Death at Glamis Castle

by Robin Paige

  The Prince stirred, stretched, and frowned. Now that he was awake, he was also hungry, and he hoped that Flora would not forget where he was or fail to bring him something to eat—and especially that she would not allow herself to be taken captive by the King’s men who were pursuing them both.

  But his apprehension was short-lived, for there was a noise at the door. It opened with a heavy groan, and Flora appeared with a large tea tray.

  “I’ve brought you something to eat, m’lord,” she said, smiling.

  He understood her easily, in part because his hearing was not as impaired as he liked to pretend, in part because she was careful to say her words distinctly and to speak directly to him, so that he could watch her lips.

  He smiled and threw off the blanket. “What a feast!” he exclaimed, seeing that not only had she brought him a large pot of tea, but fruit and cheese and oatcakes and his favorite ginger biscuits. “I shan’t go hungry. Thank you, my dear.”

  “Guid.” She returned his smile. “If ye’ll be only a little patient, sir, and make nae noise at all, ye’ll be perfectly safe here.”

  His brow clouded, and he frowned petulantly. “But I thought we were going to Skye,” he muttered, going to the table. “I am more than ready, now that I’m free from those dreadful men. The French ships may already be waiting at Skye, Flora, so we should not delay much longer.”

  “We are going tae Skye, sir,” Flora replied, pouring his tea. “Just as soon as it may be arranged. But I do hope that ye’ll restrain yer eagerness, and that ye’ll trust me.”

  He pulled up the tipsy chair. “I shall try, Flora.” He gave her a small smile. “And I must trust you, mustn’t I? My life is in your hands.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  From a purely practical point of view, Philip Magnus [biographer of Edward VII] is right when he states: “The promotion of Prince George to the position of heir presumptive was a merciful act of providence. Prince George, who possessed a strong and exemplary character as well as a robust constitution, had early given promise of becoming the embodiment of all those domestic and public virtues which the British peoples cherish.” There was even a rumour current for many years that Prince Eddy had been the victim of a judicial killing; that . . . he had to die, to make way for one better suited to be King and Emperor.

  Clarence

  Michael Harrison

  Kate looked down at the gold watch pinned to her dress. Seeing that it was nearly lunchtime, she turned back toward the castle, hoping that Charles might finish his tasks and arrive in time to join her and tell her what was going on. At a distance, she had caught several glimpses of men and wagons moving through the park, and a bivouac area had been set up in a large field at the rear of the castle. Obviously, Colonel Paddington’s men were going about their business, although what that business was, she hadn’t a clue.

  The morning mist was brightening, the pale sun shining behind it like a silver coin. Her camera on a strap around her neck, Kate was strolling through the garden at the south-east corner of the castle, enjoying the colorful begonias and pelargoniums, the gay scarlet salvias and glowing golden chrysanthemums, their colors the brighter against the gray of the day. Clematis and roses made a lovely pastel display against a rosy brick wall, and several varieties of hydrangea were heavy with bloom, the heavier for being damp still with the morning’s chilly mist. She had nearly reached the main entrance of the castle when she heard hurrying hoofbeats and turned to see a hired carriage coming fast along the lane. Glamis Castle, it seemed, was about to receive another guest.

  The carriage pulled up in a shower of gravel, and a liveried man seated beside the coachman jumped down to open the carriage door and give his hand to an alighting woman. She wore black and was heavily veiled, and it was not until she lifted her veil that Kate realized, with some surprise, that the woman was Princess Victoria, daughter of King Edward and Queen Alexandra.

  Kate had first met the Princess during the year after she and Charles married. They made occasion to see one another when they were both in London, and since Victoria—or Toria, as she was called by her family and friends—was a loyal reader of Beryl Bardwell’s novels, Kate always inscribed a first-edition copy of each book to her. Toria, now in her early thirties, was Queen Alexandra’s only unmarried daughter. She served as her mother’s companion and personal secretary, rarely venturing far from the Queen’s side. An encounter with her here, in this remote corner of Scotland, was startling, to say the very least.

  Kate stepped forward. “Welcome to Glamis, Your Highness,” she said and dipped a practiced curtsy.

