Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter by Diana Souhami (people reading books .txt) 📗

April, after seven weeks, Biarritz bade the King farewell. Soldiers of the 49th Infantry Regiment who went out each year with him, local French soldiers and the fire brigade held a military tattoo under his hotel balcony. There was a fireworks’ display, parades. ‘I shall be sorry to leave Biarritz,’ Bertie said. ‘Perhaps it will be for ever.’

He arrived home on 27 April. He wrote to Cassel saying he looked forward to meeting him on 7 May at Buckingham Palace and to ‘talking over many matters’ with him. He went to Sandringham for the weekend, supervised some gardening, ‘stood about in the cold wind’ and on 2 May returned to London. He played bridge with Mrs Keppel but she sent him off home at 10.30 to go to bed early. Over the next few days he was ill and she visited him each day at the Palace.

Alexandra arrived home on the evening of 5 May. She had heard of the seriousness of this illness when she got to Calais. Bertie had chest pains, fainting fits, was a terrible colour and choked when he smoked his cigars. Cassel, too, returned to Brook House that day from his cruise. Mrs Keppel called to see him right away. He wrote to Maudie:

Poor Alice met me on arrival in despair. There is grave ground for anxiety … but there is no reason to despair. I shall go to the Palace tomorrow where my appointment for tomorrow still holds good.

Next morning his butler, Davidson, had a phone call saying the King was too ill to receive Cassel. Half an hour later Lord Knollys left a message instructing him to go to the Palace at once. Cassel took with him for the King an envelope with £10,000 in banknotes.

He first saw the Queen. She asked after his daughter Maudie. She and the physician Sir Francis Laking advised him not to let the King speak much. Bertie, dressed and in his sitting room, tried to rise from his chair to shake hands but ‘looked as if he had suffered great pain and spoke indistinctly’. He too asked after Maudie and was glad the cruise had done her good. He said, ‘I am very seedy, but I wanted to see you … He then talked about other matters, and I had to ask his leave to go as I felt it was not good for him to go on speaking.’

Late in the afternoon the Prince of Wales brought news that Bertie’s horse, Witch of the Air, had won the 4.15 at Kempton Park. ‘Yes, I have heard it,’ said the King. ‘I am very glad.’

In his last hours Mrs Keppel went to see him. She had sent the Queen the letter Bertie wrote her in 1901, when he had appendicitis. It stated that if he were to die he wanted to ‘say farewell’ to her and that he was ‘convinced that all those who have any affection for me will carry out the wishes which I have expressed in these lines’. The Queen shook hands with her, said, ‘I am sure you have always had a good influence over him’, then turned away and walked to the window.

Bertie had had a series of heart attacks and was incoherent. He kept falling forward in his chair and did not recognize his Little Mrs George. Cassel’s envelope of money was by his bed.

In a rare display Mrs Keppel lost control and kept repeating, ‘I never did any harm, there was nothing wrong between us, what is to become of me.’ Princess Victoria tried, but failed, to calm her. Mrs Keppel was carried to Frederick Ponsonby’s room in a ‘wild fit of hysterics’. It was hours before she quietened down. Lord Esher wrote in his journal, ‘Altogether it was a painful and rather theatrical exhibition and ought never to have happened.’

Bertie died at a quarter to midnight. Alexandra said Biarritz had killed him. She wanted to hide herself away in the country but ‘there was this terrible State funeral and all the dreadful arrangements that had to be made’. Francis Knollys sent the envelope of banknotes back to Cassel: ‘I presume they belong to you and are not the result of any speculation you went into for him.’ Cassel returned the money, saying it represented ‘interest I gave to the King in financial matters I am undertaking’.

It was a large sum to have in notes – about half a million pounds in today’s money – and an odd offering to bring to the bedside of a dying King. ‘It was the fruit of a quite exceptionally lucrative investment’ said Cassel’s biographer, Anthony Allfrey, who surmised that the money was intended for Mrs Keppel. It was, perhaps, an indication of the casual way her fortune was accrued.

The atmosphere was grim on 5 May at 16 Portman Square. Strangers gathered outside the house. ‘I was afraid to approach my stern, unsmiling mother,’ Sonia said. George was abstracted and serious, Nannie evasive, Moiselle silent.

Next morning Violet and Sonia woke to learn the King was dead. Their mother and George had left the house in the night to stay with Arthur and Venetia James in Grafton Street. He was a racing friend of Bertie’s. To Venetia, Mrs Keppel said the Queen had sent for her to go to the dying King’s bedside, had kissed her and given her the promise that the royal family ‘would look after her’. Mrs James spread this story round the Ritz, ‘telling everyone about Mrs Keppel’s visit to B. Palace’. ‘Mrs Keppel has lied about the whole affair … and describes, quite falsely, her reception by the King’ Lord Esher wrote.

Violet and Sonia, too, were taken to Mrs James’s house by Nannie and Moiselle. The Keppel family never returned to Portman Square. Mrs James was rich and childless and her house severe. The hall was of yellow marble with nude classical figures in niches. Manservants of ‘untouchable dignity’ opened and closed the doors to ‘frigid reception rooms’. Blinds were drawn, lights dimmed, everyone