Ravenscliffe (62 page)

S
eptember passed, October and November followed in rapid pursuit. Parkinson wondered aloud where the time was going, so swiftly did the days spin by. It’s because we’re so busy, Mrs Powell-Hughes told him, it’s because the work never ceases, and she was right. The house was alive with comings and goings; as one set of guests left with merry farewells, others would arrive with boisterous hellos. When the dowager countess left for Denbigh Court in September – taking Isabella with her and therefore, unavoidably, Bryony too, to whom Tobias had given, unkindly, the nickname Barnacle – the young Lord and Lady Netherwood had flung open the great doors of Netherwood Hall as if her absence was all they’d been waiting for. There followed a near-constant stream of visitors. The speed trials in early September – ‘A triumph,’ said Parkinson gloomily, ‘if only in the sense that no one died’ – brought forty guests to the house, and twenty-five motorcars to the stable yard. For two days no one was safe on the avenues, since when contestants weren’t racing, they were practising, and there was no peace to be had until it was all over. Wally Goldman took the title in his Ford Model A, managing an average speed of twenty miles an hour,
even accounting for a couple of hair-raising bends where the avenue met the lane. Tobias, in a Daimler Wagonette de Luxe, had to settle for second place and Thea, in a brand new Daimler Phaeton, came fifth overall, and was crowned motoring queen at the last-night banquet. There were riotous scenes when the chair she sat in was lifted high by four young men and carried in a lap of honour round the table. Parkinson spent more time in the cellars fetching wine than he did in the dining room. Henrietta began to feel old.

There followed, in the subsequent weeks, four shooting parties, a point-to-point, and a fancy-dress ball, the theme of which was The Hunt: all the ladies were foxes, all the gentlemen were hounds or masters of the hunt. The chase – a wild careen through the ground-floor rooms of the house – ended when the foxes had all been caught and corralled in the library. Three of the hounds went too far and had their foxes pinned to the floor as if they really did intend to tear them limb from limb, so Tobias, magnificent in white breeches and red jacket, clambered onto the Chippendale library table in his riding boots and gave a blast on his huntsman’s horn to break things up. Footmen watched with impassive faces. The ladies were saved but the Chippendale table was not.

More and more, Henrietta absented herself from these hedonistic entertainments and even Dickie, who was game for most things, declared them ‘a bit much’ and took himself off to the Italian Riviera with an old school chum. Thea and Toby reigned supreme in the palace of high jinks. Henrietta remembered with fondness the days when a dinner party would conclude with cards and music in the drawing room, and no one wished for anything more. She was no prude, but wantonness and impropriety in private was one thing: in public, quite another. And yet the boundaries of what was and wasn’t acceptable were being constantly pushed, as if a life lived quietly was no life at all. Henrietta, increasingly drawn by her
high-minded and earnest suffragist friends, found herself less and less dependent on the attentions of Thea. Thea, in turn, filled her empty hours by planning party after party as autumn turned into winter, the pinnacle of which was a Fireworks Spectacular – her response to a startlingly persuasive plea from the head gardener that the Grand Canal should be officially opened in some way commensurate with its grandeur. Daniel had requested a meeting, not in the morning room where generations of countesses had always conducted their business, but by the side of the canal itself from where he had invited her to join him on the farthest stepping stone, this being the vantage point from which the water looked its most dramatic.

‘What you have here, your ladyship, is the largest uninterrupted stretch of water of any private garden in the kingdom,’ he had said. ‘Just be still for a few moments and consider this fact.’

His tone wasn’t quite that of gardener to countess, but Thea’s sense of social superiority was not what it would have been had she been born to this life. She still had a habit of smiling at the footmen and asking them how they were, and she had asked her new lady’s maid to call her Thea (which the maid declined to do – the very idea made her feel faint). So, standing there on the square grey stone, she had taken no offence at the slight reprimand in Daniel MacLeod’s voice and had done as she was bid. She gazed out across the water and as she did so she felt she looked at the canal for the first time, though of course no one could fail to miss it. It lay there before her, magnificent, glassy and reproachful, and she had turned to Daniel and said: ‘Fireworks, do you think?’ which was, of course, the perfect answer.

So fireworks it was, and such fireworks that the county had never seen. Locals gathered on Harley Hill and Netherwood Common to watch the spectacle from a distance. Pyrotechnicians came and arranged their wares around the water’s perimeter,
sending thousands of pounds’ worth of explosives squealing into the black winter sky, releasing red, blue and white lights above the vast mirror of the canal. Afterwards, on the main terrace, kitchen staff – noses blue with cold – served beef bouillon in enamel mugs, hot baked potatoes with butter, and toffee apples. Thea, mastermind of the whole affair, felt heady and powerful with the success of it. She sought out Toby and tilted her face up to his. She knew she looked adorable, cheeks rosy with the cold air and the hot broth. With her eyes on his, her fingers found the buttons of his greatcoat and she opened them then snuggled into the folds of the coat with him. He stooped to kiss her.

‘You taste beefy,’ she said. She slipped a hand deep inside the waistband of his trousers and felt the shocking contrast of his warm flesh against her cold skin. He gasped, then moaned into her hair like a helpless animal. He pulled the coat tighter around and submitted to her skilful attentions: tiny movements, adroitly placed. In seconds she brought him shuddering to a silent climax and then she brought out her hand, wiped it, deft and efficient, on his tweed waistcoat, and slipped away. He lost sight of her almost at once; it was dark, and the terrace was crowded with friends. His wife had as many tricks as a seasoned whore and this should probably trouble him, he thought: for the life of him, though, he couldn’t do anything but smile.

