The House of Cards Complete Trilogy (68 page)

“I’ve struggled so hard to avoid that, Mortima, truly I have. It would not simply be destroying one man but several hundred years of history. There are limits.”

“Think about it, Francis. Is it possible?”

“It would certainly be a distraction from bellyaching about the underprivileged.”

“Governments don’t solve people’s concerns; they simply try to rearrange them in their favor. Can’t you rearrange them in your favor?”

“Inside two weeks?” He examined the determined look in her eyes. She was in earnest. Deadly earnest. “That’s what I’ve spent all night thinking about.” He nodded gently. “It might just be. With a little luck. And witchcraft. Make him the issue, the people versus the King. But this would not simply be an election, it would be a revolution. If we won, the Royal Family would never recover.”

“Spare me the pity. I’m a Colquhoun.”

“But am I a Cromwell?”

“You’ll do.”

He suddenly remembered they had dug up Cromwell and stuck his rotting skull on a gibbet. He looked at the remnants of charred toast, and was very much afraid she might be right.

PART THREE

Thirty-Seven

A public life is like a laundry basket—it quickly overflows with dirty linen.

February: The First Week

The ringing of the telephone startled him, intruding into the quiet of the apartment. It was late, well after ten, and Kenny had already retired to leave Mycroft working on some last-minute arrangements for the King’s tour. Kenny was on standby; Mycroft wondered whether the telephone was summoning him to fill a last-minute vacancy on some flight crew, but surely not at this time of night?

Kenny appeared at the bedroom door, rubbing wearily at his eyes. “It’s for you.”

“For me? But who…?”

“Dunno.” Kenny was still half asleep.

With considerable trepidation Mycroft lifted the extension. “Hello.”

“David Mycroft?” the voice inquired.

“Who’s speaking?”

“David, this is Ken Rochester from the
Mirror
. I’m sorry to bother you so late. It’s not too inconvenient, is it, David?”

Mycroft had never heard of the man before. His nasal tones were unpleasant, his informality insolent and unwelcome, his concern patently insincere. Mycroft made no reply.

“It’s something of an emergency; my editor’s asked if I can come on the tour tomorrow, along with our Royal correspondent. I’m a special features writer myself. You moved, have you, David? Not your old number, this.”

“How did you get this number?” Mycroft asked, forcing out every word through suddenly leaden lips.

“It is David Mycroft, isn’t it? From the Palace? I’d feel a total fool talking about this to anyone else. David?”

“How did you get this number?” he asked again, the constriction in his throat drying his words. He had supplied it to the Palace switchboard for use only in an emergency.

“Oh, we usually get whatever we want, David. So I’ll turn up tomorrow to join the rest of the reptiles, if you’ll make the necessary arrangements. My editor would be furious if I couldn’t find some way of persuading you. Was that your son I spoke to on the phone? Sorry, silly question. Your son’s at university, isn’t he, David?”

Mycroft’s throat was now desiccated, unable to pass any words.

“Or a colleague, perhaps? One of your highfliers? Sounded as if I’d woken him from bed. Sorry to have disturbed you both so very late at night, but you know how editors are. My apologies to your wife…”

The journalist prattled on with his confection of innuendo and inquiry. Slowly Mycroft withdrew the telephone from his ear and dropped it back into its cradle. So they knew where he was. And they would know who he was with, and why. After the visit of the Vice Squad he had known it would happen sooner or later. He’d prayed it would be much later. And he knew the press. They wouldn’t be satisfied with just himself. They’d go for Kenny, too, his job, his family, his private life, his friends, everybody and anybody he’d ever known, even through his dustbins in search of all the mistakes he had ever made. And who hadn’t made mistakes? They would be remorseless, unstinting, uncompromising, unspeakable.

Mycroft wasn’t sure he could take that sort of pressure; he was even less sure he had the right to ask Kenny to take it. He wandered over to the window and glanced up and down the darkened street, searching the shadows for any hint of prying eyes. There was nothing, nothing that he could see at least, but it wouldn’t be long, maybe as soon as tomorrow.

Kenny had fallen asleep again, innocent and unaware, his body twisted in the sheets as only young people can manage. All they had wanted was to be left alone, yet it was only a matter of time before others came to tear them apart.

