Jane Todd stared at her cards and tried not to yawn. Pelay, the little Brazilian bellhop, had managed to get them a room overlooking the park this time. Dawn sunlight was already leaking in around the drawn curtains. All four people at the table were smokers and the cigarette haze was thick as fog. The green felt tossed over the table to protect it was covered in ashes, beer bottles, poker chips and cards. The radiator under the window was hissing and the big bed on the other side of the room was starting to look very tempting. Jane and the others had been at it since midnight, and even the sandwich trays Pelay had cadged from his pal down in the Oak Room couldn’t soak up the sour taste of too much beer and coffee and far too many cigarettes.
Jane let out a small unladylike belch and looked down at the cards again. She’d dealt herself a pair of fives and not much else. Everybody had anted up for the hand and four bucks’ worth of chips lay in the pot. Pelay, sitting on Jane’s left, drew three cards, then wriggled back in his seat with an irritated expression on his face. Rusty Birdwell, her scrawny pal from the Daily News, was seated directly across from Jane. Like the bellhop, he drew three cards, then used a wetted index finger to smooth down his Clark Gable.
“Well shit,” he muttered and took a slug from the bottle of Pabst in front of him. Dick Walsh, the handsome, dark-haired headwaiter from the Stork Club, tapped the table and held up three fingers as well. Jane dealt them out, then took three for herself. Still nothing but the pair of fives.
Pelay shook his head. “You a rotten goddamn dealer. You know that, Jane?”
“Yeah,” said Walsh. “But at least she’s democratic. She doesn’t deal anyone a good hand.”
“Bet,” said Jane. She shook a Lucky out of the pack in front of Pelay and lit it with his slim, solid-gold lighter.
“Where does an evil little dwarf like you get the money for a Dunhill?”
“A gift,” said the bellhop. He tossed a dollar chip into the pot.
“From a guest?” asked Birdwell, who threw in a dollar as well.
“A grateful guest, my friend.” Pelay arched an eyebrow. Walsh folded, tossing in his cards, then stood up and wandered off toward the john.
“Grateful for what?” asked Birdwell, playing into it.
The bellhop leered, then reached down with his free hand and squeezed the crotch of his uniform trousers. “I gave her what no woman can give herself.”
“What would that be?” Jane asked. “One of those little cocktail wieners they serve down in the bar?” She added her dollar to the pot. “Anybody worth shooting in the hotel?” she asked.
Pelay shrugged. “Miss Bankhead is here. The Duke and Dukette of Windsor arrive tomorrow, but they do not allow pictures. You know that, Jane.”
“I think that’s duchess, my little South American friend,” said a grinning Birdwell.
“I don’t care for a shits what you want to call her,” Pelay snorted. “All I know is she has too much luggage and never tips.”
“Nobody else?” Jane asked. Because she was a freelance news photographer, information from people like Pelay at the Plaza and Walsh from the Stork Club was worth its weight in gold. Which was half the reason for the regular once-a-week poker game, of course.
Pelay sighed. “Mr. Dewey is having a party here on Friday. Mr. Astaire arrives on Thursday. Mr. Powell is here on Saturday and Sunday before heading to Cape Cod.” He gave a little laugh. “Then there are the regulars, of course: wives playing fec-a-fec on their husbands, husbands playing fec-a-fec on their wives, assorted kings and queens without countries.”
“Think the King and Queen of England will stay at the Plaza when they come to the States?” Birdwell asked.
“If they stay in New York they would stay nowhere else,” said the little man, lifting his head proudly. “I would see to it personally, me, Juan Auguste Pelay!” He poked a thumb into his chest.
“Not if the duke and duchess are here,” said Jane. Everybody knew England’s new queen and the duchess hated each other. Now that would be something worth seeing, Jane thought—a down-and-dirty catfight complete with hissing and scratching and hair pulling, tiaras and crown jewels flying in all directions. What a picture that would be. You could make enough with a shot like that to retire. “Anybody want cards?”
They went around the table again and Jane gave herself a pair of eights to go along with the fives. She bet two dollars. Pelay and Rusty called and they put down their cards. Birdwell took it with queens and treys.
