Blood Royal (14 page)

“Perhaps you’re seeking the loving reinforcement that you never got from your parents.”

She nodded. “I rather suspect that’s the case. You get unconditional love from the sick and dying. And stuffed animals. But, as I was saying, I was sent off to finishing school, but the very expensive school didn’t succeed in rubbing off my rough edges. We were supposed to speak French all the time and enmesh ourselves in the arts. Naturally, I spoke English and worked on my skiing. I was unhappy at the school, feeling very much a failure. I was shy and overweight. And lonely. I finally managed to convince my father to let me return from Swiss exile.”

“You were what, sixteen or seventeen when you left school? What were you like then? How did you think of yourself?”

“Not very highly, I’m afraid. I suppose I was something of a prig. I didn’t smoke or drink, I liked watching TV, glitzy soaps like
Dynasty
and
Dallas,
chatting with friends and my flat mates, dinner out.”

“You were essentially, what, a school dropout? Waiting for an offer of marriage?”

“It’s horrid to put it that way—but it sounds like the awful truth.”

“Were you happy with yourself?”

“Happy? I was happy day to day, not depressed. If you mean satisfied, no. I thought of myself as dumpy and overweight. I was eating too much and putting on too many excess pounds. But I did try to keep busy. Back in London, I was too young to set up housekeeping on my own, so I spent time living with a family whose children I took care of, and later my mother let me stay in her city apartment. When I was eighteen, my parents bought me a three-bedroom flat in a mansion block as a growing-up present. I got a part-time job teaching kindergarten at a fashionable school in Pimlico. Along with working with children, I also had babysitting and housecleaning jobs from friends.”

She splayed the fingers of both hands on the table. “I guess you can say I did my Cinderella chores as I waited for Prince Charming to ride up on his white charger and carry me off into the sunset.”

A long moment passed as the princess stared down at her hands, looking into the past. Finally, she looked up and met Marlowe’s eye.

“My husband was raised by a nanny, too. In more of an institution than I was. I’m certain that’s why he was so cold to my needs. The absence of love in the way my husband and I were raised was the reason I was determined to show my love for my children. More than anything else, what I yearned for as I grew up was to marry and have a family and household that was full of love and sharing. I hated the upper-class, stiff-upper-lip upbringing, with parents who treated their children as if they were part of the furnishings.”

“Your husband had more formality and restraint?”

“My husband was the epitome of proper British formality and restraint. Once when we were on a native dugout in the tropics being rowed by half-naked islanders wearing loincloths, he was dressed in a dark blue business suit, starched white shirt, with French cuffs and yellow tie. He insisted I wear a Bond Street dress and hat that was suitable for afternoon tea in an air-conditioned room.”

“It must have been hotter than hell.”

“Now that I think back about it, I don’t recall him ever sweating. Now, that’s restraint!” She exploded with another one of her nervous laughs.

Marlowe looked at her watch. “I’ve kept you long enough, and frankly, I need to get to my hotel and take care of some jet lag.”

“Did you know he was held only twenty or thirty minutes a day by his mother?”

“Your father?” Marlowe asked.

“My husband.” She shook her head. “It’s all an accident of birth, isn’t it?”

“You mean life?”

“Rich and poor, sick and healthy, it’s all potluck, isn’t it? As one of my friends says, it’s the luck of the draw.” The princess shook her head. “You are so lucky.”

“Lucky?”

“You were born poor.”

St. Andrews Hotel

A pack of newspeople, no fewer than the number who had ambushed her at the airport, was lying in wait in front of her hotel. Marlowe made it through the front door with Philip Hall and a doorman running interference.

Inside, Hall told her, “Trent has already arranged for your registration.”

She felt like asking if he had already had the room bugged, too, but restrained herself. She liked Hall. She thanked him before he left her at the elevators.

