Palace Circle (9 page)

When he had received the cable informing him of the birth, his answering cable had simply read:

When he arrived five days later she was in the frost-covered walled rear garden, cutting long sprays of yellow-berried pyracantha to fill the Chinese vases in the hall.

It was a footman who hurried out to her with the news. “His lordship has arrived, my lady. And he's gone straight to the nursery.”

Thrusting the pyracantha into his arms she ran to the house, yanking off her coat as she did so.

“His lordship is in the—” Bellingham began helpfully as she raced past him.

“I know, Bellingham! I know!” Tossing her tam-o’-shanter at him, she hurtled up the stairs.

Bellingham, by now well accustomed to his mistress's easygoing familiarity, gravely carried the tam-o’-shanter toward the cloakroom.

With a fast-beating heart Delia hurried along the corridor toward the nursery. “Please don't be too disappointed, Ivor,” she whispered to herself. “Please think Petronella beautiful. Please.
Please
.”

She opened the nursery door.

Still wearing his traveling clothes he was standing by the crib, looking down into it with a bemused expression on his face.

She stood very still. “Do you like her?” she said, unable to voice the words drumming in her brain:
Are you going to be too disappointed to love her?

“Like her?” He turned toward her and to her vast relief he was smiling. “Of course I like her, Delia. She's beautiful.”

All her tension and fear ebbed away. Everything was going to be all right.

She crossed the room and stood beside him, taking hold of his hand and squeezing it to express her gratitude.

“Why Petronella?” he asked. “I've never heard of it before. Is it a Chandler family name?”

“No. It's a Roman family name. And I chose it just because so few people will have heard it and because I like it.” She remembered how important having a son was to him and realized how magnificently he was overcoming his disappointment. “We can change it if you want to, Ivor. I don't mind.”

“I don't want to change it. It suits her. Who does she look like, do you think? I don't see the faintest resemblance to myself in her—and I don't think she looks much like you, either, except for her dark-red hair.”

“Imagining that babies look like family members is usually wishful thinking. Petronella just looks like herself—and I'm glad. Think how awful it would be if she had your big feet or my father's nose!”

He chuckled and she said, “Would you like to hold her?”

He shook his head. “No, I don't think I should when she's sleeping. It would only disturb her. And I have to go straight on to Downing Street. Lloyd George is waiting for my report on my meetings with the American bankers.”

Lloyd George, the chancellor of the exchequer, was not a man known for patience and she didn't try to dissuade Ivor. Instead, linking her arm in his, she said as they left the room, “Where will we be spending Christmas, Ivor? Here, or at Shibden?”

“It's tradition for Christmas to be spent at Shibden, you know.” He saw the expression on her face and added, “Is there a problem with that?”

“Only that Norfolk is bitterly cold at Christmas and as Petronella will still be only a few weeks old I think it would be better if she wasn't taken to Shibden until the spring.”

They had reached the head of the stairs and he came to a halt, looking puzzled. “But that isn't a difficulty, Delia. She'll remain here in the care of her nurse and nurserymaids.”

“And I will be over a hundred miles away. I'm sorry, Ivor, but not being with her at Christmas would make me very unhappy. I should like to stay here.”

He hesitated and she knew he was thinking how odd it would look not spending Christmas at Shibden when the royal family would be spending Christmas at nearby Sandringham.

“If that is what you want,” he said at last, a little reluctantly.

“Yes, it is. Thank you, Ivor.”

With her arm still linked in his she walked downstairs with him, feeling more optimistic about her marriage than she had
since its first few headily careless days, her mind racing with ideas for making Petronella's first Christmas the most splendid Christmas the Cadogan Square house had ever known.

In the New Year, with a very satisfying nursery routine established under a new nurse—who wasn't at all disconcerted when Delia treated her as if she were a member of the family—Delia began socializing and riding again.

