Blood Royal (36 page)

“I was afraid.”

“Afraid of who? What?”

“Everything, everybody.”

“Be more specific—why did you take the gun?”

“To protect myself.” She shook her head. “I can’t explain. I was frightened, I took the gun.”

“What were you frightened of?”

“I told you: everything. I wanted the pain to go away.”

“You planned to kill yourself?”

“Yes, that’s right, I planned to use the gun on myself.”

Marlowe shut her eyes. The princess’s statement that she planned to use the gun on herself resounded in her mind. And it rang false. She opened her eyes and said, “I don’t believe you. But more importantly, the jury won’t believe you.”

“Well, they will have to believe me, it’s the truth. I was going to kill myself and at the last moment I decided to kill my husband instead. I—I had the gun already, to use on myself. But at the party, I went suddenly into a rage and used it on him instead. That still makes it sudden provocation, doesn’t it?”

“If I thought you could sell that story to a jury, I’d say run with it, but it’s not ringing true to me. If it’s true, you should have told me and we could have built a defense around it. Now that we know you got the gun a day ahead of the shooting, you either got it as part of a premeditated plan to kill your husband … or you got it for another reason. It’s going to sound contrived when we suddenly come up with a suicide theory.”

“As my advocate, isn’t it your duty to sponsor my story? That’s how it was explained to me, that you tell your barrister what happened and they explain it to the judge and jury. Well, I want you to say that I took the gun because I planned to kill myself and changed my mind when I was provoked by my husband.”

“My job as an attorney is to represent you to the best of my ability, within the scope of what I have to work with. But that doesn’t include helping you concoct a story. I don’t have to believe in your story to advocate it, but I’m not a robot, either. What I saw in this room was you latching on to a version I suggested, that you took the gun to use it on yourself.

“Let’s get down to the bottom line. I don’t care where you got your story, you’re the only person on earth who really knows why you pulled that trigger. I’m not your judge or jury, I’m here to persuade them. My only concern is whether a jury will buy it. My instincts are that the story sounds contrived, a tap dance around the truth. And it gets worse—the only way to get before the jury is for you to testify. I don’t think you can do it convincingly.”

“I don’t want to testify.”

“No defense lawyer wants a defendant to testify, but if it’s the only way to avoid a conviction, you will have to do it.”

The princess turned away from her and Marlowe spoke to her back.

“I’m getting a gut feeling that you have lied to me about exactly what brought you to the point where you pulled the trigger and killed your husband.”

She turned around to face Marlowe. “You have lost faith in me.”

“That’s not true. Trials aren’t based upon faith, trust, loyalty, or any other fine moral stance. They’re not even based upon the truth—they’re based upon the evidence that gets admitted. And that evidence has to be credible. Despite anything you’ve heard or read, juries are not easily fooled. When you get twelve people from different walks of life listening to the same evidence, there’s always going to be one or more who see through bullshit. When you lose credibility with a jury on one issue, you might as well pack it up, because they will not believe anything you say. Once a liar, always a liar, that’s how juries judge lawyers and their clients. If they think they’re getting a snow job at any time, you’ll lose them.”

“And you think they will believe I am snowing them, as you put it.”

“I think there’s something you’re holding back. You’ve talked about your fears in general, but I also get the impression that you were actually frightened about something specific, but that you won’t tell me what it is.”

The princess got up and stood by the window, looking out at the Thames. After a moment she turned back to Marlowe.

“I’m afraid that I have said all I plan to say about the subject.”

Marlowe sighed. She checked her watch. “We’re due back in court in an hour. I will be giving my opening statement.” She met the princess’s eye. “All right: As they say, you’re a big girl and it’s your life. But if there are any more surprises, you had better let me in on them now.”

The princess turned back to the window for a long moment. Without turning, she asked Marlowe, “Have they told you I once took a lover?”

“No one’s told me about a lover.”

“He was a man much like my husband, very well bred, he reminded me of my husband.”

“You loved him? Had an affair?”

“Loved him, had an affair. Later, I heard that he had told others about it.”

“Do you still love him?”

“I’m not sure I know what love is anymore. I was lonely and needed him. I’m certain about one thing, though. Men are bastards.”

The judge called upon Marlowe to open her case.

She stood up and placed her notes on the small podium that sat atop the bench table. She always had copious notes on hand when she began her opening and closing statements and examinations of witnesses—and rarely relied on them. It was a security blanket, but one she didn’t need because she had performed the three vital tasks any lawyer had to do prior to trial: preparation, preparation, preparation.

“Mr. Desai was wrong when he described to you the plight of a princess as a fairy tale. As you will learn during the trial, it was a horror story, a story of torment and abuse, of a young woman swept into a nightmare, spiraling down further and further in a dark hell until she ended the abuse by striking back at her tormentor.

“It is a tale of a marriage that was a fraud, of a domineering bridegroom who took a picture of his lover along on his honeymoon.

“The princess was an ordinary young woman. She had been born into an old family that had money and position, but she was raised in that conservative British fashion where young ladies who take skiing vacations to the Swiss Alps also learn how to darn socks and cook plum pudding.

“Before she entered into the royal marriage, there wasn’t much that distinguished her from most other young women in her late teens. She was something of a dreamer, a romantic dreamer whose ambitions were not in the direction of academics. She was more inclined to read a tale of love than dissect a frog.

“That is a key thing that you have to realize about her. Her goal was to find a man who would love her and take care of her. Unlike many young women in her late teens in this day and age, she did not even experiment with sex. She was saving her virginity to give it to the man she loved.

“The man who came into her life was not an ordinary person but a prince, a real one, one of the richest and most powerful men on earth, the scion of the First Family of the entire English-speaking world. Heir to the throne of a world power. A person of rank and privilege that is unimaginable to ordinary people.

