A Dangerous Fortune

by Ken Follett

  Hugh thought of how Nora refused to make love more than once a week, and how she changed her tune if he bought her gifts; and he felt miserable and looked away. "She's always been deprived," he said. "It's not surprising that she became materialistic."

  "She was not as deprived as I was," Maisie said scornfully. "Even you were taken out of school for want of money, Hugh. It's no excuse for false values. The world is full of poor people who understand that love and friendship are more important than riches."

  Her scorn made Hugh defensive. "She's not as bad as you make out."

  "All the same you're not happy."

  Feeling confused, Hugh fell back on what he knew to be right. "Well, I've married her now, and I won't leave her," he said. "That's what the vows mean."

  Maisie smiled tearfully. "I knew you would say that."

  Hugh had a sudden vision of Maisie naked, her round freckled breasts and the bush of red-gold hair at her groin, and he wished he could take back his high-principled words. Instead he stood up to go.

  Maisie stood up too. "Thank you for coming, dear Hugh," she said.

  He intended to shake her hand but instead he bent to kiss her cheek; and then somehow he found himself kissing her lips. It was a soft, tender kiss that lingered for a long moment and almost destroyed Hugh's resolve; but then at last he tore himself away and left the room without another word.

  Ben Greenbourne's house was another palace a few yards along Piccadilly. Hugh went straight there after seeing Maisie. He was glad to have something to do, some way of taking his mind off the turmoil in his heart. He asked for the old man. "Say it's a matter of great urgency," he told the butler. While he waited he noticed that the mirrors in the hall were covered, and he guessed this was part of the Jewish mourning ritual.

  Maisie had thrown him off balance. When he saw her his heart had filled with love and longing. He knew he could never be truly happy without her. But Nora was his wife. She had brought warmth and affection into his life after Maisie rejected him, and that was why he had married her. What was the point of making promises in a wedding ceremony if you were going to change your mind later?

  The butler showed Hugh into the library. Six or seven people were just going, leaving Ben Greenbourne alone. He had no shoes on and sat on a plain wooden stool. A table was piled with fruit and pastries for visitors.

  Greenbourne was past sixty--Solly had been a late child--and he looked old and worn, but he showed no sign of tears. He stood up, straight-backed and formal as ever, and shook hands, then waved Hugh to another stool.

  Greenbourne had an old letter in his hand. "Listen to this," he said, and he began to read. "'Dear Papa, We have a new Latin teacher, Reverend Green, and I am getting on much better, ten out of ten every day last week. Waterford caught a rat in the broom cupboard and he is trying to train it to eat out of his hand. The food here is too little, can you send me a cake? Your loving son, Solomon.'" He folded the letter. "He was fourteen when he wrote that."

  Hugh saw that Greenbourne was suffering despite his rigid self-control. "I remember that rat," he said. "It bit Waterford's forefinger off."

  "How I wish I could turn back the years," Greenbourne said, and Hugh saw that the old man's self-control was weakening.

  "I must be one of Solly's oldest friends," Hugh said.

  "Indeed. He always admired you, although you were younger."

  "I can't think why. But he was always ready to think the best of people."

  "He was too soft."

  Hugh did not want the conversation to go that way. "I've come here not just as Solly's friend, but as Maisie's too."

  Greenbourne stiffened immediately. The sad look went from his face and he became the caricature of the upright Prussian again. Hugh wondered how anyone could so hate a woman as beautiful and full of fun as Maisie.

  Hugh went on: "I met her soon after Solly did. I fell in love with her myself, but Solly won her."

  "He was richer."

  "Mr. Greenbourne, I hope you will allow me to be frank. Maisie was a penniless girl looking for a rich husband. But after she married Solly she kept her part of the bargain. She was a good wife to him."

  "And she has had her reward," Greenbourne said. "She has enjoyed the life of a lady for five years."

  "Funnily enough, that's what she said. But I don't think it's good enough. What about little Bertie? Surely you don't want to leave your grandson destitute?"

  "Grandson?" said Greenbourne. "Hubert is no relation to me."

  Hugh had an odd premonition that something momentous was about to happen. It was like a nightmare in which a frightening but nameless horror was about to strike. "I don't understand," he said to Greenbourne. "What do you mean?"

