Lady of Fortune Read online

  ‘May I call on you?’ asked Dougal.

  She smiled at him from beneath the shadow of her hat. ‘If you wish. I’m sure that Jack wouldn’t object. And I’m quite sure that I wouldn’t.’

  ‘You are the sweetest, most engaging girl,’ said Dougal. ‘Perhaps I could meet you on Saturday, with my sister Effie, and we could take a boat down the river to Greenwich.’

  ‘I would adore it.’

  Dougal stood on the pavement watching their cab trot away towards St Mary-le-Strand and Fleet Street. A boy wearing boots with no laces in them came up to him and said, ‘Spare sixpence, guv’nor?’

  He remembered what his father had said. ‘Better tippence in the bank than saxpence in the aumos-dish.’ He reached into the pocket of his vest and produced a shilling, which he tossed up for the boy to catch. It tumbled sparkling in the wet night air.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  After an hour of testy indecision, Effie decided not to be at home that evening when Henry Baeklander called. She heard his rich-timbred voice at the door, reverberating like the bass notes of a harmonium, but she remained in the living-room, tense, steadily embroidering her butterflies, hoping that he would accept Jerome’s explanation that she was suffering from a slight head-cold and ‘fatigue,’ and that he should perhaps return tomorrow, after eleven. Her heart was dancing far faster than usual, and she tied an impossible knot in her yellow silk. But after a minute or two, she heard the front door close again, and then the grinding and clattering of a carriage outside, and she put down her embroidery frame and sighed in relief.

  Henry Baeklander had called on her almost every day since they had gone riding together. Twice, he had invited her to the opera. Once, he had invited her to the play. He had even asked her if she would care to go skating with him in St James’s Park, since so much of the lake had been still thickly frozen over. He had sent her hothouse flowers, and a pineapple.

  He had twice postponed his sailing-date for the Mediterranean, in order to repeat his proposal of marriage.

  Effie felt confused, and even frightened. She found Henry attractive, and mesmerically charming, and if he had planned to stay in London for longer than just a few days, she would have enjoyed getting to know him, and learning from him whatever she could. He was a very rich man, and all very rich men have important advice to pass on, even if that advice is nothing more than ‘never try to become rich’. But about one thing Effie was quite certain, and that was that she would never marry Henry. She wanted to fulfil her own ambitions first, before she married; and when she did marry, she wanted to walk down the aisle proudly, on the arm of a man who could be her partner as well as her husband. She had seen her mother alternately bullied and ignored by her father. Henry, just as perilously, treated Effie as if she were some delicate pink wild flower that he wanted to pluck, a muskmallow or a wild geranium. That frightened her, although she wasn’t entirely certain why. Perhaps it was because she wanted to love her husband as a woman and speak to him as a woman, as Effie – not as a slave, or as a fragile bloom, or anything at all apart from what she really was. Romantic similes unsettled her. She did not want to be compared with a rose, or a swan, or a dove, or even (as she had read in a copy of The Ladies’ Home Journal, ‘a far and alluring country, whose graceful contours entrance the eye!’).

  Jerome came in with a letter on his silver tray. He said, in tones that could have dissected a tortoise, ‘Mr Baeklander presented his compliments, Miss Watson, and regretted that you were feeling so unwell. He wishes you a speedy return to health. He will call again tomorrow after eleven o’clock, and meanwhile he has left you this letter.’

  Effie took the letter without a word. There was something inside the envelope apart from writing paper, something small and hard and wrapped in tissue-paper. She said, ‘Thank you, Jerome, that will be all for now.’

  Is there anything I can bring you, Miss Watson? A little tea, perhaps, or hot chocolate?’

  She shook her head. ‘No. No, thank you.’

  Jerome waited for a moment, said ‘Very well, Miss Watson,’ and then retreated across the living-room on pumps so silent that Effie sometimes wondered if his feet actually touched the floor at all. She stood up, and tore open the envelope with hands that didn’t seem to want to be controllable.

  The tissue paper contained an engagement ring, a single diamond of two carats, surrounded by sapphires. It must have been worth £3000 at least, perhaps much more. If she had sold it, she could have bought herself twelve semidetached houses in Surbiton, just outside London, with the proceeds. Or, one hundred and fifty hand-tailored suits, of the richest and finest fabrics, and the best-quality lace. She held it up to the light and it winked and dazzled and sparkled with rainbows.