“This prince of princes pointed at the young woman and literally picked her out of a crowd and asked her to be his wife.

“The future princess is an impressionable, inexperienced, naive, rather immature eighteen-year-old when the prince first gives attention to her. Her only experiences in life are those of a schoolgirl.

“He is thirteen years her senior, a symbol of world power and privilege, worldly, well traveled, a veteran of the military. He has spent his entire life in the public eye. Instilled in him are centuries of both supreme privilege and a sense of duty.

“He reaches out and asks the young girl to marry him, to become a real-life princess, to someday become the queen of a world power, a position of unparalleled power, privilege, and prestige. It meant someday she would assume an ancient throne and have the adulation of hundreds of millions of people.

“When the news is made public, a media storm the like of which the world has never seen ignited like the burst of a supernova. And that media explosion knocks the young woman off her feet. In one fell swoop, she goes from being a rather ordinary teenage girl, living in an apartment and doing odd jobs, to being the focus of world attention.

“To say that it was a mind-blowing experience for her would be a gross understatement. It went beyond the impossible and unbelievable, it was a
soul-wrenching
experience—an experience she had no training or background to deal with.”

Marlowe’s eyes slowly swept the jurors. “It was an unimaginable turn of events. An average teenage girl was overnight turned into a worldwide media sensation—and no one offered assistance or advice on how to handle the sudden explosion of interest.

“The world acclaimed her as their fairy-tale princess.
It was not a position she sought.
She was not a young woman who lacked a good sense of reality. She did not think of herself as a fairy-tale princess.
It was how the world thought of her.
”

She paused to take a drink of water and let what she had said sink into the minds of the jurors. Her eyes traveled slowly from juror to juror as she continued, making sure she made direct eye-to-eye contact with each.

“If there is anything about the princess that dominated her emotions, it was the need to not disappoint people. She felt she had been rejected by her own parents when she was a child, that she had disappointed them, and that experience resulted in a need not just to be accepted, but to be loved. And she thought she had found that love and acceptance.

“But while the public would find her marriage to be a fairy tale come true, she would soon discover that it was a living nightmare, a horror story.

“She had been waiting for love. Like many of us women, she was waiting for the knight in shining armor to ride up and carry her away. When the prince gave her attention, she adored him. By the time he asked for her hand, she was hopelessly in love with him.

“You have to keep in mind, this was no ordinary man who was asking for her hand. Like millions of other young girls, she had been raised to respect and admire the man who was heir to the throne of their country.

“She is a woman of infinite passion, a woman who had held her passions in check, waiting for the right man and the right time. And when he came along, she was willing and eager to share her fire with the man she loved.

“But that sharing was never to happen.

“You see, the fairy-tale marriage was a fraud. It was a loveless, emotionally brutal
institution
of a marriage, a pro forma arrangement by a man who used and abused his power and privileges in his treatment of his bride.

“He did not marry the princess for love.

“He married her out of a sense of duty to his royal mother and the country, out of a need to fulfill his duty to father a child that would follow him on the throne.”

She spoke slowly. “
He did not marry for love.
That fact needs to be repeated, because if he married her for any other reason, the marriage contract was a fraud.”

She paused again and pretended to peruse papers, letting her comments sink in some more.

“Regretfully for both of them, the woman he deceived was a diehard romantic, a woman who gave him her heart and soul, who had married for only one reason—
true love.
”

Marlowe deliberately slapped her hand on the podium.

“He deceived her and cheated her of love because the marriage was a sham and a fraud from the beginning. As the princess would later put it, the marriage was rather crowded because there were three of them in it from the beginning.

“The other woman was not a ghost in the marriage, the memory of a premarital fling. Many men and women have had prior love affairs before marriage, and marriage doesn’t wipe clean memories of love past.

“But this was a perverse one, because the prince didn’t just carry on a relationship with the other woman after marriage, but from the very beginning made her part of the marriage, right from the time of the honeymoon, when he took along mementos of the woman.

“
Honeymoon.
It’s an unusual combination of two words, isn’t it? I suppose the word grew out of the belief that the first month of marriage is the sweetest. But it wasn’t, in this royal marriage. There was strychnine on the honeymoon, not sweetness.

“You need to understand what was happening to this teenage girl. She was the fairy-tale bride in the marriage of the century. But thrown into a media frenzy, into the preparations for the wedding of the century, isolated and alone, by the time of the wedding she was sick, physically ill, suffering from bulimia, a terrible, violent reaction to stress and depression that caused her to vomit out much of what she ate, leaving her to waste away.

“Rather than a romantic, relaxing, passionate honeymoon, the virginal bride is taken to a relative’s estate for a few days where there are other people in residence. They then go on board the royal yacht with a crew of several hundred.

“It was not a passionate honeymoon because the prince had not married the woman he really loved. He married a girl he considered to be little more than a breeding animal to provide a royal heir.

“Throughout the marriage, the princess asked him to be honest with her about his feelings about her and this other woman. He refused to discuss the matter. He refused to discuss it on their honeymoon and continued to refuse to discuss it as the marriage began to unravel and he renewed his relationship with the other woman.

Marlowe paused and met the eye of every juror.

“
Who the hell did he think he was?
What gave him the right to grind his young bride’s dreams and passions under his heel? Where did he get the audacity to do what he damn well pleased when he had entered into a marriage?

“Flaunting the other woman, not into the face of a person he had been married to for years …
but on their honeymoon.
”

Marlowe shook her head and lifted her arms in frustration. She painted a picture for the jury of the scene aboard the honeymoon ship when the prince wore to dinner the cuff links given to him by the other woman.