The New Countess

by Fay Weldon

  ‘You’re a good girl, Molly,’ said Grace approvingly. ‘Lady Minnie was right about you.’ Molly glowed.

  Molly had almost decided that when they’d got to the hotel she’d somehow slip out to Belgrave Square and let the world and the newspapers know that the Dilberne heir was being kidnapped, but now she thought perhaps she wouldn’t. A word of praise made all the difference.

  ‘Oh, do please hurry,’ said Minnie, as they set off again. ‘I feel so exposed on the open road. I won’t feel really safe until I’m on the boat.’

  ‘You won’t be safe even then,’ said Eddie. ‘The Carpania carries a wireless telegraph. A day out at most and the police will alert the captain and the crew will start searching the boat high and low.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Minnie and she began to cry.

  ‘But they won’t find you. I’ve booked us all in third class,’ said Grace. ‘Nobody will be looking for a Viscountess and the heir to the Dilberne name and fortune in third class, rest assured. I’ll go on board as a visitor, Molly can have my passport which calls me a maid, and if there’s trouble I’ll just leave.’

  ‘That’s not why I’m crying,’ said Minnie. ‘This is where I fell in love with Arthur. On this very road. In this very place. It was a steam car and we ran out of water.’

  ‘Oh for Heaven’s sake,’ said Tessa, ‘you daft eejit. Pull yourself together. If you loved him you shouldn’t have run out on him in the first place. You think every man is like your father and you can do what you like and he’ll still love you. Well, they’re not and they don’t. They take offence.’

  ‘But I didn’t do anything,’ Minnie wailed.

  ‘That’s as may be,’ said Grace sagely, ‘but I daresay you might have wanted to. You know what the Bible says. Those who commit adultery in their hearts—’

  Minnie wailed again.

  ‘That’s a horrible word. It wasn’t like that!’

  ‘Pure in thought, word and deed, that’s what they want their wives to be,’ said Mr Eddie, ‘just not other men’s wives.’

  Minnie began to sob dreadfully.

  ‘I love him so!’

  Edgar began to cry and held out his little arms to Molly.

  ‘Oh please, everyone,’ said Molly, before she could stop herself, ‘do be quiet. You’re upsetting the little ones.’

  They stared at her; shocked, she thought, that the dumb should speak. She straightened her blue and white nursemaid’s uniform and tried to look as undaunted as Nanny. It worked. They quietened: even Minnie stopped her sobbing and pulled herself together.

  Edgar went back to sleep.

  ‘What will you do the other end?’ said Eddie. ‘You’ll have three passports between four people.’

  ‘We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,’ said Grace. ‘Molly can pass as another child.’

  Eddie drove determinedly and skilfully towards London. There was no pursuit.

  Connor stirred; Mrs O’Brien put him on her knee and let him swarm joyously all over her plump shiny pastel blueness, little heels digging into grandmotherly flesh, little teeth searching for her shiny nose, little fingers picking at her valuable pearls.

  ‘The sweet darling!’ said Tessa. ‘A real O’Brien, this one. Just look at him. And a dead ringer for me, wouldn’t you say, Grace? I’m not so sure about Edgar. He takes after the Dilberne side. Ever so grand!’ It was true enough. Three-year-old Edgar was now sat upright on his mother’s knee, quiet and composed, staring into space, with a slightly pained expression, looking down a patrician nose, as if well aware that he was a Dilberne to the manner born and that these others were probably not. He was, Molly thought, his grandfather Robert reborn, but without his Lordship’s joviality.

  By the time they arrived at Brown’s in Dover Street, after a successful day’s kidnapping, they gave all the appearance of a perfectly normal family party. Tessa, after Connor’s manhandling, was perhaps a little more dishevelled than when she had started out from the Savoy that morning, Minnie not so much so – and Grace as self-possessed as ever. Molly was pleased to find there was a laundry service available and that her uniform could be boiled, starched and ironed overnight and returned to her first thing.

