The Golden Prince (2 page)

“Steady on the speed, sir,” Piers warned when they were out in open country again. “That last corner was taken very wide …”

David made a noncommittal sound not very different from the one his father often made. Cullen was a humorless killjoy and having him alongside for a two-hundred-mile journey was tiresome, if unavoidable.

His low spirits fell further as they crossed the county border into Dorset. His younger brother, Bertie, wouldn’t be home as Bertie’s leave from Dartmouth came much nearer the end of term. Since Harry, Georgie, and John were too young to count, this meant there would only be his fourteen-year-old sister, Mary, for company and finding something fun they could do together wouldn’t be easy. Though his younger brothers’ nursery could be raided for board games, his father always insisted such games be played with no uproarious laughter, which, to David, defeated their point; and they wouldn’t be able to play cards, because there wouldn’t be a pack to be found.

As Dorset merged into the airy uplands of Hampshire the loneliness he always fought to keep at bay swept over him with such force he could hardly breathe. He had no one he could truly call a friend. Piers Cullen was too dour a Scotsman to be someone whose
companionship he would voluntarily seek. As far as Dartmouth was concerned, his father had never had to worry about friendships, for the boys he would have liked to make friends with kept their distance and the others toadied up to him—and he hated toadies.

He was so deep in thought he didn’t see the blind bend ahead until it was too late for him to slow down. As Piers Cullen gave a shout of alarm, he took it far too wide and far too fast.

Too late he saw what was in front of him. Too late he saw that short of a miracle, there was going to be an accident of tragic proportions.

He slammed his foot on the brake. Slewed the wheel to the left. Then, with a girl’s screams, Cullen’s desperate “
Jesus God!
” and horrendous barking ringing in his ears, he plummeted into a future beyond all his imaginings.

Wearing a straw
boater with a scarlet ribbon around its shallow crown, a high-necked white blouse, and an ankle-length navy skirt, Rose Houghton ran down the last few steps of the sturdy oak staircase and headed in the direction of Snowberry’s kitchen.

Built as an extension to the main building, the kitchen incorporated sixteenth-century timber posts and beams from the framed house that had originally stood on the site. It was a gigantic room lit by long bands of windows, and the marble-topped pastry table where Millie, Snowberry’s cook, was busy rolling dough was at the very far end of it.

Rose was accustomed to walking long distances at Snowberry—and to having dogs at her heels. As her high-button boots rang out on the stone-flagged floor a chocolate-brown Labrador sprang up from where he had been lying beneath the table and bounded to greet her.

“Yes, I’m going into the village, Homer, and yes, you can come with me.” She fondled his ears, saying to Millie, “Has Grandpa told you that when he comes back from the dentist he’s bringing Lord Jethney with him? That means meringues for pudding tonight. Perhaps you could top them with stewed apples and cream like last time?”

“Perhaps I could, and perhaps I couldn’t,” Millie said, not troubling to look up from what she was doing, “and if you’re taking that silly dog out from under my feet, take Fizz and Florin as well. This is a kitchen, not a kennel.”

The cocker spaniels in question were already at Rose’s feet, tails wagging in eager anticipation.

“The reason the dogs are always in here is because you’re always giving them tidbits.”

She spoke with loving affection. Millie had been in service at Snowberry since before Rose was born, having entered into Lord May’s service when his only child, Rose’s father, had married. She had baked Rose’s christening cake and the christening cakes for all three of Rose’s younger sisters. She had prepared the funeral meats when Rose’s father had died at the shockingly young age of thirty-six, and two years later, on Rose’s mother’s remarriage to a French nobleman, she had baked the wedding cake.

“Though I wouldn’t have done,” she’d often said afterward. “Not if I’d known she was going to leave the children behind her when she went off to live in France.”

She was the only person indignant at the arrangement. Lord May had been delighted that his four granddaughters were to remain beneath his roof. Nine-year-old Rose, seven-year-old Iris, and five-year-old Marigold hadn’t had the slightest desire to leave Snowberry—not once it had been explained to them that their army of much-loved pets wouldn’t be allowed to accompany them if they did so. As for three-year-old Lily—she’d been too young to have any opinion.

None of them had missed their mother as much as Millie had thought they would—or should. Their day-to-day care had always been in the hands of nannies and nursery maids, and when their father died, their mother sought comfort by plunging into a hectic London social life. From then on she became only a visitor to Snowberry. That she now lived in Paris, instead of London, made very little difference to her daughters, who thought of her more as a much-loved aunt than a mother.

With the dogs close behind her, Rose left Millie to her pastry making and walked out of the kitchen and out of the house. From the distant tennis court she could hear Marigold shouting, “The
ball was
out
, Lily. You can’t continue being umpire if you don’t umpire properly!”

What Lily’s response was, she couldn’t hear. Nor could she hear if Iris was also protesting. One thing, however, was certain. No matter how much fuss Marigold and Iris made, Lily would remain sweet tempered.

Fizz and Florin, easily diverted, raced off to see what the fuss was about. Rose walked around the corner of the house to the stables where, as well as three horses and a pony, bicycles and—when not in use—her grandfather’s stately Talbot motorcar were kept.

She had two letters to post for her grandfather, letters that she had written for him earlier that morning.

“Because of my failing eyesight you’re going to have to deal with all my correspondence, Rose,” he had said to her when she had returned to Snowberry after three years at St. Hilda’s, Oxford. “Also, because I can no longer do as much as I used to, I’m going to need your help in managing the estate.”

It had been a bolt from the blue. One she had been totally unprepared for.

While at St. Hilda’s she had joined the Women’s Social and Political Union, putting her organizational skills to very good use. Now what she wanted most in the world was to live an independent life in London, forge a career for herself, and, until that aim was achieved, meet regularly with her suffragette friends and work alongside Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter, Christabel, at the WSPU head office.

