Beggar Bride Read Free

brushes his strong white teeth in the saucepan water, now tepid. He pushes a flannel over his face, runs a comb through his tangled blond hair.
    Oh, he might be a screwball but she loves him, she loves him. She can’t blame Billy, not for anything. Billy has done his best. If there’d been work he would have taken it. He’ll put his hand to anything, hod-carrier, dishwasher, cleaning on the Underground, waiter in a Pizza Hut, and once his boyish good looks got him a job as doorman at a tourist hotel, far posher than this one. He wore a splendid uniform and looked like a drummer boy in a picture, brave, proud and good, on his way to war with a flag. The wages were poor but the tips were amazing. But then they discovered that he had no licence and was moving customers’ expensive cars. He is so unlucky. Something always goes wrong to bugger him up, not his fault.
    What will he think when he hears of her plans? Are they plans?
    Perhaps that won’t be necessary. Perhaps they’ll hear some good news today. But if not, whatever Billy says Ange is determined to press ahead, he might call it prostitution but it’s not, not when you only go with one man. She has thought it all out, down to the smallest detail. And she wouldn’t be only a mistress, either, she’d be secure, married, a wife to another man.
    Bigamy? So what? There are worse crimes than that, much worse. Living as they are forced to live, for a start. If that’s not a crime, what is?
    She knows exactly what she wants. The only real problem will be how to find the rich man of the prunes.

2
    T HE MORNING EXPERIENCE OF the Hon. Sir Fabian Ormerod, financier, widower, divorcee, son of a peer of the realm and knighted in his own right, differs from Ange’s in a multitude of ways. Coffee is brought to him on a tray as soon as he presses his handy button, and his day’s appointments appear on the screen beside his gigantic bed. Already his clothes are laid out, his trousers pressed, his striped shirt aired and crisp as if returned from a laundry… Estelle’s ironing has always been impressive.
    His days are full.
    No time for painful self-reflection, no need to explore his raison d’être. Everyone needs him, everyone wants to speak with him and that is why no calls are put through to his house in Cadogan Square, tucked between embassies, they must wait till he gets to his office at ten.
    Naturally he insists on some time for himself.
    He joins his daughter, Honesty, for breakfast, a formal breakfast laid out in the dining-room, the way they did before Helena died.
    He helps himself to scrambled egg. ‘What are your plans today, darling?’ A mindless kiss on the head as he passes his daughter’s chair.
    He hardly listens as she reels off her list. Long ago, Fabian discovered, it was necessary to sift the intelligence reaching his brain, binning the vast majority of it, putting some on hold, and keeping the essentials on screen to be dealt with soonest.
    Honesty’s day can be safely binned. The hairdresser’s to get her highlights touched up. Coffee with Nisha, shopping in the Arcade, lunch with Adelle, and the afternoon playing tennis indoors at the club. What a waste of an education, but Honesty’s happy, she’s not on drugs, and surely, these days, you can’t ask for more.
    The round, creamy-faced Honesty, fresh from finishing school in France, is surely too shrewd to go wrong like so many of her Sloaney cronies. Give a little, take a little, is her favourite adage. With ease she slipped into her mother’s role after the divorce, and again, after Helena’s death. Daddy’s little helper. Helena, his second wife, was a great big brute of a woman. Later, when Honesty studied the life of Henry the Eighth at school, that poxed old monster, she compared herself dramatically with Mary, daughter of the lawful queen.
    Old-fashioned as he is, it was always obvious that Fabian would prefer a male heir to his monetary kingdom. So, with all the imperiousness of a