Long Live the King (23 page)

‘But what is it all about?’ she entreated. ‘Tell me!’

‘Not yet, not yet. It’s a surprise,’ he said, ‘a great big, big, wonderful surprise, my darling!’

She rose to her feet, smoothed down her black dress and went back to her room, while he gazed after her with infinite joy. What fate offered you on a plate, she thought, it was rude to your Maker to reject. For many years she had let others make decisions on what she ate, wore, thought, felt, said – now she could decide for herself. She might have decided on something completely awful but it was her decision to make. And she longed to see a kangaroo. All the same when she went to bed she cried and cried, she was not sure why, but at least orphans were meant to cry and she finally had. But Mrs Kennion too had let her down, handing her to Frank on a plate. Everyone just wanted to be rid of her.

Ivy and Frank at Doreen’s

Ivy had left a note at the market stall for her mother to pick up when she took over on Saturday, and on the Monday she and George called by at Doreen’s cottage. The thatch needed money spending on it, and her precious prints – Goliath and the Lady of Shallot and Helen of Troy and some sweet little kittens and even sweeter rosy children in a Pears soap advertisement – were all looking rather the worse for wear, what with the damp and water actually coming through the kitchen ceiling. Ivy felt bad about that. She had given most of the parish money to George when it should have gone to her mother.

Doreen said as much. George said,

‘But what about your fancy man on the Parish Council, Doreen? Fine figure of a woman like you. He should make an honest woman of you; he’s the one to mend your roof.’

‘No one knows about that,’ she said. ‘What have you been saying, our Ivy?’

‘Everyone knows,’ said George, ‘or will soon.’

After that Doreen behaved. She liked George, with his jolly smile and dancing eyes, and his appreciation of a woman’s worth. If it wasn’t for Ivy she’d be after him herself.

She’d seen Jenny at the market on Saturday, she said, they’d even had a cup of tea together. She’d brought the subject round to Adela. Jenny said the girl spent most of her time looking at the swans on the moat. Yes, she’d been given the best room in the Palace, first floor just to the left of the portcullis.

‘It was her,’ said Ivy. ‘I told you it was her I saw in the window!’

‘All in the mind,’ said George, shutting her up. He couldn’t bear to be wrong, even in retrospect. ‘Let your mother get on!’

It seemed the lock on the door was faulty; had quite rusted away with age. Everything in the Palace was beginning to show its age. The door seemed locked but the floor wasn’t level so its tendency was to stand ajar. Jenny had been at the market buying yet more clothes for Adela. Everything in black, of course, but Jenny had drawn the line at crape, so scratchy, she went for a good bombazine, although it was twice the price. Crape was far too dismal for someone so young. Adela was bursting out of everything. She was in one of those growing spurts girls sometimes go through. Mind you, she’d just come on for the first time. Poor little thing, she had been quite shocked. Her daughter Agnes had done the same, but she’d warned Agnes what was going to happen to her, she didn’t care what people said. Ignorance might be bliss but it was still a shock to a growing girl. Adela had quite a bosom now. A few months and she’d turned from a miserable little waif into a real beauty. She was reading her way through the library, Jenny said, not that she’d find much to interest her there. It seemed a real waste to shut her up in a convent for the rest of her life. Jenny didn’t understand the way her family had just abandoned her. The wrong side of some family feud, it seemed, on the father’s side; something religious on the mother’s. There was a rumour that she was an actual Princess, which Agnes believed, but was probably a lot of stuff and nonsense, only they had put her in the best bedroom and she was allowed to dine at the Bishop’s table. She knew which knife and spoon to pick up which was more than a lot of the old codgers knew these days. She had a really good appetite, and if a footman passed a dish before her eyes she could be relied upon to eat some, even spinach. She had a beau already, Mrs Kennion’s nephew Frank, who had come into a fortune and was off to Australia and had been alone in the library with her for at least half an hour without a chaperone, but it wouldn’t come to anything: a girl like Adela wouldn’t look twice at someone like Frank Overshaw. He might be rich but he had pebble glasses and was very plain. His socks were smelly and the laundry girls would only go near them with tongs.

‘Jenny certainly talked a lot,’ said Ivy.

‘People confide in me,’ said Doreen. ‘I have that kind of face.’

‘I think we know all we need to know,’ said George. He seemed very happy. He handed over a wodge of fivers to Doreen and said, ‘That’s for the roof, Doreen. Just don’t let Fancyman get away with it. He’s a churchwarden at St Bart’s. I saw the way he looked at you at the funeral. Lock the back door against him until he comes to heel. He will.’

