‘Very wise, sir.’
‘It would be a catastrophe.’
‘An absolute catastrophe.’
‘But I won’t be a swine and not say goodbye to her properly. Yes, properly, Bugger. That means I’ll make the position clear the moment she walks through the door. If she spends only ten seconds in this room that’s all the more reason to make it nice … Not many men have to subordinate their hearts to the price of petrol. I am one of them. And frankly it’s a bit much.’
‘I should look upon it, sir, as one of your many sacrifices.’
‘He will give no trouble. She will give no trouble.’
And the King’s private secretary agreed, on the whole. Brendan had of course run a check on He, months ago: daughter of the long-serving Chinese Ambassador in Paris; mistress for nine years to a Scandinavian head of state; probably in need of a nestegg. And she would get a nestegg, Brendan knew.
‘Sorry to lumber you with all this, Bugger. It’s not your job, but do make it comfy.’
Brendan was left alone, in the neglected gazebo. It wasn’t his job — but what was his job? Scandal-management, scandal-control. Scandals were like periodic tidal waves of varying height and mass. This business with Loulou — Louisa, Duchess of Ormonde: the wave did not tower or hover, but its innards might churn with surprising guile. Just now, the exposure of the King’s affair with He Zizhen would hide the sun — and would not stop, would not stop till it had rolled through villages. And as for the wave that could be gathering for the Princess: it was the work of a thousand Krakatoas …
Leaning back on the striped sofa, Brendan was now warmed by a feeling of luxury quite unconnected to his immediate surroundings: John II’s chintzy — and of course chilly — lovenest reminded him of the Royal Train before Henry belaboured it with his millions. The warmth of ease had been drawn out of him by the silence — as he realised when a truck-sized lawnmower blew past like a whale before fading into the silence of distance. And that silence, emphasised by weakly festive birdsong, had allowed him to listen to his own heart and take warmth from it.
When Victoria was four she went to bed without saying goodnight, and Brendan had felt it — all the blood within him. When Victoria was fourteen … It was on the last leg of her California tour; diversion was at an end, and what awaited her now was boredom, royal boredom — boredom cloudless and entire. Halfway through the final afternoon it became clear to him that the Princess was no longer there, that she had sent out an emissary, a simulacrum, a lifesize photograph, leaving her soul to curl up in the dark somewhere while she smiled at strangers, smiled at strangers — as if being fourteen wasn’t work enough, he had thought … Later, with an apologetic inclination of the head, Brendan asked her to choose between this or that logistical punctilio as she approached the next unveiling or investiture: who should nod, who should bow. The Princess let her tongue slide out of the corner of her mouth and raised her hands towards him with the thumbs and forefingers in the shape of two V’s. ‘W’: ‘Whatever’. And he had felt it again, all of it, all the blood within him. Girls of thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, they sometimes wear a look of panic: the eyes are trapped in the changing face. Where am I heading? From childhood the presence of the Princess had always contained agitation, a tremor of electricity; but there was no dismay in it. For the time being she looked like a thrillingly ardent woodland creature in an animated cartoon. Still, there wasn’t any doubt about the destination, which was womanhood.
He wanted to protect her, but for now he was passive, he was helpless. Well, one royal scandal at a time, he thought. Brendan felt like going for a twenty-mile hike. Instead, he took his laptop from his briefcase and started learning all he could about the prison riot in Cold Blow Lane.
Early that month the Duchess of Ormonde had swept south across the Thames to Millwall, there to cut the ribbon on a new shopping mall and fitness centre in the famously and stubbornly depressed manor of the Isle of Dogs. After the ceremony a peoplecarrier full of the Duchess’s security men mounted the pavement at speed, accidentally ramming the moped of a certain Jimmy O’Nione who, at that point, had half a second to live. The Isle of Dogs was the Isle of Dogs, and so the crisis merely intensified when O’Nione stood revealed as a career criminal (much incarcerated, with a mesmerising record), who moreover, on that day (judging by the disposition of loot and tool in his saddlebag), was clearly on his way from one crime to another. Two days after the shopping mall and the fitness centre had been plundered and torched, the Duchess’s office announced its intention to install a marble plaque in Cold Blow Lane, to honour O’Nione, which the Duchess would herself unveil (‘In memory of the valued member of the community, James Patrick O’Nione, who died so tragically at this site’). In the meantime Cold Blow Prison had come out in florid riot; the inmates had now made their base on the chapel roof, which overlooked O’Nione’s cenotaph.
The Cold Blow mutiny (Brendan now learnt) had nothing to do with Jimmy O’Nione — though he had, inevitably, spent a year or two behind its walls … The cause lay in the broodings of Prisoner Dean Bull, who, during a visit from his teenage girlfriend, Diana, began to have doubts about her constancy. ‘As a young offender prepares himself for a protracted sentence,’ blogged one old lag on the quickly assembled Cold Blow website, ‘you expect sentimental relationships to come under strain.’ So Dean feared that Diana, on her next visit, would tell him that she couldn’t wait twenty-three years. He was right. And he was ready. Brendan groaned, and sighed, and read on.
Preceded by his metal chair, Dean came through the plexiglass partition and set about Diana’s face with one of its shards. Now: every last prisoner in Cold Blow, not excluding Dean Bull, fully accepted that he would face a supplementary sentence and the loss of all remission. Dean, now twenty-one, would be released in his mid-fifties: this was fair enough. What rankled was the beating he’d taken from the guards. Because Dean, it was pointed out, had conducted himself, once his deed was done, with marked restraint, dropping his weapon and (after muttering, ‘See how that goes down down the pub Friday’) raising his hands in submission — before the first nightsticks chopped him to the ground. Some of the sterner romantics now sliding around the chapel roof (they had a seized laptop up there, and several mobile phones) argued that Dean had had no choice anyway, being a man truly in love, and what more precious token could he have offered than twelve years of his prime? More sober hands agreed that that wasn’t the point. What had come to pass was ‘a personal matter, strictly between Diana and Dean’. And then word came down from the hospital cells about the severity and duration of the stoving they’d given him …
By accompanying the Duchess to the shrine of Jimmy O’Nione, Henry IX was doing his favourite cousin a kindness: that was the thing to emphasise, thought Brendan. A nasty business (and a weird conjunction), made no easier by its timing: Henry was going down to Cold Blow on the morning after his final assignation with He Zizhen.
And on that day Brendan would have an unexpected message to pass on to the King, concerning the matter of the Princess.
Barefoot, and led by Colonel Mate, He walked the length of the ha-ha in the midgey dusk, and then emerged alone between the hedgerows for the last stretch to the lovenest of John II. In that lovenest, a nestegg (two baldrics of fire opals), and a king whose hand was already at his lips, bidding adieu.
Henry shot up from his chair and listened: He’s feet on the bare boards of the veranda … Once upon a time she had shown him the shoes worn by her greatgrandmother, the warlord’s concubine, in Shandong, where the Yellow River meets the Yellow Sea: they resembled the party boots of a three-year-old. The woman’s feet had been ‘bound’ in the traditional way — broken, crushed, then dressed and swaddled. This greatly increased her erotic worth (He explained to a horrified Henry): the crippled woman, when she walked, when she stood, evoked ‘a willow wavering in the wind’. He Zizhen had then imitated her grandmother’s agonised and papery tread, and the King’s arms had surged out towards her. Why? Why did he want to enfold that willow? The spectacle aroused him — but not as much as the sound of He’s feet on the wooden slats, registering her shape, her soft mass, the grasshalms on her dewy soles, all coming closer.