The Golden Prince (37 page)

Theo Jethney was
a man with a great deal of care on his shoulders, for Jerusha was not well. Always very slender, she had now become rake thin. The headaches that had plagued her for well over a year were increasing in both number and severity, and none of the doctors he had taken her to had been able to put an end to them. All of them, from their family doctor to the consultant he had taken her to on Harley Street, had said the same thing. Jerusha’s problem was her age. Though she was a little young to be so, at forty-five she was already in early menopause. Headaches often afflicted women during the menopause. When her hot flushes began—as they were bound to do at any time—the headaches would cease.

Although he was able to express his anxieties about Jerusha’s health to friends in a general way, he had no one he could discuss the specifics of it with. He could hardly discuss Jerusha’s early menopause with the prime minister, the home secretary, or any other of his male friends. Herbert, for instance, would be completely at a loss, and embarrassed. What he needed was a close female relative, and he didn’t have one.

What he could do, he did. No matter how heavy his governmental workload, he ceased the habit of staying the night in town. However late the House sat, he always returned to his Hampshire estate, giving Jerusha the comfort of his presence every single moment he possibly could.

His guilt at having been so obsessed with Marigold was total.
It wasn’t that his feelings toward her had changed. His feelings for her were something completely beyond his control, and he was certain that they would never change. What had changed, though, was that she was now no longer uppermost in his thoughts. His thoughts were all of Jerusha. He couldn’t bear seeing her lying in their darkened bedroom, a cold compress against her eyes as she bravely rode out yet another bout of crippling pain.

The only time he now ventured out into society—and he only did so when Jerusha was deep in an exhausted sleep—was when he visited Herbert at Snowberry. With Marigold as permanently at Sibyl’s as Rose was, it was something he could do with his old ease.

There wasn’t quite the same old ease about Snowberry, though. There was something in the atmosphere that he couldn’t quite put his finger on—a kind of suppressed tension. Since it was tension Marigold wasn’t there to cause, he could only imagine that Iris’s forthcoming wedding to Toby Mulholland was responsible for it.

Iris was certainly a young woman transformed by love. Always the plain Jane of the family, radiant happiness ensured she was a plain Jane no more.

“I’ve never been so happy in all my life,” she had confided to him on one of his visits, “and a Christmas wedding is going to be perfect. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if it snowed?”

Herbert, too, was deeply happy at the prospect of Iris marrying Toby. “I was at the boy’s christening,” he’d said to Theo as they sat companionably together in the drawing room, brandies to hand. “He’s been in and out of Snowberry ever since he could walk.”

“Do you intend that he should run the estate?” he’d asked, knowing how much his aged friend had previously relied first on Rose, and then on Iris, to do so.

Herbert had chuckled. “That’s the best part of having him as a grandson-in-law. He’s been raised to run Sissbury and so managing Snowberry will be no problem for him. At one point the Snowberry estate runs side by side with Sissbury’s.”

That it was convenient, Theo had to admit. And not just for Herbert.

Not liking the way his thoughts were going, he had changed the subject, asking after Rose and then, because it would have seemed extremely odd not to have done so, asking after Marigold as well.

“Rose is now a very independent modern young woman,” Herbert had said with pride. “Your friend Mr. Green thinks very highly of her. She writes regularly on suffragette issues, has also reported on the investiture and other important events, and, this week, her subject was the effect the new National Insurance Bill will have on domestic servants.”

“So it was Rose who was responsible for that piece, was it? There was no byline.” It had intrigued him that there hadn’t been. “Why was that?” he’d asked, surprised that Hal wasn’t making capital out of publishing straight news items written by a woman.

Herbert’s response had begun happily enough, but then tailed off into confusion. “Oh,” he’d said, “it was thought best Rose didn’t bring attention to herself. Not at the moment. Not when Lily and …”

He’d broken off so suddenly that for a second Theo thought he’d been taken ill.

“Not when Lily has not yet been presented and when having a sister doing something so scandalous as writing for a national newspaper might rebound on her,” he had finished, flustered.

Because Lily couldn’t now be presented at court until next summer—and since she probably wasn’t fussed about being presented at all—it was reasoning that had bewildered Theo. He had, however, put Herbert’s odd reply down to the fact that he was growing increasingly vague and confused—which was the main reason Toby would be managing the estate for him—and that it wasn’t the first time he’d lost track midsentence.

Making a quick recovery, Herbert had changed the subject. “As for Marigold,” he’d said, swirling the brandy around in his glass, “it would seem she is on the verge of becoming a princess. Prince Maxim Yurenev has been her constant escort for some time now,
and I believe a spring wedding is in the offing. It’s a match that will please her mother—he’s one of the richest young men in Russia—and that sort of thing matters to her. It will mean Marigold would live for much of the year in St. Petersburg and the Crimea, though, and I don’t like the prospect of that. The dear girl never fails to keep me entertained. Did you know she was learning Italian?”

Theo hadn’t known, and he thought it rather unlikely. If Marigold was in the process of learning a foreign language, surely the language she would be learning was Russian?

