Daughters of Fortune: A Novel (7 page)

“Amber!” Elizabeth’s reproach was only half-hearted.

“But she
is
weird,” Amber insisted. “I mean, did you see that cardigan she was wearing? And those
jeans
. They were so shapeless. Definitely not Levis.” She wrinkled her nose. “God, I wouldn’t be caught dead looking like that.”

Despite herself, Elizabeth laughed. She didn’t usually like to gossip, considering it beneath her. But even she couldn’t resist discussing the new arrival. That was why she’d allowed Amber to come in to her room despite the earlier incident with the necklace.

“I know what you mean,” Elizabeth mused. “She could do with a haircut, too.”

Long hair was all very well if you looked after it. But that tangle of black curls wasn’t doing Caitlin any favors. Not that she was unattractive. In fact, she was quite pretty, Elizabeth admitted grudgingly, in that very wild, Celtic way. It was just hard to tell when she did so little with herself.

Amber leaned across the bed. “You know,” she stage whispered, “I think she might be a bit slow, too.”

Elizabeth laughed again. “Why on earth do you say that?”

“Because she was so quiet. She hardly said a word.”

Elizabeth considered this for a moment. “She’s probably just still upset about her mother.” As she vocalized the thought, Elizabeth felt a sudden pang of guilt about the way she’d treated Caitlin so far. But she quickly quashed it. “Not that it’s got anything to do with us,” she added hastily.

Amber nodded solemnly. “That’s right,” she parroted. “It’s got
nothing
to do with us.”

Looking back later, Caitlin wasn’t sure how she got through that first month at Aldringham.

William disappeared the morning after she arrived. “He had to return to London,” Isabelle informed her apologetically over breakfast. “Some emergency at the office. But I’m sure he’ll be back when he can.”

The last part was said unconvincingly. So much for wanting to get to know me, Caitlin thought, wondering why on earth he’d been so insistent about her coming to live with them. Maybe if he wasn’t that bothered about her being here, then he might let her go back home to Valleymount. But even as she let the hope enter her head, she somehow knew it was too much to wish for. For whatever reason, William wanted her here. She knew if Nuala could have changed his mind, she would have.

Later that morning, Elizabeth came to her room. She was clearly under instructions from her father to entertain their guest, and just as clearly not happy about the situation. “So what do you want to do today?”

Caitlin said, quite honestly, that she didn’t care.

Elizabeth sighed. It obviously wasn’t the answer she’d been after. “Well, do you ride?” she asked impatiently.

Caitlin shook her head.

“Play tennis?”

Again, Caitlin shook her head.

“
Great
,” Elizabeth muttered under her breath. “Fine. Well, I guess I’ll have to teach you, then.”

Predictably, it was a disaster. After an hour of Elizabeth’s ill-tempered coaching, a red-faced and breathless Caitlin suggested going in. Elizabeth readily agreed. After that, Caitlin didn’t ask for any more lessons, and Elizabeth didn’t offer. They were just so different. Caitlin frankly found Elizabeth’s effortless confidence intimidating.

Surprisingly, it was Isabelle who was most kind to her.

“Do you want to call that lady you were staying with?” she offered a few days after Caitlin arrived. “Your mother’s friend—what was her name?”

“Nuala. Aunty Nuala.”

“Yes, of course. Nuala. Well, you know you can call Nuala whenever you want,” Isabelle said kindly. “You don’t need to ask permission. There’s a phone in your room, so you can have some privacy.”

Caitlin decided to wait until the evening, when the family were more likely to be home. For the first time since she’d arrived at Aldringham, there was something to look forward to.

When she heard Nuala’s voice, she felt herself start to choke up.

“Ah, it’s so good to speak to you, pet,” her mother’s friend said warmly.

“You, too,” Caitlin sniffed. She didn’t trust herself to say anything else in case she started crying. She felt overwhelmed and embarrassed at the intensity of her emotions—after all, she hadn’t even been away a week.

“Róisín’s here,” Nuala said, seeming to sense that she was just about to break down. “Why don’t I put her on?”

Talking to her friend was easier. “What’s the house like?” she wanted to know. “Is it huge? Does it have a pool? When can I come to stay?”

