The New Countess Read online

  ‘And what on Earth has Isobel done with this room?’ said Ettie. ‘It simply won’t do. There used to be a perfectly good Rembrandt above the fireplace. Now there’s a strange daub of a lot of swimmers about to jump into water which doesn’t look in the least like water.’

  ‘My dear,’ said Alice. ‘We’re lucky there’s a fireplace at all. People keep taking them out and replacing them with radiators. Personally I don’t mind the bathers. I think it was little Minnie who chose it.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Ettie. ‘Little Minnie. Least said, soonest mended.’

  ‘Quite so,’ said Alice. Ettie was having an affair with Balfour, everyone said. Constance Ripon had observed that since Balfour was the cleverest man in England it was only right that he should have Ettie Desborough as his mistress, since she was the cleverest woman in England.

  ‘Unless we count you, of course, Alice,’ Constance had been kind enough to add, thus spoiling a good line.

  Not surprising, thought Alice, if Isobel seemed to be a little tense; overshadowed, as anyone would be, by the most vivacious and brilliant women in the land.

  And then word came that the King had finally arrived. All moved to the doors. Bertie had arrived with Ponsonby in one of his Daimlers – he had bought seven in the year – and also with Detective Inspector Strachan, who seemed to be in high royal favour, though it had been rumoured he had messed up the Dilberne abduction, which no one was meant to know about but everyone did. The King’s security cabal followed after – five strong young men who vanished into the servants’ entrance. Strachan stayed with the King. Life became quite complicated these days. Who went where was no longer clearly defined.

  To love a king was a wonderful thing. It was magic; a holy thing, like the love of a priestess for her God, a child for her father. You loved the greatest living being in the world; you encompassed the orb and the sceptre in your love: it was a great comforting blanket which had fallen on you, and him, protecting and inspiring, and kept you warm and safe for ever. The heart soared. I love the King. The King loves me. It had happened on the first day they met. He was only the Prince of Wales, then. It was on 27th February 1898. She was twenty-nine, and married to George. He was fifty-six, and married to the future Queen of England. He’d come to dinner. Their souls met. Both had mistaken it for something different. He came to her room at a house party at Cassel’s place in Moulton Paddocks a few days later. She had been expecting it. The Prince of Wales! It was immensely exciting. He had parted from Daisy Warwick, whose politics and behaviour were increasingly strange. To sleep with the future King of England – to know how he cried out: that was the only way to understand a man – and the cachet was great. If the Prince wanted you, everyone wanted you. It had been base enough.

  She had lain in bed waiting in her whore’s underwear – for that was what it was, for all it had been designed by Worth and cost the Earth – and the Prince, this great burly magnificent creature, had stripped to his union suit, and simply lay on the bed beside her and said:

  ‘This was the only way I could get to talk to you without other people interrupting. Do you mind?’ and she had felt a great relief and said:

  ‘Not at all, Your Majesty,’ and he had said:

  ‘Bertie.’

  And that was that.

  They had talked and talked and touch was pleasant, and there was a little childish rolling about and slipping of limbs between limbs to get comfortable but that was all they needed.

  She was the youngest of nine children; he was the eldest of nine. It seemed to be a connection. He understood the pattern of rivalries, the weight of expectation, the painful allocation of love in a large family: he understood what it was to be married to George, a mere Honourable in a world of my Lords and Sirs: she understood what it was to have been married off by a mother to a deaf Danish girl who was all charm and no brain. He talked about the Indian waiter, ‘the Munshi’, who seemed to have replaced him in his mother’s eyes: that made him excitable and distressed. She realized how emotional he was, how easily tears sprang to his eyes, how his face lit up when he broke into a smile. How he would cry and smile at the same time.

  It occurred to her to recite ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ to calm him down. Her father’s favourite poem; he was an army man. She knew it by heart:

  Half a league, half a league,

  Half a league onward,

  All in the valley of Death

  Rode the six hundred.

  ‘Forward, the Light Brigade!

  ‘Charge for the guns!’ he said:

  Into the valley of Death

  Rode the six hundred.

  ‘Forward, the Light Brigade!’

  Was there a man dismay’d?

  Not tho’ the soldier knew

  Someone had blunder’d:

  Theirs not to make reply,

  Theirs not to reason why,

  Theirs but to do and die:

  Into the valley of Death

  Rode the six hundred.

  ‘That was better than sex. What a wonderful poem!’ he said. After that they got together whenever they could. He healed her; she healed him. Everyone thought she was his mistress, but being the King’s mistress was no bad thing. Anything, frankly, in Society was better than being a mere Mrs. Miss at least held the promise of future change but once a boring Mrs, always a boring Mrs. Mr Balfour could get away with not being Lord Balfour because obviously he would get to being that in the end, but George would never be Lord Keppel.

  But Mrs Keppel, King’s Mistress, was title enough; let people think what they would; she would never disabuse them. Occasionally Alexandra raised her eyebrows and sniffed a little but it was Alice’s opinion that she knew well enough what went on – that is to say, these days, precisely nothing – and if she was jealous of anything it was of time spent with her husband in intelligent conversation and Alice’s understanding of politics and statesmanship – not the Queen’s forte. And if she, Alexandra, wanted to present herself as wronged, she had grounds enough in Alice’s existence.

