Coronation Year: A Novel

by Jennifer Robson

Genres: Historical Fiction; 20th Century Romance

Synopsis

The USA Today bestselling author of The Gown returns with another enthralling and royal-adjacent historical novel—as the lives of three very different residents of London’s historic Blue Lion hotel converge in a potentially explosive climax on the day of Queen Elizabeth’s Coronation.

It is Coronation Year, 1953, and a new queen is about to be crowned. The people of London are in a mood to celebrate, none more so than the residents of the Blue Lion hotel.

Edie Howard, owner and operator of the floundering Blue Lion, has found the miracle she needs: on Coronation Day, Queen Elizabeth in her gold coach will pass by the hotel’s front door, allowing Edie to charge a fortune for rooms and, barring disaster, save her beloved home from financial ruin. Edie’s luck might just be turning, all thanks to a young queen about her own age. 

Stella Donati, a young Italian photographer and Holocaust survivor, has come to live at the Blue Lion while she takes up a coveted position at Picture Weekly magazine. London in celebration mode feels like a different world to her. As she learns the ins and outs of her new profession, Stella discovers a purpose and direction that honor her past and bring hope for her future.

James Geddes, a war hero and gifted artist, has struggled to make his mark in a world that disdains his Indian ancestry. At the Blue Lion, though, he is made to feel welcome and worthy. Yet even as his friendship with Edie deepens, he begins to suspect that something is badly amiss at his new home.

When anonymous threats focused on Coronation Day, the Blue Lion, and even the queen herself disrupt their mood of happy optimism, Edie and her friends must race to uncover the truth, save their home, and expose those who seek to erase the joy and promise of Coronation Year.

 

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Release date: April 4, 2023

Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks

Print pages: 397

Sample

Chapter One

Edwina Duncan Howard

Thursday, January 1, 1953

A gale from the east had swept across the city late the evening before, scouring away the worst of the smog, and the rare sight of London’s night sky had inspired Edie to open her curtains and raise the fraying blackout blind. She’d tucked herself into bed, her spectacles still on, because what was the point of looking at the stars if she couldn’t make them out?

But she’d been tired, so awfully tired, and she’d fallen asleep straightaway. And now it was a quarter to seven in the morning, the stars had faded from the still-dark sky, and before she was even fully awake she remembered it all. Nothing tragic or calamitous; nothing she would dream of sharing with any of the people who worked for her. Just worries, an impatient and none too polite queue of them, each demanding her attention, her time, and every last penny of the Blue Lion’s ever-diminishing supply of capital.

She threw back the covers, sat up straight, and set her feet on the cold floor. Time to be up, past time to stop fretting and fussing, for it was a new day—a new year, the year of the queen’s coronation, and in six months the world would be coming to London, and by the greatest stroke of good fortune she and her guests at the Blue Lion would have front-row seats for at least part of the festivities.

Even now, months after learning the coronation procession from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Abbey would pass by her front door, Edie still marveled that some bureaucrat in Whitehall had made the fateful decision to send the procession along Northumberland Avenue, never for a moment considering the effect it would have on the historic, if often overlooked, hotel that Edie’s ancestor had founded in 1560.

A knock at the door put an end to her musings. “Miss Howard?”

“I won’t be a moment.” She fumbled for her spectacles, which she fortunately hadn’t crushed in her sleep, pulled on her robe, stepped into her slippers, and glanced at the overmantel mirror to ensure her hair was tidy. Only then did she unlock and open her door to the hotel’s night manager.

“Good morning, Mr. Swan, and Happy New Year.”

“The same to you, Miss Howard. May I bring in your breakfast?”

“Yes, thank you. How were things overnight?”

“Nicely quiet. Not a peep from the rooms.”

Well. There wouldn’t be, given that only seven guests were in residence, among them their three long-term boarders, and none were the sort to stay up late. By midnight they had likely been abed for hours.

“Any trouble with the Queen Bess?” The public house down the street made for good neighbors most of the time, but bank holidays occasionally meant messes to clear up and, intermittently, broken windows when its patrons turned into amateur pugilists.

