The Gropes Read Free

further assault on the grounds that like all previous fashions it would soon pass. But inevitably even Beatrice, now the dominant mistress of the Hall, finally succumbed to the lure of antimacassars and the cluttered furnishings that had been popular elsewhere fifty years before. The old tin baths that had sufficed the family for their annual ablutions for so many years were discarded and replaced with a huge iron bath equipped with tapsand regular cold and occasional hot water and the female Gropes were to be found bathing at least once a week.
    But for the husbands and the odd son still lurking about, things continued much as they had before. Grope menfolk brewed ale for their wives and distilled various lethal spirits which they called brandy or gin according to their colour as they had for generations, and if they were lucky, or if their wives desired their services that night, were allowed to take the occasional bath in a nearby river.
    Gentrification aside, men and women generally went about their business as though nothing material would ever change. But they were wrong.
    At the start of the twentieth century coal was found on the estate in larger quantities than ever before and in seams so thick and in such close proximity that not even Adelaide Grope, the one daughter to possess a shrewd business mind and acting head of the family in place of the now senile and bedridden Beatrice, could resist the prospect of immense wealth. The naval arms race with the Kaiser’s Germany had just begun and the demand for coal to build and fuel dreadnoughts was enormous. A narrow railway line was built along the desolate valleys, trucks loaded to the brim trundled down to the great ironworks and shipyards sixty miles to the east and returned filled with sturdy men to work the mines.
    Almost overnight the Gropes became relatively rich,both in money and in an apparent surfeit of men who might service the Grope girls, even if they wouldn’t marry them. But it wasn’t to be. The sinister reputation of the family, and nine awful dogs, descendants of the friendly bloodhounds but now decidedly unfriendly, deterred any men, whether new to the district or not. So did the girls. In truth, Beatrice’s daughters, all five of them, retained too many of the physical attributes of their forebears to hold any attraction for even the most desperate man. Soon the miners steered clear of Grope Hall altogether, moving only in groups, a single man being an easy target. From the windows of the Hall predatory eyes watched them clamber out of the empty coal wagons in the morning and cling to the sides of full ones returning at night. There was nothing the Grope girls could do.
    Adelaide, however, who retained the ruthless attributes of her ancestors, still found ways to exploit both the new-found Grope riches and the sudden increase in available men. For one thing, she had foreseen the taxation problems that lay in the possession of ostentatious wealth. To ensure that the taxation authorities would be unable to establish the true profit from the mine she had drawn up the contract herself. It was an extraordinary document, to put it mildly. All profits were to be in gold sovereigns payable on a monthly basis, and to be brought to the Hall by the chief accountant of the mining company who was himself privately guaranteed 5 per cent of the unrecorded total.Finally she had persuaded Beatrice, legally still head of the family, to sign the contract with the mining company in the presence of two terrified doctors, one a psychiatrist at a mental hospital, together with a notary public. Since Beatrice had been confused to the point of dementia at the time, Adelaide had paid extravagantly for this privilege, forking out a substantial sum by way of bribery to guarantee the doctors’ and the notary public’s acquiescence that Beatrice was in her right mind
    Having secured the Grope family fortunes, Adelaide turned her attention to the vexing problem of securing the