Princes and Princesses

by Cartland, Barbara

  One of the things he had admired more than anything else about the Hungarians was their horses and the way that they rode them.

  When he mentioned this to the Princess, he saw her eyes light up and for a moment the sadness and the fear vanished from them.

  “My father was a magnificent horseman,” she said, “and, although we had only a small stable at home, every horse in it was outstanding.”

  “Do you ride here?” Lord Arkley enquired.

  She shook her head and he saw the yearning in her expression as she replied,

  “Sometimes I ride at home, but the Prince does not like me to do – anything that he is – unable to do too.”

  It was typical, Lord Arkley thought, of the selfishness as well as the brutality of the man, but aloud he said,

  “That you must find very hard. I wish I could invite you to ride with me here in the forest where there are particularly lovely rides among the pines, especially the one that leads to the Monastery at Teppel.”

  “I have longed to go there,” the Princess replied. “I hear that the Abbot arranged a shooting party for King Edward last year, which seemed a strange thing for monks to do.”

  “They were anxious to please him,” Lord Arkley smiled, “and the King is very fond of the Monastery. He goes there every time he visits Marienbad, eats a large tea and the monks adore him.”

  “That I can understand. He is such a happy King and so different – ”

  The Princess stopped suddenly and Lord Arkley knew that she had nearly said something indiscreet.

  Dinner was finished and she looked nervously across the table at the Prince.

  “You may leave us, Mariska,” he said in the tone of one addressing a servant.

  She rose instantly and, as soon as she had left the room, the Prince ordered port and brandy to be brought to the table and the servants then withdrew.

  “Now we can enjoy ourselves,” he began. “Tell me, Arkley, what you think of the Political situation in Germany?”

  Lord Arkley’s replies were guarded and he soon realised, as even a stupid man would have done, that the Prince was attempting to get him drunk.

  He and the Baron were also asking him questions that, if he had answered them truly, would undoubtedly have been of interest to certain people in Berlin.

  Lord Arkley was, however, far too experienced to be deceived by the over-effusiveness of his host or to indulge too heavily in the excellent port or the well-matured brandy.

  Instead he watched the Prince, encouraged by the Baron, becoming himself more and more inebriated.

  Finally, finding the whole performance dull and degrading, he sat back in his chair and made no further effort to join in the conversation.

  “Drink up, old man, drink up!” the Prince kept saying.

  When Lord Arkley made no effort to do so and answered any questions put to him in evasive monosyllables, he said with a bad grace,

  “I suppose I should retire to bed. These cursed doctors who order me about as if I was a raw recruit keep telling me I must get plenty of sleep.”

  His words brought his guests to their feet.

  “I can only thank Your Royal Highness for an extremely pleasant evening,” Lord Arkley said.

  “We have not finished all the things we wanted to talk about,” the Prince replied, slurring his words. “We must meet again, Arkley, and soon – very soon.”

  It was an order more than an invitation and Lord Arkley bowed his head.

  “It will be a pleasure. Will you please convey my gratitude to the Princess?”

  Prince Friederich did not deign to reply to this, but merely put out his hand towards the decanter.

  As Lord Arkley reached the door of the room, he could not help wondering whether the Princess would suffer, because, if Prince Friederich had hoped to elicit secret information from him, the dinner had been a failure.

  He was not certain how far the Baron was involved until when they were outside in the corridor he said,

  “Poor Friederich, my heart bleeds for him! It is quite understandable why he should try to take an interest in what is going on in the world, although he can take no active part in it.”

  “He certainly seems to be well-informed,” Lord Arkley remarked.

  “Do you think so?” the Baron asked. “I thought myself what he said was all rather naïve and mostly a repetition of what one reads in the newspapers.”

  Lord Arkley did not reply and after a moment the Baron went on,

  “I am going to the casino as I expect you are. Shall we go together?”

  “That would be delightful,” Lord Arkley agreed. “If you will allow me time to collect my cloak and hat from my own suite, which is next door.”

  “You have not far to go.”

  “No, only a few steps,” Lord Arkley agreed.

  He opened the door of his sitting room and the Baron walked in.

  “As I was saying,” he continued, “Prince Friederich is trying to keep abreast of events. In my opinion the Germans made a mess of the Moroccan Conference? What do you think?”

  It was not so much his words as the way he said them and the look he gave Lord Arkley that told him it was not by chance that the Baron had been invited to dinner tonight.

  He parried the question.

  “I saw General von Echardstein here this afternoon,” he said. “When he was in England, I thought him very able.”

  “That is what I thought myself,” the Baron agreed, “but I understand he is rather perturbed about the close friendship between the French and the English where it concerns Morocco and, of course, your King’s obvious predilection for the French.”

  That was plain speaking with a vengeance, but Lord Arkley had found out what he wished to know, that the General had been in touch with the Baron.

