The Golden Prince

by Rebecca Dean

  He was just about to demand Lily’s address again when Homer growled for a second time, his hackles rising,

  This time Iris did nothing to restrain him.

  Knowing he was beaten, knowing he would get no more information from her, he swung on his heel, slamming doors behind him as he stormed from the house. The only relatives of Lily whom he knew of were her great-aunt Sibyl and Sibyl’s grandson, Rory Sinclair. As her great-aunt apparently lived year-round on St. James’s Street, it had to mean that Lily was with the Sinclair branch of the family—and he knew exactly where the Sinclair family home was sited. It was on the banks of Loch Gruinart, on the Isle of Islay.

  He went by rail to Inverness. Changed trains there for a train on the local line to Tarbert, and from there he caught a Western Isles ferry to Islay.

  In the cold and damp of February he could never remember a more miserable journey. The sea was rough. The ferry basic in the extreme. Even though he was a Scot himself, he couldn’t for the life of him work out why Rory Sinclair was happy to make the journey as regularly as he did.

  As he stood freezing on Port Askaig’s jetty, asking where he could find a taxi, the only thing keeping his temper in check was the certainty that within a very little while he would be with her again. This time she was going to listen to him. This time she was going to see sense.

  There was, it turned out, only one motorized taxi on the island, and as well as smelling of stale cigarette smoke, it gave him a preposterously uncomfortable ride.

  With his thoughts centered entirely on Lily he took little interest in the magnificent scenery. As they crossed the island from east to west, the driver said in a thick Scottish burr, “There be Loch Indaal on your left, sir.”

  Piers noted that it looked more like a bay than a loch, but he was otherwise uninterested. He was trying to imagine Lily’s surprise when she saw him. Her look of delighted pleasure.

  The driver turned inland on a narrow single-track road. There was moorland on either side of them crisscrossed by rivulets of shining water. After a much shorter time than it had taken to drive from Port Askaig to Loch Indaal, another sea loch opened in front of them.

  “Gruinart,” his driver said helpfully. “Castle Dounreay be nearly at the mouth of the loch.”

  He’d known, of course, that his destination was a castle. What else would an annoying prick like Rory Sinclair have as a home?

  It proved to be an extremely pretty castle, which made Piers even angrier than ever. As they drew up to it a flock of geese flew low across the sky. He wondered if there were many sightings of golden eagles on Islay. In the Highlands, where he had been brought up, the giant birds could quite often be sighted, circling high in the mountains and then swooping down at ferocious speed to kill their prey.

  “Wait for me,” he said curtly to the driver. It wasn’t because he anticipated being with Lily only for a short time; he didn’t. But he was hardly going to be invited to stay the night, and he couldn’t count on anyone being willing to give him a lift back to Port Askaig and the nearest hotel.

  To his stunned surprise it wasn’t an old family retainer who opened the door to him, but Rory. If he was surprised at being faced with Rory—who he had assumed was in London, beavering away in the Foreign Office—Rory was flabbergasted at being faced so unexpectedly with Piers.

  “What the devil …” he began, hardly able to believe his eyes.

  Piers didn’t waste time in being polite. “I believe Lily is staying with you,” he said bluntly. “I need to speak with her.”

  “You need to what?”

  “I need to speak with Lily.”

  Rory, resplendent in tweed jacket, kilt, and sporran, led the way into a drawing room that didn’t look much different from the drawing room at Snowberry. There were comfy sofas and chairs covered in chintz, a half-finished jigsaw puzzle on a table, a log fire roaring away in a fireplace big enough to roast an ox.

  Rory crossed the room to where a silver drinks tray stood on a Georgian sideboard. Removing the stopper from a cut-glass decanter, he poured a generous three thimblefuls of whiskey into two glasses.

  “Lily,” he said, handing one of the glasses to Piers, “isn’t here. What made you think she would be?”

  Piers blinked, his disappointment so shattering he could hardly assimilate it. “I went to Snowberry to see her, and Iris told me she was staying with relatives. The only relatives I know of are you and your grandmother.”

