The Proprietor's Daughter Read online

  THE PROPRIETOR’S DAUGHTER

  Lewis Orde

  © Lewis Orde 1988

  Lewis Orde has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1988 by Little Brown & Co.

  This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  For Collie,

  who told me that an even-money winner

  is always better than a 50–1 loser.

  No sounder advice on life could any father give his son.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter One

  KATHERINE KASSLER felt her husband stir beside her in the king-sized brass bed, and she knew it was ten minutes before six. Franz Kassler had a mental clock that unfailingly tugged him from sleep at precisely the same time each morning. Winter or summer, rain or shine, early or late to bed the previous night: it did not matter. At exactly ten minutes before six, even before the housekeeper had stumbled out of bed, Franz was awake and ready for his morning run over London’s Hampstead Heath.

  The weight on the mattress moved as Franz lifted the quilt, swung his legs over the side, and stood up. Katherine cracked one eye open, focusing slowly in the dimness of the June dawn. Married six years, she still found enormous pleasure in looking at the body of her German-born husband. Tall, fair, athletic, he had a physique that was muscular without being grotesque. Like some mythical Greek god on Mount Olympus, Katherine always thought. But then again, those Greek gods on Olympus should have been so lucky!

  Through one barely open eye, Katherine followed her husband’s every move as he walked across the sand-colored Wilton. Sliding back a mirrored closet door, he pulled out a gray track suit. As he slipped into it, first the top and then the bottom, Katherine felt a twinge of regret at being deprived of her view. That disappointment lasted for barely a second, until an enjoyable notion took its place. My husband — Katherine pressed her thighs together in an involuntary gesture of anticipation — is one of those rare men who look better without any clothes on at all. My husband is the kind of man who makes tailors throw away their cutting shears in absolute despair, because no matter what magic they perform with cloth and padding, they can never hope to improve on what nature has bestowed on him in the first place.

  Franz began to turn around. Katherine snapped shut the open eye, assuming the pose of sleep. It was best to watch when Franz did not realize he was under observation. But Franz’s light blue eyes danced with laughter, as though he understood exactly what had been happening while his back was turned. He leaned over the bed to kiss his apparently sleeping wife on the cheek before leaving the room and pulling the door shut behind himself.

  Katherine opened both eyes. The room was growing brighter with each passing second. She lay back, hands clasped behind her head. She could never understand how Franz found such reward in running. He swore that breathing in deep lungfuls of crisp morning air and pumping oxygen through his bloodstream tuned his mind to cope with the coming day. Katherine was the opposite. She preferred to lie in and stare at the ceiling while she planned her day. Only after Franz had returned from the Heath, and had put in another twenty minutes of vigorous exercise, would she get up, as prepared to face the world as he was.

  She listened for sounds of the front door closing, the slap of Franz’s Pumas on the ground. Instead, her own bedroom door flew open. Two pajama-clad, fair-haired children, a boy of five and a girl of three, exploded into the room.

  “Happy birthday, Mummy!”

  Henry reached his mother first. Clutched in his hands was a brightly colored sheet of paper. “Look what I made for you! A birthday card, and I painted it!”

  Katherine took the card from her son. “It’s lovely, thank you very much.” As she studied it — a house, a tree, a blue sky with a yellow sun, and a stick woman she assumed was meant to be herself — chubby arms were flung around her neck. A mumbled birthday wish and a wet, sucking kiss announced Joanne’s arrival on the bed.

  Katherine leaned back against the headboard of thick brass rails, an arm around each child. She glanced toward the open door. In the hallway stood Franz. Instead of beginning his run, he had been priming the children to celebrate their mother’s twenty-sixth birthday.

  “Happy birthday,” Franz called out. “Do you not think you should get up and enjoy it?”

  Katherine plucked the pillow from behind her head and flung it at him. He ducked, laughed, and disappeared. A minute later, Katherine heard the front door close.

  “Do you like my birthday card?” Henry asked.

  “I love it, darling. Did you really do it by yourself?”

  The boy nodded solemnly, blue eyes large and round as he acknowledged the magnitude of his deed. Katherine kissed him and his sister, then she clapped her hands. “Both of you go out and play now. I want to get up.”

  She watched the children chase each other across the room. The door slammed; excited squeals erupted in the hall. Then came a new sound. A woman’s voice, singsong but full of authority. Katherine smiled. The children might take liberties with her and Franz, but they toed the line when facing Edna Griffiths, the middle-aged housekeeper who had been with the family for two years.

  When the noise subsided, Katherine got up. She walked into the en suite bathroom, shivering as the soles of her feet came in contact with the pale beige Italian marble floor. After stepping out of her filmy nightgown, she entered the shower stall, pulled closed the glass door, and turned the water full on. The last vestiges of sleep departed in a blast of ice-cold water.

