Sons of Fortune (55 page)

“I hope and trust I should know my duty,” Boy said.

“There!” John turned triumphantly on Caspar as if he were routed. Caspar smiled. “I hope you’ll both be very happy,” he said, half to himself. Then, raising his voice, he went on in a firm, calm tone: “You have told me your wishes, sir. Now I will tell you exactly what I am going to do. I am going to my room to pack. Then, tomorrow, I shall leave this house for the last time. I will not go into the army. I shall go into business on my own account. And when Boy’s ‘knowledge of his duty’ has brought your firm to its knees, I will buy out what is left and show you how it should be managed. All this I promise you.”

“Caspar!” Nora called out angrily. “You burn every boat!”

“Exactly.”

John laughed. Anyone who entered at that moment would have taken it for a most pleasant laugh. “You are very sure of yourself,” he said.

Caspar stood to go. In equally pleasant vein he replied, “Not entirely without cause.” He crossed the room to the door.

“Steamer!” Winifred pleaded.

He stopped and guiltily faced her. “Sorry, Winnie,” he said. “Let’s see what’s in store for you.” He sat—a very provisional gesture—near the door.

Winifred turned back to John. “I know you wish me to marry, Father,” she said, “but I swear to you now by my most solemn oath that I never shall. You may disown me. You may throw me out of your house. I will not marry. I shall teach. And one day I shall be head of my own school, and it will be the best that…”

At that point John exploded. “God in heaven!” he roared. “Is there no obedience, no respect, no sense of duty in this family! You are going to bring my firm to its knees; and you are going to manage to acquire and run the best school in the world! Is this a new race we have bred? All must want—all must have—the best? What do you know of the world? Of life? Nothing! You are children. Yahoos screaming for superlatives. It is we who know the world and life, we, your mother and I. And it is we who will determine what you shall do. Within one month, sir, I guarantee you will be back on your knees, begging me to use my influence at the War Office on your behalf. And you, miss, before this twelve months is out, will be begging me for a husband. Now do not trifle with me”—his voice rose to a new pitch of fury as he saw her draw breath to argue—“I warn you, there is a way to make you
beg
me to get you married. Do not force me to use it. Bend now, willingly, for if you resist, I will break that proud and rebellious spirit before it poisons your whole life.”

The strings of the harpsichord carried forth into the silence a hundred fading resonances of his anger. Boy then added his obbligato: “If only everybody did their duty, there would be no strife and we would be one happy family again. Why must we quarrel so?”

John smiled and nodded at him with a warmth that only Boy took to be wholehearted.

Nora, seeing no one else was going to speak, said, “I’m glad I was included a few moments ago, because I feel it’s time I had my say.”

“It’s pointless, mater,” Caspar said, and all his bitterness now came out into the open. “How can you argue about duty to family, and obligations, and respect, with
that
person, when you know and I know, full well, that he…”

“Caspar!” Nora almost screamed. The intensity of her voice frightened everyone, even herself a little. “Never…” she said, pointing a warning finger at him. The finger shook as she struggled to complete the sentence; but no words came. At length she drew breath, gathered herself with some effort, and, still looking at Caspar, said in a most casual, conversational tone, “This young man is well able to look after himself. When he goes from here, our firm loses one of the best—potentially one of the best—business brains I have ever seen. I fear not for him but for us.” She turned to John then. “And I fear for you, too,” she went on. “It is not in your nature to see ability wasted. If you have your way with these two young people, it would be the most monstrous waste of ability. And one day that fact would be borne in upon you. I think when this black storm has passed from you, the regret would be more than you could bear.”

She relapsed into silence, though only moments earlier her whole attitude had been one of winding up to some climax. Her stillness took them all by surprise.

“Is that all?” John asked tendentiously.

She looked miserably at him and squared her shoulders. “Not quite. You must be saved from the worst of yourself. Winifred is of age. You have no further obligation to her. You may leave her to me now. I shall make sure her abilities are not wasted.”

