Blood Royal (12 page)

Would you?
Marlowe wondered. Was there a woman in the world who would not have sacrificed a little happiness to marry a prince and someday become queen? But it wasn’t time to challenge her on her story.

“That’s a point we’ll get across to the jury, that there’s more to happiness than material possessions and titles.” Marlowe met her eye. “I’ve met the rest of your defense team. They appear to be a well-rounded group of professionals. Why did you reach across the ocean and hire me? You had to know it would throw jet fuel on an already raging fire.”

The princess stared at her a little openmouthed, started to say something, and broke into a laugh. “You Americans, always so blunt. Do you have an ax in your briefcase you’ll bludgeon me with if you don’t like my answers?”

“I’m sorry, but I defend my clients with all my heart and all my energy. To win cases, I need to explain my client so well that the jury walks in my client’s shoes. To do that, I need to first walk in the shoes myself. Before we start building a defense about the shooting of your husband, I need to start with one of the most perplexing things about the case—why you hired me.”

“You called my defense team well-rounded. What did you think of Anthony Trent?”

Marlowe thought for a moment. “Intelligent, perceptive, probably a very able negotiator—all together, a sharp attorney. Well groomed, successful, distinguished, a leader in the courtroom and outside it. Not a typical criminal defense attorney, at least by American standards, where I’ve heard the best defense attorneys described as pit bulls with snapping jaws. In the States, I’d see him as more of a high-powered corporate attorney, perhaps even one who defends CEOs accused of white-collar crimes.”

“Would you say he’s ambitious?”

“Ambitious? I don’t know him well enough to answer that, but most successful people are. Including me.”

“I would imagine that the ambitions of most American attorneys are to succeed at their profession, win cases, and make money. Having the admiration of your peers or the public and financial rewards are universal motives that I can also imagine. But in Britain, we have an added mark of success. Knighthood. And above that, a life peer.”

“Life peer?”

“One is granted a noble title for life, but unlike hereditary titles, the title expires with the person. Lord Finfall is a life peer, awarded the title for public service. Do you know who creates knighthoods and peerages?”

Marlowe nodded. “The queen. I see what you’re getting at. Sir Fredic is a knight, Lord Finfall is nobility.”

“And Sir Fredic would like to be Baron Fredic. And I can’t tell you how much it would warm Anthony Trent’s heart to be called Sir Anthony.”

“You think they’d sell you out for a knighthood or peerage?”

“Selling me out, as you put it, would be too strong. They are honorable men and women, the people on the defense team. I don’t believe any of them can be bought or sold like common merchandise. It’s something much more subtle.”

“What do you mean?”

“Our legal system is very tight knit. The people at the top of it went to the same schools, socialize together, and no doubt think pretty much alike. That’s most of the reason I wanted an outsider as part of it, to bring in fresh thinking. And the other part is this knighthood thing. I trust Trent, he is a good and honorable professional. I don’t doubt his ability or his loyalty. But I can’t help wondering if somewhere in the back of his mind there might be a nagging thought that if he defended me too aggressively, he would never be Sir Anthony. I can’t help wondering if that nagging thought might inadvertently tip the scales against me in a critical moment.”

“You’re right, we don’t have anything like knighthood in the States, unless it’s membership to a snooty country club.”

The princess took a sip of her coffee. “I rather suspect that Americans don’t understand the role of the Royals in British life. You have royalty, too, you treat your movie and music stars not just as celebrities, but in many ways with the pomp and adulation we treat the Royals. In Britain, the Royals are not just people who enter your life when you see a movie or play a song, but are a part of your life from the day you are born. And surrounding the Royals are families like mine, people in the upper echelon of the social, political, and financial strata, and the Royals possess a powerful social hammer. The richest people in the country don’t feel fulfilled until they hear the titillating sound of ‘Yes, Your Lordship,’ or ‘How are you today, Lady Jane?’”

She eyed Marlowe. “I suppose this thing about royalty and nobility is difficult for an American to appreciate.”

