The Runaway Princess (37 page)

“It was my only way of keeping in touch. Jo was the project manager for a friend a few years ago, and she mentioned this young gardener from Yorkshire who was looking for work. I put two and two together, and then when I hired Jo, bingo.” She wiped her eyes, smearing her heavy makeup. “It was really hard sometimes, hearing what a great time you were having, you two,” she whined. “Your parties, and the interesting people in your house. You always did fall on your feet, Amy.”

“I wondered why she kept making all her friends hire you and Ted,” Jo pointed out. “I mean, you’re good, but it was a bit weird that she didn’t want you to do her own garden.” She sighed. “And I thought it was for my benefit. Never mind.”

If she was trying to lighten the mood, she was wasting her time.

“Back up there, Kelly,” I snapped. “I always fell on my feet? Hello? Did you miss the part where I worked my arse off for three years at college to get my degree? And then dug gardens till my nails went black to get my business going?”

Kelly screwed up her face. She looked a lot less polished now. “But you were clever. It was easy for you, it wasn’t like you had a social life to distract you.”

“I had no social life because you made me a total outcast!” I roared.

Mum and Dad were doing a Wimbledon-worthy
back-and-forth
head swivel.

“Oh, you were always a swot.” Kelly waved a hand. “Yes, I messed up my A levels, get over it. That’s why I wanted to believe all the stuff Chris told me about the investment—I wanted to do something to make Mum and Dad proud of me too, instead of having them remind me how much homework you did.”

“Oh,
Kelly
,” said Mum, but Dad was looking stern.

“And then when I realized how stupid I’d been, I thought leaving was the best thing to do. I didn’t want to hear about how I’d messed up again.” Kelly wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “I had this big plan to go away and get a great job, then come back and show you I wasn’t the letdown everyone thought I was.”

“But look at you, love!” Mum stroked Kelly’s cashmere-clad and gym-toned bicep. “In your lovely clothes with that dear handbag. You’re obviously doing well for yourself.”

Kelly opened her mouth to lie, but caught me and Jo glaring at her. “It’s not really my money, Mum,” she admitted. “I got married to a guy who was a bit older than me—”

Oh, it was all coming out now.

“—but it didn’t work out and, um, Greg gave me a generous settlement when we separated. I was going to use the money to retrain at something,” she added very quickly, in Dad’s direction, “and then I met Harry, and he wanted me to stay in London and then he proposed. …”

“You’re getting married too!” Mum’s face lit up; then the happiness extinguished almost as quickly when Kelly said, “When his divorce comes through.”

“Oh,” said Mum. Dad didn’t say anything.

Kelly looked down at her feet. “I don’t know if that’s going to happen now, though. Some journalists have been pestering me, and if I don’t give them a story, they’re bound to get hold of Chris. … I don’t think Harry’s going to want to be married to someone with a criminal record.”

“He’s a barrister,” Jo supplied helpfully.

“Dear me,” said Dad under his breath. “What a pair.”

Silence descended over the shed as the dust settled around us. (Metaphorically. Dad kept a spotless shed.)

Eventually, Kelly reached out to me. I didn’t want to take her hand, but everyone was looking at me, so I had to.

“I’m really sorry for doing this to you, Amy,” she said, in a humble voice I’d never heard from her before. “I didn’t want to think what was going on at home, I was just focused on the future and everything being okay somehow. I was so happy for you when I saw you’d started dating Leo. It made me think maybe I’d get a miracle in my life too, something good so I could come back and not feel like scum. Honestly, you looked beautiful in that Zoë Weiss ballgown. I showed everyone I knew, all my friends. …”

My eyes filled up. Jo reckoned Kelly—Callie—didn’t have many friends. She always said she reckoned the ladies who lunched tolerated Callie because Harry was rich and she had a house near Harrods.

“Do you want me to talk to Leo?” Kelly sounded pathetically eager. “I’ll tell him everything, if it would make him see that you had nothing to do with it. I’ll do an interview or something. Whatever you need.”

“Actually,” Jo murmured, “that’s not a bad idea.”

Mum and Dad looked at her in horror.

“No, really,” she went on. “It’s going to come out anyway, much better to be in control of the story.”

“But Liza’s got a press agent like a rottweiler,” I pointed out, “and they still printed …” I didn’t want to mention Whalegate in front of Mum.

“But if we went to them direct, with Kelly and a tame writer and some exclusive photos …”

Light dawned. “You mean one of those girls who covered your show?”

She nodded. “Everyone loves a reformed sinner and a royal wedding. Imagine the two together!”

Except there would be no wedding.