  “I find most Politics a bore, especially when I am on holiday,” he said indifferently. “Tell me the places of amusement, real amusement, to be found in Marienbad this season.”

  He spoke with a light-hearted gaiety that he knew would deceive the Baron who was far too heavy-handed to be subtle.

  Because he was anxious to ingratiate himself, Lord Arkley found himself listening to some bawdy descriptions of women and the places where one could meet them which occupied the whole time they were walking to the casino.

  When finally they joined a number of other friends, Lord Arkley had not only made up his mind to avoid any place that the Baron had recommended but also in the future, the Baron himself.

  He did not stay long talking with his friends nor did he waste his money on the tables.

  Instead, because he was genuinely tired and wanted an early night, he slipped away from those who were trying to detain him and started to walk back towards the hotel in the starlight.

  It was very quiet away from the music and the chatter of voices in the Kurhaus.

  The fragrance of the pines and the night-scented stock merged together and gave Lord Arkley a sense of escape into a different world from that which had occupied his mind all the evening.

  Then, as he reached the garden of the hotel with its hidden lights amongst the shrubs, which gave it a mystic appearance, he saw a slight figure sitting on a seat half-hidden by the bended boughs of a willow tree.

  It was instinct rather than observation, he thought afterwards, that had made him aware of her.

  Perhaps ninety-nine people out of a hundred would have passed by without being aware that she was there, but Lord Arkley felt her presence and walking towards the tree bent his head to pass through its veil-like leaves.

  She started, looked up at him and he felt that she had been far away in her thoughts and that he had brought her back to reality.

  “I am glad to have the opportunity, Your Royal Highness, of thanking you for dinner tonight,” he started.

  The Princess drew in her breath and he thought that for a moment she could not find words to answer him.

  Then she said in a very low voice,

  “Tha
nk you, Lord Arkley. It – it was not possible for me to – bid you goodnight.”

  “I understood that.”

  He waited and then he asked,

  “May I join you for a moment?”

  “I-I was just leaving,” the Princess said. “I-I should not be here – alone – but it was so hot and – ”

  There was no need for her to explain that she had wanted to escape and that she wanted freedom if only for a few minutes.

  “Please don’t let me feel that I am driving you away,” Lord Arkley said as he sat down beside her, “but if you would rather I left you alone, I will do so.”

  “N-no – I should not be here – and – ”

  “No one will know,” Lord Arkley said soothingly, “and let’s forget everything but the peace and beauty of the night. As I was coming through the wood from the casino, I felt as if I were stepping into another world.”

  “That is what I try to do,” the Princess replied, “but sometimes I ask myself if there – is another world.”

  “But of course there is!” he answered. “A world that we imagine and sometimes dream about, but which is just as real as this one and very much more beautiful.”

  He was surprised to hear himself speaking in such a way, but he knew perceptively that it was what she wanted to hear.

  “Is that really true?” she asked almost like a child who needs reassurance.

  “But of course,” he answered, “and that special world is always waiting for us to find it. It is just that sometimes we are too busy or too stupid or perhaps too unhappy.”

  “Surely when we are – unhappy it should be – easier to find?”

  He shook his head.

  “I don’t think that is true. I think when people are unhappy they envelop themselves in a fog that is impenetrable. To reach it, to grasp what is indefinable, our spirit, if nothing else, must be free.”

  “I – understand what you are saying to me,” the Princess said, “and it helps – it helps a great deal.”

  “I think to put in a nutshell what I am trying to say is that one must never lose faith.”

  She turned her face to look at him and her eyes seemed like great pools of darkness as she murmured,

  “I never thought that – anyone like you would – understand.”

  He smiled and she added quickly,

  “No, that is rude – but I think you know what I mean. You are part of the world that – frightens me – the world that is hard and brittle – and without compassion.”

  He knew that she was thinking not of her own suffering but the way that Prince Friederich had been dropped and ignored by the very people who had fawned on him before his injuries.

  They would have followed the Kaiser’s lead and the Germans, who liked superior men and admired brawn and muscle, had no use for cripples and those who were physically incapacitated.

  “When I was in India last year,” Lord Arkley said, “I went to the foothills of the Himalayas. I was looking at the great mountains, their peaks dazzlingly white in the sunshine and I thought that beauty, great beauty, that appeals to the soul as they do is often accompanied by cruelty.”

  “What you are saying is that we have to – pay in one way or another for any – ecstasy that we might feel.”

  “Or perhaps because of what we suffer we find the ecstasy,” Lord Arkley pointed out.

  “I hope you are – right,” the Princess answered, “but I shall think of what you have said to me – and try to understand myself.”

  “That is what I have tried to do,” he said, “and I am certain of one thing that, when suffering takes us to a crossroads, we can take the way to Heaven or go down into Hell.”

  He smiled.

  “That, as you know, is over-simplifying the whole matter. At the same time we can play any variations we like on the original theme and that is our choice.”

  There was silence and then the Princess rose to her feet.

