Great Historical Novels (104 page)

‘Where there’s muck there’s brass,’ he’d said. ‘Where there’s sheep there’s nought but wool, and who wants wool now cotton’s here? Your young man’s a second son, he won’t inherit. He’s not in the habit of earning a living. All he can do is chatter and look down his nose. It’s a good nose – I’ll grant you that – for looking down.’

‘He loves me, Father,’ said Isobel. ‘His father will set him up as Member of Parliament.’

Silas had snorted. ‘Then he’ll die even poorer. Tell him he’ll get not a penny from me and see what he says then.’

She told Robert, and though he blanched just a little, he said it made no difference, he loved her, and meant to marry her.

Isobel was Silas’s youngest child, and born out of wedlock. Her mother was a young widowed actress, Fanny Bridie, a member of the London
demi-monde
, that frivolous fringe of society where artists, musicians, poets and theatre people clustered together, talked, fornicated and chatted freely and all without any apparent sense of guilt.

Silas had married his cousin Nell when he was twenty and she was sixteen, and left to her own devices by him when she was thirty, already the mother of five boys who’d burst from her like peas from a pod, and who, like their mother, struck Silas as plain, dull, worthy and without special merit. Nell made no objection when her coal baron husband vanished from home for weeks at a time to cleave to pretty, lively, silly Fanny, the London actress. Nell was relieved that there would be no more babies, and that she could reap in peace the benefits of her husband’s ever-increasing wealth and status in the world. The fact that he had a mistress was no secret but seldom referred to.

When Isobel was born Silas thought that at last he had a child worth having – a bright, lively, pretty little thing, who
could read when she was three, speak Latin when she was four and by the time she was fifteen was writing poetry, had been painted by Rossetti (some say she was the model for
La Castagnetta)
, and keeping company with members of the Garrick Club, who often visited Fanny at her home, and who took her child up as a kind of mascot and wrote poetry to her, sometimes romantic, sometimes lascivious and often bad.

Within a few years Silas had replaced Fanny with another, but continued to support her and her daughter in some comfort and style. Fanny could never be accepted in bourgeois society of course, let alone in high society, but the handicap did not worry her. While there was food, drink, conversation and the thrill of the theatre, who cared? Her little girl grew and flourished on the edges of society where the rich and powerful mingled with the bohemians; she took good care to preserve the girl’s virtue and was rewarded when the young Robert Hedleigh wooed and won her.

The eldest son and heir to the Dilberne title would never have been excused such behaviour, but a second son was allowed more latitude, and Isobel’s charm was great and her manners perfect, so the imprudence of the marriage was all but overlooked, though some Hedleigh eyebrows were raised. But when it was rumoured that Silas had settled one hundred thousand pounds on the girl, so that she was, in fact, an heiress, society marvelled at the romance of it all. When Robert’s father and eldest brother were killed in a yachting accident in a storm off the Isle of Wight, and Robert stopped being ‘the Honourable’ and became an earl and she became a Countess overnight, Isobel’s origins were quietly overlooked. She seemed born to the title, preferred the town to the country, gave excellent dinner parties and lavish balls and her invitations were eagerly awaited by anyone who mattered.
And who mattered in today’s Society was increasingly decided by Isobel, Countess of Dilberne.

Silas was a frequent visitor at Dilberne Court, and rubbed along well enough with his son-in-law while continuing to believe that the man had no head for business, though saw that perhaps he did for politics. He was of the view that few politicians died rich unless they were corrupt; and the landed gentry saw corruption as beneath them, though how long their principles would stand fast against hard times was anyone’s guess.

Alas, Robert had spent money he did not have on the lavish refurbishment of Dilberne Court. He had for long done what he could to avoid using his wife’s money. In the end he had asked Baum, a young solicitor recommended by the Prince’s friend Ernest Cassel – albeit that the latter was described by his enemies as a Shylock and a moneylender – for a loan to pay the builders. There were a couple of bad harvests. Soon he was eating into his wife’s money, and his children’s. He had no option. His Lordship gambled, the sooner to pay Baum back, and lost yet more.

