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Bancroft empire until a few years ago when he retired.”
    â€œCoffee.”
    â€œWhat, dear?”
    â€œTheir money started in coffee, of all the damn things. I’d never put my money in anything where Mother Nature was my partner. But I guess it was a different time. Early nineteenth century. That ancestor of his had to be pretty damned smart.”
    â€œNow they just seem damned, don’t they?”
    â€œThe Bancrofts? No. Marty, don’t let this Nola thing affect you. The Bancrofts made whatever adjustment they had to twenty years ago. Sybil married a decent enough fellow, they have two grandchildren, and sure, you never forget a child, but I don’t think you can say they’re damned.” He pulled into the new garage attached to the original main house, an addition Crawford had commissioned.
    The new wing was tastefully done and didn’t resemble a garage. If anything, it was the tiniest bit overdone.
    The garage doors rolled down behind the red Mercedes.
    The first building on this site was a log cabin built in 1730 by Tobias Beasley’s grandson. Over the years it had been replaced with a handsome brick structure boasting a huge center hall and four-over-four windows. Each generation that made money added to the main house. This meant about every thirty or forty years a ballroom would be built or more bedrooms with sleeping porches. Whatever excited the owners’ fancy was added, which gave Beasley Hall true character.
    Crawford opened the door into the mudroom and ushered his wife through.
    â€œThank you, dear.”
    â€œNightcap?”
    â€œHow about a small brandy with a rind of orange on the rim.”
    He laughed at her but made her the drink and brought it upstairs to their huge bedroom, decorated by Cole-fax and Fowler. Crawford could have hired Parish Hadley out of New York, but no, he had to go to London. The woman who put the English country house look on the map, Nancy Lancaster, whose mother, Lizzie, had been born a Langhorne of Virginia, was influenced by Mirador, the Langhorne seat in Albemarle County. Crawford liked telling people he and Marty were simply bringing her talent back home. Nancy Lancaster, born in 1897, had been dead since 1994, but her decorating firm soldiered on.
    The simple truth was that Crawford was a dreadful snob.
    They slipped into their scarlet cashmere bathrobes from Woods and Falon, another English firm, and nestled into an overstuffed sofa suffocating with chintz-covered pillows.
    Marty enjoyed unwinding on this sofa before retiring to bed. When she and Howard had separated and Crawford’s lawyers had played the old starve-the-wife routine, she’d had ample time to consider the financial impact of divorce on middle-aged women. She realized she could not make a graceful transition into the ranks of the
nouveau pauvre.
    â€œWhen
is
the first day of cubbing this year?” Crawford put his arm around her.
    â€œSeptember seventh, I think.”
    â€œTime to leg up the horses.”
    â€œTime to leg up ourselves.”
    â€œOh, honey, you look fantastic. In fact, you look better than when I married you.”
    â€œLiar.”
    â€œIt’s true.”
    â€œYou can thank the business—and yourself.”
    One of her demands for returning to Crawford, who had been unfaithful to her, was that he buy her the landscaping firm where she had been working to make ends meet. She’d fallen in love with the business. When the owner, Fontaine Buruss, died an untimely death in the hunt field, Crawford made a handsome settlement upon Fontaine’s widow. Marty had never been happier now that she was running her own business. She had a real purpose of her own.
    He kissed her. “Funny how things work out.”
    â€œYou look pretty fantastic yourself.” She winked at him.
    He’d lost his paunch, changed his diet, and worked with a personal trainer. He’d also endured liposuction, but he wasn’t