The Runaway Princess (30 page)

W
hen your diary goes from quite busy to packed with appointments like planes stacking up in Heathrow, time passes very quickly. Worryingly quickly.

I was aware of ticking things off my to-do list—booking caterers, finalizing numbers for the Hadley Green ceremony, double-checking with Dad that he and Mum had valid passports for the Nirona blessing—but time was sliding by faster than I realized in my own life. July turned into August turned into September, and I noticed autumn creeping into the leaves and soil, but it barely seemed ten days since my last credit card bill had come and there was another month gone.

Until I saw it on the newsagents’ stand by the Sloane Square Underground, I had, for instance, completely forgotten that Grace Wright’s rooftop garden was going to feature in the October issue of
Gardens Illustrated
—she’d told me that someone was coming to photograph it in July, when the cottage-garden containers and wildflower barrels were at their multicolored, blowsy best.

Well, actually, she’d asked me if I could “borrow” some extra plants for her, “just to zhush it up a bit.” Daddy was planning to sell, apparently, now that she was moving in with Richard. It was very much mission accomplished for both Daddy and Grace.

“Are you not moving in with your fiancé?” she’d asked from her sun lounger. Since I’d got engaged, Grace had spent a lot of time sipping green tea on the balcony and telling me all about her wedding dramas. I’d nodded, pruned, and mentally crossed off a lot of ideas from my own list.

I’d told her that, no, I wasn’t.

She’d looked shocked—as far as her Botox would allow. “
Really
? Are you … saving yourself?” Her voice dropped respectfully, but also slightly disbelievingly. “Is it part of the deal about marrying the heir to the throne?” She mouthed, “No bedding before the wedding?”

I’d laughed at that point, because it definitely was not; but I didn’t know how to explain why I hadn’t moved in with Leo in terms Grace would understand.

The truth was, I loved sharing a flat with Jo. Leominster Place was more and more like a comfort blanket for me, the safe place between Leo’s super-high-class world of jewels and assistants, and the small, net-curtained world of Rothery that I’d almost forgotten how to live in after three years in London. Jo helped me smooth out the problems in both, putting Sofia’s curt e-mails about my measurements and Mum’s anxious phone calls about the church choir into perspective. She’d even shelved her plans to take
Chicago-a-go-go
up to the Edinburgh Festival so she could keep me sane while the decisions mounted up for both ceremonies, and every time we went out, she left the house first, so she could check for lurking paparazzi.

I’d never had a friend like her before. I’d been shy at school, and then a pariah; spending time with funny, confident Jo, who dragged me along to all her parties and then gossiped about them over a fry-up afterward, was something I would miss more than I could say. The summer had gone by too fast as it was, and I only had a few more weeks of flat-sharing—with her, and Dickon and Mrs. Mainwaring, and Badger—and I wanted to enjoy them as much as I wanted to keep moving in with Leo as a special moment in a relationship that was already going at a million miles an hour.

Jo and I were heading up to the King’s Road to get some lunch, since we were working on the same house in Passmore Street: Jo was making sure the electricians didn’t leave before the carpenters arrived, and I was sketching out a plan to overhaul the neglected garden.

I stopped as soon as I saw Grace’s balcony on the magazine stand. The main heading was “Country Heaven in the London Sky,” and I was bursting with pride. I’d made that.

“Wow!” said Jo in a loud voice over my shoulder. “Is that garden, on the front cover of that national magazine, designed by Amy Wilde of Botham & Wilde Gardens? Is it? And is the magazine only four pounds? I’ll have ten to give to all my friends!”

“Shh!” I nudged her. People were turning round to see what the fuss was about as they left the Tube station.

“No, this is not a
shh
ing situation. This is a trumpet moment!” Jo reached into her bag for her purse and bought the two copies that were there. “You should send one to your mum and dad! They’ll be so proud of you.”

I smiled, but at the same time I wondered if, somewhere, Kelly would see it. I mean, it was unlikely—she always said gardening was dead boring—but you never knew, she might be in a dentist’s waiting room. Getting her teeth whitened, knowing Kelly.