He didn’t have to wonder how he felt about the prospect of her marrying Prince Yurenev. He knew how he felt. He felt a sense of inappropriate, colossal loss. To get married at the earliest opportunity was, though, what he had advised her to do. And she would be deliriously happy at becoming a princess. All in all, it was the very best thing that could happen, for without a shadow of a doubt he knew he would never again play a romantic part in her life, or anyone else’s.

Jerusha’s ill health had shown him very clearly how much she meant to him, and where his loyalties lay. He would never be unfaithful to her again. The thought of causing her more pain than the pain she was already suffering was unthinkable.

Lily liked the fact that after a long period of absence from Snowberry, Lord Jethney was again a frequent visitor. In the first week of December, he arrived when there was no one at home but herself. She had been working on her tern-in-flight sculpture when William had called up through the speaking tube that Lord Jethney was in the drawing room.

“No one else is here, I’m afraid,” she’d said minutes later, hurrying into the drawing room still wearing her working smock. “Grandpapa is in Winchester for the day, and Iris is in London for the final fitting of her wedding gown.”

“Ah, yes.” He was dressed casually in a tweed suit and a soft-collared shirt. “Only another five days until the big day.” He smiled at her fondly. “Jerusha and I are looking forward to it immensely.” Eyeing her clay-spattered smock, he said apologetically, “You’re working and I’ve interrupted you. I’m sorry.”

“I was ready to be interrupted.” Her coal-black hair was swept into a loose knot on the top of her head, and she brushed a straying corkscrew curl behind her ear. “I’m working on a new sculpture, a tern in flight, and try as I might I can’t get any sense of movement into it.”

“You’re probably being too hard on yourself.”

She grinned ruefully, her cheeks dimpling. “I don’t think so. You should see it. It’s the most leaden object you could possibly imagine.”

“I’d like to see it. May I?”

She hadn’t meant to be taken quite so literally, but it would be embarrassing to retract the invitation, and he was, after all, almost a member of the family.

It was only as they walked into her studio that she realized he would see far more than the tern: he would also see her finished bust of David. The thought came too late for her to change her mind. He was already walking over to the work so obviously in progress.

He stood silently in front of it for a few minutes. Lily may have thought her work leaden, but that wasn’t the description he would have given it. Though far from finished, the tern already soared, with only a slender curving rod holding it fast to a base of simulated rock that would eventually, like the tern, be cast in bronze. He remembered that she was hoping to become a pupil at the Royal College of Art, and he hadn’t the slightest doubt that when she applied she would be immediately accepted.

“What is going to be of the most importance to you next year, Lily?” he asked. “Becoming a pupil at the Royal College of Art or being presented at court and enjoying the season?”

To his astonishment her eyes took on an expression that was
almost somber. “I won’t be applying to the Royal College,” she said, her eyes on the tern and not on him. “Though I shall, I think, be being presented.”

There was something in her voice that told him the subject was one she didn’t want to discuss, and, being a sensitive man, he didn’t pursue it. He was imbued once again with the sense of secrets being kept at Snowberry, secrets even Herbert wasn’t disclosing.

“If you should ever want a buyer for this sculpture,” he said, deeply sincere, “you needn’t look any further, Lily.”

She blushed rosily, immensely pleased at how much he liked it.

Theo stepped back from the tern and looked around him. At what he saw, he went rigid.

“Dear God!” he said when he had recovered his breath. “When did you do this, Lily? It’s stunning! It’s absolutely magnificent!”

The bust had been cast in bronze by a local blacksmith, and Theo’s immediate opinion was that it should be on exhibition at the Royal Academy.

“It’s the Prince of Wales, isn’t it?” The question was entirely unnecessary, for Lily had caught Prince Edward’s very essence.

But how, without him having sat for her, had she done so? Until his investiture at Caernarvon, the prince had been deemed too young to play a public role and so there had been barely any photographs of him in the press. That had all changed at his investiture, of course. Every newspaper in the land had then carried reams and reams of photographs of him, and in all of them, in his spectacular robes and with a coronet on his pale gold hair, he had looked the very incarnation of a fairy-tale prince.

But the bust Lily had sculpted wasn’t of a fairy-tale prince. Nothing about it signified his rank. It was, though, Edward to a tee—and not what was fast becoming his public image, but the young man behind that image, the young man whom Theo had been privileged to catch only a glimpse of on a few fleeting occasions. That Lily had achieved such a likeness without having seen the prince in the flesh astounded him.

He was still trying to get over it when there came the sound of the speaking tube being cleared, and William shouted into it, “Master Rory has arrived, Miss Lily. He’s in the drawing room.”

Relieved at the interruption—and hoping that now she wouldn’t have to answer any questions about her bust of David—Lily took off her smock and threw it over the back of a paint-marked chair.

“Now he’s sitting his Foreign Office exams, Rory is always visiting,” she said, making for the door. “He’ll be glad you are here. He always asks after you.”

What Theo Jethney’s reply was she didn’t know, for as they went down the stairs her thoughts were full of David.

The last few months had been months of painful separation, and even though David had now finished his tour of duty aboard the
Hindustan
, they were still painfully separated because before leaving for India, King George had decreed that the moment David stepped ashore, he was to be accompanied to Sandringham where, for the duration of the winter, he was to study the subjects he would be taking at Oxford. David had written to her of his frustrations.