“Thank you God for my good supper, please may I get down!” she parroted in one breath.
She did not wait for permission, but slithered from her chair and walked across the room to stand at the Prince’s side.
“You’re bigger than my Dadda,” she said conversationally.
“And you are smaller than Alana,” the Prince replied.
The way he spoke her name made Alana feel a little flame of excitement run through her.
Then she told herself that the mere fact that he no longer prefixed it with ‘Lady’ depicted all too clearly the gulf that lay between them.
Now she was no longer ‘Lady Alana’ or even ‘Miss’.
She was just a servant to be addressed by her Christian name and ordered to do the bidding of her betters.
“Have you come to see Alana?” Eloise asked curiously.
“Yes, I have,” the Prince replied, “and I have been looking for her for a long time.”
“Has she been hiding?”
“Yes, she has been hiding, but I have been very clever in being able to find her.”
“She’s here with us.”
“I know that now.”
Because Alana found his conversation with Eloise embarrassing, she ordered,
“Go and get into bed, Eloise, and I will come and hear your prayers in a moment.”
Eloise was looking at the Prince.
“You can kiss me goodnight,” she said invitingly.
Alana could not help a smile.
Whatever their age, she thought, they found him attractive.
It was like the stab of a dagger to realise how many women there were in his life. She was just one of them, only perhaps more foolish than the others.
The Prince now picked up Eloise and put her on his knee.
“You will be very pretty when you grow up,” he said, “and there will be no need then to offer your kisses to any young man. They will all be asking for them.”
Eloise was not listening, she was playing with the buttons on the Prince’s coat.
“Don’t encourage her,” Alana said in what she hoped was an ordinary voice. “I regret to say she is already an incorrigible flirt!”
“Why not?” the Prince asked. “It is a natural instinct in every woman to attract a man and to be glad when she is able to do so.”
“I think you are generalising – from your own experience,” Alana said sharply.
The Prince laughed.
“I might have guessed that such a statement would evoke an argument,” he said. “Put the children to bed and then we can talk.”
Alana wanted to reply that they had nothing to talk about and then she thought that it would sound foolish.
By now she had put Billy into his nightshirt and she picked him up in her arms, saying as she did so,
“Come along, Eloise.”
“Goodnight,” Eloise said to the Prince.
As she spoke, she raised her arms and put them round his neck.
He kissed her and then said,
“Would you like me to carry you to bed?”
“Yes, please. You are very tall and if you carry me I shall be very high off the ground.”
Alana had already reached the door of the room where she slept with Billy. Opening out of it there was a small room, little more than a cupboard, which Eloise, as the only girl, had to herself.
As she walked into the room with the Prince following, it flashed through her mind that they might be husband and wife putting their children to bed.
Then she told herself that she must be demented to imagine that the Prince would ever do such a thing even with his own children.
As Eloise told him where her bedroom was, she saw him carry the small girl through the doorway, her arms still round his neck and her fair hair brushing his chin.
‘I suppose this is a new experience for him,’ Alana thought almost savagely.
But it somehow hurt her to see him doing anything so simple when she knew how very different his life was in every way.
She put Billy into his cot, tucked him up warmly and kissed his cheek.
His eyelids were already beginning to close as she lifted up the side of the cot and pulled the curtains to shut out the dusk, which was rapidly turning into night.
Then, as she moved towards Eloise’s room, the Prince came from it closing the door behind him.
“I have heard her prayers,” he said, “so there is no need for you to trouble.”
“It is no trouble,” Alana replied.
She opened the door and looked into the room.
There were no candles but by the light from the outer room Alana could see that Eloise was tucked up in bed with her head turned on the pillow.
She closed the door again to find that the Prince was watching her with a smile on his lips as if he mocked at her efforts to find fault.
She blew out the two candles in the, bedroom and they went into the nursery, where the light came from an oil lamp standing on the table in the centre of the room.
Now that the children were no longer with them it swept over Alana even more forcibly than it had before how different she must appear to the Prince from the last time he had seen her.
He had kissed her when she was wearing Charlotte’s black evening gown decorated, as Lady Odele had said, theatrically with white orchids that had also haloed her head.
Now with the sleeves of her gown rolled up above her elbows, with her hair untidy from bathing the children and wearing a flannel apron that was the badge of office of every Nanny, Alana told herself that the Prince saw her as she really was.
Almost instinctively her chin went up a little and her eyes looked at him defiantly.
He walked automatically to the fireplace to stand with his back to the fire, which had a protective brass guard in front of it that was drying several pairs of socks that Alana had washed earlier in the day.
The bath was at his feet and the two towels that had dried the children lay beside it.
She wanted to pick them up and then refrained from doing so.
The sooner the Prince said what had to be said and left the better.
