Lady of Fortune

by Graham Masterton

  ‘That sounds like an old family joke,’ said Prudence.

  Dougal nodded. ‘Aye. But you don’t have any reason to fret about Effie. She’s only seventeen, and I think all this million-pound banking business has gone to her head a little.’

  ‘Sit down,’ said Prudence, patting the sofa beside her. ‘I can’t bear to be loomed over.’

  Dougal pulled up his coat-tails, and sat down beside her. He was feeling warmer now, less shivery, and more at ease. She was quite right, Prudence, when she said there was no need to be worried about being chaperoned. This was London, after all, and he was twenty-five years old, and quite capable of behaving himself. He had kissed plenty of girls, of course, and apart from his initiation at the hands of Miss Maidment, there had been Queenie McKay, the daughter of one of his father’s clerks, and a great deal of panting and petticoat-lifting and urgent caressing with Ruthie Waterton, whose father owned Waterton’s Colonial Stores in Princes Street (where the discerning shopper could purchase anything from an ‘Arctic’ brand footwarmer to a 10-lb tin of goat’s-butter).

  Prudence held out her hand, and Dougal, hesitantly at first, took it, and laid it on his, a small white hand over a large red hand.

  ‘Do you know what my mother told me?’ Prudence asked him, gazing down at their intertwined fingers. ‘She said that I should never hold hands with a boy until I was engaged to be married to him. Women are queens, she said, and should never fail in their queenly dignity. I would as soon have let a boy hold my hand when I was young as pick up a snake! She said that holding hands acts directly on the nerves of the body, and makes them morbidly sensitive! You will end up being diseased, and weak.’

  Dougal narrowed his eyes at her, and said, with a small grin, ‘I can’t see any signs of the disease yet. How are you feeling? Bad? Worse?’

  Prudence arched her neck back, and sighed with exaggerated delirium. ‘I believe that I’m actually feeling quite sumptuous. Do you know something, I adore your Scottish accent. I could close my eyes and listen to it all night.’

  She brought her head up straight again, and stared at him, in case he had missed the point about ‘all night’. He looked back at her with caution, unsure if she was teasing him or if she really meant it.

  ‘Prudence,’ he said, with the faintest hint of a question in his voice. He leaned forward, still holding her hand, until their faces were only inches apart. They stared at each other closely, their eyes flickering quickly from side to side the way lovers’ eyes do. Then Dougal bent forward a little more, and kissed her.

  Her lips were moist, and tasted of cloves. He ran the tip of his tongue around them, and then sensitively parted them, so that he could lick at her teeth. She wasn’t shocked by ‘French kissing’, as most young girls would have been. Instead, she let his stiff tongue slide into her mouth as deeply as it would go, and she breathed steadily and passionately through her nose as if she were swimming through a summer tide. He held her bare shoulder with his left hand, slipping his fingers beneath the openwork strap of her dress, and smoothing her skin around and around.

  ‘Dougal,’ she whispered, close to his ear, ‘you don’t know much I’ve desired you, ever since I first saw you.’

  ‘But Jack –’

  ‘Oh God, Jack! Jack won’t mind. Jack loves you, too, like his own brother. Oh God, Dougal, don’t let’s wait.’

  Dougal looked towards the half-open living-room door. His blood rushed noisily around his head. ‘But your friends? What time will they be back?’

  ‘They won’t. They’ve gone for the whole night. Oh, Dougal, please.’

  Dougal couldn’t believe what was happening. He felt as if he were drunk: that odd sensation of being here and yet not being here, those intermittent fadeouts of consciousness and those losses of wilful strength. But with one shoulder strap already hanging loose, and her dress so low that Dougal could see the edge of her cream satin-covered corsets, and the way it cupped her breasts so that they bulged out of her bodice, Prudence was already unfastening his necktie, and tugging it away from his celluloid collar, and unbuttoning the top few buttons of his shirt. She panted and kissed and sighed continuously, and occasionaly pulled at his blond clock-spring curls and murmured, ‘Dougal. You gorgeous animal, you.’

  They kissed each other fiercely, and clawed at each other’s clothes. They rolled off the sofa on to the burgundy-coloured carpet, until they got stuck against the legs of a weighty spoonback chair. They rolled back again, trying as they kissed to wrestle off the last of their clothes. Soon, Prudence was wearing only her corset, her garter belt, and her black stockings. Dougal was completely naked.