“Not as much as you might think. Because we read and speak English, it’s British literature, British law, British culture that most Americans relate to. Your queen in a sense is our queen, too.”

The princess lowered her eyes a moment, wondering how to approach Marlowe with a touchy subject. “I understand that, uh, your financial background is much different than mine, at least when you were young. Will that make it difficult for you to understand me? To fight for me? Or do you fight the same for all your clients?”

“I fight for all my clients, that’s what my profession demands. I’d like to say that it doesn’t matter if the client is wealthy or not, but the truth is that rich people can pay for the teams of experts that can make a difference in a case.”

“Do lawyers work harder if they’re paid more?”

“I can only speak for myself and I’d like to say no, that I don’t work harder for the rich than I do the poor, but that would be a lie. I won’t turn down a case that I believe in just because of money, but I have to pay rent, buy food, and cover office expenses like anyone else. Someone has to pay for that, and it won’t be the poor.”

The princess spread her fingers on the table and stared down at them. Her fingernails had been chewed on. Embarrassed, she hid them as she realized Marlowe had noticed.

“In a sense, I see you as a counterbalance. Asking you to represent me was not a spur-of-the-moment decision. I actually had you thoroughly checked out. I learned that in America, successful criminal defense lawyers gain something of celebrity status—”

“Or notoriety.”
It wouldn’t have taken much for the princess’s friends to have checked my background,
Marlowe thought. There had been plenty of stories about her over the years.

“Or that. Naturally, I was impressed by your string of victories. But also with how you managed them. The person who investigated you on my behalf called you a master of empathy. You were able to explain your clients to the jury in a way that they truly understood what the clients went through. You could only do that if you had a great reserve of empathy. And if there’s anything I need, it’s for people to understand from my point of view what drove me to pick up a gun and pull the trigger. I think you can understand that better than anyone else.”

Marlowe got an intuitive flash as to why the princess had hired her. She wasn’t just looking for empathy. Marlowe’s attraction to her was that both of them had taken abuse and humiliation and struck back at their husbands the same way.

“I don’t want to be locked up in prison. Or a mental ward, which is the place they’d most like to put me. You see, that would explain everything to their satisfaction, wouldn’t it? If I was crazy, it’s not his fault and it’s not really even my fault, either, because I had no control over my actions. But that would mean not only that I would be written off as a crazy, but that I would be locked up forever.

“My main concern is for my children. I could never explain to them why I killed their father. They’ve asked me why I did it and I simply shook my head and cried. I need to leave them a legacy about me that doesn’t simply label me a crazy. There are things about a relationship between a man and a woman no mother could ever explain to her child, things that are so personal or painful that the words can’t be said to children. But I hope I can give you those words and let you explain me to the world.”

She met Marlowe’s eyes. Marlowe saw sadness and world-weariness in the princess’s moist eyes.

“I want you to be my champion, Marlowe. To be my advocate and fight my battles. But most of all, I want you to understand me, so you can explain me to the world. I can only hope to God that my sons learn things about me and my marriage that makes them understand that I was driven to a heinous act. I took their father from them, but I did so only after years of mental abuse that robbed me of my dignity and very nearly my sanity.”

The princess locked eyes with Marlowe again. “They made me do it, drove me to it. That’s what I told the police investigators—and that is the truth. The biggest problem with my marriage and my position as the future queen was that I never really belonged. My husband’s family and his circle of friends never accepted me. They lined up against me when they found out that I would not simply stand back and take it.”

“Why don’t we start at the beginning?” Marlowe took a tape recorder out of her briefcase.

“I’d prefer not to be taped, just in case it fell into the wrong hands.”

“Okay, but I’ll have to take notes.” She substituted a notepad for the recorder. She actually knew quite a bit about the princess—her legal assistant was a compulsive reader of tabloids and magazines that revealed the private lives of celebrities. She had given Marlowe an hour-long dissertation on the princess and other Royals. But how much of it was truth and how much was made-up lust and disgust and other exaggerated nonsense was yet to be seen.

