A Great Prince: A Royal Bad Boy Romance (3 page)

After the meeting with the king, the Burgenland Palace’s bureaucracy had descended on her like a smothering pillow, whisking her away, cancelling all her public appearances.

Gustav Krupp, King’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, sat her down in her hotel suite and lectured her sternly. “Your Highness, that was not the speech that was prepared for you.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

“Our foreign policy is a matter of considerable deliberation, and craft, and consultation with the Landtag. It is not…”

“Is the Monarch not the last word on these matters?”

“
He
is indeed. And in this matter, he
was
. Or so we thought.” He sighed. “You are not the monarch, Your Royal Highness. Nor will you be. Prince Leopold is the heir to the throne now.”

“Prince Leopold is a dunce,” she blurted at the thought of her twelve-year-old stepbrother.

Minister Krupp gasped. “Highness!”

“He is,” she said angrily. “He’s a spoiled brat who’ll make Joffrey Baratheon look like Good King Wenceslas. He doesn’t care one whit for the people of this country and…”

“Highness! This is entirely inappropriate and I must say…”

Blah blah blah
, Francesca thought, turning away to look out the window of the hotel room, watching the snow fall gently on the streets.

And her heart skipped a beat. Outside the hotel, a “translator” on each arm, was King Nikolas, getting into a limousine — presumably to go off somewhere and have one hell of a good time.

Obviously,
she thought enviously,
there was nobody to lecture him on appropriate behavior.

Once upon a time, a child’s laughter had rung out everywhere in Schloss Esterházy, the home of Burgenland’s royal family. In the Empiresaal, the great banqueting hall, Francesca had hidden under the linen tablecloths – but not very well, for the sound of her mother’s voice, teasing her, had always made her giggle and reveal herself.

In the Haydensaal, the Palace’s great Baroque-era performance hall, she had sat at the grand piano, plinking out random notes while her mother, an audience of one in the front row, applauded vigorously. They had run laughing through the Schlosspark, scattering the birds, a security detail always on the lookout for danger, but mostly for photographers, hoping to get a candid shot of the queen.

For she was more than garden-variety royalty. Queen Valerie was also Hollywood royalty, a jolt of fresh blood injected into an old, decayed line. She had given up her career at the age of twenty-seven, at the peak of her box office power.

“Your career in Hollywood is pretty much over at thirty, anyway,” she’d said with the tart frankness that made the media love her. A frankness that would not serve her well in the Palace.

The Palace.
Here in Burgenland it wasn’t just the stultifying bureaucracy it was in England. Here, it was the servant of the
real
rulers of the country – the bankers, the billionaire tax refugees, the corporations registered in this delightful tax haven, like Lichtenstein but with more culture, and with even less regulation.

And it was the Palace’s job to keep Queen Valerie from… doing things. Things like calling attention to the hard lives of the “guest workers,” the Poles and Russians and Filipinos who worked as maids and butlers and drivers for pennies, their passports held hostage, their families dependent on the money they remitted home.

But
she did anyway. What land mines and AIDS were to Princess Diana, “guest workers” around the world, from Burgenland to Dubai, had been Valerie’s crusade.

So they hated her, the Old Guard – the bureaucracy, the aristocracy, the bankers, everyone but the people. And the king.

Franz Joseph had been an unbelievably handsome man. “Like the young Ramon Novarro,” Valerie had sighed to a friend back in America, on a cell phone call one day. “That’s the difference between me and Grace Kelly. I would never have married an ugly man, not for all the crowns in the world.” Francesca knew her mother had said that, because her phone had been hacked by a British tabloid, and the conversation had been splashed across the globe.

In her childhood, the worst sound in the world was a discreet cough. She could see the light and laughter leave her mother’s face when they heard it – the sound of one of the Palace handlers declaring an end to their playtime. They would leave off their games in the park and walk back to the Schloss.

Sometimes Queen Valerie would look up at it as they walked into its shadow and grip her daughter’s hand a little tighter, as if to fortify herself, and remind herself where her real duty lay.

The Palace would descend on the two of them like crows, angrily flapping their black wings. “Your Majesty, Her Royal Highness is late for her riding lesson.” “Your Majesty is late for the opening of the new Central Bank building.” “His Majesty will be most disturbed to hear that you took Her Royal Highness swimming… in the pond!”

And Francesca had her little duties, too. Royals were the original overscheduled children. She had tutors and carefully selected playmates who knew just when and how to lose a game to her; she had her visits to the Children’s Hospital and the Orphanage.

And she had riding lessons, the one duty she never wanted to shirk. The Palace wanted her to learn to ride stiffly in the pomp-and-circumstance parades she’d be participating in for the rest of her life. But she wanted to learn to fly, to race.

She loved the horses. The smell of them, the heat of them, the wild look in the eyes of the big ones, the ones she couldn’t ride yet. She would doodle during her math lessons, pretending to scribble algebra formulas when she was actually working on the geometry of a horse’s head, its body in motion.

When she was seven years old, there was one day she would never forget. As long as she lived. As hard as she tried.

“I want to ride that one,” she announced that day to Gustav, the stable manager.

Gustav chuckled. “I bet you do, young mistress.” He started to saddle the princess’ pony, a sweet and docile creature that wouldn’t run if its tail was on fire.

He could address the girl that way because they were alone. There was a Crown Equerry, a nobleman who “managed” the horses and stables, but Francesca Albertine rarely saw him. Gustav did all the work while the Baron von Waldberg took the credit. The advantage to this arrangement was that Gustav could tell the baron to stay the hell out of the way.

