Daughters of Fortune: A Novel (39 page)

With over a hundred and fifty mourners thronging the drawing room, no one noticed him go. A buffet lunch was being served, but Elizabeth had no appetite. There was no one she could talk to, no one who would understand. Caitlin hadn’t even bothered flying back for today, and in some ways Elizabeth didn’t blame her: it wasn’t as though Rosalind had been especially welcoming to her illegitimate grandchild. And Amber was nowhere to be seen. She had come back from New York full of talk about her latest fad, modeling. No doubt she had sneaked
upstairs to call her friends and tell them all about it. That was the last thing Amber needed—a bunch of people spending the day flattering her. Elizabeth still couldn’t quite understand why their father had allowed it.

Their mother seemed to think the independence would do Amber good, teach her some responsibility. But two months abroad seemed to have done little to stem her teenage rebellion. She’d even had the gall to turn up at the funeral in black jeans, a black T-shirt, and oversized sunglasses. Elizabeth had been horrified by the show of disrespect. Then she thought,
if granny could see Amber now, she’d sniff and say that was all you could expect from such a spoiled child,
and that made her smile. That was what today should be about, after all: remembering who Rosalind Melville had been.

“That was a beautiful speech you made in the church, Elizabeth.” The girl looked up to see her father.

“Thank you,” she said. Truthfully, she had been surprised when he’d asked her to give the eulogy today. It had taken a lot for her to get through it without crying. “I did my best.”

“Yes, you did,” he said firmly. “She would have been delighted, you know.”

Elizabeth looked away, unsure how to react. These expressions of fatherly pride were so longed for by her, but equally so rare that she had no idea how to deal with them.

Before she could think of an appropriate response, William had moved off into the crowd, back to playing his role as genial host. Elizabeth walked over to the bar and got the waiter to fix her a gin and tonic. It was Friday, and she was planning to stay for the weekend at Aldringham rather than rush back to Tokyo. She heard a shout of laughter behind her and whirled around, prepared to glare at whoever was being disrespectful. But as she surveyed the room, she suddenly realized that no one looked contrite or embarrassed by their humorous outburst. The low, respectful voices that people had used at the start of the day were abandoned now, along with their jackets and ties. Because, deep down, no one really cared about Rosalind. Most of these people were only here to show their faces, to network. Standing there, in the middle of the hypocrisy, Elizabeth felt a sudden desire to be alone.

She had the bartender pour another large gin and tonic and then took it out onto the veranda. But even there she felt too close to everyone
else. She wanted to get completely away. So she started to walk, heading down toward the tennis courts. No one would find her there. Only when she was far away from the house did she finally sink down onto the stone steps and rest her head on her knees, pleased to be able to let her public mask slip away.

She’d hardly been there a minute when she heard a cough behind her. She looked up and her heart sank. It was Cole.

“Oh, great,” she muttered. That was all she needed. She’d spotted him in the church earlier and had managed to avoid his gaze. Now, she quickly wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. She hated anyone to see her looking vulnerable, and it was even worse that it was Cole. However, he didn’t seem to notice her discomfort. Instead, he took out a clean hanky from the pocket of his suit jacket and held it out to her. She hesitated for a moment and then took it from him.

“Thanks,” she mumbled, blowing her nose.

“I followed you,” Cole explained unnecessarily. “I saw you leaving the house. Thought I’d make sure you were okay.”

“Thanks. But I’m fine.” She just wished he’d go away.

He didn’t. “You were close to your grandmother,” he said.

It was more of a statement than a question, but she nodded anyway. “Yes. Yes, I was.” She cleared her throat, fighting to regain her composure. “But, like I said, I’m fine, honestly. You should go back to the house. I’ll be in soon.”

She expected him to take the easy way out and leave then. But instead he sat down on the step beside her and took her hand. They sat like that, not speaking, not moving, but perfectly at peace, for a very long time.

