Hollow Crown

by David Roberts

  ‘I see. Well, yes, poor Mr Harbin. After Mrs Harkness and I have bathed I doubt there will be anything for him. As I remember it, she was quite happy to rough it for days at a time but when she is in civilization, so to speak, she likes to indulge herself. By the way, Fenton, where is her room? I would like to have a chat with her . . . a private chat.’

  Fenton raised an eyebrow – a liberty permitted by his long and intimate connection with his master which, on occasion, went beyond that of master and servant to trusted aide and partner in the detection of crime.

  ‘Don’t try my patience,’ Edward said irritably. ‘My interest in Mrs Harkness is purely business.’

  ‘Indeed, my lord,’ Fenton said hastily. ‘Her room is next to yours. Indeed, there is a connecting door behind the screen but the door is locked so it is necessary to go out into the passage.’

  Edward went over to the corner where a chinoiserie screen of surpassing ugliness made an unavailing attempt to suppress a draught or two. He peered behind it and saw a stout door which looked as if it had not been opened in years. He did not try it because if Fenton said it was locked, then it was. It was typical of the man’s efficiency that he had surveyed his master’s sleeping quarters so carefully. Edward noticed that, rather unusually in a country house, his bedroom door had a key in it.

  ‘What’s your room like?’ Edward asked.

  ‘Modest, my lord, but, if I may say so, more comfortable than this one. It is on the top floor where the other servants sleep.’

  ‘Well, you’d better go and draw my bath then. Though wait a moment, perhaps it would be polite if I first discovered whether Mrs Harkness wanted to bathe now or later. I’ll just knock on her door.’

  Molly answered his knock after a moment’s struggle with the doorknob. She was still fully clothed and said she was going to rest on her bed before having her bath so Edward put his head back round his own door and told Fenton to go ahead.

  ‘Come and sit down over here, Edward dear,’ she said when he had returned. ‘Would you like a snifter?’ She waved a silver flask at him.

  ‘Where did that come from?’ Edward asked admiringly.

  ‘Oh, I have stayed with Leo before and, knowing how cold this house is, I took the precaution of bringing my own supplies of warmth. I can’t rely on you providing bodily warmth, can I?’

  Edward knew she was alluding to their nights on the veldt when they had clung together against the wind that chilled the marrow in their bones, and he smiled.

  ‘What is it? Brandy? Yes please, Molly, just a drop. Is Leo really hard up or just a skinflint?’

  ‘The latter. He’s rolling in it. Come and make yourself comfy on the bed, darling.’

  ‘Do we use these?’ Edward brought over two water glasses that stood beside a carafe on the bedside table. In companionable silence he watched her pour two inches from her flask in each glass.

  ‘Chin-chin,’ she said, and they touched glasses.

  Edward drank, spluttered but felt with gratitude a warm tingle spread through his stomach. ‘More please! Have you got enough?’

  ‘Yes, here.’ She passed him the flask. ‘Hey, not too much. I must keep some for later. You know Pickering can’t bring us booze without his master’s express permission. Leo keeps the keys to the tantalus himself. Isn’t that the limit? By the way, you are coming to see me later?’

  ‘Well, yes, I do want to talk to you. Perhaps just before we turn in?’

  ‘’Talk? I never understand why we only talked when we were in Africa. I suppose it was my fault. I was still feeling ghastly over that business with Raymond. You were so sweet to me.’ She came up close to him and Edward knew she wanted him to kiss her.

  ‘Hey, steady on, old girl,’ he said, choosing his words to sound as unenthusiastic as possible. ‘I thought we agreed we would just be good pals?’

  ‘Oh, that was in Africa. It’s different now.’

  ‘But surely, I mean, a beautiful woman like you . . . ’

  ‘You think I must have lovers?’ she said bitterly. ‘I could have. I did have. Don’t you read the papers? But at the moment I’m – what do they say? – fancy-free.’

  ‘Well, yes. That’s what I need to talk to you about . . . later.’

  ‘What?’ she said, suddenly suspicious.

  ‘Lovers, ex-lovers.’

  ‘You don’t have a message for me from him, do you?’

