A Royal Affair

by Allison Montclair

  “They brought in some of the old Greek hands from the Great War. One was this fellow with an absolutely enormous dome of a head, like someone had stuffed five human brains inside a mushroom and stuck the whole assembly on top of a three-piece suit. He was charming enough, but not all that helpful for our missions. He was a spy from an earlier era. He believed that the best way to gather intelligence was to find the best café in town, order a pot of coffee, and sit and pretend to read the newspaper. Eventually, anybody worth spying on would show up, and if they didn’t, at least you’d have a decent pot of coffee before you went off to the office.”

  “He makes spying sound like a pleasant, genteel occupation,” said Gwen.

  “Oh, no doubt he saw his share of horrors,” said Sally. “He downplayed them—no one wanted to scare us away in training.”

  “How long was he posted there?”

  “I’m not exactly sure. End of the war, then through the Greek-Turkish hostilities after, maybe three or four years in all. I’m not certain what he did then, being but a wee small lad at the time, if you can imagine me as a wee small lad at any time.”

  “I can,” said Iris, resting her head on his chest. “I wish we had known each other when we were children. Any idea where he is now?”

  “Probably in a café somewhere, drinking coffee and reading a newspaper,” said Sally.

  “In England, at least?”

  “I had the impression he was no longer in the Service,” said Sally. “I remember he had this funny little tie pin shaped like a train locomotive. Now, are you going to tell me what this is really about?”

  “It’s exactly what I said,” replied Iris. “We’re vetting a prospective groom for a client.”

  “Who is tied to a former English spy,” said Sally.

  “If this is the right Talbot,” said Iris. “And I have a feeling it is. What was the date of that knighthood, again?”

  “Fourteenth of December 1922,” said Gwen.

  “Odd time of year to be knighted,” said Iris. “It didn’t come with the Birthday Honours nor the New Year Honours. He must have done something unusually significant.”

  “But he wasn’t the naval attaché anymore,” Gwen pointed out.

  “Once a spy, always a spy,” said Sally. “He may have had some particular talent or connection.”

  “It does narrow down the time frame,” agreed Iris. “That’s helpful.”

  “What does 1922 have to do with a current engagement?” asked Sally.

  “We don’t know yet,” said Iris. “We’re excavating old skeletons.”

  “Well, don’t go digging in Greece, if you can avoid it,” said Sally. “Things are dicey there. I just had a thought—one fellow who might know where to find Commander Talbot.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Your old boss,” said Sally. “He was working that neck of the Mediterranean back then.”

  “Only if I’m desperate,” said Iris.

  “Very well,” said Sally. “Will that be all the interrogating? I have people waiting to buy me drinks.”

  “You wouldn’t rather keep cuddling us?” purred Iris, dragging her nails across his chest.

  “I would, except you and I know it won’t go anywhere,” said Sally. “Not even Noël Coward lives in a Noël Coward play. Come to the pub with me?”

  “I have to work tomorrow,” Iris said regretfully, getting to her feet and retrieving her hat, Gwen following suit.

  “So responsible now,” said Sally. “Not at all like the girl I once knew. We have heard the chimes at midnight, Sparks.”

  “That we have, that we have,” said Iris. “Now, there’s a role you should play. You’d be a marvelous Falstaff.”

  “I’m not old enough to do it justice,” said Sally. “But when I am, will you be my Mistress Quickly?”

  “No, darling,” said Iris, coming over to kiss him lightly on the cheek. “I’ll take my time with it. Good night, Sally.”

  “Good night, sweet ladies,” he said, rising and walking them to the door. “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts, won’t you?”

  “But those are my favourite Greeks,” protested Iris.

  “We will,” promised Gwen, dragging Iris out of the flat. “Good night, Sally. Smashing play. Good cuddle. Thank you for letting me be part of it.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Iris’s party smile faded as they descended from Sally’s flat, and her pace, normally quick and frenetic, became slow and contemplative. Gwen, whose height advantage over her partner was a frequent cause of Iris’s frenetic pace, slowed down to match her. She maintained a companionable silence, waiting.

