She met Marlowe’s eyes. Marlowe saw sadness and world-weariness in the princess’s moist eyes.
“I want you to be my champion, Marlowe. To be my advocate and fight my battles. But most of all, I want you to understand me, so you can explain me to the world. I can only hope to God that my sons learn things about me and my marriage that makes them understand that I was driven to a heinous act. I took their father from them, but I did so only after years of mental abuse that robbed me of my dignity and very nearly my sanity.”
The princess locked eyes with Marlowe again. “They made me do it, drove me to it. That’s what I told the police investigators—and that is the truth. The biggest problem with my marriage and my position as the future queen was that I never really belonged. My husband’s family and his circle of friends never accepted me. They lined up against me when they found out that I would not simply stand back and take it.”
“Why don’t we start at the beginning?” Marlowe took a tape recorder out of her briefcase.
“I’d prefer not to be taped, just in case it fell into the wrong hands.”
“Okay, but I’ll have to take notes.” She substituted a notepad for the recorder. She actually knew quite a bit about the princess—her legal assistant was a compulsive reader of tabloids and magazines that revealed the private lives of celebrities. She had given Marlowe an hour-long dissertation on the princess and other Royals. But how much of it was truth and how much was made-up lust and disgust and other exaggerated nonsense was yet to be seen.
“I first dated my husband—”
“No, I mean really at the beginning. Let’s go back. I need to understand you, not just the woman who married a prince, but the person you were before you entered the spotlight.”
The princess sighed. “I have been trying to understand how I came to be held a prisoner in the Tower myself. I suppose you’re right, the cause goes back farther than my marriage. But I need to have you understand one thing about me that probably dominated my life, at least after I reached puberty and began dreaming about who I would spend my married life with. You see, I never thought of marriage as arranged like a business transaction, but as something created in heaven. And I’m afraid that neither my parents nor my husband and his family thought of it the way I did.” She lifted her hands palm up in a gesture of confusion. “Where do you want me to start?”
“Let’s do it the way the king told a witness at the trial in Alice in Wonderland: Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end, then stop. So let’s start with day one, your birth, your childhood, and move forward.”
13
“She what?”
Philip Hall smothered a grin. He, too, was offended by Marlowe’s insistence that she interview the princess alone, but Sir Fredic’s expression was a mixture of shock and outrage that bordered on the comical.
“She insisted on going in alone. I informed her that was not our ethical practice, but she—”
“The bitch. I knew we would have problems the moment the news broke that she had brought in this American.” Sir Fredic shot a glance around to make sure they were not being overheard. “It makes one wonder about the princess’s sanity, doesn’t it?”
Hall raised his eyebrows. “She wouldn’t have killed her husband unless she was a bit bonkers, would she?”
* * *
THE PRINCESS SPOKE WITH her coffee cup to her lips, her eyes staring past Marlowe, looking back over the years. “My birth. Well, I suppose you can say I was disappointing people from the moment I came into the world.”
“How can a baby disappoint anyone?”
“When the baby’s a girl and a boy is needed to inherit a title that’s been in the family for centuries, it’s a crushing disappointment. My parents had been trying to have a boy. Before I was born they had two daughters and a son, but the boy died in infancy. When my mother became pregnant with me, there was great pressure on her from my father and his own father, the seventh earl, to produce a boy who could ultimately inherit the title and estate.
“My parents were so counting on a boy, they had not even chosen a girl’s name. So I came into the world, a naked, crying little thing without a name and as a big disappointment.”
“Did your parents ultimately get their male heir?”
“My brother came along several years later, but the damage was done to the marriage. My father is not a particularly easy man to get along with. He blamed my mother for producing girls—”
“That’s nonsense.”
“When you’re dealing with centuries of tradition and only a male can inherit the title of an earl, the difference between a boy and a girl can be earth-shattering.”
“An earl, that’s a significant noble title?”
“Yes, below a duke, above a baron, what they call a count in many European countries. While my grandfather was alive, my father was a viscount. After my grandfather passed when I was a young teen, my father became the eighth earl, my brother the viscount, and I became a lady.”
“That’s heady stuff for a young teen.”
“Not when you are raised in an atmosphere where it’s just part of everyday life. I was born in and spent most of my preteen years in a manor house on the queen’s estate at Sandringham. Being so close physically and agewise to the queen’s two younger sons, my siblings and I often had the two royal princes as playmates, but not the man who became my husband, of course. My husband was thirteen years older than me, but his younger brothers are close to the age of my brother and I.
“We had been a significant family in England for nearly half a millennium, dating back to the fifteenth century when my family had been wealthy sheep traders. Charles I awarded one of my ancestors an earldom and a family crest, no doubt in return for a substantial contribution to the royal coffers. I suppose it did Charles himself little good because he soon became the first of our kings to lose his head—literally—in a dispute with Parliament.
