The New Countess (25 page)
Authors: Fay Weldon
The Phaeton roared on to London as if nothing could stop it, Eddie driving intent and concentrated. It seemed that the woman in navy blue called Grace was a servant too. Molly looked behind, half expecting the police to be chasing them, but there was nothing: nothing on the road could keep up, let alone overtake. The roads were almost empty anyway. It would take Nanny ages to get home and call the alarm. You had to admire the ladies: ordinary criminals were stupid, but these three had everything so well organized. But Lady Isobel would be furious and Lord Arthur would not let his sons go easily. Edgar was the heir. The whole country would be in uproar.
The Phaeton they were in was a limousine; it could only be a prototype. Lord Arthur was trying to rush his own, Jehu, limousine into production. Molly had seen photographs of the new Phaeton down at his Lordship’s workshop where her mother and father worked. In the flesh – or rather in the strong metal frame and brass-lined bonnet that seemed to smile, and with its two strong headlights like watchful eyes – it was rather glorious. The Jehu was all right but didn’t have the Phaeton’s glamour. Lord Arthur would be the more furious: not just his children kidnapped but in a rival’s car, of all things an Austin Phaeton. The papers would love to get hold of the story. And Molly was the centre of the story. Whatever happened next, she would be famous. The two five-pound notes were only the start.
Doubt set in; shock at the suddenness of it all. Nothing to lose, she thought, but what about her job? If there were no children to look after why would the Dilbernes need her? She’d be out on her ear. Nanny might stay on because she’d been in the family so long, the horrid old cow, but she, Molly, had only just begun. And supposing she got blamed, for all she was kidnapped? Her father and mother might lose their jobs.
Molly tried to work it out. And the children, she wondered about them. Was it better for Edgar to be brought up as an Irish person in America or as a Lord in his own country with everyone bowing and scraping? Connor was no problem, he’d be all right wherever he was, but Edgar was different. He so seldom smiled; perhaps if you were born to a title you had to have the instincts that went with it or you couldn’t thrive? Now he’d fallen asleep on his mother’s knee. She was cradling his head in her arms to stop it banging against the dashboard when the car cornered. She was a good mother. Everyone said Lord Arthur was a good father but to Molly’s eyes he seemed embarrassed by his own children.
The four of them were talking. She listened to find out what she could: in the circumstances it didn’t feel like eavesdropping, just doing her duty by her charges. The man called Eddie was a friend of Grace’s. He worked as a concierge at an hotel called Brown’s. The Phaeton had been ‘borrowed’ by Eddie from the hotel mews, where it had been stabled by a Mr Herbert Austin, a guest at Brown’s, but away in Birmingham for a couple of days. The worry was that Mr Austin would return early and find his vehicle gone. Grace had been booked in for the night at Brown’s as Lady Stephenson from Dorchester; Minnie and her mother were Mrs O’Corcoran and maid from Chicago; and the children and Molly were the Masters O’Corcoran and nanny from Brighton.
‘Meaning no harm, Mrs O’Brien,’ apologized Mr Eddie, ‘turning you into the servant, but we don’t want to attract attention. In my experience the best lies are the ones that are nearest to the truth.’
‘You’re a cheeky blighter,’ said Mrs O’Brien. ‘So I’m the maid and Grace is the lady? I’m the one who pays the bills, remember that, and paying well over the odds into the bargain. Keep that straight.’
‘And aren’t I risking my job and worse for the sake of Grace’s blue eyes?’ asked Eddie, hurt to the quick.
‘My eyes are brown,’ said Grace. ‘And don’t think I’ll be doing you any favours tonight, Mr Eddie, because I won’t be.’
‘Oh just let’s get on back to London,’ said Minnie. ‘Bicker, bicker, bicker, I’m so tired. Who cares who’s the maid and who’s the lady? Isn’t that so, Molly?’
‘Yes, your Ladyship,’ said Molly, ‘but the baby needs changing. And there aren’t any nappies.’
But Grace, who was obviously the one who thought of everything, had some baby things packed away in her hamper. Eddie drew the Phaeton to a gentle halt where the road to Hindhead met the Devil’s Punchbowl and it was safe to park. Molly saw to the nappy and cleaned the old one off as well as she could with a couple of dock leaves before folding it back into the spare bag. She had been tempted just to throw it in the bushes but refrained. She had never stayed in an hotel before but presumably there would be somewhere to wash things out. A supply of nappies was less easy to determine.
