The Runaway Princess (19 page)

“Leo, it’s a big deal for my parents.” I twisted the tea towel between my fingers. “It would be a big deal even if you weren’t who you are.”

“You told them about the whole … prince thing?”

I boggled at him. “Flying visits in Rothery don’t generally involve an actual helicopter.”

“Well, they seem fine about it to me.” Leo fixed me with one of his piercing looks. Sometimes he let me get away with a bit of self-deprecation, but this wasn’t one of those times. “It’s only you who’s in a state of nervous tension. I hope this isn’t some kind of weird inverse snobbery at work?”

“Absolutely not,” I said hotly. Although the kitchen did suddenly feel quite small with both me and Leo in it. And Badger’s paw prints all over the lino. And Dad’s wellies by the door.

“Listen.” Leo pulled me closer so our noses were touching, and whispered in my ear, “I don’t like people judging
me
on the basis of where I live, so I don’t judge anyone on theirs. And since you obviously can’t see it, this place is fascinating. Your dad’s been showing me his old posters for the village sports.”

“It’s not as nice as our old house,” I started to say.

“Then that must have been even more fascinating. Look. We’ve got three more plates of cake to eat, and two more really embarrassing stories to hear, and then I’m taking you back to London in my helicopter, if that’s all right? Or would you rather get the train?”

“Ooh, I heard that!” Mum was at the kitchen door, beaming all over her round face as if she were at the best party ever. “Room for a small one?”

That was the first joke I’d heard her crack in months and months, and for that I was more grateful to Leo than he knew.

L
eo invited me to stay with him in his palace in the same relaxed way that he brought up most things that, even after several weeks of official dating, I still couldn’t say aloud without pulling a satirical face. Things like “an informal ball” or “your mother, the supermodel.”

March had breathed some welcome spring warmth into the London air, and as my work diary ticked over into April I could smell the summer coming in the fresh leaves. Leo and I were sitting in the rose garden eating lunch—homemade egg and cress sandwiches and coffee, as it was my turn and funds were low. Now that all the roses were planted, uncurling their roots into the soft earth and preparing for the summer’s exertions, Leo was musing aloud about what might be missing from the display.

“It needs something else,” he said. “Something … central.”

“What? Are my meticulously sourced and historically accurate rosebushes not enough?” I half-turned to him on the bench, and he leaned back and slipped an arm round my shoulders, kissing me on the temple as he pretended to inspect the view with a critical eye.

I loved these picnics with Leo. I didn’t know how long it took him to get from the City to Kensington at lunchtime, or what he told his PA he was doing in his long lunch break, but at least twice a week he met me in the garden with a takeout bag from Pret or M&S, and we just sat and talked. And talked and talked. He explained how his job worked, as a fund manager for a large
charitable
-investment portfolio, and I rambled on about wildflowers and how even the commonest meadow-mix daisies and poppies kept the bees going and the ecosystem ticking over.

The food was ordinary, but the setting wasn’t: it was like
having
a table for two in the most beautiful garden restaurant in
London
, especially now that the yellow daffodils and crimson tulips that had sent pops of color in every direction were giving way to frothy blossom in the cherry trees, like clouds of delicately scented champagne over our heads.

“I think it needs a birdbath,” he said, regarding the central bed thoughtfully. “Or a fountain. Something tall, in the middle.”

“There’s nothing about that on the plans!” I reached into my bag for the copy of the original plans, but Leo put a hand on my arm.

“I know.” He smiled mysteriously. “I just wanted to put our own mark on it. Something old and new. I thought you could come and choose something from the gardens at home.”

“From the …” I had to brace myself to say it. “Palace
gardens
?”

“Yup. They won’t miss a small one. I asked Granddad, and he said I could ship anything that wasn’t cemented in.”

That would be Leo’s grandfather, the Sovereign Prince Wilhelm. Another thing I found quite hard to say with a casual
expression
.

“Did I tell you he used to live here, in the fifties?” Leo went on, jerking his head backward to his own house. “Keeps trying to tell me about all the various hijinks he got up to in my house.” He held up his hands, as if trying to keep back some particularly hair-curling specters from the past. “Some of it makes Rolf look like he isn’t even trying.”

I bit into my sandwich with a smile. “I think it’s fine to have scandalous grandparents. What sort of thing did he get up to?”

“Oh, the usual—wine, women, song. Racehorses. Film stars. Escapades with various naughty duchesses.”

That was not the usual in my family. They were more wine, women, and whippets.

“What sorts of escapades?” I asked, letting my imagination wander. “Are we talking undone bow ties and white gloves discarded over the grand piano?”

