by Robin Paige
“Excellent. Kirk-Smythe will testify on my behalf, if required. He left early this morning to escort Temple to Ports-mouth, where the man will be handed over to the captain of one of the Queen’s warships, bound for Bombay. And I shall personally inform Mama of the events of the weekend.”
The Prince, Kate thought, seemed well pleased with the way in which the matter had been disposed. He turned to Charles with a vast smile. “Ah, Charles. Once again, I must thank you for your first-rate investigation. If it had not been for you, the scheme would have escaped detection; indeed, it might even have succeeded. All of us are in your debt.”
Charles bowed slightly. “It was mostly luck, sir, and Kate’s skillful questioning of the laundry maid. If she hadn’t persuaded the girl to name Temple, I might still be trying to discover recognizable fingerprints on the whiskey bottle and pistol. And it was great good luck that the laundress was able to identify the brand of Knightly’s cigar.”
The Prince shook his head. “I always told Milford those cheap cigars. of his were abominable,” he said. “I never understood why the deuce he fancied the filthy things.”
Kate turned to Daisy. “What’s to become of Meg?” she asked. “What she did was very wrong, but she is a good girl who was led astray by her love for Marsh. I hope she won’t be turned out.”
“I think not,” Daisy said. “She could have had no idea of the damage her actions might cause. And she has already paid dearly.”
“Ah, yes,” the Prince said. “Love can make people behave quite foolishly.” He became lost in thought for a moment, then roused himself. Turning to Charles, he said, “Speaking of love, when is the great day? I am sure Alix will join me in wishing to attend.”
“Lord Warwick and I would like to come, too, of course,” Daisy said.
Kate felt a rush of alarm. If Royalty and aristocracy were to attend the wedding, they would be followed by the press and crowds of the curious, and the ceremony would be turned into a circus. But she need not have been concerned. Charles spoke firmly.
“We plan, sir, to marry very quietly, on account of my brother’s situation, you see. As to the date, we have not yet set it.” He took Kate’s hand and pulled her close to him. “When we leave here, we are going to Somersworth to tell my family the news. Kate refuses to fix a date until Mother has been consulted.”
“Commendable, my dear,” said the Prince approvingly, “quite commendable. I am sure that the Dowager Baroness will be delighted by her son’s choice of a bride. And she will be relieved by the prospect of a continuance of the Somersworth line.”
Kate felt a small shiver of cold apprehension. She was not at all sure that Charles’s mother would be pleased, and as for the continuance of the Somersworth line, it was something she and Charles had not yet discussed. She supposed there would be children, of course, although Beryl Bardwell was not overjoyed by the thought.
“Now, Charles,” the Prince went on, “you must not forget our talk about the national crime laboratory. I am convinced that you are just the man to administer such an undertaking. I realize that it will be some time before your family responsibilities permit it, but we shall speak of the matter again.”
“Yes, sir,” Charles said, resigned.
The Prince straightened his waistcoat and hung his walking stick over his arm. “Well, I suppose it is time to be off. No need to confound schedules all up and down the line.”
Lord Warwick bowed. “Lady Warwick insists on having the honor of driving you to the station, sir. The pony cart is ready in front of the stable.”
“Then we shall be off,” the Prince said.
As Kate and Charles stood alone together on the steps, waving good-bye to the Prince and Daisy as they trotted down the lane in the pony cart, Kate said, “What do you suppose will happen to their relationship, Charles?”
Charles put his arm around Kate’s shoulders. “I should think HRH will shortly convince himself that it is time to find another mistress,” he said. “Daisy is a fascinating woman, but she will continue to invite controversy—something he can no longer afford.”
The door opened behind them and Bradford stepped out. “Oh, there you are,” he said. “I have been looking for you. Poor Ellie is feeling beastly, I am afraid, and has asked me to escort her back to London: I wonder, Charles, old man—would you be so kind as to drive the motorcar back to Marsden Manor? I can send Lawrence along to help out.”
“But I am returning with Kate,” Charles said. “We were planning to stop at Somersworth to tell Mother about our engagement.”
“That’s all right, Charles,” Kate said eagerly. “I would love to have a ride in the motorcar. Perhaps you can even teach me to drive it!”