‘You’re a good girl, Molly,’ said Grace approvingly. ‘Lady Minnie was right about you.’ Molly glowed.
Molly had almost decided that when they’d got to the hotel she’d somehow slip out to Belgrave Square and let the world and the newspapers know that the Dilberne heir was being kidnapped, but now she thought perhaps she wouldn’t. A word of praise made all the difference.
‘Oh, do please hurry,’ said Minnie, as they set off again. ‘I feel so exposed on the open road. I won’t feel really safe until I’m on the boat.’
‘You won’t be safe even then,’ said Eddie. ‘The
Carpania
carries a wireless telegraph. A day out at most and the police will alert the captain and the crew will start searching the boat high and low.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Minnie and she began to cry.
‘But they won’t find you. I’ve booked us all in third class,’ said Grace. ‘Nobody will be looking for a Viscountess and the heir to the Dilberne name and fortune in third class, rest assured. I’ll go on board as a visitor, Molly can have my passport which calls me a maid, and if there’s trouble I’ll just leave.’
‘That’s not why I’m crying,’ said Minnie. ‘This is where I fell in love with Arthur. On this very road. In this very place. It was a steam car and we ran out of water.’
‘Oh for Heaven’s sake,’ said Tessa, ‘you daft eejit. Pull yourself together. If you loved him you shouldn’t have run out on him in the first place. You think every man is like your father and you can do what you like and he’ll still love you. Well, they’re not and they don’t. They take offence.’
‘But I didn’t
do
anything,’ Minnie wailed.
‘That’s as may be,’ said Grace sagely, ‘but I daresay you might have wanted to. You know what the Bible says. Those who commit adultery in their hearts—’
Minnie wailed again.
‘That’s a horrible word. It wasn’t like that!’
‘Pure in thought, word and deed, that’s what they want their wives to be,’ said Mr Eddie, ‘just not other men’s wives.’
Minnie began to sob dreadfully.
‘I love him so!’
Edgar began to cry and held out his little arms to Molly.
‘Oh please, everyone,’ said Molly, before she could stop herself, ‘do be quiet. You’re upsetting the little ones.’
They stared at her; shocked, she thought, that the dumb should speak. She straightened her blue and white nursemaid’s uniform and tried to look as undaunted as Nanny. It worked. They quietened: even Minnie stopped her sobbing and pulled herself together.
Edgar went back to sleep.
‘What will you do the other end?’ said Eddie. ‘You’ll have three passports between four people.’
‘We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,’ said Grace. ‘Molly can pass as another child.’
Eddie drove determinedly and skilfully towards London. There was no pursuit.
Connor stirred; Mrs O’Brien put him on her knee and let him swarm joyously all over her plump shiny pastel blueness, little heels digging into grandmotherly flesh, little teeth searching for her shiny nose, little fingers picking at her valuable pearls.
‘The sweet darling!’ said Tessa. ‘A real O’Brien, this one. Just look at him. And a dead ringer for me, wouldn’t you say, Grace? I’m not so sure about Edgar. He takes after the Dilberne side. Ever so grand!’ It was true enough. Three-year-old Edgar was now sat upright on his mother’s knee, quiet and composed, staring into space, with a slightly pained expression, looking down a patrician nose, as if well aware that he was a Dilberne to the manner born and that these others were probably not. He was, Molly thought, his grandfather Robert reborn, but without his Lordship’s joviality.
By the time they arrived at Brown’s in Dover Street, after a successful day’s kidnapping, they gave all the appearance of a perfectly normal family party. Tessa, after Connor’s manhandling, was perhaps a little more dishevelled than when she had started out from the Savoy that morning, Minnie not so much so – and Grace as self-possessed as ever. Molly was pleased to find there was a laundry service available and that her uniform could be boiled, starched and ironed overnight and returned to her first thing.
Better to be too active than too idle, Inspector Strachan thought. When the kidnapping crisis blew up so suddenly and dramatically he had found himself almost pleased. Frankly he had been marking time at Dilberne Court and could well have gone back to his Special Branch duties at Windsor. The likelihood of an assassination attempt on the King during a shooting weekend was low, though not impossible: he had men in the area and no report of any unusual activity had come to their ears, no sinister Irishmen, no wild-eyed Russians. If there was reason for alarm something would have surfaced by now: he could reasonably have gone home a week ago. But home, after the death of his wife Helen and little son in childbirth three years back, was lodgings in Camden Town with a landlady whose meals were meagre and grudging, where the hot water geyser in the shared bathroom erupted every few minutes and sprayed the naked bather with soot. Better far to spend as much time as he could in Dilberne Court.
