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The Golden Prince

Page 27

by Rebecca Dean


  The fact that Esher, the deputy constable and lieutenant governor of Windsor Castle, had been confided in when he, Craybourne, had not was, in his eyes, disgraceful. As the King’s private secretary, his role was that of the King’s chief adviser. He was the channel of communication between the King and his government. He informed and advised the King on all constitutional, governmental, and political matters. He, not Lord Esher, should have been the first person the King had confided in. But not only had the King not confided in him first; he hadn’t confided in him until three months after the event in question!

  “It seems incredible to me, sir, that Prince Edward could have met any young woman often enough to have formed a relationship of any kind,” he said, keeping his feelings in check only with the greatest difficulty. “Surely his equerry …”

  “Cullen knows nothing.” King George spat the words, his face a choleric purple. “Absolutely nothing. He was aghast when I confronted him with what David had told me. According to David, he was introduced to this … this strumpet … by Prince George of Battenberg.”

  He strode up and down the room, slamming a fist repeatedly into his palm. “Prince George admits introducing a female friend of his to David when on a visit to Dartmouth early this year. He says she was with a party of her friends—and that the girl David has become so obviously infatuated with must be one of them. His friend married a Canadian in August and has gone to live somewhere in Saskatchewan—he doesn’t know where.”

  “She must be traced. I’ll speak with Canada’s governor-general immediately.”

  King George came to an abrupt halt in the center of the room. “Grey mustn’t know why you’re doing so. There mustn’t be a whisper of this affair to anyone, Craybourne.”

  “Of course not, sir. But the sooner we know the identity of the young woman in question, the sooner we can put an end to this situation.”

  Though his face was impassive, his voice without an inflection of any kind, Craybourne was inwardly seething. Prince Edward had gone to the King to ask his permission to become betrothed, and King George, instead of controlling himself until Edward had told him the young woman’s name, had so violently lost his temper that David had prudently decided it was safer not to divulge it. And the farcical quagmire they were now in was the result.

  Lord Grey, Canada’s governor-general, would see to it that the information required was speedily with them, but because the King had chosen not to confide in him for so long, an unconscionable amount of time had been lost.

  King George returned to his desk and abruptly sat down behind it. “I want official negotiations immediately put in place for a marriage between David and the Grand Duchess Olga. I’ve already had the tsar’s unofficial written approval for such a union, but my cousin changes his mind according to whoever he last spoke with. Under the present circumstances, the sooner an official announcement can be made, the better.”

  The possibility of a marriage that would link Britain more closely with Russia had been discussed at length some months ago and had Craybourne’s wholehearted approval. It would be taken as a personal affront by the kaiser, who had a very marriageable nineteen-year-old daughter, but that was no bad thing. If anyone needed taking down a peg or two, it was Kaiser Wilhelm II.

  “Now,” King George said, “about my durbar and my state entry into Delhi. Why the devil am I to enter the city on a horse? Surely an elephant would be more appropriate? On ceremonial occasions Indian princes always ride on elephants. It’s a centuries-old tradition and, as India’s King-Emperor, it is what will be expected of me.”

  “I believe the decision was taken on the advice of the viceroy, sir. It is Lord Hardinge’s opinion that for reasons of safety and security, horses are preferable to elephants.”

  Aware that the King was about to robustly protest, he added, “Elephants are notoriously unstable beasts, sir. Hardinge says one ran amok and rampaged through the crowd earlier this year in Rajputana. The death toll was eighty-nine.”

  Whatever protest King George had been about to make remained unsaid.

  “Who will be riding on either side of me as I make my state entry into the city? The viceroy and India’s secretary of state?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The King gave one of his habitual “harrumphs.” Where his durbar was concerned, he had little to worry about. Though arrangements had had to be made on a mind-bogglingly vast scale, they were all in place. It wasn’t the durbar that was ruining his peace of mind. It was his eldest son.

