Thus the great ballroom picture, in its ornate golden frame, which had only recently formed the background to Amy and Ferdel's interview, now looked down upon the golden heads of Amy's little nephews and nieces: Jamie and Jack and Alexander, Isabelle and Chantal and Beatrice. All six of them owed their presence in London to their appointment as pages and bridesmaids at the Royal Wedding.
The Princesses had not the heart to interrupt the excited games of the children as they raced in and out of the famous silk and gilded 'Vienna' furniture. Ferdel, smoking heavily - a habit which came as a surprise to his future sisters-in-law - hardly appeared to notice them, even when baby Beatrice, the smallest and blondest, clasped him round his dark-blue trouser leg.
'I love you,' she cried, gazing up at him. Ferdel smiled rather vaguely in her direction as though she was some importunate dog - or rather puppy.
Little Jamie, sensing the abstraction of the grown-ups and seeking to turn it to his advantage, asked loudly: 'Mum, why can't I wear my kilt at the wedding instead of that silly page's suit? It makes me look like a girl. I want to wear my kilt,' he concluded in an even more stentorian voice.
'I think that is a skirt -' piped French Isabelle in her know-all way till she was shushed by Princess Harriet. But when Princess Sophie, normally a stern mother, responded by bursting into sobs, even Jamie was abashed. Putting his finger in his mouth, a gesture he was thought to have abandoned, he ran over to his father who was sitting in the window (wondering in point of fact whether it would be bad taste to ask for a dram of whisky so early).
'Come on, old chap,' said his father gently, disturbed from his reverie. He drew Jamie on to his lap. 'Let's be specially nice today, shall we? Mum's having -' He paused.'- a specially difficult time,' he ended rather lamely.
All in all, the attendance of Jemima Shore upon Ione Quentin, at the latter's suggestion, passed almost unnoticed in the devastated community of Cumberland Palace. It was in this way that Jemima found herself travelling in a police car, beside Ione, through the bedecked streets of London - bedecked in a way that seemed particularly bizarre to Jemima, since the decorations were all for a wedding that seemed at the moment peculiarly unlikely to take place.
There were displays in the shop windows: brides in numerous guestimates of Princess Amy's wedding dress, ranging from the super-frilly to the super-sleek. Prince Ferdinand for the most part had to make do with Ruritanian-type uniforms: since no one was quite clear just what he could wear at the ceremony. The cognoscenti knew that a European Catholic wedding involved a white tie and tails; but a sombre baffled statement from Cumberland Palace had not made it quite clear whether this would be the case at Westminster Cathedral. Maybe, as more than one shop-window dresser decided, one could let the imagination roam? As a result, Jemima was whirled past various wax dummies of Prince Ferdinand, bending over the hand of his fiancee, and wearing a variety of white, green and even pale-blue uniforms, which would not have disgraced the male lead of an operetta.
'We're still in a kidnap situation,' said the policeman who appeared to be in charge to Jemima; he spoke, in a seemingly offhand manner, from his position in the back seat between the two women. Ione Quentin's outward demeanour was impassive but Jemima noticed she had twisted a small white handkerchief so tightly round her wrist that it had the look of a tourniquet.
'A kidnap situation?' It was Jemima who asked the question; Ione did not — or could not — speak.
'A kidnap situation, not a siege. That is to say, we know where she is, but they don't know we know. We'd like to avoid a siege, if possible. Just get her out quietly' - a pause and then some emphasis - 'All the same, we have marksmen in place.' Another pause, 'Naturally.'
'Naturally,' echoed Jemima. Ione still said nothing. Then she murmured something desperate, and Jemima, turning, saw that there were tears in her eyes. Jemima realized that what Ione had actually said was: 'Marksmen.' She added more distinctly: 'She may be killed.'
The policeman gave her a slightly cold glance. 'Miss Quentin, it is our sincere aim that no one should be killed. Not even the killer.'
'The killer?' repeated Jemima.
'Detective-Sergeant Fitzgerald, who was shot in the Royal Box whilst attempting to prevent the abduction, died in hospital shortly before you telephoned. The person or persons we have reason to believe are holding HRH ...,' still that pause, then:'... are wanted on a charge of murder.'
After that there was silence in the car and even when they arrived at the edge of the Covent Garden backwater, where operations were being directed from a hidden police command post, Jemima said very little.
Ione Quentin, twisting the tight white tourniquet, said nothing at all.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
End of a Fairy Tale
Princess Amy woke up first. It took only an instant for the horror to return: an instant in which she realized that the curious dark object next to her, lying on the pillow beside her, was a masked head. For a moment she thought - some battered but beloved toy of her childhood; then reality, terrible reality, flooded in.
'I must not cry.' Sayings of the past came back. That governess, the cruel one: 'Tears don't help.' Her father, overheard saying gruffly to her mother: 'Now Henriette, here's my handkerchief, you know I can't bear to see a woman cry.' (What long-forgotten peccadillo had he committed to make her mother cry?) She braced herself. One of her wrists was tied to Beagle's and the other to the bed, but her ankles were not tied. She gave a tentative wriggle.
