The New Countess Read online

‘Why is his tummy upset?’ Minnie now inquired of Molly.

  ‘Yesterday he stole green apples from the tree. The wind got up in the night and one of the apple tree branches came down, it was that heavy with fruit.’

  ‘Little boys of one and a half don’t steal, Molly. They may take apples but they don’t steal them.’

  ‘That’s what I said,’ said Molly, ‘but Nanny said he has to learn. It’s a sin to take what isn’t yours. She said she’d give Master Connor a good smacking only you might get to hear about it. So she put him in the corner for an hour and prayed for his wee soul instead. What a carry-on! I checked the pips and they were black, only the skin was green, so what a kerfuffle about nothing.’

  ‘What’s your real name, Molly?’ asked Minnie as she took Connor’s little hand in hers. He looked like his Irish grandfather, wide face and blunt nose and bright-blue smiling eyes, bashing and rushing and stamping. He fell on his nose and laughed and got up. He enjoyed life. Edgar looked like his father the Viscount and his grandfather the Earl before him; the long patrician nose, the close-set eyes. Edgar seldom fell on his nose. The material world seemed to arrange itself around him. They might just possibly let Connor go; but never Edgar. He was one of them.

  ‘I started out as Irene,’ said the girl. ‘My mother had ideas for me.’

  ‘That will be all, Irene,’ said Minnie. ‘You may go.’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Irene. ‘Molly will do. It’s what I’m used to.’ She went away and Minnie was left to roll about on the floor with her children.

  Minnie thought that when the time came to run away she would take Molly with her. She seemed a calm, sensible and kind girl; Cook’s food would give anyone spots.

  Goings-on

  30th September 1905, The Gatehouse

  By the end of September Arthur still had no secretary, though the office was just about up and running. Lily had been making herself useful ferrying calendars, notebooks, orders, receipts and so forth from the workshops to the Gatehouse and sorting blueprints into the satinwood map chest Minnie had helped buy. Lily was neat, competent and literate and he thought she might possibly make a good secretary, but his mother said no, that was impossible; she was too good as a lady’s maid. Besides, his mother said, Lily was needed up in London from time to time. She was a friend of Mrs Keppel’s maid Agnes; the pair met on their days off in St James’s Park and Lily was very good at eliciting all kinds of facts about the Keppel household in Portman Square.

  ‘But Mother,’ said Arthur, alarmed, ‘you really can’t get the servants to do your spying.’

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ said Isobel, ‘I need to know whether the odalisque’s bathrooms are tiled or lined. How else can I find out? Tiling is practical but wall-papering is considered smart.’

  ‘I am sure Pater would find it all very silly,’ said Arthur.

  ‘Perhaps your father should not have asked the King down in the first place,’ said Isobel, in her gentlest, sweetest voice.

  She had brought Inspector Strachan with her this particular morning. They had walked together up from the Court to look at Arthur’s security arrangements. The King’s visit to Dilberne was private and would be kept out of the newspapers: assassination attempts were highly unlikely: but the nation’s borders were porous and maniacs and foreigners were cunning. The Court itself would be made secure enough: an empty gatehouse would be all too convenient as a base for evil-doers.

  ‘It’s not empty,’ said Arthur. ‘There will be myself and others here during office hours. By night it may well be unoccupied. When the time comes, I will ask the night-watchmen to include the Gatehouse in their normal rounds.’

  ‘Their rounds should be extended to include the Gatehouse from the beginning of December,’ said Strachan, ‘two weeks before the King is expected. Germans are the most efficient spies, and can make a very good show of pretending to be British. Extra security men need to be hired and a lookout kept for any suspicious comings and goings by day and night.’

  ‘Oh I see,’ said Arthur. ‘A bevy of Teutons is expected to run in and assassinate our King while he is shooting birds and a World War will break out? Guarding against this eventuality will be very expensive in wages. Perhaps the King is paying?’

  ‘Arthur!’ remonstrated Isobel. ‘You are too bad!’

  ‘Entertaining monarchy is always an expensive business,’ observed the Inspector.

  ‘One certainly realizes that,’ said Isobel.

