Page 52 of The Secrets of Ashmore Castle (Ashmore Castle #1)
In the afternoon of the twenty-eighth, Mrs Sands visited Richard again. ‘I’ve come to tell you about the wedding.’
‘You were there?’
‘We stood outside. There was a huge crowd. We saw everyone arrive, and we could hear the music. And we saw them come out at the end. The bride looked beautiful. And your brother appeared very distinguished. There were so many photographers, it was like an electrical storm! There’ll be pictures in all the papers.
But I thought you’d like a first-hand account. ’
‘Tell me from the beginning,’ Richard said. So she did, with particular reference to the music and – being after all a woman – what everyone was wearing.
Nina knew that her stay in Berkeley Street would end with the wedding, but she had not expected to be hurried away so precipitately.
No sooner had the bridal couple left for the station than Lady Bayfield’s maid, Higgins, appeared at her elbow and said, ‘I’ll help you get changed now, miss,’ and urged her away upstairs to her bedroom.
There she found everything already packed, some day clothes laid out on the bed, and her trunk only waiting, as Higgins told her, for the bridesmaid dress to go in.
‘You’ve been – busy,’ Nina said, swallowing tears.
‘Her ladyship had me pack your things while you were all at the church,’ Higgins said, her face a blank. If she felt any sympathy, she didn’t show it. ‘I’ll help you get changed, and there’ll be a cab downstairs for you as soon as you’re ready.’
Nina turned her back towards Higgins to be unbuttoned, thinking about Kitty. In the last moment before she went out of the front door with her new husband, Kitty had darted over to Nina, drawn her close, and whispered into her ear, ‘Thank you for everything, darling Nina! I’m so happy.’
And over her shoulder, Nina had met Giles’s eye for an instant, before he looked away with a fleeting expression of pain.
That was all there was. It was over. To say she felt flat was an understatement. She felt hollowed out, empty, transparent, lost.
Perhaps it was for the best not to linger here. She should get back as soon as possible to what would be her life from now on. Real life, whatever that turned out to be. And much as she loved Kitty, she hoped just then that she would never see her again, because it would be too painful.
Higgins helped her into her day clothes, and she picked up her hat and gloves and said, ‘Thank you. I’m ready.’
‘I wasn’t sure when to expect you,’ said Aunt Schofield. ‘I have people coming to dinner tonight, but it will be easy to lay an extra place for you. What did Lady Bayfield say when you said goodbye?’
‘I didn’t see her. She sent her maid to help me change, and then a taxi came.’
Aunt Schofield gave her a keen look. ‘What an odd woman she is. But never mind. They’re nothing to do with us. You’re not going to mope, are you?’
Nina managed to smile, wanly. ‘No. I’m going to be brisk and get on with things.’
‘Good girl. There’s a very nice young woman coming tonight who I think you’ll be friends with – Lepida Morris.
She’s been helping with the library scheme, and I’d like you to join forces with her and really make a push to get things going, before everybody goes out of Town for the summer.
I’d like the library to open this winter if possible.
Run and take off your things, then come and help me decide the place-settings. ’
At dinner that night, Nina felt foolishly surprised that no-one was discussing the Stainton wedding, which had been the foremost subject in her circle for the last month. There was much discussion of the King’s illness and operation, and the cancelled Coronation.
‘They’re calling it “appendicitis” now, not “typhlitis”,’ said Dr Broadbent – a doctor of philosophy, not of medicine.
‘It’s the word of the moment. The appendix, which we are all accustomed to thinking of as a scholarly addition to a book,’ he looked around the company with a dry smile, ‘is apparently some superfluous organ in the abdominal region. An evolutionary left-over, like an ox-bow, a cul-de-sac in which infection can collect, unseen and unsuspected until disaster strikes.’
Quintin Caldecott, professor of ancient history, said, ‘I wonder how frequently this mysterious appendix has been to blame in cases of sudden death. Until now, an episode of acute abdominal pain followed by convulsions and death was likely to be ascribed to poisoning, and many a poor wretch has gone to the gallows for it. It would be interesting to know if they were all appendicitis after all.’
‘The danger is that the opposite will now prevail,’ said his wife, Mary. ‘Wronged wives who poison their husbands will persuade physicians to write it off as appendicitis.’
‘We shall all have to be kinder to our wives from now on,’ said the professor, giving her an adoring look.
