David Dickinson - Goodnight Sweet Prince

He was nearing open country now. The Victorian villas had stopped their relentless advance along the river bank and the spire of St Nicholas’ Church was behind him. There were no lights to be seen ahead, only the flickering of the moon across the water as the clouds scudded overhead. As he rounded a bend Prince Eddy could see a large house in the distance. That was his destination.

A mere eighteen months before, the nation had been shocked by the Cleveland Street scandal when a house at No. 19 was exposed as a homosexual brothel, run by a certain Charles Hammond. The scandal deepened when it was revealed that Lord Frederick Ravenscourt, an equerry to the Prince of Wales and to Prince Eddy, had been involved and had fled the country to escape disgrace or to avoid implicating his masters. The homosexual elite of London had reacted promptly. They abandoned Cleveland Street and began a six-month search for more suitable accommodation. They found Brandon House ideal for their purposes.

It sat in its own grounds a mile from Hammersmith Bridge in one direction, and the same distance from Barnes Railway Bridge to the west. To the north there was nothing between it and the grounds of Chiswick House where Eddy had played as a boy. South was the river, and the staff of Brandon House kept two boats permanently moored, oars tucked into the sides, in case a rapid escape was needed to the green fields of Barnes on the other side.

The Club, as it was known, had a very special set of rules. The entry fee was ?500. The Club operated on the principle of mutual blackmail to survive. Membership was by personal recommendation only. And then the Club’s management, half seriously referred to by the members as the Star Chamber, took and checked the names and addresses of two close family relatives of each member – wives, mothers, brothers, sisters. Any breach of the society’s rules, which were remarkably strict, led to immediate disclosure, first to the family and then, if necessary, to the newspapers. Two well-known suicides of the previous decade were attributed by those in the know to the activities of the Star Chamber.

The house was built in the late eighteenth century. It had a kitchen in the basement, three grand reception rooms on the ground floor and a series of bedrooms on the two floors above. All the windows on the first two floors were heavily shuttered. The house rarely opened its doors before nine o’clock in the evening in summer and six o’clock in winter. Thin beams of light were shining through the shutters as Eddy entered the drive.

The staff of the Club were all former sergeant majors or petty officers from the Navy who encouraged proper discipline in the running of the Club’s affairs. Its finances were looked after by a distinguished banker, its legal problems, on the rare occasions it attracted them, by a couple of MPs and a High Court judge. Once a month there was a masked ball. Once a year there was a fancy dress party when historical figures ranging from the Marquis de Sade to Cleopatra graced the White Drawing Room. And as he unbuttoned his gloves and greeted the duty porter the Duke of Clarence and Avondale was told: ‘Good evening, sir. All the normal services are available this evening.’

‘Just look at this thing, Johnny, look at it for God’s sake.’

Powerscourt and his friend Lord Johnny Fitzgerald were in a small sitting-room on the top floor of his sister’s house in St James’s Square. It was known in the house as Uncle Francis’ room. The presence of some scattered toys showed that his nephews were regular visitors.

‘I mean, you’ve got to laugh really. They’re so pompous, those Marlborough House people.’ Powerscourt was holding a couple of letters up to the light. ‘Twelve days ago Rosebery and I go to see Private Secretary Suter at Marlborough House. He says that he needs more time to consider some of the proposals I put to him, the ones we discussed at Rokesley, if you recall.’

Lord Johnny nodded, thinking more of the bottle of Chassagne-Montrachet with the fish than the minutiae of detection. He was working his way down a mere bottle of Chablis this evening.

‘Of course, we said. So Suter says that he will let me know in a couple of days. After that I get the first little billet-doux, which I’ve got here somewhere,’ Powerscourt looked around desperately as if it might be hiding behind one of his nephews’ battered Roman legionnaires, ‘and then I got this second one here today.’ Powerscourt waved the missive up and down and began to read.

‘“Marlborough House, Pall Mall et cetera, et cetera. My dear Powerscourt, Please accept my humble apologies for the apparent procrastination in response to your proposals. We have been in receipt of another of those blackmailing messages. It referred to the fact that HRH the Prince of Wales had been in Easton Lodge with Lady Brooke. It commented, again, that the ordinary people of Britain would not countenance his behaviour and the monarchy would be brought down in scandal and disgrace.

‘“Turning to the substance of your proposals, I regret to have to inform you that we require a further period of consultation and clarification before we can give you any more definite reply. It would be helpful if you could furnish us with a written memorandum outlining what we discussed in more detail. This would enable the consultation with colleagues to proceed at a more expeditious pace. I look forward to hearing from you. Your humble servant et cetera, et cetera.”

‘There,’ said Powerscourt, ‘you could win prizes for that lot. The Suter Prize, awarded annually to first year undergraduates for the most pompous piece of prose in England. And why should I write anything down? Do I not have my own little state secrets, my own red boxes, which are not to be passed around after dinner at Marlborough House or left on the billiard table at that Marlborough Club just a dice throw away across the street?’

Fitzgerald laughed, examining the label on his bottle of Chablis very closely. ‘Never mind, Francis, never mind. Do you think that new blackmail message is important? Do you suppose the Beresfords have opened up a little newspaper cutting and pasting operation over there in Eaton Square, that they are the blackmailers?’

‘They could be, of course they could be. But the messages could just as easily have come from the Archbishop of Canterbury or the Foreign Secretary for all I know. Anybody could have sent the things. They could even have come from inside Marlborough House itself.’ Powerscourt was fiddling absent-mindedly with a one-legged member of Napoleon’s Imperial Guard, wounded in battle with a nephew.

‘Why don’t I tell you what I have discovered since our evening in Oundle? It’s not very much, but it’s better than nothing.’

‘Very good, Johnny. Tell me all.’

‘Now then,’ said Fitzgerald, ‘you remember we talked about Prince Eddy and whether or not he might be involved in the world of male brothels?’

Powerscourt’s eye was drawn to one of his many paintings of the Battle of Waterloo. It showed a British regiment of the line forming square at Quatre Bras forty-eight hours before the great engagement itself. In the centre of the square stood the massive figure of a Regimental Sergeant Major guarding the flag of the Union and the colours of the regiment. Standing and firing was one half of the men in the square. Kneeling in the front row, bayonets poised to impale any French cavalry who dared approach, was the rest of the detachment, some of them little more than boys, shouting cheerful defiance at the enemy. On the fringes of the picture French cavalry whirled, lances raised, unable to break through. Around the participants there swirled the smoke from the rifles and the distant firings of the great guns.