Your Royal Hostage

by Antonia Fraser

  'She's killed herself!' exclaimed Susanna Blanding suddenly from her crouching position, holding headphones with which she was listening to the news flash. 'Killed herself in prison. Lydia! How on earth did they let her? My God, poor old Ione, this will kill her, sorry, unfortunate use of language. Well, perhaps it's for the best. Think of the trial and all that. Which reminds me -'

  Still sounding rather shocked,' but ever dutiful, Susanna began scurrying through her notes and the order of the procession.

  'What have we here? Ah yes, do you have this, Jemima? Rick -it needn't bother you. "The Hon. Amanda Macpherson-Wynne, Acting Lady-in-waiting to hrh, etc., etc., will travel in the second carriage in place of Miss Ione Quentin."'

  'I have that,' said Jemima, thinking with pity, certainly no vindictive satisfaction, of the intense girl she had seen praying -as she had then thought - at the statue of St Francis. Even if Susanna, in her practical way, was right, and death, self-sought death (and how had she managed to achieve it? Some dereliction of care there?) was the best solution to that particular tragic life, she could not mark the event, like any youthful suicide, without some pang of emotion for what once might have been prevented.

  Poor Ione. As Susanna, her cousin, had charitably and percipiently said.

  It was while the first cascade of roaring cheers came through on the monitor, greeting Princess Amy as she was drawn slowly in her coach out of the gates of the royal palace into the Mall, that Jemima, looking in her monitor as the television cameras raked the crowds now here now there, saw a face she recognized.

  'My God!' she thought. 'I don't believe it. How could they have let her? They were going to watch her. She's right there. I saw her.'

  Subsequently, Jemima's chief memory of the events which followed centred on the fearful and frustrating experience, comparable only to a nightmare which sometimes plagued her of swimming through mud, of trying to move rapidly through a crowd which was profoundly and determinedly stationary. Only the trainer shoes were helpful and seemed like an extraordinary piece of prescience.

  'It must have been like Jean Louis Barrault in Les Enfants du Paradis,' observed a film buff friend wisely afterwards. 'You remember, looking for Arletty as the crowd all swirled, revelling in the opposite direction.'

  'This revelling crowd was not swirling in any direction,' countered Jemima rather sharply, for she too had seen the movie many times. That was the whole point. It was standing stock still and revelling if you want to put it like that, on its stationary feet and in its position which it had risen at dawn or even slept out all night to protect.'

  At the time it was the thought of that face in the crowd which impelled her forward, a killer's face, above all a desperate face, and she must get there, no time now for phone calls, no good to appeal to the many policemen on the route, certainly no time to appeal to a higher authority.

  So that it was in fact at the exact moment, in the antiphonal rise and fall of the cheering, of Princess Amy's own arrival in the piazza, that Jemima managed to get within striking distance of her prey. And it was at the moment of arrival too, that Jemima, whose determined path beaten through the crowd had not passed unregarded, was herself seized by the authoritative hand of the law.

  Jemima, pulled back temporarily from engagement with the person she had sought, was able to witness for herself the moment when Princess Amy, pointing the toe of her plain but immensely high-heeled white satin shoe, stepped gingerly out of her coach.

  The flowing white train with its occasional blue bows was bundled out after her and then fanned out on the pavement before the Cathedral by the designer, energetically aided by the cooing little French bridesmaids, Amy's nieces. Beneath the soft white tulle veil gleamed diamonds — some respectable British tiara one supposed, in view of the dismal track record of the Russian sapphires. Amy's distinguished and ancient French grandfather, who was to give her away, eased himself stiffly out of the coach and stood for all his age erectly beside her, a tall figure compared to her tiny one.

  Beneath the drifting veil, lifting slightly in the breeze, Princess Amy's expression was impossible to discern. More strongly than ever, Jemima had the impression of a doll, a doll at the centre of these hieratic ceremonies, but still mercifully a living doll.

