Dorothy Eden (36 page)

A new baby, a new dress. Who would have thought that Daisy, who had had so much lavished on her, would be content with so little, the kind of things that even peasant women achieved.

So little? Beatrice blinked back tears, angry at her sentimentality and her jealousy.

William had given her nothing more than a dutiful kiss on the brow after the birth of her children. One didn’t dare think what he might have done to Daisy’s mother had he had the opportunity.

“Well, Bea,” said William, who was as pleased as Punch, “so we have one grandchild, at least, even if it is a Russian one. Now how about that trip to St Petersburg? Shall I go and see my fellow and get some travel brochures?”

“I think so. Yes, do.”

They looked at each other in a completely spontaneous moment of affection and anticipation. Beatrice felt her heart quicken with joy. She didn’t say so, because it would sound ridiculous, but this strange exciting journey would be like a very belated honeymoon for her, even if William’s purpose was primarily to see Daisy and his granddaughter.

The brochures were obtained and studied, the tickets ordered and the travelling bags brought out. And then the news arrived from Germany and, like delicate summer buds whipped off in a gale, their lovely journey had vanished.

Edwin was under house arrest in the British Embassy in Berlin, and was to be brought to London for trial for treason.

Florence said bitterly and furiously, “Serve him right! He never had a conscience. Didn’t you know that, Mamma? He would do anything to get things for himself. All those clothes and guns, and hob-nobbing with the aristocracy—that’s how he’s been paying for them. The stupid fool! Those Germans set traps for silly little boys like him.”

Handing over military secrets to the enemy! What military secrets would a minor Embassy official be entrusted with? It simply couldn’t be true.

But William, after he had made detailed enquiries, said that it could.

“You know Edwin’s passion for the army. He’d made a friend of the British Military Attaché, for one thing. And then he’s such a damn fine shot. He was accepted in circles that otherwise wouldn’t have noticed his existence, and he got carried away by his enthusiasm for Prussian military superiority. We knew that. He told us so himself.”

“That Baron von Hesselman,” Beatrice said indignantly.

“
And
the Baroness,” Florence added.

“Yes,” said William. “Thalia von Hesselman. You’ll have to know, Bea, because it will come out at the trial. Edwin was having an affair with this woman. It was a plot, of course. To live up to her he needed plenty of money. He got into debt, as was anticipated, and then these people offered to pay—” William licked dry lips “—for any information he might be able to give them. Trifling, perhaps. But useful.”

“A spy!” Beatrice whispered. “Our son!”

William straightened his shoulders.

“Yes, my father wouldn’t have cared about it. We’ll have to ride it out, Bea.”

“But doesn’t treason carry the death penalty?” Beatrice asked painfully. Edwin hanged in some horrible dank jail courtyard, and buried beneath the cobblestones! Was this her punishment for allowing Mary Medway to languish ill in jail? The wild thoughts raced through her mind, and she could hardly listen to William’s grave judicial voice.

“It depends on the degree. I gather that the amount of information passed to the enemy has been pretty innocuous. Fortunately, the whole thing was nipped in the bud. I’m glad to say that at least the boy had no real talent for spying.”

“He revered the Uhlans,” said Florence. “I believe he’d have joined them if he could have. Surely that will go against him.”

“Idealism,” said William. “I’ve talked at great length with John Merton who has agreed to defend Edwin. We’ll plead slow development owing to his bad eyesight and his thwarted ambitions for an army career.”

“With a first at Oxford!” Florence exclaimed.

“That’s a strange form of precocity that apparently young men of Edwin’s type can have. But he is, in fact, still mentally an idealistic schoolboy.”

“Would this Baroness,” Beatrice frowned with distaste, “have fallen in love with a schoolboy?”

“But she wasn’t in love with him, of course,” said William. “That’s Edwin’s tragedy.”

