Lady of Fortune

by Graham Masterton

  John Browning had built, with Effie’s money, two new prototypes of his machine-gun, and was convinced that he had invented a weapon ‘as revolutionary as the bow-and-arrow, at least’. He had invited Effie to visit the factory to see them, but Effie was feeling unwell that day, and had to decline.

  She knew that the baby growing inside her was Alisdair’s: it could be nobody else’s. But far from making her feel disturbed and unhappy, as she supposed it should have done, it gave her for the first time in her life an almost incandescent desire to care for somebody else, and nurture them, and enfold them in love and happiness. She should have been distressed, renting her raiment and stalking haggardly from room to room, but she wasn’t. She felt a secret joy that sometimes brought her close to tears.

  A large measure of her joy came from her belief that when somebody good dies, somebody else is born to replace them. It had happened several times in her life that a friend had died, and a few weeks later, or a few months later, a new baby had been born to somebody else who was close. It could have been that Alisdair had been born to replace poor Jamie Arbuthnott; and it could be that out of the grief she had felt for Karl von Ahlbeck, a child would be born to her. Alisdair’s seed had given her baby life, but she thought of it constantly as Karl’s child.

  She said nothing to Dougal, although she confided in Kitty, whom she had taken with her to 81st Street. Kitty, God bless her, had said nothing, but hugged her very tight, and kissed her. In the few weeks that she had been Effie’s maid, they had become intensely close, although not so much through words and conversation as through mutual respect and affection for each other. Every night, when she came home from the bank, Kitty would bath Effie, and while Effie lay nude on the ottoman in the bedroom, a silk scarf around her hair, her face in a thick cream pack, Kitty would massage her with Exotica perfumed oils from Paris (pre-war, of course), her strong black fingers easing the muscles in Effie’s neck and shoulders, firming her cheeks, smoothing around and around her breasts, her stomach, and slapping at her upper thighs. Kitty knew Effie more intimately than any other woman ever would; and, after a while, Effie came to know Kitty just as well, because she asked Kitty to undress as well whenever she bathed or massaged her. Effie never questioned her own feeling about Kitty; and really there was nothing to question. She felt more feminine now, with her baby inside her, than she had ever felt in her life, and when she and Kitty were together, naked, she was enjoying nothing more complicated than a celebration of femininity, of womanliness. She would lie back with her eyes closed, feeling Kitty’s hands on her stomach and her hips, and the swaying touch of Kitty’s bare breasts against her thighs, and she would feel as if she was closer to what she actually was, closer to the essence of herself, than she could ever be in Robert’s company, or Dougal’s.

  She sometimes wondered, though, at the office the next day, if she was being over-romantic, carried away by the gushing prose of Ladies Home Journal, or by the plain oddity of mind from which pregnant women were always supposed to suffer. She had no husband to give her emotional equilbrium, and Kitty, after all, was only a servant.

  Dougal took advantage of her silent moods and her moving-away to East 81st Street to see very little of her. Sometimes, they met each other as seldom as twice a week, and then only during policy meetings which were attended by ten or eleven other bank executives. Dougal seemed to be ill-at-ease with himself, twitchy and preoccupied. She asked him to come round to her apartment one evening, hoping that she might be able to talk to him, but he didn’t show up. The next day, when she reminded him about their appointment, he simply stared at her, as if she must have made a mistake.

  On 1 February 1917, the German government, desperately trying to isolate Britain and France from the war-supplies that were still being sent to her from America, announced that unrestricted submarine warfare against neutral ships would resume. The Kaiser himself wrote in the margin of a memorandum from the German Admiralty, ‘Now, once and for all, an end to the negotiations with America! If Wilson wants war, let him make it, and let him have it.’

  President Wilson immediately ordered American merchantmen to be fitted with guns, but during March, four of them were sunk by German U-boats. By the end of the month, it was clear that the President who had ‘kept us out of war’ had no alternative but to plunge America into it. On the night of 31 March, he sat on the south verandah of the White House with a bowl of milk and crackers that his wife had brought him from the kitchen, and wrote on his portable typewriter that speech that would end America’s neutrality. ‘It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful nation into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars. But the right is more precious than the peace.’