  The Inspector Takes Charge

  3rd and 4th December 1905

  Better to be too active than too idle, Inspector Strachan thought. When the kidnapping crisis blew up so suddenly and dramatically he had found himself almost pleased. Frankly he had been marking time at Dilberne Court and could well have gone back to his Special Branch duties at Windsor. The likelihood of an assassination attempt on the King during a shooting weekend was low, though not impossible: he had men in the area and no report of any unusual activity had come to their ears, no sinister Irishmen, no wild-eyed Russians. If there was reason for alarm something would have surfaced by now: he could reasonably have gone home a week ago. But home, after the death of his wife Helen and little son in childbirth three years back, was lodgings in Camden Town with a landlady whose meals were meagre and grudging, where the hot water geyser in the shared bathroom erupted every few minutes and sprayed the naked bather with soot. Better far to spend as much time as he could in Dilberne Court.

  Andrew Strachan was the only son of a widowed innkeeper in Leicester. He had won a scholarship to grammar school, gone on to University College London to study electrical engineering, then entered the Metropolitan Police. He had risen rapidly through the ranks, been seconded to the Special Irish Branch, then to Mr Akers-Douglas’s newly formed Royal Protection Command, of which he was now Acting Commander: which he suspected meant ‘not quite gentleman enough to be Commander, but someone has to do the work’. Mildly put out by the slight, he continued to refer to himself as ‘Inspector’. That was what he did. He inspected; he sought out error; he looked out for danger.

  He enjoyed the comforts of Dilberne Court. The towels were thick and heavy, never shared, and warmed before use by heated porcelain rails. He had a telephone line by his bed (a new mattress) with priority access to the Dilberne telephone exchange and from thence emergency connections to the Metropolitan Police and various local policing agencies. Cook kept an excellent table. There were some difficulties and embarrassments, of course. His social standing was never made quite clear to anyone. He was not a gentleman, in that he was obliged to earn a living: he was a public employee of comparatively low status, who yet had the ear of the King. It confused everyone, including himself.

  Her Ladyship would say, ‘Oh, do join us for supper tonight,’ mostly when she dined alone or with Lady Minnie, if seldom when Lord Robert was expected down from Belgrave Square or Lord Arthur prepared to spend time away from the workshops. Neither seemed quite at ease in his presence. If the invitation did not come he would make his way down to the servants’ hall and eat there. But then the servants, in their turn, would let him know, in subtle or not so subtle ways, that he was endured rather than welcomed at their table. He could understand why he put a damper on their conversation, but it quite upset him. He liked a joke and a good laugh as much as anyone. What he wanted really, of course, was a family. He had thought after Helen’s death that he could perhaps find one in the Police Force, but found that as promotion succeeded promotion, his own staff became wary of him. Being mostly spies, they were not over-genial at the best of times.

  When Nanny, dishevelled and incoherent, had fallen through the front door to report that the young masters had been snatched, and their nursemaid with them, the Inspector had both a sense of failure – he had allowed errors to occur, a danger he’d anticipated to come to pass – and also of irritation: he had warned them and they had chosen to ignore his warnings. A surfeit of righteous indignation had blinded them to the fact that Minnie might fight back. They had been complacent. Things could go wrong, did go wrong, sometimes horribly wrong. The French Revolution had happened; kings and princes got assassinated, governments were overthrown; yet in spite of all evidence to the contrary the Dilbernes and their like felt they were inviolable b
y reason of their natural superiority. When he had warned her Ladyship that something like this might happen, she had laughed him off.

  Mr Strachan was not without sympathy for Minnie. She had had two births within a year, by a husband who paid far more attention to his cars than his wife. When he first met her she’d been an artless, bright little thing, eager to please and be pleased: over the months she had become withdrawn and depressed. Arthur struck him as one of those men who fall in love with Mary Magdalene but once she has a baby see her as Mother Mary, holy, pure and not to be defiled. If she then disturbs the vision, there will be no end to his outrage. If Lady Minnie wanted a love life like other women had she was probably wise to go home to Chicago: but she must accept that she would have to do it without her children. To try to include them in her new life was irresponsible and unkind. Nursemaids could always take the mother’s place, no one the father’s.

