“May I announce Your Royal Highness?”
I stared blurry-eyed at the servant posted at the bottom of the stairway. It took a moment for him to come into focus. “No, no, I want to surprise my husband.”
I kept myself going, one step at a time, but the dread was making my feet drag. Music came from the balcony, a Melbourne symphony on tour of the “old country” and roped in for a free royal command performance that they would probably later use in their advertising. Being a Royal was much about promoting the country’s products. No one told me before I married a Royal that Cinderella had to be concerned about where her glass slippers were manufactured.
As I got closer to the balcony doors and the party noise and music got louder, a merry-go-round of thoughts spun in my head—I saw my husband at our wedding in his magnificent uniform, saw him across the table from me at so many dinners when he was reproachful and unsympathetic about my “condition,” saw him surrounded by those cronies who curried royal favor and were always all over him like a bad rash, saw him in the arms of that woman.…
Is it right? Am I the crazy one? I fought back my fears and doubts and kept moving forward, forcing my feet along. A blur of people were on the patio, with the orchestra off to my right. I kept my eyes straight ahead.
He was standing next to the balcony railing, looking down at the boars that were being barbecued over a huge bed of coals. His costume was black, from boots to hat, with a black mask over his face. Black Bart, the English highwayman. It was the costume my dresser told me he’d be wearing. Even with the mask, his ears made him recognizable.
One of the toadies next to him was pouring champagne off the balcony and onto the boars roasting. Cheers came from the guests spread out on the lawn as $1,000-a-bottle champagne splashed on the cooking meat. When you are rich enough, you don’t think about the inappropriateness of showing off with expensive champagne at a charity ball.
Bright light from the television crew momentarily blinded me. I squinted and kept my eyes locked on him. One of his friends nudged him and gestured in my direction and my husband turned, starting at my approach.
I heard my name and realized it was the TV announcer off to my left speaking into his mike, telling the audience that there was a surprise appearance by the Princess of Wales. I didn’t need a lip reader or crystal ball to know what thought jumped into the head of the prince’s cronies the moment they saw me: There she is again, being erratic, saying she wasn’t attending and then suddenly showing up.
I stared at my husband. There are moments in life in which it seems like time stands still—the moment I was married, the first time I made love, the birth of my children. I suppose it has something to do with an adrenaline rush that captures your mind, your whole existence, at that moment.
My heart thumped in my chest and my ears filled with a roar as panic and terror shot adrenaline through me. I fumbled getting the gun out of my wrist purse and nearly dropped it.
One of his friends, that toady bastard who had been leading the campaign to discredit me, laughed and said something to him. I heard a little of what he said through the roar in my head, something about “Maybe she’s going to kill you,” and my husband laughed with his friends.
I was ten feet away when I stuck the gun out, not aiming but pointing it as I’d been taught.
He grinned at the gun and spoke to me.
I don’t know exactly what he said, something about how real the gun looked. I pulled the trigger and the world exploded. The bullet knocked him backward, his champagne glass flying out of his hand, his body twisting as he fell to the floor.
As my world spun out of control someone was beside me, grabbing my gun hand, propping me up as my knees collapsed.
Behind me I heard the television announcer’s shocked voice.
“The princess has shot the Prince of Wales!”
2
Old Bailey, London
Anthony Trent, Q.C., lead defense barrister in the case of Regina vs. Princess of Wales, came out of the courthouse and paused at the top of the steps in the glare of TV and news camera lights. Beside Trent was another member of the defense team, a grizzled elder rock of justice, Lord Douglas Finfall, Lord Chief Justice, retired.
Standing behind the princess’s barrister, awaiting his turn to face the worldwide news media coverage of a legal case that would have driven a World War off the front pages, was the Crown Prosecutor. Above all the commotion at street level, on the dome high atop Old Bailey, the home of London’s central criminal courts, stood the golden statue of Justice, armed with sword and scales.
Trent, tall, distinguished, in the wig and robe required of the English trial lawyers called barristers, wore an “old school tie” beneath the black robe. Black-haired with a sprinkle of gray showing at the temple, at fifty he was fit, successful, and conveyed just a hint of the smugness that sometimes glowed from members of the British “Establishment.”
Nothing in his long career or even his imagination had prepared him for the day he would represent a royal defendant in a murder case that held the attention of the world. But being very reserved in the uniquely British manner, he did not convey to the outside world his elation at having his image and name broadcast daily to just about everywhere on the planet.
He knew Lord Finfall hated having to be his standby as the media feeding frenzy focused on a mere barrister, and it gave him secret delight to be one up on the gray-haired, rock-jawed justice who had more than once interrogated him in the past when he had appeared before the high court for oral arguments.
Trent paused, letting his eyes adjust to the lights that glared in the gloom of a gray London late afternoon. Questions would be shouted at him from any number of newspeople, but his public relations person had already posted several reporters up front and those were the ones he would respond to.
“Is it true that the princess is planning to enter an insanity plea to save the nation the trauma of a trial?” was the first question.
“The princess’s options are still being assessed,” Trent said.
