The New Countess Read online

  ‘Oh please,’ Minnie said lately to Isobel, when little Connor was running round making a noise and nuisance of himself, ‘don’t slap him. He’s just being a little boy,’ and Isobel had just gone ahead and slapped him.

  ‘For Heaven’s sake,’ Isobel had said, ‘how else are you going to make a child behave? What do you want them to be? Little Red Indians?’

  And her mother-in-law had been spending more and more time at Dilberne, seemingly intent on pulling the house to bits. Arthur and Minnie had to move their bedroom to the green room while Isobel had the plumbing done and the old tree-of-life wallpaper stripped and replaced by a new flock stripe in pink and white from Heal’s. Minnie had demurred.

  ‘It’s fresh and modern, but pink and white? With the old beams?’

  ‘Well, you weren’t there to ask,’ Isobel had all but snapped. ‘Chasing off like that after Rosina. What a waste of time that was!’

  Rosina had been to visit her mother in Belgrave Square, Minnie knew, but apparently it had ended badly. Isobel had not actually said, ‘Never mention her name again in my presence,’ but she might as well have. Minnie asked for Rosina’s address so she could write but Isobel said:

  ‘I have no idea of her whereabouts, Minnie. And since she has not left me her card I have no intention of chasing after her to find out. You could ask Inspector Strachan if you really want to know but I don’t advise it.’

  Inspector Strachan had been recommended by the King as the man to advise Isobel how best to secure the new up-to-date Dilberne Court against thieves, flood and fire. The household had already been woken in the night several times by the gong which now sounded whenever a trip wire powered an electrical solenoid, and once or twice by day when Connor discovered how it was done. The Inspector was quite a frequent visitor, with his Lordship’s assent, and very pleasant and friendly, but Rosina’s whereabouts were scarcely his concern.

  Minnie asked Arthur, but Arthur put on his pompous, fatherly, closed face and said: ‘Oh, forget Rosina, Minnie. Let sleeping dogs lie. She made an uneasy ally at the best of times.’ One way and another Minnie herself felt reluctant to press too closely. And after all, she too had been hurt and disappointed when Rosina had failed to drive back with her to Belgrave Square. It had been all but rude of her to go back to London the way she had with her friends. If the family had now set their face against her – in the same way, she remembered, they had once set their face against the orphaned Princess Adela – she was in Rome and must do as the Romans did.

  But Rosina was fun. Rosina in the East Wing would have been company for Minnie in the West. Rosina would have come to church and knelt in the same pew as Minnie and Arthur, and giggled with them when the priest betrayed his Papist sentiments, voiced her outrage to him as they filed out of the church as to why in ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’ brothers were to lift their voices in song but no mention of sisters. No one at Dilberne was ever enraged, or showed themselves to be, and Minnie was forgetting that it was even possible.

  She would quite like another child, a girl to be a companion, but the way things were going with Arthur it was beginning to look unlikely. Tonight Arthur would get home after dinner, look in to say good-night to his sleeping children – Nanny Margaret never let him wake them – take cold meats and chutney in their rooms, talk a little about shaft transmission and wheel gearing, call for Thompson his valet to help him pull off his boots and pick up his scattered clothes and then climb into bed and fall promptly asleep. That would be that for the day. He would stretch out a companionable hand when she joined him and she had no sense that he didn’t love her – just that he was exhausted. He never slept in his dressing room – she would have to be grateful for that, she supposed. Some women would be glad enough to be left alone and spared a baby but she was a different kind of woman.

  When Isobel came down from Belgrave Square it would be with a bevy of architects and designers, but they seldom had much to say for themselves, or else, more likely, saw no advantage in making themselves pleasant to Minnie, she being married and a mother. If the Earl came it was mostly to see how the shoot was coming along for the Autumn – foxes were being quite a pest this year – or to talk about the Matumbi rebellion at Samanga, and he would think the less of her if she admitted that she had no idea what he was talking about.

