To Marry a Prince

by Page, Sophie

  ‘We’ll send a minder along, of course. And you must ask for any advice you want. But basically be yourself. Ver’ charming. Ver’ charming.’

  With the Royal seal of approval, it seemed Bella could not go wrong. Even Lady Pansy stopped arguing. Though the High Level Talks on the wedding dress nearly changed that.

  It was Lady Pansy, of course, who arranged the conference room and the coffee in the Palace. So she decided to take the initiative and invite four of her favourite designers to come too, in the afternoon, to present their ideas.

  ‘You did what?’ said Bella aghast, arriving before her support group.

  Lady Pansy was affronted. ‘Time is ticking away. You need to assign the contract today. Having the top four here will save time. Not all together, of course. You can talk to them in turn,’ she said kindly.

  Bella was tight-lipped. ‘You knew quite well that this was to be a planning meeting only. This is not helpful. Get rid of them.’

  But even her grandmother, when she arrived, said that it would be bad form to uninvite them at such short notice. So Bella gave in. She was still seething, though.

  However, the discussion itself was very useful. Everyone had a different perspective. Bella realised she wouldn’t have thought of half the points on her own.

  Janet said the most important thing Bella needed to think about was being comfortable. She would be standing a long time, she would have to move a fair amount, step backwards, go round corners, up steps, kneel and stand up again.

  ‘You have to feel that you can move in the dress without having to brace yourself every time, pet,’ her mother said earnestly. ‘There’s so much to do at a wedding. You want to be able to put your dress on and forget about it.’

  Lottie was the self-appointed Look of Now expert. She set up her laptop and delivered a PowerPoint presentation of some of the options, given current fashions. She had cleverly produced images of Richard and Bella which were to scale and transferred dresses across to slot on to the Bella figure.

  Every time anyone stopped speaking, Lady Pansy broke in with what the Queen had worn at her wedding, the Dowager Queen, Richard’s aunt the Princess Royal … She described the dresses in loving detail. They were all clearly meringue on the grand scale.

  Bella said clearly, ‘Thank you, Lady Pansy. We have understood the precedents very clearly now.’

  She was not seething any more. Her indignation had cooled to an icy determination to stop Lady P in her tracks. She stood up.

  ‘So let’s get this out of the way now. I will not go down the aisle to meet Richard wearing some vast crinoline that makes me look like the Dame in a provincial pantomime. It’s not my style. Please, everyone, strike that option now.’

  She sat down. Lottie applauded. Lady Pansy was temporarily hounded out of sweet superiority and glared with fury. Bella ignored her and turned to her grandmother on the other side of the conference table.

  ‘Georgia? You haven’t said anything yet. What do you think?’

  Georgia considered. ‘A wedding dress makes a big statement. And you need to remember what the back of it says. The photographs will all show the front. But in the church—’

  ‘Cathedral,’ put in Lady Pansy loudly.

  They all ignored that.

  ‘In the church everyone will be looking at your back throughout the service. That young man who likes to design backless wedding dresses seems to me to be asking the congregation to join the bride in – well, almost deceiving the bridegroom. Sneering at him, even. I’m sorry, Lottie. I don’t think they’re very kind.’

  ‘Hadn’t thought of that one,’ said Bella cheerfully, her temper restored. You could always rely on her grandmother to come out of left field. ‘OK, Georgia. Dress must be kind. What else?’

  Lady Pansy snorted audibly.

  ‘Of course, it’s all about the way line and colour are combined. Something very white and severe could say “I’m not for touching”, for instance. Myself, I think that some of those boned tops, which cut into the flesh, look as if the bride is constrained. In a straitjacket, if you will. Not comfortable and not … free.’

  Lottie laughed aloud. ‘Well, that’s knocked out the collections of at least three designers I know, Georgia. That’s narrowed it down.’

  ‘If you want my advice, Bella dear, I think you have to consider the message you want to give the congregation. And, more important even than that, the message you want to give your husband. He’s the most important person there for you, after all. Isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Bella, feeling her ears go pink and knowing there was not one single thing she could do about it. ‘Yes, he is. Good thinking, Batwoman.’

