A Dangerous Fortune (32 page)

“Even though you’re Jewish?”

“Yes. Jews can be as snobbish as anyone else.” He would never know the real reason—that Bertie was not Solly’s child.

“Why didn’t you simply tell me what you were doing, and why?”

“I couldn’t.” Remembering those awful days, she felt choked up again and had to take a deep breath to calm herself. “I found it very hard to cut myself off like that; it broke my heart. I couldn’t have done it at all if I’d had to justify myself to you as well.”

Still he would not let her off the hook. “You could have sent me a note.”

Maisie’s voice dropped almost to a whisper. “I couldn’t bring myself to write it.”

At last he seemed to relent. He took a gulp of his wine and averted his eyes from her. “It was awful, not understanding, not knowing if you were even alive.” He was speaking harshly, but now she could see the remembered pain in his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” she said feebly. “I’m so soriy I hurt you. I didn’t want to. I wanted to save you from unhappiness. I did it for love.” As soon as she heard herself say the word “love” she regretted it.

He picked up on it. “Do you love Solly now?” he said abruptly.

“Yes.”

“The two of you seem very settled.”

“The way we live … it isn’t difficult to be contented.”

He had not finished being angry with her. “You’ve got what you always wanted.”

That was a bit hard, but she felt that perhaps she deserved it, so she just nodded.

“What happened to April?”

Maisie hesitated. This was going a bit too far. “You class me with April, then, do you?” she said, feeling hurt.

Somehow that deflated his anger. He smiled ruefully and said: “No, you were never like April. I know that. All the same I’d like to know what became of her. Do you still see her?”

“Yes—discreetly.” April was a neutral topic: talking about her would get them off this dangerously emotional ground. Maisie decided to satisfy his curiosity. “Do you know a place called Nellie’s?”

He lowered his voice. “It’s a brothel.”

She could not restrain herself from asking: “Did you ever go there?”

He looked embarrassed. “Yes, once. It was a fiasco.”

That did not surprise her: she remembered how naive
and inexperienced the twenty-year-old Hugh had been. “Well, April now owns the place.”

“Goodness! How did that happen?”

“First she became the mistress of a famous novelist and lived in the prettiest little cottage in Clapham. He tired of her at about the time Nell was thinking about retirement. So April sold the cottage and bought Nell out.”

“Fancy that,” said Hugh. “I’ll never forget Nell. She was the fattest woman I’ve ever seen.”

The table had suddenly gone quiet, and his last sentence was heard by several people nearby. There was general laughter, and someone said: “Who was this fat lady?” Hugh just grinned and made no reply.

After that they stayed off dangerous topics, but Maisie felt subdued and somewhat fragile, as if she had suffered a fall and bruised herself.

When dinner was over and the men had smoked their cigars Kingo announced that he wanted to dance. The drawing room carpet was rolled up and a footman who could play polkas on the piano was summoned and set to work.

Maisie danced with everyone except Hugh, then it was obvious she was avoiding him, so she danced with him; and it was as if six years had rolled back and they were in Cremorne Gardens again. He hardly led her: they seemed instinctively to do the same thing. Maisie could not suppress the disloyal thought that Solly was a clumsy dancer.

After Hugh she took another partner; but then the other men stopped asking her. As ten o’clock turned to eleven and the brandy appeared, convention was abandoned: white ties were loosened, some of the women kicked off their shoes, and Maisie danced every dance with Hugh. She knew she ought to feel guilty, but she had never been much good at guilt: she was enjoying herself and she was not going to stop.

When the piano-playing footman was exhausted, the duchess demanded a breath of air, and maids were sent scurrying for coats so they could all take a turn around the garden. Out in the darkness, Maisie took Hugh’s arm. “The whole world knows what I’ve been doing for the last six years, but what about you?”

“I like America,” he said. “There’s no class system. There are rich and poor, but no aristocracy, no nonsense about rank and protocol. What you’ve done, in marrying Solly and becoming a friend of the highest in the land, is pretty unusual here, and even now I bet you never actually tell the truth about your origins—”

“They have their suspicions, I think—but you’re right, I don’t own up.”

