Goodnight Sweet Prince Read online

‘I have been closeted with Lord Rosebery in his Dark Tower by the sea at Barnbougle. Somebody is trying to blackmail the Prince of Wales. The Princess is fearful for the life of their eldest son. They say, God help us all, that he likes men as well as women. I am bidden to a great conference with Private Secretary Suter in Pall Mall two days from now. That’s it in a nutshell.’

  Outside a couple of very small birds were performing a slow dance across the lawn.

  ‘Bloody hell! Some shell. Some nut.’ Lord Johnny Fitzgerald looked closely at his friend. ‘That would be the very devil to crack. I’m not sure it can be done. Nobody’s going to talk.’

  ‘We can’t give up at this stage, Johnny. We haven’t started yet. I think I am going to make some inquiries about the Prince of Wales’ finances.’

  Fitzgerald helped himself to a couple of crumpets and a small mountain of butter. ‘And I could make some inquiries into what the rich and discreet homosexuals of London get up to. Prince Eddy must be known in that world, if what they say is true.’

  ‘Do you think we could get a man on the inside, Johnny? Blackmailers usually have inside knowledge from somewhere. The most likely place is from the servants at Marlborough House or Sandringham. I wonder if they’d let us put one of our own people in there, a senior footman or underbutler, somebody like that.’

  ‘You could try it, Francis. I think I know a man who went to school with that Private Secretary Sir William Suter. He was a mean little sod then. I don’t suppose he’s changed.’

  For two hours the two men talked until the fire had gone out and darkness had fallen over the Powerscourt estate beyond the windows. As they went off to dinner in Oundle’s finest hotel, Lord Johnny had cheered up sufficiently to order a bottle of Chassagne-Montrachet with the fish.

  ‘We’re celebrating,’ he told the wine waiter. ‘I saw three kestrels and a hawk today.’

  2

  The blinds were tightly drawn. The door was locked and bolted. Two lamps cast fitful light over the long table. At one end was a large pile of newspapers and magazines. Lined up along the table, in four untidy rows, were the letters of the alphabet, cut loosely from their pages. The hands moved awkwardly with the paste as they composed a new message. Quite often the hands spilt paste on to the table or on to the floor. The hands had always been bad at art at school, always bottom of the class. This Sunday afternoon another message was almost complete, capital letters used in the middle of words, full stops in the wrong place, the letters themselves set at irregular angles on the page. The artist began to giggle, quietly at first, then almost hysterically as the message was completed. Tomorrow the message would go to London. There it would be posted in an obscure West End postbox. As the hands tidied up the letters and opened the blinds once more, the giggling stopped.

  ‘I’ve always thought London is much more interesting at this time of the morning,’ said Rosebery to Powerscourt as the two men set off to walk from Rosebery’s house in Berkeley Square to their meeting with Private Secretary Suter at Marlborough House. A thin rain was falling, dusting the hats of the wealthy and the caps of the poor. At a quarter to nine the streets were jammed, not with the carriages of the rich, but with the deliveries that made their life possible: hams, geese, truffles, oysters, cases of claret and champagne. Carts laden with coal rubbed up against the lighter vehicles of the window-cleaners; local bakers’ boys were handing over great sheaves of loaves to undercooks on the pavements. Here and there an anxious butler or senior footman could be seen hovering around a furniture van with instructions to beware of the Queen Anne table in the hall and not to hit any of the banisters on the way up the great staircases.

  The aristocrats of the early morning round were the liveried carriages of the great shops of London, the pale green of Fortnum and Mason, the dark green of Harrods, the dark blue of Berry Brothers and Rudd. At the bottom of Berkeley Street, just where it joined the fashionable artery of Piccadilly, three coalmen were locked in furious argument with a young Turk from Justerini and Brooks who refused to give way.

  ‘I don’t expect this will be an easy meeting,’ said Lord Rosebery, picking his way delicately past a grocer’s van that had drawn up on the pavement. ‘Anyone dealing with the Royal Family has first to negotiate between the Scylla and Charybdis of the two Private Secretaries. Sir George Trevelyan, the keeper of Victoria’s chamber, and Sir William Suter, the guardian for the Prince of Wales, have raised procrastination to an art form and obfuscation to depths undreamt of by Niccolo Machiavelli. They rarely say yes. They seldom say no. But between those two extremes they have made all negotiations into a perilous voyage, with many squalls for the unwary and little prospect of a safe arrival at the final destination. It is one thing to decide to send for you, my dear Powerscourt. It may be quite another to do something about any proposals you may have. I presume you have some crumbs of thought to bring to our humble table this morning?’