  "That woman was already with child when she married my son."

  Hugh gasped.

  "Solly knew it, and he knew the child was not his," Greenbourne went on. "He took her all the same--against my will, I need hardly add. People generally don't know this, of course: we went to great lengths to keep it secret, but there's no need to any longer, how that--" He broke off, swallowed hard, and continued. "They went around the world after the wedding. The child was born in Switzerland; they gave out a false birth date; by the time they came home, having been away for almost two years, it was hard to tell that the baby was actually four months older than they said."

  Hugh felt as if his heart had stopped. There was a question he had to ask, but he was terrified of the answer. "Who--who was the father?"

  "She would never say," Greenbourne said. "Solly never knew."

  But Hugh did.

  The child was his.

  He stared at Ben Greenbourne, unable to speak.

  He would talk to Maisie, and make her tell the truth, but he knew she would confirm his intuition. She had never been promiscuous, despite appearances. She had been a virgin when he seduced her. He had made her pregnant, on that first night. Then Augusta had contrived to split them up, and Maisie had married Solly.

  She had even called the baby Hubert, a name closely similar to Hugh.

  "It is appalling, of course," Greenbourne said, seeing his consternation and misunderstanding the reason for it.

  I have a child, Hugh thought. A son. Hubert. Called Bertie. The thought wrenched at his heart.

  "However, I'm sure you now see why I don't wish to have anything more to do with the woman or her child, now that my dear son has passed away."

  "Oh, don't worry," Hugh said distractedly. "I'll take care of them."

  "You?" Greenbourne said, mystified. "Why should it be any concern of yours?"

  "Oh ... well, I'm all they've got, now, I suppose," Hugh said.

  "Don't get sucked in, young Pilaster," Greenbourne said kindly. "You've got a wife of your own to worry about."

  Hugh did not want to explain and he was too dazed to make up a story. He had to get away. He stood up. "I must go. My deepest condolences, Mr. Greenbourne. Solly was the best man I ever knew."

  Greenbourne bowed his head. Hugh left him.

  In the hall with the shrouded mirrors he took his hat from the footman and went out into the sunshine of Piccadilly. He walked west and entered Hyde Park, heading for his home in Kensington. He could have taken a hansom but he wanted time to think.

  Everything was different now. Nora was his legal wife but Maisie was the mother of his son. Nora could look after herself--and so could Maisie, for that matter --but a child needed a father. Suddenly the question of what he was to do with the rest of his life was open again.

  No doubt a clergyman would say that nothing had changed and he should stay with Nora, the woman he had married in church; but clergymen did not know much. The strict Methodism of the Pilasters had passed Hugh by: he had never been able to believe that the answer to every modern moral dilemma could be found in the Bible. Nora had seduced and married him for cold-hearted gain--Maisie was right about that--and all there was between them was a piece of paper. That was very little, weighed against a child--the child of
a love so strong that it had persisted for many years and through many trials.

  Am I just making excuses, he wondered? Is all this no more than a specious justification for giving in to a desire I know to be wrong?

  He felt torn in two.

  He tried to consider the practicalities. He had no grounds for divorce, but he felt sure that Nora would be willing to divorce him, if she were offered enough money. However, the Pilasters would ask him to resign from the bank: the social stigma of divorce was too great to allow him to continue as a partner. He could get another job but no respectable people in London would entertain him and Maisie as a couple even after they married. They would almost certainly have to go abroad. But that prospect attracted him and he felt it would appeal to Maisie too. He could return to Boston or, better still, go to New York. He might never be a millionaire but what was that balanced against the joy of being with the woman he had always loved?

  He found himself outside his own house. It was part of an elegant new red-brick terrace in Kensington, half a mile from his aunt Augusta's much more extravagant place at Kensington Gore. Nora would be in her overdecorated bedroom, dressing for lunch. What was to stop him walking in and announcing that he was leaving her?

  That was what he wanted to do, he knew that now. But was it right?

  It was the child that made the difference. It would be wrong to leave Nora for Maisie; but it was right to leave Nora for the sake of Bertie.