  She was suddenly breathless and her pupils dilated.

  ‘Not exactly,’ he said awkwardly. ‘Tell me something, Molly. How was it you met the Prince of Wales? I mean, to put it crudely, you weren’t moving in those sort of circles in Kenya. That man you were consorting with – what was his name, Davenant? He wasn’t exactly out of the top drawer if you’ll forgive me for saying so.’

  ‘Douglas? Yes, he was rather awful, wasn’t he? He couldn’t stay in the colony after Raymond shot himself – not without marrying me and neither of us wanted that. I don’t hold it against him. We never pretended we loved each other or anything like that. We were lovers, yes, but only because we were so bored. Raymond was such a swine . . . ’

  ‘You loved him once,’ Edward said reprovingly.

  ‘I know I did,’ she said sombrely, ‘but he was so weak. Drunkards are such bores, aren’t they, darling? I thought I could make him something important in the colony – top dog – but he was too idle, too bloody weak.’

  She spoke with a contempt which chilled Edward. He now remembered why they had never become lovers. He had been sorry for her, he had admired her spirit – she was as brave as a lion and flew totally without fear – but she was cold. She had never spoken of her own childhood but it cannot have been happy. She had never managed to learn how to love. That was Edward’s diagnosis. Freud might have been interested in her, he thought. She was seductive, she could pretend to love but poor Raymond had not lived up to her expectations and had been humiliated by her. He must have known long before he found her in bed with the odious Douglas Davenant – a remittance man of the worst kind who had never done a day’s work in his life – that she was cuckolding him. She had driven the man to drink and suicide. It was as simple as that and yet, as soon as she got back to England, she had been taken up by the Prince and his circle. Edward knew he had some pretty raffish friends but it needed some explaining.

  ‘Raymond left me quite well off, you know,’ she said, looking at him speculatively.

  ‘Yes, but how did you meet the King – or rather the Prince as he was then?’

  ‘I met this very sweet man in Cape Town. Lewis Van Buren. I don’t know whether your paths have ever crossed?’ He shook his head. ‘Well, he was an absolute dear. He took charge of me and took me back home and introduced me to David.’

  ‘Were you and this man lovers?’ he inquired brutally.

  She blushed and Edward felt he had been a cad.

  ‘Sorry, my dear, but you do attract men, don’t you?’

  ‘Well, if you want to know, we were lovers, very briefly. He’s a diamond merchant – very rich.’ She opened her eyes wide. ‘I mean very rich. A Jew but a nice Jew. I liked him. I felt . . . I felt safe with him.’

  ‘And he introduced you into royal circles?’ Edward said ironically.

  ‘Yes, I think he had lent the Prince money . . . anyway, he knew him very well. He said the Prince would love me . . . and he did,’ she said simply.

  Edward understood that Van Buren was one of those useful men who hang about the rich and famous – lend them money, find them women and do their dirty work. He wondered if Verity might find out something about him through the paper.

  ‘I see. Look, Molly, there are things we have to talk about. I know it’s not my business but, as a friend, I hate to see you get into trouble . . . ’

  ‘Oh God, Edward, you’re not going to lecture me, are you? Anyway, I’m not the one who’s going to get into trouble. I’ve seen a lot of things and I could tell a lot of tales . . . but I don’t want to. I just want to be treated . . . fair
ly. I’m not just a whore to be chucked out with the garbage . . . ’

  At that moment, to Edward’s relief, there was a light knock on the door and Fenton informed him his bath was ready for him.

  ‘Molly, I’d better go and do my ablutions, don’t y’know,’ he said awkwardly. ‘Let’s talk after dinner. There are things I want to say to you – not a lecture, I promise, but not just now . . . Fenton, my man, tells me the hot water system in this place is suspect so I ought to go. See you later, eh?’

  The bath was a huge ornate affair and the taps were in the shape of dolphins and difficult to manoeuvre but the water was warm enough – just. As he lay looking at the peeling paint on the ceiling, he wished he was in his rooms in Albany. But then his heart beat a little faster. Despite the horror of having to break bread with men like Scannon and his cronies, despite having to extract a lover’s letters from a woman betrayed, there was the sheer excitement of being in the same house as Dannie.

