The Runaway Princess (17 page)

“Me neither. But I don’t want to go to Tramp, thanks,” I added quickly, in case he thought I was angling to follow Jo and the
others
.

“Wild horses would not drag me to Tramp,” said Leo solemnly. “Not even with you.”

I shivered, but not because I was cold. “It’s such a gorgeous evening,” I said. “Look at those stars. So clear. It’s almost like we’re not in London.”

“I wish we weren’t in London.” Leo gazed up into the sky, then looked back down at me. “I know I should say good night and put you into a cab,” he said. “But I don’t really want to.”

“I know. They’re ridiculously expensive at this time of night,” I started to gabble, then made myself stop. I had to learn how to be a bit more cool and calm. Now would be a good time to start.

We stood there for a very long, quiet second; then he murmured, “Can I kiss you?”

I nodded twice, and very slowly Leo leaned forward, tilted his head to one side and closed his eyes.

I closed mine and held my breath, and suddenly his lips were on mine, just touching at first, then kissing, harder. Sparks flew all round my body as his hands slid under my coat and around my waist, stroking and pulling me closer.

And my hands, I have to confess here, were inside his coat too, but he didn’t flinch at my chilly fingers against his warm body.

“Amy.” Leo’s voice sounded thick in his throat. “Can I take you home?”

I didn’t say anything, but I didn’t need to. I think my kisses were saying everything I needed to say, and quite a bit more than that.

M
y dad’s birthday was one of the nonnegotiable home
visits
of my year, along with Mum’s birthday, my birthday, Hadley Green Agricultural Show, and Christmas.

This year, I’d bought my train tickets up to Yorkshire weeks in advance to get the cheapest fare. Mum and Dad lived in a small town in the middle of nowhere, and the combination of trains and buses required to get there made it only slightly less of a trek than walking. But not going, as I tried to explain to Jo when she found me at the laptop at 5:30 a.m. grabbing the discounted tickets, wasn’t an option.

For one thing, birthdays allowed my mum to bake for a reason other than to off-load her nervous tension. My parents dealt with stress in different ways: Dad dug for hours on his allotment, and Mum turned into a one-woman all-night bakery. She’d always been a keen home cook, testing out recipes for the canteen on us in scaled-down portions; but since she’d given up her job at the school, she baked so much that our house now smelled permanently of fairy cakes.

I mean, it was lovely—much better than the house smelling of cats, like Di Overend’s did—but all the cake had to go somewhere, and most of it was going into Mum and Dad. Mum was now at least two or three times the size she’d been when I lived at home, and I’d had to persuade her to set up a cake stall at the hospital, just to give Dad’s pancreas a break.

But the main reason I had to go home, the reason we all knew but never actually said, was that Dad’s birthday was two days before Kelly’s, and me being there for his party meant that Mum and Dad could celebrate Kelly’s birthday too, but without any of us mentioning her at all.

It was amazing what complicated emotional knots my family could tie themselves into without talking about anything. We were the emotional equivalent of Jo’s mime classes.

*

T
ypically, this year Dad’s birthday party landed on a weekend filled with all sorts of London delights. Jo was on the VIP list at three different clubs, Mrs. Mainwaring had invited us both to a sherry party in her flat for the first time ever, Dickon had an
opening (although
we were privately a bit dubious about that one), and Leo had tickets to a completely sold-out gig at the Royal Albert Hall that was so popular the tickets were allocated by lottery.

He’d revealed this surprise to me over hot soup and takeaway coffee in his garden, where I’d spent the morning planting Souvenir du President Lincoln rosebushes, delivered straight from the French rose specialist I’d tracked down online.

“I’ve got a surprise for you,” he said when we were huddled up on the bench together with our minestrone. “Call it a late Valentine’s present.”

“But you’ve already given me a Valentine’s present,” I protested. “I’m not one of those girls who has to be constantly plied with gifts, you know. Though obviously they’re much appreciated.”

I’d got back to Leominster Place after the most eye-opening night of my entire life in Leo’s antique sleigh bed to find he’d had the flat filled with flowers—not forced scentless blooms, but proper garden-grown roses, with delicious fragrance that was almost edible, lilac Blue Moons and blushing White Mischief interlaced with china-blue hyacinths and flag irises and tangles of greenery.

“They were just flowers. Coals to Newcastle, I know. Here. And don’t tell me you don’t like the bands playing—I checked out your iPod.” He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the tickets: front-row stalls.

I boggled. “Seriously? Leo, I know for a fact that this is sold out because Jo failed to get tickets when they went on sale
last year
. How did you get these?”

He grinned, and pulled a piece off his bread roll. “Magic. Don’t ask.”

“I won’t.” I grinned back. Maybe dating a prince had unexpected advantages. But then I looked at the tickets again, and my heart sank. “Oh … these are for Saturday night.”

