by Ken Follett
"What's happened?" she said.
Mrs. Dai Ponies answered her. "Everyone have been evicted!"
"Everyone?" Ethel said, not understanding. "Who?"
"All the miners who rent their houses from Celtic Minerals."
"Good grief!" Ethel was horrified. "God save us all." Shock was followed by puzzlement. "But why? How does that help the company? They'll have no miners left."
"These men," said Mrs. Dai. "Once they get into a fight, all they care about is winning. They won't give in, whatever the cost. They're all the same. Not that I wouldn't have my Dai back, if I could."
"This is awful." How could the company find enough blacklegs to keep the pit going? she wondered. If they closed the mine, the town would die. There would be no customers left for the shops, no children to go to the schools, no patients for the doctors . . . Her father, too, would have no work. No one had expected Perceval Jones to be so obstinate.
Mrs. Dai said: "I wonder what the king would say, if he knew."
Ethel wondered, too. The king had seemed to show real compassion. But he probably did not know the widows had been evicted.
And then she was struck by a thought. "Perhaps you should tell him," she said.
Mrs. Dai laughed. "I will, next time I sees him."
"You could write him a letter."
"Don't talk daft, now, Eth."
"I mean it. You should do it." She looked around the group. "A letter signed by widows the king visited, telling him you are being thrown out of your homes and the town is on strike. He'd have to take notice, surely?"
Mrs. Dai looked scared. "I wouldn't like to get into trouble."
Mrs. Minnie Ponti, a thin blond woman of strong opinions, said to her: "You have no husband and no home and nowhere to go--how much more trouble could you be in?"
"That's true enough. But I wouldn't know what to say. Do you put 'Dear King,' or 'Dear George the Fifth,' or what?"
Ethel said: "You put: 'Sir, with my humble duty.' I know all that rubbish, from working here. Let's do it now. Come into the servants' hall."
"Will it be all right?"
"I'm the housekeeper now, Mrs. Dai. I'm the one who says what's all right."
The women followed her up the drive and around the back of the house to the kitchen. They sat around the servants' dining table, and the cook made a pot of tea. Ethel had a stock of plain writing paper that she used for correspondence with tradesmen.
"'Sir, with our humble duty,'" she said, writing. "What next?"
Mrs. Dai Ponies said: "'Forgive our cheek in writing to Your Majesty.'"
"No," Ethel said decisively. "Don't apologize. He's our king, we're entitled to petition him. Let's say: 'We are the widows Your Majesty visited in Aberowen after the pit explosion.'"
"Very good," said Mrs. Ponti.
Ethel went on: "'We were honored by your visit and comforted by your kind condolences, and the gracious sympathy of Her Majesty the queen.'"
Mrs. Dai said: "You've got the gift for this, like your father."
Mrs. Ponti said: "That's enough soft soap, though."
"All right. Now then. 'We are asking for your help as our king. Because our husbands are dead, we are being evicted from our homes.'"
"By Celtic Minerals," put in Mrs. Ponti.
"'By Celtic Minerals. The whole pit have gone on strike for us but now they are being evicted too.'"
"Don't make it too long," said Mrs. Dai. "He might be too busy to read it."
"All right, then. Let's finish with: 'Is this the kind of thing that should be allowed in your kingdom?'"
Mrs. Ponti said: "It's a bit tame."
"No, it's good," said Mrs. Dai. "It appeals to his sense of right and wrong."
Ethel said: "'We have the honor to be, sir, Your Majesty's most humble and obedient servants.'"
"Do we have to have that?" said Mrs. Ponti. "I'm not a servant. No offense, Ethel."
"It's the normal thing. The earl puts it when he writes a letter to The Times."
"All right, then."
Ethel passed the letter around the table. "Put your addresses next to your signatures."
Mrs. Ponti said: "My writing's awful, you sign my name."
