Long Live the King (6 page)

Presently Edwin came out of the Rectory with two young men from Jones and Willis the Church Furnishers, presumably so that all could see how the work of destruction was progressing. Adela thought they were inappropriately dressed, in coats with fur collars and soft felt Homburgs, but it was a new century and no doubt they thought they were arbiters of new thinking. She moved behind a tall gravestone so as not to catch their attention. The taller of the two men was smoking a pipe and tapped it out on the low wall of the lych-gate, next to where the builders were piling the old wood. Adela thought that was sacrilegious; the lych-gate was where coffins could wait under cover for burial, where the preacher could stand to deliver the service during bad weather. But her father made no objection to the liberty the pipe smoker took, and the three of them went back into what they had left of her church, laughing.

The sky was already darkening, though it was nowhere near dusk. Black cumulus clouds were piling up behind the steeple, their paler edges lined with a purpled red. The gilt weathercock swung first this way, then that, unable to make up its mind where the worst danger came from, but flashing a general warning. There’d be a storm in the night. Adela rather hoped so. She loved storms. It crossed her mind that she should check that the embers of the tobacco were properly out as she walked back to the Rectory, but she didn’t bother, why should she? It was going to rain, in any case.

Rosina Complains to Minnie

‘I think it is outrageous,’ said Rosina to Minnie, ‘that given three extra tickets for the Coronation, my parents have not seen fit to invite me. Not only does Arthur process, but you do too. Both of you are younger than me, sillier than me, yet you get to dress up in crimson silk and ermine trim and tiara, and I am stuck here in the country, practically walled up like a delinquent nun. You know she haunts the green room down the corridor?’

‘I have heard as much,’ said Minnie, ‘but I don’t believe in ghosts.’

‘Then you are flying in the face of the spirit of the times,’ said Rosina. ‘Everyone who’s anyone believes in ghosts; the Leader of the House believes in them and holds séances in Carlton House Terrace. They found a planchette board in the Old Queen’s room when they were turning out Osborne and burning everything before the public got to know about it. Some say the King got to hear about it and dragged it from the flames and now he has it, and is trying to bring back his mother to tell her she should be ashamed of herself. And even Father had the Psychical Research people down here the other week when you were in London. They didn’t find a thing, there was nothing to find, just a rumour that in the year 1701 a servant girl sinned and the lady of the house locked her in the green room without food until she and the baby died of starvation. That’s the Hedleighs for you. They care nothing for women. I am the first born, Arthur the second, but I don’t even get a seat to sit on at the Coronation.’

‘But you keep saying how you disapprove of pomp and circumstance, Rosina.’

‘Oh don’t be so silly, Minnie. One can hold two different ideas in one’s head at the same time. You do it all the time. You love Arthur and you hate Arthur.’

Minnie was too alarmed to speak and Rosina laughed.

‘Oh, don’t worry about it,’ she said. ‘All women love and hate their husbands. That’s why I’m never going to marry. It’s too confusing. That, and having to produce all these little Hedleighs running around, and not a Dilberne amongst them. My children will never get to parade up and down in ermine trim in Westminster Abbey; at least one of yours will. And you’re not even English.’

‘Rosina,’ said Minnie cautiously, ‘if you want another title so much you could always marry one.’

‘For heaven’s sake, Minnie,’ said Rosina, ‘who would marry me? I think too much. I talk too much, and not the kind of thing anyone wants to hear. Besides, I don’t want any old title; I want the one that was denied to me.’ She uttered a kind of shuddering sigh. On his perch in the corner of the room, Pappagallo, Rosina’s parrot, aroused no doubt by some sense of unusual emotion on his mistress’s part, opened a beady eye, squawked, ‘Votes for Women!, Votes for Women!
’
, scattered some nut husks around the room for the staff to pick up, closed the eye again and fell silent. Tears began to form on Rosina’s cheeks. ‘I just want Mama and Papa to ask me to sit beside them when they’re doing something special.’

Minnie felt so homesick for her own mother and father it was all she could do not to weep herself. She had found that the English disliked touching one another, but she ventured to put her arms round Rosina to comfort and was not rebuffed. They embraced. Minnie came up to Rosina’s shoulder. It was part of Rosina’s problem that she was as tall as her father and rather ungainly with it, towering over most men, and, given half a chance, felt always compelled to argue with them rather than to charm, flirt and flatter, as her mother did.

