Sons of Fortune

by Malcolm Macdonald

  Would he marry her? He wouldn’t have to.

  But if that was the only way? It was hard for him to think of it. He would have to do all those things his mother cautioned against—leave Fiennes (where he was now following her advice to become the golden boy) and either finish his own education in Sheffield or be done with it and go out to earn his own—and her—living.

  But if there was no other way? It would mean giving up four million at least. And, with Mary, he could never have any place in Society. It was giving up a lot.

  But if there was no other way? He would. He did not decide it. He realized it. He was still a prisoner of her gentleness and her ghastly beauty. Besides, he comforted himself, a lot of people led very agreeable lives outside Society. Doctors, clergymen, teachers, lots of people with very successful small businesses. Their lives were probably a lot happier than those of people in Society.

  The doorknocker on the house in the Cours des Coches took the form of a femal icthyogryph—as if to be a mermaid were not already deformity enough. It was a long time being answered. But the girl who came was both young and dainty. She held the door only part open, on a long chain.

  “Votre carte de visite, s’il vous plait, monsieur?” she asked.

  “I beg your pardon!” Caspar gasped. Somehow he assumed that the last thing anyone would mention or ask for in such a place was an honest name.

  “Monsieur est anglais?”

  “Yes…er…je cherchez…je lookez for…”

  She smiled prettily—and contemptuously. “Monsieur may speak English. Monsieur must comprehend that only gentlemen of refinement are admitted ’ere.”

  Reluctantly Caspar handed in his card: Mr. Caspar Stevenson. Bang went half his strategies. The girl shut the door and silence fell once more.

  After another interminable wait the chain was removed and the door swung open to reveal a portly man ravaged by ancient smallpox pits. “Welcome in, milor’!” he said with a bow. “César Calignani’s choice of female pulchritude is yours.”

  “Lookin’ forward to this, what!” Caspar said as he came in.

  They walked down a long, carpeted corridor. Caspar saw the names on the doors—the names Nick had listed. The walls were hung with gothic paintings of grotesque females in obscene situations; little niches held sculptures of a similar nature. Plush and gilt were everywhere.

  “Some of our beauties cannot even waddle upstairs,” Calignani said. “These are their boudoirs.”

  “That girl who answered the door…” Caspar began.

  Calignani laughed. “You like that touch? You are a man of refined wit, sir, despite your youth. Yes, many of my visitors do not see the exquisiteness of it—as an act of the wit.”

  His accent was better than his vocabulary.

  They came to the centre of the house, a kind of large lounge full of sofas and ottomans where the choice was made. The pretty girl was ready with two glasses of brandy.

  “My compliments, milor’,” Calignani said. “Our selection of belle tournure is at this hour somewhat diminished. Many of my choicest dainties have retired for the night with their ardent paramours. But”—he waved his hand around the dimly lighted room—“we still have the grandmother, the bald one, the little—tcha! It’s better en français, oui: La Grand’mère, La Tête-chauve, La Minime, La Grasse-grasse, La Courbée, La Mère l’Oye…”

  Caspar looked around the sorry collection of hopeful freaks with more pity than revulsion. “I have a particular taste,” he said. “I hear from a friend that you have a red-headed girl here, half of whose face is perfect, the other half completely…”

  Calignani held up his hand. “La Répandreuse, oui?” he asked.

  “I don’t know her name.”

  “Always she weeps.”

  “Ah! Now that sounds like her.”

  “Hélas, monsieur, she is no more.”

  It was a while before Caspar could say the word: “Dead?”

  “No, no, no. She is no more here.”

  His excellent English was obviously a patter that lasted only from door to lounge room.

  “Oh!” Caspar’s relief was enormous. “Some other house?”

  The man laughed. “For her? There is no other house but Calignani’s.”

  “But where is she, then?”

  “I cannot tell you that, milor’.”

  “But you do know?”