  “Hello, Kate,” the Princess said with no surprise in her voice. She held out both her hands eagerly, and Kate rose. “I have been hoping that you would come to Glamis with Lord Sheridan. It’s been far too long since we’ve seen each other. Do you remember that wonderful day last winter when we stole away and went shopping at the new Wool-land in Knightsbridge? I certainly do—and I treasure the tea gown I bought there, even though Motherdear objects to my wearing it.”

  Kate went to the Princess and took her offered hands, and they exchanged affectionate kisses. “You thought I might be here?” She gave a chiding little laugh. “Well, then, you certainly know more than I, Toria. Perhaps you’ll let me in on the secret.”

  The Princess did not answer, for behind them, the coachman lifted the reins, and the carriage moved off. At the same moment, the castle door opened, and the house steward, Simpson, came out onto the steps. At the expression that came and went on his face, Kate judged that he recognized the Princess, was surprised to see her, but also understood why she had come—which was certainly more than Kate could fathom. It was true that Balmoral, the royal Scottish retreat, was no more than a day’s journey by coach, and that the Duchess of Fife, Toria’s older sister, lived not far away. But Glamis was rather out of the way and certainly not on the usual route of travel.

  Simpson made a deep bow. “Your Highness,” he said with aplomb. “Welcome to Glamis. I regret to say that Lord and Lady Strathmore are not in residence at the moment, and that Lady Glamis has just this morning departed. But the staff and I shall certainly do all in our power to make you comfortable during your stay.” It was the only speech Kate had heard from him, and there was not a trace of Scots in it. The man was obviously a Londoner.

  “Thank you, Simpson,” Toria said. “I’m sure I shall be quite all right. Might it be possible for me to have the Rose Room? I should also very much like some luncheon, the sooner the better.” She began to strip off her gloves. “And immediately after lunch, I should like to have a talk with you and Duff about my—” She paused, with a quick glance at the man who had helped her down from the carriage, who was now standing beside her trunk. “About Lord Osborne.”

  “Very good, Your Highness,” Simpson said. “The Rose Room, Thomas,” he added to a footman, who went to help the waiting manservant with the trunk. As a gong sounded somewhere inside, Simpson bowed again to the Princess. “As to luncheon, ma’am, it is just now being served in the family dining room. Of course, if Your Highness would like to freshen up first—”

  “Luncheon,” the Princess said decidedly, “is of the highest priority. I’ve come from Denmark, and it was not convenient to stop for breakfast.”

  Kate, too, was hungry, her own breakfast having consisted of bread and butter and coffee procured on the railway platform in Perth, and had spent the last hour repenting of her decision not to let Flora bring a tea tray. But only a few minutes later, she and Toria were in the pleasant and informal Strathmore family dining room, with pots of ferns at the window and pastel watercolor landscapes on the walls, an agreeable change from the forbidding portraits of ancestors that hung everywhere else.

  Kate unfolded her napkin across her lap. “I was very sorry to hear of your aunt’s death,” she said. “Please accept my condolences.” The news of the long-expected death of the Dowager Empress Friedrich had been in all the newspapers, along with reports of the Royal Fa
mily’s trip to Germany to attend the funeral. “You were in Berlin with your mother and father?”

  “In Hamburg and Potsdam,” Toria replied, “where the ceremonies for Aunt Vicky took place. Papa has stayed on for a planned state visit with Cousin Willie.” She made a little face, and Kate was reminded that none of Queen Victoria’s English grandchildren had any admiration for their German cousin, who was now the Kaiser. “And Motherdear has gone on to Denmark,” Toria added, “for her usual visit with Grandmama and Grandpapa. I left her in Bernstorff.” Motherdear was her children’s name for the beautiful Queen Alexandra. The Queen’s parents were the rulers of Denmark, and she always spent a few late-summer weeks with them.

  “And you have come to Glamis,” Kate remarked thoughtfully, as a footman set steaming bowls of giblet soup before them. “I should rather have expected you to stay in Denmark with Her Majesty.”

