Henderson's Spear

by Ronald Wright

  “These gentlemen are here to ask certain questions of a delicate nature,” he said. “I need hardly add that what is discussed today must remain within these walls, and should you meet any of us by accident at some future date, we will not know each other.”

  “But I already know you!” I protested.

  “You used to know me. If we meet again, you have not seen me since our Swiftsure days. You’ve brought the note I sent?” I had done as asked. He took the letter from me, and its smoke soon curled up from a brass ashtray, adding a pale spiral to the blue haze in the room. One of the men opened a briefcase, taking out a thin, cheap-looking broadsheet which he slid across the table.

  “Have you ever seen this before, Lieutenant Henderson—or another number of the same pamphlet?” It was entitled The Liberator, and the leading article bore the headline: Future King of England Is a Bigamist! The printing and paper were very bad, but the content was clear enough. The article claimed that Prince George had married, quietly but lawfully, at Malta in 1890, and that he’d concealed this prior marriage in order to marry Princess May, his late brothers fiancée, in 1893. (The royal wedding had taken place that summer, and I had been among the many guests invited to the garden party at Marlborough House.)

  “Certainly not.”

  “Have you anything to say about these allegations?”

  “Only that they’re rubbish, as if you didn’t know. Just two years ago Prince George was asking my advice about his marrying Princess May. He’d hardly do that if he was married already. He was asking lots of people. We would have known. It’s unthinkable. Why ask me?”

  “We are putting the questions, Lieutenant. You are here to answer them.” Only one inquisitor did the talking, as if delegated by the rest; he continued, “The Liberator is published irregularly in Paris by republican extremists seeking to blacken the name of the monarchy and to bring Her Majesty’s Government into ill repute. Their technique is to cast any filth that comes to hand in the hope that some of it will stick. We assume that French agents are involved, along with a small cabal of British exiles. Anarchists. Communists. Fugitives from justice.” The man prodded the pamphlet in front of me with a nicotine-stained finger. “There are other examples, worse than this, often nothing more than a single sheet. Usually they affect a portentous title—Liberator, Intelligencer, Free Briton, and the like. Many of their calumnies concern the late Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence, known as Prince Edward or Eddy. We believe you knew him as a young man?”

  “That’s a matter of public record. He and Prince George and I were on H.M.S. Bacchante together for three years—there’s an exhaustive book about that cruise. You’ll find it at any library or booksellers.…”

  “Please refer yourself to a part of that voyage, in the autumn of 1881, which is not on public record. We believe you were with Prince Edward on a … special excursion. To the Tahitian islands.”

  “I’m not prepared to discuss anything of a private nature, or anything I was asked to keep in confidence. That is simply a statement of principle, not an admission that there is anything at all to hide.” I began to rise from my chair.

  “Please keep your seat, sir. This is part of an official enquiry, at the highest level. I advise you to co-operate.” My wits were not about me. The claret had turned acid in my innards. The fact that they seemed to know something confidential disarmed me. Had I been thinking clearly, I should have asked them for proof of who they were and what they were doing. As it was, I merely reacted to their questions like a simpleton, a habit ingrained by years of naval discipline.

  “We want to find out where these republican elements are getting their ideas, Lieutenant. Of course it’s fabrication and distortion. We are well aware of that. But lies, in order to be effective, require trappings of verisimilitude. These same treasonous elements are, in all probability, at the bottom of the rumours about the late Prince Edward and the Cleveland Street affair.”

  “Cleveland Street?”

  “I forget—you Navy chaps are out of the country a lot. A libel concerning a bordello of a special … specially depraved kind. Telegraph boys were said to have been involved in unnatural practices with certain gentlemen. Titled gentlemen. Prince Edward was never named—indeed he was in India by the time the matter came to trial—and the proprietor of the one newspaper to publish the allegations in this country is now behind bars. But rumours are not so easily locked up. From the Cleveland Street business they’ve taken ever more preposterous flights of fancy. Now it is the common gossip of the East End that the late Prince had something to do with the Whitechapel murders—in short, sir, that the former Heir Presumptive was the so-called ‘Ripper’—though as far as we’re aware none of that has yet shown its face in print.