There was something about a roll of banknotes when a man takes them from a bulging wallet and peels them off one by one and hands them over, even though you’d handed him the notes in the first place. It made him seem generous and you feel grateful. Ivy felt quite jealous. But it was probably only about forty pounds in all, enough for her mother to get the roof ridge done, at any rate, and the kitchen roof mended and even a paraffin stove to dry the place out and rescue the prints, but the whole roof would be more like eighty pounds.

‘Ooh, you’re such a one, George!’ said Doreen. ‘If only all of my gentlemen were as generous as you!’

Ivy asked her mother if she still had the red velvet dress she’d taken from the Rectory the day before it burned down and Doreen said yes she had. Ivy asked her to take it out and Ivy shook it out, and all admired it. It was a quality dress.

George said they didn’t want to miss the bus to Yatbury, they should get back to Bath as soon as they could. He wanted to make a move tomorrow.

‘More haste, less speed,’ said Ivy and asked her mother for a pair of scissors and a needle and matching thread. George asked what on earth was she up to.

‘If a girl’s been wearing black for the past few months,’ said Ivy, ‘she’ll be glad to see a bit of colour, and there are a few seams I’m going to let out.’

‘I follow your reasoning,’ said George. ‘I’ll say this for you. You’re not slow. We’ll show her a new world, a new life. We’ll be doing her a favour. She was light as a feather when I took her through the flames. A child. A different kettle of fish now, to all accounts.’

‘Don’t get any ideas,’ warned Ivy.

‘Aren’t I married to you, Ivy, queen of my heart?’

‘Not yet you aren’t, George.
Georgie Porgie pudding and pie, kissed the girls and made them cry
. Go down to the cowshed and get the envelope I left hidden in the cow stall while I do this.’

‘Why?’ asked George. ‘Nothing we can do about those: they’d bar the Abbey door to the likes of us. They’re just fancy tickets. Unless you can sell them in the market, Mother?’

‘Can’t do any harm,’ said Doreen. ‘Someone might want to frame them, hang them on the wall. Curiosities.’

‘I think Adela ought to have them,’ said Ivy. ‘They’re rightfully hers.’

‘Yes, but she’s rightfully ours,’ said George.

‘Supposing it’s true and she is a princess, then the Abbey’s where she ought to be. In Westminster Abbey on the 26
^th
June with her own kind.’

‘Not if she’s foreign, she’s not,’ said George. ‘Supposing we don’t hurry up and she sails off to Australia or goes into a nunnery, and we lose her?’

Ivy sewed more quickly, while her mother put on the kettle to steam the fabric and bring up the pile where it had been mistreated. All agreed Adela would look a picture in it on a platform, with its trailing ribbons and fine pink lace. George went off to fetch the invitations. They left the envelope with Doreen for safe keeping and caught the bus back to Bath.

A Late Breakfast

‘For heaven’s sake,’ said his Lordship. ‘First it’s sign papers so she can go into a convent, now it’s notification that she means to get married. Can’t the girl make up her mind?’

‘Robert,’ said Isobel, reproachfully, ‘you are the girl’s uncle. We need at least to take an interest.’

‘You’ve changed your tune,’ said Robert. ‘But you are looking particularly pretty this morning.’ So she was: Spring sun was shining in the tall windows of Belgrave Square, and catching the dust motes in the air. His wife’s fair hair was caught up and falling in tendrils from the top of her head. She was wearing a yellow silk tea-gown with a splodge of bright red flowers all over it, and her eyes wide and trusting. She was being very nice to him, these days, summoning him out of his dressing room when he thought he least deserved it, being a little drunk or noisy, and welcoming him into her bed just the same. He’d hardly given the matter of Consuelo a thought, what with one thing and another. He was busy. Had he been more certain of his reception, or younger, or had more time on his hands, or had a less satisfactory wife, he might well have pursued the matter of Consuelo, or at least slipped by Sunny’s office in Buck House one lunchtime just to see what would happen next, but he had not. So far.