He set her breakfast tray on the desk by the window, straightened it with care, and turned to face her. “Not as bad as Boxing Day. Quieted down long before last orders.”

“Good, good. I always sleep well when I know you’re at the front desk.”

“Thank you, miss,” Arthur said, his ears reddening at the compliment. “I’ll see you this evening, then.”

The particulars varied, but the essentials remained the same. In

 the fourteen years Arthur had been night manager, neither he nor Edie had deviated from the established formula for their morning conversation. She knew he was married and that his wife’s name was Florence but he called her Flossie. She knew he had two children, Arthur Junior and Gawain, the latter name a startlingly poetic choice for such a placid and practical man, and she knew his address and of course exactly how much he made, since she was the one who paid his wages. But she’d gleaned nearly every scrap of information from overheard conversations and secondhand exchanges with other hotel employees. Not once had she and Arthur spoken of his life beyond the hotel, and if she were ever to unbend herself and ask after Flossie and the children, she was almost certain he would faint on the spot.

She never called him Arthur to his face, though she thought of him that way. She thought of all her employees as family, though she could never allow herself the luxury of friendship with them. Be friendly, her father had liked to remind her, but remember that you’re not their friend. You’re not meant to be friends.

Edie had remembered that advice, together with everything else Pa had told her, when she’d been left with the hotel. A few months shy of twenty-one, still in shock after the death of her parents, suddenly responsible for the livelihood and well-being of eighteen full-time employees, she’d clung to her memories of Pa and Mum and the generations of Howards before them. Her family had kept the Blue Lion open and modestly profitable for almost four hundred years. She had only to follow in their footsteps.

Pa had loved to tell her stories of the hotel, so while other girls fell asleep to fairy tales or stories from Schoolgirl’s Own, Edie’s bedtime fare had been the unfolding saga of the Blue Lion and its glorious past.

“It was our ancestor, Jacob Howard, who founded this hotel,” her father would often begin. “Mind you, it was an old building even then, never mind the Victorian coat it wears now, and ever since then, for seventeen generations, there’s been a Howard at the helm. Your mother and I have the running of it now, just as your grandparents did before us, which means . . . ?”

“It will be mine one day.”

Left unsaid was all that had happened before she was born. Her brothers, killed during the Great War, lost in the mud and blood of the Somme, and Edie the replacement, conceived so the Howard name would not die along with them. The disappointment of her being a girl was never mentioned, of course.

“Think of it, Edie—every timber and flagstone and scrap of plaster and stick of furniture in these buildings will be yours. And that makes you the luckiest girl in London.”

She had believed him then, but now? Now she wasn’t so sure. It all depended, she supposed, on what one accounted as luck.

The little clock on her mantel trilled the hour. Seven o’clock already, her breakfast growing cold, and the entire day yet to get through

. One day she would lounge in bed until noon, and she would eat her breakfast without getting up, never mind the crumbs, and she’d spend all afternoon reading. One day, after the coronation, when she had restored the hotel’s fortunes and the weight of it all didn’t sit quite so heavily on her shoulders.

Today, however, she could not afford to linger. Instead she ate her toast and marmalade, poured her tea and gulped it down, and then set about getting dressed. She always wore the same thing, excepting the odd evening out, for it saved time in the morning and, more importantly, made her instantly recognizable to both her guests and employees. A white poplin blouse with detachable collar for easier laundering, a charcoal-gray skirt that grazed the top of her calves and was scarcely fuller than the Utility skirts she’d worn during the war, a tailored jacket to match, and sensible lace-up shoes with a low heel. On her left lapel was a blue enamel badge, its edges delicately gilded, that read Miss E. D. Howard and, below it, Proprietor. She wore no jewelry apart from her mother’s wristwatch.

After making her bed, Edie collected the tray to take downstairs. Her room was on the top floor at the back of the hotel, with a northerly aspect and an unremarkable view of the surrounding roofs. The largest of the staff bedrooms, it was half the size of the best guest rooms at the front of the building, and its furnishings were the same as they’d been when her parents had taken over the chamber at the turn of the century.

