The Golden Prince (54 page)

Some day, far in the future, when her pain had eased, she would unveil it and it would take pride of place in one of her sisters’ homes—perhaps even in her and Rory’s home. For now, though, she had to turn her thoughts to Rory. To the life they were going to build together on Islay. She thought of the way the baby she and David had created would never have to live within a prison-house of formality and pomposity and rigid etiquette as David had always done—and always would do.

Instead he, or she, would have the most beautiful Hebridean island of all for a playground. She would have her freedom, too. The freedom to paint and sculpt. The freedom to go where she wanted, when she wanted. The freedom of not being watched by a royal household of censorious eyes. She would have the greatest blessing of all, for unlike David she would never be lonely. Rory had always been in her life and now always would be.

After the wedding reception, she and Rory were traveling straight to Islay. She wouldn’t be in the studio again for a long time. Looking around, she silently said good-bye to it and then turned and began making her way down to the drawing room where her family were fast assembling.

She paused at the foot of the stairs, listening to the chatter that was coming from the drawing room. She could hear her mother saying bewilderedly, “But why wasn’t I asked to help arrange the wedding, Iris? Why is it so small and informal?”

She didn’t hear Iris’s reply because Fizz and Florin rushed past her, barking excitedly to welcome Rose, who, as she entered the house, did so accompanied by a startlingly handsome man. Marigold had already described Hal for her. “He’s all dark and damn-your-eyes,” she had said graphically, and for once Lily had to admit that Marigold hadn’t been exaggerating.

“Hal, Lily,” Rose said, introducing them. “Lily, Hal … and Jacinta, Hal’s daughter.”

“Are you the bride?” Jacinta asked as Lily shook hands with her. “I do like your dress. I can see it’s not really a wedding dress, but it’s very pretty.”

“Thank you,” Lily said gravely. Her dress was a very simple one of white voile with a lace fichu collar. It most certainly wasn’t a typical wedding dress, but she hadn’t wanted to wear one, and Rory had told her to wear whatever she felt most comfortable wearing.

“Are Marigold, Theo, and the boys here yet?” Rose asked as Lily picked up her bouquet from the hall table.

“I don’t know. I haven’t been downstairs at all since people began arriving.”

Rose looked at Lily’s pale face with disquiet. Hal still didn’t know the history behind Lily’s wedding to Rory—and she had told her grandfather and Iris and Marigold not to mention it in his presence. Hal was a newspaper editor. When he asked her to marry him—which she was sure he would do—then she would tell him. When he had become family, she would be able to rest easy that he wouldn’t be tempted to put what he was told into print.

His presence meant she couldn’t speak to Lily as she would have liked, but as they reached the drawing room and Hal opened the door for them, she did say in a low, urgent voice, “If you’re having second thoughts, Lily, please tell me.”

“No. I know I’m doing the only thing I possibly can do. Rory will make me happy, Rose. Happiness is something he’s very good at. And I’m going to make him happy, too.”

With Jacinta walking behind her as if she were her bridesmaid, Lily entered the room to the acclamation of her family, and fifty minutes later, in a church smelling of lilac and with her mother dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief, she became Mrs. Rory Sinclair.

Rose’s sense of relief when the wedding was over was vast. If any of the guests suspected that the bride was nearly three months’ pregnant, their thoughts hadn’t been put into words—and Lily didn’t look pregnant. She looked as delicate as a camellia, her blue-black hair caught in a shining coil on the nape of her neck, little ringlets escaping round her temples.

At the wedding breakfast Toby had made a speech in which he managed to be surprisingly funny. Their grandfather had made a speech during which he’d had to blow his nose vigorously to disguise the fact that, at the thought of losing Lily to Islay, he was close to tears. Rory, resplendent in a black doublet and kilt, a lace jabot at his throat and lace ruffles at his wrists, had responded with a short speech of thanks on behalf of him and Lily.

Toasts had been made, champagne had been drunk, and when the wedding party had spilled out onto the terrace and into the garden, Rory and Lily had done so hand in hand.

Rose watched them, her throat tightening.

“They look grand, don’t they?” Millie said, coming up to her. “He’ll make her happy. He has the knack. If you have a minute, could you help me move the wedding cake from the wedding-breakfast table to another table where the bottom tier will be easier to slice? I’ve asked Tilly, but she’s too frightened of dropping it.”

Rose walked back into the house with her and as she did, the front door bell clanged. Moments later William came into the dining room saying bewilderedly, “Captain Cullen has arrived to speak with Miss Lily, Miss Rose.”

Rose was in the process of transferring the wedding cake from what had been the top table, to a small lace-covered table that had been prepared especially for it. It was only thanks to Millie that the cake didn’t come to grief.

She walked out of the room and down the corridor, her face tense.

Piers Cullen was standing in the middle of the hall, staring down at a trail of wedding rice.

He raised his head, his eyes meeting hers.

“Who is the bride?” he demanded. From her dress it quite obviously wasn’t Rose, and he added sneeringly, “Marigold?”

“No.” It wasn’t a moment Rose had foreseen, though she realized now that it should have been. There was no point in lying. Even in the hall the sound of the partying on the terrace and on the lawn could be heard, and he would only have to walk through the drawing room to the open French doors to see who the bride was.

“Well who, then?”

“Lily,” she said, and waited for the explosion.

It didn’t come. She’d robbed him of the breath to give vent to one. He was so shocked she thought he was going to faint.