  He lifted himself above her. He paused, panting for breath. Then he reverently dipped his head first to the right, and then to the left – to kiss with open-mouthed kisses the wide pale-pink nipples of her breasts. Prudence moaned, and tossed her head from side to side, and spoke his name over and over again in a hot, low, Ethel Barrymore whisper. ‘Dougal, Dougal, you beautiful animal. Oh, Dougal!’ She touzled his hair, and squirmed her legs beneath him, and clung on to him so tightly at one time that her fingernails dug red furrows across the muscles of his arms. ‘Oh, Dougal, don’t deny me! Oh, Dougal!’

  He knelt on one knee, picked her up unsteadily in his arms, and carried her through into the nearest bedroom. She pushed the door open with her black-stockinged feet. The bedroom was decorated in blue and white; with wallpaper like blue Wedgwood pottery and a white lace bedspread on the bed. On a small painted-pine dressing-table stood a blue china jug and a blue china bowl, and an oval mirror surrounded by blue china roses. Dougal laid Prudence down on to the bed, kissed her, and then climbed on to the lace beside her, holding her face so close that he could scarcely focus on it, just a blur of dreamy blue eyes and creamy white skin. He kissed her again and again.

  ‘You must think so badly of me,’ murmured Prudence. Her brown curls, smelling of lavender and London fog, lay across his face like a soft and frondy mask. He traced along the line of her shoulder with his fingertip, her warm fragrant shoulder, and then he held the weighty softness of her breast in his hand, and felt the nipple rise up to tickle his palm, touch his lifeline, brush his heartline. His penis surged up against his thigh, its head congested, and dark as a plum.

  They made love twice while the evening passed them by, while tiny clocks whirred and chimed unheard in other rooms. Someone upstairs was singing ‘Tell Me, Pretty Maiden’, from last year’s hit musical Florodora. Someone in another flat was practising scales on the piano, over and over again, up and down. In the hallway, there was the bumping and squeaking of carpet-sweepers, as the cleaners polished and swept up the buildings for tomorrow. The bed-springs in the blue and white bedroom let out a lewd and persistent complaint, but that only excited Dougal all the more. To think that other people could hear them, and know what they were doing. To think that everybody in this whole block of flats was listening to Dougal Watson and Prudence Cutting have illicit and energetic intercourse.

  In the oval, rose-bordered mirror on the dressing-table, he glimpsed Prudence’s face, flushed and grimacing. Then he saw his hand on her breast, his fingers digging deep into her white bare flesh. Then nothing but tangled sheets, and a blur of brown hair. But near the end, as Prudence mounted him, her fingers painfully entwined in the blond curls on his chest, he saw in the mirror the two pale moons of her bottom, rising up and down, and his own glistening shaft, actually plunging into the brown tangle of her hair, and the vision of that would remain with him for the rest of his life, framed in blue china roses.

  Later, he stood by the window staring out at Wrights Lane, taking pinches of snuff. Prudence came in from the bedroom, her hair brushed, wearing an embroidered robe of turquoise silk, beneath which her breasts danced a complicated jiggle. Jink and diddle, they called that motion in Edinburgh, the way Prudence’s nipples moved beneath the silk. It was the way that people danced to the fiddler’s elbow, here and there, with a kind of tremulous, hesitant, starting dance.


  Dougal, in his trousers and his undervest, his suspenders hanging from his waist, turned and smiled at her, and reached out his arm. She slithered up close to him, and kissed his cheek.

  ‘You’ve been taking snuff,’ she said, tapping the tip of his nose with her finger.

  ‘Sneeshin, we call it in Scotland,’ said Dougal, and held up his small silver snuff-box. ‘And this we call a sneeshin-mill.’

  She kissed him again. ‘You’re beautiful,’ she said.

  Dougal touched her hair. ‘I’m only as beautiful as you’ve made me,’ he said. ‘I didn’t believe that things like this could happen.’

  ‘Of course they can happen. They happen all the time. Men and women fall in love; sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. There isn’t a woman alive who wouldn’t swap places with me, if she could, and do just what I’ve done.’ She kissed him once more. ‘Love has struck me like lightning. I can’t help it. It’s an act of God. And, anyway, who can jump out of the way of lightning? Not me. Not that I’d want to.’