The longer I spent at home, the farther away Leo’s world felt. Press agents. Ballgowns worth more than cars. For heaven’s sake. That wasn’t my life. It was Amelia’s. Amelia, the made-up
princess
.

I felt my lip wobble, even though I was trying to hold myself together with every last shred of energy I had.

Dad stretched out his arm to me, and I got a faint whiff of that familiar smell that took me back to the long wordless summer we’d spent together. Washing powder, and a bit of honest sweat; the smell of a man who’d worn suits for work for twenty-five years, and then found himself in shirtsleeves all day, with just his spade and what remained of his pride. My heart ran back to him, like a little girl stumbling over a lawn speckled with daisies.

“If nothing else comes of it,” he said, his gray eyes shining with very un-Yorkshire-man tears, “you’ve brought our family together again, Amy. And that’s the most wonderful thing you could ever have given your mother and me.”

“Stop it,” I said, but in another second I was enfolded in Dad’s arms, my head against Mum’s ample bosom, and even Kelly—who still reeked of Joy by Jean Patou, nothing bloody changed—was squeezing me as if we were in a storm and the shed was about to be whisked away.

It didn’t feel right to be so happy when my heart was ripped to bits, but weirdly I was. Somewhere, a clock was starting to turn backward, one slow second at a time.

J
o and I said we wouldn’t watch the live streaming of Boris’s coronation on the Internet, but obviously we did.

“Better to know,” she said, as we parked ourselves in front of the laptop with the last of Rolf’s ridiculous bottles of champagne, and a fish pie that Mrs. Mainwaring had thoughtfully made for us.

Mrs. Mainwaring owed me and Jo, in a roundabout way. She’d seen off a particularly persistent snapper with her handbag, and then a rival paper with very little news to print that day had paid her two thousand pounds to talk about her “paparazzi hell,” with Dickon in the background, looking suspiciously like a boy toy.

The Saturday of the coronation, the photographers weren’t even bothering to hide behind bushes, because of course I was still supposed to be supporting an unnamed member of my family through an illness, and they were desperate to get a glimpse of me not ill, and not in Yorkshire. At least Mum and Dad were safe. They were up in Scotland at the remote hunting-lodge hotel belonging to a friend of Jo’s mother, where Kelly would be joining them, accompanied by Sukey the writer, just as soon as she’d finished bringing Harry the barrister up to speed.

“The rule is, we can watch the coronation, but with no sound.” Jo passed me a glass and topped up her own. “I don’t want to know what they’re saying.”

“You wouldn’t, it’s in Italian,” I said, as the TV news station live feed from Nirona flickered into life. The island was quite small, but it seemed everyone had turned out to see the pageantry. Cheering crowds lined the narrow cobbled streets around the cathedral, and the camera was panning along the various dignitaries arriving at the Gothic entrance. I recognized some famous model friends of Liza’s, and a couple of royal princes, and some prime ministers and, blimey, that was the American First Lady, wasn’t it? And that was definitely Elton John. Elton John never missed a good royal do.

“There are some really famous people there,” I said, surprised.

“Yeah.” Jo looked up from her phone. “It seems you were the last person to realize that the Wolfsburgs are kind of a big deal.”

“Maybe.” I searched for Leo’s face but couldn’t see him. I spotted Giselle, though, and Nina, Liza’s assistant, in a mad green hat that looked like an alien frying pan. It was weird to see such familiar faces on television like this. In a parallel universe, I was there too. I wondered what I’d have been wearing.

Something hideous, if it had been down to Sofia.

“Oh, look out for Sofia’s hat,” said Jo. “Apparently looks like she got her head stuck in a ceiling tile but came along anyway.”

“Don’t read Twitter!” I tried to grab the phone off her. “I don’t want to know what they’re saying about—”

I stopped as a subtitle went across the screen. I didn’t speak Italian, but I guessed
fuggitiva
and
principessa
meant what I thought they did.

“At least they care,” said Jo, with a pretend solemn look on her face.

The camera spun back to a parade of horse-drawn carriages and cars arriving, and suddenly, getting out of a shining Daimler was Leo.

My heart expanded in my chest at the sight of him. He looked so handsome. So clearly the sum total of a supermodel and a prince, with his broad shoulders and winning smile and the modest wave he did to the crowds. Rolf was behind him, playing up to them a bit more with a bigger wave, but even he had toned things down. His hair was a little shorter, and his suit a little quieter.

“Leo looks good,” said Jo kindly. “But tired.”

“He looks
affranto
, apparently,” I said, reading the subtitles. “What’s that?”

There was a pause while Jo checked online. “Heartbroken. I thought you started an Italian course.”

