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The Fourth Son

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His eldest sister, older than his eldest brother, is aggrieved.

Why not, in the other principality, their near neighbour and rival for more centuries than anyone could remember had recently amended to rights of succession to allow for the eldest child of either sex to ascend the throne.;

Her best friend and accomplice in crime Isobel had done just that, and if her father wasn’t the bloody-minded bastard he was, she would have been queen and not her pesky little brother.

Perhaps slightly less on the Richter scale of explosiveness, his eldest sister was a leaf out of her mother’s book and inherited the same bloody-mindedness and ruthlessness as her father.

Somehow, those traits passed our new king, and although yet to be proved, it might be a blessing in disguise that he was the monarch and not her.

She was not backwards in telling him what she thinks

He resists the urge to simply poke his tongue out at her.  Childish pranks of siblings are not the considered and measured response of a proper monarch.

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The Fourth Son

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The woman he dreaded.  The woman who was never really a mother for him.  That had fallen to the wife of the king’s brother, the Ambassador way back in New York.

The woman who once threated his mother to a pistol duel at dawn and had got as far as the back lawn and started walking the ten paces before the king came and stopped it.

It might not have been a good idea to stand between the two very angry women.

Ah, the memories.

But his mother was not herself, not the firebrand he was expecting, just there to apologise for not being there to welcome him home before she collapsed on the floor, the sedatives finally taking hold.

The doctor is apologetic.

In between this, there are a few questions for the butler, who used to be his father’s, the morgue superintendent and the doctor, again, when he goes to see the bodies of his brothers and father, sans the eldest, who is missing.

There’s a problem: why is he missing? He should be somewhere in the debris caused by the avalanche, like his two other brothers.

That was something he was going to get to the bottom of.

Autopsies are asked for when he learns they were not going to.

Odd…

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The Fourth Son

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Banquets are not cosy dinners, or parties with friends, or dining in the best restaurant in the city with a dozen others. Ruth had done all that, and it had been amazing. 

A banquet, an orchestra – I mean a full complete orchestra playing music – and a menu that was designed and delivered by a three-Michelin-star chef.

Now you know why there is one, not only on the plane.

It was Cinderella at the ball, with the exquisite ball gown, the music, the dancing, and the prince. Oh no, there wasn’t a glass slipper or a fairy godmother.

AND THIS WAS JUST THE FIRST NIGHT!!!

Was reality going to set in in the cold, hard light of dawn?

I don’t think so.

Not for Ruth anyway.

For our new King, it might be said it was a little different.

Breakfast in the room where he had all his breakfasts when he was a child, and the reminiscing coming back in a flood of thoughts, his father, his mother, his brothers, his sisters.

Now, he got to sit at the head of the table.

Except for one small problem.  His mother was there waiting for him.

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The Fourth Son

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Is it possible to be so apprehensive and get to heave a sigh of relief?

His mother is nowhere to be seen, sedated after the death of her husband, and they are only confronted by his sisters and stepsisters.

As well as all the other dignitaries like the Chancellor and parliamentarians, justices, councillors, and selected citizens.

It’s brief because there are more documents to sign. And there’s going to be a welcome home banquet and no rest for the wicked.

Susie, yes we haven’t forgotten her, hasn’t stopped saying Oh my God, since she got on the plane, and that only increased in intensity from the plane to the castle.  She honestly believes she is in Disneyland.

I’ll try not to make it sound like she is.

Ruth is trying not to be overwhelmed, but she is beginning to understand a little of his world and how different it is, and realizing just how much it will impinge on their lives.

Hasn’t changed her mind, though.   Perhaps the thought of being a real-life princess is starting to crystallise in the back of her mind.

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The Fourth Son

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Facing the public was not going to be easy.

For someone who had not had to be the public face of anything and who was living in an environment where in America only two people knew who he was, stepping out of the plane at the small international airport, he is staggered to discover half the principality has turned out to see him.

The fear he feels extends to whether it is going to be a problem for Ruth.

He need not have worried.  She is far more experienced in fronting up to, sometimes hostile, crowds, having worked for an accounting firm that specialised in takeovers, mergers, and bankruptcy.

A crowd of adoring people is grist to the mill for her.

Of course, meeting people who are pleased to see you is one thing, but there’s also the drive to the castle and the people who might not want to see you or make you welcome.