Ethel was about to protest, then it occurred to her that Mrs. Ponti might be illiterate, so she did not argue, but simply wrote: "Mrs. Minnie Ponti, 19 Wellington Row."
She addressed the envelope:
His Majesty the King
Buckingham Palace
London
She sealed the letter and stuck on a stamp. "There we are, then," she said. The women gave her a round of applause.
She posted the letter the same day.
No reply was ever received.
{ VI }
The last Saturday in March was a gray day in South Wales. Low clouds hid the mountaintops and a tireless drizzle fell on Aberowen. Ethel and most of the servants at Ty Gwyn left their posts--the earl and princess were away in London--and walked into town.
Policemen had been sent from London to enforce the evictions, and they stood on every street, their heavy raincoats dripping. The Widows' Strike was national news, and reporters from Cardiff and London had come up on the first morning train, smoking cigarettes and writing in notebooks. There was even a big camera on a tripod.
Ethel stood with her family outside their house and watched. Da was employed by the union, not by Celtic Minerals, and he owned their house; but most of their neighbors were being thrown out. During the course of the morning, they brought their possessions out onto the streets: beds, tables and chairs, cooking pots and chamber pots, a framed picture, a clock, an orange box of crockery and cutlery, a few clothes wrapped in newspaper and tied with string. A small pile of near-worthless goods stood like a sacrificial offering outside each door.
Da's face was a mask of suppressed rage. Billy looked as if he wanted to have a fight with someone. Gramper kept shaking his head and saying: "I never seen the like, not in all my seventy years." Mam just looked grim.
Ethel cried and could not stop.
Some of the miners had got other jobs, but it was not easy: a miner could not adapt readily to the work of a shop assistant or a bus conductor, and employers knew this and turned them away when they saw the coal dust under their fingernails. Half a dozen had become merchant sailors, signing on as stokers and getting a pay advance to give to their wives before they left. A few were going to Cardiff or Swansea, hoping for jobs in the steelworks. Many were moving in with relatives in neighboring towns. The rest were simply crowding into another Aberowen house with a non-mining family until the strike was settled.
"The king never replied to the widows' letter," Ethel said to Da.
"You handled it wrong," he said bluntly. "Look at your Mrs. Pankhurst. I don't believe in votes for women, but she knows how to get noticed."
"What should I have done, got myself arrested?"
"You don't need to go that far. If I'd known what you were doing, I'd have told you to send a copy of the letter to the Western Mail."
"I never thought of that." Ethel was disheartened to think that she could have done something to prevent these evictions, and had failed.
"The newspaper would have asked the palace whether they had received the letter, and it would have been hard for the king to say he was just going to ignore it."
"Oh, dammo, I wish I'd asked your advice."
"Don't swear," her mother said.
"Sorry, Mam."
The London policemen looked on in bewilderment, not understanding the foolish pride and stubbornness that had led to this. Perceval Jones was nowhere to be seen. A reporter from the Daily Mail asked Da for an interview, but the newspaper was hostile to workers, and Da refused.
There were not enough handcarts in town, so people took it in turns to move their goods. The process took hours, but by midafternoon the last pile of possessions had gone, and the keys had been left sticking out of the locks on the front doors. The policemen went back to London.
&
nbsp; Ethel stayed in the street for a while. The windows of the empty houses looked blankly back at her, and the rainwater ran down the street pointlessly. She looked across the wet gray slates of the roofs, downhill to the scattered pithead buildings in the valley bottom. She could see a cat walking along a railway line, but otherwise there was no movement. No smoke came from the engine room, and the great twin wheels of the winding gear stood on top of their tower, motionless and redundant in the soft relentless rain.
CHAPTER FIVE
April 1914
The German embassy was a grand mansion in Carlton House Terrace, one of London's most elegant streets. It looked across a leafy garden to the pillared portico of the Athenaeum, the club for gentleman intellectuals. At the back, its stables opened on the Mall, the broad avenue that ran from Trafalgar Square to Buckingham Palace.
