy.

“And please give me only brown eggs with breakfast tomorrow, Mrs. Gibbons,” Ram instructed his housekeeper after dinner late on Friday night at Woodhill Manor.

“Certainly, Sir,” the stout, self-respecting lady replied. Queen Elizabeth, too, would eat only brown eggs from a farm in Windsor. Mrs. Gibbons, to her relief, had seen few changes in forty years at Woodhill but she was beginning, albeit reluctantly, to approve of her late master’s grandson and heir.

This rare weekend alone in Devon was a necessary respite for Ram. Recuperation and meditation were on his agenda. All winter he had been working particularly hard and staying out much later than was usual for him. His decision to set about a search for a wife had led him to accept invitations to a number of weekends and parties he
normally would have refused, but the candidates had to be surveyed before he could make a logical and reasonable choice.

Now, at least, he was able to define what he did
not
want, although he still hadn’t found anyone remotely suitable. As he methodically got ready for bed he reviewed the possibilities he had rejected. They included any number of that group known as the “Sloane Rangers”—after fashionable Sloane Square in Chelsea. They were clever young society women who spent their days shopping and having their hair done and trading secrets over lunch at San Lorenzo in Beauchamp Place, a close-knit clique who dressed in an informal uniform of checked or plaid blazers, silk shirts, wool skirts from St. Laurent and highly polished boots. Ram found them highly antipathetic. They knew each other far too well, they told each other far too much, they had, quite simply, been around too long to attract him. And having thoroughly looked over the current debutante crop of last spring’s beauties who had just been hatched, he hadn’t been charmed by a single one of the worldly herd of Amandas, Samanthas, Alexandras, Arabellas, Tabithas, Melissas, Clarissas, Sabrinas, Victorias and Mirandas, who at only eighteen already “knew everybody.” He fell asleep while he was mentally rejecting every girl he had met in the last four months.

The next morning Ram took one of his Purdey shotguns and set out on foot. He intended to inspect his fences, at least symbolically, since nine hundred acres of fields could hardly be covered except by his bailiff and his men. However, Ram liked the idea of walking on his own land.

There was something in the air, even now, as early as the beginning of February, which if it was not quite green, somehow smelled of approaching greenness, but it went unnoticed by Ram, who was thinking of an article he had recently read by Quentin Crewe, who pointed out that if a man had earned 250 pounds a week since the Crucifixion and saved every shilling of it, he still would not be as rich as the Dukes of Westminster or Buccleuch or Earl Cadogan. There were nineteen dukes, thought Ram, who each possessed over ten thousand acres—yes, land-was still where the money was in England. But only as long as it wasn’t taken away by the government in the form of taxation. Private British wealth might only last out his
lifetime—perhaps not as long as that Ram had foreseen that possibility long ago and invested so heavily in other countries that even if he had to leave England and all he owned, including these ancient acres, he would always be excessively rich.

Did he require a wife to be rich? Not necessarily, thanks to his foresight. Did he require her to be of absolutely impeccable birth? Yes … sheer self-respect demanded that minimum. A virgin? Again yes. It was perhaps, in fact, unquestionably, an old-fashioned notion in these days, but firmly in Ram’s mind was a need to find a girl of innocence, someone who hadn’t been exposed prematurely to the taint of the London Season, a girl not quite formed, who would adore and admire him. A proper wife.

He turned to look back at Woodhill Manor, a dwelling dating from the Elizabethan period, added onto in the time of Queen Anne, and boasting a new wing of Edwardian origin, which, because of the fairly uniform use of gray limestone and stone-tiled roof, formed a charming harmonious whole. It was not a truly grand house in the tradition of the great English country estates, but it had something new money could not buy: tranquility, grace, timelessness.

He had sensed that same quality—to a much higher degree—on a trip he had recently made to Germany, in connection with investments in a large ball-bearing factory. There, he had been invited to spend the weekend at a Bavarian castle, a
schloss
which had belonged to the family of his hosts since the thirteenth century, in which twenty-two generations had managed to live without interruption in spite of wars, pestilence and other nastiness of history. This Germany, the Germany of the Furstenburgs and the Windisch-Graetzs, the Hohenlohe-Langenbergs, and Hohenzollern-Sigmarigans and von Matternichs, this Germany of Serene Highnesses and Royal Highnesses and Illustrious Highnesses, called to something elemental in Ram. Not only did he appreciate the straightforward, unabashed richness of his hosts, he also approved of the emphasis he found everywhere among the nobility on serious, sensible application to the
business
of life. These were practical, stern, proud people who did not let the antiquity of their names deter them from extracting the maximum from their forests and their vineyards, from expanding their family businesses and investing in foreign countries. As he had sat at lunch with his host and hostess,
Ram had seen, outside on a path on the other side of the lawn, two young girls, perhaps not more than eleven or thirteen, accompanied by a groom, riding past.

“Our daughters,” the Prince had said with a casual wave toward the window which did not conceal the pride he took in them, even as he returned to an explanation of why anyone listed in Part One of the
Almanack de Gotha
cannot marry somebody who is not listed in either Part One or Part Two without losing his royal prerogative. This discourse was largely lost on Ram, as, in his mind’s eye, he contemplated the momentary vision of the two blonde children as pure and untouched as if they were figures in a tapestry.

