by John Pearson
“Alice!” she exclaimed, as if her presence were a genuine surprise. “How lovely to have someone here from Southwold to prevent my getting homesick,” and Alice blushed with happiness.
Then finally it was Mrs. Bridges’ turn, and Hudson tactfully explained how she had come at such short notice and how well she was coping. Mrs. Bridges preened herself at this.
“I’ll do my best, I’m sure, your ladyship. Good honest food’s my motto. In my opinion a body can’t have too much of it.”
“I’m sure one can’t,” said Marjorie. And then, quite suddenly, the politenesses were over and, like some machine that starts to function, normal life began in 165.
“Hudson,” said Marjorie, in the tone of voice that she would use with him for the remainder of her life, “we shall take tea in the drawing room at four. And afterwards perhaps we could discuss the arrangements for the day. I take it Mrs. Bridges has dinner satisfactorily in hand.”
“Certainly, my lady.”
“Oh, and Hudson.”
“Yes, m’lady?”
“Was there any message from my mother?”
“None, m’lady, I’m afraid. But Lord Southwold sent the flowers that are in the bedroom. Most anxious his lordship was that you’d have the tuberoses when you came. He also sent the champagne and the claret for this evening with his compliments to Mr. Bellamy.”
And so the Bellamys began their life in 165. Few people witnessing this scene, or hearing these somewhat stilted but assured exchanges, could have suspected the extraordinary happenings that had brought them here. Theirs had been the stormiest courtship of the year, but their behaviour gave no hint of the battle it had been—or of the long wars that lay ahead.
1883
2. Scandal in a Champagne Glass
Like all the best romances, theirs had begun in Paris in the spring—the spring of 1883. It was a vintage year to fall in love: Gounod was still conducting at the Opéra, Offenbach had set the whole of Paris dancing to his music, whilst at the Bal Musette and all the other houses of Montmartre there was the can-can with its message that all that mattered now was love and youth and pleasure. Yet at the time their love seemed so improbable—and came so unexpectedly—that it caused something of a scandal, and turned Richard Bellamy into what he emphatically was not—a high romantic character.
For by nature he was a careful, rather prudent figure at the time, ambitious certainly, but with a strong hold on his emotions and a keen eye on his future—quite the last person anyone would choose to carry off the daughter of a belted earl and jettison his future in the process.
He was just twenty-seven, a career diplomat, and for the previous two years he had been second secretary with the British Embassy, thus enjoying the rare privilege of working in one of the loveliest buildings in the whole of Paris, the old Hôtel de Charost in the Rue du Faubourg St. Honoré, once owned by Pauline Bonaparte. And since the Revolution the home of the British Embassy. Richard enjoyed this touch of splendour in his life.
At this time there were still two sorts of diplomat—those with money (and generally a noble name) and those who did the work. Richard was in the second category. Among the former he had a reputation as a very bright young man indeed, but as someone scathingly remarked, “he was not otherwise too unpleasant.”
This rather summed him up. He had a certain blandness in those days, a way of smiling condescendingly and appearing to agree with everyone he met. People thought him, quite correctly, something of an intellectual snob. Among his English colleagues he was also seen as something of an oddity, a sort of poor boy who had improbably made good, and it amused him to play up to this. In fact he was not all that poor, nor were his origins anything like as humble as they were later rumoured. (Nor, for that matter, was there any real mystery, as the rumour-mongers had it, to his family—certainly nothing in the least discreditable in his paternity to account for the swiftness of his rise in his profession.) Like Clive and Nelson, he was the product of a country rectory, and he had received his education at Rugby. He was on a scholarship and luckily the school was gentler than in Tom Brown’s school days. He was never to inherit any money from his parents: his father, the Reverened James Bellamy—an unworldly man and a distinguished amateur Latin scholar in his way—had died just before his son went up to Oxford on a scholarship. What money was around naturally had to go on supporting the widow and the elder brother, Arthur, who was still at medical school.
But none of this had ever caused Richard what could honestly be described as hardship. At Rugby he had already been an outstanding scholar, and he had made his way by a sort of easy brilliance, entering Magdalen College, Oxford, on a classics scholarship in 1874 and then taking most of the University classics prizes.