  “We know, as I’m sure you know, that that charge can’t possibly be true. But there’s the rub, Lieutenant. For the anonymous authors of this filth, and for their ignorant and impressionable readers, the mere suggestion of impropriety on the part of the late Prince is enough. That is why these will-o’-the-wisps, these mere whiffs and ornaments of scandal, are so damaging.

  “This brings me to the reason we have asked you here. Namely, we want to know what they might know—or might have been able to find out—about a violent incident during your Pacific voyage. One that took place on the territory of a foreign Power.”

  Again I rose from my chair. “I’ve told you before, I can’t possibly discuss anything of the sort. Good day to you!” A murmur passed around the table, and the speaker then asked me to wait outside for a minute. I did so, feeling like a schoolboy sent out of class. Through my mind ran a low satirical ditty then going the rounds, about Eddy’s Indian tour:

  And this is what impressed me most,

  Whilst Hindustan I travelled o’er:

  A laundry boy named Chundra Dass,

  Who won my heart at Shuttadore!

  Before I had time to collect my thoughts, I was summoned back inside and offered a cigar, which I accepted, then instantly regretted—I had no wish to be beholden to them for even the slightest hospitality.

  “Lieutenant Henderson. I’m not going to beat about the bush any longer. It would help us—and therefore your country—enormously if we had a precise idea of what the late Prince did, or was believed to have done, that caused so much offence to the Tahitian natives. We are certain the information, however distorted, will get into republican hands sooner or later, if only because it could be used to add credence to the foulest lie of all.”

  “What might that be?” I asked. My interrogator glanced around at his colleagues, two of whom gave barely perceptible nods.

  “It will be all over London soon enough.” He paused to relight his Havana, then resumed, emitting puffs of information like a train. “Their latest”—puff—”and vilest”—puff—“calumny is that”—puff—”the Prince’s death may not have been purely accidental. That it was … given his character … dynastically convenient.” He paused again, scrutinizing me with wolfish eyes through the pall he had emitted. “Pamphlets to this effect have been intercepted at Dover. Doubtless others will get through.”

  This was no great revelation—I’d heard it at least once elsewhere, and almost said so. But that seemed unwise; the cigar had revived a few of my wits. “Good heavens!” I exclaimed.

  “I’m afraid we are up against more than mere extremist rags, Lieutenant.” He removed a clipping from a folder and slid it across the mahogany, scattering crumbs and ash. “This article appeared in The New York Times at the height of the Cleveland Street affair. A full two years before Prince Edward’s death. Today there are those who take it as a sinister prophecy.”

  I can’t remember the whole of it, but a certain paragraph to which my attention was drawn still stands out clearly:

  From a London Correspondent: There has come to be a general conviction that this long-necked, narrow-headed young dullard was mixed up in the scandal, and out of this has sprung a half-whimsical, half-serious notion which one h
ears propounded now about clubland: that matters will be arranged so that he will never return from India. The most popular idea is that he will be killed in a tiger hunt, but runaway horses or a fractious elephant might serve as well. What this really mirrors is a public awakening to the fact that this stupid, perverse boy has become a man, has only two precious lives between himself and the English throne, and is an utter blackguard and ruffian. It is not too early to predict that such a fellow will never be allowed to ascend the British throne.

  Poor, dear Eddy, I thought. To them I said, “The boy was no ruffian. Simple, perhaps. But not capable of violence. I’ve never known a boy of his age with so little drive, so little interest in the world around him. It was all we could do on Bacchante to roust him out of bed each morning. Is that the portrait of a blackguard, a ruffian? I think not.”

  They then asked me again the same question as before. Again I told them nothing.

  “Look here, my dear fellow,” my old shipmate spoke up. “Tell us what you know. It’s vital to the national interest. If we know what these swine are working with, we can make preparations to counter it. Tell us, Frank. There’s a good chap.” It was the first time he had called me Frank. Surnames had been de rigueur in the Swiftsure’s gunroom. His gauche familiarity set me on guard, the reverse of his intention.