Still, he could not look to any young German girl for a wife. It was out of the question, for no matter how perfectly brought up and carefully protected she might be, no matter how flawless her English, how ancient her lineage, how splendid her accomplishments, she would still be foreign. To people like the Fulfords of Great Fulford Devon, and the Crasters of Craster West House, Craster, Northumberland, to others of the great untitled families of England, the Monsons, the Elwes, the Henages, the Dymokes—he, a direct descendant of Rurik, Grand Duke of Novgorod and Kiev, founder of Imperial Russia—he, Prince George Edward Woodhill Valensky, was still something of a foreigner.

Ram shrugged and resumed his walk. He faced without rancor the fact that he felt that his own Englishness was not firmly enough established for him to take a non-English wife. In his own opinion, even Queen Victoria had never quite lived down the stigma of Prince Albert’s nationality.

As he cast a last backward thought at the memory of his glimpse of the two young German princesses he realized that he had been wasting his time prospecting in London, evaluating the harvest of young women. Although they told anyone who would ask that they were
not
officially entered in the marriage stakes, although “having” a London Season was now emphatically dismissed as merely a chance to “widen one’s circle of friends,” Ram was not fooled. A rich husband was even more avidly sought after in tax-poor England today than he had been in England of yesterday. Granted, the time was past when the first thing openly asked about any prospective mate, male or female, was the extent of that person’s wealth or expectations.
Such healthy honesty had gone underground since the days, not so long ago at that, when Jane Austen would cite the precise number of pounds of income per year as an absolutely essential part of her description of any of her characters.

Ram had always known the importance of money. There had never been a time he could remember when he was too childish to realize that his father was rich and his mother and her second husband were not. Nor did he believe that other people weren’t as involved with money as he was. It was merely that they hid their fascination, as indeed he did, except at work. It was all very fashionable and up-to-date for a girl to protest that the worst thing that could happen to her was to be considered a prominent debutante, that what she really longed for was to become a student of Russian or Chinese history or travel around the world in a sailboat, that all she wanted was to be young and carefree and never think of things like income. Ram knew better. Her career, such as it was, would be abandoned gladly when the proper young man with the proper amount of money came along. That’s what they were after, all of them, except for a few rare, odd females who had always been out of step with their world, a world that was certainly dying but nevertheless, as far as the English upper classes were concerned, the best world that had ever been.

As Ram moodily considered the case of certain eighteen-year-old eligible beauties—Jane Bonham Carter, great-granddaughter of Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, who was already ensconced in the study of economics and philosophy at London University; Sabrina Guinness, working for a living and in a frightfully unsuitable way if what Ram heard was true, as a governess for Tatum O’Neal—he suddenly realized that he should be searching in the world of seventeen-year-old girls. Eighteen was just too sophisticated, too headstrong, too stubborn, too self-oriented an age for a wife. By eighteen, a girl was ruined, Ram decided, breaking off a branch from a young oak and inspecting the buds without really seeing them.

Sarah Fane, Sarah Fane? The name swam into his mind, and it took a minute for him to remember that last week over a business lunch, her father, Lord John Fane, had grumbled to him about his daughter. Had he been complaining because she insisted on coming out at Queen Charlotte’s Birthday Ball next May or because she had
refused to be presented at the ball? Ram couldn’t recall—he hadn’t paid attention—but he did remember that he’d been surprised that the subject was even raised. It seemed a short time ago that he had seen her, a child of fourteen, when he’d gone to spend a weekend in Yorkshire at Lord John’s—it must have been mid-August because they’d been gathered for the opening of the grouse-shooting season.

Could it have been three years ago? He had a memory of a tall, shy silent girl with blue, clear eyes and long, straight blonde hair that kept falling over her face, but with something of an air about her. She had held herself with none of the stoop-shouldered attempts at invisibility one might have expected of an adolescent, but walked well, her steps firmly planted on the Fane moors as she followed the shooting party at a discreet distance. Well, whatever her plans for the London Season, it didn’t traditionally start until the Private View at the Royal Academy on the first Friday in May. Ram decided to investigate Sarah Fane—the Honorable Sarah Fane, to be exact. She’d probably prove to be another of many disappointments, determined to become a photographer’s model or a cordon bleu chef—but she had carried herself well, and by all calculations she must still be under eighteen. He’d write himself a memo when he went back to the house. It was worth looking into. And after all, her grandfather
was
an earl.

18

I
just don’t like it, Kiki, can’t you understand?” Daisy went to the window and looked out at Prince Street, already busy with tourists from uptown spending this early fall day of 1976 wandering about SoHo. The air was still warm and the potholes of the winter of 1975 were twice the size they had been, and half the size they would be by next spring, but there was no sign that the city intended to repair them. Perhaps, she thought, they were already considered historic landmarks.

“Daisy, look at it this way,” Kiki implored her.“You’re doing them a favor by wearing his dress to their party—you’ll probably be photographed and that’s good publicity for Robin Valarian.”

“I don’t trust the whole thing,” Daisy repeated stubbornly.

“The dress? But it’s so pretty,” Kiki protested.

“No, I admit the dress is nice, even if it’s not my style. I mean, you don’t think that a wisp of chiffon and feathers like this, stolen practically line for line from St. Laurent’s last collection, will still look great in thirty-five years, do you? But that’s not what I mean. I get this feeling of spider webs, spun from pure gold—but still webs. You think I’m being paranoid, don’t you?” she accused Kiki.

“Maybe a little. In the last year you’ve got Vanessa to thank for two major commissions, that big oil of the three Short girls and the other oil you did last Christmas of the two Hemmingway boys. She persuaded you to raise your price for watercolors by five hundred dollars, she’s insisted on giving you a couple of dresses, she’s invited you to a lot
of parties—I grant you that. But look at what she’s had in return.”