“Royalty has always looked kindly upon me,” Birdwell said, screwing up one eye as though he was wearing a monocle. Then he leaned forward and raked in the pot. He lit a Spud and leaned back in his chair. “They’ll go over big, those two,” Birdwell predicted. “Just you wait.”
“From what I hear, he’s kind of dull,” said Jane. “Not like his big brother.”
“Not what the Brits need right now,” Birdwell said, shaking his head. “He went shooting tigers in India, flying around in airplanes, kicking up his heels with Mrs. Simpson. Old George and Elizabeth are just what the doctor ordered—Fairbanks and Pickford all over again, mark my words. He’s shy, she’s charming and both of them are salt-of-the-earth types. Just what you want in a war.”
Walsh came back from the john with splashes of water on his wrinkled white shirt and Jane handed him the cards, begging out of the game for a hand or two. She stubbed out her cigarette, then stood up and went to the window. She pulled back the drapes and hauled up the lower pane six inches, letting in a waft of fresh, cold air. She eased herself down onto the radiator, tucking her dark skirt under her thighs, leaned back against the window frame and looked out over the park. Nothing was moving except a cop on horseback going around the pond to Inscope Arch. Jane took a deep breath and closed her eyes for a moment.
Jane Mary Todd was thirty-nine years old, born with the century in Brooklyn, New York, on March 31, the same day McKinley officially put America onto the gold standard, making her her mother’s personal Golden Girl, as she was called when she was a little girl, much to her shame and horror.
Jane’s mother had been a seamstress and her father had worked for the New York Central Railroad. Her father had died in a trench in France in late 1917 and her mother died a year later during the influenza epidemic, leaving eighteen-year-old Jane to take care of Annie, her blind, dull-witted older sister. Helped by friends of her father, Jane managed to find work as a telegraphist’s assistant with the railroad, but the money she made wasn’t nearly enough to support both herself and Annie. In the end she was forced to have her sister committed to the Metropolitan Hospital Lunatic Asylum on Welfare Island.
Jane lasted two years on the railroad, then found a job as a copy girl on the New York Herald Tribune, where she eventually earned enough money to buy a ten-year-old Speed Graphic and set herself up as a freelance reporter and photographer. That was in 1923 and she’d been doing the same thing ever since, bouncing around from one city to the other all over the United States, including a couple of years as a publicity photographer in Hollywood, which was where she’d first met Rusty Birdwell.
For the last three years she’d been back in New York, living and working out of a two-room office in a rundown block on Twenty-third Street that was occupied by jobbers, bail bondsmen, second-rate lawyers and even a couple of private detectives. She’d come close to marriage a few times but had never taken the final plunge. Thankfully she’d never sunk as low as sleeping with any of her poker partners, no matter how desperate she’d found herself. Even though she was pushing forty, most men agreed she was a looker, like a slightly out-of-focus Glenda Farrell in the Torchy Blane films, blond bob and perm, big eyes and a mouth that made you think about all sorts of things, but so far no one was willing to live with her longshoreman’s vocabulary, the constant smell of photographic chemicals and a parrot named Ponce de Leon, who only said rude things in Italian. Jane had been given the orphan bird by Dan Hennessy, a cop friend, after covering the murder of its previous owner for the Daily News. The dead man, a low-level gunsel for the Gambino family, had been named Vinnie the Mook.
“You gonna play or you gonna jump out the window?” asked Birdwell. Jane opened her eyes and yawned, putting her hand in front of her mouth. She glanced out the window. The horse cop was gone and the park was empty. Somewhere far away she heard the howling of a police siren.
“Play,” Jane said finally. She closed the window and went back to her seat. Birdwell was dealing now. Jane anted up and then checked her cards. Junk. She thought about folding before she wasted any more money but decided to stay in for the draw.
“So why you think they coming to America?” Pelay asked.
“Who?” asked Jane, lighting another cigarette.
“This king and this queen,” said Pelay.
Birdwell drew a pair. “Depends on if you’re a Democrat or a Republican,” he said, arranging his cards in a fan.
“I do not understand,” said Pelay.
