Fortune Is a Woman - Elizabeth Adler [117]
Harry insisted they stay at all the grandest hotels. He slept all day and refused to see any of Europe’s beauty, except its women. He ate at all the smartest restaurants, drank the oldest wines and the best champagne, and patronized the fanciest brothels.
He bought half a dozen automobiles, a Rolls-Royce, a Bugatti, a Hispano Suiza, a Benz, a de Dion Bouton, and a de Courmont. He had them all specially refinished in the exact color of the Harrison burgundy livery and fitted out in ebonywood and silver. He bought a two-hundred-foot yacht from a tea magnate in England, ordered it to be refurbished from stem to stern and staffed it with a permanent crew of forty. He sent diamond bracelets to women he fancied and sable coats with emerald buttons to those whose favors pleased him.
Buck was no prude, but he watched tight-lipped. Harry’s wild oats were on a princely scale, but whenever Buck protested, he just laughed and said he could afford it. And few people, except Buck, knew about his drinking and his taste for opium. Harry was clever enough to keep that to himself. He would just disappear for a night every so often, but he always emerged again the following afternoon, freshly showered and shaved, immaculately dressed and clear-eyed. Whatever he did, it surely didn’t show on his face.
The Wingates had had money for three generations, as long as the Harrisons. They owned a fine home in San Francisco, an apartment in New York, and a summer “cottage” in Newport for the sailing. They lived well, but Buck had never seen anyone spend money or pursue drink and women the way Harry did. After a few weeks he had had enough. He cabled his father that he was returning and left Harry to his expensive pastimes.
Left alone, Harry marched angrily into the Ritz bar and at once took up with a crowd of young Englishmen, who were over for a roisterous weekend in Paris. He was bored without Buck’s company and tired of the same faces, and when the Honorable Morgan Tilmarsh invited him to visit he accepted with alacrity.
Tilmarsh Hall was a stately pile surrounded by several hundred acres of prime hunting country in Gloucestershire. As Harry sped up the three-mile-long driveway in his racy little Bugatti, a footman in worn dark-blue livery immediately rushed to open the door and take his luggage. “Mr. Morgan is taking tea with Miss Louisa in the small drawing room, sir,” the silver-haired butler told Harry. “If you would like to follow me, sir, they are expecting you.”
Harry glanced around, impressed as he followed the butler through a raftered medieval hallway four times the size of his own. A fire roared in an enormous stone grate, but the chill of centuries still clung to the ancient stone walls adorned with the antlered heads of long-dead deer. The “small” drawing room was forty feet long, and crammed with chintz sofas and little tables covered with silver-framed photographs of royalty and children. Half a dozen spotted dogs lolled in front of the fire and on the sofas, and as the butler showed him into the room they leapt toward him, almost bowling him over.
“Down, Ace, down, Jack! Rex, Smarty, get down, will you? Behave yourselves for once.”
An elegantly booted foot kicked the dogs gently out of the way and a charming English voice said, “I’m so sorry, I’m afraid they’re a little overexcited. They were allowed out with the hunt today, you see.”
Harry looked up from the dogs and saw the most beautiful girl in the world. “I’m Louisa Tilmarsh,” she said, smiling and holding out her hand.
Harry took it, and wanted to hold it forever; he wanted to keep her close to him so he could look longer into that flawless face and bask in her pearly smile and the warm glance from her clear gray eyes. He said, “I’m Harry Harrison. I met your brother, Morgan, in Paris.”
She laughed and made a little face as Morgan unfurled himself from the sofa and shook Harry’s hand. “Glad you could make it,” he said warmly. “You’re just