The Golden Prince (13 page)

A royal courtier would be a much better bet. Lord Knollys and Lord Stamfordham were both in the abbey, as was Lord Esher, but all three were intimate friends of his father. Since he didn’t want
his father to know of his curiosity with regard to morganatic marriages, he made no move toward any one of them.

He suddenly heard an elderly voice saying plaintively, “I really am going to have to sit down for a little while, Esher. As the order of procession is to be just the same as it was when King Edward was crowned nine years ago, I really don’t see why so many lengthy rehearsals are necessary.”

The weary peer was Lord Wainwright, a man of great age who, fifty years ago, had been a courtier to David’s great-grandmother, Queen Victoria. If anyone knew about morganatic marriages, it would be Wainwright—and Wainwright was not a member of his father’s inner circle.

As Esher moved away and as Lord Wainwright sat down—most inappropriately on a seat inscribed with Mrs. Asquith’s name on the back of it—David sat down next to him.

“I have a query—purely academic—that I think you may be able to help me with,” he said with a friendly smile. “I want to know what would happen if the heir to a throne wanted to marry a young lady who, though aristocratic, was nonroyal.”

“Ah, you’re talking, of course, of an heir to a
European
throne,” Lord Wainwright said, mistaking David for one of the many minions who were helping the earl marshal to organize the rehearsal. “Well, there are plenty of examples to be found. Take Emperor Franz Josef’s heir, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, for instance. He wanted to marry Countess Sophie Chotek, who was not nearly royal enough. It caused a crisis lasting for more than a year, for when the archduke was asked to choose between his lovely countess or succession to the Habsburg throne, he refused to.”

“Quite right,” David said stoutly.

Lord Wainwright, who loved an audience, smiled at him benignly. “It took the prime ministers—two of them, because the Habsburg Empire straddles both Austria and Hungary—as well as a whole cluster of bishops, and an even bigger cluster of constitutional lawyers nearly a year to come to a workable conclusion.”

“Which was?”

“Which was that if Franz Ferdinand promised that his countess would never show herself either at court or in high social circles and would never make claims of any sort or seek to play a royal role, a morganatic marriage would be found acceptable.”

David breathed a sigh of relief. “So Franz Ferdinand kept his Sophie and also keeps his right of succession to the throne?”

“Indeed he does. But any children he and Sophie have will not be allowed to succeed him—and when he and Sophie married, not one member of his family was present.”

“How unspeakable.” David was outraged.

“Then of course there was the morganatic marriage of Queen Mary’s grandfather,” Lord Wainwright said as a procession of heralds passed close by them.

“Queen Mary? D’you mean the Queen Mary who ruled in the fifteen hundreds and persecuted the Protestants?”

Lord Wainwright ducked to avoid his head coming into contact with the standard of England as the hereditary King’s champion who was carrying it followed the heralds down the aisle. “No, dear boy,” he said. “Our present Queen. When her grandfather, Duke Alexander of Württemberg, married a nonroyal Hungarian countess, he wasn’t as lucky as Franz Ferdinand. Unlike him, he lost his right of succession to the throne—and so did his son, the Queen’s father.”

Oblivious of the way David’s jaw had dropped, he said, “It made things very difficult for Queen Mary’s father, who was given the title Prince of Teck, Teck being a subsidiary name of the House of Württemberg. He was quite fortunate in that Queen Victoria didn’t view
ebenbürtig
in the same way the German courts have always done. When he fell in love with Princess Mary Adelaide, Queen Victoria’s niece, Queen Victoria happily gave them her blessing.”

“
Ebenbürtig
?” David’s head was reeling.

“It means of equal birth. The German royal families are sticklers for it.”

The standard of Wales was now being carried past them, followed by the standard of Scotland. David struggled to get his head around the amazing fact that his maternal great-grandmother had not been of sufficient equal birth for his great-grandfather to have been able to marry her and to keep his rights of succession. Why had no one ever told him of the skeleton rattling away in the family cupboard?

