The Runaway Princess (21 page)

“That depends on how special the plants are.” I rose to my feet, hoping I hadn’t been looking too nosy. “Or how big your garden is, of course.”

“Indeed. And I have had a good few gardens in my time,” he said with a wistful smile. “I hope I haven’t disturbed you, my dear. It’s nice to see someone taking a moment to enjoy the roses, rather than snapping away with a camera.” He produced a small Tina pruning knife from his baggy jacket and cut an apricot-yellow tea rose from the thick climber.

“My own favorite,” he said, presenting it to me with a courtly inclination of his head. “Lady Hillingdon. A dependable old climber, but very sweet. And the color of your rather lovely hair, if you’ll permit me to say so.”

“Thank you.” I buried my nose in the velvety petals, and decided not to think too hard about the reference to the climber. “Lady Hillingdon’s one of my favorite roses too. I’ve planted one of these in the garden I’m working on in London. It’s a historical rose garden, lots of traditional varieties like this.”

The old man tipped up the brim of his hat with a crooked finger, and raised his white eyebrow. “How interesting. I know London well. Whereabouts?”

“Kensington. Not too far from the Royal Albert Hall.”

The blue eyes twinkled conspiratorially. “Ah, yes. The Royal Albert Hall. Now, these are exquisite too, these deep pink blooms. Amy Robsart, do you know it? See, even the leaves have a fragrance.” He cut me another with a professional nip, and rustled the leaf between his fingers to release the smell.

I met his gaze over the top of the petals and found an equally old-fashioned shyness creeping over me in response to his chivalrous attentions. This was a man, I could tell, who’d known a rose to match the eyes, hair, and name of every film star in the marina.

I smiled. Even so, he still had the knack of making a girl feel special.

“Let me show you the red roses,” he said, offering me his arm, and we walked slowly along the thickly flowered beds, pausing to admire one variety or another. Soon I had a round posy of perfect roses, the thorns deftly removed, and a promise of cuttings to take home with me. From the man’s encyclopedic knowledge of the gardens and the proud way he reeled off answers to my questions about the care of them, I guessed he was either the head groundsman or—I wasn’t
daft
—Leo’s grandfather. I didn’t want to show myself up by asking, and in any case, it didn’t matter; we were talking plants, not palaces, and I was far more confident when it came to black spot and rust than I was on tiaras.

We’d probably have got through the whole conversation without mentioning the elephant in the rose garden if he hadn’t brought it up himself, but he did so with such grace that I barely had time to feel embarrassed.

We’d paused by a smallish stone fountain with a dancing woman at the center. Water was pitter-pattering off her outstretched arms in pretty arcs, and blush-pink rose petals from the climber wrapped around the nearby arch floated in the water.

“You like this statue?” he asked, with a sidelong glance.

“I do. It’s very elegant. Not too big.”

“It’s modeled on my mother. Adelaide. She was a wonderful dancer in her youth, although she wasn’t able to continue with it after her marriage, of course.” He left a discreet pause for me to catch up. “She also designed these gardens. These are her own roses here, named in her honor. Princess Adelaide—very delicate in appearance, but almost impossible to kill off with a bad winter. We prize our beautiful imported varieties here. They bring such strength and character to our garden.”

Oh, nuts. I wasn’t sure what to do now he’d told me who he was. Would a curtsy be appropriate? Could you do a retrospective one? I didn’t want to do the wrong thing. Prince Wilhelm didn’t have Liza’s “curtsy now” aura, but he had a definite old-school dignity about him that I wanted him to know I’d noticed.

I started to fumble with my skirt, but he just patted my hand and gave me three flowers on a stem, each one the color of ballet slippers.

“Please, no. No ceremony. One thing I enjoy most about these gardens is that here I am Willi, and I can talk with people who love these roses as much as I do. There is enough bowing and scraping inside. Outside, it’s the flowers who deserve the attention. And if I take an hour out of the day, at my age, then I will. What is the point of being a prince otherwise?”

He smiled, and I remembered what Leo had said about his grandfather’s playboy heyday in London: the wine, and the women, and the song. I could see that. I could definitely see that in his smile. I could see him in Leo’s rose garden, watching the dawn break over the wet grass from the summerhouse.

“Thank you, Your Highness,” I said. “You’re very kind.”

“You must call me Willi,” he said solemnly.

“I’m Amy,” I said, and he took my hand and kissed it. That was the wrong way round, etiquettely speaking, but I was beginning to realize that hand-kissing was very much par for the course round here, royalty or not.

“And what have you done with Leo?” He gestured for me to sit down on the bench. It was identical to the benches in the Trinity Square garden, except instead of “To Dodger, a True Friend and Shooting Companion, 1985–1998” on the plaque, it read, “Princess Adelaide of Nirona and Svetland, a Mother, an Australian, a Gardener.”

