“Before this goes a step further, I want you lovebirds to listen to me.” Mr. Bingham jabbed his finger again at Anisette, then wheeled toward Francis. “Do you want to know what sort of American I am? I’m the sort who’s not looking to trade a lifetime of hard work for the deed to a run-down castle full of nothing but history and bad debts.”
All eyes were suddenly on Francis. He was puzzling over lovebirds and Mr. B’s Before this goes a step further and wondering just what this was. Certainly he was game for a little flirting with the young Miss Bingham, but it seemed that the Bingham family had been buzzing about a much more long-lasting connection in the days since the Britannic had docked. This was a new development in the FC Plan. He didn’t know how long he could sustain being Angus MacFarquhar, but looking around the dining room with its piles of silver, its bottles of Bordeaux, its gilt-framed landscapes, and then at the spray of diamonds on the necks of the younger Binghams, he was willing to keep it up for a while. Right now, he needed a way to say neither yes nor no.
He dabbed at the corners of his mouth. Bonhomie, he told himself. Aim for loads of bonhomie. “There’s no need to worry, sir. Our castle is in tip-top shape, but I must confess it’s not mine for the trading. My older brother is the heir. Second son of an earl is about as lucky as the fourth son of a baker.”
While Mr. Bingham swallowed a mouthful of ham, his eyes made it clear that he had more to say. “That’s not exactly settled, is it? Let’s say your older brother drops dead. Doesn’t that make you the heir?”
Now it was Mrs. Bingham’s fork clattering to her plate. “Emery! Really!”
“I have a right to ask! It’s a strange way of life—idle days spent wishing bad fortune on others.”
“Sir Angus would never wish bad fortune on his older brother,” Anisette said. “Just look at all he’s done for Sir Malcolm.”
“I’m saying it’s a bad system that ties your fortune to an accident of birth and not your own efforts. Just look at their king. Two years ago he was a duke. Father on the throne and older brother ready to take over. And now he’s the one with his face on all the coins. But did he do anything—he, himself—to improve his lot in life?”
“He didn’t have to,” Mrs. Bingham said. “It was all that Simpson woman’s doing.”
“Don’t blame her,” Mr. Bingham said. “She saw what she wanted and she got it. That woman has gumption to burn.”
“Is that why they burned witches?” Félicité said. “Because they were so full of gumption?”
“You’d best steer clear of fires yourself,” Mr. Bingham said to his older daughter. “You’ve got at least as much gumption as that Simpson woman.”
“If that’s what that dreadful woman has,” Mrs. Bingham said, folding her hands in her lap, “and what Félicité has, then I hope our daughter’s gumption comes from your side of the family.”
Anisette had followed this latest turn in the conversation with a tight-lipped set to her mouth and a few nervous glances at Francis. “Oughtn’t we to refer to her as the Duchess of Windsor?” she said. “Wouldn’t that be proper, Sir Angus?”
“You can call her what you will,” Francis said. “But, please, just call me Angus.”
Mr. Bingham turned from Félicité to Mrs. B. “Don’t go playing the nun,” he said. “When my Sarah passed, you staked your claim and staked it quick.” The bristles of Mr. Bingham’s mustache hid a smile. “Yes sirree, you were on your guard for anyone with the claim jumper’s eye. I could tell stories—”
“That’s quite enough, Emery.” She may have sounded shocked, but she could not forget the ferocity of her younger self—eighteen years old, a nurse to the first Mrs. Bingham in the final months of her decline, clearing the way of better-bred rivals.
“This is my point,” Mr. Bingham said. “You can’t blame the one who’s willing to take what he—or she—wants. The world’s full of namby-pambies waiting for a handout, whether it’s from FDR or Joseph Stalin or Jesus Christ. But the joke’s on them. The winners aren’t the ones who get; they’re the ones who take.”
“That’s an awfully cruel world you’re describing,” Francis said in his plummiest Angus accent.
“It is a cruel world!” Mr. Bingham’s fist banged the table. His wine jumped in its crystal goblet. “Maybe you can’t see it from the walls of your castle, but I guarantee you this: somewhere in history, you had a great-great-grand-someone—the first in your line of dukes or earls or what have you—and he started with nothing in this world but a knife in his hand.” Mr. Bingham gripped his bread knife with a balled fist; no longer the family silver, it was a dagger, a shiv. “And one day he spied some fat lord sitting pretty in his own tip-top castle, and when that man turned his back, your ancestor—God bless him!—made him pay for his carelessness. You and yours have that man to thank for all that you have.”
Francis knew that as Angus, he should speak up on behalf of divine right or noblesse oblige or the class system or some such nonsense. But Mr. Bingham was describing a universe that Francis knew, a universe whose rules Francis was desperately trying to turn to his advantage. Wasn’t this the FC Plan writ large? Francis had been dealt a bad hand but right when he could have called it quits, he had decided to make a go of it. To reach for the knife. To show a little gumption.
“Now look, Emery. You’ve offended our guest.”
The collective stare of the Bingham family was again on Francis.
“Oh, not at all.” His voice nearly cracked, he was so giddy. “Not at all. Only I was wondering, Mr. Bingham, whom do you have to thank for all that you have?”