The constant rhythm of the wheels had stopped. Through the window there were harbour walls, dockside cranes, sailors in their blue guernseys, and wheeling seagulls. The train was being slowly manoeuvred onto the ferry from Calais to Dover, a miracle of modern engineering. I remembered reading that it was possible to be on the sleeper and to wake up in London, entirely unaware of the crossing. In the same way, I was thinking, as some dutiful wives manage to sleep peacefully through their husbands’ snoring, even though the husband sounds as if he were driving an entire herd of restless pigs to the slaughterhouse.
The train passed through Dover Station, left the seagulls behind us and in two hours was in the heart of London, at Victoria Station. Sabine would go in search of our luggage and I would go immediately on the first errand of my investigation. In the meantime, Jenks — that is, if he had continued his journey to the capital — was now lost in this metropolis of a million souls.
***
The archives of The Times of London occupied the attics of its offices in Printing House Square, in the heart of the city. Mr. Elderbridge was the chief archivist — a man of very small stature, who sat on his high stool like a gnome. He had lank hair, a high forehead, and eyes that were so shrunken-looking behind the extremely thick lenses of his round spectacles that his gaze resembled that of a reptile. To add to his striking visual appearance he had a very high-pitched voice. In short he was the kind of character that had to remain hidden in dusty vaults or low-ceilinged attics. He would never excel on a sports field, or defending some picket on the North West Frontier of Britain’s Indian Empire — he had been born for this very job, and in it I would find he certainly did excel.
“If you would be so good as to sit down here, please,” he said in a kindly tone, moving some piles of paper from a chair and dusting its seat. The piles were simply added to other piles perched on what must have been, underneath, a table. Evidently he rarely received guests.
“They usually just send a boy round,” he went on, fussing over some files, “and what with you, from the Continent even! Would you like some cordial or some tea?”
“I’m afraid time is slightly against us, Mr. Elderbridge. I trust you understood my telegram?” I could effect a politely efficient manner par excellence when I chose; my mother had taught me that of English ways at least.
“Of course, of course. Now let me explain how my system works. Nine years ago I started keeping a clippings index. That means I cut from an additional copy of the paper any article I thought might interest someone at some time in the future. Don’t ask me the criteria I use. All I can say is that it has been a great success. I can, for example, help you instantly.”
“You can?”
“I have two clippings to hand. The first is one I have just found for you. It concerns a certain bulldog named Rex from St. Helens, Lancashire, who bears an uncanny resemblance to His Majesty —”
My heart sank. I knew this would be a waste of time. I was sure I was really no good at solving mysteries after all. I could call that feminine intuition, or just plain realism!
“— the other I laid my hands on first about six or seven weeks ago at the request of another caller. Sat right where you are now, he did. Odd that I should have had exactly the same request twice like that, isn’t it?”
He reached into a box that was filled with clippings of various sizes, some of them pinned together by their corners. This was a single small piece:
EDWARDS IN A TUSSLE
A Tale of Two Kings
Two actors who both thought they had landed the part of His Majesty the King in a lampooning new production All the King’s Mistresses came to blows outside a theatre, The Majestic Music Hall and Variety Theatre in Wilton Street, Bow, London E1, yesterday.
Both bear an uncanny resemblance to His Majesty and are in frequent demand for performances depicting the Monarch. The disagreement started after they had left the office of Mr. George Buckle, the theatre proprietor, last Tuesday at around 12.30 and 1 pm, respectively. Both understood that they would be engaged for the role and after each had retired to celebrate at The Leg of Mutton public house adjoining the theatre, trouble soon ensued. Blows were exchanged, although neither was injured.
It is a salutary lesson to Republicans and to other reformers that perhaps the country is best served with only one Monarch!
I put the cutting down. It was just what I was looking for. The fact that it had been sought before was also the evidence I needed that I was on the right track. It all fit. It was a preposterous idea — but still the main question was unanswered — why?
“This other caller, Mr. Elderbridge?” I asked, “Was he of stocky build, rough in appearance, and with red hair? Might have used the name Jenks?”
“Why yes, Countess — I mean Your Ladyship — that’s him all right, but he didn’t give his name. Do you know the gentleman?”
“If only he were a gentleman!” I replied.
***
Sabine was guiding the cabby up the stairs with the portmanteau. Max, my brother, was holding the door open. The cabby was no doubt regretting the offer of his assistance as the apartment was on the fifth floor and there was no lift. Fortunately for him, Max was a good tipper.
I was taking a tour of inspection.
“When you wrote and said you’d moved to Mount Street I thought you had taken a house, Max.”
“Trixie, these are some of the best apartments in Mayfair, built less than twenty years ago when the place was generally recognised as the most stylish street in London.”
“But you’ve hardly a stick of furniture — thank God at least you’ve got good carpets.”
I had breezed through the sitting room which opened out in the dining room. “And where are your staff? Couldn’t you have sent your man down to take the box up?”
