The Perils of Pursuing a Prince

by Julia London

  “I shall await you at the coach,” Harrison said, clearly eager to be gone.

  Mrs. Bowen folded her arms about her to warm herself. Lulu visibly shivered.

  “Well then,” Greer said, hesitating. “I suppose I must go now,” she said. “I shall miss you dearly.”

  “And we you, Miss Fairchild,” Mrs. Bowen said, who was now shivering alongside Lulu.

  “I will be on my way then,” she said, and glanced again at the door. Ifan looked at her expectantly; Mrs. Bowen and Lulu shivered more. Yet Greer could not seem to make her feet move.

  “Miss?” Ifan said.

  “Yes,” she said, and moved stiffly to the door, managing to put one foot and then the other across the threshold. Behind her, Ifan quickly pulled the door closed and gestured for her to accompany him. He walked quickly to the coach, where Harrison stood by the open door, his gloved hand held out to her.

  She reluctantly allowed him to hand her up. Harrison followed, taking the bench across from her.

  “Godspeed, Miss Fairchild,” Ifan said, and shut the door to the coach. She heard him shout up to the driver, saw him hurry back to the castle door to get out of the cold.

  “Take heart,” Harrison said kindly.

  The coach lurched forward, and the gray walls of the castle with the birds’ nests and the nicks and marks of ancient battles began to roll by. The big gates swung open; the coach lumbered through.

  Greer turned as the coach passed through the gates and saw a pair of red kite hawks fly out of some crevice and soar into the blue sky.

  She had no idea why, but seeing the red kites fly made her realize she could not leave, not without knowing how he had found Miss Yates, and she suddenly felt desperate to know. She had to know.

  Greer suddenly pounded on the ceiling. “Stop!” she shouted. “Stop!”

  “What are you doing?” Harrison exclaimed.

  “I forgot something,” she said breathlessly as the coach pitched to an abrupt halt. Greer was already out of the coach before anyone could climb down to help her. She was running as fast as she could on the tracks the coach had made in mud and slush, oblivious to Harrison’s shouts. The hood of her cloak slipped off her head as she picked up the garment and struggled to reach the courtyard before the gates swung shut and Llanmair was forever gone.

  Rhodrick was standing beside the window. As the coach rolled away, he clenched his jaw and pressed his palm to the cold glass. “It is for the best,” he muttered. “It is best.”

  As he was about to turn away—he could not bear to see the coach disappear altogether—he saw it come to a sudden stop.

  He paused; the door swung open and Greer all but fell out, righting herself at the last moment. She gathered her cloak in one hand and ran as Lord Harrison vaulted out after her. But Greer ran in the mire as best she could, almost as if she fled from someone or something, and quickly disappeared from his view as she neared the castle.

  Confused, Rhodrick turned and looked at the hearth, his mind and heart racing.

  Several minutes later, one of the dogs lifted its head, and he heard a commotion down the corridor. In another moment, she was at his door, her chest rising and falling with her panting, her cheeks flushed. She braced herself with both hands against the door frame and looked at him with eyes as wide as saucers.

  He self-consciously shoved a hand through his hair. “Have you forgotten something?”

  “How did you find her?” she rasped. “Please! I must know the answer, Rhodrick.”

  The question made his heart sink, and he abruptly turned away. “There is no point in treading over old ground—”

  “There is every point,” she insisted, coming into the room. “I have been wrong about everything else, and it is the only question remaining.”

  That earned his attention; he jerked his gaze to her and noticed that her eyes were glistening. “You’ve been wrong?”

  “Astoundingly wrong,” she said, flinging her arms wide in an effort to show him just how wrong as she struggled for breath.

  He turned fully toward her. His heart had begun to skip and drum erratically in his chest on a wild, ridiculous hope.

  “I thought the house…” She sighed, pressed her fists to her temple a moment. “I cannot seem to put aside the question of how you found her.”