  When his business with Lord Craybourne was finished and he was again on his own, the King remained at his desk, his hands clasped tightly together, his brow furrowed, his lips pursed. All his children had always been a mystery to him, but David had now become incomprehensible.

  Even if, on an afternoon of free time at the Naval College, he’d met up with Georgie Battenberg and then been introduced by Georgie to several young women, how had he managed to form a relationship with one of them? The aspect of the situation that so mystified Craybourne also mystified him.

  Though David had obviously managed to give Captain Cullen the slip when he’d gone to meet Georgie, he couldn’t possibly have given him the slip on a regular basis. He had no doubts at all that Cullen had been entirely ignorant of the meeting. The man’s bewilderment when he’d been told of it had been so profound it couldn’t possibly have been simulated.

  The devil of it was that he’d never expected David to act in such a monstrous way, not when he’d been made aware of his unique position in life ever since nursery days and when the concepts of duty and responsibility had, ever since, been ceaselessly drummed into him. George’s grandmother, Queen Victoria, had terrified his father, Edward VII, and his father had, in his turn, terrified him. It was a legacy King George felt was only right and proper when the parent in question was the sovereign, and he had always rigorously ensured it had been maintained. Or he thought he had. Now, having been confronted in such a way by David, he wasn’t at all sure that he’d terrified David enough.

  He pushed his chair away from his massive desk and rose to his feet. Even as a child there had been a perversity about David that his younger brothers and his sister hadn’t possessed.

  Brooding on David’s disturbing difference, George crossed to the cabinet where his Purdey shotguns were kept. Removing one of them, he took it back to the desk with him and withdrew his gun-cleaning kit from one of the desk’s deep lower drawers. Cleaning his guns always soothed him, though he doubted it would have the power to do so this time.

  Kings of England were notorious for having bad relations with their eldest sons—for very good reason George III couldn’t bear to have his son, the future George IV, within his sight. It wasn’t a situation he had ever imagined happening to himself, but David was already becoming an irritation in a way that the King doubted the far more tractable Bertie ever would be.

  He began disassembling the gun. Bertie, for instance, would never describe any ceremonial clothes he was required to wear as “a ridiculous outfit,” which was how David had referred to his investiture costume. Also, if Bertie were heir to the throne, he would never immediately change the subject whenever the words “when you become King” were mentioned to him, as David so infuriatingly did.

  He rammed a cleaning rod down the gun’s barrel. Just as English history was full of kings who had deplorable relationships with their eldest sons, so too it was full of instances where the second son, not the first, had eventually inherited the throne.

  Henry VIII, one of the most well-known of English kings—though not the best loved—only succeeded to the throne after his elder brother, Arthur, had died suddenly of an undefined illness at the age of fifteen. A hundred years or so later, Charles Stuart inherited the throne, becoming Charles I, when his elder brother, another Henry, died of typhoid. Far closer to home, he himself was a second son, only becoming heir to the throne when his beloved elder brother, Eddy, had died of influenza at age twenty-eight.

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nbsp; He picked up a cleaning cloth, reflecting on how different English history would have been if Arthur Tudor and Henry Stuart had lived, and how different his own life would have been if Eddy had lived. He wasn’t remotely imaginative, but May had been betrothed to Eddy at the time of Eddy’s death, and the thought of May being a sister-in-law to him, not a wife, made the hair at the back of his neck stand on end.

  He began polishing the inside of the Purdey’s choke. Such reflections on what-ifs where second sons were concerned were nonsensical. It wasn’t a situation that was going to afflict David and Bertie. However more tractable Bertie might be, he didn’t have the makings of a king. His stammer saw to that.

  A spasm of temper flooded through him. Why Bertie persisted in stammering when he knew how intensely annoying everyone found it, he couldn’t understand. It wasn’t as if Bertie hadn’t been taken to task about it. “Spit it out, boy!” he roared at him every time Bertie spent five minutes trying to say something that should have taken only seconds. No matter how much he bellowed, it never made any difference. Bertie only stammered worse than ever.

