The Golden Prince (5 page)

He stared at it, his mouth tight, his nostrils pinched and white, knowing Rose Houghton must have thought his looking for a run-of-the-mill cottage a great joke.

Gritting his teeth, he embarked on the long walk up Snowberry’s elm-tree-lined driveway. By the time the parkland came to an end and the gardens began, much as he hated being so, he was impressed.

Wisteria and honeysuckle flowered against mellow stone walls. Bees hovered over huge banks of lavender. Early roses gave off a heady, sweet scent. The house looked as if it had always been there, hidden from the narrow country road in splendor that
was timeless. He wasn’t much of a historian, but he judged it to be mid-seventeenth century, possibly even Elizabethan. It was the sort of house that never changed hands but was passed down in the same family from one generation to another. Rose Houghton may have been everything he hated in a woman, but if Snowberry was her home, she was also extremely fortunate.

Dropping the bicycle to the ground, he strode past the carelessly parked Austro-Daimler and rapped hard on the door.

An elderly butler opened it to him.

“Captain Cullen,” he said to him abruptly. “Equerry to His Royal Highness Prince Edward.”

“Is that so, sir?” The butler gave a puzzled frown. “Is his lordship expecting you?”

“His Royal Highness is expecting me!” Piers snapped, wondering if the old fool was senile.

“That may be so, sir, but this is the home of the Earl of May. His lordship is not at home and there is presently no guest at Snowberry, royal or otherwise …”

“Actually there is, William.”

Piers looked beyond the butler to where Rose Houghton, accompanied by another young woman of similar age, was crossing the hall to take charge of the situation.

“Lily has taken Prince Edward down to the tennis court so that Marigold may meet him,” she said as she reached the open doorway. “I should have told you, William, but there were unusual circumstances.” The bruising fast coming up on her face, and the raw graze, indicated just how unusual the circumstances had been.

Turning to Piers she said with cool politeness, “Please come in, Captain Cullen.”

Piers, who wanted only to march down to the tennis court in order to retrieve Prince Edward from Lily and Marigold—whoever they might be—stepped into an enormous stone-flagged hall.

“It’s quicker to walk through the house to the rear, than to walk around it,” Rose said, and he saw that she had changed into a spotlessly
clean lace blouse and dove-gray skirt and that her thick knot of waving chestnut hair had been brushed and repinned. “May I first introduce you to my sister? Captain Cullen, Iris. Iris, Captain Cullen. Captain Cullen is Prince Edward’s equerry and has kindly brought my damaged bicycle home for me.”

Piers gave an abrupt nod in the direction of a pleasant-faced young woman with intelligent brown eyes. Then to Rose he said equally abruptly, “The tennis court, Lady Rose, if you please.”

“Aah!” Rose tilted her head to one side. “I see that William has caused confusion. The Earl of May is my grandfather. My father was the late Viscount Houghton.”

Once again she had caught him out in a wrong assumption, and he shot her a look of pure malevolence. “Then to the tennis court,
Miss
Houghton,” he said through gritted teeth.

She led the way through a house that was flooded with sunshine and as lyrically lovely on the inside as it was on the outside. Lovingly polished William and Mary furniture emanated a pleasing scent of beeswax polish, and on every surface there was a vase or a bowl of flowers. In the drawing room, winged armchairs decorated with needlepoint panels cohabited happily with Edwardian sofas. On one of the many cushions a Burmese cat was curled, contentedly asleep. On a rosewood card table a jigsaw puzzle was waiting to be finished. On another table ivory chess pieces had been left enticingly in midplay. It was a family room, a room to linger in.

He wasn’t allowed to.

“The tennis court is quite a walk,” Rose said as they exited the house via French doors. “My grandfather wanted it sited as far away from the house as possible so that it wouldn’t spoil the view.”

Piers didn’t blame him.

A vast lawn studded with specimen trees led down to a small lake. Beyond the lake the vista dissolved into woods and, beyond the woods, into gentle hills.

Homer loped to meet them, greeting him as if he was an old friend. Piers wasn’t a dog person and if Homer had hoped for a
friendly pat, he was left disappointed. Piers saw Rose Houghton’s full-lipped mouth tighten and didn’t care. All he wanted was to put the day back on course and that meant having Prince Edward at the wheel of his Austro-Daimler heading once more for Windsor Castle.