  ‘And no doubt alarmists may profit from it,’ said Arthur.

  ‘If not the Germans in their quest for Africa,’ said the Inspector, without batting an eyelid, ‘there are the Communists. Some very nasty things are going on in Russia. The place is in uproar. Strikes, riots, bombs. The wealthy are fleeing. The Tsar is about to do a foolish thing, to promise the Russian people a parliament with legislative powers – it is always dangerous to show weakness when under attack. It will make matters worse. It is when a tight lid lifts that the pressure blows. Now they will go on until they win.’

  ‘That hardly means they want to assassinate Edward VII in his own back yard. And how can you possibly know what is in the Emperor of Russia’s mind?’

  ‘The Tsarina is His Majesty’s niece,’ said Strachan calmly. ‘And this is not his back yard, it is yours. His is securely guarded night and day. Its doors are strong and the locks secure.’

  Arthur fell quiet. Isobel tapped her foot. Strachan expressed himself pleased to see that the grass and hedges round the Gatehouse were kept cut and trimmed. The best thing would have been a resident gatekeeper, but since there was none he advised Arthur to keep an automatic revolver in the top drawer of the office desk, with the bullets kept in the one below. At the first sign of danger he was to load the bullets. He hoped Arthur was acquainted with the use of weapons and Arthur said yes, he could load a gun and arm a grenade well enough – he had learned in the cadet corps at Eton – and added, in a last show of defiance, that no doubt he could use them effectively against any intruding pigs and chickens. Inspector Strachan sighed and said it was no laughing matter.

  ‘Try to be serious, Arthur,’ said his mother, as if he were eight, ‘and be polite to Inspector Strachan. He was explaining to me on the way up just how very dangerous and different a place the modern world is. I only hope your father knows what he is doing.’

  Arthur thought that his mother and Inspector Strachan seemed rather thick: she simpered and sulked as if she was a young girl. He hoped he imagined it. She was a Countess and the Inspector was at least twenty years younger; such things simply did not happen. Arthur said he had already fixed Yale combination locks on both doors and Strachan said he would suggest Chubb as stronger but first the doors needed to be strengthened.

  ‘They look as if a couple of quick kicks would be an end to them. No point in having locks stronger than the wood they rest in.’

  Arthur refrained from saying, ‘Two of my quick kicks on your fat arse and there’d soon be an end to you’ as being perhaps too graphic for his mother. A series of small explosions told him that Reginald was on his way back from the station with his passenger, a journalist from the Daily Mirror. The newspaper had written ahead, asking for an interview with ‘the man of the moment’ – an English Viscount who knew his subject and was prepared to talk openly and freely about the future of the automobile industry. Arthur had allowed himself to be flattered, and the appointment with the motoring correspondent had been made.

  ‘It’s the yellow press,’ he warned his mother. ‘They’re on their way. I have an interview.’

  ‘I do wish you wouldn’t,’ said Isobel. ‘It is so vulgar to be in the newspapers.’

  ‘Bear in mind there must be no mention of the royal visit,’ put in Strachan.

  ‘Why on Earth would I mention it? I thought it wasn’t until Christmas.’

  ‘Christmas always comes faster than you think,’ observed the Inspector.

  ‘And I’ll thump your fat face, too,’ thought Arthur.


  ‘It’s one thing to have a piece in The Times, when one’s amongst friends,’ said Isobel. ‘But hardly the rags! You shouldn’t encourage them.’

  ‘I am trying to start a company, Mother,’ said Arthur, biting his oily nails. ‘And as Phineas Barnum said, no such thing as bad publicity.’

  ‘Phineas Barnum was an American,’ said Isobel, as if this was dismissal enough. ‘Please remember you are not in trade, Arthur. You are a peer of the Realm. Do you really want to be called “The Motoring Viscount”?’

  Arthur bit back the retort that his maternal grandfather had been in the coal trade, his parents in gold mines, his wife in the hog business, his children half American, he himself in the motor trade, and what’s more she was talking codswallop. It was out of character. Who was she trying to impress? A detective inspector? He feared it must be so. Could she possibly be in love with him? His own mother? The Countess and the Policeman? That would make a dreadful headline.