She locked her door, neatly balancing the tray on one arm, and walked to the end of the corridor, through the staff-only door, and down the back stairs to the kitchen. There she deposited the tray and greeted Cook, Ruth the assistant cook, and Dolly the scullery maid.

“Happy New Year, ladies.”

“Good morning, Miss Howard, and a happy New Year to you,” Cook answered brightly, though she didn’t look up from the bowl of eggs she was whisking.

“Happy Coronation Year, Miss Howard!” burbled Dolly, who was a fervent devotee of the royal family. Everyone at the Blue Lion had heard, most more than once, how the late king himself had visited her street in Stepney Green after it was blitzed, and even though Dolly had only been four years old, and her right arm had been in a sling, he’d reached out and grasped her left hand, and given it a proper shake, and he’d been so gentle and nice and hadn’t cared one bit that she’d been all over with dust. When his death had been announced, almost a year ago now, Cook had needed to sit Dolly down and fortify her with a mug of well-sugared and lightly brandied tea.

Edie had also been sad, for the king been a good and decent man, and everyone knew the war had more or less killed him. And she had an idea, too, of what it was like to be weighed down by duty and expectations and centuries of compliant ancestors.

“Only six months and a day, Miss Howard, and then the gold coach and the queen herself will be passing by our front door!”

“It is exciting, yes,” Edie agreed, “although we do have a while to wait until then, and in the meantime rather a lot of work to get through.”

On the great day itself, they’d be working from dawn to the wee hours, for the hotel would be bursting with guests for the first time in years, and everyone, Edie included, would be run off their feet. All the same, she resolved to find a way for her staff to watch the procession as it rolled past. What difference would a half hour make in the grand scheme of things?

Edie continued on through the dining room, occupied at present only by the Hagerty family—a middle-aged Australian couple and their teenage sons, all of them pleasant, undemanding, and unfortunately only staying for two nights—as well as Miss Polly and Miss Bertie, now in their third decade of residence at the Blue Lion and lingering over their second pot of tea. She offered nods and hellos and just the right amount of a smile, with an expression that suggested she would love to chat but was hurrying along to deal with something terribly important.

Professor Thurloe was waiting for Edie in the front hall, just as she’d been expecting, since it was the first of the month and he was nothing if not a creature of habit. After handing over his monthly report, which consisted of a detailed list of the occasions when he had been bothered by excessive noise, together with a summary of his complaints on a range of subjects that invariably included the food served at breakfast and tea (not enough butter for his toast, not enough tea leaves in his teapot, not enough cress in his egg-and-cress sandwiches), he trailed after her in his usual hangdog fashion, only stopping short when she opened the door to the front-desk alcove and her office beyond.

“Is anything the matter?” she asked in as polite a voice as she could contrive. “I’ll read your report as soon as I have a spare moment, but I am really quite busy this morning.”

“It will only take a moment for me to explain. I’ve made some fascinating discoveries, you see.”

“About the beams in the cellar and tunnels?” She hoped she didn’t sound as weary as she felt. “I’ve already told you, more than once, that I cannot allow you to go rummaging around down there. Not until I’ve had a surveyor in to check that it’s safe.”

Every month the professor had something new and, to his mind, utterly fascinating to share with her; and every month, without exception, in the twelve and a half years he’d boarded at the Blue Lion, he had regaled her with arcane facts about the ancient building techniques used to construct the hotel. But she had

a soft spot for the man, who had no one else in the world to look out for him, and who wasn’t so very annoying in comparison to some guests who had stayed at the Blue Lion over the years. So she smothered her honest reaction and instead allowed him a glimmer of hope.

“Perhaps once the coronation is over and things are a bit less busy? I could have the surveyor in then.”

“Oh, yes, please. That would be splendid. Only . . . you’re quite certain I can’t have a peek in the meantime?”

