There was a little sob that she could not prevent in her words and the Prince’s fingers tightened on hers.
Then he took his hand away and said,
“We have a little more time together – tonight I am taking you to see the decorations and tomorrow I am going to ask you to dine with me again.”
“But I thought you said you had an – engagement that you could not – break?” Angelina said.
“I am not going to break it,” the Prince answered. “I am going to take you with me.”
Angelina waited and he went on,
“There are quite a number of Cephalonians in London. They are all working people who meet every month in a restaurant where one can eat good Greek food.”
He smiled as he said,
“We shall have a very different meal from the one we have had here tonight, but I want you to meet some of the Cephalonians I reign over.”
“Will they want to meet me?” Angelina asked.
“They will be proud to meet any friend of mine,” the Prince answered, “and particularly somebody as beautiful as you. There is not a Greek living who does not appreciate beauty when he sees it.”
“May I – really come with you?”
“I would not ask you to do so if I thought there was any danger,” the Prince replied. “But these people need not know who you are and you are very unlikely to meet them in the Society you and your grandmother move in.”
He went on,
“You will eat the food that you would eat if you were with me in Cephalonia and you will see how my people dance when they are happy or when they celebrate.”
It flashed through Angelina’s mind that it was the way they would dance at his marriage and, as if he thought the same, the Prince said rapidly,
“When we are apart, it will make us seem closer, if you know the way I am living and I am selfish enough, Angelina, to want you not to forget me.”
“I could – never do that,” she replied, “and, if you think it is – right for me to do so, I would love to come with you tomorrow night.”
“Then we will go together,” the Prince said, a smile illuminating his face, “and perhaps we can meet in the morning for a few minutes in the garden, but you must not be disappointed, as I shall be, if I am unable to come.”
“What will you be doing?” she asked.
“As my Foreign Minister is arriving tonight and he has been visiting a number of European countries,” the Prince answered, “we shall have a long and doubtless very boring meeting when he will talk interminably about the conferences he has been involved in.”
“Why do you not like this man?” Angelina asked curiously.
The Prince knitted his brows.
“I don’t know exactly and it is very indiscreet of me to admit to you that I dislike him,” he answered, “but there is something wrong about him that I cannot quite put my finger on and yet it is there.”
“I know that feeling exactly,” Angelina said, “and I am sure that one should – always trust one’s intuition.”
“I would trust yours anywhere,” the Prince replied, “and I like to trust my own. But you know as well as I do that nowadays people expect dossiers, reports, references and personal histories before they make up their minds about another fellow being.”
“Papa has told me how intuitive the people are in India. Although he did not say so, I know that some Indians can see the aura of a person they are talking to and others have a clairvoyant insight that is never at fault.”
“I don’t have to be clairvoyant to know that everything about you is perfect,” the Prince said. “It radiates from you in a light which haloes you as it haloed Apollo when he leapt from a ship disguised as a star at high noon.”
Angelina gave a little cry of delight and added,
“The flames shone around him – and a flash of splendour lit the sky.”
“Then the star vanished,” the Prince continued, “and there was only a handsome young man armed with a bow and arrows.”
Angelina clapped her hands together.
“You have read the same story!”
“It is the most beloved one in the whole history of the Gods,” the Prince answered. “It was then that Apollo chose the place for his Temple at Delphi.”
“You have been there?”
“Of course! Many times.”
“It is where – I long to go,” Angelina said. “Did you feel Apollo near you – when you stood beneath the Shining Cliffs?”
“I felt a kind of quietness and saw the light above and below me,” the Prince responded. “But I felt alone. I know now it was because you were not with me.”
“Perhaps one day – I shall be able to come to Greece,” Angelina said in a dreamy voice.
“Do you think it would give me any pleasure to know that you were there without me?” the Prince asked.
He made a sound that was almost a cry.
“I want to be with you in Greece, Angelina. There is so much I want to show you, so much that I can talk to you about and so much that we can feel together.”
Her eyes were irresistibly drawn to his.
He looked deep into them and said,
“How can I be without you? How can I live, knowing that you are somewhere in the world but I cannot see or touch you?”
“When you – talk like that,” Angelina said, “you make things – worse.”
“But not as bad as they will be,” the Prince answered. “When I came to England, I was longing to return to Cephalonia, but now when I leave only a part of me will go home. My heart will stay with you.”
Their eyes held each other until the Prince, with what was almost a superhuman effort, looked away and said in a voice that was suddenly harsh,
“I must not keep you out too late.”
He asked for the bill and, when it was paid, they rose without speaking and Angelina led the way out of the restaurant.
The Head Waiter bowed obsequiously at the door and the Prince thanked him for an excellent dinner, but Angelina knew that neither of them had tasted a morsel of what they had eaten.
Outside the carriage was waiting for them and Alexis had Twi-Twi sitting beside him on the box.
