The Golden Prince (15 page)

A five-minute meeting she had with the prime minister at Downing Street was equally unsuccessful.

Mr. Asquith had been most affable, taking both her hands warmly in his and saying how much he had enjoyed their last meeting at one of her great-aunt’s dinner parties.

“What can I do for you, my dear?” he had asked when she was comfortably seated on a chintz-covered sofa in Number 10’s drawing room.

Rose had wasted no time in preliminaries. “A friend of mine, Lady Daphne Harbury, has been sentenced to three months’ imprisonment in Holloway for taking part in a suffragette demonstration, Prime Minister,” she’d said. “I’m here to plead that she be given an early release on the grounds that she should never have been sentenced as a common criminal. As a suffragette, she should be a political prisoner.”

He had been as immovable on the subject as his home secretary. At last, when she had risen to her feet, knowing she had failed utterly in her mission, he had asked her if she would like to look at the roses in Number 10’s rear garden.

Knowing very well that the invitation had been made in order that he could take hold of her arm as he escorted her, she had declined.

In the end, the only person who was helpful to her was Theo Jethney.

“My friend is not only on hunger strike and being forcibly fed, but she is in an underground cell so damp that if the forced feeding doesn’t kill her, pneumonia will!” she said to him in passionate outrage. “How can civilized men—men like King George and Mr. Asquith and Mr. Churchill—allow women to be kept in such appalling conditions?”

“The King and the prime minister and the home secretary don’t make personal visits to Holloway,” Theo Jethney said drily. “And the governors of Holloway aren’t likely to enlighten them as to conditions there.”

They were in his office at the House of Lords. Rose was wearing suffragette colors. Green for hope. Purple for dignity. White for purity. In her purple narrow skirt, with a spray of vivid myrtle leaves pinned to her jacket and a wide white picture hat on top of her thickly waving auburn hair, she looked enchanting.

Partly because she did look so enchanting, partly because she was Marigold’s sister, and partly because he shared her outrage at the treatment being meted out to the suffragettes, Theo had set aside plenty of time for his meeting with her.

“Then someone else must tell them,” she said vehemently. “That person must be someone they will listen to.”

“Do you think I am that person?”

“Yes. Neither Mr. Asquith nor Mr. Churchill will be as dismissive, or as patronizing, to you as they were to me. The general public also need to be made aware of the horrors taking place in Holloway. Force-feeding is a torture straight from the Middle Ages, yet newspapers treat it as a joke. Editors would soon change their tune if it was
their
daughters, or sisters, or mothers, who were being held down and violated in such an inhuman manner.”

Theo stood up and walked across to a window that looked out over the Thames. “A year or so ago,” he said, looking not at her, but at the strongly moving river, “when force-feeding first became an issue, Kier Hardie raised a question in Parliament, objecting to it strenuously on moral grounds. His fellow members of Parliament
roared with laughter. He said afterward that if he hadn’t heard that laughter for himself, he would never have believed that a body of gentlemen could have found reason for mirth and applause over such an issue.”

He turned away from the window and walked back to his desk in deep thought. At last he said, “We cannot denounce torture in places like Russia and support it in England, but members of Parliament—as well as the general public—have to come to an understanding that it
is
torture, and far from being a joke. The only way to achieve that, Rose, is via a sympathetic press. It needs a national newspaper to wholeheartedly and unequivocally denounce the horrors of force-feeding—and I think I know the newspaper most likely to.”

He seated himself once more behind his desk and drew out a small black notebook from its central drawer.

“The man you need to speak to is Hal Green,” he said, flicking pages. “He’s editor of the
Daily Despatch
—and the most bohemian editor in Fleet Street. He likes a controversial cause.”

“Would you arrange for me to see him?”

Theo flashed her one of his rare smiles and, for the first time, Rose understood just why Marigold had been so dazzled by him.

“Nothing easier. I’ll speak with him myself. Even hard-boiled Fleet Street editors like an invitation to the House of Lords every now and then.”

From a page in his notebook he copied Hal Green’s telephone number onto a piece of paper and passed it across his desk toward her, saying, “Is everyone well at Snowberry? I haven’t visited recently and I’m rather missing Millie’s meringues.” Then, before she had the chance to respond, he said, “And Marigold? Is she in London in readiness for the coronation?”

“Yes, she’s at Sibyl’s.” With great difficulty Rose kept her voice as nonchalant as his. “Her house is on the processional route. Lily and Iris are arriving tomorrow morning and I think Rory will be joining us there.”

“Good. The five of you will have a grandstand view.”

He walked her to the door. “I’ll tell Hal Green to expect a call from you, and I’ll speak to both Churchill and the prime minister.”

“Thank you.” The words came out stiff and stilted. In the seconds before he turned his head away from hers, she had seen the expression in his eyes when he had spoken Marigold’s name, and her shock was so profound she didn’t know how she was still managing to behave normally.

He was in love with Marigold. A public figure with a flawless reputation, sophisticated and long married, he was as dazzled by Marigold as Marigold, for a time, had been dazzled by him.

She said good-bye to him. Never once had it occurred to her that Theo Jethney had already responded to Marigold’s shameless flirting. Her fear had simply been that he might be tempted to. Now she had the horror of wondering just how intimate their relationship had been.

