A Dangerous Fortune - Ken Follett [94]
Several other guests had arrived already and stood around drinking champagne and smoking cigarettes. This was new to Hugh: he had never seen people smoking in a drawing room. Solly caught his eye and detached himself from a group of laughing people to come over. “Pilaster, how nice of you to come! How are you, for goodness’ sake?”
Hugh perceived that Solly had become a little more extrovert. He was still fat and bespectacled, and there was already a stain of some kind on his white waistcoat, but he was jollier than ever and, Hugh immediately sensed, happier too.
“I’m very well, thanks, Greenbourne,” Hugh said.
“I know it! I’ve been watching your progress. I wish our bank had someone like you in America. I hope the Pilasters are paying you a fortune—you deserve it.”
“And you’ve become a socialite, they say.”
“None of my doing. I got married, you know.” He turned and tapped the bare white shoulder of a short woman in an eggshell-green dress. She was facing the other way but her back was oddly familiar, and a feeling of déjà vu came over Hugh, making him unaccountably sad. Solly said to her: “My dear, do you remember my old friend Hugh Pilaster?”
She paused a moment longer, finishing what she was saying to her companions, and Hugh thought: Why do I feel breathless at the sight of her? Then she turned very slowly, like a door opening into the past, and Hugh’s heart stopped as he saw her face.
“Of course I remember him,” she said. “How are you, Mr. Pilaster?”
Hugh stared, speechless, at the woman who had become Mrs. Solomon Greenbourne.
It was Maisie.
2
AUGUSTA SAT AT HER DRESSING TABLE and put on the single row of pearls that she always wore at dinner parties. It was her most expensive piece of jewelry. Methodists did not believe in costly ornament, and her parsimonious husband Joseph used that as an excuse not to buy her jewelry. He would have liked to stop her redecorating the house so often, but she did it without asking him: if he had his way they might live no better than his clerks. He accepted the redecoration grumpily, insisting only that she leave his bedroom alone.
She took from her open jewelry box the ring Strang had given her thirty years ago. It was in the form of a gold serpent with a diamond head and ruby eyes. She put it on her finger and, as she had done a thousand times before, brushed the raised head against her lips, remembering.
Her mother had said: “Send back his ring, and try to forget him.”
The seventeen-year-old Augusta had said: “I have sent it back already, and I will forget him,” but it was a lie. She kept the ring concealed in the spine of her Bible, and she had never forgotten Strang. If she could not have his love, she vowed, all the other things he could have given her would be hers somehow, one day.
She would never be the countess of Strang, she had accepted that years ago. But she was determined to have a title. And since Joseph did not have one she would have to get him one.
She had brooded over the problem for years, studying the mechanisms by which men gained titles, and many sleepless nights of planning and longing had gone into her strategy. Now she was ready and the time was right.
She would begin her campaign tonight, over dinner. Among her guests were three people who would play a crucial part in having Joseph made an earl.
He might take the title earl of Whitehaven, she thought. Whitehaven was the port where the Pilaster family had begun in business, four generations ago. Joseph’s great-grandfather Amos Pilaster had made his fortune with a legendary gamble, putting all his money in a slave ship. But then he had gone into a less chancy business, buying serge cloth and printed calico from Lancashire textile mills and shipping it to the Americas. Their London home was already called Whitehaven House in acknowledgment of the birthplace of the business.