Princes and Princesses

by Cartland, Barbara

  Even so she knew, because she loved him, that however glamorous the party might be, however many attractive men she might meet, it would be hard to concentrate her thoughts on anyone except the man she had met because Twi-Twi had chased a ginger cat.

  Lady Hewlett stayed with her grandmother for over an hour.

  When she left, Angelina escorted her down the stairs to the front door and waved as she drove away in her exceedingly smart carriage drawn by two horses.

  Then she went back upstairs to her grandmother’s bedroom.

  Lady Medwin was looking immeasurably better from having had a visitor.

  “Daisy knows all the gossip,” she said, as Angelina entered the room. “I have enjoyed seeing her more than I have enjoyed anything for a long time.”

  “I am so glad, Grandmama.”

  “She has some charming young men she wants to introduce to you, while she is in England.”

  “H-how – kind.”

  “It has made me see how remiss I have been in not making other arrangements for you, once I became ill,” Lady Medwin went on. “‘A girl should marry early,’ Daisy said to me, ‘and the sooner Angelina finds a husband the better!’”

  Angelina started.

  “A – h-husband, Grandmama?”

  “Daisy is right,” Lady Medwin continued. “I married when I was just eighteen and my mother always said that eligible bachelors get fewer as one gets older.”

  Angelina found this hard to puzzle out. She was hoping desperately that her grandmother would not get a fixed idea in her head that she must be married.

  Lady Medwin, as her son knew, could be determined to the point of obstinacy, when she wanted something.

  No arguments could make her change her mind and opposition usually strengthened her resolve to get her own way.

  “I am quite happy with you, Grandmama,” Angelina said quickly. “So don’t let us worry about my being married for a very long time.”

  “That is nonsense!” Lady Medwin retorted, “and it is dear Daisy who has made me see the error of my ways.”

  “We will wait until you are well and then talk about it,” Angelina said soothingly.

  “We shall do nothing of the sort!” Lady Medwin replied. “When Daisy goes back to Paris, I shall get in touch with some of my other friends and ask them to chaperone you during the Winter Season. Oh dear, I am really angry with myself that I did not think of doing this before!”

  “Please, Grandmama, don’t worry about it,” Angelina begged her. “I am happy, very happy here. I love reading to you and taking Twi-Twi into the garden. I have really not had time to think of parties or balls.”

  She realised that her grandmother was not attending to her.

  “I must buy you some new gowns, Angelina,” she said. “Tell Madame Marguerite to call here on Monday morning and that other dressmaker whose designs I liked. What was her name?”

  “Grandmama, I have lots and lots of gowns I have not yet worn,” Angelina protested.

  “Just do as you are told, dearest child,” her grandmother said, “and tomorrow we will make a list of my friends who I know will help me, as dearest Daisy is so willing to do.”

  ‘It is hopeless,’ Angelina thought.

  She would never now be able to persuade her grandmother that things were perfectly all right as they were.

  And yet, she asked herself, when she went to her room to change, would it not ease the agony she was going to feel when the Prince had left England if she had other things to think about except the emptiness of the Ministry next door?

  But for a moment Angelina could think of nothing but the evening that lay ahead.

  She would see him – she would talk to him – they would be together and – she stopped her thoughts and felt herself blush as she knew how much she wanted him to kiss her again.

  Perhaps it would be impossible tonight – perhaps he would not want her – perhaps –

  Her thoughts went round and round like a squirrel in a treadmill, but all the time an irrepressible excitement was rising in her breast so that she felt as if fireworks might explode around her!

  It was, she knew, simply because there was now only a very little time left before she would be with the Prince again.

  She had difficulty in choosing what she thought was her second most attractive gown because, as she had told her grandmother, there were quite a number of them in her wardrobe that she had not yet worn.

  Tonight, she finally put on one that was as different as possible from the one he had already seen her in.

  It was a simpler gown of very pale blue, the colour of a thrush’s egg, and was trimmed with little velvet bows of the same colour interspersed amongst flounces of shadowy lace so fine that it might have been made with fairy fingers.

  There was lace on the bodice and, when she was ready, Angelina looked very young and very fragile like a spring flower coming into bloom after the snows of winter.

  At the last moment she thought that perhaps the Prince would prefer her to have worn something more formal and elaborate, but it was too late. Ruston would be waiting in the dining room to serve her dinner.

  She ran down the stairs, Twi-Twi following her and, when she entered the dining room, Ruston said reproachfully,

  “Your soup’s getting cold, Miss Angelina.”

  This, Angelina knew was quite impossible considering the silver cover was on the tureen and the soup would have been at the point of boiling when Mrs. Briggs tipped it out of the saucepan.

  “I am sorry, Ruston,” she said meekly.

  Once again, she went through the pretence of eating, slipping everything back into the dishes on the sideboard as soon as Ruston had left the room. As usual he protested because she had eaten so little.

  “You’re not eating enough. Miss Angelina, to keep a mouse alive and that’s a fact!” he said with the affectionate anxiety of an old retainer.

  “I am so excited about the Coronation, Ruston,” Angelina replied.

