David Dickinson: Goodnight Sweet Prince

‘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.’

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 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.