“In America you’d boast about your humble beginnings the way Kingo boasts about his ancestors fighting at the battle of Agincourt.”

She was interested in Hugh, not America. “You haven’t married.”

“No.”

“In Boston … was there a girl you liked?”

“I tried, Maisie,” he said.

Suddenly she wished she had not asked him about this, for she had a premonition that his answer would destroy her happiness; but it was too late, the question had been raised and he was already speaking.

“There were pretty girls in Boston, and pleasant girls, and intelligent girls, and girls who would make wonderful wives and mothers. I paid attention to some of them, and they seemed to like me. But when it came to the point where I had to make a proposal or back off I realized, each time, that what I felt was not enough. It was not what I felt for you. It wasn’t love.”

Now he had said it. “Stop,” Maisie whispered.

“Two or three mothers got rather cross with me, then my reputation spread around, and the girls became wary. They were nice enough to me, but they knew there
was something wrong with me, I wasn’t serious, not the marrying kind. Hugh Pilaster, the English banker and breaker of hearts. And if a girl did seem to fall for me, despite my record, I would discourage her. I don’t like to break people’s hearts. I know too well what it feels like.”

Her face was wet with tears, and she was glad of the tactful dark. “I’m sorry,” she said, but she whispered so softly that she could hardly hear her own voice.

“Anyway, I know what’s wrong with me now. I guess I always knew, but the last two days have removed any doubts.”

They had fallen behind the others, and now he stopped and faced her.

She said: “Don’t say it, Hugh, please.”

“I still love you. That’s all.”

It was out, and everything was ruined.

“I think you love me too,” he went on mercilessly. “Don’t you?”

She looked up at him. She could see, reflected in his eyes, the lights of the house across the lawn, but his face was in shadow. He inclined his head and kissed her lips, and she did not turn away. “Salt tears,” he said after a minute. “You do love me. I knew it.” He took a folded handkerchief from his pocket and touched her face gently, mopping the teardrops from her cheeks.

She had to put a stop to this. “We must catch up with the others,” she said. “People will talk.” She turned and began to walk, so that he had to either release her arm or go with her. He went with her.

“I’m surprised that you worry about people talking,” he said. “Your set is famous for not minding anything of that sort.”

She was not really concerned about the others. It was herself she was worried about. She made him walk faster until they rejoined the rest of the party, then she let go of his arm and talked to the duchess.

She was obscurely bothered by Hugh’s saying that
the Marlborough Set was famous for its tolerance. It was true, but she wished he hadn’t used the phrase
anything of that sort
; she was not sure why.

When they reentered the house the tall clock in the hall was striking midnight. Maisie suddenly felt drained by the tensions of the day. “I’m going to bed,” she announced.

She saw the duchess look reflexively at Hugh, then back at her, and suppress a little smile; and she realized that they all thought Hugh would sleep with her tonight.

The ladies went upstairs together, leaving the men to play billiards and drink a nightcap. As the women kissed her good night Maisie saw the same look in the eyes of each one, a gleam of excitement tinged with envy.

She went into her bedroom and closed the door. A coal fire burned merrily in the grate, and there were candles on the mantelpiece and the dressing table. On the bedside table, as usual, there was a plate of sandwiches and a bottle of sherry in case she got peckish in the night: she never touched them, but the well-trained staff of Kingsbridge Manor put a tray beside every bed without fail.

She began to take off her clothes. They might all be wrong: perhaps Hugh would not come to her tonight. The thought stabbed her like a pain, and she longed for him to come through the door so that she could take him in her arms and kiss him, really kiss him, not guiltily as she had in the garden, but hungrily and shamelessly. The feeling brought back an overwhelming memory of the night of the Goodwood races six years ago, the narrow bed in his aunt’s house, and the expression on his face when she took off her dress.

She looked at her body in the long mirror. Hugh would notice how it had changed. Six years ago she had had tiny turned-in pink nipples like dimples, but now, after nursing Bertie, they were enlarged and strawberry-colored, and stuck out. As a girl she had not needed to
wear a corset—she had been naturally wasp-shaped—but her waist had never quite returned to normal after pregnancy.