“Quite. Now, tell me: Have you had your breakfast this morning?” The poor man was looking even more frail than usual.

“Well, no. I’m afraid I’ve been rather wrapped up in my reading.”

“Come along with me to the dining room, then. I’ll have Ginny bring out your breakfast straightaway.”

“Dear girl. I’d waste away without you. And you will consider my request?”

“When things aren’t quite so busy, yes. I’ll consider it then.”

Edie settled the professor at his usual table in the far corner of the dining room, and then returned to the front hall, intent on greeting Mr. Brooks, the hotel’s assistant manager, who had been patiently waiting for her to finish her conversation with the professor.

But then her attention was caught by a flickering lightbulb in the wall sconce to the left of the stairs. It took only a moment to tighten, her fingers smarting from the heat of the glass, but the fleeting discomfort was worth the satisfaction of solving at least one problem that morning, no matter how trivial.

“That’s done,” she said. And then, belatedly, “Good morning, Mr. Brooks. Happy New Year.”

“The same to you, Miss Howard. The morning papers are on your desk. No post, of course, on account of the bank holiday.”

“Any telephone messages?”

“Nothing overnight.”

“Very well. Give me half an hour, and then we’ll go through the reservations for this coming week.”

There weren’t many to discuss. The Australians were leaving tomorrow, and after that no one was expected until Monday, when three regular guests were due to check in. A salesman from Manchester who always asked for the cheapest room, and a retired couple from Southend-on-Sea, up for three days and two nights so Mr. Tippett might have his annual appointment with his Harley Street heart specialist. She’d have to remind Cook that he’d be wanting his eggs without the yolks, and every bit of fat stripped from his bacon. Then she’d have to listen to complaints about ingrates who wouldn’t recognize a decent plate of food if it bit them on the nose.

Edie shut her office door, grateful for a moment of quiet before the day began in earnest, and went to sit at her desk. It was satisfyingly tidy, just as she preferred, with her notebook to the left, t

he old metal tray that held the post and messages to her right, and before her a neat stack of the Times, the Daily Telegraph, and the Daily Mail.

Nearly everything in the office was as her father had left it: the same furniture, the same ancient and threadbare carpet, the same black-framed photographs of her brothers in their uniforms. The only significant addition was the typewriter on an adjoining table. Pa’s secretary had retired just before the end of the war and Edie, determined to rein in costs, had shouldered the extra work herself rather than find a replacement. One day soon, once there was a little money to spare, she would train up someone new for the work. Until then, the secretary’s old office was a useful spot to stow luggage and parcels and bits of furniture that needed mending.

Opening her notebook, she began her daily list. Mr. T food remind Cook, she wrote. C day staff view Qn coach. Typewriter ribbon. BOILER. That last item had been part of her daily list for weeks now, but she’d been avoiding what was sure to be a disagreeable conversation with the curmudgeon who’d been maintaining it since she was a girl. She would call Mr. Pinnock that morning, she resolved.

The newspapers were thin, with the usual sort of warmed-over stories that dominated on a bank holiday, but she went through them carefully, alert to any sort of news that might affect the hotel—a looming coal strike, the prospect of reduced income tax in the forthcoming government budget, an unexpected turn in the weather—and found nothing alarming, nor even terribly interesting. She paused to skim through a rather smug editorial in the Telegraph about the coming coronation and the new Elizabethan age it would surely herald, and didn’t even bother to inspect the included map of the route the queen’s procession would take.

Only one point on the map mattered to her: the stretch of Northumberland Avenue that, by some happy accident of geography, was only yards from the spot where the Blue Lion had stood for centuries. The hotel wasn’t directly on the procession route, but its position mere yards from the avenue, with nothing but a stretch of open pavement between it and the route, was close enough as made no difference and, crucially, the view from its upper floors across the avenue was clear and entirely unobstructed.

Only once before had a coronation procession passed by the hotel, and that had been in 1937, when the queen’s father had been crowned. Edie couldn’t remember much from that day, apart from the crowds and cheering and general air of celebration at the hotel; she’d been too busy to even spare the time to watch the gold coach pass by. The hotel had been full to bursting, but that had been in the old days, before the war, and if her parents had been excited by their proximity to the festivities they certainly hadn’t said as much to Edie.

