The Summer Queen

by Margaret Pemberton

  For a moment or two May couldn’t see him, either, and then a group of tourists moved away from where they had been watching workmen redoing the cathedral’s facade in white-and-green marble and she had a clear view of him. Dressed in a cream cutaway jacket, white flannels, a flamboyantly patterned floppy silk bow-tie and a straw boater, he was in conversation with a well-dressed Italian.

  For a few seconds, enjoying being able to look at Mr Thaddy when he was unaware of her doing so, May didn’t draw Miss Light’s attention to him. Below his boater, his dark hair curled low into his neck and, against sun-bronzed skin, his blue-black immaculately trimmed pencil moustache gave him an even more Italian look than that of the man he was speaking to.

  She drew in a quick little breath, aware, for the first time, of the similarities between Mr Thaddy and Eddy. At twenty-three, Mr Thaddy was only three years older than Eddy and both of them were tall, dark-haired and, although Eddy wasn’t sun-bronzed, he had such a naturally olive-tone to his complexion that it was a Wales family joke that dear Eddy didn’t look at all English. Just as she was wondering if she was destined to go through life being attracted only to men who looked Mediterranean, Miss Light closed her parasol with a snap, saying triumphantly, ‘There he is! Mr Thaddy! Mr Thaddy!’

  He waved in acknowledgement, ended his conversation and, with loose-limbed ease, strode across to them.

  ‘I am so looking forward to this, Mr Thaddy,’ Miss Light said as they entered the cathedral’s vast, impressive interior. ‘I can’t tell you how foolish I feel for not already being familiar with this particular sculpture.’

  ‘Then I hope it will not disappoint.’

  When they were ten yards into the cathedral he came to a halt and gently turned her around.

  ‘Now, Miss Light. Look upwards and to your left.’

  Miss Light did so, drew in her breath and said, ‘Oh, I am glad you have pointed him out to me. You are quite right in that he looks very bored and also, I think, rather lonely, positioned as he is away from all the cathedral’s other tomb memorials.’

  ‘That, I think, is because he is not one of Florence’s better-known bishops.’

  ‘Indeed he is not,’ a plummy elderly male voice said from behind them. ‘How nice to run into you so unexpectedly, Bianca. Would your young friends mind if I stole your company for a half-hour or so, in order to catch up on family gossip?’

  Miss Light was kissed on either cheek, introductions were made and it was agreed that Miss Light and her cousin, a gentleman who was relying heavily on a walking stick, would spend some time sitting companionably together in the coolness of the Duomo.

  May and Thaddeus watched them make their way towards the nave and a pew, and then Thaddeus quirked an eyebrow. ‘As we are both so familiar with the Duomo, would you like to spend the next half an hour having an iced lemonade at one of the cafes in the piazza?’

  It was a loaded question. Even though he had become so close a friend of the family that her parents regarded him almost as if he were family, convention ensured that she had never been alone with him. When he came to I Cedri to paint her portrait, her mother always joined them. On countryside excursions, when Rowena and Belinda were also with them, so was Miss Light – a chaperone, even though she was never openly referred to as such. In the many months they had known each other, this was the first time they been alone together.

  May knew what her response should be. She should decline the invitation and instead remain with Mr Thaddy in the Duomo, admiring artworks long familiar to both of them and keeping well within sight of Miss Light and her cousin.

  Instead she said, ‘Thank you, Mr Thaddy. Iced lemonade would be most welcome.’

  He proffered his arm. She slid her net-gloved hand into its crook and, before Miss Light could remember her duties as a chaperone and hastily re-join them, they walked briskly together out of the Duomo and into the still-strong sunlight.

  ‘The heat doesn’t seem to trouble you as much as it does your mother,’ he commented as they began crossing the crowded piazza.

  ‘No, it doesn’t. At I Cedri I can nearly always find a cool place to sit, and I enjoy Florence’s heat. It’s far preferable to an often-chill English summer.’

  He shot her a quick smile. ‘Or a distinctly wet Irish one, which is why I like living here.’