  But if the discussion was a success, the beauty parade of designers was not. Once they grasped that meringue was out, they pitched hard for their own most recent collections. Bella sat there with a frozen smile on her face, feeling it was more and more hopeless, until eventually one man said, ‘Everything happens around the Bride. A wedding is a picture, with the church and congregation as the frame, and the Bride the blank canvas to which I apply the image of the Day.’

  There was a brief flurry. Suddenly Georgia was on her feet, elegant and deadly.

  ‘May I clarify something?’ she said, very courteously. ‘You just said that my granddaughter is a blank canvas?’

  He did sense danger but not enough to sidestep it. ‘Just for the purposes of the Day …’ he began airily.

  He was stopped dead in his tracks.

  ‘You are a very silly man. You do not know how to do your job. Please leave.’

  That was when things changed, Bella thought afterwards. Up till then, the Press had either loved her or given her the benefit of the doubt. Even the grumpy Daily Despatch hadn’t actually attacked her. But soon there was a rumour that Bella had told favourite-of-the-stars designer Jonas Krump that he was a silly man who did not know how to do his job. And the backlash started.

  It wasn’t all bad. The Morning Times did a very nice piece about her family, including Neill’s upcoming appearance as a Viking, and ran a profile of her bridesmaids in their weekend supplement. A charities magazine did an evaluation of her first three months at the forestry project and said she was hard-working and inventive, with really sound hands-on experience from her time in the Indian Ocean. The women’s pages were generally pleased when she chose a younger British designer, Flora Hedderwick, to design The Dress.

  But LoyalSubjekt101 said she was a control freak with an ego problem, who didn’t care about British trade, the Royal Family or even the Prince of Wales. And other bloggers started to creep out of the ether, repeating the same story.

  ‘Bloody nonsense,’ said the King, storming into Lady Pansy’s office while Bella was there one Wednesday. He was in a fine temper, and knocked over a small table stacked with files as he fulminated.

  Lady Pansy, leaping to her feet, did not know whether to curtsey or rescue the files, so did a sort of wild salmon writhe until the King said, ‘Oh sit down, woman. Sit down.’

  This grumpiness was so unlike him that Bella was astonished. His colour was high, too.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she asked him.

  ‘Bastard reptiles, he said, not answering directly. ‘All they want to do is tear into people. Never mind who gets hurt. You carry on, my dear. You tell the truth – and if they don’t like it, tough.’ He turned on Lady Pansy. ‘And if any of them ask you, it’s no comment. Right?’

  And he stamped out, leaving Lady Pansy curtseying behind him.

  ‘I do think,’ she said in the soft, patronising voice that Bella was coming to loathe, ‘that it would be a lot easier if you were to move into the Palace, where you could be guided more, Bella dear.’

  ‘Bastard reptiles,’ floated back down the corridor.

  Bella’s lips twitched. ‘I think I’ve got it about right as far as His Majesty is concerned,’ she said.

  And left, with a spring in her step.

  If only she had known. />
  She spent Easter with the Royal Family at the Castle and, after lunch on Sunday, she and Richard drove down to Devon to cheer on Neill and his fellow Vikings the next day. The fields were full of green shoots and a brilliant spring sun made the budding trees look as if they had been studded with tiny emeralds.

  They had a perfect evening in the grounds of a small village pub tht led down to the river where the longboat was due to land the next day. In fact they were sitting there in the scented dark when Neill arrived, looking harassed.

  ‘We’ve got a problem, Sis,’ he told Bella. ‘Our celebrity has broken his hand, careless bugger, and we’re one oarsman short. Can you call Lottie? She said she’d try and get one of the Richmond lot to come along. At this stage, we can live without a celebrity. We just need someone to pull an oar.’

  Richard stretched lazily. ‘I can pull an oar,’ he remarked.

  Neill said, ‘I haven’t got her number. I’ve looked everywhere. I—’ He did a double take.

