Long Live the King (27 page)

‘I really don’t understand the need for all this haste,’ she said at Slough. ‘I hope she’s grateful. All this for a cousin we tried to ignore.’

‘Adela’s very young,’ said Isobel. ‘We don’t want her making a mistake that will spoil her life.’

‘When she was going to be a nun she was even younger. That brought none of us running,’ observed Rosina.

Isobel patted her daughter’s arm pacifically. Once you realized that what Rosina said was not in any way malicious, but she just spoke the truth when others did not, it was possible to be fond of her. The girl was too clever for her own good, and especially for any man she might encounter, and that was a misfortune. But most families had old maids in them. It was bound to happen; there were not enough men to go round.

As they left Reading Rosina said, ‘But then of course we realized Adela was a Princess, although from the wrong side of the family, and now nothing will do but that we go running to her side, to all our great inconvenience.’

‘She is very minor royalty, darling,’ said Isobel, and entertained her daughter with tales of tea at the University Club for Ladies with the Duchess, though Rosina seemed more interested in whether her mother had had a sighting of Beatrice Webb, a social reformer and a rather plain woman.

The first-class dining carriage was still attached, and Isobel and Rosina had a not very good lunch of a steak and kidney pie overloaded with kidneys which might have been none too fresh. But they shared a very good half-bottle of a Bordeaux. Lily went with Reginald to stand at the bar and when she joined her employers in their compartment again she was smelling of beer and giggling.

At Pewsey Rosina said, ‘I wonder why our cousin is marrying in such haste? Can she have got herself into trouble? In which case it might be wiser not to visit her and not to know.’

‘For heaven’s sake,’ said Isobel. ‘She is a clergyman’s daughter and a Dilberne.’

‘Exactly,’ said Rosina and Lily forgot herself and giggled.

At Newbury Rosina talked only about the Speenhamland system which originated in the town, and was something to do with the fixing of the wages of agricultural labourers about which Isobel knew little and cared less. Apparently it featured largely in the book which Rosina was writing at the instigation of one Seebohm Rowntree, another social reformer. A strange name but Rosina seemed very caught up with him, although he was married. She had met him at some dining club.

As they ran into Westbury, Rosina said, ‘Perhaps there’s an inheritance involved and he’s marrying her for her money. He may be a rogue and a villain.’

‘That’s why we are in a hurry,’ said Isobel.

‘To save her virtue?’ asked Rosina. ‘I hardly think so. If it’s gone it’s gone.’

Lily had fallen asleep otherwise no doubt she would have giggled again.

They changed trains at Witham Friary and settled back into more comfortable and cleaner seats. Lily sat with them. It was easier.

‘I know!’ said Rosina. ‘I’ve solved it. We’re in a hurry because now Minnie’s out of the picture you need someone pretty and smart to process with at the Coronation, or Consuelo will relegate you to the any-old countesses. You want the wedding deferred and the sailing postponed so you can walk beside a princess. Let’s just hope Papa is wrong and she’s pretty and smart but don’t hold your breath.’

For a moment she thought her mother would hit her, but Isobel just said,

‘Rosina, you’re so smart you’ll cut yourself.’

At the Bishop’s Palace all was alarm and consternation. Adela had disappeared. She had not come down to dinner the previous evening, but Frank had already disclosed his proposal of marriage and Adela’s acceptance of it in a manner perhaps more colonial than English and it was assumed she was too bashful to appear in public. It was only the next day that the maid bringing her breakfast found her bed still made and no Adela. The Palace had been searched at once, and then the grounds, and after that the Cathedral itself, in case she was lost in prayer. Frank was noisy and disconsolate, and ran around searching where others had already searched. He was not totally unattractive, Isobel thought, and too earnest to be a villain. Isobel was reminded of the confusion earlier that day at Paddington Station. People ran to and fro as if movement itself could solve a problem. Prelates prayed noisily and scuttled about in groups, Adam’s apples waggling (Rosina’s phrase) over high clerical collars.

Mrs Kennion greeted her guests with scant courtesy and a quite uncalled-for ‘and about time too’.