“Are you seeing someone else?”

“No. Well, yes. My dad. It’s his birthday.” I felt awful. “I’m going to Yorkshire for the weekend. I don’t think I’ll be able to get back in time.”

Leo’s face fell. “You can’t leave a little early?”

“It’s not quite as easy as that—it takes two trains and a bus to get there. And I can’t leave until all the sandwiches have been eaten and everyone’s checked me over to make sure I haven’t started talking like a southerner and eating crème fraîche. You know what family dos are like. Well,” I added, “maybe you don’t.”

“What if I came with you?” Leo beamed as if he’d just had a great idea. “Hey, let’s do that! I’ll drive you there and back—we can do it in a day. I’ve never been to Yorkshire. It’ll be a nice day out.”

I choked on my soup.

“What?” Leo frowned. “Don’t you want me to come?”

“No, it’s just …” I was going to say, “I can’t even imagine you in my parents’ house” but changed it to, “. . . this soup is very hot. And it’s a long way.”

I know. Not great. But it was the first thing that came into my head. The thought of Leo and his gorgeous princely glow in my parents’ cramped front room made me feel panicky. They’d need at least six months’ notice—(a) for my dad to rebuild the whole house, and (b) for my mum to have enough therapy to deal with the stress of hosting someone who wasn’t an immediate member of our family.

I regretted it as soon as I’d said it, because Leo looked crestfallen. Admittedly, sitting on a park bench in his winter coat, with a gray cashmere beanie over his expensively tousled hair—and, okay, his nose red with the cold—he looked rather more normal than he did in black tie, but even so. My last boyfriend had been an apprentice scaffolder.

“I don’t see what the problem is,” he said, hurt. “Don’t you want them to meet me? Unless … you haven’t told them you’ve got a boyfriend? Is that it?”

Ironically, that
was
it. “Not in so many words.”

Leo’s mouth dropped open. “What? You haven’t—”

I hurried to explain. “It’s just that my parents tend to give anyone I bring home the third degree. Especially my dad. They’re quite protective of me. They worry.” I was editing a lot here. “It’s nothing to do with you, they’re just a bit mad. Sometimes you’ve just got to … you know, humor your folks.”

“Listen, they can’t be more mad than my family.” Leo stretched out his long legs, crossing them at the ankle to reveal a flash of discreet black sock. “You know I said Mom was involved in this campaign to”—he employed heavy air quotes—“make every American girl an everyday princess? Well, Mom made me and Sofia fly back to Nirona for the afternoon on Monday, just so we could be in a photo shoot for
Vanity Fair
, talking about how important a down-to-earth upbringing was and how we’d always eaten our greens, et cetera, et cetera. Sofia was
not
happy. She kept following the journalist around, telling her that actually she wasn’t ‘normal’ at all, she’d been a member of MENSA since she was twelve.”

“No Rolf?”

“Definitely no Rolf.” He twisted his lips in wry amusement. “And of course Mom couldn’t let rip at Sofia while the journalist was there, but she more than made up for it when the woman left. I thought something was going to get broken. The windows, maybe. That’s not in the American Princess Plan, let me tell you.”

I smiled and blew on my soup. Then stopped myself. That wasn’t good etiquette. Or was it? I’d have to check.

Leo sighed and dipped his bread in the soup. “So you’re telling me I’m going to have to take Rolf?”

“Well, that’d be perfect for your mother’s big campaign! What could be more mannerly than taking your own brother to a rock concert! There’s bound to be a photographer there,” I added.

“I’m not going anywhere with Rolf if it has a backstage area,” said Leo. “No way, José.”

“Take Jo, then. Take Jo
and
Rolf, and you can teach him how to show a lady a good time.” That wasn’t what I meant. I spluttered on my soup. “I don’t mean, like that! I mean—”

“I know what you mean.” Leo shook his head. “But I don’t
really
want to go without you.”

I thought for a moment that he was trying to get me to cancel on my parents, but I shook my head. I wasn’t going to do that. And I couldn’t bend the laws of time and physics to do both.

“Another time,” I said. “I promise.”

*

I
t was only a few weeks since I’d been home to Yorkshire for the annual unofficial mince-pie eating record attempt, but as usual my parents reacted as if I’d been on some round-the-world voyage, not digging a few gardens at the other end of the East Coast rail line.

“You’re skin and bones!” wailed my mum, before I’d even heaved my rucksack over the threshold. Badger lurked behind me, letting Mum’s attention wash over me first before it could turn to him and his “hygiene issues.” “Aren’t you eating? Are you too busy to eat?”

“You’re looking worn out, Amy,” added my dad. “Have you got one of those colds going round? They say they spread round the Underground network like wildfire. Germ cocktails. Mutating all the time.”

