Blood Royal

by Harold Robbins

  After the ceremony, we had brunch at Buckingham Palace, a place as warm and cozy as the British Museum. And as emotional as the mineral exhibit in the museum. The faces around the table were polite and unemotional, welcoming me into the family not with tears and grins but with reserve and courtesy, as if I were a new piece of furniture added to the royal family’s collection.

  My God, I felt that need to love and be loved right down to my toes. The first three days of the honeymoon were spent at a palatial estate with staff and servants hovering about. Now I was aboard a honeymoon vessel, but rather than a cozy sailboat, it was a royal yacht the size of a battleship and crewed by nearly three hundred men. I would rather have taken a Caribbean cruise ship over the Britannia. At least there would have been dancing and entertainment, people to laugh and talk with, a shipboard casino, shops, and tacky little tourist destinations to complain about.

  Instead of love on a warm beach or a fun cruise, I felt as if I had been sent on a mission with the Royal Navy. I didn’t even have the foresight to bring along anything to read, not even one of those romantic blouse-rippers I enjoy. The prince, however, brought several of his philosophy books along. I wondered why he would want to spend his time with boring books instead of being with me.

  Last night, he had wanted to discuss passages from the South African philosopher Van der Post. “Life begins as a quest of the child for the man and ends as a journey by the man to rediscover the child,” he said. “What do you suppose he meant by that?”

  “I haven’t the faintest,” I told him. And my tone said I didn’t care, either.

  He rolled over and read with his back to me. I was angry and humiliated. I wanted to cuddle up to him and have him tell me how much he loved me. Instead, I felt that if I wasn’t interested in the Big Questions in life, those found in books by people who sit in front of the fireplace and drink brandy while they discuss endless philosophies of life, that I had no value. There are better things to do and talk about. It’s not difficult to fathom that my husband and I walked different paths when it came to subjects like philosophy.

  I know I must come across like a silly shopgirl. My new husband is one of the preeminent men in the free world. But I have never pretended to be an intellectual genius. I never pretended to be anything but who I am. I saw women around me trying to please him and gain his attention by focusing in on his interests as if they shared them, women who were bored silly by polo but name-dropped famous players. I was unable to fake it. I am just who I am and it is very discouraging to be constantly made to feel that whatever I am is not good enough, that I have to be someone else. I am perfectly aware that he relates on all levels to his old girlfriend, from polo to the hunt—no doubt she has read the philosopher’s books.

  I lay in bed after he turned his back on me and fumed. A rage grew in me. Unable to resist an urge to eat, I took a candy bar from where I had them stored in the bottom drawer of the end table. Then I ate another. I had a tremendous urge to rush to the galley and get a big bowl of ice cream, but I smothered it. Feeling bloated after I satisfied myself, I rushed into the bathroom and threw up.

  I wanted to storm back into the bedroom and grab him by the throat and tell him that I wasn’t stupid, that I was as good as his old girlfriend and the rest of that group that were always all over him like a bad rash.

  And, oh, yes, I’ve been told by my husband that I use the “bad rash” expression too much, but it’s the way I talk. I can’t help it if it’s not found in philosophy books.

  This is the only honeymoon I will ever have and I wanted to share it bosom to bosom, soul to soul, with the man who would father the children I bore and be the only lover I would ever know. Instead, I found myself with nearly three hundred sailors, few of whom dared even to smile at me, and a husband who wanted to sit in the salon and debate the nature of man in between discussions with the captain about the state of the world’s navies.

  I calmed myself and went to bed. I knew I was wrong, that what was happening was my fault. My new husband is a gentleman, a man of impeccable breeding, well read, well spoken. If the fate of the world was in his hands, I know he would handle the crisis with the skill of a master surgeon at the operating table. He treated me with courtesy and gentleness. But I was immature and silly enough to wish he would at least once lose that calm, collected demeanor and rip off my clothes! That he would confess that he loved me with all the fire and passion his soul could generate.

  But it was not just his calm demeanor that was puzzling me. I had seen him around other people. Certainly not the life of the party, but neither was he a wallflower. Although he tended to be reserved and formal toward the people he met as part of his official and social duties, he was comfortable with his intimate friends, the men and women who shared his interest in horses, polo, and the hunt.

  And that was the crux of it. My new husband, the man whose bed I expected to share the rest of my life, was not completely relaxed with me. While he didn’t treat me as someone who was part of his official regiment, from the very beginning I sensed an invisible shield between us. At first I thought it was nothing more than his own sense of reserve—after all, he is conservative in all his actions. When I told my girlfriends that I sensed a space between us, they told me that it was just his nature, that the reserve would melt once we were intimate. “British men have ice cubes for balls most of the time,” one of them said, “but they start rubbing up against you and whimper when they want to get in the pink.” I didn’t want him horny for me. I wanted him to love me, to need me, and to accept me wholly into his heart and his life.

  With my diary in hand, I walked into our private salon.

  “My secretary has sent me an update of my schedule on our return to London. You’ve been scheduled to attend several of the events with me. We need to coordinate our diaries.”

