Long Live the King (24 page)

At least he was laughing. But why Consuelo again? If her, Isobel’s, suspicions were unfounded, why did Robert feel the constant need to mention her? The sun seemed to go in: the dust motes to stop dancing.

Things had been going so well: such a pleasant visit from Minnie and Rosina. She was more than happy that Minnie was with child, and happy that Rosina’s temper seemed so much improved, so that she almost seemed an ordinarily loving daughter – why did her own peace of mind have to be so threatened by this chit of a girl, this lively little Duchess half her age? Half her age – perhaps this was the crux of the matter? The black fog was closing in again.

‘I wish you knew more about horses, my dear,’ Robert was saying.

‘Horses?’ Isobel enquired, mystified. She found the beasts that so preoccupied her husband rather repellent, unruly and unpredictable creatures, and had always been relieved that neither of her children took an interest in them. Arthur preferred his engines, Rosina her books, Minnie looked good on horseback, but was beginning to show and must put it off for the time being. It struck her as outrageous that Robert seemed more preoccupied with the fate of the English cavalry horses stranded in South Africa than with his own family.

‘Forget horses, my dear,’ she said. ‘The people will look very oddly at you if you let your own orphaned niece marry in haste and with no proper ceremony. It will do you no good in the public estimation.’

He looked at her rather coldly, she thought, but at least said, ‘Do what you want about it, pay the Bishop a call, inspect this gift horse of a husband in his mouth to see the state of his teeth, just do me the favour of not bringing the girl home.’

‘Her name is Adela,’ said Isobel, ‘and her blood runs in your veins.’

Love nests, she decided, could be uncomfortable after a while: if there were dust motes in the air it was because there was too much dust about: she would ask Minnie and Rosina to come up to Belgrave Square and keep her company, and bring servants with them. Now Minnie was pregnant it was probably safest to keep her away from Arthur’s bed – she had no doubt he was an ardent lover – and she would have Rosina to keep her company, and really she did not mind the parrot too much; the creature could be really quite amusing. Rosina could bring it with her if she insisted.

Robert left the breakfast table and went up to his room to try and find a new collar and for lack of a valet scattered garments far and wide. Some days one felt younger than others. Today was one of those days when Spring was in the air and young lads and lasses went a-courting, but he was not a young lad, he was a peer of the realm and had responsibilities. But affairs of State still mattered, and perhaps he would call by Sunny’s rooms at lunchtime and if Consuelo was there she might talk to him about horses. Her father was a horse breeder, after all, though she probably knew more about thoroughbreds than the war horses which now preoccupied him, be they cavalry, gun, artillery or humble mules.

On the way out he called out to Isobel to check that she had put the invitations to the Baums in the post. She came out of the breakfast room to say she had yet to have lunch with Consuelo to get replacements, but was doing so in a couple of days; there was lots of time. Also she needed to discuss with Consuelo who was to process with whom on the 26
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in Minnie’s absence. She would arrange a visit to the Bishop’s Palace to see Adela after that. He must remember that she too was busy.

The Abduction of Adela

Now they knew where her room was, Adela’s rescue was simple enough. Ivy wore a black servant’s dress and George wore a flat cap and a handyman’s leather apron and looked like someone on his way to fix the pipes. The porter’s lodge on the drawbridge was unmanned. No one challenged them. A few prelates wandered the corridors with prayer books and papers; a few servants bustled around with trays of food but seemed to take strangers in their stride. When guests came to stay they brought their servants with them. Adela’s room was easy enough to find, and she was inside it when they pushed the door open. It was almost too easy. George said later it was as if God had been watching over them.

Adela lay on the great bed reading; her fair hair startling against the red velvet of the bed cover and her black dress. George, remembering the child he had carried through the flames, was shaken by the difference in her.

‘My,’ said Ivy, ‘you have grown up.’

Adela, startled, put down her book and hurled herself towards Ivy, almost knocking her down. ‘Oh Ivy, Ivy,’ Adela cried. ‘Why have you been so long? Have you come to take me away? Where are we going?’

