Death at Daisy's Folly (2 page)

But now was not the moment for such thoughts, pleasant as they were. Silently, he raised the wooden bar and slipped into the Royal stall, ducking under Paradox's warm belly. If a lady were expected, she would no doubt soon appear, and it would not be prudent of Harry to make his presence known. Best wait in the stall until the business were over. But Harry had as much curiosity as the next man, and he wanted to see which of the ladies had consented to a tryst in the stable. Was it the red-haired one he'd glimpsed sweeping across the croquet lawn yesterday afternoon, her hair like flaming embers? He had heard that red-haired women were looser in their morals than other women, and she was said to be an American. Perhaps—

The door creaked again, and Harry stood up to peer over the side of the stall. He saw a cloaked woman enter, close the door, and stand still for a moment, as if getting her bearings.

“Over here,” came the husky voice of the waiting man, and the cloaked woman turned swiftly. The light was poor, but Harry did not think it was the red-haired lady. It might even have been a slender man. Unfortunately, the answering voice offered no clue. It was low and husky and had a certain sweetness, but it could have been that of either a woman or a man.

“Where is your colleague?” the cloaked figure asked. “I assumed that he would be here as well.”

“Momentarily,” the other replied. His voice was eager. “Then you have decided to join us?”

“Quite the contrary. I wish no part of this sordid business, and I've come to tell you so. I am a loyal subject of the Crown. Some of the things you have proposed would be deeply embarrassing, and might even tend toward treason.”

Treason! Harry thought, all idea of a tryst flying out of his head. A plot against the Prince! What were they scheming? An accident to the Royal person? A plan to blow up the Royal train? He had better listen closely, so that he could report the conversation to the proper authorities—to the Prince himself! His reward would certainly be that pair of silver epaulettes his mother was so anxious for him to win.

“Oh, but I say!” the first man protested. “You have it wrong. All we mean to do is—”

Beside Harry, Paradox moved restlessly, pawing the straw with a shod hoof. Harry tensed, catching out of the corner of his eye a fleeting movement in the shadows behind him. He turned and saw a pale face looming over the side of the stall, a hand upraised, wielding a heavy object, about to strike.

It was the last thing Harry saw.

At the end of November [1895] the Glasgow magistrates had refused the permission sought by a local umbrella manufacturer to run a [petrol-powered] delivery van in the streets. This anonymous tradesman reacted with gusto: “Those in authority in our city,” he declared, “might as well try to beat back the waves of the sea with a broom as try to stem the tide of horseless carriages that are looming in the distance.”

—T. R. NiCHOLSON
The Birth of the British Motor Car

 

 

I
have a poser for you, old man,” said the Honorable Bradford Marsden, clutching the steering tiller in both hands.

Sir Charles Sheridan smiled at his friend, who was maneuvering his Daimler along the narrow road, trailing clouds of suffocating dust. Having suffered a mechanical breakdown beside the road the previous afternoon (to the manifest amusement of two laborers clearing a drain), Charles and Bradford had rolled up their sleeves and effected temporary repairs, then dispatched Lawrence, Marsden's man, to London for the proper part. They had slept the night at the Cock and Thorn in Braintree, breakfasted, then togged themselves in goggles, motoring caps, and poplin dusters, and resumed their journey to Easton Lodge, which lay on the further side of Great Dunmow, only a few miles away.

“Your question would not concern His Highness's support for the Locomotives on Highways Bill, would it?” Charles asked lightly.

Bradford grunted. “Dash it all, man. Am I that obvious?”

“Only to someone who knows your passions,” Charles replied. “Since you've come back from that automobile exhibit at Tunbridge Wells, you've spoken of nothing else but promoting the motorcar.” While he and Bradford pursued quite different interests and did not see one another as often as they once had, they had been at Eton together and still remained close friends.