Denbigh Court would do very well, Clarissa thought. It was older and more distinguished than Netherwood Hall: begun in the sixteenth century and completed in the seventeenth, it had been designed by a student of Inigo Jones and had all the free and fanciful hallmarks of the Jacobean age. Netherwood Hall, by comparison, was quite flat and dull. Archie Partington would
do well enough too, though Clarissa had made it plain, in terms that couldn’t be misunderstood, that their relationship would not extend into the bedroom. His face had fallen, but she had stood firm. It wasn’t as if he lacked an heir; he had offspring from both of his previous marriages. And she presumed that, if he still felt the urge to seek physical pleasure, then he must have some arrangement already in place. There was no earthly reason for his marriage to Clarissa to alter the way they both lived. All of this she set out with no more emotion than a lawyer, adding that if Archie should pre-decease her, she must insist on inheriting, in her name for the duration of her own life, his Park Lane mansion. She would not be forced to hole up with his oldest son Henry and his fat wife, whose name she had been told countless times but which continued to elude her. Archie listened to all of this and when she finished, he said: ‘Very well, my dear. Received and understood,’ and then he gave her a bracelet of emeralds and she felt almost sorry that she’d been so stern.

‘How do you like the duke?’ she said later to Isabella. ‘Shall you be able to love your new papa?’

‘Shall I be expected to?’ Isabella asked, with some surprise. ‘I don’t see why I should if you don’t.’

Clarissa had chided Isabella for her insolence, but half-heartedly. After all, she made a perfectly good point. However, she must remember, said Clarissa, that through the Duke of Plymouth, great connections could be made. He dined with the king whenever he was in London, she said, widening her eyes significantly, as if to suggest that Isabella might reasonably hope to throw her cap at a prince. Isabella was sceptical: wasn’t royal blood a requirement in the bride of a prince?

‘Depends,’ Bryony said in the bedroom that night. ‘One of the younger ones with no chance of the throne, perhaps. You’re the daughter of an earl, and you’ll be step-daughter
of a duke. Quite the aristocrat. I, of course, can hope for very little, especially now my parents have brought disgrace upon me. I shall be free to marry for love, however. I shall live a passionate life with a man who cares nothing for material wealth.’

She sounded jubilant, not tragic, and Isabella was silent. She didn’t know what to say. The older girl seemed to have the knack of deflating Isabella’s spirits while affecting to buoy them up. She wondered if she might have Bryony sent back to London.

Claude Reynard had given notice. César Ritz was building a new hotel in Piccadilly that would open in spring next year, and Monsieur Reynard simply couldn’t resist the glamour, the cachet or – perhaps most significantly – the promise of working once more among compatriots. This Yorkshire kitchen had lost its appeal; he wished to bark orders in French and have them understood; he wished to sit, eat and behave how he liked, free from the baleful gaze of an English butler; he wished never again to be asked to provide a crowd of unruly inebriates with fifty baked potatoes in place of dinner. At home in Bordeaux,
pommes de terre au four
was what his grandmother had fed to the pigs, and they did not require an Escoffier-trained chef to produce them. Sarah Pickersgill, given the bare bones of the news by Mrs Powell-Hughes, dropped like a stone onto a kitchen chair and looked at the housekeeper with damp and wounded eyes.

‘Why?’ she said.

Mrs Powell-Hughes said: ‘He has his reasons,’ which meant she wasn’t entirely sure herself.

‘I believe he’s had a better offer,’ said Parkinson. ‘The London Ritz wants him, and if you ask me—’

‘I haven’t asked you, Mr Parkinson,’ said Sarah, made bold by her grief and disappointment. ‘And I don’t want to ’ear it.’

She stood and ran from the room, her pinny at her face to catch the tears. The butler looked at Mrs Powell-Hughes in high dudgeon, but she wasn’t in the mood to join him.

‘Let her go,’ she said. ‘She’ll come to her senses before long.’

There was a pause, during which Parkinson wondered when, exactly, it had become acceptable for an under-cook to dish up insolence to a butler. For now, and while he still could, he blamed Claude Reynard.

‘The sooner the Frenchman goes, the better,’ he said. ‘Good riddance, I say. He has his merits, but I’m afraid I just don’t like him.’

‘Well, Mr Parkinson, you surprise me,’ said Mrs Powell-Hughes. ‘You’ve done such a good job of concealing it.’

He was polishing the plate as she spoke and something in her tone made him stop and look up from the task. The housekeeper had turned away to busy herself with table linen, but Parkinson got the distinct impression that her shoulders were shaking with laughter. For a little while, he watched her, hurt and indignation battling in his breast, but soon enough the shaking stopped and she began to hum lightly as she folded the linen glass cloths and placed them in tidy piles in a dresser drawer. But he felt unsettled. It seemed to him – and it had done now for quite some months – that the ordered surface of his existence was starting to craze with hairline cracks and the sight of the housekeeper’s private mirth was yet more evidence of a creeping deterioration in standards of behaviour. It was disorientating; he was surrounded on all sides by the familiar, yet by tiny increments the world was altering, and not for the better.
It was a measure of his distress that he found himself wondering who was butler at Denbigh Court and whether the dowager countess might insist he be replaced by her own dear Parkinson.