  “What do you suspect?” I asked. “If I had the faintest notion of what you’re driving at, I might be able to help.”

  “Enough of this!” my inquisitor announced. “Within these walls we’ll call a spade a spade. I refer, Lieutenant Henderson, to the sin of Sodom. I mean buggery, sir. Hardly unknown to a Navy man, surely? What is it you chaps say—‘rum, bum, and baccy’—the three solaces of life on the ocean wave? Isn’t that what it was, with a deadly degree of coercion? That and a political manoeuvre disastrously ill conceived by persons who had no business meddling in affairs of state.”

  “You needn’t try to shock me into revelations,” I replied. “Look here. At the time you mentioned—the autumn of ’81, didn’t you say?—Prince Eddy wasn’t yet eighteen. Don’t you think that’s rather young for him to be involved in intrigues, political or otherwise? Throughout his entire, short life that poor, gentle boy was notoriously immature for his age.”

  “Don’t pretend to be naive, sir. Information has come into our hands that you yourself were also morally compromised. Perhaps you will tell us about that.”

  I surveyed the figures in the darkening room. Rum, bum, and baccy! I’d be damned if I’d listen to anything more from these wattled and bewhiskered badgers.

  “I decline to answer charges of buggery,” said I sarcastically. “Even at the ‘highest level.’ Though I suggest this inquisition of yours is at the lowest.”

  I made for the door and left without hesitation, angry words following me down the passage.

  Five

  TAHITI

  Arue Prison

  THE TAHITIAN SUN BURNS WHITE AND HAZY at this time of year, as if through hothouse glass. Thunderheads build high on Mount Orohena, congealing from the overcast. For a while they seem tethered to the peak. Then one by one they slip their moorings and sink low over the coast like great black airships, lashing the land with aerial waterfalls and threads of light.

  Pua breaks off her dance lessons, but my hour outside is too precious. I stay at the top of the yard to watch the storm, feel the sting of raindrops in my mouth, the deluge in my hair and between my shoulderblades, and running away through the toes as if I were a tree or a young girl.

  Being in jail is being a child again, all decisions made by others whose keys and purposed footsteps echo down long corridors. Freedoms always been the dearest thing in life to me. I made my choice: love or liberty; and you know which I chose. Some think children are free, but I know better. I remember those years too well, each one slow as a decade. I couldn’t wait to grow up. Be careful what you wish for.

  I expect you’re wondering what it is they think I’ve done. Not easy to explain just yet. Better to tell you how things happened in the order they happened. But you may as well know it was a death on the ocean, possibly but not necessarily suspicious, a body surrounded by water. All I did, all any of us did, was fish her from the sea about five hundred miles off Tahiti. International waters, technically, but the French don’t see it that way.

  We still don’t know where she came from, how she died. We don’t know her name or nationality. If only we did! It’d be so much easier to disprove any link with ourselves. We reported to the authorities thoroughly, if slowly. And that was our downfall. Our report became evidence against us, a gift to powers-that-be with motives of their own.

  There are consolations in being not guilty: I am clean and good, whatever the law may say. But I often think I could put up with prison a lot better if I deserved it.

  Captivity isn’t just being in a room, a building. It’s the loss of possibility. When I brood on how I can no longer command my own body to walk out of this door, let alone to the shops or the beach, I feel a landslide of despair. And rage, the opposite of a landslide, a hot mass gathering itself and rushing upwards.

  Not only am I innocent but those who’ve put me here are guilty, at least of perjury. It’s enough to make me want to do what I’m accused of—on bad days I’d cheerfully murder those faceless Robespierres, whoever they are. And I must fight this down, for it means they’re winning, making me become what they’ve said I am and I know I am not.

  I was a late starter, for obvious reasons, loitering at Tilehouse Street in indecision and disgrace. Twenty before going to university, twenty-three before leaving England for Canada. I told myself—told everyone—I’d be back in three years. I didn’t foresee how experience transforms, how time would make me into someone who could never go back to Britain’s fifty million people and five thousand years; and the smothered memory of you.

