Goodnight Sweet Prince (7 page)

This had been his Christmas present to three of his nephews, a huge board portraying the battlefield of Waterloo in minute detail, and toy soldiers representing all the different varieties of
troops on duty that June day.

William, Powerscourt’s eldest nephew, was eight years old and in command of two younger soldiers, Patrick and Alexander. Patrick was the drummer boy, equipped with a replica of the
equipment used to drive the French infantry to success and glory across the battlefields of Europe. Alexander was the bugler, trained to give the different orders to the men of Wellington’s
command.

‘After the artillery bombardment,’ Powerscourt puffed bravely on at his cigar, enveloping the battlefield with smoke, ‘the next thing is the attack on the farm at Hougoumont.
Four regiments of veterans,’ he pointed to a small cluster of models, ‘began to advance towards the farm. Beat the drum.’

As William moved his troops forward through the smoke Patrick beat out the
pas de charge
: boom boom, boom boom, boom a boom, boom a boom, boom boom.

‘Splendid,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Now, Alexander,’ he brought in the youngest, ‘you are standing beside the Duke of Wellington, here, on his horse Copenhagen. Your job
is to sound the bugle call that sends out his orders. Look! He has seen the French advancing towards the chateau. Reinforcements are needed. Now! Blow!’

It could not be said that Alexander was master of the full repertoire of bugle calls from the reveille to the retreat. But he did make a great deal of noise.

‘
Alors
,’ cried Powerscourt, ‘some of the French did manage to get inside the building. And I’ll show you what happened then. Pretend that this door is the main
entrance to Hougoumont. You three go outside, with your drums and bugles, and push as hard as you can to try to get in. You’re going to be French just for once, and I’m going to be
Colonel Macdonnell who closed the gate.’

The three boys pushed as hard as they could. ‘Make more noise! Shout in French!’ Powerscourt was getting carried away. Cries of ‘
Allez! Allez! Vive la France! Vive
l’Empereur!
’ – Powerscourt himself had taught them that one – sounded out across the upper levels of the house and floated down to the drawing-room two floors below.
With a mighty heave Powerscourt at last closed the door. Three small boys fell backwards on the floor in a tumbling melange of arms and legs.

‘Powerscourt! Powerscourt!’ shouted Rosebery. He burst into the room, taking in the battlefield at a glance. ‘I think you’ll find that you have put the British cavalry a
bit too far to the left,’ he said absent-mindedly, surveying the order of battle. ‘But come, Powerscourt, come, we must go at once! Reasons on the way!’

Rosebery led a swift charge down three flights of stairs, pausing only to give apologies to Powerscourt’s sister at the bottom. ‘A thousand pardons for this invasion, Lady Rosalind!
We shall return to fight another day!’

With that Rosebery bounded down the flight of steps, pulling a bemused Powerscourt behind him into the night, and hurried his friend into a waiting brougham.

‘Liverpool Street! As quick as you can. I have a train waiting!’

‘A train?’ said Powerscourt feebly, wondering if this was all another dream.

‘Yes, yes, yes. If you want to get anywhere in a hurry in this country you have to order yourself a special train. I’ve done it before.’

Even at this moment of crisis Powerscourt found time to reflect on his friend. Most people in a hurry would consult timetables, seek out alternative routes, fret over possible delays on the
line. Rosebery simply hired a train, and the best that money could buy, thought Powerscourt, as the engine pulled them slowly out of the station, real smoke billowing out over London’s
suburbs.

‘Where are we going? What is the rush?’

‘Rush? Rush? Wild horses couldn’t get us there fast enough. We are going, my dear Powerscourt, to Sandringham. Something terrible has happened. Some disaster we don’t yet know
about.’

He thrust a cable into his friend’s hand.: ‘Come immediately. Most urgent. Bring Powerscourt. Brook no delay. Suter.’

‘Death closes all,’ Powerscourt muttered to himself, ‘but something ere the end, some work of noble note, may yet be done, not unbecoming men that strove with Gods . . . sorry,
I have been reading Tennyson again last thing at night.’

‘What makes you think of death, Francis?’

