The Golden Prince (47 page)

“I see that it’s why you’re sending me to Germany. You’re hoping I’ll find a German princess who takes my fancy. Well, it’s never going to happen. I love Lily.
Really
love her. If you’d only meet her …”

“I shan’t be meeting her, but Lord Esher will be meeting with Lord May. That, David, will put an end to this stupidity. You’re dismissed. By the time we next talk, I pray to God you will have returned to your senses!”

There was nothing for it but for David to leave the room. In the corridor he leaned against the wall to steady his breathing. Nothing had gone as he had hoped it would. All that had been achieved was that his father now knew Lily’s identity. He’d lost a battle—a battle he’d thought he would win—but he hadn’t yet lost the war. He still had the morganatic card up his sleeve. If Emperor Franz Josef’s heir had married morganatically, he could see no reason why he shouldn’t be able to. A morganatic marriage might well
suit Lily very well, for she wouldn’t then be in the limelight all the time—something he knew she wasn’t looking forward to.

King George took far longer to get his breath back than David did. For a good half hour he remained in the library, and then, the veins at his temples still throbbing, he went in search of his wife.

She was sitting with a lady-in-waiting in the small sitting room adjacent to her bedroom. There was a fire in the hearth, and a small table was set for morning coffee. Both of them were sewing.

The minute he entered the room they both rose hastily to their feet. Queen Mary, realizing instantly how agitated he was, swiftly dismissed her lady-in-waiting, and when the door had closed, she said in concern, “George, what is it? What has happened?”

“In my first interview with David since he returned from France he’s had the nerve—the unmitigated gall—to tell me he still wants to marry a girl of his own choice. Does the boy have no idea of the responsibilities attendant to his position as heir to the throne? Where is his sense of vocation? His sense of duty? Has Hansell taught him nothing about the history and tradition of the British monarchy?”

As he was speaking he was striding up and down the room, every line of his body taut with frustration and a fury he couldn’t curb. “It turns out the girl in question is the daughter of the late Viscount Houghton. Whenever has a British heir to the throne married the daughter of a viscount? It’s ridiculous. Totally unthinkable.”

He came to a halt in his pacing. “Since he won’t listen to me, you must speak to him, May.”

Queen Mary froze. She never spoke to her children—or anyone else—about anything other than superficial matters. But because she never disobeyed George, it meant she was now between a rock and a hard place.

“I’ll get Esher to speak to him as well—and the prime minister and the Archbishop of Canterbury. David has to be brought to an understanding of how gravely inappropriate his liaison with this young woman is. If he’s acting like this at seventeen, how is he going to be acting in another ten years? It doesn’t bear thinking about.”

An hour later, fortified by a glass of sherry, Queen Mary made her way to David’s suite of rooms. When she entered his private sitting room, it was to find him at his bureau, writing a letter. She wondered to whom he was writing and whether it was to the girl he was so infuriatingly besotted with.

“Mama!” He sprang to his feet. His mother had never before visited him unannounced. In fact, he could never remember her ever visiting him in his private rooms. Even when he was a small child, confined with Bertie to the nursery, her visits had been few and far between. It was he and Bertie who, shepherded by Lala Bill, had been taken to visit her.

“It’s … it’s nice to see you, Mama.”

Queen Mary inclined her head, grateful that for the moment David was without his equerry and that Finch was nowhere in sight.

“Please sit down, Mama.” There could be only one reason for his mother’s unexpected visit. The King had spoken to her about Lily. He felt a flare of panic at the thought, and then relief. When he mentioned the word
morganatic
to her, she would be bound to be sympathetic. How, with her family history, could she be anything else?

“For what I have to say, David, I would prefer to stand.”

“Have you come to talk to me about Lily, Mama? Because if you have, I’m so glad. I’ve wanted to talk to you about her for a long time and …”

His mother raised a heavily beringed hand to silence him. Lily. So that was the girl’s name. It was a very common name, more suitable for a housemaid than for someone wellborn.

“It won’t do, David. When you marry, you will marry suitably.”

“Lily is suitable, Mama.” His eyes, the same midsummer blue as her own, pleaded with her for understanding. “She’s the dearest girl imaginable, and she is wonderfully good for me. She not only makes me happier than I’ve been before in my life, she gives me confidence to do all the things I find so difficult.”

“What things?” Queen Mary was finding the interview stressful. “You are not making sense, David.”

“Being on show at ceremonial occasions. She helped me enormously when it came to the coronation and my investiture, and I know that if I only have her by my side I won’t mind being Prince of Wales. She always encourages me so, you see.”

Queen Mary stared at him, appalled. That he had even discussed the coronation and his investiture with anyone outside the family was inconceivable to her. As to him inferring that he
minded
being Prince of Wales—words failed her and she felt very much in need of a large brandy.

