The Golden Prince (4 page)

“His Royal Highness, Prince Edward,” Rose said, wondering how much worse things could get and wishing a pit would open at her feet and swallow her up. She took a deep steadying breath. “Your Royal Highness, allow me to present my sister, Miss Iris Houghton.” Her fierce hope that Iris’s reaction would be a vast improvement on Lily’s was fulfilled. Iris’s eyes flew to David’s and a second later, recognizing him instantly in a way her sisters had not, she sank into a very accomplished curtsy.

The result was that David looked even more discomfited. “The graze on your sister’s face needs attending to, Miss Houghton,” he said, struggling to keep his eyes on her and not on Lily. “A doctor needs to be called.”

“Yes, sir.” Then Iris, practical to her fingertips, turned to Rose. “Let me look at the damage, Rose.”

Rose took the handkerchief away and though Lily sucked in her breath, Iris said, “It’s really not so bad, Rose. All it needs is to be bathed and Vaselined.”

David’s relief was vast. “Then could that be taken care of immediately? Please don’t mind me. I’ll wait here until Captain Cullen arrives.”

“You would be more comfortable down by the tennis court having a glass of lemonade,” Lily said, blithely uncaring that she shouldn’t be speaking to him with such easy familiarity. “Marigold would love to meet you, too. It doesn’t seem fair that we’ve met you and she hasn’t.”

This time it was Rose’s turn to suck in her breath.

Iris looked as if she was about to pass out.

David flushed an even deeper red, saying with shy awkwardness, “I would like that enormously, Miss Houghton.”

Lily flashed him a sunny smile. “Please call me Lily. Everyone calls me Lily.”

David paused, about to do something he had never done before in his life: suggest that the Houghton sisters drop all royal protocol and call him by the name only his family used. It would cause an awful row if his father was to hear about it, but he never would. The friendships he was now making—and he was certain that he was, for the first time in his life, on the brink of making real friendships—were ones his father would never know about.

“Please call me David,” he said, shooting Lily an engaging smile. “I’d like all of you to call me David.”

Her answering smile had his heart doing somersaults.

“Would you like to make up a four for tennis?” she asked as she led him across the lawn in the direction of the tennis court, while Rose and Iris hurried into the house. “Rose won’t want to play, not with her face smarting as it must be doing, but she can umpire. I’ve been umpiring for Iris and Marigold and I’m sick to death of it. A doubles game would be great fun.”

As two spaniels bounded to meet them David felt as if he had entered an entirely different world; it was a world aeons removed from the stiff rigidity of his royal home life or his life at Naval College, where, if anyone tried to befriend him, they only did so because of who he was.

The Houghton girls’ naturalness with him was something he had never previously experienced. True, Rose had done her best to behave correctly once she knew his identity, but there had been nothing toadying in the way she had done so. She filled him with colossal admiration—and awe. The way she had reacted after her brief moment of unconsciousness had been incredible. He’d never known anyone to lay into Piers Cullen in the way she had done. She had been just as forthrightly blunt where he, David, was concerned. She had called his action in taking the corner so wide and at such speed very stupid. Which it had been. Even once she realized who he was, she hadn’t apologized. It was exactly the way a member of his family—one of his young German aunts, for instance—might
have treated him. It had given him a glimmer of what it must be like to be an ordinary person—and the desire to be an ordinary person, and not someone different and set apart, was something he had longed to experience ever since he could remember.

If Rose seemed like a young, but intimidating aunt, Iris reminded him of his sister, Mary. Where Lily was as beautiful as a Raphael Madonna and Rose was breathtakingly striking, Iris, with her hazel eyes, brown hair coiled in a no-nonsense knot, was a plain Jane. Her build, sturdy rather than slender, was also reminiscent of his sister’s, as was her down-to-earth practicality—in the same situation, Mary would also have asked to see the damage done to Rose’s face before calling a doctor. When he thought of the embarrassing questions that might have been asked if a doctor had been called, he was very grateful for her undramatic common sense.

Then there was Lily—and Lily was the most magical creature he had ever met.

