by Robin Paige
The brisk morning breeze whipped her auburn hair into an unruly mass, but it was nothing like the fury of the storm several days before, which had left piles of debris all up and down the south coast. Although the wind made pedaling difficult and the tandem made uphill riding a challenge, it was a beautiful day for bicycling. The sparkling blue-green waters of the Channel stretched out to the horizon, and the sky was a complementing blue, punctuated here and there with wheeling flocks of white gulls. Directly below them was a small cove cut in the white chalk cliffs, and a narrow crescent of wet shingle. The tide was just beginning to ebb.
Charles laid the bicycle on the turf and joined her at the edge of the cliff, where they sat down together. “Hauptmann’s traveling case? Yes, just down there, to the left, on those rocks.”
Kate followed Charles’s pointing finger to a pile of jagged rocks against which a gentle surf was breaking. “What about the skiff?”
“It washed up farther to the east, what was left of it.”
She tucked her skirt under her knees and was silent for a moment, thinking of how it must have been, alone in a terrifying storm in a small wooden boat. “Do you suppose they will ever find the count’s body?” she asked at last.
“It doesn’t seem likely,” Charles replied. “Of course, Hautpmann may have gotten clean away. Finding the wrecked skiff was hardly a surprise, after all. Once he made the ship, he would simply have abandoned the boat to the mercy of-the storm. Finding the case—that’s what makes me think he was drowned.”
Kate turned to look at Charles, loving his grave, thoughtful face, the strength of his shoulders. “It is over, then.”
“Over?” He chuckled wryly. “I think not, my dear. How did Kipling put it the other evening? ‘The great game is over when we are all dead.’ ”
“But if Hauptmann himself has perished and the plan is known, the danger is past, isn’t it?”
“But Hauptmann is only a single player, Kate. And this scheme of his may have been a serious plan for invasion—or it may have been merely a diversion or a contingency plan. When they learn what happened, the Kaiser’s agents will no doubt consider themselves fortunate that this particular intrigue did not create an international incident. But they will try again at another place, at another time, with another strategy. That is how the game is played.”
Kate turned her gaze back to the ocean, thinking about the past few days. After Hauptmann had rowed out to sea on that stormy night, Charles sent a coded message to the Brighton chief constable, who had set up a command post at the telegraph office in Newhaven. Sir Robert had directed his forces to surround and seize the villagers and confiscate the smuggled goods. The next morning, a fresh contingent of coast guards undertook an aggressive patrolling of the beach. In the flotsam of the storm, one of them had found the count’s traveling case.
What Kate knew of the contents of the case, she owed to Charles’s narration. In a heavily secured room of the Rottingdean coast guard station, in the presence of Charles and Kipling, the chief constable had forced the clasps of Hauptmann’s case. The items they found sealed in a waterproof oilskin pouch told a story of methodical, meticulous planning for an invasion of the south coast. Photos and glass negative plates covered virtually every foot of shoreline from Newhaven to Brighton, carefully detailing each usable landing area at which troops could disembark, every avenue of advance by which the invading force could move swiftly inland, every commanding high ground upon which artillery batteries and observation posts could be established. Elaborate notes, compass bearings, and triangulations pinpointed the location of each photo. There was a collection of onionskin map overlays, a selection of railway timetables, and a manuscript composed of columns of six-digit numbers, clearly an encrypted report.
After examining the contents, Sir Robert closed the case and locked it in a mail sack. The sack was taken under guard to Brighton, where Arthur Sassoon secured it in his bank vault until the Prince had conferred with the War Office and an appropriate course of action was decided upon. Charles and Sir Robert had, of course, sent their offical report to HRH that very night, by royal courier. His response was what they had expected: all involved were sworn to absolute silence and the matter was declared a State secret. In particular, the Prince insisted that the Queen not be told, for fear that she could not restrain her wrath against her grandson the Kaiser and would reveal all in an unguarded moment. A nice bit of irony, Kate thought, for Her Royal Majesty had complained for years that the Prince could not be trusted with important matters.