Robert turned to Silas. Silas refused him cash but gave him free advice. Robert should grit his teeth, tighten his belt, sell off the less productive farming tenancies, and a couple of the villages – times were such that overdue rentals were running at atrocious levels – pay off Baum and the gambling debts: these money people were not tradesmen to be ignored but were dangerous – and invest the rest in the productive Welsh coalfields. Baum’s advice was different: forget coal, invest in the diamond mines of Kimberley.

Robert sold off a third of the Dilberne estates – which enraged his two remaining siblings, Alfred Hedleigh, the third son, who was an army officer in India and Edwin
Hedleigh, the fourth, a country parson and amateur architect. As the eldest surviving son he had inherited the land outright – but the other two had their principles. Robert did not have the moral right, they claimed, to sell off land which had been in the Hedleigh family for generations. Robert was surely unduly influenced by his wife. Such a marriage could never have been expected to turn out well. He was landed aristocracy; she was trade, and a by-blow at that. Old wealth and new wealth would never speak the same language.

Forget that the unproductive Dilberne acres were sold to an idealistic developer who wished to create a self-contained garden city of ten thousand souls; to clear the tenants’ debts and rehouse them in better conditions than they had ever dreamt of; forget that much of the profit from the sale was to be set aside for improvements to the two thirds of the land and tenancies that remained: the Hedleigh brothers were not appeased.

The sale went ahead and notification arrived that the cheque had reached the bankers. His Lordship havered. Coal or diamonds? It just so happened that on the very day the cheque was safely in his Lordship’s bank – his Lordship now banked with Ernest Cassel himself, banker to the Prince of Wales – Silas was visiting his daughter Isobel. She was the only one of his many children whose company he sought, though when he did visit he had to put up with a son-in-law who was too pleasant a fellow fully to understand the world, and a grand-daughter Rosina who was too self-righteous to make concessions to it. Silas didn’t object to Arthur because they were both interested in engines.

But Rosina, then aged twenty-four, at the time much exercised by reports of two hundred and fifty deaths in the
terrible accident at the Albion mine near Pontypridd that very day, had a heated argument with her grandfather over the morality of coal mining.

‘It is a disgrace,’ said Rosina. ‘That so many should die to make a few rich men even richer. The owners knew the mine was dangerous but they did nothing to make it safe.’

‘So a few people die that many will be warm?’ said old Silas, snappily. ‘It is not so bad a bargain.’

‘Coal is nasty, filthy stuff, ‘said Rosina. ‘God put it underground, there it should stay, and not be gouged out for reasons of profit.’

She was young but argumentative. Silas, who had started as a miner himself and ended up as one of the wealthiest men in England, who saw very well the benefit to himself, to his family, to this household, to his very country, of digging coal out and burning it, felt such a spasm of anger that, in the words of Elsie who was there to witness the event: ‘The poor old man just grabbed his heart, fell down in a faint and passed away there and then.’

‘All I did was speak the truth,’ said Rosina, over and over into the uproar, as doctors, police and lawyers gathered round the sofa where the body lay. Robert had been sent for. ‘Coal is nasty dirty stuff.’

‘Just be quiet, Rosina,’ said her mother, through tears. ‘For heavens’ sake, just for once have the decency to keep your theories to yourself.’

‘But it’s true,’ said Rosina.

‘You killed him.’ Isobel turned on her daughter and slapped her, short, fierce and hard against the cheek, and though after that mother and daughter were civil to one another, neither one ever really forgave the other. Some things once said cannot be unsaid.

‘Nasty, dirty, dangerous stuff,’ said Rosina but under her breath, out of the hearing of her mother who knelt beside the body, her head resting on the still chest. Rosina looked at her grandfather’s body with cold detachment. Already the white hairs of his beard were taking on a wiry appearance, the skin a marbled solidity.

‘My goodness,’ Arthur remarked at the time, ‘you don’t give in easily, do you, Rosy.’

‘Your difficulty in life, Arthur, is that you have no principles.’

‘And your difficulty, and ours, is that you have,’ said Arthur.

The love between the two siblings was fitful at the best of times. Rosina was her father’s daughter, Arthur his mother’s son. Conversations held over dead bodies carry considerable weight and are not quickly forgotten.