Boy was scandalized at this defiance. “Mother!” he said.

Caspar shouted at Boy to mind his own business—while he still had it. Before two words were out of his mouth, Winifred joined in, shrieking at both her brothers to be quiet. Meanwhile Nora was trying to add, above the shouting, that she would support Winifred and finance her school—and make sure it was profitable.

In the midst of the babel John rose and walked to the door. The move silenced them. Into that silence he said, “The prattle of self-will! Let it run while it may!”

Nora, seeing that old, implacable glint in his eye, was suddenly gripped by an immense though formless anxiety. He was planning some dreadful response to this defiance by Winifred and Caspar. And until she knew what it was, she could do nothing but pray that the “storm,” as she called it, would lift from him before rather than after he did…whatever it was.

***

She had not long to wait, though she was not at home when the blow fell. The storm over John’s mind was as black as ever when his carriage drew up outside Nora’s Hamilton Place and he sent in word desiring Winifred to come out and see him. Winnie suspected nothing as she climbed into the carriage; the notion that she was being abducted by her own father never entered her head.

But while they were still on their way to London Bridge station John made it very clear that she was already beyond her mother’s protection. In the calmest voice, a voice far more sad than angry, he told her how, two hours from now, while he and she were on their way to Folkestone harbour and the ferry to France, a message would be delivered to Nora advising her of Winifred’s new, temporary residence at an
école corrective et tempérante
in Normandy—a place where recalcitrant daughters could be imprisoned until they came to their senses. Nora would doubtless bring on her necessary belongings when she went over there—as she certainly would—to try to get Winifred released. It would be a vain journey.

He was a little unnerved that Winifred made no reply, but he went on to explain that it was for her own good—that it was wicked of her to flout his authority and to want to work. Whoever heard of a teacher who was also the eldest daughter of an earl! Lady Winifred Stevenson, teacher of coal merchants’ daughters—what did that sound like!

Still she said nothing; but those great, pitying eyes never left his face.

He told her, too, that the discipline in this French school would be harsh, the work arduous, the day long, the comforts few, and rest short. But she need not stay there one minute longer than she wanted. She had only to ask to see the matron and to tell her that she was ready to submit to his will and she would be on the next cross-channel ferry to England. He would be at the quayside to meet her.

And still she said nothing.

Not until their coach was drawing up before the gates of the rather grim fortress that was to be her home did she break her silence. He clearly had not seen the place before; even he was a little shaken at the sight of it.

“Dear, innocent Papa!” she said, gentle and unsmiling. “I’m sure it never once occurred to you that everyone in Society will assume I am pregnant.” She deliberately chose a word considered too coarse for polite society. “Everyone will think that
that
is why you have put me away in here!”

She saw at once in his face that the thought had, indeed, never struck him. He had been too singlemindedly intent on getting her away from Nora and into some place where only her submission would buy back her freedom.

She saw the doubt wound him; then she poured on the salt. “Those ranks of elderly viragos who sit at the side of every ballroom, determining who shall and who shall not be eligible for whom—what do you think they’ll make of it, Papa? Mr. Blenkinsop turned off at his very arrival. Me put in here within a fortnight. Now
there’s
two and two to make forty! Not all the money nor all the influence of the great Earl of Wharfedale will find me a husband
then—
or not one the great Earl may be proud of.”

“Be quiet!” he said angrily.

“And the longer you keep me here, the more you will confirm their suspicions.”

“At least,” he said, hoping to silence her by turning her own argument around, “it will stop your ideas of being headmistress in your own school.”

“Not a bit of it,” she said, as if she had expected him to say that—as, indeed, she had, for she had passed two-thirds of her long and silent journey imagining all the turns this last, vital conversation between them might take. “My girls are the daughters of the middle classes. Much more practical, down-to-earth people than your upper-class pishies. They look for
value.
Results! It’s the class you ought never to have left.” She gave a little laugh. “Why, they might even welcome the chance to patronize a lady against whom there was a little whiff of scandal!”