  ‘I like living here as well.’ She was relieved that he was as easy to talk to when they were on their own as he was when they were with other people. ‘I like it so much I never want to live anywhere else.’

  ‘Where Florence is concerned, I feel like that, too, although I suppose I will eventually return to Dublin.’ They sidestepped a man selling toy monkeys-on-a-stick from a tray. ‘Your father tells me you have another year – perhaps even another two years – before you all return to London.’

  ‘What I would like,’ she said, putting her daydream into words for the first time, ‘is not to return to London at all. I would like to continue living in Florence. I would like Florence to be my home, not just for a year or two while my parents are here, but for always.’

  His eyebrows rose. ‘But surely such a thing is not possible? It would never be allowed for any young unmarried woman – and certainly not one who addresses Queen Victoria as “Aunt Queen”!’

  ‘It might be allowed, if I have a suitable lady companion living with me. Someone similar to Miss Light, for instance.’

  They had reached the far side of the piazza, and a cafe with outdoor tables set beneath an awning. Waiters hurried over. Chairs were pulled out for them. Careful to make enough room for her bustle, May sat down.

  Shocked at the realization of how serious she was, Thaddeus suppressed the desire for a large whiskey and said to the young man waiting for their order, ‘Due limonate con ghiaccio, per favore.’

  The waiter nodded and hurried away and Thaddeus said, concerned, ‘I’m sorry, May. I’m afraid not even Miss Light’s presence would make the situation you are envisaging possible.’

  She bit her lip and looked away from him, but not before he had seen that he had dashed something she had been seriously hoping for. After a few moments she said bleakly, ‘I’m sorry. At heart, I always knew it was impossible. It would have been so nice, though, if it hadn’t been.’

  ‘But why?’ He was mystified. Although he had always been sensible enough not to show it and to embarrass either May or himself, he was deeply attracted to her. He liked her quiet manner, her natural dignity, her sense of fun and quick intelligence. He liked the way her hair was neither blonde nor brown, but a tantalizing mixture of both shades, and the way it was shot through with strands of dark gold. He liked the way she had become so passionate about Renaissance art, and how her eyes shone with enthusiasm whenever it was under discussion.

  The waiter served them their lemonades and May replied, ‘In London, being royal means I live a very different kind of life from that which I live here. Friendships can only be made within the family – and no one within the family is interested in the kind of things that I’m interested in.’

  ‘Which are?’

  ‘Art and history, and making visits to galleries and museums.’

  He frowned. ‘But some of them must be, surely? In their palaces and castles the British royal family is surrounded by some of the greatest paintings in the world.’

  ‘True, but the walls could be bare and, other than Papa and me, no one would notice. Although I think Eddy would,’ she added. ‘I think if someone took the time to introduce Eddy to art, he would be very interested in it.’

  ‘Eddy?’ Thaddeus was regretting his decision not to have ordered a whiskey. ‘Eddy, as in His Royal Highness Prince Albert Victor?’

  May nodded, and he was interested to see a faint rise of colour in her cheeks. He took a long sip of his lemonade. Their conversation had crossed boundaries that had never been discussed before. In revealing her desire to remain in Florence permanently, May had been treating him not just as a family friend, but as an intimate personal
friend who could be trusted with a confidence. As such, there was something he wanted to ask her.

  ‘I would like it,’ he said, as they rose to their feet to leave, ‘if you dropped the name your mama has christened me with, and which everyone uses now, and began calling me Thaddeus.’

  ‘Thank you, Thaddeus.’ The faint colour in her cheeks deepened. ‘I would like that very much.’

  She slipped her hand into the crook of his arm and together, looking like a very handsome couple, they stepped out of the shade of the awning and into the brilliant sunshine of the piazza.

  Chapter Eleven

  MAY 1886, MARLBOROUGH HOUSE

  ‘Come on, Maudie. Don’t be a spoilsport,’ Frank Teck pleaded.