“Passion be damned,” Bradford growled. “This is bloody serious.” The Daimler had overtaken a cyclist, a village parson garbed in collar and long wool coat, who, gesticulating wildly, pedaled his safety bicycle off the road and upended it in the hawthorn hedgerow. Bradford hardly noticed, he was concentrating so intently on the steering. “You know as well as I do that if this country doesn't get off its arse and regain its prestige in industry, we're finished. Germany will see to that. The Kaiser is not above causing us mischief wherever he can—even if he is the Queen's grand-son. The Prince is crucial in this matter. He must be brought to understand that the motorcar represents the Future of England.” He coughed. “Let's make a stop, old man. This confounded dust is choking me. I need a drink of water.”

The Future of England struggled noisily to the top of the rise, hiccuped, and lurched to a halt. As Bradford pulled a jug of water from beneath the seat and swigged at it, Charles raised his goggles and looked out across the gentle slopes of west Essex. The fields were painted in pleasing harvest hues of browns and grays and golds, brightened by swathes of early morning sunlight. A group of village women, hempen sacks over their shoulders, were gleaning among the yellow stubble, while a placid herd of stocky Ayrshires and black-and-white Freesians grazed on the other side of the hedgerow, watched over by a herdsboy and his collie dog. Beyond lay the market town of Great Dunmow, its citizens going about their daily business in the narrow streets overhung with buildings built in the century of Henry VIII and Elizabeth. No alarms—other than a noisy flight of rooks rising from a nearby tree—stirred the pastoral peace of this rustic scene; no motorcars—other than the one in which he sat—broke the resonant silence. Since the advent of the railway in the earlier part of the century, heavier traffic had gone by train, leaving the roads to bicycles, horses, and foot travelers. Not even the whuffle and clank of an ox team intruded upon the quiet. The prosperous heart of England seemed to beat in these idyllic hills, just as it had for centuries past.

But Charles knew that at present, the heart of England beat somewhere else. To the south and west lay London, the seat of international commerce. To the north rose the great, grimy cities of Manchester, Birmingham, and Sheffield, built on iron and coal. The fields and meadows, villages and towns, that had once been England's chief treasure no longer earned its livelihood. The cities were now the country's promise, its future. It was as an industrial society that the nation would stand or fall, and the motorcar would certainly play its part.

“You don't believe me, eh?” Bradford asked, misunderstanding Charles's silence. “You scientists have been too busy looking at beetles to see how fast Germany's star is rising, how fast ours is sinking.”

“On the contrary,” Charles replied. “I spent several days at the Krupps' Works in Essen this summer, studying the latest innovations in munitions. The Germans have moved far ahead of everyone else since the Franco-Prussian War. Their technological proficiency is quite amazing, actually. It makes one suspect that they are about to realize Jules Verne's fantasy of shooting a man to the moon.” He paused, then added, “Of course, there's the horrendous problem of acceleration, which Verne did not consider. No human being could withstand the forces involved in attaining the velocity necessary to escape—”

“Ah,” Bradford said hastily, with the air of a man bottling a genie. “You do see. And didn't I hear you were down to Sandringham for the Princess's birthday a fortnight ago? Perhaps I can prevail on you to put in a word with HRH about the bill, which has gotten lost in the melee of Rosebery's defeat. Salisbury and the Conservatives oppose it, of course—they are against anything that smacks of progress. But since the motorcar exposition at Tunbridge Wells, popular interest has risen dramatically. A word from you and the Prince might be persuaded to support—”

“But I was at Sandringham on a photographic mission,” Charles protested. Princess Alexandra had asked him to take pictures of the family gathering, and although he thought such assignments a waste of his time, he could hardly refuse what amounted to a Royal command. He had, after all, been awarded a knighthood (to him a matter of minor importance) for his photograph of the Queen upon the occasion of her Jubilee in '87. “In any event, I don't have the ear of the Prince,” he added. “For that, Marsden, you shall have to approach our hostess. That is the Countess's special privilege.”

The quiet was shattered as Bradford pushed the throttle and the Daimler launched itself down the hill toward Great Dunmow. Hearing the racket, the gleaners looked up with frightened faces and the pied cows raised their tails and galloped frantically to the far hedgerow. Charles pulled down his goggles, clung to the seat, and braced his feet against the bone-rattling plunge, thinking that something must be done to cushion the shock, or England's future would be too bumpy to endure.

