Lady of Fortune by Graham Masterton Read Free Book Online Page A

There’s a Nugent-Dunbar, right enough. A plain, no-mistake Nugent-Dunbar. Thin in the blood and pale in the face. Nugent-Dunbar and no quarrel about it at all.’
    At seventeen, although she didn’t quite realise it, Effie was on the verge of breaking out into some of the prettiest years of her life. She had always been mousy, when she was younger, and shy; and embarrassed about her skinny arms and legs. Her bright blue Nugent-Dunbar eyes had seemed far too large for her, and her paternal grandmother, now seven years dead of double pneumonia, had remarked from the lacy fastnesses of her bed that she looked like a fledgling that had fallen out of its nest. ‘Do you eat your parritch, child?’ she had rasped. ‘If you don’t, you’ll expire for the lack of it.’
    Like many of her friends in Charlotte Square – the other pale, primsy girls of wealthy Edinburgh families, like Celia Calder-Haig, who always wore velvet collars, and Mary McArrol, who had bright ginger hair and had embroidered her father a chanter-case for Christmas – Effie had been tutored at home. Her first teacher, Miss Murdoch, had been a mim-mouthed woman of thirty whose only suitor had died in 1879 in the Tay Bridge disaster, and who would now and again lapse into remote trances, and hum Bonny Dundee to herself. Then, she had been brought a variety of tutors – Mrs McCreith for English and historical studies (‘The Celts, Effie, were a
wild
collection’); Miss Wallace for mathematics; and a Portuguese lady with an unpronounceable name and a startling facial tic, for piano.
    The result of this education, combined with the happy and delicate guidance of her mother, had been to give Effie all the havins she would ever need – all the good manners and the common sense. But it had left her empty of real experience. She knew all about China, and South America, and what grew there, and why; she knew how to address a bishop; and what to wear if she were invited to a weekend house-party. But she had never travelled further than Ayr, and the only life she had ever seen was within the boundaries of the city of Edinburgh. A grey, respectable life, of church, and social mornings with her mother, and endless formal teas.
    Her father was always asking her mother why she wasn’t courting yet; but her mother (although Effie didn’t yet knowit) was doing everything she could to protect her from what she saw to be the disastrous consequences of early marriage. Besides, most of the cultured and eligible young men of Effie’s age were still at the University, or training to be doctors, or fighting in South Africa. One of the young managers at Watson’s Bank, Alasdair Maclachlan, had called on Effie two or three times, twice with flowers and once with heather, but the last thing Fiona wanted for her daughter was to marry a banker, especially from Watson’s, and besides, she didn’t care for the yellow Maclachlan tartan, or for the red birth-mark on the side of Alasdair’s nose.
    Effie herself, though, never once dreamed of professors, or doctors, or bankers, or even of slightly-wounded heroes returning with medals from Kroonstad. Effie dreamed of mixing with kings and princes, and living in palaces. It wasn’t an unusual dream for any young girl during the heyday of the British Empire, with His Majesty King Edward VII proclaimed monarch and emperor of India only yesterday, and Europe still thick with Battenbergs and Saxe-Coburgs and scores of lesser royalty. But for a girl of seventeen, Effie took her dream unusally seriously. She would sometimes stand in front of the cheval glass in her bedroom, her head draped in a lace shawl, and whisper an announcement for herself, as if she were entering a grand reception. ‘Princess Effie of Edinburgh.’ Or, better still, ‘Queen Effie the First.’

CHAPTER EIGHT
    Dougal said, ‘We’re to leave Albion to founder, is that it,