Kane and Abel/Sons of Fortune Page 5

  The Kane family always stayed at the Ritz in Piccadilly when they were in London, which was convenient to Richard’s office in the City. Anne used the time while Richard was occupied at the bank to show William the Tower of London, Buckingham Palace and the Changing of the Guard. William thought everything was “great” except the English accent, which he had difficulty in understanding.

  “Why don’t they talk like us, Mommy?” he demanded, and was surprised to be told that the question was more often put the other way around, as “they” came first. William’s favorite pastime was watching the soldiers in their bright red uniforms with large, shiny brass buttons who kept guard duty outside Buckingham Palace. He tried to talk to them, but they stared past him into space and never even blinked.

  “Can we take one home?” he asked his mother.

  “No, darling, they have to stay here and guard the King.”

  “But he’s got so many of them, can’t I have just one?”

  As a “special treat”—Anne’s words—Richard allowed himself an afternoon off to take William and Anne to the West End to see a traditional English pantomime called “Jack and the Beanstalk” playing at the London Hippodrome. William loved Jack and immediately wanted to cut down every tree he laid his eyes on, imagining them all to be sheltering a monster. They had tea after the show at Fortnum and Mason in Piccadilly, and Anne let William have two cream buns and a thing called a doughnut. Daily thereafter William had to be escorted back to the tea room at Fortnum’s to consume another “doughbun,” as he called them.

  The holiday passed by all too quickly for William and his mother, but Richard, satisfied with his progress in Lombard Street and pleased with his newly appointed chairman, began to look forward to the day of their departure. Cables were arriving daily from Boston, which made him anxious to be back in his own boardroom. Finally, when one such missive informed him that 2,500 workers at a cotton mill with which his bank had a heavy investment in Lawrence, Massachusetts, had gone out on strike, he was glad that his planned date of sailing was only three days away.

  William was looking forward to returning and telling Mr. Munro all the exciting things he had done in England and to being reunited with his two grandmothers. They had never done anything so exciting as visiting a real live theater with the general public. Anne was also not unhappy to be going home, although she had enjoyed the trip almost as much as William, for her clothes and beauty had been much admired by the normally undemonstrative English. As a final treat for William the day before they were due to sail, Anne took him to a tea party in Eaton Square given by the wife of the newly appointed chairman of Richard’s London branch. She, too, had a son, Stuart, who was eight—and William had, in the two weeks in which they had been playing together, grown to regard him as an indispensable grown-up friend. The party, however, was rather subdued because Stuart felt unwell and William, in sympathy with his new chum, announced to his mother that he was going to be ill too. Anne and William returned to the Ritz Hotel earlier than they had planned. She was not greatly put out, as this gave her a little more time to supervise the repacking of the large steamer trunks, although she was convinced William was only putting on an act to please Stuart. When she put William to bed that night, she found that he had been as good as his word and was running a slight fever. She remarked on it to Richard over dinner.

  “Probably all the excitement at the thought of going home,” he offered, sounding unconcerned.

  “I hope so,” replied Anne. “I don’t want him to be sick on a six-day sea voyage.”

  “He’ll be just fine by tomorrow,” said Richard, issuing a directive that would go unheeded, but when Anne went to wake William the next morning, she found him covered in little red spots and running a temperature of 103. The hotel doctor diagnosed measles and was politely insistent that William on no account be sent on a sea journey, not only for his own good but for the sake of the other passengers. There was nothing for it but to leave him in bed with his stone hotwater bottle and wait until he was fully recovered. Richard was unable to countenance the two-week delay and decided to sail as planned. Reluctantly, Anne allowed the hurried changes of booking to be made. William begged his father to let him accompany him: the fourteen days before the ship was due back in Southampton seemed like an eternity to the child. Richard was adamant and hired a nurse to attend William and convince him of his poor state of health.

  Anne traveled down to Southampton with Richard in the new Rolls-Royce.

  “I shall be lonely in London without you, Richard,” she ventured diffidently in their parting moment, risking his disapproval of emotional women.

  “Well, my dear, I dare say I shall be somewhat lonely in Boston without you,” he said, his mind on the striking millworkers.

  Anne returned to London on the train, wondering how she would occupy herself for the next two weeks. William had a better night and in the morning the spots looked less ferocious. Doctor and nurse were unanimous however in their insistence that he remain in bed. Anne used the extra time to write long letters to the family, while William remained in bed, protesting, but on Tuesday morning he got himself up early and went into his mother’s room, very much back to his normal self. He climbed into bed next to her and immediately his cold hands woke her up. Anne was relieved to see him so obviously fully recovered. She rang to order breakfast in bed for both of them, an indulgence William’s father would never have countenanced.

  There was a quiet knock on the door and a man in gold-and-red livery entered with a large silver breakfast tray. Eggs, bacon, tomato, toast and marmalade—a veritable feast. William looked at the food ravenously as if he could not remember when he had last eaten a full meal. Anne casually glanced at the morning paper. Richard always read The Times when he stayed in London, so the management assumed she would require it as well.