  She never seemed to meet anyone young and lively. Arthur had his cluster of workshops near the Big Gates at the end of the oak drive and had moved the motor works offices into the Gatehouse itself – modernized by Norman Shaw in 1890 from the original Palladian for Robert’s father; everything, everything, had a history and the past was always being used to justify the present – so Minnie seldom met his colleagues and if she did they talked only about transmission gears and exhaust valves. Since Minnie’s ill-fated excursion to Tilbury Isobel had not invited Minnie to Belgrave Square at all. It seemed Isobel no longer wanted advice: she wanted the new, improved Dilberne Court to be hers and hers alone. Yet when the Earl died – God forbid – would not she, Minnie, be Countess and Isobel relegated to Dowager Countess and no longer be in charge? Should not she at least be consulted? Some things were owed to history, and this debt did not involve conceding to Mrs Keppel’s taste in all things bamboo and bright. Plumbing and wiring was one thing, flock wallpaper and chintz another. She was amongst Philistines.

  She thought about Diana and her brother Anthony: they were her kind of people, but they’d flashed before her eyes like a tantalizing mirage, only to be snatched away by fate. Anthony had curious eyes, dark fringed and almond shaped. She had taken Thoreau’s Walden out of the Boots Library in Brighton as soon as she got home to Dilberne, and read it and loved it but there was no one to talk about it with. Arthur liked the way gears worked, not the way trees grew.

  She hated the way she was finding fault with everything and everyone. And now they were singing the last verse of the Reverend Stacey’s favourite hymn about the Mercy Seat.

  Poor tempest-tossèd soul, be still;

  My promised grace receive;

  ’Tis Jesus speaks – I must, I will,

  I can, I do believe.

  Well, like Mr John Newton the slave trader, she was certainly tempest-tossed. She remembered what her mother always said: ‘God helps those who help themselves.’

  She would have to help herself if she wanted this dark cloud of sorrow to pass, and she would. I must, I will, I can…

  His Lordship Gets Away

  20th August 1905, The House of Lords

  Reginald was waiting in the trap when his Lordship left the church. He was to catch the train back to London. The Ngindo tribesmen in German East Africa were causing trouble again – it was primarily a German problem but unrest had a habit of spreading. Lansdowne of the Foreign Office had called him to the Cabinet table – along with Sunny Marlborough and Alfred Lyttleton – for a consultation; the last thing Lansdowne wanted was a premature showdown with the Kaiser, but the excesses of the German governor, Peters, must be challenged in some way if a rebellion was to be avoided. Peters’ tendency was to slaughter not negotiate, finding the latter tedious. Better for him to ship water into drought areas and relieve famine, but cheaper and easier to slaughter enraged hordes of savages who believed that millet and castor-oil fetishes turned bullets to air. Stirring up hatred was no way to govern. Boundaries were lines on a map and tribal areas overlapped. The British Luo territories might be next to go. No doubt the white man had to take up his burden, as Kipling was so fond of telling the Americans they had to do, but did it really have to be on a Sunday morning, thus depriving a man of his Sunday lunch with the family? These days Robert looked back almost wistfully at his days in Fisheries: nothing was ever urgent about the mating habits of trout: salmon with machetes lined no river banks.

  The train failed to stop at Dilberne Halt – the initial agreement with the Railway Company that any passing train must stop there when requested was now some sixty years old and these days was often honoured only in the breach. The Com
pany had offered to buy the rights back. The Earl and Countess were willing enough – it was a bore forever having to call up the Portsmouth stationmaster when one wanted a train, and there were other stations not far away – but Arthur was determined that his father should hold on to the rights. Easy access to the Jehu works was essential, and was not the village itself growing to meet the needs of the new plant? Rather, Dilberne should become a regular stop on the Portsmouth to Waterloo line. So if the railway management failed to remember that the train had been asked to stop, and it simply steamed on through, that was not surprising. Reginald had to drive on to Petersfield, and his Lordship had to catch the next train. He was just in time for the four o’clock appointment, only to discover Lansdowne and Sunny had been called away to meet with the King and the meeting had been cancelled.