  ‘I have indeed.’ Powerscourt smiled, pausing only to look at the arsenal of weaponry on display in the windows of London’s most exclusive and most expensive gun shop in St James’s Street.

  ‘I have spent much time reading in the London Library. I have spent even more time talking to my two sisters who move about on the fringes of the Marlborough House set.’

  A junior footman showed them up to the Private Secretary’s office on the second floor. It was a large well-proportioned room with high ceilings and tall windows that looked out over the gardens to St James’s Park.

  ‘May I introduce the Treasurer and Comptroller of His Royal Highness’s Household, General Sir Bartle Shepstone?’ Sir William had the impeccable manners of the well-tempered courtier.

  The four men sat down round a table next to the window. To the right was a huge desk, cluttered with papers and correspondence, the raw material, Powerscourt presumed, of Suter’s world. A full-length portrait of the Princess of Wales, standing by the lake at Sandringham, looked out at them from its command post above the fireplace.

  ‘Let me say first of all how grateful we are for your presence here this morning,’ Suter began, blessing each of them in turn with a wintry smile.

  Sir William was tall, slightly stooped, with a high forehead and a well-tended moustache. His face, as Powerscourt observed it over the months ahead, was one of the most unusual he had ever seen. Years of dealing with the scandals of the Prince of Wales, scandals he knew about, scandals he could only suspect, had trained him to lock all expression out of his face. The grey eyes were always opaque. Neither smile nor grimace touched his lips. Sir William’s face betrayed no emotions at all. Suter was a Sphinx.

  ‘I presume, Lord Rosebery, that you have acquainted Lord Powerscourt with the information I imparted to you at our last meeting about the extortionate demands made of the Prince of Wales and the method of delivery?’

  Rosebery nodded gravely. Extortionate demands, thought Powerscourt, that’s not bad as a circumlocution for blackmail.

  ‘We at our end of Pall Mall have naturally been giving thought to what might lie behind such unreasonable behaviour. We have been trying to identify the circumstances in which an extortionist could feel that a Prince of the Crown might prefer to offer some pecuniary obviation to prevent unfortunate outbreaks of publicity.’

  ‘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 disa
ppeared 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.

  Memorandum

  From: Sir William Suter

  To: Lord Rosebery, Lord Powerscourt.

  At issue are the complicated relationships that have developed between Lord Beresford, his wife Lady Charles Beresford, Lady Brooke and HRH The Prince of Wales. The events go back a number of years. These are the salient facts. Definite information about dates is sometimes difficult to ascertain.

  Lord Charles Beresford forms a close friendship with Frances Maynard, Lady Brooke. This friendship lasts for a year or more and begins to become the subject of adverse comment in certain sections of Society.

  Mindful of this, or of his position as an MP and junior member of the Government, Lord Beresford abandons the friendship and renews his marriage vows with Lady Charles.

&
nbsp; Lady Brooke, meanwhile, resents the fact that Lord Beresford appears to have annulled their friendship and returned to his proper station. Her anger is further fuelled when she learns that Lady Charles is with child.

  Lady Brooke writes a most intemperate letter to Lord Charles in which she pleads for him to return once more to her. This letter is full of compromising and embarrassing statements and should never have been despatched. Lady Brooke went so far as to suggest that Lord Beresford had no right to have issue with his own wife.

  Peradventure, the letter is opened and read not by Lord Charles, as intended, but by Lady Charles. She is appalled by its contents and resolves to use the letter to undermine Lady Brooke’s position in Society.

  Lady Brooke throws herself on the mercy of the Prince of Wales. She appeals to him for help in recovering the letter before her position is seriously compromised. Lady Brooke forms a close friendship with HRH the Prince of Wales as she had before with Lord Beresford.

  Lady Charles gives the letter to London’s leading libel solicitor George Lewis for safe keeping. He writes a letter to Lady Brooke which incenses her further.

  The Prince of Wales pays a call on Mr Lewis and requests that he show him the letter. Mr Lewis acquiesces but refuses to part with it or to destroy it without the agreement of his client. That agreement is not forthcoming.

  Lord Beresford, wearied perchance of the intrigues of the women, returns to his earlier profession, the Navy. He takes command of a vessel in the Mediterranean.

  The friendship between Lady Brooke and the Prince of Wales also becomes the object of censure in the less well-bred quarters of society. Acting as the champion of Lady Brooke, the Prince of Wales ceases to invite Lady Beresford to Marlborough House and lets it be known that he will not attend any social event where she may be present.

  Lady Charles is deeply distressed at the social isolation in which she now finds herself. She writes to the Prime Minister, threatening to expose the friendship between the Prince of Wales and Lady Brooke to a wider public.