Dance on a Sinking Ship

by Kilian, Michael;

  “Perry, if you’re trying to tell me my father hasn’t much longer to live, why do you think I decided to take this holiday? I don’t know when we’ll have such an opportunity again. I know my duty. I expect to fulfill it, but not yet.”

  The woman’s gaze upon him was unwavering, the small glittering in her eyes a reflection from the lamp.

  “Coming to Paris was a mistake, David,” Fruity said. “We should have advised you better. Too much French politics—and too damned many machine guns.”

  Edward stood in silence, the smoke from his cigarette hanging eerily about his head.

  “I like Paris,” he said. “I like it a damned sight better than London. Especially now.” He sighed, turning and sticking his hand in his side pocket. “Very well, Fruity. I’ll leave. But not for London. Don’t even suggest that again. You must find us another place, someplace amusing. I’ll give you an hour to do that. An hour only. Otherwise I shall jolly well do as I please. And that very well might mean staying here.”

  He grinned at them broadly. “Now go.”

  The two friends of the prince went to Brownlow’s room down the hall, a large chamber that seemed lonely and empty without Lady Brownlow’s presence. Brownlow poured Metcalfe a scotch whiskey and himself a brandy from large traveling flasks on his dresser.

  Major Metcalfe went to the window. It looked south and had only a glimpse of a view of the Place de la Concorde, though he could see flickers of light from the fires reflected against nearby buildings.

  “Should we have told him how serious it is?” he said, his back to his companion.

  “It wouldn’t have made any difference,” Brownlow said. “He knows that once he goes back he’ll never leave England again until the king dies. His only escape would be to Fort Belvedere, and I daresay that if he has to winter there it will come to seem a prison.”

  Fruity turned. “The reports from MI-5 were quite grave. Four suspected assassination plots.”

  “I’ve read them all, Fruity, old boy. Of course, this sort of thing is hardly new. They’ve had a standing report on a suspected Irish Republican Army conspiracy ever since the end of the Irish civil war.”

  “These are much more specific, Perry. Most particularly that one on the Russian agent.”

  “I’d hardly call that specific. ‘Assassin: Stalin’s best. Intended victim: A British royal.’”

  “Specific enough,” Metcalfe said. “And it frightens me awfully. We have no choice but to get the prince off the continent.”

  “You’re the man of action. Have you any ideas?”

  “You’re the sage counselor, but I do have an idea. I’ve been thinking hard upon it the whole bloody day.”

  Brownlow paused with his glass halfway to his lips. “Well, then. Out with it.”

  “I think we should take the prince and Mrs. Simpson to America.”

  “America? Are you mad?”

  “I didn’t say anything about the two of them strolling up Fifth Avenue arm in arm, posing for photographers. I don’t think we should let them debark at all. But if we could get them on a boat for a crossing back and forth, we could keep them out of danger for at least a fortnight. As soon as we returned, off we’d all go to Fort Belvedere, where we could keep him safe and tidy until …”

  “Until the king dies.”

  “God save the king. But, yes. He’d have had his fling, and he’d have no choice but to conduct himself circumspectly for a while.”

  “He’d have to travel completely incognito. We couldn’t afford the sort of attention he received on his 1924 crossing. We’d have to secure the utmost assurances of discretion from the shipping line.”

  “Of course.”

  “It couldn’t be a British ship.”

  “And certainly not a German one. Nor a Frenchie. The press flock to those. We’d have to find the most obscure boat available.”

  Brownlow stood up and unbuttoned his jacket. It was oppressively warm in the room and he was perspiring.

  “It’s a sort of desperate notion, this,” he said. “But we’re in a desperate situation. On balance, I quite like your idea, Fruity.”

  “I see only one real problem.”

  “That a shipping line wouldn’t cooperate?”

  “No, Perry.” He nodded toward the door that led to the corridor. “The entourage.”

  Brownlow seated himself, “Fruity, they’re his friends.”

  “Nonsense. Most of them would abandon him in a trice if he weren’t going to be king.”

  “I don’t think that’s entirely true. At any rate, they’re the closest thing he has to friends, after you and me. And Lady Diana comes from one of the first families of the kingdom.”

