A Royal Pain

by Rhys Bowen

  Chapter 2

  It took me a moment to react. I was rooted to the spot with horror and couldn’t seem to make my body obey me when my brain was commanding me to run. Siegfried bent and picked up a hatbox and a ridiculously small train case and started up the stairs with them. I suppose if I had been capable of rational thought I could merely have dropped to my hands and knees and pretended to be sweeping. Aristocrats pay no attention to working domestics. But the sight of him had completely unnerved me, so I did what my mother had done so successfully, so many times and with so many men—I turned and bolted.

  I raced up the second flight of stairs as Siegfried came up the first with remarkable agility. Not the countess’s bedroom. At least I managed that degree of coherence. I opened a door at the rear of the landing and ran inside, shutting the door after me as quietly as possible. It was a back bedroom, one from which we had taken the extra quilts.

  I heard Siegfried’s footfalls on the landing. “This is the bedroom she has chosen?” I heard him saying. “No, no. This will not do at all. Too noisy. The traffic will keep her awake all night.”

  And to my horror I heard the footsteps coming in my direction. I looked around the room. It contained no real wardrobe, just a high gentleman’s chest. We had taken the dust sheets off the chest and the bed. There was literally nowhere to hide.

  I heard a door open close by. “No, no. Too impossibly ugly,” I heard him say.

  I rushed to the window and opened it. It was a long drop to the small garden below, but there was a drainpipe beside the window and a small tree that could be reached about ten feet down. I didn’t wait a second longer. I hoisted myself out of the window and grabbed onto the drainpipe. It felt sturdy enough and I started to climb down. Thank heavens for my education at finishing school in Switzerland. The one thing I had learned to do, apart from speaking French and knowing where to seat a bishop at a dinner table, was to climb down drainpipes in order to meet ski instructors at the local tavern.

  The maid’s uniform was tight and cumbersome. The heavy skirts wrapped around my legs as I tried to shin down the drainpipe. I thought I heard something rip as I felt for a foothold. I heard Siegfried’s voice, loud and clear in the room above. “Mein Gott, no, no, no. This place is a disaster. An utter disaster. Aunt! You have rented a disaster—and not even a garden to speak of.”

  I heard the voice come across to the window. I think I have mentioned that I am also inclined to be clumsy in moments of stress. My hands somehow slipped from the drainpipe and I fell. I felt branches scratching my face as I tumbled into the tree, uttering a loud squeak. I clutched the nearest branch and held on for dear life. The whole thing swayed alarmingly but I was safely among the leaves. I waited until the voice died away then lowered myself down to the ground, sprinted through the side gate, grabbed my coat from the servants’ hallway and fled. I would have to telephone the countess and tell her that unfortunately the young maid I sent to the house had suddenly been taken ill. It seemed she had developed a violent reaction to dust.

  I had only gone a few yards down Park Lane when somebody called my name. For an awful moment I thought Siegfried might have been looking out of a window and recognized me, but then I realized that he wouldn’t be calling me Georgie. Only my friends called me that.

  I turned around and there was my best friend, Belinda Warburton-Stoke, rushing toward me, arms open wide. She was an absolute vision in turquoise silk, trimmed with shocking pink and topped with cape sleeves that fluttered out in the breeze as she ran, making her seem to be flying. The whole ensemble was completed with a little pink feathered hat, perched wickedly over one eye.

  “Darling, it is you,” she said, embracing me in a cloud of expensive French perfume. “It’s been simply ages. I’ve missed you terribly.”

  Belinda is completely different from me in every way. I’m tall, reddish-blondish with freckles. She’s petite, dark haired with big brown eyes, sophisticated, elegant and very naughty. I shouldn’t have been glad to see her, but I was.

  “I wasn’t the one who went jaunting off to the Med.”

  “My dear, if you were invited for two weeks on a yacht and the yacht was owned by a divine Frenchman, would you have refused?”