  What Kate did not say was that she was deeply surprised that Queen Alexandra had permitted her daughter to leave the Danish court and come to Scotland. Over the fifteen years or so since Toria had come of marriageable age, many in Court circles had expressed concern that the Princess had not been permitted to find a husband. It was even whispered that Queen Alexandra had refused at least one match—a love match, sadly—and intended to keep her daughter by her side, unmarried, as her life-long companion. If this was true, Kate thought, it was a very unfortunate thing. There was no shortage of ladies-in-waiting anxious to serve the Queen, and Toria ought to have the right to do as she wished.

  Of course, it would have been one thing if Toria herself had chosen not to marry and if she were happy to be constantly with her mother. But as Kate well knew from earlier conversations with the Princess, neither was the case. Now, looking at her friend, she thought the Princess looked even more unhappy than she had when they took their clandestine shopping expedition the previous winter. She was thinner and more pale, her eyes bleak, her mouth pinched. It looked as if she were increasingly frustrated by the narrow limits imposed upon her life by a compulsively possessive mother.

  Toria picked up a roll and began to butter it. “Motherdear did expect me to stay with her, but she finally allowed me to be excused when I told her that I felt very ill.” After a moment, she added, with a carefully restrained bitterness, “It is the one reason Motherdear will accept when I want to be apart from her. She supposes me to have returned to Sandringham for a week of resting in bed.” Her face lightened. “Of course, Papa knows that I am here and encouraged me to practice my little deception. It was he who instructed me to come.” Roll in hand, she began to eat her soup.

  King Edward had sent his daughter to Glamis? Feeling rather confused, Kate took up her soup spoon. “Why, if I may ask?”

  “Why, for the same reason he dispatched Lord Sheridan and the men from London.” Toria’s dark eyes rested quizzically upon Kate. “Papa believes that one family member must be here, to make sure that things are done properly. He needs Georgie with him for the talks with the Kaiser, although I’m not sure why, since nothing is ever decided. They just talk and talk, and then the Kaiser struts off and does exactly as he pleases.” Her voice softened. “But I was the logical one for Papa to send. After all, Eddy and I have always been very close. We understand one another, whilst the others . . .” She shrugged. “And of course I’m very glad that Papa feels he can count on me in an emergency like this.”

  Eddy. Nothing about this was making sense. More confused than ever, Kate sipped soup from her spoon. “You obviously know more than I about the reason Lord Sheridan was sent here,” she said ruefully. “Perhaps you can tell me.”

  Startled, Toria met her eyes. “You mean, you don’t know ? Lord Sheridan didn’t tell you what happened here?”

  “He couldn’t,” Kate replied. “He didn’t know either—at least, not until we arrived early this morning, at which point I was immediately whisked off to the castle. No doubt he has been told what is going on, but I haven’t seen him.”

  Toria was silent for a moment. “Well, then,” she said at last, “we shall have to have a frank talk.” To the footman, she said, “I would be glad if you could put the serving dishes on the table so that her ladyship and I may help ourselves. And please see that we’re not disturbed.”

  A few moments later, they were alone. Toria leaned forward and spoke in a low voice. “You must keep what I’m about to tell you in the strictest confidence, Kate. As Papa says, it is a state secret.”

  A state secret? “Of course,” Kate said, startled. “But I don’t understand what—”

  “My brother Eddy lives here at Glamis Castle.”

  “Your brother—” Kate stared at her, only half-comprehending. “Prince Albert Victor? But I thought . . . I lived in America then, but the story was in all the newspapers. About his death, I mean. It was—how long ago? A decade, surely.”

  “Well, that’s just the thing, you see,” Toria said matter-of-factly, pushing her soup bowl away and beginning to fill her plate with sandwiches and salad. “Eddy’s death was only a pretense, a necessary pretense. Papa and Mama arranged it in order to permit him to live quietly here, and allow Georgie to take his place as Papa’s heir. Perhaps you don’t know, because you were in America during those years, but the rumors and gossip—most of them lies, of course—made it utterly impossible for dear Eddy to ascend to the throne. Georgie has made a much more suitable heir. Eddy himself says so.”