“I first dated my husband—”

“No, I mean really at the beginning. Let’s go back. I need to understand you, not just the woman who married a prince, but the person you were before you entered the spotlight.”

The princess sighed. “I have been trying to understand how I came to be held a prisoner in the Tower myself. I suppose you’re right, the cause goes back farther than my marriage. But I need to have you understand one thing about me that probably dominated my life, at least after I reached puberty and began dreaming about who I would spend my married life with. You see, I never thought of marriage as arranged like a business transaction, but as something created in heaven. And I’m afraid that neither my parents nor my husband and his family thought of it the way I did.” She lifted her hands palm up in a gesture of confusion. “Where do you want me to start?”

“Let’s do it the way the king told a witness at the trial in
Alice in Wonderland
: Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end, then stop. So let’s start with day one, your birth, your childhood, and move forward.”

“She what?”

Philip Hall smothered a grin. He, too, was offended by Marlowe’s insistence that she interview the princess alone, but Sir Fredic’s expression was a mixture of shock and outrage that bordered on the comical.

“She insisted on going in alone. I informed her that was not our ethical practice, but she—”

“The bitch. I knew we would have problems the moment the news broke that she had brought in this American.” Sir Fredic shot a glance around to make sure they were not being overheard. “It makes one wonder about the princess’s sanity, doesn’t it?”

Hall raised his eyebrows. “She wouldn’t have killed her husband unless she was a bit bonkers, would she?”

*   *   *

T
HE PRINCESS SPOKE WITH
her coffee cup to her lips, her eyes staring past Marlowe, looking back over the years. “My birth. Well, I suppose you can say I was disappointing people from the moment I came into the world.”

“How can a baby disappoint anyone?”

“When the baby’s a girl and a boy is needed to inherit a title that’s been in the family for centuries, it’s a crushing disappointment. My parents had been trying to have a boy. Before I was born they had two daughters and a son, but the boy died in infancy. When my mother became pregnant with me, there was great pressure on her from my father and his own father, the seventh earl, to produce a boy who could ultimately inherit the title and estate.

“My parents were so counting on a boy, they had not even chosen a girl’s name. So I came into the world, a naked, crying little thing without a name and as a big disappointment.”

“Did your parents ultimately get their male heir?”

“My brother came along several years later, but the damage was done to the marriage. My father is not a particularly easy man to get along with. He blamed my mother for producing girls—”

“That’s nonsense.”

“When you’re dealing with centuries of tradition and only a male can inherit the title of an earl, the difference between a boy and a girl can be earth-shattering.”

“An earl, that’s a significant noble title?”

“Yes, below a duke, above a baron, what they call a count in many European countries. While my grandfather was alive, my father was a viscount. After my grandfather passed when I was a young teen, my father became the eighth earl, my brother the viscount, and I became a lady.”

“That’s heady stuff for a young teen.”

“Not when you are raised in an atmosphere where it’s just part of everyday life. I was born in and spent most of my preteen years in a manor house on the queen’s estate at Sandringham. Being so close physically and agewise to the queen’s two younger sons, my siblings and I often had the two royal princes as playmates, but not the man who became my husband, of course. My husband was thirteen years older than me, but his younger brothers are close to the age of my brother and I.

“We had been a significant family in England for nearly half a millennium, dating back to the fifteenth century when my family had been wealthy sheep traders. Charles I awarded one of my ancestors an earldom and a family crest, no doubt in return for a substantial contribution to the royal coffers. I suppose it did Charles himself little good because he soon became the first of our kings to lose his head—literally—in a dispute with Parliament.

“There is nobility on both sides of my family tree. My mother was the daughter of a baron, a family with roots in Ireland and England. It was my mother’s family, actually, that had acquired the rights to our house on the queen’s estate. King George V had granted my grandfather, the fourth baron, the lease of the house. It had initially been used for the overflow of guests and staff from nearby Sandringham House, the queen’s winter residence.”