  “Probably not,” I said. “Was it as divine as you expected?”

  “Divine but strange,” she said. “I thought he had invited me because, you know, he fancied me. And since he’s fabulously rich and a duke to boot, I thought I might be on to something. And you have to admit that Frenchmen do make divine lovers—so naughty and yet so romantic. Well, it turned out that he’d also invited not only his wife but his mistress and he dutifully visited alternate cabins on alternate nights. I was left to play gin rummy with his twelve-year-old daughter.”

  I chuckled. “And flirt with the sailors?”

  “Darling, the sailors were all over forty and had paunches. Not a handsome brute among them. I came back positively sex starved, only to find all the desirable males had fled London for the country or the Continent. So seeing you is a positive ray of sunshine in my otherwise gloomy life. But darling Georgie”—she was now staring at me— “what have you been doing to yourself?”

  “What does it look as if I’ve been doing?”

  “Wrestling with a lion in the jungle?” She eyed me doubtfully. “Darling, you have a wicked scratch down one cheek, a smudge down the other, and you have leaves in your hair. Or was it a wild roll in the hay in the park? Do tell, I’m mad with curiosity and I’ll be even madder with jealousy if it was the latter.”

  “I had to make a speedy exit because of a man,” I said.

  “The brute tried to attack you? In broad daylight?”

  I started to laugh. “Nothing of the kind. I was earning my daily crust in the usual way, opening up a house for people arriving from the Continent, only the new occupants turned up a day early and one of them was none other than the dreaded Prince Siegfried.”

  “Fishface in person? How utterly frightful. What did he say when he saw you garbed as a maid? And more to the point, what did you say to him?”

  “He didn’t see me,” I said. “I fled and had to climb down from an upstairs window. It’s a good thing we became so adept at drainpipes at Les Oiseaux. Hence the scratches and the leaves in my hair. I fell into a tree. All in all a very trying morning.”

  “My poor sweet Georgie—what an ordeal. Come here.” She removed the leaves from my hair, then took out a lace handkerchief from her handbag and dabbed at my cheek. A wave of Chanel floated over me. “That’s a little better but you need cheering up. I know, let’s go and have lunch somewhere. You choose.”

  I desperately wanted to have lunch with Belinda, but funds were horribly low at that moment. “There are some little cafés along Oxford Street, or one of the department stores?” I suggested. “They do ladies’ lunches, don’t they?”

  Belinda looked as if I’d suggested eating jellied eels on the Old Kent Road. “A department store? Darling, such things are for old women who smell of mothballs and suburban housewives from Coulsden whose hubbies let the little woman come up to town for a day’s shopping. People like you and I would cause too much of a stir if we appeared there—rather like letting in a peacock among a lot of hens. It would quite put them off their grilled sole. Now where should we go? The Dorchester would do at a pinch, I suppose. The Ritz is within walking distance, but I rather feel that all it does well is tea. The same goes for Brown’s— nothing but old ladies in tweeds. There is no point in going to eat where one can’t be seen by the right people. I suppose it will have to be the Savoy. At least one can be sure of getting decent food there—”

  “Just a moment, Belinda.” I cut her off in mid sentence. “I am still cleaning houses for a pittance. I simply couldn’t afford the kind of place you’re thinking of.”

  “My treat, darling,” she said, waving a turquoise-gloved hand expansively. “That yacht did put into Monte Carlo for a night or two and you know how good I am at the tables. What’s mo
re, I’ve made a sale—someone has actually bought one of my creations, for cash.”

  “Belinda, that’s wonderful. Do tell.”

  She linked arms with me and we started to walk back up Park Lane. “Well, you remember the purple dress—the one I tried to sell to that awful Mrs. Simpson because I thought it looked like an American’s idea of royalty?”

  “Of course,” I said, blushing at the fiasco of my brief modeling career. I had been called upon to model that dress and... well, never mind.

