Lady of Fortune

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Mother?’ asked Effie, from the top step.

  Fiona Watson looked up. Her face was as pale as a pebble at the bottom of a burn, and equally drowned. She said something but Effie couldn’t understand what it was. It sounded like, ‘Fever’, or ‘Forever’. Effie said, ‘What, mother? What is it?’ but her mother said only, ‘Bring me my purse. Hurry, Effie. I have to pay this gentleman some money for his trouble.’

  It was only when Effie had brought the purse, and Fiona Watson had pressed a half-crown into the man’s hand, that she came up the steps, with the fine rain glittering in her hair, and reached out for Effie’s hand.

  ‘Mother, what’s wrong? Who was that man?’

  ‘He was nothing but a messenger, an old friend from the wynds.’

  ‘Mother?’ asked Effie.

  Fiona Watson raised her head, and closed her eyes. ‘Jamie’s dead,’ she said, in a clear whisper. ‘He was found at his sister’s house an hour ago, gassed. His hearing was due to start tomorrow.’

  ‘Oh, mother,’ said Effie. ‘Oh, mother, my darling.’

  Fiona Watson opened her eyes again, and quickly pressed her hand to her cheek. ‘He was considerate enough not to leave a note. He obviously didn’t want to implicate me in anything.’

  Effie held out her hands to hold her mother close, but Fiona Watson said, ‘No, it’s all right. I’m quite all right. Thank you, Effie, I’m quite all right.’

  Effie stood watching her as she walked slowly and with painful dignity to the foot of the stairs, and then, without looking back, went up to her bedroom, and closed the door. I gave her more money than any woman in Scottish history, her father had said. All that money, and nothing else, but an argumentative family and a lover dead on coal-gas.

  What happened that night came with such grotesque inevitability that it surprised no one, not even those who were most deeply distressed by it. It was the final act in a melodrama that was so vicious, and so destructive, that not even its audience could walk away from it unscathed.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  It was a few minutes past two in the morning. The wind had risen, and was blowing from the west-north-west, from the black wrinkled peaks of the Grampians, eastwards along the valley of the Forth, from Bannockburn and Bo’ness, as harsh and uncompromising as claws scratching on slate. It rattled the upstairs windows in Charlotte Square, and whined at the chimneys, and Effie, awake, lay in bed and felt, as she had often felt as a small girl, that she was marooned in the capital of the chilly North, a princess isolated in a remote and hostile kingdom.

  She remembered the clock chiming two, in the hall. Then, she must have slept for a minute or two, because she was awakened by the sound of sobbing. It was a high-pitched sobbing, but muffled, as if someone were crying into a pillow, or covering their face with their hands. She thought at first that it was William Albert, young Alisdair-to-be, but then she remembered that he was staying in St Andrews. She sat up in bed, and for a minute or two there was silence; but then the sobbing started again, and she realised that it was coming from across the hallway, in her parents’ bedroom.

  Later, in dreams and nightmares, she crossed that landing a hundred times more, her bare feet squeaking on the polished boards, and then padding softly on the Persian rugs. She was to open the door of her parents’ bedroom time after time after time, so that its opening and closing blurred through her memory over and over like the falling blade of a sycamore seed. But what she saw when she stood at the foot of her parents’ bed was as sharp and as horrifying as her very first impression of anything frightful, as vivid as the drowned cat she had found in the Forth, as clear as the picture in her Sunday school book of St Catherine being broken on the wheel.

  Her mother was squatting in the corner of the bedroom, behind the dressing-table, biting her own hand and shaking and crying. Her father lay on his back on the bed, in his nightshirt, his toes bright blue and sticking up like fresh-caught prawns, before boiling. On the bureau, unaccountably, her mother’s musical jewel-box was still open, and was playing the overture from Nourjahad, an unpopular 1850s opera by Edward James Loder.

  Effie said, ‘Mother? Mother, what’s wrong? Father?’

  Her mother stared at her, and uttered a cry that sounded more like a peculiar animal than a person. Effie stepped closer to the bed, and then she saw what had happened. Her father was dead, choked, his mouth stuffed with Scottish banknotes. His eyes were wide open, and his hands were still gripping at the sheets in the stiffened obstinacy of sudden death. You may kill me, his face proclaimed, but I will not die!