‘I’ve heard it said,’ said Mr Carnoustie, lecturer in political history at University College London, ‘that removal of the appendix is expected to become the most fashionable operation in Town. That fellow Treves is making the most of his sudden fame. Members of the ton are already queuing up for it.’ He looked at Aunt Schofield with a mischievous smile.
‘Anyone who still has an appendix by the end of the year will be condemned as sadly behind the times.’
‘Which just goes to show the folly of having too much money and not enough to do,’ Aunt Schofield said.
‘It’s all very well,’ said Mrs Henry Morris, ‘but the King really was in mortal danger.’
‘And I believe a lot of businesses have suffered considerable loss,’ said Mr Carnoustie. ‘Hoteliers. Manufacturers of souvenirs – all their plates and mugs have the wrong date on them.’
‘My own magazine,’ said Henry ‘Mawes’ Morris, who was an illustrator, ‘had to destroy thousands of copies of the latest issue. It contains a long and detailed article entitled, “How I Saw the Coronation, by a Peer’s Daughter”.
You may laugh,’ he said, as everyone did, ‘but the expense was considerable.’
‘Not least the expense of imagination by the peer’s daughter,’ said Aunt Schofield.
‘An expense of imagination in a waste of fame,’ Quin Caldecott murmured.
‘My favourite story,’ said Oswald Eagan, ‘concerns the Coronation feast. An exquisite banquet for two and a half thousand guests suddenly not wanted. Mountains of caviar, forests of asparagus, three hundred legs of mutton, tons of strawberries and lakes of cream.’
‘I expect the palace servants made up parcels for their families,’ said Mrs Morris.
‘Of course, but there was so much that not even they could account for it all. Apparently, the rest was packed up to be given to the poor. Just think, while the King was under the surgeon’s knife, East End soup kitchens were serving consommé de faisan !
I am quite charmed by the idea of ragged beggars in Whitechapel dining on sole poached in Chablis, garnished with oysters and prawns.
Mawes, you could do an excellent cartoon on the subject. ’
‘I shall speak to my editor,’ Mr Morris promised.
‘We must hope the poor won’t be spoiled by the luxury,’ said Professor Caldecott.
‘Well,’ said his wife, ‘if they baulk at sleeping on the casual ward, they can always go to the Savoy or Claridges – both empty, now the foreign royalty who booked rooms for the Coronation have left. The hotel staff who were expecting large tips must be devastated.’
‘If they were expecting large tips from foreign royalty, they were foolishly optimistic,’ said Mrs Morris.
The Lord Warden Hotel in Dover was the largest and grandest, and had always been the first choice of eminent foreign travellers, but it, too, had emptied suddenly as disappointed Coronation guests went home.
So the Earl of Stainton and his new bride were especially welcome.
Their room was exchanged for a lavish suite at no extra charge, and there was almost an embarrassment of staff to hover about them.
The dining-room was quite daunting: a twenty-foot-high ceiling with elaborate classical frieze, floor-to-ceiling mirrors, Corinthian columns, crimson drapes with bullion fringes, magnificent gasoliers.
The table to which Giles and Kitty were shown had a silver-gilt stand in the centre laden with exotic fruit and topped by an enormous pineapple, which prevented them from seeing each other.
Giles summoned a waiter and had it removed.
Kitty was impressed. It would not have occurred to her that the hotel’s arrangements could be challenged.
She was very tired, worn out by the strain of the day: the long hours on her feet, the solemnity of the church service, the frightening number of people she had had to greet, the noise of conversation and the hundreds of eyes on her – all critical, she couldn’t help feeling.
She had been unable to eat at the banquet, and a few sips of champagne had made her feel so dizzy she had left the rest. Higgins had helped her change – Marie, she told Kitty, was busy packing.
Kitty was afraid of Higgins, and she was by then so tired and confused she hardly knew what she was doing.
Only as she and Giles were being urged out of the door by the press of guests towards the carriage that was to take them to the station did she see Nina nearby – she had been seated very far away at the banquet.
She had shaken her hand free from Giles’s arm to run back to her, feeling as if she were being torn away from a safe rock into a stormy sea.
Marie, and Giles’s new manservant, James, had travelled in the same carriage with them to Dover, so there had been no conversation – she was too tired and bewildered in any case to talk.
So it was not until, having been changed into a dinner gown, she sat down in the Lord Warden’s dining-room, that she was in a position to look at her husband properly.
She gave him a rather wan, nervous smile.