He handed the small Pekingese to the Prince who helped Angelina into the carriage and then put Twi-Twi on the seat opposite her.
The hood had been opened as he promised and now, while they had been in the restaurant, darkness had come and the gas lamps threw a golden glow all down the street.
They drove into Piccadilly and Angelina could see that most of the shops had illuminated decorations that shone brightly on the flags, the bunting and the portraits of the new King and Queen.
It made the streets of London look very gay and somehow swept away a lot of their sombre dignity so that they had quite a raffish air.
Angelina looked round her with delight. Then she felt the Prince take her hand in his and, as if she could not help herself, she drew a little closer to him.
“It is just how I thought – it would be,” she said in an excited voice, “and it seems right that there should also be a – moon and stars in the sky.”
She looked up as she spoke and the Prince, seeing her thrown back head and the exquisite line of her neck, drew in his breath.
Alexis drove them through Piccadilly Circus, then down the Haymarket and into Trafalgar Square.
The fountains, illuminated with concealed lights, were throwing iridescent rainbows high into the sky. There were garlands round Nelson’s Column, flags and bunting round every lamppost.
There was the sound of a hurdy-gurdy and some young people were dancing around it while a crowd watched and applauded.
“You see how happy everyone is that your King is well enough to be crowned?” the Prince remarked.
“He is very popular,” Angelina replied, “and they call him ‘Edward the Peacemaker’.”
“Let’s hope he can keep the peace,” the Prince remarked.
Angelina knew that he was
thinking that the Germans might be a menace to Great Britain, as the Turks still menaced the Greeks.
She turned towards him impulsively.
“Let’s forget politics for the next few days,” she begged, “and perhaps too we could forget the – future.”
“Forget that we have to part?” the Prince asked.
“Yes. After all, we are so lucky to have the present. Please – please don’t let us miss a single moment of it.”
“All right,” he agreed, “and there is always the chance that tomorrow may never come.”
“Even if it does,” Angelina said, “we shall have had – today.”
“You are very wise, my little Persephone.”
He raised her hand as he spoke and kissed it.
There was something in the touch of his lips on her skin that made her quiver with a thousand feelings that she had never known before.
“Oh, God, I love you so much!” the Prince cried. “I promise, my lovely one, that I will try to make the present as perfect as it is possible for it to be for us both.”
The carriage drove through Admiralty Arch into the Mall. Here the decorations on the lampposts were dignified and yet attractive, but Angelina’s eyes went to where the moon was now shining on the lake in St. James’s Park.
She could see the glimmer of silver between the trees and she thought that it looked very romantic and very entrancing.
The Prince’s eyes were on her face.
“Shall we go and look at the ducks?” he asked. “My guide book tells me they were first introduced there by your ‘Merrie Monarch’ – King Charles II.”
“Can we – do that?”
“Why not?”
He called out to Alexis, who drew the horse to a standstill.
“We will leave you to look after the little dog,” the Prince said. “We will not be long.”
He put his arm under Angelina’s and she pulled her velvet wrap round her shoulders, thinking perhaps that she looked too smart to be walking in the Park, as if she was a country sightseer.
But the crowds who would have been wandering there earlier in the day had gone home to bed and there was only an occasional couple close to each other in the shadow of the trees.
When they reached the bridge over the lake, they were alone in an enchanted place, for the moon turned everything to silver, even themselves.
Angelina was acutely conscious that the Prince’s eyes were on her face as they had walked along together, but there seemed nothing to say.
Or rather they talked to each other without words, knowing a strange almost overwhelming contentment because they were close and because his hand was touching her bare arm.
They stood as if gazing at the ducks, but there were none to be seen.
Then, as they turned to walk back again towards the carriage, the Prince stopped under the shadowy branches of a tree.
Angelina looked up at him enquiringly and he spoke for the first time since they had left the carriage.
“I want to kiss you,” he said, “I want it more than I have ever wanted anything in my whole life, but if you tell me that I should not do so, then I will obey you because I love you too much to do anything that you would not wish.”
Angelina did not answer.
She only looked up at him and, although neither of them seemed to move, she was close in his arms and he was holding her tightly against him.
Then, as her eyes were still held by his, he bent his head and his lips found hers.
It was a very gentle kiss, the kiss of a man who touches something so sacred that he is half-afraid that he is committing sacrilege.
Angelina’s mouth was very soft beneath his, then as his kiss deepened, a wonder that seemed to come from the sky itself drew them together with a divine radiance.
Angelina felt as if light was quivering round them and they were one with the shining stars, the silver glimmer of water and the soft music that came from within their souls.
It was so perfect and she felt as if she touched the very wings of ecstasy and was lifted into the sky itself.
Then there came a little flicker of fire that she had never known before.
