Page 85 of The Secrets of Ashmore Castle

‘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.

Giles, who was tired to the bone, and a little depressed, roused himself to do his best for his very young wife. ‘It seems strange to be sitting down to dinner when we had an entire banquet only this afternoon. But I must say I wasn’t able to eat much of it. Are you hungry?’

‘I am, quite,’ she admitted.

‘Yes, I don’t think you ate much, either. What would you like?’ She was holding a vast leather-bound, gold-tasselled menu as though it might bite her. ‘Would you like me to order for you?’

‘Oh, yes, please,’ she said gratefully. He gestured to the waiter, and ordered a little foie gras with toast, a poached fillet of sole in sauce mousseline, the pheasant with salads of endive and tomato, and a strawberry mousse, hoping to please her with light, delicate dishes that would not overpower her. He ordered champagne to drink, but noticed that she only sipped it.

Conversation was sticky. He tried talking about the wedding, but she answered with an effort, agreeing with his comments without adding any of her own. ‘You’re tired,’ he said at last. ‘Perhaps we can manage without conversation.’

Kitty felt immediately guilty, and roused herself to say, ‘Won’t you tell me about the places we’re going to? I’ve never been abroad.’

He’d have been happy to eat in silence, but he couldn’t ignore her request. ‘Paris first,’ he said. ‘Then Italy. It’s too late in the year for Venice – it smells intolerably when it gets hot there. We shall have to do that another year.’

‘Another year,’ she murmured, pleased. The words reminded her that it was not just today, and this trip, that she would be with him but for years to come. It warmed her.

‘But we’ll visit Florence,’ he went on. ‘I have an acquaintance there. Perhaps Rome – perhaps Naples. I would like to show you Pompeii.’

‘Is that the lost city?’

‘Lost under a volcanic eruption, yes.’

‘Where you said there were lovely mosaics?’

He was pleased that she had remembered. ‘Yes. And then, perhaps, a few days in Sorrento, which is nearby. It is one of the most beautiful coastlines in the world. Lord Byron was a regular visitor. And Goethe. And Walter Scott.’

‘Walter Scott? We read The Bride of Lammermoor at Miss Thornton’s,’ Kitty remembered.

‘Have you seen Donizetti’s opera?’ Giles asked. ‘The mad scene is quite an experience. Perhaps we might catch a performance somewhere in Italy.’