The New Countess (29 page)

They took tea in the drawing room and at least the cheese straws and the macaroons were good which meant the dinners probably would be, and within the half-hour they were joined by a bevy of amiable and lively ladies. Constance Ripon the shooting widow joined them – and surprised and alarmed all by reading from a list her husband had just given her: he had recently managed to kill sixty-five coots, thirty-nine pheasant, twenty-three mallard, sixteen rabbits, nine hares, seven teal, six partridge, six gadwall, four pochard duck, three swans, three snipe, two moorhens, two heron, one otter, one woodcock, one woodpigeon, one goldeneye, one rat, and a pike that was shot while it swam through shallow water: all in a single day. It was not surprising, Ettie Desborough whispered to Alice, that with a husband so busy and effective Constance had no children and collected art.

Most of the men were still down in the gunroom examining their weapons and talking to the shoot captain as to how the shoot was to go. It was expected to be a good day, even a record one. By five the King had not arrived: the message came that his knee was giving him trouble and he might have to attend in a Bath chair but ‘nothing would keep him away.’

‘He always does what he means to do,’ Alice said to Ettie Desborough. ‘He’ll be happy to have got the Queen’s and his joint birthday celebrations over and done with and escaped from Sandringham at last. They make a great thing there of birthdays but families can be so tedious and he has to be back up there for Christmas. On the whole we’re a younger crowd, positively skittish – oh yes, he’ll be here.’

‘And what on Earth has Isobel done with this room?’ said Ettie. ‘It simply won’t do. There used to be a perfectly good Rembrandt above the fireplace. Now there’s a strange daub of a lot of swimmers about to jump into water which doesn’t look in the least like water.’

‘My dear,’ said Alice. ‘We’re lucky there’s a fireplace at all. People keep taking them out and replacing them with radiators. Personally I don’t mind the bathers. I think it was little Minnie who chose it.’

‘Ah,’ said Ettie. ‘Little Minnie. Least said, soonest mended.’

‘Quite so,’ said Alice. Ettie was having an affair with Balfour, everyone said. Constance Ripon had observed that since Balfour was the cleverest man in England it was only right that he should have Ettie Desborough as his mistress, since she was the cleverest woman in England.

‘Unless we count you, of course, Alice,’ Constance had been kind enough to add, thus spoiling a good line.

Not surprising, thought Alice, if Isobel seemed to be a little tense; overshadowed, as anyone would be, by the most vivacious and brilliant women in the land.

And then word came that the King had finally arrived. All moved to the doors. Bertie had arrived with Ponsonby in one of his Daimlers – he had bought seven in the year – and also with Detective Inspector Strachan, who seemed to be in high royal favour, though it had been rumoured he had messed up the Dilberne abduction, which no one was meant to know about but everyone did. The King’s security cabal followed after – five strong young men who vanished into the servants’ entrance. Strachan stayed with the King. Life became quite complicated these days. Who went where was no longer clearly defined.

To love a king was a wonderful thing. It was magic; a holy thing, like the love of a priestess for her God, a child for her father. You loved the greatest living being in the world; you encompassed the orb and the sceptre in your love: it was a great comforting blanket which had fallen on you, and him, protecting and inspiring, and kept you warm and safe for ever. The heart soared. I love the King. The King loves me. It had happened on the first day they met. He was only the Prince of Wales, then. It was on 27
^th
February 1898. She was twenty-nine, and married to George. He was fifty-six, and married to the future Queen of England. He’d come to dinner. Their souls met. Both had mistaken it for something different. He came to her room at a house party at Cassel’s place in Moulton Paddocks a few days later. She had been expecting it. The Prince of Wales! It was immensely exciting. He had parted from Daisy Warwick, whose politics and behaviour were increasingly strange. To sleep with the future King of England – to know how he cried out: that was the only way to understand a man – and the cachet was great. If the Prince wanted you, everyone wanted you. It had been base enough.

She had lain in bed waiting in her whore’s underwear – for that was what it was, for all it had been designed by Worth and cost the Earth – and the Prince, this great burly magnificent creature, had stripped to his union suit, and simply lay on the bed beside her and said:

‘This was the only way I could get to talk to you without other people interrupting. Do you mind?’ and she had felt a great relief and said:

‘Not at all, Your Majesty,’ and he had said:

‘Bertie.’

And that was that.

They had talked and talked and touch was pleasant, and there was a little childish rolling about and slipping of limbs between limbs to get comfortable but that was all they needed.

She was the youngest of nine children; he was the eldest of nine. It seemed to be a connection. He understood the pattern of rivalries, the weight of expectation, the painful allocation of love in a large family: he understood what it was to be married to George, a mere Honourable in a world of my Lords and Sirs: she understood what it was to have been married off by a mother to a deaf Danish girl who was all charm and no brain. He talked about the Indian waiter, ‘the Munshi’, who seemed to have replaced him in his mother’s eyes: that made him excitable and distressed. She realized how emotional he was, how easily tears sprang to his eyes, how his face lit up when he broke into a smile. How he would cry and smile at the same time.

It occurred to her to recite ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ to calm him down. Her father’s favourite poem; he was an army man. She knew it by heart:

Half a league, half a league,

Half a league onward,

All in the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

‘Forward, the Light Brigade!

‘Charge for the guns!’ he said:

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

‘Forward, the Light Brigade!’