Beagle was awake immediately at that; her movement must have disturbed him. He had not in fact intended to fall asleep at all, not only for reasons of security (although Lamb was guarding the house downstairs) but also to have time to reflect, to savour ...
'I want to see your face,' said Princess Amy. She spoke softly but urgently as she struggled in vain to sit up until Beagle cooperated by sitting up with her. Then she had to lean awkwardly against the wall until he bent to release her other hand.
'No, not to identify you,' she went on. 'You know why. I want to see you.' She had the impression it had been removed at some point in the long night - but then darkness had surrounded her, had surrounded them both.
There was a long pause while the other figure on the bed, still disfigured, appeared to consider her proposition. Then Beagle took off his mask. In the eerie morning light filtering through the heavy shutters, Princess Amy stared at him. Then she put up her newly freed hand and touched his cheek. It was in no way a tender gesture, more an enquiry or a gesture of exploration.
'Recognize me?' he asked. There was something almost pleading about Beagle's question. 'Amy,' he added. The Princess dropped her hand.
'How should I recognize you?' she asked coldly.
'We've met before. We played together. You once gave me a toy dog for Christmas, black and white spotted. Somewhere I've still got it.'
Amy's expression showed quite clearly that she feared, apart from everything else, she now had to cope with madness.
'Oh don't worry, Your Royal Highness.' This time Beagle spoke with something of his old familiar and sardonic tone. 'I don't expect you to remember. You must have played with so many people. And given away cart-loads of spotted toy dogs. I'll end the dreadful suspense. I'm Josh Taplow these days, Jossie when you used to know me. Jossie Taplow the chauffeur's son. That's right, Taplow who used to work for you and now works for His Highness Prince Ferdinand, your oh-so-noble fiancé.’
'I do remember,' said Amy slightly incredulously. 'Jossie Taplow. Ione said something the other day. Didn't you have long hair? And you were dressed -' She stopped.
'Like a girl. But of course I'm not a girl. Explains a lot, no doubt. And I expect that toy dog explains a lot too, an early love of animals, even when stuffed.' Beagle laughed. It was not a pleasant sound.
'So your father's involved —*
'Oh, don't blame him, Your Royal Highness. He's been blamed enough already. Principally by my mother. She is involved in a way: not that she knew everything. Bu
t she's always backed me up - unlike my father who at one point chose to term me the rotten apple. Charming! As a result I haven't spoken to him for years.'
Princess Amy said nothing.
Beagle went on almost eagerly: 'This place is actually in my mother's name, you know, so as to keep it really quiet. No links to me. And it is really quiet, isn't it, Your Royal Highness? As I was saying, I'm sure the shrinks will blame my mother for everything, including setting up this flat, if they ever get hold of me.'
Since the Princess was still silent, Beagle turned her face towards him. 'So what do you think of all that?' he asked.
‘I think - I'm sorry for you,' said Princess Amy slowly. It was not true. She was not in the slightest bit sorry for Beagle; all her energies in that direction were occupied in trying not to feel sorry for herself. But it occurred to her, if only she could keep calm and think straight, that there must be some kind of advantage to her in this weird conversation. Jossie Taplow! Princess Amy did not even remember him as clearly as she had pretended; that had been mere instinct, keep the man talking, don't give up, don't despair. But a recent casual remark by her lady-in-waiting about dressing little boys as girls had stuck in her mind because Ione had connected it to her nephew Jamie's repeated complaints about the girlish nature of his page's suit.
'Boys as girls! It's all wrong.' All wrong indeed.
'Yes, I'm sorry for you,' she repeated more strongly.
It was at that moment that Lamb, alone in her self-imposed vigil at the door, cramped, stiff, icy with a despair as acute in its own way as that which Princess Amy was trying to keep at bay, decided that death was the only answer.
She wondered how she would make out with the automatic pistol: was it easy to fire? With some confused idea of target practice, Lamb fired two shots rapidly into the door jamb.
When the sound of shots — and the instantaneous police reaction outside - reached Beagle upstairs, he recognized it to be disaster. He had been half expecting it of course. For one thing Beagle knew that he should not have taken off his mask and that some time in the remote past his mother (who liked such things) had read some silly fairy story to Jossie a.k.a. Beagle (who did not) in which a princess persuaded a prince fatally to unmask... everyone turned into an animal, no, a swan. Or was it only the prince? In this case the story was somewhat different: Beagle was already the animal and nothing could turn him back into a prince. Beagle, once Jossie, jerked himself into the present.
Ever since the wounding - or possibly death — of the detective, Beagle had been seized with a feeling of doom. He knew the disaster to be irreversible. There would be no kingdom of the innocent now, he was aware of that. He was doomed. As he had told Lamb the night before, it was more a case of who or how many he took with him. And yet — it had been worth it, hadn't it? What he had planned, worked and waited for, in one way he had achieved it. Beagle, aware, since Lamb's unwise shots, of the strong police presence outside, felt none of the sick tension and fear which had possessed him throughout the Royal Gala, leading up to the climactic abduction from the box.