“If you’re a Democrat you think it’s a nice gesture, hands across the sea and all that, the result of a friendly invitation with no political significance at all,” Birdwell replied.
“And if you’re a Republican,” Jane explained with a smile, “you think it’s a secret plot by FDR to get America into the war.”
“This is twice you have spoken it. What war?” Pelay asked nervously. “I have not heard of this.”
“The war with Hitler,” said Birdwell. “Which you can bet your socks is coming, slick as shit.”
“I don’t want your socks. I want your money,” said Walsh. “Three cards.” He took them and then it was Jane’s turn. She drew three as well and came up with a pair of jacks. She bet two dollars.
“You think the king is coming to make some kind of deal with Roosevelt?” Jane asked, looking across at Birdwell.
The skinny reporter lifted his narrow shoulders. “Hard to say. There’s never been a British king on American soil before, so it must mean something.”
“I can tell you what it means,” said Walsh. “It means that we’re already up to our armpits in crap from the World’s Fair out in the Meadows and now we’re going to be buried in more crap pasted with pictures of the Limey royals—that’s what it means.” He shook his head. “Billingsly’s probably going to come up with a whole new goddamn menu for us to memorize. Quail à la queenie and king crab cakes.” He drew two cards, frowned at his hand and folded again.
“I guess we’ll just have to wait and see,” said Jane. A few minutes later Pelay took the hand with three queens and Jane went home to her office and Ponce de Leon the parrot.
Alan “Tommy” Lascelles stepped out of his office on the ground floor of Buckingham Palace, his outstretched arms loaded down with a half dozen red leather dispatch boxes for His Majesty’s attention, and no doubt, the meddlesome attentions of Her Majesty as well. The thin, tall and slightly stooped man turned right and headed down the long gloomy corridor. It was ten minutes to ten, and like everything else in the ill-lit pile that was the royal residence in London, the enormous size of the building had to be factored into any estimation of personal punctuality.
From his office at one end of the Privy Purse Corridor, Lascelles had to walk the entire length of the northeast wing, passing all the Household Offices, then wait for the ancient and interminably slow King’s Lift, which would then, if it didn’t stop halfway up, deposit him in the King’s Corridor, directly in front of His Majesty’s study.
Hardinge, the king’s private secretary, had made a study of the journey over a period of two years and had discovered that the regular 10:00 A.M. delivery of the dispatch boxes required a lead time of a full ten minutes if the lift was on the upper floor and had to be summoned, and seven minutes if the lift was already on the main floor. According to Pendrell, the deputy master of the household, it was even worse for the kitchens; the average distance traveled by a Buck House meal was the better part of half a mile, and the elapsed time for a bowl of soup to go from royal ladle to royal lips was roughly eighteen minutes.
Delivering the boxes was usually Hardinge’s job, but Sir Alexander Hardinge, KCB, GCVO, Military Cross and Bar was, damn his bloody eyes, indisposed after what his note that morning had cryptically referred to as a “trying” weekend in the country. If Lascelles knew anything about it, he was fairly sure that the trying part of the weekend had involved far too much Scotch and God only knew what with one or more of his young friends from the grenadiers.
Lascelles reached the tiny elevator just in time to be bowled over as Elizabeth and her younger sister came charging out into the corridor, shrieking with laughter. Both the young princesses were dressed in plaid wool skirts and light blue wool sweaters against the ever-present chill of the palace. Neither the skirts nor the sweaters were particularly becoming, not surprising given the somewhat rural background of their mother.
“Dreadfully sorry, Tommy!” said Elizabeth. She helped Lascelles retrieve the scattered boxes while Margaret watched solemnly, a thumb tucked wetly into the corner of her mouth like one of Churchill’s cigars. With the boxes back in Lascelles’s arms Princess Elizabeth gave him a quick little curtsy, pushed the button to open the narrow elevator door, then grabbed her sister’s hand and skipped away down the corridor.
The tall man smiled, watching the future Queen of England race away, thinking fondly of his own two children, John and Lavinia, and wondering briefly what the future held for them. Lascelles stepped into the elevator, vowing that if either one of them showed the slightest sign of marrying into the royal family he’d have them committed to the Cane Hill Asylum just outside Croydon. Grinning broadly, he nudged the UP button with his elbow and the coffin-size lift began to move.
