The Golden Prince (22 page)

As if reading her thoughts, he said, “It wasn’t all my father’s fault—though he terrified me when I was a child and often still does. The real misery was caused by my nanny. She was a real horror.”

They had reached the lakeside and she remained quiet, sensing he was about to tell her things he had never told anyone before.

Still in silence they walked out onto the small jetty.

They sat down together at the end of it and he undid his shoelaces and pulled off his shoes and socks.

“Every teatime, when I was brought down from the nursery to visit my parents, she would twist my arm to make me cry just before we entered the drawing room.” He rolled up his trouser bottoms. “Naturally my mother would ask her to take me away again.”

His voice was so bleak and filled with such remembered pain, both physical and emotional, that she felt sick.

He plunged his feet into the cool water of the lake. “It was always like that. Every day there would be arm-twisting and pinching. Poor Bertie came off even worse. She always kept him hungry, and Bertie has suffered chronic tummy trouble ever since.”

“The woman was a sadist!” Lily’s tender heart was outraged. “Surely your parents must have realized there was something terribly wrong if you were crying whenever they saw you?”

“Oh, I suppose they just thought I was a difficult child. People don’t like crying, bawling babies, do they? Eventually, after three years of this torture, the nanny had a nervous breakdown and left and Lala Bill—who now looks after John—became my nanny.”

Lily, who couldn’t imagine how, day after day, for three years, any mother could banish a crying child instead of taking it in her arms to comfort it, fumed silently. It wasn’t up to her to tell David that his mother had ice in her veins, but she knew she would never feel the same about Queen Mary ever again.

He said with deep regret, “I can’t stay for much longer, Lily. It’s going to be dawn in an hour or so and I have a busy day ahead of me. It’s the traditional Coronation Fleet Review at Spithead tomorrow.”

They rose to their feet and he rolled down his trouser legs, stuffed his socks into the pockets of his trousers, and pushed his wet feet into his shoes.

Then he took her hands in his. “There’s something I have to ask you, Lily. It’s the most important thing I’ve ever asked anyone—or ever will ask anyone.”

His eyes held hers pleadingly, his hair gleaming pale gold in the fast-fading moonlight.

She waited trustingly, ready to do whatever it was he asked.

He said with a tremor in his voice, “Will you marry me, Lily? Please, please say you will. I need you so very much, you see.”

Her bewilderment was total. “How can I marry you, David? I’m not royal. I’m not even a little bit royal.”

His hands tightened hard on hers. “That doesn’t matter, Lily darling. All that matters is that I want to marry you—that I can’t face the thought of life without you. Being royal is such a nightmare for me. I can’t face the thought of it without you by my side. Once my father understands that—and once he meets you and knows how sweet and wonderful and beautiful you are—he’ll be only too happy to give his consent to our betrothal.”

“But … it would mean I would become Princess of Wales!” Her
next thought stunned her. “It would mean I would one day become
Queen
!”

The horror in her voice was so naked he felt as if the ground was shifting beneath his feet, as if at any moment he was going to fall into a bottomless chasm.

“You wouldn’t be Queen for years and years, sweetheart,” he said, desperately trying to reassure her. “My father is only forty-six. He’ll probably reign for as long as Queen Victoria—and she reigned until she was eighty-two. Please don’t think about any of that king and queen stuff. Just think of me and of how much I love you and how much I need you. Please say you’ll marry me, sweet darling Lily.
Please!
”

The blood pounded in her ears and then, overcome by his all-encompassing need of her and by all the love she felt for him, she said with quiet certainty, “Yes, of course I’ll marry you, David. It’s what people in love do, isn’t it?”

With a sob of relief he caught her to him. “Thank you,
thank you
, darling Lily.” He swung her round and round off her feet. “We’re going to be so happy, sweetheart!” Tears of joy filled his eyes. “For the rest of our lives we’re going to be the two happiest people in the world!”

Though he’d had
no opportunity to visit Lily again, Piers was still euphoric at how well things had gone on their afternoon out together. His heart beat faster whenever he remembered how pleased Lily had been to see him, and how she had been so interested in everything he’d said, hanging on to his every word.

His experience with her was so different from the stilted unsatisfactory experience he’d previously had with young women that he knew he couldn’t let her slip out of his life. Until now he’d barely given a thought to marrying. Now he could think of nothing else.

Because of the grand occasions taking place during coronation week he’d had no opportunity to contact his father and speak to him about his intentions with regard to Lily, but as soon as he and Prince Edward returned from the Coronation Fleet Review at Spithead, he was going to do so. Until then, he was deeply grateful that the review was an occasion absorbing all Edward’s attention.

Since Edward was being educated at the world’s most prestigious naval college, this wasn’t, of course, too much of a surprise. Even Piers, an army, not a navy man, was impressed by the sight in front of them as they steamed out of Portsmouth’s great dockyard and into the Solent aboard the royal yacht. There, in breathtaking magnificence, the entire British fleet was arrayed in review lines, full flags flying, their upper decks manned.

“What a sight, May! What a sight!” Piers heard King George say
to Queen Mary. For once he had to agree with his King. No country in the world had a navy to rival Britain’s—not even Germany, where the shipyards at Kiel were building battleships as fast as was humanly possible.