  And David, as well as having an admirable speaking voice—even Winston Churchill, famous for his oratory, had commented on how well he had spoken at his investiture—also had great appeal.

  Appeal some unknown girl had immediately latched on to.

  He flung down the cleaning cloth in exasperation. If David’s escapade with the friend of one of Georgie Battenberg’s friends was anything to go by, the sooner he was safely betrothed and married, the better. He only hoped Nicky wasn’t going to shilly-shally over a public announcement of David and Olga’s betrothal. Nicky was a terrible vacillator, and when push came to shove, he wouldn’t want one of his dearly loved daughters leaving Russia, no matter that she’d be leaving it to become Princess of Wales and the future Queen of England.

  As for David … David was going to have a very big surprise if he thought he was going to return from his tour of duty aboard the Hindustan and immediately speak to him yet again about this damned girl he wished to marry. The less that was said between them, the better it would be. In five days he and May were to leave for India aboard the Medina, the latest addition to the P & O fleet and a vessel blessed with a suitably Eastern-sounding name. In those intervening five days he would refuse to see and to speak with David. And by the time he and May returned from India, the girl in question would have been located and bought off, and David would, if he knew what was good for him, have forgotten all about her.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Theo Jethney was a man with a great deal of care on his shoulders, for Jerusha was not well. Always very slender, she had now become rake thin. The headaches that had plagued her for well over a year were increasing in both number and severity, and none of the doctors he had taken her to had been able to put an end to them. All of them, from their family doctor to the consultant he had taken her to on Harley Street, had said the same thing. Jerusha’s problem was her age. Though she was a little young to be so, at forty-five she was already in early menopause. Headaches often afflicted women during the menopause. When her hot flushes began—as they were bound to do at any time—the headaches would cease.

  Although he was able to express his anxieties about Jerusha’s health to friends in a general way, he had no one he could discuss the specifics of it with. He could hardly discuss Jerusha’s early menopause with the prime minister, the home secretary, or any other of his male friends. Herbert, for instance, would be completely at a loss, and embarrassed. What he needed was a close female relative, and he didn’t have one.

  What he could do, he did. No matter how heavy his governmental workload, he ceased the habit of staying the night in town. However late the House sat, he always returned to his Hampshire estate, giving Jerusha the comfort of his presence every single moment he possibly could.

  His guilt at having been so obsessed with Marigold was total. It wasn’t that his feelings toward her had changed. His feelings for her were something completely beyond his control, and he was certain that they would never change. What had changed, though, was that she was now no longer uppermost in his thoughts. His thoughts were all of Jerusha. He couldn’t bear seeing her lying in their darkened bedroom, a cold compress against her eyes as she bravely rode out yet another bout of crippling pain.

  The only time he now ventured out into society—and he only did so when Jerusha was deep in an exhausted sleep—was when he visited Herbert at Snowberry. With Marigold as permanently at Sibyl’s as Rose was, it was something he could do with his old ease.

  There wasn’t quite the same old ease about Snowberry, though. There was something in the atmosphere that he couldn’t quite put his finger on—a kind of suppressed tension. Since it was tension Marigold wasn’t there to cause, he could only imagine that Iris’s forthcoming wedding to Toby Mulholland was responsible for it.

  Iris was certainly a young woman transformed by love. Always the plain Jane of the family, radiant happiness ensured she was a plain Jane no more.

  “I’ve never been so happy in all my life,” she had confided to him on one of his visits, “and a Christmas wedding is going to be perfect. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if it snowed?”

  Herbert, too, was deeply happy at the prospect of Iris marrying Toby. “I was at the boy’s christening,” he’d said to Theo as they sat companionably together in the drawing room, brandies to hand. “He’s been in and out of Snowberry ever since he could walk.”

