Cheesecake? Mousse? Profiteroles? Not exactly the kind of thing that she currently had a hankering for, but it would have to do for now, she thought, as she began loading up her plate.
Straightening up and backing away from the cart—figuring that, probably, it would be fair to give someone else a crack at it—her senses were confronted with the ephemeral, fleeting aroma of exactly what she had been looking for. It seemed to be passing right by her, and she wheeled suddenly, trying to catch onto it before it disappeared completely.
And so it transpired that, as she wheeled, she collided with the Prince who, on this occasion, had opted for making a beeline straight up the middle.
And, for the second time that day, Daisy Silverman went down for the count.
• • •
She came to gradually, revived by the scent that had captured her attention just prior to the collision. Dimly, she took in the sound of a vaguely familiar voice uttering an imperious command.
“Quick, Sturgeon! Fetch a glass of water!”
Eyes still closed, she inhaled a full measure of her all-time favorite combo: chocolate and peppermint. In this particular chocolate, she discerned the musky odor of a high-priced but fun-loving trollop, while the peppermint on offer extended the cleanly virginal promise that one’s innocence might be regained. She felt her nostrils quivering involuntarily as the firmly supportive hand under her elbow assisted her to her feet.
Rising slowly, still feeling unsure of her footing, Daisy found herself brown-eye-to-flesh with the largest biological instrument for listening that she had ever encountered in her life. The whorls of the canal seemed to go on forever. It might have been the result of an optical illusion, brought about by such unusually close proximity, but she could have sworn that Dumbo had nothing on this specimen.
The Ear was the single most erotic organ that Daisy had ever seen.
Straightening to her fully extended, vertically challenged stature, Daisy found herself raptly gazing up at the face that was attached to The Ear. It was the face of…
“Oh, my God! Charley!”
“Sturgeon!” he called, unable to tear his own focus away from the sheer openness of the face that was looking up into his. “Haven’t you managed to locate a single glass of water in this entire place yet?”
Sturgess, slightly miffed at being drafted into service as a common waiter, deemed it prudent to break the electrical current by drawing the still stunned Daisy off to one side.
“Miss,” he began, trying to come across as gently forceful and magisterially suggestive at the same time. He endeavored to keep his voice down so as not to draw undue attention to what was fast becoming A Situation. “One cannot address the Prince of Wales as ‘Charley.’”
“Why ever not?” Daisy asked dreamily, staring back at the place where her new acquaintance still stood. She smiled shyly and, lifting her hand, sketched a little wave by wiggling her fingers.
No one, to Sturgess’s knowledge, had ever asked that question before. He drew himself up to his full height. “Because it simply is not something that one does.” He could see already that lessons in protocol were not going to be easy with this one. “Upon first being presented to the Prince of Wales, one is to initially address him as ‘Your Highness.’”
“But I wasn’t presented to him,” Daisy cheerfully protested. “I fell at his feet.”
“Be that as it may,” Sturgess pressed onward, clearing his throat. He refused to allow himself to become caught up in the details. “If, following the initial encounter, one is permitted to remain in the Royal presence long enough so that a second address becomes required, one may use the more simplified title of ‘Sir.’”
“You must be out of your mind,” Daisy laughed, returning to her democratic senses. “I mean, he may be special,” she added, thinking of The Ear, “but let’s not go overboard here.”
The spell broken for the moment, she turned and faced Sturgess, really seeing him for the first time. “And how does one address you? Is your name really Sturgeon?”
“God, no,” came the unguarded, and therefore unprecedented, reply.
Daisy looked first at the Prince, then back at Sturgess, and finally back to the Prince again. She was clearly confused. “But I could have sworn he said—”
“Sturgeon is merely the, er, nickname that His Highness chooses to address me by,” he hurriedly supplied, backpedaling like mad.
“And if one wished to address you by the name that you were meant, and possibly prefer, to be called?”
Sincerely praying that his answer would in no way imply a dissatisfaction or a criticism of his betters, that worthy servant replied, “That would be Sturgess, Miss.”