Both the question—and Trent’s response—had been arranged. Trent’s spiel was that the princess was aware that the case constituted a matter of grave national concern. His reply was intentionally noncommittal, neither answering the question nor shutting the door on the issue.
As Trent gave the response the defense team had worked out, a BBC reporter awaiting her turn to ask a question pressed her earphone closer. “What?” she asked, her question relayed back through the mini-mic clipped to the top of her blouse. Hearing the same information again, she shook her head. “My God!”
The BBC reporter stepped forward, interrupting the planned sequence of questions that Trent’s defense team had arranged. “Is it true that the princess has hired an American lawyer to assist in her defense?”
The question had the effect of a pistol shot. A moment of stunned silence. Trent, a practiced trial lawyer who was used to thinking on his feet, was caught completely by surprise. “Nonsense,” he said. He couldn’t think of anything to say and the denial simply fell out of his mouth.
The BBC reporter pressed the earphone against her ear again.
“It’s coming over the wires,” she told Trent. “The princess has hired the Burning Bed lawyer to represent her.”
3
A knight in shining armor and panty hose …
Marlowe James, Esq. was seated in the first-class section of a London flight, with Greenland looking like a colossal iceberg forty thousand feet below, when she caught the action in the seats across the aisle from her. It was late, the wee hours before dawn, the cabin lights were dimmed, but there was no doubt about it—the man and woman across the way were getting it off.
A thirty-nine-year-old trial attorney with a reputation for winning, Marlowe wasn’t shocked by the idea that the two people were enjoying each other on a plane seat. To the contrary, it grabbed her attention. Ordinarily she would have had three words to describe sex play on an airplane: tac
ky tacky tacky. But this time it stirred something in her—a prurient interest. And memories of her own explosions of desire. Her husband and she had enjoyed each other more than once as subtly—and dangerously—as this couple were, but that happened long ago, at a time before their marriage and lives crashed and burned.
She snuggled under her blanket with her earphones on and pretended to sleep while she watched the action out of the corner of her eye. They were being very discreet. No one but an old pro at dangerous liaisons would recognize it, she thought.
The couple looked a few years younger than her, maybe in their mid-thirties, she thought. Could be they were lawyers, too, or doctors? They both had a professional look to them, as opposed to businesspeople or the idle rich. The man had the window seat and the woman the aisle, within a few feet of Marlowe. Like her, both had their airline blankets pulled up to their necks. They were married—the woman had a wedding ring and a not-too-ostentatious diamond engagement ring.
It was both the movements under the blankets and their body language that tipped her off that they were masturbating each other. She had seen his hand sneak across to the woman earlier. While pretending she wasn’t looking, Marlowe could see the slight movement in the blanket in the woman’s lap area that exposed the fact he had his hand between her legs. Her pumping movement in his lap area was slightly more noticeable.
But it was really their faces that gave it away. His face was rigid as he tried to suppress a grin, hers was flushed, her cheeks warm, eyes closed, her breathing slow and deliberate as she struggled to pretend she wasn’t experiencing erotic pleasure.
Marlowe found herself getting aroused. She also shared a seat with a man. She sat in the aisle seat and to her right was a conservatively dressed gentleman with short-cropped salt-and-pepper hair. She had always wondered if a man’s pubic hair turned gray when the hair on his head did, but didn’t think it would be polite to ask. Instead, she thought about what it might be like to have the man make love to her. He wasn’t a Cary Grant type, the unrealistic standard by which she judged older men. And there was no doubt in her mind of how she would have reacted if the king of sophistication had approached her—gray pubic hair or not, she would simply have torn off her clothes and spread herself out for him.
Giving a sideways glance at the man beside her again, she decided he wasn’t her type. Not an iota of Cary Grant there. He wasn’t a sensuous man, but very much a businessman, his mind and soul into matters of commerce rather than the heart. And if Marlowe was anything, she was a romantic, though a practical one—her love life had been a rocky road.
She found herself more emotionally connected to the couple caressing each other across the aisle than to the man beside her. She lowered the music on her headset and snuggled back under her blanket again. Closing her eyes, she imagined herself across the aisle, in between the married couple.
His hand came to her under the blanket, warm and firm, impatiently clutching at the belt to her slacks. She undid her belt for him and unzipped her slacks, lifting up off of the seat a little so she could pull down her slacks and make it easier for his hand to slide in.
Her body trembled as his hand went between her legs and cupped her. As he began to gently stroke, her legs opened wider and her feminine juices awakened.
She sneaked her own hand across his lap and rubbed the bulge in his pants. She remembered how, when she was married, she liked to catch her husband unawares, guiding his penis out and before it became erect, feeling it grow in her mouth until it was full and hard.
Now she unzipped the man’s pants and used her fingers to open his shorts and release his organ. It sprang out of his pants, a beast of a thing, pulsating excitedly as it slipped out.
She grasped the hard stalk, surprised that he wasn’t circumcised. She had never had sex with a man who wasn’t, but it was a nice difference. A female friend had told her that the head of the penis of an uncircumcised man was extra-sensitive because it was ordinarily covered by the foreskin. Remembering that comment, she was careful as she pumped, sliding the foreskin over the head of his penis and back down again. She had an insane impulse to lean over and take his cock in her mouth and almost giggled aloud at the thought of what the flight attendant would think as she came by and saw a head job.