  In the privacy of a neglected summerhouse, he had succeeded in fighting his way beyond the innumerable pearl buttons on the bodice of her dress, had defeated a silk chemise, an underbodice, a corset protector and was now at the last bastion: her corset.

  The milky-pale half-moons of her breasts rose tantalizingly above stiff whaleboning and he urgently wanted to free them. He wanted to cup them in his hands. He wanted to see if her nipples were a rosy-red or a pale pink and, whatever colour they were, he wanted to kiss them. He wanted to kiss them so much he could hardly breathe.

  Maudie had no intention of letting him do any such thing. Over the last few months she had discovered that the only way she could be sure of Frank’s company was if she allowed him certain liberties – liberties that, if anyone else knew about them, would result in disastrous consequences for both of them. It wasn’t as if she had even embarked on her debutante year yet, and Frank was several months younger than she was.

  ‘Please.’ He was breathing heavily, feeling as if he was going to burst. ‘If you won’t let me lift them out, lift them out yourself, Maudie. It would mean such a lot to me. Really it would.’

  Because all through her childhood she had trailed after Frank, longing for him to take notice of her, and because he had only rarely done so, the new-found power that her body had over him was intoxicating.

  ‘I will,’ she said, ‘if you promise, on your mother’s life, that you will only look and won’t try and touch them.’

  Frank groaned. Looking wasn’t what he’d had in mind, but he was desperate enough to know that it was better than nothing – and that, after doing it once, a barrier would be broken and she would be happy to do it again, whenever he asked it of her.

  ‘All right, Maudie. You win. I promise.’

  Fascinated that it took so little to bring a sixteen-year-old to his knees, Maudie obliged.

  Frank seriously began to wonder if he should ask his parents if he could marry Maudie. When not pushed up by her corset, her breasts were smaller than he had imagined, but they were pert and as firm as apples, and her nipples were a wonderful deep silky red. The Maudie who was able to offer such delights was a far cry from the Maudie who, until a few weeks ago, he had regarded as a tiresome nuisance.

  ‘That’s it. You’ve looked long enough.’

  Maudie stuffed her nipples back below the hard rim of her corset and began rearranging her corset protector, underbodice and chemise.

  ‘Help me with these buttons, will you?’ she said, when it came to buttoning up the bodice of her dress. ‘There must be at least twenty of them.’

  He did as she asked and then said, ‘Another kiss before we go back to the house, Maudie.’

  ‘No.’ It wasn’t that she didn’t want to kiss him again, but an instinct as old as time told her that the more she rationed the liberties she was giving him, the more eager for them Frank would be.

  Having enough sense to realize she meant what she said, Frank followed her out of the summerhouse and across the vast rear lawn of Marlborough House. Until his new-found relationship with Maudie, he had never been as regular a visitor there as May and his older brother, Dolly, had always been. Toria and Looloo had never been of any interest to him and there was a five-and six-year age difference between him and Georgie and Eddy. When they had been children, it had been an age difference that had mattered. Now, when it might not have mattered quite so much, Georgie was a lieutenant aboard Uncle Affie Edinburgh’s flagship in the Mediterranean and was seldom home on leave and, after he had left Cambridge, Eddy had begun officer training at the Hussars’ riding school at Aldershot.

  He didn’t envy Georgie his life at sea, but he did envy Eddy the glamour of his Hussars uniform and what he suspected was now, unknown to his parents and his grandmother, the raciness of his private life. His own future was also to be the Army, and Frank couldn’t wait until the day he began officer training at Sandhurst and, as he was sure Eddy was doing, started a secret life of gambling and womanizing.

  ‘Do get a move on, Frank.’ Maudie was striding out as much as her narrow ankle-length day-gown allowed her to. ‘It’s beginning to rain.’

  Frank hurried unenthusiastically to catch up. Now the weather had changed, there would be no alternative but to join May, Looloo and Toria in one of the drawing rooms, and that would mean passing the time playing cards – although not for money and so, to Frank, pointless – or in a game of Halma, or helping with a jigsaw.

