The House of Cards Complete Trilogy (52 page)

***

It was still dark when Mycroft woke, stirred by the clatter of milk bottles being deposited on doorsteps. Outside a new day was beginning, dragging him back to some semblance of reality. He was a reluctant captive. Kenny was still asleep, one toy bear from his immense collection propped precariously beside his pillow, the rest tumbled to the floor beside the Kleenex, victims of a long night’s loving. Every corner of Mycroft’s body ached, and still cried out for more. And somehow he would ensure he would get it, before he returned to the real world waiting beyond Kenny’s front door. The last few days had been like a new life for him, getting to know Kenny, getting to know himself, becoming lost in the mysteries and rites of a world he scarcely knew. There had been times at Eton and university, of course, during those days of the hash-smoking, free-for-all, do-everything-screw-anything sixties, but that had proved to be a limited voyage of self-discovery that had been all too self-indulgent and lacking in direction ever to be complete. He had never fallen in love, never had the chance, his affairs had been all too brief and hedonistic. With time he might have gotten to know himself better, but then had come the call from the Palace, a summons that did not allow for exhaustive and, at that time, illegal sexual experimentation. And so for more than twenty years he had pretended. Pretended he didn’t look at men as anything other than colleagues. Pretended that he was happy with Fiona. Pretended that he wasn’t who he knew he was. It had been a necessary sacrifice but now, for the first time in his life, he had begun to be completely honest with himself, to be his own person. At last his feet had touched bottom. He was in at the deep end, not knowing whether he had been pushed by Fiona or had jumped, but it didn’t matter. He was there. He knew he might drown in the depths, but it was better than drowning in corrupt respectability.

He wished Fiona could see him now and hoped she would be hurt, disgusted even; it was like shitting all over their marriage and everything she stood for. But she probably wouldn’t give a damn. He’d found more passion in the last few days than he had experienced during the entire course of his marriage, enough to last him a lifetime perhaps, though he hoped there would be more. Much more.

The real world was waiting for him outside and he knew he would have to return to it soon. Leave this Kenny-Come-Lately, perhaps for good. He had no illusions about his new lover, with a teddy in every port “and a Franky and a Miguel too,” he had bragged. Once the adrenaline of initiation had worn off Mycroft doubted whether he would have the physical stamina to keep hold of a man twenty years his junior with a velvet skin and a tongue that was both inexhaustible and utterly uninhibited, but it would be fun trying. Before he returned to the real world…

Could an incorrigible air steward with the inhibitions of a Calcuttan street dog coexist beside the duties and obligations of his other world? He wanted it to be, but he knew others would not let him, not if they knew, not if they found him here amid the clutter of teddy bears, underpants, and dirty towels. They would say he was failing the King. But if he ran away now, he would be failing himself, and wouldn’t that be far worse?

He was still confused but happy, more elated than he could remember, and he would remain that way so long as he stayed beneath this duvet and didn’t venture outside that front door. Kenny was stirring now, his long-haul tan stretching all the way from the stubble on his chin to the trunk line just above his white buttocks. Damn it, let Kenny decide. He leaned over, ran his lips across Kenny’s neck just where the vertebrae protruded, and started working his way down.

***

As he waited, Benjamin Landless gazed at the barrel-vaulted ceiling, illuminated by six great chandeliers, where Italianate plaster cherubs with pouting cheeks chased each other through an abundance of clouds, gilded stars, and spectacular plasterwork squiggles. He hadn’t been to a carol service in more than thirty years and he’d never before been inside St. Martin-in-the-Fields but, as he always mused, life is full of new experiences. Or at least new victims.

She had a reputation for being late for everything except meals, and this evening was no exception. The drive was less than three miles, complete with police motorcycle escort, from Kensington Palace to the fine Hanoverian church overlooking Trafalgar Square, but presumably she would make some asinine excuse like getting stuck in the traffic. Or perhaps as a Royal Princess she no longer bothered making excuses.

