“Virginia Fenwick won’t be vanquished until she’s six foot under. But how can I help?”

“I want to take over Farthings Bank and remove Adrian Sloane once and for all. But I can’t hope to pull it off without your help.”

*   *   *

“You can’t win them all,” said Lady Virginia, “but as Wellington reminded us after Waterloo, it’s only the final battle that really matters.”

“And who’s playing Napoleon on this particular battlefield?”

“None other than Emma Clifton.”

“And what will my role be?” asked Fisher.

“I need you to find out what really happened on the first night of the Buckingham’s maiden voyage because clearly the Home Fleet story was nothing more than a smoke screen. Priscilla Bingham overheard one of the directors telling her husband that if the truth ever got out, Emma Clifton would have to resign and the company might even go bankrupt. Nothing would suit me better because that would leave our precious chairman with no choice but to settle the action and pay my costs.”

Fisher remained silent for some time, before he said, “There are a couple of directors on the board who’ve recently had a run-in with Mrs. Clifton, and one of them has a tendency to drink a little too much, especially when he’s not paying. Do we have anything to offer him in return, should he decide to resign?”

“A place on the board of Farthings Bank.”

“That would swing it, but what makes you think you can pull it off?”

“The chairman, Adrian Sloane, has every reason to loathe Sebastian Clifton, and will do anything to bring him down.”

“How do you know that?”

“It’s amazing what you can pick up at dinner parties, especially when your host thinks women couldn’t possibly begin to understand what goes on in the City.”

III. Giles Barrington 1970

GILES BARRINGTON

1970

Chapter 17

17

GILES HADN’T GIVEN a moment’s thought to how he wanted to spend his fiftieth birthday, but Gwyneth had.

Whenever Giles thought about his marriage—and he thought about it a great deal—he still couldn’t pinpoint when things had begun to go wrong. The tragic death of their son Walter at the age of three, and the realization that Gwyneth couldn’t have another child, had turned her from a bright spirit who lit up everyone’s lives, to a melancholy shadow, lost in her own world. Instead of the tragedy drawing them closer together, Giles found they were slowly drifting apart, not helped by a Member of Parliament’s unsocial hours and then a minister’s demanding schedule.