Sturgeon, Sturgeon, Sturgess? Daisy glimpsed an unfortunate pattern developing here and, deciding that it was high time that someone took it upon themselves to do something about it, called for an emergency nomination. She unanimously—if unilaterally—elected herself, and would have marched straight back to the patiently waiting Prince of Wales were it not for the fact that her twisted ankle rendered the straight march more of a listed hobble, her beeline a pathetic s-curve.
“I can’t believe that you do that all the time,” she accused, helping herself to a champagne glass that had ventured too close within her orbit.
“What?” the Prince enquired absently. Earlier his stomach had been growling. (Embassy parties were notorious for their meager pickings, and besides, who wanted to eat with all of those strangers staring at you, hoping to catch sight of a Royal with spinach stuck between his teeth or a milk mustache? “Got milk?” He thought not. Much better to wait until after.) But now he found his appetite had completely deserted him. He couldn’t quite put his finger on what was so bewitching: The Girl or the ethereal-like quality of The Dress?
“I can’t believe that you call him Sturgeon all of the time, when his real name is Sturgess.”
“It is?”
“Don’t you know how important a person’s name can be to them, Charley?”
The moonish perplexity on the Prince’s face made manifest that, clearly, he did not.
“Even if a person absolutely hates their name, it’s still their own.” And here, she could feel herself about to fly off on some tenuously related—at least, one could hope—tangent, but was powerless to stop herself.
“When my father named me Daisy, he doomed me to a life that would always be at least partially juvenile. Can you just hear what Daisy Thatcher would have sounded like? Kind of loses something, if you ask me. I doubt that anyone would have ever nicknamed me Old Iron Girdle, or whatever it was they used to call her.”
Daisy noticed that a veritable paddock of horsy-looking women on the sidelines were all shooting daggers at her, but she chose to ignore them and barreled blithely on, pursuing instead what she was sure would be her winning point. “I mean, one can only presume that there’s a good reason why you didn’t name your own two sons Gaston and Alonzo. So, you see then, it would be okay if, for instance, I were to call him Sturgeon. Because then it would be to show that I liked him, not because I couldn’t or wouldn’t be bothered with remembering his proper name.”
The Prince suddenly found himself in need of a glass of champagne after all. Badly.
He thought that he could glean just the dimmest outline of a point that he could respond to in there, somewhere. But then, he thought, looking at her, did it really matter?
Leaving Daisy and Sturgess to fight it out for supremacy of the satay tray, he flagged down a passing waiter and, helping himself to a glass, decided that it was time to respond to something. Anything would do, really. The important thing, at this juncture, was merely to get the point across that he was not a mute.
“I could try to change.” He was surprised to hear the spoken words offered in his own voice, tentatively.
“Hah!” she returned with a mildly mocking laugh. “Almost no one ever can, even if they want to. It’s only when you’re not trying at all that those things seem to just happen to you.�
� She gave the matter some further thought. “And often, it’s a change for the worse.”
“You know this whole name thing, which you have so kindly brought up, has called to mind a memory from my youth,” the Prince confided, choosing to drive down a different street. “As a child, I always imagined that my real name was something more sturdy, like Richard Blake, and that I’d been switched with Charles Windsor at birth.”
Daisy grabbed onto his sleeve, laughing. “And I always pretended mine was something more sophisticated, like Catherine Harkness!”
The Prince laughed along with her. “And is that your family name, Daisy? Harkness?”
The lights in the hall had dimmed and a quartet, set up in one corner, launched itself on a showcase of Billy Joel tunes. Daisy—uncertain if the nausea aroused in her stomach was the result of too much champagne or if it had been brought on by the cellist’s overly zealous rendition of “Uptown Girl”—snagged a healthy slice of mille feuille off of the pastry trolley before answering. Unfortunately for her, she committed the tactical social error of trying to speak with food in her mouth.
“No, it’s Daisy Sil—” And this was where she began to choke, one of the thousand layers of feuille having become as firmly lodged in her esophagus as it is possible for pastry to become lodged.