In the months after the queen’s accession, as she and the rest of the world waited for details of the coronation to be announced, Edie hadn’t allowed herself to hope that Northumberland Ave

nue would once again be part of the official route; the anonymous men who made such decisions might easily decide to send the entire parade up the Mall and straight down Whitehall to the Abbey instead. Yet the official route had included Northumberland Avenue after all, and the queen would indeed pass by the Blue Lion, and Edie had eight guest rooms at the front of her hotel with excellent views—she’d run upstairs and checked, just to be absolutely certain. In that instant last July, seeing the map in the newspaper for the first time, she had known one thing straightaway: She and the Blue Lion had been given a chance.

Now it was 1953 and six of those eight rooms were booked, each of them at the monstrous sum of seventy-five guineas a night with a minimum stay of one week starting the Saturday before the second of June, and none of the people who had written and cabled and even rung up the hotel had balked at the cost. Only later had she learned that other hotels, and indeed anyone in possession of windows with even a half-decent view of the procession’s route, were asking hundreds and even thousands of pounds for a single day’s rental of a well-situated room.

All the same, the profits from those few days would be enough to carry along the Blue Lion for some months. Enough to put off any dispiriting conversations with the bank for a while. And maybe, just maybe, it would allow her to save the only home she had ever known.

 

Chapter Two

Stella Giovanna Donati

Tuesday, January 6, 1953

Stella was not unhappy.

She loved Rome, even though it was noisy, loud, smelly, and occasionally almost too much for a girl who had spent the past seven years living on a farm in the Veneto. She enjoyed her work at Signor Rosato’s foreign-language bookshop in the Piazza del Spagna, where the customers were interesting, the work was rarely taxing, and her wages were generous enough to pay her rent, eat well, buy pretty clothes, send some money home, and keep her camera, the only truly valuable object she owned, loaded with film.

She loved the neighborhood where she lived, only a few hundred meters from the shop, in a shared flat on the top floor of a decrepit palazzo on the Vicolo del Babuino, and while her room was only big enough for a bed and table and a folding chair, it was, all the same, hers alone. It even had a view, for if she leaned out her window and looked to the right, she could just spy the squared turrets that topped the Villa Medici.

Life in Rome was wonderful, but Stella was lonely, and more than a little homesick, too. She missed her zia Rosa and nonno Aldo and the rest of her adopted family. She missed the sounds and smells of the farm and its animals, and the chores that had become as familiar as her next breath. She missed the softly huffing dialect that everyone used in Mezzo Ciel, its words and cadences so different from the formal Italian her parents had spoken at work and home alike.

But she had learned to live with loneliness, just as she had learned to endure the absence of her parents. Their deaths were an old wound, imperfectly healed, that would never stop aching. Painful, yes, but not enough to prevent her from recognizing moments of joy in the new life she had created for herself. She would not, could not, betray their memory by allowing herself to be unhappy.

So Stella was not unhappy, but she could not say, either, that she was truly content. Her work at the bookshop was pleasant enough, but it did not inspire her, nor did she believe it would lead anywhere beyond her little room with its scrap of a view and her not-quite friendships with flatmates who knew nothing of the life she had once lived.

Anna-Maria, Sofia, and Bruna were friendly girls, and were generous in their efforts to include Stella in their conversations and evenings out. She’d learned the names of their beaux, and heard about where they’d grown up, how they’d come to live in Rome, and their plans for the future. In return, she had shared a little of her own stories. Not enough to upset them, nor enough that they would look upon her with pity. Only the bare bones of her life, or rather lives, before she had come to Rome.

The other girls knew Stella’s parents were dead, but as she never elaborated, and they were too polite to ask, or possibly uninterested, she was spared the burden of sharing the truth. That her life, the life she ought to have lived, had been stolen from her, and even now, nearly eight years after her liberation, she still had not discovered where she was meant to go and who she was meant to become.

