The Golden Prince (43 page)

For a second Iris felt absolute compassion for him. “That’s because you make yourself so unlikable,” she said gently. “If you just spoke more pleasantly to people and …”

“I don’t need a woman to teach me how to speak to people!” His fury was incandescent. Lily would never have spoken to him in such a way. Lily respected him for what he was. A strong man, with a strong manner. Totally unlike the ineffective boy she had so foolishly agreed to marry.

He was just about to demand Lily’s address again when Homer growled for a second time, his hackles rising,

This time Iris did nothing to restrain him.

Knowing he was beaten, knowing he would get no more information from her, he swung on his heel, slamming doors behind him as he stormed from the house. The only relatives of Lily whom he knew of were her great-aunt Sibyl and Sibyl’s grandson, Rory Sinclair. As her great-aunt apparently lived year-round on St. James’s Street, it had to mean that Lily was with the Sinclair branch of the family—and he knew exactly where the Sinclair family home was sited. It was on the banks of Loch Gruinart, on the Isle of Islay.

He went by rail to Inverness. Changed trains there for a train on the local line to Tarbert, and from there he caught a Western Isles ferry to Islay.

In the cold and damp of February he could never remember a more miserable journey. The sea was rough. The ferry basic in the extreme. Even though he was a Scot himself, he couldn’t for the life
of him work out why Rory Sinclair was happy to make the journey as regularly as he did.

As he stood freezing on Port Askaig’s jetty, asking where he could find a taxi, the only thing keeping his temper in check was the certainty that within a very little while he would be with her again. This time she was going to listen to him. This time she was going to see sense.

There was, it turned out, only one motorized taxi on the island, and as well as smelling of stale cigarette smoke, it gave him a preposterously uncomfortable ride.

With his thoughts centered entirely on Lily he took little interest in the magnificent scenery. As they crossed the island from east to west, the driver said in a thick Scottish burr, “There be Loch Indaal on your left, sir.”

Piers noted that it looked more like a bay than a loch, but he was otherwise uninterested. He was trying to imagine Lily’s surprise when she saw him. Her look of delighted pleasure.

The driver turned inland on a narrow single-track road. There was moorland on either side of them crisscrossed by rivulets of shining water. After a much shorter time than it had taken to drive from Port Askaig to Loch Indaal, another sea loch opened in front of them.

“Gruinart,” his driver said helpfully. “Castle Dounreay be nearly at the mouth of the loch.”

He’d known, of course, that his destination was a castle. What else would an annoying prick like Rory Sinclair have as a home?

It proved to be an extremely pretty castle, which made Piers even angrier than ever. As they drew up to it a flock of geese flew low across the sky. He wondered if there were many sightings of golden eagles on Islay. In the Highlands, where he had been brought up, the giant birds could quite often be sighted, circling high in the mountains and then swooping down at ferocious speed to kill their prey.

“Wait for me,” he said curtly to the driver. It wasn’t because he
anticipated being with Lily only for a short time; he didn’t. But he was hardly going to be invited to stay the night, and he couldn’t count on anyone being willing to give him a lift back to Port Askaig and the nearest hotel.

To his stunned surprise it wasn’t an old family retainer who opened the door to him, but Rory. If he was surprised at being faced with Rory—who he had assumed was in London, beavering away in the Foreign Office—Rory was flabbergasted at being faced so unexpectedly with Piers.

“What the devil …” he began, hardly able to believe his eyes.

Piers didn’t waste time in being polite. “I believe Lily is staying with you,” he said bluntly. “I need to speak with her.”

“You need to
what
?”

“I need to speak with Lily.”

Rory, resplendent in tweed jacket, kilt, and sporran, led the way into a drawing room that didn’t look much different from the drawing room at Snowberry. There were comfy sofas and chairs covered in chintz, a half-finished jigsaw puzzle on a table, a log fire roaring away in a fireplace big enough to roast an ox.