  She thought, as she left the dining room, that was definitely true.

  It was her little bit of the Coronation that was more exciting than anything else in the whole world.

  She had hurried so much that she realised, when she came downstairs wearing a chiffon wrap of the same colour over her gown and carrying Twi-Twi, that the hands of the clock in the hall were only pointing to ten-past-eight.

  It would be impossible for her to wait in the mews if the Prince was not there, so Angelina waited in the doorway of the study from where she could see the grandfather clock.

  Twice she thought the clock itself must have stopped because the hands moved so slowly, but at last they were only a few seconds to a quarter-past and she sped down the passage towards the garden door.

  She let herself out, ran across the paved garden and opened the door into the mews.

  As she did so, she found herself facing the Prince.

  She looked up into his face, her heart turned a somersault and there was a constriction in her throat that made it impossible to speak.

  She could only stand gazing at him as he was gazing at her.

  Then he spoke first.

  “I have to tell you,” he said in a very low voice, “that we are not going to the party alone.”

  “N-not – alone?” Angelina repeated.

  “There was such a fuss because they believed that I was out alone last night,” the Prince said, “that I had to agree to take one of my aides-de-camp with me.”

  He must have seen the disappointment in Angelina’s face because he added,

  “You know, my darling, that I long to be alone with you. I want it more than I can possibly say, but I have had to do what the Minister and all the rest of them want.”

  “Would you – rather I did not – come?”

  It was difficult to say the words because they seemed to stick on her tongue, but somehow she managed it.

  “No, of course not,” the Prince replied. “You have to come. You must come! Leave
everything to me. I will manage somehow so that I can talk to you alone.”

  He saw her eyes light up and he said still in a voice so low it could not be overheard,

  “I have been waiting for this moment all day. It has been unmitigated hell to know that you were so near and yet I could not see you.”

  “I – waited in the – garden.”

  “Do you suppose I was not aware of that?” the Prince asked and his voice was raw. “I thought of you and I longed to be with you but it was impossible.”

  “I-I knew that.”

  Now he was there, she was near to him and it was almost as if they were one person as they had been last night.

  “I love you!” the Prince said. “I would have thought it impossible, but you look even more beautiful than you did last night.”

  He smiled and suddenly everything was changed as he said in a very different tone of voice,

  “Come, let’s go to the party and forget all our problems, at least for the next few hours.”

  He drew Angelina towards the carriage and, as they reached it, a young man hastily stepped out.

  He would have been considered handsome, she thought, if one had not instantly compared him with the Prince.

  “May I present,” the Prince asked, “Captain Aristotelis Soutsos, who is not only my aide-de-camp but a very old friend since we went to school together.”

  Angelina held out her hand and Captain Soutsos bowed over it.

  They climbed into the carriage and the aide-de-camp sat on the small seat and Angelina put Twi-Twi beside him.

  “Will he bite me?” Captain Soutsos asked.

  “He might,” Angelina replied, “so I advise you not to touch him. He does not really like being touched by strangers.”

  “He has never tried to bite me,” the Prince pointed out.

  “Perhaps he did not think you were a stranger,” Angelina said without thinking.

  Then, as she met the Prince’s eyes, she knew that they were both aware that they had never, in fact, been strangers.

  From the first moment there had been that awareness that their feelings for each other were unique.

  “Aristotelis and I have had a most exhausting day,” the Prince said. “It started immediately after breakfast with meetings at which everyone said too much and nobody listened!”

  Captain Soutsos laughed.

  “That is very true, sir.”

  “You will find,” the Prince said, addressing Angelina, “that the Greeks can be very verbose when they get on to a subject about which they feel deeply.”

  “Were those the sort of subjects you were discussing today, sir?” Angelina asked.

  “I certainly felt deeply about most of them!” the Prince replied, “if nobody else did.”

  He spoke in a manner that told Angelina, without his having to explain, that they had been discussing his marriage.

  Because she wanted him to be happy when they were together, she changed the subject and told him how her grandmother had been visited by Lady Hewlett and how she was to dine with her and the Ambassador at a party the next evening.

  “I know His Excellency,” the Prince said. “He is a very intelligent man. I only wish that the Ambassadors whom Britain sent to Greece had half his understanding and tact.”

  “You sound as if you are dissatisfied with our representatives,” Angelina said half-jokingly.

  “Not exactly dissatisfied,” the Prince said. “I just wish that they had a little more knowledge of the countries where they fly the British flag.”

  Captain Soutsos laughed.

  “You are making me think of the Lord High Commissioners of the Ionian Islands when they came under British protection after the Napoleonic War.”

  The Prince laughed too and Angelina asked,

  “Were they extraordinary?”

  “They were certainly great individualists or shall I say eccentrics, to put it mildly,” the Prince replied. “They were very important and made certain the Greeks were well aware of it.”

  “The first Commissioner,” Captain Soutsos interposed, Sir Thomas Maitland, was notorious for his rudeness, especially to anyone bearing a letter of introduction.”

