The Sex Life of Royals
by David Barber
Dichley watched Prince
Rupert shoot himself.
"At the time they
insisted it was an accident," Gelda Woles gloated. Gelda was his editor.
"Obviously he was a closet homosexual, so just tie that to a tragic
suicide and there's your book."
Dichley was
video-calling Woles from the Third International Chronocapture Conference in
London.
"Concentrate on
the time he spent at Balmoral," Gelda had advised. "Strapping stable
lads and so forth. Or that stag trip to Baden-Baden. Who knows what they got up
to there."
Weeks of flicking
through royal holidays in Scotland had uncovered nothing more interesting than
Rupert being bullied by his older brother.
"Read the
literature," Gelda had shrugged. "Read the diaries. Victorian
aristocrats expected their sons to be bullied. It was called Eton. Didn't King
George V say he was frightened of his own father and by God, his children would
be afraid of him?"
Yet only Rupert put a
shotgun barrel in his mouth, thought Dichley, but it did seem the eighteen-year-old,
fourth in line to the throne, was still a virgin when he blew his brains out.
Dichley had
chronocaptured all eighteen years. Now he realised how lucky biographers in the
past had been, with the forest of a life already pruned for them, leaving the
marriages, triumphs and deaths like a well-spaced avenue of trees, and visible
in the far distance, the historical landscape of Napoleon, a World War, the
Depression.
Dichley though, was
lost in the woods.
Then he'd chanced on
the Prince at fifteen, bathing in his dressing room at Balmoral. To fill that
royal hip-bath took an extraordinary effort, a convoy of housemaids carrying
buckets from distant kitchens. Balmoral Castle would have to wait half a
century for piped hot water.
The plump, freckled
girl puffed in with a last top-up, just as the Prince was done. Thanks to low
bit-rates in the chronocapture there was no sound, and the past was in
monochrome.
Slopping soapy water,
the Prince stood up, a teenage boy in the presence of a young woman. Dichley
supposed he asked for his towel and she placed her palm on his bare, wet chest.
A secret observer
would have seen Dichley chortle with glee. After the hours spent watching
Prince Rupert eat, shit and pick his nose, here at last was him tumbling a girl
into bed.
Then moments later,
Rupert rolled away, his face unreadable.
Dichley viewed it
again, the girl speaking as she smoothed down her skirts, presumably telling
the Prince that it didn't matter, that these things happened.
Flicking through more
damp Scottish summers, it took him only a day to discover the seventeen-year-old
Prince in the arms of a governess. Reviewing the previous weeks, it was easy
now to spot the exchange of glances, conversations on a staircase, a note
slipped into her hand.
The governess was a
painfully thin, frizzy-haired woman in her thirties. It was the Prince who drew
the curtains of her narrow room on a view of wet roof tiles and grey skies.
Awkwardly, they began to undress each other and Dichley paused the picture.
Here, just before the Prince broke away and fled, he tells her something.
Dichley studied the
bafflement on the woman’s face.
After that, he took
Gelda’s advice and jumped to the Prince’s visit to Baden-Baden. It was his
eighteenth birthday, and at the end of a boisterous evening, his cousin and
some friends escorted him to an exclusive brothel.
Chamber-maids and
governesses belonged to the class that didn’t complain about their betters, but
this French girl was annoyed when the Prince left her untouched, perhaps
worried that the Madam would blame her.
Downstairs there was a
noisy scene. The Prince’s companions emerged half-dressed to interfere,
banknotes were thrown, and Rupert slammed out into the night.
"It all
fits," announced Glenda. The suicide was the despairing act of a young man
unable to admit his sexual orientation.
But even with that
short life laid out like a dissection, Dichley still felt he was missing
something.
He’d made it clear to
Gelda that he wanted this biography to be taken more seriously than his others,
so she didn't mention that an explicit first draught had already interested a
friend in the media. But they both agreed a high bit-rate chronocapture of the
suicide was a good investment of what remained of his advance.
Dichley had become
hardened to the scene, though this time the blood would be red and he would
hear Rupert's last wild words. Privately, he hoped they would gift him a title
for his book.
"Stop watching
me," the Prince cried to the empty air. "Always watching me."
"Leave
me alone," he sobbed, the gun
blast putting an end to his paranoia.
The End
