Free Prisoners of the North by Pierre Berton Page A

had breakfast with him daily and took him on drives in the country. Her ten-year-old daughter, Ileanna, became his constant companion, and Boyle delighted the little princess by reciting for her Service’s “The Shooting of Dan McGrew.” At last the King of the Klondike had found a warm and fulfilling family.
    Marie had never met a man like Boyle. He did not fit the palace stereotype. To the stuffy salons of the Romanian court he brought a whiff of the clean, northern Canadian air. There, he was “Klondike Boyle,” a soubriquet bestowed in admiration but one that also stamped him as an alien, albeit a glamorous one.
    For all of his career he had been beholden to no one, but now, day by day, he was becoming a slave to a new kind of passion. Marie had only to crook her finger and he stood ready to do her bidding. Back in Canada his demure little wife tried vainly to get an answer to her official inquiries about him. In the Yukon, Joe Boyle, Jr., was trying to reach his father to discuss his concerns about the state of the Canadian Klondyke Company. From the maelstrom of eastern Europe there was no response. His company was now in receivership, yet Boyle appeared indifferent to the collapse of his empire. Though he yearned for the Klondike, as Marie’s writing makes clear, he didn’t try to launch a rescue attempt.
    Why? Was it that he had done what he set out to do and moved on? To quote his favourite poet: “It wasn’t the gold that I wanted, so much as just finding the gold.” But these excuses for his inaction are not very plausible. Something else was holding him back, keeping him tied to the exotic kingdom, and that something, surely, was Marie. He could not bear to slip away with scarcely a goodbye, as he had slipped away from Elma Louise, still waiting for him wistfully on the other side. The great dredges had been his toys, but now he had put away childish things and flung himself into a romance that some might consider adolescent but that turned out to be the first abiding love affair of his life.
    As he recovered from his devastating illness, new challenges presented themselves, all revolving around the needs and desires of his royal confidante. In the late fall of 1918 he masterminded a successful campaign to spirit the Grand Duchess Marie of Russia, the Queen’s cousin, out of Odessa. In Paris in December he persuaded his old Klondike acquaintance Herbert Hoover of the Allied Food Council to dispatch three shipments of food to starving Romania. Next, in London he negotiated a twenty-five-million-dollar loan for that beleaguered country, lobbied (unsuccessfully) for a massive Allied intervention in Russia, and arranged for young Prince Nicholas, Marie’s son, to attend Eton.
    In the midst of this whirlwind of activity he was “knocked clean out” by an attack of influenza that weakened him further. The Saviour of Romania was also, thanks to Marie, now the Duke of Jassy. That did not deter the War Office, which was back with annoying questions about his right to wear the King’s uniform. Boyle continued to resist all attempts to put him into mufti. Grudgingly, the War Office agreed to allow him to continue the masquerade until September 1920, a deadline later extended to the following January.

    Joe Boyle recovering from his near fatal illness, Kishinev, Bessarabia, 1918 .
    By this time, political opposition to Boyle in Romanian court circles was building. His attempts, at Marie’s behest, to separate Crown Prince Carol from his commoner mistress were seen as an intrusion into internal affairs that was much resented. The government had changed, and there was continuing uneasiness about the supposed influence of an outsider on the royal family. The intrigue began to tell upon the Queen herself. “They one and all torture me about faithful old Boyle and my unshakeable belief in him,” she wrote. Yet the crisis only deepened their affection for each other. “You and I are man and woman and we have come