“The Countess, you say?” Bradford shouted, above the clatter. “But Daisy has her own mission with the Prince, I understand. Isn't that why you've brought along that photographic arsenal?”

Charles waited until they had descended the hill and the clatter had somewhat subsided. “Lady Warwick—Daisy—told you her intention, then?”

“No, she was very mysterious. She said only that she had arranged an excursion to Chelmsford for HRH and that a motorcar was wanted, which I am delighted to provide. She mentioned that you were coming along to take photographs. Knowing how little you fancy country-house weekends, even the informal one she promised, I thought that might be the chief reason you agreed to come—that, and the fact that Miss Ardleigh has been invited, as well.”

In the distance, a horse was approaching, pulling a dog-cart. Bradford steered the Daimler well onto the grassy verge and turned off the motor. Horses, as yet unaccustomed to motorcars, were apt to be skittish in their neighborhood.

In the sudden silence, Charles shifted uncomfortably. He had indeed looked forward to seeing Miss Ardleigh—Kate, she had asked him to call her. They had been acquainted now for over a year, an eventful year, as it had turned out. Kate's circumstances had much changed since she arrived from America to work as secretary to her aunt at Bishop's Keep, near the Marsdens' country home in East Essex. Beautiful if a bit headstrong and willful, Kate had succeeded her aunt, now deceased, as mistress of the family manor. Charles had it in mind to marry her, if she would have him. He had determined to lay the question before her this very weekend—a momentous determination for Charles, a man of rational intellect who found his scientific pursuits quite engrossing enough and had never before yielded to love for a woman.

But Charles's romantic scheme had been turned upside down the day before yesterday, when he received the letter from his mother, the Dowager Baroness of Somersworth. Her news had filled him with personal sorrow and the bleak realization that his life was about to change—not, in his opinion, for the better. He was summoned to do his duty. He could not now, after all, ask Kate for her hand. Loving her as deeply as he did, and wishing nothing more than her complete happiness, he would not ask her to join him in a life he knew she would despise.

The thought of it filled Charles with a great sorrow.

To get into the best society nowadays, one has either to feed people, amuse people, or shock people.

—OSCAR WILDE
A Woman of No Importance

 

 

“
I
'm sorry you're feeling so unwell, Ellie. Please, let me—”

Kathryn Ardleigh reached for the silver teapot to pour her friend Eleanor Farley a cup of tea, but an immaculately gloved hand and green-sleeved arm suddenly appeared over her right shoulder. A reproachfully respectful male voice murmured, “Permit me, please, miss,” and both Ellie's and her own cups were refilled.

Kate sighed. She had done it again—forgotten that instead of reaching for what she wanted, she was supposed to sit and wait until she was waited upon. At Easton, of course, one didn't have to wait very long. The Countess of Warwick had trained the footmen and maids to anticipate her guests' unspoken requests and barely imagined desires. Kate did not as a rule attend house parties, and she had arrived only yesterday afternoon. She hadn't yet gotten used to the servants reading her mind.

Eleanor Marsden Farley accepted two cubes of sugar, stirred her tea, and sipped it. “Mornings are the worst,” she said with a deep sigh. “Five more months. I will be so glad when this is over. Oh, if only it would be a boy!” Ellie's lovely face was drawn and her spritely voice thin and peevish. “You are not to tell anyone of my condition, Kate. This will be my last house party for some time, and I intend to enjoy it!”

Kate nodded, thinking that Ellie did not seem to welcome her impending motherhood with any special joy. To cheer her friend, she changed the subject.

“Well, you ought to find enough enjoyment here,” she said. “I understand that the Countess has invited twenty guests for the weekend, including His Highness.” Kate had been presented to the Prince the night before, and had dropped her obligatory curtsy with a disgraceful clumsiness. But his avuncular charm had put her at ease immediately, and before the evening was out, she had even danced with him. “Speaking of the other guests,” she added, “I wonder where they are. Will the Prince come down to breakfast?”