  The bedroom Alice and George Keppel shared that night at Dilberne was comfort itself. Alice was even quite impressed: one whole wall was taken up with a capacious wardrobe, beautifully finished and polished in burr walnut, with rank upon rank of drawers, compartments and brass rails and hooks, a real filing cabinet for garments – handkerchiefs, ties, gloves, spats, veils, scarves, hats – a paradise for Agnes. A soft new bed and mattress – no four-poster nonsense with dusty hangings and canopy – but one missed the feel of country, where you’d wake to ice flowers on the insides of windows and the floors were cold on one’s bare toes. Here the heavy iron radiators gurgled, groaned and spluttered through the night. She missed the clatter of fire tongs, and the smell of apple wood burning in the fireplace, and flames that seemed to speak to you. The bathroom was well lit, so you could see yourself properly in the mirror, but the old latticed windows had been recently replaced by metal ones – practical for lunatic asylums where the inmates might escape – and she had some in her own basement area in London to guard against burglars – but really, deep in the country, in a Jacobean manor? She said as much to George, as they got undressed.

  ‘It might be the police wallah’s suggestion, of course,’ George remarked. ‘He’s a great one for locking and barring. And of course it might all be in your honour, Alice. Where the King goes so do you, and long may it last.’ Sometimes she would like her husband to be just a touch more jealous, if only for form’s sake, but he never was.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Alice. ‘I think it just is that Isobel has no class. She tries too hard. Her father started life as a coal miner and the mother was some kind of courtesan. She’s simply not born to it.’

  ‘You were, of course,’ said he. ‘You’ve come down in the world. You should never have married me.’

  It was true enough. She had been born impoverished in Duntreath Castle, home of her forebears since the fourteenth century, an entitlement older than any mere
Dilberne. It was not in George’s nature to make money. But she had enough for herself now, thanks to the King’s and Sir Ernest Cassel’s help and the sudden blossoming of the Congo rubber trade.

  She laughed and said:

  ‘Marrying you was the best thing I ever did. We have two lovely daughters and are happy.’ It was true enough.

  Later that night she crept along the corridor to Bertie’s room, not taking too much trouble not to be seen. The corridors were warm and carpeted for which she was thankful. In Blenheim she had almost frozen to death on her way to him. She only stayed a short time: he was tired and his poor stiff knee was giving him trouble. He was sad, too, thinking of his sister Victoria who had died four years since, victim of her own son the Kaiser, who had refused her proper medical care. Sadness easily slipped over into anger, which he found easier to bear. He ranted against his nephew Wilhelm. She lay beside him and recited a soothing verse or two from Tennyson’s Maud.

  ’Tis a morning pure and sweet,

  And a dewy splendour falls

  On the little flower that clings

  To the turrets and the walls;

  ’Tis a morning pure and sweet,

  And the light and shadow fleet;

  She is walking in the meadow,

  And the woodland echo rings;

  In a moment we shall meet;

  She is singing in the meadow,

  And the rivulet at her feet

  Ripples on in light and shadow

  To the ballad that she sings.

  He fell asleep, no longer angry, just sad. Poor Bertie.

  A Day of Broken Records

  16th December 1905, The Dilberne Estate

  In the morning George was up and out before dawn, the gleam of killing in his eye. He was a good shot, just not so lavish with his pellets as the King, let alone Ripon – or so single-minded as either, but good-looking, well-behaved, a generous tipper and popular with the men. The whole village would come out on these occasions, wives and children to flank the beaters, control the dogs, and help with the picking up. If the shoot was good and the birds flew high their cooking pots and ovens would be full for weeks.

  Alice breakfasted in her room, and took her scented bath – George liked a simple violet, the King La Rose Jacqueminot from Paris, and Agnes used the latter without asking. Alice had her hair washed and put up, and dressed in a new wonderfully low-cut Worth tea gown of purple velvet and silk which she knew would create comment, although almost within the hour she would have to change into a rather more cumbersome and sportif tweed suit for lunch. The ladies were to join the Guns in the marquee – Isobel had really outdone herself – walkways had been built through woodland and moor so the lunch would be brought to the Guns, not the Guns to the lunch. Daylight was short and precious. The ladies must be there, in their sporty tweeds and furs, to admire the splendour of the bags and the prowess of the hunters.

  Should the day remain as fine as it promised to be Alice would stay on after lunch to keep the King company and assist his loader. She watched from the metal windows as the party gathered outside the front door. It was a frosty morning; horses whinnied and stamped. The Guns and their dogs piled into the assembling carriages; Strachan manned the King’s wheeled chair. It would be tough going to the butts, Alice thought, once the walkways stopped and the rough ground began. The King was a heavy man, but then Strachan was not exactly frail. There had been some talk about Isobel and Strachan, but Alice dismissed it as servants’ gossip. It was far too unlikely. The police cabal piled into one of the Daimlers: what possible likelihood could there be of an assassination attempt in such company? Balfour was far too imaginative. At least Campbell-Bannerman would just huff and puff and not fuss. Bertie had his brave face on: the one he put on for his subjects, benign and stoical. It would be better if he stayed at home in the warm and rested his poor stiff knee and admired the ladies – they would love that – but of course he would not. He wanted to outdo Ripon, Willy Desborough, George, and Dilberne too in the final bag count. It was an odd ambition for a man resolved to bring peace and concord to all Europe and so far doing well; surely he had nothing to prove.