As they neared the end of the formal lawn, the magical creature said chattily, “I do hope you are going to stay long enough to meet Grandfather. He’s in Winchester this afternoon, at the dentist’s. He never likes leaving Snowberry and as he especially doesn’t like leaving it in order to go somewhere horrid, your being here when he comes home will cheer him enormously.”

Whenever she spoke to him he flushed. He simply couldn’t help it. She also left him tongue-tied, because although he’d never stammered—Bertie was the stammerer in the family—he was fearful that with her he might be just about to start.

The lawn petered out into a belt of rough grass and wildflowers. Beyond it lay a small lake, and between scattered trees he could see a boathouse and a diving board.

They didn’t continue on toward it. “The tennis court is over here, on the left.” She indicated a gateway set in a magnificent six-foot-high yew hedge. “Marigold is going to die with delight when I introduce her to you.”

Her smile deepened. “Marigold, unlike Rose, really loves all the excitement that goes with royal events, though even Rose is making an exception where the coronation next month is concerned. I can’t quite believe that King George is your father. It’s odd, isn’t it?”

“Very,” he said with feeling.

“Iris doesn’t often get excited by anything,” Lily continued, not registering the inflection in his voice, “though she is excited at the thought of being in London for the coronation procession and at the thought of all the coronation parties and balls she’s been invited to.
I
would be excited as well if I was going to all the parties and balls, but I haven’t been presented at court yet, so I won’t be going. Grandfather has asked me if I will wait until next year. He hated all the disruption when Rose, Iris, and Marigold had their seasons. I’ll probably be very lucky if I get presented at all.”

For David it was a most bizarre conversation, not just because of its subject matter but because he’d never before had a casual chat with any girl other than his sister and cousins. Once, when he was eight or nine, he’d had dancing lessons with wellborn children who were not blood related, but the experiment had not lasted long and he remembered very little of it.

Other than that, because he had never been sent away to school but had been educated at home by a private tutor, there had been no social interaction with anyone outside his family until he had gone to Naval College at the age of thirteen. There his socializing had been limited strictly to boys and, because of the barrier of his royal status, there had been no end-of-term invitations to private homes. Even if someone had had the temerity to issue such an invitation, he wouldn’t have been allowed to accept it.

Though Lily and her sisters couldn’t possibly realize it, this occasion at Snowberry was his very first experience of a home outside his royal family circle. If he wanted to enjoy it again—and he did—then he would somehow have to square such visits with Piers Cullen, whose role as his equerry included keeping his father closely informed of all his activities.

“Marigold!” Lily called out as they stepped through the gateway. “You are never going to believe this! Stop practicing serving and come and be introduced to His Royal Highness, Prince Edward!”

Totally inexperienced as he was when it came to girls, David knew the instant he laid eyes on Marigold that not only was he way out of his depth, but Piers Cullen—and every other man he knew—would be out of their depth also.

Marigold was, in the crude slang he’d picked up at Naval College, hot stuff. It was nothing to do with the way she looked—though a superb figure, cat-green almond eyes, and orange-tawny hair with a flower decorating it would, he supposed, take a girl far, even when her nose was too big and her mouth too wide. The sexiness was in her blatant self-confidence and in the knowing expression in her eyes; it was an expression that in a girl not much older than Lily certainly shouldn’t have been there.

Immediately Piers Cullen saw Marigold he would label her as being “fast”—and David knew that the result of that would be finding himself en route to Windsor in double-quick time.

One way of stalling such an outcome would be if Cullen were to find him in the middle of a game of tennis. Iris’s racket lay on a canvas chair at the side of the court. He picked it up and spun it in his hand, saying in his tentative manner, “How about we have a knock-up until Rose and Iris join us?”

Lily’s flawless face lit up with pleasure.

“The two of us against the one of you?” Marigold arched an eyebrow.

“Why not?”

This time David’s smile was no longer shy. This time, with his newfound friends, his smile had a confidence that transformed him from a gauche boy into a young man of spellbinding charm.

