Now she came to the final and most difficult part of the meeting. One of her basic rules had always been that betrayal brought punishment, immediate and merciless, as Billy Gould had been punished. When she had first sniffed treachery in the present case she had sworn retribution, but now she discovered something new.
Well, she thought, it was never too late to learn, even about oneself. Perhaps about oneself most of all.
‘I have strong feelings for all of you,’ she said. ‘Both professionally and personally. We could never have achieved what we have except as a team. We have had differences from time to time, but that is to be expected. All of us thought the company was finished, but it was not. We have lived through bad times together, as a family should. Now we shall enjoy our prosperity together, as a family should. Because that is how I think of everyone around this table. You are my family and I love you. And to love, as I am sure you all know, is to forgive.’
Her eyes were burning torches as once again they moved from one listener to the next, and no one spoke.
She had thought to drive home the lesson, to talk about rumours she had heard, about the past being a closed book, but had decided to say none of it. What she had said was enough; it would send a message to the guilty and to add to it would cause finger-pointing. That she would not tolerate. Not only was it distasteful; it would weaken the company. And the company, now and as far into the future as any of them could envisage, had by its success and ability to bring prosperity not only to the family but to the state, the country and the world, become the unifying purpose of their lives.
Pete Bathurst was fifteen minutes late but Bella had expected no less. The miracle was he had come at all; it showed how worried he must be. Two other things: he was in a fury, and he had come alone. He was not even in the chair to which Bella, with elaborate courtesy, directed him before he was snarling.
‘How the hell you managed it I shall never know,’ he said.
‘Managed what?’ she said. ‘The new arrangements with China or how I discovered your ham-fisted attempt to bankrupt my company?’
‘I had the Chinese consul on the phone not half an hour after you rang me.’
‘I believe I mentioned you’d be hearing from him,’ Bella said.
‘Damn right I heard.’
He ground his teeth; Bella had heard the expression a hundred times but this was the first time she had ever observed it in practice.
‘And what did he say?’
‘He asked me – as a favour, mark you! – to permit Tuckers access to my railroad. While alternative arrangements acceptable to all parties were being negotiated. Whatever that’s supposed to mean.’
‘Just that, I imagine. They are asking for a temporary arrangement while they work out suitable alternatives.’
‘A temporary arrangement involving my railroad?’ He pounded his huge fist on Bella’s desk. ‘Why in hell’s name should I agree to that?’
‘Why, indeed?’ Bella said. ‘As you say, it is BradMin’s railway. You have every right to refuse.’
‘And kiss goodbye to any new contracts from the Chinese government!’
‘I know,’ said Bella, expression concerned, heart exultant. ‘It puts you in a difficult position, doesn’t it? As you say, a request from that source is really an order. So what did you say?’
‘I said I’d get back to them.’
‘Mature consideration is always the best,’ she agreed. ‘But I wouldn’t keep them waiting too long. My experience is they don’t like it.’
‘I might still say no,’ he said. ‘Hell, they still have to buy the ore from somewhere. They need us as much as we need them. And I gotta real problem with being shoved around by –’
‘By a woman?’ Bella enquired sweetly. ‘A bunch of little yellow men? Or both?’
It gave her such delight to see the bully boy squirming.
‘And of course there is always that other matter,’ she said.
‘Other matter?’
As though it would have slipped his mind, even for a moment.
For all her exultation over the railway she had never forgotten how he had plotted to destroy her business and herself. She would not have objected had he used proper business methods but the way he had gone about it had been despicable. Even, possibly, criminal.
She looked at him and saw – what was the expression? – a cat on a hot tin roof. She had no intention of making things easy for him. She smiled pleasantly and let him stew.
Eventually Bathurst said: ‘If I agree to let Tuckers use our railroad…’
‘Yes?’
‘You mentioned something about photographs…’
That was why he was so anxious. It was not the risk of losing the contracts; as he had said, China needed them, too. It was not even the use of the railway; all he would lose over that was face. No, what had him scared was what she might be planning to do about the industrial espionage. A scandal like that could destroy his career. That was why he was sitting across from her now.
She smiled sweetly at him. ‘You want to see those photographs? Is that what you’re saying?’
She had them ready; she pushed the folder across the desk.
‘I have copies,’ she said casually.
He studied them, then looked at her. ‘These prove nothing.’
‘A senior member of my company visiting your home, late at night? Not once but several times? If you say it means nothing then of course I believe you. But I wonder how Mr Gulliver would view it? And of course there is the audio tape.’
Silence. Eventually he said: ‘What are you planning?’
‘Nothing.’
He had not expected that.
‘Provided you give us unfettered access to your railway. But I shall keep them, in case you are tempted to try any more tricks in the future.’
‘What’s to stop you sending them to Houston anyway?’
‘That is what you would have done, isn’t it?’ Bella did not hide her contempt. ‘But my word is good. You behave yourself, this information stays with me.’
‘We’ll have to renegotiate the terms for using the railroad,’ Pete said fiercely.
‘I don’t think so.’
They watched each other. Eventually he lifted his hands in surrender. ‘I guess I’m over a barrel.’
