A Great Prince: A Royal Bad Boy Romance (4 page)

And of course, Francesca was a girl. She was the firstborn, but the laws of succession would have given the throne to any younger brother.

Her father called her in to his study the day after her mother’s death. She quaked with fear, as she always did around the man. “The man,” not “my father,” because the man always treated her like someone else’s child.

King Franz Joseph was still handsome, The graying hair at his temples and the crinkles around his eyes were the only signs that he was almost fifty years old. But his eyes were old and cold. They were blue, but not like Valerie’s, which had been the blue of warm Caribbean waters and clear skies. His were blue like polar ice, blue like polished gems.

He sat behind the old, heavy desk like a judge. The dark paneling of the study, its old brown books, the grim tapestries, and antique chairs all sucked away the light from the lone long window.

“Your mother’s passing is a heavy burden,” he said to his daughter with a formality more appropriate to a press release than a family conversation. “But you are a princess, and you will continue to conduct yourself as you have so far.”

As she had so far…
The tabloids were already feasting on her, the brave little girl walking in her mother’s funeral procession. She hadn’t cried – after all, she’d inherited both royalty’s stiff upper lip and the movie star’s sense of drama and occasion. She’d cried in her room with Sonia. Again and again. But never in public.

“Yes, father,” Francesca Albertine replied in her little voice. Years later it would occur to her that this was the closest her father had ever gotten to complimenting her on anything.

“Yes, well then.” King Franz Joseph picked up a folder and started reading it.

Francesca waited a moment for any more words from her father. When none came, she gave the king an unseen bow and walked away quietly.

With her mother dead, Francesca’s childhood was really over. Valerie had protected her as much as she could from the Palace, had allowed her to run and play and scream and overindulge in ice cream like a normal girl. Now the crows, perched so patiently on the telegraph line, watching, waiting, swept in.

On the morning she turned seven years old, she came down to breakfast and looked for her governess. Sonia was nowhere to be found, so she ate alone in the great dining room. The ticking and quarterly chiming of the grandfather clock was the only sound, other than the rustling of the servants when they refilled her glass of orange juice.

When a teary-eyed Sonia finally joined her, Francesca thought for a brief moment that her father was dead, too. And even at her tender age, she felt a twinge of guilt that the thought didn’t upset her at all.

“It’s time for you to go away to school, Frankie,” she smiled.

“Today?”

“Yes. I’m sorry, I wasn’t warned, I should have seen it coming, tried to prepare you…”

She smiled. In her mind, a little bird hatched and spread its wings. She ran and hugged her “other mother” and whispered to her.

“I’ll miss you. But I won’t miss them. All of them. All of this.”

She nodded. “I know. I know. I almost envy you.”

Boarding school! It sounds so dreary, Jane Eyre and all that, but for Francesca, it was heaven.

Le Rosey was in Switzerland, far from the crows, far from the dark shadows. The campus was more like a little village unto itself – when Francesca got older and saw the old
Prisoner
TV series, she looked at “the village” and thought of Le Rosey. Though instead of becoming a prisoner, Francesca Albertine was finally free.

The junior campus, where children her age lived and studied, was like a university in a box, with sunny skylit couches for reading and monkey bars for frolicking. And best of all, she was just another kid, in a school full of princes and sultans-in-waiting and heirs to more powerful, if untitled, financial thrones.

She was so happy, in fact, that she barely cared about the news that her father was remarrying, an announcement made six months to the day after Queen Valerie’s death.

Until, that is, she heard the Countess Alexandra Therese would be the new queen, a woman young enough to provide what Queen Valerie hadn’t…a son. Burgenland’s laws of succession were clear – Francesca would take the throne in the absence of a male heir, but she would be bumped from that place by any legitimate son of the king.

When the royal correspondent on BBC started prattling about the marriage, a teacher hastened to turn off the TV, but Francesca stopped him. The teachers were usually very good about ignoring royal commands, but there was something about the way the little girl just raised her hand ever so slightly off the arm of the chair, her eyes glued to the TV, that was just too majestic to defy.