  Ponsonby, who had broken the news, took Robert along to the bar and bought him a whisky.

  ‘I hope the King has something of importance to say,’ said Robert, ‘other than whether the shooting at Bowood or Blenheim will be better this year.’

  ‘The King is much exercised about Lansdowne’s wisdom in backing France rather than Germany in the Moroccan matter,’ said Ponsonby, a little stiffly. ‘He has received a letter from his nephew the Kaiser and sees trouble ahead.’

  ‘And so the fortunes of our East African protectorate fade into insignificance,’ said Robert.

  ‘Up to a point, yes,’ said Ponsonby. ‘Britain can cope with any number of little wars. A big war between the major powers is surely a different matter. The King is right to be concerned. He is wise when it comes to matters of war and peace: he sees the wider picture, and is as good a diplomat as he is a shot.’

  Robert thought that was not saying much. He had seen too many sportsmen put their birds the King’s way, and the King simply not notice, preferring to believe the myth of his own making, that he was the keenest marksman in the land. He was good with a gun and a stag, fairly good with a gun and a sluggish pheasant, not very good with a gun and a lively partridge, and with a mouthful of a woodcock to destroy, downright bad, let the beaters do what they could.

  ‘Little wars lead to greater wars,’ Robert said. ‘And what goes on in East Africa should not be a matter of indifference to His Majesty.

  ‘You are very censorious all of a sudden, Dilberne,’ observed Ponsonby and smiled as he spoke. Well, thought Robert, times were changing. He was a charming fellow and it was possible to overlook what once would have seemed impertinence. No ‘your Lordship’, no ‘my Lord’, just ‘Dilberne’, fellow to fellow.

  ‘No doubt if one his sisters had married some naked African war lord rather than the Kaiser,’ Ponsonby went on, ‘he would be interested enough. His Majesty’s skill in diplomacy, I realized long ago, comes from family. He is big brother to the nations: he understands the foibles of rulers and the patterns of jealousy between them. He is dealing with his brothers and cousins by marriage. But he is coming down to see you at Christmas: you must tell him your concerns then.’

  Robert refrained from saying that by then it would be too late – Luoland would either be in flames or it would not, and Lansdowne’s problems with Germany would be insuperable or they would not. He had done what he could. He would take Ponsonby’s lead and talk about lighter matters. He said he could only hope the shooting would be good enough for the King: the foxes had been very lively in the Spring and had wreaked havoc amongst the nesting birds.

  Ponsonby said that was not a matter of great concern. The King would get his fill of good bags at Sandringham at the beginning of December when he and Alexandra celebrated their birthdays: he would not be in a competitive mood: His Majesty just hoped to spend some pleasant and relaxing hours with Mrs Keppel, before returning to the bosom of his family for Christmas. Robert was quite taken aback. It was one thing to be friends with a monarch, another to find that friendship used as a cover for clandestine arrangements. It would certainly not be prudent to repeat the remark to Isobel. She was so taken up with the matter of a weekend four months in the future that she seemed to have entirely lost her sense of humour.

  ‘But I like Dilberne Court as it is,’ he’d protested, ‘shabby and old-fashioned. What you have done to Belgrave Square is the talk of London Society. Can’t you leave it at that?’

  She could not. He resented it. He was a busy man. He needed peace and familiarity not continuous novelty. Wherever he looked in Belgrave Square there seemed to be swatches of fabric or reams of wallpaper and strange etiolated young men discussing the advantages of one and the disadvantages of the other. Dilberne Court was even worse. Familiar walls would suddenly not be there at all: what had once been a dressing room was now a bathroom. She had already told him she meant to put the King in one wing and the Keppels in another.

  ‘Dilberne is a family home,’ she’d said. ‘I simply do not want any of the creeping-down-corridors-in-the-middle-of-the-night behaviour that used to go on in the fast set. There was no way I might simply refuse the Keppels, of course, once you had seen fit to invite the King in the way that you did, but if they are here together, that’s that.’

