He crashed, he crunched to his knees, in obliterating defeat: his womanblood, his childblood, taken by his enemy. The physics of it sent his Dickhead twisting up and away. He heard the wet crack, the wet crack of his knees followed by the wet crack of the sliced glass. The world stopped turning, and started turning again — but the other way. Only now after a heartbeat did the sparrow rear up with the whirling of its wings: the little paparazzo of the sparrow.
The sky is falling!
Then the words ‘Get down’ and a second, fervent blow.
The sky is falling, and I’m off to tell the …
Seemingly rigid now, like the statue of a fallen tyrant, he crashed sideways into the damp paving, and lay still.
2. Hal Nine
The King was not in his counting-house, counting out his money. He was in a drawing-room in the Place des Vosges, absorbing some very bad news. The equerry on the armchair opposite was called Brendan Urquhart-Gordon. Between them, lying on the low glass table, was a photograph, face-down, and a pair of tweezers. And the room was like a photograph: for several minutes now neither man had moved or spoken.
A vibration was needed to animate the scene, and it came: the ping of a tuning-fork, as one of the thousand facets in the icy chandelier minutely rearranged itself within that ton of glass.
Henry IX said, ‘What a dreadful world we’re living in, Bugger. I mean, it’s such a ghastly, dreadful … world.’
‘It is indeed, sir. May I suggest a brandy, sir.’
The King nodded. Urquhart-Gordon wielded the handbell. More vibrations: scandalously shrill. The servant, Love, appeared in the distant doorway. Urquhart-Gordon had nothing against Love, but he found it awkward using his name. Who would want a servant called Love?
‘Two large Remy reserve, if you would, Love,’ he called.
The Defender of the Faith — he actually headed the Church of England (Episcopalian) and the Church of Scotland (Presbyterian) — went on: ‘You know, Bugger, this shakes my personal belief. Doesn’t it shake yours?’
‘My personal belief was ever but a slender reed, sir.’
An unlikely expression, perhaps, coming from a man shaped like a cummerbund. Bald, dark, rosy, with Jewish brains (some said) from the mother’s side.
‘Shakes it to the core. These people really are the limit. No. Worse. I suppose it’s all part of some ghastly “ring”?’
‘That is possible, sir.’
‘Why did … How could it be so arranged that such creatures play a part in God’s plen?’
Love reentered and, as he approached, perhaps a dozen clocks, one after the other, began to chime the hour. An instinctively practical man, Urquhart-Gordon reflected that more work would have to be done on the modernisation of the King’s short ‘a’. In times of crisis, especially, it sounded almost prewar. Brendan’s rosy cheeks were for a moment all the rosier as he recalled Henry’s visit, as Prince of Wales, to the trade-union rest-house in Newbiggin-by-the-Sea, and the Prince at the piano singing ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’: ‘My old men’s a dustman, He wears a dustman’s het, He wears cor-blimey trousers, And he lives in a council flet!’ The Fourth Estate had not been slow to point out that the truth was otherwise: Henry’s old man was Richard IV, and he lived in Buckingham Palace.
Feebly averting his face from the humours of the brandy balloons, Love continued towards them, and still had a fair way to go. It was five past six by the time he left the room.
‘Forgive me, Bugger. My mind’s a blenk. Delivered …?’
‘The photograph was hand-delivered to my rooms in St James’s. In a plain white envelope.’ This envelope Urquhart-Gordon now produced from his case. He handed the transparent zipper-wallet to Henry IX, who gave it a more than averagely puzzled squint. MR BRENDAN URQUHART-GORDON ESQUIRE, and, in the top right-hand corner, Private and Confidential. ‘No accompanying note. Calligraphy and the redundant “Esquire” suggest an uncouth or foreign hand, or an attempt to have us believe as much. Protection will conceivably tell us more.’
Urquhart-Gordon studied the King’s frown. Henry IX normally wore his thick fair hair swiped sideways across his brow. But now in the royal disarray his quiff had collapsed into a baffled fringe, making his eyes look even more beleaguered and inflamed. Henry IX frowned on at him, and in response to this Urquhart-Gordon shrugged and said,
‘We await further communication.’
‘Blickmail?’
‘Well. I would say extortion. It seems reasonably clear that this is not the work of the media, in the usual sense. If it were, then we would be looking at that photograph in some German magazine.’
‘Bugger!’
‘I’m sorry, sir. Or on the Internet.’
With a bedraggled gesture Henry IX reached for the thing on the table. His hand wavered.
‘Use the tweezers, sir, if you would. Turn it with the tweezers, sir.’
The King did so.
He had not seen his daughter naked for perhaps three or four years, and, over and above everything else, he was harrowed, he was bitterly moved, by how much woman was already in her, in his girlchild who still played with her dolls. This, together with the dreaminess, the harmlessness, of the face, caused her father to cover his eyes with his sleeve.
‘Oh Bugger.’
‘Oh Hotty.’
Urquhart-Gordon looked on. A fifteen-year-old girl in what was evidently a white bathtub, with her arms up on the side, her legs folded at an angle in six inches of water: Princess Victoria, in her costume of nudity, her catsuit of nudity, adumbrating womanhood. The conspicuous tan-lines — she seemed, furthermore, to be wearing a spectral bikini — suggested summer. Urquhart-Gordon had checked the scrolled itineraries: all the Princess ever did, apparently, was go on holiday. But she had been back at boarding-school for six weeks and it was now almost November. Why, he wondered, had they waited? There was something about the Princess’s expression that worried him, that additionally disquieted him: the elevation of the pupils … Brendan Urquhart-Gordon’s nickname, by the way, derived from his initials, Henry IX’s from his performance as Hotspur in a school production of Henry IV, Part One.
‘Do you think,’ the King said miserably, ‘that the Princess and a uh, girlfriend might have been messing about with a camera, and uh …’
‘No, sir. And I’m afraid it is highly unlikely that this is the extent of it.’
The King blinked at him. The King always made you spell it out.
‘There must be more photographs of the Princess. In other … poses.’
‘Bugger!’
‘Forgive me, sir. That was unfortunate. The point is: look at the Princess’s face, sir. That is the face of someone who thinks she’s alone. We must take comfort from the fact that the Princess was and is quite unaware of this really unprecedented intrusion. Quite innocent of it.’
‘Yes. Innocent of it. Innocent of it.’
‘Sir, do I have your permission to activate John Oughtred?’
‘You do. Not another soul, of course.’
Henry IX got to his feet, and so, therefore, did Urquhart-Gordon. They fell into step together, the one so sleek, the other so lean. When the great embrasure of the central window had at last been reached, the two men looked out through the lace, through its weft and warp. Floodlights, cranes, gantries, retractable ladders: the firefighters of the Fourth Estate. It was the eve of the second anniversary of the Queen’s accident. The King was expected to make a statement in the morning before flying back to England and then on to his wife’s bedside. For the Queen was not in the garden, eating bread and honey. She was attached to certain machines, in the Royal Inverness.