Not for the first time Tommy Lascelles found himself wondering just what he was doing as an assistant private secretary to yet another royal. He’d spent nine years as assistant private secretary to the Prince of Wales, and then, fool that he was, he’d taken on the job again when the prince became, however briefly, Edward VIII. By that point, already in his late forties, he really had very few employment choices. Both unwilling and unable to support a family on his military pension, he reluctantly accepted the post as assistant private secretary to George VI. At the time he’d assumed, optimistically, that nothing could be as bad as being APS to George’s older brother, Edward. He was wrong.
Having had reasonably close relations with the royal family for the last twenty years, Lascelles had come to the reluctant conclusion there was something inherently “wrong” about virtually all of them. Edward, now the Duke of Windsor, had appalling taste in women and certain personal practices Lascelles found both revolting and embarrassing. Henry, the Duke of Gloucester, was almost cretinously stupid, and the duke’s sister, Mary, married to Lascelles’s uncle the Duke of Harewood, was interested in virtually nothing but horses and had the intellect to match her passion.
Prince John, never mentioned in the press and rarely within the family, had been born a “backward” child, and epileptic. Dead of the terrible disease at fourteen, almost twenty years ago, he was buried secretly on the family estate at Sandringham and all but forgotten.
The only one of the lot with any spirit or real backbone was the other George, the Duke of Kent, and even he was something of a spendthrift, especially when it came to exotic, expensive bijous and bric-a-brac. There were also tales concerning the young man’s late-night catting about in the London clubs that belied his supposedly happy marriage.
George, the present king, was sovereign purely by the disastrous default of Edward’s abdication. He had a childhood stutter that had left him horribly lacking in confidence. A kind man certainly, and a doting father to his daughters, but terribly unhappy with the role unhappily thrust on him by fate. Like Edward, the king’s taste in women was magnificently naïve at best, although there were plenty of people at the palace who would tell you that it wasn’t the king’s taste at all—it was the Scots belle of Glamis Castle who’d set her porridgy sights on the poor stammering man right from the start. Lascelles, privy to most of the secrets in the royal closet, knew that both the little princesses had been conceived through a new and somewhat offensive procedure called artificial insemination due to a “recurring medical condition” afflicting His Royal Highness. Lascelles wasn’t sure if it was a medical condition at all and not just simple fear of the woman he’d found himself married to. It certainly wasn’t something he held against the king. Quite the contrary, in fact—it showed a certain inborn sense of self-preservation in the face of danger.
The elevator reached the upper floor and thumped to a stop. The door opened and Lascelles stepped out into the King’s Corridor. Directly behind the lift was the Throne Room, and directly in front of him, across the long, slightly tatty carpet, was the King’s Study. Balancing the boxes on one arm Lascelles first checked the bow tie at the tall collar of his morning suit, then gently tapped at the door.
“Enter,” a woman’s voice called out.
Oh God, thought Lascelles, the witch is in there with him. He opened the door and stepped into the room. The study was large, high-ceilinged and memorable only for the tall bow window that looked out across the wall and over to Green Park. The window was set with French doors leading out onto a small balustraded balcony. The French doors, like all the windows at Buckingham Palace, were fitted with long, heavy drapes in deep red. A door on the left side of the study led into the king’s private dining room, while an identical door opposite led into the king’s bedroom.
There were three comfortable-looking green-and-gold armchairs arranged around the marble fireplace, a matching settee, and several small tables. The dark oak floor was covered with a balding but obviously valuable Persian carpet and a number of paintings were hung on the walls. Lascelles had attended to the needs of the room’s previous tenant and knew that every single picture had been changed at the queen’s direction and according to her baldly sentimental tastes.
One in particular, a Frank Holl titled No Tidings from the Sea, was fit only for a biscuit tin and depicted a sobbing woman who has been out all night looking for her sailor husband in a storm. Given the torrent of tears on the woman’s face and the grizzling of a small girl clinging to her grandmother’s skirts it could be assumed that the sailor husband has been found dead.