  Refreshed by the shower, Katherine wrapped herself in a terry-cloth robe and sat at her dressing table, inspecting her reflection while she ran a brush through thick, shoulder-length blond hair. She liked what she saw. Clear-complexioned, a straight nose set between wide-spaced eyes. Her father’s eyes, vivid blue, capable of expressing any emotion. A facial shape that could not quite make up its mind, oval until it reached the chin, and then just a hint of squareness. Her father’s chin, determined. She was, all in all, her father’s daughter, and Katherine regarded that as the finest compliment she could ever ask for.

  Hair still damp, she made her way down to the breakfast room. Decorated country-style, with oak floor and beamed ceiling, the breakfast room overlooked a back garden that was a jungle of shrubs and trees and uncut grass; both Franz and Katherine maintained that children could never have fun in a carefully cultivated garden. Henry and Joanne, now washed and dressed, were sitting at the pine table. Edna Griffiths, a large bustling woman with salt-and-pepper hair pulled back into a functional bun, placed dishes full of cereal in front of them, with the ever-optimistic admonition not to make a mess.

  “Kettle’s on, Mrs. Kassler,” the housekeeper said. “Tea’ll be up in a couple of minutes.”

  “Thank you.” This early in the morning, Katherine had to conce
ntrate to understand the housekeeper. Despite having left her native Swansea twenty years earlier, Edna still possessed a lilting brogue. Instead of speaking sentences, she had a tendency to chant them. Caught between Franz’s clipped German accent and the housekeeper’s musical Welsh voice, Katherine sometimes felt that she was trapped in the middle of an amateur dramatics production.

  Franz returned to the house as Katherine was sipping a cup of tea. Red-faced, skin glistening with perspiration, he entered the breakfast room and stood next to Katherine. “Happy birthday again,” he said, and bent down to kiss her.

  “If you genuinely wanted me to have a really happy birthday, you would have let me sleep,” she complained lightly.

  “If I had let you sleep, you would have slept through this.” From a pocket in the track suit top, Franz withdrew a small square box.

  Watched closely by the children, Katherine opened the box. Inside was a diamond eternity ring. She swung around. “It’s beautiful —” she began, before realizing that Franz was no longer there. She could only hear the hammering of his feet as he took the stairs two at a time on his way to the top floor of the three-story house. There were times, Katherine decided, when he had to be the most unromantic swine in the entire world! And those times were always in the morning, when exercise was king.

  Katherine waited for fifteen minutes before following Franz up to the top floor. Originally, the sixty-year-old house had contained six bedrooms, four on the second floor, and two on the third. When Katherine and Franz had bought the house six years earlier, they’d had it renovated from the ground up. The work had included gutting the two top bedrooms to create one large game room. Inside was a snooker table and an assortment of exercise equipment: weights, a rowing machine, and a section of bars affixed to one wall.

  Reaching the top of the stairs, Katherine heard explosive bursts of breath as Franz pushed himself through the final part of his rigorous daily fitness program. Katherine swung back the door. Franz had discarded the track suit. In black shorts and a white West German soccer shirt — Katherine had made him a gift of a dozen such shirts after West Germany had won the World Cup two years earlier, in 1974 — Franz was lying on a padded gymnasium mat, feet hooked beneath the bottom rung of the wall bars, hands clasped behind his neck as he executed sit-ups. Veins popped in his temples each time he swung his torso up and forward.

  “For God’s sake, enough already!” Katherine cried out. “You’ll do yourself an injury.”

  “Another twenty!” Franz gasped. “Do you — nineteen, eighteen, seventeen — like the ring?”

  “I love it. But I love you more. It hurts me to see you torture yourself like this.”

  “Not torture! Eleven . . . ten . . . nine . . .!” Franz finished the count and lay back, chest rising and falling like an angry ocean. “Every mile I run, every sit-up I do, adds to my life expectancy. I do not do this for myself. I do it for you, for the children.”

  “I know you do.” Katherine walked to where Franz lay and knelt beside him. Her hair covered his face as she lowered her lips onto his. She found the heat and sweat exciting, like a horse steaming after a gallant race. Katherine could always sympathize with that.

  Franz reached up. His hands snaked beneath the terry robe. “If only I had known.”

  “If only you had known what?”

  “That you were waiting for me like this.”

  “What would you have done?”

  “I would have run faster, to be back here sooner.”

  Katherine stood up, walked to the door and locked it. Turning around, she shrugged herself out of the robe and lay down beside Franz on the padded mat. “I think I’m out of shape. May I join your fitness class?”

  “What do you want your exercises to achieve?”

  Katherine pulled Franz’s West German soccer shirt over his head and tossed it into a corner of the room. “I am looking,” she whispered as the tips of her fingers dug tantalizingly beneath the waistband of Franz’s shorts, “for an exercise that will give me internal satisfaction.”

  Franz arched his back and wriggled out of his shorts. “I think I have the very thing you are seeking.”

  “Oh?” Katherine returned to being the instigator. She kissed Franz’s eyebrows, so white as to be almost invisible. Her right hand traced a pattern across his flat stomach, fingernails catching in hair. “Tell me about it.”