Walter von Ulrich did not live there--yet. Only the ambassador himself, Prince Lichnowsky, had that privilege. Walter, a mere military attache, lived in a bachelor apartment ten minutes' walk away in Piccadilly. However, he hoped that one day he might inhabit the ambassador's grand private apartment within the embassy. Walter was not a prince, but his father was a close friend of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Walter spoke English like an Old Etonian, which he was. He had spent two years in the army and three years at the war academy before joining the Foreign Service. He was twenty-eight years old, and a rising star.
He was not attracted only by the prestige and glory of being an ambassador. He felt passionately that there was no higher calling than to serve his country. His father felt the same.
They disagreed about everything else.
They stood in the hall of the embassy and looked at one another. They were the same height, but Otto was heavier, and bald, and his mustache was the old-fashioned soup-strainer type, whereas Walter had a modern toothbrush. Today they were identically dressed in black velvet suits with knee breeches, silk stockings, and buckled shoes. Both wore swords and cocked hats. Amazingly, this was the normal costume for presentation at Britain's royal court. "We look as if we should be on the stage," Walter said. "Ridiculous outfits."
"Not at all," said his father. "It's a splendid old custom."
Otto von Ulrich had spent much of his life in the German army. A young officer in the Franco-Prussian War, he had led his company across a pontoon bridge at the Battle of Sedan. Later, Otto had been one of the friends the young Kaiser Wilhelm had turned to after he broke with Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor. Now Otto had a roving brief, visiting European capitals like a bee landing on flowers, sipping the nectar of diplomatic intelligence and taking it all back to the hive. He believed in the monarchy and the Prussian military tradition.
Walter was just as patriotic, but he thought Germany had to become modern and egalitarian. Like his father, he was proud of his country's achievements in science and technology, and of the hardworking and efficient German people; but he thought they had a lot to learn--democracy from the liberal Americans, diplomacy from the sly British, and the art of gracious living from the stylish French.
Father and son left the embassy and went down a broad flight of steps to the Mall. Walter was to be presented to King George V, a ritual that was considered a privilege even though it brought with it no particular benefits. Junior diplomats such as he were not normally so honored, but his father had no compunction about pulling strings to advance Walter's career.
"Machine guns make all handheld weapons obsolete," Walter said, continuing an argument they had begun earlier. Weapons were his specialty, and he felt strongly that the German army should have the latest in firepower.
Otto thought differently. "They jam, they overheat, and they miss. A man with a rifle takes careful aim. But give him a machine gun and he'll wield it like a garden hose."
"When your house is on fire, you don't throw water on it in cupfuls, no matter how accurate. You want a hose."
Otto wagged his finger. "You've never been in battle--you have no idea what it's like. Listen to me, I know."
This was how their arguments often ended.
Walter felt his father's generation was arrogant. He understood how they had got that way. They had won a war, they had created the German Empire out of Prussia and a group of smaller independent monarchies, and then they had made Germany one of the world's most prosperous countries. Of course they thought they were wonderful. But it made them incautious.
A few hundred yards along the Mall, Walter and Otto turned into St. James's Palace. This sixteenth-century brick pile was older and less impressive than neighboring Buckingham Palace. They gave their names to a doorman who was dressed as they were.
Walter was mildly anxious. It was so easy to make a mistake of etiquette--and there were no minor errors when you were dealing with royalty.
Otto spoke to the doorman in English. "Is Senor Diaz here?"
"Yes, sir, he arrived a few moments ago."
Walter frowned. Juan Carlos Diego Diaz was a representative of the Mexican government. "Why are you interested in Diaz?" he said in German as they walked on through a series of rooms decorated with wall displays of swords and guns.
"The British Royal Navy is converting its ships from coal power to oil."
Walter nodded. Most advanced nations were doing the same. Oil was cheaper, cleaner, and easier to deal with--you just pumped it in, instead of employing armies of black-faced stokers. "And the British get oil from Mexico."