I’d been thinking about Kelly quite a lot lately, because the invitations had arrived from the printers in Harrogate, and we were on a countdown to post them exactly six weeks before the ceremony on December 7. Mum still had Kelly down on her list of invitees from our side, but with no flicker of contact from her, despite me and Leo appearing on the lower slopes of the
Daily Mail
website’s Sidebar of Celebrity, and no forwarding address, I didn’t know where Mum was planning on sending it. Maybe Santa could forward it on from the North Pole.

I looked down and grinned at the magazine in my hands. Excitement mingled with pride at what this exposure might mean for my design consultancy dreams. Ted and I had a friend who’d had her copper water features spotlit in a magazine, and she’d sold her entire shedful almost overnight and been commissioned by Heal’s to design a line.

“We should go out tonight to celebrate,” Jo went on, linking her arm through mine and shepherding me across the road. “After dancing class. Rolf says he’s found a great new restaurant in Ebury Street, and I’m trying to encourage him into tasteful ways. Which means restaurants with fully clad staff and no theme other than food.”

“You’re spending a lot of time with Rolf,” I observed. “Have you changed your mind about the whole marrying-into-royalty ban?”

Jo shot me a sideways glance. “I’ll see how you get on with it first.”

“Ah-ha! That’s not what I asked!”

I’d noticed that Jo’s merciless criticism of Rolf had changed over the past few weeks. It was no longer the disparaging tone she’d always used in the beginning, but had softened into the pointy banter she and Ted cheerfully slapped each other with.

“I just see it as my duty to do what I can to save you from a brother-in-law who opens champagne bottles as if he’s just won a Grand Prix,” she said. “If I can knock some manners into Rolf before it’s too late, you never know, you might invite me to your principality. I could oversee work on your nursery.”

I ignored that. “Last time I saw Rolf, he was wearing a plain blue shirt. Was that down to you as well?”

Jo seemed pleased. “Perhaps. Listen, knocking men into shape is a family tradition. My dear mother Marigold’s grandmama was the same. She went out with a personage we cannot name as a sort of learner girlfriend. Taught him all she knew, and then was retired to a teensy little château in the Isle of Wight.”

“So she didn’t listen to her father when it came to royalty
either.
”

“No rings were involved. And …” Jo arched her eyebrow. “It depends who you mean by her father.”

This was the sort of conversation I would really miss. I hugged my magazines to my chest and made a mental note to ask Leo to sort out a permanent guest room for Jo in the east wing.

*

J
o and I were enjoying a smoothie and the air-con in Pret a Manger when my phone rang. It was Leo.

“Amy, is this a good time to talk?”

“Just having lunch with Jo,” I said happily. “I’ve got something to show you later.”

I was hoping he might respond to the sauciness in my voice, but he didn’t.

“That’s great,” he said in a strained tone. “Listen, I need you to come and meet me and Mom in her suite at Claridge’s. There’s something we need to discuss.”

The smile slid from my face. “That sounds … ominous. What does she want to discuss?”

I guessed it was about my dress for the blessing. Zoë Weiss had been asking, but I wasn’t allowed to choose a designer before Liza had squared off her complicated series of favors owed between various international celebrity types. It was awkward, since Zoë had shown me the nearly finished dress she’d made for Mum, and it was so beautiful it nearly made me cry. (I had a feeling the finished invoice would make me cry too, having done some research, but I’d cross that bridge later.)

“It’s a press thing,” said Leo. He sounded guarded.

“Is this about Rolf?” I glanced at Jo. “Has he done—”

“No. Look, I’d rather not discuss it over the phone. How soon can you get here?”

I pushed my unfinished smoothie toward Jo. “Well, I’ve got to finish up in Passmore Street, and then I said I’d go round to—”

“No, there’s no time for that. Can you get in a taxi right now?”

“Okay,” I said, bewildered.

It couldn’t be the dress. Maybe they’d found out Di Overend’s nephew Ryan was penciled in to take the Hadley Green wedding photos.

*

I
borrowed twenty quid from Jo and hailed a black cab, which got me to Claridge’s in seventeen minutes, during which time I’d run through all possible options and decided it had to be something to do with my proposed therapy garden in Nirona. I’d worked through the night all weekend, and given the organizers a very detailed plan of the sensory stimulation areas I wanted to create—maybe it was too specific?

Leo was waiting for me in the tiled lobby. His face was strained, as if he’d been listening without speaking for a long time.

