The Golden Prince (18 page)

“So what now?” Marigold said, waving down to a carriage carrying eighteen-year-old Princess Alexandra and twenty-year-old Princess Maud, David’s English cousins. “The parties and balls
don’t start for hours yet and soon the only people left in the procession will be foreign royalty. How about we go down and enjoy the atmosphere in the streets? The hoi polloi look to be having tremendous fun.”

To her great surprise, Iris was the first taker for such an adventure. “Yes, let’s,” she said eagerly. “Let’s make our way to Buckingham Palace, because that is where the greatest crowds will be. Once the King and Queen arrive back at the palace they will come out on to the balcony and there will be lots of singing of the national anthem and lots of dancing by cockney pearly kings and queens. Rory will come with us to make sure we’re safe, won’t you, Rory?”

Rory ran a hand through his hair. “I shall if you think my great-uncle won’t mind.”

“Grandfather won’t mind,” Marigold said airily, not caring overmuch whether he did, or didn’t. “We’ll need umbrellas with us though in case it starts to rain.”

“And in case we need help in getting through the crush,” Lily said impishly.

“I’m not sure you should go, Lily.” The worried frown was back on Rose’s face again.

Lily looked at her aghast. “Oh,
please
, Rose! I’ll keep
very
tight hold of Rory’s arm. I promise!”

It was Iris who came to her aid. “It would be most unfair to make Lily stay here on her own, Rose,” she said reasonably. “We’ll all be together. She’ll be quite safe.”

“On your head be it then, because I shan’t be with you. I’m going to the Harburys to see Daphne.”

“She’s been released from Holloway then?” As they all stepped from the tiny balcony and back into the room there was surprise in Rory’s voice. “I thought she had at least another month of her sentence to serve.”

“She had, but the government used the coronation celebrations as an excuse to release her early without losing face. They had to find some excuse, Rory, for if they hadn’t, Daphne might well have
died. She doesn’t have the constitution for a prolonged hunger strike and the torture of force-feeding.”

Mindful of how gray and blustery the day was, Marigold and Iris went to change into something a little warmer than the chiffon dresses they were wearing. Rose, already sensibly dressed in a high-necked blouse and navy-blue serge tunic—the tunic worn knee-length over a matching skirt, arrow straight and tight at the ankle—secured a hat on her head with a mother-of-pearl hat pin and picked up a pair of kid gloves.

“Bye,” she said to them, adding as an afterthought, “and be careful on the streets. Whatever you do, don’t lose each other.”

When she had left the room, Rory said to Lily, “So tell me about the Prince of Wales, Lily. Have you and he become special friends?”

Her cheeks flushed. “We write to each other.”

“And he doesn’t write to Rose or to Iris or to Marigold?”

She shook her head. “No. Rose and Iris are much older than he is, and even Marigold is a good two years older.”

Rory didn’t know whether to be amused at the thought of his favorite cousin being the calf-love of the Prince of Wales, or alarmed. “But you’re not sweethearts, are you, Lily?”

This time Lily didn’t merely flush. Her cheeks flew scarlet banners. “No,” she said, avoiding his eyes. “But we’re
very
good friends. David’s never been able to have a really best friend before—not outside of his family. He loves being at Snowberry, and when he can’t visit he misses it terribly.”

She didn’t say that he missed her most of all, but Rory was beginning to read between the lines.

“How the devil does he manage to visit Snowberry? I’d have thought every moment of his day is accounted for.”

“It is usually, but he manages to spend a couple of hours at Snowberry every time he travels between his Naval College and Windsor—and because of all the arrangements that had to be made for the coronation, he’s been able to do that several times.”

“But he doesn’t travel alone, surely?”

“No. He has an equerry, Captain Cullen.” She gave him her seraphic smile. “Rose thinks Captain Cullen rather likes Marigold. But then
all
men like Marigold.”

“You shouldn’t be aware of things like that, young Lily—though if Cullen does have his own reason for surreptitiously visiting Snowberry, it explains why Prince Edward has been finding it so easy to do.”

Iris and Marigold reentered the room. Iris was dressed in a mulberry-colored coat dress over a skirt not quite narrow enough to be fashionable, her matching hat sporting two small, but jaunty feathers. She made an attractive picture, but not a head-turning one.

