Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories (28 page)

Sarah insisted on explaining it all to me, as if I wouldn’t know that Edward VIII was Queen Mary’s eldest son, the family’s “Uncle David,” the one who abdicated to marry that woman from Baltimore and sent the Crown into such a tizzy that the word
divorce
still gives them palpitations. It cost poor Margo her romance with Peter Townsend in the Fifties, and pretty well ruined her life. People were always muttering about Edward VIII whenever Charles and I had a row, so I should jolly well know who he was by now. He left off being King in 1936, and went to France, leaving his younger brother Bertie to take the throne of England. I couldn’t see why Adolf Hitler would want to offer Uncle David another throne, though. Rather uncharacteristically thoughtful of him, I said. Still, nothing came of it, because the Russians kept their communist leaders for years and years, and Uncle David and Wallis Simpson kept on knocking about the world partying and staying in expensive hotels for decades until they both went gaga, so I couldn’t see what Sarah was looking so fluffed up for.

“What difference does an old letter make?”

“Quite amazingly dim.” Sarah sighed, tapping her head, and looking at me in a sorrowful way. The sort of look I got from Charles when I asked if one of his modern paintings was done by Pablo Casals.

“Rubbish,” I said. “The letter was written fifty years ago by a now-defunct government. Uncle David’s dead. The Soviet Union is a hodgepodge of little states. The Nazis are just a bunch of old war movies now.
The Great Escape. The Dirty Dozen
. So what?” Another thought occurred to me. “Why did they address the message to the Duke of Hamilton, anyhow? Why not to the King?”

Sarah looked pleased with herself. “What’s the
only thing you know about Dungavel House?” she prompted me.

“It’s in Scotland, so it’s cold and damp.”

“No. It’s been converted into a prison now, as a matter of fact, but in 1941, Rudolf Hess bailed out of his plane on the grounds there. You
have
heard of him, haven’t you, Diana?”

“Vaguely. Some sort of spy, wasn’t he?” I shrugged. “Anyhow, don’t tell me you knew all this off your own bat. You’ve been mugging it up in the library, haven’t you?”

“One or two encyclopedias,” Sarah said. “I knew it was important, and I wanted to get it all straight. Rudolf Hess was Hitler’s deputy führer. In May 1941 he stole a plane, flew to Scotland, and asked to speak to the Duke of Hamilton. Apparently, they had met at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.”

“I thought we were at war with Germany in 1941,” I said. I’ve always hated trying to remember dates.

“We were. Hess claimed that he was acting on his own initiative, and that all he wanted was to negotiate a peace between Britain and Germany.”

“That sounds rather noble. I don’t suppose anybody was grateful.” I was pretty sure that I’d have heard of him if he’d won the Nobel Peace Prize.

“
Ungrateful
is understating the case,” said Sarah. “This is where it all gets madly interesting. The Duke of Hamilton did go and talk to him, but after that, the government shut Hess up in the Tower of London for the duration of the war. He was the last prisoner ever kept in the Tower of London, in fact.”

Sarah’s frightfully good at crossword puzzles. You can see why. Four letters:
last prisoner wishes to trade Tower for Cassel
, that sort of thing. “Was the job offer to Edward VIII part of Mr. Hess’s peace plan?” I still couldn’t see why it mattered, but it was hours till teatime, so I humored her.

“No. It was never mentioned. No one would have dared.” She could see I wasn’t following her. “Look. The offer was that Edward should have the throne of Russia upon the following conditions: that Britain should ally with Germany, and that Britain should help Germany invade and defeat Russia.”

“Offer refused, of course.”

“Yes, of course, but here’s the thing: the secret offer was made on May 11, 1941. Germany invaded Russia in late June. Britain did not warn the Russians of the coming invasion. According to these papers, Hess told our government about the invasion plans, but we did not pass along the information to the Russians, our allies. Well, not our allies yet, but not our enemy, either. They had declared themselves neutral. Yet we didn’t warn them.”

“Why didn’t we warn them?” I tried to work it out for myself. “We didn’t like the Russians frightfully, did we? They had a revolution during the First World War, and killed off the Czar and all the Royals, who were relatives of our lot.”

