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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  The INNS of Court

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  The Princess in the Tower

  Epigraphs

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Marlowe

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Old Bailey

  Epigraph

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Epigraph

  Chapter 38

  Epigraph

  The Prisoner of Fear

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Epigraph

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  The Prisoner in the Dock

  Epigraph

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Epigraph

  Chapter 63

  Epigraph

  Teaser

  Forge Books by Harold Robbins

  Praise for Harold Robbins

  Copyright

  Harold Robbins

  left behind a rich heritage of novel ideas and works in progress when he passed away in 1997. Harold Robbins’s estate and his editor worked with a carefully selected writer to organize and complete Harold Robbins’s ideas to create this novel, inspired by his storytelling brilliance, in a manner faithful to the Robbins style.

  For

  Adréana Robbins and Jeff Greenberg,

  with love

  (Trotsky, too)

  Acknowledgments

  I want to thank the people who assisted in getting this book through the creation, editing, and publication process: Jann Robbins, Hildegarde Krische, Carol McCleary, Elizabeth Winick, Bob Gleason, Eric Raab, Irene Gallo, and Kevin Sweeney.

  1

  Once upon a time, in a kingdom far away …

  I was nineteen years old when I was asked to become the next queen.

  I rode through the streets in a glass coach to the cheers of thousands on my wedding day.

  And it’s true that I have two older sisters, a wretched stepmother, and that I was scrubbing the floor in the kitchen when the call came from the prince.

  People called it a fairy tale when a teenage girl with a poor education, whose only work experience had been babysitting, became the Princess of Wales and would someday become, by the Grace of God, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of her other realms and territories, Head of the Commonwealth, and Defender of the Faith.

  Six months after that ride in the glass coach and a wedding televised to the entire planet, I threw myself down a stairway soon after I became pregnant with the future king.

  I had fallen through that thin line between dreams and nightmares.

  Now as I stared at myself in the dressing mirror, a mature woman with pale features drawn by tension, my knees shook as I took a gun and put it in the small bag that hung from my wrist.

  I didn’t hear the maid enter as I was fumbling the gun into the little bag.

  “Your Royal Highness, I beg your pardon—”

  “What?” I said, startled. I held the gun close to me, concealing it with my dress.

  “The—the cream you sent me for—” she stammered.

  “Put it on the counter and leave.”

  The woman put the jar of makeup on the dressing table. Her face was flushed.

  I stopped her before she went out the door. “Please remember what I told you. My husband is not to be told I’ve arrived. Nor is anyone else. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She flew out the door. I knew what she was thinking, that the princess was acting erratic again. “Hot and Cold,” I once overheard a staff member call me while talking to another employee, because of those mood shifts the tabloids all say I have. That’s where I find out about myself, not from family and friends, but from what’s been reported in the tabloids.

  I wondered if the snotty little bitch of a maid lied about not telling the prince that I was here. I’d always known that the staff has worked against me. I made many mistakes and one of them was trying to be friendly to the help. The servants respected His Royal Highness and the toadies who hung around him and treated them like footstools—but they were appalled at me for popping into the kitchen to grab a sandwich and chat with them. It had never happened before. Familiarity does breed contempt.

  After the door swung shut, I ran for the bathroom, dropping the gun on the floor. I didn’t make the loo but threw up in the sink. It wasn’t the bulimia this time, I hardly had anything in my stomach. It was my raw nerves. My skin was clammy. As I leaned over the sink I got a rush of cold chills, then a hot sensation crawled up my legs and back. I held on to the sink for support as the burning nausea spread from my toes to my brain and I teetered on the edge of passing out. I slowly slid down to the floor and sat with my back against the wall. The tears came, as they always do when these attacks come. In the haze, I thought about the gun lying on the floor of the other room.

  Good work, they find you passed out with a gun nearby and they really will lock you up.

  As I talked to myself, my thoughts went to my two boys. Tears came that I couldn’t stop. What would they think? What would people tell them about their mother? They needed to understand that I wasn’t crazy, that it was the situation that was insane, that things were so confusing for me, sometimes my thoughts spun like a merry-go-round.

  How could I explain that there are horrors that are far worse than murder?

  I had to go on. I got to my feet. My knees were still wobbly, but I stood up straight and leaned on the counter for support. I took deep breaths until the room stopped moving and stared at the face in the mirror, pale, drawn from worry, eyes puffy from crying. “The fairy-tale princess isn’t doing too well,” I told the reflection.