It had been a long day. She was beat but kept her head up as she stepped inside the elevator. When the doors closed, she leaned back and gave a sigh of relief. When the doors opened at her floor, she straightened her shoulders and stepped out, half expecting to be ambushed by a crazed reporter. As she walked down the deserted corridor, she had the feeling she was being watched, but put it down to paranoia.

In her room, she immediately tossed her clothes and climbed into the shower. She leaned against the shower wall, letting the hot water flow down her body. She was exhausted, mentally, partly from the media circus that had erupted in the wake of being hired by the princess, but she had to face something else, too. From the moment the news was leaked that she was going to represent the princess, her own past had been shoved into her face from blaring headlines and a media blitz. The husband-killer defending the husband-killer had become the stuff of late-night talk show jokes.

Later, wrapped in a big terry-cloth robe and a towel around her head, she drank hot tea and stood at the window, staring out at the foggy night, listening to the horns of boats on the Thames and the sound of Old Ben heralding the time. Remembering.

Modesto, California

Sixteen-year-old Marlowe and her brother Robbie, who was two years older, were walking to school when he shocked her with a family secret.

“Dad hits Mom. He beats her at night when they’re alone in their bedroom.”

Marlowe stared at her brother Robbie with disbelief. “Bull, you’re lying.”

“No, I’m not. I heard them last week through the heater vent on the floor of my room. He hit her and she kept crying.” He spoke in a monotone, controlling his voice.

She stared at him, unable to accept the truth of what he said. Her brother’s face was grim and she could see that he was ready to cry.

“So you only heard them once?”

“No, I’ve heard sounds before come from their bedroom, but it’s not loud enough to make out what they’re saying. Remember they had a new venting system installed a couple weeks ago, so I hear things now if I get down real close to the vent. I was doing my push-ups on the floor.”

“Why’d he hit her?”

Robbie turned and looked at her. “He does it all the time. Apparently, he’s been doing it for years.”

“No!”

“That’s what I heard through the vent last week, that she’s been putting up with it for years.”

“Did you hear her fight back?”

“No, she just cried kind of softly.”

“I don’t believe you. You heard wrong. Maybe it was the TV in their room.”

He shrugged. “I know what I heard. I don’t think he beats her with his fists. It’s not like guys fighting. I think he hits her with his open hand, that sort of thing.”

“That’s crazy.” She didn’t want to believe him, but there was a ring of truth to it. Her mother suffered bruises frequently, but claimed it was because she bruised so easily. Sometimes she had big bruises, not the kind of thing you got just from bumping into things. She even had a black eye once, but she claimed she slipped in the shower.

“Dad’s rough on her, you know that, he’s always bullying her, putting her down. She just sits and takes it.”

She glanced at her brother. “He’s hard on you, too, Robbie. And you just take it. I’ve told you a hundred times to stand up to him.”

“I don’t want to argue.”

She opened her mouth to give him a lecture about dealing with bullies, but stopped. He was too disturbed about what he had found out about their parents. So was she, but she was still in the shock and disbelief state, the response she went into when she didn’t want to believe something. And while Robbie would have sat back and said nothing, she was going to confront the issue the moment she got home from school.

“You can’t say anything,” Robbie said.

“I’m going to find out if it’s true.”

“Don’t, please, Dad will jump all over me for it.”

“You mean he’ll hit you?”

“I don’t know what I mean. Just don’t say anything. Maybe you’re right, maybe I heard the TV. Look, if you promise not to say anything, next time I hear something, you can listen.”

“You’ll come get me?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, then I promise not to say anything.”

They were the only two children of the family and were close emotionally, but had far different personalities. In many ways, Marlowe was more like her father, while her brother was more like her mother. Marlowe was precociously mature and sure of herself. At sixteen she thought she knew everything about everything and was usually willing to argue the point if anyone said she was wrong. While she was assertive and outspoken, rarely thin-skinned about anything except the number of freckles on her face and cracks that she should use Band-Aids instead of a bra, Robbie on the other hand was sensitive and introspective. He had an intense interest in learning and was an A student, while she barely tolerated school and was satisfied with C’s.

