Read The House of Cards Complete Trilogy Online
Authors: Michael Dobbs
The House of Cards Complete Trilogy (42 page)
To mark this new lease of life for FU, I’ve taken the opportunity of reworking the novel—no great changes, no one who read the original will think it a different book, but the narrative is a little tighter, the characters more colorful, and the dialogue perhaps crisper. I’ve revisited it in order to repay some of the pleasure that
House of Cards
has given me during all these years. What has remained constant is the novel’s unashamed wickedness. Bathe in it. Enjoy.
So was it worth that drubbing by Maggie Thatcher? Well, what’s that phrase? You might say that, but I couldn’t possibly comment.
Michael Dobbs
Lord Dobbs of Wylye
@dobbs_michael
Copyright © 1992, 2014 by Michael Dobbs
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
Published by Sourcebooks Landmark, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.
P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410
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Fax: (630) 961-2168
Originally published in 1992 in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is on file with the publisher.
To Play the King
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Forty
Forty-One
Forty-Two
Forty-Three
Forty-Four
Forty-Five
Forty-Six
Introduction
When I wrote
To
Play
the
King
in 1990 as a sequel to
House
of
Cards
, it was partly because I believed that the Royal yacht was heading for turbulent waters. And so it proved to be. I wrote about fractured marriages, financial scandal, political controversy, and public humiliations, and for the next few years the Royal Family seemed to follow the script with breathless tenacity. At times it seemed as though various individuals were openly auditioning for parts in the story. If my book was intended to be by way of a warning, as I suppose it was, it failed completely. The House of Windsor was to endure some of its worst moments. The yacht nearly sank and some members of the crew were thrown overboard.
My fictional king isn’t simply a version of Prince Charles—there have been many heirs to the throne who have gotten themselves into difficulties and I took a little inspiration from more than one—but it was inevitable that some comparisons would be made. At the time I began writing it was clear that his marriage was falling apart, despite all the official denials, so I decided that my kingly character would have no wife. I hope none of what I wrote amounted to disrespect because that is not what I intended.
In any event, despite those dire years, both he and the institution have displayed their tenacity and powers of recovery, and today they stand higher in public esteem than they have for decades. The royal yacht sails on.
And so does FU. Nearly thirty years after I created him he has developed a life of his own, in books, on global television, as a character who has been quoted both in Parliament and the press. Do you suspect he might even have been muttered about in the corners of various palaces? Well, you might say that but I am not going to comment…
M. D. 2013
Prologue
Away with kings. They take up too much room.
It was the day they would put him to death.
They led him through the park, penned in by two companies of infantrymen. The crowd was thick and he had spent much of the night wondering how they would react when they saw him. With tears? Jeers? Try to snatch him to safety or spit on him in contempt? It depended who had paid them best. But there was no outburst; they stood in silence, dejected, cowed, still not believing what was about to take place in their name. A young woman cried out and fell in a dead faint as he passed, but nobody tried to impede his progress across the frost-hard ground. The guards were hurrying him on.
Within minutes they were in Whitehall, where he was lodged in a small room. It was just after ten o’clock on a January morning, and he expected at any moment to hear the knock on the door that would summon him. But something had delayed them; they didn’t come until nearly two. Four hours of waiting, of demons gnawing at his courage, of feeling himself fall to pieces inside. During the night he had achieved a serenity and sense of inner peace, almost a state of grace, but with the heavy passage of unexpected minutes, growing into hours, the calm was replaced by a sickening sense of panic that began somewhere in his brain and stretched right through his body to pour into his bladder and his bowels. His thoughts became scrambled and the considered words, crafted with such care to illuminate the justice of his cause and impeach their twisted logic, were suddenly gone. He dug his fingernails deep into his palms; somehow he would find the words, when the time came.
The door opened. The captain stood in the dark entrance and gave a curt, somber nod of his helmeted head. No need for words. They took him and within seconds he was in the Banqueting Hall, a place he cherished with its Rubens ceiling and magnificent oaken doors, but he had difficulty in making out the details through the unnatural gloom. The tall windows had been partially bricked up and boarded during the war to provide better defensive positions. Only at one of the farther windows was there light where the masonry and barricades had been torn down and a harsh gray glow surrounded the hole, like the entrance to another world. The corridor formed by the line of soldiers led directly to it.