She walked down the Palace of Westminster’s marble-floored corridors to the St. Stephen’s entrance, clinging to the word
had
. Marigold was no longer infatuated with him. She had seen sense and the relationship was over. The bleak misery in Theo’s eyes at the mention of her name seemed to be a testimony of that. As she stepped out into brilliant sunshine she thanked her lucky stars that Marigold was not quite as foolhardy as she often seemed.

Marigold was a mile away in Chelsea, lying on her tummy upon a silk-covered couch in Lawrence Strickland’s studio. With her weight on her elbows, her head at a coquettish tilt that ensured her mane of hair fell to one side in a riot of glorious golden-red waves, and with her ankles crossed blithely in the air, she was as naked as the day she was born.

That she was didn’t faze her in the slightest. On her first visit to his studio, when Strickland had said he wanted to do the classical Greek painting first and had asked her to take off her clothes, she
had done so with the casual nonchalance of a professional artist’s model. The only difference Strickland could see was that where professional models chatted to him about mundane things as he worked, most frequently their family and friends, Marigold was more interested in him.

“What is your background, Strickland?” she had asked him as she settled into the pose. “Who are your family? Where are you from?”

“My family is my own affair,” he had said, sketching her outline in broad, confident strokes. “As for where I’m from—I’m from Norfolk.”

Later, when it had become obvious to her that the fact of being born in Norfolk was the full extent of the personal information he was prepared to give—and that he wasn’t at all interested in her, or any other woman, sexually—she had asked him about his work. Much to his surprise, he’d answered her questions. Later still, she had talked to him about herself.

“So you were how old when you lost your virginity?” he had asked, fascinated.

“Nineteen. But I didn’t lose it, Strickland. I simply didn’t see the importance of keeping it.”

He’d grinned. Her careless outspokenness about sexual matters was extraordinary coming from a girl of her age, class, and upbringing. Though he mixed with the aristocracy—accepted by them because of his very great talent—he privately had a great deal of contempt for them. He didn’t have contempt for Marigold, though. Marigold fascinated, amused, and intrigued him. Yet despite his private antipathy for peers, he couldn’t help feeling sorry for her grandfather. From all he’d heard about Lord May, he was a decent old cove. Not the kind of man to deserve a granddaughter who was undoubtedly destined to go through life leaving a trail of scandal behind her.

“And who was the lucky man?” he asked as he captured the exact coquettish tilt of her head.

“Lord Jethney. He was passionately in love with me.” She didn’t
want to talk about Theo. She wanted to talk about the painting. “What will happen to this painting when it’s finished, Strickland? What will you do with it?”

“I’ve no idea,” he said truthfully.

“Couldn’t you forget about a Royal Academy showing for the other portrait you are going to do, and enter this one instead?”

He cracked with laughter, thinking she was joking.

Not at all put out, she said, “Why not? The academy is always exhibiting paintings of classical nudes.”

“True,” he said, still chuckling. “But the models for such pictures are professional models—they aren’t members of the aristocracy. You would be instantly recognized and the furor would be enormous.”

“The furor would be fun. Who are you depicting me as? Penelope?”

“Persephone.”

Marigold, whose knowledge of Greek mythology was hazy, looked blank.

“She was raped by the god Pluto,” he said helpfully. “He was the ruler of the Underworld. During one of his visits to the upper realms he saw a beautiful girl picking spring flowers, desired her, seized her, and carried her off to his kingdom where she ruled as his queen.”

He removed a speck of tobacco from his tongue. “Every spring he allowed her to return in order that, for a few short months, she could comfort her grieving mother.”

“So this pose—this lying-on-my-tummy pose—in the finished painting will I be lying in a grassy meadow full of flowers?”

“Yes—unless I change my mind and depict you struggling in Pluto’s arms as he carries you off.”

She shivered in shocked delight, not knowing whether he was joking or not, and not caring. All that mattered was that the painting was going to cause a sensation—a sensation she would be the center of.

Iris was deeply unhappy. In two days’ time she would be leaving for London with Lily and their grandfather. With Marigold and Rose they were to stay at their great-aunt Sibyl’s for a week so that they could conveniently attend all the coronation parties and balls that would be taking place—parties and balls at which she and Toby would be able to enjoy each other’s company. Only she was no longer sure Toby wanted to enjoy her company.

She was in what was known as the estate room, a small room adjoining the library where all the paperwork dealing with the running of Snowberry’s home farm and tenanted cottages was kept. Since Rose had hared off to London to fight for Daphne Harbury’s release, dealing with the estate correspondence had fallen to her. She had been surprised at how satisfying she had found doing it. But she wasn’t finding it satisfying just now.

Just now all she could think of was that a proposal from Toby was growing unlikelier by the day.

She put her pen down, overcome by the suspicion that there were times when Toby came down from London to spend a few hours at Sissbury without telling her. A year ago, when he had first joined the Guards, if he visited Sissbury, he also popped over to Snowberry and they would have a game of tennis or mooch companionably around the lake with the dogs at their heels.

The sun streamed in through the estate room’s windows, and she was overcome with the longing to visit Sissbury and gain news of Toby from his mother. Lady Mulholland had never made any secret of the fact that she would welcome her as a daughter-in-law, and a chat with her could well remove the doubt she was now feeling.