  Kate checked her first feelings of amazed incredulity. The British people were quite aware that the Royal Family held many closely guarded secrets, in particular those involving the scandalous behavior of Prince Eddy in the late 1880s. But she and Charles had come to know rather more than most people about the Prince’s secret life, since Charles’s investigation of a blackmail scheme involving Jennie and Winston Churchill had led to the discovery that Prince Eddy had entered into a secret marriage to a Roman Catholic commoner, and that he had fathered a child by the woman. Then there was all that wild talk about his being involved with the Ripper killings, which had no more died down than the papers began trumpeting the notorious scandal at the male brothel on Cleveland Street. There was little doubt that Prince Eddy was involved in the sordid business, since his best friend, Sir Arthur Somerset, fled the country to escape being brought to trial and forced to name Royal names. The whole thing was quashed quick as you please, the one journalist who dared to write of it being hustled off to jail. Eddy himself was dispatched to India to protect him from further public scandal.

  Meanwhile, however, it was also well-known that Queen Victoria was seeking a wife for her erratic grandson. After her advances were rejected by two more promising princesses, she fastened her attention upon the unpromising Princess May, spinster daughter of a penniless aristocratic cousin, who dutifully agreed to marry the Prince in return, it was said, for the settling of the family’s debts. The engagement was announced with the usual fanfare. Eddy’s parents professed themselves satisfied, and a posed photograph of the Royal couple appeared in the newspapers, May wearing an ironic smile, Eddy gloomy and remote, his expression as stiff as his neatly-waxed mustaches.

  All seemed well, or as well as could be expected, since this was an engagement arranged by royal decree. But a mere month before the wedding, at the family home at Sandringham, Eddy had died, suddenly, unexpectedly, inexplicably. His tragic death had transfigured him from the butt of jokes in the press to a romantic hero of Byronic proportions, and he was entombed in the Memorial Chapel at Windsor Castle amidst an outpouring of national sympathy for the bereaved family.

  And now, Eddy’s sister, in a brisk, matter-of-fact tone that rang with absolute truth, was saying that her dead brother was still alive, and living at Glamis Castle.

  “I . . . see,” Kate said quietly. “It was your brother’s choice, then? He preferred exile?”

  Kate could hear a world of hurt in Toria’s deep sigh, and in the words that came very slowly and painfully, as if they were being carved out of her heart. “To tell the
truth, Kate, it was difficult to know just what Eddy would have preferred. He was then—is still, unhappily—quite muddled in his mind.”

  Muddled in his mind? “You mean,” Kate asked, concealing her pity, “that he was—is—deranged?”

  “Not that, exactly, I don’t think,” Toria replied, not looking at her. “Perhaps ‘unbalanced’ is a better word, or ‘troubled. ’ Eddy’s behavior was always erratic and impulsive, and when Grandmama and Papa ordered him to marry May, he seemed to . . . well, to snap. He actually set a fire at Sandringham that nearly destroyed—” She stopped, biting her lip as if she was afraid she had said too much. After a moment, she took a breath and went on, in a steadier voice. “To answer your question, Kate, yes—Eddy chose not to be King. And the time it became clear that something had to be done, the whole family could see that it was impossible for him to ever inherit the throne. He was far too unstable for that.”

  “How dreadful for him—for all of you!” Kate exclaimed, thinking that mental instability was difficult enough in an ordinary family. In the Royal Family, whose every member had many public duties to perform, it must be agonizing. And when an heir to the throne was unbalanced—

  Toria nodded. “Papa and Motherdear were devastated, of course. Papa tried to persuade Eddy in all the usual ways to do his duty, but nothing succeeded. Perhaps, if Grandmama hadn’t been so absolutely dead set on Eddy’s marrying May, something might have been worked out. There was even some talk of sending him to an asylum, but that was felt to be too horribly public and embarrassing. In the end, Papa and two or three of his closest advisors conceived the pretended death and carried it all out—with Eddy’s consent, of course. Motherdear was aghast at the idea, as were Georgie and I, but we were finally forced to agree that it was the only way out of the dilemma. Grandmama never knew. Like everyone else in the kingdom, she thought Eddy had died.”