My God, but it was cold. He’d had nothing to eat since yesterday, he’d refused the meal they had offered, and he was grateful for the second shirt he had asked for, to prevent him shivering. It wouldn’t do to be seen to shiver. They would think it was fear.
He climbed up two rough wooden steps and bowed his head as he crossed the threshold of the window, onto a platform they had erected immediately outside. There were half a dozen other men on the freshly built wooden stage while every point around was crammed by teeming thousands, on foot, on carriages, on roofs, leaning from windows and other vantage points. Surely now there would be some response? But as he stepped out into the harsh light and their view, their restlessness froze in the icy wind and the huddled figures stood silent and sullen, ever incredulous. It still could not be.
Driven into the stage on which he stood were four iron staples. They would rope him down, spread-eagled between the staples, if he struggled, yet it was but one more sign of how little they understood him. He would not struggle. He had been born to a better end than that. He would but speak his few words to the throng and that would be sufficient. He prayed that the weakness he felt in his knees would not betray him; surely he had been betrayed enough. They handed him a small cap into which with great care he tucked his hair, as if preparing for nothing more than a walk through the park with his wife and children. He must make a fine show of it. He dropped his cloak to the ground so that he might be better seen.
Heavens! The cold cut through him as if the frost were reaching for his racing heart and turning it straightway to stone. He took a deep, searing breath to recover from the shock. He must not tremble! And there was the captain of his guard, already in front of him, beads of sweat on his brow despite the weather.
“Just a few words, Captain. I would say a few words.” He racked his mind in search of them.
The captain shook his head.
“For the love of God, the commonest man in all the world has the right to a few words.”
“Your few words would be more than my life is worth, sir.”
“As my words and thoughts are more than my life to me. It is my beliefs that have brought me to this place, Captain. I will share them one last time.”
“I cannot let you. Truly, I am sorry. But I cannot.”
“Will you deny me even now?” The composure in his voice had been supplanted by the heat of indignation and a fresh wave of panic. It was all going wrong.
“Sir, it is not in my hands. Forgive me.”
The captain reached out to touch him on the arm but the prisoner stepped back and his eyes burned in rebuke. “You may silence me, but you will never make me what I am not. I am no coward, Captain. I have no need of your arm!”
The captain withdrew, chided.
The time had come. There would be no more words, no more delay. No hiding place. This was the moment when both they and he would peer deep inside and discover what sort of man he truly was. He took another searing lungful of air, clinging to it as long as he could as he looked to the heavens. The priest had intoned that death was the ultimate triumph over worldly evil and pain but he discovered no inspiration, no shaft of sunlight to mark his way, no celestial salvation, only the hard steel sky of an English winter. He realized his fists remained clenched with the nails biting into the flesh of his palms; he forced his palms open and down the side of his trousers. A quiet prayer. Another breath. Then he bent, thanking God that his knees still had sufficient strength to guide him, lowering himself slowly and gracefully as he had practiced in his room during the night, and lay stretched out on the rough wooden platform.
Still from the crowd there came no sound. His words might not have lifted or inspired them, but at least they would have vindicated. He was drenched in fury as the overwhelming injustice of it all hit him. Not even a chance to explain. He looked despairingly once more into the faces of the people, the men and women in whose name both sides had fought the war and who stood there now with blank stares, ever uncomprehending pawns. Yet, dullards all, they were his people, for whose salvation he was bound to fight against those who would corrupt the law for their own benefit. He had lost, but the justice of his cause would surely be known in the end. In the end. He would do it all again, if he had another chance, another life. It was his duty, he would have no choice. No more choice than he had now on this bare wooden stage, which still smelt of resin and fresh sawdust. And they would understand, wouldn’t they? In the end…?
A plank creaked beside his left ear. The faces of the crowd seemed frozen in time, like a vast mural in which no one moved. His bladder was going—was it the cold or sheer terror? How much longer…? Concentrate, a prayer perhaps? Concentrate! He set on a small boy, no more than eight years old, in rags, with a dribble of crumbs on his dirt-smeared chin, who had stopped chewing his hunk of loaf and whose innocent brown eyes had grown wide with expectation and were focused on a point about a foot above his head. By God, but it was cold, colder than he had ever known! And suddenly the words he had fought so hard to remember came rushing back to him, as though someone had unlocked his soul.