“He’s dealing with his office inside.” I paused. “Has he told you about the rose garden? Has he shown you photographs of it now?”

Willi coughed, and I realized he wasn’t quite as fit as I’d thought. When I offered to go for some water, he waved away my concern.

“He has indeed. Leo has been sending me photographs, you know, of all the work you’ve been putting into my square. It’s brought back some wonderful memories for me.”

“Really?” I felt proud. “And do you like what we’ve done?”

Prince Wilhelm smiled distantly, as if an old film was running through his mind and he didn’t want to interrupt it. “I am
very
happy with what you’ve done,” he said. “Do you know, I met my wife in those gardens? We used to have supper in the summerhouse when Evelyn’s chaperone was otherwise engaged. I used to leave the light on, and Evelyn would pretend she was going to a dancing class in Marylebone and take a taxi, and we’d eat smoked salmon from Harrods and … It was all very innocent. But tea roses always remind me of those special evenings. I’m sure they will for you too. Such happy times.”

I blushed faintly at the “happy times” I’d already enjoyed in that garden without a single rose having yet bloomed. (Not like that.) “That’s what I love about gardening. Flowers always bring back memories for people, and they come back every year—if you’re reasonably careful.”

Prince Wilhelm sighed and nodded, and we sat on our bench gazing out over the English garden in companionable silence while white-winged butterflies flitted from bush to plant. A few French tourists wandered in with maps of the formal gardens, and he rose politely from the seat to answer their questions, very much the distinguished head gardener, albeit with a perfect French
accent
.

When an English couple wandered in, I did the same, and was able to advise them pretty thoroughly about growing similar
flowers
at home—what I didn’t know about pre-1925 English rose varieties by now wasn’t worth knowing. And halfway through my pruning advice, I caught Prince Willi gazing at me with a conspiratorial smile on his face, and without thinking, I winked.

And he, the Prince of Nirona, winked back.

I
made my first solo appearance on the YoungHot&Royal
website
shortly after the weekend in Nirona. It was a bit of a wake-up call, to say the least. I’d had no idea that my hair had got so “out of control,” or that anyone would ever describe me as “mysterious.”

“But I’m the least mysterious person I know,” I protested to Jo, as we both stared at the home page in shock, transfixed by the banner headline “After Flora: Prince Leo’s Mysterious New Love Interest!” “How can they say I’m mysterious?”

“They mean they haven’t managed to find you on Facebook or in the back of
Tatler
.” Jo clicked on the comments box.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m leaving an anonymous comment to say you’re a natural beauty. Your hair doesn’t
need
a Brazilian blow-dry, we don’t all have to look like Middleton clones.”

“What? Where does it say that? Jo, have you read this page before? You have, haven’t you? You’ve been Googling us again! Show me.” I leaned forward, but Jo covered the screen with her hand.

“Nothing! It’s nothing. Go and make us a cup of tea.” She flapped her hand. “Go on. Tea.”

Reluctantly, I went through to the kitchen, trying not to let my imagination fill in the blanks.

Jo and I had repeated our solemn vow not to keep checking the royal gossip websites to see what they were saying about Rolf and Leo, but it was like accidentally eavesdropping on a
conversation
and hearing your own name mentioned, and then walking on by. As Jo said, only the virtuous or the very stupid wouldn’t care.

I was neither of those things, and I was freaked out, to say the least. Not just about what fashion verdict they’d slapped on my outfit (I was already regretting our gleeful hoots of derision at some of their comments about other royal girlfriends’ fashion mistakes) but what they’d managed to find out about me and, more to the point, my family.

When the photos of Jo and Rolf had been dissected on the site, they’d got a fair bit of mileage out of the Honorable Jo—between her various festival fringe shows, and her well-connected exes, and her frequently married parents, and her great-great-grandmother after whom the Prince of Wales’s fourth yacht was named (who knew?), there was a lot to hoot about. But they hadn’t found much to say about me with Leo until now, and we’d been dating for well over four months.

I stared blankly at the boiling kettle. Seeing this new post made something else fall into place. A photographer had been lurking around our house on and off for the past week; Jo had spotted him from the kitchen, and we’d left by the back door every day. He’d got bored by Thursday and rung the bell to ask to use the loo, but Mrs. Mainwaring had told him to get lost in very robust terms. It was a good job he hadn’t got Dickon’s bell, or he’d have been upstairs posing with just his long lens to cover his modesty before he could say “nudey angel.”

I made the tea, gave the tea bags one more dunk, and dropped them in the bin. A photographer hanging around
our
house to photograph Jo and
me
. It was surreal. Like it was happening to someone else. Except the evidence was right there on the Internet, for every single person in the world to read if they wanted to. And now putting “Amy Wilde” into Google would lead to this photo of me with three-day-old hair and a distracted (polite version)
expression
—possibly for the rest of my life.