  3

  Larry Harbin was by no means a typical American tourist. At first glance he might have been taken for an academic or a lawyer, and indeed he had a law degree from Harvard, but he was in fact a businessman and financier. He had been born in Baltimore of a wealthy family and was now in his mid-fifties. He had made his own fortune investing in China and Japan but he had travelled the length and breadth of Europe – he could speak French and German fluently. His wealth and influence with President Roosevelt – they had met and become friends at Harvard – had given him access to most of Europe’s political leaders and he despised them all, with the possible exception of the German Chancellor. He was not himself a politician and had no wish to be one. He liked to say back home he owned half a dozen senators and as many congressmen and that was enough politics for him. However, Roosevelt trusted his judgement particularly when it came to European politics on which the President was not well informed.

  Harbin was impressed with the way Hitler had transformed Germany’s economy and given its people self-respect even if it had been at the expense of the Jews and the Communists. He was by instinct and nurture anti-Semitic and his hatred of the trade unions in the United States had made him virulently anti-Communist. He despised French politicians whom he had found to be more corrupt even than the Chinese and he had no faith in England – which was how he always spoke of Britain – being able to win a war against Germany – a war which he considered inevitable. He strongly believed that the United States should keep out of European affairs and had persuaded the President to his view of the hopelessness of Europe.

  In his personal habits he was an ascetic. He neither smoked nor drank alcohol. He wore wire-rimmed spectacles which he had a habit of pushing up the bridge of his nose, which was thin and beak-like, whenever he gave an opinion. His suits were made in Savile Row, his only extravagance, and his American accent was so slight as to be hardly noticeable. He was unmarried and had absolutely no sense of humour.

  He let slip he owned an oil well in Texas, not in any attempt to impress but to make a point. ‘In my view, Leo,’ Harbin said in his rather prissy voice, ‘your great empire is defenceless unless you guys can assert control over your source of oil – Persia, Iraq. If those places prove indefensible, as I guess they will, then you’re lost.’

  ‘So you think there will be war in Europe?’ Scannon asked.

  ‘I most surely do. In the next few months your friend Mr Hitler will declare a glorious union between the Reich and Austria – Zusammenschluss, – they call it. You’ve read Mein Kampf, haven’t you, Leo?’

  ‘I confess I haven’t yet, though the Führer signed a copy for me in Berlin.’

  ‘Well, read it. It’s all there. On the very first page he declares German-Austria must return to the great German motherland and, as I hear it, the British have said they won’t interfere. Lord Halifax told me himself he sees it as a legitimate aspiration of the German people to be at one again.’

  Edward was shocked. ‘Is that really true, Leo? We would do nothing to prevent Germany swallowing up Austria?’

  Scannon nodded. ‘In practical terms, what could we do?’

  ‘It’s natural justice,’ Hepple-Keen said. ‘We won’t go to war about the union of two peoples who share a language and a culture – a voluntary union. If the union happens, in my view it will be an expression of true democracy.’

  ‘Maybe you won’t go to war when Herr Hitler walks into Austria, sir, nor when he walks into Czechoslovakia or Poland, but there will be time a when the Reichsführer will walk into France and then you will have to fight and, without wishing to give offence, gentlemen, you’re going to lose.’

  There was a stunned silence after Harbin had finished speaking. A cold shiver ran down Edward’s spine. He didn’t like Harbin. There was something bloodless about him but he could not deny the man saw clearly and his vision was by no means comfortable. Edward remembered how his mother had called these shivers ‘someone walking over my grave’. The American had expressed Edward’s own views on what would happen if Britain did not stand up to Hitler, but hearing Harbin spell out the future in so menacing a way was like finding death itself at the dinner table. And Harbin hadn’t quite finished. He was determined they should hear the truth even if they did not like it. ‘Where I come from,’ he went on, ‘we have enough oil to mobilize an army or two but, I have to tell you, there is no way the American people would do that except to defend their own frontiers.’

  Scannon said, ‘That’s what President Wilson said in the last war but in the end you had to come and help sort out the mess.’