  ‘Mother?’ whispered Effie.

  Her mother said nothing, but whimpered under her breath.

  Effie, frightened and shocked, bent close to her father, and pressed her ear to his chest. There was no heartbeat; just a soft and frightening exhalation of breath as she depressed his lungs. His eyes were wide open, and he was staring intently at the ceiling as if he had seen something of extraordinary interest up there, like a Penny Black postage-stamp, or a rare butterfly.

  Effie said, in utter horror, ‘He’s dead.’

  Fiona Watson glanced up at her from her crouching position in the corner. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He wasn’t very good with money, after all.’

  Cautiously, disgustedly, Effie pulled out the first two £5 notes that were protruding from between her father’s turquoise-blue lips. They were soggy, the notes, soaked in saliva. Then, with her little finger crooked, she pulled out more notes, crumpled-up and wet, from his mouth and his throat and even from his windpipe. She laid all the money out on the end of the bed, all £5000 of it, smoothing out the wet and screwed up notes and setting them out neatly side by side.

  ‘He said I had to be beholden to him, because he gave me so much money,’ whispered Fiona Watson. ‘But what was money, without love, and without respect? I didn’t even notice the money. But I did notice that he never loved me, that what was supposed to go on between us in bed was nothing more than a dubious duty, a means of producing children, and that after you were born, his third child, his only daughter, it was no longer going to be necessary for him to sleep with me. There are men like that. In fact, there are many woman like that, too, but I’m afraid that I’m not one of them. I needed more than money, more than children, more than security, more than anything your father was capable of giving me.’

  She stood up, stiltedly, as if her joints were stiff, and came up to the end of the bed. She leaned on the brass rail, and stared down at the body of the husband she had choked with an expression that was regretful, and even lonely, but not loving, not for the briefest of moments.

  ‘He was such a pig,’ she said, venomously, and the tears slid down her cheeks. ‘I didn’t dislike him. Can you believe that? When I first met him, I thought he was wonderful. But he was such a pig.’

  Effie took her mother in her arms and held her close, soothing and lullabying her in the same way that her mother had only recently soothed and lullabied her. She whispered, ‘I love you,’ in her mother’s ear, over and over, monotonously, like the drone of chanter, until her mother’s eyes began to close, even though she was standing up, and she began to breathe harshly and deeply, like someone who is fast asleep, but dreaming of peculiar conversations, and fearful dilemmas, and women with faces as red as molten steel, walking through parks where children play. The wind tapped at the window and tapped again, a ghost from the Grampians without a name or a home.

  ‘Mother,’ said Effie, ‘I’m going to have to tell Robert.’

  Her mother stared at her. ‘Robert?’

  ‘He’ll have to know.’

  ‘But of course. He’ll have to come to the funeral, won’t he? You can’t expect a boy not to come along to his own father’s funeral.’

  ‘Mother, you must think about the police, too.’

  ‘The police? I don’t even know what you’re talking about. The police? The police ask nothing but questions. What policeman could possibly understand what it was like to be married for thir
ty years to a man like that? What policeman could believe what he did to me tonight, and how he arranged to have Jamie destroyed, and probably killed as well. Your father tortured me body and soul; and what you see on our bed tonight is the dead evidence that I could stand him no longer. He’s dead, Effie. Out of our lives for ever.’

  Effie touched the lace around her mother’s nightdress collar, the way a child does. ‘What happened? Did you have an argument?’

  Fiona Watson ran her hand into her hair, and bent her head forward. ‘He talked of Jamie; and he made it quite plain to me that it was he who had arranged for Jamie to be prosecuted. He murdered Jamie, you know, just as surely as if he had gripped his throat and strangled him! Because your father was especially clever, when it came to making sure that Jamie was completely ruined. Oh, yes! He made sure that Jamie would lose his diggings, and his job, and the respect of the people of the slums. Slum-people can forgive most crimes. Thieving, beating, cheating, and stabbing. But they never forgive crimes to do with morals, with sex. They’re far more prudish, most of them, than anybody can imagine. And when it comes to children, they’re even less forgiving. Jamie knew that he could never walk through the Lands again, even if he were acquitted. He could never see me again. And every reason he had for staying alive was gone.’

