Before the War (30 page)

‘As we say,’ said Mallory, ‘we try not be angry, but just get on with things without rancour.’

‘I had the best of Grandma,’ said Stella. ‘I loved all that shopping when I was small.’

‘Alas, poor Stella,’ said Mallory. ‘
A damsel of infinite jest, of excellent fancy
.’

They had even learned their
Hamlet
in the finishing school, along with fine cookery, manners, how to greet royalty and look down their noses. They would survive without him.

‘We could have stopped you coming, Papa, but we needed you. We want you to take us to visit our mother’s grave on our birthday. We believe it is at an abbey in what was Austria but is now Germany. We understand crossing borders may be difficult if we are unaccompanied.’

‘The understatement of 1939,’ said Sherwyn. He almost felt like crying, it had all turned out so well. And he was so relieved. If they’d gone home with him he’d have stood no chance with Elvira. He did not want that. Elvira was everything a man could want. And then suddenly he became Delgano again, restored and confident. He did not look forward to going back to London. But one way or another he would move the plot of his life to a satisfactory ending.

Sherwyn hired an odd little car, one of Herr Hitler’s new populist Volkswagens, and they crossed without trouble into Germany, down to Munich and from thence to the Bavarian Alps. They were charged double what they should have been for petrol. Rationing was expected. Such deals were done cheerfully. The locals were buoyant. War was coming but who needed to be scared? The Nazis were at hand. The war would be sharp and short, restore the nation’s territories and pride and show the rest of Europe who was master.

Barscherau was no longer the little village Sherwyn remembered. It was now a tourist destination: in the winter a cable car took skiers to the higher mountain slopes. Now, in the summer bird watchers and hikers thronged the streets, uniforms and KdF groups were everywhere; the swastika was everywhere; geraniums bloomed in the window boxes: no-one seemed cheerless or gloomy. The old Town Hall was now spectacular with traditional Bavarian Lüftlmalerei. There was a shop doing good business selling cuckoo clocks. The Gasthaus Post had been extended and refurbished. Sherwyn looked through the window and saw the Bielers sitting by the fire, old people, nodding and smiling.

It seemed prudent not to linger. The twins spoke perfect German but Sherwyn could be too easily recognised as an Englishman. They found the office of Herr Becht, Rechtsanwalt, on the high street, but it was closed for lunch.

As they took the new road up to the abbey, Sherwyn began to feel more at home. The mountain above was snow capped. Eagles soared, the long grass below was alive with Alpine flowers. It had been a glorious summer, indifferent to human affairs. Sherwyn marvelled at how nature seemed to apologise for the terrors other forces were about to unleash, by creating such spells of benign weather. One could become very suspicious, sometimes, of clear blue skies. The old abbey had been partially restored, which was a pity. He preferred it as a ruin. But at least the Painted Madonna stood where she always had, calm, smooth and perfect, now beneath an elaborate frescoed baroque ceiling that did not leak. Vivvie would be pleased.

Mallory found the grave under the long grass. Someone had cleared it lately and left some flowers in a jam jar. There was a simple cross and a small brass plaque on which was engraved
Vivien Ripple
and
Requiescat in Pace.
There was no date. Sherwyn was embarrassed to admit he had not been to the funeral.

‘I was upset at the time,’ he said.

‘Because you loved her so much,’ the twins said.

‘She gave her life for us,’ said the twins. ‘Thank you, Mama.’

Sherwyn could see it behoved him not to elaborate.

Next to it they found a smaller cross and an even smaller plaque:

ARTHUR RIPPLE

Infant, one day old

R.I.P.

The cow, thought Sherwyn, enraged, the cow! Adela thought of everything.

‘You mean we were triplets? We had a brother who died?’

All of it, all of it, Adela’s fault. It was intolerable.

Fortunately Sherwyn found the person who had left the flowers. Actually there were two of them. One introduced herself as Maria Walker, the English doctor’s wife. The other as her friend Berthe.

‘We come here quite a lot,’ Maria said. ‘Such a blessed place. And she was so good. Almost a saint. She gives me hope still.’

‘She had twins, you know,’ said the other one. ‘Not a son. I should know. It was two little girls I breast fed for their first day of life. One doesn’t forget a thing like that.’

‘I took them after that,’ said the doctor’s wife. ‘For a whole month. My husband insisted. My own little girl had to go hungry. One was a little angel, the other one scratched and fought. So why the son? We’ve always wondered.’

‘A genuine mistake,’ said Sherwyn. But oh, beware, he thought, one’s sins will find one out. He had not played fair with Vivvie. Some things may be confessed to, others never. But, as it occurred to him later, some benign influence he did not deserve came to his rescue. Delgano would have it that it was the Painted Madonna, with his reward for being Joseph.

The twins came back into the church at that moment looking for their Papa, and were met by cries of joy and delight from the two people who’d nourished them and known them when they were babies. For all concerned it made the day complete. The twins heard from Berthe that she had known their mother well before she died, and from Maria Walker that her husband had been present when Vivvie died, and there was nothing anyone could have done to save her. In the noise and tumult of reunion the matter of Arthur, infant, was forgotten; this poor baby that Adela never had.