  ‘I can pull an oar. I was in the second eight at college. Of course, it wasn’t quite Viking style.’

  Neill said eagerly, ‘But you were pretty good when we were playing around that weekend.’ And then, ‘No. No, you can’t. We haven’t got a costume for you.’

  ‘What happened to the celebrity’s costume, then?’

  ‘I mean we haven’t got a costume for you.’

  ‘I don’t think Viking raiders had Prince of Wales feathers on their sea coats,’ said Richard dryly. ‘I’m up for it, if you are.’

  And of course, he did brilliantly. His springy hair kept pushing off his Viking helmet, so it had to be held on with elastic, but otherwise he looked the part fantastically. And when they came to land, he swaggered up with the rest of them, bare-chested and with a distinct glint in his eyes.

  ‘Sexy swine,’ said Bella, going to meet him along with all the other wives and girlfriends. ‘God, you smell good.’

  There was a lot of laughter and making faces at the camera but the wind had got up and soon enough the mighty oarsmen decided they could do with tee-shirts. And the tee-shirts, carried the logo of the sponsor, a hand-crafted biscuit manufacturer.

  It was on the internet by nightfall. Prince of Wales in Advertising Scandal. And there was Richard, in the green-and-white tee-shirt, with a tankard of ale in his hand and one arm round a laughing Bella, advertising Morgan’s Ginger Thins.

  Some said he was stupid and drunk. Some said he was stupid and calculating. Some said he was stupid and did what his bride-to-be told him to. Of course, every version of the story started with the fact that his fiancée’s brother was the reason Richard had become a Viking in the first place.

  Bella’s phone rang all the time. It felt as if the thing was vibrating with rage. Richard was inclined to shrug it off.

  ‘It’s bad luck about the sponsorship. But as long as Morgan’s don’t try to cash in – which would be very silly of them – I don’t think anyone will care, for long. The proceeds go to Sailing for the Disabled, after all. And I had a bloody good time. End of.’

  Only then his Father heard about it.

  By midnight the King was in hospital with a suspected heart attack.

  Richard suddenly went very quiet. A helicopter was scrambled to take him to London.

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ said Bella.

  But Richard shook his head. He looked pale and drawn but he was his usual calm self, contained, in control. Bella had never felt so far away from him, not even when they fought.

  ‘Better not,’ he said, as politely as if she were a stranger. ‘Someone has to drive the car back to London.’

  ‘You want me to do that?’

  ‘If you wouldn’t mind?’

  ‘Oh, my love.’ She went to put her arms round him but he evaded her embrace without really seeming to see it.

  ‘I’ll call you.’

  He doesn’t want me, Bella thought. He blames me. And he’s right. It’s my fault. Neill would never have agreed to let him in the boat if it weren’t for that silly game, rowing on the carpet at home, before Christmas.

  She swallowed. ‘Yes, do. Please. Call me as late as you like. I won’t go to sleep until you do.’

  ‘Yes. OK,’ he said, only half with her. ‘Got to go.’

  A kiss – barely a kiss at all, really – and he was gone.

  21

  ‘When One Thing Goes Wrong …!’ – Tube Talk

  Bella drove back very carefully the next day. She hadn’t slept much.

  Richard had rung to say that his father was in the King George IV Memorial Hospital for Officers and seemed to be stable. The doctors weren’t really sure what was going on. They’d done a blood test and results suggested a minor heart attack.

  ‘According to his valet he fell asleep over the television last night and then woke up and suddenly started talking scribble. That could have been because he was still half asleep. But it just might have been a small stroke, which is what’s worrying them. Madoc said he’s been short of breath a lot lately. And also there were a couple of odd episodes this week, when my father seemed very anxious about something. But Madoc didn’t press him and it seemed to pass. Classic symptoms of a mild heart attack, apparently. He’s being monitored round the clock at the moment. Anyway, the quacks say it isn’t life-threatening, though he needs to be careful.’

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘Me?’ Richard sounded drained but impeccably polite, as always. ‘I’m fine. The emergency was all over, pretty much, by the time I got here. My mother is shaken, though.’