Another painting, Sir Joseph Noel Paton’s The Return from the Crimea, was equally mawkish, depicting a one-armed corporal back from the war, bloody bandage around his head, his mother weeping on his shoulder and his wife kneeling at his feet, embracing him. Paton had been appointed official painter for Scotland by Victoria and the hanging of the picture in the King’s Study was as much a trophy for the Bitch of Glamis as was the Russian helmet at the foot of Paton’s amputee soldier.
As Lascelles came into the room the queen, dressed in yet another of her ghastly kilts, was arranging a vase of her favorite pink Betty Prior Polyantha roses on the mantelpiece. The king, dressed in a plain gray suit, was seated behind the cluttered desk that stood in front of the bow window. The desk was large, gilt-edged with a matching lyre-back chair and laden with stacks of paper. There were a pair of wicker IN and OUT baskets, a small ormolu clock, two telephones, a silver inkstand, a framed photograph of the queen and the children, an adjustable brass lamp, and, on the leather-bound blotting pad, a large, overflowing cut glass ashtray that held one of the king’s fuming, ever-present Players cigarettes.
As it had been since Victoria’s time, the blotter on the desk was jet black to ensure absolute privacy. Glancing past the king’s shoulder Lascelles could see over the wall to the upper deck of an omnibus moving along Constitution Hill and found himself wishing almost desperately that he was on it. The king gestured to a small table adjoining the desk and Lascelles gratefully put down the red leather boxes.
“Well, Tommy?” Once again it was the queen who spoke, forcing Lascelles to turn his head uncomfortably, unwilling as he was to look away from the king but forced by protocol to recognize the queen.
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Anything of interest in this morning’s boxes?”
As though they contained copies of the Times, thought Lascelles, or in her case, the Picture Post. “A number of bills requiring His Majesty’s signature and seal,” he answered quietly.
“What about the trip?” asked the queen, proffering a small half smile in his direction. Presumably she was asking about the upcoming royal tour of North America and not a jaunt out to the greenhouses at Windsor Castle for more Betty Priors.
“Yes. Wha-wha-t about the trip?” the king repeated. He picked up his Players and drew on it, holding it in the European style, just the way his brother Edward did. “And do sit dow-down, Tommy, you make me awfully ner-nervous looming over me like that.” Once again the queen was putting him in an awkward position. The king had given him leave to sit, but the fact that the queen remained standing prevented it. Lascelles stood his ground.
“Presumably the problem with that funny little man in Canada has been solved,” said the queen.
The funny little man in question was Mackenzie King, the prime minister, who was also that country’s foreign minister and who had insisted on accompanying Their Royal Highnesses on the entire tour, including the few days they would be spending in the United States. Normally on such a tour they would have been accompanied by the governor general, but Tweedsmuir had graciously stepped aside, making himself unavailable by arranging to be on a fishing holiday.
“Yes, madam, the problem has been solved.” Lascelles nodded. “Lord Tweedsmuir shall not attend.”
The queen nodded and turned back to her vase of roses.
“That’s ra-ra-rather a shame,” said the king. “I’ve enjoyed his st-st-stories. Particularly the one about the sub-submarine.”
“The Thirty-nine Steps, sir.”
“Common stuff, if you ask me,” muttered the queen, fiddling with her flowers.
“An-anything else of con-consequence, Tommy?” asked the king.
“The itinerary has been set,” Lascelles answered. “Eight cities in Canada with a one-day rest at Banff in the Rocky Mountains, then the United States. Two days in Washington, a day in New York City to attend their World’s Fair, and then a rest day with the president at his country estate on the Hudson River.” Lascelles paused. “Following that, the royal train proceeds to Halifax and Their Royal Highnesses board ship for England.”
“Sounds a bit gru-grueling,” said the king with a sigh. “I’m not terribly good at this sort of thing, as you well know, Tommy.”
“You’ll do fine, sir. The Canadians are a friendly lot. I spent quite a bit of time there some years ago.”
