To Marry a Prince (37 page)

‘Cathedral,’ put in Lady Pansy loudly.

They all ignored that.

‘In the church everyone will be looking at your back throughout the service. That young man who likes to design backless wedding dresses seems to me to be asking the congregation to join the bride in – well, almost deceiving the bridegroom. Sneering at him, even. I’m sorry, Lottie. I don’t think they’re very kind.’

‘Hadn’t thought of that one,’ said Bella cheerfully, her temper restored. You could always rely on her
grandmother to come out of left field. ‘OK, Georgia. Dress must be kind. What else?’

Lady Pansy snorted audibly.

‘Of course, it’s all about the way line and colour are combined. Something very white and severe could say “I’m not for touching”, for instance. Myself, I think that some of those boned tops, which cut into the flesh, look as if the bride is constrained. In a straitjacket, if you will. Not comfortable and not … free.’

Lottie laughed aloud. ‘Well, that’s knocked out the collections of at least three designers I know, Georgia. That’s narrowed it down.’

‘If you want my advice, Bella dear, I think you have to consider the message you want to give the congregation. And, more important even than that, the message you want to give your husband. He’s the most important person there for you, after all. Isn’t he?’

‘Yes,’ said Bella, feeling her ears go pink and knowing there was not one single thing she could do about it. ‘Yes, he is. Good thinking, Batwoman.’

But if the discussion was a success, the beauty parade of designers was not. Once they grasped that meringue was out, they pitched hard for their own most recent collections. Bella sat there with a frozen smile on her face, feeling it was more and more hopeless, until eventually one man said, ‘Everything happens around the Bride. A wedding is a picture, with the church and congregation as the frame, and the Bride the blank canvas to which I apply the image of the Day.’

There was a brief flurry. Suddenly Georgia was on her feet, elegant and deadly.

‘May I clarify something?’ she said, very courteously. ‘You just said that my granddaughter is a blank canvas?’

He did sense danger but not enough to sidestep it. ‘Just for the purposes of the Day …’ he began airily.

He was stopped dead in his tracks.

‘You are a very silly man. You do not know how to do your job. Please leave.’

That was when things changed, Bella thought afterwards. Up till then, the Press had either loved her or given her the benefit of the doubt. Even the grumpy
Daily Despatch
hadn’t actually attacked her. But soon there was a rumour that Bella had told favourite-of-the-stars designer Jonas Krump that he was a silly man who did not know how to do his job. And the backlash started.

It wasn’t all bad. The
Morning Times
did a very nice piece about her family, including Neill’s upcoming appearance as a Viking, and ran a profile of her bridesmaids in their weekend supplement. A charities magazine did an evaluation of her first three months at the forestry project and said she was hard-working and inventive, with really sound hands-on experience from her time in the Indian Ocean. The women’s pages were generally pleased when she chose a younger British designer, Flora Hedderwick, to design The Dress.

But LoyalSubjekt101 said she was a control freak with an ego problem, who didn’t care about British trade, the Royal Family or even the Prince of Wales. And other bloggers started to creep out of the ether, repeating the same story.

‘Bloody nonsense,’ said the King, storming into Lady Pansy’s office while Bella was there one Wednesday. He was in a fine temper, and knocked over a small table stacked with files as he fulminated.

Lady Pansy, leaping to her feet, did not know whether to curtsey or rescue the files, so did a sort of wild salmon writhe until the King said, ‘Oh sit down, woman. Sit
down
.’

This grumpiness was so unlike him that Bella was astonished. His colour was high, too.

‘Are you all right?’ she asked him.

‘Bastard reptiles, he said, not answering directly. ‘All they want to do is tear into people. Never mind who gets hurt. You carry on, my dear. You tell the truth – and if they don’t like it, tough.’ He turned on Lady Pansy. ‘And if any of them ask you, it’s no comment. Right?’

And he stamped out, leaving Lady Pansy curtseying behind him.

