Your Royal Hostage (25 page)

Jemima found that her mind was still half distracted by those other nagging fears: but she
must
put them aside, this was not the time or place, if only because Jemima, not being a natural fashion journalist, knew that she needed all her concentration to interpret the Keatsian language to American viewers (waking up after all to an extremely early breakfast by us time). At this moment the final Press release was handed to her from below by Susanna. This was the one everyone had been waiting for:
the
Press release,
the
sketch,
the
dress itself....

The sketch now before her showed in effect an enchanting doll. On the evidence of this, Jemima had no difficulty in believing that Princess Amy bridal dolls would be bestsellers for many years to come. As for the fluttering Princess Amy blue bows (the traditional 'something blue') which were depicted nestling at the shoulder and somewhere in the endless bouffant train (eighteen feet long: six inches longer than that of the Duchess of York, the Press release proudly proclaimed), those belonged perhaps more to the world of the chocolate box. Jemima also had no difficulty in believing that chocolate boxes, mugs, plates, thimbles and so forth, depicting Princess Amy in all her bridal glory, would also be bestsellers for many years to come.

All the same, why shouldn't poor little Princess Amy look like a living doll if that was how she wanted to look? Given her ordeal, which had so nearly ended in her being not so much a living doll as a dead one. It was time to think again about her own personal language of lyrical freshness. What about some historical and artistic comparisons? Winterhalter, Greuze, Gainsborough: these were names to conjure with and she only hoped that Susanna Blanding, somewhere in her copious notes, had had the forethought to conjure with them.

Jemima gazed down at the little television monitor flush with the desk before her. The only public alteration to arrangements made at the instigation of the police, was to have the bride leave from one of the other royal palaces in The Mall, as other royal brides had done in recent years, instead of from Cumberland Palace itself, which being sited in Regent's Park, involved a far longer and less controllable route. The crowds in The Mall were quite as deep as Jemima remembered from shots of other weddings involving members of the Royal Family closer to succession. The abduction, however distressing for its subject, had undoubtedly been good for business: that is, if you had the temerity to regard the public attendance at a Royal Wedding as a form of business.

She could see numerous placards being held up echoing the theme of the celebrated buttons:
amy means i love you
, now occasionally altered to
amy means i adore you
, and there were balloons, and here and there paper hats of Amy blue bearing the same message. Then there were some new-style placards bearing the allusive message:
amy not animals
. Jemima learnt later that a few rash protesters had emerged bearing placards which read on the contrary:
we love animals not amy.

Regrettably if understandably, these small groups were manhandled by the crowd and forced to disband, their placards pulled apart; equally regrettably perhaps, there was little or no interference from the police during these scattered episodes. The police, standing with their backs to the route facing the crowds (an innovation at the wedding of the Prince of Wales), maintained an impassive stance. They were watching of course: watching not only these - the few - who proclaimed their animal rights' sympathies but watching for those who might share these sympathies without proclaiming them.

There were no Innoright posters, placards or buttons, no Innoright balloons or paper hats. The sad-eyed logo was signally absent from the proceedings. Pussy, having reached a decision to attend personally instead of making do with television - 'to see the little Madam one last time for myself, as she put it - took care to wear nothing and carry nothing that might connect her with Innoright. Weddings of healthy young women generally made her feel physically sick with rage when she thought of Caro-Otter who would never have a wedding, but for the time being she knew she must subjugate her revulsion.

Pussy installed herself on a small portable seat near the front of the crowd in the piazza of the Cathedral. It was not, to be honest, that she had arrived all that early to achieve such an advantageous position: just that Pussy, heavily pressing, was a difficult force to resist when it came to having her own way. Her present desire was to watch the wedding from a convenient spot at the bottom of one of the stands in the piazza, amid the crowds but not swamped by them, and she achieved it.

Pussy took out a plastic box of sweet pastries and proceeded to lick round the chocolate coating of one. She needed sweetness, and sustenance. Pussy, unlike some of those near her, did not offer to share her pastries with the policeman in front of them. Pussy, watched by the impassive policeman, and watching him, licked resolutely on.

Jemima, from her perch roughly above Pussy's head, studied the order of events and the official programme with its seemingly endless list of coaches and carriages and cars and mounted escorts and so forth and so on. (No official mention of armed escorts and so forth and so on, although one would imagine that in view of recent events the practice at recent royal weddings of substituting policemen for various bewigged coachmen on the boxes of the coaches would scarcely be abandoned at this one.)

'She's killed herself!' exclaimed Susanna Blanding suddenly from her crouching position, holding headphones with which she was listening to the news flash. 'Killed herself in prison. Lydia! How on earth did they let her? My God, poor old
Ione
, this will kill her, sorry, unfortunate use of language. Well, perhaps it's for the best. Think of the trial and all that. Which reminds me -'

Still sounding rather shocked,' but ever dutiful, Susanna began scurrying through her notes and the order of the procession.

'What have we here? Ah yes, do you have this, Jemima? Rick -it needn't bother you. "The Hon. Amanda Macpherson-Wynne, Acting Lady-in-waiting to
hrh
, etc., etc., will travel in the second carriage in place of Miss
Ione
Quentin."'

'I have that,' said Jemima, thinking with pity, certainly no vindictive satisfaction, of the intense girl she had seen praying -as she had then thought - at the statue of St Francis. Even if Susanna, in her practical way, was right, and death, self-sought death (and how
had
she managed to achieve it? Some dereliction of care there?) was the best solution to that particular tragic life, she could not mark the event, like any youthful suicide, without some pang of emotion for what once might have been prevented.

