The Storms of War by Kate Williams Read Free Book Online

their way,’ replied Sir Hugh.
    Verena signalled to the footmen and they bent to clear the plates. ‘Dessert?’ she said, brightly. ‘We have jellies. Then let me tell you about our latest plans for the summer party, Sir Hugh. I’m sure it will be our best yet. The village needs a little treat.’
    Five years ago, on the drive to Hampshire, Celia had drawn pictures of what Stoneythorpe Hall might look like: castles with turrets, long, flat white houses with no chimneys, big square pale brown boxes with pretty doors, a cottage but ten times larger, one great tower. When they arrived at the top of the long drive, the house looked nothing like her drawings. It was huge and heavy, red ornamental stone flanking the great pale doorway and carved porch. The two front wings were set forward from the door, the windows drew up to three triangular gables on the roof, the chimneys over it all. The windows were cracked, trees straggly. The place looked old and untidy – and, to her, beautiful.
    ‘This is a manor?’ said Emmeline beside her. ‘And we left London for this? Where am I supposed to wear my gowns?’ Arthur was laughing behind his hand.
    ‘It was built in the seventeenth century for the earl at the time,’ said their father. ‘It was a great house in the local area. The land even features in the Domesday Book. You will be impressed when you enter, my dear.’ The Lenley family had been the wealthy associates of royals from the thirteenth century, Rudolf said, but they became most powerful under Elizabeth I, and bought this great estate to celebrate. The Queen had visited once for hunting. ‘Imagine, Emmeline,’ he said. ‘Elizabeth I came here on a progress.’ Emmeline kicked her heels on the floor of the car.
    Rudolf often told them that he had come over to London from Berlin as a young man to make his fortune – and because he had read so many English books. In his twenties, he said, he could recite every word of Shakespeare’s most famous works. He called his first son after a king, his youngest daughter after a heroine in Shakespeare. Verena chose the names of the middle two to be modern. From the beginning, Rudolf told his family, he knew that he had to fit in by pretending he had forgotten everything about Germany: the flecks on the alphabet, trams in Berlin, freezing snow at Christmas, slow boats on the Rhine. People were unforgiving of such things, and if you let the memory of past places remain, you could never escape. He threw his precious copy of Goethe from the boat on the way over. Verena had instructed the children from very young that they must not tell him that his accent retained Germanic inflections and always betrayed him: the quick endings of words and the tripping around ‘t’ and ‘d’.
    ‘I am more English than the English,’ he was fond of saying in Hampstead, as he stepped out to his club in his neat suit, hat and silver-tipped walking stick, returning in the evening to his fireside surrounded by prints of the countryside. They lived on the same road as that great English poet, John Keats, after all. Rudolf was always proud of the fact that he never grew fat, like some meat dealers did. ‘The Englishman keeps his figure.’ He said that if you kept yourself quick and upright, life would not catch you.
    After the first journey there, Emmeline’s lip quivered as she gazed at the front of Stoneythorpe Hall. ‘I won’t go in.’
    Celia did. In those days, Emmeline and their mother complained almost daily about poor plumbing, holes between the bricks, cracks in the floorboards, the birds in the roof. Celia saw Stoneythorpe for what it really was: the grand house she had read of in her books about princesses. She loved everything about it: the unkempt grounds, the stone drive. She begged her father not to change it.
    On the day of their arrival, Celia had hurtled ahead of the others so that she could enter Stoneythorpe first. She stood in the hall and then began running down the