To Marry a Prince (25 page)

Then she had a call from someone who described himself as working in the King’s private office. Please would she give him her date of birth, her social security number and her passport number? Also her parents’ and her stepfather’s. And, in future, would she remember that it was not permitted to stay overnight in a Royal residence without three days’ prior notice?

‘They’re not exactly making you feel welcome, are they?’ said Lottie, hearing Bella’s side of that particular conversation.

‘I know. It’s odd. Both the King and Queen Jane were very nice to me.’

But she rounded up the passport numbers, as instructed.

‘You know, I think you ought to check with Richard,’ said Lottie. ‘I mean, it’s odd. Maybe Wormtongue doesn’t work for the King at all. What’s his name?’

‘Madoc … Julian Madoc.’

‘Well, find out if Mr Madoc is legit before you send him anything.’

So for once Bella called Richard. He answered immediately.

‘How’s Day Two of being the First Girlfriend going?’

‘Odd actually.’ And she told him about the messages she’d had from the Palace.

He exploded. ‘Bloody Madoc! Officious little toad! Know what he’s doing, don’t you? He’s trying to get you positively vetted.’

Bella gasped, coughed and couldn’t stop laughing. ‘Sounds a bit agricultural and rather nasty.’

But Richard wasn’t amused. ‘It’s security clearance for people who have to read government secrets. How dare he? How
dare
he?’

But Bella was still bubbling with mirth. She went into a very bad Russian accent. ‘I am Olga the Beautiful Spy. You will tell me all your secrets.’

Richard laughed reluctantly. ‘Yes, very funny. But Madoc needs kicking. I shall speak to my father. What else has the House of Horrors thrown at you today, my love?’

She told him about the Officer of the Watch and her decision to grovel without protest. ‘I look on it as an investment in future good-will.’

He groaned. ‘And I thought it would be the Press that were the problem!’

‘Well, I’ll probably do better now. Your mother is providing me with a mentor.’

‘A what?’

‘A mentor. You know, someone who’s already done something and guides the faltering footsteps of a new recruit.’

‘Hell’s teeth,’ he said blankly. ‘The woman’s got a mind like a corkscrew. Has she really wished one of my old girlfriends on to you?’

Bella giggled at the idea. ‘I don’t think so. She’s called Lady Pansy, and when she called me this morning she sounded like Celia Johnson. Must be a good seventy-five.’

‘Oh, Pansy.’ He sounded more relaxed. ‘She’s harmless. She’ll probably give you long lectures about orders of precedence and teach you how to curtsey.’

‘Coo-er.’

This time Richard laughed as if he really meant it. ‘I love you,’ he said before ringing off. ‘Dream Girl.’

Lady Pansy didn’t give Bella lectures on orders of precedence. She gave her a booklet, bound in shiny Royal blue, with the Royal coat-of-arms on the front and gold lettering. And a book on protocol at the Court of St James’s, revised edition, and a book on the Royal Families of Europe, plus a ring binder about the organisation of the Royal Household (London) with the internal telephone numbers of, as far as Bella could see, everything and everyone from the King’s Private Office to the Head Groom.

‘Just a few memory joggers,’ she said sweetly. For Lady Pansy was very sweet indeed.

Bella found her way to a sitting room off a back staircase in the Palace for, as she thought, a friendly chat,
and came away feeling as if she had gone ten rounds with the Cookie Monster.

The woman who had summoned her was tall and rangy, with a profile like a horse’s and a lacquered backcombed helmet of beautifully tinted grey-brown hair that would, thought Bella, have withstood a Force 10 gale. She was elegantly dressed in a dark blue dress and short jacket worn with a triple string of pearls, matching pearl earrings, and a pair of well-polished shoes. So far, so Golfing Ladies. Except that Lady Pansy smiled all the time and never stopped talking. She did not so much gush as swirl like the tide. She was, in short, unstoppable.

She also called Bella ‘dear’ a lot. It set Bella’s teeth on edge.

‘I have known the dear Queen since she came here as a bride. And the Dowager Queen before her. Indeed, I was brought up with His Majesty’s father. My own father was what is called an Equerry. You will find out about the Court in here.’ And she added another tome to Bella’s extensive pile.