  “Of course I know.” Calignani looked at him suspiciously. Caspar dropped all pretence. “But please tell me,” he begged. “I wish to marry her. Truly I do.”

  Something communicated directly from ardent youth to jaded old ruin. Calignani saw something there whose existence he had forgotten. His beady, avaricious eyes softened for a moment. “You cannot,” he said. “She is married now.”

  “Who to?” Caspar was growing desperate.

  “Of course I cannot tell you. He is a frequent visitor here. He is an aristocrat—enough!”

  “Please tell me! All I want is to speak to her. I just want to be sure she is happy—please?”

  Calignani looked around the lounge. “Nothing here will do instead?” he asked.

  “Is she happy?”

  “She loves music, hein?”

  “I…yes, I think she did.”

  “I am told she is often at concerts and the opera. They call her La Veuve—because of the dark veils, you see. ‘The widow,’ I think.” He spoke to a gilded Corinthian column, near Caspar. “You sure there is nothing here for you?”

  Caspar knew he would get no more out of the man. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Too early.” The man chuckled.

  Caspar looked at him in surprise. It was well past midnight.

  “Forty…fifty years too early. We wait! What about Garence? Does she interest you?” He put his hand through the arm of the pretty girl.

  Caspar looked at her. Of course she interested him! Any other night—any other time. “Tomorrow…or tomorrow,” he said.

  Calignani tightened his grip on the girl. “Thank the good God for l’amour,” he said, parading his relief. “I am lonely too, tonight.” He pulled the girl to him. She laughingly imitated a cat, purring and rubbing herself against him.

  “I must pay you for my brandy,” Caspar said. “At least I must do that.”

  But the man let go of the girl and swept Caspar back into the corridor. Caspar’s last glimpse of the girl showed the smile falling from her face like a discarded mask. “The women of this trade have a saying,” he told Caspar. “Payer c’est oublier—to pay is to forget. I will not let you pay, and then you remember this brandy, this scene, this house, many years. And when you are old and nothing excites anymore, then you think perhaps it’s time to come back to Cours des Coches. I am dead perhaps. These…filles…are gone. But la service it’s immortal.” He saluted and laughed. “You come back—oh, yes!” He took the empty brandy glass from Caspar’s fingers and pulled it away, level and slowly, as if a thread already united himself and the young man.

  As Caspar crossed the threshold back into the street, Calignani gripped him by the shoulder. “Mary Coen,” he said. “She is now a comtesse! Either she is happy or she is a fool. That’s good for you, yes?”

  Caspar smiled. “I suppose it is,” he said.

  ***

  When he went to bed that night he truly intended to go home the following day. But the pigeons awoke him just after dawn and he spent two sleepless hours in bed reconciling himself to the fact that he was not going to leave Paris until he had seen Mary Coen and assured himself that she was happy in her new life—if, indeed, it was not all a figment, the sort of tale any brothel keeper might use for putting off the importunate.

  All the sensible, rational parts of him were already condemning this whole venture. Surely, they said, he had got over Mary Coen very nicely until Nick had come along? His res
ponse had not been from rekindled love but from mere fellow feeling, the thought of Mary drinking herself nightly into oblivion and weeping so. Not love, surely. He wasn’t making that mistake again, was he?

  He could listen to those inner voices quite calmly. But he could not yet pay them much heed. Something in him—call it foolish, call it what you would—something had to see her.

  One look in the Almanac de Gotha convinced him of the impossibility of tracing her through the list of comtes he found there. Music—that was his only hope: Mary’s love of music. Had it survived the booze and the land where she was “beautyfull”?