She had been set

adrift on a wide and empty sea, and though her raft had reached the opposite shore, the world she now inhabited felt, at times, like a foreign place where she understood the language, could make sense of the customs, but would never quite belong.

More than once, Stella had begun a heartfelt letter to her friend Nina, who had saved her at Birkenau, and had cast herself in the role of elder sister from then on. It was Nina’s family who had taken Stella in after the war, but in the years since, her friend had moved away from the farm in Mezzo Ciel and was now married, studying for a degree in medicine, and busy with two small children. Nina was happy in the life she had made for herself, and Stella could not bear the thought of stealing so much as a gram of her joy. So she kept her silence, and when Nina or Zia Rosa asked if she was happy Stella told them she was.

And then she told herself it was not a lie, but rather a prediction. One day she would be happy again. One day she would be content in the life she had made for herself.

When she had first come to Rome some eight months ago, Stella had visited nearly every newspaper, magazine, and news agency with offices in the city and asked if they were hiring photographers. Each time she had left behind an envelope of her best pictures. Precisely three of her attempts had resulted in polite but formulaic replies that had thanked her for her interest before conveying their profound regret at being unable to offer her a position. The remainder had simply ignored her, and the knowledge that her photographs had likely been dropped in a bin was disheartening enough to prevent her from persisting.

She would simply have to become a better photographer. She would study the newspapers and magazines to see what they were publishing, and she would improve her technical skills—she had already read and practically memorized every book on photography that Signor Rosato carried in the shop—and she would, in time, assemble a portfolio of work that would impress even the most discerning editor.

 

“When you’ve finished wrapping up the orders to go out by post, my dear, could you set out the newsmagazines from America and England?”

“Of course, Signor Rosato,” Stella replied, though she had already begun the latter chore.

“I’ll go upstairs for my dinner and a nap, I think. Are you all right to keep the shop open? The tourists never seem to bother with a proper meal and rest.”

“I don’t mind at all,” she said, briskly sorting the magazines into neat piles. The new issue of Picture Weekly from London had arrived, its cover an eye-catching photograph of the pretty English queen in a strapless gown, and she set it aside to read while she ate her own modest lunch of bread, chees

e, and dried figs, the latter now quite squashed, which Zia Rosa had sent in her latest parcel.

It took hardly any time at all for Stella to set out the magazines and newspapers on their racks, ready for the foreign tourists hungry for news from home, and once that was accomplished, and the rest of the shop returned to a state of perfect tidiness, she retreated to the back room, her ears alert to the arrival of any customers, and ate her lunch at a pace that would have horrified her zia. All the better to allow her a few minutes of leisure to perch on Signor Rosato’s stool behind the front counter and look through Picture Weekly without fear of marring its pristine pages with crumbs or greasy fingerprints.

She read through it quickly, focusing on the photographs before returning to the opening pages. The editor’s letter touched upon the coming coronation of Queen Elizabeth as well as other newsworthy events in the months ahead, and at the bottom of the page, unusually, there was an advertisement.

Photographer wanted

We are looking for a news photographer to join our staff. Experience in magazines or daily news preferred but not essential. Apply in writing with samples of your work (include explanatory captions) to:

Walter Kaczmarek, Picture Weekly,

87 Fleet Street, London EC4

She lost track of how long she sat there, staring at that single paragraph of text, wondering and hoping and warning herself there was no chance, not a single chance, that a magazine as well-known and respected as Picture Weekly would be interested in her humble photographs. Her favorite subjects were ordinary people doing, for the most part, ordinary things: an elderly man reading a newspaper as he waited for a tram; a young couple wandering around the gardens at the Villa Medici, their faces tilted toward the thin winter sunshine; a nun, her habit flapping in the wind, chasing after a handful of pamphlets she’d dropped while crossing Piazza San Pietro.

The bell above the door jangled as a gaggle of American tourists came into the shop, likely in search of copies of Time or Life or the Herald-Tribune. ...