Enjoying the feel of his maleness in her hand, flowing with the rhythm of his fingers caressing her, she leaned back, breathing shallowly. She gasped as a hand touched her breast.
She had forgotten about the man’s wife! She was wedged in between the two of them, could feel their warm thighs pressing on the sides of her own thighs. The woman’s hand had traveled over and found her breast.
Still hidden beneath the blanket, Marlowe unbuttoned her blouse and unclipped her bra. As the bra came undone, the woman’s warm hand grasped her breast and delicately petted it. Her finger came over Marlowe’s nipple and rubbed it.
As she pumped the man’s firm stalk, squeezing the muscular tube with its load of hot blood, her own nipples grew hard under the sensation of the woman’s touch. Between her legs, a fire had erupted. Trying not to make it obvious that the woman’s husband was masturbating her while the woman caressed her breast, she began to flow with the action, her crescendo soaring.
Having sex with two people at the same time, being touched by a woman sexually, were forbidden passions. Now she rode the sensation, creaming her pants at the erotic pleasure. She turned to look at the woman and the woman smiled and leaned toward her with full red lips and—
“Ms. James.”
Marlowe almost ejected from her seat.
The flight attendant bent down and whispered, “The captain asked me to advise you that there will be a large number of newspeople waiting when we get to the gate.” She bent a little lower. “All the girls on the flight are for the princess. He done her wrong, as they say in the old movies.”
Marlowe murmured her thanks. She didn’t say anything to the flight attendant because she knew from past experience that statements from loose lips end up on the evening news.
She took a deep breath and pushed the blanket down. She was sweating.
The man seated next to her paused in putting away papers in his briefcase. “I thought I recognized you,” he said. “You’re Marlowe James, the American attorney hired to defend the princess.”
“One attorney of many,” she said. “The rest of the team is British.”
“You’re the specialist on husband killings. They call you the Burning Bed lawyer, don’t they?”
“They call me many things, especially if the sources of news are tabloids.”
She could have told the man she never actually represented a woman who burned her husband in bed, that it was just one of the appendages that had been stuck on her by a clever reporter. The “Burning Bed” expression arose from a 1970s legal case in which a wife, after suffering years of battering from her husband, poured gas on him when he was passed out and tossed a match on the heap.
Somewhere along the line, during seven high-profile trials in which she successfully defended six women and one man, all abused spouses who had finally struck back and killed, a tabloid had pinned the “Burning Bed” label on her. But the man beside her probably knew from news accounts that there was something in her own past that made her connection to the princess’s murder case even more sensational.
She would have been more comfortable being called the “Heat-of-Passion lawyer” because that was how the law defined a killing done in a moment of anger after provocation.
“What the princess did was very bad for the country,” the man said. He spoke with a soft English accent. “Very bad indeed.” He appeared to be in his late fifties, a well-to-do businessman, perhaps upper management with a London financial institution: He had the smug look of a person used to handling other people’s money—never risking his own, of course.
She mulled over his comments and tone as she removed her work materials from the tray in front of her and put them into her briefcase. He had voiced
by word and inflection disapproval both for her as a lawyer and for the princess as a defendant. She had generally found that men make better jurors than women in cases involving women abused mentally or physically. Men have their sense of chivalry outraged, and are generally repulsed by a man striking a woman, considering it cowardly. On the other hand, women tended to be harder on the abused woman, sympathetic for her pain but unforgiving because she had put up with it for so long. How come she stayed and took it? Why didn’t she walk out? Why didn’t she just get a divorce? women asked. When it came down to selecting a juror, she almost always was inclined to believe that men were the best pick when it came to judging a battered woman who had resorted to a “Texas dee-vorce”—ending the marriage with a gun or kitchen knife as opposed to legal papers.
But she had never defended anyone like the princess before. The Princess of Wales was admired by women throughout the world, many of whom no doubt were rallying behind their “wronged sister” in this time of crisis. She had to consider whether this time women, especially younger women, would make the best jurors.
So far she had heard from one woman, the flight attendant, who was emotionally for the princess, and one man, the businessman, who thought they should hang her for the good of the country.
The fact that she was on her way to London to defend the Princess of Wales in the most provocative murder trial in history had still not settled comfortably in her mind. Why she had gotten the call was just one of many mysteries about her being hired—certainly there were exceptional lawyers in Britain capable of defending the princess.
The couple across the way were now relaxed. Satisfied, Marlowe thought, not without envy. She could have told them that she wasn’t a stranger to sex on an airplane. Her now-deceased husband and she had been sexually daring, even dangerous in terms of the potential to get caught. Once, on a flight from L.A. to Chicago, they had gotten worked up just sitting next to each other, just the rubbing and touching that comes with closeness on a flight. They had ended up together in the plane’s tiny toilet compartment, he sitting on the toilet and she pulling down her pants and spreading herself backward onto his erection, doggy-style—
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