A Royal Affair

by Allison Montclair

  How do narwhals applaud? she thought drowsily. Such a wonderful picture. Agnes was a darling for staying up to give it to her. Governesses are our national treasures. Our national nannies.

  Nannies.

  She thought about Philip, fleeing Corfu with his family at the point of a gun. How old would he have been? He was five years older than the princess. In 1922, he would have been one or two.

  There must have been a nanny, she thought. No doubt an English one, given Princess Alice’s background. And a lady’s maid. Probably two, given all those girls to handle.

  I wonder what they knew?

  * * *

  Iris was first to the office the next morning. She held up an opened letter with a triumphant grin when her partner came through the door.

  “Good news,” she announced. “Miss Pelletier has received a proposal from Mr. Carson!”

  “Bravo!” said Gwen, hanging up her hat. “That was one of yours, I recall.”

  “You supported it fully,” said Iris. “Do you know what that means? We are only one marriage away from reuniting you with Cecil!”

  “Oh, Cecil!” cried Gwen. “How I long to see you again! To slide my legs—Well, there is no way to complete that sentence without committing an impropriety.”

  “I wonder who will be next. Mr. Trower did not hit it off with Miss Sedgewick.”

  “No surprise. She wanted him for the frisson of dating an exonerated man. Does he wish to continue through the list?”

  “He does, and I would hate to disappoint the rest of the thrill seekers. There may be one or two amongst them who will work out.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “Miss Conyers might be a good fit for him.”

  “Hmm.”

  “You don’t like Miss Conyers?”

  “Not for our Mr. Trower. Miss Donnelly, on the other hand—”

  “Care to make a small wager on who gets him?”

  “We promised that we wouldn’t bet on a client’s success or lack thereof,” said Gwen.

  “We did,” remembered Iris. “A sound policy, now that I consider it. Best get back to work.”

  “Yes,” said Gwen. “Oh, before we do, I must show you this.”

  She carefully unrolled Little Ronnie’s picture and handed it to Iris, who held it to the window and examined it critically.

  “That is you in a cat costume being watched by a narwhal in a top hat,” she said. “This is quite nice. Your son is going through a surrealist phase. I like it much better than his early cubist work which, frankly, I found derivative. Talented boy.”

  “Thank you,” said Gwen.

  “When do I get to meet him?” asked Iris.

  “Oh,” said Gwen in surprise. “You haven’t, have you?”

  “Haven’t met your son, haven’t been to your house, haven’t met your in-laws.”

  “I haven’t exactly been in a position to have people over,” said Gwen. “I still live there at the sufferance of the Bainbridges.”

  “And they wouldn’t want me sullying their doorstep,” said Iris.

  “You wouldn’t like them, anyway.”

  “Probably not. You don’t like them, and you’re an astute judge of character. But I would love to meet your son. I adore children. In theory. We could talk about art and aquatic mammals and other things beginning with ‘A.’”

  “I’ll see if I can pry him away for a visit to Mummy’s office,” said Gwen. “Would that be acceptable?”

  “Entirely.”

  She grabbed her half of the daily correspondence and opened the top letter. The two worked in silence for a few minutes.

  “What sort of wager did you have in mind?” asked Gwen.

  “Tuppence on Conyers,” said Iris.

  “Same on Donnelly,” said Gwen.

  “Done,” said Iris.

  * * *

  They broke for a light lunch, then closed the office for the afternoon.

  “If we had a secretary, we could do this without guilt,” said Gwen as she hung up the “Closed” sign. “We could waltz out the door, calling over our shoulders to the prim and efficient Miss Betsy—”

  “Miss Betsy?”

  “For the want of a real name. ‘Mind the store, Betsy,’ we’d call out. ‘We’re off to investigate a prince.’”

  “And she would say, ‘Again?’ and then resume her typing,” said Iris. “Betsy sounds ideal. We should hire her immediately.”

  “Maybe we could find out from Sally who typed his script,” said Gwen. “It was neat and error-free, I noticed, and I was using the third or fourth carbon.”