  Bella just longed to be with him, to hold him. Somehow she couldn’t quite bring herself to say it. She did say, ‘What can I do?’

  He puffed out his breath as if he were trying to think of something for her to do, to make her feel better. ‘Bring the car back to Camelford House. I’ll make sure the Guard House are expecting you and don’t play any of their stupid tricks.’

  She knew he would too. Even when he was so tired he couldn’t see straight, even when he was desperately worried about his father, he would make sure that she did not have to lock horns with some jobsworth who wanted to show her she didn’t belong there. She thought her heart would break.

  ‘I’ll see you tomorrow then.’

  ‘What? Oh, yes. Tomorrow. Thank you.’ He was obviously about to put the phone down and added conscientiously, ‘Good night. Thank you for waiting up.’

  She did not know how long she sat there with tears falling silently. She loved him with all her heart but in his distress she could not get near him. It was like walking into a wall.

  Bella did not know Richard’s big car very well. Had only driven it a couple of times before, to move it in car parks and so on. But she was a good driver, steady and unflappable, and the tears had dried towards dawn. She delivered it safely to Camelford House by mid-afternoon.

  It was Fred, one of the nicer security men, in the Guard House when she put her head round the door.

  ‘Afternoon, Miss Greenwood. How’s His Majesty?’

  ‘On the mend, we hope, Fred. Has Prince Richard got back yet?’

  ‘Been and gone, miss. He’s over at the Palace with the Private Office. They’ll be rearranging diaries, I reckon.’

  ‘Yes.’ Yes, of course. She shouldn’t have needed a security officer to tell her that. ‘I’ll – just go then.’

  ‘Right you are, miss.’

  He took the keys from her and Bella wandered blindly out into the London streets. Should she join Richard? Would he want her? Or would she be just another burden that he had to carry and be polite to, in addition to everything else?

  There was only one way to find out. She half expected it to go to voice mail but he answered his phone after only three rings.

  ‘Bella. Where are you?’

  ‘Back in London. They tell me you’re at the Palace. Shall I come over ? Or—’

  ‘Yes,’ he said with urgency. ‘Yes, come now. That would be – yes.’

  A flun
key escorted her to a room she hadn’t seen before. It was long and thin, with several desks with slightly outdated computer screens on them, and wall-mounted clocks showing the time in Ottawa, New York, Kingston Jamaica, Paris, Rome, Delhi and Canberra.

  Richard was standing at a long folding table – it reminded Bella of a pasting table she had seen decorators use in her mother’s house – with three other men, looking at a huge roll of paper.

  He glanced up when she came in and surged towards her, almost lifting her off her feet with the strength of his hug.

  ‘I’m glad you’re here,’ he said, too quietly for anyone else to hear. ‘So glad. I wished I hadn’t gone off last night the moment I got into the helicopter. I wasn’t thinking straight.’

  ‘You were worried. We both were. What’s this?’

  He took her hand and led her towards the table. ‘My father’s schedule. He doesn’t hold with computers. He likes to see it mapped out in front of him.’

  It resembled nothing so much as a giant campaign plan. It was even colour-coded. One of the blocks of colour started in three days’ time. She looked at it hard.

  ‘But that’s—’

  ‘Australia,’ said Richard levelly. ‘Yes. My father and mother were due to fly out on Thursday on the first leg of an Asian Pacific Tour. Six weeks away. They’d get back just over a month before our wedding. It’s out of the question now. The King has to be under medical observation for at least a month.’

  ‘You’re going to cancel?’

  He held her hand very tight by his side. ‘No. Can’t do that. I will take over their schedule. Nell will accompany me to Australia and fulfil my mother’s programme there. My mother may join us later, depending on my father’s rate of recovery.’

  ‘So you don’t want me there?’

  ‘Oh, I want you all right,’ he said, with such bitter weariness that she had to believe him. ‘I just can’t have you. It’s not done. It’s not protocol, God help me. You’re not Royal yet.’