The Golden Prince (25 page)

Edward slowed down to turn in between Snowberry’s massive permanently open entrance gates. Piers wondered who they would find at home. The earl, certainly. Herbert Houghton seldom left Snowberry. Neither, fortunately, did Lily. But if Prince Edward was to be engaged elsewhere while he snatched a few precious minutes alone with Lily, he had to hope that at least one of her sisters was also home.

His preferred choice was that the sister in question would be Iris. He found Iris unthreatening, unlike Rose and Marigold. Rose he detested. She had a way of looking at him—as he suspected she looked at all men—as if he was of absolutely no consequence. All suffragettes were anathema to him, and he believed that those, like Rose, who supported Pankhurst-style militant action should be locked away in Holloway.

As for Marigold …

His body went rigid at the thought of Marigold. Her bold-as-brass, flagrant sexuality was almost as abhorrent to him as Rose’s suffragette militancy.

It was a horrific thought that when he married Lily, Rose and Marigold would become his relations by marriage, and he dealt with it by determining that, as a married couple, he and Lily would have little to do with them.

“I want to have a few private words with Lord May,” Edward said, bringing the Austro-Daimler to a halt on the gravel in front of the house. “I’ll leave it to you to let the girls know we’ve arrived.”

They entered Snowberry to be informed by William that Lord
May was in the drawing room and that Miss Houghton, Miss Iris, Miss Marigold, and Miss Lily were down by the lake.

It was then that Piers became aware of just how extreme Edward’s nervous tension was. It emanated from him in waves. Piers was mystified by it. Unable to take a shortcut to the rear of the house via the drawing room and its French doors, he strode back outside, walking around the house toward the vast lawn leading down to the lake. Whatever the subject the prince wished to discuss with Lord May, it was one that had put him in a great tizzy, but for the life of him Piers couldn’t imagine what the tizzy could be about.

“Captain Cullen!” Iris was the first to notice him as he stepped down from the terrace steps onto the velvet-smooth grass. She rose from where she had been sitting, waving welcomingly.

He ground his teeth. The minute His Royal Highness Prince Edward had invited the Houghtons to address him as David, Piers had had no choice but to be on similar Christian-name terms. Other than when Lily addressed him as Piers, he didn’t like it. It offended his sense of dignity. Iris reverting back to a little formality wasn’t, however, a good sign. Not when he wanted to make headway with his courtship of Lily.

Lily was with Rose in a rowboat far out in the center of the lake. The boat was motionless, rocking gently beneath a sun so hot it was already making him perspire.

Marigold, he saw with a fierce tightening of his stomach muscles, was seated on the grass next to the remains of a picnic, her arms clasped around her knees.

Not troubling to rise to her feet, she said as he approached, “Are you here to see Lily, or is David with you?”

Taking satisfaction from the fact that Lily had obviously told her about their afternoon out together, he said, not looking at her, but looking out toward the rowboat, “I’m carrying out equerrying duties. Prince Edward is in the drawing room, having a few words with your grandfather.”

He showed no sign of joining Marigold on the grass, as David
or Rory would most certainly have done, and Iris, who found him uncomfortable company, said with forced cheeriness, “I’ll go back to the house and ask for cane chairs and fresh sandwiches to be brought down.”

“There’s no need.” The last thing in the world Piers wanted was to be left alone with Marigold.

With vast relief he saw that the rowboat was no longer motionless, but that having registered his arrival, Rose had begun rowing in the direction of the shore.

Ignoring Iris and Marigold, he walked away from them and out onto the lake’s small jetty.

Seated in the stern of the rowboat, Lily looked as enchanting as ever. Her hair was held away from her face by two tortoiseshell combs, and the lilac tea gown she was wearing was embroidered with flowers the exact violet shade of her eyes.

Her face shone with happiness as, brief minutes later, he helped her from the boat. At the thought that whenever she saw him he would, for the rest of his life, see that kind of joy, Piers felt himself to be the luckiest man alive.

“HRH is having a few words with your grandfather,” he said, before he could be asked about the prince’s whereabouts. “Probably something to do with the investiture. I imagine he is inviting him to be present at it.”