She heard the men coming up the stairs, heavy-footed and laughing at some joke. Hugh had been right: not one of them would be shocked by a little adultery at a country-house party. Did they not feel disloyal to their friend Solly, she thought derisively? And then it hit her like a slap in the face that she was the one who ought to feel disloyal.

She had put Solly out of her mind all evening, but now he came back to her in spirit: harmless, amiable Solly; kind, generous Solly; the man who loved her to distraction, the man who cared for Bertie, knowing he was another man’s child. Within hours of his leaving the house Maisie was about to let another man come into her bed. What kind of woman am I? she thought.

On impulse she went to the door and locked it.

She understood now why she had disliked Hugh’s saying
Your set is famous for not minding anything of that sort
. It made her feeling for Hugh seem commonplace, just another one of the many flirtations, romances and infidelities that gave society ladies something to gossip about. Solly deserved better than to be betrayed by a commonplace affair.

But I want Hugh, she thought.

The idea of forgoing this night with him made her want to weep. She thought of his boyish grin and his bony chest, his blue eyes and smooth white skin; and she remembered the expression on his face when he looked at her body, the expression of wonder and happiness, desire and delight; and it seemed so hard to give that up.

There was a soft tap at the door.

She stood naked in the middle of the room, paralyzed and dumb.

The handle turned and the door was pushed, but of course it would not open.

She heard her name spoken in a low voice.

She went to the door and put her hand to the key.

“Maisie!” he called softly. “It’s me, Hugh.”

She longed for him so much that the sound of his voice made her moist inside. She put her finger in her mouth and bit herself hard, but the pain did not mask the desire.

He tapped on the door again. “Maisie! Let me in?”

She leaned her back against the wall, and the tears streamed down her face, dripping off her chin onto her breasts.

“At least let us talk!”

She knew that if she opened the door there would be no talking—she would take him in her arms and they would fall to the floor in a frenzy of desire.

“Say
something
. Are you there? I know you’re there.”

She stood still, crying silently.

“Please?” he said. “Please?”

After a while he went away.

Maisie slept badly and woke early, but as the new day dawned her spirits lifted a little. Before the other guests were up she went along to the nursery wing as usual. Outside the door of the nursery dining room she stopped suddenly. She was not the first guest to rise, after all. She could hear a man’s voice inside. She paused and listened. It was Hugh.

He was saying: “And just at that moment, the giant woke up.”

There was a childish squeal of delighted terror that Maisie recognized as coming from Bertie.

Hugh went on: “Jack went down the beanstalk as fast as his legs could carry him—but the giant came after him!”

Kingo’s daughter Anne said in the superior voice of
a knowing seven-year-old: “Bertie’s hiding behind his chair because he’s scared. I’m not scared.”

Maisie wanted to hide like Bertie, and she turned and began to walk back to her room, but she stopped again. She had to face Hugh sometime today, and here in the nursery might be the easiest place. She composed herself and went in.

Hugh had the three children enraptured. Bertie hardly saw his mother come in. Hugh looked up at Maisie with hurt in his eyes. “Don’t stop,” Maisie said, and she sat down by Bertie and hugged him.

Hugh returned his attention to the children. “And what do you think Jack did next?”

“I know,” said Anne. “He got an ax.”

“That’s right.”

Maisie sat there hugging Bertie, while Bertie stared big-eyed at the man who was his real father. If I can stand this, I can do anything, Maisie thought.

Hugh said: “And while the giant was still halfway up the beanstalk, Jack chopped it down! And the giant fell all the way to the earth … and died. And Jack and his mother lived happily ever after.”

Bertie said: “Tell it again.”

4

THE CORDOVAN MINISTRY
was busy. Tomorrow was Cordovan Independence Day and there would be a big afternoon reception for members of Parliament, Foreign Office officials, diplomats and journalists. This morning, to add to his worries, Micky Miranda had received a stiff note from the British Foreign Secretary about two English tourists who had been murdered while exploring the Andes. But when Edward Pilaster called, Micky Miranda dropped everything, for what he had to say to Edward was much more important than either the reception or
the note. He needed half a million pounds, and he was hoping to get the money from Edward.