  “Good thought,” said Iris as they reached the street. “Now, on to Colindale! You can read my notes on the train.”

  * * *

  An hour later, they walked towards the entrance to the British Library’s newspaper repository.

  “It’s enormous!” exclaimed Gwen.

  “Newspapers take up a lot of space over the years,” said Iris. “And there are an awful lot of them. Every town has one.”

  Gwen stopped suddenly, looking off to one side. The burnt ruins of a large building lay beyond a temporary fence.

  “They bombed a library?” she asked in shock.

  “Errant hit,” said Iris. “There are factories nearby. Or someone jettisoned their bombs while fleeing. It doesn’t matter much the reason. The records and times of hundreds of places over hundreds of years were destroyed, mostly small-town and Irish papers. It’s not exactly the burning of the Library of Alexandria, but a terrible loss nevertheless.”

  “Birth announcements, weddings, ribbon-cutting ceremonies, all gone,” said Gwen sadly. “All of those people existed once.”

  “Well, the London papers survived, so let’s go find our Mr. Talbot,” said Iris.

  “Assuming he’s not from a small town or Ireland,” said Gwen.

  Iris led her to a reading room with large windows at the upper levels and shelf after shelf of tall bound volumes. There were several desks with large, flat, slanted tops, almost like easels, but solid.

  “You take the Times index,” said Iris, pointing to one section of the shelves. “I’m switching to the Daily Express. We’ll grab a couple of plinths—”

  “A couple of what?”

  “Plinths. Those reading desks.”

  “They’re called plinths? I always thought that was something vaguely architectural.”

  “A plinth is a thing upon which you can place another thing,” said Iris. “Like one of those massive bound indices, or the massive bound volumes of newspapers they will bring us after we use the massive bound indices.”

  “Right,” said Gwen, looking at them dubiously. “I do hope there are some muscular bearers to bring out the massive bound thingies. So I’m on Talbot patrol. Where do I start?”

  “Begin at the ending,” Iris said, very gravely, “and go on till you come to the beginning: then stop.”

  “Curiouser and curiouser,” said Gwen, gazing along the dates until she found the most recent volume.

  She pulled it out and rested it on a plinth, then began flipping through it until she got to the T’s.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “You don’t have to tell me that for every single one,” said Iris, scanning the Daily Express.

  “Sorry. Oh!”

  “What?”

  “This just covers part of the year. So I should continue with the other parts?”

  “Yes,” said Iris wearily.

  This is going to be a very long afternoon at this rate, she thought irritably. What was I thinking, letting an amateur—

  “Found him!” crowed Gwen. “That was easy.”

  Iris stared at her with a mix of astonishment and chagrin.

  “Well?” she asked.

  “I am now giving up any hope of interviewing the man,” said Gwen.

  “Why is that?”

  “I’ve found his death notice. And his funeral. Both in April of last year.”

  “I was afraid that
would be the case,” said Iris, coming over to look at the spot where Gwen was pointing.

  “Really? Why?”

  “The anonymous letter. ‘I know what he knew.’ It put him in the past tense.”

  “Well, he’s been put there on a permanent basis, it appears,” said Gwen. “What do I do now?”

  “Write down the dates on a call slip and take it to the desk. Someone will fetch that volume for you.”

  “A muscular bearer!”

  “We can only hope.”

  Gwen trotted off, looking supremely pleased with herself.

  Iris located the same information in the Daily Express, but elected to travel back into the past, searching for any other reference she could find. Somewhere in 1937, Gwen returned, staggering under the bulk of a thick, Times-sized book.

  “I’ve joined the muscular bearers union,” she gasped, lowering the book carefully onto the plinth. “It took ages for it to arrive from the mysterious bowels of the building. The woman who fetched it was eighty-seven and used a rolling cart, which I think is cheating.”

  “Let’s take a look at our dead man, shall we?”

  Gwen sat at the desk and flipped through the pages.

  “Be gentle,” urged Iris. “Newspaper is delicate.”

