To Play the King

by Michael Dobbs

  TO PLAY THE KING

  MICHAEL DOBBS

  Harper Collins Publishers

  77-85 Fulham Palace Road Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

  Published by HarperCollins 1992

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

  Copyright © Michael Dobbs 1992

  The Author asserts the moral right 10 be identified as the author of this work

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 0 00 223886 1

  Set in Linotron Meridien by Rowland Phototypesetting Limited Bury St Edmunds. Suffolk Primed in Greai Britain by HarperCollinsManufacturing Glasgow

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,

  in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  Lucy and Andrei. For Medford 1971. For Fiskardon 1981. For Villars 1991. For everything

  .

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  My beloved Aunt started it all. In a midnight phone call after the showing of BBC TV's final episode of House of Cards she complained: 'They let the bastard get away with it!'

  And wasn't that the truth? In the original book I had awarded the honour of survival to the delectable political correspondent Mattie Storin, believing in truth, justice and the triumph of good. But those sinister people who run the BBC's drama department are made of sterner stuff and, deciding that virtuous heroines are not to conquer the Nineties, reversed the ending to leave the evil Francis Urquhart triumphant and my poor, desirable heroine lying trampled on the cutting room floor. It was a wicked twist of fate which has brought me nothing but great good fortune and, long after the credits had finished rolling, left many people insisting on knowing what happened next.

  So my thanks to Ken Riddington, Paul Seed and Andrew Davies, a team of unique talent whose abilities pushed me into the instant resurrection business while they deservedly picked up awards around the globe. And, most particularly, my gratitude goes to Ian Richardson. His electrifying portrayal of Francis Urquhart will live with me for a lifetime.

  There are many others I want to acknowledge. John Hanvey held my hand through the murky parts of the opinion polling business while Tony Hutt also held it through some of the murkier drinking establishments of London. Benjamin Mancroft lent me his wisdom, Charlotte Morrison one of her bedrooms and Tracy Macmunn her wardrobe and three years of her life. Chris Sear of the Public Information Office at the House of Commons was imaginative, patient and immensely resourceful in answering my obscure questions, as were Ian Nimmo and Tim Walker in the City and Sergeant Ian

  Allan in the firing ranges of Westminster. I am also indebted to Lord Callaghan of Cardiff, a Commander-in-Chief at Westminster when I was a foot-soldier in the opposing army. Many others, both high and humble, guided me through the labyrinthine passages of Buckingham Palace and Downing Street, but prefer to remain uncharacteristically coy. If anyone is to be taken to the Tower of London for extended incarceration, it shall be me alone. Oh . . . And thank you, Auntie.

  PROLOGUE

  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 which 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 finger nails 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, sombre 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 grey 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 ol 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 practised 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 stare, 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 smell 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.

  And in the year sixteen hundred and forty-nine, they took their liege lord King Charles Stuart, Defender of the Faith and by hereditary right King of Great Britain and Ireland, and they cut off his head.

  In the early hours of a winter's day, in a bedroom overlooking the forty-acre garden of a palace which hadn't existed at the time Charles Stuart took his walk into the next life, his descendant awoke with a start. The collar of his pyjama shirt clung damply and he lay face-down on a block-hard pillow stained with sweat, yet he felt as cold as ... As cold as death. He believed in the power of dreams and their ability to unravel the mysteries of the inner being, and it was his custom on waking to write down everything he could remember, reaching for the notebook he kept for the purpose beside his bed. But not this time. There was no need. He would never forget the smell of the crowd mixed with resin and sawdust nor the heavy metallic colour of the sky on that frost-ridden afternoon. Nor the innocent, expectant brown eyes of a boy with a dirty chin smeared with crumbs. Nor that feeling of terrible despair that they had kept him from speaking out, rendering his sacrifice pointless and his death utterly in vain. He would never forget it. No matter how hard he tried.

  PART ONE

  December: The First Week

  It had not been a casual invitation, he never did anything casually. It had been an insistent, almost peremptory call from a man more used to command than to cajolement. He expected her for breakfast and it would not have crossed his mind that she might refuse. Particularly today, when they were changing Prime Ministers, one out and another in and long live the will of the people. It would be a day of great reckoning and few could doubt that by evening he would have still more trophies to adorn his many mansions. She wondered if she were intended to be one of them.