  'Let me go,' cried Jemima, and then more forcibly: 'Stop her.’ For one moment Jemima did succeed in getting free and ran a short way, elbowing amid the crowd, only to be grasped yet more firmly by someone in plain clothes who was evidently a policeman.

  'She must go into the Cathedral,' thought Jemima desperately, 'Once she's inside, she's safe. Don't just stand there....'

  Still the Princess stood, poised, inscrutable, in her ivory tower of lace and tulle and diamonds, on the verge of taking the arm of her towering grandfather, but still half facing the cheering crowds on the piazza.

  'I'll just have to shout, I'll just have to bellow,' thought Jemima. 'There's no other way. We're quite close. I hope to hell she can hear me.'

  'Ione!' she yelled.

  Although Jemima's frantic appeal, half scream, half cry, had to reach the ears of Ione Quentin, now in the front row of the crowd, over all the other noise, the cheers, the chomping of the horses, the jangling of their bridles, the music now swelling from inside the Cathedral, reach her it did. It must have reached her, because Ione Quentin hesitated just one instant, still with the concealed weapon in her hand, and turned her head, as it were involuntarily, sideways.

  One instant was enough. In that instant Princess Amy put her hand at last on her grandfather's arm and began to move gracefully and, thank God, inexorably into the interior of the Cathedral.

  Behind her, and still quite unknown to the bridal cortege, Ione Quentin, former lady-in-waiting to hrh Princess Amy of Cumberland, collapsed in the savage grip of three policemen.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  But Who's To Answer?

  Afterwards Jemima Shore's decision to abandon her post was much criticized - by tus that is, and by Rick Vancy in particular. tus behaved with what was considered by Jemima's agent to be a strange lack of moral fibre in trying to withhold her fee on the grounds that she had never actually commented on the wedding itself- not at the crucial moment anyway. Fortunately it was not for nothing that Jemima's agent, a girl in her twenties, was already known as the Dragon of Drury Lane (where her office was) and the matter, months later, was finally sorted out to the Dragon's, if not tus's satisfaction.

  Some of Rick's bitterness could probably be ascribed to the fact that tus did not in the event find itself with only one presenter in the shape of Rick himself for the arrival of the bride. When Jemima precipitately and clumsily unhooked herself from her position, and fled the plastic studio-in-the-sky there was a short anxious cry from the producer: 'Is she sick or something?' followed by the imperious command, 'Cut the anchor.' This sounded strangely nautical to English ears, along the lines of 'abandon ship'. But it merely meant that the freelance British cameraman hired for the occasion, who happened to be Jemima's friend Spike Thompson, formerly of Megalith, should swing away from the 'anchor' in the shape of Jemima and concentrate on the wedding scenes below.

  Spike, like the Dragon of Drury Lane, was in his own way more than equal to the occasion. He swung his camera neatly away from Jemima's seat, pausing only to file away the notion of further financial claims against tus for services beyond the call of contract (Spike Thompson's claims in this respect being a legend in his lifetime, held by many of the mean-hearted to be at least partly responsible for the recent coup at Megalith). A minute later he had his camera unerringly focused on the resplendent figure of Curt, already installed, be-microphoned and be-earplugged in Jemima's place. So now there were two 'anchors' on the tus desk again, if you preferred the more exciting American phrase to the calmer British notion of presenters.

  The rest, as many at tus (but not Rick Vancy and not Susanna Blanding) would murmur with awe afterwards, was history: British history. Where, oh where, had the somnolent Curt acquired th
at intimate knowledge of every detail of the wedding ceremony, that intimate command of anecdote about every royal personage, that intimacy - one had to use the word since a sense of intimacy combined with pageantry subsequently became his trademark as a broadcaster - with every facet of British history from the Conquest onwards? By the time Curt's dazzling reputation had been established, outclassing coast to coast and rating for rating the laid-back style so sedulously cultivated by Rick Vancy during his weeks in Britain, it was far too late for Susanna Blanding's indignant cry from the depths: 'None of this is in my notes. I do believe he's making it all up.' A star had been born. For this at least Rick Vancy would always blame Jemima Shore.