  “It is similar to a push-up,” Franz said. He lifted his head just enough to touch his lips to Katherine’s right breast, caress the swollen nipple with his tongue. “But you need a partner because you would look very foolish doing it by yourself. Specifically, you need a partner with whom you are in love.”

  How could she have thought him unromantic? “I love you,” she whispered.

  “Even hot and sweaty?”

  “Especially hot and sweaty!”

  Franz began to laugh. Katherine cut off the noise by covering his mouth with her own. It was all she could do to stop giggling as well. Moments like this, stealing away from the rest of the household to make love, were to be treasured.

  She sat astride him, balancing, eyes closed, senses seeking that plane of ecstasy. She felt his hands on her shoulders, drawing her down. Their faces touched, and then, with a swift, practiced movement, they rolled over. Katherine’s legs wrapped themselves around Franz, her heels dug into him, a rider urging greater effort from her mount. She held him with her arms, with her legs, with her body, and in one gigantic, throbbing spasm, she enveloped his climax within her own.

  “Was that a better birthday present than the ring?”

  “You bet it was!” she replied, and gently bit his ear.

  Fifty minutes passed before they returned downstairs. Franz wore a double-breasted suit, while Katherine was dressed in a gabardine navy pleated skirt with matching jacket, and a cream silk blouse. She bought half a dozen such suits at a time from Harrods, varying the colors and fabrics, but always staying within set style parameters. Fashionable yet businesslike — that was the way she liked to dress for work.

  The breakfast room was empty, the children playing in the garden. On the pine table lay the two newspapers that were delivered to the house. Franz lifted the distinctively pink Financial Times. Katherine eagerly flicked through the pages of the Daily Eagle.

  “Are you in there today?” Franz asked.

  Katherine’s answer was to fold back the newspaper to the Monday’s women’s section. There was her picture at the top of a feature about a home in Highgate for battered women. Franz read the story as though he were going over a company report, eyes lifting important words and phrases from each paragraph before darting on to the next.

  “Poor women, to go through so much.”

  “That’s because they don’t have husbands like you.”

  Franz accepted the compliment with a warm smile. He leaned forward to kiss Katherine gently on the lips, and told her that he would see her that evening.

  Katherine followed him to the front door, watching as he climbed into a silver Jaguar sedan and swung out of the driveway, heading for his office in Hayes, near London Airport. Soon after, Katherine left the house, carrying a slim leather attaché case in preference to a handbag. The diamond eternity ring shone brightly from the same finger on which she wore her wedding and engagement rings. She drove her white Triumph Stag as far as Chalk Farm station, taking the underground from there into town. At Tottenham Court Road, instead of changing trains, she rode the escalator to the street. She was early. The weather, for once, was marvelous. She would walk the remaining mile or so.

  The warm early morning sun matched the glow inside Katherine. She passed Holborn station, turned down Kingsway and cut through Lincoln’s Inn Fields. There was something to be said for starting the day the way she had started it with Franz. A broad grin spread across Katherine’s face, happy and stupid and glad to be alive. She bit it back before the people she passed could question her sanity. But what did they know? Had they commenced their day on such a wo
nderful note? Katherine doubted it, certainly so if the gloomy Monday-morning expressions on their faces were any barometer of how they felt.

  She reached Fleet Street to find it at a standstill. Newspaper trucks grumbled in place, the household names emblazoned on their sides now preaching solely to the converted. Buses and taxis disgorged passengers who preferred to get out and walk. Car drivers, unable to do otherwise, simply sat and waited. Only motorcycles moved, jockeying their way through the narrowest of gaps with a defiant roar.

  After picking her way through the stagnant sea of traffic, Katherine paused to look down the length of Fleet Street to where it ended at Ludgate Circus, with its imposing backdrop of St. Paul’s Cathedral. No matter how many times she had seen it, this view of the world’s most famous newspaper street never ceased to thrill her, never failed to instill in her a sense of wonder that she was a part of it. She loved this street like no other place in the entire world.

  She turned into Bouverie Street. Above a doorway, in raised white letters, was the legend: Eagle Newspapers Limited. On either side of the door was a title: Daily Eagle, Sunday Eagle. Not as grandiose an entrance as that of the Telegraph or the Express, Katherine could not help thinking, but then the Daily Eagle had been publishing for only eleven years, and its Sunday version for five years less. A moment or two when compared with the longevity of Fleet Street’s more illustrious denizens.

  Entering the building, Katherine came face-to-face with an enlarged, framed copy of the Daily Eagle’s first front page. A proud banner in red and black, a lead story about the 1965 Rhodesian independence crisis. Katherine had been fifteen then, a schoolgirl, but she recalled that first issue as clearly as if it had been printed only yesterday, for it had signified the moment when she had decided to become a journalist herself, a writer who would one day work on the Daily Eagle.

  Heels clicking loudly on the marble floor, she crossed the foyer to one of the two elevators. An elderly man with World War II combat ribbons pinned to his black uniform jacket touched a hand to his lined forehead in a greeting reminiscent of a military salute.