  She looked up to him and clasped her hands together at her breast. Her blue eyes implored him as she moved deeper into the room, closer to him. “I am pleading with you now—tell me how you found her, I beg of you. Tell me how you found Miss Yates so that I might go back to London secure in the knowledge that I was right to deny myself the best and happiest thing I have ever known in my life!”

  “I cannot, Greer,” he said quietly, his heart and mind racing frantically. “I cannot.”

  “But why?” she cried. “What more can there be than what I have already made of it?”

  He wanted nothing more than to take her in his arms and confess all to her. “Because I could not bear to see the look in your eyes when you believe that I am mad.”

  “How can I think you mad?” she asked earnestly, her eyes glistening. “How can I think anything but that I love you?”

  The admission stunned him—Rhodrick suddenly understood that if he was to make her his as he desperately wanted to do, he had to tell her the truth. And there was nothing more to lose at this point. He summoned his courage and said simply, “Your mother showed me.”

  Greer paled. She seemed incapable of speech and sank heavily onto the chair at the hearth. It was as if she’d been wounded, was in some sort of pain. “M-my mother died almost fourteen years ago.”

  “Yes,” he said, nodding. “I am well aware.” He shoved both hands through his hair, trying to think how he might explain this madness. “I never even knew her. She was gone from Kendrick when I was just a lad.”

  Greer’s hand fluttered to her throat, to the place the amulet had hung. “Is this some sort of jest?” she asked weakly.

  “No,” he said with a firm shake of his head. “Would that it were.” He winced at Greer’s expression of horror. “Just…just hear me, Greer. Just listen, will you?”

  Her stunned expression was his reply.

  “There are many in Powys who believe in Welsh lore and magic, but I’ve never been among them. I’ve always rather thought that the belief in spirits was for the uneducated.”

  Greer blinked; she was unmoving, her gaze riveted on him.

  He looked helplessly at his hands. “As I told you, Morwena Yates was quite in love with Percy. She believed his wretched lies and held on to the absurd hope that he would make an honest woman of her. I know, for she told me as much. Of course I tried to dissuade her, but there was nothing I or her parents could do to convince her, and inevitably, Percy ruined her. It is as I told you—I sent her to Cornwall to bear her child and to take up a position as governess. But she returned, desperate to win his affection, and that night she appeared uninvited at Kendrick.” He glanced up at Greer and said bitterly, “I so foolishly let Kendrick to him.”

  Greer said nothing, but swallowed hard.

  “How shall I tell you this?” he asked, more of himself than of her. “How shall I relate what happened? You will think it madness, Greer, but when Miss Yates went missing, I knew she’d met with her death because I had dreamt it.”

  Greer’s sharp intake of breath was a knife to his heart. “Steel yourself, for I must tell you furthermore that…Alis Bronwyn, whom I knew as an older child when I was but a lad, and had met only once or twice when I came of age, came to me in a dream. She was standing at the door of Kendrick, beckoning me forward.”

  With a sound of great despair, Greer covered her mouth with her hand.

  He would lose her with the truth, Rhodrick thought, and turned away from her, finding the look on her face unbearable. “When in my dream I followed the…the apparition, I suppose you might call her, I saw the room where Miss Yates had been kept. I saw her there, going mad in that room.”

>   He dared not glance at Greer, dared not see the denunciation of his admittedly bizarre dream in her eyes. But he’d said too much to stop now, so he continued, “Naturally, I thought it only a dream.” The horror of it all began to rise up in him again.

  “A week or so later, my fears were confirmed when Mr. and Mrs. Yates called on me to relate that their daughter had gone missing. I confronted Percy, and he denied it. But I took myself to that room and found it, just as you saw it. That was when Mrs. Evans, who’d tended to Miss Yates, confessed that Miss Yates had escaped.

  “I organized search parties at once, of course. I rode every day, all day, to the point of exhaustion, looking for her and finding nothing. As you said, there are thousands of empty acres here.”

  He paused; it was difficult recounting this aloud. He’d refused to even think of it these last few years. “When…when I had given up all hope of finding her,” he said haltingly, “I had another dream. Your mother came to me again, standing at the door of Kendrick. This time, she whispered where I should look for Miss Yates. ‘The old canal bridge,’ she said.”