"They have bought the Mexican oil wells in order to secure supplies for their navy."
"But if we interfere in Mexico, what would the Americans think?"
Otto tapped the side of his nose. "Listen and learn. And, whatever you do, don't say anything."
The men about to be presented were waiting in an anteroom. Most had on the same velvet court dress, though one or two were in the comic-opera costumes of nineteenth-century generals, and one--presumably a Scot--wore full-dress uniform with a kilt. Walter and Otto strolled around the room, nodding to familiar faces on the diplomatic circuit, until they came to Diaz, a thickset man with a mustache that curled up at the tips.
After the usual pleasantries Otto said: "You must be glad that President Wilson has lifted the ban on arms sales to Mexico."
"Arms sales to the rebels," said Diaz, as if correcting him.
The American president, always inclined to take a moral stand, had refused to recognize General Huerta, who had come to power after the assassination of his predecessor. Calling Huerta a murderer, Wilson was backing a rebel group, the Constitutionalists.
Otto said: "If arms may be sold to the rebels, surely they may be sold to the government?"
Diaz looked startled. "Are you telling me that Germany would be willing to do that?"
"What do you need?"
"You must already know that we are desperate for rifles and ammunition."
"We could talk further about it."
Walter was as startled as Diaz. This would cause trouble. He said: "But, Father, the United States--"
"One moment!" His father held up a hand to silence him.
Diaz said: "By all means let us talk further. But tell me: what other subjects might come up?" He had guessed that Germany would want something in return.
The door to the throne room opened, and a footman came out carrying a list. The presentation was about to start. But Otto continued unhurriedly: "In time of war, a sovereign country is entitled to withhold strategic supplies."
Diaz said: "You're talking about oil." It was the only strategic supply Mexico had.
Otto nodded.
Diaz said: "So you would give us guns--"
"Sell, not give," Otto murmured.
"You would sell us guns now, in exchange for a promise that we would withhold oil from the British in the event of war." Diaz was clearly not used to the elaborate waltz of normal diplomatic conversation.
"It might be worth discussing." In the language of diplomacy that was a yes.
The footman called out: "Monsieur Honore de Picard de l
a Fontaine!" and the presentations began.
Otto gave Diaz a direct look. "What I'd like to know from you is how such a proposal might be received in Mexico City."
"I believe President Huerta would be interested."
"So, if the German minister to Mexico, Admiral Paul von Hintze, were to make a formal approach to your president, he would not receive a rebuff."
Walter could tell that his father was determined to get an unequivocal answer to this. He did not want the German government to risk the embarrassment of having such an offer flung back in their faces.
In Walter's anxious view, embarrassment was not the greatest danger to Germany in this diplomatic ploy. It risked making an enemy of the United States. But it was frustratingly difficult to point this out in the presence of Diaz.
Answering the question, Diaz said: "He would not be rebuffed."
"You're sure?" Otto insisted.
"I guarantee it."
Walter said: "Father, may I have a word--"
But the footman cried: "Herr Walter von Ulrich!"
Walter hesitated, and his father said: "Your turn. Go on!"
Walter turned away and stepped into the Throne Room.
The British liked to overawe their guests. The high coffered ceiling had diamond-patterned coving, the red plush walls were hung with enormous portraits, and at the far end the throne was overhung by a high canopy with dark velvet drapes. In front of the throne stood the king in a naval uniform. Walter was pleased to see the familiar face of Sir Alan Tite at the king's side--no doubt whispering names in the royal ear.
Walter approached and bowed. The king said: "Good to see you again, von Ulrich."
Walter had rehearsed what he would say. "I hope Your Majesty found the discussions at Ty Gwyn interesting."
"Very! Although the party was dreadfully overshadowed, of course."
"By the pit disaster. Indeed, so tragic."
"I look forward to our next meeting."
Walter understood this was his dismissal. He walked backward, bowing repeatedly in the required manner, until he reached the doorway.