Max was silent on this one, now paying off the cab-driver. Since he was turned away from me, I could look at him dispassionately. He was a tall, handsome man — with our mother’s fair hair, a moustache with a graceful wave, and if he had turned, the most piercing but somehow soft blue eyes. We looked a pair, bred from the same stock. His deep-cut brow, which gave him an air of intense concentration, was from the von Morštejns. I wondered how he would look amongst my mother’s people, the de Clyffordes. They were very grand, however, even though my mother had been raised very much as the poor relation, owing to her circumstances.
Ah, here’s the kitchen (I was striding about with a proprietorial air already). “And why don’t they keep the place at all tidy?”
“Now I know you are going to find it hard to believe, Trixie, but I am servantless. Difficult times, the manpower shortage because of the Boer War and now the fact that I am enjoying my privacy,” explained Max, coming up behind me. “I predict that the servantless household will become highly fashionable — one day.”
“And anyway,” he went on, “I have the latest machine for cooking — it works by electricity.”
There was indeed a monstrous apparatus at one end of the room. I opened a cupboard. It was full of tins of sardines. “Max!” I exclaimed at the sheer horror of it all.
“Sweet sister, I didn’t say I knew how to operate the machine.”
“Cooking, like most of the wifely arts, is quite simple. It consists of mixing various ingredients and changing the temperature of the whole. You will have to learn, Max” — but not from me. I didn’t have the faintest idea beyond making hardboiled eggs for painting as Easter gifts.
In one week I had now seen the interiors of two kitchens — quite remarkable, I was thinking. Next I poked into Max’s bedroom. It was a very brief visit: “And how many times a year do they collect your laundry?”
Max now sat me down back in the sitting room.
“Look,” he said, “the place is in a mess, and I can only agree.”
“So Sabine will sort it all out for you. She will
make it a habitation fit for our species. I will sleep in your room, Max. Sabine can take the small bedroom, and you may sleep on this sofa. It will only be for a few days.”
I could see that, quite apart from Max’s feelings, Sabine was about to protest too. These were duties for a Maid-of-All-Work, not a Lady’s Maid. Servants were very particular about such distinctions — just as I would be about recognising, now that I was here again, a Baron below an Earl (whose wives respectively would be a Baroness and a Countess) and an Earl below a Duke, who would of course be lower in precedence than a Royal Duke, and so on. Interleaved between these, like tissue paper in a photographic album, were also Viscounts and Marquesses — just as there were Under Footmen and Grooms-of-Chambers in the household hierarchy.
“And, Sabine, when Mr. Max’s apartment here is gleaming, I’m sending you back — and you may break your journey in Paris for a whole week.”
Sabine smiled, a faraway look creeping across her face. How easy it would have been, I thought, to have ended the French Revolution thus. “Let them have holidays” was what M. Antoinette most obviously should have declared. Love would have been their food!
“Now Max, we shall go for an early dinner at the Café Royal. Fortunately I have plenty of money with me. Karel gave it to me as he believes I am a murder suspect on the run! But all this is a long story. Perhaps tonight I shall tell it you — but in the meantime, do you recognise this man?”
Max brushed off my seemingly fantastic comment in the way that brothers and sisters by force of habit rarely take each other seriously. I pulled out of my handbag the photograph of the French actor. I showed it to him, but keeping a finger over the printed name.
“There is something familiar in that face. Let me think on it for a while. But a clue?”
“He is a well-known personality in politics or of the ruling classes in Europe, I should imagine. Indeed he is most probably French. I presume not military or religious because he wears no uniform of either. One thing I can say is that he is not a personality of the theatre.”
“But Trixie, that’s just the kind of printed carte de visite an actor would have.”
“Very well. I take my hand away. There is a name you haven’t heard of — so instead, just tell me of whom the face reminds you. Perhaps that is fairer?”
Max stared hard at the man I had nearly seen in the restaurant of the Gare du Nord.
“So now tell me, why were you talking about such economies? That’s not the von Morštejn way, surely?” I was trying to lighten the tone to give him a chance to concentrate on the face, but I didn’t succeed. Max’s tone seemed serious:
“There’s a war brewing between Russia and Japan. It could break out in earnest any day. Russia is on the very brink. It has already attacked Port Arthur and I have invested heavily — and have advised others to invest — in Trans-Siberian Railway stock.”
“Karel’s family was nearly ruined by buying Brazilian railway shares. In fact the shares weren’t to blame in the end. Complete ruination came about as a result of a game of cards as I don’t mind telling anybody — nor need reminding you. It’s a good lesson. But surely, with Russia needing to send all those troops towards Japan, then the railway will do well?”
“But everyone here believes that Japan might win!”
“You can’t be serious, Max. How could that affect things? The Japanese won’t try to invade St. Petersburg or anything, will they? And they’re such tiny people too!”
“No, of course not. But if Russia does lose, then the word is that revolution will break out there. Then the stock will be even more worthless than those Brazilian shares of your father-in-law.”
“So…?”
“I am selling, for whatever price I can get, however low.”
“Then we had better cheer ourselves up, hadn’t we?”