  He cheered himself up by thinking of how, when Maudie joined in with one of her family’s boring pastimes, he could beat the boredom by mentally summoning up the image of her standing before him in the summerhouse, her gown unbuttoned to the waist, her underclothes in disarray and her wonderful tip-tilted, creamy-white breasts fully exposed to his appreciative gaze.

  ‘Where on earth have you two been?’ Toria asked as they walked into the drawing room. ‘We wanted to play Halma, but as there were only three of us, we couldn’t.’

  ‘Two of you could have.’ Frank did his best to sound reasonable and not exasperated, ‘and as there are now five of us, if you do have a game, one of us will have to sit it out. And before you start puzzling who that should be, Toria, I’ll be the one to volunteer.’

  Toria, who would have preferred it to be Maudie who volunteered, began setting the board with more force than was necessary.

  ‘Did you play much Halma to while away the tedium when you lived in Florence, May?’ Looloo asked, her curiosity sincere.

  ‘No, I don’t believe we did.’ May seated herself at the table, ready to play. ‘I don’t remember there being any tedium when we were in Florence.’

  ‘But what did you do? I thought there was nothing to do in Florence but visit boring galleries and museums?’

  ‘There are certainly plenty of both of those, but they are far from being boring, and I loved visiting them.’ She was so overcome with the longing to be back in Florence that she had difficulty keeping her voice steady. ‘There is also lovely countryside within easy walking distance of the town, and the most stunning wild flowers – flowers that we never see in England. There were always lots of parties being given: afternoon parties, tennis parties, even musical mandolin parties. There were Saturday dinner parties, and my mama would sing and we would play charades. Sometimes there was a small dance. And on top of all that, there were painting classes and singing lessons to go to, and lots of new people to make friends with.’

  She thought of Rowena, Belinda, Miss Light and Thaddeus, and a lump formed in her throat. In the two years since she had left Florence, all four of them had written to her, and she had received a letter from Thaddeus only that morning. His letter had been posted not from Florence, but from Algiers, where he had gone to study Oriental art. His interest in Orientalism had sparked her own interest in it, and whenever she could persuade her mother to accompany her, May had visited London galleries to see first-hand examples of Orientalist paintings.

  Frank had called her a bluestocking, which meant he thought her passion for self-education was distinctly unfeminine.

  ‘I don’t see why it should be thought so,’ she had said crossly. ‘I’d far rather read a book, or visit a gallery, than sit gossiping about which member of the family is destined to marry another member o
f the family – especially when it’s often someone they barely know and, if they do know, have no particular liking for.’

  As if she had been reading May’s mind, Toria said, as she made the opening move on the Halma board, ‘Aunt Beatrice says Granny Queen has a list of German princesses, any one of which would make Eddy a suitable bride – or will make him a suitable bride, when they become of marriageable age.’

  Maudie’s eyebrows lifted. ‘Poor Eddy. He’s not going to want to be pushed into marriage in the same way he was pushed into spending years at sea with Georgie. He’s only twenty-two.’

  From the depths of an armchair where he had been pretending to be interested in a Horse & Hound magazine, while all the while imagining Maudie with her gown unbuttoned to the waist, Frank said, ‘Your Grandpa Albert was only twenty when he married Granny Queen, and your papa was only twenty-one when he and your mama married. Going by family example, Eddy is being very lax in his reluctance to marry at twenty-two.’

  With Maudie’s attention being taken up by Frank, and with May staring at the Halma board without giving any indication of actually seeing it, Toria took the opportunity to hop-jump her checker four squares across the board.

  ‘Mossy would make a nice sister-in-law,’ Looloo said. ‘I wonder if she is on Granny Queen’s list? I like Mossy.’

  Mossy was fourteen-year-old Margaret of Prussia, Willy’s youngest sister and, unlike Toria, Looloo and Maudie, not a member of the family with whom May had ever spent time.

  ‘Not Mossy, when her sister Moretta is at least five years older and still not spoken for.’ Maudie was trying to keep her attention on the Halma board and the conversation, but it was difficult when she was so aware of Frank looking at her with a very lustful expression in his eyes.