It seemed to rise from the very depths of her body through her breasts into her lips and to join with a fire that she felt burning in the Prince and which was all the mystery and wonder of the Divine.
It might have spanned the centuries and been part of the same flames that had soared from Apollo and made him appear as if he was a star.
How long their kiss lasted it was impossible to determine.
The Prince raised his head and Angelina, looking up at him, felt as if they had both ceased to exist as human beings and had become transfigured into Gods.
For one moment they were still and then, because there were no words to express what they felt, they walked quietly hand-in-hand back to the carriage.
As Alexis drove on, their hands were clasped and, only when they came down Grosvenor Crescent and reached the Square, turning not towards the front of the house but to the mews at the back, did the Prince say in a voice that was curiously unlike his own,
“If I don’t see you before tomorrow evening, I will be waiting for you at the same time as tonight.”
The carriage came to a standstill outside the garden door.
The Prince drew the key from the cushioning where he had placed it, then. as Angelina picked up Twi-Twi in her arms, he helped her out of the carriage and opened the door that led into the garden.
When he had done so, he put the key in her hand and, as she quivered at his touch, she looked up into his eyes.
The moonlight was on their faces and for a long, long moment they stared at each other.
“Goodnight, my precious love,” the Prince said hoarsely.
“Good – night,” Angelina whispered.
She passed through the garden door and he shut it behind her.
Then with feet that hardly seemed to touch the ground, she ran to the back door.
She let herself in and put the key from the outer door back into the dish from which she had taken it before putting Twi-Twi down on the ground, because it was easier in the darkness of the house to find her way if she could hold out both hands in front of her.
Only when she reached her bedroom could she think and know that what had happened tonight was as wonderful and mystic as if she had taken part in the mysteries of Eleusis.
She felt that tonight she had really been Persephone. But she had not handed the symbolic ear of corn to an initiate who had passed through all the terrors of the underworld, but had received the sacred token herself.
She sat down on the edge of her bed.
‘This is love!’ she thought, ‘the love that is so perfect and so truly part of God that, having once known it, one could never contemplate an imitation.’
She knew then that when she lost the Prince it would be impossible for her ever to marry anybody else.
How could she give any other man what she had given him – not only her heart but also her soul?
She knew, without his telling her in words, that what she had experienced he had experienced too.
It had been as if they had been encircled by a special light, quivering and beating in the air and the wings of the Gods had swept them up into the sky and nothing could ever be the same again.
Angelina, at the moment, did not even think of how she would suffer when she lost the Prince.
She was only worshipping at the shrine that their love had taken them to, knowing that she had been sanctified and blessed above all other women.
*
When old Emily came into her bedroom the next morning, Angelina felt as if she had only just fallen asleep.
She had lain awake pulsating with the wonder of the Prince’s lips, feeling that she was still in his arms, still lifted into the skies and enveloped with the light of the Gods.
“It’s a nice sunny day, Miss Angelina,” Emily said in her croaking old voice as she pulled back the
curtains, “and you mark my words, it’ll be fine tomorrow for the Coronation.”
“Would you like to watch the King arrive at Buckingham Palace, Emily?” Angelina asked, sitting up in bed.
“I’m too old for that sort of thing,” Emily replied. “I’ll read about it in the newspapers. Although I’d like to see the King and Queen with my own eyes, my feet wouldn’t carry me there.”
It had just been an idea, Angelina thought with a little sigh, that perhaps she could persuade Emily at the very last minute to go with her into the crowds.
She knew, however, that, if she was honest, it was not the King and Queen she wanted to see but the Prince. But after all she could have a private view of him from the garden.
He would look very handsome in his uniform with all his decorations, she thought, although it did not matter at all what he wore.
It was his eyes she wanted to see and the expression in them when he looked at her, which told her even better than words that he loved her as she loved him.
‘Could any man be more wonderful or more magnificent?’ she asked.
And she knew as she had last night, that it would be impossible for any other man to mean anything in her life.
He had said that he might be able to get away and meet her in the garden and because every nerve in her body longed to see him and be with him, Angelina dressed so quickly that she was downstairs before Ruston was ready for her.
“You’re ever so early, Miss Angelina!” he said. “I doubt as your egg’s cooked yet.”
“It does not matter,” Angelina answered. “I am not hungry.”
“You must have a proper breakfast,” old Ruston said firmly. “We can’t have you looking thin like the General.”
He went off slowly down the stairs to the kitchen and Angelina waited, knowing that there would be a terrible fuss if she did not eat any breakfast, but feeling as if every second that kept her from the garden was a century of drawn-out time.
She only took Twi-Twi for a short walk immediately after breakfast before she went to her grandmother’s room, then for a longer walk, after she had read aloud the headline news in the papers and helped Lady Medwin to open her letters.
There were usually not many of these.
Princes and Princesses Page 9
