Eden Falls (52 page)

Anna and Maya’s rooms were in a quaint, blue-painted cottage in a street just behind the Parade. They had a bedroom and a sitting room, and a key for the front door in case they came in after dark. ‘I hope we do,’ Anna whispered to Maya as their landlady led them down the front hall to demonstrate the idiosyncrasies of the lock. ‘Otherwise we shall be having a very dull time.’

She was pleased, though, that she hadn’t accepted Henrietta’s invitation to occupy a cabin on the
Lady Isabella
. The modesty of their rented dwelling was perfectly in keeping with Labour ideals, she felt. Was it her fault if, whenever she and her daughter stepped out of the house, they were cheek by jowl with all of England’s aristocracy?

They met Henrietta on the lovely, lawned sweep of land behind Cowes Castle. She was arm-in-arm with Thea, and they made a small spectacle with their hugs and hearty hellos. Maya looked beguiling in a sailor frock and red patent-leather shoes, and Thea, who was in white embroidered linen and lace with a navy satin ribbon trim, at once took her by the hand and said, ‘Look! We’re the best-dressed pair on the Parade.’ They walked ahead, and Henrietta and Anna followed.

‘To be perfectly frank,’ Henrietta said, when they were far enough behind the others not to be overheard, ‘I thought you wouldn’t come. I gather the chancellor has rather put the spotlight on the idle rich with his Limehouse speech.’

Anna said, ‘Well yes, and I did waver. I think if my husband hadn’t been so against the plan I might have stayed at home.’

Henrietta laughed. ‘I never could bear to be told no myself,’ she said. ‘When I was young, my dear father was always forbidding things. I think that’s why I became such a rebellious soul.’

‘I don’t wish to make Amos unhappy. But he does try to bend me to his will.’ She glanced at Henrietta. ‘And he disapproves of some of my friends.’

‘Well he was extremely kind to me, the last time I saw him,’ Henrietta said, and Anna frowned, trying to think when that might have been. Certainly, outside the Caxton Hall back in May, his manner had been far from kindly.

‘I called on you in Bedford Square,’ Henrietta said. ‘Toby took me, after he had fetched me from Holloway. I wanted to show you I was free, and to say thank you, but you’d gone to Netherwood. Amos answered the door.’

‘Oh?’

‘He said he was happy that you’d been able to help, and told me to look after myself.’

‘Did he? That doesn’t sound very much like Amos.’

‘And yet it was, unless you have a very gruff housemaid. He didn’t tell you, I suppose.’

‘Not a word.’ She wondered why. Perhaps the silence that so often existed between them lately had proved too intractable. Ahead, Thea and Maya had settled in a sunny spot on the grass at Prince’s Green, and were looking at the boats on the water. They were chatting animatedly, each of them speaking and listening in equal measure. Anna allowed herself a rush of pride at her daughter: her grave, sweet face, her sociability, her curiosity about the world. Maya saw her and patted the grass.

‘Come and sit down, Mama. This is the best view of the races.’

‘Is that so?’ Anna said. She smiled at her daughter and sat down, and Henrietta joined them. The grass was warm and dry, and although there were deck chairs for hire, it suited their unceremonious mood to sit on the ground. The four of them made a picturesque group, and a photographer, roving the Parade with his Box Brownie, insisted on taking their picture exactly as they were. Afterwards he gave them a small card bearing the address of his studio. Before she left Cowes, Anna bought a copy of the photograph from him: there she was with Maya, sitting on the ground between the Countess of Netherwood and Lady Henrietta Hoyland. Three attractive young women and a child. Thea and Maya were squashed up close; a more decorous gap separated Anna and Henrietta. All four wore happy smiles. No one would be able to say, from looking at their images, which of them were titled and which were not. This fact seemed to Anna immensely significant; it lay, she felt, at the very heart of everything she believed.

In the galley kitchen of the
Lady Isabella
, Sarah was managing terrifically well. It was an acknowledged fact that for a head cook of a large private household she was very young. When Mrs Adams – her predecessor, mentor and bully – had keeled over in the cold store and died, she had been two days shy of her fiftieth birthday. Sarah wasn’t yet thirty. But perhaps it was precisely because of her inexperience that she was so undaunted by a challenge. This was Mrs Powell-Hughes’s theory, which had come to her as she watched Sarah assemble nine platters of lobster Thermidor, and a plain boiled lobster with mayonnaise for the child. This, after mixed hors d’oeuvres and stuffed artichoke hearts, and before roast saddle of lamb and a frozen chocolate
Bombe Nabob
.