  I blew my n
ose and rinsed my face with water, but there was no way I would be able to get rid of the redness around my eyes. I got my feet moving and went back into the dressing room. I knelt to pick up the gun, not daring to bend over for fear the nausea would hit again.

  As I went back to the mirror to put the finishing touches on my face and my costume, I heard my husband’s hunting dogs baying outside. I knew it was just the pack giving out their last volley before they were placed in the kennels for the night, but the sound reminded me of stories I’d heard about dogs howling over the body of their dead master. People say animals can sense things beyond human experience. I shuddered.

  I hurried with my costume, wishing I could have the maid help me, but I could not take the risk. I was not expected to attend the prince’s annual costume ball after the fox hunt at Cragthorpe. Everyone knew—at least everyone who read the tabloids, and that was just about everyone—that I hated fox hunts. What does a poor little fox feel when the dogs get to it, when they rip its guts and throat—what does a man feel when a bullet rips through his heart—

  Terrible upheaval in my stomach rose again and I rushed back to the sink and dry-heaved. I had been alternating between dry-heaving and vomiting all day, eating only a little food in order to have something to throw up because it hurt so bad when it seemed like only my insides were going to be wretched out.

  When I came out I sat down on the vanity stool and thought about what I had to do. What would people think? How would the world judge me? Would they understand that the fairy tale became a nightmare, that love turned to hate, that everyone has a breaking point?

  Thinking about my husband brought a poem from Byron to mind.

  When we two parted,

  In silence and tears,

  Half broken-hearted

  To sever for years,

  Pale grew thy cheek and cold,

  Colder thy kiss …

  Colder thy kiss.

  Isn’t that the truth. I used to joke that my sleeping companion on trips with my husband was a vibrator. That’s how it went, the other woman, all over my husband like a bad rash while I held a vibrator.

  Frankly, I was tired of being the discarded wife who had to look on while her husband told another woman he wished he were a tampon so he could always be inside her. Imagine my horror when I found out that my fairy-tale prince was recorded saying that over the phone to a married woman.

  I was not Mother Teresa. I am a woman, with the same needs, desires, and even lusts as other women. Men may need to just get it off, but women need cuddling and romance. Living in a palace and being married to a prince didn’t mean I don’t sometimes need my ego stroked and my clit caressed. It didn’t mean that I don’t need to let my hair down and let the slut come out of me once in a while. You could not put me on a shelf in a room full of medieval armor and Ming vases and expect that I will curtsy to queen and country every time you take me off the shelf and wind me up.

  People have wondered about my romantic frustrations, but you know, royalty has a protocol for everything, even making love. A word of caution for women out there who fantasize about marrying a prince—never marry a man you have to call “sir” until your wedding day, and thereafter having to walk down the hallway to his room on those nights scheduled for coitus, pretending to the spying servants that you’re not horny, but just have a need to talk about matters of state.

  And never engage in “coitus”—it just isn’t as satisfying as good, old-fashioned lovemaking.

  Do you know what separate bedrooms do to romance? They said I’m a silly girl who read romantic drivel, those Barbara Cartland stories of women and men who come together in passionate embrace. Maybe I did read romances rather than philosophical tomes, but none of the lovers in those books have separate bedrooms—and they live happily ever after. Maybe if—

  No, it was too late for all that, there were no more “ifs.” I was so tired of wishing and wanting, of hoping things would change. And tired of protocol, sick to my marrow of being a fixture in the institution of royalty.… I wished I could have puked out that part of my life and flushed it down the loo, too.

  All I ever asked was to be treated like a woman, not a piece of palace furniture.

  Now there was only one way out.

  I completed my outfit, a pirate’s costume, Blackbeard, or Bluebeard, or whoever the old-time buccaneer was. I selected the pirate’s garb because the antique pistol I took from my husband’s collection went nicely with it.

  It was a pretty little gun, small and clever like a toy, but what made it real was the weight and grip. It wasn’t really an antique; it fired a regular bullet rather than black powder and a ball. But it was an historic piece—the mistress of the Duke of Orleans had shot the duke with it when she learned the duke had taken another mistress. I had chosen the weapon carefully, certain that the tabloid press would easily find an analogy to the situation that I faced with the other woman crowding my marriage.

  I’d fired a gun before. All of the royals were given training by the Royal Protection Service, firing the same sleek and modern weapons that police and terrorists use. The idea is to be able to pick up a gun that’s fallen on the ground during a terrorist attack and use it. All I really got out of the lessons was which way to point the gun and where the trigger was, but that was all you really needed because they taught me not to aim but simply to point and pull the trigger.