George saw to the door, jamming the lock with the end of the window pole while Ivy helped Adela off with her black dress and put on the red one, made her take down her hair and wrapped her in a pale-blue serge coat. George tried not to look. Ivy said she was coming with her and her new husband George, they had a plan, they were to live in Bath. George was the one who had saved her from the fire and did Adela recognize him? Adela blushed almost the colour of her dress and said yes, she did.

‘Saved you once,’ George said, ‘I’ll save you again,’ and Ivy wondered quite what she had let the girl in for, but it was done now. What would be, would be.

Adela wanted to leave a note but George stopped her. Ivy wanted her to take her few belongings but Adela refused, saying that would be stealing. Nothing was hers, everything was borrowed. The three of them walked out boldly, Adela with her head held high, her hair loose, her clothing bright, looking like someone no one had ever seen before but would want to see again, and still no one challenged them.

George said she had a fine future on the stage, she was a born actress and Adela blushed again. On the way home on the bus she went on about how she didn’t want to be married and go to Australia, but it had suddenly seemed better than being a nun, and how then it seemed too late to stop it, and she felt like a rabbit being hypnotized by a snake. Ivy felt better about it all. It was only a few weeks until Adela’s birthday and no one would then be able to say she had been coerced into running away, but had gone of her own free will.

The landlady had kicked up a fuss and said she wasn’t having an extra, a girl who for all anyone knew was no better than she should be, in a room for two, and George forked out for an extra room, without too much argument. They had fish and chips in the front-floor back.

‘Ivy,’ Adela said, ‘I’m so much older now. Please tell. What does “no better than she ought to be” mean? Is that me now?’

‘Not yet,’ said George, ‘not yet. We’ll get too good a price for you as you are.’

Adela looked puzzled.

He was joking, of course, about something Adela didn’t understand but Ivy did. Later that night Ivy found the bottle of chloroform and the gauze pads in the pocket of the coat George had worn on the bus, and worried. But he’d never have dared to have used it, surely. It might have ended up in the law courts and a really heavy sentence. They tried to be really quiet that night, because of Adela in the next room.

New Horizons

A drop of cerulean blue dripped from the end of Minnie’s brush, and she bent down to mop it up with her turpentine-soaked rag. Mr Neville the butler, who had come all the way up to the East Wing attic with Minnie’s mid-morning beef tea, intervened.

‘Let me call a servant to do that, Miss Minnie,’ said Mr Neville. Minnie ignored him and only succeeded in leaving a nasty smear of blue on the polished floor. He raised his eyebrows slightly as he went away. Rosina, who had settled in the studio to watch Minnie paint, which Minnie rather wished she wouldn’t, said, ‘Now you’ve annoyed Mr Neville. You really need to give the servants work to do, Minnie, otherwise they get nervous in case they lose their jobs. They’re worried enough that the parents have so few looking after them in Belgrave Square. Supposing we learned to live without them? Then what would they do for employment? And are you sure the smell of oil paint isn’t bad for an unborn baby?’

‘Quite sure,’ said Minnie.

‘Is that a fur waistcoat you’re wearing? I know it’s draughty up here, but I hope not. An animal has had to die to keep you warm. I don’t approve of the infliction of pain on any sentient being, man or beast. George Bernard Shaw is of the same opinion. Is it mink?’

‘It is beaver, Rosina,’ said Minnie, ‘and my mother gave it to me to keep me warm.’

‘You should be content with wool,’ said Rosina. ‘That at least is only theft, not murder. The sheep goes on living.’

Minnie tried to ignore her and went on painting. It was a landscape: the long and majestic avenue of oaks which lined the quarter-mile drive from the gate to the front steps of Dilberne Court. It was what she could see from her window.

‘But Minnie,’ said Rosina, ‘trees aren’t blue in the first place, but green, and the oaks are still not in leaf so why are you painting in blue leaves that aren’t even there? Do you know better than Nature?’

‘Rosina,’ said Minnie, ‘I am an artist, not a copyist. Try and understand. I paint a mixture of what I see with my eyes and the truth of what I see in my head.’

‘But we are in a new century, Minnie. I think a photograph will always be more truthful than a painting, and certainly take less time to produce. Could you not be a photographer? It would be less messy.’

