The Golden Prince (23 page)

He, fool that he was, had become completely enslaved. It was only because Marigold’s grandfather was one of his oldest, dearest friends that he had found the willpower to put an end to the insanity. Herbert Houghton was a man of integrity and honor and thought he, Jethney, was equally honorable. To have Herbert realize otherwise—to have him know that his hospitality had been taken advantage of and his granddaughter deflowered—was a horror so unspeakable he’d found a strength he would otherwise have been utterly unable to summon.

But it was when he had exercised that strength that the unimaginable had happened. Instead of being devastated that he was putting an end to their love affair, Marigold had merely been petulant. Then, as if it wasn’t of the slightest importance, she had told him that he hadn’t been her first lover. Who, then, had been? The thought tormented him. Had it been someone he knew? Had it been one of his many close friends?

He strode toward the chief whip’s office, his jaw clenched so hard his teeth hurt. Had it perhaps been the son of one of his friends? Someone young. Someone single. Someone who might still be in love with her and might ask her to marry him?

Clenching his jaw even harder he came to a halt outside the chief whip’s office, wishing to God that he was still a bachelor.
If he were, he wouldn’t be suffering as he was now suffering. He would have put a ring on Marigold’s finger and lashed her to him so tightly she would never have looked at another man again.

As he tried to order his thoughts before entering the office, a wave of shame washed over him. How, in the name of all that was holy, could he be thinking such thoughts? How could he be wishing he had never married Jerusha, who had never said, or done, an unkind thing to him in all the years of their married life?

Desperately trying to focus his thoughts on the subject of the meeting ahead of him—Lansdowne’s proposition that the House of Lords should consist mainly of indirectly elected members—he put his hand on the brass door handle and turned it, knowing that after his behavior of the last few months he needed to be horsewhipped.

The Honorable Toby Mulholland was wrestling with the most difficult decision he had ever faced. Did he do what his family, and Iris and Iris’s family, so clearly expected of him and propose to Iris, or did he make it crystal clear that he was never going to do any such thing?

His platoon was in the middle of a training exercise in Windsor Great Park and as he automatically went through drills that were second nature to him, he passionately wished that he was at Sissbury. Sissbury and Iris were, for him, inextricably linked and, if he had to make a decision about her, it seemed only right that the decision should be made where, ever since they were children, they had spent so much time together.

He felt he should be at Sissbury for other reasons as well. Sissbury lay so close to Snowberry that at one point the two estates marched side by side for nearly half a mile, and this was the reason his father had always encouraged the idea of a romance between Toby and Iris.

“With Lord May’s son dead, and May not being a stickler for
tradition, there’s no absolute certainty who will eventually inherit Snowberry,” he had said bluntly to him when he was fifteen years old. “The Sinclair boy is the nearest male relative, but he’d be out of the running if May had a male grandchild and I somehow don’t see the eldest girl being early marriage material.”

Since Rose at that time had only been fifteen, Toby had always been impressed by his father’s very accurate foreknowledge.

Nothing had been said at that time about Marigold, but it hadn’t been very long before it became obvious that Marigold was going to prove even less likely early marriage material—though for quite different reasons—than Rose. Lily, being the youngest daughter, didn’t count at all in his father’s scheme of things.

“Iris is the one,” his father had said. “Marry Iris and there’s no knowing what the future might bring.”

The idea of marrying with an eye to the Snowberry estate one day becoming one with the Sissbury estate had been repellent to him at the time, though now he could see the sense of it, especially when the girl in question was one he got on with so well.

Iris was, quite simply, his best friend. Ever since he was six and she was four, she had always been his best friend. They had learned to ride together—and of all her sisters, she was by far the best horsewoman. Together they had solemnly trained their pet dogs to be gun dogs. They had learned how to fish together and had ridden out with the local hunt together. Their interests were the same. So he had never minded teasing references about being “childhood sweethearts,” or careless remarks about “when Toby and Iris tie the knot.”

Or he hadn’t until the last twelve months.

Though he hated to admit it, joining the Coldstream Guards had changed everything. For one thing, it had taken him away from Sissbury and plunged him into a life that was very different: far more sophisticated. Imbued with the glamour of being a Guards officer, he’d suddenly found himself knee-deep in girls—and he had liked it. Suddenly, the thought of marriage to a girl he had
known nearly from the cradle no longer seemed so attractive. Instead it seemed circumscribing. Put bluntly: he’d begun to have cold feet.

The crunch had come the evening of Lady Harland’s precoronation ball. Marigold had looked absolutely stunning that evening, and like every other red-blooded male in the room he’d wanted to be seen with her, to flirt with her, to find out if her very racy reputation was justified.

Whether it proved to be or not, he’d had no intention of becoming seriously involved with her. Unlike Iris, Marigold was not a girl any sane man would choose to become seriously involved with. She was, though, sexually exciting: merely dancing with her had sent the adrenaline racing through his bloodstream.

He’d realized almost immediately, of course, that she wasn’t going to play ball. The way she had so pointedly brought Iris into the conversation had shown him that. Then he had made the remark that had brought his long-rumbling dilemma into full focus. By saying he and Iris no longer saw much of each other he had indicated quite clearly that a Sissbury-Snowberry wedding was no longer in the cards.