Poor
Ione
. As Susanna, her cousin, had charitabl
y and per
cipiently said.

It was while the first cascade of roaring cheers came through on the monitor, greeting Princess Amy as she was drawn slowly in her coach out of the gates of the royal palace into the Mall, that Jemima, looking in her monitor as the television cameras raked the crowds now here now there, saw a face she recognized.

'My God!' she thought. 'I don't believe it. How could they have let her? They were going to watch her. She's right there. I
saw
her.'

Subsequently, Jemima's chief memory of the events which followed centred on the fearful and frustrating experience, comparable only to a nightmare which sometimes plagued her of swimming through mud, of trying to move rapidly through a crowd which was profoundly and determinedly stationary. Only the trainer shoes were helpful and seemed like an extraordinary piece of prescience.

'It must have been like Jean Louis Barrault in
Les Enfants du Paradis,'
observed a film buff friend wisely afterwards. 'You remember, looking for Arletty as the crowd all swirled, revelling in the opposite direction.'

'This revelling crowd was not swirling in
any
direction,' countered Jemima rather sharply, for she too had seen the movie many times. That was the whole point. It was standing stock still and revelling if you want to put it like that, on its stationary feet and in its position which it had risen at dawn or even slept out all night to protect.'

At the time it was the thought of that face in the crowd which impelled her forward, a killer's face, above all a desperate face, and she must get there, no time now for phone calls, no good to appeal to the many policemen on the route, certainly no time to appeal to a higher authority.

So that it was in fact at the exact moment, in the antiphonal rise and fall of the cheering, of Princess Amy's own arrival in the piazza, that Jemima managed to get within striking distance of her prey. And it was at the moment of arrival too, that Jemima, whose determined path beaten through the crowd had not passed unregarded, was herself seized by the authoritative hand of the law.

Jemima, pulled back temporarily from engagement with the person she had sought, was able to witness for herself the moment when Princess Amy, pointing the toe of her plain but immensely high-heeled white satin shoe, stepped gingerly out of her coach.

The flowing white train with its occasional blue bows was bundled out after her and then fanned out on the pavement before the Cathedral by the designer, energetically aided by the cooing little French bridesmaids, Amy's nieces. Beneath the soft white tulle veil gleamed diamonds — some respectable British tiara one supposed, in view of the dismal track record of the Russian sapphires. Amy's distinguished and ancient French grandfather, who was to give her away, eased himself stiffly out of the coach and stood for all his age erectly beside her, a tall figure compared to her tiny one.

Beneath the drifting veil, lifting slightly in the breeze, Princess Amy's expression was impossible to discern. More strongly than ever, Jemima had the impression of a doll, a doll at the centre of these hieratic ceremonies, but still mercifully a living doll.

'Let me go,' cried Jemima, and then more forcibly:
'Stop
her.’
For one moment Jemima did succeed in getting free and ran a short way, elbowing amid the crowd, only to be grasped yet more firmly by someone in plain clothes who was evidently a policeman.

'She must go into the Cathedral,' thought Jemima desperately, 'Once she's inside, she's safe. Don't just
stand
there....'

Still the Princess stood, poised, inscrutable, in her ivory tower of lace and tulle and diamonds, on the verge of taking the arm of her towering grandfather, but still half facing the cheering crowds on the piazza.

'I'll just have to shout, I'll just have to bellow,' thought Jemima. 'There's no other way. We're quite close. I hope to hell she can hear me.'

'
Ione
!' she yelled.

Although Jemima's frantic appeal
, half scream, half cry, had to
reach the ears of
I
one Quentin, now in the front row of the crowd, over all the other noise, the cheers, the chomping of the horses, the jangling of their bridles, the music now swelling from inside the Cathedral, reach her it did. It must have reached her, because
Ione
Quentin hesitated just one instant, still with the concealed weapon in her hand, and turned her head, as it were involuntarily, sideways.

One instant was enough. In that instant Princess Amy put her hand at last on her grandfather's arm and began to move gracefully and, thank God, inexorably into the interior of the Cathedral.

Behind her, and still quite unknown to the bridal cortege,
Ione
Quentin, former lady-in
-waiting to
hrh
Princess Amy of Cumberland, collapsed in the savage grip of three policemen.

CHAPTER TWENTY

But Who's To Answer?

Afterwards Jemima Shore's decision to abandon her post was much criticized - by
tus
that is, and by Rick Vancy in particular.
tus
behaved with what was considered by Jemima's agent to be a strange lack of moral fibre in trying to withhold her fee on the grounds that she had never actually commented on the wedding itself- not at the crucial moment anyway. Fortunately it was not for nothing that Jemima's agent, a girl in her twenties, was already known as the Dragon of Drury Lane (where her office was) and the matter, months later, was finally sorted out to the Dragon's, if not
tus's
satisfaction.

Some of Rick's bitterness could probably be ascribed to the fact that
tus
did not in the event find itself with only one presenter in the shape of Rick himself for the arrival of the bride. When Jemima precipitately and clumsily unhooked herself from her position, and fled the plastic studio-in-the-sky there was a short anxious cry from the producer: 'Is she sick or something?' followed by the imperious command, 'Cut the anchor.' This sounded strangely na
utical to English ears, along th
e lines of 'abandon ship'. But it merely meant that the freelance British cameraman hired for the occasion, who happened to be Jemima's friend Spike Thompson, formerly of Megalith, should swing away from the 'anchor' in the shape of Jemima and concentrate on the wedding scenes below.