“Ha! Exactly. According to Granddad, there are a couple of very famous movie party scenes that were directly based on parties he threw in the palace. Ask him about them—he’d love to tell you.”

“I will,” I said, boggling inwardly at the thought. If Boris was Rolf to the power ten, what would
his
father be like?

“It was really because of Granddad that Nirona was so fashionable in the fifties,” Leo went on, as if he were discussing the founding of the local Neighborhood Watch. “Granny had a few Hollywood actress friends, and he let them film on the island for very advantageous rates, then quickly built some ritzy hotels for them all to stay in and hustled them down to the casino to blow their fees. No one really knew where the island was, so the press couldn’t interfere with the merrymaking, and before you know it, Bob Hope’s your uncle. And Bob Mitchum. And Bob Redford.”

“Wow.”

“Well, sort of wow. It all got a bit hot in the eighties when helicopters and telephoto lenses came in—that’s why Uncle Pavlos has been building his reputation as a very, very responsible and reliable pair of hands. Poor sod. He likes being photographed about as much as you do.”

“Well, I think that’s totally understandable.”

Jo and I had already had our paparazzi photos posted on YoungHot&Royal.com, and neither of us came out of it well (although I had found out that Jo was actually the
Honorable
Josephine Frenais de Vere, something she’d kept very quiet until now).

Leo finished his sandwich and looked at the lunch box. “These sandwiches are very more-ish,” he said. “Can I have another?”

“Yes,” I said absently, still processing all the glamour dismissed in a few sentences. “It’s Mum’s secret recipe. A touch of English mustard.”

“Oh, your mother. Did she tell you she’d sent me my own box of Battenberg? She should have her own cooking show.” He bit into the sandwich with relish. “So, how about it? Are you doing anything this weekend?”

“You want to go back to Rothery for more cake?”

“No, I mean back to mine. Unless you’ve got plans?”

I swiveled on the bench and gazed at Leo, the prince in a suit and overcoat, eating an egg sandwich with his eyebrows raised in question as if I seriously might have something better to do than be flown to a castle to choose a priceless piece of antiquity to go in a garden.

Since the visit to my parents, he’d been even more careful to ask before he sprang surprises on me. It had niggled me since, I have to be honest; I didn’t know that it wasn’t a case of throwing money at a problem but forgetting there were people involved, but I’d pushed it aside, because I was fairly sure being annoyed at someone whisking you away in a helicopter to go to a sellout gig fell under the heading of “inverse snobbery.”

“No,” I said. “I’m not doing anything this weekend.”

“Great,” said Leo with a cheerful grin. “I’ll book the plane.”

*

Y
ou know the usual minibreak panic you get the first time your new boyfriend takes you to Paris or New York or somewhere for the weekend:

What do I take?

How can I prevent him from seeing my passport photo?

Should I take sexy pajamas?

Is there such a thing as sexy pajamas?

How can I engineer that moment you always get in films where the girl slips on his oversize white shirt and slinks around the bed looking kittenish?

Etc.

Now multiply it by a factor of Meeting the Parents, then by another factor of Staying in a Castle, and then multiply all that by a factor of royalty, and you have a rough idea of the nervous hysteria I was suffering by the time I was in the car on the way to the airport on Saturday morning.

I was traveling light, but that was only because Jo had gone through my wardrobe
and hers
and even then deemed only four items of clothing appropriate. Two of those were cashmere cardigans.

“Royalty appreciates thrift,” she insisted when I was wailing in panic at my limited selection. “They wear the same clothes for years and years. Look at Princess Anne. She has blouses older than her children.”

“I don’t think Liza Bachmann and Princess Anne are the same sort of princess,” I protested. “Remember that blog that tracks Princess Eliza’s outfits to make sure she never repeats them?”

“Oh, but she’s a
supermodel
!” Jo clapped me about the arms. “Anyway, Leo’s been out with a model and he dumped her. He likes the normal-girl thing better. He won’t
expect
you to turn up looking glam.”

I think she meant that to sound reassuring; but the more I saw myself on YoungHot&Royal.com, the more I secretly wondered if my carefree “no-makeup makeup” look was actually looking
careless
rather than
carefree
. And I hated myself a bit for even thinking that.

“Here, take these.” Jo dumped her collection of vintage scarves into my bag. “Ring the changes with accessories.”

“Just because you read that in a magazine doesn’t mean they won’t notice that I’ve worn the same thing with four different scarves.”

“Darling,” said Jo. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned about models, it’s that they’ll be so busy with their own outfits they won’t notice what you’re wearing at all. And anyone royal will be far too polite to mention it.”