  “Do you intend that he should run the estate?” he’d asked, knowing how much his aged friend had previously relied first on Rose, and then on Iris, to do so.

  Herbert had chuckled. “That’s the best part of having him as a grandson-in-law. He’s been raised to run Sissbury and so managing Snowberry will be no problem for him. At one point the Snowberry estate runs side by side with Sissbury’s.”

  That it was convenient, Theo had to admit. And not just for Herbert.

  Not liking the way his thoughts were going, he had changed the subject, asking after Rose and then, because it would have seemed extremely odd not to have done so, asking after Marigold as well.

  “Rose is now a very independent modern young woman,” Herbert had said with pride. “Your friend Mr. Green thinks very highly of her. She writes regularly on suffragette issues, has also reported on the investiture and other important events, and, this week, her subject was the effect the new National Insurance Bill will have on domestic servants.”

  “So it was Rose who was responsible for that piece, was it? There was no byline.” It had intrigued him that there hadn’t been. “Why was that?” he’d asked, surprised that Hal wasn’t making capital out of publishing straight news items written by a woman.

  Herbert’s response had begun happily enough, but then tailed off into confusion. “Oh,” he’d said, “it was thought best Rose didn’t bring attention to herself. Not at the moment. Not when Lily and …”

  He’d broken off so suddenly that for a second Theo thought he’d been taken ill.

  “Not when Lily has not yet been presented and when having a sister doing something so scandalous as writing for a national newspaper might rebound on her,” he had finished, flustered.

  Because Lily couldn’t now be presented at court until next summer—and since she probably wasn’t fussed about being presented at all—it was reasoning that had bewildered Theo. He had, however, put Herbert’s odd reply down to the fact that he was growing increasingly vague and confused—which was the main reason Toby would be managing the estate for him—and that it wasn’t the first time he’d lost track midsentence.

  Making a quick recovery, Herbert had changed the subject. “As for Marigold,” he’d said, swirling the brandy around in his glass, “it would seem she is on the verge of becoming a princess. Prince Maxim Yurenev has been her constant escort for some time now, and I believe a spring wedding is in the offing. It’s a match that will please her mother—he’s one of the richest young men in Russia—an
d that sort of thing matters to her. It will mean Marigold would live for much of the year in St. Petersburg and the Crimea, though, and I don’t like the prospect of that. The dear girl never fails to keep me entertained. Did you know she was learning Italian?”

  Theo hadn’t known, and he thought it rather unlikely. If Marigold was in the process of learning a foreign language, surely the language she would be learning was Russian?

  He didn’t have to wonder how he felt about the prospect of her marrying Prince Yurenev. He knew how he felt. He felt a sense of inappropriate, colossal loss. To get married at the earliest opportunity was, though, what he had advised her to do. And she would be deliriously happy at becoming a princess. All in all, it was the very best thing that could happen, for without a shadow of a doubt he knew he would never again play a romantic part in her life, or anyone else’s.

  Jerusha’s ill health had shown him very clearly how much she meant to him, and where his loyalties lay. He would never be unfaithful to her again. The thought of causing her more pain than the pain she was already suffering was unthinkable.

  Lily liked the fact that after a long period of absence from Snowberry, Lord Jethney was again a frequent visitor. In the first week of December, he arrived when there was no one at home but herself. She had been working on her tern-in-flight sculpture when William had called up through the speaking tube that Lord Jethney was in the drawing room.

  “No one else is here, I’m afraid,” she’d said minutes later, hurrying into the drawing room still wearing her working smock. “Grandpapa is in Winchester for the day, and Iris is in London for the final fitting of her wedding gown.”

  “Ah, yes.” He was dressed casually in a tweed suit and a soft-collared shirt. “Only another five days until the big day.” He smiled at her fondly. “Jerusha and I are looking forward to it immensely.” Eyeing her clay-spattered smock, he said apologetically, “You’re working and I’ve interrupted you. I’m sorry.”

 

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