  “You have helped me – you have helped me so much. I would like to say ‘thank you’, but it is such an inadequate word.”

  “Words can never express what comes from the heart,” Lord Arkley said, “and I think tonight, Princess, I have spoken to you from my heart and I hope that it reached yours.”

  “It has,” she answered. “But now – I must go.”

  She looked up at him and he knew that she was asking him not to accompany her just in case they should be seen.

  It was extraordinary, he thought, how he could read her thoughts. Or was it in fact, as he had just said, that her heart spoke to his?

  To make it easy for her he suggested,

  “Will you forgive me if I sit here for a little while and think?”

  “I shall be – thinking too.”

  She put out her hand and he raised it to his lips. But now he kissed it, his mouth feeling the softness of her skin.

  He thought at his touch that she was very still.

  Then without another word she turned and walked away from him, moving so lightly over the lawn that it was as if she was carried on a cloud or a wave of music.

  Then he was alone and sat down as he had told her he would to think.

  He could hardly believe that their conversation had actually taken place.

  How had he been inspired to speak in such a way? How had the words come to his lips almost, he felt, as if they had no part of his brain?

  It was his brain that concerned itself with the behaviour of nations, with people like the Baron and Prince Friederich’s pitiful efforts at intrigue.

  But for the Princess some other part of him had taken control and he thought now that it was a part of which he himself had been in ignorance.

  Yet he knew that everything he had said had been exactly right and, as she had said, he had helped her.

  He could understand how frightening her life must be.

  She was still very young. In fact he doubted if she was yet twenty-one and for three years she had been married to a shattered embittered drunkard.

  Her Eszterházy blood would have given her a pride that made her hold herself stiffly and he was quite certain she would never have confided to anyone what she was suffering.

  Had he not overheard the way the Prince had treated her last night, he knew it would never have crossed his mind that she had been humiliated and outraged in such a manner.

  At dinner she had talked with a graciousness and a charm that might have been envied by a far older and more experienced woman.

  It was only because he was watching for it that he had seen the fear in her eyes when she looked at the Prince to see that he was getting steadily more inebriated as dinner progressed.

  Thinking over everything that had happened and been said since he had come to Marienbad, Lord Arkley thought that he knew the key to the Prince’s behaviour.

  Some of it, of course, arose from his Germanic self-conceit and his attitude of contempt towards women, which was inherent in the German character.

  He was sure too that the reason he had beaten the lovely fragile creature who was his wife was his fury that, while he had been incapacitated by the anarchist’s bomb, she had escaped unscathed.

  He would hate her for her immunity and his innate cruelty would want to make her suffer as he was suffering. So he beat her into unconsciousness.

  “It is intolerable!” Lord Arkley said aloud violently. “But God knows what I can do about it. God knows how I can save her!”

  Chapter Three

  Princess Mariska opened her bedroom door and as she did so she saw Josef showing a gentleman into the sitting room.

  She only had a glimpse of him, but she realised that it was the commanding and somewhat aggressive figure of Baron von Echardstein.

  She waited until he was out of sight and, opening the door further, went into the vestibule.

  As she did so, she heard Prince Friederich say,

  “Good morning, General. It is a surprise to see you so early.”

  “I am leaving Marienba
d today,” the General replied, “and thought that I would have a word with Your Royal Highness before I departed.”

  “Sit down,” Prince Friederich said. “What will you drink, champagne?”

  “That would be very pleasant,” the General answered in his guttural voice.

  Prince Friederich must have indicated what he required to Josef, for he came from the sitting room and as he did so Mariska heard the General say,

  “I wondered if perhaps you had any news for me.”

  “Gott im Himmel,” Prince Friederich exclaimed. “You can hardly expect results so – ”

  The rest of the sentence was cut off as Josef closed the door. He saw the Princess standing there and explained,

  “I am fetching champagne for His Royal Highness.”

  “I want to go and see the Duchesse, Josef,” Mariska said in a low voice. “I will not be long.”

  “You’ll have plenty of time, Your Royal Highness,” Josef replied.

  He smiled at her as he spoke and she knew that, as he had done before, he would try to cover up for her if Prince Friederich commanded her presence.

  Mariska often wondered what she would do if Josef was not there.

  It was only he who could save her from her husband’s brutality and only he to whom she need not pretend.

  Josef knew all their secrets, the drunkenness of his Master, the way he ill-treated and insulted his wife and the fear that Mariska found impossible to hide all the time however hard she tried.

  Knowing that she was safe for a short while, she ran along the passage and down the stairs to the first floor.

  The Duchesse de Vallière was the only friend she had in Marienbad and as she often told herself, the only friend she had in the world.

  Old now the Duchesse had been in her youth a great beauty and Mariska could remember her staying in Hungary with her Eszterházy relations while she was still a small girl.

  The Duchesse had for the past few years made her home in Marienbad because the climate of Paris did not suit her.