Goodnight Sweet Prince (3 page)

‘They ought to be controlled by law, these damned newspapers and magazines.’ Sir Bartle Shepstone appeared to have turned red even thinking about them. ‘Ought to be controlled
by the laws of England.’

Powerscourt noticed that Shepstone was still wearing full military dress as if he was on parade. He looked as though he might have been an adjutant. Looking at his almost manic neatness,
Powerscourt felt that this was a man who could have organized the transport of supplies through the Khyber Pass or a fleet of artillery down the more dangerous passages of the Nile.

Forty miles north of Pall Mall the station platform was invisible by the time the train pulled out of the station, billows of smoke drifting back to envelop the chaos it had
left behind. The platform had disappeared beneath a miscellany of trunks, portmanteaux, valises, cabin trunks, shooting gear, hatboxes, shoeboxes, walking sticks and grips. Trying unsuccessfully to
bring order to this sea of baggage were the accompanying staff who had decamped off the train, shouting at each other: two valets, two footmen, one groom, two loaders and an underbutler.

The station was Dunmow Halt not far from Bishop’s Stortford. The arriving guest, with his large retinue of retainers, was the Prince of Wales. The hostess was Daisy Brooke, mistress of
Easton Lodge in the County of Essex and adjacent lands that ranged over five counties. Daisy was also the current mistress of the Prince of Wales. When he was eighteen years old, the Prince of
Wales had been stationed in Ireland with his regiment. Some of his fellow officers had introduced a Dublin actress called Nellie Clifden into his bed. His conversion in that camp at the Curragh was
as sudden and as whole-hearted as that of Paul on the Damascus road. That long night the Prince of Wales found his mission in life. His calling was to have as many women as possible. Beautiful
women, willing women, reluctant women, women in Ireland, women in England, women in France, women in Germany.

Daisy was the latest.

As the luggage chaos on the platform slowly struggled into order, Daisy and her Prince were riding merrily away, through the ornate red brick gates of Easton Lodge and into her estate. The late
October sun blest the flat acres of Daisy’s domain and Daisy’s birds were singing the songs of autumn.

‘Our conclusion was that there was one series of events which might have given rise to the feeling that money might be extracted in return for silence.’ Suter
coughed slightly, as if embarrassed at what he had to say. But he did not hesitate. ‘I have taken the liberty of summarizing these events in the form of a memorandum. I felt it would be
simpler to communicate in this fashion. I would ask you both to read it in turn and then return the paper to me. However distinguished our guests,’ here came that wintry smile again,
‘we do not feel it appropriate that any piece of paper should leave this room.’

There, thought Powerscourt. There was a glimpse of cold steel within the scabbard.

‘But before you read that, I felt I should acquaint you with some of the blackmail documents themselves.’

Suter looked as if he had just stepped into a very disagreeable gutter. He took a small key from his waistcoat pocket and unlocked a drawer in his desk. He extracted a plain envelope and handed
the contents round to his guests.

Powerscourt looked through them quickly. Then he looked through them again. He observed that the blackmailer had never mastered the art of cutting out letters or pasting them on to a page. The
cutting was rough, there was always too much paste round the edges, as if the blackmailer was worried his messages would not stick. There was no proper punctuation as letters in upper and lower
case, usually taken from different publications, sprawled their untidy way across the page.

The messages were usually brief. ‘You were at Lady Manchester’s with Lady Brooke. You are a disgrace. Unless you pay up, all of Britain will know of your deeds.’ ‘You
were at a house party in Norfolk with Lady Brooke. The working people of this country will not stand for this behaviour. You will have to pay.’ Powerscourt thought he could detect
The
Times
and the
Morning Post
typefaces but there were another two he did not recognize.

‘Does anything occur to you after your inspection?’ Suter’s voice called Powerscourt back to the meeting.

‘Fellow seems to think he speaks for England. One of those damned radicals, I shouldn’t wonder!’ Sir Bartle Shepstone did not have a high opinion of radicals.

‘I’m afraid,’ said Powerscourt, handing back the venomous bundle, ‘that it is virtually impossible to deduce anything at all. The messy pasting, the untidy letters, could
all be designed to throw us off the scent. I’m afraid,’ he looked enigmatically at Sir Bartle, ‘that they could as easily have come from a duke living in Piccadilly as a labourer
in Peckham.’ Privately, he thought the duke the more likely of the two.

Shepstone made a noise that might have been a grunt and might have been a cough. Suter hurried the business forward. ‘The memorandum, gentlemen. Our memorandum.’