  Nevertheless, he had suggested to her Ladyship that she had been unwise in shutting the door in Minnie’s face. It was tactless and unnecessarily hurtful. Some kind of negotiation would have been a better course.

  ‘Standing between any female and its young is never wise,’ he had said. ‘A normally placid cow will batter the barn door down and kill you if her calf is on the other side.’

  ‘For Heaven’s sake, Mr Strachan,’ she had replied. ‘Stick to your policing and leave me to deal with my family. Minnie, moral imbecile though she may be, knows well enough that as an adulterous wife she is not fit to bring up children. And to liken her to a cow is absurd. Humans have souls and reason; beasts of the fields have neither. Minnie is a lady not a cow.’

  ‘She is also a woman,’ he thought but did not say, contenting himself with:

  ‘It is hardly a matter of reason, your Ladyship, but of passion.’

  She’d looked mildly puzzled at this and he wondered if she’d herself ever sacrificed reason to passion. Probably not.

  His Lordship was a genial enough cove but wouldn’t encourage his wife to behave other than decorously. Like so many of his class he kept passion for himself and his harlots, reserving ‘respect’ for his wife. At this moment the Earl was visiting a tart called Carmen, so it was reported by his guardians: Ministers of the Crown were discreetly watched over, though the Home Secretary Akers-Douglas had advised that it was better if they did not get to hear of it – they would only object, preferring to put their privacy before their security. So the watchers moved silently and secretly. The Earl in particular could too easily fall victim to blackmail; the King was open about his liaisons – those who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear – but the Earl, no doubt out of respect for his wife, kept his secrets.

  Carmen was watched too. She was a Brazilian; Brazil was a polyglot state awash with mad dictators, agents provocateurs and anarchists: Heaven alone knew what plot she might be part of, what pillow talk she heard or passed on. And Strachan was keeping an eye on his Lordship’s valet Digby, the one who introduced his Lordship to The Cardinal’s Hat. Strachan knew about the place: it was little more than a sophisticated brothel, its customers international diplomats, titled gentlemen and high-ranking Westminster officials, many with devious tastes. It prided itself on its discretion and was anything but discreet; as it happened, Special Branch already had three paid informers on the staff: one cloakroom girl, one cleaner and one barman, who reported back on the comings and goings of the clientèle.

  Digby was a rather unsavoury character who had exotic proclivities; how he had ended up in Dilberne employ had yet to be ascertained. This was enough to attract Strachan’s attention, the more so because Digby had been seen to call at the offices of a Mr William Brown, a publisher, who was a friend of a certain the Hon. Anthony Robin, an editor, with whose sister Diana, the Dilberne daughter Rosina, a radical writer and agitator, just happened to be staying on her return from Australia. It was unlikely that No. 3 Fleet Street was a nest of conspirators but it all certainly seemed rather too close for comfort to the heart of political power, especially since Dilberne was in the King’s circle. One needed to be sure that everything was innocent and coincidental. In his experience coincidence was actually rather rare.

  In her recent runaway mode Minnie had chosen to take refuge with Rosina, and who knew what unhealthy influences the latter had? Mother-love could indeed provoke a mother to kidnap her own children, but so could spite, politics, greed. Sex was the most innocent motivation of all, and it was something of a reassurance that Mr Robin was to be cited as a co-respondent in Lord Arthur’s divorce case. If the Viscount had not yet served papers on his wife, it was certainly not because he had changed his mind but for the simple reason that she could not be found.

  The Dilbernes were charming, affable and well-connected; to cancel the King’s trip would be a pity, but might yet have to happen. Poor Isobel. Her trouble was that she would not be advised. He knew well enough that she trusted him and liked him, and he suspected that had he been better born she might even have fancied him, and his thoughts did stray sometimes in that direction – though he kept a stern check on them. Just every now and then he detected a look from her which suggested that were he to do something drastic, such as tell her of Carmen’s existence, she might in shock and distress, and the desire for vengeance – never to be discounted in a woman – fall into his arms. But it was not going to happen.

  And she was rash, thus quarrelling with a clever daughter, and now with a wealthy daughter-in-law. At least it was pretty evident that the kidnapping was a domestic matter. A terrorist or criminal, anyone who offered a threat to the King, would have snatched the children but left the maid. Only a woman, a mother, would think of taking the nursemaid as well.