‘I take my hat off to you, Sarah Pickersgill,’ said the housekeeper. ‘I can’t imagine Mrs Adams would’ve taken this in her stride in the way you have.’

Sarah snorted. ‘I’d like to have seen ’er in this kitchen. We should ’ave ’ad to get ’er out with a shoe ’orn.’

It couldn’t be denied. Mrs Adams had had arms like hams and the girth of a beer barrel. ‘Anyway,’ Sarah went on, ‘it might be small, but it’s very well thought out. Everything in its place, and a place for everything. I walk miles in t’course of a week in my kitchen at Netherwood ’all. At least on a yacht your legs are spared.’

Mrs Powell-Hughes smiled at her. ‘Well, I think you’ve done a marvellous job in very difficult circumstances.’

Sarah stopped what she was doing. ‘Thank you,’ she said. She was touched. ‘And I’m glad you’re back on your feet.’

The housekeeper pulled a wretched face. ‘Only because we’re steady now. As soon as that anchor’s pulled I shall be queasy again. I tell you, I’m not like you; I can’t adapt.’

‘You should ask leave to travel up on deck when we sail for Portsmouth. You’ll do better in t’fresh air.’ The boatswain had told her this, but she delivered it as her own advice. The less Mrs Powell-Hughes knew about her conversations with Mr Clough – for that was he – the better. Even Sarah blushed to think of the confidences they’d swapped in the close confines of his cabin. Not to mention the rest of it. He was a very ardent man when his coat was off. As soon as she’d told him she was only Mrs Pickersgill because she was the cook, not because she was married, he had been after her with all the unbridled eagerness of a ferret down a rabbit hole. She smiled at the half-hearted way she’d tried to halt his advances. In the end, she’d thought why the dickens not? Soon enough, she’d be back below stairs at Netherwood Hall and his salty lips and firm flesh would be a distant memory.

The cautious clip of Mr Parkinson’s shoes on the narrow galley stairs heralded his imminent arrival, and sure enough he appeared in due course with a loaded tray. He held it out to the housekeeper and said, ‘If you wouldn’t mind, Mrs Powell-Hughes.’

She took it, and put it down carefully. Glassware, mostly; lovely plain crystal, with gold-plated stems, all bought new for the boat. ‘Are you managing?’ she said. ‘Up there, I mean.’

‘Oh, I’m managing perfectly well,’ the butler said with a sort of snippy stoicism that, in spite of his words, suggested some displeasure. He was unhappy with the guest list, Mrs Powell-Hughes suspected. He didn’t think the Earl of Netherwood’s butler should have to wait on Anna Sykes and her little girl. She didn’t want to hear about it, so she just said, ‘Excellent,’ in a bracing voice that left him no opportunity to expand his views. She handed him an empty tray and he turned on the stairs and disappeared, little by little, from view.

The seating plan for the upper-deck dining table on the
Lady Isabella
was thus: Tobias at the head of the table, Thea at the bottom. Anna was on the earl’s right, and to her right was Henrietta, then Peregrine Partington, Isabella, and Ulrich. Thea had insisted on having Maya at her right-hand side, and next to the child was Archie. Amandine, Perry’s wife, came next, and then Clarissa, who was displeased to find herself opposite Anna Sykes, whom she found inappropriately opinionated for one so lowly. Neither, in her sadly unsought opinion, should there be a child at dinner, but somehow the fact that they were afloat had changed all the rules. She shared an occasional, comforting glance with dear Parkinson, whom she knew would perfectly understand, and share, her discomfiture.

Tobias was in full flow. Earlier in the day he’d bumped into Sir Francis Knollys, who as the king’s private secretary was meant to be a tower of discretion, but instead was rather a gossip. He had told Tobias that the king was wild with fury at Lloyd George over the Limehouse speech.

‘Knollys says he’s already fired off a letter to Lord Crewe, demanding that he kick up a stink about it, and he’s asked Asquith to tell Lloyd George he’s gone too far this time.’

‘It was a little inflammatory,’ Henrietta said.

‘Goodness,’ said Clarissa. ‘Politics at the dinner table. How very
outré
.’

‘Sorry Mama,’ Tobias said.

‘I believe Lloyd George knows exactly what he’s doing,’ said Anna, who had no compunction about discussing politics at the dinner table: quite the contrary, in fact; at her own dinner table it was what they did much of the time. ‘He’s determined to push his budget through. I admire him enormously.’

‘Aren’t you meant to be for Labour?’ said Peregrine, with an expression of milk-curdling sourness.