Jo attempted to close the laptop as I got back with the tea, but I stopped her.

“No, I need to know what they’re saying.” I took a deep breath. “It’s better to know.”

“Is it? Half of it’s made up. At least half.”

“Show me.”

Jo narrowed her eyes as if she was about to argue.

“I’m being brave,” I said. “Hurry up before it wears off.”

She sighed and lifted the screen. As she did, my stomach lurched and I had to hang on to the chair because my knees had turned to water.

It was worse than I’d thought at a quick glance. They’d put two photographs side by side: one taken at the charity boxing match, of me in my shiny ballgown with half a ton of fake tan covering my freckles and most of my cleavage, but the other was—I blanched—not quite so glam. It was a paparazzi shot of me outside Grace’s flat in my dirty jeans and fleece, loading spades and compost into the back of the van, while trying to stop Badger charging down the street in pursuit of a squirrel. The photographer had managed to catch me mid-yell and Badger mid-bark so we both looked as if we were about to savage a passerby.

“It’s not your best angle,” said Jo diplomatically. “But who does look their best at ten in the morning?”

I opened my mouth, but no words came out. What if Leo saw that? What if
Mum
saw that? Well, that at least was unlikely, given her fear of the interwebs.

Jo noticed my expression, and hurriedly made the evening photograph much bigger, so it filled the screen. “Look,” she said. “They love your natural beauty, and your amazing triceps—”

I jostled to get back to the text. “From all the digging I do in my
laboring job as a contract gardener
.”

She jostled me back out of the way. “I’ll get them to correct that. You’re a garden designer. You’re a horticultural artist. They’d know that if they’d bothered to check out the website clearly displayed on your van.” Jo sounded indignant. “Lazy! Anyway, they think Leo’s absolutely besotted with you. And he is—just look at the way he’s staring at you there!”

“Well …” That was the only consolation—they’d chosen a shot in which Leo was standing behind me looking incredibly handsome in his dinner jacket, with his gaze angled proudly toward me as if he couldn’t quite tear his attention away.

And once I’d got used to the grinding shame of seeing my own wonky grin outlined in very red lipstick, I had to admit that, actually, I didn’t look that different from the other shiny-legged socialites in the background. My hair looked glossy and my dress clung in all the right places. If you didn’t know, you might have thought I was called Tilly or Viola or something.

Something else stirred underneath all the internal memos to get my brows threaded and stop eating biscuits: I was the official girlfriend of Prince Leo of Nirona.

Or as the caption put it, “Sorry, girls, but it looks like
London-
loving millionaire Leo is off the market again … for the time
being
.”

“Out of the way,” said Jo, reaching for her mug. “I have a few corrections to make.”

“What? No! Are you going to tell them you’re my flatmate? Isn’t that the saddest thing possible?”

Jo sipped her tea. “No, I will be e-mailing them in my pseudonymous capacity as your press agent. There are a few key details that they need to clear up.”

I started to laugh, then realized she was being absolutely
serious
.

*

I
’d be lying if I said there weren’t some incredible upsides to dating a man who not only had a lot of money of his own, but who seemed to have a key to doors I didn’t even know existed.

Leo asked me if I’d go to another charity ball with him, this time for the Liza Bachmann Foundation for Makeup to Make Up.

“It’s not as trivial as it sounds,” he said, in a tone that suggested it wasn’t the first time he’d said as much. “They donate makeup to women’s refuges and work with birthmarks and stuff. Mom will be there, and I’m sure she’ll insist on us being photographed, so I can’t possibly ask you to come without buying you a dress. Please let me.”

“Oh, there’s no need—” I started automatically, but then stopped. I did need a new dress. I’d now worn everything in my wardrobe once, borrowed everything of Jo’s that would fit, and even considered wearing a bizarre number from Jo’s mother Marigold’s wardrobe of ’70s classics.

“It’d be a favor to Mom, actually, if you went to Zoë and got something,” said Leo. “She’s best friends with Zoë Weiss, the dress designer—I don’t know if you know of her?”

I nodded. I had not heard of Zoë Weiss. For all I knew, she was Edel Weiss’s sister. “Mm-hm.”

Leo didn’t respond, and I looked across the bench. A half smile was twitching his lips. “Do you know who Zoë Weiss is?”

I contemplated lying, then shook my head. I’d dropped my long-term habit of pretending to know stuff I didn’t with Leo; he read me like a book. And besides, I liked the way that we could be honest with each other.

“No,” I admitted. “So she’s a fashion designer?”

“Yup. She is. Anyway, she’s in London this week, so if you go to her suite at the Ritz, she’ll sort you out with a dress for the ball, and Mom will be thrilled that she’s got her some press coverage. Everyone’s a winner.”

He took a bite of his Subway sandwich, then winked at me over it. He reminded me of his grandfather when he did that. Of the three generations of Wolfsburgs I’d met, it was hard to decide who was the most charming.