Landless did not know Her Royal Highness Princess Charlotte well. They had only met twice before, at public receptions, and he wanted to meet her more informally. He was not a man who accepted delay or excuses, particularly from the chinless and indigent son of minor nobility he paid twenty grand a year for “consulting services”—which meant fixing private lunches or soirées with whomever he wanted to meet. Even Landless had to compromise this time, however; the Princess’s Christmas schedule was so hectic as she prepared for seasonal festivities and the Austrian piste that sharing a private box at a carol service was as good as he was going to get, and even that had cost him a hefty donation to the Princess’s favorite children’s charity. Still, charitable donations came from a private trust set up by his accountants to mitigate his tax position and he had found that a few carefully targeted donations could bring him, if not acceptability, then at least access and invitations. And they were worth paying for, particularly for a boy from Bethnal Green.

At last she was there; the organist struck up the strains of Handel’s
Messiah
and the clergy, choristers, and acolytes processed down the aisle. As they peeled off to occupy their allotted positions, in the Royal Box above their heads Landless nodded respectfully while she smiled from beneath the broad brim of a matador’s hat, and the service began. Their seating was, indeed, private, at gallery level and beneath a finely carved eighteenth-century canopy affording them a view of the choir but keeping her at some distance from most of the congregation, who in any event were largely Christmas tourists or refugees from the cold streets. She leaned across to whisper as the choir struck up their interpretation of “O Come O Come Emmanuel.”

“I’m dying for a pee. Had to rush here straight from lunch.”

Landless had no need to consult his watch to know that it was already past five thirty. Some lunch. He could smell stale wine on her breath. The Princess was renowned for her bluntness: putting people at their ease, as her defenders argued; displaying her basic coarseness and congenital lack of authentic style, according to her rather greater number of detractors. She had married into the Royal Family, the daughter of an undistinguished family who counted more actuaries than aristocrats among their number, a fact of which the less respectful members of the press never ceased to remind their readers. Still, she had done her job, allowing her name to be used by endless charities, opening new hospital wings, cutting the ribbons, feeding the gossip columns and providing the nation with a daughter and two sons, the elder of whom would inherit the throne if some dozen of his more senior royal relatives all suddenly succumbed. “A disaster waiting for a disaster,” as the
Daily
Mail
had once ungraciously described her after a dinner during which she had been overheard suggesting that her son would make an excellent monarch.

She looked at Landless quizzically. There were small, fragile creases underneath and at the corners of her slate-green eyes that became more prominent when she frowned, and the flesh at the bottom of her neck was beginning to lose its elasticity, as happened with women of her age, but she still retained much of the good looks and appeal for which the Prince had married her all those years ago, ignoring the advice of his closest friends.

“You’ve not come here to write some scandalous nonsense about me, have you?” she demanded roughly.

“There are enough journalists in the gutter taking advantage of your family without my joining in.”

She nodded in agreement, the brim of her hat bobbing up and down in front of her face. “Occupational hazard. But what can one do about it? You can’t lock an entire family away, even a Royal one, not in this day and age. We’ve got to be allowed to participate like other people.”

It was her endless refrain of complaint and justification: Let us be an ordinary family. Yet her desire to be ordinary had never stopped her embracing the paparazzi, dragging all the First Women of Fleet Street backstage behind the royal footlights to write gushing tributes, being seen eating at London’s most fashionable restaurants and sedulously ensuring she received more column inches than most other members of the Royal Family, including her husband. With each passing year her desire not to fade from the spotlight had grown more apparent. It was part of being a modern Monarchy, she had contended, not getting oneself cut off, being able to join in. It was an argument borrowed from the King before he ascended the throne, but it was one she had never understood. He had been seeking to find a concrete but constitutional role for the heir, while she saw it in terms of being able to find some form of personal fulfillment and excitement to take the place of a family life that had largely ceased to exist.

They nodded deferentially through a prayer before picking up the conversation during the reading of the lesson from Isaiah—“For a boy has been born for us, a son given to us, to bear the symbol of dominion on his shoulder; and he shall be called…”

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about, the gutter press.”

