Later they would drive away in their big motor cars to their modernized manors, and as they sat in their hot baths before dinner the more impressionable visitors might reflect how they seemed to have been privileged to step for an hour and a half out of their own century into the leisurely, prosaic life of the English Renaissance, and how they had talked at tea of field‑sports and the reform of the Prayer‑Book just as the very‑great‑grandparents of their host might have talked in the same chairs and before the same fire three hundred years before, when their own ancestors, perhaps, slept on straw or among the aromatic merchandise of some Hanse ghetto.
But the time came when King's Thursday had to be sold. It had been built in an age when twenty servants were not an unduly extravagant establishment, and it was scarcely possible to live there with fewer. But servants, the Beste‑Chetwyndes found, were less responsive thar their masters to the charms of Tudor simplicity; the bedrooms originally ordained for them among the maze of rafters that supported the arches of uneven stone roofs were unsuited to modern requirements, and only the dirtiest and most tipsy of cooks could be induced to inhabit the enormous stone‑flagged kitchen or turn the spits at the open fire. Housemaids tended to melt away under the recurring strain of trotting in the bleak hour before breakfast up and down the narrow servants' staircases and along the interminable passages with jugs of warm water for the morning baths. Modern democracy called for lifts and labour‑saving devices, for hot‑water taps and cold‑water taps and (horrible innovation!) drinking water taps, for gas‑rings, and electric ovens.
With rather less reluctance than might have been expected, Lord Pastmaster made up his mind to sell the house; to tell the truth, he could never quite see what all the fuss was about; he supposed it was very historic, and all that, but his own taste lay towards the green shutters and semi‑tropical vegetation of a villa on the French Riviera, in which, if his critics had only realized it, he was fulfilling the traditional character of his family far better than by struggling on at King's Thursday. But the County was slow to observe this, and something very like consternation was felt, not only in the Great Houses, but in the bungalows and the villas for miles about, while in the neighbouring rectories antiquarian clergymen devised folk‑tales of the disasters that should come to crops and herds when there was no longer a Beste-Chetwynde at King's Thursday. Mr Jack Spire in the London Hercules wrote eloquently on the Save King's Thursday Fund, urging that it should be preserved for the nation, but only a very small amount was collected of the very large sum which Lord Pastmaster was sensible enough to demand, and the theory that it was to be transplanted and re-erected in Cincinnati found wide acceptance.
Thus the news that Lord Pastmaster's rich sister‑in‑law had bought the family seat was received with the utmost delight by her new neighbours and by Mr Jack Spire, and all sections of the London Press which noticed the sale. Teneat Bene Beste-Chetwunde, the motto carved over the chimneypiece in the great hall, was quoted exultantly on all sides, for very little was known about Margot Beste‑Chetwynde in Hampshire, and the illustrated papers were always pleased to take any occasion to embellish their pages with her latest portrait; the reporter to whom she remarked, 'I can't think of anything more bourgeois and awful than timbered Tudor architecture, did not take in what she meant or include the statement in his 'story'.
King's Thursday had been empty for two years when Margot Beste‑Chetwynde bought it. She had been there once before, during her engagement.
'It's worse than I thought, far worse, she said as she drove up the main avenue which the loyal villagers had decorated with the flags of the sometime allied nations in honour of her arrival. 'Liberty's new building cannot be compared with it, she said, and stirred impatiently in the car, as she remembered, how many years ago, the romantic young heiress who had walked entranced among the cut yews, and had been wooed, how phlegmatically, in the odour of honeysuckle.
Mr Jack Spire was busily saving St Sepulchre's, Egg Street (where Dr Johnson is said once to have attended Matins), when Margot Beste‑Chetwynde's decision to rebuild King's Thursday became public. He said, very seriously: 'Well, we did what we could, and thought no more about it.
Not so the neighbours, who as the work of demolition proceeded, with the aid of all that was most pulverizing in modern machinery, became increasingly enraged, and, in their eagerness to preserve for the county a little of the great manor, even resorted to predatory expeditions, from which they would return with lumps of carved stonework for their rock gardens, until the contractors were forced to maintain an extra watchman at night. The panelling went to South Kensington, where it has come in for a great deal of admiration from the Indian students. Within nine months of Mrs Beste‑Chetwynde's taking possession the new architect was at work on his plans.
It was Otto Friedrich Silenus's first important commission. 'Something clean and square, had been Mrs Beste‑Chetwynde's instructions, and then she had disappeared on one of her mysterious world‑tours, saying as she left: 'Please see that it is finished by the spring.
Professor Silenus ‑ for that was the title by which this extraordinary young man chose to be called ‑ was a 'find' of Mrs Beste‑Chetwynde's. He was not yet very famous anywhere, though all who met him carried away deep and diverse impressions of his genius. He had first attracted Mrs Beste‑Chetwynde's attention with the rejected design for a chewing‑gum factory which had been produced in a progressive Hungarian quarterly. His only other completed work was the décor for a cinema‑film of great length and complexity of plot ‑ a complexity rendered the more inextricable by the producer's austere elimination of all human characters, a fact which had proved fatal to its commercial success. He was starving resignedly in a bedsitting‑room in Bloomsbury, despite the untiring efforts of his parents to find him ‑ they were very rich in Hamburg ‑ when he was offered the commission of rebuilding King's Thursday. 'Something clean and square' ‑ he pondered for three hungry days upon the aesthetic implications of these instructions and then began his designs.