Sons of Fortune (49 page)

As Caspar crossed the threshold back into the street, Calignani gripped him by the shoulder. “Mary Coen,” he said. “She is now a comtesse! Either she is happy or she is a fool. That’s good for you, yes?”

Caspar smiled. “I suppose it is,” he said.

***

When he went to bed that night he truly intended to go home the following day. But the pigeons awoke him just after dawn and he spent two sleepless hours in bed reconciling himself to the fact that he was not going to leave Paris until he had seen Mary Coen and assured himself that she was happy in her new life—if, indeed, it was not all a figment, the sort of tale any brothel keeper might use for putting off the importunate.

All the sensible, rational parts of him were already condemning this whole venture. Surely, they said, he had got over Mary Coen very nicely until Nick had come along? His response had not been from rekindled love but from mere fellow feeling, the thought of Mary drinking herself nightly into oblivion and weeping so. Not love, surely. He wasn’t making that mistake again, was he?

He could listen to those inner voices quite calmly. But he could not yet pay them much heed. Something in him—call it foolish, call it what you would—something had to see her.

One look in the
Almanac de Gotha
convinced him of the impossibility of tracing her through the list of comtes
he found there. Music—that was his only hope: Mary’s love of music. Had it survived the booze and the land where she was “beautyfull”?

The season was not in his favour. True, the Conservatoire concerts were over. So were the Concerts Philharmoniques established by M. Berlioz. But that still left a lot of summer promenade concerts. Caspar spent that first evening dashing from Musard to Herz to Ste. Cécile, and all the other first-class public salons. At each he searched frantically for a heavily veiled woman. At each he was disappointed. But at the Union Musicale he had one small stroke of luck—enough to make him prolong his search by at least a few days. One of the attendants there took him aside and asked him to cause less stir. Caspar explained he was looking for “La Veuve.” The man’s response made it plain that such a person did, at least, exist, and that she frequented concerts often enough to be remarked upon.

It was not until lunchtime on his third fruitless day that he remembered reading of the open-air concerts at the Pré Catalan in the Bois de Boulogne. Murray’s dismissed it as “vastly over-rated by the Parisians, who speak of it as perfection.” Caspar saw he had read this carelessly the first time. The judgement referred to the Pré Catalan as a garden—not to the quality of the music that was presented there. He decided to spend the afternoon at the place.

He saw no one in widow’s weeds. That evening he telegraphed his bank to send more money. He also wrote to his mother, telling her the bare outlines of his search and stressing the visits he was making to the Palace of Industry and the Louvre—which he did at a brisk, nonstop walk next morning.

That afternoon he was once again at the Pré Catalan and once again seeing no widow, as at all the concert halls the previous evening. The widow existed but could not be found. It was, he realized, a statistical problem. The most tiresome and inelegant way to solve it would be to blanket-cover every concert, every evening. He had to find her pattern by inquiry. He had to match it. Then the other part of his mind told him if that was all he was doing—reducing the whole thing to a mathematical game—he might as well complete the journey to Connemara and play it on the beach with stones. It would be a great deal cheaper.

At that moment an urchin put a note in his hand and waited for a reward. Caspar read it before parting with any money:

Darling Caspar,

I was in the coach behind you here yesterday. And again today.

He looked around. There was no coach.

I will give this to a gamin and I will go. You are a big risk to me. If you are foolish, I will say I do not know you and so. Come back tomorrow and walk past the carriage. I will pretend to recognize you and call you over. You must behave like it’s no big meeting. Yawn, look at your watch, and etc. Whatever we say. If you get talking hot, I will have to drive away. Please do this whatever you think if you have any regard to me altogether.

Mary (La Comtesse d’Auvreuil)

PS—God love you.

Next day he left much too early. At the Porte Maillot he stopped the cab and decided to walk the remaining three kilometres through the Bois. He ran the gauntlet of a long line of
putains
; some of these Paris girls were glorious creatures. But even as he looked at them, admiring them, lusting for them, he knew he would never actually go with any of them. He looked and admired as a male animal. But as Caspar he knew he would always be thinking of the coarseness of people like Nick; the commercial thing would ruin it—the public commercial thing. What he really wanted was Mary. A mistress. Like his father had.

