December – 1901

Adela Annoys Her Father

'Will we be going to the Coronation, Father?' asked Adela, in all innocence.

She should not have. He was now in a bad mood. Adela was hungry. She waited for her father to start his breakfast: no one could begin before he did. The last food she'd had was at six the previous evening. Supper had been a bowl of chicken soup (its fourth appearance at the table) and some bread and cheese, from which Ivy the maid had been obliged to scrape away so much mould there was precious little cheese left. The Rectory at Yatbury was an abstemious household, dedicated more to the pleasures of the spirit than the flesh.

'We certainly will not,' her father said. 'I daresay your uncle and his brood will prance around in ermine robes with sealskin spots, but I will not be there to witness it, nor will any member of my household.' He spoke of his elder brother Robert, the eighth Earl of Dilberne, whom he hated.

'But Father —' said Adela. Better if she had kept quiet. Her mother Elise, a princess of the Gotha-Zwiebrücken-Saxon line, known locally as the Hon. Rev.'s wife, kicked Adela under the table with the heel of a boot, scuffed and worn, but still capable of delivering a painful blow to the shins.

'And I'll have no further mention of this absurd business, Adela, until the whole event is over. The country is still at war and income tax has risen to one shilling in the pound and likely to go up tuppence more. And why? To pay not for the war but for a party. A pointless party for a monarch who is already accepted in law and by the people, in a vulgar display of purloined wealth,' said Edwin. He was the Rector of the small parish of Yatbury, just south-east of the City of Bath in Somerset, and in speaking thus he spoke for many. 'That wealth has been stolen for the most part by piracy; gold, diamonds and minerals wrenched from the native soil of unhappy peoples by virtue of secret treaties, then enforced by arms, intimidation and usurpation.'

The worst of it was that, though he had said grace and been about to crack open his boiled egg, Adela had spoken a moment too soon. Her father laid down his teaspoon the better to pursue his theme. All must now do likewise, since the habit of the house was that its head must be the first to eat.

'I am surprised no one has paraded the heads of Boers on poles outside the House of Lords,' said the Honourable Reverend Edwin, by way of a joke. 'My bloodthirsty brother would love that.' His audience of two laughed politely. But still he did not eat.

Edwin regarded his elder brother Robert, Earl of Dilberne, recently risen to Under Secretary of State for the Colonies, as a man entirely without scruple. Was he not known as a gambling companion to the King, the lecher; and as a friend to Arthur 'Bob's your Uncle' Balfour, nepotist, necromancer and Leader of the House? All politicians were damned and Dilberne was the worst of all politicians, a full-blooded Tory, more concerned with the welfare of his war horses than relieving the miseries of the troops. As near as dammit a Papist, who had permitted his only son to marry a Roman Catholic girl from Chicago, who would no doubt breed like a rabbit and remove Edwin still further from any hope of inheritance. A man married to a wife better fitted to be a pillar of salt out of Sodom and Gomorrah than the social butterfly she was, Isobel, Countess of Dilberne.

'But —' said Adela.

'I have heard too many buts from you, girl,' said Edwin. 'Don't interrupt me.'

'Yes, Father,' said Adela.

She was a pretty if underfed girl of sixteen, with large blue eyes in a pale angelic face, and when her hair was not in tight plaits, as her mother insisted upon, it rippled in thick, clumpy, blonde-red Botticelli waves to her waist. She was doing her best not to answer her father back, but it was difficult, though no doubt good practice for her future life of humility, devotion and obedience. The convent of the Little Sisters of Bethany, where her parents had entered her as a novitiate, she comforted herself, at least kept a good table. On the 21st of May, her seventeenth birthday, she would be off. She couldn't wait.

Adela willed her father to pick up his spoon, and his hand trembled and she thought he would, but he had another thought and put it down again. Adela took a breath of despair and hunger mixed and a button burst off her bodice. Fortunately no one noticed, and she was able to push the button under the edge of her plate. She would ask Ivy to sew it on later. It was a horrid dress anyway, dark brown and no trimmings and too tight around her chest.

Actually Elise had noticed, but said nothing, so as not to draw Edwin's attention to his daughter's bosom. Time passed but brought its embarrassments with it. Ivy the maid suggested from time to time that new dresses should be bought, now that all possible seams had been let out, but new clothes were an extravagance when half the world was in rags. It was Elise's conviction that if Adela ate less she would grow less.

Once it had been a love match – a chance meeting on a cross-Channel steamer in a storm between an Austrian princess and the fourth son of an Earl – but both dedicated to the service of God. The flesh had won over the spirit, the Anglican over the Catholic; they had...