“Our present Queen also owes a great debt to Queen Victoria’s fair-mindedness,” Charlie Wainwright added as the standard of Ireland was carried past them. “It was she who suggested that Mary of Teck would make a perfect future Queen of England. Because of not being
ebenbürtig
, her hopes of marrying into a European royal house had been rather thin until then.”

David goggled. Lord Wainwright was talking about his
mother
. That his mother might once have been considered not royal enough to marry into a royal house was a staggering revelation. He had always thought of her as the most regal, royal, majestic person he had ever met. Which she now was, thanks to her marriage to his father—and that marriage, apparently, had been entirely due to his awesome great-grandmother, Queen Victoria.

Before he could gather his thoughts and ask something more, the Duke of Norfolk announced in ringing tones, “After the standards will come the King’s regalia and then the sword of temporal justice, which will be carried by Lord Kitchener, and the sword of spiritual justice, which will be carried by Lord Roberts.”

As the lords concerned took their places, David reflected on all he had just learned. His mother’s family history meant that if he should wish to marry someone not of royal blood, she would surely be understanding. Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s experience showed that it
was
possible for the heir to a throne to both marry a nonroyal
and
to remain heir to the throne.

Even though the situation wasn’t yet applicable to him, just knowing what the possibilities were made him feel quite giddy. If he were ever so fortunate as to have Lily fall in love with him, then
the difficulties they would face would be difficulties that could be overcome.

As if on cue, there was a blare of trumpets and as shafts of sunlight fell upon the fawn and azure hangings, and peers and prelates passed and repassed across the blue and gold carpet in front of the throne, David felt for the first time the grandeur and the sacredness of what was soon to take place there. He remembered what Lily had said about the splendor of royal ceremonial cheering the lives of millions of people and suddenly, instead of finding the role he had been born into a nerve-racking burden, he was filled with pride and honor.

“Ah, there you are, sir,” the Duke of Norfolk said, bearing down on him, and then adding to Lord Wainwright, “If you’ll excuse us, Wainwright. I would like His Royal Highness to go over his homage speech one more time.”

Leaving behind them a poleaxed Lord Wainwright, he bore David off for one final rehearsal.

Lily was alone
in her aerie. Sunlight streamed in through the massive skylights her grandfather had had put in when she first asked if she could use the large attic room as a studio. Her turbulent hair was pinned carelessly on top of her head, and she was wearing a flowered overall over one of her oldest dresses.

She was working in water clay on a bust. Though she usually liked people to sit for her, this time she was working from memory. The bone structure she was capturing was so delicately molded it could have been that of a girl, but for the masculine stubborn set to the mouth.

She stepped back from her work table for a moment, assessing what she had done so far, wondering if she should, perhaps, have tried to capture David’s likeness in paint rather than sculpture. It was expression she most wanted to convey, most particularly the melancholy she often saw in his eyes when he had to leave Snowberry for what he always termed his “prince-ing” life at Windsor.

“
Weltschmerz
is the word for it,” her grandfather had said when she had tried to explain the expression to him. “It means intense sadness caused by comparing the actual state of things with the ideal state of things. In Prince Edward’s case, the actual state of things is the prison he was born into—and make no mistake about it, Lily, to be born heir to a great throne is to be born into a life so confining it can only be described as a prison—and the ideal state of things, which for him would be the freedom to live life howsoever he chooses.”

She also wanted to be able to convey David’s shy charm. It was a quality he seemed totally unaware of, and one that was quite spellbinding. Even Rose, who found charm in men intensely suspect, had fallen an instant victim to it.

Lily took more clay out of the clay bin and set to work again. Several days ago he had written her a sweet, short letter telling her of how he was in London for a coronation rehearsal and of how he was missing Snowberry. And her.

She had never kept anyone’s letters before, but she had hunted out a shallow japan box that had once held biscuits and was prettily decorated with roses and butterflies and placed the letter inside it. Since she had saved that letter two more had joined it. Letters she had told no one about as yet, not even Marigold.

She wasn’t sure, but she thought that Marigold, too, had a secret. Even though she had so recently spent a long weekend in London, she had been back there twice in the last few days, and each time she had returned home, Lily had sensed Marigold’s inner excitement.

