by Rebecca Dean
With the transaction over, she’d made introductions. “Mr. Green, my sister, Marigold,” she’d said, sounding unusually flustered. “Marigold, Mr. Green. Mr. Green is the editor of the Daily Despatch.”
Until then Marigold hadn’t given a moment’s thought to Rose’s editor and, even if she had, her mental image of him would have been totally at odds with the reality. Tall and loose-limbed—and with straight hair so black it had a blue sheen—he looked the kind of man it would be both exciting and a little dangerous to know. What he didn’t look to be was the kind of man Rose was likely to know.
“I’m very pleased to meet you, Miss Houghton,” he’d said with an easy smile and an even easier manner. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”
“From Rose?”
He’d shaken his head and at the amusement in his eyes she’d known immediately that gossip had reached him of her Queen of Sheba appearance at the fancy dress ball.
Unfazed, she’d flashed him her most bewitching smile. “Are you about to enter the Savoy, Mr. Green?” she’d asked with her usual careless disregard for proper behavior. “Because if you are, perhaps you would like to escort me inside? Rose,” she had added, “is on her way to the WSPU offices in Clement’s Inn.”
It was then that the real surprise had come.
He hadn’t taken her up on her offer.
Instead he had said pleasantly, “I, too, am on my way toward the Aldwych. I shall look forward to meeting you again sometime, Miss Houghton.”
With that he had turned his attention from her to Rose, who, to Marigold’s amazement, seemed quite happy to be the object of it.
As she watched the two of them walk away together it occurred to Marigold that they were walking extremely close together and that though it couldn’t have been intentional, Rose’s dove-gray walking costume fitted her like a second skin, drawing attention not only to her wasp waist and the pleasing curve of her hips, but also to a pair of extremely neat ankles.
“I said that if her editor hasn’t warned your sister against going down to the docks, he’s a damned fool,” Strickland said again, aware that Marigold had gone off into a world of her own. “It’s time we got back to work.” He stubbed his cigarette out. “You haven’t griped about your youngest sister yet. What is she up to? Is the aristocratic boyfriend who cannot be named still on the scene?”
“Yes. In spirit if not in actual fact.”
He began painting again, saying drily, “He’s dead, then?”
Laughter fizzed in her throat. “No. He’s at sea.”
“Ah!” Strickland’s hooded eyes lit with fierce satisfaction. “Then I know who he is!”
“You can’t do!” Marigold tried to sound calm, but doing so wasn’t easy.
Strickland was on gossiping terms with everyone who was anyone in London. If he let the cat out of the bag none of her sisters would ever forgive her.
“But I do. It was obvious right from the first that you wouldn’t be fighting shy of scandal in order not to lose a mere marquess or an earl as a brother-in-law. Knowing you as I do, I don’t think you’d even be fussed at losing a duke as a prospective brother-in-law. So your insistence on remaining scandal-free until your sister has been walked down the aisle can only be because she has snared a prince and when it comes to a prince of the right age—especially one who is currently at sea—only one fits the bill.”
Marigold wasn’t given to panicking, but she was on the verge of doing so now. What was going to happen at the next dinner party Strickland was invited to and at which the prime minister or the foreign secretary was present? Would he be able to resist becoming the center of attention by revealing the riveting information that the Prince of Wales was in love with—and wanted to marry—Miss Lily Houghton? It was a secret so explosive she doubted if anyone would be able to keep it, unless they had a vested interest in doing so.
Queasily she said, “Well, since you know his identity, you can well understand why it needs to be kept secret until there is a public announcement.”
Strickland stopped painting, his interest intense. “So how near is that to happening? Has royal permission been given?”
“Not exactly.” There were times when Marigold was astonished at how truthful she could be. “But King George does know they want to marry.”
“I wouldn’t have thought it was too much of a problem. I think royals having to have the King’s consent to marry is carried a bit far at times. If Prince George of Battenberg wants to marry Lily, the only consent needed should be that of her legal guardian. Which is probably your mother, though it may well be your grandfather. I’m not au fait with guardianship legalities.”
“Prince George of Battenberg?” Marigold was so stunned—and relieved—by the realization that Strickland hadn’t been talking of David she nearly betrayed the fact by the tone of her voice.
His eyes sharpened and she said swiftly, “How bright of you to have guessed so correctly.”
He lit another cigarette, plastering it to his lower lip. “You gave it away when you said he was at sea. Prince George is in the navy—not surprising when you consider that his father is a vice admiral and commander in chief of the Atlantic Fleet. Which is an odd thing for a German to be,” he added, “even though he is related to the King.”
Marigold wasn’t interested in royal genealogy. Her relief that Strickland had got things so wonderfully wrong was too vast.
“Where are you spending the weekend?” he asked, suddenly changing the subject. “Are you going down to Snowberry?”
“To be bored to death by talk of Iris’s wedding? No, thank you. Maxim has been invited to Marchemont. A Romanov aunt of his has taken it for the summer, and he’s wangled me an invitation.”