‘I believe you are,’ Bella said.
She had won, and they both knew it.
He could do nothing against her, now or in the future, and they knew that, too. For all his bluster, she had tamed him at last.
CHAPTER SIXTY
Within the month, the authorities squared, Chinese engineers were on the ground and work on the railway had begun. BradMin’s track had taken four years to lay; the Chinese estimated eighteen months. And there were enough iron ore reserves to supply even China’s needs for fifty years. Betrayal left a lingering hurt but Bella was tough enough to survive that, as she had survived so much else in her life. The future, she told herself, was bright.
When the news broke, Tuckers shares went through the roof. From being a millionaire, Bella was looking at billions. Not only Bella; a month later, she had a phone call.
‘Helmut! What a nice surprise!’
‘Not as nice as the surprise you have given us. The way you pulled off your China negotiations was more like a miracle.’
‘Miracles are stock in trade in the mining business.’
‘So it seems.’
‘Why are you calling?’
‘Are you planning to visit Europe in the near future?’
Bella had been considering exactly that. The China contracts signed, Pete Bathurst tamed, the traitor warned, the business seemed secure beyond possibility of failure. Now, at last, she would have the time to branch out into other fields. Off-shore gas was one possibility, that clean energy project another. There would be funds for university chairs, medical research… She would need to get hold of the federal ministers, discuss what tax concessions might be available. All was wonderful, but how
much better if she could share these exciting prospects with someone else.
Strange how Martin Dexter had once been a possibility for that role. Thank God I was wise enough to trust my instinct on that one, she thought. What a mistake it would have been. But there were other possibilities, were there not?
‘Visit Europe?’ she repeated. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘Some of our institutional investors would like to meet you. Give you a banquet, perhaps, as a token of gratitude. You have certainly earned it. And to discuss any further investment possibilities you might have in mind.’
‘That would be delightful,’ Bella said.
‘On a more personal level,’ Helmut said, ‘I would like to see you, also. Very much.’
‘Ich auch,’ she said. Me too.
After she had rung off she sat for a while, thinking, imagining… She had a hard job keeping the smile off her face.
You are old, she thought. You should be propped in a corner with a bundle of knitting, not contemplating an affair with a rich and attractive man.
Oh yes? she thought. And who says so?
She flew to Frankfurt. Helmut met her with roses, his most charming smile and a chauffeur-driven Mercedes half a mile long. He had taken the most expensive suite in the Fleming’s de Luxe for her. He was wonderful company – considerate, courteous, attentive at all times. As promised, he had arranged for her to meet the investors who were in the process of making several fortunes out of the Tucker empire. In every way but one her visit was a resounding success.
On the personal level the chemistry, when they came to it, wasn’t there. She liked and respected him. He was an admirable man but kissing him was like kissing a doorpost. They did their best but both realised it was hopeless. They parted friends, and friends they would remain all their lives. They parted nonetheless.
She had been unsure what to do after Frankfurt. She had thought she might go to Copenhagen, to meet the alternative energy experts. She had considered Rome, a city she had always wanted to visit. In the event she flew to London.
She told herself she had one reason.
Shortly before leaving Germany she had received news from her London agent. She had known that the Earl of Clapham, her supposed father, had died at the age of ninety, four years before. Now she learnt that the countess, well into her eighties, had been reduced to living in straitened financial circumstances; her brother, true to character, had placed her money in a number of investments that, for one reason or another, had failed. Now he was living in luxury in Morocco, his actions under review by the fraud squad, while Charlotte Richmond, dowager Countess of Clapham, was enduring comparative penury in a small suite of rooms at Ripon Grange. And with no opportunity to appeal to the charity of the next earl because, with no cousins to inherit, the title – after three hundred and twenty-four years – was extinct.
Bella intended to go and see her because Bella, mindful of the way the countess had treated her in the past, had a plan.
When she arrived, her first impression was of neglect. The gate-keeper’s lodge was empty, the blinds down in the windows. The gates were open, the wrought iron scarred with rust. The grounds, which Bella remembered as one of the glories of the Grange, were overgrown.
Her chauffeur-driven car stopped at the foot of the entrance steps. The massive front doors were closed. By the look of them they were seldom anything else, but Bella had phoned ahead and was not to be put off by appearances.
She climbed the steps – mossy, with rank grasses in the cracks – and rang the bell. While she waited, she looked out at the view. Much had changed in forty-seven years but that had not. The verdant countryside stretched away to the moors that, now as then, dominated all.
The door opened and she turned. Once it would have been a liveried footman; now a slatternly dressed woman in bedroom slippers stared at her.
‘Yes?’
‘I have an appointment with the countess.’
‘Best come in, then.’
Bella stepped inside; the door closed behind her. Shadows were everywhere; she doubted whether the entrance hall, once immaculate, had seen a broom or duster in years.
The woman trudged ahead of Bella towards the stairs.
‘Countess keeps to her room. None too nimble, these days,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘Can’t mind the last time she were downstairs.’