“There is nobility on both sides of my family tree. My mother was the daughter of a baron, a family with roots in Ireland and England. It was my mother’s family, actually, that had acquired the rights to our house on the queen’s estate. King George V had granted my grandfather, the fourth baron, the lease of the house. It had initially been used for the overflow of guests and staff from nearby Sandringham House, the queen’s winter residence.”
“So you were raised rubbing shoulders with royalty.”
“Yes and no. My husband was not part of my growing up. As I said, he was much older and he was heir to the throne. The queen and the Prince of Wales are not just Royals, she is the Royal and he is the heir to the throne. They both function at a much higher level than the other Royals. I had little interaction with either of them before my late teens. And I was engaged to marry him by the time I was nineteen.”
“You said something about the damage was done, after your birth.”
“I suppose the pressure my father put my mother under to produce a male heir caused irreparable harm to their marriage. There was also an age difference, almost the same as with my husband, my father was thirty and my mother eighteen when they married. I have learned that while a twelve- or thirteen-year age difference between a man and wife is not significant later in life, an eighteen- and thirty-year-old are worlds apart.
“Emotional trauma erupted in my life as I became one of the pawns in the parental-blame game that inevitably follows contentious divorces. My father would show silent disapproval when it was my mother’s turn to have me, and my mother would cry when we parted after visitation, making me feel that it was my fault my parents had broken up.
“One of the blame-game tactics was to shower us children with gifts, but it was done without any real feeling. At Christmas or a birthday, my father gave me a toy catalog and told me to choose something. But expensive gifts without feeling behind them didn’t take the place of hugs and kisses.
“I always wondered whether that was why I seem to have an unfulfilled yearning to be loved. It s
eemed to be the story of my life that I would constantly be seeking love. At home I had stuffed animals, dozens of them, they crowded my little room so much there was hardly space for me. I hugged and kissed them so much the poor little things were always needing stitching and patching.”
“They gave you unconditional love. Did you also have a dog or cat?”
“Of course not, pets might damage the furniture or carpets that had been gathered for centuries and were meant to be handed down for more generations of my family during the next millennium. I did manage to sneak my horse upstairs one day,” she laughed. “I got hell for that one.”
“You wouldn’t describe your childhood as happy?”
“I had food and shelter and even servants in a world where millions of children go to bed hungry every night. Or even starve to death. But I was not an emotionally content little girl. One of the big scars of my emotional makeup was the breakup of my parents. No one ever said it to me, but as I grew up, I pretty well understood that my birth was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. But like so many other things, their marital problems were never discussed or explained to me.
“The actual split came when I was six. It had a terrible traumatic impact on me. There was a nasty custody battle that everyone knew from the beginning my father would win. He was much more aggressive than my mother and it didn’t help that he trumpeted the story that my mother had abandoned her four children for a man. It also didn’t help that my mother had been named as the other woman in the divorce of the man she would later marry. Even her own mother criticized her for not staying in the marriage for the sake of us children. I lost my mother except for occasional visitation and I was basically placed in the hands of a succession of nannies to be raised.”
“I take it your father wasn’t the house-dad type?”
The princess exploded with a howl of laughter. “If you showed my father a baby’s nappy, he probably would have thought it was a handkerchief to wipe a horse’s nose. No, he was not maternal, nor particularly paternal, either. My father wasn’t comfortable with his children. He raised us the way he was raised, with the same formalities and restraints that existed between him and his parents. He was more jolly and relaxed with his hounds than with his children.
“The worst thing my father did to me was fail to explain why he and my mother were divorcing. It was a terrible trauma for a six-year-old with horrible guilt feelings and I still bear those scars. He did not believe that he owed his children an explanation. And I suppose my mother felt the same way, but since I lived mostly with him, my father became more of a dominant influence in my life than my mother.”
The princess said that when she was in her early teens, her father was named as “the other man” in the divorce of her soon-to-be stepmother. “At first I rather disliked my new stepmother, perhaps out of the jealousy children feel when their parent remarries, but I got past all that. But in one of those quirky things that happen in life, my stepmother was the daughter of a world-famous writer of romance novels and I loved the books. Do you read romance books?”
“No, I don’t, though I know people who do. I don’t have the time for reading anything but law.” Marlowe smiled. “That makes me a bore, I’m afraid.”
“They say that the books are part of the reason for my problems.”
“They?”
“That pack of hangers-on and cronies that are always all over my husband like a bad rash. They talked behind my back, to my husband and the queen, and even the tabloids. They spread stories that my mind had been ruined by reading romances, that I was caught up with romantic fantasies that my husband could never have lived up to. I know many people thought the romance novels were foolish, virginal heroines being swept off their feet by dashing heroes and all that, but there was always great passion and fiery sex.” She laughed and her eyes sparkled for the first time since Marlowe sat down with her. “Of course, the sex itself was never on the printed page, it was only experienced in one’s imagination, but that’s the best kind, isn’t it? Best of all, there was always a happy ending.”