“Oh, Stan, be quiet. Amy’s not
ill
,” Mum corrected him, stroking my arm. “When she’s ill, she looks more
gray
. She looks
peaky
, not ill. Underfed, if you ask me.”

Dad made a snorting noise, because only remote tribes in Tonga where women weigh more than horses would consider me underfed.

“Happy birthday, Dad,” I said, before he could start arguing with my mum about my body fat. “I’ve got you a present.”

“You shouldn’t have,” he said automatically, but I could tell he was pleased. “Is it seeds? Or bulbs?” He eyed my rucksack hopefully, then spotted Badger behind me. “Oh. I see you’ve brought the demon dog with you.”

“Yes,” I replied. “He’s the reason I had a table seat to myself on the train. Wouldn’t travel without him.”

“I’ve just hoovered,” said Mum. “I hope there won’t be a repeat of last time.”

“Oh, come on, Mum, it’s not Buckingham Palace!” I said, and immediately wished I hadn’t.

My mum and dad’s end-of-terrace house was nice enough by Rothery standards—Victorian, with bay windows, a narrow kitchen, and a faint air of gloom that wasn’t helped by the noise of the railway line running behind the street. But if you went through the house into the back garden, it was like stepping into a different world. Dad had crammed every inch of available soil with an ever-changing patchwork of plants and shrubs, the pride of which was a vine that he’d actually coaxed grapes from during the very hot summer of 2010. Thankfully, not enough to make any wine.

We’d moved to Rothery ten years ago, after Kelly’s Shame had forced my parents to downsize from our lovely thatched cottage in the much nicer village of Hadley Green, with a huge garden that was the star turn on the Neighborhood in Bloom poke-’n’-preen. Kelly and I’d had swings on the apple tree and rabbits in the garden, and Dad had presided over a huge vegetable patch that was so impressive they eventually made him a judge at the local show because they ran out of categories for him to win.

Now Dad had an allotment on the other side of town and blagged exotic seeds off me from a contact I had at the agricultural college. Badger hadn’t exactly covered himself in glory last time Dad took him up there at New Year’s, although he
had
covered himself in soil and pigeon droppings from the pigeon loft next door.

“Don’t be mean to Badger,” I said. “He’s been looking forward to seeing you.”

“I’m only going on past record,” said Mum darkly.

“You’re okay, aren’t you, lad?” Dad gave him a roughhousing stroke, and Badger barked, rolled onto his back, and, I think, made a terrible smell.

“Go through,” said Mum, waving us down the hall toward the sitting room. I waved too, to dissipate Badger’s indiscretion. “I’ve put a few things out in case you were hungry on the train, just to carry you on till teatime. …”

I edged past her—no small feat, given the narrowness of the hall and the width of my mother—and went into the conservatory. Pale Yorkshire sunlight filtered bravely through the net curtains, falling on the groaning table of plates and glass cake stands waiting for me.

Chocolate birthday cake. Thick slices of fruitcake. Cookies, various. Brownies in a tumbling nutty pile. Five types of sandwiches cut into tiny quarters with the crusts trimmed off. I blinked. Had I got it wrong? Was this a surprise birthday party for our whole family?

I glanced at Dad.

“Your sister’s card arrived yesterday,” he whispered. “It set her off. Thought she might be coming.”

A familiar weight draped itself on my shoulders like a moody cat. Kelly sent cards every birthday and Christmas, but never said where she was or when she’d be back. It didn’t stop Mum pulling out all the stops, just in case. “And is she? Did she put a letter in this time? Was there a postmark?”

Dad shook his head sadly. “No. Nothing we could make out. Just ‘Happy birthday, lots of love from Kelly. Kiss kiss.’ That’s one more kiss than last year.”

On the table between all the cakes were five cards—mine from the Kew Gardens collection, one “to my dear husband,” one “to my dear brother,” one “to a special neighbor” (well done, Di Overend), and a big sparkly card that dwarfed the others.

A white-hot ribbon of anger ran through me. If Kelly could spend ten minutes writing a simple note in these cards, instead of just picking the most expensive one in the shop, then Mum might not be in such a state. It was almost worse than not sending one at all. It just got their hopes up three times a year—as usual, it was more about Kelly salving her conscience than helping them with the chaos she’d left behind.

Over the past few years I’d tried to track her down myself via Facebook and friends, but Kelly had covered her tracks pretty well for someone with that big a mouth. She obviously didn’t want to be found. I was only sixteen when it all happened, and I hadn’t properly understood the full extent of Kelly’s stupidity then; but now, looking at Mum comfort-eating herself into XXXXL smocks and Dad lost in enforced early retirement from a job he’d loved really made me realize that it wasn’t Kelly who’d been punished for what she’d done—it had been us.