  Nanny had managed to provide an adequate description of the perpetrators, and there could be no doubt but that they were Minnie, her mother the Irishwoman Tessa O’Brien and a tall woman who was as likely as not to be Grace, the ex-employee who might or might not be described as disgruntled. It was a possibility that the nursemaid was an accomplice; the plot could have layer upon layer to it, starting with some anarchist in Odessa, and point back to the King, but Mr Strachan did not think so. Local girls of fifteen were more likely to run off than conspire. Those who bring the bad news are often involved, true, but it was not likely to be Nanny. Nanny was an old, confused woman who after the snatch had dragged the empty pram after her down muddy lanes and all the way to the front door, thus taking twice the time to bring the news as she need have. It had not occurred to her simply to abandon it. She was in the first stages of senility, and in Mr Strachan’s opinion should not have been left in charge of the nursery. He might in time say as much to her Ladyship but since all she was likely to say was, ‘Oh for Heaven’s sake, Mr Strachan, stick to your policing,’ et cetera, et cetera, he felt disinclined so to do.

  He had put all necessary procedures in place without delay. They were not exactly normal procedures since obviously steps must be taken to avoid public attention. A divorce was bad enough but for a Viscountess to kidnap her own children would reverberate through the centuries. Or so her Ladyship observed, and his Lordship agreed. The Dilbernes had received the news calmly. That is to say they did not shriek, wail or call upon their Maker. They seemed more outraged than anxious. His Lordship had started to put through a call to the Home Secretary but changed his mind and said:

  ‘Do what you must, Strachan, at whatever cost. Just get them back safe and sound, soon, and above all quietly.’

  ‘Oh what a little horror she is!’ was all the Countess said. ‘What a mother for poor little Edgar to have!’ and she called for Mr Neville to fire the nursemaid in her absence for disloyalty. She was not to serve out her notice.

  ‘It is wrong to wish anyone dead,’ said Lord Arthur, ‘but I certainly wish my wife had never been born,’ and went away into a corner with the Earl, presumably to discuss whether Mr Strachan could be trusted with the task of bringing back the children. From the expression on his face and the tone of his voice it seemed that f
or Arthur the answer was no, Strachan was far from trustworthy. It occurred then to the Inspector that the Viscount suffered from paranoia and imagined there was something ‘going on’ between himself and her Ladyship. The idea was absurd. They had walked up to the Gatehouse together once or twice discussing locks and keys and how the pheasant chicks were doing. Anything else was ludicrous.

  Her Ladyship joined her husband and son and after a few more words were exchanged turned to him and said, ‘Mr Strachan, we are so lucky you are with us. We trust you completely. Now just get on with it!’

  Perhaps the idea was not so ludicrous, but now was not the time to think about it.

  In the interests of discretion he did not use the usual channels to inform the Liverpool Police of the kidnapping but made sure a few key figures in the Special Branch were put in the picture. He used his own team – some at the Court, some billeted in various cottages around – to scour the immediate area and found nothing. They were not expected to. Nanny had taken a long time to raise the alarm; the birds were well flown. But it transpired very soon that the absconding party had left in one of the new Austin Phaetons – a motorist had seen it pass.

  If Minnie had any sense, the Inspector realized, she would get her children back to the United States as soon as possible, and in his opinion Minnie was both sensible and efficient, if over-emotional. She would try. Tracing the absconding party would only be hard once they were outside the country. The wealthy are easily remembered: they are watched where they go with envy and wonder. But speed was of the essence. By mid-afternoon ten of his team were on the case; enquiries at shipping lines and grand hotels were made and soon revealed that Mrs O’Brien and Grace had landed from New York on the Tuesday, spent the night in the Savoy, where they had been joined the next day by a distraught Minnie. The party of three had stayed until the following Monday – presumably the day after Minnie’s indiscretions had led to her being barred the door of her home, her life and her children – when they had checked out of the Savoy leaving no address. Presumably they had spent the days thereafter planning the abduction.