  He said he hoped she might reconsider: he doubted that much ‘went on’ down the corridors these days other than conversation with old friends and relaxation: the King was not a young man, nor an agile one. But her Ladyship would not relent.

  ‘I will not be party to it, and nor should you,’ she said. ‘To place them near together is to invite the staff to gossip.’

  Isobel had been much unsettled, Robert surmised, by Rosina’s sudden return from the Antipodes and her equally sudden departure from Belgrave Square. What exactly had gone on between his wife and their daughter she would not tell him in detail. Enough that Rosina had ‘behaved quite dreadfully’. It had involved Rosina’s ruddy parrot, that much was clear: dreadful bird – and a book Rosina had written while away on the habits of the Australian aboriginals. Robert thought Isobel worried unnecessarily: it was unlikely to find a publisher – who would be interested? He was sorry to have missed Rosina – but she was in good health and spirits enough to defy her mother, and to all accounts well provided for. She would turn up again when she saw fit. He had other things to worry about.

  When he had been in Fisheries, he reflected, his family and their troubles had preoccupied him. Now he was in the Colonial Office and responsible for the fate of millions, he had less patience with their problems. Power was a mixed blessing. Great men were seldom sentimental men.

  In the meanwhile Ponsonby was talking to him about protecting the Monarch. Now his Lordship had a minute or two to spare, due to the unexpected postponement of the meeting, perhaps his Lordship would have a word with Inspector Strachan. ‘His Lordship’ now came to Ponsonby’s lips with ease, thought Robert. Perhaps his own slight raise of the eyebrows at the secretary’s earlier familiarity had been noted. Ponsonby was an astute young man. When an instant or two later the Inspector came to the bar, it even occurred to Robert that the meeting with Lansdowne had been cancelled on Ponsonby’s instructions simply to make possible this more important meeting.

  The other drawback to becoming a man of power, reflected Robert, was that you saw conspiracies everywhere. He dismissed the suspicion as unworthy or at any rate irrelevant, and concentrated on what Strachan had to say; namely that the Inspector would send a few of his men down a couple of weeks before the visit to stay in the village, frequent the pub, and report on any untoward activities. Strachan said he would like to come down himself in a day or so to make a further assessment of the doors, windows and locks.

  ‘The place is in something of an uproar,’ said Robert. ‘Today’s door is tomorrow’s window and vice versa, but by all means come down and inspect. You have my permission, though, I must say, my good man, you do seem to be making a mountain out of a molehill. What can you be expecting on the soft chalk downs of Sussex? Anarchist gangs, crazed madmen, roaming socialists, white-slave traffickers?’

  Strachan did not smile, but then policemen we
re well known for having no sense of humour. The Inspector was a new kind of man: neither a gentleman nor in trade, but a public servant, as so many these days seemed to be, from County Council officers to School Boards, laying down the law from everything as to where one might build one’s house, educate one’s children or the speed at which one might drive one’s motor.

  As such the Inspector was granted respect but not quite trust, and certainly not familiarity.

  ‘We can be certain of nothing, my Lord,’ he said. ‘Today even the chalk downs are not safe from wastrels and destitute wanderers. They roam further and further afield. Your own farm labourers, I understand, have been conspiring to form a union of agricultural workers. There is unrest everywhere. One does not want the King to encounter any unpleasantness.’

  ‘Indeed not,’ said Robert. In the past Rosina had stirred up agitation amongst the estate workers, simply by asking them questions about their wages. They had compared notes and felt oppressed. The shift from gratitude to resentment could be swift and sudden. Some of his best beaters were beginning to ask for more money, on the grounds they could always apply for a job in Arthur’s workshops, and all Arthur had to say when he remonstrated was: ‘If they have the ability and talent, then they deserve what they get.’

  And when he queried the number of pheasant eggs per nest this season as compared to last, Alan, now the head gamekeeper, had given him an average of seventeen – not last year’s triumphant twenty – and blamed the frequent noisy blasts which accompanied the Jehu engines’ test runs.

  ‘When they hears it them birds takes to the air,’ he said, ‘instead of keeping their heads down and their eggs warm.’