‘Oh, well of course,’ Anna replied sunnily. ‘But still, I admire the chancellor for the strength of his conviction, and his courage. I don’t speak for my husband, or the Labour Party, naturally. This is just my opinion.’

Peregrine looked across the table at his wife, whose mind was blessedly free of opinion, and said, ‘Dear one, if you can’t manage all your lamb?’

‘But Anna,’ Henrietta said, ‘Surely the chancellor knows there’s nothing to be gained by antagonising the very people with the power to veto his plans? The peers will never allow this budget to pass through Parliament.’

‘Heavens, Henry,’ said Clarissa. ‘Please desist.’

‘Exactly. It’s a clever trap, I believe,’ said Anna. ‘Traditionally, peers don’t interfere with finance bills. The last time they did there was a civil war and the king was beheaded.’

Amandine gasped. ‘The king, beheaded?’ she said. Ulrich laughed, and Isabella said, ‘Charles the First, Amandine, not Edward the Seventh.’

Perry said ‘Damned disgrace,’ through a mouthful of his wife’s lamb. ‘If Lloyd George thinks he can topple Bertie he’d better think again.’

‘No, no,’ Anna said. ‘I’m sure the chancellor means no disrespect to the king. But if the upper house rejects the finance bill and throws out Lloyd George’s budget, the king will have to dissolve Parliament and the Liberals will take their case to the country.’

‘Goodness, what a lesson we’re enduring. Parkinson, I think we have finished,’ the duchess said meaningfully. The butler shot her a small, colluding smile and began to clear the dinner plates.

‘And so?’ said Tobias to Anna, lured back into the debate in defiance of his mother, who looked at him coldly, her mouth pinched into a tight, straight line. ‘What of it? We have nothing to fear in the House of Lords from another general election.’

‘You might have, if the Liberals go to the country on the peers’ excessive powers of veto as well as on the budget.’ Anna smiled pleasantly at the peer whose hospitality she was currently enjoying. ‘Your days as a member of the ruling class could be numbered.’ There was a short, rather stunned silence, and then Peregrine said, ‘I say! That’s quite enough politics. There are ladies present, you know.’

Anna laughed, and said she hoped she could count herself among their number; Clarissa looked at her doubtfully. At the other end of the table Thea clapped her hands for silence and said that clever little Maya knew a Russian folk song and had agreed to sing it for them, loudly enough that the tsar might hear.

‘On your chair, sweetie,’ she said to Maya, who looked at Anna for a nod of permission and, having received it, clambered nimbly into a standing position on her seat. ‘Now, the tsar’s yacht is just over there,’ Thea said, pointing to the middle of the harbour. ‘So face that direction and give it everything you’ve got.’

Well, thought Clarissa, this really is the limit. The two people in the party who had least cause to draw attention to themselves were now dominating the evening. She glanced down the table at Archie to convey her displeasure, and saw that he was fast asleep.

W
hen Anna was thirteen years old, Tsar Alexander died and the news was a shock to all of Russia. Anna’s parents, in the cataclysmic spirit of the moment, undertook the long and arduous train journey from Kiev to St Petersburg, in order that they and their children might pay their respects. It was November. Anna and her brother Alexei were wrapped in wool and fur but, even so, their hands and feet lost all feeling, standing amid thousands of mourners in the dirty snow of Nevsky Prospect. Anna was so cold that she forgot to mourn, and while all around her people hung their heads, she instead stared boldly at the red and gold carriages, trying to pick out their occupants. The cortège moved at a snail’s pace, advancing slowly towards the Cathedral of Peter and Paul, where all the Romanov tsars were buried. Behind the imperial family, alone in a coach of her own, the young and beautiful Princess Alix of Hesse was hidden behind heavy veils, but little Anna saw what she believed was a sad half-smile, directed only at her. She started, as if she was about to run to the carriage, and she believed she might have done if her mother hadn’t grabbed her arm roughly and hissed, ‘Be still! Bow your head and pray.’

‘It’s the new tsar’s bride, Mama,’ Anna had whispered, and her mother had crossed herself and said darkly, ‘She has come to us behind a coffin.’ The next day they had shuffled in a line of thousands past Alexander’s bier while priests chanted litanies and a hidden choir sang sorrowful hymns. Anna’s father had lifted her so that she could say a respectful farewell to the dead emperor. He had a holy picture in his hands, which seemed a simple thing to be carrying after all the luxury of his life. His face wore an expression of mild contentment, although his skin was waxy and pallid like a doll’s. He looked, to Anna, as if he had never actually been alive. ‘What a shame I only ever saw him dead,’ she had said, too loudly; her father put her down at once, and her mother slapped the back of her head.