‘Think of it, my friend,’ Powerscourt went on, who had thought of little else since they fled the battlefield of Waterloo. ‘If there was some natural act, like a fire or the
roof falling in, they would send for the fire brigade or the builders. If it were the death of an aged uncle or aunt, the family would not be summoning you in the middle of a January night. They
would not be sending for me. They would be sending for the tribes of relations and a couple of parsons. Bishops, more likely. Maybe Archbishops.’

‘Are you possessed of second sight as well as a photographic memory, Francis?’ Rosebery was peering closely at his friend as if another telegram was about to appear, etched across
his forehead.

‘Certainly not,’ Powerscourt laughed. ‘But it seems to me the most likely explanation is that there has been some dirty work afoot in Norfolk. Death not by natural causes is
usually called murder. But we must wait for some hard intelligence before our speculations run away with us.’

The two men sat silently, lost in their thoughts. Rosebery was wondering about the political implications of a royal death. Powerscourt looked troubled.

‘I am sure that it is impossible to underestimate the effect a strange death could have on the Royal Family,’ he said, watching Rosebery’s cigar smoke drift down the carriage.
‘I have been thinking about this a lot lately,’ he went on, looking out at the occasional ringlets of light that gleamed faintly against the East Anglian sky. ‘Somewhere at the
back of all the royal minds there must be a fear, maybe not a fear, an anxiety, a tremor in their dreams. On the surface, of course, all is serene, the palaces, the pomp, the pageantry. But
underneath?

‘Think of it,’ he continued, in what for him was a most animated fashion, ‘like a painting by Claude. There’s a huge mythological landscape, elegant classical buildings,
assorted Greeks and Romans like Dido and Cleopatra up to no good. You know the sort of thing.’

Powerscourt drew a large frame in the condensation of the window between them. ‘All the normal Claude tricks are here, the fantastic buildings, the intense sunlight, the faint sense of
being in another world. I expect you’ve got a Claude or two, Rosebery, lying about the place?’

‘I’ve got three, actually,’ admitted Rosebery, ‘maybe four. I can’t remember. But what’s going on in this one here?’ He pointed to the Old Master taking
dim shape on the railway carriage window.

‘Here,’ said Powerscourt, drawing an ill-defined blob at the bottom of the frame, ‘is the fantastic palace, the grand pillars, the colonnades, the battlements, flags waving in
the sunshine. And here, on an elaborate and bejewelled royal throne, we find the little Queen, resplendent not in a bonnet as so often, but in a proper crown. Around her are disported the usual
crew, the courtiers, the secretaries, the equerries, the waiting servants – a mass of uniforms and all the decorations in the kingdom. I think Claude would have fun with that.

‘But here, behind them, in the park,’ Powerscourt’s finger added a series of semicircular blobs to the window of the Great Eastern, ‘we have a series of statues. Some of
them lurk invisible at the end of a terrace until you turn the corner, some of them are in semicircles, standing rigidly to attention waiting for time’s last roll call. Right at the back we
find some of Royalty’s distant predecessors, Henry VII, Richard II, two small princes in the Tower, a reminder to their successors in the big house down here at the bottom of the picture,
that their ancestors waded through rivers of blood to sit upon a throne. And threw a previous monarch out to get there.

‘At the back of the semicircle, here, Charles I on execution day. Kings of England can lose their heads, even on a balcony above Whitehall. Then, slightly closer to the house we find
Robespierre, the man who struck Terror not just into the hearts of the French, but into the hearts of every crowned head in Europe. In his left hand he holds a model guillotine and at his feet, a
tumbril, with the powdered heads of the aristocrats already overflowing. Do you not like the tumbril, Rosebery?’

‘No tricoteuses, Powerscourt?’ said Rosebery with a smile. ‘No room for Madame Defarge and the knitting needles of death?’

‘No room on the plinth,’ said Powerscourt, turning back to the window. ‘The picture is nearing completion. At one edge of the semicircle, nearest the house, we place the
Queen’s relation and colleague in Royalty, His Most Serene Majesty Alexander II, Czar of all the Russias, blown to pieces by a terrorist bomb twelve years ago and with a face so disfigured
that his relatives fainted when they went to kiss him a last goodbye in his coffin.

‘On the other side we have Lord Frederick Cavendish, Her Majesty’s appointed representative, Viceroy of Ireland, stabbed to death by Fenian assassins in Dublin’s Phoenix Park
in 1882, just ten years ago.