Every morning at eleven o'clock she trotted into Rotten Row, riding sidesaddle on Juno, the thoroughbred Ivor had bought for her shortly after their marriage. Compared to riding in Norfolk, it was sedate—and certainly nothing like the gallops she had enjoyed in Virginia.

Occasionally Sylvia would also be in the Row, her satin-black hair worn in a bun that showed off the lovely long line of her neck. Her hat was always tilted at a provocative angle, the veil pressing against her face, her elegant riding habit fitting so perfectly Delia wondered if she was wearing anything beneath it.

They would incline their heads to each other and nothing more. When there was no one nearby to observe, they never bothered pretending they were friends.

In February, Lord and Lady Denby's only son was killed in his first twenty-four hours of action.

By March, the death toll of officers in the Grenadiers and the Scots—two guards regiments packed with Ivor's friends or the sons of his friends—was so high Delia was terrified for Jerome's safety. But in his letters he repeatedly told her not to worry.

In April, when he came home on leave, his description of life at the front was very different.

“It can't be expressed in a letter,” he said, his hand holding hers so tightly she thought he was going to break it. “It's indescribable. Filth. Thigh-deep mud. The dead unburied. The injured lying with them for hours, sometimes days, before they can be carried to a field hospital. Constant cold. Constant pandemonium. And a feeling of near uselessness.”

His voice was bitter, his olive-skinned face pale with fatigue.

“Uselessness? But why? I don't understand.”

“Cavalry might have been the army's ace in previous wars, Delia, but they weren't on the scale of this one. How can cavalry successfully charge against machine guns and barbed wire and six-foot-deep trenches? More and more valiant horses are dying horrific deaths. In a charge near Ypres we lost one hundred and forty-four horses out of one hundred and fifty—and the number of men lost is almost beyond human calculation.”

She blanched.

“In the short time I have before going back to such a hell, I want to enjoy myself—and not talk about the war.” He gave a lopsided smile. “How's Petra? As we didn't have the chance to celebrate her birth with champagne at the time, let's toast her now.”

Delia forced herself into a cheerful mood; a mood of loving gaiety that would enable him to forget, for a little time at least, the horrors waiting for him when his leave was over.

“Petra?” With superhuman effort she banished the images he had conjured up, knowing that the minute he had gone they would resurface in endless nightmares. “No one calls her Petra,” she said, managing to giggle. “Not even Ellie.”

“Well, no one will keep calling her Petronella when she's older. It's too much of a mouthful. And better Petra than Nellie!”

This time her laughter was unforced. “Just for you, Jerome— and because I would take a gun to anyone who called my lovely daughter Nellie, Petra it is.” She hugged him tightly, saying, “God, but I've missed you, Jerome. I've missed you more than words can tell.”

The days after Jerome's return to the front were spent in an agony of anxiety. The newspapers were full of accounts of the British spring offensive at Ypres and she knew that Jerome was in the thick of it. If Sylvia was similarly concerned she showed no sign. “There's no need to worry about Jerome,” Delia overheard her saying at a house party at the Wharf, the Asquiths’ country home on the upper reaches of the Thames. “He always falls on his feet.”

At the beginning of May she discovered that she was pregnant again.

“Which is about the only good news I've had for many months,” Ivor said. “And, once again, I'm going to be in America for part of your pregnancy, though this time in the early part.”

“America? But why?”

“I'm going with a begging bowl,” he said grimly. “We need American financing in order to keep armament production at its present level. I don't work only for the King nowadays, Delia. I work for the government.”

She tilted her head a little to one side, her eyes reflective. “If the Atlantic is safe enough for you to cross, then it's surely safe enough for me. Petra is six months old and my parents still haven't seen her. We could sail together to New York and then you could go to Washington or wherever it is you have to go, and I could go down to Virginia. We could meet up again in New York for the trip home.”

“No,” he said, not even hesitating. “I'm not going to allow
you to take even the slightest risk. When the war is over, then we'll go to Virginia, Delia. And not before.”

