Your Royal Hostage

by Antonia Fraser

  'Moscowitz.'

  'Big woman,' went on Pompey. 'Rather gloomy. Appears to be Polish. Doesn't sound it, but looks it. Ordinary member of Innoright. She finally admitted that she popped into the Republican merely to go to the ladies for free - felt hot and tired after prolonged shopping in nearby Marks and Sparks. Subsequently rested in the empty Republican lounge. Except it wasn't empty. It contained the dead body of our friend. She didn't notice. And didn't notice Wadham's appearance cither. Doesn't know Wadham anyway.'

  'Plausible?'

  'Why not? Innoright is a biggish organization, the outer layer of it, in some ways not unlike Greenpeace, with lots of different causes, all aspects of innocence abused is how they put it. Or some such phrase. Security all the while was concentrated on the actual conference inside the big double doors. The murderer certainly hit on a convenient moment to do it. No other clues.' Pompey sighed. 'With this interview business on top of it all, Special Branch not being very cooperative as usual, it beats me. Except I am not paid to be beaten. And nor, young fellow-me-lad, are you.'

  'A message came from on high,' Vaillant spoke delicately, 'while you were talking to Mrs Pompey about - whatever it was you were talking about.'

  'Sutton's seed catalogue!' exclaimed Pompey bitterly. 'She thinks I've hidden it on purpose. Go on.'

  'The Palace has said no.' 'That's the message?'

  'That's the drift of it,' murmured Vaillant.

  'So the interview goes ahead? And no statement? No speaking up for the poor little animals from our young couple?'

  'Not a dog's bark if you'll pardon the expression,' concluded Vaillant.

  Pompey presumably did pardon the expression since he did not refer to it.

  'Very interesting. Very interesting indeed,' was all he said. 'Have a look in the drawer will you and see if that damn catalogue is lurking. Do you suppose I ought to be grateful that Mrs Portsmouth is into flowers not animals?'

  But Vaillant knew better than to answer that one.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Courtiers

  ‘I guess I'm intrigued about her. I mean, how do you treat a guy when you find out he's been cheating on you? If you're a princess, that is?' added Rick Vancy.

  'Just the same as any other girl?' suggested Jemima. 'Unless you choose to stab him with the sharp end of your tiara.'

  'But how is that?' persisted Rick. 'We have to know this.' He sounded worried. 'Susanna, do you have anything on this?'

  Susanna Blanding, researcher royal to tus, her lap piled high with the memos, documents, notes and the various thick red books emblazoned with gold without which she seemed unable to move, was crouched in the back seat of Rick Vancy's car behind Jemima. Curt, her American colleague, whose whole role as tus researcher had become no more precise over the last few days, was asleep beside her. They were all four on their way to Cumberland Palace. Rick was speaking in a lull between the many telephone calls both incoming and outgoing which were deemed necessary during the comparatively short journey from Jemima's flat to the Palace.

  Susanna Blanding did not answer.

  'Soo-zee, I'm talk-ing to you,' sang Rick in his melodious baritone voice, the voice which was as much part of his image as his English-film-star looks. 'Do you have anything on the kind of emotions which could be coming into play here? And Soo-zee, would you extinguish that cigarette?'

  'Emotions, Rick?' panted Susanna, stubbing out the cigarette across Curt's recumbent body. Jemima wondered into what delightful reverie of eighteenth-century royal descent she had been plunged.

  'Do you have anything relevant on Amy's emotional makeup? In confidence, maybe. Psychological reports? Doctors? Anything like that? Something to help us build up the correct picture of the way this young woman will respond to the unique pressures currently being imposed upon her. I guess I'm talking about strain here, Susanna. Strain and Amy's emotional stability.'

  'I could research you some nice mad royal ancestors if you like.' Susanna Blanding spoke cautiously, feeling her way. 'For example the old Russian Princess, Amy's grandmother, was always said to be absolutely bonkers. Ended up thinking she was an Alpine goat: always wore a little bell round her neck and loved climbing stairs.'

  Jemima took a quick look at Rick's face and decided to intervene speedily in the interests of Anglo-American accord.

  'We don't exactly know he's been cheating on her,' she pointed out. 'After all, he did have his clothes on.'