  He was interrupted by a steward bringing him lemon refresher, his favorite drink, one that he never traveled without. His personal servant always made sure to pack enough of the drink for the duration of his trips. The same was true of his favorite breakfast cereal, bran flakes, and Chocolate Oliver biscuits.

  While the prince stepped over to give instructions to the steward concerning cocktails to be served to senior officers that evening, I picked up his diary to inspect the dates. As I lifted the book, a picture fell out. I bent down and picked it up and tossed it on the desk. My heart just broke.

  He only stared at me, his features a mask of control, when he came back to retrieve his diary.

  “It … just fell out. Was there a reason you brought a picture of her with you on our honeymoon?”

  “You don’t need to concern yourself.”

  My blood rose and so did my voice. “Excuse me, yes, I do. As your wife, I find it incomprehensible that you would carry a picture of a woman you were rumored to be involved with, on our honeymoon. How can you?”

  “Please lower your voice. As I said, it is not your concern. Let’s coordinate our diaries before this discussion gets out of hand.”

  I was speechless. Struck dumb for a moment. “May I ask you something, sir?” I said, the sir coming out in a testy voice. “Do you love me?”

  He hesitated and looked at the picture he had taken from me. “Of course. Whatever that is. And please don’t use that tone of voice with me or be insulting on how you address me.”

  “Then please flush that bitch’s picture down the loo!”

  I left the room, shaking. With no place else to find complete privacy, I went into the bathroom and locked the door. I threw up stomach juices that burned my throat. After I brushed my teeth and gargled, I sat on the toilet and stared at the wall. I had turned twenty years old only two weeks earlier and I had hoped I had become a complete woman and left behind any girlish ideals. But now I felt as if the world had been pulled out from under me. My stomach was in knots. I wanted reassuring words from my new husband that he loved me.

  Dinner was a bore. Another night in which the senior officers joined us
and the discussion would go to things about the state of the world and ships that had no interest for me.

  I put an artificial smile on my face and made every effort to seem interested. Perhaps if I had managed to complete finishing school I would have been better equipped for these times when wives of important men were expected to be stimulating listening posts for male guests. I’d heard that there were tribes in South Pacific islands where it was polite for a man to offer a male guest his wife for the night, and I suppose making the wife listen to endless talk from a male guest was something less provocative and certainly more boring.

  My appearance was one of composure, but my insides were still churning and burning from the confrontation with my husband. He had barely spoken to me as we dressed for dinner and escorted me into the dining area. Now as I looked down the table to smile at him, the gesture froze. I stared in shock, not certain my eyes had seen right.

  He was wearing matching gold cuff links with intertwined initials on them.

  I immediately recognized who they were from.

  I couldn’t believe my eyes. After my dismay that he carried a picture of her on our honeymoon, instead of appeasing me, his new bride, the bloody bastard was flaunting his old love. How dare you! I wanted to scream. My God, did he not have any concern for me? We had been married only days and he was already insulting me, rubbing salt into a wound?

  Who did he think he was?

  There was no expression on his face as he met my eye, but I realized exactly why he had done it.

  He was demonstrating his power—not just the authority of a husband, but the power of a man of worldwide prestige. He would do what he damn well pleased.

  As I sat there I felt really low in myself. Had I been chosen as his bride because my breeding made me an uncontroversial place setting at the dinner table? Because I was young and strong and could service him in the bedroom? Because I was expected to produce heirs?

  Where did love come into it?

  He had put the same sort of thought process into choosing me as his wife as he did in choosing a breeding mare.

  I felt ugly and rejected. I felt my body bulging, bloating from the food I had just eaten. It swelled in my stomach. I could taste the acid rising from it into my throat. Unable to resist the terrible urge to throw up, I mumbled an apology and got up from the table.

  He threw me a look of disapproval. I’m sure that everyone at the table thought I was having a bout of diarrhea. I guess, as a Royal, if I had the urge to go to the loo, I was supposed to stay seated, keep a stiff upper lip, and shit in my pants.

  Love came to Ilona not as a warm, exotic sense of joy, but as an all-consuming fire. She felt it burn through her until, watching the Prince dancing with Mautya, she wanted to tear the woman from him, to strike her, to do her violent injury, even to murder her.

  —BARBARA CARTLAND, THE PROUD PRINCESS

  The PRISONER OF FEAR

  39

  York

  While Dutton was trying to unravel the mystery of the Abbey, and Marlowe was sizing up the competition in a British courtroom, Walter Howler, former famed plastic surgeon, reconstructionist of the dead, and a man who could breathe life into wax, was on a train pulling into York. The city, occupied successively by the Romans, Danes, Anglo-Saxons, and the Normans, lay at the confluence of the Rivers Ouse and Foss, about halfway between London and Edinburgh. It wasn’t Howler’s destination. He planned to stay on the train to the Scottish capital, then make his way by bus into the Highlands, getting as far away from London as his feet could carry him.

