The Golden Prince (24 page)

After six months, when Queen Alexandra had still not moved out of Buckingham Palace and when the royal family, Queen Alexandra included, were at Sandringham for Christmas, May traveled back to London, taking advantage of her mother-in-law’s absence to have her belongings moved into temporary quarters in the palace her husband always referred to as “the Sepulchre.”

It had been an action so uncompromising that Motherdear’s removal to Marlborough House had taken place almost immediately.

Since then Queen Mary had not spent an idle moment. Sepulchral-like the palace might be—her late father-in-law had detested its musty smell so intensely that he had spent as little time as possible there—but she had been determined that it wouldn’t
remain so. What it needed was redecorating and renovating. She’d had very radical ideas as to how such work should be done.

“Each room devoted to a particular period of history and style of furniture?” her husband had said to her, his protuberant blue eyes full of doubt. “Surely that will look very odd, May? Even museums aren’t set out like that.”

“Maybe not,” she had said with stark simplicity, “but I think that perhaps they should be.”

King George, who had other things on his mind—not least Mr. Asquith’s insistence that he create enough peers to ensure the passage of bills such as the budget through the House of Lords—had said that he was sure that she knew best, and he returned his attention to the difficult question of how to deal with a querulous prime minister.

The problem troubling Queen Mary was a very different one, and she was pondering it in the private sitting room leading off her bedroom. For once—and it was something that happened rarely—she was alone, without a lady-in-waiting in attendance. Seated at her secretaire, she was in the middle of writing a letter to her late mother’s sister, the Grand Duchess Augusta of Mecklenburg-Strelitz.

Her elderly aunt had been a first cousin of Queen Victoria and, because of her age, was a vast reservoir of information on generations of royal marriages.

May looked down thoughtfully at the sentence she had just written.

Remembering that Queen Victoria’s daughter Vicky was only fifteen when Crown Prince Friedrich of Prussia came to Balmoral to propose to her, she laid down her pen.

The marriage between Vicky and Prince Friedrich hadn’t taken place until Vicky was eighteen. The diplomacy surrounding royal
marriages could not be concluded in a matter of weeks, or even months, and three years was, she thought, possibly the average length of time negotiations would take—and in three years’ time, David would be twenty.

Kaiser Wilhelm, the black sheep of the family, was just twenty when he had proposed to—and been accepted by—Princess Augusta Victoria of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg, who, to avoid confusion with the many other Augustas and Victorias in the family, was always known simply as Dona.

Closer to home, George’s father, King Edward VII, was also only twenty when he had proposed to the seventeen-year-old Alexandra.

Taking into account such examples, it wasn’t premature at all of George to have begun thinking about a suitable bride for David.

She picked up her pen again.

She knew, without having to ask, which candidate her aunt would prefer. As a member of both the House of Mecklenburg and the House of Hanover, Aunt Augusta was most definitely going to favor a British–German wedding, rather than a British–Russian wedding.

There was another, far more pertinent reason why a German wedding would be preferable to a Russian wedding. Olga’s brother, the tsarevitch, was a hemophiliac. It was a bleeding disease passed down to sons through the female line and, in the case of the tsarevitch, was traceable back via his mother and grandmother to his great-grandmother, Queen Victoria. Though Olga and her sisters didn’t suffer from the disease, just as their mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother hadn’t suffered from it, it wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that they, too, were carriers of it.

Via a different daughter of Queen Victoria—Vicky, who had
married Crown Prince Friedrich—the German royal house had a similar line of descent, but neither Vicky’s son, the kaiser, nor any of the kaiser’s sons, suffered from the hideous disease. For that reason alone, Queen Mary found the thought of a German daughter-in-law far preferable to the thought of a Russian one. She felt quite sure George would, too, when he was forced to face the hideous “H” word he was so obviously blocking from his mind.

In his own suite of rooms, in an entirely different part of the palace, David was wrestling with problems that, if Queen Mary had known of them, would have stupefied her.

How was he to tell his parents that he had met the only girl he would ever want to marry? How was he to go about introducing her to them in order that they could see for themselves what an absolutely terrific, special kind of person Lily was? Before other kinds of obstacles could be overcome—Lily not being royal, for instance—he had to surmount the obstacle of how, and when, he had met her.

Telling the truth was most definitely out of the question. If it was known what part Piers Cullen had played in enabling him to make secret visits to Snowberry, Piers would be disgraced and his army career over; though he felt no strong tie of friendship to Piers, it was something he couldn’t let happen.

It would be far better if the King and the Queen believed that he had met Lily at a court function or that he had met her via a member of the royal family.

If Lily had been presented at court, a case could have been made for his having first seen her then. But she hadn’t been presented at court. The only member of the family he could think of who could believably have become acquainted with the Houghtons and introduced them to him was his second cousin, Prince George of Battenberg.