  Dougal held both her shoulders, and pressed his lips to her forehead, breathing in the smell of her hair again. Outside, on the black window-panes, sleet began to clatter again, and then subside, and then clatter louder.

  ‘I’d better be getting back to Eaton Square,’ said Dougal.

  ‘I’ll see you again, though?’ asked Prudence.

  ‘Charging elephants couldn’t keep me away.’

  ‘And you will be nice to Jack, and to Mr Snetterton, and Mr Plant? I know they’re honest, and I know how dedicated they are. You mustn’t let your sister discourage you.’

  Dougal slipped his hand inside Prudence’s robe. ‘I won’t,’ he promised, with his eyes closed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  The following evening, Tuesday, Dougal came back from the office to find Effie in the library, in a soft cream blouse with mutton-chop sleeves and a long brown skirt, reading Principles of Finance by Thomas Jethroe. He closed the doors behind him and stood watching her quietly; the way the lamplight fell across her face; the way her hair shone. There was no doubt about it, Effie had grown up since she had come to London.

  She looked up, and said, with pleasure, ‘Dougal.’

  ‘What are you reading?’ he asked her.

  She held the book up. ‘Jethroe on foreign investment. I don’t particularly agree with him, but I suppose I’m going to have to understand what’s wrong before I can say what’s right.’

  Dougal sat down on the tall leather library chair opposite her, and crossed his arms. ‘I’ll give you one thing, Effie, you’ve got plenty of gall.’

  ‘Gall?’

  ‘Well, nerve, if you want to put it that way. You even had me worried yesterday. Poor old Snetterton was throwing a fit.’

  Effie’s expression didn’t change, but she felt a cold tingle run down her back, as if someone had outlined her vertebrae, one after the other, with a single wintry finger. She said, ‘You haven’t committed yourself yet? You haven’t signed anything?’

  Dougal said, evasively, There was no earthly reason why we shouldn’t.’

  ‘You’ve done it, then?’

  ‘Aye, we’ve done it. We signed the papers this afternoon, at Lothbury.’

  Effie stood up, her face as white as the pages of her open book. ‘Dougal, what have you done?’

  ‘Done? What do you think I’ve done? Signed a loan agreement for a profitable railway line, that’s what I’ve done. What else?’

  ‘But what about Lord Rethesdale?’

  ‘What about Lord Rethesdale? He’s in Florence, yes, I’ll grant you. But we have his written guarantee. You’re not still trying to tell me that yon crouchie fellow you met in the park on Saturday was Lord Rethesdale?’

  Effie raised a hand to touch the bronze statue of David which stood on the lacquered console table beside her. She said, in a voice that was little more than a hoarse whisper, ‘You don’t even understand how completely you’ve burned your boats, do you?’

  Dougal said, ‘You’re blethering.’ He was cross now, although he didn’t want to hurt her feelings. She was still his sister, and his closest friend, whatever Prudence had said, and however densely the visions of what had happened with Prudence last night crowded in to his mind. He looked down at his hand, resting on the arm of the chair, and thought, that was the very hand which cradled itself round Prudence’s breasts, and touched the sleekit inside of her thighs.

  Effie said, ‘You cannot call it back? The agreement? You cannot tell Mr Snetterton that you’ve made a mistake?’

  ‘Effie – I’m growing quickly tired of this! There’s no mistake. This is where I get my particular revenge on father, and this is where my banking career begins.’

  Effie lowered her head. She knew that it was no use. She had hoped that Dougal might have changed his mind about Snetterton and Plant (not to mention the invisible Beest) if he had given himself a day or two to think about their proposal at greater length. There were so many questionable things about the Lake Victoria railway spur, things that Dougal would usually have challenged. Did the land along the proposed route actually belong to Snetterton and Plant? If it didn’t, and it was leased, then who did own it? Where was their rolling-stock, and where were their engineers? Who was their railway architect? Who would build their bridges and their cuts? What experience did either of them have in building or running a railway?

  She could guess the answers to all of those questions; and the answer in every case was what her arithmetic tutor used to call ‘a guid few fewer than a twa three’, which meant nothing at all.

  ‘Dougal,’ she said.