  'C'mon sweetheart — where clothes are concerned -' But perhaps fortunately Rick's rejoinder was cut off by the high loud bleeping of another incoming telephone call.

  As they were slowing down for the small black police post at the entrance to the Palace drive, a slight young man in horn-rim glasses walking a dog could be seen parallel to them on the pavement. The dog, which had a vaguely bulldoggish aspect, lurched silently into the centre of the road, causing Rick to brake violently. Susanna Blanding bumped her nose and lost her papers. Curt woke up.

  'Noel, Noel!' came the high well-modulated voice of the dog's owner. The young man patted his cowering animal and glared at the inhabitants of the car as if dogs not cars traditionally occupied the tarmac thoroughfare.

  'Dogs should be banned from urban conurbations!' exclaimed Rick; Jemima thought his unusual irritability was probably due to the ordeal ahead, something outside his usual experience of war-stained statesmen. 'Do you know the figures on city-centre animal-related disease in children?'

  'Daddy won't let Sabrina - that's my sister - bring Emma — that's her dog - to London,' contributed Susanna, anxious to restore herself to Rick Vancy's favour.

  Cumberland Palace had a placid air of early Georgian elegance. Its low wall abutting Regent's Park (on which Tom and Beagle had once plastered the words amy means trouble) was now free from any such excrescence. In its graceful sylvan setting, green lawns surrounding, the plash of oars on a lake heard nearby, this might have been a mansion in a country park; as it was its look of rus in urbe made the outer serenity especially delightful to behold.

  The inner serenity of the Palace, in so far as it had ever existed, was however at this moment markedly disturbed.

  Over the heads of the royal couple, Ione Quentin's eyes met those of Major Pat Smylie-Portcr. The Major gazed steadily back at her without visible sign of either worry or exasperation, both of which would have been amply justified by the distressing circumstances in which the urbane Major Pat currently found himself. Nevertheless the steady look that passed between the two courtiers indicated that they understood each other perfectly; the situation, in a favourite cliche passed round Cumberland Palace in recent days, was desperate but not serious. As veterans of many similar situations - if never admittedly quite so serious -the two of them found themselves experiencing a certain not unpleasant quickening of the pulse at the challenge to tKeir powers thus presented.

  Although neither the Major not Ione would have dreamt of phrasing it like that, certainly not to each other, they were aware of being needed. Never more than at the present time. And Ione Quentin, unmarried at thirty-one, highly competent and professional at her job, which despite its old-fashioned title of 'lady-in-waiting' often called for executive qualities, as though she was in fact the manager of a popular star — Amy being the star — the efficient self-controlled Ione Quentin liked to be needed. She knew that about herself.

  Major Pat, looking at her one more moment before dropping his eyes and fixing his tie, thought involuntarily what a thoroughly good girl — woman really — Ione was. In Major Pat's opinion, Ione was very much Colonel Q's daughter beneath that ladylike exterior; although thank God she didn't look like the terrifying old boy (Major Pat's former commanding officer). Nor did she collect guns: Major Pat still remembered certain evenings in the Mess centring round Colonel Q's collection with an admiring shudder.

  All the same, Ione had something of Colonel Q's celebrated resourcefulness.

  To put it another way, in the present crisis, thank God he had Ione aboard. Some
where at the back of Major Pat's mind was another unspoken thought that he would probably end by marrying Ione one day, the Major being a widower with two increasingly recalcitrant teenage children. Ione would be good with them, God knew, given what she had been through with that pathetic drop-out sister of hers. Now she took after the late and disastrous Mrs Quentin. Lydia. Christ, would she have to live with them? ...

  Oddly enough in the same frozen moment, Ione's own thoughts had veered briefly, as they often did, to Lydia Quentin, a.k.a. Lamb. Lydia was staying out very late these days, nor had Ione,

  no fool, believed for one instant in the endless stories of cinemas with Janey, Melissa, Gaby and so on. Sadly, Ione knew too much about her sister. Something more would have to be done about

  Lydia

  The moment passed. Both the Major and Ione devoted themselves once more to the issue in hand.