“Oh, yes, James, Alexandra Therese is definitely a throwback to the old days. The Palace, you know, they never warmed to Valerie, she was an outsider and an upstart. Alexandra Therese is from a very old family, very aristocratic, good blood and all that. Young Francesca Albertine will have a little brother soon, I’m sure.”

“Or sister,” the news anchor added.

“Oh, yes, or sister,” the royal watcher laughed, nearly rolling her eyes at the idea of hoping for a royal sister.

Francesca’s first reaction had been shock. The Countess Alexandra Therese! To be her stepmother! A woman who’d never been less than totally rude to both Valerie and her “half-breed” daughter.

But her second reaction had been… relief. If her stepmother did have a son, she wouldn’t have to be queen, wouldn’t have to rule, wouldn’t have every minute of her life managed by the Palace. She wouldn’t have to suffer like her mother – she’d be free to live her own life, however she wanted to!

Francesca Albertine looked out the corner of her eye. Nobody was in the room. Nobody could be heard in the hallway. And so, for one second, she allowed herself to smile.

She came home for the wedding, of course. It was a muted affair, given that the former queen was so recently in the grave. Muted, that is, by royal standards; just the few hundred or so people who could fit inside St. Martin’s Cathedral. Even at the age of seven, Francesca could look around and see who was here… and who was missing. Pretty much any noble who’d been friends with Valerie wouldn’t be found here today.

On the steps outside afterwards, her new stepmother (after making sure the cameras were on them) bent down and gave her a little hug, and then one of
those smiles.

The kind Francesca knew well, the ones the Palace twits gave her as they insisted that “princesses don’t do things like climb trees.” The patronizing ones that treated her like she was, well, seven.

“I’m sure we’ll be such good friends,” Queen Alexandra Theresa said. The new queen was raven haired, green eyed, with porcelain skin and a pair of thin lips that were clearly formed to smirk more than smile. She was thin, almost bony.

Francesca smiled back at her, just as sweetly. “I’m sure we will be.”

The new queen blinked, and almost (almost) lost her composure. She was prepared for a sulk, an outburst, but not for impeccable manners. But she could see in Francesca’s eyes that she felt the same way Alexandra did about her.

I hate you.

“Well then! Let’s go see your father.”

That night she had tea with Sonia, who was still on staff at the Palace, even though her charge was so rarely home now. Valerie had seen to that in Sonia’s employment contract. They sat side by side in three-hundred-year-old chairs in front of a roaring fire.

“So,” Francesca said, “now I’m free.”

Sonia frowned. “What do you mean by that?”

Francesca kicked her heels, her feet still not reaching the floor from the formal chairs.

“Well, she’s going to have a child, a boy no doubt. And then I won’t be queen. And I can do as I like.”

Sonia put her tea cup down on the table between them. She waited until Francesca set down her own.

Then Sonia reached over and slapped her.

“Ow!” Francesca screamed. “What did you do that for?”

“You are not free to do as you like. You never will be. I don’t care who’s king or who’s queen. You are a princess of Burgenland, and your responsibility is to the people. What do you think is happening in this country? What do you think is happening to all the reforms your mother forced through, thanks to all the media attention she brought?”

“I… I don’t know.”

“Oh, yes, you’ve been in Switzerland and can’t bother to keep up with events here in our little country.”

She softened and took Francesca’s hand. “Now more than ever the people will need you. This woman… you know her. Whatever son she makes, she’ll make him in her image. You may never be queen but the people will need you to stand up for them, to do what’s right.”

Francesca bit her lip. “Yes, ma’am. You’re right. I’m sorry.”

Sonia smiled. “Come on, dear. There are the leftovers of about a dozen cakes in the kitchen, left from the wedding. Let’s go sample them all.”

Francesca had been abruptly whisked out of Davos the next morning, and sent back home to face the music. As the motorcade crawled down Joseph-Haydn-Gasse towards the Palace, she looked glumly at the scene. The narrow streets of Eisenstadt prevented the sort of mad-dashing motorcade of police motorcycles and limousines seen in other world capitals. But all the same, it wasn’t slow enough for Francesca.

The closeness of the old buildings along the street felt like a mine shaft, like she was making a descent back into a deep, dark place.