It was a possibility that had only just occurred to him, but expressing it enabled him to appear very much in the know.

Lily stumbled, and his arm flew around her, steadying her. “David is speaking with Grandpapa?” she asked, and he could feel her tension. It was almost as extreme as David’s tension had been.

“It won’t be anything you need worry about,” he said reassuringly, the blood surging through his body in a hot tide as he reluctantly removed his arm from her waist. “All HRH has on his mind at the moment is his investiture at Caernarvon.”

Lily didn’t look at all convinced, and her pale-cream skin was paler than he’d ever seen it. He wondered if she thought Edward
was telling her grandfather that after his investiture he would no longer be able to visit Snowberry as often as he had been doing and if she thought it meant that he also would not be visiting as often.

“Shall we stay down here and wait for David to join us?” Iris asked. “Or should we stroll back to the house and wait for him on the terrace?”

“The terrace, I think.” Rose began placing the remains of their picnic into a large picnic hamper. “There’s something you should know, Piers,” she added as Marigold and Iris each took hold of one of the hamper’s wicker handles and began walking toward the terrace with it. “Our cousin, Rory Sinclair, is staying with us. At the moment he’s over at Norbury, taking part in a steeplechase. I don’t think he’ll be back until early evening, but you never know.”

Piers’s look of alarm was immediate. The possibility of visitors turning up at Snowberry while the prince was also there had always been his deepest nightmare, for then there would be no way of keeping Edward’s visits secret. Once the gossip reached the palace—which it would do in double-quick time—his days as an equerry would be over faster than lightning.

He steadied his rising panic by remembering that steeplechases were daylong affairs and that Rose was probably right in thinking Rory Sinclair wouldn’t be back at Snowberry until the evening. Just as he was beginning to breathe a little more easily, another thought hit him.

Instead of walking after Iris and Marigold, he said sharply, “This Sinclair cousin of yours. He doesn’t know about Prince Edward’s visits, does he?”

Rose brushed her skirt free of grass. “Yes,” she said, unruffled. “I know we all promised to tell no one, but Rory is very close family, more like a brother than a cousin. We knew that he’d be visiting Snowberry and so, just in case David visited while Rory was here, we thought it best to put him in the picture. He won’t gossip. Getting gossip from Rory would be like getting blood from a stone.”

Her certainty and her self-composure were so total he wanted
to lay violent hands on her.
She
, God damn her, had nothing to lose if there was gossip. He had everything to lose. The mere thought made him break out in goose bumps.

As if what she’d said was of no consequence, she turned away from him and began walking after Lily, who was now hard on Iris’s and Marigold’s heels.

He glared after her, fuming silently. His only comfort was the knowledge that Prince Edward’s visits to Snowberry were soon going to be seriously curtailed—and might perhaps come to an end altogether.

“
You want to
marry Lily?” Herbert Houghton swayed on his feet, wondering if he was hallucinating. “But, my dear boy …” He remembered to whom he was speaking. “Your Royal Highness …” he said, desperately trying to gather his scattered wits. This, too, didn’t sound right. Not when Prince Edward had specifically requested that he wasn’t to be addressed formally when at Snowberry.

Aware, all too late, of the deep pit he had dug for himself by allowing the heir to the throne to visit Snowberry in the same free and easy manner that Toby Mulholland and other friends of his granddaughters visited, he tried again. “Prince Edward … David … you cannot possibly want to marry anyone unknown to your family.”

His breathing, which had been terrifyingly erratic over the last few seconds, began to steady. It was a joke. A prank. Any minute now Rose, Iris, Marigold, and Lily would come tumbling into the room, laughing fit to bust at the way Prince Edward had taken him in.

He was going to be very, very cross with them. Extremely cross. It was the kind of joke that could have resulted in him having a heart attack. He couldn’t, of course, be cross with Prince Edward. That would be taking familiarity too far. With great effort he managed an indulgent smile, to show that he knew he was the victim of a prank and that he was taking it in good stride.

The Prince didn’t burst into chuckles, and the girls didn’t burst into the room.

