Malice at the Palace

by Rhys Bowen

  “I’d better go and change out of this new outfit into something more eveningy,” I said. “And I’ll hang it up myself before Queenie can ruin it.”

  “No, don’t change. We’re going out. You look just perfect for where we’re headed.”

  “All right.” I gave him an excited smile.

  “I’ve borrowed a motorcar,” he said. “Come on. What are you waiting for?”

  It wasn’t the ragtop Triumph he had borrowed once before but a sleek Armstrong Siddeley.

  “This is rather posh,” I said. “From whom did you manage to borrow a motorcar like this?”

  “I have my connections,” he said with a mysterious smile.

  I climbed in beside him. Darkness had fallen and a mist hung over the Round Pond.

  “So where are we going?” I asked.

  “You’ll see.” He was grinning.

  We drove. City lights flashed past us. Up the Edgware Road to the Finchley Road past Golders Green. City lights gave way to rows of suburban houses, little high streets with people queuing to get into picture palaces and loitering around corner pubs.

  “We’re going out of London?” I asked.

  He nodded, still staring straight ahead.

  “To a friend’s place?”

  “No.”

  “You’re being annoying, Darcy O’Mara.”

  He grinned, still staring at the road, which was now down to the occasional streetlight overhead. I felt a knot of excitement and apprehension. Had Darcy decided we had waited long enough and was he taking me to a hotel for the night? In which case didn’t people normally head south to places like Brighton or the New Forest instead of to this northern fringe of the city with only the industrial midlands ahead? It didn’t seem particularly attractive, but maybe he had a special place in mind. . . . The knot in my stomach grew. Was that what I wanted? A picture of Belinda, sitting alone at that clinic on the coast, suddenly flashed into my head. And Bobo, who was forced to give up her child, and Princess Sophia, whose ghost wandered the palace looking for the child who was taken from her. It was true that my circumstance was different from theirs. I had Darcy. He wouldn’t desert me. He’d marry me if the unthinkable happened. All the same . . .

  “Darcy,” I began. He glanced across at me. “I don’t want . . . I mean, I want it to be right. The time to be right.”

  It was as if he read my thoughts. “It will be,” he said.

  “Because, you know . . .”

  He took a hand off the steering wheel and covered mine with his own. “It will be,” he said. “I understand.”

  “So where the heck are we going?” I demanded.

  He didn’t look at me but stared straight ahead into the night. “Gretna Green,” he said.

  Historical Note

  To those of you who think I have besmirched the good name of the royal family, I have to tell you that this story is based on truth.

  Prince George, the Duke of Kent, was known for his profligate behavior, both before and after his marriage. He had both male and female lovers, including Noel Coward, singer Jessie Matthews and reputedly even novelist Barbara Cartland.

  In the Roaring Twenties he was introduced to Alice “Kiki” Preston, a London party girl who was known as the “girl with the silver syringe” because of her drug habit. Kiki and George were lovers for years.

  It was known that Prince George produced a love child. Was Kiki the mother, or was it another of his mistresses, called Violet Evans? Biographers disagree. However, arrangements were made to have the child adopted by an American publishing magnate and taken back to America. His name became Michael Canfield and he achieved celebrity when he married Lee Bouvier (Jackie Kennedy’s sister). But he had a troubled life marred by alcohol and pills and died on a plane flight from New York.

  All the participants in this drama came to a sad end. Prince George was killed during World War II, when his plane hit a Scottish hillside. It is not known whether this was pilot error.

  Kiki Preston threw herself from a fifth-floor window in New York in 1946. Violet Evans gassed herself.

  Prince George’s behavior was so scandalous that his papers were sealed on his death and have not been made available to the public.

  In contrast his older brother Albert—later King George VI—lived an exemplary life and brought England through the dark days of World War II.

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