  Effie sent a telegram to John Browning, saying simply, ‘At last’. She didn’t receive a reply until May, when John Browning wrote to her in his own handwriting, and said, ‘The U.S. Army have thoroughly tested the Browning medium machine-gun and found it eminently suitable for the task they have in hand. They have placed preliminary orders for 20,000 of them. Your foresight and your courage have paid off, twenty thousandfold. Regards, John.’

  Dougal, when he came into the office later that day, frowned at Effie and said, ‘You’re putting on weight. Did you know that?’

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  She couldn’t, of course, conceal her pregnancy for very much longer. In May she was already six and a half months, and most of the staff at Watson’s New York had guessed that she was about to give birth, in spite of the flowing coats she wore, and the ‘milkmaid’ day-dresses. There was curiosity, and gossip, but fortunately for Effie the declaration of war on Germany had done a great deal to change the New Yorker’s attitude towards women. While men responded to the Uncle Sam posters which demanded ‘I Want You’, the girls were flocking to become trolley conductors, traffic cops, factory machinists, and ‘farmerettes’. The Marine Corps enlisted 269 ‘Marinettes’ as typewriters and clerks.

  When Effie stopped work at Watson’s at the end of May, there was a paragraph in the gossip column of the Evening Graphic which said ‘Which unmarried bankerette … newly arrived in Gotham … and not distantly unrelated to the Tartan Tycoon Dougal Watson … has quit her vice-presidency of a Broad Street greenback-factory to produce, we hear, a tycoon tot …?

  Effie had expected Dougal to be apoplectic. In fact, she was quite disappointed when he wasn’t. In early June, on a fine warm day with a breeze blowing across the city from the Jersey shore, he came to visit her at East 81st Street, parking his new dark green Pierce Arrow at the curb outside, and saying ‘Good morning, officerette’, to a woman cop who was already unbuttoning her notebook and licking her pencil in anticipation of booking him for obstructing a fire-hydrant.

  Effie was sitting with her feet up on her reproduction Louis XIV chaise-longue, putting together on a tray a Parker Brothers’ jigsaw of Mount Vernon, the Home of Washington. Kitty was sitting in the corner, sewing lace on Effie’s lingerie. Effie was wearing a silk gown in vivid eau-de-nil, with a biege shawl collar. The only jewellery she was wearing was a nine-carat diamond ring, which John Browning had brought round after he read the column about her in the Graphic. He had said, with a smile, ‘I’m delighted. Now you’ve got two babies. Me, and junior.’

  Dougal offhandedly gave Effie a large bunch of white roses, wrapped in white paper and white ribbon. Effie passed them over to Kitty, and said, ‘Thank you. I hope that’s not a discreet way of saying that I ought to have remained a virgin.’

  Dougal said, ‘No, of course not. I’m delighted for you, just so long as you’re delighted.’

  ‘That’s a bet-hedging compliment if ever I heard one.’

  ‘What do you want me to say, Effie? You came over to New York uninvited –’

  ‘Oh, uninvited, was it? I was supposed to beg an invitation from my own brother?’

  ‘I didn’t mean that. I meant that I gave you a partnership in the bank in good faith. And part of that good faith was that you were a lady.’
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  Effie blinked at him. ‘You’re trying to tell me that I’m not a lady? I have a baby kicking inside me, and you’re trying to say that I’m not a lady? What do you want me to do, pick up my skirts and prove it to you?’

  ‘Effie – for God’s sake!’

  Effie carefully laid her jigsaw on to the occasional table beside her. She reached out for Dougal’s hand, and when he took it, reluctantly, she reached out her other hand, and held him tight.

  ‘There’s something wrong, isn’t there? Nothing to do with me, or this baby.’

  Dougal quickly shook his head. ‘You’ve got enough problems of your own. You don’t want to listen to mine.’

  ‘That’s where you’re quite wrong. Look at me, doing jigsaws! Don’t you think I’d be delighted to have something else to do?’