  Rory didn’t correct him. If Piers didn’t know that Lily’s mother was alive and well and living in Paris, he wasn’t going to enlighten him. Like Iris, he, too, knew exactly what Piers’s agenda was with regard to Lily—and though he hated the thought of Lily becoming engaged to the Prince of Wales, he felt downright revulsion at the thought of her becoming engaged to Piers Cullen.

  “I’ve no idea where Lily is.” It was a lie, but he’d no problem at all in telling it. He took a deep swallow of his whiskey. “I think it’s time someone told you that you’re wasting your time where Lily is concerned. She isn’t interested in you.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong!” Piers knocked back his whiskey in one great gulp. “She was on the point of accepting a proposal from me when Edward stuck his oar in!” His eyes were black and bitter. “And all to what purpose?” he continued, letting fly with his feelings. “He’ll never be allowed to marry her. Not in a million years. I want her to see what an absolute impossibility such a marriage is, and I want her to understand that I know why she accepted his proposal. Any girl her age would have her head turned if a prince proposed to her. But it doesn’t mean she’s in love with him, because I don’t believe she is.”

  “You don’t know a damn thing about Lily!” Rory’s own feelings where Lily and David’s love affair was concerned were too emotionally charged for him to suffer listening to Piers spout on about it. “You’ve built something up in your mind that has absolutely no foundation in reality. Stop pestering her. Stop visiting Snowberry. You may be damned right that permission will never be given for Edward and Lily to marry, but if he isn’t able to marry her, she isn’t going to turn to you!”

  “She’ll turn to me, because I’m going to forgive her.”

  “Forgive her? Forgive her?”

  It was such a pompous, sanctimonious, self-righteous remark that Rory couldn’t contain himself. He slammed his glass down on the nearest surface, bunched his fist, and sent it straight-armed into Piers’s jaw.

  Totally unprepared for it, Piers went flying, sending tables and the lamps on them crashing to the floor.

  Amid broken glass, he struggled to his feet and launched himself at Rory, who was ready and waiting for him. It was a fight that could have gone on for hours, for both were tall and tough and superbly fit, but the uproar could be heard all over the castle and half a dozen people ran from all directions into the room.

  When a six-foot-three, seventeen-stone ghillie, who had been in the kitchen paying his respects to the cook, joined in with the task of trying to separate them, the fight was over.

  “You’ll regret this, Sinclair!” Piers shouted as he was forcibly escorted out to the waiting taxi, blood still pumping from his nose. “I’m going to marry Lily! You just wait and see!”

  “Like hell you will!”

  Piers clambered into the taxi and as the driver fired the engine, Rory tore himself free of the ghillie’s restraining hold.

  He raced toward the car, but the driver was too quick for him and was already picking up speed.

  Coming to a floundering defeated halt in its wake, Rory shouted after it at the top of his lungs, “If Edward doesn’t marry her, Cullen, it won’t be you she’ll then marry! It will be me!”

  Two weeks later, when he was back in London, Rory gave Rose an edited account of what had happened.

  “I know I shouldn’t have behaved like that, Rose,” he said as they sat over cups of tea in a small café near the Foreign Office, “but I was so damned mad with him, I could have killed him.”<
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  “If you had, Lily’s hopes of marrying David would have gone straight out of the window. Can you imagine the headline? ‘Friend of Prince Edward Kills Equerry.’ ”

  Rory gave a wry smile. “Your editor chappie would be pleased by it. You’d be able to write nearly a firsthand account.”

  Not wanting to think about Hal, she changed the subject. “Before Piers hared off to Islay, Iris had a run-in with him at Snowberry. It was over the same thing. He wanted to know where Lily was. I can’t help wondering if we should tell Lily—warn her. We all know Piers has become obsessed by her, but Lily, bless her heart, hasn’t a clue.”

  Rory said, “Let’s talk about something else, shall we? I was sorry to miss Lady Jethney’s funeral. She was a lovely lady and I shall miss her. Were there lots of prominent members of the government there?”

