The Last Queen of England (5 page)

A tinkle of glass announced Jean’s return with the wine.
 
She pulled out a low table between the chairs, set the wine down and curled her legs up, facing Tayte.
 
She’d changed into jeans and a pastel-blue jumper and she was wearing her glasses now - the makeup gone.
 
Tayte thought the natural look suited her better.

“Thanks,” he said as Jean handed him a glass.
 
The wine was red.
 
He took a sip.
 
“Not bad.”

“I don’t know much about wine, I’m afraid,” Jean said.
 
She smiled.
 
“It’s red, white or rosé.
 
That’s my limit.”

Just as long as it contained alcohol Tayte didn’t really care what colour it was or what it tasted like.
 
“I noticed a couple of motorcycle helmets on my way through.
 
You ride?”

“It’s the only way to get around town.”

Tayte had difficulty imagining Jean on a scooter.
 
She didn’t seem the type, but what did he know?
 
“And the other helmet?
 
Your ex-husband’s?”

Jean smiled at him as if she’d just been caught with her hand in the till.
 
“My son’s,” she said.
 
The baggage was out.

“Does he live with you?”
 
The question just came out.
 
Tayte had no idea why he was acting so interested.

“Off and on,” Jean said.
 
“He prefers to stay with his dad.”

Tayte nodded and gulped his wine.
 
Small talk was definitely not his thing.
 
He decided to change the subject, eager to go over the conversation at the restaurant earlier.
 
He needed to know if Jean had any more insight into what Marcus had been working on and more than anything, he hoped it would take him closer to finding out why it appeared to have led to his murder.

“Do you think you were close with any of those questions you asked Marcus at the restaurant?”

“I don’t know,” Jean said, “I’ve been thinking about it all afternoon.
 
He was keen to shut me up, wasn’t he?”

“Yes, he was, and I’ve been thinking about it all afternoon, too.
 
Especially about what Marcus said just before he -”
 
Tayte couldn’t continue without pausing first.
 
“Before he died.”

“Treason?”

Tayte nodded.
 
“You mentioned a Bonny Prince.
 
Bonny Prince Charlie, the Jacobite?”

“That’s right.”

“And the two words fit together, don’t they?
 
Jacobite and treason?”

“Very much so,” Jean said.
 
“But not in the twenty-first century.
 
The Jacobite risings happened over two hundred and fifty years ago.”

Tayte wished he had Marcus’s briefcase.
 
While he hoped DI Fable and his team would turn something up at the house, he knew how particular Marcus was with his paperwork.
 
Whatever he was working on was likely to have been with him at
Rules
and his killer clearly knew how important it was.

“And what about Queen Anne?” Tayte said.
 
“You told me she’d been the hot topic with Marcus all month.
 
How might she fit in?”

Jean shook her head while she thought about it.
 
“I really don’t know,” she said.
 
“Anne succeeded William III in 1702 and reigned until 1714 when the Hanovers came to the throne.
 
Since the Act of Union between England and Scotland was passed during Anne’s reign, she became the first monarch of Great Britain and the last queen of England.
 
Further Jacobite risings happened soon after she died.
 
One in 1715 and another in 1745.
 
Marcus wasn’t so much interested in the Bonny Prince as with Jacobitism in general.
 
It’s all basic history stuff.”

Tayte considered what he knew about the Jacobite movement, most of which he’d gleaned from movies about Bonnie Prince Charlie and books by authors such as Robert Louis Stevenson.
 
He quickly concluded that he didn’t know much at all and decided to let the professional bring him up to date.

“How about a little history 101?” he said.
 
“What was their beef?”

Jean sipped her wine and settled back with the glass.
 
“It began in 1688 with the Glorious Revolution, when Anne’s father, James II, fled England and thus abdicated from the throne.
 
The situation was later aggravated by the 1701 Act of Settlement, passed under William III’s reign just before he died and Anne came to the throne.
 
She and her sister Mary - although daughters of James II who was a devout catholic - were equally devout converts to the Church of England.
 
The Act stipulated that only those of the Church of England faith were eligible for succession to the throne.”

“And that placed the Hanovers next in line?”

“That’s right.
 
It ensured that in the event of Anne dying without issue - which she did - succession would fall to the Electress Sophia of Hanover, rather than to James II’s son, who was also called James and was later known as the Old Pretender.
 
Anyway, Sophia died a few weeks before Anne, so the title fell to her son George, who in 1714 was crowned King George I.
 
The Act still stands today.”

Tayte scoffed.
 
“I thought all your British kings and queens came to power by right of succession through the divinity of God, not man.”

“And there’s your
beef
as you put it.
 
The Jacobites essentially stood for what was arguably right - maintaining the line of kings through the direct Stuart bloodline and James II.
 
When Anne died, being the last of the Stuart monarchs, the uprisings against the Hanovers gained momentum in an attempt to restore the bloodline.”

“Because the Hanovers only came to power by virtue of their faith?”

“More or less.
 
You see, the Electress Sophia of Hanover was - now let me get this right.
 
She was Queen Anne’s first cousin once removed, descended from the Stuart line through James I’s daughter, Elizabeth.
 
George I was Anne’s second cousin and something like fiftieth in the line of succession.”