  ‘I do remember, Mama,’ said Arthur. ‘You will not let me forget. And “The Motoring Viscount” certainly has its appeal. The Jehu Automobile Company, brought to you by courtesy of The Motoring Viscount. Pretty good.’

  ‘Just keep the Dilberne name out of it,’ said her Ladyship, and they walked off.

  He looked after them as they went away. His mother was carrying a pretty little lace and gold parasol. He wished for once that she was more like other mothers, dull and plain. Alternatively he wished she was more like Alice Keppel, granddaughter of a Greek peasant girl, who yet consorted with kings, not commoners. The ground went gently uphill along the first stretch of the oak avenue and he saw the Inspector take the Countess’s arm, as any gentleman would do. Except he was not a gentleman.

  And then the Jehu was at the door.

  ‘But you’re female,’ he exclaimed, opening it to a young woman who reminded him of someone – the plentiful fair hair, pink cheeks and innocent mouth, the startled blue eyes and slightly raised eyebrows – as if she had just met a man who planned to take advantage of her and she was trying to make up her mind as to whether or not to let him. She did not look, in fact, at all like a lady. She looked like Flora, whom he would rather not remember: all having so nearly ended in disaster.

  Once in his foolish youth when there was time for these things he had thought he was in love with Flora. But then he had met Minnie, the mother of his sons, and realized what love was truly about. Not sex, but family. When this girl stretched out her hand to shake his it was ungloved, and her wrist was bare – smooth, soft, silky and gently veined, a delicate blue tracery just underneath the whiteness of the skin. Her fingers were cool. Flora always had cool hands and a cool bottom. But what was he thinking about? This young person was one of a very new breed, a lady journalist, and a cunning one at that. She had given no warning, had let him assume that she was a man. No doubt she had adopted the name Evelyn to that very end. Another deceiving little minx. Women snared one. One must be careful. One thought one had no time for sex any more, but one could be deceiving oneself.

  He glanced quickly at Reginald – Reginald must have encountered Flora once or twice when dropping him off at her Mayfair flat – to see whether he had noticed the similarity. He thought perhaps he had – he was staring into space with so set an expression on his face he was surely trying not to laugh. But perhaps that was merely Arthur’s own guilty imagining. Enough that Reginald had gone to the station to pick up a man, found an unescorted young woman in his place, and one with obvious attractions, and delivered her unchaperoned into the clutches of a man. But either way Reginald was to be trusted: he did not gossip.

  Indiscretion

  30th September 1905, The Servants’ Hall

  Cook served an early tea. His Lordship was coming down for the rest of the weekend, so there would be an extra course of roast beef for dinner. He liked to eat as soon as he got in. Cook would have to fire up the stove and that took time. New gas ovens had been installed by the Southampton Gas, Light and Coke Company, and were well able to deal with a fancy eight-course dinner for thirty, but Cook did not trust them with a classic beef roast. The old iron range had been kept on, so she would use that. Beef needed a really fierce oven if it was to be properly sealed: the new namby-pamby steel ovens with their thermometers were all well and good, but nothing beat the back of the hand and experience. A good roast was burned on the outside with the fat well shrivelled up, brown on the inner layers and pinker and moister the further in you got.

  Digby had telephoned to say his Lordship would be down by train as soon as he was free at the House. Lily had left the phone giggling.

  ‘He told his Lordship about The Cardinal’s Hat,’ she told the assembled staff. ‘Digby reckons he’ll be going this afternoon. He’s fed up with her Ladyship. I’m not surprised.’

  ‘That’s enough of that,’ said Mr Neville.

  ‘What with Mr Strachan and all,’ said Lily.

  ‘And even less of that,’ said Mrs Neville. ‘I daresay they’ll be keeping to their separate rooms.’

  ‘I should hope so,’ said Lily. ‘I was going in with her cup of tea this morning, but she came out and told me not to bother. I reckon she had the Inspector in there.’

  ‘God will curse you for telling such wicked lies,’ said Elsie.

  ‘So I took it to Lady Minnie instead and she was in a right state. All Master Arthur does is leave her alone. I reckon she’d be better off running away. She doesn’t fit in and never will. And she knows it.’