As two spaniels bounded up from the lower end of the lawn to join Homer’s welcome party he glanced down at his watch. It was ten to three. It wasn’t late enough for alarm to be caused at Windsor. There had been no set time for their departure from Dartmouth and there was no set time for their arrival. A longer interruption to their journey would, though, begin to cause concern. If a telephone call was made to the Naval College and the approximate time of their departure given, he would have a lot of explaining to do.

At the thought of giving such an explanation to King George a nerve pulsed at the corner of his jaw. The fiasco that the afternoon had turned into had gone on long enough. Whether Prince Edward liked it, or whether he didn’t, he was going to have to put this little adventure behind him and get on with the tedious rigidity of his royal life.

He could hear a tennis ball being thwacked across a net and voices and laughter.

A terrible fear seized hold of him. Surely Prince Edward couldn’t be playing tennis with two young women he had met in so casual and careless a way?

Rose Houghton led him through a gateway cut into a high yew hedge and his fear was confirmed.

Two girls, one with dark hair tumbling in ringlets down her back, the other wearing a flower in upswept fiery-colored hair, were with the prince, knocking a tennis ball back and forth across the net.

As if that wasn’t shocking enough, Edward had discarded his collarless round-necked naval jacket.

Never before had Piers seen Prince Edward in shirtsleeves and waistcoat and he doubted if anyone else—other than his valet—
had either, for King George’s insistence on correct dress for members of his family at all times and for every occasion was written in stone. When Edward was in the presence of his father, he was expected to wear a morning coat. At dinner he wore a tail coat with a white tie. If he were to play a game of tennis at Windsor or Sandringham with one of his brothers, he, and they, would be dressed accordingly in buckskin shoes, knickerbockers, a shirt with a stiff collar, and an appropriate tie fastened with a gold pin. Any deviation was totally unthinkable. Or had been until now.

“Your friend is here,” the sensuous-looking girl with the flower in her hair called out richly to Edward as she hit a cross-court volley. “So are Rose and Iris. Have we to start a game of doubles?”

David let the ball bounce, caught it in his hand, and turned to face Piers.

“The girls want a game of mixed doubles,” he said pleasantly. “As there are six of us—and as we thought that under the circumstances Rose would be happier not playing but umpiring—if you want to make up a foursome I’m sure Iris, Marigold, or Lily would act as ball boy.”

Piers sucked in his breath, grateful only that it hadn’t been suggested that
he
should act as ball boy.

“I’m afraid a game of doubles isn’t going to be possible, sir,” he said, wondering for how much longer he could keep his temper under control. “Our journey to Windsor has already been delayed by well over an hour. Any longer and questions will be asked.” He picked up Edward’s jacket from where Edward had dropped it on the umpire’s chair. “If we leave directly, sir, we will run into no problems.”

The sensuous-looking girl gave a heavy sigh of disappointment, saying as she walked toward the net, “Oh, David, do the two of you really have to do a bunk?”

Piers’s jaw dropped. He was so shocked he felt physically dizzy. Then he felt violently sick. Not because of the vulgar slang she had used, but because no one,
no one
, ever referred to the prince by the name used within his family.

His fellow naval cadets—those in his year group—had, he knew, been given permission to drop his title and call him Edward. One boy, Lord Spencer’s son, even called him Eddy. No one else took such liberties. Piers had been in Edward’s service for nearly twelve months, ever since Edward’s grandfather, King Edward VII, had died, and he had never been invited to call him anything other than Edward—and then only when no one else was present.

Yet now he had invited these four girls—four girls he knew nothing whatever about—to call him David. Hard on the heels of his shock came fierce, roaring jealousy. Then hard on the heels of his jealousy came a resentment so burning he knew it would never leave him.

Through his raging emotion he saw the smaller girl of the two, the one whose hair was a torrent of smoke-dark ringlets, approaching him.

“Dear Captain Cullen,” she said in the loveliest voice he had ever heard and as if she had known him for years, “do please delay your journey long enough for us all to play at least one set of doubles with you and David. It will be such fun.”