  “I owe you an apology,” Iris said finally.

  “Yes, I believe you do,” replied Gwen.

  “I should have taken you along to the library, shown you some research techniques, and split up the work. Instead, I lorded my education over you and made you feel small and resentful.”

  “Not small,” said Gwen.

  “Still, it was not a nice thing to do,” said Iris. “Not a nice thing to do to anyone, but even worse to do to a friend. I’m not used to having a close female friend. I never have been. My problem, one of my problems, and this is by no means an attempt to justify any of my behaviour, is that I have a great deal of lingering resentment for women like you.”

  “Women like me? In what category are you placing me?”

  “The aristocracy. The rich girls who get presented at court and drink champagne while wearing exorbitantly expensive frocks and have their entire lives of luxury laid out for them before they’re even born. The ones who know to go to Burke’s Peerage to look people up. Which was a very good idea, by the way.”

  “Darling, I didn’t look it up,” drawled Gwen. “I had someone do it for me. That’s how one does that sort of thing. There are advantages to being in the aristocracy.”

  “Yes, there are, and I have envied and despised them. My mother divorced my father when I was fifteen, so we were anathema to that world. Forget any chance of my coming out at court, or being invited to the best parties. I never got to vent my spleen with a shotgun at some blameless grouse or fox. But I got into Cambridge on merit, and became that gorgeous brainy girl who was always up for a bit of fun with the upper-class boys, and that got me entry into a lot of places that money didn’t.”

  “I thought you enjoyed being that girl,” said Gwen.

  “I did. Well, I thought I did. Looking back, the reputation I so eagerly earned probably shot down my first engagement, although I have no regrets over not being stuck with that dolt for life. But I’m not a Good-Time Charlie anymore, and I don’t want the old school boys treating me like one.”

  “You are dating a gangster,” Gwen pointed out.

  “I’ve gone out with Archie twice. He’s a marvelous dancer, and he’s taken me to out-of-the-way places where nobody knows either of us and we can lower our defenses and talk like human beings. It’s not at all the same thing.”

  “That sounds rather pleasant,” admitted Gwen.

  “He has a friend—”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Had enough male attention for one evening?”

  “More than enough, thank you. Is the apology over?”

  “Have I covered everything? I may not have actually said ‘I’m sorry.’”

  “Consider it said. And consider it accepted. Do we have a date for the library tomorrow afternoon?”

  “We do.”

  “What have you learned so far?”

  “I was concentrating on the prince and his parents, looking through the Times index. I wasted a good half hour before I realised that they were mostly listed under ‘Greece’ rather than their names.”

  “Well, of course they would be,” said Gwen. “How else would you index royalty?”

  “I really hate you right now,” said Iris, glaring at her. “In any case, I’ve been working backwards in the chronology. It turns out that their departure from Greece was rather dramatic.”

 
; “How so?”

  “Prince Andrew, or Andrea, was a commander of an army during the Greco-Turkish war after the Great War. His older brother was the king.”

  “The one who died from the monkey bite?”

  “What?”

  “One of the Greek kings died after being bitten by someone’s pet monkey, or something like that. I remember hearing about it when I was a child, and it always stayed with me. It was such a ridiculous way to die, yet he died nevertheless. I’ve never quite trusted monkeys after that.”

  “Maybe the monkey is still plotting against the family,” speculated Iris. “How long do they live?”

  “I suppose it depends on the breed. I could ask Ronnie. It’s the sort of thing he would know.”

  “Well, let’s rule out the monkey. For now. In any case, a battle was lost, so when the Greek government is overturned and the king flees, which is an annual occurrence there, from what I can determine, a bunch of former prime ministers, cabinet officials, and generals are arrested and given very quick trials and even quicker sentences. Prince Andrea is one of them.”

  “Really? What did he do?”

  “It’s what he didn’t do. They said that he refused an order to have his army advance, so he became one more scapegoat in a vast herd.”

