The Golden Prince (40 page)

Great efforts had been made to try to overcome both obstacles. Queen Victoria, together with her prime minister and several senior ministers, had conferred long and hard as to what Eddy’s
constitutional position would be if Princess Hélène renounced her religion and turned Protestant. It was Hélène’s father who had brought the matter to a close by announcing that under no circumstances would his daughter forsake the church of her birth. Eddy had declared that in order to marry Hélène he would abdicate his rights to the succession. Hélène had tearfully said that under no circumstances could she allow him to do so.

By the spring of 1891 the affair was at an end.

By the summer Eddy was passionately in love with Lady Sibyl St. Clair Erskine, the second daughter of the fourth Earl of Rosslyn. By December he was betrothed to May.

With such a track record in the family it was highly likely that David was long over the girl he had, six months ago, been insistent on marrying. By now, he probably didn’t even remember her name.

As the
Medina
edged into her berth Piers Cullen waited with the royal party for the moment when they would be able to step aboard her for the family reunion. Princess Victoria, King George’s sharp-tongued unmarried sister, was huddled deep in somber mourning furs. Queen Alexandra, petite and aged and, behind her long crêpe veil, still delicately beautiful, was almost childlike in her impatience to be reunited with the son she still referred to in private as her “darling Georgie boy.”

Her grandson wasn’t showing any such signs of impatience.

From where he was standing, a couple of feet behind him, Piers could see tension in every line of Prince Edward’s body. He knew why Edward was so on edge. He was steeling himself for the inevitable interview with the King. Piers had not the slightest sympathy for him. All he felt was a well-hidden, deep, and jealous hatred.

It galled him to the depths of his being that someone he regarded as being so insignificant should be treated with such deference, should have such vast wealth. As Duke of Cornwall as well
as Prince of Wales, Edward’s revenue from Cornwall alone was in the region of £90,000 a year—and he didn’t even have the expense of an establishment of his own. As for his future—how much more glittering and fantastic could it be? When his father died, he would be Edward VIII, King of Great Britain and Ireland and of the British Dominions Beyond the Seas, Defender of the Faith and Emperor of India. And what had he done to earn any of it?

The answer was absolutely nothing. Everything he was, everything he had and would have, was his simply by right of birth. Even just thinking about it made Piers want to choke, and when he thought of the adulation Edward had begun to receive since his very public exposure at the coronation and at his investiture, he had to run a finger around the inside of his collar in order to give himself a little more air.

How could such a narrow-shouldered, slight figure arouse such universal admiration? It wasn’t as if Edward were even tall. He was barely five feet seven. What kind of masculinity was that? More to the point, why the devil did he want to marry the one girl he, Piers, wanted to marry? It was almost, he thought, his hands clenching into fists as the
Medina
slid into her berth, as if Edward was doing it to deliberately spite him.

That wasn’t possible, though. Edward needed him. He was, after all, the only person outside the Houghton family who knew his secret.

Grimly he wondered how Edward would manage in France without him.

“The whole point of Prince Edward’s visit to France is that he will return home fluent in the language,” King George had said to Piers shortly before he had left the country for his durbar. “That being so, the elder son of the Marquis de Valmy is to act as Prince Edward’s equerry while the prince is a guest of the de Valmy family. It will ensure he doesn’t fall back on speaking English—and that he doesn’t run the risk of speaking French with the kind of John Bull accent the French find so offensive.”

Had the King meant that Edward would be at risk of picking up a John Bull accent from him? He’d fumed, as only he could fume, over what he felt sure was a slur on his linguistic ability. He had, however, welcomed the thought of a break from his equerrying duties. Edward’s stay in France would turn Edward’s long separation from Lily into a separation of even longer duration. During that separation, Piers was going to lay siege to Lily.

The gangway was being lowered and as the royal party gathered closer together, preparatory to boarding, he felt a surge of steely confidence. He would explain to her, as no one else could, that King George would never give his consent to a marriage between her and Edward. He would open her eyes to the fact that Edward was still a mere boy and that whatever he had ever said to her, the words had carried no weight. He would point out to her that he himself was far from being a mere boy. When he said he loved her—which he did—she could rely implicitly on that love leading to a very speedy, secure marriage. Something he knew all young girls yearned for.

He would tell her that he absolutely forgave her for having her head turned when Edward had asked her to marry him. After all, what young girl wouldn’t want to be a princess and a future queen? Then he would tell her again that any such hope was a lost cause.

He remembered her studio at Snowberry—a studio he had never been invited to enter. He would point out to her that even if the traditions as to whom a Prince of Wales could marry were different, it would be unthinkable for a Princess of Wales to dabble with paint and clay. As his wife, however, she would always be able to, and he would stress to her how important he thought it was for a woman to have a hobby.

It was now time for them to board, and as they did, shielded from the snow by giant umbrellas, he was obsessed with the thought of how he was going to make Edward pay for all the slights he had suffered at his hands. For the way Edward had never treated him as a friend—although he had instantly treated the Houghton
family as friends. For the way he had never invited him to call him David. For the way he had snatched Lily from under his nose.

He ground his teeth together so loudly that Sir Dighton looked across at him in alarm. Piers was too deep in thoughts of revenge to notice.

Pale February sun
streamed into the white, gold, and yellow drawing room of the Marquis de Villoutrey’s elegant home in Neuilly, in the Sixteenth Arrondissement.

It was a drawing room very different from Snowberry’s. Instead of comfortable chintz-covered sofas, Louis Quinze furniture was upholstered in heavy brocades. No jigsaw puzzles were within easy access, waiting to be finished. No chessmen were waiting for play to be resumed. It was a stiffly elegant room of mirrors and candelabra where gold-leaf gleamed and glowed. It was the kind of formal setting Louise de Villoutrey much preferred to Snowberry’s haphazard coziness.