  She stood as still as an alabaster statue, the tears chilled on her face. Then she said, in a breathy voice, ‘I saw no reason why Jamie should die, and why his persecutor should stay alive. Do you understand me? And those were the very words I spoke to your father tonight. That’s what I told him. And do you know what he did? He laughed at me, and slapped me; and when I finally tried to get into bed, he gripped back my arms and attacked me with this.’

  She picked up, from the rumpled blankets, her ivory-handled hairbrush. She said, ‘He didn’t strike me with it, Effie. He forced it up me, inside me. He said –’ and now she began to break down, and her shoulders started to shake, ‘- he said – I – he said – I – was a woman of no reputation – a woman who had ruined herself – and that – nothing – more could ruin me –’

  Effie, in horror, turned towards the bed, where her father lay on his back, dead. The fact that he was a body now, a corpse, was suddenly beginning to penetrate. My father, my actual father, is dead, and there he is, staring and stiff on that bed. That’s his body. He’s dead.

  Fiona Watson was saying, in a voice like a broken jigsaw, ‘There was so much money in the dressing-room. There were handfuls of it. Handfuls! And when he fell asleep I – pushed it – crammed it – down his throat – right down his throat with my finger – hundreds of pounds – thousands – and he was choking and lashing out – but it was too late – he was choked by his own money – but it took – took – thousands to kill him, Effie – thousands –’

  Effie looked at the crumpled money on the bed, at her dead father’s bright blue toes. The wind sighed sarcastically in the fireplace, where the evening’s coals had long since whitened and died.

  Mechanically she picked up the Mallaig shawl that was hanging over the gilded bedroom chair, and draped it over her mother’s shoulders, to try to stop her shuddering. Her mother drew it around herself as if she were ninety years old, and shuffled slowly across the room to the carved oak chest which stood beside the door and sat herself down on it. She had brought this chest with her when she had first married Thomas Watson, carefully packed by her own mother with linen and lace. On the night of his death, she returned to it, sat on it, her own ground.

  The door opened a little way. It was Robert, holding a candle in a brass candle-holder, and bulkily wrapped in a dressing-gown of purple padded silk. He said, ‘I heard noises.’

  Then he saw his father. He said, in his throat, ‘Oh, God.’ But he made no attempt to step forward, nor to take his father’s pulse, nor to hold a mirror to his father’s lips to see if he was still breathing. He knew immediately, as Effie had known, that if his mother were ever roused to do harm to his father, she would extinguish him for good, and never allow him a moment’s breath, nor the opportunity to take his revenge.

  He said, ‘He’s dead?’ just to make sure; and when Effie nodded, he looked around the room, and then down at the floor, and then covered his mouth with his hand as if something extraordinary had just occurred to him, something of the greatest moment.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  It had, of course. With his father dead and buried a week later in the Watson plot in Kilmory, on Loch Caolisport, and marked by a Celtic cross, Robert now inherited Watson’s Bank, in its entirety, unchallenged by Dougal, and undisturbed by his mother. Doctor Campbell had felt obliged to refer Thomas Watson’s death to Mr Charles Long, the Procurator-Fiscal, apologetically, and with an extremely discursive explanation about deaths which occured in what he called ‘hotch’d-up circumstances’; but Robert took Mr Long to luncheon on the day before a preliminary hearing at the Courts of Law, and impressed on him how upset he would be if his father’s memory were to be slighted or stained, and how it would inevitably lead to something of a run at the bank, which in turn would lead the bank to reconsider the £15,000 loan which they had made last year to Mr Long’s cattle farm in the Breadalbane hills.

  They were sitting in the Oyster Bar at the Café Royal, in West Register Street, beneath the Gothic stained-glass portraits of sportsmen – a bowler, a tennis-player, an archer, and a huntsman – and they were eating Loch Tay salmon and drinking single malt whisky from Pitlochry. Mr Long, white-haired, with a face as big as a horse, was looking decidedly unhappy, partly because of his heavy cold, and partly because of Robert’s insistence that he should treat Thomas Watson’s death as ‘failure of the heart’.