Everything here is so old.
She sighed. The streets were lined with old people, waving flags… but no young people. Either they had no interest in seeing a princess or, if they had talent and drive, they had already left Eisenstadt for Germany and its booming economy. You could stay here and be a banker, or… move away.

Her only comfort was that so many of them, here and abroad, were blogging about her speech, tweeting their responses, cheering her for defying the Powers That Be.

And I’m about to pay the price for that
.

She was brought directly into her father’s study. King Franz Joseph sat in the throne-like chair, and Queen Alexandra Theresa stood behind him, a hand on his shoulder.

“Girl,” her father rumbled. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“What my mother would have done,” she responded, startling them both.

The queen shook her head. “My dear child. It just won’t do. You’re a goodwill ambassador, you know, not a
real
ambassador.”

“And a real ambassador would give the speech he was told to give,” the king added.

“Honestly,” the queen went on. “Do you know how much trouble you’ve stirred up here? Why, my friend Countess Marie told me that her maid demanded her passport back! And the girl has yet to work off the price of her plane ticket here!”

“My sincerest regret that the countess was inconvenienced.”

The queen sighed. “Can’t you pick something… nicer? Some AIDS people, even, or starving Africans. And those… refugees. Syrians and who knows what. You’re encouraging them. Just what we need here: Islamic terror cells migrating en masse to Burgenland…”

Francesca listened, stone-faced. Standing in this study, she couldn’t help but think of her grandfather. The former Franz Joseph had been the “Good King,” a man who’d pretended to accommodate the Nazis while he’d saved Jews and funded the Resistance. All her own father had inherited from her grandfather seemed to be his name, she though, seeing her stepmother do all the talking for her father.

“You won’t be making any more speeches,” the king said, interrupting his wife’s anti-immigrant tirade. “You’ve got a ribbon-cutting on a…” he fumbled through some papers. “The Bonisdorf nature trail or something, in Neuhaus am Klausenbach tomorrow. You will have ten words to say. The Palace has written them. You will say no other words.”

She curtsied. “As you wish, Majesty,” she lied, a plan already forming in her head.

She closed the study door behind her, and as she turned she nearly ran into a little boy on his way in.

“Oh! Leopold, I’m sorry.”

“Your Royal Highness is how you address me,” the boy snarled.

At twelve tender years old, His Royal Highness, Crown Prince Leopold, was already a rotten little shit. At Le Rosey, Francesca had seen the first episode of
Game of Thrones
, and after King Joffrey had Eddard Stark beheaded, she’d turned to a school friend and said, “That’s my brother.”

Just before she’d gone to Davos, she’d seen her personal servants, Klaus and Amelia, trying to avoid her as she called after them. The elderly couple had been her mother’s loyal retainers, and were just as faithful to Francesca.

Klaus reeked of urine and Amelia was sobbing. “Klaus!” Francesca exclaimed. “What happened?”

“It’s nothing, Highness,” he said abruptly. “An accident.”

Something clicked in her mind. She turned to Amelia, who was always the one she could count on to spill secrets. “Amelia,” she said darkly.

“No!” Klaus said. “Amelia.”

“It was Leopold, wasn’t it?”

They’d said nothing, their faces set in perfect masks of discretion. But they couldn’t lie to her, either, which told her what she needed to know.

Francesca had fumed. The little monster had no doubt found it hilarious to humiliate two old people. More to the point, two old people loyal to her, not the queen.

Thinking of that scene now, she kept her face stone cold as she curtsied to His Royal Highness. “My apologies, Highness.”

“That’s better. Guess you got your ass handed to you, didn’t you? Going on about those dirty Muslims trying to break into our country.”

“Excuse me, Highness, my father the king has tasked me with something. Good day.”

It hadn’t taken long for Francesca to see that Sonia was right. Alexandra Theresa had made her son in her own image. And now more than ever, the Kingdom of Burgenland would need her to protect its subjects from their rulers.

As the southernmost village in Burgenland, Bonisdorf was just a few thousand meters from the border with Slovenia. Literally, just over – maybe a thousand feet or so.