  Benjamin Landless opened the door himself, which struck her as strange. It was an apartment for making impressions, overdesigned and impersonal, the sort of apartment where you'd expect if not a doorman then at least a secretary or a PA to be on hand, to fix the coffee, to flatter the guests while ensuring they didn't run off with any of the Impressionist paintings enriching the walls. There was a Pissarro, a Monet and at least two Wilson Steers, all displayed ostentatiously at the whim of some interior designer rather than hung for the discerning pleasure of a true collector. Landless was no work of art himself. He had a broad, plum-red face which was fleshy and beginning to sag like a candle held too near the flame. His bulk was huge and his hands rough, like a labourer's, with a reputation to match. His Telegraph newspaper empire had been built by breaking strikes as well as careers; it had been as much he as anyone who had broken the career of the man who was, even now, waiting to drive to the Palace to relinquish the power and prestige of the office of Prime Minister.

  'Miss Quine. Sally. I'm so glad you could come. I've wanted to meet you for a long time.'

  She knew that to be a lie. Had he wanted to meet her before he would most certainly have arranged it. Something had happened to make him want to meet her now, and alone. He escorted her into the main room around which the penthouse apartment was built. Its external walls were fashioned entirely of toughened glass, which offered a magnificent panorama of the parliament buildings across the Thames, and half a rain forest seemed to have been sacrificed to cover the floor in intricate wooden patterns. Not bad for a boy from the back streets of Bethnal Green, he occasionally admitted, but the description was redundant. They had all been back streets where he was born.

  With so much light the apartment seemed to hover in the air, suspended halfway between street and sky, gazing down upon the politicians and law-makers on the other side of the river and thereby diminishing them to the scale and significance of punctuation marks in one of his editorials, an effect she felt sure was intentional. It was Olympus, an eyrie which seemed to cut them off from reality, and Sally off from any means of escape. But that was why she had come, the challenge of meeting a man of power face-to-face, the opportunity to test herself, to prove she was as good or better than any of them, perhaps to beat them at their own game and to get her own back. It might end in disaster, of course, in a crass attempt at physical flattery and seduction or even coercion, but it was a risk she had to take if she were to stand any chance of getting what she wanted. Risk was all part of the exhilaration.

  He ushered her towards an oversized leather sofa in front of which stood a coffee table laden with trays of piping-hot breakfast food. There was no sign of the hidden helper who must only recently have prepared the dishes and laid out the crisp linen napkins. She declined any of the food but he was not offended. He took off his jacket and fussed about his own plate while she took a cup of black coffee and waited.

  He ate his breakfast in single-minded fashion; etiquette and table manners were not his strong points. He offered little small talk, his attention focused on the eggs rather than on her, and for a while she wondered if he might have decided he'd made a mistake in inviting her. He was already making her feel vulnerable. Eggs finished, he wiped his mouth and pushed his plate away.

  'Sally Quine. Born in Dorchester, Massachusetts. Aged thirty-two, and a girl who's already made quite a reputation for herself as an opinion pollster. In Boston, too, which is no easy city for a woman amongst all those thick-headed Micks.' She knew all about that; she'd married one. Landless had done his homework; he wanted to make that clear, and to know what she felt about her past being pawed over by him. His eyes searched for her reaction
from beneath huge eyebrows tangled like rope. 'It's a lovely city, Boston, know it well. Tell me, why did you leave everything you'd built there and come to England to start all over again? From nothing?'

  He paused, but got no reply. 'It was the divorce, wasn't it? And the death of the baby?'

  He saw her jaw stiffen and wondered whether it was the start of a storm of outrage or a move for the door. But he knew there would be no tears. She wasn't the type, you could see that from her eyes. She was not unnaturally slim and pinched as the current fashion demanded, her beauty was more classical, the hips perhaps a half-inch too wide but all the curves well defined. She was immaculately presented. The skin of her face was smooth, darker and with more lustre than any English rose, the features carefully drawn as though by a sculptor's knife. The lips were full and expressive, the chin flat and the cheekbones high, her long hair thick and of such a deep shade of black that he thought she might be Italian or Jewish. It was a face full of strength and passion, capable of defying the world or captivating it as she chose. Yet her most exceptional feature was her nose, straight and a fraction long with a flattened end which twitched as she talked and nostrils which dilated with emphasis and emotion. It was the most provocative and sensuous nose he had ever seen; he couldn't help but imagine it on a pillow. Yet the eyes disturbed him, didn't belong on this face. They were shaped like almonds, uplifted, full of autumnal russets and greens, translucent like a cat's, yet, while the nose was prominent and almost public in its emotion, the eyes hid behind oversized spectacles. They didn't sparkle like a woman's should, like they probably once had, he thought. They had an edge of mistrust, as if holding something back, and when she concentrated her mouth turned down puckishly but defiantly at the corners. She was a woman who would not easily lose control, nor readily give of herself.