  “She and Duff are the best of the lot. The others, I daresay, are ruddy trouble—especially the Mountbattens. And that Channon chap. He’s the most outrageous social climber in the world.”

  Brownlow looked at him unhappily. The most outrageous social climber in the world was the woman they had just left in the prince’s chambers.

  “Lord Mountbatten is a cousin to the king,” Brownlow said with great emphasis. “He is a prince of Hesse, a relative of virtually every royal family in Europe. Edwina, of course—”

  “Is the granddaughter of a Jewish banker,” Metcalfe finished. “But that’s one of the best things about her.”

  The two stared at each other. Peregrine, Lord Brownlow, was from one of England’s most aristocratic families. Major Metcalfe had been nothing more than a somewhat dashing Irish cavalry officer until he had met Prince Edward in India in 1922. His current high station was due solely to his friendship with the prince—and his marriage to one of the daughters of the legendary Lord Curzon.

  “They’ll have to stay with us, Fruity,” Brownlow said finally. “He simply wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  The major sighed. “Suppose you’re right, old boy. Deuced right. We’ll have to manage with them as best we can.”

  “It’s still rather a wizard idea, Fruity. The best thing of all is that I think he’ll leap at it. Two weeks at sea on a great secret adventure—he’ll think it just the ticket.”

  “I daresay. That’s what appealed to me most about it.”

  “For all that, it still terrifies me.”

  “Old boy, Paris terrifies me more.”

  The Mountbattens had taken a suite almost as outsized as the prince’s and Lord Louis was alone in it, in bed in his carefully pressed pajamas. He was reading a new Royal Navy text on destroyer antisubmarine warfare with intense concentration, having drawn the heavy draperies across the windows to muffle the noise of the rioting. He and Edwina had left their servants behind at their villa near the Royal Navy base on Malta, and he was managing without them quite handily. His clothes, including a magnificently tailored navy commander’s uniform, were hung in the closet with more care than they were usually accorded. The most methodically German member of the royal family and its branches, Mountbatten had arranged each garment himself so it did not touch another. In the morning, he would examine them all, certain he would not find a single wrinkle. He was absolutely certain about everything he did. He had never once, to his knowledge, been wrong.

  The sudden ringing of the telephone alarmed and then irritated him. It could not be Edwina. She had already made her obligatory call explaining her absence, informing him she was in Montmartre in search of a new Miró painting for her collection. Yet it was so late the caller could be no one else. After pausing to mark his place neatly in the book, he snapped up the phone, saying “Hello!” in a cold, demanding tone, which vanished abruptly when he heard the voice of the speaker.

  “Oh, David! Sorry, I thought it was hotel staff.… What? … America?” He sat up, stunned. “Oh! What a topping idea! Edwina will be thrilled. She could use a restful ocean voyage after that airplane trip from Australia.… Yes? … Oh, it should be no trouble getting time off. I have leave coming. I’ll simply wire Malta in the morning.… Yes, David. I think it’s a marvelous idea. Rea
lly do. Cheery bye.”

  He hung up, furious. There was a war on in Abyssinia. His destroyer squadron might soon be engaged. Edward’s impulsive journey might consume two weeks. Mountbatten was well aware of the depth of resentment felt toward him by his fellow officers, junior and senior. He had dealt with that simply by being the most perfect officer in the history of the Royal Navy—at least since his father. This sort of flighty behavior would be considered self-indulgent and irresponsible. As if rules were not applicable to royals. Mountbatten’s father’s troubles in the Royal Navy during the last war had stemmed entirely from the fact that he had been born a German prince. Mountbatten’s own derived from his trying to work his way up through the ranks to the highest levels of the navy as the cousin and best friend of the man who would shortly be king. “Rise above it, Dickie,” Edwina always said of his fellow officers’ animosity. “Rise above it.” In his more generous moments, Mountbatten would admit to himself that Edwina was due part of the credit for his career advancement—Edwina, and his cousin Prince Edward. But his generous moments were indeed rare.

  He had been quite content, indeed pleased, to be all by himself that night. But with Edward’s call and the disagreeable prospect it offered, he found himself longing for Edwina’s presence—as he hadn’t in all the weeks and months she’d been away in the Far East. There had to be a way to extricate himself from the prince’s voyage. He just needed Edwina to think of it.