‘Thank you.’

‘Of course, I have retired now. The King has very kindly given me a little Grace and Favour apartment in Hampton Court but I come in to the Palace most days, to give what service I can. Old habits die hard.’ She had a tinkling laugh, that didn’t sit very well with the horse-like teeth or a strident upper-class voice that could have stripped paint.

‘I suppose they must,’ murmured Bella.

‘Royal service is my inheritance. I am very proud to
serve. I have my little corner here,’ Lady Pansy explained, indicating a sitting room the size of a suburban house, full of eighteenth-century furniture and a goodish collection of porcelain. ‘And I am always available to help new people who join the Court with any little pieces of advice that I can. Just ask me anything you like, dear. My card. My phone number.’

She gave Bella two small pasteboard cards, one simply inscribed with Lady Pansy’s name in flowing gold script, one more businesslike with phone and fax numbers but no email address.

‘You will find it all bewildering at first,’ instructed Lady Pansy. ‘But I shall be here to guide you. You may call on me at any time. I suggest we meet regularly.’

Taking a surreptitious glance at her watch, Bella realised that the interview had already taken two hours. Her discussions with Lady Pansy, she resolved, would henceforward take place on the telephone. But she murmured more grateful thanks. And Lady Pansy launched into a terrifying account of the hounding she could expect from the Press.

Bella finally staggered out with two cloth bags full of books and papers, three hours after she’d gone into the Palace.

She went straight back to the flat and lay down in the sitting room, in blessed, blessed silence.

‘Thank God I took the day off,’ she told Lottie that evening. ‘The woman made my head ring – and scared the wits out of me. She made me think the journalists and photographers would be knee-deep outside the flat. But there wasn’t one.’

As it turned out, the Press were relatively uninterested in Bella. There were a couple of pointed questions asked of Richard at his next public appearance, but he evaded them neatly. And a single photographer turned up outside Bella’s office. But that was it.

‘Of course, you’re not one of the candidates to become his Princess,’ explained Lady Pansy on the telephone. ‘The serious Royal correspondents know that and won’t waste their time. But the riff-raff can be intrusive. When would you like to call on me this week?’

‘Thank you, but I think I will save that pleasure for when the riff-raff get worse,’ said Bella, and put the phone down before Lady Pansy could object.

Lottie, however, agreed with the courtier.

‘There’s a lot of celebrity action at the moment,’ she said darkly. ‘You wait till the dead zone between Christmas and New Year. That’s when we’ll get all the pieces about “Isabella Greenwood, Is She Right for Our Prince?”’

‘So what?’ said Bella, who had just come off the phone with Richard and was still basking in his ‘Good night, Dream Girl’. ‘I’ve got my love to keep me warm. I can handle it.’

She and Lottie were both wrong.

The trouble started when an undercover freelance journalist approached Bella’s mother in Town. Of course, she didn’t say she was a journalist. She said she’d heard the news about Bella and the Prince of Wales, and just had to stop and tell Janet how pleased she was. And
then she switched on her mini tape recorder and let Janet burble.

Bella’s mother didn’t say anything untruthful. She said that they hadn’t met Prince Richard yet but hoped to soon. She also said they were very much looking forward to meeting the King and Queen – at this point, reading the article, Bella put her arms over her head and groaned loudly – and that she hoped to invite Queen Jane, a noted amateur golfer, to a round at her own club. Yes, she agreed, it would be lovely if Bella and Richard got married. Following your heart was so important. Only then the journalist asked if she thought that the family would object, and Janet got completely the wrong end of the stick. Her ex-husband, she said, could keep his silly opinions to himself and not jeopardise his daughter’s happiness. Who cared whether he thought the monarchy should be abolished or not? He was never in the country anyway.

It went round the wires in seconds. The next day a journalist turned up in Cambridge, asking about Finn’s behaviour when he was an undergraduate there. Someone found an incendiary article he had written as a student coming back from Paris, praising the French événements of 1968. A man he had fallen out with badly on his Pamirs expedition sold a highly coloured account of Finn’s alleged anarchist ravings while they were in the mountains together.