Minnie put down her paintbrush and asked if Rosina was setting out to annoy, and Rosina stopped pouting and laughed and said yes, she supposed she was, it was a habit of which she was trying to cure herself, and apologized. She had toiled all the way up to the attic to tell Minnie that they had both been summoned to attend the Countess in Belgrave Square that very day, without so much as a by-your-leave. She, Rosina, was to abandon her book just as she was getting to the index, and Minnie was to abandon Arthur’s bed not to mention her easel, and neither had any choice in the matter, any more than Minnie had a choice as to what colour the nursery was to be painted, or which local wet-nurse was to be engaged. Moreover they were to go by carriage, not train, because Minnie would not want to expose herself to the public gaze.

‘The public is welcome to gaze on me as much as they want,’ Minnie said. ‘I am having a baby, and proud of it. Why should I pretend I’m not?’

‘Because this is England and not Chicago. It’s embarrassing for everyone. A public and shameless declaration of what you have been up to in bed.’

She had married into a family of aliens who pretended no one had sex, a race who never acknowledged weakness, physical or emotional, who did not weep or get drunk at funerals, or run to the side of orphaned family members, or countenance pain if they fell off a horse and broke an arm, but just remounted and got on again. They demanded servitude and got it. Insisted on inequality and were not defied. She was going to give birth to another one. Well, they ran a mighty empire. It could be worse.

Arthur was in Coventry for the week, discussing the possibility of a motorized landau to follow the coaches at the Coronation. Daimler were to provide a twenty-two-horsepower four-cylinder vehicle, which could reach forty-five miles an hour if it had to, which on this occasion it certainly wouldn’t, could be armour plated if assassination was feared, and was fairly impressive. Arthur, whose very presence carried an implicit promise of increased Royal patronage, was trying to persuade Daimlers to incorporate the Arnold Jehu’s new electric ignition system into their future designs. Daimler, he was able to argue, was regrettably German in its roots; English input would do much to help the firm’s credibility in the British market. It was working. He was turning into a business man as well as an engineer. Minnie, who was developing quite an interest in the way the automobile trade worked – it was not so different from selling hogs, after all, and at least machines did not squeal when slaughtered – had suggested to Arthur this particular route to Daimler’s essentially Prussian heart, and it had worked. She would be happy enough to spend the week in London. She looked forward to another meeting of the I.D.K. and another lively argument between the rationalists and the idealists.

Rosina cheered up. In London, Minnie reminded her, she would be able to pay the £3 membership and work in the peace of the London Library, with access to far more books than she could find in the Boots Booklovers’ Library in Brighton. And even run into her literary hero George Bernard Shaw writing some play that went on for ever about the meaning of everything.

‘You mean,’ said Rosina, ‘that I might find some vegetarian husband there. I am thirty-three years old. I was born to be an old maid. Too late.’

‘Thirty-three’s nothing at all. George Eliot married when she was sixty. She was a writer.’

Rosina laughed. ‘That is no comfort, Minnie. She was a scandalous woman and a freak and plain as a pikestaff, and the man she married killed himself almost at once. You know even our little cousin Adela, not yet seventeen, her parents scarcely cold in the grave, is engaged to be married to a rich colonial farmer twice her age? They are to be married any minute and leave at once for Australia.’

‘I thought she was going to be a nun,’ said Minnie. ‘But perhaps she decided any man was better than no man at all. I certainly would have. This is the first I’ve heard of it. I suppose the news came through the shipping clerk to some hotel concierge to the servants in Belgrave Square through Mrs Flowers at the local telephone exchange, and by-passed the family altogether.’

‘Reginald told me,’ said Rosina. ‘Mother didn’t even bother to mention it. More evidence of my failure in the marriage market, I suppose. Reginald also told me she’s actually a princess of the Gotha-Zwiebrücken-Saxony line.’

‘But that’s rather useful,’ said Minnie. ‘She could replace me as Isobel’s partner walking up the aisle in the Abbey on the 26
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. If she hasn’t already been whisked off to be the only princess in Australia. She might have to stay by Royal Command. She may not be of the direct Dilberne line, being daughter of a fourth son, but any connection on the Gotha side might count. Imagine if she was allowed six inches of ermine trim, twice as wide as a countess’s!’