With barely contained
fury Piers Cullen watched the Austro-Daimler disappear up the hill in a cloud of exhaust fumes. Of all the annoyances he’d had to endure as an equerry, the present fiasco was the worst. But this, he reminded himself as he shifted the bicycle so that it would sit a little more comfortably on his shoulder, wasn’t an annoyance. It was an outrage.

The worst of it wasn’t the indignity he was suffering—though it was one he would never forget or forgive. The worst of it was the prospect of the King getting to hear of his son’s escapade. King George’s temper, over even the most minor of misdemeanors, was ferocious—and his eldest son disappearing with an unknown girl and with no other companion, was not a misdemeanor. It was a catastrophe of epic proportions, for Rose Houghton would be able to accuse Prince Edward of any impropriety she chose.

The mere thought brought beads of sweat to his forehead. The reason no well-brought-up young woman was allowed to be alone with a young man without a chaperone being present wasn’t simply to safeguard the girl’s reputation. It was to safeguard the young man’s reputation as well. Or at least this was so where the heir to the throne was concerned.

Once again he shifted the bicycle into another position on his shoulder. The prince certainly wouldn’t instigate any unseemly behavior. He wasn’t seventeen for another three weeks, and in Piers’s estimation he was young for his age rather than precocious. He judged the Houghton girl, however, to be several years older, possibly
twenty-three or twenty-four, and she was no shy shrinking violet. When he thought of the way she had sworn when speaking to him, rage surged through him in a hot engulfing tide. A young woman like that would be capable of any kind of wild allegation if she thought it would be to her profit.

As if that scenario wasn’t horrendous enough, there was another, even worse possibility. What if there were another accident? This time a fatal one?

If the heir to the throne were to be killed when he, Piers, should have been with him and wasn’t, then he might as well simply slit his throat. He tried to imagine Prince Edward’s younger brother, Prince Albert, succeeding to the throne in Edward’s stead, but found the idea farcical. Bertie was highly nervous and had a speech impediment too severe for any kind of public speaking.

A horse pulling a cart full of animal feed came clopping up behind him and he stepped a little closer to the shoulder.

“Halloa there, soldier!” the carter called out as he came alongside him. “Would you like a lift a little ways?”

The undignified address was too much for him to take. “I’m a royal equerry, you country bumpkin!” he roared. “I wouldn’t be seen dead on your filthy cart!”

“Youm be a nutter!” came the aggrieved response, “and I wouldn’t ’ave youm on my cart, not for all the tea in China!”

As the cart trundled past him, Piers continued to fume. Where the devil was the blasted cottage he was looking for? He couldn’t see sight or sign of a house of any description, only fields on one side of the road and, on the other, the kind of wall that signified it was the boundary of private parkland, with the parkland itself hidden from view by a belt of trees.

The bicycle wasn’t unduly heavy to carry, but it was awkward as well as being demeaning and he fought the temptation to toss it into the nearest field. Damn that Houghton girl. If it hadn’t been for her, he and Prince Edward would have been back at Windsor by now. He liked Windsor. He liked being an equerry. He liked the status it gave him.

When Lord Esher, on behalf of King George, had interviewed him for the position he had emphasized how difficult the selection process had been. “Several people have been mentioned to His Majesty as being suitable for the post and having known your father as I have, for so many years, and taking into account your excellent army record, I think you are well fitted for the position,” he had said in his ponderous manner. “You will always have to take into account Prince Edward’s youth. You will have to be always watchful—without seeming so. Instructive, without being boring. Most of all you will have to retain the high moral standards that have made you eligible for this position.”

High moral standards were no difficulty for him. Both his father and his grandfather had been Church of Scotland ministers—his father distinguishably so—and he was a puritan by both upbringing and inclination. Though he had opted for the army as a career, rather than the church, he had never joined in the camaraderie of army life. He was a loner. A loner who didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, didn’t often seek female company—and when he did he always behaved with immaculate correctness. All were virtues of which King George highly approved.

He had now reached the top of the long sloping hill and there was still no cottage in sight. There was, though, an imposing gateway and scrolled in the wrought-iron work was the name of the house. SNOWBERRY.