Rosina occupied the west wing of Dilberne Court, the Elizabethan pile that had been the Hedleigh home for so long and seen the family through its many vicissitudes. The house had some forty rooms, accumulated over centuries, most leading into one another – which was annoying but had to be put up with – many staircases and corridors, a few grand halls, a priest hole, a ghost and no central heating. It was more pretty than impressive, with its tall chimneys and added Jacobean attics, but pleasantly situated in five thousand acres of good pastureland, and sheltered by the hills around. It was not at all warm in winter, but the household wrapped up well, though the servants, who were kept busy carrying coals, increasingly longed for their annual migration to Belgrave Square for the Season. In Belgrave Square there was central heating, running hot water and electric light everywhere.

But after the family narrowly escaped financial ruination as the previous century turned to the new, it had within a couple of years met sudden prosperity, as its current head, Robert, Earl of Dilberne, had transferred his interests to the gold and metal mines of the Transvaal. Now, in both Belgrave Square and Dilberne Court, builders and painters, electricians and plumbers, worked ceaselessly, restoring the place – if not to its one-time glory, at least with a few extra amenities and not in any danger of falling down for another hundred years.

Robert was now obliged to spend a great deal of his time in London – ‘running the country’, as Isobel put it – and Arthur broadly speaking looked after the estate. Broadly, because much of Arthur’s time and attention was now taken up with his new company, the Jehu Automobile Works, devoted to the advancement and manufacture of internal combustion-engine racing cars, which he ran with his new partner, Davey Clacton, in an old mill in the village of Dilberne, one mile from the Court. Luckily, the estate had a competent and honest manager in the form of Tom Shooter, who kept its acres functioning well and in good repair. Arthur’s current ambition was to create an automobile racing track, both for testing his and Davey’s motors, and to extend the track in time to a proper racing circuit to take in Dilberne and the adjacent village of Samsey. He aimed to have an annual international event underway to start in 1905.

‘Pity the poor villagers,’ said Lady Isobel. ‘The noise, the people!’

‘With wheat only twenty-seven shillings a bushel and falling,’ said his Lordship, ‘they’ll live to be grateful.’

‘The roar of the engines will be music to their ears,’ said Arthur. Steam engines had at least been quiet: the new combustion-engine motors were fast, more manoeuvrable, better suited to hills, but extremely noisy. Racetracks and circuits were the thing of the future, he swore. Road racing was popular, but increasingly dangerous as machines got faster and automobiles more plentiful and likely enough soon to be banned by an interfering government.

‘Oh Arthur,’ said Minnie, ‘I wish we could spend just a little more time together.’

‘I love you with all my mind and all my heart,’ said Arthur, promising to be home as soon as he possibly could from giving his attention and skills to the split radiator, the problematic flange, the fusing spark plugs – whatever the emergency happened to be. He’d been true to his promise, paying Minnie so much focused attention her complaints were, for a time, quietened. But it was a bit lonely.

‘Well, you married him,’ said Rosina. ‘I warned you. He’s a man.’

It was after an argument with Isobel that Rosina had left her rooms at Belgrave Square and taken up residence in the west wing. The argument had been about Pappagallo, a bird whom, although obviously handsome, the girl kept only to annoy, training it to shriek ‘Votes for Women!, Votes for Women!’ whenever a man came into the room. It liked to use its beak to scatter birdseed husks around its cage and when let out to fly about the room – which was often – left its droppings everywhere, and in general annoyed the staff. Now a medical friend had warned Isobel of the dangers of psittacosis, a disagreeable and sometimes fatal disease which can be passed from parrots to humans. For Isobel this was the last straw. She told Rosina the parrot had to go. She could not abide it in the house a moment longer. Rosina enquired as to why everyone hated her so, and her mother suggested perhaps it would be as well if Rosina went down to live in Dilberne Court for a while and take the parrot with her. Rosina said yes, rather to everyone’s surprise, since she would be away from the lectures and political meetings she loved so much. Perhaps, the family thought, if Rosina was more in the country her revolutionary zeal would be muted. It was unlikely that Rosina could make a good marriage, but she might yet make a respectable one, perhaps to some local landowner.