  Although the cameras had already been set up in the large Vienna Drawing-Room (so-called for its relics of the Congress, imported by some Austrian ancestress) the couple were still seated in Amy's delicately furnished blue sitting-room.

  'I want to see them,' Princess Amy was saying mutinously, 'I want to see the photographs. Otherwise I won't talk to the Press. Not to these Americans, not to anyone. I don't care.' She stuck out her lower lip. Recent events had thinned her somewhat. She looked very pretty indeed in an Amy-blue dress with an enormous white sailor collar, the picture marred only by the expression on her pouting face, somewhere between adult fury and girlish sulks. Prince Ferdinand rolled his eyes.

  'Please darling, be reasonable,' he began. Then he burst out: 'You're being utterly childish.'

  'I'm being childish, am I?' Amy's voice rose. 'And you're grown up, I suppose. And that ghastly woman, is she grown up too? Is that the point? Go on, say it.'

  A footman entered, dressed in the discreet dark-green semi-uniform of the Palace, adapted long ago by the Duke from his regimental dress. He bowed his neck in the same discreet traditional fashion. 'Your Royal Highness, Mr Richard Vancy and Miss Jemima Shore have arrived and are in the Vienna Dra wing-Room.'

  'Ma'am, do you not think it would be a good idea to join them?' suggested Ione in her agreeable, low voice.

  Princess Amy looked at her; her expression was at its most Hanoverian, once again recalling her late father. Suddenly she stood up and gave a wide, ravishing smile. The sulky face was transformed, the pout totally vanished.

  'Let's go then,' she said. 'On your heads be it.'

  'And what is that supposed to mean, my love?' enquired the Prince in a voice of barely suppressed ennui as he rose to his feet. Major Pat thought that the Prince's sudden passionate wish to find himself a million miles away from this wayward girl, instead of being committed to marry her within weeks, was only too apparent.

  'I was thinking of the threats made by those Animal Rights people,' replied Princess Amy, giving him a special smile, which was almost seraphic in its sweetness. 'That's all. Come along, darling.'

  The Princess undoubtedly looked wonderful as she swayed out of the room on Ferdel's arm, although her high white heels hardly brought her up to her fiance's shoulder. At the same time, Ione, seeing that particular expression, that glint in the royal blue eyes, feared something, without knowing quite what it might be.

  The royal couple entered the Vienna Drawing-Room, dominated by the huge early nineteenth-century portrait of dancers at some grand ball held at the Congress, just as Jemima had finished explaining patiently to Rick Vancy: 'I curtsey modestly off camera because I'm British, and you don't bow on or off camera.' She wanted to add: 'Because you're a genuine American republican democrat quite uninterested in the doings of British Royalty -which only leaves unclear what your television station is doing here in the first place.' Instead she added: 'I'll begin with "Your Royal Highnesses" leaving you to continue the interview with "Prince Ferdinand" or "Princess Amy". None of this makes you -or me for that matter - a courtier.'

  'The picture I have is that we're all courtiers here,' Rick responded with something less than his usual urbanity.

  'Trust me,' murmured the (American) producer of the show yearningly, as she had indeed been murmuring yearningly at intervals since the project of the interview was first discussed.

  Then Rick visibly cheered up at the sight of Princess Amy whose enchanting friendly smile, no less than her nubile figure, filled him with sudden hopes of achieving the first really truly informal interview with British Royalty ... Fergie was not a precedent. Remember after all that the Duchess of York, another lady with a nubile figure and an enchanting friendly smile, was not exactly Royalty to the palace born, having been actually born a commoner, a term which Susanna Blanding had recently dinned into his head. Unhesitatingly Rick Vancy dismissed from his mind all the many other really truly informal royal interviews: this and only this would be the one where the British Royals would be speaking as you have never heard them before, to coin the phrase that tus would undoubtedly be using to promote it. After all no royal couple that he'd ever heard of (not Prince Charles and Princess Diana - another 'commoner' in Susanna's phrase; not Prince Andrew and Fergie, well, not exactly) had been threatened with recent scandalous pictures of him and her, her in this case being a naked film star.Under the circumstances Princess Amy

  had to show herself yet more informal than anyone in the history of royal informality. As for Prince Ferdinand ...