He couldn’t know for sure that Marigold had passed on what he had said to Iris word for word, but he thought her arrival at Sissbury a few days later, in the middle of his party for friends he’d never bothered to introduce her to, was a pretty fair indication she had.

He continued drilling, wiping a bead of sweat from his forehead. God, that party! It had been harmless enough in itself. Everyone there moved in a pretty fast set and none of them would have thought it particularly wild. Wild was opium and cocaine. But he had seen the expression on Iris’s face when she had been faced with the sea of champagne bottles and the squealing, giggling behavior of the bathing-suited girls. Iris had thought it wild—and suddenly he had seen it through her eyes.

Taking advantage of his parents’ absence to throw the kind of
party he certainly wouldn’t want them to know about had been a shabby thing to do, as had encouraging the drunk and near drunk to cavort in Sissbury’s beautifully ornate eighteenth-century fountain and pool. Sissbury deserved better of him than to be treated so cheaply. So although in front of his friends he had tried to laugh off Iris’s unfortunate intrusion, he had known that she deserved better of him as well.

The worst part, though, had been Iris’s bewilderment and hurt.

Then instead of easing that hurt, he had compounded it at the Coronation Day ball.

He had known she would be there and even when he had stepped into the ballroom he still hadn’t made up his mind as to how he was going to behave toward her. If he apologized, he would be setting their relationship back to what it had always been—and a proposal would still be expected of him.

Not apologizing to her and not behaving normally toward her would send the clearest possible signal that no engagement was to be forthcoming.

And that was what he had done.

The stricken look on her face when, instead of crossing the room toward her, he had turned his attention to the girl standing next to him, was one he knew he would never forget. When, absolutely mortified, he had turned to look again toward her, she hadn’t been there. But before he could decide what to do about it, Marigold had made her outrageous, half-naked entrance. He had seen Rose bundle Marigold swiftly out of the house, and assuming that Iris had already left the ball ahead of them, he had, when the excitement had died down, sloped off for a lone supper at the Café Royal.

The question now was: Was he going to continue on the course he had set himself, enjoying his bachelorhood and forgetting all about marriage to anyone for at least another ten years, or was he going to make things right between himself and Iris?

It was a hot day and as the drill relentlessly continued he perspired
even more freely. He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, remembering his family motto “Suivez-raison,” Follow Reason. And he then knew with a flash of blessed certainty what it was he was going to do.

Rory had never suffered any kind of inner turmoil. Like his favorite second cousin, Lily, he possessed a sunny nature that was rarely ruffled. Unlike Lily, he also possessed a great deal of Marigold’s sexual chutzpah. Girls constantly flocked round him, but as soon as they assumed a claim on him they were dropped without trace.

He spent a great deal of time in London, always staying, as did his cousins when in the capital, at his maternal grandmother’s town house on St. James’s Street. It wasn’t his favorite place to be, though. A Scot through and through, his favorite place in all the world was the place where he’d been born: the seventeenth-century Castle Dounreay, overlooking Loch Gruinart, on the Isle of Islay.

Islay’s nickname was “Queen of the Hebrides,” and if Rory could have lived there year-round, he would have. As it was, he was studying for his Foreign Office examinations and he knew that in the near future he could expect to find himself posted to any one of a score of European capital cities.

Until that day came, he was enjoying a vast number of London friendships and spending as much time as possible with his Houghton cousins. Usually such get-togethers were nothing but fun and pleasure, but though he hadn’t let it show, their get-together on Coronation Day had seriously disquieted him; he was now lying wide awake in his bedroom at St. James’s Street, brooding over the Prince of Wales’s visits to Snowberry.

What the devil was the heir to the throne doing paying visits to a private house, which no one but his equerry knew about? Even worse, what was he doing playing Romeo to Lily’s Juliet? It
was lunacy of the highest order. Once the palace found out about Edward’s visits, there would be an immediate end to them, and his great-uncle would suffer the ignominy of being accused of luring the prince to Snowberry in the hope of forging exactly the kind of romantic relationship now taking place.

Why his great-uncle hadn’t seen the dangers and put an end to Prince Edward’s visits—unless, of course, the visits had been sanctioned by King George—he couldn’t imagine. Presumably it was because he simply hadn’t envisaged the prince falling in love with one of his granddaughters.

Who could blame him for that, Rory thought grimly as he stared sleeplessly up at the ceiling.

What was needed was for a male member of Lily’s family to have a few pertinent words with the prince, pointing out to him that for his own sake—as well as the Houghtons’—his relationship with Lily had to end, as had his Snowberry visits.

The problem with this was that the only male members of Lily’s family were her grandfather and himself. That it should be her grandfather who spoke to Prince Edward was obvious. That his great-uncle was too genial an old buffer for such a task was equally obvious.

Which left him.

On that grim thought, he punched his pillow, turned over, and tried, once again, to go to sleep.

Queen Mary was
at Buckingham Palace, a royal residence she still didn’t feel completely at home in. After the late King’s death, when his widow, Queen Alexandra, should have moved out of the palace and into Marlborough House in order that the new King and Queen could move in, she had steadfastly refused to do so. Even Kaiser Wilhelm, a member of the royal family only Queen Mary had a partiality for, had urged Queen Alexandra to behave as tradition demanded. It had been a complete waste of his breath. Though she was one of the most loved queens the country had ever had, in private life, and where selfishness, stubbornness, and sheer awkwardness were concerned, “Motherdear” had few equals.