  He glanced at Greer from the corner of his eye. She was staring blankly at him, her eyes rimmed with an emotion he could not and dared not fathom.

  “I left before dawn the next morning, and I searched around the old canal bridge for the better part of the day. I found nothing, and naturally, I thought I was losing my mind. But she came to me again that night, and once again urged me to look at the old canal bridge.” He chuckled derisively at his own tale. “One might think with all the preternatural assistance I was receiving, I might have found Miss Yates. Yet I searched another day to no avail. On the third night, your mother showed me the precise place. She took me there in a dream. I could see Miss Yates plainly, lying at the bottom of the ravine.”

  He stopped and glanced heavenward. He had seen her lying there in the exact manner in which he later found her. “The next morning, I remembered the path and a peculiar fork. I rode again, and this time, I crawled down the steep embankment and I found her. She had fallen—or jumped—who can know considering her state of mind? But her neck was broken.”

  He dragged his gaze to Greer. Tears were glistening in her eyes, but she remained silent. “I should never have found her,” he said, his voice low. “No one should have found her, not as remote as her body was. I told the authorities that my dogs had found her. No one questioned it—I rather believe they all think that in the course of searching thousands of empty acres, the dogs and I stumbled upon her.”

  Greer said nothing. He waited, silently begging her to say something. But she didn’t speak; she covered her face with her hands and sobbed.

  Rhodrick could not possibly have felt worse. She was no doubt lamenting the surrender of her virtue to a madman, and an ugly one at that. He turned to the window and stared out at the crystal blue sky.

  He had no idea why, after all these years, he had voiced aloud the very thoughts he’d struggled to put away. The price of it was too great to pay, the pain of it unbearable.

  “I closed Kendrick, of course,” he said, wondering vaguely why he continued to talk. “Because such a heinous crime occurred there, and because of the ghost that had long been rumored to roam those halls—well before your mother was born—I was convinced it was prudent. And I did not dream of your mother again until you appeared on my doorstep in the company of Mr. Percy.”

  He glanced at her from the corner of his eye and felt a dangerous swell of sorrow and longing. “Admittedly, that night, I had been drinking quite a lot to dull the pain in my leg—but when I saw the amulet around your neck, and your…lovely blue eyes,” he said, almost choking on the words, “the only true color in this grayish world of mine, I mistakenly thought you were her. I did not realize the connection until you showed me the hand portrait. I recalled that she’d married, but I had quite forgotten the name of Vaughan. It is a rather common name in these parts. Since you have come, I have dreamed of her thrice more…always at the door of Kendrick, always beckoning me inside.”

  Greer continued sobbing quietly.

  “Please do stop,” he said. She did not move. He drew a deep breath and walked to her side. He withdrew the handkerchief from his pocket that he had carried with him every day since she’d come and went down on one knee before her. He touched her leg; Greer uncovered her face and looked at the handkerchief as he unfolded it, removing her amulet, which he’d put there for safekeeping and the ring he’d foolishly given her, and handed her the cloth.

  She looked at the amulet and ring in his hand, and the handkerchief she thought she’d lost, and understanding dawned in her eyes. More tears fell as she carefully took it from his hand.

  “Please stop,” he begged softly. “Your tears are unbearable for me, for I have loved you, Greer. I have loved you from the beginning of time, long before I ever met you. And now I have dashed all hope of loving you with my mad ramblings. There now,” he said, with a tender caress of her knee. “You have the answer you sought and Lord Harrison is waiting to take you home. There is no need to burden yourself further.”

  Greer did not get up and run from him as he’d hoped; she caught a sob in her throat and flung herself at him so suddenly that he scarcely caught her. She fell down on her knees before him and buried her face in his shoulder. Rhodrick tried to sit her up, but she clutched desperately at him, and he stilled, lifting his hands in the air, afraid to touch her.

  “Can you ever forgive me?” she sobbed. “Please forgive me, Rhodrick! I love you, I have loved you, too! To think that all this time, she was leading me to you and bringing me home where I belonged!”

