Pearls [antikvár]

Catherine Bourton was so beautiful that men seldom realized she had any other qualities until it was too late. Her óval face, with its creamy olive complexion, was one of the faces of the eighties - so Time magaziné had said. But her bronze-brown eyes seemed to know much more than they saw; they hinted at the ancestry of the Bourton family, rich Italians grafted to the British aristocracy by Queen Elizabeth I to dissuade them from bankrolling the Spanish Armada. Such beauty made men vulnerable. Even a man like Mr Phillips, the Crown Jeweller of Great Britain, whose daily round was largely devoted to considering the effect of the world's most famous jewels on the world's most beautiful women, temporarily forgot the purpose of their meeting in his cramped óval office overlooking Regent Street. In the concrete canyons around Wall Street, the presence of Catherine Bourton could render innumerate any of the men who had dollár signs where their wives presumed their hearts to be; in a boardroom in the City of London, captains of industry would meander through their agenda muttering compliments and vying for her attention if Catherine Bourton was among them; the two men in Mr Phillips5 gilded candy-box at Garrard's were lost the instant she joined them. The power of her beauty came from the combination of the symmetrical purity of her High Renaissance face with the sensual promise of her mouth. Catherine Bourton's mouth looked soft and crumpled, as if it had just been kissed and would respond favourably to being kissed again. The top lip was a little wider and fuller than the bottom lip, giving her an ineradicable smile. Time magaziné had called her the Mona Lisa of Wall Street. Catherine had not been surprised. She had been called the Mona Lisa of somewhere or other ever since she could remember. Nowadays, her reputation came before her. Mr Phillips had first met her when she was a debutante; pretty, he remembered, but not more distinctive among the crop than one of the spring daífodils in Hyde Park. Like many men after him, Mr Phillips had misjudged her. She had seldom been out of the headlines since their first meeting, on so many different counts - her marriage, her divorce, her adventures in the City, her glittering connections, and the suspicion that she was the architect of somé of the most conspicuous personal fortunes in the world.