“I only had time for a few lessons.” I couldn’t tear my eyes off the screen as Leo walked into the cathedral with Rolf, pausing to speak to the officials who beamed at him as he passed.

I’d have to be doing that,
said the little voice in my head, and I shrank inside. What would they be scrolling across the screen if I were there? What mean things would they be saying about my hat?

Half of me longed to be by Leo’s side, feeling the tender pressure of his hand resting protectively in the hollow of my back, as I had done at the glittering gala nights we’d attended. But half of me was beyond relieved not to be there.

As the ceremony carried on, and I saw the banked cameras and the sea of faces in the cathedral, and then Boris and Liza arriving like the starriest Hollywood stars of all time, decked out in velvet robes and proper crowns, the half dwindled to a quarter, and finally, when Jo was telling me that Sofia’s hat had gone viral and already people were linking to satirical web pages devoted to how she was keeping it on her head with magnets, I had to acknowledge that I’d done the right thing.

If I’d been there, I’d have slipped on some horse dung, or blanked the bishop from nerves. Not like Liza, who sailed through the whole thing as if she’d been born to it, all the while casting tiny, camera-friendly, admiring glances Boris’s way. The perfect princess wife. Not normal. Not in the least bit normal.

I felt sadly envious of whoever Leo found to fit that role. She was going to be the luckiest woman in the world, as well as one of the most nervous.

*

I
had arranged to meet Leo Monday at lunchtime, as agreed in his e-mail, and I didn’t sleep at all on Saturday night or Sunday.

I owed him an explanation, but I didn’t really have one. Well, not one that really covered everything in a way I felt did any justice to the soul-searching that had been keeping me hollow-eyed and sleepless.

Instead I worried about where we could meet without anyone seeing us, but as ever he had everything under control; he texted me early on Monday morning to say he’d be in the summerhouse of the private garden in Trinity Square at 1 p.m. Leo kept such a low profile in London that I didn’t even think the press knew where his house was.

There was a burly protection officer lingering by the gate when I arrived; he was dressed as a normal passerby, but most locals near Trinity Square didn’t look as if they’d recently been discharged from the marines.

With a nod, he let me in, and I walked down the gravel paths that led to the summerhouse. Even on an autumn day like today, the lawns were immaculate, without a single leaf lying around to mess up the green velvet, and the glossy box hedges were dark and still fragrant. Nostalgia swept through me along with the familiar smells, as I remembered all the chatty picnic lunches, and drinks, and sweet, soul-exploring moments we’d had here, with my bare feet up on Leo’s lap on the bench, or his head resting near mine as we lay near the rose beds, breathing in the scents of the flowers and the warmed summer air.

This was the last time. This was the very last time I’d be able to wander in this hidden garden where Wolfsburgs fell in love. That broke my heart almost as much as what I knew I had to do.

Leo was waiting in the summerhouse. The table was spread with a white cloth, and three silver domes were arranged on top, just as it had been on our first date. I smiled weakly.

“Lunch?” he said.

He seemed thinner, and though he smiled back at me, I could see deep shadows under his eyes. I’d never seen Leo with stubble, but he had a very fine crop of it on his chin, and it rather suited him.

I sat down, and he whisked the domes away to reveal two club sandwiches and two packets of crisps.

“Good-quality ones,” he added, and the crack in my heart deepened another notch.

I asked him about the coronation, how it had gone, and he told me, describing the events with his usual mix of courteous and dry wit. Now it just reminded me of something he’d once said, about being trained to chat, to put people at ease. It was more of an effort for me to begin with, but his manner coaxed me into almost normal conversation. I confessed that Jo and I had watched it, and played Fashion Police Bingo on the guests, and he looked tickled.

“You’ll have seen Sofia’s hat, then?” he added with a raised
eyebrow
.

“I did. Was it a bet?”

“It was her way of making sure no one looked at me and Rolf.” He popped a crisp into his mouth. “For which I’m actually grateful. There was enough of that already.”

I looked down at my plate. It had the Wolfsburg crest on it: two lions rampant, gold ribbons, white roses. White roses, like the white rose of Yorkshire. “I’m sorry.”

“The official line is that you’re still with your sick relative,” he said, his tone deceptively light. “That’s why the palace hasn’t sent out the invitations to the wedding yet. Are you … ?” The pause seemed to stretch out forever.

I couldn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to.

When Leo spoke again, there was a distinct crack in his voice. “Are you coming back with me?”

A tear dropped onto my plate, and I shook my head.

Leo said nothing. Then he said, a little stiffly, “Can I ask why?”