She leaned closer and he tried to shift his bulk around in the narrow chair, but it was an unequal struggle.

“There’s a story going around that I’m afraid could do you harm.”

“Not counting the empty liquor bottles in my dustbin again?”

“A story that you’re getting designer clothes worth thousands of pounds from leading fashion houses and somehow forgetting to pay for them.”

“That old rubbish! Been floating around for years. Look, I’m the best advertisement those designers have. Why else would they still keep sending me clothes? They get so much free publicity, it’s me who ought to be charging them.”

“As they offered gifts most rare, At Thy cradle rude and bare,” the choir rang out.

“That’s only part of it, Ma’am. The story goes that you are then taking these clothes that have been…donated, shall we say, and selling them for cash to your friends.”

There was a moment of guilty silence before she responded, deeply irritated. “What do they know? It’s nonsense. Can’t possibly have any evidence. Who, tell me who. Who’s supposed to have these bloody clothes?”

“Amanda Braithwaite. Your former flatmate, Serena Chiselhurst. Lady Olga Wickham-Fumess. The Honorable Mrs. Pamela Orpington. To name but four. The last lady received an exclusive Oldfield evening dress and an Yves St. Laurent suit, complete with accessories. You received one thousand pounds. According to the report.”

“There’s no evidence for these allegations,” the Princess snapped in a strangulated whisper. “Those girls would never—”

“They don’t need to. Those clothes are bought to wear, to show off. The evidence is all in a series of photographs of you and these other ladies taken over the last few months, quite properly, in public places.” He paused. “And there’s a check stub.”

She considered in silence for a moment, finding reassurance lacking as the choir sang sentiments of bleak midwinter and frosty winds.

“Won’t look too good, will it. There’ll be a bloody stink.” She sounded deflated, the self-confidence waning. She studied her gloves intently for a moment, distractedly smoothing out the creases. “I’m expected to be in five different places a day, never wearing the same outfit twice. I work damned hard to make other people happy, to bring a little Royal pleasure into their lives. I help to raise millions, literally millions, every year for charity. For others. Yet I am expected to do it all on the pittance I get from the Civil List. It’s impossible.” Her voice had become a whisper as she took in the inevitability of what Landless had said. “Oh, stuff it all,” she sighed.

“Don’t worry, Ma’am. I think I’m in a position to acquire these photographs and ensure they never see the light of day.”

She looked up from the gloves, relief and gratitude swelling in her eyes. Not for a moment did she realize that Landless already had the photographs, that they had been taken on his explicit instructions after a tip-off from one of the women’s disgruntled Spanish au pair who had overheard a telephone conversation and stolen the check stub.

“But that’s not really the point, is it,” Landless continued. “We need to find some way of ensuring you don’t run into this sort of trouble ever again. I know what it’s like to be the victim of constant press sneering. I feel we’re in this together. I’m British, born and bred and proud of it, and I’ve no time for those foreign creeps who own half our national press yet who don’t understand or care a fig about what makes this country great.”

Her shoulders stiffened under the impact of his bombastic flattery as the vicar began an appeal for help to the homeless built heavily around images of insensitive innkeepers and quotations from the annual report of a housing action charity.

“I’d like to offer you a consultancy with one of my companies. Entirely confidential, only you and me to know about it. I provide you with a suitable retainer, and in return you give me a few days of your time. Open one or two of our new offices. Meet some of my important foreign business contacts over lunch. Perhaps host an occasional dinner at the Palace. And I’d love to do something like that on the Royal Yacht, if that’s possible. But you tell me.”

“How much?”

“A dozen times a year, perhaps.”

“No. How much money?”

“A hundred thousand. Plus a guarantee of favorable coverage and exclusive interviews in my newspapers.”

“What’s in it for you?”

“The chance to get to know you. Meet the King. Get some great PR support for me and my business. Get the sort of exclusive Royal coverage that sells newspapers. Do you need more?”