***

Urquhart had arrived back late from the diplomatic reception to find Sally waiting for him, chatting over a plastic cup of coffee with a couple of Protection Squad officers in what passed as their office: a cramped closet-sized room just off the entrance hall. She was perched on the corner of their desk, supported by her long and elegant legs, which the seated detectives were admiring with little sign of reticence.

“My apologies for disturbing you at your work, gentlemen,” he muttered tetchily. He realized he was jealous, but felt better as the detectives sprang to their feet in evident confusion, one of them spilling the coffee in his haste.

“Good evening, Prime Minister.” Her smile was broad, warm, showing no aftereffects of their previous meeting’s misunderstanding.

“Ah, Miss Quine. I was forgetting. More opinion polls?” He attempted an air of distraction.

“Who do you think you’re kidding?” Sally muttered from the corner of her mouth as they made their way from the room.

He arched an eyebrow.

“If they thought you’d really forgotten about a late-night meeting with a woman who had a figure like mine, they’d send for the men in white coats.”

“They are not paid to think but to do as I tell them,” he responded waspishly. He sounded as if he meant every word, and Sally felt alarmed. She decided to change the subject.

“Talking of opinion polls, you’re six points ahead. But before you start congratulating yourself, I have to tell you that the King’s tour will blow that lead right out of the water. It’s going to be one heck of a circus—lots of hand-wringing and talk of compassion. Frankly, not a game where your side fields a strong team.”

“I’m afraid His Majesty is going to have distractions of his own before the week is out.”

“Meaning?”

“His press officer and close friend, Mycroft, is a homosexual. Shacked up with an air steward.”

“So what? It’s no crime.”

“But sadly the story is just dribbling out to the press, and in their usual disreputable fashion they will be bound to make him wish he were a simple criminal. There’s not only the deceit of his family—apparently his poor wife has been forced to leave the marital home after more than twenty years of marriage in disgust at what he’s been up to. There’s also the security angle. A man who has access to all sorts of sensitive information, state secrets, at the heart of our Royal Family, has lied his way right through the regular vetting procedures. Laid himself wide open to blackmail and pressure.” Urquhart was leaning on the wall button that would summon the private lift to the top-floor apartment. “And then, most serious of all, is deceit of the King. A lifelong friend, whom he has betrayed. Unless, of course, you wish to be uncharitable and conclude that the King knew all along and has been covering up to help an old friend. Messy.”

“You’re not implying that the King, too—”

“I imply nothing. That’s the job of the press,” he responded, “who, I confidently predict, by the end of the week will be wading in it.”

The lift doors were open, beckoning. “Then why wait, Francis? Why not strike now, before the King sets off and does all that damage?”

“Because Mycroft is no more than a dunghill. The King needs to be pushed not from a dunghill but from a mountain top, and by the end of his tour he will have climbed about as high as he’s going to get. I can wait.”

They stepped into the lift, a small, insalubrious affair that had been squeezed into a recess of the old house during refurbishment earlier in the century. The narrowness of its bare metal walls forced them together and, as the doors closed, she could see the way his eyes lit up, sense the confidence, arrogance even, like a lion in his lair. She could be either his prey, or his lioness; she had to keep pace with him or find herself devoured.

“Some things you shouldn’t wait for, Francis.” Match him step for step, hold on to him, even as he slithered toward his own mountain top. She leaned across him to the control panel, and as her groping fingers found the key the lift stopped quietly between floors. Already her blouse was unbuttoned and he was kneading the firm flesh of her breasts. She winced. He was getting rougher, more bruising, his thrust for domination more insistent. He still had on his overcoat. She had to allow it, to encourage and indulge him. He was changing, no longer bothering with self-restraint, perhaps no longer able. But as she wedged herself uncomfortably in the corner of the lift, bracing her legs against the walls, feeling cold metal on her buttocks, she knew she had to go with him as far as she could and as far as he wanted to go; it was the type of opportunity that would not present itself again. It was once in a lifetime and she had to grab it, whether or not he any longer said please.

***

It was four a.m. and pitch dark when Mycroft crept slowly from the bedroom and began to dress quietly outside. Kenny still slept, his body innocently engaged in a tumbling match with the bed linen, an arm wrapped around a toy bear. Mycroft felt more father than lover, driven by a deep and innate sense of protectiveness toward the younger man. He had to believe that what he was doing was right.