“The house is nice,” Caitlin said vaguely, not wanting to talk about it. “Tell me what’s been going on with you instead.”

Róisín needed no further encouragement. “Ah, everything’s much the same here. Mary’s got herself a bloke, and her mam’s having fits about it . . .” She chattered on happily for the next half an hour, until she was called away for her tea.

“Ring me again soon!” she said breezily.

Caitlin slowly replaced the receiver. The conversation had made her feel worse rather than better. It was horrible, knowing that all her friends were back in Valleymount and that she couldn’t be there with them.

To Caitlin’s relief, Isabelle tactfully avoided asking her about the call. She could be quite sensitive, Caitlin realized during those first few weeks. In fact, she wondered sometimes if Isabelle was as unhappy as she was at Aldringham. With William away so much, his wife filled her days lunching with friends or doing charity work. She also spent a great deal of time shopping with Amber in London. More than once she invited Caitlin along. “We’d love you to come with us,” she said, ignoring the face that Amber made. “And you must need a few new things before school starts.”

“That’s an understatement,” Amber muttered under her breath.

But so far, despite Isabelle’s repeated invitations, Caitlin hadn’t felt like going with them. Even though she was aware that her clothes were far cheaper and less trendy than those of the other two girls, it would seem somehow disloyal to replace her old things. Her mother had worked so hard to pay for them—it would be like a betrayal.

Apart from that, the family had pretty much left Caitlin to her own devices. It was still summer vacation, and so she had endless hours to explore the house and grounds and to indulge in her favorite pastimes of reading and sketching.

But she wasn’t happy. She missed her mother and Valleymount every day. Aldringham was beautiful but cold, like its inhabitants. Her room might have a walk-in closet, separate sitting room, and luxurious marble bathroom, but every night Caitlin climbed into the four-poster bed, with its high threadcount sheets and goosefeather pillows, and then lay awake, longing for the simplicity of her old life and her real home.

She wondered when—or if—that feeling would ever go away.

_________

Caitlin’s difficulties settling in hadn’t gone unnoticed. William was aware of the problem and keen to resolve it. But right now, seated in his office at Melville’s London headquarters, he was concentrating on the business at hand: the quarterly performance figures.

Sitting with him were the two people he trusted most in the world: his mother, Rosalind, and his brother, Piers. Forty percent of the company might be listed on the London Stock Exchange, but Melville still operated very much as a family business. The main decisions were made here, in William’s office, away from the boardroom—and the board, too.

Piers adjusted his glasses and began. “Obviously we’re still waiting for the final figures to come through. But the first run of numbers looks very promising.”

At thirty-nine, Piers Melville was a decade younger than William, but his slow, staid manner made him seem older. Like William, he was well dressed and well spoken, a true English gentleman, but that was where the similarity ended. While William was a strong, dark, imposing figure, with a sharp mind and commanding presence, Piers’s fair coloring and fine features gave him an air of fragility, especially when combined with his slightly plodding ways and distinct lack of charisma. But despite these failings—or perhaps because of them—Piers was ideally suited to his position as William’s right-hand man. His lack of personal ambition and unconditional loyalty to Melville meant he had never once questioned the fact that it was William, not he, who had been chosen to head up the family business.

“Like-for-like sales are up 5 percent,” he went on now. “And there’s been an improvement of fifty basis points in the gross margin.”

William listened carefully as his brother ran through the numbers. Piers’s youthful shyness had grown into a thoughtfulness and attention to detail that made him the perfect Finance Director.

“And where exactly is the growth coming from?” William asked. It was a question he could guess the answer to, but he wanted to hear it anyway.

“Mainly Melville Essentials.”

William flicked a pointed look over at his mother, Rosalind. The matriarch of the Melville family, she was a formidable lady. In her day, she had been singlehandedly responsible for taking the moderately successful English company and growing it into an internationally renowned name. Now, at seventy, she looked a decade younger and was as sharp as anyone half her age.

She inclined her head, acknowledging his point.

“I know, William.” She sounded amused. “Yet again you’ve proved that Melville Essentials was an excellent idea.”