Strickland began painting once again. “You Houghton girls do have a lot of leeway, don’t you? I don’t know of any other single girl of your age and class who could go haring off to a house party in Dorset given by someone unknown to her family. I’m painting a portrait of Lady Diana Manners at the moment, and she complains bitterly that she can’t even have a meal out with an admirer without having a married couple accompanying them as chaperones.”
“We have leeway because our father is dead, our mother lives in France, and our grandfather is blissfully unaware that the freedom he gives us is anything out of the ordinary.”
Strickland chuckled. “It’s out of the ordinary enough for your baby sister to be unofficially betrothed to a prince; for your eldest sister to be in paid employment by a national newspaper, wandering around such places as the East End and docklands; and for you to be spending a weekend at a house party with a Russian lover. It seems to me the only one of you four girls doing things by the book is Iris.”
“Iris always has done things by the book. She’s very pleasant and very dull. And Prince Maxim Yurenev is not my lover. Though he may well be so after this weekend.”
Marigold had never understood the fuss that was made about losing virginity before marriage. To her, virginity had always seemed an unnecessary encumbrance, and she had been ecstatically happy when Theo had relieved her of it.
The problem, now she knew how delicious lovemaking was, was that not making love was extremely tedious, especially when she had an admirer as ardent as Maxim. And she wouldn’t be risking scandal by going to bed with Maxim. He was a Russian royal prince. He wouldn’t tell. In which case, all that would happen was that her reputation would remain exactly as it had been ever since her debutante year. She would be regarded as being “fast” and “not quite the thing,” but nothing worse. It was a conclusion that could lead to only one decision.
Two days later, as Marigold packed her weekend case, her excitement was at fever pitch.
Marchemont was more a faux French chateau than an English country house. Against a wooded hillside, fairy-tale turrets and steeples pierced the skyline. The vast parkland ran down to the sea and nearer to the house, on terraces and amid flower-filled parterres, peacocks strolled and white doves fluttered.
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Marigold’s hostess, Princess Zasulich, wizened and weighed down by twelve ropes of perfectly matched pearls reaching down to her knees, greeted her warmly without having the slightest idea as to whom she was, apart from the fact that her favorite nephew had wished her to be invited. As the princess continued greeting some of her other thirty guests it was her private opinion that Maxim’s bohemian-looking chère amie was probably an actress. She didn’t mind. The girl would add a little spice to the weekend. And in Princess Zasulich’s opinion, a little spice was always welcome.
Though it was customary for the bedroom of a married lady, if unaccompanied by her husband, to be sited conveniently close to the bedroom of her lover, such considerations were never shown to single young women of class. Actresses, however, were a different matter, and because Princess Zasulich was convinced Marigold was a member of the demimonde, Marigold was delighted to discover that Maxim would have very little distance to cover when he left his room for hers.
Until he did so, there was an afternoon and an evening to get through and she knew none of the other guests, all of whom were either Russian or French. Maxim, a regular guest at Marchemont, offered to walk her around the grounds.
“If we were in Russia, we wouldn’t consider Marchemont’s parkland very large,” he said, as they unobtrusively slid away from a game of croquet that was engaging everyone else’s attention. “But everything is vaster in Russia. The parkland at Verechenko, my family’s country home on the edge of the Black Sea, is as large as an English county.”
“Is Verechenko as superbly landscaped as Marchemont?” she asked, her hand tucked intimately in the crook of his arm as they walked so close together their hips almost touched.
“There are lakes, grottoes, fountains, panoramas. Perhaps one day you will see it for yourself.”
Marigold made no response. Maxim in London—or in Paris, Berlin, or even St. Petersburg—was one thing. Maxim on the shores of the Black Sea—somewhere so distant she wasn’t even sure where it was—was entirely another.
A little later, as they wandered through Marchemont’s magnificent orangery with small, brilliantly colored tropical birds flying above their heads, he again began rhapsodizing about Verechenko. She wondered if he was doing so because he had an ulterior motive; if he wanted to gauge her reactions to his descriptions of Verechenko because he was considering proposing to her and because, if she accepted him, he intended Verechenko to be their principal home.
Mentally, she tried out what her new name and title would then be. Princess Marigold Yurenev. It sent a thrill through her so urgent she didn’t see how she would be able to refuse him. To be known as Princess Marigold in London society would be wonderful. She wondered if people would curtsy to her.
Then she thought of having to leave England for Russia. From all she’d previously heard about Russia, that wasn’t an enticing prospect. Also, though Maxim could give her a title and a magnificently wealthy lifestyle, he didn’t have the added frisson of being politically powerful—and that frisson was one that meant an awful lot to her.
She thought of Theo and dug her nails into her palms.
At her great-aunt Sibyl’s dinner table, influential people such as Lord Lansdowne had spoken quite openly of Theo one day becoming prime minister. No Russian prince was likely to become the Russian prime minister. Even if such a thing were to happen, the real power would always be in the hands of the tsar who ruled as an autocrat. In Britain it was different. Britain was a constitutional monarchy, and the prime minister held far more real power than did the King.
The thought of never again sitting in on the kind of political conversations she so frequently sat in on at her great-aunt’s—together with the thought of living thousands of miles away on the shores of the Black Sea—made the prospect of becoming Princess Marigold a tad less appealing.