  “Oh, look,” said William, staring at the photograph on an inside page, “a picture of Daddy’s ship. What’s a ca-la-mity, Mommy?”

  All across the width of the newspaper was a picture of the Titanic.

  Anne, unmindful of behaving as should a Cabot or a Kane, burst into frenzied tears, clinging to her only son. They sat in bed for several minutes, holding on to each other, William wasn’t sure why. Anne realized that they had both lost the one person whom they had loved most in the world.

  Sir Piers Campbell, young Stuart’s father, arrived at Suite 107 of the Ritz. He waited in the lounge while the widow put on a suit, the only dark piece of clothing she possessed. William dressed himself, still not certain what a calamity was. Anne asked Sir Piers to explain the full implications of the news to her son, who only said, “I wanted to be on the ship with him, but they wouldn’t let me go.” He didn’t cry, because he refused to believe anything could kill his father. He would be among the survivors.

  In all Sir Piers’s career as a politician, diplomat and now chairman of Kane and Cabot, London, he had never seen such self-containment in one so young. Presence is given to very few, he was heard to remark some years later. It had been given to Richard Kane and had been passed on to his only son. On Thursday of that week William was six, but he didn’t open any of his gifts.

  The lists of survivors, arriving spasmodically from America, were checked and double-checked by Anne. Each confirmed that Richard Lowell Kane was still missing at sea, presumed drowned. After a further week even William had almost abandoned hope of his father’s survival.

  Anne found it painful to board the Aquitania, but William was strangely eager to put to sea. Hour after hour, he would sit on the observation deck, scanning the featureless water.

  “Tomorrow I will find him,” he promised his mother again and again, at first confidently and then in a voice that barely disguised his own disbelief.

  “William, no one can survive for three weeks in the North Atlantic.”

  “Not even my father?”

  “Not even your father.”

  When Anne returned to Boston, both grandmothers were waiting
for her at the Red House, mindful of the duty that had been thrust upon them. The responsibility had been passed back to the grandmothers. Anne passively accepted their proprietary role. Life had little purpose left for her other than William, whose destiny they now seemed determined to control. William was polite but uncooperative. During the day he sat silently in his lessons with Mr. Munro and at night wept into the lap of his mother.

  “What he needs is the company of other children,” declared the grandmothers briskly, and they dismissed Mr. Munro and the nurse and sent William to Sayre Academy in the hope that an introduction to the real world and the constant company of other children might bring him back to his old self.

  Richard had left the bulk of his estate to William, to remain in the family trust until his twenty-first birthday. There was a codicil to the will. Richard expected his son to become president and chairman of Kane and Cabot on merit. It was the only part of his father’s testament that inspired William, for the rest was his by birthright. Anne received a capital sum of $500,000 and an income for life of $100,000 a year after taxes, which would cease at once if she remarried. She also received the house on Beacon Hill, the summer mansion on the North Shore, the home in Maine and a small island off Cape Cod, all of which were to pass to William on his mother’s death. Both grandmothers received $250,000 and letters leaving them in no doubt about their responsibility if Richard died before them. The family trust was to be handled by the bank, with William’s godparents acting as cotrustees. The income from the trust was to be reinvested each year in conservative enterprises.

  It was a full year before the grandmothers came out of mourning, and although Anne was still only twenty-eight, she looked her age for the first time in her life.

  The grandmothers, unlike Anne, concealed their grief from William until he finally reproached them for it.

  “Don’t you miss my father?” he asked, gazing at Grandmother Kane with the blue eyes that brought back memories of her own son.

  “Yes, my child, but he would not have wished us to sit around and feel sorry for ourselves.”

  “But I want us to always remember him—always,” said William, his voice cracking.

  “William, I am going to speak to you for the first time as though you were quite grown up. We will always keep his memory hallowed between us, and you shall play your own part by living up to what your father would have expected of you. You are the head of the family now and the heir to a large fortune. You must, therefore, prepare yourself through work to be fit for that inheritance in the same spirit in which your father worked to increase the inheritance for you.”

  William made no reply. He was thus provided with the motive for life which he had lacked before and he acted upon his grandmother’s advice. He learned to live with his sorrow without complaining, and from that moment on he threw himself steadfastly into his work at school, satisfied only if Grandmother Kane seemed impressed. At no subject did he fail to excel, and in mathematics he was not only top of his class but far ahead of his years. Anything his father had achieved, he was determined to better. He grew even closer to his mother and became suspicious of anyone who was not family, so that he was often thought of as a solitary child, a loner and, unfairly, a snob.