As for Rottingdean, the Smugglers’ Village, it had been ordered that all contraband was forfeit to the Crown and that all tunnel entrances were to be sealed, including the one on the beach, which was to be hidden by a carefully contrived avalanche of rocks. To Harry Tudwell’s enormous relief, no other action was to be taken against the village and its inhabitants. There was no doubt that they could be trusted to hold their tongues for all eternity. After all, none of them wanted to confess to being naive, gullible fools, easily taken in by a Trojan Horse scheme that had deceived them with its promise of glittering wealth.
And Patrick? If it had not been for him, of course, Hauptmann might have succeeded in his scheme. When the boy had seen the photographer standing by the barn in the downs, he recognized him as the antiquarian, a recognition that was confirmed when he found a compass the man had left on the wall. Realizing that the boy had seen and could identify him in all three of his disguises—the count who attended Sassoon’s party in Hove, the photographer who took pictures in the downs, and the antiquarian who wandered up and down the coast—Hauptmann had seized Patrick and hidden him in the tunnel. For his courageous service in helping to foil the spy’s plot, the lad was to receive a handsome royal stipend sufficient to guarantee him an education appropriate to his talents. Kipling had managed to locate the boy’s father and obtain his permission to act on Patrick’s behalf. Now, he and Charles were debating whether to send the lad to Westward Ho!, Kipling’s school, or—
“Patrick,” Kate said now, thinking aloud. “You know, Charles, there are other alternatives for the boy.”
Charles turned, startled by what must have seemed to be a change of subject. “I suppose there are,” he said. His eyes lingered on hers. “I have wondered,” he said after a moment, “whether you should like to bring him to live with us.”
“I have thought of it,” Kate said. “Since we cannot...” She stopped and made herself say it: “Since I cannot have children, perhaps you would like to have him with us. He is a fine boy, and very brave, and he admires you enormously. Of course, he is not your son and cannot inherit from you, but—” She stopped and swallowed and then said, in a sudden burst of feeling, what had been in her heart for too many weeks. “Oh, Charles, my dear, I am so sorry! I have failed you. Because of me, your family name will not—”
Charles put his arm around her and pulled her against him. “Kate,” he said gently, “because of you, I will never be lonely, or bored, or want for beauty or grace. Measured against the many ways you enrich my life, my concern for my name or my inheritance is—” He held up his thumb and forefinger, a fraction of an inch apart. “Is only this.”
Kate bit her lip. “You’re not just trying to make me feel better?”
“Look at me,” he said, and lifted her chin so that she could not avoid his eyes. “I don’t speak easily about such matters, Kate. But I tell you now that you are the joy of my life, and I want no other. And to reveal my utter selfishness, I should add that if you were a mother, your attention and your loyalties would always be divided. As matters stand, I count myself lucky to have you, just you, wholly to myself.” He kissed her gently and added, with a chuckle, “You and Beryl Bardwell, of course.”
She leaned against him, feeling a deep peace and contentment within her for the first time in a very long time. They sat for several quiet moments, then Charles said, “There is just one thing that I must know, Kate.”
“What is it, dear?” she murmured.
Kate frowned. “Have you thought what might have happened if I hadn’t appeared on the beach and taken that photograph? Hauptmann would have tried to take Patrick into the skiff, and you would have leapt upon him and been shot to death by that awful gun of his. And then both Hauptmann and the boy would have drowned and—”
“Stop,” Charles said, putting his finger on her lips. “I admit to all that, Kate. I am glad you were there, believe me. But I still don’t understand—”
Kate sighed. “Well, it was Patrick, of course. And Beryl.”
“Beryl?”
“Don’t you remember? I told you she wanted to see the tunnel. The plot she has in mind for the next story has a tunnel in it.”
“Ah,” Charles said, “I see. And the camera?”