“How is Iris?” she asked Lily. They were seated on opposite sides of a low glass-topped table that was set on a centerpiece of ebony cherubim, enjoying coffee from black and gold Sèvres china.

Lily, perched uncomfortably on a gilt-framed spindly-legged chair that wouldn’t have looked out of place at Versailles, shot her mother a wide smile. “Ecstatically happy. Though she’s spending quite a lot of time at Sissbury, she isn’t living there yet and won’t be until Toby has said a final good-bye to the Guards.”

“Who will act as housekeeper at Snowberry, when Iris isn’t there to do so?”

“Oh, we already have a new housekeeper. Millie’s sister. Tilly. She used to work for Lady Conisborough, but the Conisboroughs live a quite grand lifestyle. Lord Conisborough is a financial
adviser to King George, and because Tilly has a weak heart, it all became a bit too much for her. The gentle pace of Snowberry suits her far better, and if she isn’t feeling up to snuff, Millie just takes over for her.”

Her mother pursed her lips. It sounded very lackadaisical, but then things at Snowberry always were. She ran things very differently. At both Neuilly and at the de Villoutrey chateau in the Loire valley, the male staff wore a livery of black suits with waistcoats striped with red and, on formal occasions, navy tailcoats collared and cuffed in crimson. The embarrassing lack of formality at Snowberry was why, when she and Henri had been in England for Iris’s wedding, they had stayed with Sibyl.

“And Rose?”

“Rose is fine, Mama,” she said. “She loves living in London at Great-Aunt Sibyl’s, and she loves the feeling of financial independence she gets from her journalism.”

At the mention of Rose’s freelance work for the
Daily Despatch
, her mother shuddered. With such a history, Rose was never going to make a suitable marriage. Even worse, she didn’t even think Rose
wanted
to make a suitable marriage. Iris, however, had already done so, albeit not very excitingly—and Marigold appeared to be on the verge of making a marriage par excellence.

“It was a shame,” she said, ignoring her coffee and fitting a Sobranie into a long amber holder, “that Prince Yurenev had to leave the wedding reception for Marchemont so suddenly. We had only just begun to talk together when the message came that Princess Zasulich had been taken ill. He’s very charming. Sibyl, who knows him very well, absolutely adores him.”

Since Maxim Yurenev was a Russian royal, exceedingly handsome and sinfully rich, Lily wasn’t surprised that he had made such a favorable impression. She tried to give the subject her attention, but her mind kept straying to David, for now that both of them were in Paris, all she could think of was when—and how—they would be reunited. Before they left England they had envisioned
their reunion as being relatively simple to arrange. In reality it was proving to be the very opposite, for her mother was allowing her to go nowhere unaccompanied.

Louise, having lit her cigarette, was studying the Russian imperial eagle distinctively stamped on it. It conjured up lots of delightful images. Marigold and Maxim’s initials entwined beneath the Yurenev crest and decorating table linen, bed linen, and stationery; perhaps even the buttons on the livery of their household staff. There would be visits to St. Petersburg and audiences with the tsar and tsarina. Perhaps next time the Russian royal family visited Britain aboard the imperial yacht
Standart
, Prince and Princess Yurenev would be invited aboard.

The prospect of a Russian royal son-in-law was so intoxicatingly heady it almost—but not quite—overshadowed the news she had been saving until family matters were out of the way.

“I have the most
amazing
news, darling. News you are going to find
incredible
.”

Lily did her best to look interested, but her thoughts were still on David. Their plans had been that, under the guise of visiting the Louvre or Notre Dame Cathedral or the Eiffel Tower, Lily, accompanied by Marguerite and Camille, her two stepsisters, and David, accompanied by Luc de Valmy, who was acting as his equerry, would meet up “accidentally” and they would then persuade those accompanying them to give them some time together on their own—and to be silent afterward at having done so.

The blow to this plan had been that Marguerite and Camille weren’t in Paris. “Such a nuisance,
ma petite chérie
,” her mother had said on greeting her. “They now go to finishing school in Lucerne and won’t be home until Easter—and finishing school is something I would like to talk to you about, Lily. But perhaps a little later,
que penses-tu
?”

It was something Lily had no need to think about, but she didn’t say so. She’d been too devastated at knowing it was going to be her mother, not her stepsisters, who would be accompanying her when she went sightseeing.

“So far only a very few people know what it is I am about to tell you,” her mother said with a wave of her cigarette holder. “Though I am sure word will spread very quickly.
Cela c’est une certitude
.”

Lily was only listening to her with half an ear. Accustomed to the freedom of movement her grandfather had always given her and that she, Rose, Iris, and Marigold had always taken for granted, it hadn’t occurred to her that her mother—who had always been too absent a parent to be a diligent one—would take the responsibilities of chaperoning so seriously. It was unexpected, to say the least—and it wasn’t the only thing that was unexpected.

“Though I am here incognito, I’ve still had to pay my respects to President Faillières,” David had said with something like despair in his voice when, announcing himself to the butler as her cousin, he had telephoned her hours after her arrival. “It was a very formal occasion—just the kind of thing I thought I wouldn’t have to endure. The British ambassador, Sir Francis Bertie, was there, and President Faillières presented me with the grand cordon of the Légion d’Honneur. It was all very nice, but—oh darling Lily, I didn’t want to be in the Elysée Palace! I wanted to be with you, walking hand in hand on the banks of the Seine!”

It had been a cry from the heart, and Lily’s hand had been trembling when she replaced the receiver.