“Hi, Leo,” I said, reaching up for a kiss. “What’s happened? Are you all right?”

He grabbed my arms. “Amy,” he said, “I just want you to know that I—”

“Amy!”

We spun round to see Liza at the bottom of the sweeping staircase. She was wearing a coral sleeveless shift with bare legs, and I marveled anew at her perfectly golden tan and the effortless way her mane was today swept into a messy updo, held in place by huge sunglasses.

But while her clothes said warm, her expression said cold. Very cold indeed.

Behind her was Giselle, the press officer. Giselle was the embodiment of that expression “she looked like a bulldog chewing a wasp” (or the less polite variants), but in navy separates.

“Shall we go up to my suite?” said Liza, and it wasn’t really a question.

*

L
iza had taken the Brook Penthouse, which was, as far as I could see without craning my neck into all the rooms, a complete Art Deco flat at the top of the hotel.

She steered me into the soft lilac sitting room, which had a lavish panoramic view of London over the private roof terrace, and then pointedly positioned me on the sofa facing the fireplace, not the distracting window.

Leo sat down next to me, and Liza and Giselle faced us.

I took a deep breath and tried to smile. I’d been sitting in a garden all morning moving plant pots around, and I wasn’t even well-dressed enough to be a staff member here.

Liza did not return my tentative smile. “I won’t beat about the bush. We have a problem, Amy.”

A million terrible thoughts flashed through my mind. Well, a couple of headline ones and several thousand minor ones.

What had I done? What had she found out about me? Had Leo been involved in one of those big banking crises? Had Dr. Johnsson told her I’d been cheating on the diet in Pret a Manger? Had Martin Ecclestone sold his story to YoungHot&Royal?

The pause stretched out across the glass coffee table.

“Don’t play mind games, Mom,” snapped Leo. “This isn’t
CSI: Mayfair
. There’s going to be something in the paper, Amy,” he said, turning to me. “Something about you.”

I actually thought I was going to be sick.

Liza looked at us both. Her immaculately lined eyes had the furious gleam of a woman whose elaborate plans have been derailed by a loose paper clip. “Giselle keeps close tabs on all news outlets, as you know, and she’s brought it to my attention that two newspapers are intending to run with this. Giselle?”

Giselle pursed her lips and pushed her black-rimmed glasses farther up her small nose. She took a leather portfolio out of her bag, unzipped it, and pushed a piece of paper across the glass toward Leo.

I felt a shameful rush of relief that Leo seemed to be the one who needed to deal with it.

Then she removed another and pushed it toward me.

Slowly, and with Liza’s eyes burning twin holes in the top of my head, I began to read.

As my eyes moved down the page, a furious buzzing noise started up in my ears like a swarm of angry hornets, and my tongue suddenly seemed too big for my mouth.

The headline was “How to Marrow a Millionaire!” and beneath it was a photograph of me at Hadley Green Agricultural Show, aged about six, going by the missing front teeth. I was standing next to Dad and his prize marrow for that year, which was about the same size as me. Dad had been en route to the Gardeners’ Club comedy dancing display, and was sporting a flat cap with his fancy dress trousers belted with twine—something that was not explained in the caption.

Next to that was a photo of Leo at a premiere in black tie, and then a long-lens paparazzi shot of me leaning against the
Botham & Wilde
Gardens van, swigging from a bottle of water. The photographer had managed to make it look as if it wasn’t necessarily water, and had also captured Badger apparently peeing against someone else’s hedge.

“I would never let Badger do that,” I gasped. “And my dad was a bank manager! He was in a costume in that photo!”

Leo and Liza said nothing.

Well. They were embarrassing photos, sure, but did they warrant this level of drama?

I looked up, and Giselle snapped, “Read the copy.”

My eyes skimmed over the text, but I couldn’t make them engage with the words. Phrases were familiar—
“Amy is a jobbing gardener in London … parents live in an ex-council house in the down-at-heel former mining town of Rothery … Prince Leo, banker and millionaire heir to the principality of Nirona, met at a no-holds-barred party thrown by society actress the Hon. Jo de Verais, former on-off girlfriend of Leo’s brother Rolf
 
…”
—but
other parts were so weird I couldn’t believe they were talking about me. Like the things I’d allegedly said.