It was ridiculous, William knew, to want her to acknowledge that he was in the right. At fifty, he should be past such childish behavior. But taking over from Rosalind hadn’t been easy for William. She might have been a Melville by marriage rather than blood, but she had more claim to this company than anyone else. For three decades, Rosalind had run Melville with indisputable success. She was always going to be a hard act to follow.

When William had finally taken over from her in 1972, he had been determined to make his own mark on the company. He was over thirty and felt that he had no time to spare. By then, Melville had fourteen stores in major cities throughout the world. With the oil crisis and subsequent recession in the U.S. and Europe, William had decided against further store openings. Global expansion had been his mother’s innovation—he needed a new strategy.

So he’d taken stock of Melville’s strengths and weaknesses. The ready-to-wear line had never performed brilliantly; the bulk of sales had always been from accessories—handbags and shoes. With this and the poor world economy in mind, William had decided to produce a range of products at a lower price point than the traditional handcrafted leather goods. Still bearing the Melville monogram, the new
line of cosmetics cases, purses, and bags would be manufactured using lower-cost materials and sold in department stores and perfumeries. The idea was to bring Melville products to a new set of consumers—those who would be too intimidated to enter a designer store.

Rosalind had opposed the idea, arguing that a cheaper line had no place in a luxury goods firm, but William had forced the change through—and his strategy had worked. Melville Essentials was such a success that it began to rival the traditional goods. When Melville’s sales hit 300 million pounds in the late eighties, Rosalind had finally admitted she had been wrong. It was a great moment for William. In less than twenty years, he had tripled sales and quadrupled profits. As Forbes had observed last year,
“William Melville is the linchpin of the world’s foremost fashion dynasty.”
He still kept a copy of that article in the top drawer of his desk.

“Thank you for that, Piers,” William said ten minutes later, when his brother had finished running through the rest of the financial report. “Can I take it home to read this weekend?”

“Of course.” Piers handed over his bound copy. William put the report in his briefcase and snapped the lock closed. He stood up and reached for his jacket.

Rosalind placed a bony hand on his arm. “Darling, do you really have to rush off now? I hoped we could all go for an early supper.”

“Sorry, but I want to get back to Aldringham, to check on Caitlin.”

Keen now to get away, William turned and headed for the door. His abrupt departure meant he missed the troubled look that passed between his mother and brother as he left.

Outside, Perkins was waiting for him in the Bentley. It was Friday evening, and William didn’t relish the task ahead of him. When he had called Isabelle last night to get an update on Caitlin’s progress, he hadn’t been happy with what she’d told him. It seemed Caitlin was still spending most of her time alone.

He’d always known it wouldn’t be easy for her, adjusting to this new life, but he wanted to help her fit in as much as possible. One of his greatest regrets was how things had ended with Katie. All he could do now was make sure her child—
their
child, he corrected himself quickly—had every possible chance at a happy life. He was aware that he’d always been a somewhat distant father to Elizabeth and Amber, unconsciously taking out his frustrations over his unhappy marriage
on them. With Caitlin, he didn’t want to make that same mistake. He wanted to get to know her and to look out for her in her new life with them at Aldringham. It was the least he could do for Katie.

Later that evening, Rosalind Melville sat alone in the dignified quiet of her Mayfair apartment. Situated within a luxury building on Grosvenor Street, it was one of the most prestigious addresses in London, but tonight she took no comfort in her surroundings.

On the writing table in front of her stood a half-finished tumbler of Hennessy Ellipse, her favorite drink. Next to it were the documents she had asked her lawyer to prepare.

“Are you quite sure about this?” Gus Fellows, her friend and legal adviser for over thirty years, had asked when he’d dropped the papers off that evening. Sure? She took a large swig of cognac. Of course she wasn’t sure. But unfortunately she had no choice. Not when she cared so much about Melville, the company she had nurtured and grown.

The story of Melville had always fascinated her. It had begun in 1860, with the birth of John Miller into a family of Northampton shoemakers. Back then, shoemaking was little more than a cottage industry, but John wanted more. Smart and ambitious, he knew that the only way to make serious money was to cut out the middlemen. So he banded together with other tradesmen and started supplying direct to retail outlets in London. Any additional profits he reinvested in the business, expanding operations without sacrificing quality.