Rory crossed the room to where a silver drinks tray stood on a Georgian sideboard. Removing the stopper from a cut-glass decanter, he poured a generous three thimblefuls of whiskey into two glasses.

“Lily,” he said, handing one of the glasses to Piers, “isn’t here. What made you think she would be?”

Piers blinked, his disappointment so shattering he could hardly assimilate it. “I went to Snowberry to see her, and Iris told me she was staying with relatives. The only relatives I know of are you and your grandmother.”

Rory didn’t correct him. If Piers didn’t know that Lily’s mother was alive and well and living in Paris, he wasn’t going to enlighten him. Like Iris, he, too, knew exactly what Piers’s agenda was with regard to Lily—and though he hated the thought of Lily becoming engaged to the Prince of Wales, he felt downright revulsion at the thought of her becoming engaged to Piers Cullen.

“I’ve no idea where Lily is.” It was a lie, but he’d no problem at all in telling it. He took a deep swallow of his whiskey. “I think it’s time someone told you that you’re wasting your time where Lily is concerned. She isn’t interested in you.”

“That’s where you’re wrong!” Piers knocked back his whiskey in one great gulp. “She was on the point of accepting a proposal from me when Edward stuck his oar in!” His eyes were black and bitter. “And all to what purpose?” he continued, letting fly with his feelings. “He’ll never be allowed to marry her. Not in a million years. I want her to see what an absolute impossibility such a marriage is, and I want her to understand that I know why she accepted his proposal. Any girl her age would have her head turned if a prince proposed to her. But it doesn’t mean she’s in love with him, because I don’t believe she is.”

“You don’t know a damn thing about Lily!” Rory’s own feelings where Lily and David’s love affair was concerned were too emotionally charged for him to suffer listening to Piers spout on about it. “You’ve built something up in your mind that has absolutely no foundation in reality. Stop pestering her. Stop visiting Snowberry. You may be damned right that permission will never be given for Edward and Lily to marry, but if he isn’t able to marry her, she isn’t going to turn to you!”

“She’ll turn to me, because I’m going to forgive her.”

“Forgive her?
Forgive her
?”

It was such a pompous, sanctimonious, self-righteous remark that Rory couldn’t contain himself. He slammed his glass down on the nearest surface, bunched his fist, and sent it straight-armed into Piers’s jaw.

Totally unprepared for it, Piers went flying, sending tables and the lamps on them crashing to the floor.

Amid broken glass, he struggled to his feet and launched himself at Rory, who was ready and waiting for him. It was a fight that could have gone on for hours, for both were tall and tough and superbly fit, but the uproar could be heard all over the castle and half a dozen people ran from all directions into the room.

When a six-foot-three, seventeen-stone ghillie, who had been in the kitchen paying his respects to the cook, joined in with the task of trying to separate them, the fight was over.

“You’ll regret this, Sinclair!” Piers shouted as he was forcibly escorted out to the waiting taxi, blood still pumping from his nose. “I’m going to marry Lily! You just wait and see!”

“Like hell you will!”

Piers clambered into the taxi and as the driver fired the engine, Rory tore himself free of the ghillie’s restraining hold.

He raced toward the car, but the driver was too quick for him and was already picking up speed.

Coming to a floundering defeated halt in its wake, Rory shouted after it at the top of his lungs, “If Edward doesn’t marry her, Cullen, it won’t be you she’ll then marry! It will be me!”

Two weeks later, when he was back in London, Rory gave Rose an edited account of what had happened.

“I know I shouldn’t have behaved like that, Rose,” he said as they sat over cups of tea in a small café near the Foreign Office, “but I was so damned mad with him, I could have killed him.”

“If you had, Lily’s hopes of marrying David would have gone straight out of the window. Can you imagine the headline? ‘Friend of Prince Edward Kills Equerry.’ ”

Rory gave a wry smile. “Your editor chappie would be pleased by it. You’d be able to write nearly a firsthand account.”