The sweetness of the expression on her face smote his heart. Her smile was so winsome that his knees felt weak. Her black-lashed eyes were a color he had never thought humanly possible.

When she handed him her racket, he took it. It would have been unthinkable for him to have done anything else.

Her smile widened, and he saw that she had the tiniest, prettiest dimples imaginable.

“If you and Marigold play against David and Iris, Rose will umpire and I will be ball boy.”

“Yes,” he said stupidly, knowing he was the victim of something he had thought didn’t exist except in men’s imaginations. A
coup de foudre
. He, Piers Cullen, a man who had never committed a rash act in his life, had in one life-changing second fallen unreasonably, instantaneously head over heels in love.

Two hours later
, when the Austro-Daimler roared away down the drive with David at the wheel, Rose said drily, “Snowberry can’t have seen many afternoons as extraordinary as this one.”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Marigold’s voice was languid. “Didn’t Queen Anne stay overnight in 1710?”

“She didn’t play tennis and she didn’t invite her host and hostess to call her by her first name.”

“David isn’t his first name.” Iris was pedantic as always. “It’s actually his last name.”

“Whatever, it was
extraordinary.
” With the car now out of sight Rose turned to go into the house. “As was his asking if he could visit Snowberry again.”

“But surely that was just politeness?” As they stepped into the vast entrance hall Iris began to look worried. “I mean, from his point of view, coming here again in such a casual manner wouldn’t be the done thing at all, would it?”

“I shouldn’t think so. He did seem to enjoy himself though, didn’t he?”

Marigold, who had played an extremely strenuous game of tennis, undid the top buttons of her blouse, blotting the sweat from full, lush breasts with a handkerchief. “Whether he did, or didn’t, my deb friends in London are going to be green-eyed with jealousy when I tell them he dropped in for a game of tennis.”

Rose came to a halt in the middle of the hall. “Because of the
circumstances—the way he came to be here—I don’t want you to say a word to anyone, Marigold.”

“Heavens, no.” Iris’s pale skin turned a shade paler. “If it became public knowledge that Prince Edward had been responsible for a road accident in which Rose had been knocked from her bicycle, it could cause all kinds of trouble for him. You know what people are like. It would get exaggerated and before you know where you are, the story going the rounds would be that he’d nearly killed her.”

Rose refrained from saying that as far as she was concerned, he very nearly had. Instead she said, “We’ll tell Grandfather, of course. And Rory.” Rory was their second cousin, the grandson of their grandfather’s only sister, Sibyl, Lady Harland. “Other than that, we’ll keep it to ourselves. I’m sure that’s what David would want. Also, if we keep it to ourselves, there’s far more chance of his coming here again. And I’d be happy if he did, because I liked him.”

Marigold weighed up what was most advantageous to herself: enjoying brief envy because Prince Edward had paid an isolated visit to Snowberry, or saying nothing about his visit in the hope that he would become a regular visitor. The latter was rather long odds, but she liked taking a risk.

“OK,” she said agreeably. “I’ll go along with keeping this afternoon a secret. What time d’you think Grandfather and Lord Jethney will be here?”

Rose shot her a sharp glance. Though Lord Jethney was their grandfather’s close friend, he was only in his forties. One of the youngest ministers in the government, he was also married with two sons. Of late, Marigold had been showing far too much interest in him.

“Who knows?” she said coolly, thanking her lucky stars that Jethney hadn’t arrived while the heir to the throne was playing a vigorous game of mixed doubles in his shirtsleeves.

Marigold returned Rose’s speculative gaze with amusement, well aware that her elder sister knew that young men bored her
and that she preferred older men, men like Theo Jethney, who possessed both sophistication and power.

“I’m going upstairs to bathe and change,” she said, uncaring that Rose’s suspicions had been aroused. “Let’s just hope,” she added as a parting shot, “that if David does visit again, he does so without Captain Cullen. He didn’t like you one little bit, Rose.”

Rose, well aware of the antipathy between herself and Captain Cullen, gave a dismissive shrug. She had more important things to worry about than an army officer who took himself so seriously he couldn’t even crack a polite smile. As Lily said wistfully that she wished their grandfather had been at home while David had been with them, she wondered if it was about time she took Iris into her confidence where her worries about Marigold were concerned.