LITMIR.BIZ

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looked up from her stitchery. ‘You do not do yourself justice, my dear. You misunderstood him, I am sure. Few prospective brides are as handsome and as comme il faut as you are.’

      ‘And few lack as much pedigree as I do,’ retorted Stacy briskly, returning to her desk and sitting down again. The desk was another of her father’s innovations; previously the office had been furnished with an old-fashioned lectern at which one stood.

      She looked across at a row of oil-paintings on the opposite wall. The older ones were hack-work, done by travelling colourmen for a few shillings; the last two were fine things, one by a pupil of Gainsborough and the other by Romney.

      ‘My great-grandfather began life as a Huguenot pedlar who turned himself into a prosperous back-alley moneylender.’ She waved her hand at the oldest painting. ‘My grandfather built up the business until he was able to found Blanchard’s Bank, and my father transformed it into the richest bank in England.’ Now she waved at the Romney. ‘His father sent him to Harrow, and he had the manners and tastes of a gentleman and married a lady of aristocratic birth, but that does not make us gentry. And they do not really accept us, however much they and the nobility fawn on Blanchard’s—when they need the Bank to lend them money to carry on their gambling and their follies.’

      Opening a large red and gold ledger which stood on her desk, she said almost savagely, ‘Would you like me to read to you the loans we have made to the flowers of English society—and tell you how many have reneged on them? No, I am merely the cit’s daughter, who has the bad taste to behave as a young man might, and run Blanchard’s—successfully, too.’

      She closed the ledger again. ‘Do you know what he said to me, Louisa, in the middle of his pretence of loving and admiring me? That he expected that once we were married I would give up the foolishness of running the Bank and put in a manager to do it for me, so that I could give my mind to being a wife fit for a person of his station.’

      Miss Landen stitched for a moment in silence, before replying, ‘Most husbands would expect you to do that, my dear.’

      ‘Yes, I know that, Louisa, and that is why I promise never to marry. Father didn’t train me to run Blanchard’s in order to stop doing so once some handsome popinjay decides that he might like my money while consigning me permanently to the nursery or to talk nonsense to fine ladies.’

      Louisa sighed, before saying gently, holding up her work to inspect it the better, ‘I thought you told me not long ago that you would like to have children of your own, my dear. You are leaving it rather late to marry—you are already twenty-eight years old—and husbands do not grow on trees.’ And she gave her one-time charge a sideways look.

      So even Louisa was full of sententious piff-paff, it seemed, and she, Stacy, was condemned to live in a childless desert because in order to have children one must first have a husband. How much better if one were a plant, fertilised at a distance by a passing bee—with no idea where the pollen came from!

      This ridiculous notion was enough to restore her good humour and bring a wry smile to her face. It was the kind of nonsensical idea which she could never share with kind Louisa but which would have amused her father. Tears pricked at the back of her eyes. Hardly a day passed but she missed him—her father, her tutor, her mentor, her friend, the parent with whom, improbably, she had shared her jokes.

      It occurred to her that it was too long since she had made one, or heard one, and meantime Louisa deserved an answer. But she would not like it.

      ‘Oh,’ she said, the hint of unexpected laughter in her voice bringing Louisa’s head up, ‘never fear, my love. When one is as rich as the heiress who owns Blanchard’s Bank, husbands forsake the trees and spring out of the ground! There will be no shortage of offers for the richest prize in England! The shortage lies, Louisa, in men whom I might wish to accept. And that is enough of that. I have work to do.’ And she opened another ledger and began to write as briskly as she had spoken.

      If Miss Landen was thinking sadly that her one-time charge was such a strong woman, both mentally and morally, that it would need a man of equal strength to contain and perhaps tame her, she did not say so. It was all her stupid father’s fault, she thought ruefully as she watched Stacy’s quill drive across the paper, bringing her up as he had done.

      It had been the failure of Louis Blanchard’s wife to give him boy children who could survive birth which had done the damage. He had married Lady Rachel Beauchamp, of a poor and noble family, and he had loved her in his aloof fashion, but constant childbearing and miscarriages had made her sickly and ailing.

      It had been a miracle that she had carried her one girl child to term—another miracle that the child had been born large and healthy—but the birth had killed her mother, and left her father, for a time, resentful of the child who had taken his wife from him.

      And then, as she grew up, her bright intelligence had begun to impress him. The child was christened Anastasia, but he had early shortened her name to Stacy, not Anna, because Stacy sounded more like the boy he had wanted to continue the Blanchard dynasty. Louisa remembered the first time she had met Louis Blanchard and Stacy.

      ‘I’m not hiring you as a governess,’ he had told her bluntly in the rich study of his home in Piccadilly. ‘I want her to have the manners and appearance of a fine lady, even if she has the brains and mental accomplishment of a clever man. I have hired male tutors to educate her. Why,’ he boasted proudly, ‘she can calculate a percentage and draw up a bill better than any of my clerks, and she still but a child.’

      Louisa had risen from her chair, said severely, ‘I do not wish to undertake this task, Mr Blanchard. You are doing the poor child no favour and I ought not to abet you.’

      He had given her the smile which transformed his hard face, and which immediately won him Louisa Landen’s heart.

      ‘And that is exactly why I am hiring you,’ he had told her warmly, ‘to keep her still a woman, and a modest one, for all her accomplishments.’ He had seen Louisa hesitate. ‘I will send for her,’ he had said, and had rung the bell, ‘and you may see that I am not asking you to care for a hoyden or a female pedant.’

      What Louisa had seen when a lady’s maid brought Stacy in was a shy, dark little girl, the image of her handsome father, who, for all her shyness, was thoroughly in command of herself, and who took one look at Louisa Landen and thoroughly approved of what she saw.

      ‘My dear,’ her father had told her, as coolly as though he were addressing an equal, ‘this is Miss Louisa Landen, who I hope will agree to become your companion and teach you the conduct and etiquette of a lady.’

      Stacey had looked at the ladylike figure before her, and had seen through Miss Landen’s modest exterior to the kind heart beneath it. She had made a short bow and said in a pretty voice, quite unlike anything which Miss Landen might have expected of the child prodigy whom her father had described, ‘Oh, I do so hope, Miss Landen, that you will become my companion. I really do need someone to talk to and tell me exactly how a young lady should behave.’

      Such composure in a ten-year-old Miss Landen had not met in her long career as a governess. She had bowed in her turn and murmured gently, ‘And I shall be pleased to do just that, my dear,’ and had begun her long association with Stacy and Louis Blanchard.

      And if she had fallen a little in love with Louis Blanchard on the way, no one was ever to know. Occasionally she had remonstrated with him over his daughter’s odd education, telling him in no uncertain terms that it was quite improper and that he was doing her no favour by insisting on it.

      He had smiled at her and announced, ‘I am not here to do her favours. I am here to secure for Blanchard’s someone of that name who can run it when I am gone, and if that someone is a woman, then I must make do with what the Creator of us all has sent me!’

      And that had been that. Louisa had never raised the matter again and here was the end of it, Louis Blanchard having died suddenly at a comparatively early age, leaving Stacy, still unmarried, to run the Bank, and waiting now for her right-hand man Ephraim Blount to come in to discuss the day’s news

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