Long Live the King (16 page)

Minnie’s Alarm

While the Princess sat in the church and contemplated the coffins of her parents and reflected on mortality, Minnie sat in Rosina’s room and sucked boiled sweets to settle her digestion. Rosina was being very kind and had sent Reginald down to the sweet shop in the village to bring back half a pound each of pear drops, ginger balls and lemon slices. Mrs Neville had decanted them from their paper bag into an elegant silver bowl before bringing them up to Rosina’s room, and smiled with special meaning at Minnie, and said, ‘I hope they help, your Ladyship. The ginger works best.’

There was no privacy, there never would be, ever again. That morning Arthur had gone down to his workshops as usual, but actually singing, seeing Minnie’s morning nausea as proof of what all had been waiting for. Minnie could no longer dismiss her early-morning queasiness as too much wine the night before or too hot blankets or too vigorous lovemaking – she was pregnant. She would have to tell Isobel who would tell his Lordship who would shake Arthur’s hand vigorously and congratulate him and say something like, ‘And about time too.’ She would write to her parents in Chicago and her mother would offer to come over to be by her side and Minnie didn’t want that. She certainly wanted Tessa to be by her side but she did not think she could bear Isobel’s impeccable politeness and raised eyebrows as Tessa spoke her mind on how the baby’s nursery should be a warm sunny room next to his parents’, not the cold attic quarters on the third floor which had served the Viscount and his brothers and sisters well enough, not to mention their forebears for the last four hundred years. It would be endless. She must tell her mother not to come.

Rosina agreed.

‘Just give in,’ she said. ‘You’ll never win. Put up with it, see it through. You will give birth to a future earl, not a baby. They will give it to a nanny and nursemaids to look after and bring it down for you to look at twice a day and send him off to boarding school when he’s seven, in case he grows up to be like Oscar Wilde. He will be very polite to you but he will love his nanny more.’

‘Never win!’ squawked the parrot. ‘Never win!’ and with a flurry of his beak joyfully scattered nut husks from his food tray far and wide, and then laughed uproariously.

Minnie laughed too; she couldn’t help it. She saw why Rosina kept the bird. It was good company. Mrs Neville was right. The ginger had helped. She felt quite normal.

‘But why are you so sure it will be a boy?’ she asked.

‘If it isn’t they won’t notice,’ she said. ‘Just put it to one side and wait for the son to come along. At least you’ve proved you’re not barren, that’s the main thing. If you only have girls the title will go to my Uncle Alfred in Bombay, if he outlives Arthur. Then if he dies without sons it would have been Edwin, he was next, only now he’s gone.’

‘Edwin’s gone?’ asked Minnie. ‘I wrapped up a parcel for Adela only the other day. No one said anything about her father being “gone”.’

‘He only went the day before Christmas Eve,’ said Rosina, ‘and I only heard the other day. There was this horrible fire and they both went; and the church, and the house. They didn’t suffer; they died in their sleep from smoke inhalation. Don’t look so shocked.’

‘Shocked!’ squawked the parrot. ‘Shocked! Any old iron, any old iron!’

Rosina got up and threw a shawl over the parrot’s cage. And while Minnie gaped and blinked Rosina explained there was a family feud, her uncle did not want to be buried in the family vault so his wishes would be respected and at least it meant no one had to go into mourning, or to go to the funeral, which she believed was today. It was very sad but no one liked him very much.

‘They had family feuds in the old country,’ said Minnie. ‘But not in Chicago. No one has time for them.’

‘Just like your mother, Minnie,’ said Rosina. ‘Everything in God’s Own Country is better than your own. Remember this is your country now.’

‘At home there’s a lot of noise when people die,’ said Minnie. ‘Weeping and wailing and embracing, and everyone gets drunk and the wake goes on for days. Here’s just so silent and the waters close over. I don’t know if I can bear it.’

‘I don’t see that you have much choice,’ said Rosina. ‘You can’t get divorced unless Arthur does something truly terrible, which he won’t; if you run away they’ll keep the baby and never mention your name again. And if I were you I’d change to watercolours: the smell of oil paints and turpentine will upset Mother. I’m surprised she hasn’t mentioned it already.’