“Close relatives. The Czar and George V were first cousins, and could have passed for twins. Their mothers were Danish princesses. So I don’t suppose anyone in Britain actually liked Stalin and his government, but that isn’t why they withheld the information about the Nazi invasion.”

“Are you sure? It wouldn’t be the first thing the family’s done for spite. Remember how they refused to make Uncle David’s wife a
royal
duchess, just because they loathed her?” I can’t remember battles or dates, but titles and family trees do make a fair bit of sense to me. It’s all people ever seem to talk about.

“I know exactly why we didn’t warn the Russians about the invasion,” said Sarah dramatically. “It’s because we would have had to show the Russians the paper that Rudolf Hess was carrying—in order to prove
how we knew. And we couldn’t show them the paper, because it also proved that Edward VIII was a traitor.”

I was very shocked indeed. And indignant. Imagine being a collaborator with the Nazis and not having the tabloids crucify you! Sarah can’t even wear polka dots without getting narky stories run, and they go on about my shopping until I could scream, but here’s a Royal who actually did something frightful and—not a word! Unfair, I call it. Beastly.

“Do you really think the government would have protected Uncle David even at the risk of offending a wartime ally?” If so, I thought, things have certainly changed for us Royals.

Sarah frowned. I could tell that she was thinking about all the lectures she’d got from the palace watchdogs, and all the ticking off for the most trivial of reasons. “Well,” she said at last, “he was the King.”

“Not then he wasn’t,” I pointed out. “By 1941, he’d already abdicated, and was being a royal nuisance, ringing up the new king, and trying to tell him how to run the show. And the Queen Mum, who was Queen Consort then, hated him. She still practically spits his name, because she thinks his abdication shortened her husband’s life—all the extra responsibility of being king. Edward hated her, too. He called her the Monster of Glamis, because she was so mean about his dear Wallis. I don’t think the courtiers or the government would have lifted a finger to get him an extra ration coupon, much less risked national security to save him from his own silly blunders.”

“It’s true,” said Sarah. “All of Edward’s staff would have left royal service, because the new king would have wanted people whose loyalty he could trust. The new courtiers would have been in their jobs because they
opposed
Edward VIII. So, no. The government wouldn’t have kept it a secret.”

We looked at each other, realizing the truth of it at
the same time. “But the family would!” Even if they loathed him, they’d have kept the secret to keep the rest of them from looking guilty by association.

I went back to my ballet exercises, and Sarah began to pace up and down, as we worked it out. “The government was never given these papers,” Sarah announced. “They were never told about them. Hess landed in Scotland, said his piece to the Duke of Hamilton—”

“And Hamilton notified the family instead of the government!” Of course he would. He was a duke.
My
father would have done the same.

“Douglas Hamilton was a Scottish duke,” said Sarah. “All the more reason. The Queen was the (laughter of a Scottish earl. Of course he’d warn their majesties about the family scandal.”

“They wouldn’t tell the government, would they? No. It would make the whole family suspect.”

“People thought there was far too much German blood in the family as it was,” said Sarah. “Remember that everyone had to change their surnames during the First World War. The Saxe-Coburgs became the house of Windsor; the Battenbergs became Mountbattens, and—I forget—who did the Cambridges used to be?”

“Teck, I think. That was Queen Mary’s maiden name. Her father was a German prince, you know.”

Sarah gave a low whistle. “They dared not let the secret out, did they? Britain might have dumped the monarchy then and there.”

I nodded. “So they took the papers—but they turned Hess over to the government. Why didn’t he tell what he knew to Churchill?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he did, and he wasn’t believed. But I doubt it. I wonder what became of him.”

I shrugged. “Too bad the encyclopedias here are so out of date. What are you going to do with the papers? Destroy them?”

“No,” said Sarah. “I think I’ll keep them. They might come in handy someday.”

I shouldn’t have let Sarah keep those papers, but I don’t see how I could have prevented her. I was never any good at talking her out of mischief. I even helped her poke people with umbrellas at Ascot once. I thought people would never shut up about that. I did wonder what had become of Rudolf Hess, though. It was tricky thinking of people to ask. They might want to know why I was interested. Your grandfather, Prince Philip, would know, of course, but he’s terribly touchy about the subject of Nazi Germany. His sisters were married to German soldiers, and they weren’t even invited to his wedding in 1947, so I thought I’d better not broach the subject with him.