She had known an irrepressible joy and her heart had leapt at the sight of him, but she now felt an agony because this was how he would remember her and not as she had looked and been when he had kissed her in the Music Room at Charl Castle.
As he did not speak, she asked,
“Why – have you come – here?”
“To talk to you.”
Even as he spoke, she added in an agitated voice,
“How – can you have – found me? Who told you – where I was?”
“Charlotte, as it happens.”
Alana stared at him wide-eyed.
“Charlotte? I don’t believe you.”
“It’s true, although she was reluctant to do so until I blackmailed her into doing what I wanted.”
“Blackmailed?”
Alana spoke the word in horror, but the Prince was smiling.
“Come and sit down and I will tell you all about it. I am sure you are curious.”
She was curious, Alana admitted to herself. At the same time it was an order and she knew that she had to obey him.
Hardly thinking of what she was doing, she untied the tape that held the flannel apron round her waist and put it down on a chair. Then she pulled down the sleeves of her gown and fastened them neatly at the wrists.
She was uncomfortably aware that the Prince was watching her and with a nervous little gesture she put her hands up to her hair as she seated herself on a chair opposite the one he had sat in before.
Because he was still standing, she had to tip her head back to look up at him as she asked,
“You have – seen Charlotte?”
“Yes.”
“She is – married?”
It seemed for the moment the most important question of all and, as if the Prince understood her anxiety, he was smiling as he replied,
“Very
much so. I have never seen two people so happy.”
“How did you – find them?”
“If I make up my mind to do something, I am invariably successful,” the Prince said. “I was sure that Charlotte and Shane had run away to get married.”
Alana gave a little gasp.
“You – knew that?”
“Shall I say that I not only have eyes in my head but, as you know better than anybody else, an instinct that cannot be denied and is invariably correct.”
“So you – guessed they – loved each other?”
“It was obvious to me as soon as I saw them together.”
“Then why – ?”
Alana stopped.
She felt that what she was going to say would be impertinent besides being too intimate, but there was really no need for words between them for the Prince said,
“That is just what I am going to explain to you. But what I had expected was to find you at Derryfield with Charlotte and your supposed cousin.”
Alana drew in her breath.
“How did Charlotte – explain my – absence?”
“She tried to convince me at first that you had left for your home, which was in another part of Ireland. But again that instinct, which you and I both have, told me that she was not speaking the truth.”
“You – you said you – blackmailed her into – telling the truth.”
“Perhaps ‘bribed’ would be a prettier word and indeed more accurate,” the Prince replied.
“Bribed?” Alana repeated. “Or did you threaten her?”
Her voice was accusing.
“No, I did not resort to anything so unpleasant. There was really no need. I merely made it clear, after the first shock of seeing me was over, that I was prepared to help Shane.”
Alana looked up at him.
“You would – really help him – you mean in breeding horses?”
“I have bought quite a number from him.”
“That was kind, really very kind of you,” Alana cried. “If he can support Charlotte, then I am sure that her father will forgive her for running away and everything will be – all right in the future.”
“That is what I thought,” the Prince agreed. “Equally I made your address a condition of sale!”
It flashed through Alana’s mind that in a way Charlotte had betrayed her trust and she might at least have warned her.
As if the Prince again was aware of what she was thinking, he said,
“You will understand better when I tell you why I wanted to see you.”
As he spoke, he sat down in the chair opposite her and it struck her that he seemed entirely at ease and at home even in such an unlikely place as an untidy nursery.
But, because she still felt shy, she said automatically,
“You should – not have – come here.”
“Why not?”
“The Vicar and Mrs. Bredon are – away and the village will – talk.”
“Do you really mind if they do?”
“Of course. I have to live here.”
It struck Alana what a great deal of gossip there would be if it was known that Prince Ivan Katinouski of Charl Castle had called to see her.
How could she explain his presence?
She could almost hear the news of his visit running like wildfire from cottage to cottage and from farm to farm and the whispered constructions that would be put on it.
“Please – say quickly what you have to say to me – and go,” she murmured in a low voice.
“If I do obey you,” the Prince replied, “without telling you why I have come, would you not wonder all your life what it was you had not heard?”
“Y-yes – of course,” Alana admitted. “But you have no – idea what it is like to – live in a small village.”
“You certainly don’t behave like a villager and you certainly did not look like one when I last saw you.”
“I was – acting a part,” Alana parried defiantly. “I was wearing Charlotte’s gowns and Your Highness’s orchids. Now you see me – as I really am.”
“I wonder,” the Prince said. “You would be the first to tell me that it is not what people look like but what they think that matters. It was with our brains that we talked when you were at The Castle and also with our instincts.”