“D’you know how many battleships and dreadnoughts are out there, Cullen?” David suddenly said to him. “Thirty-two. And they are backed up by twenty-four armored cruisers, sixty-seven destroyers, twelve torpedo boats, and eight submarines. I wish I was serving as an officer aboard one of them.”

“Yes, sir,” Piers said, knowing that if such a day should come, he would be replaced as Edward’s equerry by a naval officer.

The royal yacht was nearing the lines, and the world suddenly exploded in thunderous, deafening noise as twenty-one guns began firing a royal salute.

Only with great effort did Piers stop himself from wincing. As the smoke finally cleared away and the royal yacht began steaming slowly down the first of the review lines, he wondered how long his position as an equerry was likely to last. He certainly still wanted to be Edward’s equerry when he married Lily. That way Edward would be in attendance at their wedding and, with luck, might be there as his best man.

They had reached the first of the battleships, and three great cheers went up from the men lining her decks. At moments like this he liked to pretend that the cheers were for him. That his position and Edward’s were reversed. Only he wouldn’t have Edward as an equerry, not even in his imagination.

He would have someone far more forceful.

He would have someone like himself.

Unlike Piers Cullen, Hal Green never indulged in daydreams. At thirty-two he was the youngest editor on Fleet Street. It was a position he’d gained via brilliant talent, tireless energy, and family
connections, for his uncle, Gerald Fielding, was the press baron, Lord Westcliff.

That nepotism was responsible for his position as editor of the
Daily Despatch
rode easily on Hal’s shoulders, for he knew that even without Gerald he would have become the editor of a newspaper of similar stature. His own hungry talent would have seen to that. The only difference would have been that the editorship would have taken a little longer to achieve.

He surveyed the morning’s headlines, well pleased with them. The
Despatch
’s crusade for first-division status for imprisoned suffragettes was causing a furor—which was just what he had set out to achieve. Rose Houghton’s visit had so piqued his interest about how suffragettes were being treated in the third division that he had applied to visit Holloway in order to see conditions for himself.

It had been a request that had been refused.

Hal hadn’t been too concerned. Such a refusal, when publicized as he could publicize it, was all grist to his mill. Also, because he never took no for an answer, he knew he’d eventually get the visit he was after.

“I intend running a weekly page devoted entirely to suffragette issues,” he said in a telephone call to Rose. “It will have the headline ‘A Woman’s Voice’ and feature articles by leaders of all suffrage societies and reports of any forthcoming suffrage activities. I’d like your friend, Lady Daphne, to write an article detailing her experiences in the third division—and I’d like to meet with her. D’you think you could arrange that?”

“I can try,” she said crisply.

He severed the connection, his mouth quirking into a smile. Rose Houghton’s masculine-like forthrightness and her obvious, though unexpressed, low opinion of men amused him vastly.

He tapped a pen against his teeth, wondering what her prose style was like. She wouldn’t have had much education; girls of her class rarely did. She’d probably been educated by private tutors with a few “polishing” months at a finishing school in France—
where the only academic subject would have been French. Her eyes, however, were fiercely intelligent—as well as beautiful—and instinct told him that anything she wrote would be commercially compelling as well as incisive.

If he was right in his assumption, there was no reason why the
Daily Despatch
shouldn’t be the first national newspaper to employ a female journalist. Doing so would tie in very nicely with the present campaign—and even when the campaign was over, there was room for a woman’s slant on national topics. The controversy such an appointment would arouse would increase circulation figures, just as the controversy caused by the present campaign was increasing them.

He pushed his chair away from his desk and rose to his feet. He was due to meet with his uncle at the Savoy in half an hour and was going to add the possibility of Rose being employed by the
Daily Despatch
to their agenda. Gerald would be aghast, Hal knew, but he would talk him round to the idea.

Just as he would talk Rose Houghton round to the idea.

Stepping out of the building and onto Fleet Street, he ignored the chauffeured Daimler that was at his beck and call and began strolling in the direction of the Strand.

Lord Jethney was sunk in so deep a depression he could barely bring himself to be civil to people. With his decision to end his relationship with Marigold, all the joy had gone out of his life. Time after time he told himself he was being ridiculous. He was, after all, a very fortunate man. He came from a family that had been prestigious since the time of the Tudors. He was well respected. He was wealthy. He was healthy. He had two handsome, intelligent sons and he had a wife who loved him. He had, in fact, all that a sane, reasonable man could wish for. But he wasn’t happy, and in his blackest moments, he seriously wondered if he would ever be
happy again. All because of a nineteen-year-old girl he had known since her birth—a girl who was young enough to be his daughter.

Sophisticated though he was, nothing in his experience had prepared him for Marigold. It had simply never occurred to him that a girl so young—and brought up as she had been brought up—could be so sexually teasing.

Never in a million years would he have thought that instead of disapproval, his reaction would be to fall headlong, crazily in love with her. He was forty-six. Men of forty-six didn’t lose their heads in such a way. If and when they indulged in love affairs, they were always carefully in control of the affair. It didn’t disrupt their lives, never disrupted their marriages, and they never, ever, became enslaved.