  “What were the consequences?”

  “Firing squad for the first lot. But, as you said, there are advantages to being in the aristocracy. Andrea was a cousin to our King George the Fifth, and Alice is Victoria’s great-granddaughter. I suppose that King George was still feeling guilt over not saving the tsar and family, so when he’s confronted with another cousin facing death by revolution, he intervenes somehow. Prince Andrea is convicted, but instead of inhaling a hail of bullets, he’s banished. There’s a British cruiser, the HMS Calypso, conveniently waiting at the dock. Andrea and his wife are escorted to the boat personally by someone in power, and off they go to Brindisi, making one stop along the way to pick up the children and servants.”

  “Corfu.”

  “Exactly. There are several dispatches detailing their journey from that point. They meet the pope, they arrive in Paris, they come to London.”

  “And Talbot?”

  “Not mentioned in a single article about the prince in the Times. But this all happened in the last few months of 1922. Andrea is freed by the Greeks in early December, which is why the timing of Talbot’s knighthood ten days later is intriguing. I wonder what role he played in this affair.”

  “Assuming he played any. So, back to the British Museum to read some more newspapers?”

  “Not the museum,” said Iris. “Have you never done research like this before?”

  “Not a lick.”

  “Then you’re in for a treat. We shall be spending a lovely afternoon at the British Library facility for newspapers in Colindale. Ever been there?”

  “I never even knew it existed. What fun!”

  “You say that now,” said Iris.

  “What about this former boss of yours? The one Sally mentioned?”

  Iris didn’t answer.

  “I see,” said Gwen. “We’re back into the war years, aren’t we? Someone you worked for in Special Operations, I take it?”

  “Someone I’d rather not owe any more favours to,” said Iris.

  “How many do you owe him now?”

  “More than I can repay.”

  “Will he call in that debt?”

  “He tried to,” said Iris. “About a month ago.”

  “What did he want?”

  “Me. Working for him again.”

  “As a—as a what, exactly? Would you be a spy? Do they even use that term?”

  “An operative. A vague word for an undefinable business.”

  “Is that something you want to do?”

  “No,” said Iris firmly. “And I told him as much.”

  “Hmm,” said Gwen, looking at her closely.

  “What? And stop with the voodoo perusal. Do you think I want to work there again?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I thought that last little speech in Sally’s play about missing the war years might have been based on you.”

  “Me? I was the other woman.”

  “You were cast as the other woman,” said Gwen. “But Sally knows you better than anyone, and it wouldn’t surprise me a whit if he excised a sample of you to insert into Lydia. Not to mention her having an affair with a married man.”

  “Yes, let’s bring that up, shall we? May I also point out that Lydia was also married in the play, which I never have been, despite the best efforts of several suitors.”

  “Has Sally ever proposed to you?” asked Gwen.

  “Good Lord, no,” said Iris. “He’s too good a friend to spoil a relationship with marriage.”

  “You do lead him on an awful lot,” said Gwen.

  “That’s just teasing,” said Iris. “We both know it. It’s been our way forever.”

  “Your way, perhaps.”

  “Why must you take a perfectly lovely evening and spoil it like this?” asked Iris. “If I wanted to be analysed—oh wait. I agreed to that already, didn’t I? When is my appointment, again?”

  “This Thursday afternoon,” said Gwen. “Right after mine. Then drinks to celebrate.”

  “Unless your doctor discovers that drinking is the root of my problems,” said Iris.

  “In which case, cake should be an adequate substitute.”

  “I think I’m going to like psychotherapy,” said Iris.

  “Getting back to your old boss…”

  “I don’t want to contact him if I can avoid it,” said Iris. “To put it in Freudian terms, I want to figure this out myself before I go running off to Daddy for help. Let’s see what we can find out on our own.”

  “‘We,’” said Gwen. “You’re saying ‘we’ again. Better.”