Haltingly, I began to tell him the whole story about Kelly, and my family. About my childhood and why I cared so much about what people thought of me, and how I’d tried to be true to my old life
and
my new one. Why my parents deserved a life too, after giving up so much of theirs to put right Kelly’s mistake. And more than that, why he deserved someone outgoing to fit the job he’d been born to do, instead of a lifetime apologizing for me.

I went on for ages. I didn’t want to miss anything out. Leo didn’t say anything when I’d finished, and I struggled to find a way of explaining what was trying to burst through my chest, and in the end, as usual, I could only find one way of doing it.

“The thing is, Leo,” I said, waving a hand toward the garden outside, “this place is you. It’s elegant and measured, and every bed blooms at the right time because someone’s planned the flowering seasons. It’s lovely, but I couldn’t live in it. I love those wildflower meadows I plant because that’s what I feel like inside—I look at meadow banks and I see butterflies and bees and all the rhythms of the seasons, but with a freedom that there just isn’t here. And you could never combine the two. It would spoil what someone’s taken years to create.”

Leo looked up, and his gaze moved slowly around my face, as if he was trying to print my eyes, my lips, my cheekbones, on his memory. We were both nearly in tears. He reached into his pocket and brought something out, sliding it across the table.

I thought it was my diamond bracelet or the diamond ring, and was about to refuse it, but it wasn’t either. It was a Yale key.

“Guess this is the wrong time to give you a present,” he said.

“What is it?”

“I bought us a house.”

“A house?”

He nodded, wretchedly. “A house up in Yorkshire. One with a mature cottage garden, and an apple tree with a swing in it. A lovely place to bring kids, to see their grandparents.” He didn’t need to say it, but he did anyway. “In Hadley Green.”

The breath choked in my throat. He’d bought our old house, as a surprise for me. It was the sweetest thing to do; but in that instant I realized how little Leo understood me, or my family. I couldn’t go back. Dad and Mum … they could never go back.

Dad had been right, people like Leo did think that money solved all problems. It had probably been a petty-cash transfer for him, but it was something else entirely to my family.

“But Leo,” I said carefully, “you know my parents could never ever go back. There are too many memories. Good and bad. Selling it …” I gulped. “Selling it was the only thing that let them keep any dignity after the court case.”

“I realize that now.”

I smiled through my tears. “And how often would we go there? A garden like that needs constant attention. Mum always used to say it was a full-time job on its own. It’s too nice a house to be wasted on a couple who’d only have time to visit twice a year. And I don’t want to move back. My life is in London now.”

I pushed the key back over the tablecloth. The tips of our fingers met, and I felt a spark of electricity run up my finger, all the way into my arm. I leaned forward until our foreheads touched, and we sat like that for a while, tears dripping onto the thick tablecloth as all the lost possibilities of our future, the grandchildren, the gardens, the happiness we now wouldn’t have, ran through our minds.

And then I knew I had to leave, before my heart gave out completely.

I pushed back my chair and touched his shoulder. “It’s no one’s fault, Leo. We’re just the right plants in the wrong place. I’ll never forget this, though.”

He stood up, pulled me into his arms, and kissed me with a terrible sad hunger, and I kissed him back, trying to fix the taste of him and the feel of his skin against mine in my memory forever.

Then, before I had time to register any “last anythings,” I grabbed my bag and ran out of the garden.

*

A
s October turned into November, I tried to keep as busy as I could. Luckily, Ted and I had more business than we could pack into the working week, to the point where we were even talking about taking on another gardener. Paid for by our own profits.

Well, loud talking. We got as far as defining a job description for a container gardening expert with lawn expertise and “good legs” (must like small dogs), but no further. But we talked about it a fair bit, since Ted was getting to be a regular visitor round at our flat for dinner. So regular that Dickon was sketching him in a selection of sheets, and Jo was finding it harder to convince me that their bickering wasn’t taking on a suspiciously cozy quality.

I planted up Christmas bulbs in our kitchen, and watched the Japanese maples near Leominster Square turn from green to a flaming, luminous orange, while the beeches and oaks in the park dropped their leaves to reveal stark bare branches. That was exactly how I felt inside. As if my life had burst into glorious color, which had suddenly fallen away, leaving nothing but a bare outline of trudging work and sleep and once-a-week Zumba, and a long wait until spring and the hope of new buds.

To be honest, though I pretended to be positive for Jo, I wasn’t always sure there would be new buds. Sometimes plants had one bonanza year and were never quite the same. How could any man in the Fox and Anchor match up to Leo? I tried that gloomy metaphor on Jo one evening, and she told me that it depended entirely on the fertilizer you were using.