His voice was implacable. Disappointment flooded her, but she knew better than to lose her dignity in an argument she couldn't win.

A week later she lost all desire to cross the Atlantic with her precious daughter.

“There's just been a wireless announcement that a German submarine has sunk the
Lusitania
, my lady!” Ellie said, coming into Delia's bedroom with her breakfast tray. “It was on its way from New York to Liverpool carrying hundreds of civilian passengers. Mr. Bellingham says it's the worst outrage he's ever heard of. His lordship left the house in a great hurry. He'll be going to Downing Street, I expect.”

Four hours later he returned home, his handsome features so grim they looked as if they had been carved in stone. “Cu-nard is talking in the region of over a thousand drowned.” He poured a large whiskey and added the merest squirt of soda to it. “There'll be no more passenger sailings. The American financing will have to be carried out by telegraph.”

He drained his glass and then said unsteadily, “The
Lusitania
was the sister ship of the
Mauretania
, Delia. What kind of world is it when a liner carrying American passengers, who are neutral and not at war, can be blown out of the sea as mercilessly as if she were an enemy warship?” He covered his eyes with his hand. “It's something I would never have believed.”

Two weeks later, despite it being the beginning of the London season, they went to Shibden, taking Petra and her nurse with them. Juno, and his groom, Charlie, followed. The horse, accustomed to traveling in a horse box, was no trouble. According to the nurse, who was traveling with Petra and a nurserymaid in a separate car, Petra was.

“She's cried on and off the entire journey, my lady,” the nurse said as Delia lifted Petra from her arms the instant they
had all stepped from the cars in front of Shibden's porticoed entrance. “I think maybe she's beginning to teethe.”

Though she knew Ivor would think it extremely undignified, Delia didn't hand Petra back to her nurse, but carried her into Shibden and up to the rooms set apart as a nursery. She had determined to take an even greater part in her daughter's day-to-day care and was setting out as she intended to carry on.

Within days, Ivor was summoned back to London for a meeting of the Privy Council. “The war is at a crisis point,” he said bluntly as she walked with him to his car. “Now Lloyd George is no longer chancellor but minister of munitions, he is doing all he can, but so far it isn't enough. I hate to say this, but I think the fault lies with Herbert. He was an excellent prime minister when we were at peace, but war is a very different kettle of fish. If Lloyd George were to make a bid for the premiership he would have my support.”

Delia was so shocked, she was speechless. Long after the Silver Ghost had disappeared she stood on the driveway, staring after it. Just as it was impossible to think of Buckingham Palace not being home to King George and Queen Mary, so it was impossible to think of H.H. and Margot not at 10 Downing Street.

Heavyhearted she walked back into the house just in time to take a telephone call from Gwen. “Darling,” her sister-in-law said, “I'm on my way to Hunstanton to stay with the Den-bys and thought I would call in at Shibden and stay overnight. It's so long since I've been able to have a really good chat with Ivor.” The static on the line made Gwen's next few words unintelligible. “And so there will be two of us … so kind of you, darling.”

The line went dead before Delia could tell Gwen that Ivor was in London and that for Gwen to go out of her way to see Ivor at Shibden was pointless.

When she rang Gwen back, it was only to be told by the butler that Gwen hadn't been at home all morning and would be in Norfolk for the next few days.

Faced with the choice of telephoning a whole host of Gwen's friends to see where she was or simply letting things stand, Delia decided to let it go.

“Lord and Lady Pugh will be staying overnight,” she said to Parkinson. “Please make sure the maids have a room ready for them.”

Much later in the day she put on her riding clothes and went to the stables. The horses Ivor and his guests rode looked toward her, hopeful of an afternoon ride.

“Sorry,” she said, as Charlie saddled Juno. “I'm afraid I'm a one-horse woman, boys.”

That Juno was there was an achievement in itself, for Ivor disapproved of her riding when pregnant.

“I'll stop in three months’ time,” she had said when they had argued over it, “and I won't gallop hard. I promise.”