Andrew Strachan was the only son of a widowed innkeeper in Leicester. He had won a scholarship to grammar school, gone on to University College London to study electrical engineering, then entered the Metropolitan Police. He had risen rapidly through the ranks, been seconded to the Special Irish Branch, then to Mr Akers-Douglas’s newly formed Royal Protection Command, of which he was now Acting Commander: which he suspected meant ‘not quite gentleman enough to be Commander, but someone has to do the work’. Mildly put out by the slight, he continued to refer to himself as ‘Inspector’. That was what he did. He inspected; he sought out error; he looked out for danger.
He enjoyed the comforts of Dilberne Court. The towels were thick and heavy, never shared, and warmed before use by heated porcelain rails. He had a telephone line by his bed (a new mattress) with priority access to the Dilberne telephone exchange and from thence emergency connections to the Metropolitan Police and various local policing agencies. Cook kept an excellent table. There were some difficulties and embarrassments, of course. His social standing was never made quite clear to anyone. He was not a gentleman, in that he was obliged to earn a living: he was a public employee of comparatively low status, who yet had the ear of the King. It confused everyone, including himself.
Her Ladyship would say, ‘Oh, do join us for supper tonight,’ mostly when she dined alone or with Lady Minnie, if seldom when Lord Robert was expected down from Belgrave Square or Lord Arthur prepared to spend time away from the workshops. Neither seemed quite at ease in his presence. If the invitation did not come he would make his way down to the servants’ hall and eat there. But then the servants, in their turn, would let him know, in subtle or not so subtle ways, that he was endured rather than welcomed at their table. He could understand why he put a damper on their conversation, but it quite upset him. He liked a joke and a good laugh as much as anyone. What he wanted really, of course, was a family. He had thought after Helen’s death that he could perhaps find one in the Police Force, but found that as promotion succeeded promotion, his own staff became wary of him. Being mostly spies, they were not over-genial at the best of times.
When Nanny, dishevelled and incoherent, had fallen through the front door to report that the young masters had been snatched, and their nursemaid with them, the Inspector had both a sense of failure – he had allowed errors to occur, a danger he’d anticipated to come to pass – and also of irritation: he had warned them and they had chosen to ignore his warnings. A surfeit of righteous indignation had blinded them to the fact that Minnie might fight back. They had been complacent. Things could go wrong, did go wrong, sometimes horribly wrong. The French Revolution had happened; kings and princes got assassinated, governments were overthrown; yet in spite of all evidence to the contrary the Dilbernes and their like felt they were inviolable by reason of their natural superiority. When he had warned her Ladyship that something like this might happen, she had laughed him off.
Mr Strachan was not without sympathy for Minnie. She had had two births within a year, by a husband who paid far more attention to his cars than his wife. When he first met her she’d been an artless, bright little thing, eager to please and be pleased: over the months she had become withdrawn and depressed. Arthur struck him as one of those men who fall in love with Mary Magdalene but once she has a baby see her as Mother Mary, holy, pure and not to be defiled. If she then disturbs the vision, there will be no end to his outrage. If Lady Minnie wanted a love life like other women had she was probably wise to go home to Chicago: but she must accept that she would have to do it without her children. To try to include them in her new life was irresponsible and unkind. Nursemaids could always take the mother’s place, no one the father’s.
Nevertheless, he had suggested to her Ladyship that she had been unwise in shutting the door in Minnie’s face. It was tactless and unnecessarily hurtful. Some kind of negotiation would have been a better course.
‘Standing between any female and its young is never wise,’ he had said. ‘A normally placid cow will batter the barn door down and kill you if her calf is on the other side.’
‘For Heaven’s sake, Mr Strachan,’ she had replied. ‘Stick to your policing and leave me to deal with my family. Minnie, moral imbecile though she may be, knows well enough that as an adulterous wife she is not fit to bring up children. And to liken her to a cow is absurd. Humans have souls and reason; beasts of the fields have neither. Minnie is a lady not a cow.’