They were still setting out the seats when he arrived despite his leisurely stroll through the Bois. The first of the musicians were just uncasing their instruments. In the baking August sun he had to endure almost forty-five minutes of music, walking up and down past the carriages, having no idea which, if any, she was in. But at last she put him out of his misery.

A carriage window went down. “Mr. Stevenson?” It was her voice.

For her sake he turned, frowning with slight annoyance.

“Over here,” she said.

Scowling he walked to her coach. She was still concealed in the dark. It was a low-slung landaulette, so they were more or less on a level.

“No need to overdo it,” she said. “The quare fella has no English.”

That must mean the coachman.

Caspar took off his hat. “Why, it’s Miss…Miss…?”

“Miss Coen, as was. Now La Comtesse d’Auvreuil.”

He took the gloved hand she pushed out through the window and kissed it. Nothing about it was Mary, for which he was profoundly glad.

He stood back. “Tedious weather.”

“It is the count’s day to go to—that place. Don’t name it!”

“I was there. Nick told me.”

“Nick?”

“Nick Thornton. He saw you there.”

She clearly had no memory of it.

“Could you lift your veil?” It was so frustrating to have to make these heartfelt requests in the tones he normally used with people he barely knew.

“Better not. Why did you come?”

“You know why I came.” He yawned.

“Then you know why I cannot change anything now.”

“Are you happy, Mar…Madame?”

“I can do no harm to you here. I can do no harm to Boy.”

His fake yawn induced in him a real desire to yawn. Paradoxically, because it was genuine, he did his best to smother it.

She laughed. “That was much better! Yes, I am happy. I go to many concerts and the opera. I learn the piano. I learn to sing. I’m fierce happy altogether. Tell Boy that.”

“I will. What about your man, the fella with the title?”

“That’s no business of yours.”

“Of course. I had better go.”

“But I’ll tell you. He never touches me if that’s what…He’s very old. I have a dress like actresses wear, to change quickly. We sit in our box in the Opera and pull the curtains to a crack. And I sit and watch the stage, naked as a babe, while he spends the whole evening putting jewels and bangles on me and moving the candelabra round to look at me.”

“The ‘land where you’d be beautyfull’,” he said with a light, despairing laugh. “You found it at last.”

“It is so,” she said. “You can’t have every dream come true. Or where would be the use of heaven?”

I take it we’ve heard the last of Mary Coen?” Nora asked when Caspar had come back to Quaker Farm.

“You take no such thing. The comte is old and she is young. And so am I.” Caspar was teasing, but his mother swallowed it.

“Caspar! You can’t still be thinking along those lines.”

“It’s not every man who boasts a mistress who outranks his own mother, socially!”

She saw he was joking then and changed her tone at once. “Oh! A mistress—now, that’s quite another matter.”

“I see,” Caspar said, his smile hardening. “Mistresses are all right.”

The smile faded from Nora’s lips. She returned to reading the financial journal on her lap. “By the way,” she said, ultra-conversationally, “did our new comtesse tell you how she came to make her first visit to Paris?”

“She did.”

“In detail, I mean?”

“In
every
detail.”

Nora’s frown darkened, though she was still pretending to be more absorbed in her reading. “It’s not a tale for wide currency.”

Caspar laughed, desperately wanting to provoke her into joining him. “Oh, mater—I wasn’t even going to tell
you
!”

“That’s right, popsie,” she said, still with her eyes on the page, and still not smiling. “I’m sure I never want to hear it.”

Caspar sighed and stood up; that was a hornet’s nest! “I’ll go along the beach and meet the others coming back.”

“They might take the road.”

“I’ll have to chance that.”

***

Winifred and Nick, at least, were returning from their outing by way of the beach.

“Steamer!” Nick called and spurred his horse into a gallop, pulling short only inches from where Caspar unflinchingly held his ground. Nick looked worried, until he saw Caspar smiling; then he grinned.

“As I was saying before you rushed off, I had the elephant woman instead. I hope you took my advice, young ’un.”

Caspar was holding a string of seaweed he had picked up idly as he walked. He swung it at the horse, making Nick forget everything except trying to control the beast.

