David Dickinson: Goodnight Sweet Prince

‘I do, indeed I do. But in my case they are mostly brothers. Men are so obvious in these matters, they’ve nearly given up on me now. Sisters, I should think, are more devious.’

‘They certainly are,’ said Powerscourt, ‘and I have three of them. Like the three witches in Macbeth, endlessly stirring at their noxious brew, eye of this and hair of that. They stalk the streets of St James’s at night, you know, potions bubbling in their hands.’ Powerscourt drew his long fingers into the shape of a goblet and held it up to the candles.

‘I can’t believe they are as bad as all that, Lord Francis. I do have one very tiresome aunt, though.’ Lady Lucy leaned forward to impress on her companion the gravity of her relations’ behaviour. ‘She doesn’t invite what she considers to be suitable men one at a time, but in bundles of three or four at a single sitting. Repulsing one decent but undesirable male is not very difficult, but three or four can be very hard. But come, Lord Powerscourt. Let us be serious if only for a moment. One of your sisters told me that your wife and son were lost at sea some years ago?’

‘Indeed they were. And your husband, Lady Lucy?’

‘He went with General Gordon to the Sudan. He never came back. I cannot remember if they were meant to conquer the country or to give it back to the natives. It doesn’t matter now. At least I have my little boy to remember him by.’

‘Let us not trade sorrow for sorrow over the sorbet,’ said Powerscourt as the duck was taken away .’How old is your little boy?’

‘Robert is seven now.’

Lady Lucy was suddenly aware that she had broken one of the golden rules in this sort of conversation. ‘Don’t tell them you have a child,’ her mother and her brothers had always urged her. Well, she didn’t care if she had broken it. Lord Francis seemed a lot more pleasant than the usual run of sporting bores she met at her brothers’ houses.

The middle of the room was dominated by a full-length portrait of Lady Rosalind, painted by Whistler just before her marriage to Lord Pembridge. Against a grey background, Powerscourt’s sister looked radiant in black, her eyes sparkling merrily out of the picture.

At the far end of the table Powerscourt’s other brother-in-law William Burke was holding forth about American railway stocks and South American bonds. At his end the conversation had turned to the prose of Cicero.

‘That’s what I started on when I began to teach myself Latin all over again. I thought I could help Robert, you see,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘I always found it quite easy to translate but rather boring after a while. All those orotund periods seem to strike the same sort of rhythm, don’t you think?’

Powerscourt agreed wholeheartedly. Was she moving on to Sallust or Tacitus, he inquired, and he began a long exposition of how simply untranslatable Tacitus was, just untranslatable.

‘Honestly, darling,’ Lady Rosalind said to her husband late that night after all the guests had gone. ‘Francis makes all that fuss about one extra person coming to dinner. Then they manage to have a distinctly flirtatious conversation about some dead Roman author called Tacitus. Getting on famously, they were. But I don’t think he liked the duck. Was there anything wrong with the duck, Pembridge?’

‘There was nothing wrong with the duck, my dear,’ said her husband loyally. ‘But you can’t have flirtations on the subject of dead Roman authors, Rosalind.’

‘Oh yes you can. I only heard one of the bits he was quoting to Lady Lucy, but they sounded fairly rich to me. Their eyes were talking and I haven’t seen our Francis’ eyes like that for years.’

‘Come to mention it,’ said her husband, ‘I think I heard them arranging to meet for luncheon at the National Gallery the day after tomorrow.’

‘Really,’ said Lady Rosalind. ‘I wonder if Lady Lucy mightn’t be the one after all.’

‘There you go again,’ groaned Lord Pembridge. ‘They’ve only met for a couple of hours at a dinner party and you are marching them up the aisle already. Not so fast.’

‘Don’t be so sure,’ said Lady Rosalind.

Lady Lucy went to sleep that night thinking about Powerscourt’s deep voice and his hands with their long thin fingers. Powerscourt went to sleep thinking of the toss of Lady Lucy’s head and her deep blue eyes.

The man collected his parcel from the blacksmith when it was dark. As well as his normal duties the blacksmith sharpened knives, a skill he had learnt in his previous career in the Army, sparks from knives old and blunt flying from his stone. The blacksmith didn’t know why he had been asked to sharpen this one in secret, without anybody knowing about it. He didn’t bother with things like that, he just liked getting on with his work.

The man unwrapped his parcel in a locked room. He took off layer after layer of paper. The blacksmith had used a lot of oil. The knife glistened in the firelight, distorted reflections of the room dancing on its silvery surface. Very gently he put his finger to the side of the blade. Even that brought a thin flow of blood. The man smiled and put the knife in a black sheath designed by its German makers. He tried putting it inside his boot. It fitted perfectly. The man smiled again.

Prince Eddy, Duke of Clarence and Avondale, eldest son of the Prince of Wales, was saying his farewells to his mother in the hall of Marlborough House. Twenty-eight years of maternal devotion had not dimmed the sadness Princess Alexandra felt at losing her eldest, even for an evening.

‘Wrap up warm, darling. Have you got your gloves? And your scarf?’

Most young men would have felt deeply embarrassed at this display of affection more suitable to a child of eight or nine. But Eddy didn’t care very much.

‘Of course I have, Mother dear. Don’t worry about me. I shall be back presently.’ He kissed his mother affectionately on the cheek.

Eddy didn’t care very much about anything. That was part of his problem. If only, he thought, as he hailed a cab passing in front of Marlborough House, if only they would leave me alone. All his life, he reflected, as the cab made its way towards Hammersmith, somebody had been after him to do things. When he was small they wanted him to learn things in books. Eddy hadn’t seen much point in that. Then they’d sent him off to join the Navy and a different lot of somebodies had wanted him to learn another set of tricks. Climbing up ropes. Navigation with horrid maps and set squares and something mysterious called trigonometry. Knots. Eddy couldn’t see much point in that. There was always somebody else to tie your knots for you and nobody in their right mind was ever going to ask him to navigate anywhere. Then there was the Army. Yet another lot of somebodies tried to persuade him to march correctly, to grasp the rules of war, whatever they were, to learn how to command men and armies. Eddy couldn’t see much point in that either though there were some fine fellows in the Army who became his friends.

And all the time people had kept on reminding him who he was and what he would inherit one day. And what his duty was. Eddy didn’t want his grandmother to die. He didn’t want his father to die. Least of all did he want his mother to die. Only after two of those deaths could his awful duty come upon him. That duty was still some way off. Anyway, he reflected, as he stepped out of his cab by Hammersmith Bridge, he had watched his father doing his duty all his life. He proposed to follow his example, but in his own way.

The wind was getting up as Eddy walked along the river bank towards Chiswick, flecking the dark waters with little spots of cream. A couple of barges, heavily laden, were trudging purposefully up the Thames. Eddy was wearing a plain grey suit and a dark coat, trying to look as much like his future subjects as he could. As he passed another tavern the sounds of raucous laughter floated out into the street. A flock of seagulls hovered expectantly around the water’s edge.