  He wondered what Nora would say when he told her, and his imagination gave him the answer. He pictured her face set in lines of hard determination, and he heard the unpleasant edge to her voice, and he could guess the exact words she would use: "It will cost you every penny you've got."

  Oddly enough, that decided him. If he had pictured her bursting into tears of sadness he would have been unable to go through with it, but he knew his first intuition was right.

  He went into the house and ran up the stairs.

  She was in front of the mirror, putting on the pendant he had given her. It was a bitter reminder that he had to buy her jewelry to persuade her to make love.

  She spoke before he did. "I've got some news," she said.

  "Never mind that now--"

  But she would not be put off. She had an odd expression on her face: half triumphant, half sulky. "You'll have to stay out of my bed for a while, anyway."

  He saw that he was hot going to be allowed to speak until she had had her say. "What on earth are you talking about?" he said impatiently.

  "The inevitable has happened."

  Suddenly Hugh guessed. He felt as if he had been hit by a train. It was too late: he could never leave her now. He felt revulsion, and the pain of loss: loss of Maisie, loss of his son.

  He looked into her eyes. There was defiance there, almost as if she had guessed what he had been planning. Perhaps she had.

  He forced himself to smile. "The inevitable?"

  Then she said it. "I'm going to have a baby."

  PART III

  1890

  CHAPTER ONE

  SEPTEMBER

  1

  JOSEPH PILASTER DIED in September 1890, having been Senior Partner of Pilasters Bank for seventeen years. During that period Britain had grown steadily richer, and so had the Pilasters. They were now almost as rich as the Greenbournes. Joseph's estate came to more than two million pounds, including his collection of sixty-five antique jeweled snuffboxes--one for each year of his life--which was worth a hundred thousand pounds on its own, and which he left to his son Edward.

  All the family kept all their capital invested in the business, which paid them an infallible five percent interest when ordinary depositors were getting about one and a half percent on their money most of the time. The partners got even more. As well as five percent on their invested capital they shared out the profits between them, according to complicated formulas. After a decade of such profit shares, Hugh was halfway to being a millionaire.

  On the morning of the funeral Hugh inspected his face in his shaving mirror, looking for signs of mortality. He was thirty-seven years old. His hair was going gray, but the stubble he was scraping off his face was still black. Curly moustaches were fashionable and he wondered whether he should grow one to make himself look younger.

  Uncle Joseph had been lucky, Hugh thought. During his tenure as Senior Partner the financial world had been stable. There had been only two minor crises: the failure of the City of Glasgow Bank in 1878 and the crash of the French bank Union Generate in 1882. In both cases the Bank of England had contained the crisis by raising interest rates briefly to six percent, which was still a long way below panic level. In Hugh's opinion, Uncle Joseph had committed the bank much too heavily to investment in South America--but the crash which Hugh constantly feared had not come, and as far as Uncle Joseph was concerned it now never would. However, having risky investments was like owning a tumbledown house and renting it to tenants: the rent would keep coming in until the very end, but when the house finally fell down there would be no more rent and no more house either. Now that Joseph was gone Hugh wanted to put the bank on a sounder footing by selling or repairing some of those tumbledown South American investments.

  When he had washed and shaved he put on his dressing gown and went into Nora's room. She was expecting him: they always made love on Friday mornings. He had long ago accepted her once-a-week rule. She had become very plump, and her face was rounder than ever, but as a result she had very few lines, and she still looked pretty.

  All the same, as he made love to her he closed his eyes and imagined he was with Maisie.

  Sometimes he felt like giving up altogether. But these Friday-morning sessions had so far given him three sons whom he loved to distraction: Tobias, named for Hugh's father; Samuel, for his uncle; and Solomon, for Solly Greenbourne. Toby, the eldest, would start at Windfield School next year. Nora produced babies with little difficulty but once they were born she lost interest in them, and Hugh gave them a lot of attention to compensate for their mother's coldness.

  Hugh's secret child, Maisie's son Bertie, now sixteen, had been at Windfield for years, and was a prizewinning scholar and star of the cricket team. Hugh paid his fees, visited the school on Speech Day, and generally acted like a godfather. Perhaps this led a few cynical people to suspect that he was Bertie's real father. But he had been Solly's friend, and everyone knew that Solly's father refused to support the boy, so most people assumed he was simply being generously faithful to the memory of Solly.