Rose was also spending nearly all her time in London.

Her friend, Daphne Harbury, had been given a three-month prison sentence and had been sent to Holloway.

“And Rose,” Iris had told Lily, “is lobbying everyone she can in order to get Daphne released—and via Great-Aunt Sibyl that is an awful lot of powerful people.”

The door nudged open and Homer ambled into the studio and flopped down by her feet. Lily didn’t mind. She liked it when Homer, or Fizz and Florin, kept her company.

As she continued to work, she thought about the forthcoming coronation. That David was the Prince of Wales still seemed strange to her, and she wondered if it would seem a little less so after she had seen him on Coronation Day in full royal regalia.

She wouldn’t be in the abbey, of course. Of their little family at Snowberry only her grandfather, a peer of the realm, would be in the abbey, dressed in what he termed his coronation “full fig”: his
coronet and an ankle-length robe of crimson velvet topped by a shoulder cape of white ermine trimmed with the appropriate number of black sealskin spots.

Great-Aunt Sibyl, who was a dowager marchioness, would also have a seat in the abbey. Rory, however, was joining her, Rose, Iris, and Marigold at Sibyl’s house, where, from one of its wrought-iron balconies, they would have a grandstand view of the coronation procession as it passed down St. James’s Street on its return to Buckingham Palace from Westminster Abbey.

She paused in what she was doing, rotating the turntable on which the bust stood in order to view it from another angle, grateful that as no one else would be with them, they would be able to talk freely about David as his carriage passed below their balcony. If their mother had been with them, they wouldn’t have been able to utter a word—or at least not a word that would indicate he was both a regular visitor to Snowberry and their friend. A secret of that kind was one their mother would be totally unable to keep.

There had been a rather fraught period of time when they’d thought their mother was coming over from France for the coronation, but since her second marriage rendered her ineligible for a seat in the abbey, she had decided against it. She was a woman who liked being at the center of things and, if she couldn’t be, she preferred to give the appearance of negligent unconcern.

Lily continued looking at a section of the head from the left-hand side. She had been wrong to have started on the cheekbones so soon. Before working on the bust again, she picked up a calliper and began retaking measurements to ensure that all her basic proportions were exactly as they should be.

It was William who interrupted her. “I’m very sorry to disturb you, Miss Lily,” he shouted through the speaking tube that linked Snowberry’s ground floor to its upper floors, “but Captain Cullen is here to see you.”

Lily stopped what she was doing and with her heart pounding
she crossed the studio to pick up the funnel-shaped end of the speaking tube. “Is Prince Edward with him?” she shouted down it.

“No, Miss Lily. The captain is unaccompanied.”

Lily’s eyebrows pulled together in a puzzled frown. “Did he initially request to see Marigold, William?” she asked, her heart returning to its normal rhythm.

“No,” William shouted, as if she were in the next county and not merely two floors above him. “He simply asked if you were at home.”

“I’m sure you’ve made a mistake, William. Why would he ask to see me?”

“Perhaps he has a message for the family from His Royal Highness. With your grandfather being in London to collect his coronet from storage at Aspreys, and with Miss Rose and Miss Marigold also in London and Miss Iris out for a walk somewhere, I didn’t like to say you were unavailable. Just in case.”

As she told William that she was on her way down, her heart began beating faster again. William’s assumption had to be correct—though because Piers had specifically asked for her, she doubted that the message he was bringing from David was for the family as a whole. It was far more likely to be a message just for her.

Scrambling out of her flowered overall, she ran from the studio, Homer hard on her heels.

Piers Cullen was waiting for her in the middle of the drawing room, as ramrod straight and forbidding looking as always.

“How nice to see you, Captain Cullen!” she said cheerily and a little breathlessly as she hurried into the room. It wasn’t too much of an exaggeration. Not if he had a message for her from David.

Piers cleared his throat. From his first visit to Snowberry, when Prince Edward had invited the Houghton sisters to address him as David, he had been known by his Christian name as well.