I waited until we got back to London and I was trotted out for a formal reception. I have to make small talk with diplomats and generals, and I thought that might be an intelligent thing to ask, instead of “Does your wife polish your medals for you?”

I picked a doddery old fellow, who looked old enough to remember Napoleon, and worked the conversation round to the war, and then I said, “By the way, General, do you happen to know what happened to Rudolf Hess?”

He got a funny look on his face, and for a moment I thought I was doomed, but then he harrumphed, and said, “Officially, you mean?”

That set me wondering. “After the war,” I said. “I know he was in the Tower of London until then.”

“Oh, that. We turned him over to the Americans and the Russians, and they put him in Spandau prison in Berlin.”

I smiled prettily. “And when did they let him out?”

“Never did. He committed suicide in there a few years ago, at the age of ninety-something. Good riddance,
Nazi bugger.” The general peered at me curiously. “Are you thinking of resitting your O-levels, ma’am?”

I gave him the downcast, eyelash look that people take for shyness, and murmured, “Oh, no, General. It’s just that I thought he went on to become a ballet dancer in the Sixties.” That’s the sort of remark people expect me to make, and I got away with it and drifted on to the next guest. I had hoped to find out what he meant by
officially
, but I’m not allowed to dawdle with any one guest. Besides, it might have made him suspicious.

When the party was over, I barricaded myself in the bathroom, and rang up Sarah. “Found out what happened to Rudolf!” I told her, reciting the general’s account of Hess’s life imprisonment.

“Life?” said Sarah in disbelieving tones. “That seems a bit stiff for someone who sat out most of the war in London. And on a peace mission, too. And he lived to ninety, and they didn’t let him out?”

“It’s an unforgiving world,” I said. “When did Wallis Simpson see the inside of Buckingham Palace? Not until her husband’s funeral.”

“That was family spite,” said Sarah. “Government memories are shorter. I still say it doesn’t make sense.”

“Well, the general did say something else. When I first asked him what had happened to Hess, he said, ‘
Officially?
’ Now what do you suppose he meant by that?”

“It suggests a secret. Perhaps we should ask a few more generals.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t want anyone to notice. I’ll ask my hairdresser. He always knows everything.”

A
LTHORP
D
ECEMBER 1992

Bear with me, Wills. I know this is a longish letter about ancient, ancient history, but Mummy does have a reason. And it took ever so much longer for me to find it all out than it will take you to read. Besides, I should think by now that you’ll be doing the government boxes, so you should be used to reading longish wrangles about government intrigue. But this is special. This is family.

It’s Christmastime now, but I couldn’t bear to spend another holiday at Sandringham, pretending we’re all happy families, now that the separation is official, so I came home to spend the season with your Uncle Charles, Earl Spencer. I miss your Auntie Sarah more than ever, but I dare not talk about her to anyone. This has been the worst year of all of our lives, with Sarah and Andrew splitting up, and the problems between your father and me coming to light and ending in separation, and now the year ending with the fire at Windsor. If I’ve learnt anything these past twelve months, it’s that I must never let anyone see this paper. Nothing I do is safe. Not even a telephone call. Poor Sarah. For all her cleverness, she trusted the System far too much. I only hope that when You are the System, Wills, you can fix things.

I was right about my hairdresser. He knows absolutely all the dirt, and he
never
tells tales to the press. I just adore him. I must admit, he was surprised when I asked him about Rudolf Hess.

“Rudolf Nureyev, Your Royal Highness?” he murmured, tucking a curl into place.

“No. It isn’t a ballet question,” I told him. “I mean the Nazi fellow who crashed in Scotland on a peace mission during the war. I heard that there was some sort of rumor about his case.”

He thought for a moment, while he combed. “Seems like there was a bit of talk when he died, back in the Eighties, ma’am. While this side bit sets, let me nip over to the other booth and ask Nigel. Loves war movies, does Nigel.” A few minutes later he was back, combing again. “Nigel says you must be referring to the theory that it wasn’t Hess at all in the prison.”