‘What about Adela?’ asked Minnie. Rosina had the knack of finding one’s weakest point and going for it. Minnie the hopeful artist. The best thing to do was not react. ‘The poor little thing! Homeless and orphaned. Is no one going to take her in?’

Rosina pondered.

‘It’s a matter of breeding,’ Rosina said. ‘I wouldn’t think so. Father’s so into horses. Only daughter of a fourth son, and one who’s not quite in his right mind at that? A religious obsessive, must have been quite mad not to want to be buried in the family vault? Her mother, Austrian minor royalty? – No, they’ll find someone on the mother’s side and hope the girl will vanish back into impoverished obscurity. She’s landed on her feet anyway. The Bishop of Bath and Wells has taken her in. There’s some talk of her becoming a nun and that would suit everyone.’

‘A nun!’ said Minnie, in horror.

‘I’d be a nun,’ said Rosina. ‘Only I don’t suppose they’d let you keep a parrot. At least they wouldn’t keep pestering you to get married to some man you don’t really like, or snubbing you because you don’t look or feel the way you’re supposed to. I don’t want children anyway, any more than you do.’

‘But I’m very happy to have a baby,’ said Minnie. And she realized it was true. She wanted to give birth to a little boy like Arthur, with bouncy brown hair and crinkly eyes and a lovely smile to look up at her with trust and love. She would worry about him being sent off to a boarding school when the time came. She wouldn’t worry too much if he turned out to be a girl. She didn’t like feeling ill, but she’d put up with it. She was disappointed about missing the Coronation, that was all. She would miss walking down the aisle of Westminster Cathedral behind four Duchesses, in a fitted brocade dress with a long train and a two-inch ermine trim – though the day would come when she’d take over as Countess from Isobel, and be entitled to three inches. She was beginning to feel like one of them, and it was good. She crunched the rest of the ginger sweets.

A Clash of Admirers

Adela was relieved to see that Ivy, as she had hoped, was amongst the mourners. It was because she so much wanted to see Ivy, and cry on her shoulder, and saw no other way of doing so, that she had gone to such lengths to be allowed to attend.

‘Oh please, please let me go,’ she’d begged Mrs Kennion. ‘And then I can settle down to the fact that they’re—’ To say ‘dead’ seemed unaccountably rude to her parents, so it came out rather lamely as ‘passed over’.

‘It isn’t seemly,’ said Mrs Kennion. ‘It’s a very modern fashion for women to go to funerals, and in any case you’re too young. Ask the Bishop, if you want, but he’s bound to say no.’

It had taken some courage to argue with the Bishop: you never knew with men; they could so easily erupt with rage, bang the table and shout, but she had his wife’s permission and had spoken cheerfully and softly and smiled, and it had worked. It was how, it seemed, Mrs Kennion dealt with the Bishop. Her mother, faced by her father, had seldom smiled, but just lapsed into more passive dolefulness, which gave him more liberty to behave as badly as he felt inclined.

Adela walked slowly up the aisle behind the two coffins, one large and one small, and tried to not to think of what was in them, and the practical business of getting two melted-together bodies properly separated, and how she should be crying but was not, but rather tried to pretend she was walking up the aisle as a Bride of Christ, and the funeral march was really the wedding march. St Bart’s had a fine organ, better and bigger than the one at St Aidan’s, as her father had often complained. But now there were no coffins, just Jesus with his gentle smile and crown of thorns waiting for her by the altar. Alas, the vision would keep changing and the crown of thorns and robe dissolve in favour of a faceless young man in a cotton shirt about to throw her over his shoulder and run off with her, against a background of flames, noise and general chaos. She was damned, confounded, hopeless. Three quarters of the way up the aisle, just before she was meant to take her place in the front row, she caught sight of Ivy, and felt such a surge of pleasure and relief it was all she could do to continue the mournful pacing, and not run off to embrace her.

Then she saw that the figure next to Ivy was the tall, broad, fair-haired young man of the smoke and flames. He, like Ivy, was smiling at her. His teeth were very white, perfect. All of him seemed perfect, more dream than reality. Except he was wearing spectacles. She walked on.

Be still, my soul; your best, your heavenly friend

Through thorny ways leads to a joyful end . . .