  “It is, isn’t it? And here’s the cab stand. See you bright and early, partner. Matchmaking in the morning, library in the afternoon.”

  “So exciting,” said Gwen, getting into a waiting cab. “Remember: The world must be peopled!”

  “The world must be peopled,” echoed Iris, waving as the cab drove off.

  The next driver in the queue looked at her expectantly. She opened her bag, assessed her available funds, then exchanged rueful shrugs with him and started walking towards Marylebone.

  * * *

  Gwen let herself into the Bainbridge house in Kensington as quietly as she could. It was after eleven, and she doubted that anyone would still be awake to greet her. She was mistaken. Agnes, Little Ronnie’s governess, came to the top of the main staircase, her dressing gown wrapped tightly over her nightgown.

  Gwen’s heart gave a quick leap of concern when she saw Agnes waiting up, but Agnes quickly smiled and put a finger to her lips, allaying Gwen’s fears.

  “It’s nothing,” she whispered. “He’s fine. He’s been asleep, but he made me promise I’d wait up for you.”

  “Why?” Gwen whispered back as she climbed the stairs.

  “Come,” said Agnes, beckoning.

  She led Gwen to her room, which was next to Ronnie’s. She went in to retrieve a piece of paper.

  “He was very excited that Mummy was going to be in a panto,” said Agnes, handing the paper to her.

  Gwen held it up to the light. It was a drawing of a woman dressed up as a cat on a stage with red curtains all around her. Triangular black ears jutted out of a yellow mane of hair.

  “Is that me?” asked Gwen in delight.

  “Yes, Mrs. Bainbridge,” said Agnes. “You as Puss in Boots.”

  “And there’s Sir Oswald the Narwhal in the audience,” said Gwen, laughing. Sir Oswald was Little Ronnie’s creation, a heroic narwhal who battled Nazis on and under the seas. “He’s wearing a little top hat!”

  “What else would a narwhal wear to the theatre?” replied Agnes.

  “Oh, this is wonderful!” said Gwen. “Thank you for waitin
g up for me.”

  “You’re more than welcome, Mrs. Bainbridge,” said Agnes. “He is a treasure. I hope he stays in London for his schooling.”

  “Ah, so you’ve heard about that battle,” said Gwen.

  “Lord Bainbridge wants him to hew to the family tradition and go off to St. Frideswide’s. I know its reputation. It’s an antiquated institution that propagates antiquated thinking. We need our Ronnie to save the world from his ancestors, not run it aground on their behalf.”

  “I agree, but don’t spout off like that where anyone else can hear you,” said Gwen.

  “I know better than that,” said Agnes. “Good night, Mrs. Bainbridge.”

  “Good night, Agnes.”

  The governess glided through her door and closed it silently behind her.

  Gwen tiptoed into her son’s room and sat by his bed, gazing down at him fondly as he slept. He was so much a copy of his father. She sometimes wondered what of her was in him. She couldn’t see any features that echoed any from her reflection, but he was still six. She didn’t need to re-create herself; she had herself. Or used to—she was still working on getting that woman back.

  And then getting her son back. Lord and Lady Bainbridge had seized legal custody after the news of Gwen’s husband’s death had sent her to the sanatorium. Her current regimen with the psychiatrist was not merely a medical necessity, but a legal one to complete before she could even begin the process of regaining custody of him. Lady Carolyne and she had reached an uneasy rapprochement recently, but Lord Bainbridge was the rigid one. The anticipated eruption over Little Ronnie’s schooling, which Gwen naturally wanted to take place in London, was a daily source of consternation.

  Well, that battle would not be fought until His Lordship returned from inspecting the family holdings in East Africa. The autumn term was still a month or so away, Little Ronnie and she were still together, and Sir Oswald would be there to protect her. Even in the theatre.

  She yawned, the stimulation of the evening’s activities finally draining away. She smoothed the curls away from her son’s forehead and kissed him softly. He murmured something in his sleep that she could not catch, then began breathing deeply again.

  She crept out of the room and closed the door.