‘I do think,’ she said in the soft, patronising voice that Bella was coming to loathe, ‘that it would be a lot easier if you were to move into the Palace, where you could be
guided
more, Bella dear.’

‘Bastard reptiles,’ floated back down the corridor.

Bella’s lips twitched. ‘I think I’ve got it about right as far as His Majesty is concerned,’ she said.

And left, with a spring in her step.

If only she had known.

She spent Easter with the Royal Family at the Castle and, after lunch on Sunday, she and Richard drove
down to Devon to cheer on Neill and his fellow Vikings the next day. The fields were full of green shoots and a brilliant spring sun made the budding trees look as if they had been studded with tiny emeralds.

They had a perfect evening in the grounds of a small village pub tht led down to the river where the longboat was due to land the next day. In fact they were sitting there in the scented dark when Neill arrived, looking harassed.

‘We’ve got a problem, Sis,’ he told Bella. ‘Our celebrity has broken his hand, careless bugger, and we’re one oarsman short. Can you call Lottie? She said she’d try and get one of the Richmond lot to come along. At this stage, we can live without a celebrity. We just need someone to pull an oar.’

Richard stretched lazily. ‘I can pull an oar,’ he remarked.

Neill said, ‘I haven’t got her number. I’ve looked everywhere. I—’ He did a double take.

‘I can pull an oar. I was in the second eight at college. Of course, it wasn’t quite Viking style.’

Neill said eagerly, ‘But you were pretty good when we were playing around that weekend.’ And then, ‘No. No, you can’t. We haven’t got a costume for you.’

‘What happened to the celebrity’s costume, then?’

‘I mean we haven’t got a costume for
you
.’

‘I don’t think Viking raiders had Prince of Wales feathers on their sea coats,’ said Richard dryly. ‘I’m up for it, if you are.’

And of course, he did brilliantly. His springy hair kept pushing off his Viking helmet, so it had to be held on
with elastic, but otherwise he looked the part fantastically. And when they came to land, he swaggered up with the rest of them, bare-chested and with a distinct glint in his eyes.

‘Sexy swine,’ said Bella, going to meet him along with all the other wives and girlfriends. ‘God, you smell good.’

There was a lot of laughter and making faces at the camera but the wind had got up and soon enough the mighty oarsmen decided they could do with tee-shirts. And the tee-shirts, carried the logo of the sponsor, a hand-crafted biscuit manufacturer.

It was on the internet by nightfall.
Prince of Wales in Advertising Scandal
. And there was Richard, in the green-and-white tee-shirt, with a tankard of ale in his hand and one arm round a laughing Bella, advertising Morgan’s Ginger Thins.

Some said he was stupid and drunk. Some said he was stupid and calculating. Some said he was stupid and did what his bride-to-be told him to. Of course, every version of the story started with the fact that his fiancée’s brother was the reason Richard had become a Viking in the first place.

Bella’s phone rang all the time. It felt as if the thing was vibrating with rage. Richard was inclined to shrug it off.

‘It’s bad luck about the sponsorship. But as long as Morgan’s don’t try to cash in – which would be very silly of them – I don’t think anyone will care, for long. The proceeds go to Sailing for the Disabled, after all. And I had a bloody good time. End of.’

Only then his Father heard about it.

By midnight the King was in hospital with a suspected heart attack.

Richard suddenly went very quiet. A helicopter was scrambled to take him to London.

‘I’ll come with you,’ said Bella.

But Richard shook his head. He looked pale and drawn but he was his usual calm self, contained, in control. Bella had never felt so far away from him, not even when they fought.

‘Better not,’ he said, as politely as if she were a stranger. ‘Someone has to drive the car back to London.’

‘You want me to do that?’

‘If you wouldn’t mind?’

‘Oh, my love.’ She went to put her arms round him but he evaded her embrace without really seeming to see it.

‘I’ll call you.’