Though Georgie’s father, Prince Louis of Battenberg, was married to one of Queen Victoria’s grandchildren, Georgie was far enough removed from the throne to be free of royal protocol. He also, like all the Battenbergs, led a flamboyant lifestyle. It would be quite easily believed that Georgie and Lord May’s granddaughters were on friendly terms and, because there was only two years’ difference between them and because Georgie had still been at Dartmouth when David had first gone there, and because the two of them had always got on very well together, it would also be easily believed that Georgie had introduced the Houghton girls to him.

The only question was whether or not Georgie, now a junior naval officer, would play ball.

David chewed the corner of his lip. Later that afternoon he was scheduled to accompany the King and Queen to the Crystal Palace, where their majesties were to give an immense tea party to a hundred thousand London children. As far as stunts went—stunts being the name of any official duty he was required to carry out—it promised to be more enjoyable than most, but he would have much preferred being at Snowberry.

He wondered if Lily had told Rose—and perhaps even Iris and Marigold—that he had asked her to marry him and rather thought that she wouldn’t have. Not yet. Not till he’d had the chance to speak to her grandfather.

When, he thought with frustration, was that going to be? From now until his investiture as Prince of Wales at Caernarvon Castle he was either going to be accompanying the King and Queen on a string of postcoronation celebration visits to towns in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales or cooped up with the chancellor of the exchequer, Mr. Lloyd George, grimly coming to grips with enough Welsh to see him through the investiture ceremony.

Remembering his desperate need for practice, David declaimed melodramatically as Finch came into the room: “
Mor o gan yw Cymru i gyd!
”

“Yes, sir,” Finch said, ever equable. “What does that mean, sir?”

“All Wales is a sea of song.”

“I’m pleased to hear it, sir, but give me London any time.”

With his somber mood dispelled by Finch’s cheery banter, he flashed him a smile. “Me, too, Finch. Me, too,” he said, determining to contact Georgie immediately and to beg off one of his meetings with Mr. Lloyd George in order, instead, to shoot down to Snowberry and break the news to Lord May that he wished to make his youngest granddaughter Princess of Wales.

The opportunity didn’t come for another five days and, when it came, he had little option but to be accompanied by Piers Cullen. Leaving the palace without his equerry—especially when he should have been in a meeting with Mr. Lloyd George—would simply have attracted the kind of attention he was anxious to avoid. He had expected Piers to be unhappy at having his career put on the line yet again, but instead he had seemed elated at the thought of a Snowberry visit.

David, knowing via Lily that Marigold was no longer in London but had been sent home to Snowberry in disgrace after an unfortunate costume choice at a fancy dress ball, thought his equerry’s elation was probably justified. Wryly, it occurred to him that if Piers were to marry Marigold, he would become Lily’s brother-in-law. What his and Piers’s relationship would be when he and Lily then married, he didn’t know, but he did know it would be one completely beyond Piers’s imagination.

The thought made him chuckle, as did the thought of Rose, Iris, and Marigold acting as bridesmaids at the biggest royal wedding the country had seen since his parents’ wedding eighteen years ago.

Piers was looking across at him as if he had lost his marbles. He didn’t care. He was on his way to make the first public declaration of his intention to marry Lily, and the knowledge gave him an all-pervading sense of optimism.

Once he had spoken to Lily’s grandfather, his cards would be very firmly on the table. Though there would still be a mountain to climb where gaining the King’s permission—and the prime minister’s approval—was concerned, it was a mountain that step by step, he would scale.

Because he was slightly built and blond and fey-looking, people thought he could easily be bent to their wills. Over the next few weeks and months they were going to find out that they were very, very mistaken, for he knew something about himself that other people still had to find out.

When he made up his mind about something, as he had now, no force on earth could make him change it.

Relegated to a passenger seat while the prince drove, Piers wondered if Edward was heading toward a nervous breakdown. For the past couple of weeks he had been unusually introspective, as if he had a lot on his mind, the burden being, presumably, the coronation—now safely over—and, still looming ahead, his investiture at Caernarvon. Chuckling to himself for no apparent reason was, Piers felt, yet another indication that the strain of the ceremonies the prince now had to take part in was beginning to tell on him.

Sending a message to Mr. Lloyd George, informing him that because of a migraine he couldn’t meet with him as arranged, was yet another example of odd behavior. Not, of course, that Piers had minded. As far as he was concerned, any opportunity to see Lily was something he fervently welcomed and if, instead of getting to grips with the Welsh language, Prince Edward wanted to knock a tennis ball around with Rose or Iris or Marigold, that was fine by him.

The problem he was mulling over as they sped through the village adjacent to Snowberry was how he was to find enough free time from equerrying duties to be able to begin to court Lily properly. He could, of course, ask to be released from duty as an equerry, but he didn’t want to do that. It was being an equerry that made him special.

Lily had been absolutely entranced at the little bits of gossip he had been able to give her about King George, Queen Mary, Princess Mary, Prince Albert, Prince Henry, Prince George, and Prince John. Now his ultimate goal was to have Prince Edward as best man at his and Lily’s wedding. If, at the time of their wedding, he was still the prince’s equerry, then it was very likely that Edward would be so. If, on the other hand, Piers was no longer a member of the royal household, then the chances of such a social triumph were nearly zero.