  “Well, darling, I met another American lady at Crock-ford’s—yes, I admit it, gambling again, I’m afraid—and I told her I was an up-and-coming couturiere and I designed for royalty, and she came to my studio and bought the dress, just like that. She even paid for it on the spot and—” She broke off as a front door opened and a man came out, pausing at the top of the steps with a look of utter disdain on his face.

  “It’s Siegfried,” I hissed. “He’ll see me. Run.”

  It was too late. He looked in our direction as he came down the front steps. “Ah, Lady Georgiana. We meet again. What a pleasant surprise.” His face didn’t indicate that the surprise was in any way pleasant, but he did bow slightly.

  I grabbed at my coat and held it tightly around me so that my maid’s uniform didn’t show. I was horribly conscious of the scratch on my cheek and my hair in disarray. I must have looked a fright. Not that I wanted Siegfried to find me attractive, but I do have my pride.

  “Your Highness.” I nodded regally. “May I present my friend Belinda Warburton-Stoke?”

  “I believe we have had the pleasure before,” he said, although the words didn’t convey the same undertones as with most young men who had met Belinda. “In Switzerland, I believe.”

  “Of course,” Belinda said. “How do you do, Your Highness. Are you visiting London for long?”

  “My aunt has just arrived from the Continent, so of course I had to pay the required visit, although the house she has rented—what a disaster. Not fit for a dog.”

  “How terrible for you,” I said.

  “I shall endure it somehow,” he said, his expression suggesting that he was about to spend the night in the dungeons of the Tower of London. “And where are you ladies off to?”

  “We’re going to lunch, at the Savoy,” Belinda said.

  “The Savoy. The food is not bad there. Maybe I shall join you.”

  “That would be lovely,” Belinda said sweetly.

  I dug my fingers into her forearm. I knew this was her idea of having fun. It certainly wasn’t mine. I decided to play a trump card.

  “How kind of you, Your Highness. We have so much to talk about. Have you been out riding recently—since your unfortunate accident, I mean?” I asked sweetly.

  I saw a spasm of annoyance cross his face. “Ah,” he said, “I have just remembered that I promised to meet a fellow at his club. So sorry. Another time maybe?” He clicked his heels together in that strangely European gesture, and jerked his head in a bow. “I bid you adieu. Lady Georgiana. Miss Warburton-Stoke.” And he marched down Park Lane as quickly as his booted feet would carry him.

  Chapter 3

  Belinda looked at me and started to laugh. “What was that about?”

  “He fell off his horse last time we were together, at that house party,” I said, “after he had boasted how well he could ride. I had to say something to stop him from coming to lunch with us. What on earth were you thinking?”

  Belinda’s eyes were twinkling. “I know, it was rather naughty of me but I couldn’t resist. You in your maid’s uniform and Prince Siegfried at the Savoy—how utterly scrumptious.”

  “I thought you were supposed to be my friend,” I said.

  “I am, darling. I am. But you have to admit that it would have been a riot.”

  “It would have been my worst nightmare.”

  “Why should you care what the odious man thinks? I thought the whole idea was to make sure that he would rather fall on his sword than marry you.”

  “Because he is liable to report back to the palace, especially if he noticed I was dressed as a maid, and even more especially if he put two and two together and realized he’d just spotted me cleaning his house. And if the palace found out, I’d be shipped off to the country to be lady-in-waiting to Queen Victoria’s one surviving daughter and spend the rest of my days surrounded by Pekinese and knitting wool.”

  “Oh, I suppose you do have a valid point there.” Belinda tried not to smile. “Yes, that was rather insensitive of me. Come along, you’ll feel better after a jolly good lunch at the Savoy.” She started to drag me down Park Lane. “We’ll take a cab.”

  “Belinda, I can’t go to the Savoy dressed like this.”

  “No problem, darling.” Belinda yanked me sideways into Curzon Street. “My salon is only just around the corner. We’ll just pop in there and I’ll lend you something to wear.”