He doesn’t want me, Bella thought. He blames me. And he’s right. It’s my fault. Neill would never have agreed to let him in the boat if it weren’t for that silly game, rowing on the carpet at home, before Christmas.

She swallowed. ‘Yes, do. Please. Call me as late as you like. I won’t go to sleep until you do.’

‘Yes. OK,’ he said, only half with her. ‘Got to go.’

A kiss – barely a kiss at all, really – and he was gone.

‘When One Thing Goes Wrong …!’ –
Tube Talk

Bella drove back very carefully the next day. She hadn’t slept much.

Richard had rung to say that his father was in the King George IV Memorial Hospital for Officers and seemed to be stable. The doctors weren’t really sure what was going on. They’d done a blood test and results suggested a minor heart attack.

‘According to his valet he fell asleep over the television last night and then woke up and suddenly started talking scribble. That could have been because he was still half asleep. But it just might have been a small stroke, which is what’s worrying them. Madoc said he’s been short of breath a lot lately. And also there were a couple of odd episodes this week, when my father seemed very anxious about something. But Madoc didn’t press him and it seemed to pass. Classic symptoms of a mild heart attack, apparently. He’s being monitored round the clock at the moment. Anyway, the quacks say it isn’t life-threatening, though he needs to be careful.’

‘How are you?’

‘Me?’ Richard sounded drained but impeccably polite, as always. ‘I’m fine. The emergency was all over, pretty much, by the time I got here. My mother is shaken, though.’

Bella just longed to be with him, to hold him. Somehow she couldn’t quite bring herself to say it. She did say, ‘What can I do?’

He puffed out his breath as if he were trying to think of something for her to do, to make her feel better. ‘Bring the car back to Camelford House. I’ll make sure the Guard House are expecting you and don’t play any of their stupid tricks.’

She knew he would too. Even when he was so tired he couldn’t see straight, even when he was desperately worried about his father, he would make sure that she did not have to lock horns with some jobsworth who wanted to show her she didn’t belong there. She thought her heart would break.

‘I’ll see you tomorrow then.’

‘What? Oh, yes. Tomorrow. Thank you.’ He was obviously about to put the phone down and added conscientiously, ‘Good night. Thank you for waiting up.’

She did not know how long she sat there with tears falling silently. She loved him with all her heart but in his distress she could not get near him. It was like walking into a wall.

Bella did not know Richard’s big car very well. Had only driven it a couple of times before, to move it in car parks and so on. But she was a good driver, steady and unflappable, and the tears had dried towards dawn. She
delivered it safely to Camelford House by mid-afternoon.

It was Fred, one of the nicer security men, in the Guard House when she put her head round the door.

‘Afternoon, Miss Greenwood. How’s His Majesty?’

‘On the mend, we hope, Fred. Has Prince Richard got back yet?’

‘Been and gone, miss. He’s over at the Palace with the Private Office. They’ll be rearranging diaries, I reckon.’

‘Yes.’ Yes, of course. She shouldn’t have needed a security officer to tell her that. ‘I’ll – just go then.’

‘Right you are, miss.’

He took the keys from her and Bella wandered blindly out into the London streets. Should she join Richard? Would he want her? Or would she be just another burden that he had to carry and be polite to, in addition to everything else?

There was only one way to find out. She half expected it to go to voice mail but he answered his phone after only three rings.

‘Bella. Where are you?’

‘Back in London. They tell me you’re at the Palace. Shall I come over ? Or—’

‘Yes,’ he said with urgency. ‘Yes, come now. That would be – yes.’

A flunkey escorted her to a room she hadn’t seen before. It was long and thin, with several desks with slightly outdated computer screens on them, and wall-mounted clocks showing the time in Ottawa, New York, Kingston Jamaica, Paris, Rome, Delhi and Canberra.

Richard was standing at a long folding table – it
reminded Bella of a pasting table she had seen decorators use in her mother’s house – with three other men, looking at a huge roll of paper.