  “The next was certainly no better,” the Prince interrupted as if he wished himself to tell the story to Angelina. “Sir Frederick Adam married an ambitious Corfiote whose moustache, according to contemporary cartoons and biographies, would not have shamed a dashing Hussar!”

  “I don’t believe it!” Angelina laughed.

  “It is true, unless the history books lie!” the Prince averred, “and this peculiarity did not prevent the Commissioner from lavishing most of the revenue of the islands on the hairy lady!”

  “Let’s be fair,” Captain Soutsos objected, “successive British Commissioners did build roads, hospitals, asylums and prisons.”

  “For the prisons, of course, their conquered people were extremely grateful!” the Prince said, his eyes twinkling.

  All the way to their destination Captain Soutsos vied with the Prince in telling Angelina amusing incidents that had happened in the long distant past.

  Because they made her laugh and because the Prince seemed almost boyish when he was indulging in a verbal duel with his aide-de-camp, she thought that the evening, despite the fact that she was not alone with the Prince, would be a happy one.

  She was not mistaken.

  When they arrived at what appeared to be a rather small and unimpressive Greek restaurant off Shaftesbury Avenue, an excited little band of Cephalonians rushed out to greet them.

  They entered a large low-ceilinged room and Angelina found that there were over a hundred people waiting for them, who clapped when they appeared.

  The whole place was decorated, not with flags and bunting like the streets, but with garlands of flowers and leaves made into intricate designs that Angelina was sure had been the work of Greek girls.

  There were a number of them present, all she thought, very beautiful, with their huge dark long-lashed eyes and hair braided round their heads in thick plaits.

  They wore their national dress and she knew that nothing could be more becoming than the large white handkerchief or head scarf with one end flung over the left shoulder and the other hanging to the waist, a scarlet bodice faced with yellow, full white sleeves, a long dark blue skirt and pale blue apron with diagonal yellow stripes.

  It made the restaurant seem vivid with colour and the Prince and Angelina were led to a table at the far end that was decorated with flowers. The rest of the guests sat at long tables drawn close to the walls and leaving the centre of the room free.

  Angelina knew that this was for the dancing which would come later, but now she looked curiously at the dishes that were put in front of them.

  The Prince accepted an aperitif of ouzo, a spirit, he told Angelina, with the flavour of aniseed, which she would not like.

  She was conscious, as he spoke, that while they were talking in words that anyone could listen to, they were saying things to each other that could not be heard, but which linked them together with the mesmeric magic they had known the night before.

  “You are looking very beautiful,” the Prince whispered almost under his breath.

  The light in her eyes answered him and in a normal voice he said,

  “You must try meze, which I know you will enjoy.”

  A big plate of meze was put in front of them and the Prince helped Angelina to a small canapé spread with brik which he told her was red caviar and taramasalata, which she found was a delicious preparation of fish roes.

  There was cucumber, yoghurt, garlic and olives of various sorts, green or black, and a Greek, the Prince told her, could recognise from which part of Greece each came.

  She looked at them in surprise, thinking that they all looked the same.

  “The oval olive,” he explained, “comes from Delphi and the pointed one from Kalamata.”

  Angelina took an oval olive and they smiled at each other knowing
that at there was Delphi was the Temple of Apollo.

  Afterwards it was difficult for her to remember all the different dishes she sampled, but they were all delicious.

  There was fish prepared with a special sauce of oil and lemon juice and there was souvlakia which were kebabs of meat on a skewer roasted on charcoal, which the Prince told her was a favourite dish in Greece.

  There were dolmades, which were vine leaves folded round mince and rice and Angelina really felt that she could eat no more by the time that the desserts were brought to the table.

  But she could not resist baklava, a sticky sweetmeat made of honey and nuts covered with a flaky pastry and the Prince would not allow her to refuse a handleless cup of Turkish coffee.

  “It is called sketo without sugar and methio with it,’ he said.

  Angelina laughed.

  “I really did know that. I have been trying to study Greek all by myself, but the difficulty is that although I know how a great number of words are spelt, I cannot pronounce them.”

  “I will teach you the ones that are important,” he said caressingly.

  Then, even as he spoke, they both realised that there would be no time to do so.

  “Perhaps,” Angelina said, “your Minister will be – able to recommend a Greek – teacher.”

  As she spoke, she thought that it a possibility, but was not prepared for the sudden anger that flashed into the Prince’s face.

  “Do you think I want anyone to teach you anything except myself?” he asked.

  When, because of his tone of voice, she looked at him in surprise, she saw the pain in his eyes and was once again aware of how desperately he was suffering.

  When dinner was finished, the dancing began and now Angelina saw, as she had always wanted to, the traditional Greek dances that were referred to in almost every book she read, but which were difficult to visualise unless one saw them actually happening.

  The orchestra was certainly a strange one, but she soon realised that there were particular instruments for certain dances.

  The first dance was only for the men and although they looked large and heavy and many of them, Angelina thought, were porters in the market or wagon-drivers, they danced with a panther-like grace and, linked by a coloured handkerchief in each hand, they bounded to and fro with a swirling motion which gave the impression of the bindings of a chain.