Rosina was at least someone to talk to, though what she said was often shocking. Arthur talked about engines – and there was a limit to Minnie’s interest in chain drives and drum shafts – Isobel talked about fashion and fabrics, and though Minnie liked spending money well enough – as who does not – and had helped greatly in the furnishing and remodernizing of Belgrave Square, was easily bored by talk of the latest styles. You saw, you decided, you spent, and that was that. If you lived in the contemporary world, what appealed to you was contemporary fashion; why worry about it?

And his Lordship seldom put in an appearance, being so busy in London – Rosina would suggest he took more than a passing interest in the young fancy-free Duchess of Marlborough, but Minnie didn’t believe a word of it, he being so obviously dedicated to his wife. Robert quite frightened Minnie: she would be struck dumb when he was there at the head of the table. He must think her very stupid. Minnie’s father Billy had a different kind of power – amiable until angered but then perfectly capable of strangling an enemy with his bare hands. She was used to that. Her father-in-law was yet more urbane, but would never use his bare hands. He would get someone else to do whatever it was, then alter the law of the land to make sure there were no consequences.

That evening Minnie confided her conversation with Rosina to Arthur when finally he got home for supper, which they had in their rooms by the fire; fresh bread from the kitchens, newly churned butter – properly hung cold beef (Minnie seldom ate pork) with walnut pickle, followed by apple pie (the last of the season’s Bramleys) and Cheddar cheese.

‘Rosina is really upset about not being invited to the Coronation,’ she said to Arthur. ‘Can’t you do something?’

‘It’s her own fault,’ Arthur said. ‘She can’t be trusted to behave. I don’t blame her; it’s just very sad when a girl has brains. She’s never going to be happy. And what a man wants above anything else is to have a happy wife. Are you happy, Minnie?’ he asked. He liked to be sure.

‘Very happy,’ she said, and if she crossed her fingers she was sensible enough to be sure he didn’t notice.

‘That’s good,’ he said, ‘because I am.’ Arthur’s fingernails were always dirty with engine oil, no matter how hard he scrubbed away at them. She found that rather exciting. Isobel deplored it.

‘Anyway,’ said Arthur, ‘the parents are probably keeping them back for the Baums, or whoever seems suitable nearer the time. There’s a good six months to go, after all. A lot can happen in six months. Davey Clacton’s talking about adapting Jehu V with a fixed-drive shaft and ring and pinion gear: he reckons we could get her up to sixty-five miles an hour if we did, it’s worth trying. A real nuisance, having to stop everything and get into the old ermine and sealskin, just about the time we’ll have her ready. All very well for you girls, you love dressing up. That’s all that Rosina misses, I’ll swear.’

The song kept rising up in Minnie’s mind, taking her by surprise. She wished it wouldn’t.

Oh what care I for your goosefeather bed,

With the sheets turned down so comely-oh,

Oh what care I for your house and your land,

I’m off with the raggle-taggle gypsies-oh.

It wasn’t even as if their bed was goosefeather, it was a hard and scratchy horsehair mattress, which she and Arthur were quite satisfactorily pummelling the life out of.

Ivy’s Sweetheart

Ivy had gone round to the cottage opposite Swaley’s Farm and handed her mother the parcel. It was only sensible and hardly stealing. At least it had not been burned and a parcel destined for Adela was not going to end up anyhow with the poor of the parish, more likely in the wardrobe of some deserving relative of the Lady Superintendent. She was right about the parcel: it contained a truly fancy and expensive piece of clothing, a young girl’s nicely made red silk velvet dress, ankle length, with a pink lace collar and crimson satin ribbons, with good seams for letting out, tiny hand-stitching and of very good quality indeed. Her mother reckoned it would fetch at least ten shillings if not more on her Saturday stall. Doreen could get the thatch mended, or at least a start made on it. Ivy wrenched a smile or two out of her mother on the strength of it.

They would have burned the wrapping paper but Ivy wanted to keep the little reindeers, so they smoothed out the paper and folded it neatly, and wound the string onto Doreen’s existing roll of odds and ends. It was green. Neither had seen green string before. String was meant to be white. But waste not want not.