  “There’s the notice,” said Gwen. “Eighteenth of April 1945. ‘Commander Sir Gerald Talbot, KCVO, CMG, OBE, RNVR (retired) died at Felixstowe yesterday.’ Where’s Felixstowe?”

  “On the Channel, out past Ipswich. There’s a port there.”

  “Sounds like a dreary place to die.”

  “Not if you were Royal Navy. I wonder if he was still doing his bit for the Crown then. What else does it say?”

  “Um, born August 1881, so he was sixty-three. Youngest son of late Lieutenant-Colonel G. F. Talbot. Cheltenham, Caius College—”

  “A Cambridge lad!” cheered Iris.

  “RNVR in the last war, British Naval Attaché in Athens 1917 to 1920—Ah, here’s a new item. Director of the London and North Eastern Railway Company. Didn’t Sally say he had a locomotive tie pin?”

  “He did. Anything else?”

  “Married Hélène, widow of Captain C. Labouchere, French army, in 1920. He married a French war widow. Trés gallant! One daughter, not named here. And that’s it.”

  “Fairly skeletal. Let’s see who showed up at the memorial.”

  Gwen flipped through to the twenty-seventh of April.

  “Here it is,” she said. “Held at St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Nice choice. Reverend Loveday himself officiated.”

  “I’ve always liked St. M’s,” said Iris. “Nell Gwyn’s buried there. Patron saint of mistresses.”

  “That last part isn’t true,” said Gwen.

  “It should be,” said Iris, resting her chin on Gwen’s shoulder to get a better look at the article.

  “My, look at all the knights and ladies who attended,” said Gwen.

  “And look at all the Greeks,” pointed out Iris. “‘The King of the Hellenes was represented … the Greek Chargé d’Affaires … Sir John Stavriki, Mr. Jean Romanos, Mr. P. Argenis, Mr. C. Torgos, Mr. D. Caclamenos, and other well-known members of the Greek Colony in London.’”

  “But he hadn’t been stationed in Greece since 1920,” said Gwen. “And he was only a naval attaché when he was. Why was he still so popular with the Greeks twenty-five years later?”

  “Why, indeed? It does sound like he’s our man.”

  “Bad luck about his current lack of existence,” said Gwen.

  “Are you saying we’ve reached a dead end?”

  “I was going to, but now I can’t. What do we do now?”

  “Keep looking,” said Iris. “There may be more.”

  It was Iris who found it, nearly an hour later, poring through back issues of the Daily Express and sneezing profusely.

  “Here it is,” she said, her eyes streaming. “Blast the Times and their reticence. I should have looked in the Daily Express from the start.”

  “What did you find?”

  “According to them, Talbot was in Paris when the Greek ministers and generals were arrested. He gets the word from Lord Curzon to go to Lausanne, then received instructions to head to Athens. Gets there too late to stop the first batch of executions, but in time to save Prince Andrea. He even arranged for the Minister of War himself to accompany them to the port in case there was anyone thinking of taking a potshot at the prince.”

  “We have our Talbot,” said Gwen. “That doesn’t sound very covert, landing himself in the papers like that.”

  “His cover wasn’t blown until after he completed the mission,” said Iris. “This story came out in late December, after he had already received the knighthood. Maybe that was his reward—being allowed to leave the Service, covered in glory.”

  “He traveled with the family from Greece?”

  “Apparently.”

  “Then he would have been at Corfu when they picked up the children,” said Gwen. “I wonder what he found there. I wonder if he kept it.”

  “Something someone thinks they can use for blackmail,” said Iris. “Let’s get back outside. I need some air.”

  They returned their volumes to the front desk and walked outside. Without saying anything, they wandered over to the charred wreckage of the bomb site.

  “Paper burns,” observed Iris gloomily. “When it survives, it holds information. Secrets. The questions are, what are we looking for, and where is it?”

  “That doesn’t narrow things down much,” said Gwen.

  “On the contrary—we’ve narrowed them down from everything in the world to one man’s life.”

  “Which ended more than a year ago.”