  He grabbed her shoulders and forced her to look up. “What are you saying?”

  Greer dragged the back of her hand beneath her nose. “You are not mad! I know what you are telling me is true, because I have had those very dreams of her! Always standing at the door at Kendrick, smiling and beckoning me within! But the last times I have followed her inside, you have been waiting there!”

  She abruptly grabbed Rhodrick by the arms. “Don’t you see?” she demanded frantically, shaking him. “I have had a single dream of my mother for years. From the time I was a girl, after she died, I dreamt of her standing at the door of a big white house—a house I didn’t even know existed until I saw Kendrick. Rhodrick, I dreamt of Kendrick before I ever thought to come to Wales! She brought me to you,” she said wildly, taking his face in her hands. “She brought me to you.” She flung her arms around his neck and cried.

  Somewhere in the space of that moment, his heart began to pound so hard that he feared it would push through his skin. “But how—”

  “I don’t know!” Greer cried. “I scarcely care! But I know it is true, I know that she has given you to me. She has watched over me when I despaired what would become of me, and she led me to you.”

  Rhodrick pulled her arms from his neck, took her hand, and pressed it against his chest. “Do you feel it? It has not beat so wildly as this in thirty-eight years of living. It only began to beat when you came to Llanmair, Greer. You can’t leave me.” He grabbed her face between his hands, kissed her forehead, her nose, her lips. “Promise me you will never leave me.”

  “I can promise you no less,” she said. “I love you, Rhodi. Above all others, I love you.”

  For the first time in his life, Rhodrick felt his heart truly soar.

  Forty minutes later, Ifan led Lord Harrison to the portrait gallery, of all places, where the prince and Miss Fairchild stood. The prince’s hair was mussed, his neckcloth quite undone, and he was smiling like the village idiot.

  “Miss Fairchild,” Harrison said sternly, “the carriage is waiting. Are you coming?”

  “Carriage?” the prince casually repeated, then, as memory served, he nodded. “Yes, of course. You are no doubt in a hurry to be on your way, my lord, but I should hope you would stay until a special license is obtained and the vicar can join us.” He looked at Ifan. “Send for him, Ifan, will you, and a
special license. No, no, never mind. I shall fetch the license myself.”

  Next to him, Miss Fairchild giggled, and the prince smiled at Harrison. “You will stay, won’t you, Harrison?”

  And Rhodrick smiled broadly, as broadly as Ifan had ever seen him smile in his thirty-odd years of service at Llanmair. He blinked at his smiling lord, then bowed sharply and turned, walking briskly from the gallery. As he went, however, he was certain that he heard the prince laugh.

  He arrived in the foyer, where Mrs. Bowen and Lulu, freezing to death, waited for Miss Fairchild.

  “Well?” Mrs. Bowen asked.

  “Have her trunk brought in,” Ifan said, and rolled his eyes when the two women squealed with delight.

  Thirty-one

  D own on her knees, pinning the last folds of the gown she was making for Ava, who could scarcely fit into anything now that she was carrying a child, Phoebe had a mouthful of straight pins. She almost inhaled the lot of them when Lucille burst into the room, holding vellum aloft. “Lord Harrison has returned!” she cried.

  Phoebe quickly spit out the pins and sat back on her heels. “I swear it, Lucy, one day you will find me sprawled in a fit of apoplexy, you do startle me so. Has Greer come with him?”

  “However should I know?” Lucy asked. “Your sister Ava sent a messenger to say that you are to come soon, for Harrison will call on Middleton this afternoon.”

  “Oh!” Phoebe cried. “That can only mean she’s come home!”

  But when Phoebe arrived at Ava’s later that day, breathless and smiling, she found no one about but Ava, who paced restlessly in the salon, one hand on her growing belly, the other on the small of her back.

  “Has she come?” Phoebe asked, her smile fading.

  “I don’t know!” Ava said irritably. “I can’t understand why Harrison is being so coy, so I’ve sent Middleton over to have a look. It is just as I told Middleton—”