Not wanting to think about Hal, she changed the subject. “Before Piers hared off to Islay, Iris had a run-in with him at Snowberry. It was over the same thing. He wanted to know where Lily was. I can’t help wondering if we should tell Lily—warn her.
We
all know Piers has become obsessed by her, but Lily, bless her heart, hasn’t a clue.”

Rory said, “Let’s talk about something else, shall we? I was
sorry to miss Lady Jethney’s funeral. She was a lovely lady and I shall miss her. Were there lots of prominent members of the government there?”

Rose nodded. “The prime minister was there, as were Winston Churchill and the new home secretary. The really touching thing was how many ordinary, local people were there. The church where the service was held dates from the fifteenth century, and it was so packed that people were standing in crowds outside it in order to pay their respects.”

She didn’t describe Jerusha’s coffin, laden with a wreath of yellow roses from her two sons and a wreath of white roses from Theo. Nor did she even attempt to describe Theo’s grief. Beneath his beaver-collared coat his massive shoulders had been bowed, his face ashen as the words of the Twenty-third Psalm filled the church. Afterward the congregation had sung Jerusha’s favorite hymn, “Abide with Me.”

Marigold, who had been standing next to Rose, had sung the hymn with tears streaming down her face. Their grandfather had taken hold of her hand, squeezing it comfortingly. Iris hadn’t trusted herself to sing at all.

When the service was over, Rose had returned to St. James’s Street with Marigold. Marigold had wanted to be back in London because she was dining with Maxim that evening, and Rose had wanted to be back in London because she had an early morning meeting the following day with Hal. This time their meeting was to be in his office at the
Daily Despatch
.

As she and Rory left the café together she thought about that meeting and how difficult she now found it to control her feelings when she was with Hal. He had wanted to see her to brief her about the next newspaper piece he wanted from her.

“I want you to write a woman’s impressions of the luxury liners now plowing to and fro across the Atlantic,” he’d said, pushing his chair away from his desk and stretching his legs out in front of him, crossing them casually at the ankles.

Though she’d tried not to look, she hadn’t been able to avoid seeing that his suspenders that day were not purple, but a deep wine-red.

“But they are not a new thing,” she’d said, disappointed the assignment wasn’t more challenging. “They’ve become quite commonplace.”

“The liner due to sail on her maiden voyage next month isn’t commonplace.” He’d flashed her a smile that had turned her knees to jelly. “The
Titanic
is the biggest liner ever built. She’s gigantic, Rose. She has a swimming pool, a ballroom, a gymnasium, a Turkish bath. They say she’s unsinkable. Harland & Wolff are allowing the press aboard her a week before she sails, and I have a press pass here for you.”

He’d leaned forward and handed her a small white card.

She’d said, becoming interested, “Where is she berthed?”

“Southampton.” There’d been amusement in his voice. “Nice and handy for your home at Snowberry.”

She hadn’t responded. She now found it so difficult being in his company that she was always stilted with him, terrified that if she wasn’t, there would be a repetition of the time his hand had touched hers and then all her emotions would again be plunged into jangling chaos.

He had watched her intently as if trying to read her mind, his gray eyes concerned. “You don’t seem to be yourself, Rose.” Rising to his feet, he’d rounded the desk to where she was sitting and put a hand gently on her shoulder.

A tremor she hadn’t been able to control had run through her.

When he spoke, it was in a manner quite different from his usual casual familiarity. “I’d like it if you would have dinner with me tonight, Rose. Nothing to do with work. Just the two of us and champagne and perhaps a little dancing … ?”

It was an invitation she had known would come—and because she had known it would come, she had given a lot of thought as to how she would handle it. None of her practice runs had been as
hard as this, though, when he was so near to her she could hardly breathe for wanting to step into his arms.

“No, thank you,” she had said in a voice that didn’t seem like hers at all and that couldn’t have been more stiffly polite if she had been refusing an offer of a cup of tea.