Sherwyn conveyed the twins safely back to the Académie St. Augustine in Lausanne, content to get on with their lives. He was able to use his best Delgano skills in getting himself back to London and the Albany. It was the day after the declaration of war, and all borders were closed and closely guarded; a disgruntled fisherman managed to get him back to Dover for a price. The journey had been dangerous, but he had survived. Major Grand of Section D would be pleased. At last the real war could begin.

~

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The story continues in
After the War
, which will be released in spring 2017

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Love & Inheritance
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In the dying days of Victoria’s reign, the events of a single turbulent morning herald bankruptcy and ruin for the Earl of Dilberne. His wife, the Countess Isobel, believes the solution is to marry off their handsome, wilful son to a rich and pretty heiress from the Chicago stockyards. It’s a clash of cultures and principles that rocks the household from parlour to pantry.

Gold mines fail, bankers plot, bad girls flourish, the London fog descends, Royalty intervenes and unlikely lovers triumph.
Habits of the House
, the first book in the Love & Inheritance trilogy, is a ravishing portrait of the
fin de siècle
from one of our best-loved British authors.

Can’t wait? Buy it here now!

8.45 a.m. Tuesday, 24th October 1899

As it was, even without the annoying arrival of Mr Baum, Isobel anticipated a busy day. There were eighteen to dinner and Rosina had upset her seating plans, deciding the company was not interesting, and had found a meeting she
had
to go to at a new ladies’ club in Bayswater, this one in support of the movement for the peaceful settlement of international disputes. Pleas from her mother merely hardened Rosina’s resolve. Isobel sometimes complained to her husband that Rosina had stuck at the age of sixteen, when girls were at their most wilful and argumentative. Isobel would rely on Grace to help her with the seating and the place names. Grace had her finger on the pulse of society, on the many-tongued gossip which travelled from lady’s maid to lady’s maid, concierge to concierge, footman to footman all around London: only butlers could be relied upon to be discreet. In any case that was the common perception.

At least the Prince of Wales had not been invited, as Robert sometimes threatened. Then the seating would become a nightmare, though Grace could be relied upon to know who would be welcome sitting next to the Prince, and who had best be kept at the further end of the table. And, after a great deal of fuss and bother, news might come in any case that he was unable to attend after all. In the same way as Rosina was so good at finding meetings that simply had to be attended or her very life would collapse, so the Prince would find his mother the Queen had summonsed him, or affairs of State had arisen that needed his attention. Or perhaps he would decide suddenly that his wife demanded him by her side. Not that this courteous and well-mannered woman caused her husband any trouble unless she felt his reputation was in danger.

It was not the expense of royal dinners that worried Isobel – though the Prince was a hearty eater – but extra agency staff would have to be brought in, usually undertrained and prone to spill food and chip plates in return for outrageous wages. Robert worried about large sums of money but not the small, assuming that the normal workings of a large household came to him by right and were therefore free of charge. Isobel had been brought up by a mother from the North, who would say things like ‘many a mickle makes a muckle’ and ‘look after the pence and the pounds will look after themselves’, and her daughter knew it to be true. ‘Come round to dinner,’ his Lordship was quite capable of saying to the Prince, but instead of the pleasure and pride that a normal dinner party would avail, the inclusion of royalty brought only anxiety and tension. She reflected that the way Robert dealt with problems was first to invite them and then deny them. When Grace called her she was already fully awake. After his Lordship’s earlier attention she felt languid and relaxed and her bed more comfortable than usual.

Her ladyship protested when roused that she saw no reason why she should be summoned early to breakfast just because of Mr Baum’s presence. He was just a trumped-up tradesman who dealt in
money,
not even goods. He did not know how to behave. Coming to the door so early was not the mark of a gentleman, nor was asking himself to breakfast. She could not for the life of her think why his Lordship put up with Mr Baum and did not send him packing,

‘No, ma’am,’ said Grace, whose normal role was to agree, receive information but not comment on it. His Lordship put up with it, thought Grace, because the Prince had recommended Mr Baum, because his Lordship was in all probability quite heavily in debt to Mr Baum, and because the children’s affairs were – rashly, in Grace’s opinion – dealt with by Mr Baum, which was why their mother needed to be in attendance. But hers not to reason why, let alone offer an opinion, just to decide what her Ladyship was to wear that day.

For Lady Isobel’s immediate morning wear Grace picked out one of her new health corsets, which did not grip the waist and force the bosom up, a mere four layers of petticoats, to be topped by a loose brown woollen dress that did not sweep the floor but approached the ankle, with a high collar in cream lace to frame the face. She twisted her Ladyship’s long, thick, fair hair into a simple top-knot. She needed no jewellery. It was merely a breakfast, after all. Only when her friend and rival the Countess d’Asti was in the offing, Grace knew, did her Ladyship worry greatly about her appearance. Then she had be firmly laced, encased in vast masses of expensive and heavy fabric, hair tonged and tortured into fashionable shapes, simply so as to keep up appearances with the Countess. Grace thought Lady Isobel looked even more lovely and youthful when simply dressed, as now. She might be the child of a coal mining family but there was nothing dwarfed or rickety about her, as there was, frankly, about the Countess, whose invitations were so eagerly sought after by all London society. The Countess was witty, mean, and, Grace always felt, slightly fraudulent. Why her Ladyship took the woman so seriously Grace could not imagine.