The Golden Prince (36 page)

It was a conversation Rose still had to have with Marigold and, because Marigold was failing in her promise to remain scandal-free, it was a conversation she wasn’t looking forward to.

She said now to Lily, “Even though the King refused to give his consent to a marriage between you and David, I would have thought that now he knows how David feels about you, our entire family would have come under close palace scrutiny. And we haven’t. According to Iris, Grandfather has received no telephone calls from the King’s private secretary, and neither have there been any letters.”

Lily fiddled with the tern’s wire armature. “That’s because King George doesn’t yet know my identity. He questioned Piers, of course, as to who it was David was in love with, but Piers said he didn’t know and was unaware of David having formed a romantic relationship. If he’d admitted he knew of it, he’d have lost his position as David’s equerry. David says it is best his father doesn’t know who I am until he’s agreed in principle to a wellborn nonroyal marrying the heir to the throne.”

Rose, who had believed David’s conversation with his father had been far more explicit, stared at her, deeply shocked. “But that doesn’t sound as if King George is anywhere near to giving his consent! How can he be, if he doesn’t even know who you are?”

She sat down suddenly on the window seat as if the strength had gone from her legs. “If David has indicated to you that his father is likely to come round to the idea of his marrying you, I think he’s being very naive, Lily. I hate to say this to you, darling, but I don’t think the King is ever going to come round to such an idea. Never ever.”

“
Never!” King George
stormed to his private secretary, Lord Craybourne. “Never have I been faced with such impertinence! And from my own son! He’s met a girl and wishes to make her Princess of Wales! I’ve never heard such poppycock!” Seizing hold of a book that was on his desk, he threw it against the nearest wall with all his strength.

Lord Craybourne was long familiar with the King’s violent outbursts and with his vitriolic temper. This time, though, he had to admit that the King’s rage was justified. His own rage, though he couldn’t give vent to it, was nearly as intense.

Fifteen minutes earlier, at the King’s request, he had come into the library to discuss with him the arrangements for his durbar. Instead of broaching the subject of the durbar, the King had suddenly revealed that at the end of July the Prince of Wales had proposed marriage to an unknown girl.

It was information so bizarre, so preposterous, that he was still having difficulty assimilating it. One thing he hadn’t had any difficulty assimilating was that since it was now the last week in October, the incident had taken place nearly three months ago. That he, the King’s private secretary, was only now being put in the picture he found almost too incredible to be believable.

“May I ask who else is privy to this information, sir?” he had asked, white-lipped.

“Esher,” the King had snapped in response.

Craybourne’s bloodless lips had tightened. Though King George hadn’t volunteered
when
he had confided in Lord Esher, he intuited it had been several weeks ago; that on hearing the news from Prince Edward, the King’s immediate response had been to send for the man he regarded as his closest friend.

The fact that Esher, the deputy constable and lieutenant governor of Windsor Castle, had been confided in when he, Craybourne, had not was, in his eyes, disgraceful. As the King’s private secretary, his role was that of the King’s chief adviser. He was the channel of communication between the King and his government. He informed and advised the King on all constitutional, governmental, and political matters. He, not Lord Esher, should have been the first person the King had confided in. But not only had the King
not
confided in him first; he hadn’t confided in him until three months after the event in question!

“It seems incredible to me, sir, that Prince Edward could have met any young woman often enough to have formed a relationship of any kind,” he said, keeping his feelings in check only with the greatest difficulty. “Surely his equerry …”

“Cullen knows nothing.” King George spat the words, his face a choleric purple. “Absolutely nothing. He was aghast when I confronted him with what David had told me. According to David, he was introduced to this … this
strumpet
 … by Prince George of Battenberg.”

He strode up and down the room, slamming a fist repeatedly into his palm. “Prince George admits introducing a female friend of his to David when on a visit to Dartmouth early this year. He says she was with a party of
her
friends—and that the girl David has become so obviously infatuated with must be one of them.
His
friend married a Canadian in August and has gone to live somewhere in Saskatchewan—he doesn’t know where.”