Edwin was fortunate in having not only a brilliant defence counsel, but a reasonably lenient judge. Before pronouncing sentence the judge made remarks about a flawed personality, and lack of mental balance, as evidenced by his obsession for anything military. It seemed that the country which was most accomplished in spit and polish would have this unfortunate young man’s admiration and even, regrettably, his loyalty. However, he had begun on his clumsy fumbling career as a spy and must suffer the consequences. He would be committed to prison for a period of seven years. The judge wound up his comments by an acid suggestion that in future the Foreign Office take more care in selecting its recruits.

And all the time Edwin stood in the dock with his head held at that high awkward angle, and the monocle his counsel had forbidden him to wear (it made him look too much like one of those Uhlan officers whom he aped), concealed in his pocket. Beatrice knew it was there because his right hand was constantly pressed against it. She hoped he would look across at her and his father when sentence had been pronounced, but he never varied that far-off stare, as if he were entirely alone in the world.

Since he had been brought back to England she and William had only been able to see him in his prison cell, in the presence of a warder. At these meetings he had remained almost entirely silent, neither defending himself nor admitting regret for what he had done. Even then he had had that terrible solitary look.

Now that the trial was over, Beatrice hoped she might get nearer to him. Perhaps he couldn’t bring himself to confide in her completely, but surely he could show some feeling towards her, his mother. She longed to help him and comfort him. He was her only son. If she had failed in this kind of comfort before, it was because he had not seemed to need it. From such an early age he had had that self-contained aloofness.

One knew one’s faults only by hindsight. Couldn’t Edwin, who now knew what it was to be obsessed by love for a woman, forgive her for her unconscious neglect?

But the young man sitting opposite her, the wooden table between them, the jailer at the door, seemed to have no emotion at all.

He only asked that the baggage that would be arriving from Germany be put in his room and left untouched.

“Don’t let the servants unpack it,” he said. “I’ll do it myself when I come home.”

In seven years? Beatrice’s heart ached at the sight of the rigid figure.

“Edwin,
why
?” she cried. “Was it the money you needed? You had Grandmamma’s legacy.”

There was no answer.

“Was it that you really felt more loyalty to Germany than to your own country?”

Again no answer.

“This—” she wanted to say ‘adventuress’, “this Baroness—you won’t torture yourself over her, will you?”

She might have been speaking to a dummy.

“I believe we will be allowed to send you certain things in prison,” she said, giving up the attempt to read his mind. “Books, for instance. What would you like? Some military histories, I expect.”

Then he did speak in a strange abrupt voice.

“Grandfather’s sword.”

“Grandfather’s sword!”

“No, I don’t suppose that would be allowed. I might run myself through. Ha ha. Don’t worry, Mother. I’ll survive. I’ll even be lucky enough to escape the war that’s coming. Now hadn’t you better hurry back to father? Or your customers?”

William said that the baggage from Germany must be opened. He couldn’t allow what might be a potential bomb to remain locked up in his house for seven years.

The contents of three of the bags were harmless enough. They contained Edwin’s personal effects, his good clothes, his beautifully polished riding boots and spurs, his pistols. The remaining bag was the odd disturbing one.

In it, carefully folded, was the uniform of a Uhlan cavalry officer, the blue tunic with the stiff red collar, the strange helmet that was a copy of the Polish
czapka
, the lance and the sword.

Where had Edwin managed to acquire this? What uneasy symbolism did it have for him?

“Our son!” William exclaimed incredulously.

Beatrice shivered and said, “Shut it up, William. Put it out of sight. I never want to look at it again.”

She was remembering Edwin’s sneering blue eyes, and thinking that he had been such a pretty little boy. She had been devoted to him until Mary Medway had come, and taken all her thoughts for far too long…

E
DWIN’S ADMIRED UHLAN CAVALRY
regiments went into action in August 1914, along with other highly-trained and well-equipped German regiments.

The Great War, long predicted by William, had begun.

Edwin, humiliatingly safe in Pentonville Prison, was going to miss it as he had predicted. William was too old for service. The only member of the family to be directly affected was Daisy. The war had isolated Daisy as efficiently as if she had gone to live at the North Pole. Letters from her entirely ceased. It seemed certain that Sergei would be called up and sent to the Eastern front. What would happen to Daisy and her small daughter? Would they have enough to eat, would they be protected supposing the victorious Germans overran the Eastern marshes and marched on Moscow and St Petersburg, as they had already overrun Belgium and parts of France?

