The Gropes (2 page)

But the most persistent problem was that of firstborn males when girls were wanted or, worse still, Mrs Gropes who failed to produce female offspring at all. The Registration of Births & Deaths Act of 1835 made the old remedy of strangling or suffocating baby boys at birth a decidedly risky procedure. Not that the family had ever admitted having recourse to such a thing.

A dearth of female heirs was a particular problem for Mrs Rossetti Grope who was seemingly incapable of producing girls.

‘It’s not my fault,’ she wailed when a seventh baby boy arrived. ‘Blame Arthur.’

This excuse, later to be proved scientifically accurate, did nothing to satisfy her sisters. Beatrice was furious.

‘You shouldn’t have picked the brute in the first
place,’ she snorted. ‘Any fool can see he’s disgustingly licentious and masculine. Don’t we know anyone round here who has a spotless record for fathering only girls?’

‘There’s Bert Trubshot over in Gingham Coalville. Mrs Trubshot has had nine lovely girls and –’ started Sophie.

‘Bert the night-soil man? I don’t believe it. An uglier man I never did see what with his acne and … are you sure?’ asked Fanny.

Sophie Grope was.

‘I am not being bedded by Bert Trubshot!’ screamed Rossetti hysterically. ‘My Arthur may not be the perfect husband but at least he’s clean. Bert Trubshot’s absolutely filthy.’

Her sisters looked at her with angry eyes. No Grope had ever refused to do her duty before. Even during the Plague when other farms in the district had shut their doors against strangers, a barren and widowed Eliza Grope had bravely dragged a number of terrified men misguidedly looking for the safety afforded by the remoteness of Mosedale to her bed and had given them succour. Not that her efforts had been rewarded in the way she hoped. She had died of the plague herself. But her example had set a standard for all later generations of Gropes to follow.

‘You will lie with Bert Trubshot whether you like it or not,’ Beatrice told Rossetti darkly.

‘But Arthur will be furious. He’s a very jealous man.’

‘And a hopeless husband. In any case he won’t know anything about it.’

‘But he’s bound to find out,’ Rossetti said. ‘And he’s very keen on his loving.’

‘Then we’ll just have to see he loses interest in that side of things,’ said Beatrice.

Three months later, when Rossetti was sufficiently recovered and her baby boy had been consigned to the usual orphanage in Durham, Arthur Grope was given an excessively strong dose of sleeping draught in his soup and had just enough time to comment that it tasted better than the soup usually did before falling asleep over the boiled mutton and carrots. Later that night he had a most unfortunate encounter with a broken bottle of brandy from which he never fully recovered.

In the meantime, Sophie and Fanny set off in a curtained carriage for Gingham Coalville to fetch Bert Trubshot. They found him going about his noisome task at two o’clock in the morning and while Fanny approached him from the front – ostensibly to ask if they were on the right road to Alanwick – Sophie, armed with a loaded blackjack, rendered him unconscious with a judicious blow to the back of his skull. After that it was a simple matter to drive him back to Grope Hall where, after he had been scrubbed and blindfolded and liberally anointed with several bottles of perfume, given a great many oysters and some crushed pearl, he
performed his duty in a state of hallucinatory delirium brought on by concussion.

Even Rossetti found the experience less distasteful than she had expected and felt a sense of loss when he was finally drugged and driven back to Gingham Coalville. What Bert Trubshot felt when he was found stinking of perfume and stark naked on the doorstep of the Trubshot cottage was the back of his wife’s hand and a degree of regret that he had ever married such a violent and unlovely woman.

Arthur Grope was feeling even worse. Lying in Wexham Hospital he was painfully aware of what had happened to him but couldn’t for the life of him imagine how or why it had happened.

‘Isn’t there something you can do?’ he asked the doctors in an already altering voice, only to be told there wasn’t much left to do anything with and anyway he shouldn’t have drunk so much brandy. Arthur said he couldn’t remember having drunk any brandy at all, not a drop, because he’d been a teetotaller all his life but that, if what the doctors told him was true and his only pleasure in life had gone for good, he was damned well going to drink like a fish in future.