  He shook his head, the way a horse shakes away a persistent fly. ‘I’ve made my decision, Effie. I’ve made it on my own good experience. It’s a chance that I have to take, and I’m taking it. I know your fears; you’ve no need to remind me what they are. But that’s enough of them. I have to do this thing on my own.’

  ‘You’ve let your anger against father cloud your sense,’ said Effie.

  ‘I’m not angry!’ shouted Dougal. ‘Will you not see that I’m a man in my own right now! I have to do whatever I think is judicious, and whatever I believe is best!’

  Effie was silent for a long while. Then she came over, and took Dougal’s hand, and kissed his forehead. ‘You’re a dear brother,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry for what I said, and I’m sorry for doubting you.’

  Dougal clutched at her skirt. He said nothing, but she could guess what was going on in his mind. He must know, just as clearly as she did, that Snetterton and Plant were suspicious characters, and that Jack’s enthusiasm had a little too much gloss on it. He must know that the security put up by Lord Rethesdale – whoever Lord Rethesdale might be – was deeply in question. Yet he needed so much to show his father that he was right. He needed so much to prove himself to Robert.

  Effie left him in the library, with the door ajar, and went into the living-room. There, she pulled the bell-rope for Jerome.

  When the butler appeared, she said calmly, ‘Jerome – I want you to find a messenger for me – to take a letter to Mr Henry Baeklander, on board the Excelsior, at Hungerford Bridge.’

  ‘Mr Baeklander, miss?’

  Effie nodded. ‘As quickly as you can, please.’

  Then she sat at the small eighteenth-century secrétaire which stood in the very corner of the room, beneath three framed dioramas of British butterflies in the September wheat, took out her Waverley Cameron pen, and began to write.

  She thought, as she sealed the envelope, of the advertising signs in Blair Street, in Edinburgh, They come as a Boon and a Blessing to men/The Pickwick, the Owl, and the Waverley pen.’

  This letter to Henry Baeklander would not be a boon, nor a blessing. But Effie saw it as the only possible way out of a crisis that was already pressing her closer and closer into accepting the responsibility of her own imminent womanhood, and her own fierce ambitions.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  She had never thou
ght to ask herself why she wanted wealth and independence so passionately, or how the daydream that had started off as a nursery fantasy of castles and princesses had grown into such a clear and particular vision of what she needed out of her life. She had never thought of herself as complicated, or extraordinary. But now, as she sat in front of her dressing-table mirror and brushed up her hair in readiness for going out, she kept trying to think what it was that drove her so. She felt like a small chess-piece in the game of her own destiny, as if the swirling course of her life were more important than she was herself. What she couldn’t yet see was that the fearsome persistence of her father and the uncompromising femininity of her mother had come together, awkwardly and explosively in her, and created between them a personality both strong and humane, calculating and yet sensitive. As a small girl, she had adored the fairy-tale pictures of queens in bejewelled gowns, and of coaches drawn by plumed horses; but at the same time she had been thoroughly irritated by princes and adventurers who were so witless that they didn’t realise they were being trapped by trolls, or seduced by witches, or beckoned by loonies to the brinks of fearful chasms. She was romantic, but also sharply pragmatic.

  Henry Baeklander arrived, in person, at eight o’clock. It looked as if he had shaved hurriedly, for he had nicked his cheek. He wore full evening dress, with white tie, and he carried a silver-topped cane fashioned in the shape of a snarling lion. He smelled of Floris Special No. 127, one of the most exotic and fashionable colognes of the year. Jerome made him wait in the hall while Logan went upstairs to tell Effie that her ‘gentleman caller’ had appeared. Henry gave his hat and his gloves to Jerome, and smoothed back his wiry hair with both hands.

  Down the wide flight of stairs, in a soft rustle of silk petticoats, Effie descended to the hallway. Her brown hair shone from brushing, and in the light of the crystal gasolier halfway down the stairs, the curls around her forehead revealed their light reddish tints. She wore an evening dress of pale cream silk, with triangular panels of overlaid lace, edged with tiny pearls. Around her neck she wore a choker of lace and pearls, and there were pearls sewn in spiderweb patterns along the backs of her gloves. She had bought the dress with Vera Cockburn, from Mme Estraud, in Bond Street, and tonight she was glad of it.