William, who deplored the possible capture of Paris by those ‘bloody Huns’, nevertheless reserved most of his anxiety for the Russian cities and Daisy’s welfare. He agonised over her silence and constantly wrote letters himself, hopefully posting them and praying that they would reach their destination.

He grew thinner and more frail and his hair was too liberally sprinkled with grey. If Beatrice could have looked at him with unprejudiced eyes, she would have seen a quiet elderly man with a look of defeat, the merry twinkle in his eyes completely quenched. She saw his delicacy, that was true. She had always seen that. Indeed, when he was propped up in bed he had a disturbing resemblance to the old General, with a face too haggard, its bones too stripped of flesh. But his charm and his good looks remained indelibly printed in her mind. She thought that he was still the most handsome man in the world.

He had grown querulous, too, which was unlike him, with his usually unfailing courtesy. But what was there in life for a man with his only son in prison, his favourite daughter in exile, and his wife and remaining daughter as dedicated to the survival of a shop, as to that of England and the British Empire?

Beatrice wanted to tell him that he still had her, she loved him as much as she ever had. But what was she now, a stoutish ageing woman, with her hair pulled into a sensible knot at the back of her head, her manner brisk and competent. She wore her manner as she wore her plain grey shop dress. She was still afraid that too much tenderness would bore and suffocate her sensitive husband.

She was not grief-stricken about Daisy’s silence. Daisy was one of those fortunate people who would always fall on her feet. Hadn’t she done so from birth, with the undeserved advantage of a good home and a pampered upbringing? She had a much better instinct for survival than her frail and clinging mother had had. She would be all right, and better, as far as Beatrice was concerned, for being three thousand miles away.

Edwin, however, was a deep and humiliating pain. At first she had written to him frequently, and travelled once a month to visit him. But, with his handsome wooden face turned away from her, he had made it so clear that he was neither interested in her letters nor her visits, that she had finally given up the visits. She still wrote, however, she said that Overton House would always be his home. His room was kept for him. His grandfather’s valuable collection of soldiers were now his, if he wished them to be. She would continue sending him books on history and famous campaigns. Contrary to what he thought, she had the deepest and most sympathetic interest in his future. She had only once been guilty of standing before the Overton vault and apologising aloud to the old General for the blot her son had made on the family honour. It was surely her fault, and that of her forbears. It could not have been an hereditary trait of the Overtons.

With the war raging in France, this was a great opportunity for Bonnington’s to renew its theme of patriotism. It was made clear to all the male staff of fighting age that they were expected to enlist. Beatrice didn’t go about handing out white feathers, but the steely look in her eyes was almost as difficult to face as German guns. The young men obediently departed to recruiting offices, including James Brush (who lied about his age in order to enlist) and who first proposed to Florence. Would she marry him now, before he left for France, or would she promise to wait for him?

Neither, said Florence unemotionally. She had no intention of marrying. She was fond of James, but second best was second best. Besides, she had a suspicion that his proposal was mainly concerned with making sure of his stake in Bonnington’s.

Captain Fielding, her true love (or had he always been no more than a romantic dream?) had died in the retreat from Mons. He was awarded a posthumous Military Cross, and Florence put a black veil on the smart straw boater which she always wore to the shop. She intended to wear the veil until the end of the war. If James Brush and other young men from Bonnington’s were also killed, the touch of mourning would serve a dual purpose. Also, the veil concealed the red-rimmed eyes with which she sometimes awoke. She only cried in secret.

From habit, Beatrice wanted to drape the shop in flags, and military emblems, and a great deal of mourning equipment, from widow’s garb to funereal black plumes. This, Florence resisted strenuously. On the contrary, everything must be gay. There must be colour and life, dainty fabrics, scarves, ribbons, even silk stockings. There must be cheerful music in the Palm Court lounge, and the food, even if less plentiful and of poorer quality, must look attractive. Women must think of the shop as a refuge from gloom and sadness. There must never be the slightest sign of defeat.