Arthur’s resolution to become a full-blown drunk was reinforced when, nine months later, Rossetti Grope gave birth to an unusually ugly daughter with black eyes and dark hair and none of the features that had distinguished the boys he had previously fathered. He died a deeply bitter and alcoholic castrato a year
later and was followed to the grave shortly afterwards by Rossetti and her daughter, both of whom caught pneumonia during a singularly cold and wet winter.

Fortunately for the Grope family, Fanny made good the shortcomings of Rossetti, producing seven baby girls without benefit of clergy by making regular repeat visits late at night to Gingham Coalville where, being less sensitive and hygienic than her late sister, she enjoyed the attentions of Bert Trubshot. Thanks to a night-soil man, the female Grope line was once again secure.

By the middle of the nineteenth century the gentrification of British society, which had begun almost a hundred years before in the South, finally reached Mosedale and Grope Hall. The Gropes, having already installed indoor water closets and Venetian green chairs, did their best to ignore this further assault on the grounds that like all previous fashions it would soon pass. But inevitably even Beatrice, now the dominant mistress of the Hall, finally succumbed to the lure of antimacassars and the cluttered furnishings that had been popular elsewhere fifty years before. The old tin baths that had sufficed the family for their annual ablutions for so many years were discarded and replaced with a huge iron bath equipped with taps
and regular cold and occasional hot water and the female Gropes were to be found bathing at least once a week.

But for the husbands and the odd son still lurking about, things continued much as they had before. Grope menfolk brewed ale for their wives and distilled various lethal spirits which they called brandy or gin according to their colour as they had for generations, and if they were lucky, or if their wives desired their services that night, were allowed to take the occasional bath in a nearby river.

Gentrification aside, men and women generally went about their business as though nothing material would ever change. But they were wrong.

At the start of the twentieth century coal was found on the estate in larger quantities than ever before and in seams so thick and in such close proximity that not even Adelaide Grope, the one daughter to possess a shrewd business mind and acting head of the family in place of the now senile and bedridden Beatrice, could resist the prospect of immense wealth. The naval arms race with the Kaiser’s Germany had just begun and the demand for coal to build and fuel dreadnoughts was enormous. A narrow railway line was built along the desolate valleys, trucks loaded to the brim trundled down to the great ironworks and shipyards sixty miles to the east and returned filled with sturdy men to work the mines.

Almost overnight the Gropes became relatively rich,
both in money and in an apparent surfeit of men who might service the Grope girls, even if they wouldn’t marry them. But it wasn’t to be. The sinister reputation of the family, and nine awful dogs, descendants of the friendly bloodhounds but now decidedly unfriendly, deterred any men, whether new to the district or not. So did the girls. In truth, Beatrice’s daughters, all five of them, retained too many of the physical attributes of their forebears to hold any attraction for even the most desperate man. Soon the miners steered clear of Grope Hall altogether, moving only in groups, a single man being an easy target. From the windows of the Hall predatory eyes watched them clamber out of the empty coal wagons in the morning and cling to the sides of full ones returning at night. There was nothing the Grope girls could do.

Adelaide, however, who retained the ruthless attributes of her ancestors, still found ways to exploit both the new-found Grope riches and the sudden increase in available men. For one thing, she had foreseen the taxation problems that lay in the possession of ostentatious wealth. To ensure that the taxation authorities would be unable to establish the true profit from the mine she had drawn up the contract herself. It was an extraordinary document, to put it mildly. All profits were to be in gold sovereigns payable on a monthly basis, and to be brought to the Hall by the chief accountant of the mining company who was himself privately guaranteed 5 per cent of the unrecorded total.
Finally she had persuaded Beatrice, legally still head of the family, to sign the contract with the mining company in the presence of two terrified doctors, one a psychiatrist at a mental hospital, together with a notary public. Since Beatrice had been confused to the point of dementia at the time, Adelaide had paid extravagantly for this privilege, forking out a substantial sum by way of bribery to guarantee the doctors’ and the notary public’s acquiescence that Beatrice was in her right mind

Having secured the Grope family fortunes, Adelaide turned her attention to the vexing problem of securing the female line. And in the tradition of her forebears she concluded that kidnap and enforced captivity was the only viable solution.

