Sample Chapter

BELLA

Isabella Mountfort, the elder daughter of Lord and Lady Mountfort, went through seven years at a girls’ school in Gloucestershire and a further three at the Sorbonne with her virginity intact.

When she finally arrived home at Mountfort Fitchett at the age of twenty-one, her parents weren’t quite sure who she was, and the next day she went off again, this time to join the circus that was passing through the village at the time, and during the following weeks she gave herself variously to the ringmaster’s son, a lion tamer, two midgets and The Flying Ronaldos.

She then decided to return home, but only to pack her bags and leave for good this time, to go and seek her fortune. Actually, she didn’t have to go far for that because it was sitting waiting for her, all two million pounds of it, in an account at the Provincial Bank, left to her by her grandfather who, knowing her rather better than her parents did, reckoned she would have need of the money sooner than she would get it if she had to wait for them to die.

The lion tamer from the circus, who fancied he had fallen in love with her (he had, they all had) came and found her and together they went to America, not because of any reason in particular but because it was the other side of the water. There were few enough positions for lion tamers in America and he soon fell to doing the other thing he did which was gambling and when he had used up all his money on this exercise, which didn’t take long, there not being much of it, he tried to use Bella’s. She, however, was not a soft touch and after the first hundred dollars disappeared from her purse she disappeared herself, no questions asked. A girl who can keep her virginity safe through seven years of school and three years of university (not to mention the Sorbonne) is unlikely to have much trouble keeping her cash safe. A hundred dollars, she reckoned, was a small price to pay to learn that particular lesson, the lesson that she shouldn’t trust anyone.

So she moved to New York and had some fancy cards printed with The Hon. Isabella Mountfort on them and, by dint of that and her looks, which it is only fair to say here were, even by American standards, eye-catching, and her accent, which was so highly polished you could see your face in it, she soon found herself invited to all the best parties, plus some of the second-best parties and one or two of the sort of party her parents would not have liked her to go to. It was at these latter that she became acquainted with cannabis. She was already on more than speaking terms with Campari, a drink she had at first thought so vile there had to be some deep meaning to it, some reason why anyone would drink it, and with some persistence she learned how to drink the awful stuff and thereafter could never remember why it was she hadn’t liked it at first.

It was at such a party that she met Eric. She was introduced to him but being unable to shake his hand, on account of one hand holding a joint and the other a glass of the red stuff, she did the only thing left to her and kissed him. Now most men would think that a little forward but depending on what kind of party it was, and your current state of inebriation, you might not, and Eric didn’t.

She went home with him and stayed there for five months. It was only then that she remembered she had a flat herself somewhere in New York and, calling Directory Enquiries to find out where she lived, went back to find a telegram from her brother. Her father had had a stroke.

The next morning she got a cab back to Eric’s apartment only to find another girl installed there. He said he thought she had left. She thought about that for a moment and told him he was right, she had.

What with it being three months since James had sent the telegram Lord Mountfort was already well on the way to recovery by the time Bella arrived home. Anyway, he was a tough old bird and it was going to take more than a little stroke to finish him off, to the consternation of his son.

Now James had nothing against his father, indeed he quite liked him sometimes but, he thought, you can take this sort of thing too far. After all, the old man was only fifty-five. He could go on for another fifty-five years at this rate and James could see his inheritance becoming so distant as to be invisible. It wasn’t the title or the estate he wanted, it was the loot. His grandfather had been either less or more prescient when it came to leaving money to James than he had been with Bella, and the young man was chafing at the bit.

Finding her father some way off needing to see his children for the last time, and what with her mother mistaking her for one of the servants, Bella decided she wasn’t needed. She did enjoy living in the servants’ quarters and serving her mother’s breakfast in her room each morning but soon even that joke wore thin. Life at Mountfort Fitchett was settling into its usual deadly nothingness and Bella got itchy feet. She had been astonishingly abstemious with her money, managing to live off other people’s most of the time, and found, when she popped in to the Provincial Bank to see how the pile was doing, that with interest it was actually bigger than when she had left it in their keeping. She made the only sensible decision she could and left it exactly where it was. She said to James that at this rate she would be a rich woman and he replied, not without some misgivings but to his credit without rancour, that she already was a rich woman, and she just
said, oh yes, probably.

Bella, James sometimes thought, could be surprisingly dim about money.

With a degree in the history of European art (she hadn’t wasted her time at the Sorbonne) Bella gravitated to Italy. There, she became the mistress of a minor Count with a house in the centre of Rome. It was a small house (he was a small Count) but she lived a very social life on his arm as they did the round of galleries, openings, parties and holidays at expensive resorts, but it finally dawned on Bella that if she was his mistress there must somewhere be a wife but if he was spending all this time with her there wasn’t. Or there was, and she was very understanding. Whilst Bella had rather liked the idea of being the mistress of a Count, even a small one, being just his girlfriend didn’t have the same kudos, and in any case if he wasn’t married there was always the possibility he would propose to her, which wasn’t the idea at all, so she left.

Well she didn’t leave just like that. She went off and got herself an apartment, and he came and looked for her and when he found her he pleaded undying love which was nice but he also gave her a gift of a miniature by Giuseppe Salvatore-Bellini, which Bella knew (courtesy of the Sorbonne) was worth another few weeks of anyone’s time.

When she left the second time he came and found her again and this time he had in his arms a landscape by Giuseppe Bellini-Salvatore, worth at least twice as much as the miniature, and so she went back.