Instead Prince Edward said with terrifying seriousness, “It’s quite usual for someone of my position to have plans for their future bride put in place when they are only seventeen, or perhaps eighteen. The only difference in this instance is that I am choosing my future bride for myself. The girl I want to marry—the girl I
will
marry—is Lily.”

Herbert Houghton put his hand out to the nearest object to steady himself. It met with the corner of the ornate William and Mary mantel shelf. He gripped hold of it, hard.

“But Your Royal Highness … David … Lily isn’t royal. She may come from a well-connected family, but she isn’t even closely royal. If the King were to know that you were even
considering
a commoner as a future bride.…” The scenario he envisaged was so horrific words failed him.

“I know all these problems, sir. Truly I do.” David ran a hand over his glassily smooth hair. “But they are problems I intend overcoming. Now that I have spoken to you and put you completely in the picture, I will be asking for the King’s consent at the earliest, most suitable moment.”

“Oh, dear God!” The mantel shelf was no longer support enough for him, and Herbert groped his way to a wing chair. What on earth was going to happen once the palace learned of the prince’s illicit visits to Snowberry and that he, Lord May, had known of them and had turned a blind eye? His own disgrace would be total, but what of Sibyl? Would his disgrace, and the social ostracism that would undoubtedly follow, extend to her? Would it extend to Rory?

It would certainly extend to his granddaughters. Rose, of course, would take it in her stride, but then Rose didn’t give a fig for high society, and to be ostracized by it wouldn’t trouble her at all.

Not to be invited to parties and balls would hit Marigold hard, though, and Iris’s long-understood unofficial engagement to Toby Mulholland—of whom not much had been seen lately—might also be affected. Viscountess Mulholland was a snob. She wouldn’t want
as a daughter-in-law a girl whose family had offended the King. As for Lily … A thought that hadn’t occurred to him before, now did.

“Lily,” he said with what breath he could summon. “Does Lily know you want to marry her? Does she know you are now asking me for my permission?”

“Lily and I are in love, sir.”

The pride in David’s voice, and his naïveté as to who he would and would not be allowed to marry, smote Herbert’s heart.

“She has probably guessed why I am speaking to you alone,” David added as Herbert struggled to think of words that would bring a return to sanity.

From outside there came the sound of Marigold’s laughter, and David broke eye contact with him as, beyond the French doors, Marigold and Iris came into view, walking up the steps to the terrace.

Hard on their heels was Lily, and one look at her taut, tense face told Herbert she knew exactly what David had been telling—and asking—him.

At the sight of her, David strode toward the French doors, all nervous tension gone.

Herbert summoned up the strength to totter after him, seeing with vast relief that Rose was also mounting the steps to the terrace and that Captain Cullen was only a yard or so behind her.

Rose’s hardheaded common sense and Captain Cullen’s pragmatism would, surely, put an end to David’s nonsensical daydream before he brought disaster down on all their heads by speaking of it to King George.

He envisaged talking to them without Marigold’s and Iris’s—and possibly Lily’s—knowledge. But as the scene unfolded he saw how euphorically Prince Edward was heading toward Lily, and with total helplessness he knew exactly what was going to happen next.

“Lily!” David strode past Marigold and Iris and made a beeline for Lily. Then, rooting everyone to the spot in thunderstruck incredulity,
he seized both of her hands in his and, with his face ablaze with happiness, said, “I’ve spoken to your grandfather, Lily darling. He’s given us his blessing. All that remains is for me to speak to the King at the earliest opportunity.”

Herbert made a choking sound, for he most certainly had
not
given the proposed marriage his blessing. Marigold and Iris dropped the picnic hamper they were carrying so abruptly there came the sound of a wineglass shattering. Rose sucked in her breath.

None of them looked toward Piers Cullen.

If they had, they would have been given far more to think about than David’s desire to make Lily Princess of Wales and, in due time, Queen Consort and Empress of India.

Piers Cullen was a man in extremis. Just as in one blinding, illuminating moment he had realized he had, for the first time in his life, fallen in love, so in an equal split second, he now realized that his love was hopeless. Prince Edward, able to offer Lily vast wealth and a lifetime of royal privilege and glamour, had stolen her from him.