Magdalen, the home of the fastest, richest set of idle and effete young men in Oxford, would hardly have appeared the place for somebody like Richard Bellamy, but this never worried him. He was a great adapter and the antics of his social betters never concerned him. Just a few years before, young Henry Chaplin, the richest undergraduate in England, had made a habit of coming into chapel in his hunting pink, and whilst Richard was still there most Oxford men who could afford it would maintain a hunter and a mistress in the town. Richard merely smiled. His time would come. He had already set his sights upon the Diplomatic Service, which had been opened to young men of talent by the reforms of the late sixties. His inevitable double first strengthened his intellectual arrogance (which like most double firsts he never really lost) and he sailed through the competitive examination and into the Diplomatic with the same effortless superiority he had shown with everything he had done since childhood.
All this had earned him his uncomfortable reputation, but, strange as it may seem, he really was somewhat indolent and soft at heart.
Wasn’t it Metternich who said that diplomacy was the ideal world for idle clever men? He would have appreciated the up-and-coming Richard Bellamy. Others did too, particularly Cartwright, our ambassador in Paris and Richard’s chief; this was the famous old Lord Cartwright of the Memoirs, himself a near-contemporary of Talleyrand and Metternich, who had won his diplomatic spurs at the Congress of Vienna and who by now was known as “the Grand Old Fox of English Diplomacy.” He was wise, worldly and had once been very wicked. Now he was old and merely self-indulgent. Paris was something of a sinecure for him and he enjoyed the pleasures of the city. But he also still enjoyed spotting talent, and he took to Richard Bellamy at once and maintained that he had one of the sharpest brains of any of the young men in his embassy. Also, like many idle men, Richard had learned the trick of picking on the work that really mattered and finishing it quickly. Cartwright was impressed by this, and, thanks to his backing, Richard had already reached the rank of second secretary by the early age of twenty-six—and great things were predicted for him.
Youthful promise—infallible recipe for tempting fate! Richard had shown it, and was now to reap the consequences: which began one April evening when the Ambassador summoned him to his office for an informal chat over a glass of very good champagne.
For a comparatively humble and self-made man, Richard had quite a taste for good champagne, as he also had for most of the good things of life. His excellency, noted gourmet and good liver, had found this out and enjoyed indulging him. For a while they chatted on about the business of the Embassy, but his excellency didn’t really feel like business at this time of day. A shaggy giant of a man with a face like that of a battered Neptune, he leaned back in his gilt-and-plush armchair, lit a slim Martinique cheroot, and started on a story. His excellency’s stories—like his indiscretions, which were frequently malicious but never accidental—were notorious.
“Richard, dear boy, I take it that you’ve heard about my cousin, the present—and for your ears only I would add, the quite appalling—Lady Southwold?” Richard replied that he had heard about the lady.
“Heard, Richard? More precision, please. What have you heard?”
“That she is
very rich.”
Cartwright nodded. He was having trouble with his cheroot now and seemed preoccupied. “Go on.”
“And powerful.”
Again Cartwright nodded.
“And that her husband, the Earl of Southwold, owns one of the oldest titles in the country and is one of the more colourful members of the House of Lords.”
“You could call him that. I’d probably just say that he was mad, but that would be ungenerous, and Southwold is a clever fellow in his way. The only really silly thing he ever did was marry my outrageous cousin. You know, it wasn’t all that long ago that they were tipping him to succeed Disraeli, and if it weren’t for her it might have happened. The Party trusts him and the people love him, with his Derby winners and his mistresses. Horse-flesh and whores’-flesh, the soundest basis for success in English politics; but as I say, his wife has put a stop to that. You must have heard about the unfortunate business with our plump, pleasure-loving friend, the Prince of Wales?”
Richard had heard several versions of the famous Southwold gaffe, but he also knew his excellency would enjoy retelling it. He shook his head.
“You haven’t? My dear boy, where do you spend your idle hours?”