  “But there are others who knew him. A widow. A daughter. Friends.”

  “Titled friends.”

  “Greek friends.”

  “‘The King of the Hellenes was represented,’” quoted Gwen. “Talbot hadn’t been involved in Greek affairs since he was exposed and knighted, yet over two decades later, the ‘King of the Hellenes,’ who fled like a Greek king does when there’s trouble, cares enough to send a representative to his funeral. Gratitude for saving his uncle?”

  “Perhaps,” said Iris. “What else would you suggest?”

  “The king in exile lives in London,” said Gwen. “My mother-in-law came home from a party sniffing about seeing him with his current mistress.”

  “She disapproves of mistresses?”

  “She disapproves of Greeks,” said Gwen. “Along with Italians, Turks— Well, the list is very long. But what I am wondering is if this has something to do with the Greek throne. Aren’t they considering restoring him?”

  “There is supposed to be some sort of vote in September,” said Iris.

  “And how far down the line of succession is Prince Philip, again? Fourth? Or was it fifth?”

  “Let me count,” said Iris, flipping open her notebook. “King George the Second is his first cousin. George has a younger brother who has a son—that’s three—then there’s an uncle with a son, making five, except he married a divorcée, so he’s out of the running, which means Philip is fifth.”

  “No women in line?”

  “Plenty of women. The Greeks don’t count women.”

  “And they claim to be civilised,” sniffed Gwen. “Well, it’s a long shot, but what if this ties into the Greek royal family? Marrying one of theirs to our heir apparent gives the monarchists legitimacy for this referendum.”

  “Then disgracing Philip could be a motive for the opposition,” continued Iris. “Possible. So the opposition in this case would be the Leftists.”

  “Have we stumbled upon an international Communist plot of some kind? That would be beyond our abilities to fight. Well, mine, at least. You, no doubt, could take Stalin on single-handed.”

  “Not my type,” said Iris. “I don’t like his mustache. So, people close to Talbot and close to Prince Andrea.”

  “There’s a widow apiece.”

 
“We can’t talk to Princess Alice,” said Iris. “Those are toes we would not be authorised to step upon. The Widow Talbot, on the other hand, might be promising.”

  “Unless she’s gone back to France. What about people who were in Corfu? The prince traveled with a small retinue of servants. And what was the name of that ship, again?”

  “The HMS Calypso,” said Iris. “Maybe the captain’s still around. Know anyone with nautical clout?”

  “I have a cousin who is some form of admiral,” said Gwen. “Rear or vice, I forget which. They both sound horrid, when you think about it. I’ll give him a ring.”

  “We have a plan, then,” said Iris. “I call this a good day’s work. Shall we—”

  She stopped when she turned and saw Gwen looking at her sternly.

  “What?” she asked.

  “You’re leaving out the most obvious avenue,” said Gwen. “Titled friends. Greek friends. And—”

  “No,” said Iris.

  “Spy friends,” finished Gwen.

  “I told you—”

  “We have a job to do, and not much time in which to complete it,” said Gwen. “If he was still in the spy game, then there should be other players who knew about it. You have access to them.”

  “Not as much as you think,” said Iris.

  “Still more than me,” persisted Gwen. “They would have the most interesting scuttlebutt. If Talbot did turn up something in Corfu, don’t you think he would report it back to his masters?”

  “Unless he kept it for himself. A little side benefit to go with the knighthood.”

  “Ah,” said Gwen thoughtfully. “Maybe that’s been the source of his business success all these years. Funded through the sale of his silence. And now he’s as silent as the grave.”

  “Only his secrets didn’t die with him,” said Iris.

  “We still don’t have proof of any of this,” said Gwen.

  “It’s out there. Somewhere. I’m sure of it.”

  “Then let’s go find it. Who was Calypso again?”

  “A nymph. She fell in love with Odysseus and kept him on her island for seven years.”

  “Another woman in love with a married man,” said Gwen. “I take it he left her in the end.”

  “He did,” said Iris. “The gods intervened, and she had to let him go. She made him a raft, and off he went.”