The week after his mother’s funeral, when everything had finally started getting back to normal, William made an appointment to see Gus Fellows, his mother’s lawyer and the executor of her estate. Afterward, William often thought that he wouldn’t have reacted quite so badly to the contents of her will if he’d had some prior warning; if she’d come to him and said, “This is what I intend to do with my shares in Melville.” Instead, he had no inkling that anything had changed since that time a decade earlier, when she had made provisions for her entire 10 percent shareholding to pass to him.

As he sat opposite Gus in the Chancery Lane offices of Fellows &
Sons, the last thing he was expecting to hear was that she had made a new will.

“When did she do that?” William asked, already suspecting that any change he hadn’t been involved in couldn’t be good.

Gus Fellows had the decency to look embarrassed. He pretended to check the date. “A little over five years ago.”

Five years ago.
When Caitlin had come to live with them.
The significance wasn’t lost on William. And he wasn’t surprised, although he was still hurt, to learn moments later that Rosalind had elected to leave her shares to her two legitimate granddaughters—7.5 percent to Elizabeth, and 2.5 percent to Amber.

And William, already feeling aged by the death of his mother, and trying to ignore the niggling awareness of his own mortality, became sharply aware in that moment of the next generation on his tail. Smart, confident Elizabeth, of whom he had felt so proud in the church, whose strength had seemed like such a compliment to him, now looked more like a threat. He knew his eldest daughter well enough to appreciate that she was young, hungry, and determined—and that her sights were set firmly on his job. That had always been the case, but at least over the past few years he had been able to control her movements within the company. Now Rosalind had given her the tools to increase her influence within Melville.

It wasn’t exactly the legacy William had hoped for.

_________

Piers jerked awake from the nightmare, covered in a cold sweat. Alone in the darkness, he felt terrified. He reached out for the bedside lamp, fumbling until he finally found the switch. Light flooded the room, and he began to feel a little better.

He lay in bed for a minute longer, waiting for his breathing to slow. Then he disentangled himself from the sheets, stood up, and padded over to the bathroom. Under the harsh fluorescent lights, he saw just how bad he looked. His eyes were bloodshot, the skin underneath loose and puffy. It was hardly surprising. He hadn’t slept properly for nearly eight weeks now. Not since his mother had passed away. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw her: gasping, choking, dying . . . Whatever he did, he couldn’t get that image out of his mind.

The lack of sleep was beginning to take its toll. He’d been walking around in a permanent daze. Eventually, after making a couple of mistakes at work, he’d gone to see a doctor. “It’s perfectly normal, of course,” he’d said, giving Piers a sympathetic smile, “after the death of a loved one. But I can understand why you might be feeling a bit desperate. Insomnia is a terrible thing.”

That was an understatement,
Piers had thought, as the doctor wrote out a prescription. Lying awake night after night, desperate to lose himself in the sweet oblivion of unconsciousness only to find that, whatever he did, he still could not sleep. Sometimes, he felt as though he was going completely crazy.

He’d hoped the sleeping pills were going to solve all that. Earlier that night, he had taken two tablets, as instructed, and after thirty minutes
he’d felt himself nodding off . . . only to wake now, three hours later, with that same image in his mind: of his mother reaching out for him, only for him to fail her. If possible he felt even worse than before. The pills, which he’d imagined were going to be a miracle cure, now seemed more like a curse.

He flushed the rest of the tablets down the toilet. Then he went back to bed, but not to sleep. For Piers, it was a long time until the sun finally came up.

_________

Caitlin O’Dwyer was nervous, excited, and late.
Late for the most important night of my life,
she thought despairingly, as the limousine inched along Fifth Avenue. Midtown traffic was always a bitch, but this evening it seemed worse than usual. Car horns sounded in an angry symphony. Tempers were rising with the temperature, everyone desperate to escape the claustrophobic heat of the New York summer. Thank God for air-conditioning, at least. It was the one advantage of the rock-star car. Tinted windows, TV, and fully stocked bar . . . Caitlin found the bling a little excessive, but her publicist had insisted on it, saying there was “no way in hell” she could turn up at the CFDA’s annual award ceremony in a cab.

The Council of Fashion Designers of America awards—the fashion industry’s equivalent of the Oscars. A shiver ran through her. Even now, she couldn’t believe she’d been nominated.