  Jemima Shore on the other hand would always blame herself for not being more emphatically direct to Pompey in their last conversation about Ione Quentin's responsibility for the murder of Schwarz-Albert at the Republican Hotel. Notions of opportunity came to her: she remembered seeing Ione Quentin leave the stage where Major Pat was holding forth at rather an odd moment in the proceedings, given her role in it all. She must have had the note delivered then, the note which drew Schwarz-Albert out of the Press Conference. Then she boldly took advantage of the royal arrival and the royal question-and-answer session for the killing itself, knowing full well how absorbed the general attention would be in the inner room. She had only to remember to remove the note from the body, and of course Ione had easy access to the 'Royal' paper-knives, besides knowing in advance how sharp they were.

  Notions of motive also passed through Jemima's mind. Who but Ione Quentin, who would, in her own phrase, 'do anything' for her sister, had such a strong motive to eliminate the inquisitive Schwarz-Albert? The other members of Innoright could merely have ejected him, but Lydia's terrifying personal vulnerability, to say nothing of her royal connection, made her a soft target for Schwarz-Albert's machinations. Did he plan to use her for further information against her comrades? If so, Ione, who regularly went through her sister's things and even followed her, as she told Jemima, would have known. As Jemima had pointed out intuitively to Pompey, the Republican Hotel represented an opportunity for Ione — who had the list of attendances at her command — an opportunity which might not come again.

  With Ione, whatever her normal feelings outside the influence of madness towards Princess Amy, Lydia always came first. (Not that Lydia herself reciprocated those feelings: she had shown the total self-absorption of the mad - or the fanatic - throughout, using her sister's royal position shamelessly without regard to the consequences for Ione. She would never even have known of Ione's daring deed on her behalf... for Ione, as ever solicitous of Lydia's welfare, would have kept her own counsel on that.) It was Lydia towards whom Ione's thoughts turned, not her royal mistress, at the moment of the abduction. That amazing conversation had given Jemima the vital clue; just as Ione's conduct at the siege, pondered over later, had brought Jemima to a full realization of the cold-blooded indifference Ione showed to Princess Amy's fate within the shuttered shop - compared to that of her sister. So Jemima's enforced passivity on that occasion had not been wasted after all. It had enabled her to see that someone capable of such indifference was in the final analysis ruthless: in Ione Quentin's case, a ruthless killer.

  Perhaps Pompey was right and like the tortoise he was, he would have reached Ione sooner or later: after all he had his creative-writing witness from the Underground who described the woman with 'burning eyes' threatening Schwarz-Albert. (Only the burning eyes in question belonged of course to Ione, not Lydia Quentin, as Jemima had surmised.) But by that time Princess Amy might have been dead; like Taplow, the photographer, and Lydia Quentin herself. As for the latter, Pompey had a few old-fashioned remarks concerning those who permitted, or at least had not prevented, her from committing suicide. The macabre detail that it was a Jong sharp pin, originally part of the Quentin tiara worn at the fatal Gala, which Lydia had secreted about her and with which she performed the opening of her veins at the wrist, did not make things any better in Pompey's opinion.

  At least Ione, driven finally to craziness by her beloved sister's death, had failed in her last mad rash attempt.

  'It would never have worked,' Pompey comfortingly assured Jemima. 'Though I grant you she shouldn't have been there in the first place - our failure entirely, so much police presence needed elsewhere, that was the trouble '

  He patted her knee. They were seated in the Groucho Club again, Pompey confessing himself to have taken quite a fancy to the place, especially since Mrs Pompey had recently approved all late home-comings from this particular quarter; the literary gleanings were to be her reward. Detective Sergeant Vaillant had dropped his superior there with some reluctance, or rather he had left him there with some reluctance; he meditated some off-the-record conferences with Jemima Shore himself one day - starting at the Groucho Club.