When the noise of the loud-hailer reached him, the strong voice of authority reverberating in the tiny mews, he knew that control had already passed from Innoright, in so far as they had ever had it. It was over, all over. Wasn't it? And no fucking fairy-tale ending either. Not for this prince. He was still, in a strange way, happy.
But it wasn't all over. Not for Lamb at any rate, crouching outside the studio door. She gripped the pistol in her hand. Lamb, intent on what now seemed to her the only possible solution as
dictated by a mind already beginning to spin away, away from all it had once held dear, had not heard or not taken in the police reaction outside. Despite a childhood spent despising and
protesting against such country pursuits as shooting, she was confident that in an atavistic way she now knew quite enough about the gun to use it — just as she had managed easily to fire it
downstairs. Colonel Q's daughter Somewhere in her spiralling state, Lamb managed to be grimly grateful for that loathsome upbringing. That horrifying collection of guns, guns for killing
animals; her father used to display to them in the library, making her feel utterly powerless and distraught. ('Just smile and say nothing, Leelee,' Ione used to urge her. 'Above all don't cry;
Daddy hates tears.')
Lamb did hear the loud-hailer. She heard it without taking in the full import of the words, more taking the echoing sound as a kind of call to action - her predetermined action, the action which she had sometimes turned over in her mind in the past, during the long nights, caught as she was in the bondage of her jealousy, her lust - and her despair. The image of suffering Snowdrop, her calming mantra, had long ago vanished to be replaced by that of Colonel Q, the hunter.
To Beagle and Princess Amy, frozen the pair of them like the figures on a Grecian urn — what mad pursuit, what maiden loth — the words declaimed by the loud-hailer were not only totally audible but immediately and totally understandable.
'... We have you completely surrounded. Do not attempt to escape. You are surrounded. There are marksmen on the roof. Throw your weapons out of the window. Do not attempt to escape.' The loud-hailer continued to give its sonorous message. Then: 'Do you hear us? Send out your prisoner. You may indicate with a white cloth or some other other signal that you are sending out your prisoner. ... We can see where you are holding your prisoner. Repeat. We see you. ... We have you surrounded.'
How could they see us? wondered Beagle. Those new X-ray spy cameras no doubt. Their range was extraordinary even if their use in surveillance circles, British as well as Iron Curtain, was not advertised to the general public. Then he wondered how they had traced the lair. The possibility of confession by Mrs Taplow, betrayal by his father, had not occurred to him, when another quite different voice, the unmistakeably well-bred and surprisingly collected voice of Ione Quentin, was heard. Beagle immediately assumed Lamb to be in some way responsible for the betrayal.
Ione Quentin was addressing her sister: 'Lydia, no harm will come to you if you surrender, Lydia!'
'The bitch,' he thought, 'I should never have got tangled up with her. I have to admit that royal connection turned me on. And she was raving for it. But she's a loony. Never trust loonies. It should be a motto, Innoright's motto. Protect the innocent! Avoid the loonies. Just supposing there's a difference.'
Princess Amy remained silent. She could not trust herself to speak, since the prospect of rescue had the effect of diminishing rather than increasing her reserves of courage. At Beagle's side she began trembling violently. The voice of the police - and wasn't that Ione? - by bringing reality into what had been a kind of hideous dream sequence, fundamentally unreal however horrible, actually terrified her.
Was he now finally going to kill her? But he didn't seem to have a gun. Would he let her go? She must try and assert control again, she must, she had been getting somewhere with him, hadn't she? They had even been in an odd way friendly this morning, they had talked about the past, he had talked about his mother, that was a good sign, wasn't it? Above all, she must stop trembling. She suddenly remembered his name, his childhood name. She would use it.
'What are you going to do with me, Jossie?’ enquired Princess Amy in a small hoarse voice, the best she could manage.
Hearing her say 'Jossie' — and aware perhaps of the effort it had cost her, otherwise how explain his ironic smile? - Beagle began to guide Princess Amy, still bonded to him at the wrist, in the direction of the shuttered window.
What had he intended to do? Was he going to open the window? And was he then going to show her, tattered but like the princess disguised as a goose-girl in another fairy story, still recognizably Her Royal Highness Amy Antoinette Marguerite Caroline, Princess of Cumbe. rlandBut the exact intentions of Jocelyn Taplow, photographer, a.k.a. Beagle, would never be known for certain and in so far as they subsequently became a matter for debate, it was an academic debate at best.
For it was at this point that Lamb, touched off finally herself to action by that whispered breathless 'Jossie,' pushed open the door of the room. The blown-up images of Princess Amy were still strewn about; Beagle had pinned some of them up to cover the huge photographs of the seals. Lamb thought confusedly that the seals who survived were gazing at her reproachfully as though at an act of betrayal; but that was wrong: it was Beagle who had been the betrayer. She tore down the photograph next to her with her left hand.
What happened then, unlike Beagle's intentions, did subsequently become the subject of quite hectic debate - none of it academic. Nevertheless, for all this debate, the exact course of these events, too, would never be known for sure, even if in this case some kind of official solution had to be proposed. Witnesses, as so often with a violent but unpremeditated crime, witnesses and their actual state of mind at the time of the crime were the problem.