David Dickinson: Goodnight Sweet Prince

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.

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.