He handed a document to Rosebery. As he read it, Powerscourt became aware of the ticking of a clock in the corner. Buckler and Sons, the legend on its face said, Clockmakers, By Appointment to
Her Majesty the Queen. Shepstone was peering at his shoes as if they too were on parade. Suter was looking out across St James’s Park. Far off in the distance the chimes of Big Ben could be
heard, tolling the half-hour.

‘Most interesting. Most interesting. Thank you,’ said Rosebery in his most pompous voice as he handed the document to his friend.

Powerscourt paused slightly before he began to read, his brows furrowed in intense concentration.

Frances Maynard, Lady Brooke, was twenty-nine years old. She claimed descent from Charles II and Nell Gwyn. She became an heiress at the age of three and had over
£30,000 a year of her own. On her marriage to Lord Brooke, son and heir of Lord Warwick, she attained a magnificent position in society. Her marriage liberated her to pursue her own affairs
while her compliant husband pursued his normal routine of hunting and shooting and very occasional forays to the House of Commons. Lady Brooke was certainly beautiful. She had in her eye the look
of one who would not be deprived of her prey, be it man or fox.

‘You know my station has just opened,’ Daisy began, ‘so we can now run special trains direct from London right to my front door.’

‘Indeed I do,’ said the Prince. ‘It is a better station than the one I have at Sandringham. I suppose it must be more up to date.’

‘Well,’ said Lady Brooke, ‘I’m going to have a party in the spring. And it’s going to last a week. I’m going to have chess in the garden, with live actors
from the London theatres dressed as pawns and castles and kings and queens. I’m going to have an orchestra that will play every night. I’m going to have the food brought over from
Paris. I want you to help me with the invitations.’

The Prince of Wales’ knowledge of society was encyclopedic, his society, Lady Brooke’s society, for the Prince of Wales had never had any gainful employment in all of his forty-seven
years. His hair was receding fast. A lifetime of seventeen-course dinners had taken its toll on his waistline. None of his circle and few of his subjects would have dared to call him fat, but the
waistbands of his ceremonial uniforms needed regular attention from his team of valets.

His mother, Queen Victoria, was a jealous guardian of the powers and privileges of royalty, reluctant to share them even with her son. And politicians, however eager they might be to curry
favour with the heir to the throne, had grown reluctant to let him know any secret or sensitive matter, as confidential Foreign Office documents were left lying about in theatre boxes or their
contents circulated around the gossip channels of the capital.

The Prince of Wales had turned indolence into a profession and the pursuit of pleasure into a full-time occupation. Aristocratic birth and great wealth were the entry tickets. This was an
exhausting life of entertainment and enjoyment, where thousands of birds were slaughtered in a single morning and where sleeping with other people’s wives and husbands at country house
parties was the expected order of the day or night.

‘Daisy, my Daisy, I have not seen you now for nearly a week.’

‘But now, my Prince, we have four or five days in front of us. The rest of the guests do not arrive until the day after tomorrow. Until then it is just the two of us.’

Of all the aspects of being a royal mistress, this was the one that Daisy loved the best. The farmers’ families and the country people turned out to watch the mistress of Easton Lodge
drive the heir to the throne through her grounds. For Daisy, this affair was about conquest. As a girl she had never known how pretty she was; only when she came out did she realize that she was
one of the most beautiful women of her time, adored, worshipped, wanted by an army of male admirers. She wanted to be the most beautiful, she wanted to have the most handsome lovers, she wanted to
make the most of her beauty while she could. Rather a last reckless ride to glory than the dull footsteps of the mundane and the everyday. To conquer the Prince of Wales, to display him rather like
a new hunter, this was, she knew, as high as she would ever reach. And, deep down, she knew it would not last.

They were passing the parish church of Little Easton, where generations of her ancestors were buried. One of them had been Private Secretary to Lord Burleigh, Lord Chancellor and First Minister
to Queen Elizabeth. Daisy felt she was carrying on a family tradition of royal service.

‘I fear I bring bad news, Daisy.’ Edward was continuing to wave his regal wave to the country people as they passed, his smile stitched firmly on to his face.

‘Oh no,’ said Daisy. ‘I thought you could escape from the affairs of state for a few days when you come to my humble house.’

The affairs of state since they had last met consisted of one race meeting, two visits to the music hall and one men-only dinner at the Prince of Wales’ very own pleasure ground, the
Marlborough Club.

‘It’s Beresford. Lord Charles Beresford.’

Daisy winced as he spoke the name of her former lover.

‘They say,’ the Prince of Wales went on, ‘that he has taken leave of his ship the
Undaunted
somewhere in the Mediterfjranean. They say he’s about to return to
London and cause trouble.’