That she wasn’t going to be able to was a fierce disappointment. It was one she had overcome. She loved her grandfather far too much to ever let him down.

As she wheeled the bicycle out of the stables she reflected how supportive he had been when she had said she wanted to try for a place at St. Hilda’s. For a man born the year before Victoria became Queen, he was wonderfully progressive in his thinking when it came to the education of women.

It had been her ultrachic, elegant, and soigné mother who had still been living in the Dark Ages.

“Oxford?
C’est une idée impossible!
” she had said in near hysterics, so appalled that she had forgotten for a moment she was on a visit to England and wasn’t at home in France. “Oxford is for plain middle-class girls who have no hope of marrying well!”

Rose had been torn between exasperation and amusement. “Actually, Mama, Oxford is for anyone who has brains and wants to use them.”

Her mother had thrown up her hands in an extravagant gesture of despair, thankful that her other daughters showed no signs of becoming bluestockings and that her two French stepdaughters were far easier to understand.

Wryly amused at how constantly and inadvertently she disappointed her mother, Rose cycled down Snowberry’s long driveway and, with Homer gamely keeping up with her, sped out onto the country road that lay beyond its high wrought-iron gates. As a child she had looked striking—her sea-green eyes and thickly waving auburn hair had seen to that—but she had never been chocolate-box pretty. And chocolate-box prettiness was what her mother had expected in a daughter. She had also expected her to be demure and captivatingly shy.

On both counts Rose had failed abysmally.

It had been the final straw for her mother that as a young woman she had preferred to spend three years at St. Hilda’s rather than as a sensational adornment of London and Parisian high society. In her most recent letter her mother had written:

The stone wall that ran along the side of the narrow road, marking the limit of the Snowberry estate, had given way to a thick hedge of hawthorn and beech rife with wild honeysuckle. Ahead of her was a blind bend and Rose could hear the sound of a motorcar approaching it from the opposite direction.

“On to the shoulder, Homer!” she shouted. Keeping him safely to the inside of the bicycle she swerved as near to the shoulder as possible in order to be well out of the way of whatever was coming.

No amount of swerving would have been enough.

The car careened round the bend, taking it so wide she thought it was going to hit her head-on.

She wrenched the handlebars violently to the left, screaming at Homer to get out of the way.

In equal horror the driver of the car spun his wheel, slewing across the road away from her, clipping her back wheel as he did so.

The result was catastrophic.

As the bicycle went into a spin she was thrown with great force over its handlebars. For a split second she was aware of the screech of tires and of demented barking. Then she hit the ground, slamming into a ditch beneath the hedgerow.

The impact was so savage every atom of breath was knocked from her body. Pain seared through her, and she fought against being sucked into a whirling black vortex, terrified that if she lost consciousness, she might never regain it.

As she lost the battle the last thing she was aware of was someone running toward her, and a voice hoarse with fear shouting, “
Oh, God! Oh, Christ, Cullen! I think she’s dead!
”

“
We need a
doctor. If you stay with her, sir, I’ll drive for help.”

The voice was different from the first one. Terse and authoritative and with a definite Scottish burr.

Rose tried to get her brain to function. If there was talk only now of a doctor and an ambulance, then she must have been just fleetingly unconscious. Which must mean that she wasn’t critically hurt.

Somewhere near to her Homer was whining piteously. He needed reassuring that she was all right, but she hadn’t, as yet, reassured herself. She tried to open her eyes, but her eyelids wouldn’t obey the commands she was sending them. Coarse grass was prickling her cheek. She could smell foxgloves and hedge parsley.

“But what if she dies while I’m on my own with her?” There was a half sob in the voice of the person she could sense was down on one knee at her side, but whether his distress was on her account, or his own, she couldn’t tell and nor, because she was so angry, did she very much care.

Gingerly she flexed her legs, discovering with relief that neither of them was broken.

“Don’t go just yet, Cullen!” Though the now-familiar voice was still unsteady, there was vast relief in it. “She’s moving!”

Rose’s eyelids obeyed the command she had been giving them for so long. They fluttered open and the first thing she saw was dry mud and, beyond it, tangled weeds.

That she had landed in a ditch increased her anger to boiling point. She struggled into a sitting position and then, in a manner very different from the tearful one her anxious audience had been expecting, said furiously to the tight-lipped man in army uniform who was looking down at her, “Just what the
hell
did you think you were doing driving so fast around a blind bend? You could have killed Homer! You could have killed me!”

Outrage at being spoken to in such a way—and especially by a woman—flared through his eyes. “Are you all right?” he demanded curtly. “No broken bones?”

His manner showed he no longer felt he was addressing a well-brought-up young lady. Rose didn’t care. She wasn’t in the habit of swearing like a stable boy, but there were times when she thought it a perfectly reasonable reaction and this was one of them.

The young man who had been kneeling white-faced beside her helped her to her feet, saying apologetically, “Actually, I was the one who was driving …”

Rose wasn’t listening. She was too busy making a fuss over Homer and too conscious of how disheveled she looked. Her straw boater was nowhere in sight. Her hair was coming loose from its pins. There was mud on her high-throated, lace-trimmed blouse—and possibly on her face as well—and there were grass stains on her skirt.

She had never been so angry in her life.

“I’m so sorry,” the fey-looking young man said again. “All my fault. I’m afraid your bicycle is unrideable. I’ll pay for the repairs of course …”

Rose steadied her breathing, removed a stem of hedge parsley from her hair, and glared at him. He seemed to be no older than Lily and with his golden hair and fiercely blue eyes would have looked more at home in a choirboy’s surplice than in what appeared to be a naval uniform. Also, though she was certain she’d never previously met him, he looked oddly familiar.