  That was all I had to do tonight, I told myself, just point and pull the trigger—the weapon would do whatever else was necessary.

  I slipped the gun into the waistband and surveyed myself in the mirror. I didn’t look like a very terrifying pirate, but like a tall, slender blonde, a young thirty-something, mother of two, features drawn, emotions ready to burst, a woman undergoing physical and mental distress. And I saw something else, a look in my eyes, I thought, a bit of the feminine feral, that wild, preternatural glint a woman gets when she can’t take any more.

  Thoughts started crowding my head again about my two boys, the oldest a young teen. What would they think? How would they handle it?

  Tears welled in my eyes and I took deep breaths. One step at a time, I told myself. Just take one step at a time and you can conquer the world. I kept that silly thought in my mind as I left the dressing area and went into the bedroom.

  I hated rooms like this, twenty-foot-high ceilings, gilt molding, elaborate murals, furniture made before King George was fighting the American colonies. It wasn’t like living in a museum, it was living in a museum. Modern heating was hidden in the walls, but it was still a cold place. It would be cold to me even in the middle of a heat wave because the coldness came from the institutional nature of the place. Royalty was an institution. Royal marriages were an institution. There was nothing personal and passionate about institutions. I wasn’t attached to anything in the room—nor to the furniture in any of “my rooms” at any of “my homes.” That’s why the prince carried his childhood teddy bear with him—even when he traveled or seasonally changed homes. He had never known anything but the institutional life of royalty, and that little stuffed toy represented a tiny speck of normalcy.

  Cragthorpe was a duke’s country estate, one of those extensive properties that came with the title Prince of Wales. When we were in residence, this was my bedroom. Not our bedroom. I know, this bedroom thing was really caught in my craw. None of those toady courtiers who hung around my husband had bothered to tell me before we were married that we would have separate bedrooms. And nothing I had imagined prepared me for it—certainly nothing in my “literary” education based upon romance novels. As a teenager, and then as a young woman barely more than a girl as I rode in a glittering carriage to St. Paul’s Cathedral, I had fantasized about love, about having my own “Prince Charming.” In those daydreams my nights were warm and intimate as I lay in the arms of my lover, naked unto each other, soul mates, his heat firing mine, our love becoming volcanic … nowhere in those magic moments did I ever imagine separate bedrooms. I often wondered
if the servants kept track of the number of nights my husband traipsed down the hall to my bedroom—and vice versa. Did they have betting pools about how many times a month we did it?

  I pushed myself to the bedroom door one step at a time, and opened it. The air in the hallway felt cold against my feverish skin. I heard sounds from the party below where eight hundred guests were gathered for an old-fashioned “hunt” dinner while cameras beamed the event to millions. Even without the gun tucked in my waistband, I would be tense. Few people realized how frightened I was of the public appearances I had to make, how strange and terrifying it still was when I appeared in public with thousands shouting my name, to have a hundred hands reaching for me, dozens of camera flashes hitting me. I was really not sure what sparked the public outburst of enthusiasm wherever I went, but I suspected that it was because people believed I was living a life that they’d only dreamed of. Of course, those people had little understanding of my life, they didn’t know how utterly boring and stifling life was as an exhibit piece in a museum.

  This time it was going to be even more frightening to face an audience. This time I had a gun.

  The grand stairway that no manor house would be without was at the end of the corridor, a sweeping path with a gnarled oak banister down to the Great Hall. I loved hardwood banisters, so warm and strong, so enduring. Walking down the stairs, my hand running along the banister, feeling its strength, was one of the small pleasures I found in living in museums. I was once accused of sliding down a banister in Buckingham Palace. It was the same stairway I used the first time I hurt myself when I was crying out for understanding.

  I went along the corridor in a daze. A servant was posted at the top of the stairs to make sure that guests did not make their way up to the royal rooms, but I didn’t notice him until he greeted me. I was sick, terribly ill, with an almost overwhelming desire to run back to the loo and vomit.

  I had to stop and hang on to the banister for a moment when my mind took flight and my knees turned to jelly. Thoughts of my boys kept popping into my head and I had to fight them back because I knew I would collapse if I let my emotions escape the tight rein I had on them. The boys were at school. And they would be well cared for. The queen would take them into seclusion. Their grandmother was the wealthiest and most powerful woman on earth. The boys would want for nothing. Except love.