The Bishop said, ‘A pity Dilberne never bothered to turn up in the first place. She’d be safely in a convent by now.’ Reginald and Lily disappeared into the bowels of the Palace. A weeping parlourmaid, Beth, lead Isobel and Rosina to a room which they were expected to share, and did not seem to want to unpack their bags for them but rather to talk. Dr Winnington-Ingram, the Bishop of London, Beth said, was convening a conference on the evils of incense and the problems of confession and absolution. He had no wife and his socks were smelly. Three senior policemen had been summoned from Bath. All three held different views on Adela’s disappearance: the first wanted the moat and ponds drained at once, the second held the view that the girl had run off with a lover – as girls were wont to do – and the third seemed to think that Frank had done it, taking the fact that he was to leave the country for Australia as all the evidence that was needed. They had at least managed to agree to a poster of the missing girl going up in police stations around the country, with a £10 reward for finding her. Beth had a poor opinion of all three of them; her own view was that Adela had run off to her convent to get away from Mr Overshaw’s philosophizing: they had better look for her there.

‘Tell me,’ said Isobel, who was lying on the bed still with her cloak on and her shoes off. ‘What does Adela look like?’

‘She’s lovely,’ said Beth, after a moment’s pause. ‘Too lovely ever to be dead. God saved her for a reason.’ Then she said she must be off to see to the Bishop’s socks, which had to be washed and dried overnight. He had no spares. ‘In my experience bachelors never think,’ she said.

Isobel could see no point in continuing the visit. She saw Dr Kennion briefly. He said he had cancelled the evening’s dinner but would be pleased to see the Countess and her daughter at breakfast. All joined her Ladyship in anxiety for the girl’s safety. She had been with them at the Palace for only a few months but all had come to love her very much in spite of her not being family.

Isobel was exhausted and went to bed, where the mattress was hard and the pillow was as unforgiving as a Scottish parson – which, come to think of it, Bishop Kennion was – but sent Rosina off to find out what she could about Frank Overshaw and his motives. Rosina returned to say she had found him weeping in the library, very much upset, and spilling tears onto a clutch of rather good sketches of Adela which he himself had drawn. She had better go back to the library to save them from ruin. In her opinion Frank was a good artist, far better even than Minnie. At least you could tell what his paintings were meant to be.

By one o’clock in the morning Rosina had not returned to her room, and with a sudden chill Isobel realized that if one girl could disappear in a well-peopled palace, so could another one. She got off the bed – she had given up any thought of sleep – walked darkened corridors until she found the library, and listened at the door. There was the sound of two voices, and both sounded reasonable and animated; they were talking about the oneness, the wholeness. She risked the creak and pushed it open. They were talking over one another.

‘The wise do not grieve,’ Frank was saying. ‘My bloody oath!’ And then something like: ‘The thing to hold on to is that the spiritual essence of a body does not perish but merely changes its form following the death of the physical body,’ and Rosina was saying something like: ‘As Socrates said to Crito, “Be of good cheer. Before they can bury me they have to find me, the real me, and how will they ever do that?”’

Isobel left them to it. She went back to bed and this time slept soundly. Rosina was in the other bed when she awoke and Isobel asked no questions.

Breakfast was a gruelling experience. Frank did not appear. Rosina did, but was no help, as though she were in a trance which precluded speech. Isobel did what she could to be bright, positive and responsible, conscious that in Robert’s absence she must speak for the family.

The Bishop was not in a good mood, glowering at the head of the table, the handsome head bowed over porridge, which he took Scottish style, with salt but no sugar or cream. Henrietta Kennion was behaving rather like a fluffy hen, pleasant and chirpy, as if trying to neutralize the Bishop’s apparent ill temper. She was looking dreadful, her hair standing on end, her jacket buttoned up awry, but Isobel imagined that it often was.

He rose to his feet as Isobel came into the room.

‘Ah Lady Isobel,’ he said. ‘It is so kind of you to spare us a moment from your busy schedule. I wrote to your father Silas once, concerning a charity for the daughters of coal miners, but he was too busy to reply.’

Isobel said nothing, but smiled sweetly. Silas had hated the Church and all its works.

‘Busy-ness seems to run in your family,’ the Bishop observed, but did not elaborate. The Bishop seemed to know a great deal about a great many things. He would have known Edwin, and perhaps been told that Robert was only a second son who had married Isobel before he inherited, and that she, Isobel, was Silas’s bastard daughter by an unknown actress. ‘Your husband is no doubt busy helping Mr Balfour with an education bill that is to destroy the moral fibre of the nation.’ Explanation enough, Isobel thought with relief, for the Bishop’s ill temper.