“Fiftieth?”

Jean nodded with enthusiasm.
 
“It’s an unprecedented figure.”

“And all because of the Act of Settlement?” Tayte said, letting Jean know that he was paying attention.

“Precisely.
 
You could argue that it changed all the rules, interfering with the intended line of kings to suit man’s purpose.
 
Although the bloodline has survived, if to a lesser extent.
 
The Windsor ancestry, or I should say the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha ancestry as it was before it was changed to something that sounded more British, still runs all the way back to Alfred the Great.”

“But theirs is not the true, direct bloodline?”

“Not if you take religion out of the equation.
 
If the Act of Settlement hadn’t been passed, we’d have an entirely different monarchy.
 
They were very political times.”

“Sounds like a masterstroke.”

“I suppose it was.
 
I try to remain impartial but you can see the Jacobites’ point, can’t you?”

“And the Jacobite movement died out some two hundred fifty years ago?” Tayte said.
 
He was trying to understand why Marcus had urged him to hurry.

“Not exactly.
 
Many Jacobite societies exist today and there’s still plenty of support for the Stuart bloodline, largely in Scotland and to the north of England and perhaps surprisingly in America.”

Tayte grinned.
 
“Actually, that doesn’t surprise me at all.”

He’d traced many American families back through Scottish immigrants in the 1700s, many of whom were transported for their Jacobite leanings.
 
He drained his wine back and went for the bottle.

“Do you mind if I help myself?”

“Fill your boots,” Jean said.
 
She checked her own glass.
 
“I must be talking too much.
 
I’ve hardly touched mine.”

Tayte sat back again and got comfortable.
 
“And what are the odds of a twenty-first century uprising these days?”
 
It seemed laughable, but he had to ask.
 
“I’m just wondering how treason fits into the picture.”
 

“I think the odds are very slim,” Jean said.
 
“Since the current heir to the Stuart bloodline - one Franz Herzog von Bayern of Bavaria - has shown no interest in pursuing a claim, I doubt that any related action against the Crown is on anyone’s agenda today - treasonable or otherwise.”

Tayte was impressed.
 
“Marcus was right about you,” he said.
 
“You really know your stuff.”

Jean smiled.
 
“It’s mostly classroom material.
 
I still keep in touch with a few students from when I taught at university who could really blow your socks off if you got them on to the right subject.
 
Are you hungry yet?
 
All this talking’s brought my appetite back.”

“Sure,” Tayte said.
 
“Let’s eat.”

Somewhere in Greater London a shirtless man knelt before a raging fire.
 
The light cast his shadow back across a derelict room, illuminating exposed brickwork, high broken windows and a tangle of iron pipework.
 
He reached towards the flames with a narrow length of pipe and stirred the white coals again for good measure until the heat on his bare arm was almost unbearable.

You never leave loose ends,
he thought.
 
You
tie them up before you move on.
 
No time for complacency.
 
No time to sit around.
 
Not now.

As he retreated from the flames he considered the business he had to finish tonight.
 
He turned his attention to the battered briefcase beside him and eyed the initials ‘MB’ on the clasp.
 
He grabbed it and opened it upside down, spilling the contents in front of the fire, covering the dusty floor with certificates of births, marriages and deaths: connections to people whose lives he would sooner remain forgotten.

Kneeling among the records, he fed them slowly and purposefully to the flames, topping off the pyre with the briefcase itself.
 
He watched it all burn and when he was satisfied he put his shirt and coat back on and headed for the door.
 
He had already removed from the briefcase the one thing he dared to keep: a black address book.
 
He took it out from his coat pocket as he walked, smiling to himself now as he flicked through the pages, thinking,
S is for Summer
.

“We get it in cardboard cartons back home,” Tayte said, digging his fork into a plastic tray of Singapore noodles and letting the tangled food slide onto his plate beside the char siu.
 
They were eating at the breakfast bar in the kitchen.
 
The oriental aromas made his mouth water.

“I know,” Jean said.
 
“I’ve seen it on telly.”

“Right.”

“I think I’d prefer cartons.”

“Why’s that?”

“Well, I’m sure the food wouldn’t sweat so much and, I don’t know, it always looks so romantic when you see a couple in a film curled up with chopsticks and the carton between them.”

Tayte loved Chinese food but not like that.
 
“It still sweats,” he said, crunching into a prawn cracker.

They ate thoughtfully for a few minutes, then Jean said, “So where do we go from here?”

Tayte picked up on the ‘we’ part straightaway.
 
He was going to do whatever it took to help the police find his friend’s killer but he figured he’d be doing it alone.

“I intend to follow in Marcus’s footsteps if I can,” he said.
 
“You know, go through the same research.
 
It could bring his killer after me.
 
Could be dangerous.”

“I know,” Jean said.
 
“But I can help.”

Tayte didn’t doubt it.

“I think I’m already involved,” Jean added.
 
“Whether I want to be or not.”

She had Tayte there.
 
He drew a long breath and held it briefly while he thought it through.
 
“Okay,” he said.
 
“I had an idea to go to The National Archives first thing in the morning.
 
Marcus might have spoken to someone about what he was working on.
 
Maybe one of his old colleagues knows something.
 
We might even be able to pick up his research from the record logs.”