They beamed at the sight of me.
“Hullo!” said the larger man. “I’m Hawker, sir. He’s Boon.”
His companion winked in my direction and that alone was enough to set every nerve in my body jangling. “You can call us the Prefects.”
Henry Lamb is a liar. Take nothing he says on trust. He is spinning you lines, sugaring the truth, telling you what he thinks you want to hear. Henry is no innocent. The lily-white Lamb has blood on his hands.
Mercifully for him, we have little interest in simply blackening his name. He has only a short time before his consciousness is irrevocably snuffed out, an eventuality which renders catcalls and finger-pointing superfluously petty. Instead, we intend to while away these last few days by telling you a story of our own, and you have our unimpeachable word for it that, in shaming contrast to Henry’s own self-serving memoir, every syllable shall be the truth.
Brace yourself for a move away from Lamb’s quotidian universe of office girls and landladies and the morning commute. Prepare for an Olympian leap from dewy-eyed sentiment about the aged and pubescent longing for the girl next door. This is the story that matters. This, the story of the war, of the last prince, of the fall of the House of Windsor.
I expect you shall find it a good deal more to your taste.
At around the time that Henry the liar was making the acquaintance of Hawker and Boon, the future king of England was listening to a roomful of people who were paid to adore him sing a rousing “Happy Birthday” in his honor.
His Royal Highness Prince Arthur Aelfric Vortigern Windsor was the kind of man whose appearance might generously be described as unusual — not for him the privileged complexions and arrogant cheekbones of most of his ancestors and a good many of that swarming mass of male relations to which he referred, in that long-suffering tone which the nation had come to find faintly irritating, as “the brood.” Lugubriously proportioned, thin lipped and pharaoh nosed, Windsor was a man profoundly ill at ease with the twenty-first century. He despised the vulgarities of its culture, the vapid light shows of its television, the unmelodic jabberings of its music, but above all else he hated the manner in which his family, once the most influential bloodline in Europe, had degenerated into a national laughing stock.
This particular day was special, not only because Arthur was celebrating his sixtieth birthday, a milestone in a life which seemed to him increasingly without compass, but also because it was the day on which he finally accepted a miserable truth. His wife — beloved by her subjects as a radiant philanthropist, sylphlike humanitarian and dispenser of hugs on an industrial scale — no longer fancied him. Naturally, he hoped that she still cared for him, that she at least felt some residual dregs of affection, but it was painfully clear that she no longer incubated the slightest scintilla of physical desire, meeting every one of his advances with barely concealed distaste. Arthur had realized it that morning when, upon his suggestion of a birthday roll around the marital bed, Laetitia had sighed and looked away, a small, darting, sideways glance which confirmed his every fear. In the end she had acquiesced, though wearily, and as she lay dutifully beneath him Arthur noticed her stifled yawns, surreptitious inspections of her nails and regular stolen glances toward the clock.
His mood was not significantly improved by the feudal cheers of his household staff which greeted him on his descent for supper by way of a “surprise” (scarcely that, since something similar had occurred annually since his birth). Arthur gazed at their ham-fisted attempts at decoration and found it difficult to suppress a sigh. He thought the pomp and strut of his official birthday (traditionally held much earlier in the year to avoid a clash with the Christmas season) taxing enough but often wondered whether this ghastly pageant of vulgar good intentions might actually be worse.
There was no sign of Laetitia. Over breakfast, she had complained of the first stirrings of a migraine, no doubt laying the groundwork for a plausible absence from the festivities. Arthur would have to face it alone, all the smiling and the shaking of hands and the pleasant inconsequentialities. This was the worst of it, he thought, the awful knowledge that one belongs, almost in one’s totality, to other people.
As the assembled domestics launched, wincingly off-key, into “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” and a troupe of small boys enthusiastically tossed rose petals in his general direction, the prince noticed a muscular, bulky man, a year or two his junior, shoulder his way toward him. Here, at least, was an ally.
“Good evening, sir,” said the man when he had at last drawn close enough to be heard above the caterwauling. “Happy Birthday.”
“Thank you, Silverman.”
“Are you quite well, sir?”
“Oh, I’m dandy.” The prince tried his best at a smile but, as usual, entirely failed in the attempt. He knew that his smile did not convince. He had seen himself many times on the television, and various acquaintances in what he supposed he was obliged to refer to as “the media” told him that it was regularly used by certain sectors of the press as a stick with which to beat him. It had a rictus quality, an overstretched look quite at odds with the boyish grins and flirty smirks of the new prime minister — a youth with whom the country still seemed inexplicably besotted.
“I have a message from your mother, sir,” said Silverman.
“Oh?”
“She sends her apologies for not being able to attend in person.”
The prince thrust his considerable chin into the middle distance and mumbled an acceptance. His mother had not appeared in public for years, having long ago removed herself to a modestly proportioned wing of the palace in order to live out an informal and thoroughly deserved retirement. Arthur had not seen his mother for almost twenty months and relied upon Silverman as a go-between. Tired of life in the public eye, the woman was close to becoming a complete recluse, although naturally no one in the palace seemed at all prepared to admit this. It suited them all — the fawners, the toadies and the yes-men — to pretend that she would go on forever, monarch in perpetuity.
“I appreciate that this is rather an irregular request, sir. But I understand that your mother would like you to meet someone.”
“Who is it?”
“I regret I do not know his name, sir. But the gentleman is waiting outside.”
“Now?”
“Your mother believes time to be of the essence, sir.”
“But this is my party.”
A deferential tilt of the head. “Indeed, sir.”
The prince looked around him at the merrymaking, brushed away the rose petals that had accumulated like expensive dandruff on the shoulders of his dress uniform and came to the conclusion that everyone present would have infinitely more fun were he simply to disappear.
Silverman walked toward the big oak doors which constituted the exit and prompted: “This way, Your Highness.”
Windsor looked back, hoping for some evidence of his wife. There was nothing. Feeling a pang of sadness rise up in him again, he followed Silverman from the room. Nobody noticed him leave — and, if they did, they scarcely cared.
Silverman led him to a large, circular chamber around the size of an Olympic swimming pool which Arthur was almost certain he had never seen before.