  As he rolled off Nora she said: "What time is the ceremony?"

  "Eleven o'clock at Kensington Methodist Hall. And lunch afterwards at Whitehaven House."

  Hugh and Nora still lived in Kensington, but they had moved to a bigger house when the boys started coming. Hugh had left the choice to Nora, and she had picked a big house in the same ornate, vaguely Flemish style as Augusta's--a style that had become the height of fashion, or at any rate the height of suburban fashion, since Augusta built her place.

  Augusta had never been satisfied with Whitehaven House. She wanted a Piccadilly palace like the Greenbournes. But there was still a measure of Methodist puritanism in the Pilasters, and Joseph had insisted that Whitehaven House was enough luxury for anyone, no matter how rich. Now the house belonged to Edward. Perhaps Augusta would persuade him to sell it and buy her something grander.

  When Hugh went down to breakfast his mother was already there. She and Dotty had come up from Folkestone yesterday. Hugh kissed his mother and sat down, and she said without preamble: "Do you think he really loves her, Hugh?"

  Hugh did not have to ask whom she was talking about. Dotty, now twenty-three, was engaged to Lord Ipswich, eldest son of the duke of Norwich. Nick Ipswich was heir to a bankrupt dukedom, and Mama was afraid he only wanted Dotty for her money, or rather her brother's money.

  Hugh looked fondly at his mother. She still wore black, twenty-four years after the death of his father. Her hair was now white, but in his eyes she was as b
eautiful as ever. "He loves her, Mama," he said.

  As Dotty did not have a father, Nick had come to Hugh to ask formal permission to marry her. In such cases it was usual for the lawyers on both sides to draw up the marriage settlement before the engagement was confirmed, but Nick had insisted on doing things the other way around. "I've told Miss Pilaster that I'm a poor man," he had said to Hugh. "She says she has known both affluence and poverty, and she thinks happiness comes from the people you are with, not the money you have." It was all very idealistic, and Hugh would certainly give his sister a generous dowry; but he was happy to know that Nick genuinely loved her for richer or poorer.

  Augusta was enraged that Dotty was marrying so well. When Nick's father died, Dotty would be a duchess, which was far superior to a countess.

  Dotty came down a few minutes later. She had grown up in a way Hugh would never have expected. The shy, giggly little girl had become a sultry woman, dark-haired and sensual, strong-willed and quick-tempered. Hugh guessed that quite a lot of young men were intimidated by her, which was probably why she had reached the age of twenty-three without getting married. But Nick Ipswich had a quiet strength that did not need the prop of a compliant wife. Hugh thought they would have a passionate, quarrelsome marriage, quite the opposite of his own.

  Nick called, by appointment, at ten, while they were still sitting around the breakfast table. Hugh had asked him to come. Nick sat next to Dotty and took a cup of coffee. He was an intelligent young man, twenty-two years old, just down from Oxford where, unlike most young aristocrats, he had actually sat examinations and got a degree. He had typically English good looks, fair hair and blue eyes and regular features, and Dotty looked at him as if she wanted to eat him with a spoon. Hugh envied their simple, lustful love.

  Hugh felt too young to be playing the role of head of the family, but he had asked for this meeting, so he plunged right in. "Dotty, your fiance and I have had several long discussions about money."

  Mama got up to leave, but Hugh stopped her. "Women are supposed to understand money nowadays, Mama--it's the modern way." She smiled at him as if he were being a foolish boy, but she sat down again.

  Hugh went on: "As you all know, Nick had been planning a professional career, and thinking of reading for the bar, as the dukedom no longer provides a living." As a banker Hugh understood exactly how Nick's father had lost everything. The duke had been a progressive landowner, and in the agricultural boom of the midcentury he had borrowed money to finance improvements: drainage schemes, the grubbing up of miles of hedges, and expensive steam-powered machinery for threshing, mowing and reaping. Then in the 1870s had come the great agricultural depression which was still going on now in 1890. The price of farmland had slumped and the duke's lands were worth less than the mortgages he had taken on them.