Charlotte was wearing a grey shawl and was hunched over a miserable fire. She had never been a beauty. Now her face was heavily lined and the knuckles of her hands swollen with arthritis, but the malignant fire that Bella remembered still flickered in the dark eyes.
She looked Bella up and down. ‘You’re back, then. What brings you to these parts?’
‘I came to see you.’
‘I can’t imagine why. We never had any time for each other when you were here and I don’t suppose you feel any more kindly disposed towards me now.’
‘Perhaps not,’ Bella said. ‘But I am here anyway.’
‘Why? To gloat?’
Driving to the Grange Bella had asked herself the same question. The countess had treated her abominably. As a child Bella had been helpless and she had taken full advantage, but now the boot was on the other foot. Bella was rich beyond dreams of avarice whereas the countess was a heap of impecunious bones in a moth-eaten chair. Yes, Bella thought, perhaps she had come to gloat.
If so, the sight of her old enemy changed her mind. There was nothing here but an old woman fallen on bad times, and what was there to gloat about in that?
‘I just came to see you,’ she said. ‘You are part of my life, after all.’
‘Revisiting the past? I wish you joy of it, in that case.’
Whatever else the countess had lost, the spirit was still there.
Bella’s plan had been to wound the old woman’s pride, the one area that still mattered to her. She had planned to offer her an allowance, knowing it would put acid in her soul, knowing she could not afford to say no. But now, seeing Charlotte as she had become, Bella changed her mind. It was all so long ago and she discovered she had no longer had an appetite for revenge.
If I do that, she thought, how am I different from her? I must be getting old myself. Ancient or saintly. What a choice.
She would pay the allowance but anonymously, to help salve the old woman’s pride.
They had nothing to say to each other and within fifteen minutes she left her, and the Grange. The door closed upon the past.
‘Where to?’ the driver said.
Bella drew a deep breath. ‘Branksome Hall,’ she said.
Unlike her visit to Ripon Grange, she had not phoned ahead. Until this instant she had not known she would be going there. She was unexpected; there might be no one at home. She sat in the back of the Daimler, eyes closed, heart beating a hundred miles a minute. When she opened her eyes the car was just turning into the long driveway leading to the house.
The day had turned gloomy, the dark line of the moors hidden by cloud. Looking over the driver’s shoulder, she saw that the lights were shining through what had been the library windows and remembered her youthful fantasy of riding beside her husband up the driveway to home.
Her life had certainly worked out very differently, she thought. More challenging, in some ways more fulfilling. Certainly she had scored a deeper line upon the page of fate than would have happened had she stayed at Branksome Hall. Yet she had wanted that more than anything. She couldn’t have had a better husband, for all their faults the children were an unfailing joy, yet she felt sad that she had missed out on the one thing that had meant so much to her. Now, watching the house drawing closer, she had time to feel panic. I am such a fool, she thought. An old woman, seeking the lost romance of her past: what else could that bring but disaster? Far better to have kept the unsullied memories of golden youth…
Yet she was here and this time, stubborn as ever, she would not turn away.
She was admitted into the hallway she remembered so well. It was shiny with
polish and bright with flowers. A woman’s hand?
For a moment Bella was paralysed with doubt. Had her information been wrong? Had Charles married the countess’s sister, after all? Someone else?
A woman came smiling from a back room. She was plump, about fifty, with a wedding ring on her finger.
‘Mrs Tucker? Mrs Tucker from Australia?’
‘Yes,’ Bella said.
‘What a pleasant surprise! I am Mrs Hardy,’ the woman said. ‘We have been reading such a lot about you in the papers recently.’
Bella’s lips were numb as she struggled for a smile.
You fool, she thought. ‘Why should that be?’ she said.
‘The iron-ore magnate? You are famous, I assure you. Especially to those of us who read the financial pages. And of course Charles has never forgotten you.’
‘How long have you been married?’ Bella asked.
‘Married?’ The woman stared; then her expression changed and she laughed. ‘I am so sorry! How foolish of me… I am not married to Charles,’ she explained, ‘but to Charles’s cousin.’
Bella blinked, licking dry lips.
‘Charles never married anybody. The family always blamed you for that, you know.’
‘I had no say in it, one way or the other,’ Bella said.
Dizzy with relief, she did not know what to do with her hands.
‘He’s with his estate manager,’ Mrs Hardy said. ‘But he won’t mind being disturbed. In fact I think he will be delighted to be disturbed.’
She led the way into the drawing room.
‘Please have a seat,’ said Mrs Hardy, the cousin’s wife. ‘I shall go and dig him out.’
Excitement, fear, embarrassment… Bella could not keep up with her emotions. She sat and listened to the thunder of her heart. This is going to be a disaster, she thought. We shall look at each other and there will be no spark, nothing. All my memories and dreams will be ash. I was a fool to come.
And Charles came. Eyes closed, she did not see him arrive, yet she knew. She looked up and there he was. For a moment she saw no change in him. He was as he had been almost half a century before. Then she saw that he had indeed changed, as she had. What else could she expect? Yet it was not so. He had not changed; she had not changed, and the world was as it had been half a lifetime ago.
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