Free Prisoners of the North by Pierre Berton Page B

together at a late period of our lives and come together in a way but few could understand,” he wrote to Marie. In the end, however, it became obvious that Boyle was no longer welcome at court, and it fell to Marie herself to break the news as gently as she could.
    In later years, Marie briefly drew aside the veil of circumspection that had masked her own inner passion for the soldier of fortune whom she had admitted into her personal life. She had been, she said, “torn between two loyalties and two affections.” (She did not name anyone, but she may well have meant Prince Stirbey or even her husband.) “It was unbearable to me to hurt anyone and yet I was hurting them and myself even more.” Boyle was devastated by this unexpected blow. In the correspondence that followed, it is possible to discern another side of Boyle, one that he had concealed perhaps even from himself. He had always been the loner, the leader who faced every setback with aplomb. Women had been secondary in his career. Now, in middle age, he found himself consumed by the kind of ardour usually associated with lovesick youths. From the moment of their first meeting he was the rock to which Marie clung, the haven to which she retreated. Now the tables were turned, but there was no way in which he could reach out to her. In one remarkable and revealing letter that has all the resonance of a wail in the night, he laid himself bare. “I do not think in my whole manhood I actually knew what fear was until … you told me I must go.” The bold adventurer was now the prisoner of a hopeless passion. “I found myself paralyzed with fear, preventing myself from screaming … by cramming my hand in my mouth and nearly biting my fingers off.”
    Boyle’s life had been marked by a series of stunning successes. Now, at last, he had a family on which he doted; the young crown prince and his siblings called him Uncle Joe. He had found a woman who could easily have been his life’s companion—a contrast to his dizzy first wife and her uninspiring successor. He was in love with Marie, and on more than one occasion she demonstrated her affection and respect. But the ultimate consummation of that unlikely affair was denied them by circumstances over which they had no control. Indeed, much of the fire in his heart may have been fuelled by the lure of the unattainable. For the first time in his life, Boyle, the take-charge man, found himself powerless to act.
    Boyle’s career at this critical time was winding down, but he refused to admit it. Settling down … taking it easy … resting on his laurels—such senior-citizen goals were foreign to his makeup. He had one last service to perform for his queen. He had finally managed to separate the future king, Carol, from the arms of his unsuitable morganatic wife, Zizi Lambrino, and nudge him in the direction of an acceptable (if unlovable) princess, Helene of Greece.
    He needed a new adventure, a new career goal, and he found it in the petroleum-rich Caucasus between the Black and Caspian seas. In May 1921, Royal Dutch/Shell, the international oil conglomerate, made him its representative in dealing with the Soviets, and he was off again for Constantinople (Istanbul), pausing for a bittersweet two-week idyll in the Romanian countryside with Marie. His treatment at the hands of the Romanian court had left him depressed. “In spite of his mighty spirit and energy he does mind being so unfairly attacked,” Marie noted as he reluctantly took his leave. He felt the Canadian cold shoulder no less keenly. He had undertaken his several adventures on behalf of the Romanians and the western Allies at his own expense, and all he had received from the military (apart from the grudging gift of a DSO) was a long haggle about his right to wear his uniform.
    By the end of August, Boyle was back in London, outwardly the man of action but inwardly at odds with himself. Only Marie understood the extent of his despair. “I am