Noting the inroads to the Grope estate afforded by the new railway lines, Adelaide embarked upon an ambitious plan by which to strengthen security and to ensure that any stray miners, once seized, stayed seized. After a particularly successful night-time sortie which saw two unsuspecting fellows contentedly fishing Mosedale River wake up several hours later trussed up like chickens under the watchful eye of two of the larger Grope daughters, these precautions took on a new urgency. A notice on the gate went up warning anyone attempting to get down to Grope Hall to ‘BEWARE THE SPANISH FIGHTING BULLS’ and indeed two lithe and dangerous bulls were loosely tethered next to the rough track that served as a drive to the house.
After a number of mishaps largely involving gored postmen and an entire absence of any letters, however urgent, for the Grope household, a box had been fastened to the wall beside the gate for the mail.

Adelaide had gone further to ensure that no one intruded and that, once in, no one would get out. The top of the wall had been implanted with iron spikes while especially thickened steel barbed wire was arranged on more iron stakes on the near side of the wall. In fact these precautions were almost counterproductive. The Gropes’ reputation had for centuries sufficed to keep the public at bay and that they had erected what amounted to a formidable defence system aroused a great deal of curiosity. People came over from Brithbury and even further afield to look at the spikes and the peculiar black bulls and of course went home to spread the word that the Grope family’s old traditions had evidently not died out.

‘They must be trying to keep some poor devil trapped in the place’ was the general opinion in the Moseley Arms. ‘Must be a very fierce fellow too to need all those spikes and wire and all. Cost a small fortune to put that lot up at that. Them rich, them Gropes, to afford to do all that. Goodness only knows where they got them bulls from.’

‘Spain supposedly. It says so on the noticeboard.’

An old man by the fire grinned. ‘Supposedly is right,’ he said. ‘Bought the brutes in Barnard Castle is my opinion. No more fighting bulls than I am.’

‘I wouldn’t want to risk going down there for all that,’ said another man. ‘It’s them nine dogs frighten the lights out me. More like wolves than bloodhounds they are.’

News of this gossip reached Adelaide. It didn’t worry her. But the accumulation of so much more wealth than they had ever possessed before, and its effect on her sisters, did. The two unfortunate fishermen had lasted a mere season in the Grope household with only a phantom pregnancy to show for it. And the continued presence of so many brawny miners passing below the house every day unsettled both the Grope women and the tethered bulls. The former spent their time yearning for marriage. The latter yearned too, but for an unspecified kind of consummation.

After several years enduring this pent-up desire Adelaide finally allowed the younger Grope women to go out into the world with sufficient incomes to live in a style to which they were unaccustomed. She wisely kept the bulls tethered.

Freed from the seclusion of Grope Hall and the dominance of Adelaide, the newly released female Gropes rapidly found husbands and settled down in towns and farms across southern England with husbands who knew nothing of the Gropes’ history. By the outbreak of the First World War, Adelaide herself had forced the chief accountant into marrying her by threatening to expose his acceptance of the percentage he received from cooking the books. And a
year later she had given birth, much to her joy and to everyone else’s amazement, to a baby girl. By then, mad old Aunt Beatrice had died and Adelaide, determined to celebrate, had completely transformed the interior of Grope Hall while the exterior remained as gaunt as ever. Inside, the rooms were no longer so far behind the times as they had been. Adelaide had had them redecorated and furnished in the most modern style since finding out from the chief accountant that she might write off the refurbishment as a business expense. Only the scrubbed wooden tables and benches in the kitchen and in what was called the study remained. It was here that business was conducted, and Adelaide had no intention of giving away any indication of her wealth. For safety’s sake most of the gold she had converted her profits into was hidden in an unnecessarily deep grave and covered with earth under the stone-flagged floor of the ancient chapel unknown to anyone except Adelaide herself together with the Reverend Nicholas Grope who was never allowed off the premises so scarcely counted. In any case, the effort of digging the grave that contained the gold had damaged his back so badly and he was so old he spent most of his time in bed and was incapable of going anywhere even had he been allowed to.