As her face turned blue, the Prince’s blanched white with worry. “Sturgess!” he demanded. “Do you think that we could have a little Heimlich over here, please?”
As Sturgess administered the required first aid, Daisy tried valiantly to complete her sentence, but the only thing that she was able to come up with—immediately subsequent to the ejection of the offending pastry—was a single sibilant “S—”
“Ah, I see,” said the Prince, putting one and two together, as he rubbed her back solicitously, the concern still evident on his face. “Daisy Sills is it, then? What a perfectly charming name.” He was relieved to see that his patient was looking much better, and he gratefully accepted that single glass of water that Sturgess had finally managed to procure. Using the sky blue silk handkerchief from his breast pocket to daub at the stain on his lapel, he wondered idly if the palace dry cleaner would be able to remove saliva and pastry stains from wool. Well, no matter, really; there were, after all, a lot of other suits in the world, he concluded, passing the silk handkerchief along to Sturgess who, having momentarily disappeared again, had re-materialized with an amazing second glass of water for Daisy. “I believe that I used to know a Major Sills in Dorchester. But probably no relation, what?”
Daisy, who would have liked to have cleared up the mix-up concerning her family name, had just taken a big gulp from her own glass of water and, now reluctant to speak with any consumable at all in her mouth, felt the moment pass her by.
Meanwhile, the Prince was experiencing his own technical difficulties concerning the mechanics of polite conversation. Completely taken by the charms of Daisy—which were beginning to outweigh the opalescent splendor of The Dress—for once in his life, the King of Small Talk was at a dead loss as to what to say to a relatively strange woman at an embassy party. The old fertilizer standby probably wouldn’t do here. And, the quartet having now embarked on the “Delilah” portion of their Tom Jones retrospective, well, there was clearly nothing neutrally inoffensive that one could say about that.
Casting about for a source of inspiration, the Royal glance chanced to fall upon Daisy’s most original choice of formal footwear. Noticing the sock and neon-pink-laced sneaker for the first time, he commented brightly, “Oh! Aren’t you clever to have worn your trainers? I wish I’d thought to do that. My feet do get so sore at these things. Sturgess, make a note.”
What? shrieked the blatantly bewildered expression on Daisy’s face.
Perceiving that, perhaps, his conversational gambit had not been received in quite the manner in which it was intended, he plunged ahead. “So, Daisy Sills, where do you hail from?”
A part of her still wanted to correct the whole name thing, but she found herself, curiously, just answering the question that had been asked. “I’m from Danbury; it’s in Connecticut.” She was about to explain where Connecticut was, when the Prince interjected robustly.
“Ah, yes!” he cried, glad to find himself in the comfortable midst of a topic of which he knew something. “Hat City! How your people must have despised President Kennedy.”
Realizing that he must assume that “her people” owned Danbury, Daisy replied, “Well, it did devastate the industry, but somehow Daddy managed to survive with his fortunes intact.” Daddy? Now where had that come from? Could Mumsy be so very far behind?
Which was kind of the truth, since Kennedy’s refusal to wear a top hat to his inauguration really had had no discernible effect on Herbert Silverman’s economic status as a septic man. Silverman’s Septic had muddled through far worse.
“And the rest of the city?” persisted the Prince. “How have the rest of the citizenry managed to hold up?”
“Well,” Daisy replied, tentatively, cognizant of the fact that the incident to which he referred had taken place nearly forty years ago. “I do believe, Charley, that most of them have managed to get on with their lives by now.” Not wishing to pursue the idea of “her people” any longer—although, technically, she did have people, only not quite in the sense that he meant and, anyway, they were all dead—she decided that it was best to turn the conversational tables on him.
“And how about you? What was it like growing up in the palace, knowing that some day this would all be yours?” she asked, her gesture only wide enough to encompass the immediate vicinity, but intended to convey the vastness of Great Britain and the Commonwealth.