Maxim as a prospective lover was, though, very appealing.
She came to a halt beneath an orange tree. “I’m not in a hurry to return to the croquet match,” she said huskily, turning to face him.
Her mouth was ripe, her lips parted, her invitation blatant.
An expression flashed through his eyes that she couldn’t read, to be followed by one she read very clearly.
“Neither,” he said in a low taut voice as he pressed her back against the tree, “am I.”
His mouth came down swift and hard on hers. His knee pressed against the silk of her skirt, forcing its way between her legs, and his hand cupped her breast, his thumb moving over the thin material covering her hard, erect nipple.
It was as if a mask—there because polite society required it to be there—had slipped and something very primitive—something very Russian—had been unleashed.
It wasn’t the kind of lovemaking she had experienced with Theo, who had always been tender and considerate, but as every nerve ending she possessed screamed out for him to finish what he had begun, Marigold knew it was the kind of lovemaking she was more than ready for.
Chapter Twenty-Five
It was the second week of September and Lily was in her habitual place of retreat—her studio. Her bust of David stood on a black-slate plinth beneath the huge skylight, and her eyes turned to it frequently as she began work on a new sculpture—a tern in flight.
David hadn’t yet seen her finished bust of him and she wasn’t sure how he would feel about it when he did, for the mood she had struggled hard to convey was one of boyish wistfulness—the weltschmerz in his eyes that both Rose and her grandfather had been so aware of when first meeting him.
It was an expression that was seen only now when he was leaving Snowberry—and not always then, for when he took his leave he did so in the certainty of returning. She knew, though, that his underlying wistfulness at never being treated the same as other young men—at always having homage paid to him—would never leave him, that it had become an intrinsic part of his personality.
She was still at an early stage with her tern-in-flight sculpture and because she was finding it impossible to block David from her thoughts, it wasn’t going well. Fretfully, she laid down the tool she was working with.
For David, once it was publicly acknowledged that they were a couple, life would be easier. The things he found intolerable in royal life would no longer be intolerable to him when he had her by his side. For her, though, life wouldn’t be easier at all. Instead it would become difficult on a scale impossible to even imagine.
For a start, all privacy would be gone. Like David, she, too, would be on constant, lifelong public display. The prospect filled her with a horror so deep she felt physically sick. David had told her that his mother was seldom without a lady-in-waiting in attendance on her. Would she be expected to have a lady-in-waiting? If that was expected, how would she suffer someone’s constant company, unless the someone in question was one of her sisters?
She picked up a damp towel from her work top and wiped clay-sticky hands on it. Even for love of her sister, Rose would never give up her suffragette activities and her exciting burgeoning journalistic career to be a lady-in-waiting. Court life would hold no charms for Rose at all.
Marigold would adore the glamour of being a lady-in-waiting, but when the initial novelty wore off, she would resent the fact that she wasn’t the center of attention. Playing second fiddle to anyone—and especially to her baby sister—simply wasn’t in her nature. There was also the troubling question of Marigold’s naughtiness with men. How could she hope to have a moment’s peace of mind if she was constantly worrying about whether Marigold was behaving herself or not?
The sister most suitable for court life was Iris, who was always dignified and who never, under any circumstances, behaved badly. Iris, however, was marrying Toby at Christmas, and she didn’t think he would be pleased at the prospect of Iris regularly disappearing for three-month stints as a lady-in-waiting.
Homer, who had been lying at her feet as she worked, sensed her inner turmoil and hauled himself to a stand in order to offer what
comfort he could. She stroked his silky head. Not in any way at all was she looking forward to the kind of future that would come with marriage to David, but loving him as she did, neither could she bear the thought of his lonely misery if she wasn’t with him.
She spoke her thoughts out loud to Homer. “To be able to survive his royal burden, he needs to be able to share it,” she said to him. “And so if King George consents to our becoming betrothed, my future will be just as mapped out as David’s future is.”
Homer licked her hand encouragingly. As no one else seemed to understand, it was encouragement she was grateful for. Rose hadn’t actually said she disapproved, but Lily sensed she was appalled at the thought of becoming so closely connected to royalty and was fervently hoping that the King would withhold his consent and that no official announcement of an engagement would ever take place. If it did take place, she was certain Rose would think her entirely unprepared for the catastrophic changes that would follow.
Marigold, of course, was feverishly hoping that King George would give his blessing and that an announcement would be made as soon as possible, but Lily knew it hadn’t even crossed Marigold’s mind to sympathize with her over the loss of freedom that would then follow. All Marigold would ever see was the glitter that came with the title Princess of Wales. The burdens that also came with that title would completely pass her by.
Iris only saw that if King George gave his assent, Lily and David would be able to marry and be together for the rest of their lives. The idea that Lily was going to find it crucifyingly difficult to live the rest of her life in the public eye was not something that had yet occurred to her favorite sister.
There came the sound of the speaking tube being cleared and then Millie shouted into it: “I’ve just baked a Victoria sponge cake, Lily. Would you like me to bring a slice up to you, along with a cup of tea?”
