extravagant style of Louis XVI. The ceiling was a riot of plaster molding, the walls had inset panels of flock wallpaper, and all the tables and chairs were perched on thin gilded legs that looked as if they might snap. The colors were yellow, orange-red, gold and green. Hugh could easily imagine prim people saying it was vulgar, concealing their envy beneath a pretense of distaste. In fact it was sensual. It was a room in which impossibly wealthy people did anything they pleased.
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 deja 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.
Section 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. Augusta would be countess of Whitehaven if her plans worked out.
She imagined herself and Joseph entering a grand drawing room as a butler announced: 'The earl and countess of Whitehaven,' and the thought made her smile. She saw Joseph making his maiden speech in the House of Lords, on a topic connected with high finance, and the other peers listening with respectful attention. Shopkeepers would call her 'Lady Whitehaven' in loud tones and people would look around to see who it was.
However, she wanted this for Edward as much as anything else, she told herself. One day he would inherit his father's title, and meanwhile he would be able to put 'The Hon. Edward Pilaster' on his visiting card.
She knew exactly what she had to do, but all the same she felt uneasy. Getting a peerage was not like buying a carpet--you could not go to the supplier and say: 'I want that one, how much is it?' Everything had to be done with hints. She would need to be very surefooted tonight. If she made a wrong move, her careful plans could go wrong very quickly. If she had misjudged her people she was doomed.
A parlormaid knocked and said: 'Mr. Hobbes has arrived, madam.'
She'll have to call me 'my lady' soon, Augusta thought.
She put Strang's ring away, got up from her dressing table, and went through the communicating door into Joseph's room. He was dressed for dinner, sitting at the cabinet where he kept his collection of jeweled snuffboxes, looking at one of them in the gaslight. Augusta wondered whether to mention Hugh to him now.
Hugh continued to be a nuisance. Six years ago she thought she had dealt with him once and for all, but he was once again threatening to overshadow Edward. There was talk of his becoming a partner: Augusta could not tolerate that. She was determined that Edward would be Senior Partner one day, and she could not let Hugh get ahead.
Was she right to worry so much? Perhaps it would be as well to let Hugh run the business. Edward could do something else, go into politics perhaps. But the bank was the heart of this family. People who left, like Hugh's father Tobias, always came to nothing in the end. The bank was where the money was made and the power exercised. Pilasters could bring down a monarch by refusing him a loan: few politicians had that ability. It was dreadful to think of Hugh's being Senior Partner, entertaining ambassadors, drinking coffee with the chancellor of the Exchequer, and taking first place at family gatherings, lording it over Augusta and her side of the family.
But it would be difficult to get rid of Hugh this time. He was older and wiser and he had an established position at the bank. The wretched boy had worked hard and patiently for six years to rehabilitate his reputation. Could she undo all that?
However, this was not the moment to confront Joseph about Hugh. She wanted him in a good mood for the dinner party. 'Stay up here a few more minutes, if you like,' she said to him. 'Only Arnold Hobbes has arrived.'
'Very well, if you don't mind,' he said.
It would suit her to have Hobbes alone for a while.
Hobbes was the editor of a political journal called The Forum. It generally sided with the Conservatives, who stood for the aristocracy and the established church, and against the Liberals, the party of
