The Scandal at 23 Mount Street (An Angela Marchmont Mystery Book 9) by Clara Benson Page B

thirty or more years at the Bar. Very early in his career he had shown a decided talent for defending the most hopeless of cases, and it had become something of a point of pride with him over the years to add to his tally of successes—for as he never tired of saying, it was easy enough to point at a poor soul who was already wretched and miserable at having spent a month or two in prison and convince a jury that he was guilty, but it was not so easy to plant enough doubt in the jury’s mind as to the wretch’s guilt that they would be prepared to acquit him. He had been only too keen to represent Angela, for they had met once or twice in the past, and although he thought the case would be a difficult one, he had defended worse, and successfully, too, as he pointed out. He now smiled encouragingly at Angela in his most avuncular manner.
    ‘Very well,’ said Angela hesitantly. ‘What is it you wish to know?’
    ‘Let us start from the beginning. When did you first meet your husband?’
    ‘I don’t know exactly,’ said Angela. ‘It must have been about fifteen years ago, shortly after I first went out to America.’
    ‘You worked for many years, I believe?’
    ‘Yes. I was employed by the Duke of Lewes as personal secretary to his wife when I met Carey Bernstein, the American financier, who took a liking to me and asked me to come and work for him in New York instead. I had always rather wanted to travel abroad, and so I said yes. Davie was a relation of Mr. Bernstein’s wife—her sister’s son, and I met him very soon after I arrived in America. That was before the war.’
    ‘You did not marry him then?’
    ‘No,’ said Angela. ‘We married a few years later, in early nineteen seventeen.’
    ‘And was the marriage a success to start with?’
    ‘No. I realized very quickly that I had made a mistake,’ said Angela shortly.
    ‘In what way?’
    Angela hesitated. Mr. Travers peered at her over his spectacles.
    ‘Remember, you must tell me everything,’ he said.
    Angela had always hated talking about personal matters, but she knew he was right, of course. This was no time to keep things to herself. She gritted her teeth and went on.
    ‘I worked for Mr. Bernstein for five years and in that time became his most trusted employee. He was very rich and owned many companies, most of which he had built up himself. He was particularly astute in the matter of investments—the buying and selling of stocks and bonds and so forth—and he taught me a great deal about it. He was kind enough to say that I had a better mind for picking investments than any man he had ever met, and after a few years he surprised me by putting me in sole charge of a small stockbroking firm he owned, Bernstein & Associates. He told me the job would be very difficult, because many people would refuse to deal with a woman, but he was willing to try me out and see what I was made of. He was right, of course; the early years were very hard, and there were many occasions on which I was convinced I had failed and thought of giving it up. But somehow I stuck with it, and eventually I started to make the place a success, and soon the company was bringing in more money than it had ever done before, and people stopped worrying about the fact that I was a woman—mostly, at least—and were happy to deal with me because they saw that I knew what I was doing.
    ‘When Mr. Bernstein died in nineteen sixteen he left me some money and a fifty per cent share in the firm. I think he would have liked to leave the whole thing to me, but his family were horrified at the very idea, and so in the end he gave in to them and left me only half. He left the other half to Davie—I believe at the urging of his wife, since they had no children themselves, and Mrs. Bernstein thought of Davie almost as a son.
    ‘Davie and I married a few months afterwards, but I regretted it almost immediately. He had always been very charming to me but I had never thought seriously