Anyway this went on for about eighteen months by which time Bella had a small art gallery of her own. And the Count had either run out of pictures to give her or patience, because the next time she left he didn’t come looking for her. She did briefly consider going round to the small house with the Salvatore-Bellini as a gift to see if she could come back but the idea struck her as absurd, which it was. At that rate they would spend the rest of their lives ferrying pictures across Rome.

So Bella packed her bags again, had the collection of works shipped to Mountfort Fitchett, and took train for Bucharest. Not because Romania had any great interest for her but simply because it was the first train leaving the station. When they pulled in to the station at Bucharest the next day, Bella peered out of the window at the city and decided it had been a mistake, and without leaving the premises booked another ticket to Budapest, possibly because it was next in the alphabet but more probably because again it was the next train out, and said goodbye to Romania. Well, hullo and goodbye really.

She found Budapest much more to her taste, like Rome only not so warm. There was the small point that while she could speak a smattering of Italian, in any case enough to book a hotel room (smoking please) and order a Campari and soda, her knowledge of Hungarian was, by any measurement, non-existent.

It was in the hotel dining-room that very evening that she spotted William de la Salle III. She had no personal acquaintance with William but she knew his face as the benefactor of the de la Salle Gallery in Savannah, Georgia. Borrowing a waitress’s uniform, she served him his breakfast the next morning (her training at Mountfort Fitchett had not, after all, been a waste) and learned by virtue not so much of her own cunning but by William having a voice that would carry across the Okeefenoke Swamp on a foggy day, that he and his party were leaving for Paris that very afternoon.

Bella had changed back into the Hon. Isabella Mountfort and packed her bags in the space of an hour, and was at the station, funnily enough, at the same time as William. And lo and behold she too was going to Paris. It’s a small world.

By the time the train pulled into Gare de l’Est Bella and William were best friends, and so smitten was he that it took only another twenty-four hours for him to discover he needed a personal assistant, a personal assistant moreover who was not only fluent in French but who had a degree in the history of European art from, of all places, the Sorbonne.

The de la Salle name opened the door of every gallery and auction house in Paris but Bella proved to be more than an asset to William, she proved in fact to be indispensable, and when she shook her head, just ever so slightly, so that only he saw it, when he bid for a Salvatore Bellini miniature, he respected her judgment and let it go. When he asked her over dinner that evening why, rather than tell him the truth which was that it wasn’t as good as hers, she said simply that she hadn’t liked it. Well, she didn’t say it like that, she said it in a sort of Princess of Wales way that had William salivating.

By the time William had bought up half of the art in Paris they were of course lovers. Bella brought up the subject of a stopover, on the way to Savannah, at Mountfort Fitchett to see the family seat. William wasn’t at all sure what a family seat was but assumed it was some kind of privy and by now was so in love with everything English that a trip to the old country to see a toilet struck him as perfectly normal.

It occurred to Bella briefly that it would be a trifle difficult to explain her mother to William, especially since she probably wouldn’t recognise her daughter, but she circumvented this little difficulty by explaining her mother’s ‘illness’, well not so much explained as hinted, and William, who believed he understood the foibles of the English aristocracy, thought it indelicate to ask too much. In fact he rather relished the notion of meeting a genuine barking mad English lady.

What took him by surprise, though, at Mountfort Fitchett, was not the crumbling masonry or the crumbling occupants but Bella’s art collection. So when he arrived back in Savannah it was with a beautiful English girl on his arm and a kind of his-and-hers collection of pictures from Europe. His father, William de la Salle II, was impressed, although more by Bella than by the pictures. Pictures, to Mister William (his son, at thirty-four, was known as Master William, Mister being a title to be inherited on the death of his father), were ten a penny, but titled English girls who spoke like the Queen were something else. Actually, Bella only spoke like the Queen when she wanted to impress. Most times she just sounded like a minor aristocrat, which she was, and when she was high on Campari and cannabis she sounded much like any other woman, well, not any other sober woman of course.

The de la Salles lived in an exaggerated mansion by the unlikely name of Shangri-La in grounds Bella calculated to be about the size of Devon. It was a bit like home only instead of sandstone it was all white-painted wood and a pair of columns, in white of course, at the front door that were plainly too large even for this wedding-cake of a house that she thought must have been bought by the yard rather than for any very good decorative purpose. It was all very entertaining in a tacky sort of way.

The de la Salle Gallery was something else though. Bella marked at least a hundred pictures she would have sold her virginity for, had such a thing been possible.

Once again, though, she found herself the object of matrimonial interest. The thought of becoming the mother of William de la Salle IV left her less than enthused and for nearly a year she dodged the subject every time it was brought up, variously, by Mister William, his over-thin wife, a selection of relatives who seemed, as far as Bella could tell, to live in a number of annexes to the house and when they were full up in houses scattered around the grounds, all of whom came for their meals in the enormous dining room and gossiped, as often as not about her.

The longer she stayed there the more it seemed to Bella that Shangri-La, apart from the very obvious differences in style, resembled Mountfort Fitchett. It did briefly occur to her to dress as a maid and serve dinner to see if anyone noticed but since the maids were all black she decided they probably would, and she sank instead into a kind of stupor, relieved only occasionally by the usual round of tennis parties and riding and all the other entertainments the very wealthy devise for themselves to fill the time between being born and dying. She took to smoking joints in her room to escape the boredom and it was after one too many when her head sort of lolloped into her soup that people started to notice.

It was time to take her pictures and go home. Wherever that was.

Copyright R S Brynin 2022