By now his excellency had abandoned his first cheroot and, throwing it towards the waste-paper basket—and missing—paused to select another. This time he was luckier and he leaned back, grunting, in his huge armchair and blew smoke rings up towards the Boucher Venus on the ceiling.
“It must be—how time flies!—three years ago now. Bertie—His Royal Highness—was a great old friend of Southwold’s. In the sixties they were both young swells and used to chase around the town together. Southwold was always in and out of Marlborough House and they were both involved in the Nellie Jordan business— but that’s another story. Despite all this, H.R.H. had never been to stay at Southwold. He had clearly heard enough of Lady Southwold to steer clear— and anyhow, Southwold is rather off the beaten track. But this annoyed my cousin, naturally. She is a jealous woman at the best of times and felt out of things. All her grand friends were having Bertie as a weekend guest, so why wasn’t she? She kept inviting him, and finally—since Bertie is the kindest man on earth when it comes to giving pleasure—he agreed to come. During Goodwood Week, what’s more. Southwold’s a fair old drive from Goodwood, so you can see the favour he was doing the good lady.”
At this point his excellency paused to give himself some more champagne. He looked a happy man and the cheroot was slowly filling the big gold-and-white salon with a blue haze and the aroma of smouldering exotic vegetation.
“Sure you won’t have one?” he said to Richard, who shook his head.
“Bismarck always said that no man should think of dying until he had smoked a hundred thousand good cigars—but to get back to the story: Bertie, as you may, but probably don’t, recall, was very engagé about this time with pretty Emily FitzAlban and as usual the private secretary, Knollys, followed standing orders and arranged for la FitzAlban to be invited out to Southwold also for the weekend. Our Bertie, after all, could hardly be expected to endure the longueurs of a whole weekend at Southwold without a little of his favourite self-indulgence. Emily was naturally invited sans mari, but my precious cousin thought this arrangement rather odd. In her world nobody invites a married lady without a husband. Quite unthinkable. So off her own bat she proceeded to invite FitzAlban too.
“You can imagine the rest. Rather funny, when one thinks about it now, but at the time it did create the most almighty stink. Midnight strikes. Bridge is finishing and as usual all the servants have been safely packed off to bed. H.R.H. rises, bids the company goodnight, goes to his room, and then, after a decent interval, comes waddling along the corridor in dressing gown to find his lady-love. Opens bedroom door, gropes forward in the dark, and finds her there in bed—plus husband!”
At this point his excellency found the whole idea so funny that he all but choked with laughter and cigar smoke and champagne, and sat there wheezing for a while before continuing.
“My, what a row! A simply marvellous to-do! You can imagine it for yourself. Billie FitzAlban is threatening his future sovereign to a duel, and Bertie, bless his heart, is threatening to leave immediately. Billie, of course, is soon persuaded to see sense. Didn’t they make the dear chap governor of Canada? Or was it Singapore? Or both? He deserved them both, poor Billy, with that wife of his. But Lady Southwold! That was another thing altogether, I can tell you. No one could hush her up, and at one stage she was threatening to tell all to the press unless she received a full apology from H.R.H. in writing.”
“Well, of course, in the end even she saw sense, but by then the damage had been done. She was completely out of smart society for good. And, most unfairly, Southwold too got blamed. That’s when he withdrew from politics as well as from society.”
The Ambassador shook his ancient head, sadly now.
“A dreadful woman, a real gorgon of a woman, a man-destroying woman.”
He sipped consolingly at his champagne, then smiled his shaggy, sea-god’s smile at Richard.
“You’ll have your work cut out looking after her when she arrives next Tuesday. But at least I’ve warned you.”
Midday, the Gare du Nord: the great new terminus still unfinished (trouble with O’Higgins, the Dublin contractor who had just succumbed to bankruptcy and drink and typhoid almost simultaneously) and builders’ men and rubbish everywhere, ladders and barrows, hoists and great stacks of masonry making the place look more like a demolition site than Paris’s great international terminal. At the same time, hideous confusion caused by the company’s decision to use it as it is. The result, a sort of Piranesiesque Inferno, with milling, shouting crowds against a background of steam, smoke and trumpeting black locomotives. Fiacres jammed the courtyard, porters in blue jackets tried to bludgeon their barrows through the crowds, and somewhere in the midst of all this chaos, the train from Calais was due any moment.