“Do you believe he did love you? Your father.”
“Oh, yes, he loved me. With formality and restraint. If you are going to understand me, my husband, and the whole British Establishment, for that matter, you must keep those two words in mind. Formality and restraint are what characterized the family and social environments both my husband and myself were raised in.” She shook her head. “How I have come to hate those words. I ran afoul of them constantly, banging my head against their sharp points.
“But to give the devil his due, as my father would say, while we were privileged, we were taught not to be snobbish. It was considered a sign of good breeding to be well mannered on all occasions and to treat everyone with respect, whether it was a servant, a stranger, or the man who hauled away the trash. Some people would say that it was all bunk, wouldn’t they? It’s certainly true that there are people of all walks of life who are snobs. Regardless of those people, I find that there are about the same percentage of titled people who are snobs and twits as there are servants and shop clerks with the same attitudes. But you know, no matter how we treated others, we knew that we were different from the madding crowd. And part of that difference was to show the formality and restraint that typified people of our class, and to a somewhat lesser extent, most of the people in the country.”
“This was how you were to show yourself to the public? Reserved, conservative?”
“Not just the public, but within your own family. You could literally only let down your hair in the loo. You have to wear two masks, be casual and laid back in private and formal and restrained in public, but even in private you are not expected to go beyond the limits of the propriety of your class. You are what you were raised to be, what you were molded as. People of my class are expected to walk like we have a ramrod in our back and keep a stiff upper lip, no matter what is coming down. Don’t have a cry, for goodness’ sake, but if you really have to do it, go into the loo and lock the door so no one will know.”
She took several deep breaths before she could go on. Marlowe made scribbled notes on her pad, key words to jog her memory when she sat down later to memorialize their meeting in greater detail.
“Sometimes I felt like I was part of the family furnishings, first of my parents and then of my husband, more like an expensive piece of fine furniture that is to be kept polished, rather than a girl and then young woman with fears and hormones. The house we moved into after my father became earl is a good example. The family manor is stuffy and depressing, with dark hallways draped with portraits of long-dead ancestors, and dark creepy places that made the unimaginable real. My grandfather had loved the place. I’m told he used to follow visitors around with a duster and once even pulled a cigar out of Winston Churchill’s mouth. But it was like living in a sterile museum, not a warm loving home.”
“Doesn’t sound warm and inviting, for sure.”
She looked away as she sipped her coffee, then put her cup down and raised her eyebrows to Marlowe. “That’s what it’s like to be brought up in a manor house with nobility and the Royals. Formality and restraint dominate personal and public personas, home has the ambience of an exhibit hall at the Albert and Victoria Museum, and family life has the warmth of institutional living. Dinners were with the nanny, not my father. I don’t recall having dinner with my father until I was a teenager.”
“That’s incredible.” Marlowe found it jaw-dropping. That one fact brought home everything the princess had been saying about her upbringing.
“You find that bizarre—I guess I do, too, now—but when you’re raised in that atmosphere, it’s the norm. There was always a separation between parent and child. My father never threw us into the back of the car and headed for the beach or a drive-in movie. When we went to the beach, it was the nanny who sat in the backseat with me and a picnic basket while the chauffeur drove and my father went off somewhere with his friends. I was soon packed
off to boarding schools despite my tears and protests that he wouldn’t send me away if he loved me.”
She stopped. She was trembling, her face flushed. “I can’t tell you what a disheartening experience it was to be nine years old and have your parent send you off to live in a dormitory with other unwanted children.”
“An orphanage.”
“It was a boarding school.”
“It was an orphanage for rich children, that’s what I’d call a place where children are sent to live in a dormitory away from the warmth and love of home and family. Boarding school is just a fancy name for it.”
The princess sucked in her breath and stared wide-eyed at Marlowe. “I never thought of it that way. You’re right, it was just a fancy orphanage. Nobody wanted us children, eight-, nine-, ten-year-olds, we were sent off so we wouldn’t be in the way. It’s a horrid thing to do to children.”
She took deep breaths, getting her breathing under control.
Marlowe sat quietly and listened as the princess talked. She knew from experience that it was a cathartic experience for the client to open up and talk out the steps that led to tragedy and despair.
“I suppose my unhappiness had an affect on my grades, too. Scholarship certainly was not my forte. I received D grades in the classroom, but I did excel at community service, visiting the elderly, the sick, and the handicapped. I had a natural ability to talk to people at all levels and tended only to be quiet in class, out of fear that I would expose my ignorance. I also won prizes at swimming and diving and was pleased with ballet, but was too tall to make a real go at it. Nevertheless, ballet was important to me. I used to sneak out of the dorm at night and do my ballet in the hallway for hours on end. It released the tension in my head.”
Blood Royal Page 10