“I’m sick of ponies!” she shouted. She was learning as little kids do that, sometimes, screaming gets you what you want. This was especially true in a royal household. “I want to ride a big horse!”

“If you’re sick of it, then go home and don’t come back until you’re ready to do this my way,” Gustav said, dropping the saddle and walking away.

“Wait!” Francesca cried. “I’m… I’m sorry.”

Gustav turned and smiled. The princess wasn’t the only child he worked with here. The children of dukes, barons, and counts, and (even more powerful) the bankers and tax refugees, were brought here as a sign of royal favor and allowed to ride Burgenland’s best horses. And if there were two words he almost never heard together in his line of work, those words were “I’m” and “sorry.” The entitled little pricks had been raised to believe they need never be sorry for anything.

But between Francesca Albertine’s mother and Sonia, the governess, they were raising her right. A child with manners, who would one day be queen and force others to have manners, too.

“I accept your apology, Your Royal Highness. Now, shall we ride?”

She mounted Theodora the pony, loving the dizzying height it gave her. Gustav led the animal by the reins, walking them out of the stable and into the paddock where Francesca Albertine repressed her impatience at still being walked around by a grownup. She was ready! She was ready to fly!

But she could wait. She could! She was strong!

“Great Princes don’t always get to do what they want,” her governess Sonia had told her some nights, tucking her into bed after an exhausting day on the Palace schedule. “Sometimes they have to do what’s right for the people.”

“For the people or for the Palace?” she asked sleepily.

Sonia couldn’t entirely hide the curl of her lips before Francesca saw it. “For the people, dear. In the end, it’s for the good of the people.”

Gustav was pleased with her progress. The girl was learning patience. He was about to hand her the reins to a mare for the first time when the commotion began.

Two of the little golf carts that were used by staff to get around the grounds quietly sped up to the paddock. Two men and a woman got out, and Gustav recognized them as the Lord Chamberlain, the Prime Minister, and Sonia.

His heart fell. Something awful had happened.

Francesca Albertine looked down at them from her horse as they bowed. “Your Royal Highness. Can you come with us, please,” the Lord Chamberlain said.

“Why?”

“Come, child,” Sonia said, and Francesca could see her red eyes, the tears that wouldn’t stop. “Come inside.”

She froze. She knew. It was the year 2001, and the last four years of her childhood had been filled with images of her, the dead princess. The People’s Princess, like her own mother. The queen’s grief had been terrible to behold – they had become friends in those last years, the two royal outsiders, the two do-gooders.

“How?” she asked quietly, stunning them all. She knew what had happened without even asking, seeing their faces.

Sonia blinked.
My God, she is a royal to the core
. “She drowned. One of the servant’s children fell off a boat in the park pond. She swam out to save him.”

“Did she? Save him?”

“Yes. She got him back into the boat. But she was exhausted. And the child’s mother can’t swim. She went under.”

Princess Francesca Albertine nodded. “Thank you.”

Burgenland had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And like their Austrian neighbors, every Christmas it was traditional to watch the trilogy of movies about Sissi, the “reluctant empress.”

But Queen Valerie and Francesca had their own tradition. Valerie had every movie about Queen Elizabeth I that had ever been made, and she and her daughter would watch all of them. The versions with Bette Davis, with Glenda Jackson, and, most recently, Valerie’s old acquaintance Cate Blanchett, whom she’d met when filming in Australia.

Francesca was riveted even then by the strange doings of the adults, the ranting and raving of Queen Mary, who threatened every minute to kill her half sister Elizabeth, who would always bow, scrape, demur, find a way to placate her mad sister, find a way to buy time.

Until finally the wicked queen died, and there was Elizabeth, standing under a great tree in a field, and men rode up, dismounted, and fell to their knees. And then she knew – she would not only survive, she was queen.

“This is God’s doing, and is wondrous in our eyes,” Elizabeth said, finally able to publicly reveal her true self, her royal self.

Francesca’s mother always whispered the words along with Cate Blanchett. “That,” she said, holding Francesca tight in her lap, “is royalty.”

“Why?” she asked.

Valerie paused. She had been an actress, not a writer, and was at a loss for words. “Because… You know, I can’t say. But I know it when I see it.”

Now she held out a hand, and Gustav gave her the reins at last.

“I want to see her.”

She turned to Gustav, who knelt and cupped his hands so she could put a foot in. She stepped up and dragged her little self into the saddle.

“But, child, she’s…” the Lord Chamberlain began.

“I will see her now,” Francesca Albertine cut him off, and began riding towards the pond.

They all watched her go, for just a second, before coming to their senses and following the Monarch-in-waiting.

Everything was different from that day on. She had rarely seen her father before, and even less so now. One night, she heard Sonia whisper to Gustav.

“The man was never good father material. I think he’d have been happier if she’d been childless. He always resented the time she spent with the girl. And that she never gave him a male heir…”

“Maybe she would have given him a boy, if he hadn’t been spending so much time with that woman…”

“Shh!” she chided him. “Don’t mention her around here. The girl might hear.”

No child wants to hear that her father doesn’t love her. But in this case, it was something Francesca already knew. Her father had married Valerie because he’d been smitten with her beauty, true. But also because his own father had forbidden it. And also because the Palace had forbidden it. So he had to marry her, or give in to all of them.

Their lives as royalty had quickly destroyed any love they’d felt, as Valerie learned that being a queen wasn’t anything like it was in the movies. That it was an endlessly dreary round of reception lines and ribbon cuttings and idle chitchat with “Some old biddy who won a medal for her roses and talked to me the whole time about what I should be doing about all these dirty immigrants,” she complained to Sophia one night.