She knew why she’d been sent south. A five-minute walk away, countless refugees from Syria were pressing on Burgenland’s border. The Kingdom was throwing fences up as quickly as possible, and while the Kingdom didn’t maintain much of a standing army, there were suddenly a surprising number of tall, bulky men in wraparound sunglasses wearing Burgenland Army uniforms. The press was calling it the “Burglin Wall.”

This was her punishment. The media was here, waiting for her to speak, to act, as she’d done in Davos.
And for me to cut a fucking ribbon and say nothing about those poor people is for me to surrender to the Palace, to take hope away from those families, to send them packing in some other direction.

At the little trail head, the local gentry stood proudly in their traditional Austrian garb, as if the twentieth century had never happened, never mind the twenty-first. The photographers waited to see what she’d do. Her security detail was placed at a distance, all of them curiously enough near the border.

She held the giant scissors in her hand, poised to cut the ribbon and speak the ridiculous, innocuous words.

And what can they do to me?
she thought, remembering Sonia’s aphorism again:
They cannot eat you.

Princess Francesca Albertine dropped the scissors on the ground and marched as fast as she could down the trail towards the border.

Her security was ready to stop her, blocking her passage. She stopped six feet from them.

“I order you to move out of my way,” she said loudly enough for the cameras behind her, racing to catch up.

“We are under orders from His Majesty, Your Royal Highness, for your protection.”

“His Majesty is not here. I am here. I am a princess of Burgenland and I order you to move.” She turned to the cameraman from the BBC. “Is this live?”

“Y-yes, ma’am. Majesty.”

She started walking, a game of chicken, the cameras whirring behind her. Five feet away, four, three… Would the guards move aside or force her to run into them, comically? Would their order extend to physically manhandling her away from the border?

Two feet. Her eyes were fixed between the two men in her way. One foot.

The men blinked, moved aside. The line broken, the media followed suit.

She could hear them at the fence, women, children, crying out to be let through, not to stay but only to pass through, to Germany, to safety. Soldiers formed a grey line behind the fence, which some in the Palace had argued should be electrified, but which for now was still scalable.

The crowd went silent as she emerged from the woods. The soldiers turned to see her, shocked.

There was a locked gate at the border crossing. The two-lane road from Slovenia was backed up with “legitimate” traffic, trucks full of goods bound for Burgenland and beyond, now stuck in the press of refugees.

She didn’t ask for permission. She was a princess of Burgenland, and Burgenland was as close to an absolute monarchy as Europe still had. She held her hand out to the sergeant.

“Open the gate when I tell you to.”

He looked back at the forest, at the wave of press. He walked into the guardhouse, ready to unlock the gate.

She faced the crowd on the other side of the fence and held up a hand. The refugees went silent.

“I am Princess Francesca Albertine, and I grant you safe passage through Burgenland. You must not stay here. I cannot guarantee your safety if you do. But you may pass, if you promise to do so in a calm and orderly fashion.”

She motioned at the guardhouse, and the gate opened.

Hardly believing their good fortune, the refugees hesitated. A woman at the front, a baby in her hand, looked questioningly at Francesca.

Francesca smiled. She took the woman’s hand and helped her across the border.

The refugees kept their promise, moving quickly but calmly. Francesca stood guard, the eyes of the world on the line, on her.

I’ll pay the price. I know they can’t eat me, and I don’t know what they’ll do to me. But I’m sure they’ll think of something.

Francesca wasn’t scared until the moment she entered the royal audience chamber. Her father sat in state on the throne, his splendid uniform, his crown on his head, a smile on his face. The queen sat next to him on a smaller throne, also smiling. That scared her.

What scared her even more was the presence of Gustav Krupp, the king’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, and Count Kurt Becker, the queen’s brother. The count gave her the creeps; she’d heard dark rumors of his… predilections, the sort of things only a man of infinite wealth and power could get away with.

There was another man there, too, frightening in his own way.
The face of an executioner,
she thought immediately.

“My darling daughter,” the king said. “Allow me to introduce you to Count Barnabas of Danubia. He brings us great news. After long and fruitful discussions with our brothers to the east, we have decided…”

Francesca swallowed.

“You are to be married, daughter. To Nikolas, king of Danubia.”