Winifred came trotting up then, forcing them to drop the subject. “Hello, Steamer.”

“Hello yourself, Winnie.”

“Nick, be a good angel and take my horse on back to the stables. I would hold some converse with this imperfect knight.”

Caspar winked at Nick, who leaned over to take Winifred’s reins. “See what happens when you give them too much education!” They all three laughed.

“Swim?” Caspar asked as they watched Nick ride away. He didn’t sound too keen on the idea himself.

Winifred smiled. “Young ladies of Bedford College do not go swimming
à la peau nue
with young gentlemen from Paris.” She took his arm and looked at him appraisingly. “Big grown-up boy—where did you get the money?”

Caspar suppressed a smile, knowing that Winifred could have no idea why he had gone to Paris. “You remember what I was telling you—just about here, in fact—this time last year? Mama’s commercial test for me?”

“Oh, I hoped it was that. So—it was a success?”

“Unh-huh.”

“A big success?”

Caspar whistled through his smile.

“I’m more glad than I can say,” Winifred told him. “If you had failed, everything would have crashed down.”

He frowned, puzzled. Her clutch on his arm was fierce. “You don’t realize, do you. You are the keystone of all our hopes. Not just of yours. Mine, too. And even Boy’s—though he’d never admit it. And because we are blazing the path, the hopes of all the others, too. Was it a really big success, Steamer? Would it
astonish
Father?”

“It astonished me.”

“Astonish me then, Steamer.”

He looked at her, wondering if he should. “A hundred pounds profit on a hundred and fifty invested,” he said.

It astonished her—and that, after all, was exactly what she had asked him to do.

“Good,” she said in the tone of someone laying aside the first item on the agenda and taking up the second. “Now, Steamer, I want you to help me with mathematics this summer. It’s something Bedford and I are not too good at.”

“Why do you want to be good at maths?”

“Because I can foresee a situation where, if we teachers don’t prepare ourselves, girls’ schools will teach languages and music—they will teach mere
accomplishments.
And boys’ schools will teach money-earning things like mathematics and science.”

“What’s wrong with that?” Caspar asked in surprise.

“Well, of course it’s wrong.”

“Surely you wouldn’t train ladies to go out and work. Like men, I mean!”

She grinned belligerently at him. “Oh, Steamer. When we have vanquished the Common Enemy, I can see battle royal between you and me. You have a lot of education yet to undergo.”

“Start now, then.”

“No. First the Common Enemy.”

Caspar laughed. They had reached the last sand bar before the harbour. The tide was at full ebb and they could just squeeze around the head of the stone breakwater.

“You haven’t a leg to stand on—that’s why you’re keeping quiet,” he sneered.

She pushed him over into the damp sand and ran around the breakwater, thinking he would hotly pursue. Moments later she crept back and peeped around the stones. Caspar was still sitting in the sand. He looked up at her in mock admiration. “I am deeply impressed,” he said, “by the rigorously intellectual nature of your argument. You have quite won me over.”

Winifred laughed and came to help him up. As she dusted the sand off him she said: “You’re so much older than Boy.”

“I always have been.”

She became serious again as they walked up the shelving, seaweed-anchored sand of the harbour floor. “You know, Steamer, we talk glibly of this battle we’ve got to fight—and quite soon now, I’d think…a year or two. And we always talk as though the winning were certain. But I sometimes think we haven’t a hope. Lord Stevenson and Society and all that terrible dead weight—they are so strong. So…strong. Do you really think we can have our puny way against them? Really?”

He hated what he was about to say, but he knew it had to be said. “Don’t rely absolutely on me, Winnie. You must have another plan up your sleeve—one without me. I’m the man who takes the chances when they duck up. I met a fella on the boat back from France, an American. He’s absolutely certain they’re going to have a civil war soon. He says there’s going to be fortunes made over there in arms and ammunition. He got me so fired up, I tell you, I damn near—excuse me—took an entirely different ship out from Liverpool. So listen well—if I get impatient, or if I see a chance that’s far too good to miss…”

He left the rest unsaid.

“I see,” Winifred said bleakly.

They were almost back at the door before she added: “I suppose it’s as well to know it.”