  His nose dripped and he wiped it with his sleeve. The woman in the facing seat stared at him with undisguised disgust. A stout, large-framed, big-bosomed woman who had the appearance of having worked hard for her living, she had sat rigid in her seat since boarding the crowded train an hour earlier and finding herself forced to sit across from Howler. He certainly did not display confidence in his appearance—disheveled clothes soiled by food and God knows what, hair hanging in dirty oily strands, in need of a shave, a bath, new clothes, and probably louse disinfectant.

  The woman hadn’t made any movement, as if she expected that the slightest motion would make her a target for whatever might crawl off of him. As the train pulled into the station, she grabbed her bag and rushed to be the first one off.

  Howler got up, too, not to disembark but to go into the bathroom and fill a pressing need. Inside the cubbyhole, he was inserting a needle into an arm that showed the track marks of a veteran drug user, the needle scars of a person straddling that thin line between the temporary relief of shooting up and the ultimate mind-exploding experience of a lethal overdose.

  The door opened as Howler was inserting the needle. He grinned at the man. “Diabetic.”

  The man was humorless.

  “Mr. Howler, I presume,” the man said. “My name is Grindstaff.”

  40

  Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive!

  The phrase from Sir Walter Scott played in Marlowe’s mind as she sat quietly and listened during a meeting of the princess’s defense team at Anthony Trent’s chambers. Members of the team presented their conclusions in regard to the issues they were assigned as part of the defense.

  It was the third meeting she had attended and she had not joined any of the discussions with any enthusiasm. Her refusal to give her all to the committee was based partly on the fact that the sessions always focused on attacks on her position rather than finding ways to support it.

  There was little discussion of defenses other than the one she brought to the table. No one supported her belief that she could not only get a jury to mitigate the act from murder down to manslaughter, but that there was a good chance that the jury would find justification and the princess would go free. That justification could only be shown by attacking the acts of the prince, and there was a noticeable silence in the room when she steered the discussion in that direction. There were times when she felt that Lord Finfall could barely constrain himself from bludgeoning her with a conference room chair.

  The “tangled web” rhyme came to mind as she realized that the princess did not have a single cohesive defense—there was another system in play, a shadow defense. It wasn’t just a matter of planning two different defense strategies for the trial—Marlowe sensed that her heat-of-passion defense was only being given lip service, that the rest of them were focused on an entirely different approach. She could understand their reluctance and doubt of whether her strategy would be successful, but their resistance went beyond that. She had the impression that meetings were taking place and plans were being made that she had no part in, as if an entire backup team was being readied for the moment she was thrown out of the game.

  What bothered her most was that she suspected the princess was creating some of the tangled webs. She knew she didn’t have a complete grip on the princess’s loyalty. The princess had brought her in out of fear that the British attorneys might be compromised, but when it came down to basics, the princess would be much more comfortable with members of the committee, people who shared a similar social background, than with Marlowe.

  Marlowe’s own attitude was part of the problem. She had a difficult time walking in the princess’s shoes. It was the first time she had such difficulty empathizing with a client. Rich or poor, most of the women she had represented in the past were of the same social class as she was—or at least the issue of “social class” never came up.

  Deep down she resented the princess, resented the opportunities that she never got herself, the opportunities the princess seemed to have thrown away. And somewhere along the line the princess had picked up on Marlowe’s feelings. That would drive her to Trent, Marlowe thought.

  But she also had to wonder whether the princess was using her simply as a club to keep her other attorneys in line until she could get something she wanted from them.

  She suddenly realized Trent was talking to her. “I’m sorry, I was thinking
about something.”

  “We were talking about the news conference coming up today. This will be the first time that you will be directly questioned by reporters on your theory of the princess’s defense.”

  She noted the “your theory” rather than “our theory.”

  “Our concern is that we don’t give away too much of the defense at the news conference, that we save it for the trial.”

  “I agree,” she said, “we shouldn’t get into particulars, but the fact that the princess will be pursuing a heat-of-passion defense, a killing in reaction to provocation, isn’t a secret. Speculation about it is in the news every day.”

  “Speculation is where we would like to leave it. I’ve spoken to the princess and she has agreed that we are to downplay her relationship with the prince at this point.”

  Marlowe almost laughed. It didn’t come as a surprise to her that Trent would meet with the princess behind her back, since she insisted that her own meetings were conducted privately. But once again she sensed tangled webs.

  “What exactly are you asking me to do?”

  “Don’t assassinate the prince’s character with cheap shots that will make nasty headlines,” Lord Finfall said.

  “What his lordship means is, let’s save our ammunition for trial,” Trent said.

  Marlowe nodded. “I agree.” She actually did agree with them. The single biggest mistake defense attorneys in high-profile cases made was trying their cases in the news media, giving the prosecution a preview of their strategy. But she also sensed another motive. She said, “Is there any question that at some point we are going to have to drag the prince’s name through the mud?” She was deliberately blunt. “If there is, we should deal with it now. You can’t have provocation unless there is a bad person doing bad things. We have a client that was driven to bulimia and suicide attempts by verbal abuse from her husband. If we can’t portray that abuse as malicious, there’s no way a jury will find mitigating circumstances.”