***
We walked just round the corner into Berkeley Square and found a hansom to take us to Regent Street. I was twenty-one when I was here in London last, when my mother had insisted she take me to “come out” and be presented at Court — to attend the traditional Queen Charlotte’s Ball, just like any another debutante living on some country estate in England with well-tended acres and an enormous ivy-clad pile of a house that was either ancient, built-up over the centuries, or made to look like it, but then I supposed I was just being bitter that our ancestral castle in Bohemia had been lost. Oh, for spires and turrets of any vintage!
Again the capital of the world’s largest empire — and undoubtedly the largest there could ever be — excited me. There was the soft, but constant, clatter of the traffic and the hum of the sheer mass of humanity, day and night. Stories that were in the newspapers here had worldwide implications; there was a certain gravitas that was missing in Austria. In Vienna and Prague the papers were filled with stories of unrest in Serbia — with Balkan revolutionaries and anarchists. But how could some story from, say, Belgrade or Sarajevo ever have any impact on the world stage? How could anything from the Austrian Empire ever affect history — whereas, here in London the tentacles of power reached from China to the frozen north of Canada, from the teeming bazaars of India to the jungles of Africa. I snuggled up to Max from the sheer excitement of it all. He, however, was in a more sanguine mood.
“Imagine — in a year or two these hansoms will be things of the past. And I don’t mean surpassed just by motor taxis. As we ride now, fifty metres below us, they are finishing the deep electric underground railway, the Piccadilly Railway. How the world is changing, Trixie.”
We were turning from Berkeley Street into Piccadilly, that great thoroughfare of the nation. I noticed that it was now lit by electric lamps, as had been the case in Prague for years; the old gaslamps had gone. The atmosphere of the city that had made such a romantic setting to the stories of Sherlock Holmes was disappearing. At least the fog could never disappear.
The cabby leaned down and spoke to Max, who turned to me: “He says that Swallow Street is closed due to the rebuilding of Regent Street. It’s of no consequence.”
Oh, but it was! It meant going about Piccadilly Circus, that hub of London — of the World. I had been a silly young girl the last time in London, a virgin, and now I was here again as a grown woman, perhaps with a little of the responsibility that rank brings, on a task that had become something much more than an adventure. In fact it threatened my life.
The Café Royal seemed to have retained all the gaiety of its reputation, but somehow the crowd seemed thinner than I had expected. They hadn’t all been exiled like one of its more infamous customers, Oscar Wilde, had they? We sat in the Grill Room, watching the faces of the diners reflected a hundred times in the French mirrors. At least reflections were plentiful.
“It’s the smallpox, Trixie,” Max explained. “Many people are staying away from the West End. The theatres are having a hard time of it, as well as restaurants. I take a strictly fatalist line: if you are going to get it, then you are — and that’s it.”
“So you don’t bother to look left and right as you cross the street?”
“No, I don’t mean that.”
“But it’s not just the quantity of the crowd here, Max — but the quality. The last time I was here, young and impressionable as I was, there was a more…well, a crowd with more —”
“‘Class’ is the word I suppose you’re searching for. And you’re probably right. Things are changing. The old rich are no longer the richest. Thanks to the diamond mines of South Africa, for example, there are now millionaires richer than the King. The Astors are now so well-established here it’s impossible to believe that they’re just successful Jewish speculators from New York and not the real blue-blooded thing — let alone Protestants!”
“So where will it all end, do you think?”
“I’ve had a few knocks here in London — not been an easy time, and I’m probably the first von Morštejn to try to earn a
living in more than two centuries. So I’ve had time to dwell on it all. At the moment it’s a simple redistribution of wealth to new people who are sufficiently near to the grabbing process to remember it.”
“What do you mean? The old families were grabbers, surely?”
“That’s precisely it. They’ve forgotten they were. Ours — it was pretty sharp changing sides in 1620 and suddenly becoming loyal to the winning Hapsburgs, wasn’t it? Look at all the estates it gained that way. But ever since it has gradually lost the need to take and thus lost the urge to grab.”
“So my father-in-law’s escapades at the gaming tables were a substitute, do you think?”
“Yes, he preferred his risks with a glass of whisky in his hand and his bottom on a comfortable chair. He should have been digging in Kimberley or staking a claim on the Klondike if he wanted to combine risk with reinvigorating the family fortunes, I suppose.”
I let this die out, then: “Oh, Max. I’m tired of dwelling on this. It makes me depressed. If they have money and pots of it, why do they insist on dressing like that?”
I pointed out a man with large whiskers like a walrus and a silk waistcoat that was dazzlingly distasteful. Max laughed.
“You’re incurable, Trixie,” he said, before going back to concentrate on his plate of smoked salmon and quails’ eggs.
A minute or two later, as the entrée was being served, Max grabbed my arm: “Show me the photograph again.”
I obliged.
“Yes. Yes, that’s who he reminds me of. Emile Brodsky. Sir Emile Brodsky.”
“And who’s he?”
“A famous scientist — French by birth…lived here for over twenty years, knighted a couple of years back for ‘Services to the British Empire.’ Leading member of the Royal Institution, pillar of the scientific establishment — all that kind of thing.”
“And what kind of science makes him so distinguished?”
“Explosives. He’s one of the world’s foremost experts on death and destruction.”
The Countess of Prague Page 10