“For Beryl’s research, of course,” Kate said. She shuddered, opening her eyes very wide. “You don’t think I was going to go down there more than once, do you? Why, there were spiders!”
Historical Notes and Authors’ Reflections
Every man must be his own law in his own work, but it is a poor-spirited artist in any craft who does not know how the other man’s work should be done or could be improved.
—RUDYARD KIPLING Something of Myself
Bill Albert writes:
As we have learned in our earlier works in this series, it is always a challenge to include a real person in a fiction. Given a man whose literary works are famous and whose political convictions are controversial, the challenge is even greater: to credibly re-create the man, and to create a credible fiction that can contain and partly explain the man. It takes luck (and often a great deal of hard work) to discover documented aspects of the person’s character that can be incorporated without contradiction into the fictional plot. In the case of Kipling, we were indeed fortunate in our choice, for as our research took us deeper into the man’s life, we uncovered many authentic aspects of his personality which supported our initial conception of the plot and showed us how to enhance and enlarge it.
Years ago, Kipling’s poetry was the hands-down favorite among the male students of my junior-high English class. While he never served on active duty, Kipling early on developed a great passion for the military in general and, in his later years, the defense of the Empire in particular. He was the common soldier’s greatest admirer, spokesman, and advocate, as he demonstrates in such poems as “Gunga Din,” “Tommy,” “Boots,” and “Fuzzy-Wuzzy,” and throughout his life he continued to call to the nation’s attention the plight of the enlisted man. He was also the Empire’s staunchest champion, raising an urgent warning against the Kaiser’s bellicose posturings and the complacency of the British.
For the purposes of our story, Kipling’s move to Rottingdean in the summer of 1897 was most fortuitous. The village has a long and well-established tradition of smuggling, and we wanted to use that aspect of its history in the plot. However, as we had learned in our research for an earlier book, Death at Gallows Green, smuggling in England had generally ended by the mid-eighteen hundreds, and Rottingdean seemed to have settled down to a more lawful existence. The key to this puzzle came to us when we were looking into an unrelated question: “Where and when was the first automatic pistol developed?” When we learned of the M96 Mauser, invented in Germany and first distributed in the year of our story, our double-layered plot emerged.
According to his personal correspondence, Kipling’s concern over the rise of Germany began in the period of our story, and we have borrowed some of his warnings for use in his character’s dialogue. In 1901, he established a firing range just outside Rottingdean because he felt the need to improve British marksmanship and raise his people’s awareness in the face of this threat. The vulnerable Sussex seacoast had been invaded by the Romans, Saxons, Normans, and French, and he could see no reason why it would not be a German target as well. When his long-predicted Great War finally came, he secured a commission for his son John, who was only a month or so old at the time of our story. The eighteen-year-old boy could have avoided service due to his poor eyesight, but his father went to considerable lengths to get his son placed in the Army. In August, 1915, Lieutenant John Kipling went to war, and in September he was reported missing in action. His loss profoundly affected his father.
A German invasion of England is a plot long celebrated in fiction—and in fact. In 1871, Sir George Chesney, alarmed by Germany’s recent defeat of France, wrote The German Conquest of England in 1875, & Battle of Dorking, or, Reminiscences of a Volunteer. The story, which first appeared anonymously, narrated the British Army’s defeat at Dorking after a German invasion at Worthing, thirteen miles west of Rottingdean. In 1903, Erskine Childers wrote The Riddle of the Sands, the first important British spy novel, describing a grand plan for a German cross-Channel invasion of East Anglia. Historical sources suggest that the German High Command considered this contingency in the 1890’s, and in July 1940, they drew up the plan for Operation Sea Lion. After a diversionary attack near Dover, the might of the Wehrmacht would land on the south coast near Brighton and push northward, enveloping London from the west and severing the English capital from the country’s industrial heartland. This plan was never implemented, due only to the Luftwaffe’s failure to wrestle air supremacy from the Royal Air Force in the skies over Southern England.
