The New Countess (15 page)

The trouble was, she was. If she were unfaithful Arthur could divorce her and find someone more to his liking, someone more like a well-greased engine. It would have to be done through the English Crown Court and with a great deal of publicity, and there was no way she would keep the children. Husband and children, in the eyes of English law, went together. At home in Illinois if you divorced you could keep the children. Chicago might be windy and ripe with the smell of the stockyards but it was good to its children. Julia Lathrop, the great reformer, was a friend of her mother’s and believed that the child’s inalienable right was to the mother’s, not the father’s, care. Motherhood, Julia argued, was the most important calling in the world.

Forget nannies, forget her future as a Countess and mistress of Dilberne, forget the threat of Eton for her sons – those icy corridors, the harsh treatment which made men of boys – the kind of men who ran the world but who thought women were engines designed for procreation – just get the children back to Chicago. Forget Dilberne Court and its renovation, forget the chance to meet the King; just run away. She had run away from Stanton Turlock. That had worked.

There was only one real problem. She loved Arthur and did not want to leave him. He deserved to be left, but that was another matter. If he walked into the room and got into bed with her she would throw her arms around him and be the happiest woman in the world. Really, marriage was a terrible burden.

Edgar came running into the room and held out his feet for his mother to take his heavy shoes off. She did so. Connor tottered in on the nursemaid’s arm. He was on his feet at last. There would be something to tell Arthur.

‘Nanny says don’t over-excite Master Connor. Nanny says his tummy’s upset.’

‘Thank you, Molly,’ said Minnie. ‘Or Maureen, as the case might be.’

‘Molly,’ said the girl, who looked rather spotty, heavy and plain, though perfectly amiable. Isobel had hired her without consulting Minnie. All the Dilberne nannies for centuries had been called Margaret and the nursemaids Molly or Maureen.

‘The name goes with the job,’ Isobel had explained to Minnie, when Minnie had said she’d prefer to call the nursery staff by their real names.

‘But why?’ asked Isobel.

‘For fear of reprisals,’ Minnie had replied, half joking. Isobel had just looked baffled. Four years on, and the nursery staff were still Margaret, Molly and Maureen, and Minnie had little appetite for jokes.

‘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.