  The season was not in his favour. True, the Conservatoire concerts were over. So were the Concerts Philharmoniques established by M. Berlioz. But that still left a lot of summer promenade concerts. Caspar spent that first evening dashing from Musard to Herz to Ste. Cécile, and all the other first-class public salons. At each he searched frantically for a heavily veiled woman. At each he was disappointed. But at the Union Musicale he had one small stroke of luck—enough to make him prolong his search by at least a few days. One of the attendants there took him aside and asked him to cause less stir. Caspar explained he was looking for “La Veuve.” The man’s response made it plain that such a person did, at least, exist, and that she frequented concerts often enough to be remarked upon.

  It was not until lunchtime on his third fruitless day that he remembered reading of the open-air concerts at the Pré Catalan in the Bois de Boulogne. Murray’s dismissed it as “vastly over-rated by the Parisians, who speak of it as perfection.” Caspar saw he had read this carelessly the first time. The judgement referred to the Pré Catalan as a garden—not to the quality of the music that was presented there. He decided to spend the afternoon at the place.

  He saw no one in widow’s weeds. That evening he telegraphed his bank to send more money. He also wrote to his mother, telling her the bare outlines of his search and stressing the visits he was making to the Palace of Industry and the Louvre—which he did at a brisk, nonstop walk next morning.

  That afternoon he was once again at the Pré Catalan and once again seeing no widow, as at all the concert halls the previous evening. The widow existed but could not be found. It was, he realized, a statistical problem. The most tiresome and inelegant way to solve it would be to blanket-cover every concert, every evening. He had to find her pattern by inquiry. He had to match it. Then the other part of his mind told him if that was all he was doing—reducing the whole thing to a mathematical game—he might as well complete the journey to Connemara and play it on the beach with stones. It would be a great deal cheaper.

  At that moment an urchin put a note in his hand and waited for a reward. Caspar read it before parting with any money:

  Darling Caspar,

  I was in the coach behind you here yesterday. And again today.

  He looked around. There was no coach.

  I will give this to a gamin and I will go. You are a big risk to me. If you are foolish, I will say I do not know you and so. Come back tomorrow and walk past the carriage. I will pretend to recognize you and call you over. You must behave like it’s no big meeting. Yawn, look at your watch, and etc. Whatever we say. If you get talking hot, I will have to drive away. Please do this whatever you think if you have any regard to me altogether.

  Mary (La Comtesse d’Auvreuil)

  PS—God love you.

  Next day he left much too early. At the Porte Maillot he stopped the cab and decided to walk the remaining three kilometres through the Bois. He ran the gauntlet of a long line of putains; some of these Paris girls were glorious creatures. But even as he looked at them, admiring them, lusting for them, he knew he would never actually go with any of them. He looked and admired as a male animal. But as Caspar he knew he would always be thinking of the coarseness of people like Nick; the commercial thing would ruin it—the public commercial thing. What he really wanted was Mary. A mistress. Like his father had.

  They were still setting out the seats when he arrived despite his leisurely stroll through the Bois. The first of the musicians were just uncasing their instruments. In the baking August sun he had to endure almost forty-five minutes of music, walking up and down past the carriages, having no idea which, if any, she was in. But at last she put him out of his misery.

  A carriage window went down. “Mr. Stevenson?” It was her voice.

  For her sake he turned, frowning with slight annoyance.

  “Over here,” she said.

  Scowling he walked to her coach. She was still concealed in the dark. It was a low-slung landaulette, so they were more or less on a level.

  “No need to overdo it,” she said. “The quare fella has no English.”

  That must mean the coachman.

  Caspar took off his hat. “Why, it’s Miss…Miss…?”

  “Miss Coen, as was. Now La Comtesse d’Auvreuil.”

  He took the gloved hand she pushed out through the window and kissed it. Nothing about it was Mary, for which he was profoundly glad.

  He stood back. “Tedious weather.”

  “It is the count’s day to go to—that place. Don’t name it!”

  “I was there. Nick told me.”

  “Nick?”

  “Nick Thornton. He saw you there.”

  She clearly had no memory of it.

  “Could you lift your veil?” It was so frustrating to have to make these heartfelt requests in the tones he normally used with people he barely knew.