“She must be traced. I’ll speak with Canada’s governor-general immediately.”

King George came to an abrupt halt in the center of the room.
“Grey mustn’t know why you’re doing so. There mustn’t be a whisper of this affair to anyone, Craybourne.”

“Of course not, sir. But the sooner we know the identity of the young woman in question, the sooner we can put an end to this situation.”

Though his face was impassive, his voice without an inflection of any kind, Craybourne was inwardly seething. Prince Edward had gone to the King to ask his permission to become betrothed, and King George, instead of controlling himself until Edward had told him the young woman’s name, had so violently lost his temper that David had prudently decided it was safer not to divulge it. And the farcical quagmire they were now in was the result.

Lord Grey, Canada’s governor-general, would see to it that the information required was speedily with them, but because the King had chosen not to confide in him for so long, an unconscionable amount of time had been lost.

King George returned to his desk and abruptly sat down behind it. “I want official negotiations immediately put in place for a marriage between David and the Grand Duchess Olga. I’ve already had the tsar’s unofficial written approval for such a union, but my cousin changes his mind according to whoever he last spoke with. Under the present circumstances, the sooner an official announcement can be made, the better.”

The possibility of a marriage that would link Britain more closely with Russia had been discussed at length some months ago and had Craybourne’s wholehearted approval. It would be taken as a personal affront by the kaiser, who had a very marriageable nineteen-year-old daughter, but that was no bad thing. If anyone needed taking down a peg or two, it was Kaiser Wilhelm II.

“Now,” King George said, “about my durbar and my state entry into Delhi. Why the devil am I to enter the city on a horse? Surely an elephant would be more appropriate? On ceremonial occasions Indian princes always ride on elephants. It’s a centuries-old tradition and, as India’s King-Emperor, it is what will be expected of me.”

“I believe the decision was taken on the advice of the viceroy, sir. It is Lord Hardinge’s opinion that for reasons of safety and security, horses are preferable to elephants.”

Aware that the King was about to robustly protest, he added, “Elephants are notoriously unstable beasts, sir. Hardinge says one ran amok and rampaged through the crowd earlier this year in Rajputana. The death toll was eighty-nine.”

Whatever protest King George had been about to make remained unsaid.

“Who will be riding on either side of me as I make my state entry into the city? The viceroy and India’s secretary of state?”

“Yes, sir.”

The King gave one of his habitual “harrumphs.” Where his durbar was concerned, he had little to worry about. Though arrangements had had to be made on a mind-bogglingly vast scale, they were all in place. It wasn’t the durbar that was ruining his peace of mind. It was his eldest son.

When his business with Lord Craybourne was finished and he was again on his own, the King remained at his desk, his hands clasped tightly together, his brow furrowed, his lips pursed. All his children had always been a mystery to him, but David had now become incomprehensible.

Even if, on an afternoon of free time at the Naval College, he’d met up with Georgie Battenberg and then been introduced by Georgie to several young women, how had he managed to form a relationship with one of them? The aspect of the situation that so mystified Craybourne also mystified him.

Though David had obviously managed to give Captain Cullen the slip when he’d gone to meet Georgie, he couldn’t possibly have given him the slip on a regular basis. He had no doubts at all that Cullen had been entirely ignorant of the meeting. The man’s bewilderment when he’d been told of it had been so profound it couldn’t possibly have been simulated.

The devil of it was that he’d never expected David to act in such
a monstrous way, not when he’d been made aware of his unique position in life ever since nursery days and when the concepts of duty and responsibility had, ever since, been ceaselessly drummed into him. George’s grandmother, Queen Victoria, had terrified his father, Edward VII, and his father had, in his turn, terrified him. It was a legacy King George felt was only right and proper when the parent in question was the sovereign, and he had always rigorously ensured it had been maintained. Or he thought he had. Now, having been confronted in such a way by David, he wasn’t at all sure that he’d terrified David enough.