  ‘And we learned our lesson,’ Harbin said flatly.

  Edward noted with interest that the American was hardly eating anything but merely messing his sole about with his fork. On what oil did this man run, he wondered. If Harbin was voicing the President’s own views, it was a bleak lookout for England.

  The Hepple-Keens were, in their way, just as curious as Mr Larry Harbin. Lady Hepple-Keen – Daphne – was placed next to Edward and sat almost silent during the first two courses. He tried valiantly to find a subject on which she felt strongly enough to express a view but to no effect. She seemed not to like her husband, which Edward thought perfectly reasonable as he put the man down for a bullying cad after being in his presence less than five minutes. She was uninterested in her husband’s career and, to judge from her monosyllabic replies to his questions, thoroughly disliked his politics. She was scared of him, Edward decided, and he felt a surge of sympathy for her. She had just lapsed into what he thought might be terminal silence when she suddenly mentioned a child and, to Edward’s relief, she now became almost voluble. She had three children, she told him. Little James was only eight and her ‘precious little angel’, a boy of ten and a girl of eleven who worried her mother sick by refusing to talk. Edward hardly dared guess what the child might be trying to deny by remaining silent. He saw Hepple-Keen looking at him strangely. He was clearly far from pleased to see his wife spilling out family secrets to a complete stranger.

  Dinner drew painfully to a close. It had been a dreary affair and Edward was heartily glad when Scannon declared it at an end. Instead of the ladies withdrawing to leave their menfolk to talk politics and smut over the port, Scannon suggested a tour of the house and Edward for one was happy to accede. Molly, too, seemed enthusiastic though she had stayed in the house several times before and knew it well. She grasped Edward by the arm and the rest followed more or less reluctantly. Scannon said, ‘We’ll go first to the long gallery. My father bought a lot of pictures when the house was being planned and he wanted to show them off. The architect suggested a long room like those you see sometimes in Elizabethan houses. They were used by the ladies as places in which to exercise in bad weather. My father thought it was a good idea to provide exercise for the mind and the body in one room so he hung the pictures on the wall and had some weights, a vaulting horse and a climbing frame fitted. As far as I know, he never used any of them and he certainly never looked at his pictures.’r />
  They climbed the heavy, ugly staircase stopping now and again to look at a claymore or crossed swords attached to the wall. ‘Family heirlooms?’ Edward queried.

  ‘Not at all,’ Scannon said breezily. ‘My father was the first of his line to make any money and he didn’t see why he had to wait several generations to have a family history. It was much easier to buy it ready made, so to speak.’

  ‘I see. So these portraits . . . ’ he was referring to paintings of colourfully dressed gentlemen and ladies of bygone ages on the staircase, ‘aren’t anything to do with you?’

  ‘Only in so far as my father adopted them. I believe most of them came from a house or castle in Fife that was being broken up at the time my father was building this place.’

  The long gallery, when they reached it, proved gloomy and ill lit. There were wall brackets but the electric light was feeble and it was almost impossible to make out the pictures despite their huge size. It was apparent that Scannon’s father wanted value for money when he was buying paintings and purchased art by the square yard. Relinquishing Molly’s arm, Edward peered at one particular picture which seemed to show several semi-naked ladies around a pool or lake. A strangely muscled man was watching them from behind a bush. Edward wanted to laugh.

  ‘The Judgement of Paris, I believe,’ Scannon said, ‘by Rossetti or one of those Pre-Raphaelites. My father held the view that art had to do with the classical world. I remember once admiring a picture of card players by Caravaggio and he was indignant. How could card players, however well depicted, be art, he said to me.’ He hesitated and then said a little guiltily, ‘I hope you don’t think I am making fun of my pater. In fact, I admired him greatly. He was one of a family of thirteen and grew up in poverty in Birmingham. By sheer grit and hard work he became rich and, by the time he was twenty, he was supporting the rest of his family. He had no education but was determined I would have what he had not. He wanted me to be an English gentleman so he sent me to Harrow. He refused to let me anywhere near the family business, so I grew up utterly useless. I had no option but to enter the House of Commons. I was not fit for anything else, and,’ he added, ‘it made my father happy.’