Even though Robbie was older, she often played the role of big sister, lecturing him on standing up for himself when he wasn’t assertive enough by her standards.

Her father drove a truck that made deliveries of mechanical parts for farm equipment, with his main customers being the farmers in the delta. He was a very precise man, neat and orderly to a fault. Robbie claimed that just watching their father change a set of spark plugs in the family car drove him crazy. “The way he meticulously changes the plugs like he’s a brain surgeon doing an operation, not getting a speck of grease on him afterwards, drives me nuts. Just once I’d like to see him with egg on his face.”

Robbie bought him a bumper sticker and pinned it on the door to the garage that their father used as his woodworking shop:
A CLEAN DESK IS THE SIGN OF A MESSY MIND
. He was not amused.

Her father was domineering and it often brought him into conflict with both Marlowe and her brother. He was constantly critical of Robbie. Nothing the boy did seemed to please him or pacify him. He didn’t ride Marlowe that much, partly because she screwed up in his eyes much less than her brother and partly because she wouldn’t take guff from him without lashing back.

Robbie wasn’t athletic and was built more like his mother, tall but slender and small-boned. Almost from the time he could walk, his father had been verbally deriding him about his inabilities at sports—he threw a ball like a girl, couldn’t catch or bat, couldn’t make a basket, got pinned almost immediately in wrestling, and broke out crying when his father put boxing gloves on him and started punching.

For the past couple of years the criticisms of Robbie had been getting more and more pointed as his father made snide remarks about his son’s manhood. The words
queer
and
faggot
increasingly crept into their conversations. And brought Marlowe increasingly into conflict with her father as she tried to protect her brother.

The person who should have protected Robbie, his mother, was too much like him to be of much help. Like her son, she was delicate and sensitive. A homemaker during most of her married life, she had taught first grade early in the marriage but stopped when Robbie was born. She was a quiet, passive woman. Because she lacked confidence in herself, when confronted with criticism from her husband she was apt to take the blame for things that weren’t her fault.

As Marlowe walked with Robbie, she thought about the accusation that he had made about their father. She had never seen him physically strike their mother. Even though he was the dominant one in the house and tended to bully his wife, he was not a macho, physically aggressive male outside the home, although he could be sarcastic to people. He seemed to reserve his domineering character for his small family.

When there were serious disagreements, her parents resolved them behind closed doors. But that was essentially what Robbie was saying, that their father was being abusive in the bedroom.

Her father wasn’t the warmest person in the world, that was a given, but he didn’t go into rages and physically abuse anyone in the family. He did tend to belittle her mother and Robbie, and that was always done by sarcasm, not beatings. He had no close friends that Marlowe knew about, no drinking buddies, no getting together with the men in the neighborhood for a beer while watching a ball game. In fact, her parents never seemed to go anywhere. When they weren’t in front of the TV, her mother was fussing in the kitchen or in the yard and her father was doing woodworking in the garage.

The woodworking was the only distinguishable thing she knew about her father. He worked for endless hours in the garage making decoys—wooden ducks used in hunting. He would start with a block of wood about a foot square and give it a rough shape with saws. Then he’d put the wood on his lathe and other machines and work it until it took the shape of a duck. After carving in the fine details, he’d paint it.

If he had a claim to fame, it was the ducks. They were even sold in gun shops. He didn’t make any real money off the decoys, they were too much work, but he had a passion for making them. To Robbie, it was redundant, monotonous work, making the same ducks over and over.

Her thoughts were interrupted with a shout from across the street.

“There’s Marlowe and her sister Roberta!”

The jeer came from Billy Yeager, a boy in Robbie’s high school class. The group of boys with him on the corner broke out laughing. One of them made a snickering catcall.

Robbie kept walking and didn’t look in the direction of the heckling kids.

“What’s going on? Why is he calling you Roberta?” Marlowe stopped. “Robbie, why is that asshole calling you a girl’s name?”