  As the Prince and Princess entered, Rick stood up. Jemima Shore gave her discreet curtsey and Susanna Blanding a curtsey which was both deeper and less graceful. To his discomfiture, Rick Vancy found himself instinctively starting to bend a knee with them: he compromised by giving a bow which was at least less ludicrous (and anyway the whole thing was off camera).

  It was not until late on in the interview that the incident took place. By this time indeed the American producer was congratulating herself that the material would in fact need remarkably little editing before transmission, scheduled to be networked later that day in the States, making it an evening show in England.

  Princess Amy gave vent to a series of unexceptional views on such matters as the family ('I love children, little children, I love my sisters' children, they're going to be our bridesmaids, I'm sure I'll love my children' - laughter - blush - 'our children'), and the man's position ('I love the idea of the man being the head of the family like they always have been, haven't they? It's traditional, isn't it? Although I'm also very very modern, aren't I, Ferdel?' Laughter, blush and even perhaps a slight pout). On being questioned about her new life in her fiance's country, however, she declared more positively: 'I'm not just going to stick in the country and be a cabbage, that would be utterly drear.' (Sweet sidelong look at Ferdel, but a hint of steel here, too, thought Jemima: it was the first indication she had had that there might be more to Princess Amy than this pretty piglet in her pretty blue dress with its ruffled white collar.)

  Prince Ferdinand for his part declared himself, equally impeccably, as looking forward to introducing Amy to her new country. 'And you will make a very pretty cabbage, darling - ouch —' So Amy followed what was presumably a royal pinch with a royal kiss on the cheek. At the same time Ferdel also stressed his English ancestry, his English schooldays, his English tastes - 'This shirt is English,' he told Rick Vancy, having observed that Rick was wearing a shirt from the same shirt-maker in St James's. 'Except for the coronet. That is not English.'

  Ferdel even remembered, as an afterthought and tribute to the programme's origins, to point out his many links with the United States, including a year at an American university. Currently there were what he pleasantly described as 'sporting and business links'; but neither Rick on behalf of tus nor the Prince himself, on his own behalf, saw any reason to give further prominence to what these links might be; even if in some publicly unacknowledged way, they had been responsible for the exclusive interview in the first place. Amy. he felt, would certainly enjoy the States with its friendly people

  It was left to A
my, extracting what was seen to be a sweet revenge for the cabbage episode, to exclaim: 'How fabulous! I'm so looking forward to seeing America! Now you've promised to take me, in front of all these cameras.' The cameras (in fact only two of them) recorded and the American producer passed Jemima a white card: i.d. when and where visit. But this the Prince smilingly declined to do.

  Because matters had really gone so swimmingly, if not exactly excitingly, neither Rick, Jemima, the producer, nor, least of all Prince Ferdinand was prepared for Amy's sudden departure from the not-exactly-scripted, but not-exactly-not-scripted either, shape of the interview. Only Ione Quentin might perhaps have warned them that something was afoot. But Ione, seated at the back of the drawing-room with Susanna Blanding, had retreated to that ladylike obscurity which her office guaranteed for her on these occasions.

  'Oh, but I do have lots of views of my own,' exclaimed Amy airily as Jemima was questioning her concerning her wardrobe.

  'Princess Amy, would you say that you are highly clothes-conscious? Or do you more or less leave it to the designers?'

  'For example I feel very strongly about animals and things like that,' continued Princess Amy, leaning forward slightly; she sounded a little more breathless perhaps than previously, and her blue eyes were wide open, otherwise there was nothing to indicate the totally unexpected nature of her response. 'And where clothes are concerned, I hate fur coats, don't you? I hate things like that. I think there ought to be a Fur Law, now how about that? People jolly well shouldn't be allowed to wear fur coats. And then there's experimenting on animals and horrid things like that, it shouldn't be allowed, should it? Now what about a law about that too? I mean, it's us who take all the pills and medicines and things like that, not the poor animals, so why not experiment on us instead of -' Princess Amy's eyes roved round and in a moment of inspiration, fell upon Happy and Boobie, lying slumbering magnificently on the Savonnerie carpet in front of the fireplace. 'Instead of those poor old doggies.' Out of excitement or pity, Amy's voice broke. 'Too, too cruel,' she concluded.