Fortune is a Woman (34 page)

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 in time for tea. Louisa will pour."

"We're just back from a day's hunting," she said, passing a cup and offering a silver dish of hot buttered crumpets. "Do you hunt, Mr. Harrison?"

"Not yet, but I'm sure willing to learn."

She threw back her head and laughed heartily. "Then you'd better get in a little practice. Tomorrow we'll fix you up with a mount and I'll take you out myself so you can get the feel of the land."

She bit into a crumpet, wiping the crumbs daintily from her mouth with long, graceful fingers. Harry couldn't take his eyes off her. Her long, copper-colored hair hung loose to her shoulders and curled in soft tendrils around her face, and she had that wonderful clear-eyed, fresh country-complexioned English look. She was still wearing her riding britches and he thought they clung to her perfect small rump as though they belonged, and her high black leather boots and masculine white silk shirt looked sexy as hell.

At dinner that night she was transformed, in trailing green velvet with a gardenia in her upswept hair. "From our hothouses," she explained when Harry commented on its scent.

Lord and Lady Tilmarsh were rundown aristocrats and very English, but they made Harry welcome and encouraged his interest in Louisa. And when, after a week, he knew he must be polite and leave or overstay his welcome, he could hardly bear to tear himself away.

***

"It's incredible," he told Buck back in New York again. "I've never even kissed her and she's the sexiest woman I've ever met."

He couldn't stay away. He forgot about Princeton and he crisscrossed the Atlantic so often that all the stewards on every liner knew him. Louisa was elusive, keeping him at arm's length, something he wasn't used to. On his twenty-first birthday she looked so divinely sexy in her britches and boots and jaunty black bowler with her copper hair tucked into a net, that he finally grabbed her and kissed her. She smelled deliciously of Mitsuko and he was overcome with passion, but he knew there was no chance of an affair, so he asked her to marry him.

The Tilmarsh-Harrison wedding was the event of the 1912 London season. The ceremony was held at St. Margaret's Westminster and was attended by a princess, two dukes, and dozens of lords, as well as three hundred other guests. Louisa looked magnificent in simple white satin from Worth, and the guard of honor outside the church wore hunting pink, forming a triumphal arch for the bridal pair with their riding crops. There was a reception at the Ritz afterward, with a thirty-piece orchestra, a towering five-tier wedding cake, and enough champagne to deplete Krug's reserves for several years to come—all paid for by Harry because it seemed the Tilmarsh's had been rather short of money for a couple of generations.

"Whatever we have we put into horseflesh," Louisa told him proudly. "Our horses are the best Irish bloodstock."

The first night of the honeymoon was spent at the Ritz, and Louisa bathed and changed into a simple white lawn nightdress. She flung herself into bed next to the waiting Harry. "I'm as tired as the dogs after a day's hunt." She yawned, snuggling her head into the pillow and falling instantly to sleep.

Harry stared at her angrily. How could she sleep, tonight of all nights, when he couldn't wait to get his hands on her? He got up again and dressed angrily. He took one last hopeful look at her before he closed the door on his way out, but Louisa was snoring gently and he stomped out of the room and down the elevator, making for London's Soho and some willing woman to assuage his needs.

At noon the next day they sailed down the Thames on his yacht and that evening before dinner he gave her a present. A sable coat with emerald buttons.

"It's wonderful, darling," she said, putting it around her shoulders and holding the soft fur against her cheek. "Heavenly."

Harry didn't usually give away sables with emerald buttons until he had had his pleasure and more, but tonight he had it made. Louisa was his. He paced the chilly decks, giving her plenty of time to undress and make herself ready, and then he hurried back to their suite bearing a bottle of chilled champagne.

She was sitting up in bed wearing an ermine-trimmed white satin bedjacket, and she looked expectantly at him with those beautiful, wide gray eyes.

"I'm ready, darling," she said quietly.

"I didn't want to rush you," Harry said eagerly, offering her a glass of champagne.

She shook her head. "No, thank you," she said primly, "I think I'd better keep my wits about me so I know what to do."

He looked at her, puzzled. Of course she was a virgin, but shouldn't she want to lose her head, not keep it?

"I expect it'll be like hunting," she explained brightly, "going over the jumps."

Harry gulped his champagne and climbed into bed with her. He put his arms around her and she lay there quietly. He kissed her and she let him. He stroked her naked body and she stiffened. She lay frozen and silent when his lips traveled slowly across her breasts and her nipples, and gasped horrified as they found her virgin softness.

Harry consummated their marriage that night, but in the next few weeks he realized that for Louisa sex was a boring duty she performed only for the sake of possible future children, and even
they
would take second place to her favorite hunter. His mistake had been in believing that the sexy-looking girl in the figure-hugging britches and boots was the real Louisa. She thought, talked, and lived nothing but horses until he wondered why she didn't smell of the stables in bed instead of Mitsuko.

After a frustrating few months he finally told her that if she ever learned to ride a man as well as she rode a horse, she might be able to keep a husband. But not him.

He played it the English way, he paid for an arranged night of love with a pretty companion in a Brighton hotel. Louisa presented the necessary evidence to a sympathetic judge and was granted a divorce. And Harry returned to San Francisco, only a year older, married, divorced, and several million dollars poorer.

CHAPTER 26

Francie didn't expect to fall in love on board the S.S.
Orient
en route for Hong Kong. In fact, at first she wasn't even sure it was love. She told herself it was just a shipboard romance; even less than that, it was a flirtation. It wasn't even that, it was just that Edward Stratton was a nice man who had gone out of his way to be kind to a woman traveling alone.