  I began in Montreal, with the National Film Board’s Studio D. It wasn’t quite a job. I was a lowly researcher, no contract, paid by the day. And paid with compliments—she liked to hire Brits, my producer said, because we brought a level of literacy, by which she meant familiarity with the great books drummed into us at our Dickensian schools. Canadians, she said, knew of such things but didn’t know them.

  It is true that in those days Canadians were not great ciné dramatists (English Canadians; Quebec mined its own Gallic veins of mime and masquerade and noir). But they had a way with documentary, and that was what I’d come for. It was wonderful to break from Britain’s wartime legacy of Pathé newsreels, with their scoutmaster voices and chirping pizzicato violins. Canada, where the war cast a shorter shadow, had moved on.

  Then the world moved on, a sharp right turn. The public arts became a shrinking waterhole surrounded by corpses of the bold. So I migrated again, to the rim of the Western world, where Canada rucks up into the Rockies and falls in tiers of stone to the Pacific.

  A few weeks after my thirtieth birthday, I stuffed my Montreal life into a U-Haul trailer, hooked it to my car, and drove west three thousand miles. There’s an old joke: if your dog runs away in Saskatchewan you can watch him leaving for a week. But the prairie held surprises I’d never guessed from the air: an oceanic swell, spare luxuries of light and contour, hills and badlands tearing the net of ownership.

  I’ve watched the mountains many times from a jet chasing the sun. I never tire of that sudden barricade at the end of the plains, as if God piled it there to stop us making the whole continent a chequerboard of wheatfields. Four squares to the mile, every ten miles a village, every hundred a town, every thousand a city.

  Escape from predictability to mystery—that’s what I wanted—from the flat-earth utopia of grain to the Rockies’ muddle of pyramids and tarns and icefields, and rivers of cloud flowing down to the sea between walls of sunlit stone.

  When I fly over those mountains I look down amazed, a Martian viewing Earth for the first time.

  There’s Hollywood, which needs no introduction. There is Bollywood, it
s Bombay avatar. And there is Brollywood—the lovely, loopy, brash, soaking city of Vancouver, a place of umbrellas and webbed feet, a city where a rainforest should stand (and did), a winter wetness in which even uprooted Brits can drown.

  Visitors from Montreal or Toronto (or Hollywood, for that matter) don’t understand if you break a date because the sun has shown itself for the first time in ninety-three days and you’re going up on the roof to let it pour into your skull through crimson eyelids. The oyster sky shucks away and forests hang above the streets. Rotting Bic-lighter towers become Cambodian temples; grimy girders turn into gold; dazzled drivers crash their cars. Then just as suddenly the clouds descend, the woods withdraw and fade to bits of bristle clogged with mist, leaving only a smile, the mountain ice.

  Brollywood thrives because it’s a cheap, photogenic location for our American cousins. It might be Seattle or Portland, but our streets are safe, we have public health, our dollar’s a bargain, our talent less litigious. If you watch trash on the box (it’s all right, I do) you’ve seen Brollywood, though you may not know it. All those Siberian gulags in B-movies, those stump-ranches full of aliens on The Outer Limits, and the corpse-sown woods of serial thrillers—these are the picturesque glens of British Columbia. The secret files are in a derelict mine beside the Whistler highway, and the leafy neighbourhoods of arts-and-crafts bungalows with eyebrow porches, where boy meets girl and spy shoots spy and terrible mutilations take place, these are Kitsilano, Shaughnessy, West Vancouver.

  My business card: Olivia Wyvern, Producer-Director, Wyvern Films. My name (it can be yours if you like) comes with a logo: a griffin with a devils tail, copied from the few bits of family plate that haven’t been pinched or pawned. The names mine, and so are one or two little follies that get built, but for bread and butter I make other peoples films, mostly for TV. Canada has been good to me; I’m a modest success in that wide cold country subtended from the Pole.