  The grandmothers decided when William was in his seventh year that the time had come to instruct the boy in the value of money. They therefore allowed him pocket money of one dollar a week but insisted that he keep an inventory accounting for every cent he had spent. With this in mind, they presented him with a green leather-bound ledger, at a cost of 95 cents, which they deducted from his first week’s allowance of one dollar. From the second week the grandmothers divided the dollar every Saturday morning. William invested 50 cents, spent 20 cents, gave 10 cents to any charity of his choice and kept 20 cents in reserve. At the end of each quarter the grandmothers would inspect the ledger and his written report on any transactions. When the first three months had passed, William was well ready to account for himself. He had given $1.30 to the newly founded Boy Scouts of America, and invested $5.55, which he had asked Grandmother Kane to place in a savings account at the bank of his godfather, J. P. Morgan. He had spent $2.60 for which he did not have to account, and had kept $2.60 in reserve. The ledger was a source of great satisfaction to the grandmothers: there was no doubt William was the son of Richard Kane.

  At school, William still made few friends, partly because he was shy of mixing with anyone other than Cabots, Lowells or children from families wealthier than his own. This restricted his choice severely, so he became a somewhat broody child, which worried his mother, who wanted William to lead a more normal existence and did not in her heart approve of the ledger or the investment program. Anne would have preferred William to have a lot of young friends rather than old advisors, to get himself dirty and bruised rather than remain spotless, to collect toads and turtles rather than stocks and company reports—in short, to be like any other little boy. But she never had the courage to tell the grandmothers about her misgivings and in any case the grandmothers were not interested in any other little boy.

  On his ninth birthday William presented the ledger to his grandmothers for the second annual inspection. The green leather book showed a saving during the two years of more than fifty dollars. He was particularly proud to point out to the grandmothers an old entry marked “B6,” showing that he had taken his money out of J. P. Morgan’s Bank immediately on hearing of the death of the great financier, because he had noted that his own father’s bank’s stock had fallen in value after his death had been announced. William had reinvested the same amount three months later before the public realized the company was bigger than any one man.

  The grandmothers were suitably impressed and allowed William to trade in his old bicycle and purchase a new one, after which he still had a capital sum of over $100, which his Grandmother Kane invested for him in the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey. Oil, William said knowingly, could only become more expensive. He kept the ledger meticulously up to date until his twenty-first birthday. Had the grandmothers still been alive then, they would have been proud of the final entry in the right-hand column marked “Assets.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Wladek was the only one of those left alive who knew the dungeons well. In his days of hide-and-seek with Leon he had spent many happy hours in the freedom of the small stone rooms, carefree in the knowledge that he could return to the castle whenever it suited him.

  There were in all four dungeons, on two levels. Two of the rooms, a larger and a smaller one, were at ground level. The smaller one was adjacent to the castle wall, which afforded a thin filter of light through a grille set high in the stones. Down five steps there were two more stone rooms in perpetual darkness and with little air. Wladek led the Baron into the small upper dungeon, where he remained sitting in a corner, silent and motionless, staring fixedly into space; the boy then appointed Florentyna to be the Baron’s personal servant.

  As Wladek was the only person who dared to remain in the same room as the Baron, the servants never questioned his authority. Thus, at the age of nine, he took on the day-to-day responsibility for his fellow prisoners. The new occupants of the dungeons, their placidity rendered into miserable stupefaction by incarceration, found nothing strange in a situation that had put a nine-year-old in control of their-lives. And in the dungeons he became their master. He split the remaining twenty-four servants into three groups of eight, trying to keep families together wherever possible. He moved them regularly in a shift system: the first eight hours in the upper dungeons for light, air, food and exercise, the second and most popular shift of eight hours working in the castle for their captors, and the final eight hours given over to sleep in one of the lower dungeons. No one except the Baron and Florentyna could be quite sure when Wladek slept, as he was always there at the end of every shift to supervise the servants as they moved on. Food was distributed every twelve hours. The guards would hand over a skin of goat’s milk, black bread,
millet and occasionally some nuts, all of which Wladek would divide by twenty-eight, always giving two portions to the Baron without ever letting him know.

  Once Wladek had each shift organized, he would return to the Baron in the smaller dungeon. Initially he expected guidance from him, but the fixed gaze of his master was as implacable and comfortless in its own way as were the eyes of the constant succession of German guards. The Baron had never once spoken from the moment he had been thrust into captivity in his own castle. His beard had grown long and matted on his chest, and his strong frame was beginning to decline into frailty. The once proud look had been replaced with one of resignation. Wladek could scarcely remember the well-loved voice of his patron and accustomed himself to the thought that he would never hear it again. After a while he complied with the Baron’s unspoken wishes by also remaining silent in his presence.

  When he had lived in the safety of the castle, Wladek had never thought of the previous day with so much occupying him from hour to hour. Now he was unable to remember even the previous hour, because nothing ever changed. Hopeless minutes turned into hours, hours into days, and then months that he soon lost track of. Only the arrival of food, darkness or light indicated that another twelve hours had passed, while the intensity of that light, and its eventual giving way to storms, and then ice forming on the dungeon walls, melting only when a new sun appeared, heralded each season in a manner that Wladek could never have learned from a nature study lesson. During the long nights, Wladek became even more aware of the stench of death that permeated even the farthest corners of the four dungeons, alleviated occasionally by the morning sunshine, a cool breeze or the most blessed relief of all, the return of rain.