  She sat down, trembling, still holding up the ring in her left hand, and read the letter in which it was enclosed. Henry’s writing was a firm, masculine italic, although his down-strokes displayed a flourish which betrayed his vanity, and his pride. Effie had read all about calligraphy in Hobson’s Guide To What Your Handwriting Reveals (McBride Press, Is. 3d.) and she was conscious as she read Henry’s letter that his undotted i’s and his curling g-tails were giving away his secret obsession with himself, and with his own magnetic ugliness, and with money.

  He had written: ‘My darling Effie,

  This must be my last bid to win your affection, for if I continue in vain to thrash the white charger of my love up the slippery faces of your glass mountain, he will surely die of a broken spirit! You neglect me so! You refuse me so! What is a man to do? So, here it is. My last bold stroke. Marry me, Effie, and accept this ring. I swear to you if you say you will marry me that I will treat you like a queen; and that your brother with be rewardingly ensconced as chief of my investment department in New York. Say yes! You must! Lo giuro, lo giuro, lo giuro, agli occhi tuoi lo giuro al nostro amor – I swear it, I swear it, I swear it by your eyes, I swear it by our love.

  Your pining,

  Henry.’

  Effie sat for a very long time, almost half an hour, turning the diamond ring over and over between her fingers. It was the key to a life of ease and riches. All she had to do was to say yes to Henry, and she would be lavished with clothes and jewellery and presents for as long as he lived; and when he died, she would be the natural heiress to estates that included nearly one-third of Colorado, eight colonial streets in Boston, including Ruggles Street, Washington Street, and Quincy Street, 650 acres of New Hampshire, three square miles of northern Connecticut, as well as houses and estates in France, Switzerland, Morocco, and England. Not to mention his yacht, the Excelsior.

  She didn’t know what to do. The temptation was very great. She lowered the hand which held the ring into her lap, and sat looking for a long time at the dying coal fire, at the reflections in the fire dogs, and the white hot caverns in which white sparks twinkled, as if they were tiny fairies who could withstand any kind of heat.

  The long-case clock in the hallway chimed ten. She thought, oddly: My lie is already passing. But what shall I do about Henry?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  It was not so much a coincidence as one of those unusual alignments of different destinies; one of those moments when the huge masticating cogs of human existence for one brief instant come into perceptible synchronicity, so that anyone who is attentive enough can glimpse through the spokes of the mechanism the relevance of somebody else’s life to their own.

  It doesn’t happen often; and it is not a coincidence in the accepted sense. Sometimes the revelation is puzzling and meaningless. Sometimes its meaning only becomes clear years and years later, when it is too late for anyone to do anything about it. Sometimes it is misunderstood, and causes accidents, or fatalities, or utter despair.

  Effie’s moment came on Saturday, when she accompanied Dougal and Prudence down the river from Albert Embankment to Greenwich. It was an extremely cold day, even for early February, and snowflakes were tumbling through the air like ash from a distant funeral pyre. Effie
wore a dark sealskin coat, and a dark fur hat, and had buried her hands in an ermine muffler. Prudence wore a long elegant coat of black merino wool, lined with astrakhan. Dougal’s nose was red, and he kept sneezing and blowing his nose on his pocket handkerchief. It was damper in London than in Edinburgh, and he had caught a slight cold.

  The river-boat Arogi, charmingly christened after the massacre of 700 Abyssinians by British forces in 1868, bore them steadily through the snow past Tower Bridge, and the London docks, a dark and leafless forest of masts and rigging. The warehouses of London were the biggest in the world, and could store nearly a quarter of a million tons of tea, spices, rubber, coffee, rum, and rope. Even on a cold day like today, the fragrance of cloves and allspice blew across the river in the north-west wind like a nostalgic conjuration of the Far East.

  Effie made a particular effort to be friendly to Prudence, and when they went down to the Arogi’s saloon, to drink hot lemon tea, and watch the brown waters of the Thames swilling past the windows, she engaged Prudence in conversation about dresses, and hats, and theatres. But Prudence, in return, was nothing more than courteous to Effie, and noticeably withdrawn. For most of the journey she held Dougal’s hand and said almost nothing.