  She wondered if Ettie would join Willy at his peg after lunch but she thought probably not. She would be too sorry for the poor dead birds, and stay and flirt with Ponsonby. Of all the husbands, Isobel had probably done best. Robert shot birds if he had to, not because he had to – a bon mot she must remember. He had other things to occupy his mind, like the state of the colonies, the revolution in Russia, the entente cordiale, and by all accounts a girl from Brazil. She rather liked him herself.

  Robert Dilberne, helped by Ponsonby, was now counting off vehicles, dog handlers, followers – and the Guns themselves: he was a good organizer, smooth and friendly. It was a jolly scene as the dawn broke, what with the barking of the dogs and the snorting horses, the cold crisp blast of the new day, the air of expectancy, a few brave ladies waving them off. Isobel was there, looking delightful in mink wrap and outsize muff.

  A mannish young woman she hadn’t seen before, booted and hatted, was going out to join Robert – Alice realized it must be the daughter, Rosina. The King had spoken of her: it seemed Strachan was quite the gossip and a source of entertainment to the King. Isobel had thrown the girl out over a parrot – an African grey: wonderful birds – and her publication of a rude book about the sexual habits of the Australian natives which Longman’s had just published and which had made quite a splash. The King had read it – or at any rate opened and closed it: he’d met the daughter and liked her – but then he did like intelligent women. He was, Alice sometimes thought, a frustrated intellectual doomed to live amongst dolts. The Queen had flicked through the book and said it was disgusting, but then Alexandra would.

  The King, in one of those acts of casual kindness which so endeared him to people, had reacted by congratulating Rosina in public on her fortitude and likening her to a female Joseph Banks whose subject was people not plants, which took the wind out of her critics’ sails and neutralized all outrage. At any rate Rosina seemed cheerful enough to be back on speaking terms with her mother, even pecking her on the cheek goodbye and planning to go out with her father for the day’s shooting. The parrot was on her shoulder, to the amusement of the guests, but to Alice’s alarm. It was such a chilly morning.

  Alice threw her ermine over her tea gown, thrust on slippers, clip-clopped down the stairs and out the doors and was in time to waylay Rosina.

  ‘Rosina, isn’t it?’ she said to Rosina. ‘Isn’t it rather cold for the bird? It must be below freezing!’

  ‘Too right, mate! Too right!’ said the bird. ‘Votes for women!’

  Rosina said the day would warm up soon, and she would take Pappagallo to the marquee if the dear love seemed unhappy. But did Alice know about parrots?

  ‘I have a pair,’ said Alice, ‘I adore them. They need to be kept at an even temperature.’

  ‘He coped with Australia,’ said Rosina, ‘where it froze by night and boiled by day. But you may be right. Will you take him for the day?’

  Alice said she would and if it warmed up by lunchtime she’d take him to the marquee.

  ‘Too right, mate!’ said the parrot and hopped onto Alice’s shoulder.

  ‘Just keep him out of Cook’s way,’ said Rosina. ‘She’ll make parrot pie. And that goes for Mama too.’ She was a nice bright girl, thought Alice, if wary.

  Lunch in the marquee was excellent: country cooking, none of this French-chef carry-on so many served these days, she heard Ripon say. Alice had ventured out with Pappagallo, for whom Cook had sent up a bowl of macadamia nuts, presumably as some kind of conciliatory gesture to the daughter of the house. The bird, seeing his owner, abandoned Alice and with another cry of ‘Too right, mate!’ fluttered over to Rosina’s shoulder.

  There were six courses only for lunch, but they were quickly and efficiently served, as a mere an hour and a half was allowed. Caviar, clear game soup, John Dory, prawns in aspic, roast duc
ks and iced pudding – the latter a triumph. The old icehouse had been restored and stocked. Isobel, on balance, forgetting the dreadful bamboo and the satin flowers, had done really quite well.

  Valets were in attendance to remove and replace wet mackintoshes and leggings, though the ground had been quite hard and dry. The bag had been good, if not spectacular. But the King had outdone Ripon by twenty-eight birds and Desborough by thirteen, the rest lagging far, far behind, and was triumphant, and over champagne Alice regaled him and Strachan with news of the day – all having left too early for The Times. There was further political trouble in Russia, strikes and massacres – which sent Strachan prowling the outskirts in a nervous agitation.

  ‘I told him,’ Bertie said, ‘I told the Tsar it would end in tears. Give them an inch and they take an ell.’

  Alice reported that Alfred Walter Williams the painter had died and Miss Christabel Pankhurst was still in prison.

  ‘Good,’ said the King, and called out to the Inspector – ‘And keep a good lookout for angry women in the undergrowth, Inspector. None of us are safe any more!’