A Dangerous Fortune - Ken Follett [167]
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.
Nick called, by appointment, at ten, while they were still sitting around the breakfast table. Hugh had asked him to come. Nick sat next to Dotty and took a cup of coffee. He was an intelligent young man, twenty-two years old, just down from Oxford where, unlike most young aristocrats, he had actually sat examinations and got a degree. He had typically English good looks, fair hair and blue eyes and regular features, and Dotty looked at him as if she wanted to eat him with a spoon. Hugh envied their simple, lustful love.
Hugh felt too young to be playing the role of head of the family, but he had asked for this meeting, so he plunged right in. “Dotty, your fiance and I have had several long discussions about money.”
Mama got up to leave, but Hugh stopped her. “Women are supposed to understand money nowadays, Mama—it’s the modern way.” She smiled at him as if he were being a foolish boy, but she sat down again.
Hugh went on: “As you all know, Nick had been planning a professional career, and thinking of reading for the bar, as the dukedom no longer provides a living.” As a banker Hugh understood exactly how Nick’s father had lost everything. The duke had been a progressive landowner, and in the agricultural boom of the midcentury he had borrowed money to finance improvements: drainage schemes, the grubbing up of miles of hedges, and expensive steam-powered machinery for threshing, mowing and reaping. Then in the 1870s had come the great agricultural depression which was still going on now in 1890. The price of farmland had slumped and the duke’s lands were worth less than the mortgages he had taken on them.
“However, if Nick could get rid of the mortgages that hang around his neck, and rationalize the dukedom, it could still generate a very considerable income. It just needs to be managed well, like any enterprise.”
Nick added: “I’m going to sell quite a lot of outlying farms and miscellaneous property, and concentrate on making the most of what’s left. And I’m going to build houses on the land we own at Sydenham in south London.”
Hugh said: “We’ve worked out that the finances of the dukedom can be transformed, permanently, with about a hundred thousand