When he had finished dressing he sat down at the table and switched on a small lamp. He needed light to write the note. He made several hopeless attempts, all of which he tore into small pieces and placed atop a mounting pile beside him. How could he explain that he was fractured between his feelings of love and duty toward two men, the King and Kenny, both of whom were now threatened through him? That he was running away because that is what he had done all his life and he knew no other answer? That he would continue running as soon as the King’s tour was over—for surely he had three days left before disaster struck?

The pile of torn paper mounted, and in the end he was left with nothing more than: “I love you, believe me. I’m sorry.” It sounded so pathetic, so insufficient.

He placed the scraps of paper back inside his briefcase, snapping the locks as quietly as he was able, and put on his overcoat. He glanced out of the window to check the street, which he found silent and cold, as he felt inside. As carefully as he could he crept back to place the note on the table where Kenny would find it. As he placed it against the vase of flowers, he saw Kenny sitting up in bed, staring at the case, the overcoat, the note, understanding flooding into his sleep-filled eyes.

“Why, David? Why?” he whispered. He raised no shout, shed no tears; he had seen too many departures in his life and with his job, but accusation filled every syllable.

Mycroft had no answer. He had nothing but a sense of imminent despair from which he wanted to save all those he loved. He fled, away from the sight of Kenny clutching a favorite bear to his chest as he sat forlornly amid his throne of sheets; he ran out of the apartment and back into the real world, into the dark, past the empty milk bottles, his footsteps on the pavement stones echoing down the empty street. And as he ran, for the first time in his adult life Mycroft discovered he was crying.

Thirty-Eight

When they circumcised His Majesty I fear they threw away the wrong part. Perhaps it is time to cut him down to size again.

The night air was damp, full of winter that dripped down the mold-covered walls and into the overflowing gullies of the concrete underpass as the old derelict stared into the face of his King. The dirt of weeks beneath his fingernails he no longer noticed and the stench of stale urine he no longer smelled, but the King had been aware from several yards away and even more so as he knelt beside the sum of all the old man’s possessions—a hand grip tied with sisal, a torn and stain-covered sleeping bag, and a large cardboard box stuffed with newspapers, which would probably be gone by the time he returned the following night.

“How on earth did he get like this?” the King inquired of a charity worker at his elbow.

“Ask him,” suggested the charity worker, who over the years had lost patience with the high and mighty who came bearing their hearts on their sleeves, to express their deeply felt concerns yet who always, without exception, did so in front of accompanying cameramen, who treated the down-and-outs as impersonal objects rather than as people, who peered and passed on.

The King flushed. At least he had the decency to recognize his own crassness. He knelt on one knee, ignoring the damp and the debris that seemed to be everywhere, to listen and to attempt understanding. And in the distance, at the end of the underpass where they had been shepherded by Mycroft, the cameras turned and recorded the image of a sad, tearful man, bent low amid the filth, listening to the tale of a tramp.

It was said later by those accompanying members of the media that never had a royal press aide worked more tirelessly and imaginatively to give them the stories and pictures they needed. Without interfering with the King or intruding too savagely on the pathetic scenes of personal misery and deprivation, they were faced with abundance. Mycroft listened, understood, cajoled, wheeled and dealed, encouraged, advised, and facilitated. At one point he intervened to delay the King a moment while a camera crew found their ideal position and changed their tape, at another he whispered in the Royal ear and got the King to repeat a scene, steam rising from the drains and beautifully backlit for effect by a street light, with a mother cradling a young baby. He argued with police and remonstrated with local officials who tried to insinuate themselves into the picture. This was not to be a caravan of officialdom who would pass by on the other side as soon as the obligatory photographs were taken; this was a man, out discovering his Kingdom, alone with a few derelicts and his conscience. Or so Mycroft explained, and was believed. If during those three days the King slept fitfully, then Mycroft slept not at all. But whereas the King’s cheeks became more sallow and his eyes more sunken and full of remorse as the tour passed from day to night and back to freezing day, Mycroft’s blazed with the fire of a conqueror who saw justification in every scene of deprivation and triumph in every click of the shutter.