Without betraying by a flicker how hard she was finding it to maintain her composure, she said stiffly, “Brides for future kings of England have always been royal. Only someone brought up to be royal could possibly cope with the stresses and strains of the exalted position marriage to a Prince of Wales gives.”

He ran a hand nervously over his golden hair. “Elsewhere, in other countries, accommodations have been made, Mama.”

This time her stare wasn’t appalled. It was bewildered.

“Emperor Franz Josef’s heir married a nonroyal, Mama, and morganatically. I don’t think Lily would mind such an arrangement. She’s marrying me because she loves me, not because she wants to become a princess. So the title of countess, which is Franz Josef’s wife’s title, wouldn’t matter to her. The thing is, we would still be married and …”

“A morganatic marriage?” Queen Mary felt as if she were about to faint. How did David know about such a thing? He couldn’t, of course, know about her own morganatic family background. None of their relations, not even the crassly insensitive kaiser, would have talked of such a thing in front of him. She put a hand out to a nearby chair in order to steady herself. “England is not Austria-Hungary. In England there is no precedent for a morganatic marriage.”

“But if Lily and I are happy to abide by the rules of a morganatic marriage—if we are happy that it would be Bertie’s children, not ours, who stood in the line of succession to the throne—why would it matter? It would be a solution to the problem, just as it was a solution for your grandfather when he married a nonroyal Hungarian countess.”

Queen Mary’s knuckles were bloodless as she gripped the back of the chair. She wanted to express to David the humiliation her grandfather’s children and grandchildren had suffered as a result of that monumentally selfish marriage. She wanted to portray to him the agony she had undergone as a young girl, a lone serene highness among royal highnesses; the bitterness she still felt at having been perceived as someone not quite royal enough.

Try as she might, she couldn’t do so. She was simply too inhibited. When it came to verbal communications of an intimate nature, she simply couldn’t bring herself to say the words. Even on her honeymoon with George she had had to resort to pen and paper in order to express her feelings for him.

She did what she always did in such situations. She abruptly terminated the conversation. “Your father and I expect you to dine with us this evening. I believe Lord Esher will be joining us.”

“Yes, Mama,” he said, equally tersely, knowing very well why Esher had been invited that evening. It was so that Esher, too, could impress on him where his duty lay.

The door had closed behind her and, ignoring the letter he had been writing to Bertie, he walked across to the deep window that
looked out over the front courtyard of the palace. Once again, nothing had gone as he had expected. His mother had not been sympathetic when he had suggested the possibility of his marrying Lily morganatically. At his mention of her grandfather’s morganatic marriage, she had simply brought the conversation to a swift end. He put a hand high on the window and leaned his head against his arm looking down at the great marble edifice that was a memorial to Queen Victoria. He had been so sure that the morganatic card was the one that would solve all his and Lily’s problems. Now he could sense from his mother’s reaction to the word that his assumption had been very, very wrong.

Things were escalating fast.

But all in the wrong direction.

“Then it got worse,” he said despairingly to Lily.

It was shortly after ten o’clock the next day and they were sitting on a wooden seat overlooking Snowberry’s lake.

“Worse—how?” He had told her he was to leave for Germany the next morning. He had told her about the interview with his father and had just finished telling her about the interview with his mother, and her face was distraught. “How could things possibly have become worse, David?”

His arm was around her and he hugged her tightly. “When I went in to dinner, I found myself facing not only Lord Esher, but also the prime minister and the Archbishop of Canterbury. Asquith told me it was my duty to put my country before everything else, and Archbishop Davidson lectured me as to how I must devote my life to the exalted, predestined role I will one day have to play.”

His eyes glinted fiercely. “But I don’t have to play that role, Lily. It isn’t inescapable. There are options open to me.”

“I’m sorry, sweetheart. I don’t understand.” Tears stung the
backs of her eyes as she thought of the way the five people at that dinner table—King George, Queen Mary, Prime Minister Asquith, Archbishop Davidson, and Lord Esher—had, together, crushed all their dearest hopes.

He hooked a finger under her chin, tilting her head to his. “No one can force me to become King, Lily. If it is a choice between one day becoming King Edward VIII, or marrying you, then there is no choice at all.”

“But how … ? Who … ?” She couldn’t understand what it was he was telling her.

“Bertie will have to pick up the reins,” he said. “It won’t be easy for him, not with his speech impediment, but he’s got a dogged, determined nature. He won’t be the same kind of king that I would be, but he’ll do all right. I’ll be quite happy to put prince-ing behind me, dearest Lily. All I want is to have a life of my own, and a life lived with you.”

Long after David
had returned to London, Lily remained in a state of heartsick, numbed disbelief. When they were in Paris together, David had been so certain that King George would approach the subject of their marriage from a very different angle now that they had proved their love by being constant to each other for nearly a year that she, too, had been equally confident.