Freedom at Midnight: Inspiration for the major motion picture Viceroy’s House. Dominique Lapierre

salons and its 340 rooms. Outside, in the formal Moghul gardens, 418 gardeners, more than Louis XIV had employed at Versailles, laboured to provide a perfect trim to its intricate maze of grass squares, rectangular flower beds and vaulted water-ways. 50 of them were boys hired just to scare away the birds. In their stables, the 500 Punjabi horsemen of the Viceroy’s bodyguard adjusted their white and gold tunics as they prepared to mount their superb black horses. Throughout the house, gold and scarlet turbans flaring above their foreheads, their white tunics already embroidered with the new Viceroy’s coat of arms, other servants scurried down the corridors on a final errand. For the last time, they all, gardeners, chamberlains, cooks, stewards, bearers, horsemen, all the retainers of that feudal fortress lost in the twentieth century, joined in preparing the enthronement of one of that select company of men for whom it had been built, a Viceroy of India.

      In one of the private chambers of the great house, a man contemplated the white full-dress admiral’s uniform his employer would wear to take possession of Viceroy’s House’s majestic precincts. No flaring turban graced his head. Charles Smith was not a product of the Punjab or Rajasthan, but of a country village in the south of England.

      With a meticulous regard for detail acquired over a quarter of a century of service in Mountbatten’s employ, Smith slipped the cornflower-blue silk sash of the world’s most exclusive company, the Order of the Garter, through the right epaulette and stretched it taut across the uniform’s breast. Then he looped the gold aiguillettes which marked the uniform’s owner as a personal ADC to King George VI through the right epaulette.

      Finally, Smith took his employer’s medal bar and the four major stars he would wear this morning from their velvet boxes. With respect and care he gave a last polish to their gleaming gold and silver enamel forms: the Order of the Garter, the Order of the Star of India, the Order of the Indian Empire, the Grand Cross of the Victorian Order.

      Those rows of ribbons and crosses marking the milestones of Louis Mountbatten’s career were, in their special fashion, the milestones along the course of Charles Smith’s life as well. Since he had joined Mountbatten’s service as third footman at the age of eighteen, Smith had walked in another man’s shadow. In the great country houses of England, in the naval stations of empire, in the capitals of Europe, his employer’s joys had been his, his triumphs, his victories, his sorrows, his griefs. During the war, he had joined the service and eventually followed Mountbatten to South-east Asia. There, from a spectator’s seat in the City Hall of Singapore, Charles Smith had watched with tears of pride filling his eyes as Mountbatten, in another uniform he’d prepared, had effaced the worst humiliation Britain had ever endured by taking the surrender of almost three-quarters of a million Japanese soldiers, sailors and airmen.

      Smith stepped back to contemplate his work. No one in the world was more demanding when it came to dressing a uniform than Mountbatten, and this was not a morning to make a mistake. Smith unbuttoned the jacket and sash, and gingerly lifted it from the dress dummy on which it rested. He eased it over his own shoulders and turned to a mirror for a final check. There, for a brief and poignant moment before that mirror, he was out of the shadows. For just a second, Charles Smith, too, could dream he was the Viceroy of India.

      Slipping his tunic, heavy with its load of orders and decorations, over his torso, Louis Mountbatten could not help thinking of those magic weeks a quarter of a century earlier when he’d discovered India by the side of his cousin, the Prince of Wales. Both of them had been dazzled by the majestic air surrounding the Viceroy of India as he presided over his empire. So much pomp, so much luxury, such homage seemed to accompany his slightest gesture that the Prince of Wales himself had remarked, ‘I never understood how a king should live until I saw the Viceroy of India.’