That was consoling. Sort of.

*

W
hen Leo said he’d book the plane, I’d naively thought he meant to flex his BA frequent flyer card; but Billy drove us to a private
airfield
south of London, where a charter jet was waiting on the tarmac, just for us.

I was beginning to realize that the more exclusive and private something was, the more unassuming it would seem to be—until you clocked the people around you. The loos in the private terminal didn’t have gold taps, but I won’t tell you who I saw using the hand dryer when I nipped in to check my makeup. It would be very indiscreet. But suffice it to say …
American Idol
.

From the second I stepped into the private jet, I was taking mental notes to pass on to Mum (and, from a technological point of view, Ted). It felt more like being in a very big luxury car than a plane, with big leather seats and clunky belts, but there were three cabin attendants waiting on us for the two-hour flight with handmade chocolates and champagne on ice.

I had a couple of chocolates, but I couldn’t risk the champagne, not in the tight pencil skirt Jo had zipped me into. She said I looked very sports luxe. I wasn’t so sure I knew what that meant. Leo, of course, was perfectly relaxed and even joked with the crew when turbulence started to bounce us across the English Channel a bit quicker than planned.

“Sorry there’s no film on these things,” he said, gently peeling my white-knuckled fingers off the armrest. “Or duty-free. Although I can tell you all about Mom’s Be an Everyday Princess campaign, if you can bear it?”

I nodded. Jo and I had spent the past week extracting every single scrap of information about Liza’s campaign and Nirona in general from the Internet, and then condensing them into a series of “intelligent dinner-party questions” I could ask. It was like the Max Barclay party chat, but about a million times more
upmarket
.

Leo’s voice was so soothing that even Liza’s waffle about personal dignity and community spirit sounded profound and even relevant to someone like me. I stared out of the window and tried not to be sick. The choppy water of the Channel turned into patchwork fields over northern France, and then snowcapped mountains spiking up from the clouds, and suddenly we were coming in to land at Naples.

I glanced across at Leo. The nervous butterflies had returned, but now they were joined by a different kind, the glamorous, tropical “I’m going on holiday” fun butterflies.

“It’ll be fine,” he said before I even said anything, and squeezed my hand.

*

A
helicopter flew us over to the island, and landed in a paddock behind a sprawling cream stone villa with stocky turrets at each end, the walls wrapped in green vines and the roof tiled in warm terra-cotta. It was built into the side of a hill, and I could already see the different gardens laid out around the grounds, as if the castle were a grand lady with her skirts spread around her, each panel neatly embroidered in its own bright colors and patterns.

“Wow,” I murmured, lost for words as I tried to drink in every detail at once. “It’s …”

How did you compliment someone on his castle?

“Breathtaking, isn’t it?” said Leo. “I get the same reaction every time I come home.”

“I just want to run around all those gardens,” I said, touched that he seemed as in awe of it as I was. “And climb up the turrets and smell all the flowers.”

A footman was stacking our bags onto a golf cart, and Leo put his arm around my shoulders. He seemed amused but pleased with my reaction. “That can be arranged,” he whispered in my ear.

The golf cart took us around to the family entrance at the back of the castle; Leo explained that there was a tour on today, so the main entrance hall was occupied by four busloads of German tourists. Underneath a stone arch topped with a blue and yellow flag, Leo’s father, Boris, and an elegant woman were waiting for us. I thought they were having a row, from the waving arms and open mouths; but when we got nearer, I realized that the woman’s mane of tawny hair—seriously, I finally understood what fashion magazines meant by a mane—hid a phone, into which she was speaking with some force.

Boris was just talking away to himself, I think.

Leo jumped off the cart and went to greet them with air kisses and a hearty handshake, respectively.

I slid off the seat with my knees together and tried to minimize the embarrassing wrinkles in my pencil skirt, which now looked a lot less Grace Kelly than when I’d wriggled into it that morning. I felt Leo’s hand on the small of my back before I had time to pull it down properly, and suddenly I was being shoved into the presence of Princess Eliza.

“Mom, this is Amy Wilde. Amy, Liza Bachmann, my mother.”

“Hello,” I squeaked, and stuck out my hand, which she took, gracefully, in both of hers.

Liza Bachmann was properly, premiere-league beautiful. Everything about her face was perfectly even and symmetrical, from her almond-shaped eyes to her wide cheekbones to her generous mouth. When she smiled, it felt as if a very large light were being shone in my face. I blinked, amazed at the star quality she exuded, then twigged that she’d positioned herself with the sun behind her. What a pro.