At last he said hoarsely, “Who to?”

“Her cousin Rory. Rory Sinclair.”

“I don’t believe you!
I don’t believe you!
”

He pushed her so violently out of his way that she went crashing to her knees. As she struggled to her feet, he raced for the drawing-room door. Seizing hold of its handle, he slammed it back on its hinges.

With bleeding knees she hurtled after him, terrified of what he was going to do. As William and Millie came running, she yelled at them to keep back, knowing that one blow from Piers could be the end for either of them.

“Piers!” she shouted. “
Piers!
”

Incredibly, once he reached the open French doors he came to a breathless halt, putting a hand to the doorjamb to steady himself.

She came to a halt a little way behind him, certain he had lost his senses, certain that he was mad—and probably always had been.

Looking past him, she could see exactly what he was seeing. The terrace with wedding guests sitting in cane chairs set around white-clothed tables. Her grandfather holding court at one of them, deep in conversation with her stepfather, the stepson-in-law he rarely saw. Great-Aunt Sibyl was sitting with them, a glass of champagne in her hand. A little way off from them, Marguerite,
Camille, and Jacinta were playing with Fizz and Florin, trying to teach the dogs tricks, Marguerite and Camille doing so in French, Jacinta showing off by doing so in Spanish.

On the lawn her mother, looking incredibly lovely in rose-pink chiffon and a hat laden with white ostrich feathers, was talking to Strickland, and he was looking down his long Roman nose at her in rapt fascination. Hal, hands in his pockets, was talking to Toby. Daphne was walking down to the lakeside with Theo’s boys one at either side of her and Theo, Marigold, and Iris were standing in a little half circle around the bride and groom.

Marigold was wearing an emerald-green silk dress and a matching hat laden with yellow roses. It dipped seductively low over her eyes as, with a net-gloved hand tucked into the crook of Theo’s arm, she laughed at something Rory was saying.

Rory and Lily were still hand in hand. A slight breeze stirred Lily’s voile skirt and lifted the edges of her lace collar.

Though she couldn’t see his face, Rose knew Piers’s eyes were locked on Lily.

He said in a strangled voice, “Does Prince Edward know?”

“No. Lily will be writing to him tonight.”

Still looking at Lily, his whole body juddered.

Rose pressed a fist to her mouth, petrified as to what was going to happen next. If he sprinted toward Lily, what would Rory do? What would Toby, Hal, Theo, and Strickland do? The whole lovely idyllic scene on the terrace and on the lawn would be reduced to one of ugly violence.

With a low moan he didn’t move forward. He whipped round to face her.

“Tell her she needn’t bother!” he yelled at her. “Tell Lily I’ll do the job for her!” With a face contorted in pain he strode past her, out of the room, out of the house.

As she heard the sound of his car careening down the drive Rose’s knees gave way and she half fell onto the nearest sofa. She was certain of only one thing. If Piers Cullen had had a gun on
him, he would have shot Rory between the eyes. She suspected that he would then have turned the gun on himself.

Piers’s Lanchester swerved from one side of the drive to the other. Lily may have married Sinclair, she may have become lost to him, but he could still fulfill one obsession. He could give himself the pleasure of telling Edward that she was lost to him, too. As he reached the road his teeth were bared in something between a grimace and glee. No longer Edward’s equerry, he didn’t even have a position to worry about losing. He could revenge himself for all the hurts, slights, and indignities Edward had dealt him by dealing Edward the blow that would, Piers was sure, absolutely destroy him. Although no longer in royal service, he knew where Edward was. He also knew he could be at Neustrelitz before Lily’s letter arrived there.

Lily wasn’t going to deliver the fatal blow to Edward.

He was going to deliver it.

The pleasure he was going to derive from doing so would help ease the torture of his own loss—and give him more satisfaction than any sexual satisfaction could possibly give.

Rose sat alone
in the drawing room, her hands clenched tightly in her lap. Her fear and panic had been so great during her nightmare scene with Piers that she hadn’t taken literally his demented intention of telling David that Lily had married Rory. For one thing, David was in Germany, so how could he?

But he had.

A private telephone call from Germany to England had been impossible even for David, and when he had phoned her in a state of hysteria, he had done so from a hotel in Dover.

“Tell me it isn’t true!” he’d begged, when a series of operators had finally connected him to Snowberry. “Tell me that bastard Cullen has simply gone off his head!”

The line had been very crackly, and there had been sobs in his voice.

“I can’t, David,” she’d said. “Lily married Rory three days ago.”

His response had been frantic. “But she can’t have! She can’t! I’ve only just received a long loving letter from her! Please help me, Rose! I think I’m going mad!”

It was an impossible conversation to conduct over a bad telephone line. “We need to talk face-to-face, David.” She tried to keep her voice steady, and couldn’t. “Can you get down to Snowberry?”

“I’m coming straight there!”

After that the only sound had been of a dangling telephone receiver and she had known he hadn’t even paused long enough to sever the connection, or to put the receiver back on its cradle.

That had been an hour and a half ago.

With every minute that went by, her tension mounted. She had sent her grandfather to Sissbury on a spurious errand. Marigold was at Sibyl’s. Telling Millie that she wanted the house to herself—and why—she had sent her and Tilly on a chauffeured afternoon trip to Winchester. William she had sent down to the village pub with instructions not to come back until teatime.