All sang, or rather piped and squeaked, the final hymn. It was not at all a full-throated congregation. Adela could pick out Ivy’s voice – she was a strong, enthusiastic hymn singer, so much so that the Rev. Edwin would rebuke her for drawing attention to herself – and from next to her a strong male voice, powerful and confident. Frank Overshaw was sitting just behind her; his was a tentative, apologetic kind of voice, annoying and over-reverent; as if the old masters in Tibet to whom he kept alluding had somehow denatured him.

After the final hymn Adela pushed her way through the crowd to find Ivy, they embraced, and George joined them. He was taller and broader and younger than most around. ‘My fiancé,’ said Ivy.

Adela tried to reconcile this information with the George who was waiting for her at the altar and failed and found tears were pouring down her cheeks. Now she was really weeping, great sobs and gasps she could not help. As they left the church people murmured and sympathized. ‘Poor little thing!’ ‘All in one night, father, mother, home, everything!’ and someone – ‘She’s far too young to be here,’ and then she was laughing so hard she could hardly breathe at all.

‘Hysteria,’ said Ivy, coolly. ‘George, she needs a slap.’ Before Adela knew it there was a sharp sting across the cheek, first one side and then the other, more startling than painful, and she could breathe again, and she was staring up at George, who was staring down at her. She could not read the expression on his face.

‘I didn’t mean so hard, George,’ protested Ivy, and then George himself was whirled round and there was Frank Overshaw, squaring up to him with fists clenched; and one of the fists hit George’s jaw, but it lacked power, and George merely staggered and recovered his balance. Now Frank was on the ground clutching the bottom of his stomach and gasping, moaning and writhing in the mud; George was laughing.

Someone else dragged Adela off to the graveside to watch the coffins being lowered into the open grave. She composed herself enough to throw the first handful of soil, as was expected. First the big one, then the little. It was raining and the mud made her hands dirty. But at least she had behaved properly, and cried for everyone to see. And she did miss them. They were what she was accustomed to.

The worms crawl in,

The worms crawl out,

They go in thin

And they come out stout . . .

Well, perhaps. She remembered a time when Ivy had left the joint in the oven overnight and they had had to eat up the charred remnants the next dinner time. There was not much nourishment in it, you were just left with a dusty mouth black around the edges and the faint flavour of what might have been. The worms would come out pretty much as thin as they had gone in.

Mrs Kennion behaved very strangely on the way home in the carriage, sitting stiffly and seeming not at all friendly.

‘I told the Bishop you were too young to come,’ was all she said to Adela, snappily, ‘but he wouldn’t listen. And as for you, Frank—’ and that was all. Frank sat pale and winced at every bump, of which there were very many. The road from Yatbury to Wells was rough. Still, the funeral was over and Adela could lean back beneath a rug and dream of St George and go to sleep. In her dreams, he did not wear spectacles.

January – 1902

The Search for Lost Invitation Cards

‘By the way,’ said his Lordship to Isobel, ‘you did send off those invitations to the Baums?’

‘Oh goodness me,’ said Isobel. ‘I forgot all about them. I’ll do it this very morning. But there’s lots of time.’ She had forgotten all about the Baum invitations, what with one thing and another. She would have to declare them lost and set about a general search in the household, which of course would fail to find them, and then declare them missing. It was a perfectly ridiculous thing to have to do, but she could see no other way out.

‘The days pass by quicker than one likes,’ said Robert. ‘This Coronation takes up a deuced amount of time. The King wants a new open landau built, at great expense to the public purse, but what if it rains all day? We can use the Coronation coach his mother used as an alternative, a gold spectacular, but it’s deuced uncomfortable. William IV said it was like being abroad in rough seas. And what about everyone else? Do we need alternatives for all the landaus, or shall the footmen just carry umbrellas and put up with looking ridiculous? At least Sunny is back from Moscow and he’s a stickler for detail. Consuelo is being a great help: she has a female eye for what things looks like which we men tend to overlook.’

‘I’m sure she’ll be a great help,’ said Isobel. ‘Did she have a good time in Moscow?’

‘I didn’t ask,’ said Robert, ‘but she was wearing a diamond choker I hadn’t seen before, so I expect she did.’

‘What, isn’t that a little, well, ostentatious? Diamonds to the office?’ asked Isobel.