She had arrived in New York six years earlier with little money but a big dream—to make it as a designer. Sure, she could easily have gotten a job at one of the big fashion houses on Madison Avenue, but she’d already decided that she didn’t want to spend the next two years doing grunt work—making up patterns of another designer’s ideas, overseeing the sample makers. She wanted to work for herself.

So she rented a dingy set of rooms in a drab tenement on the Lower East Side and started trying to sell the clothes she’d made for her year-end show. Confidently, she booked appointments with buyers at every major department store: Neiman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue, Bergdorf . . . but while the buyers liked her garments, no one was prepared to go out on a limb and stock any.

“Sorry,” she was told time and again. “We don’t take risks on unknowns.”

With funds running low, she invested in a sewing machine and got to work making alterations for half a dozen luxury boutiques. It was low-paid and technically far beneath her abilities, but at least it gave her time to work on her own designs.

It was a lonely six months. She knew no one in New York, and it wasn’t the friendliest city. She also had few opportunities to meet new people. She only went into the boutiques once a week to pick up the alterations, then worked on them alone in her basement. She missed Alain and her friends back in Belleville. She missed Lucien more than she’d thought possible.

But in some ways the loneliness worked to her advantage. She had nothing to do apart from work. And slowly, surely, life got better. She gradually built a reputation for being an excellent seamstress—quick, careful, and reliable. That meant she could pick and choose who she worked for. She particularly liked White Heat, a hip boutique on West 14th Street in the Meatpacking District. The clothes were daring, cutting edge, more her style. Every few weeks she would bring in a selection of her garments and try to persuade the owner to start stocking them on a trial basis.

“Soon,” he kept saying. “Once I’ve moved some of the stock I’ve already got.”

But soon wasn’t soon enough for Caitlin.

White Heat was popular with the young, rich, party crowd. One of its biggest customers was Lena Chapman, a Park Avenue princess and budding style icon. With her forthcoming debut at the Viennese Opera Ball, she was looking for something other than the traditional frilly dress.

“Something I can make a splash in,” she said.

Two of the salesclerks, Janice and Marie, were ordered to bring out every white dress in the store for her perusal. Caitlin, there picking up the latest garments for alteration, watched as Lena rejected them all.

“There’s nothing special enough, you know?” she complained to Janice, before sweeping out of the store.

“What a pain in the butt,” the girl remarked to Caitlin after Lena had gone.

But Caitlin was thinking something quite different. She had gotten
to know Lena a little over the past few months—knew that she would rather wear something daring and artistically challenging than look just plain pretty. She was Caitlin’s ideal client.

Dumping the alterations on the counter, Caitlin ran out after her. She caught up with Lena just as she was about to get into a cab, quickly explained that she was a designer and had a dress that she was sure Lena would love.

“Really?” The girl looked sceptical. “I thought I’d been shown all the white dresses in the store.”

“It’s not in there. It’s at my apartment.” Caitlin crossed her fingers, hoping Lena didn’t ask why it wasn’t in the shop. She didn’t want to reveal that she was only a seamstress. “You’d have to come there to see it.”

Fortunately Lena’s interest had been piqued. Always up for finding something quirky and unusual, she agreed to come by that evening at seven. At worst, it would be a waste of twenty minutes of her time.

Lena pirouetted in front of the mirror. “I love it.”

The elegant Art Deco gown was perfect. She had been sceptical about what the softly spoken, somewhat offbeat young woman was going to show her, but it was as though Caitlin had read her mind. Made of white crêpe, the dress was a deceptively simple shift-style garment, given an exotic, opulent look by the handsewn beads that covered it.

A month later, Lena turned up at the Waldorf Astoria looking coolly sophisticated in her Roaring Twenties–inspired cocktail dress. The other debutantes, in far more traditional gowns, were forced to look on as she effortlessly stole the show.

The following week, Lena’s name and picture appeared in the
New York Times
“Sunday Styles” section. Alongside, there was mention of the young, up-and-coming designer responsible for her exquisite dress—Caitlin O’Dwyer.