“I do hope there’s very little of the tour spent in automobiles,” said the queen. “Bertie suffers dreadfully from car sickness, as you are aware.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Lascelles, knowing perfectly well that it was the queen who hated car travel, not the king. “Virtually all travel will be aboard the royal train.” Lascelles also knew perfectly well that this wasn’t entirely true, but any last-minute changes by the queen would be like ripples in a pond, inconveniencing literally thousands of people on two continents. “We have also been informed that the interior refitting of the Repulse has now been completed and she’ll be ready on schedule.”
The queen gave the spray of flowers a final adjustment, then walked across the room to stand behind her husband, one hand on his shoulder. “Bertie and I have been discussing that.”
“Yes, ma’am?” said Lascelles, his heart sinking.
“Yes. The king feels that it would be improper for him to use a warship like the Repulse considering the situation with Mr. Hitler.”
Give her credit for political shrewdness, even if it was almost certainly self-serving, thought Lascelles. Repulse was a battle cruiser, and even refitted as she now was, hardly the sort of ship one wanted to cross the North Atlantic in. Repulse was also one of the few ships in the Royal Navy capable of catching the German navy’s new fleet of pocket battleships, which had been recently spotted lurking around the Spanish coast.
“Actually it was Bu-Bu-Buffy’s idea really, although I quite agree with her.”
“Perhaps I should begin looking for alternate transportation,” Lascelles said finally. Tens of thousands of pounds wasted, not to mention several months of work. At this stage of the game the only other option would be to charter a transatlantic liner, and God only knew what that would cost. Since the tour had been suggested more than a year ago, the king had offered up one excuse after another and Lascelles had come to the conclusion that His Highness didn’t want to go at all.
“I know it’s a bo-bother,” said the king. He raised a hand and placed it over the queen’s. “Bu-but Buffy is right, you know.” The look on the king’s narrow face was almost pleading. Lascelles flinched and felt color rise in his cheeks. He hated it when the king and queen used their pet names for each other in his presence. Not only was it embarrassing, it was also distinctly un-royal.
The queen smiled brightly. “Perhaps you could talk to those nice people at Cunard,” she said. “I’m sure they’d be most happy to help.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Lascelles, suppressing a sigh. “I’ll attend to it immediately.” He bowed to the king, bowed again in a slightly lesser movement to the queen and withdrew.
“I really don’t know why you keep that man around,” said the queen, pushing at her flowers again.
“To-Tommy is a tradition. He worked for Fa-Fa-Father, he worked for my bro-brother and now he works for me. For me.”
“All the more reason to be quit of him,” answered the queen. “Doesn’t do to have a man know too many family secrets.”
The king stabbed out his cigarette angrily. “I’m too bloody stupid to have any secrets, don’t you see?” Temper flaring, his stutter vanished instantly.
“Now, Bertie,” cautioned the queen.
“There’s no ‘Now, Bertie’ about it. David was the handsome one, the smart one, the one who was good at sums and reading, and Mary was the pretty one. We visited Great-granmama at Balmoral once and she didn’t even mention me in her diary.” He lit another cigarette. “I was a funk at school, worse in the navy and I’m no bloody good as the King of bloody England either!” He swept the dispatch cases off the writing table and onto the floor.
“Now, Bertie,” the queen repeated. She bent and began retrieving the red leather boxes. “You may well have been a funk at school, and your stomach troubles kept you out of the war, but at least you had the good sense to marry me, unlike your dear brother who gave up the throne for an American . . . tart!” She stacked the cases back on the desk and patted her husband on the shoulder.
“It’s this damnable trip that has me worried,” he muttered. “I shall make a fu-fu-funk of it as well.”
“Don’t be silly, Bertie. You’ll do admirably, and besides, I’ll be with you every step of the way, so there’s really nothing to worry about, is there?”
“I just wish things could be the way they were before!”
“Well, dear, they can’t, and that’s that, I’m afraid. You’re the king, I’m the queen, and we have our duty to do.” She patted his shoulder again. “Why don’t you go to the nursery and see what Lilibet and Margaret Rose are getting up to?” She placed one plump and dimpled hand on the pile of dispatch cases. “I’ll look through these and see if anything really merits your attention.”
Puffing on his Players the king stared at the cases for a moment, then stood and left the room without another word. The queen smiled, closed and locked the door behind him and then sat down at the writing table. She opened the first case and began to read.