Susan Wittig Albert writes:
For me, one of the great pleasures of historical fiction involves meeting real people and exploring real places. In Death at Rottingdean, I met Georgiana Burne-Jones, Rudyard Kipling’s “Beloved Aunt” and wife of Edward Burne-Jones, the celebrated painter. She was a woman of extraordinary power and personal charm, a socialist whose deep passion for the abstractions of social theory seemed sometimes to overtake her equally deep compassion for the poor and the sick. The Burne-Joneses came to holiday in Rottingdean in the late 1870’s and stayed to purchase a house—that they called North End House.
Georgiana spent extensive periods of time in the village while her husband was still alive, and died there, in 1920. She was a small woman, with plenty of ideas for the way the village should be run and the energy to put them into action. A disciple of the socialist William Morris, she served on the Parish Council, set up a Village Credit Society to make low-interest loans to the needy, brought a public-health nurse to the village, and helped to clean up the drains. And in 1900, this pacifist, pro-Boer woman, hearing of the victory at Mafeking, hung a blue banner at a window of North End House, bearing the words cited in the headnote to Chapter Thirteen: “We Have Killed And Also Taken Possession.” The patriotic villagers gathered angrily on the Green, planning to storm the house, and Georgiana’s pro-Empire nephew, Kipling had to come out and soothe their ugly temper.
It was the Green, The Elms, and North End House that made such a vivid impression on me when Bill and I visited Rottingdean for the first time in 1993, with the idea of this book in the back of our minds. While the village has grown substantially, the houses and the Green are much as they were in those peaceful summer days before the turn of the century, and I could imagine our characters moving and talking and trying to understand the puzzling events with which these two upstart American authors were about to confront them. My sense of pleasure was immeasurably deepened a few months ago by my discovery of a book called Three Houses, written in 1931 by Georgiana’s granddaughter, novelist Angela Thirkell, and re-released just in time for Death at Rottingdean. In it, Thirkell describes North End House, her grandmother, and the village with an attentive, affectionate intimacy. Thirkell is Kate, in Chapter Thirteen and in other descriptive passages, and many of the details of the book come from the granddaughter’s fond recollections of her grandmother’s house and garden, and her memories of Uncle Ruddy and his daughter Josephine, who died tragically in the year following our story, during a visit to America.
And
of course we were impressed by the downs, with their curving skylines and plunging scarps, their combes, dry valleys, and beechwood slopes—although the landscape has been changed since the time of our story by modern farming technology. But the Old Mill still stands on Beacon Hill, its sails stretched to the wind. And before it still lies the Channel, whose waves no longer eat away at the now-stabilized chalk cliffs, but whose gray-blue waters still stretch to the far horizon. Kipling says it best, in a poem called “Sussex”:
So to the land our hearts we give
Till the sure magic strike,
And Memory, Use and Love make live
Us and our fields alike—
That deeper than our speech and thought,
Beyond our reason’s sway,
Clay of the pit whence we were wrought
Yearns to its fellow-clay
God gives all men all earth to love,
But, since man’s heart is small,
Ordains for each one spot shall prove
Beloved over all.
Each to his choice, and I rejoice
The lot has fallen to me
In a fair ground—in a fair ground—
Yea, Sussex by the sea!
References
We use both primary and secondary documents in our research for this mystery series. Here are a few books that we found helpful in creating Death at Rottingdean. For more information, visit our web site, http://www.tstar.net/~china/index.html.
Belford, James N., and Jack Dunlap. The Mauser Self-loading Pistol, Alhambra, California: Borden Publishing Co., 1969.
Birkenhead, Lord. Rudyard Kipling. New York: Random House, 1978.
Blyth, Henry. Smugglers’ Village: The Story of Rottingdean. Brighton: Carmichael & Co. Ltd., 1984.
The British Journal Photographic Almanac & Photographer’s Daily Companion. London: Henry Greenwood, 1896 & 1897.