  As they docked at Greenwich, however, and walked down the boarded gangway, she said, ‘I love days like this. Gloomy and forbidding! You could think that the whole world is about to come to an end!’

  ‘Aye,’ said Dougal, helping her step down on to the quay. There are days in Edinburgh like this.’

  ‘And Lichfield, too,’ said Prudence. ‘We used to have a house that overlooked the Ladies of the Vale, the three spires of Lichfield Cathedral. I can remember looking out of my window and seeing the snow whirling down all around them.’

  ‘Dougal said you came from Dorset,’ said Effie. ‘The Dorset Cuttings, I believe he told me.’

  Prudence brushed snow from her coat. ‘Yes, quite right,’ she said, sharply. ‘That was before we moved.’

  Effie glanced at Dougal as they walked across the white-dusted cobbles of the quay. Dougal gave her a puffy-eyed look that seemed to mean, well, does it really matter where she was brought up?

  They climbed together up the steep green slope of Greenwich Park, until they could see northwards across the misty curve of the Thames towards the Isle of Dogs, and Millwall; and westward to Rotherhithe and the Surrey Commercial Docks. Below them, dim and elegant in the snow, were the buildings of Greenwich Hospital, designed by Sir Christopher Wren, and the Queen’s House, built by Inigo Jones for Anne of Denmark, the consort of James I.

  They toured the Royal Observatory on the top of the hill, peering at the clocks and the chronometers and the barometers and then they stood one after the other on the brass strip which marks the zero meridian of longitude. The snow began to fall more heavily still, silent and soft, and Dougal suggested that they should return to the quayside, and take tea while they waited for the boat to take them back to Albert Embankment. Strangely, a boy was flying a kite in the snow, and it dipped and twisted in the wind.

  Dougal and Prudence went on ahead, down the pathway which led to the old Hospital buildings. Effie, ten or eleven paces behind, noticed how closely they held each other, and how their cold breath, as they talked, was intermingled in clouds of vapour, as if their actual words were twining around each other, and caressing each other, before they faded affectionately away.

  She stopped to pat a red cocker spaniel, which was sitting beside the path panting. Dougal and Prudence didn’t notice that she wasn’t keeping up, and strolled on together, down the criss-cross paths, until they were well out of earshot.

  ‘Well, boy,’ said Effie, to the spaniel. ‘Well, boy, you’re a towzie boy, then. Who’s your mistress?’

  A voice, quite nearby, said thinly. ‘He has no mistress, I regret. Only a master.’

  From between the grey trunks of the elms appeared a crooked man in a wheelchair. He was probably quite young, no more than twenty or twenty-two, but his hair was thinning over the large white dome of his forehead, and there were circles under his eyes as blue as cloudberries, and when Effie looked down at his thin knees, blanketed in grey, and his skeletal hands, she knew she was looking at a man who has little time to live, and most of that in pain. He wore no hat, and no gloves, and from under his blanket there peeped only thin kid slippers, in black.

  ‘He’s been running in the mud,’ Effie said, tugging at the dog’s ears. ‘Look how gumlie he’s got.’

  The young man in the wheelchair came closer. From two or three feet away, Effie could hear the cold air whining in and out of his lungs. He raised that great pale lantern of a head up to look at her, and he smiled. ‘You’re Scottish,’ he said. ‘A Scots girl. Well, that’s excellent. We used to have a Scottish gamekeeper once, when I was very young.’

  ‘I’m Effie Watson,’ said Effie. ‘I only came down to London for the first time two weeks ago, so all of this is very new to me.’

  ‘It’s a wonderful city, London,’ said the young man. ‘It’s a hard one, though, and harder for me. I’m having treatment at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, for whatever it is that makes me so ill.’

  ‘You don’t know what it is?’

  ‘Some hereditary pox, I expect,’ the young man smiled. He reached under his blanket and took out a small clay pipe, the kind that working-men usually smoked, and laid it on his lap. Then he produced a leather pouch of tobacco.