  ‘She made such a pretty bride,’ said Elsie. ‘She loves him. And those dear little children. They’re just going through a bad patch, the way married couples do.’

  ‘Not that you’d know much about that,’ said Lily.

  ‘You’re just in a bad mood,’ said Elsie, ‘because you’re having to go up to London to talk to Agnes, just as his Lordship is coming down here. I know you.’

  ‘You’re the one who ought to wash their mouth out with soap and water,’ said Lily, ‘if you’re implying what I think you’re implying.’

  Reginald came in from the Jehu and trumped them both. He helped himself to ham on the bone. He had missed his lunch.

  ‘You’ll never guess who turned up at the Gatehouse for Lord Arthur today,’ said Reginald. ‘Bold as brass and still overflowing, if you get my meaning. Putting herself forward as a gentleman. Fat chance. Miss Flora of Half Moon Street, not looking a day older.’

  ‘Not that one? Not that Flora?’ asked Mr Neville. ‘The one he shared?’

  ‘Well, I’m not quite certain,’ admitted Reginald, ‘but she’s a dead ringer. I left them there together. And her Ladyship walked back to the house with Mr Strachan.’

  ‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ said Cook. ‘What’s the matter with everyone? One thing after another.’

  ‘Royal visits are always unlucky,’ said Mrs Neville. ‘Everything was going so well until that was announced.’

  ‘Never wise to throw out old furniture,’ said Mr Neville. ‘In my experience where things go, people follow after.’

  Arthur Resists Temptation

  30th September 1905, The Gatehouse

  After Reginald had left in the Jehu, the lady journalist stepped inside the Gatehouse. She looked round appreciatively, and sat down in one of the Liberty chairs.

  ‘Ah, Mackmurdo,’ she said. She was evidently knowledgeable and cultured, and refrained from crossing her legs. She might even be a lady. She was wearing a nice crisp white shirt tucked firmly into a broad belt, so that her bosom appeared to advantage. It was quite plump. Women with tiny waists often had an unfortunately small bosom. She had no wedding ring, yet came unescorted. It was difficult these days to judge class or status. When she spoke it was with an educated, even refined voice, and quite melodious. Flora had tended to screech when excited. Miss Braintree would never screech. He put Flora from his mind.

  Miss Braintree seemed quite pleased with what she saw.

  ‘A strange place for an office, Lord Hedleigh, but most attractive an
d I daresay perfectly functional. It is so pleasant to get out of London for the day. The city has become so grimy and crowded.’

  She spoke as if they were friends, when they were not. It was a very female strategy, thus to claim acquaintance when there was none. They were unchaperoned. He wondered if he should ask her to leave and send a male replacement but decided against it. Miss Braintree had the power of the press behind her and it was important that the Jehu Automobile Company was not represented in the Mirror as old-fashioned and stuffy. She took out the notebook journalists carried with them these days for their strange squiggles. Her fingers were long and neatly clipped. He imagined where the fingers would travel if they were in bed together and banished the thought as best he could. Perhaps he should ring up the house and get Minnie to come down at once and bring him back to his senses? But then he remembered how Minnie hated coming down to the Gatehouse, and he failed to lift the telephone. He would simply face the new world: Miss Braintree would listen and he would talk.

  Miss Braintree warned him they had little more than an hour together and then she was catching the quarter-past-one train back to the station the better to meet her deadline. She had, she said, taken the liberty of asking his driver to call back for her at one o’clock. Careful not to be misconstrued, he refrained from saying a lot could be achieved in an hour.

  ‘I thought lady journalists only wrote about fashion and how to look after babies,’ he said, and if there was a hint of derision in his voice he did not care. Women who aped men must expect to be treated like a man.

  ‘Many of them do,’ she said, ‘but I don’t. I write about the beauty of automobiles.’

  If only he could hear Minnie say such a thing. Miss Braintree asked him for his views on Herbert Austin’s new plant at Longbridge and his plan to mass-produce a new automobile, the Phaeton, to be on sale as early as next Spring. Was it feasible? Was it true?