‘I do not think the moral fibre of the nation will be destroyed by raising the school-leaving age from ten to twelve,’ Mrs Kennion spoke up, rather bravely, Isobel thought, since the Bishop was obviously in no mood for disagreement. ‘And surely the Bill strengthens the position of the Church.’

‘Do not talk about things you do not understand,’ said the Bishop. ‘The Bill is a socialist plot to stir up the Wesleyans and put education into the hands of the County Councils.’

Isobel glanced over to Rosina, fearing that the word socialist might bring her back to contentious life, but it did not, for which Isobel was thankful. Rosina continued to stare into space, and had not touched her food. She was sadly lacking in social graces: one did what one could with one’s children, but blood would out. Rosina was remarkably like her grandfather Silas, who, as Robert would have it, ‘followed his own dree’.

But she should be paying attention to the Bishop. ‘We are doing all we can to find the girl, naturally,’ he said, ‘but I find myself most reluctant to drain the moat at this juncture. To do so would disturb the swans – a great attraction to our many visitors. We will have the moat dragged, of course, though the likelihood of finding a body is minimal. It is possible she will just walk in through the door, having put us all to a great deal of trouble and expense, though the police warn us that with every hour that passes it is the more unlikely. You did not know her well, I gather, Lady Isobel? You cannot advise us as to her temperament? ’

‘I have never met her,’ said Isobel.

‘Extraordinary,’ said the Bishop under his breath. ‘And she apparently so close a relative.’

He suggested that perhaps his Lordship would see fit to raise the present reward for information which the police had suggested, and the Bishopric had put up out of its own funds, money which could otherwise be used for the poor of the diocese.

Isobel assured the Bishop that her husband would of course increase the reward – ten pounds did seem rather a small amount for the recovery of a daughter of a deceased local cleric – to perhaps fifty pounds or so. The Bishop said yes, it would be more appropriate and no doubt Dilberne with his gold mines and imported Chinese labourers had money enough to spread around.

Mrs Kennion said if the reward went unclaimed she could give it to her own charity, Mercy for Women, in Adelaide, where it was much needed.

‘If only,’ Henrietta said, eyes to heaven, ‘money alone could solve the world’s problems.’ ‘Or that it would save a man’s soul,’ added the Bishop. ‘Strange, I must say,’ he went on, ‘that the girl ran off having just received a proposal of marriage. My wife encouraged it, though I had my doubts about its wisdom. The other possibility, of course, is that my wife’s nephew may have slaughtered her, sacrificed her to one of the strange gods to whom he adheres. Do not look so agitated, my dear, I am only joking. But we must, alas, face the possibility that the girl has not met with some accident but deliberately done away with herself, so recently bereaved and no family coming forward to claim her or comfort her until too late.’ He took marmalade for his toast. ‘But you are not eating, Lady Isobel? Perhaps conscience bothers you? Your imagination? You see Adela lying there, in some lonely ditch, frozen, or dashed beneath the iron wheels of a railway train? Pray take some kippers: they are very plump and good. The hens are not laying, or I would suggest eggs. Good for the delicate digestion. And your daughter has eaten nothing at all, I see.’

‘Oh, Kennion,’ said Henrietta, ‘you are in one of your moods. Take no notice of him, Lady Isobel. He is in a fuss about his flower-burst cape, which he must wear for the Coronation. It has come back with quite the wrong stitching, gold where there should be silver and silver where there should be gold. You know how these husbands can be in the morning. I am sorry you have had to witness it. And we are all in a tizzy about poor dear Adela. I had been so looking forward to the wedding. And now Frank must sail away to distant lands without the company of a bride.’

‘Frank this, Frank that, Frank the other,’ said the Bishop. ‘And may I remind you, my dear, that the Coronation is not such a small thing as you seem to think.’ It occurred to Isobel that the Bishop had had a monumental scene with his wife that very morning, and she, Isobel, had been unfortunate enough to get in the way. ‘The role of Bath and Wells is central to the anointing of the monarch,’ he went on. ‘It is a pity that you have trouble acknowledging the significance of sacrament, but I suppose one must remember you are a colonial.’ He rose to his feet, a tall, majestic figure. ‘I have important matters to attend to. As I say, it is a great pity the child has gone astray, but the matter is in the hands of the proper authorities. If I may be frank, Lady Isobel, my own belief is that being the child of a spiteful father, as I always found the Reverend Hedleigh to be, she has done away with herself simply to spite her benefactors.’