Was there a man dismay’d?

Not tho’ the soldier knew

Someone had blunder’d:

Theirs not to make reply,

Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do and die:

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

‘That was better than sex. What a wonderful poem!’ he said. After that they got together whenever they could. He healed her; she healed him. Everyone thought she was his mistress, but being the King’s mistress was no bad thing. Anything, frankly, in Society was better than being a mere Mrs. Miss at least held the promise of future change but once a boring Mrs, always a boring Mrs. Mr Balfour could get away with not being Lord Balfour because obviously he would get to being that in the end, but George would never be Lord Keppel.

But Mrs Keppel, King’s Mistress, was title enough; let people think what they would; she would never disabuse them. Occasionally Alexandra raised her eyebrows and sniffed a little but it was Alice’s opinion that she knew well enough what went on – that is to say, these days, precisely nothing – and if she was jealous of anything it was of time spent with her husband in intelligent conversation and Alice’s understanding of politics and statesmanship – not the Queen’s forte. And if she, Alexandra, wanted to present herself as wronged, she had grounds enough in Alice’s existence.

The bedroom Alice and George Keppel shared that night at Dilberne was comfort itself. Alice was even quite impressed: one whole wall was taken up with a capacious wardrobe, beautifully finished and polished in burr walnut, with rank upon rank of drawers, compartments and brass rails and hooks, a real filing cabinet for garments – handkerchiefs, ties, gloves, spats, veils, scarves, hats – a paradise for Agnes. A soft new bed and mattress – no four-poster nonsense with dusty hangings and canopy – but one missed the feel of
country
,
where you’d wake to ice flowers on the insides of windows and the floors were cold on one’s bare toes. Here the heavy iron radiators gurgled, groaned and spluttered through the night. She missed the clatter of fire tongs, and the smell of apple wood burning in the fireplace, and flames that seemed to speak to you. The bathroom was well lit, so you could see yourself properly in the mirror, but the old latticed windows had been recently replaced by metal ones – practical for lunatic asylums where the inmates might escape – and she had some in her own basement area in London to guard against burglars – but really, deep in the country, in a Jacobean manor? She said as much to George, as they got undressed.

‘It might be the police wallah’s suggestion, of course,’ George remarked. ‘He’s a great one for locking and barring. And of course it might all be in your honour, Alice. Where the King goes so do you, and long may it last.’ Sometimes she would like her husband to be just a touch more jealous, if only for form’s sake, but he never was.

‘I don’t think so,’ said Alice. ‘I think it just is that Isobel has no class. She tries too hard. Her father started life as a coal miner and the mother was some kind of courtesan. She’s simply not born to it.’

‘You were, of course,’ said he. ‘You’ve come down in the world. You should never have married me.’

It was true enough. She had been born impoverished in Duntreath Castle, home of her forebears since the fourteenth century, an entitlement older than any mere Dilberne. It was not in George’s nature to make money. But she had enough for herself now, thanks to the King’s and Sir Ernest Cassel’s help and the sudden blossoming of the Congo rubber trade.

She laughed and said:

‘Marrying you was the best thing I ever did. We have two lovely daughters and are happy.’ It was true enough.

Later that night she crept along the corridor to Bertie’s room, not taking too much trouble not to be seen. The corridors were warm and carpeted for which she was thankful. In Blenheim she had almost frozen to death on her way to him. She only stayed a short time: he was tired and his poor stiff knee was giving him trouble. He was sad, too, thinking of his sister Victoria who had died four years since, victim of her own son the Kaiser, who had refused her proper medical care. Sadness easily slipped over into anger, which he found easier to bear. He ranted against his nephew Wilhelm. She lay beside him and recited a soothing verse or two from Tennyson’s
Maud
.

’Tis a morning pure and sweet,

And a dewy splendour falls

On the little flower that clings

To the turrets and the walls;

’Tis a morning pure and sweet,

And the light and shadow fleet;

She is walking in the meadow,

And the woodland echo rings;

In a moment we shall meet;

She is singing in the meadow,

And the rivulet at her feet

Ripples on in light and shadow

To the ballad that she sings.

He fell asleep, no longer angry, just sad. Poor Bertie.

A Day of Broken Records

16th December 1905, The Dilberne Estate

In the morning George was up and out before dawn, the gleam of killing in his eye. He was a good shot, just not so lavish with his pellets as the King, let alone Ripon – or so single-minded as either, but good-looking, well-behaved, a generous tipper and popular with the men. The whole village would come out on these occasions, wives and children to flank the beaters, control the dogs, and help with the picking up. If the shoot was good and the birds flew high their cooking pots and ovens would be full for weeks.

Alice breakfasted in her room, and took her scented bath – George liked a simple violet, the King
La Rose Jacqueminot
from Paris, and Agnes used the latter without asking. Alice had her hair washed and put up, and dressed in a new wonderfully low-cut Worth tea gown of purple velvet and silk which she knew would create comment, although almost within the hour she would have to change into a rather more cumbersome and
sportif
tweed suit for lunch. The ladies were to join the Guns in the marquee – Isobel had really outdone herself – walkways had been built through woodland and moor so the lunch would be brought to the Guns, not the Guns to the lunch. Daylight was short and precious. The ladies must be there, in their sporty tweeds and furs, to admire the splendour of the bags and the prowess of the hunters.