He spoke the words very softly and, because Alana felt an irrepressible emotional reaction, she said quickly,
“Tell me why you have come.”
“It is rather a long story,” the Prince began, “and you must forgive me if I start in 1835.”
Alana looked at him in perplexity and he went on to explain,
“That was the year my father, having quarrelled with Czar Nicholas, left Russia.”
“I have heard that he hated the Czar,” Alana said in a low voice.
“It was not surprising. Nicholas was a monster, a tyrant, a man so cruel that the horrors of his reign are deeply ingrained in all those who endured it.”
“But your father escaped.”
“He left, claiming that he loathed Russia and everything to do with it,” the Prince replied. “He came to England and was clever enough to bring with him his huge fortune and many of his treasured possessions.”
He paused for a moment before he resumed,
“The icons I showed you at The Castle belonged to my father. They had never been unpacked from the time he left Russia until I bought The Castle.”
“You had never seen them!” Alana exclaimed.
The Prince shook his head.
“Not until I had constructed that room especially for them and you were one of the first people besides myself to enter it.”
Alana looked at him wide-eyed, but he went on,
“As perhaps you may know, my father married the Duke of Warminster’s daughter and when I was born I was brought up to be English in every possible way. I was sent to English schools and to an English University. I even served for three years in a British Regiment before my father died. Then I realised that, as my own Master, I need no longer conform entirely to the dictates that he had imposed upon me ever since I was a child.”
The Prince paused for a moment before he said in a voice that seemed almost to ring out in the nursery,
“But I personally loathed and detested everything that was Russian.”
There was silence.
And then Alana asked,
“But even so – you were still half-Russian.”
“Do you suppose I was not aware of that?” the Prince asked almost harshly. “I fought against every emotion that I knew conflicted with the English side of my character. Most of all I fought against what you would call ‘instinct’, those feelings, those perceptions and the inner knowledge that no Englishman is capable of feeling or understanding.”
He gave a deep sigh.
“I am telling you this so that you will understand when I tell you that I made a terrible mistake in marrying not, as my father would have wished me to do, an English girl, but a Hungarian.”
“But you – loved her?”
Alana had the feeling that the question was impertinent, but it came from her lips instinctively.
“Yes, I loved her,” the Prince admitted. “At least I thought I did. She was very beautiful, very wild, a dashing horsewoman and we seemed to have a great deal in common.”
His eyes in the light from the oil lamp were bleak as he went on,
“A few weeks after I was married, I realised that I had made a dreadful mistake, but it was too late and there was nothing I could do about it. Then, as you know, she was injured in a riding accident, which was entirely her own fault and should never have happened.”
“It was very – tragic,” Alana said softly.
“It was not really tragic for me because I was free to roam the world, to do as I wished and to have, as you have doubtless heard, a great number of love affairs.”
His lips curled mockingly for a moment as he added,
“And how many falsehoods
lie in that word ‘love’?”
There was great bitterness in the way he spoke and Alana could think only of the beautiful women who had thrown themselves at his feet, women like Lady Odele, who in her own way had given him her heart even if it was a shallow one.
“Yes, there were women and plenty of them,” the Prince said, “but I was always determined that my wife should be English and as conventional and unimaginative as my mother had been. It was what my father had wanted and I wanted the same thing.”
He looked at Alana for a long moment and then he said,
“Because my wife died only a short time ago, I had to wait longer than I intended. But as soon as I was free, I told myself that I would now plan my life in the way that I had always intended. I would have a family who would only be one-quarter Russian and that part of my blood that I had always hated would be gradually eliminated down the generations.”
Because he spoke so positively in a way that seemed to vibrate from him, Alana clasped her hands together, but she did not speak.
“Then you know what happened,” the Prince said in a different tone of voice. “You came to The Castle with the girl whom Lady Odele had chosen as my bride-to-be and awoke within me all the feelings that I had denied and thrust from me ever since I had been a young boy.”
“It was – not intentional.”
“I know that,” the Prince replied. “But, as soon as we looked at each other, you knew as well as I did that something passed between us that was different from anything I had experienced with any other person in my whole life and I cannot believe that you have ever felt it with anybody except me.”
Alana’s lips moved, but, as if she thought that it would be a mistake to interrupt his thoughts, she said nothing and the Prince went on,
“God knows it is difficult to explain to you why I took you into the room with the icons. It was, I think, because I wanted to prove to myself I was not imagining what you were making me feel.”
“Anyone would have been – moved, as I was, by the – beauty of them,” Alana said hesitatingly.
“You know that is not true,” the Prince said sharply. “What you felt and what I felt was quite different from the reaction of any ordinary person. They would have admired their beauty and they would have appreciated their value, but do you think they would have felt, as you did, their power and vibrations or, as you said yourself, God speaking through them?”
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