  “Better not. Why did you come?”

  “You know why I came.” He yawned.

  “Then you know why I cannot change anything now.”

  “Are you happy, Mar…Madame?”

  “I can do no harm to you here. I can do no harm to Boy.”

  His fake yawn induced in him a real desire to yawn. Paradoxically, because it was genuine, he did his best to smother it.

  She laughed. “That was much better! Yes, I am happy. I go to many concerts and the opera. I learn the piano. I learn to sing. I’m fierce happy altogether. Tell Boy that.”

  “I will. What about your man, the fella with the title?”

  “That’s no business of yours.”

  “Of course. I had better go.”

  “But I’ll tell you. He never touches me if that’s what…He’s very old. I have a dress like actresses wear, to change quickly. We sit in our box in the Opera and pull the curtains to a crack. And I sit and watch the stage, naked as a babe, while he spends the whole evening putting jewels and bangles on me and moving the candelabra round to look at me.”

  “The ‘land where you’d be beautyfull’,” he said with a light, despairing laugh. “You found it at last.”

  “It is so,” she said. “You can’t have every dream come true. Or where would be the use of heaven?”

  Chapter 37

  I take it we’ve heard the last of Mary Coen?” Nora asked when Caspar had come back to Quaker Farm.

  “You take no such thing. The comte is old and she is young. And so am I.” Caspar was teasing, but his mother swallowed it.

  “Caspar! You can’t still be thinking along those lines.”

  “It’s not every man who boasts a mistress who outranks his own mother, socially!”

  She saw he was joking then and changed her tone at once. “Oh! A mistress—now, that’s quite another matter.”

  “I see,” Caspar said, his smile hardening. “Mistresses are all right.”

  The smile faded from Nora’s lips. She returned to reading the financial journal on her lap. “By the way,” she said, ultra-conversationally, “did our new comtesse tell you how she came to make her first visit to Paris?”

  “She did.”

  “In detail, I mean?”

  “In every detail.”

  Nora’s frown darkened, though she was still pretending to be
more absorbed in her reading. “It’s not a tale for wide currency.”

  Caspar laughed, desperately wanting to provoke her into joining him. “Oh, mater—I wasn’t even going to tell you!”

  “That’s right, popsie,” she said, still with her eyes on the page, and still not smiling. “I’m sure I never want to hear it.”

  Caspar sighed and stood up; that was a hornet’s nest! “I’ll go along the beach and meet the others coming back.”

  “They might take the road.”

  “I’ll have to chance that.”

  ***

  Winifred and Nick, at least, were returning from their outing by way of the beach.

  “Steamer!” Nick called and spurred his horse into a gallop, pulling short only inches from where Caspar unflinchingly held his ground. Nick looked worried, until he saw Caspar smiling; then he grinned.

  “As I was saying before you rushed off, I had the elephant woman instead. I hope you took my advice, young ’un.”

  Caspar was holding a string of seaweed he had picked up idly as he walked. He swung it at the horse, making Nick forget everything except trying to control the beast.

  Winifred came trotting up then, forcing them to drop the subject. “Hello, Steamer.”

  “Hello yourself, Winnie.”

  “Nick, be a good angel and take my horse on back to the stables. I would hold some converse with this imperfect knight.”

  Caspar winked at Nick, who leaned over to take Winifred’s reins. “See what happens when you give them too much education!” They all three laughed.

  “Swim?” Caspar asked as they watched Nick ride away. He didn’t sound too keen on the idea himself.

  Winifred smiled. “Young ladies of Bedford College do not go swimming à la peau nue with young gentlemen from Paris.” She took his arm and looked at him appraisingly. “Big grown-up boy—where did you get the money?”

  Caspar suppressed a smile, knowing that Winifred could have no idea why he had gone to Paris. “You remember what I was telling you—just about here, in fact—this time last year? Mama’s commercial test for me?”