  Rose nodded. “The prime minister was there, as were Winston Churchill and the new home secretary. The really touching thing was how many ordinary, local people were there. The church where the service was held dates from the fifteenth century, and it was so packed that people were standing in crowds outside it in order to pay their respects.”

  She didn’t describe Jerusha’s coffin, laden with a wreath of yellow roses from her two sons and a wreath of white roses from Theo. Nor did she even attempt to describe Theo’s grief. Beneath his beaver-collared coat his massive shoulders had been bowed, his face ashen as the words of the Twenty-third Psalm filled the church. Afterward the congregation had sung Jerusha’s favorite hymn, “Abide with Me.”

  Marigold, who had been standing next to Rose, had sung the hymn with tears streaming down her face. Their grandfather had taken hold of her hand, squeezing it comfortingly. Iris hadn’t trusted herself to sing at all.

  When the service was over, Rose had returned to St. James’s Street with Marigold. Marigold had wanted to be back in London because she was dining with Maxim that evening, and Rose had wanted to be back in London because she had an early morning meeting the following day with Hal. This time their meeting was to be in his office at the Daily Despatch.

  As she and Rory left the café together she thought about that meeting and how difficult she now found it to control her feelings when she was with Hal. He had wanted to see her to brief her about the next newspaper piece he wanted from her.

  “I want you to write a woman’s impressions of the luxury liners now plowing to and fro across the Atlantic,” he’d said, pushing his chair away from his desk and stretching his legs out in front of him, crossing them casually at the ankles.

  Though she’d tried not to look, she hadn’t been able to avoid seeing that his suspenders that day were not purple, but a deep wine-red.

  “But they are not a new thing,” she’d said, disappointed the assignment wasn’t more challenging. “They’ve become quite commonplace.”

  “The liner due to sail on her maiden voyage next month isn’t commonplace.” He’d flashed her a smile that had turned her knees to jelly. “The Titanic is the biggest liner ever built. She’s gigantic, Rose. She has a swimming pool, a ballroom, a gymnasium, a Turkish bath. They say she’s unsinkable. Harland & Wolff are allowing the press aboard her a week before she sails, and I have a press pass here for you.”

  He’d leaned forward and handed her a small white card.

  She’d said, becoming interested, “Where is she berthed?”

  “Southampton.” There’d been amusement in his voice. “Nice and handy for your home at Snowberry.”

  She hadn’t responded. She now found it so difficult being in his company that she was always stilted with him, terrified that if she wasn’t, there would be a repetition of the time his hand had touched hers and then all her emotions would again be plunged into jangling chaos.

  He had watched her intently as if trying to read her mind, his gray eyes concerned. “You don’t seem to be yourself, Rose.” Rising to his feet, he’d rounded the desk to where she was sitting and put a hand gently on her shoulder.

  A tremor she hadn’t been able to control had run through her.

  When he spoke, it was in a manner quite different from his usual casual familiarity. “I’d like it if you would have dinner with me tonight, Rose. Nothing to do with work. Just the two of us and champagne and perhaps a little dancing … ?”

  It was an invitation she had known would come—and because she had known it would come, she had given a lot of thought as to how she would handle it. None of her practice runs had been as hard as this, though, when he was so near to her she could hardly breathe for wanting to step into his arms.

  “No, thank you,” she had said in a voice that didn’t seem like hers at all and that couldn’t have been more stiffly polite if she had been refusing an offer of a cup of tea.

  “Then perhaps tomorrow night?”

  “No.” Her throat had been tight and dry, and for a dizzying second she’d thought she was going to be unable to continue, and then, standing by her belief that romance had no part to play in the life of someone as militant as she had determined to be, she’d risen to her feet and said, “Please don’t ask me again because the answer will always be the same.”

  As if she had slapped him, a shutter had come down over his face. Then, his eyes unreadable, he’d stepped away from her, saying as if the scene between them had never taken place, “The luxury liners piece. You’ll do it?”