Silas’s will left the majority of his wealth to his wife and legitimate children, a mere fifty thousand pounds in trust to Isobel and her children – Robert could understand that, because when it came to inheritance the true line must be respected – and an equal amount to a coal-miners’ charity. Still, the fifty thousand pounds was a useful capital sum.

The choice remained, coal or diamonds. Public outcry over the Albion disaster was such that any mining venture at home, when one’s own countrymen were involved, seemed distasteful. Silas was no longer around to argue for it. It seemed a waste to pay Baum off – the gambling debts likewise – when the money could be more profitably invested. Baum was not pressing for repayment. It seemed he had connections to the South African diamond business. All the same some instinct, some sense that diamonds were too purely commercial, too distant from the
day-to-day business of an English gentleman to be properly respectable, kept Robert havering.

‘Do make up your mind, Robert,’ said Isobel. ‘You will fritter everything away.’ By frittering she meant gambling. He was back at the tables with the Prince. ‘At least set the money to work; if it sits in the bank it may simply lose value.’ She was grieving for her father: angry with her daughter, upset by not having been able to go to Silas’s funeral. She accepted that this right must be left to the legitimate family, but she was left with an agitating sense of unfinished business, of impending doom and Robert would come home in the early hours from his jaunts with the Prince, over-exhilarated by winning, downcast by loss. At night, alone, it seemed impossible for her to keep warm.

Robert’s response to her gloom was to set about putting central heating into the Belgrave Square House, at huge expense, regardless of the fact that since the property was rented, not owned, no value would accrue to him. Isobel did not object too much. She liked to be warm. She cheered up.

Then Baum came up with another alternative. Gold. Nobody surely could fault gold. He put a prospectus from the Ladysmith Syndicate under his Lordship’s nose and enthused: the idea was to mine in a spot in the Modder Kloof region of the Transvaal, clearly a sure-fire proposal. A ridge of shale and sandstone intersected with promising veins of quartz, ripe for mining, had recently come to the notice of geologists from the Royal Institute. Now the Transvaal was safely in British hands the place swarmed with prospectors. Gold was a safer proposition even than diamonds, which had already made many a humble Briton rich. Why should not gold do the same for the landed gentry? Or platinum? The quartz might contain pitchblende which could yet prove promising. It
contained an element called uranium and traces of a strange new substance called radium, an almost pure white alkaline earth metal, which turned black on exposure to the air but emitted a strange blue glow.

His Lordship consulted the family. Their money was at stake as well as his own. Isobel made no objection. ‘Just put it where you can’t get at it,’ she said. Robert could see the wisdom in this.

Rosina was by now too absorbed by the weekly meetings of the Fabian Society to give the matter much thought.

‘If I argue you’ll fall down dead like Grandfather,’ she said, ‘just to pay me out for being a woman and having a mind of my own. Do what you like.’ Which her father took as assent.

Arthur had more important things to think about, such as getting down to Nice in France for the ‘Speed Week’ auto race in March, properly outfitted by a new and trusting tailor. His boots and gloves were to be made of sealskin, which was expensive, but light and supple.

‘Go for gold,’ Arthur said. ‘If the decision is Wales or Natal, go for Natal. The weather is better and labour is cheaper. Benz and Daimler are exporting there: we need to get into the market too. Do what you think best, Pater.’

So Pater did. A generous seam of gold was unearthed in the very first weekend and profits began to flow from the Modder Kloof mine. All rejoiced. They were to be rich; the Dilberne family fortune seemed assured.

The British had learnt how to mow down Zulu hordes, but the irregular tactics of the determined Boers were new and surprising. No one had reckoned on the flooding of the mine by white enemies armed with Mausers and field guns.

A Solution is Found

11.50 A.M. TUESDAY, 24TH OCTOBER 1899

‘The problem now, surely, is less how we have come to this pretty pass but what are we are going to do about it,’ said Isobel. Robert, Isobel and Arthur remained sitting around the breakfast table, indifferent to Elsie’s suggestion, expressed in body language rather than words, that she should be allowed to get on, that there was a lot to be done before the dinner tonight, and the early breakfast had already upset the order of things. ‘If Mr Baum is not the best person to be indebted to, he is not the worst. I do not think he would dare foreclose. Imagine Dilberne Court passing into the hands of Mrs Baum, who knows even less than her husband how anything should be done.’