  'There was a good deal of focus on the other one, of course,' continued Pompey. 'The big woman with the model daughter. But do you know all she did? Munched her way through a box of chocolate biscuits, then cried with happiness along with all the rest of them at the sight of the bride coming out of the Cathedral. Finally queued up to see the wedding flowers inside the Cathedral after the ceremony. Even then they kept a pretty close eye, naturally. But what should she do then? Never looked at the flowers but went and lit a candle to some statue or other. Harmless as you please — if you call the saints and all that sort of thing harmless which, I have to admit,' concluded Pompey generously, 'many do.’

  It was true. Pussy had not lit a candle since her own violent rejection of the Catholic religion years ago; but some kind of cathartic experience had happened to her as she watched Princess Amy, married at last, on the arm of her handsome husband, standing on the steps of the Cathedral, laughing and waving as the bells began to peal out overhead, joined, so it seemed, by all the bells of London. Not rage and bitterness but overwhelming sorrow swept over her; she wept not for happiness as her covert watchers had supposed but for loss, a loss which no anger could hope to assuage.

  So Pussy lit a candle for her daughter Caro in front of the statue of St Francis in Westminster Cathedral. Unaware of Lamb's suicide and thinking of her held in prison, she lit a candle for her too, another gesture of reconciliation towards those young women who could not really be held responsible for the death of her own daughter.

  'You did very well, my dear, very well,' Pompey conceded.

  'And my instinct? What you call my woman's instinct and I call my rational good sense. Did that do well?' demanded Jemima; but she knew she would never win this particular argument with Pompey. A team ... long might they remain so.

  As for Ione Quentin: 'A cool customer,' was Pompey's final verdict. 'But she'll probably end up in Broadmoor. Given the circumstances.'

  'You mean — she shouldn't.'

  'No, no, that's the solution all right. She's totally deranged according to the prison doctor. By the way, it seems the mother, the Quentin mother, committed suicide. Started Lydia off on her particular course. Something very unstable in that family.'

  'And the famous father - Colonel Q, you remember him - was obviously a monster, at least where Lydia Quentin was concerned. What a recipe for disaster! Martinet for a father, depressive for a mother. Ione told me that Lydia wanted to have her father put down in revenge for the death of a pet dog that he put down, when she was quite small!'

  'Now we know it was a recipe for disaster for both of them,' pointed out Pompey. 'Even if it took this particular crisis to bring out the craziness in the elder girl. But when she did go off her rocker, she still had all that lethal courage she must have got from the war-hero father. Talk about the female of the species —' But that did not seem a particularly profitable line of conversation to pursue with Jemima, so Pompey sighed and returned to the subject of Ione Quentin's future.

  ' "Given the circumstances" just meant being a lady-in-waiting — serving, servitude, perpetual attendance. Might begin to give you some funny ideas, I suppose.'
>
  'I have to say that the rest of them seem all right,' murmured Jemima. But perhaps Pompey was merely ruminating on his own servitude, in horticultural terms at least, to Mrs Pompey.

  Others would have sweeter memories of the Royal Wedding than Jemima Shore. Major Pat Smylie-Porter, for example, had some sweet memories, while shuddering away from what-might-have-been in every sense of the word, not only the demise of his royal mistress, but those secret hopes concerning Ione ... but these were now repressed deep into his unconscious, as only Major Pat knew how to repress inconvenient and strong emotions. His sweet memories included not only arrangements perfectly carried out - and God knew what a triumph that was under the circumstances - but the particular way young Amanda Macpherson-Wynne, acting lady-in-waiting to Princess Amy, had carried out her new role, staunchly and discreetly. Major Pat intended to keep a fatherly, well a not entirely fatherly, eye upon young Amanda in the future.

  The sweetest moment for Jemima herself came on her return to her flat from the Groucho Club following her drink with Pompey. She saw from the red light on her answering machine that there had been at least one call, and from the number registered on the machine itself, she discovered that there had in fact been a positive host of callers - or calls. The telephone rang again as she patted the purring Midnight, draping himself round her legs and arching his tail as one who had been unfed for weeks (a gross libel on Jemima's cleaning lady Mrs B). Jemima decided to ignore the noise.