  Dougal tugged his hand free, and pressed it under his arm, as if it was cold. He looked tired, and defeated; and the pale green colour of his worsted suit didn’t improve his appearance. Like most people who feel unwell, he had unerringly chosen the very clothes which would make him look the worst.

  ‘It’s May,’ he said, ‘she’s found someone else. She’s told me that if I don’t divorce Mariella, she’s going to leave me, and marry him.

  Effie reached out and touched his sleeve. ‘Have you thought what you’re going to do?’

  ‘No,’he said. If I leave Mariella, I’ll feel guilty for the rest of my life. If I let May go, I’ll always believe that I let the woman I should have married slip out of my grasp.’

  Effie said, ‘What do you want to do?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Dougal. ‘One minute I feel I can’t let May go for anything; the next minute I start feeling agonised about Mariella.’

  ‘Do you want my advice?’

  ‘Your advice! Look at the trouble you’re in!’

  ‘I’m not in trouble,’ said Effie.

  ‘You’re pregnant, without a husband. Nobody even knows who the father is.’

  ‘That’s nothing, compared with the trouble you’re in. You’re unhappy, and I’m not.’

  Dougal looked up. He didn’t say so, but it was clear that he was quite perplexed that Effie could be unmarried, pregnant, and not concerned about it. She was concerned about it, but not in the way that he thought she ought to be. She ought to be ashamed, as far as he was concerned, and humiliated. At the very least she ought to have gone off to a nursing-home in California and given birth in secrecy, and arranged for a tidy adoption, preferably by a Christian automobile mechanic and his wife, from Van Nuys.

  He said, at last, ‘He’s called Norris.’

  ‘May’s boyfriend? The one she’s threatened to leave you for?’

  ‘Yes,’ whispered Dougal. ‘He’s an insurance salesman. He’s young, and smart, and fast-talking, and very American; and I can’t tell you how much I hate him. I could kill him.’

  That’s only because you can’t make up your mind,’ said Effie.

  ‘You haven’t seen him,’ said Dougal. ‘He has gingery wavy hair, and a nose like a carrot. I don’t know how she can even bear to touch him.’

  ‘Perhaps she can’t. Perhaps she’s only walking out with him to force you into making up your mind.’

  ‘Oh, hell,’ said Dougal, ‘I don’t know.’

  He got up, and paced across the room, his hands thrust into his trouser pockets. ‘I can’t leave either of them; and yet I can’t stay with both of them. What on earth am I going to do?’

  Effie picked up a piece of roof from Washington’s home at Mount Vernon, and neatly clipped it into place in her jigsaw. ‘If you can’t leave Mariella easily, Dougal – if you don’t feel compelled to leave her by the love that you feel for May – then my advice to you is to stay married to her.’

  ‘I don’t want to stay married to her.’

  ‘Then leave her.’

  ‘I can’t!’

  ‘You’ll have to do something. You’re going to pieces.’

  ‘Pieces, huh? Have you got a drink?’

  Effe turned to Kitty. ‘Would you make Mr Dougal a Scotch and water, please, Kitty? And you can fix me a martini while you’re at it.’

  Dougal sat down on the opposite side of the room, on an armchair crowded with fat frilly cushions. He looked, amongst all those frills, like a cross and petulant baby. He reminded Effie at that moment of Alisdair: father and son were both so alike. Yet she could never tell Dougal that Alisdair was his; nor that the growing life inside her was Alisdair’s. Dougal knew that Robert had been married to a girl called Prudence, and that Prudence had died, but he hadn’t even realised when Effie had shown him a photograph of them on their wedding-day that it was the same Prudence he had met in London. The black veil she had won had half hidden her features, and Prudence, like Faith, and Grace, were common enough names for Victorian parents to have given their children.