Richard had done his best to cushion the distinguished guest’s arrival. The Ambassador’s own coach was waiting near the platform (the coachman and two hefty ostlers were attempting to restrain the frightened horses). At the discreet suggestion of the Ambassador, Richard was resplendent in full diplomatic dress—white gloves, gold-frogged black tunic, slim-braided trousers. He felt conspicuous and over-dressed and as he tried to hold on to his position in the jostling crowd he silently cursed his excellency and his confounded sense of humour.
“It will do you good to have a deal with the lady,” he had said at the conclusion of the interview. “A real test of your diplomatic skill.” And he had gone on to explain that Lady Southwold was coming out to Paris to arrange for the marriage of her daughter, Marjorie, to a French duke. For since the Southwold gaffe, and the family’s virtual ostracism by polite society in England, no noble English bachelor would have dreamt of putting himself so totally out of favour with the Prince of Wales as to marry a Southwold.
“Which duke will have the honour?” Richard had asked.
“The Duke d’Amboise,” his excellency had replied with a malicious smile.
“But that’s impossible, sir. Amboise is one of the most notorious …”
“Precisely, my dear boy. Everybody knows about the Duke—except for Lady Southwold. Quite typical, of course. The Lady Southwolds of this world would not acknowledge that such men exist. She has made up her mind that her daughter will become the Duchess d’Amboise—and that, I’m afraid, is that.”
“Poor girl,” said Richard.
“Oh, I don’t know,” said the one-time friend of Talleyrand, grey eyes glinting under ancient eyebrows. “Presumably the Duke will have a go at fathering an heir upon her—unpleasant though this probably will be for both of them. And if he can’t, then others will. So she’ll have children then, as well as lovers, and the château, which is glorious, and there are big estates along the Loire and in the South. No, Richard, you can spare your tears for our little Duchess.”
&nb
sp; “Then how are we involved in all this?” Richard asked. It was his excellency’s turn to groan.
“As my cousin and a distinguished lady in her own right, Lady Southwold naturally expects that she and her daughter should stay here in the Embassy. And, God help me, there isn’t much that I can do about it. I’ll even have to give a ball here in their honour. And just to make it worse, Southwold himself is wisely keeping out of it. He is in England, hunting. And you, my boy, will have to take his place. Consider yourself simply in loco parentis to the lovely Lady Marjorie. And just one word of warning. No incest, please; that would cause such a lot of trouble.”
The sudden screeching of a locomotive whistle told Richard that the Calais train was coming. The horses bucked and whinnied. Steam hissed and billowed, porters shouted, and with a clang and shuddering of iron the soot-black engine grunted to a halt. Then the great rush started. Doors were flung open, hotel touts descended on the weary passengers, and friends and relatives were kissing and embracing.
Richard did his best to be aloof and very English. He had no idea how to find Lady Southwold in all this chaos, but he reasoned that, provided he stayed by the coach with its royal coat of arms, her ladyship would finally find him: which was exactly what occurred.
“Young man!”—this in the sort of voice normally employed on under-gardeners and errant office-boys. “Is the Ambassador not here in person?”
Richard turned to see one of the most fearsome faces he had ever witnessed. It was not ugly—rather the reverse. In her young days Lady Southwold had been one of the most celebrated beauties of her time, and much of the basis of her beauty still remained—the upright carriage (was that backbone made of steel?), the remorseless profile with its geometry scarcely touched by time, and the full bosom which in any other woman might have been called voluptuous. But all these elements of what had once been beauty had been transformed by a glaring wilfulness into a heartless parody of beauty. The eyes, which were extremely large and greenish-grey, had become just a shade protuberant and stared with a sort of self-indulgent fury; the mouth, once large and generous, had grown thin and wide with unsuppressed determination. She wore a purple dress, and from beneath a purple hat tumbled the abundant curls of a bright red wig.