*

W
hat Leo didn’t tell me—but what Jo did, in a loud, disbelieving voice, shortly after my appointment—was that Zoë Weiss had dressed three of the nominees at the last Oscars and was in London to open her new flagship store on Sloane Street, opposite Gucci. It was probably a good job Leo hadn’t filled me in on that, because I would have been too freaked out to remove so much as a shoe in front of her.

Zoë was a tiny pepper pot of a lady, with tiny feet in leopard-skin ballet pumps, and she flitted around me with a tape measure in one hand and a series of espressos in the other. She didn’t seem to mind my hips or my strange gardening-inflicted muscles, but draped material over me with quick, precise movements, occasionally bestowing a compliment on my “angel hair” or my “great calf.” I stared at my reflection in amazement while she hummed and sketched and barked instructions at her assistant.

“Ah! Blushing! I love it!” She spun round to her assistant. “No colors that clash with that blush.”

The assistant snapped me again on her iPhone, then held up some swatches while Zoë went, “No, no, no, no, maybe, yes.”

I made yet another mental note to start Googling properly before every appointment involving Leo or any member of his family. No wonder all these people had assistants; they were there for
research
.

“We’re done,” she said, and touched my cheek. “I love dressing girls when they’re not sample size. So much more of a creative challenge for a designer. I am going to make you look
stunning
, my darling.”

“Um, thank you,” I said.

It wasn’t easy to work out what was a compliment and what wasn’t these days; but thanks to my compliment coach, I was getting better at accepting them.

The ballgown that subsequently arrived by courier in a huge tissue-lined box redefined the term
evening wear
forever in our flat.

I knew what was coming—I’d had two fittings—but Jo didn’t. When she zipped me into it in front of her cheval mirror and stepped back to see the result, she burst into tears.

“I’m never going to be able to shop on the high street again,” she croaked. “It’s like eating McDonald’s after going to Gordon Ramsay. This is what real dresses should taste like.”

Zoë had chosen the exact shade of rich navy-blue satin that made my hair gleam like gold and my bosom (I totally had a
bosom
in this dress) seem soft and creamy. She’d nipped the bodice in at my waist and balanced the sleeves exactly at the sweetest part of my shoulders, so they looked as if they might fall off at any moment, while the skirt swirled around me, flattening my stomach and lengthening my legs so I looked even taller than I was. It was classic but not old-fashioned, modern but not on-trend—it was me, but through a glamorous Nirona filter.

I wore my diamond daisy-chain bracelet, and Leo had sent a box round from Chamuet with a matching necklace in it. He must have had it made specially for me, because there was a handwritten note inside:
“For a girl who could make a daisy chain look like diamonds. All my love, L.”

Jo did my makeup, although she had to keep stopping to blow her nose (“with emotion—don’t want to get snot on your frock”) and curled my hair with her tongs. By the time Billy arrived, with Leo in the back of the Range Rover, I knew I looked like a princess. But the difference was, for the first time ever, I actually felt like one.

*

T
he evening went by too fast, in a whirl of champagne flutes, delicious nibbles that I didn’t eat in case I spilled them on my dress, and turns around the dance floor with Boris and Leo. They both danced so well it didn’t seem to matter that I hadn’t a clue what I was doing. I had to take a photo call with Liza, but she nudged me into position each time (she actually kicked the back of my knee to make me stand better at one point) and no one asked me anything directly, so I didn’t have to worry about getting an attack of Party Paralysis. I just smiled, dazed, and tried to remember each moment as it flashed past.

At midnight, Leo indicated that he wanted to leave, and we sneaked out through a side door, where only one or two photographers caught us. It felt weird when they shouted my name, as well as Leo’s, and I had to stop myself from glancing backward—I knew I’d look tipsy in the photos. It had started to drizzle, but Billy was waiting close by, and Leo helped me into the backseat of the Range Rover, scooping my dress up with a practiced flick and tucking me inside before I had time to get my shoes wet.

I leaned my head happily against his shoulder as we set off home. I was quite drunk on the champagne, and the warmth of the car was making me both pleasantly sleepy and somewhat
amorous
.

“Do you mind if we make a bit of a detour?” asked Leo. The windscreen wipers sloshed comfortingly in the background as Billy negotiated the late-night traffic. “There’s something I need to show you.”

I snuggled into Leo’s jacket. I loved the smell of his dinner jacket—the hot wool mingled with his distinctive cologne. I made a mental note never to tell anyone at home that. It was right up there with “Caviar is surprisingly versatile as a storage cupboard staple.”

“Well, that depends what it is you’ve got to show me,” I mumbled, thinking of how warm his house was. Particularly his enormous oak sleigh bed, shipped over from the palace. I was quite keen to get back there. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but it’s pouring down.”