Our new king is not so sure about what his family’s reaction might be, and he was definitely very scared of what his mother was going to do or say.

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The Fourth Son

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Perhaps it should be a time to reflect on what has just happened to him; after all, it is an eight-hour fight across the Atlantic, and there’s a lot of water under them proverbially and in reality.

Why did he leave his country and go and live in New York?

It could be said that he was the youngest of the boys and that there was never any possibility he would become the King.  Why stay home and have your three older brothers make your life hell just because they could?

Perhaps.

But explain this: why did he not go home every year, or at any chance he had?  Wouldn’t he get homesick?

And by the time you get to the end of the list of questions and that part of the story you will find out.

There are very valid reasons for his absence, but it was not just to get away.  He spent the last fifteen years studying, learning, and observing, with a view that one day he would return with all this accumulated knowledge. Preferably when his father had passed away.

It was one of those relationships, he hated him and yet he loved him and would mourn his loss.

And on the other hand, would be extremely grateful he didn’t have to see him.

That would have been an interesting moment in time.

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The Fourth Son

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All the while we are talking about the nuts and bolts of the story, words are being put on paper more or less at the rate of 1,666 a day.

Of course, chapters don’t magically write themselves into 1,666 words; I wish they did.

That means after 10 days, we should be a third of the way through the story, and we almost are.

I am having fun imagining what it would be like to live in a draughty and cold castle, not for the first time, I have been here before, and what it’s like for the prince who tried so hard to escape the inevitability of his life.

Perhaps a few banquets with dancing might make him see differently.

Maybe waiting for his mother to return to sanity after she couldn’t cope after losing her husband.

Or perhaps discover things about his mother that he would prefer not to know.

Perhaps discovering how far his older brother was going to throw his country under the bus because he didn’t care, might motivate him to institute a few changes.

The question is, can he? 

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The Fourth Son

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It’s a question I have to ask.  Why is there a three-star Michelin chef on the Royal Jet?

Are you getting the vibe that this Royal family are rich beyond avarice, their people are downtrodden, and the monarchy should be irrelevant?

Yes, all good topics, and they are to be covered in today’s lesson on the monarchy and the people.

The principality has been around for 800 years, and it is actually the 800th-anniversary celebrations this year.

Once, the whole country was owned by the king and staunchly defended by his army.  Gradually, over time, the need to defend the place was replaced by diplomacy. People were gradually allowed to have their own land, houses, and businesses.

Cue today, and everyone is happy.

The king is largely a figurehead.  The people are represented by a parliament that makes laws and decisions that reflect the will of the prople, the church is the church and not the inquisition,

Nobody wants to invade them because they have nothing of value unless you call their tourist industry and souvenirs worth usurping.  Of course, there are treaties with France and Germany, which guarantees them protection, but there are no enemies.

Or is there?

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The Fourth Son

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You have to love the way things can go from bad to worse to utterly impossible.

I’m not one of those people who can write the typical fairy tale “I found a prince to marry, the dream of every young girl.”

No, there has to be a conspiracy theory involving a whole bunch of conspirators that might not be conspirators but an over-active imagination and reading too many thriller books in his spare time.

Why can’t it just be an avalanche and a few missing people?

Perhaps the problems are who the missing people are.  No, not the ordinary people who are not really missing but just thought briefly to be; it’s those other people.

The ones that make the story more compelling, not just an hour and a half of Hallmark movie fun.

So the inevitable happens: the king dies earlier than expected, actually while the prince is on his way home in the “corporate” jet, and a few other problems present themselves and things get intense.

Don’t they always?

Hang on, what happened to Ruth?

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The Fourth Son

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Let’s get a Lear jet and fly out.  That should make an impression.

It does.

The morning our and the evening back

While in the air on the return journey, after a successful day of trying to explain where his country is and what relevance it had, other than that oracle of oracles, the internet said, a problem erupts back home.

It makes the relevance of his return all the more imperative.  That’s just while he’s in the air.  When he lands, the problem becomes a disaster, and by the time he goes to a press conference, the first and only one without much training, he is shoved into the spotlight as a result of an impossible situation.

It is the first of many for the young prince, a principal spokesman for his country alongside the ambassador.

What happened to stargazing on the roof and relaxing with a cold bottle of beer with the most difficult problem; whether hw would be able to see the stars.

It was time to find the witch who had cast a hundred years of bad luck on him.