The headlines were grim. ‘Prince Woos Revolutionary’s Daughter’ was the mildest of them. ‘Trotskyist Totty in the Palace’ screamed the
Daily Despatch
.

Julian Madoc rang Bella and asked her for a list of all
the clubs and societies she had ever joined, particularly any political ones. He was, he said in a smug voice, commanded by the King to ask. Lady Pansy said it was most unfortunate and that Bella should issue a statement, distancing herself from her father.

‘Can’t do that,’ said Lottie the guru. ‘Turns you into a sneaky little traitor, letting your dad down.’

‘I wasn’t going to do it,’ said Bella, more bewildered than anything else.

Richard was furious. A television interviewer stuck a microphone in his face at a Christmas Fair and he lost his cool. ‘I am a great admirer of Finn Greenwood’s work,’ he told a reporter icily. ‘I have read all his books. It will be a privilege to meet him.’

‘Prince Turns Anarchist’ trumpeted the
Daily Despatch
.

‘Oh, dear,’ said Lady Pansy, worried. ‘Maybe you ought not to see each other. Just for a bit, you know. Until all this dies down.’

But Bella was starting to get annoyed too. ‘The trouble is, people who buy the
Despatch
can’t read. They probably thought it said Anti-Christ,’ she said tartly.

And somehow that got out into the Press too. There were rumblings that the First Girlfriend was too big for her boots. Not being Royal or even aristocratic and sneering at the reading abilities of good working people.

‘Now I’m not only a Trot, I’m toffee-nosed,’ she told Richard, trying to make a joke of it. But it was starting to hurt.

She did not go to any official functions with him, and when they went to the same parties they arrived and left separately. It seemed to her that now they had
acknowledged that they were seeing each other, they saw less of each other than they had when it was only in snatched, secret moments.

‘I know,’ said Richard. They were in his flat again, curled up together on the huge sofa after a long walk and a lazy evening with a DVD. ‘It’s like there’s a conspiracy to keep us apart.’

Bella propped herself up on one elbow. ‘Do you think …?’ But at once they both shook their heads. ‘Nah. Why would anyone bother?’

‘If I have the choice between cock-up and conspiracy, I go for cock-up every time,’ said Richard. ‘We need to spend time together, private time, that everyone knows about. I can’t get away for Christmas, but I could do the Saturday after next if your mother invited me. And you could come to Scotland for the New Year.’

‘Do you think that’s wise? Lady Pansy said maybe we should cool it.’

‘Pansy’s an old worryguts,’ said Richard disrespectfully. ‘I’m not feeling like cooling anything.’

He kissed Bella long and pleasurably to illustrate his point. After a long, complicated interlude, she could only agree with him.

‘Right,’ he said later, lying half-naked and wholly relaxed on his priceless Chinese carpet. ‘That’s agreed then. You square your parents. I’ll tell mine.’

Thirty-six hours entertaining the Prince of Wales on her own territory was all Janet Bray had ever dreamed of. She paraded him round the Golf Club and he behaved, as Bella told him later with heartfelt appreciation, like a
complete star. He laughed at all their golf stories, even producing a couple of his own. He admired their charitable fund-raising, expressed interest in the club’s upcoming centenary – and spent long cold hours on the fairway playing a round with Kevin and smiling for the local paper, the curious, and children who came along hoping that the Prince of Wales would be in armour, or at least have a sword. His smile never faltered. Nobody would ever have guessed that he wasn’t riveted by golf and golfers or delighted with his day’s entertainment.

‘You’re really good at this, aren’t you?’ Bella said, walking beside him back to the clubhouse, her gloved hand tucked into the crook of his arm.

‘It’s my job,’ he said.

Janet’s stock had soared with the Ladies’ Section.

‘Good to meet the boyfriend that our Bella said she didn’t have,’ said the witch-faced Social Secretary, making certain that she was the first to shake Richard’s hand when they reached the clubhouse. Her husband’s new knighthood, as she had pointed out in the Ladies’ Cloakroom, gave her precedence.