His anger was now more frightened than choleric. “You will not be here long enough,” he promised. “This place will very quickly break you. You will submit.”

Now she was serene. She even managed to look at him with compassion as she said the one word, “Never!”

She neither paused nor even looked back at him before she vanished through the gates. Even the wardresses—and what else could one call them—stood a little in awe of her calm and self-possessed dignity.

***

A bitterly cold dawn the following day found Nora and Caspar (who had not run away quite as swiftly as he had promised in the heat of that argument) hammering at those same gates for admittance. They were allowed to pass in her boxes, but neither threats nor pleas—nor money—could gain their own entry. The rules were clear: no visitors without the father’s consent; no letters unless from the father or covered by a letter from him; and the girl herself might reply only through him.

Nanette, while all this was going on, found a back-door way of smuggling in a message to Winifred, telling her not to despair and to be sure that everything that could be done was being done to secure her early release.

Nora and Caspar went straight to the prefect of police. But it was obviously not the first time he had been disturbed at his breakfast by a distraught or angry mother. He was suave, bland, and utterly unhelpful.

Nora’s own lawyer, who handled all the legal side of her Deauville properties, was no more forthcoming: There was no right of
habeas corpus
in France, he explained, and that was why such schools were placed here. A father’s rights over an unmarried daughter, whatever her age, were paramount.

“It’s why people need two parents,” Caspar said bitterly when every potential line of action was shown to be fruitless. “If you and that man were still on speaking terms, this could never have happened.”

And Nora, although they were standing in the middle of a crowded street in broad daylight, burst into tears. These last twenty-four hours had been too much for her.

Caspar was now intensely embarrassed. He had hit out at her unthinkingly, needing only to vent his own bitterness and sense of frustration; if his father had been there, Caspar would have killed him. “There, there,” he soothed, slipping his arm about her shoulders and gripping her tightly. She turned inward to him and buried her face between his neck and shoulder, pushing off her bonnet. “I’ve been so little use to you,” she sobbed.

It had been a hard pill to swallow—after so many years when her money had seemed to spell absolute power, she had now been forced to understand that all the money in the world was futile if the institutions of the state were ranged against it. She, the richest woman in England, could not legally retrieve her daughter from an institution into which any father could jettison that same daughter for as long as he pleased.

“Don’t go to pieces now, mater,” Caspar said. “You still hold the key for all of us. When we’ve beaten him, we’re going to need you. And so will he.”

She took heart then and found enough courage to expose her tear-reddened face to the day. “You are going to beat him, aren’t you, darling!”

“Into the ground,” he answered. Then, realizing the unintended implication of the metaphor, he quickly put a flat hand level with the side of his knee. “Up to here, anyway.”

“What’ll you do now?” she asked when they were once more in their carriage and on their way back to Dieppe.

“I have a head full of Latin and Greek, which must make it the second most useless organ this side of Rome, ancient or modern. So I suppose my first aim must be to fill it with something more practical.”

She smiled for the first time since they had learned of Winifred’s abduction. He was glad. In the long, lonely months that lay ahead he wanted her to remember him as jovial and confident; whenever doubts came, he wanted that brighter picture of himself to sustain her.

“What practical things?” she asked. “I mean, in particular.”

“In particular? I’m sure I told you. Small arms and ammunition—a fairly portable skill, I think. And with all those buffaloes and Indians…”

“Do you know anything about the trade over there?”

He smiled and drew breath, like a conjuror about to top his act. “New York,” he said, in a reading voice. “Trades Directory, eighteen sixty-two. Arms: ammunition, eight firms; Arms: armaments, four firms; Guns: pistol makers, twenty…”

Nora laughed. “Very well! Very well!” she said, holding up her hands to fend off this weight of information.

“No, you asked for it and you shall hear it to the end. Guns: pistols, importers of, twelve firms; Gunsmiths, nineteen; Military goods, twenty-seven; Percussion caps, six; Shooting galleries, five; Shot manufacturers, four.”