Bradford shook his head in mock horror. “I fancied the Dowager Baroness would look askance at your riding a bicycle, Kate. What will she think if you arrive at the tiller of an automobile?”
“I am afraid Mother must make certain concessions,” Charles said with a laugh. “The future Lady Somersworth is likely to be quite irrepressible.”
HISTORICAL NOTE
The “darling Daisy affair” was the most notorious Royal affair of its day. The Prince of Wales had enjoyed many women before he took Daisy to his bed, and his profligate habits (“this corpulent voluptuary,” Rudyard Kipling called him) were well-known throughout the kingdom. Victoria’s conviction that his recklessness would incite the poor to destroy the Crown was fed by diatribes against him in the press and in Parliament. “The Prince of Wales must never dishonour the country by becoming King,” said one antimonarchist.
The affair began in 1889, when Daisy Brooke, Countess of Warwick, went to Marlborough House to beg the Prince of Wales to intercede with the angry wife of Charles Beresford, Daisy’s former lover, who had threatened her with public humiliation over a foolish letter she had written. “Suddenly I saw him looking at me in a way all women understand,” Daisy said, and they became lovers. Their relationship continued until sometime in 1896 or 1897. Daisy was a complex woman whose very real desires to do good were constantly overwhelmed by her poor judgment, abominable business sense, and enormous extravagances. It is entirely plausible to imagine, as we have done in this fiction, that the Royal relationship ended because the impulsive Daisy, who was deeply interested in radical political causes, posed too many dangers to the monarchy, and that her efforts to convert the Prince to her ideas were viewed by many at Buckingham Palace as profoundly threatening. Daisy was replaced in 1898 by Alice Keppel, a much more tractable, docile woman who did as she was told. Bertie became king in 1901. The Keppel liaison continued until his death in 1910.
The story of Daisy’s affair with Bertie does not end with their sexual liaison, however. In 1914, on the eve of the Great War, Daisy threatened to sell Bertie’s letters (including the “adored little, Daisy wife” letter we quote in the head-note to Chapter Twenty-One) to an American publisher unless Buckingham Palace paid her a hundred thousand pounds. A year later, her scheme paid off, and she was given sixty-four thousand pounds to hand over the letters. A few, however, made their way to Switzerland, where they came to light in the 1960s, and with them the story of Daisy’s blackmail.
The money Daisy received for the letters was not enough to erase her debts, but it wouldn’t have mattered anyway, since she never changed her spendthrift ways, foolishly lavishing money on well-meant but often ill-conceived causes. She became an avowed Socialist and ran as a Labor candidate for Parliament in 1923, but she was never accepted by the people she sought to help. Even her efforts to give Easton Lodge to the Trade Union Congress as an international Socialist university were ultimately rejected. The long-suffering Lord Warwick died in 1924, on the verge of bankruptcy, and Daisy’s assets by then had dwindled to almost nothing.
“When ‘they’ write my obituary notice,” she wrote in her memoirs, “it should be the record of a woman who feverishly designed many things for the betterment of human lives, while the ’Green Gods’ sat smiling at the puny efforts of an
imprisoned soul trying to find a way of escape.” In the 1930s, she retired to Easton Lodge, where she lived as an eccentric recluse. When thieves ransacked the estate two months prior to her death in 1938, they found little to carry off. In World War II, what remained of the park was turned into a military airfield, and in 1947 the hulk of the lodge was demolished.
Nothing remains of Daisy’s Folly.
Bill and Susan Albert AKA Robin Paige
REFERENCES
For this series, we have consulted numerous primary and secondary sources. The books listed here were most helpful to us.
Blunden, Margaret. The Countess of Warwick. London: Cassell & Company, 1967.
Brooke, Frances, Countess of Warwick. Discretions. New York: Scribners, 1931.
Brooke, Francis, Earl of Warwick. Memories of Sixty Years. London: Cassell & Company, 1917.
Girouard, Mark. Life in the English Country House. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978.
Hough, Richard. Edward and Alexandra: Their Private & Public Lives. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992.
Lang, Theodore. The Darling Daisy Affair. New York: Atheneum, 1966.
Montague, Lord, and F. Wilson McComb. Behind the Wheel: The Magic & Manners of Early Motoring. London: Paddington Press, 1977.
Thorwald, Jurgen. The Century of the Detective. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1965.
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