  Keeping Dougal in the dark about Prudence and Alisdair was the only secret in her life which made Effie feel guilty, and ashamed of herself. But during all the years he had been in America, Dougal had never seemed particularly interested in what she and Robert had been doing in Scotland and London, and he didn’t seem interested now, and whether it was right or wrong not to tell him that he had fathered a son, Effie felt it was kinder. Dougal had enough distress to deal with; and the boisterous 25-year-old boy who had given Prudence Gutting a baby in London in 1901 was not the tired, wealthy tycoon of 1917, with all his worries and all his uncertainties. Dougal had fulfilled for himself the promise of the American Dream but he had discovered to his perplexity that money, after all, was only paper, and that gold was only metal. He wore sealskin coats, and handmade shoes from Alan McAfee in London, and had his suits tailored by Henry Poole of Savile Row, by cutters especially brought over to New York for the purpose. He drove around New York in the latest automobiles, with gold-washed headlight housings and velvet curtains. He smoked the best Havana cigars, and ate regularly in the finest restaurants. Yet he always wore on his face the expression of a man who had been badly let down. His eyes never looked at anyone directly, but searched constantly around the room, as if he were missing something. Modern business psychiatrists would have said he was close to that condition known as ‘burned out’. To the alienists of 1917 he was suffering from ‘nervous exhaustion’.

  Effie said, ‘Why don’t you let me take over at the bank for a month or two? You could take a holiday.’

  ‘What are you talking about? You’re a woman, and you’re just about to have a baby.’

  ‘Is either of those conditions unnatural?’

  Dougal snorted, sarcastically. ‘It’s unnatural for a woman to be in the banking business, and it’s unnatural for a woman to be pregnant when she doesn’t have a husband.’

  As unnatural as poor Prudence, thought Effie, but managed to hold her tongue.

  ‘I’m only thinking of you,’ she said.

  ‘Well, it’s out of the question. I’m getting enough complaints from Dan Kress as it is. Men don’t like to be told what to do by a woman, whether she’s rich or not.’

  Kitty came in with the drinks, and Effie handed Dougal his Scotch and water. He sniffed it, and said, ‘This is the Dufftown Glenlivet.’

  ‘That’s right. Only the best for my brother. Besides, I have something to celebrate. The Army just ordered 27,000 more of John Browning’s machine-gun.’

  ‘Well, well,’ said Dougal. ‘You’ll be a billionaire before you know it.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  In an America that was sternly but zealously mobilising for war; an America whose Army was sending nearly two million men to France and whose Navy was ruthlessly hunting down German submarines in the Atlantic; an America of ‘Do Your Bit’ and ‘Swat The Hun’, Liberty Bonds and HOME Gardens; an America in which wealthy society ladies conscientiously did without bread on Thursdays and meat on Mondays, and made sure that the servants turned off the spotlights in the park to save electricity; in this America, Kay Fiona Watson was born, on 24 July 1917, at tw
o o’clock in the afternoon, at the Ollermeyer Memorial Clinic, in Manhattan.

  Effie suddenly found that she was a celebrity: the rich Scottish banking heiress who had defied all convention and given birth to the child she wanted without marrying the mysterious father. Reporters and photographers and lady gossip-columnists jostled in the corridor outside her rooms, and tugged at the sleeves of anyone who looked as if they might be a relative or a doctor. Flowers arrived in heaps; crackling with cellophane, ostentatiously tied with bows and ribbons. The Daily News ran a front-page photograph of Kay, snatched through a gap in the nursery doorway with a headline that was to give the English language a new phrase, LOVE-CHILD!

  There were plenty of good honest folk throughout America who protested that Effie was ‘sensationalising illegitimacy’. Evangelist Billy Sunday called Kay Fiona’s birth ‘an affront to all decent church-going Americans’, and suggested that Effie should be deported from America and back to ‘corrupt, decadent, war-ridden Europe’ where she had come from. The First Lady, Mrs Edith Boiling Galt Wilson, the President’s second wife, would not be drawn about the affair in public, but privately said that Effie was ‘undermining the principles which make America the champion of right.’

  John Browning however, sent her a bottle of Dom Perignon, and a small pretty card with a paper-lace heart on it. Inside, he had written, ‘For Effie, and for her new daughter, Kay, with as much confidence and trust in both of you, as you have always shown in me.’