  ‘Would you like me to fill your pipe for you?’ asked Effie. She didn’t really know why she had offered. But Dougal and Prudence were now right down at the bottom of the slope, scarcely visible in the snow, and Effie had the feeling that if she performed one act of kindness for this poor crippled creature in his wheelchair, she might somehow be going some way to justifying her ambition and her desire for wealth. The spaniel came closer to his master, and watched him with attentive eyes. The young man touched him on the head, and said quietly, ‘Hush, Pepys. Hush,’ although the dog had uttered nothing but a low mewling noise in his throat.

  ‘Do you live near here?’ asked Effie, pressing tobacco into the brown bowl of the young man’s pipe.

  ‘I have relatives here,’ the young man told her. ‘I used to live in Gloucestershire, but of course there is nobody in Gloucestershire who can deal with my daily pain. They give me baths, you know. Hot baths of brine. Sometimes, at the end of my treatment, I feel like a salted herring.’

  Effie turned up the collar of her coat. Over Stepney and the West India Docks, the sky had grown so dark that Effie could almost imagine Wagnerian Valkyries riding through the snowclouds, their hoofs threshing amongst the spires and fishbones of the tea-clippers’ masts, and drumming over the silver tract of the Thames.

  She handed back the young man’s pipe, and said, ‘I hope that burns properly. I’m not really used to tobacco.’

  He cupped the bowl of the pipe between his hands, and applied a match to it. In a minute or two, it began to burn, and he sucked, with a high whine, and sucked again, at last the smoke began to drift through the trees, and Pepys the spaniel settled down at his master’s wheels.

  ‘You don’t mind the weather?’ asked Effie.

  The young man shook his head, his pipe clenched between his teeth. ‘I think it’s a treat! Look at the way the snow’s falling! Mind you, I shall probably be scolded when I get back, for getting myself wet. “You’ll catch a chill!” they’ll tell me. “You’ll die of double pneumonia!” Well, perhaps I shall. I shan’t mind.’

  ‘You ought to mind,’ said Effie.

  ‘Ought I? What do I have to stay alive for, except to wheel myself from Greenwich Park to Maze Hill, and sometimes across to the pond on Blackheath. Even Pepys wouldn’t miss me, would you, old fellow?’

  Effie looked quickly down the hill, and saw that Dougal and Prudence had stopped, and were waiting for her.

  ‘I must go,’ she told the young man. ‘Perhaps I can come here again, and talk to you some more.’

  The young man s
miled. ‘You won’t be back,’ he said. ‘In any case, I’d prefer it if you didn’t try to seek me out.’

  ‘Why ever not?’

  ‘Because … I’m not what I should be.’

  Effie brushed snow from her lapels. ‘What should you be? What can you be, except for yourself?’

  The young man said, ‘I should be active, vigorous, and manly. I should be running my own estates. Well, they’re not my estates any more. I had to sell them to pay for my medical treatment, and for a voyage to Australia and back. They thought the climate might cure me, but of course it had no effect, except to give me rashes. And I cannot begin to describe the voyage to you. I was very seasick, I’m ashamed to say.’

  Effie held out her hand. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘if this has to be goodbye, then goodbye.’

  The young man didn’t attempt to take her hand, but gave her a jaunty nautical salute. ‘Goodbye, Miss Effie Watson.’

  Effie paused, on the grey path. ‘And to whom shall I say goodbye?’ she asked.

  The young man turned his large head towards the north, and narrowed his eyes against the wind. ‘It’s not important to you, is it?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘In that case, you may say goodbye to David, Lord Rethesdale. The sixth Lord Rethesdale, and unquestionably the last.’

  Effie said, ‘Are you teasing me?’

  The young man turned abruptly in his wheelchair, his thin fingers controlling the spoked wheels with the terrible clutching dexterity that must have been acquired through months of pain. ‘I can’t afford to tease anybody,’ he said. ‘Particularly anybody who shows me kindness.’

  ‘Are you really Lord Rethesdale?’

  There was a very long silence, and then the young man said, ‘Yes. I am. Of course, you don’t have to believe me. I can’t force you to believe me!’

  Effie looked down the hill again, towards Dougal and Prudence. Dougal was waving now, and crying out, ‘Come on, will you, Effie! We’re freezit! Come on, or we’ll miss the boat!’