She had been leaning over the deck rail watching San Francisco disappear on the horizon. There were tears in her eyes as she thought of Ollie, left behind with Annie. It was the first time they had ever been apart and she was missing him already and she knew it would only get worse.

The man next to her said, sympathetically, "Too late to turn back now," and she turned to look at him, pushing away the tears with her fingers. He took an immaculate linen handkerchief from his pocket and offered it to her. "Look at it this way," he said, smiling, "ahead lie the Hawaiian Islands and beyond that, China. You have a lot to look forward to."

She nodded, inspecting him cautiously as she dabbed her eyes. He was a confident, handsome older man of medium height with thick, dark hair brushed firmly back. He had bushy black eyebrows and candid, light-blue eyes, he was clean-shaven and he had an English accent.

"Edward Stratton," he said, offering his hand.

"Francesca Harrison," she replied, managing a smile. "I'm sorry. I don't usually cry in public."

He shrugged. "Partings are always difficult."

"Well, thank you for your help," she said diffidently, turning and walking back into the glass-enclosed verandah deck. She half-turned to look at him; he was leaning against the rail watching her and he lifted his hand to wave.

The S.S.
Orient
was a luxury ship and its passengers were a mixture of businessmen and diplomats returning to Shanghai, tea-planters en route to Colombo and rubber-station employees bound for Manila and Penang. Francie's stateroom was luxuriously paneled in walnut with polished brass fittings, soft carpets, and a big bed piled high with downy pillows and covered with an apricot silk spread. There were flowers everywhere, including a posy of lilies of the valley from Ollie; her trunks had already been unpacked and it suddenly began to feel like home.

Before she had left Annie had dragged her, protesting, to the smart Paris House store in San Francisco. "You can't travel halfway around the world without a decent cloth suit and half a dozen evening dresses," she had warned. And tonight as she dressed for dinner in a simple dark-green panne-velvet dress, she was grateful. She piled her hair up in a loose chignon, added a pair of jeweled combs and a dab of jasmine scent at her throat and wrists.

She twisted the narrow gold band nervously on her wedding finger; she had decided for Ollie's sake it would be better to be known as Mrs. Harrison, a widow, and after all, Annie had said encouragingly, it wasn't exactly a lie, she and Josh would have been married had he lived.

But it wasn't Josh she was thinking of as she made her way along the blue-carpeted corridors of the S.S.
Orient
to the dining saloon. The head waiter escorted her to the purser's table and she smiled good evening to her fellow passengers as she took her seat. She looked for Edward Stratton and saw him at the captain's table looking very handsome in a black velvet smoking jacket; she blushed as their eyes met and he smiled and nodded.

She made her way straight back to her cabin after dinner, clutching the brass rail along the companionways as the ship rolled in the Pacific swell. The scent of Ollie's lilies filled her cabin as she lay in bed later, thinking of Edward Stratton and the long voyage ahead, and hardly thinking at all of Hong Kong and Lai Tsin, who would be waiting for her there, and the business she had to take care of.

The next morning after breakfast in bed she went for a brisk walk around the upper deck. The ship rolled in the long gray swell that stretched into infinity and the wind tugged at her hat and took her breath away.

Edward Stratton watched her, an amused little smile on his lips. She was laughing as she staggered against the wind and her pale hair streamed from under her hat in long silken ribbons.

"I'm afraid we're in for some weather, Mrs. Harrison," he called as she looked up at him.

"Worse than this, you mean?" she asked, wide-eyed at the prospect.

He glanced at the sky, full of lowering gray clouds. "The barometer's dropping rapidly, we'll have rain soon and gale-force winds. I'm afraid you won't be seeing many of our fellow-passengers in the dining saloon tonight."

Francie laughed, exhilarated by the storm. "It's exciting, just the sea and the sky and the wind. It makes me feel alive again."

The sky quickly grew dark as night, the wind was howling and the sea had turned a leaden gray as they hurried inside. "I don't suppose you play poker, Mrs. Harrison?" he asked with a smile.

She shook her head and he said ruefully, "No, I suppose not. It's not exactly the sort of thing well-brought-up young ladies learn at school."

Francie thought soberly of how far his idea of her was from reality, but when she remembered the infinity outside, the stormy skies and the wind-tossed waves, she felt as though they were thousands of miles away from real life, and she felt lighthearted and gay. She felt young! Greatly daring, she said, "I could learn, though I don't guarantee I'll be any good."

"Oh, I don't know," he said, throwing her a challenging look as they walked together to the cardroom. "I have a feeling in my bones about you." The green-baize tables were empty and he shook his head. "What did I tell you, we're already losing our fellow passengers."

"Not me," she said confidently as he shuffled the cards and began to deal. His hands were strong and square with tapering fingers and she thought they expressed his personality perfectly: strong and confident, that was Edward Stratton.

They didn't play much poker, but he did tell her all about himself; he told her he was Lord Stratton, that he'd inherited the title at the age of fifteen when he was still an Eton schoolboy. He was a widower, his wife, Mary, had died five years ago, he was forty-two years old with three children aged seven to fourteen. He had a large house in Chester Square in London's smart Belgravia and the family's stately home, Strattons, near Inverness in the far north of Scotland with a stretch of the best salmon fishing river in the country and the most beautiful views in Europe. But Francie didn't tell him anything about herself in return, because she didn't know what to say.