A Marriage of Convenience Read Online Free Page B

everything seemed forced upon him from without. Until recently he had only recognised one kind of freedom: the freedom to do the things he wanted; now, he knew he lacked another variety, just as desirable: the freedom not to have to do what he did not want. Though he had foreseen his present problems years before, he had always secretly believed in a miraculous escape. His uncle might die or some less predictable piece of good fortune could arise. Meanwhile, he had assured himself, all he could do was live for the present, and in the end take the cards fate dealt him without complaint. While the crisis had been in the future, this course had served him well enough. Yet marriage for money to a woman he did not love—when she herself loved him sincerely—no longer remained the largely unobjectionable solution it had seemed before becoming an imminent and all but certain event. If the girl in question wanted him for his title, Clinton would have seen marriage to her as a fair enough exchange of assets. But since Sophie Lucas had already turned down two suitors with titles and fortunes, this conscience-saving consideration did not in any sense apply.
    One of Dick Lambert’s sayings was that to love before marriage was to squander an inheritance before getting it; and Clinton himself was not bad at justifications when he applied his mind. Love might be a reasonable basis for an affair, but a lifetime needed more rational criteria. How often do people fall in love disastrously with partners almost the opposite of what they would have chosen, if logic rather than random attraction had been the means of selection? And in any case, wasn’t love usually more to do with pride andsensual possessiveness than with gentler emotions? Far better trust money than love; money tended to last better. Although Clinton could laugh about the subject when talking to Dick, it did not alter his instinctive feelings.
    In his last days before leaving for England, Clinton pinned his hopes on persuading his brother to help him. The chances seemed remote, but Clinton was not entirely without hope. He believed he had a carrot which an avaricious man would find hard to resist. In the meantime, when his thoughts returned to Sophie, he tried to allay his misgivings by reminding himself that the motives for a deed usually changed before it had been performed. One way or other, the next few weeks would determine his future.

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    ‘To be illegitimate is a misfortune. To be illegitimate and the elder son of a dead peer is something worse, because nobody’s going to have to be a genius to work out why you’re plain Mr Danvers and not my Lord Ardmore like your father before you.’
    This much at least Esmond Danvers would sometimes volunteer to friends about his origins. Occasionally he might also remark, in the same ruefully ironic tone, that he was only born out of wedlock because his mother’s divorce proceedings went on longer than expected and delayed her remarriage to his father by a small matter of two months. Anybody hearing him, who also happened to know that his younger brother, now serving in the cavalry, had inherited the Ardmore title and everything else in the family worth inheriting, would inevitably have been impressed by the apparent lack of resentment in his voice. But that was only to be expected in a man, whose two decades in the city might have served as a useful text for a sermon on self-help.
    From solicitor’s articled clerk, Esmond had progressed in five years to a partnership in a practice dealing mainly in company law. An invitation to join the board of a small private bank had followed; and because a number of the largest borrowers were bill brokers, he had learned a lot about the discount market. Attracted by the large sums to be made discounting bills of exchange in a rapidly expanding market, he had ventured everything on winning a substantial slice of this lucrative field. Nine years later, at forty, he had found himself sole