  ‘David Campbell said that your father had suffocated; or, rather, choked,’ he said, tearing at his bread-roll. ‘He also intimated to me that this choking could have been – and when I say could have been, I mean prbably was – inflicted on him by an outside party. There were bruises consistent with a struggle, and there were contusions inside the trachea which indicated that some material had been thrust down his windpipe to prevent him from breathing. Paper, perhaps, or cotton.’

  Robert sat back in his chair. In the yellowish light from the stained-glass windows, he looked rather like a mandarin, placid and inscrutable.

  ‘Did David have any more opinions?’ he asked. ‘Such as who might have perpetrated such an infamous and unlikely act?’

  Mr Long laid down his knife and fork. ‘This is all extremely embarrassing, you know. I’ve known your father and you, your whole family, for so many years. But, the fact is that David Campbell has presented me with quite reasonable evidence that, well; your mother may have been the culprit.’

  ‘My mother? Is he mad?’

  Mr Long shrugged, and helped himself to some more whisky. ‘He’s not mad, Robert, no. The evidence is quite sound. In fact – and I have to be honest with you here – in normal circumstances I’d try for a conviction. Your mother often visited Dr Campbell and poured out her heart about how much she hated your father, and how she would like to see him dead; and when you add her private medical record to the evidence that Dr Campbell found on the scene … the throat injuries, the scratches around his face which were caused most likely by a woman’s hand … well, you can see my dilemma.’

  Robert steadily ate his bread-roll, and then lifted up a forkfull of salmon. He looked Mr Long directly in the face. He smiled. He said, ‘I think you’re taking this much more seriously than you need to.’

  ‘Well,’ said Mr Long, ‘it depends what guarantees you can give me.’

  ‘I can guarantee your loan, if that’s what you want.’

  ‘Robert, I need more than that, and you know it.’

  Robert chewed his salmon, and then busily wiped his mouth with his napkin. ‘I’ve been prepared for this, Charles. I’ll make you an offer. But, I won’t repeat it, and if you turn it down now you can forget about your cattle and you can forget about any ideas you might have for seeking co-operation from Watson�
�s Bank in the future, financial or political. I acknowledge that I have to make a concession, and I’m making it. But don’t push me any further.’

  The Procurator-Fiscal said nothing, but raised his head with as much impotent dignity as he could muster. A man at the bar broke out into uproarious laughter.

  Robert said, ‘I’ll send my mother away to a nursing-home, in Dunkeld. She’ll stay there for ten years, at least; well cared-for, but isolated. We can say publicly that my father’s death caused her a breakdown, from which she has to convalesce. I’ll guarantee your personal loans for the cattle, and make a further £25,000 available to you if you require it. I will give you no trouble, and require nothing further of you.’

  Mr Long unhappily rubbed at his neck. ‘You’ll have to give me time to consider it.’

  ‘There is no time,’ said Robert. ‘I’m about to embark on several new financial schemes, and I need to know now. There must be no breath of scandal connected with Watson’s Bank, and particularly not with me, personally or with my parents.’

  Mr Long took out his pocket-handkerchief, and blew his nose. That was a fine place they buried your father,’ he said, ‘A wonderful view of the Paps of Jura from there.’

  ‘I doubt if my father cares about that,’ said Robert. ‘But I certainly care about tomorrow’s hearing.’

  ‘I don’t care for threats,’ said Mr Long. ‘You’re threatening me, Robert, and I don’t care for it. You’re on dangerous ground.’

  Robert raised his hand to attract the attention of the waiter. ‘Bring me some more brown bread,’ he said, tersely. Then, to Mr Long, ‘I think you’ve forgotten that you’re talking to a Watson. In fact, I’m sure you must have done, to speak so tentlessly. Do you remember perhaps the arrangement you made last year with Mr Buchanan, over the matter of the property fraud he was said to have perpetrated at Leith? Surely you do! Especially since your auld mother is now staying rent-free in that fine house in Water’s Close. How could you forget?’