Ken Follett: Fall of Giants

Clearly God intended the Fitzherberts to rule over their fellow men, and to live in appropriate style; but Fitz felt he had not done much to justify God’s faith in him.

His father, the previous earl, had been different. A naval officer, he had been made admiral after the bombardment of Alexandria in 1882, had become the British ambassador to St. Petersburg, and finally had been a minister in the government of Lord Salisbury. The Conservatives lost the general election of 1906, and Fitz’s father died a few weeks later-his end hastened, Fitz felt sure, by seeing irresponsible Liberals such as David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill take over His Majesty’s government.

Fitz had taken his seat in the House of Lords, the upper chamber of the British Parliament, as a Conservative peer. He spoke good French and he could get by in Russian, and he would have liked one day to be his country’s foreign secretary. Regrettably, the Liberals had continued to win elections, so he had had no chance yet of becoming a government minister.

His military career had been equally undistinguished. He had attended the army’s officer training academy at Sandhurst, and had spent three years with the Welsh Rifles, ending as a captain. On marriage he had given up full-time soldiering, but had become honorary colonel of the South Wales Territorials. Unfortunately an honorary colonel never won medals.

However, he did have something to be proud of, he thought as the train steamed up through the South Wales valleys. In two weeks’ time, the king was coming to stay at Fitz’s country house. King George V and Fitz’s father had been shipmates in their youth. Recently the king had expressed a wish to know what the younger men were thinking, and Fitz had organized a discreet house party for His Majesty to meet some of them. Now Fitz and his wife, Bea, were on their way to the house to get everything ready.

Fitz cherished traditions. Nothing known to mankind was superior to the comfortable order of monarchy, aristocracy, merchant, and peasant. But now, looking out of the train window, he saw a threat to the British way of life greater than any the country had faced for a hundred years. Covering the once-green hillsides, like a gray-black leaf blight on a rhododendron bush, were the terraced houses of the coal miners. In those grimy hovels there was talk of republicanism, atheism, and revolt. It was only a century or so since the French nobility had been driven in carts to the guillotine, and the same would happen here if some of those muscular black-faced miners had their way.

Fitz would gladly have given up his earnings from coal, he told himself, if Britain could go back to a simpler era. The royal family was a strong bulwark against insurrection. But Fitz felt nervous about the visit, as well as proud. So much could go wrong. With royalty, an oversight might be seen as a sign of carelessness, and therefore disrespectful. Every detail of the weekend would be reported, by the visitors’ servants, to other servants and thence to those servants’ employers, so that every woman in London society would quickly know if the king were given a hard pillow, a bad potato, or the wrong brand of champagne.

Fitz’s Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost was waiting at Aberowen railway station. With Bea at his side he was driven a mile to Tŷ Gwyn, his country house. A light but persistent drizzle was falling, as it so often did in Wales.

“Tŷ Gwyn” was Welsh for White House, but the name had become ironic. Like everything else in this part of the world, the building was covered with a layer of coal dust, and its once-white stone blocks were now a dark gray color that smeared the skirts of ladies who carelessly brushed against its walls.

Nevertheless it was a magnificent building, and it filled Fitz with pride as the car purred up the drive. The largest private house in Wales, Tŷ Gwyn had two hundred rooms. Once when he was a boy he and his sister, Maud, had counted the windows and found 523. It had been built by his grandfather, and there was a pleasing order to the three-story design. The ground-floor windows were tall, letting plenty of light into the grand reception rooms. Upstairs were dozens of guest rooms, and in the attic countless small servants’ bedrooms, revealed by long rows of dormer windows in the steep roofs.

The fifty acres of gardens were Fitz’s joy. He supervised the gardeners personally, making decisions about planting and pruning and potting. “A house fit for a king to visit,” he said as the car stopped at the grand portico. Bea did not reply. Traveling made her bad-tempered.

Getting out of the car, Fitz was greeted by Gelert, his Pyrenean mountain dog, a bear-sized creature who licked his hand, then raced joyously around the courtyard in celebration.

In his dressing room Fitz took off his traveling clothes and changed into a suit of soft brown tweed. Then he went through the communicating door into Bea’s rooms.

The Russian maid, Nina, was unpinning the elaborate hat Bea had worn for the journey. Fitz caught sight of Bea’s face in the dressing-table mirror, and his heart skipped a beat. He was taken back four years, to the St. Petersburg ballroom where he had first seen that impossibly pretty face framed by blond curls that could not quite be tamed. Then as now she had worn a sulky look that he found strangely alluring. In a heartbeat he had decided that she of all women was the one he wanted to marry.

Nina was middle-aged and her hand was unsteady-Bea often made her servants nervous. As Fitz watched, a pin pricked Bea’s scalp, and she cried out.

Nina went pale. “I’m terribly sorry, Your Highness,” she said in Russian.

Bea snatched up a hatpin from the dressing table. “See how you like it!” she cried, and jabbed the maid’s arm.

Nina burst into tears and ran from the room.

“Let me help you,” Fitz said to his wife in a soothing tone.

She was not to be mollified. “I’ll do it myself.”

Fitz went to the window. A dozen or so gardeners were at work trimming bushes, edging lawns, and raking gravel. Several shrubs were in flower: pink viburnum, yellow winter jasmine, witch hazel, and scented winter honeysuckle. Beyond the garden was the soft green curve of the mountainside.

He had to be patient with Bea, and remind himself that she was a foreigner, isolated in a strange country, away from her family and all that was familiar. It had been easy in the early months of their marriage, when he was still intoxicated by how she looked and smelled and the touch of her soft skin. Now it took an effort. “Why don’t you rest?” he said. “I’ll see Peel and Mrs. Jevons and find out how their plans are progressing.” Peel was the butler and Mrs. Jevons the housekeeper. It was Bea’s job to organize the staff, but Fitz was nervous enough about the king’s visit to welcome an excuse to get involved. “I’ll report back to you later, when you’re refreshed.” He took out his cigar case.

“Don’t smoke in here,” she said.

He took that for assent and went to the door. Pausing on his way out, he said: “Look, you won’t behave like that in front of the king and queen, will you? Striking the servants, I mean.”

“I didn’t strike her, I stuck a pin in her as a lesson.”

Russians did that sort of thing. When Fitz’s father had complained about the laziness of the servants at the British embassy in St. Petersburg, his Russian friends had told him he did not beat them enough.

Fitz said to Bea: “It would embarrass the monarch to have to witness such a thing. As I’ve told you before, it’s not done in England.”

“When I was a girl, I was made to watch three peasants being hanged,” she said. “My mother didn’t like it, but my grandfather insisted. He said: ‘This is to teach you to punish your servants. If you do not slap them or flog them for small offenses of carelessness and laziness, they will eventually commit larger sins and end up on the scaffold.’ He taught me that indulgence to the lower classes is cruel, in the long run.”