  It was far too early for her to have returned, but on the slight chance she might have crept in while he was engrossed with his reading, Mountbatten rose and crossed through the sitting room to her bedroom. The rioting had interfered with hotel maid service and the chamber was still in the awful mess it had been when she left, with shoes a jumble on the floor by the closet and clothes, including underwear, strewn everywhere. The bed itself, of course, was perfectly neat. She had not slept in it, or his, since they’d arrived in Paris.

  He spoke her name to the emptiness, then, embarrassed by such folly, closed the door to her bedroom and returned to his own. He tried to resume reading but his mind had lost its fascination with destroyers. He picked up a book dealing with some of his ancestors, but not even his favorite subject appealed much to him. At length, he poured a brandy and took it to a hard-backed chair. Sipping uncomfortably, he stared at the drapes drawn across the window, wishing for Edwina and wondering how angry she’d be if he waited up for her. Life could be so terribly unhappy when it wasn’t properly organized.

  Albert Duff Cooper hung up the phone gently and lay back with his hands behind his head, saying nothing. He was content to watch his wife and Chips Channon continue the happy interlude of their game of bezique, which the affable Chips was losing, perhaps deliberately. No one who had been in the company of Lady Diana Cooper for one minute could ever take pleasure in depriving her of anything, even a trivial victory in an inconsequential game. At forty-two, she was no longer the blond goddess of London society the newspapers had devoted so much attention to a generation before, but the illegitimate daughter of the Duchess of Rutland was still extremely attractive. Her enormous blue eyes and warm, theatrical voice alone remained enough to enchant any man.

  They enchanted Duff, though for him enchantment was not quite the same thing as fidelity. Diana tolerated this, sometimes with amusement, as she did his other passions for politics, drink, and gambling. Theirs was a happy marriage, if sometimes a crowded one.

  He rubbed his short mustache, reflecting upon the telephone conversation just ended and the outrageous inconvenience that had been asked of them. Sailing off to New York at this juncture in world affairs would be a voyage Duff could undertake only with a sense of fatalistic abandon, but that was not far from his actual feelings in recent days. He was a man who had foresworn the offer of a title to devote himself to the Conservative Party and its pursuit of the national good. He had been in line for a major cabinet post. In fact, he’d been given reason to hope for the war ministry. But he’d just been turned down as too pro-French and too anti-Nazi.

  “I’ve won!” exclaimed Diana. “Oh, Chips, you dear, you cheat so marvelously. And gallantly. I almost thought I’d done it myself.”

  Channon, a thoroughly English American expatriate with the manners and dress of a squire and the burning dark eyes of an Arab, patted her hand. “Nonsense, Diana. I haven’t the skill to cheat. It’s simply that my brain jellifies whenever I’m near a beautiful woman.”

  He was one of the more agreeable of the Coopers’ friends, though others of their circle thought him odious, a snob, and an arriviste. Duff considered him a rather useless fellow, but pleasant company. He had come to their niche in British society oddly. The son of a nondescript Chicago millionaire, he had studied at Oxford and had traveled much about Europe in his youth and even lived for a time with Marcel Proust. Chips had also authored two awkward novels. But maturity had brought wiser ambitions. He’d married Lady Honor Guinness of the brewery fortune, who a few days before had borne him a son, and now he held the family Southend-on-Sea seat in Parliament. So passionately expatriate as to be a modern-day Lord Astor, he’d cleansed every trace of Chicago from his being, a folly the Coopers, who loved Americans, had indulgently forgiven. Chips was too amiable and amusing to be disliked for his affectations and incorrigible social climbing. His grandfather had in any event been English, having run away to sea as a boy from Somerset and become rich with a Great Lakes ship chandling business.

  Diana came and sat down on the bed with Duff. “Who was the mysterious caller?” she asked in her husky stage whisper.

  “That was our royal host,” said Duff. “With awful news. He thinks a bit of sea air will do us all wonders.”

  “Not the South of France again?” said Chips.