  “Of course.” And with the press pass clutched in her hand she’d left the office, trying not to think of how wonderful an evening it would have been, dining and dancing with Hal.

  “She turned me down flat.”

  Hal was having his usual weekly lunch at the Savoy with his uncle, Lord Westcliff. Quite often the lunches were 90 percent business. Lord Westcliff was a press baron who, even with someone he was as fond of as he was of Hal, didn’t indulge much in small talk. Hal, however, had never before discussed his love life with him. That he was doing so now showed how deep his feelings for the girl in question were and how much her rejection of him had hurt.

  “If she’s a suffragette, as you say she is, maybe she would have turned any man down flat.”

  Hal knew very well what his uncle was insinuating. He shook his head. “No, she isn’t a lesbian. If she was, I’d have sensed it long ago.”

  Lord Westcliff took a drink of excellent Margaux and speared a mushroom. “Then maybe there’s a man in her life already.”

  Hal, uninterested in eating, pushed his barely touched plate of beef bourguignon to one side. “No, I don’t think that’s it either.”

  “Then what the devil do you think?”

  Hal said ruefully, “I think she doesn’t find me at all appealing—and that wild horses wouldn’t tempt her to spend time with me over a candlelit dinner table.”

  The chill of February had turned into a very mild March, and Marigold had persuaded Maxim to take her out in a rowboat on the Serpentine. Hyde Park was her favorite London park and though it was as full as usual with nannies pushing prams, apart from their own rowboat, the lake was deserted.

  Marigold, in a caramel-colored coat with a fox collar and wearing a fox fur hat, was reclining on a seat at one end of the boat as Maxim, just as elegantly and inappropriately dressed for boating, was manning the oars at the other end of it.

  It was very peaceful, with no sound but the rhythmic splash of the oars. It was, Marigold felt, the perfect setting for a proposal of marriage and as Maxim rested the oars in the oarlocks and said, “Marigold, my sweet, there’s something very important I have to say to you,” she was almost certain that the moment she had been waiting for had, at last, come.

  “Yes?” She smiled across at him expectantly, the fox fur emphasizing the color of her hair and her flawless cream and apricot complexion.

  He tilted his head a little to one side as if wondering how to begin, and then he leaned toward her a little, his hands clasped between his knees, a ruby ring glittering on the little finger of his left hand. He said: “In two days’ time my engagement
to Lady Anne Greveney will be announced in the Times. Obviously I want you to be the first to know.”

  She blinked, wondering if she had heard correctly and then, satisfied that she had, she said crossly, “I don’t like being teased, Maxim—and with a tease that isn’t even funny.”

  “It wasn’t meant to be funny, and it wasn’t a tease.”

  For a second she was too taken aback to move, and then she sat bolt upright, the color vanishing from her face. “But you can’t marry Anne Greveney!” The idea was so preposterous she felt as if she were going to faint. “You’re in love with me! It’s me you’re going to marry!”

  He shook his head, the spring sun highlighting the Slavic lines of his face, the faint hollow under the high cheekbones, the sensual mouth. “No,” he said. “I’m not, Marigold. I’m going to marry Anne. But that doesn’t mean anything need change between us. There’ll be a month or two when we won’t be able to see each other—I’m taking Anne to St. Petersburg and the Crimea for our honeymoon—but once we return to England the two of us can continue nearly exactly as we have been doing.”

  It was how a man would speak to a paid mistress—to a prostitute—and with a searing flash of insight, she realized that was exactly how he regarded her, only she hadn’t been paid with money, but with gifts. She also knew, without even being told, that Anne Greveney hadn’t slept with Maxim and wouldn’t until their wedding night, and that the day she, Marigold, had tumbled with such abandon into his bed was the day she’d ensured she would never become Princess Yurenev.

  She sprang to her feet, oblivious of the violent rocking of the boat, oblivious of anything but her rage at his unfairness in regarding her as being unmarriageable simply because she’d allowed him to become her lover.

  “Sit back down,” he said sharply. “You’re going to tip the boat over.”