A Dangerous Fortune(126)

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.