He pushed his chair away from his massive desk and rose to his feet. Even as a child there had been a perversity about David that his younger brothers and his sister hadn’t possessed.

Brooding on David’s disturbing difference, George crossed to the cabinet where his Purdey shotguns were kept. Removing one of them, he took it back to the desk with him and withdrew his gun-cleaning kit from one of the desk’s deep lower drawers. Cleaning his guns always soothed him, though he doubted it would have the power to do so this time.

Kings of England were notorious for having bad relations with their eldest sons—for very good reason George III couldn’t bear to have his son, the future George IV, within his sight. It wasn’t a situation he had ever imagined happening to himself, but David was already becoming an irritation in a way that the King doubted the far more tractable Bertie ever would be.

He began disassembling the gun. Bertie, for instance, would never describe any ceremonial clothes he was required to wear as “a ridiculous outfit,” which was how David had referred to his investiture costume. Also, if Bertie were heir to the throne, he would never immediately change the subject whenever the words “when you become King” were mentioned to him, as David so infuriatingly did.

He rammed a cleaning rod down the gun’s barrel. Just as English history was full of kings who had deplorable relationships
with their eldest sons, so too it was full of instances where the second son, not the first, had eventually inherited the throne.

Henry VIII, one of the most well-known of English kings—though not the best loved—only succeeded to the throne after his elder brother, Arthur, had died suddenly of an undefined illness at the age of fifteen. A hundred years or so later, Charles Stuart inherited the throne, becoming Charles I, when his elder brother, another Henry, died of typhoid. Far closer to home, he himself was a second son, only becoming heir to the throne when his beloved elder brother, Eddy, had died of influenza at age twenty-eight.

He picked up a cleaning cloth, reflecting on how different English history would have been if Arthur Tudor and Henry Stuart had lived, and how different his own life would have been if Eddy had lived. He wasn’t remotely imaginative, but May had been betrothed to Eddy at the time of Eddy’s death, and the thought of May being a sister-in-law to him, not a wife, made the hair at the back of his neck stand on end.

He began polishing the inside of the Purdey’s choke. Such reflections on what-ifs where second sons were concerned were nonsensical. It wasn’t a situation that was going to afflict David and Bertie. However more tractable Bertie might be, he didn’t have the makings of a king. His stammer saw to that.

A spasm of temper flooded through him. Why Bertie persisted in stammering when he knew how intensely annoying everyone found it, he couldn’t understand. It wasn’t as if Bertie hadn’t been taken to task about it. “
Spit it out, boy!
” he roared at him every time Bertie spent five minutes trying to say something that should have taken only seconds. No matter how much he bellowed, it never made any difference. Bertie only stammered worse than ever.

And David, as well as having an admirable speaking voice—even Winston Churchill, famous for his oratory, had commented on how well he had spoken at his investiture—also had great appeal.

Appeal some unknown girl had immediately latched on to.

He flung down the cleaning cloth in exasperation. If David’s escapade with the friend of one of Georgie Battenberg’s friends was anything to go by, the sooner he was safely betrothed and married, the better. He only hoped Nicky wasn’t going to shilly-shally over a public announcement of David and Olga’s betrothal. Nicky was a terrible vacillator, and when push came to shove, he wouldn’t want one of his dearly loved daughters leaving Russia, no matter that she’d be leaving it to become Princess of Wales and the future Queen of England.

As for David … David was going to have a very big surprise if he thought he was going to return from his tour of duty aboard the
Hindustan
and immediately speak to him yet again about this damned girl he wished to marry. The less that was said between them, the better it would be. In five days he and May were to leave for India aboard the
Medina
, the latest addition to the P & O fleet and a vessel blessed with a suitably Eastern-sounding name. In those intervening five days he would refuse to see and to speak with David. And by the time he and May returned from India, the girl in question would have been located and bought off, and David would, if he knew what was good for him, have forgotten all about her.