  “I couldn’t possibly wear one of your dresses. What if I damaged it in some way? You know what I’m like. I’d be liable to spill something on it.”

  “Don’t be silly. You’ll be doing me a favor actually. You can be a walking advertisement for my designs when you mingle with your royal relatives. That would be a coup, wouldn’t it? Couturiere by appointment to the royal family?”

  “Not the culottes,” I said hastily, my one modeling disaster dancing before my eyes. “Some normal kind of garment that I can wear without tripping over it or looking like an idiot.”

  Belinda gave her delightful bell-like laugh. “You are so sweet, Georgie.”

  “Sweet but clumsy,” I said gloomily.

  “I’m sure you’ll grow out of your clumsiness someday.”

  “I hope so,” I said. “It’s not that I’m perpetually clumsy. It’s just that I’m always clumsy at the wrong place and the wrong time, in front of the wrong people. It must have something to do with nerves, I suppose.”

  “Now why should you be nervous?” Belinda demanded. “You’re just about the most eligible young woman in Britain, and you’re quite attractive and you have that delightfully fresh and virginal quality to you—speaking of which, anything to report on that front?”

  “My virginity, you mean?”

  Two nannies, pushing prams, turned back to glare at us with looks of utter horror.

  Belinda and I exchanged a grin. “This conversation should probably wait for somewhere a little less public,” I said and bundled her into the doorway of the building that housed her salon. Once upstairs in her little room she had me try on several outfits before settling on a light brown georgette dress with a filmy gold short cape over it.

  “Capes are so in fashion at the moment and it goes so well with your hair,” she said, and it did. I felt like a different person as I stared at myself in her full-length mirror. No longer gawky but tall and elegant—until I came to my feet, that is. I was wearing sensible black lace-up maid’s shoes.

  “The shoes will have to go,” she said. “We can pop into Russell and Bromley on the way.”

  “Belinda—I have no money. Don’t you understand that?”

  “The shoes have to complement the outfit,” she said airily. “Besides, you can pay me back when you’re queen of somewhere. You never know, you might end up with a maharaja who will weigh you in diamonds.”

  “And then lock me away in a harem. No, thank you. I think I’ll settle for a less wealthy Englishman.”

  “So boring, darling. And so completely sexless.” Belinda stepped out onto the street and hailed a taxicab, which screeched to a halt beside her. “Russell and Bromley first,” she said, as if this were normal behavior. For her it was. For me it still made me feel like Cinderella.

  It took Belinda half an hour to select a pair of gold pumps for me, then it was off to the Savoy. Belinda chattered merrily and I found my spirits lifting. The cab swung under the wonderfully modern streamlined portico of the Savoy and a doorman leaped forward to open the door for us. I swept inside, feeling sophisticated and glam
orous, a woman of the world at last. At least until my cape, flowing out behind me as I entered, got caught in the revolving door. I was yanked backward, choking, and had to stand there, mortified, while the doormen extricated me and Belinda chuckled.

  “Did you know that you design dangerous clothing?” I demanded as we went through to the grill. “That’s twice now that one of your garments has tried to kill me.”

  Belinda was still laughing. “Normal people seem to have no trouble with them. “Maybe they are secretly communist garments, sworn to destroy the house of Windsor.”

  “Then I definitely won’t let you sell one to my cousins.” I readjusted the cape so that the clip was no longer digging into my neck as we reached the entrance of the grill.

  “You have a reservation, miss?” the maitre d’ asked.

  “I’m Belinda Warburton-Stoke and I’m here to lunch with Lady Georgiana Rannoch,” Belinda said sweetly as money passed discreetly from her hand to his, “and I’m terribly afraid that we have no reservation... but I’m sure you’ll be an absolute angel and find us a little corner somewhere....”

  “Welcome, my lady. This is indeed an honor.” He bowed to me and escorted us to a delightful table for two. “I will send the chef out to give you his recommendations.”