There was the problem of the two hundred cavalry horses left in Natal. A decision was needed: a sea voyage was hard on them: these great big sturdy, round-hipped, magnificent chargers, who could carry nineteen stone on their backs, and had breeding and pluck enough at the end of a long day to charge a retreating enemy and cut him to pieces, suffered dreadfully from seasickness and exhaustion. Up to four percent could be lost on the voyage. Were they to be shipped home, and replaced by the little Cape horses, plentiful and cheap, the skinny little lean-shanked ill-fed things the Boers got about on, or sent off to India where the cavalry was short of them, or mercifully left where they were by a grateful nation? But two hundred horses at £20 a head, less £160 was £3,840, multiplied by however much a change of policy would lead to – and now this troublesome niece he had never met or wanted to who couldn’t make up her mind whether to marry or go into a nunnery – what did he keep Baum for, what was his wife for, but to look after this kind of thing?

Two letters had come in the same post. A shortage of servants was all very well, and offered privacy, but he’d had to pick them up himself from the hall floor and bring them to the breakfast table – it simply didn’t occur to Isobel to do it – and use an ordinary and rather buttery knife to open them. He could hardly appear in the House with a smeary coat, and would have to change, and where was his valet?

One letter was from Mrs Kennion in Wells asking for his approval to the marriage of Adela to a relative of her own, one Frank Overshaw, a young man of twenty-nine, of good character, well able to provide for a wife, being the owner of a large estate in Western Australia, and indubitably fond of Adela. The feeling between them seemed to be reciprocal. The Kennions had apparently become very attached to Adela, and felt confident that it was a good and sensible match and the girl was mature enough to know her own mind. It was as well, as they were sure his Lordship would agree, that if she was in the least unsure of her vocation marriage was a preferable choice for a girl of seventeen than to enter a convent. If his Lordship would take the opportunity to visit the girl and her fiancé they would be most pleased to receive him: they were sure Adela would welcome the chance to become acquainted with her most distinguished family.

His Lordship, snorting, had read the letter aloud to his wife.

‘I daresay she would,’ he said. ‘But I’m afraid her father put paid to that. She must get on with her own life. She will be seventeen, and can surely choose for herself.’

His brother Edwin kept rising from his grave, demanding his attention. Perhaps he should have gone to his funeral, laid him to rest, but if you were banned from that funeral in a spirit of enmity, the estrangement could only remain permanent. Isobel seemed not to understand.

‘But Robert,’ Isobel said, ‘she is so very young. Her parents have so recently passed away. She may be making a dreadful mistake. You can always run away from a convent – well, it has been known – but you cannot run away from a marriage. And Australia is so far!’

Robert said nothing. He opened the letter from Baum. Again, the knife was buttery, what was he meant to do? Open it with his teeth? Baum said there seemed to be no relatives on the mother’s side wealthy enough, and certainly not young enough, to take the girl on; the facts of her right to the title of Princess were established and there was also talk of an inheritance which might have come into play on her mother’s death, property in Vienna now beginning to fetch in a good income as rural land became city land. Robert thought he would call by Baum’s office when – when! – he had a moment to suggest that perhaps the lawyer didn’t hurry his investigations until Adela was safely married and passed into her husband’s legal care.

At least if the girl wasn’t a postulant a convent wouldn’t get its hands on her inheritance: better that it should come the husband’s way. He pushed the letter to one side, as if casually, and Isobel did not enquire as to its contents.

‘She is after all a Dilberne,’ Isobel was saying. ‘The Bishop’s wife will probably see tea and sandwiches as a fitting wedding feast, and think any old dress will do for the bride. It simply will not.’

‘The Bishop took her in, let the Bishop be responsible,’ he said. ‘Kennion is an ass but I daresay one can accept his advice on the girl when it comes to matters of matrimony. It seems to boil down to whether Kennion or I am the busiest, and I would claim that distinction. Mind you, he is arguing with the Court of Complaints about supporting the Queen at the Coronation, which is Bath and Wells’s prerogative. Consuelo reports Alexandra as saying she is healthy enough, and since Kennion needs to lead the King in his responses, let him worry more about learning his lines properly. She doesn’t need supporting, she says, unlike her mother-in-law Victoria at that bodge of a coronation, weighed down by the weight of her own crown – let the Bishop of Bath and Wells concentrate on poor old Temple of Canterbury, who is eighty at least, and support him when he stumbles, as he is bound to. And more, she wishes the Bishop to concentrate on singing the litany briskly; the litany being the most tedious part of the ceremony for everyone. Previous bishops of Bath and Wells, Alexandra points out, have made terrible mistakes in coronations. Everyone’s getting very nervous,’ Robert said, ‘with only eight weeks or so to go.’