  “Nothing so balmy. He has in mind New York. Autumn in New York.”

  “You’re serious, darling?”

  “Yes. We leave as soon as Perry Brownlow and Fruity can arrange passage for everyone.”

  “Can you do this, Duffie, with the Abyssinian debate coming up and all that?” She took his hand.

  “Of course I can’t. But in thinking upon it, I have to say, why not? What bloody difference would it make? This government’s not going to do anything about Abyssinia.”

  “I found meeting Mussolini gave me more of a thrill than meeting the Pope,” Channon said. “Really quite an extraordinary man.”

  “I’ll agree that he’s certainly no Hitler. But his nasty little war is causing beaucoup des frissons and here we are about to go off on an idiotic romp to the United States. He’ll doubtless make us pay our own passage.”

  Cooper was himself the son of the sister of a duke, but he and Diana were perpetually short of money.

  “Don’t be so bitter, Duffie,” she said. “After all, we’re supposed to be his friends.”

  “That’s why I’m here, I suppose, but I don’t think he’s given a single thought to the consequences. Especially for Mrs. Simpson. That woman has simply no ken of the depth of the waters she’s sailing in.”

  “But he loves her, Duffie wuffie. And if the king should pass on, they’re both going to be in for a really dreadful time. We must help them as much as we can.”

  “Am I among the favored few to be booked passage?” Chips asked.

  “Of course,” Duff said. “He was most emphatic about that. He quite likes you, as you must know.”

  “Oh, God,” said Chips, looking pleased despite his groaning. “America.”

  “You can stand it for a week or two, Chipsie,” said Diana. She had toured the United States twice in a sort of play and enjoyed herself immensely—most of the time.

  Cooper squeezed her hand, then slipped his from it and rose. “We’ll go with him, but it won’t be very bloody amusing. Now let’s find some happy café, if there is one that hasn’t been burned down. I’d rather not be here if he should ring up again. It might be he’s decided instead to go to Moscow.”

  “No worry of that,” said Channon. “I said
to him this morning, ‘No Englishman will realize the danger of the Soviet Union until we get communism at Calais.’ His Highness nodded vigorously.”

  “Tonight there might very well be communism at Calais, and Dadaism at the Elysses Palace,” Duff said. “Let’s be off. It will be damned hard to find a taxi.”

  “We can go to Montmartre,” Diana said. “Edwina’s there. ‘Looking for paintings.’”

  “Painters,” Duff corrected. “If she’s in Montmartre, let’s go to Montparnasse. The situation is scandalous enough.”

  “Tuppenny royalty, the Mountbatten,” said Chips. “Tuppenny.”

  “Chipsie,” said Diana. “Are all Chicagoans such snobs?”

  Lady Emerald Cunard’s response to Edward P.’s invitation was both genuine and immediate: “Oh, sir, it will be simply too, too amusing!”

  As she considered after hanging up, holding the telephone cradled in her lap as if it were a small dog, the voyage could be much more than that. It was an opportunity to resolve the case of her friend and fellow American, Mrs. Simpson, far more than she’d ever been able to with the private little dinners she had arranged for the couple in her Grosvenor Square mansion. It was an opportunity that she as Mrs. Simpson’s principal sponsor in British society, as well as the dominating figure in what was called “the Prince of Wales set,” dared not decline.

  She fretted with her hands. They were small and clawlike, and burdened with too many rings. She had much the absurd aspect of a bird, perhaps a parakeet, with yellow hair far too brightly colored for her sixty-three years. But she was a great hostess and commanding London figure. Many feared her, especially since the prospering of her friendship with the Prince of Wales.

  America, though. Lady Emerald had been born there—with the actual name of Maud Burke. She was always uncomfortable about returning—for any reason.

  She would certainly have to be careful. Ships were altogether different from hotels and all-night dinner parties. They would be much together. Emerald had what some called “a brilliant wit” and others described as “a vicious tongue.” She had once introduced Michael Arlen as “the only Armenian who hasn’t been murdered.” When Somerset Maugham attempted to leave one of her all-night parties at an unseemly early hour in the evening, protesting, “Emerald, I have to keep my youth,” she had replied, “Then why didn’t you bring him with you?”