      Mountbatten remembered his own youthful amazement at the panoply of imperial power that focused on the person of one Englishman the allegiance of the world’s densest masses. He recalled his awe at the manner in which the viceregal establishment had blended the glitter of a European court and the faintly decadent aura of the feasts of the Orient. Now, against his will, that viceregal throne with all its pomp and splendour was about to be his. His Viceroyalty, alas, would bear little resemblance to that gay round of ceremonies and hunting that had stirred his youthful dreamings. His youthful ambitions were to be fulfilled, but in the real world, not the fairy-tale world of 1921.

      A knock on the door interrupted his meditation. He turned. The rigorously unemotional Mountbatten started at the sight framed in the doorway of his bedroom. It was his wife, a diamond tiara glittering in her brown hair, her white silk gown clinging to the curves of a figure as slim and supple as it had been that day she had walked out of St Margaret’s, Westminster, on his arm.

      Like her husband, Edwina Mountbatten seemed to have been sought out for the blessings of a capricious Providence. She had beauty. She possessed a fine intellect, more penetrating some thought than her husband’s. She had inherited great wealth from her maternal grandfather, Sir Ernest Cassel, and social position from her father’s family whose forebears included England’s great nineteenth-century Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, and the famous philanthropic politician, the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury. There had been clouds in her paradise. An intensely unhappy childhood after her mother’s early death had left her with an introverted nature. She was easily hurt and kept the pain of those hurts locked inside her where they corroded the linings of her being. Small things pained her. Unlike her ebullient husband who never hesitated to criticize anything that displeased him and accepted criticism with lofty aplomb, Edwina Mountbatten took offence easily. ‘You could tell Lord Mountbatten what you wanted, any way you wanted to,’ recalled one of their senior aides. ‘With Lady Louis, you had to proceed with the utmost care.’

      She had locked her shyness, her introverted nature into the strait-jacket of an unyielding will. By that will, she made herself into something which nature had not intended her to be: an outgoing woman, seemingly extroverted. But the price was always there to be paid. She had been speaking in public for a decade, sometimes two or three times a week, yet, before making a major speech, her hands shook almost uncontrollably. Her health was as fragile as a porcelain vase. She suffered almost daily from the cruel thrusts of a migraine headache, but no one outside her family knew, because physical weakness was not something she was prepared to indulge. Unlike her self-confident husband who could boast he ‘never, never worried’, Edwina worried constantly. While he slept immediately and soundly, sleep’s solace came to her only as a pill-induced torpor.

      Two distinctly separate periods had marked the Mountbattens’ quarter of a century together. During the first fourteen years of their marriage, while Louis Mountbatten was slowly moving up the naval ladder, he had insisted they exclude her wealth and their social position from the naval environment in which they spent much of their time. Away from the naval stations, however, in London, Paris and on the Riviera, Edwina became, her daughter recalled, ‘the perfect social butterfly’, a zealous party-giver and party-goer, blazing through the twenties with the intensity of a Fitzgerald heroine. When she was not dancing she sought the stimulation of adventure: chartering a copra schooner in the South Pacific, flying on the first flight from Sydney to London, being the first European woman up the Burma Road.

      That carefree, innocent period in their life had ended with Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia. By Munich, the transformation was complete. From then on, her life was dominated by the conviction that it was immoral not to be fully occupied by the pursuit of some social or political good. The giddy heiress became a social reformer, the social butterfly a concerned activist with a liberal outlook little appreciated by her peers.

      During the war, she led the St John Ambulance Brigade with its 60,000 members. When Japan surrendered, her husband urgently requested her to tour the Japanese prisoner-of-war camps so as to organize the care and evacuation of their most desperate inmates. Before the first soldiers of his command had set foot on the Malayan Peninsula, Edwina Mountbatten, armed only with a letter from her husband, her only escort a secretary, three of her husband’s staff officers and an Indian ADC, plunged into territory still under Japanese control. She continued all the way to Balikpan, Manila and Hong Kong, fearlessly berating the Japanese, forcing them to provide food and medicine for their prisoners until Allied help could arrive. Thousands of starving, wretchedly ill men were saved by her actions.

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