A Dangerous Fortune(127)
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 Générate 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 beautiful 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.