Regardless of the fact that the earnest query was a tad bit Oprah, the Prince found himself smiling inwardly at the refreshing display of candor. He knew that this was the question that piqued the curiosity of everyone who had ever met him, but that they were invariably too intimidated, or too intent on appearing blasé, to ask. This reticence on the part of others had proven just as well—at least, in the past. For it had prevented him from having to disabuse people of their dearly cherished illusions.
The truth of the matter was that his existence, to date, had been neither as hedonistic nor as dreadful as most people suspected. Rather, it had mostly just been boring. Until now, at any rate.
Still, in spite of his previous reluctance to publicly delve into his own past, there was something about this upturned and open face that made him want to answer Daisy as honestly as possible.
“Well,” he began slowly, with a self-effacing grimace, “it’s actually a terribly long story. Are you certain that you would be up for it?”
“I’ve got all night,” Daisy replied, not even thinking about what she might be letting herself in for. “And I’m all ears,” she added hastily.
“Oh,” the Prince responded, his lips parting to evince a smile, the unguarded radiance of which the world had hardly ever seen. The effect was dazzling. “You too?”
• • •
“Mother always said that she wanted a normal, ordinary life for her children.”
What was she, nuts? was the very first thought that popped into Daisy’s mind. But for the time being, Miss Sills—nee Silverman—was wisely keeping her own counsel.
• • •
“Then it was off to school when I was eight. That was all Father’s doing. You know the old story: If it was good enough for him… God, how I hated it there.” The Prince sighed heavily, attempting to shrug off the memory as if he were having a bad LSD flashback. “Still, I don’t suppose it was his fault, really. After all, he did have his own difficult childhood to contend with.”
He was trying to put on a good face, but Daisy wasn’t having any of that. Besides, she could clearly see Sturgess, who was standing the requisite three paces to the rear, begin to roll his eyes.
“Your father sounds like the ultimate doctor’s wife to me,” she put in, helping herself to just a little bit more of that
lovely champagne. She wasn’t usually much of a drinker, but while she was imbibing this stuff, she didn’t seem to notice the throbbing in her ankle. So, you could say, that it was actually keeping her on her feet. That is, of course, providing that it didn’t knock her on her butt again.
• • •
“The investiture—not to put too fine a point on it—was a bitch. One might imagine it to be a moving experience, but one would be quite wrong. Why, you should have heard the razzing I took about it at school. ‘Saw you on the telly the other day with your mum, Charles. Lovely hat you had on. Looked quite a bit like my aunt, Hermione. Was that real ermine on the collar of your dress, then? Must have killed an awful lot of poor defenseless animals for that one.’ Mind you, this was back at the end of the sixties, everyone’s consciousness was being raised—love and equality for your fellow animal and all of that. Of course, they didn’t actually say all of those things directly to my face, but I could hear them. At any rate, my therapist says—considering what my life has been like so far—that it is truly amazing, but that I don’t seem to be suffering from paranoia in the least.”
• • •
“You know, when I was really small, I suffered from knocked knees; had to go around wearing these dreadful orthopedic shoes. It was something of a relief, really, when my sister Anne came along and proved to be quite a good rider and sailor. Took a bit of the pressure off. But then, of course, it did become a smidgen old quite fast, Father always going on in that obnoxiously hearty way that he has—perhaps while he was plugging a pigeon over the palace or something—‘Why can’t you be more like your sister, Charles?’ One tries to exercise patience, but it can be tiresome.”
• • •
“Bringing girls home was never easy.”
Daisy’s ears pricked up at that.
• • •
“It is difficult, always having to keep a detective with one. Although,” he hastily added, “I must say, that Sturgess is, by far, the very best that I have ever had. Still, there is a loneliness that is peculiar to an existence that must always be lived out in the presence of other people. I find that I am never so alone as when I am in a crowd. The handful of times that I have ever been permitted to be completely and physically alone have proven to be the few times that I have ever felt remotely at home in this body. Or as if it even belonged to me.”
Falling for Prince Charles Page 5
