Blood Royal by Harold Robbins

unbalanced look, and he couldn’t keep his eyes off of it. He wondered if she had gotten it from her husband—ex-husband, that is, very ex indeed, Hall thought.
    It puzzled him and everyone else in the office as to why the princess had gone “outside,” far outside, to hire an American woman to help defend her.
    What was in the princess’s mind?
    For that matter, what could have driven her to kill the Prince of Wales in front of millions of home viewers?
    Perhaps the royal lady was as bonkers as many people claimed.

The INNS OF COURT

8
    The limo carrying Marlowe and Philip Hall took them to Legal London, the area between the Thames and Holborn where the main courthouses and most attorney offices were located. Hall explained on the way that Trent’s “chambers” were in the oldest and most famous of the “inns of court,” those privileged old establishments where barristers gathered to share office space. The limo negotiated its way through a throng of reporters and into a private driveway. During the short walk from the car to the office building, bewigged, robed barristers going to and from court stared at her. She realized that she was on her way to being one of the most famous women on the planet.
    She exchanged a smile with a female barrister. “They wear wigs and robes, too,” she told Hall.
    “Really?” he said.
    The hardly audible, dry reply was the closest thing she’d experienced so far in terms of him having a sense of humor.
    Anthony Trent’s offices were mahogany and brass from another era, a time when Britannia had half the world under the Union Jack, and the cream from its colonies found its way to the table of the “Establishment,” that small core of wealthy British who owned just about everything in the country.
    The office furniture was aged, heavy hardwood, cut in colonial jungles during the time Britannica ruled the sea and the sun never set on the British Empire. The bookcases were filled with elderly volumes that conveyed a sense that they were both old and authoritative. It was hard for Marlowe to imagine any modern judge overturning the precedents in legal texts as venerable as those she saw in Trent’s office.
    Passing by furnishings that took her to a grander age, she was disappointed to see through an open door a modern computer bay with a data-entry clerk fast at work. Scribes with quills and ink pots would have fit the ambience more.
    Hall led her to a conference room. Several things struck her the moment she walked in—the scent of fine cigar smoke, a fainter wisp of brandy, a mahogany conference table solid enough to be used as the bowsprit on a battleship … and six people who were careful to keep their disapproval behind fragile masks of civility.
    Five men and a woman were seated at the table. The men stood as she entered the room. Hall started the introductions.
    “Marlowe James, may I present Anthony Trent.”
    Trent had thick, combed-back black hair that came almost to a point at the front of his head, heavy eyebrows, and a patrician nose. His suit was as conservative as Philip Hall’s, but the wool was of the finest, a smooth, almost slick midnight blue with a barely visible black stripe. His shirt was starched white, French-cuffed with gold links, and his tie was blue-and-gold-striped, displaying the colors of one of the snooty British public schools.
    Marlowe had expected a Type A personality, the character trait almost universally expected of trial attorneys, but her first impression was of a man who commanded by force of personality rather than snapping jaws. Her second impression was that subtle arrogance that sometimes comes along with wealth and success. Trent was commander in chief in his chambers—his countenance was appraising, his smile and handshake were professional but lacked warmth.
    “May I present Lord Finfall.”
    Lord Finfall was a white-haired elder statesman in a medium-gray heavy worsted suit that was woven to last the ages.
    Trent said,