‘And last of all, right here,’ Powerscourt added another artistic blob, ‘we have a bearded agitator, pamphlet in hand, fist raised in defiance, cap on head, speaking of
troubles yet to come. At the far left-hand corner of the picture’ – Powerscourt’s hand almost reached the emergency cord – ‘a small black cloud threatens the blue
serenity of Claude’s landscape, a thunderstorm perhaps, a stroke of lightning.’

They found the Duke of Clarence and Avondale shortly before seven o’clock in the morning. The front of his night-shirt was saturated with blood.

Blood red.

There was so much blood that Shepstone, veteran of many a battlefield, described the room later as smelling like a cross between a butcher’s shop and an abattoir.

Eddy’s bedroom was on the first floor of Sandringham House, looking out over the gravelled sweep of the main entrance. It was not completely flat, but sloped gently downwards to the
window. Below the sash was a small lake, whose surface glistened eerily in the candlelight.

Blood scarlet.

Tributaries flowed from the end of the single bed across the floor towards the lake, matting the carpet and, where the floor was bare, seeping through the floorboards.

Blood river.

On the dressing-table was a copy of the Bible and Eddy’s diary, open on the day of his death. Hanging on the back of the door was his full dress scarlet uniform, last worn on his birthday
just a few days before. Both of his wrists had been viciously slashed. From them both trickled a small but regular flow, running down into the mattress.

Blood crimson.

The main arteries in the legs had been severed too, adding to the blood river traffic towards the lake by the window. And his head was barely attached to his body. The murderer had slit his
throat from ear to ear, leaving it lolling dangerously off the pillow. At the age of twenty-eight, Albert Victor Christian Edward, Duke of Clarence and Avondale, second in line of succession to
Victoria’s throne, had breathed his last. Clarence was a corpse.

Blue blood.

Blood royal.

The Prince of Wales was in torment. On him, and on him alone, rested the responsibility of what to do about the murder of his son. What would happen if this death and the manner in which it
occurred were made public?

There was only word that came into his mind, and it came in letters as high as the rooftops of Sandringham itself.

Scandal.

Scandal as the newspapers began to speculate about the murder of a Royal Prince asleep in his own house, in his own bed, surrounded by members of his own family. Scandal about his own private
life that had threatened to erupt before Christmas with revelations about his affair with Daisy Brooke.

Scandal about his dead son.

Waves of anger at the death of Prince Eddy were sweeping through the Prince of Wales. For ten or fifteen minutes he would feel overwhelmed, drowned in anger. Then it would subside, only to
reappear at a time of its own choosing.

The Prince of Wales was always restless. He marched out of his study and down to the billiard room on the far side of the house where he knew he would not be disturbed. Somebody had left the
balls on the table. It was an easy shot. The Prince of Wales picked up a cue. He bent over the table, his stomach pressing against the side. He missed.

He tried another cannon on his billiard balls. Surely, he thought to himself, the red and the white will not dare to disobey their master’s will. They did. He missed again.

Scandal lay around his family like the covering of some very expensive diamond from one of those great jewellery houses in the fashionable Faubourgs of Paris. Heaven and his bankers knew, the
Prince of Wales had bought enough favours with their products over the years. The gems came in boxes, wrapped in layer upon layer of the most exquisite tissue paper. As you peeled off each rustling
layer, you felt sure that here, at last, was the treasure, only to be cheated of your prey.

Eddy lay at the bottom of the box. Or the bottom of the coffin. Edward remembered his conversation with Alexandra about Eddy’s future, some months before, with another wave of scandal
threatening to break.

‘Send him away! Send him away, for Christ’s sake! Europe, the colonies, I don’t care. Anywhere, as long as he’s out of this country for at least two years!’

And Alix, pleading softly, ‘Oh no you don’t. Not this time. You did that years ago, and it nearly broke my heart. This time Eddy is staying here.’

Against his better judgement, he had given way. Eddy had stayed here. Now look where it had got them. Of all the scandals, the ones surrounding Prince Eddy were the most serious.

Prince Edward knew a lot of it, he thought he knew most of it, but even he did not know if there were other layers, waiting to be unpeeled in the unforgiving light of publicity and a
nation’s fury. Layer upon layer of the tissue papers of scandal.