The same could not be said of Marigold. Her skirt and bolero top were a sizzling royal blue, the skirt so narrow at the ankle Rory couldn’t fathom how she was managing to walk. Her pale cream lace blouse had a dramatically large cameo at its high throat and on top of her glorious hair was a swooping, wide-brimmed hat laden with iridescent peacock feathers. She looked sensational and Rory knew that no matter how dense the crowd, every male head was going to turn as she passed.

He sighed. Escorting and chaperoning Iris and Lily would be a simple task. Accomplishing the same thing with Marigold was going to be a nightmare.

From where they were, on St. James’s Street, the only way to the front of Buckingham Palace was to walk down the length of St. James’s Street, make a very brief left into Pall Mall, and then, not following the route the procession was taking, take an abrupt right into Marlborough Road, skirting St. James’s Palace. From there they would be able to enter the Mall about a third of the way down from Buckingham Palace; though if the tail end of the procession had still not returned to the palace by the time they reached the Mall, they would then come to a complete halt, because it would be so jam-packed with spectators that walking up the Mall’s grassy shoulders would be impossible.

“Come along,” he said, wondering how he could have been so rash as to have agreed to something so reckless—and how someone as sensible as Rose could possibly have sanctioned it.

As they stepped out into the street they were deafened by hoarse cheers for the queen and king of Norway, the King’s sister and her husband. In their wake came the carriage of King Ferdinand of Rumania and his wife, Queen Marie, Queen Victoria’s granddaughter. They didn’t stand to watch it pass. Instead they began weaving their way through the crowds toward the bottom of the street.

For Iris and Lily, who seldom, if ever, journeyed any distance unless in a carriage or a hansom cab—and only then when suitably accompanied—the experience was exhilarating.

“No wonder Rose jaunts around London on her own by omnibus!” Iris shouted above the din to Marigold.

Marigold—who also jaunted around London unaccompanied, though nearly always by hansom cab—merely grinned. As far as she was concerned, the less Iris knew about her own adventurous activities when she stayed with Sibyl, the better.

Once in the Mall, even though the procession was still heading up it toward the palace, they managed to inch their way through the crush toward the spankingly new, glittering white marble monument to Queen Victoria that stood on an island in front of the palace gates.

“If we can get to the palace side of the monument, we’ll be in the best possible position to see the royal family when they step out on to the balcony,” Rory shouted as, with Iris and Lily’s arms firmly linked in his and Marigold hard on his heels, he continued to forge a way forward.

“There’s someone selling toffee apples!” Lily tugged Rory’s arm urgently. “I’ve never had a toffee apple, Rory. May I have one? Please?”

“Dear God!” Rory, as breezily unconventional as most of the rest of his family, was profoundly shocked. “I can’t have anyone
seeing Lord May’s granddaughters eating in the street. It simply isn’t done, Lily. It’s an absolute no.”

“We’re not going to meet anyone we know in this crush.” Marigold held on to her hat as a couple of street sellers squeezed past them. “I quite fancy a toffee apple. What about you, Iris?”

Iris had never been faced with such a dilemma. As conventional as Rose and Marigold were unconventional, in the normal way of things she would never, in a million years, have even considered eating in public. But today wasn’t like any other day—and the toffee apples did look nice.

When Rory saw the expression on Iris’s face, knowing that it signified she was quite happy for them all to be seen behaving in just as plebeian a manner as the thousands of people thronging around them, he put his hand into his pocket.

Minutes later, toffee apples in hand, they were about twenty people deep from the front of the palace railings. Even though carriages and bands from the tail end of the procession were still rolling from the Mall into the palace courtyard, the crowd around them were lustily shouting for the King to make an appearance and the shouts of, “We want the King! We want the King! We want the King!” were deafening.

“And Queen Mary!” a woman near to them shouted, and the chant “Queen Mary! Queen Mary! Queen Mary!” was immediately taken up.

When the royal party finally stepped out on to the balcony from the grand gallery’s center room, the storm of cheers, whistles, and applause was like nothing any of them had ever heard before.

“Oh gosh, Rory!” Iris shouted. “I’m so glad we’re here!” She squeezed his arm so tightly she nearly stopped the flow of blood. “There’s David! Just stepping out behind his mother! Oh, doesn’t he look wonderful! Just like a prince from a fairy tale!”

Rory looked toward Lily to see how she was reacting to seeing her best friend the object of such slavish adoration and respect from so many hundreds of thousands of people.

As David stepped forward, into full view, the chants “Three cheers for the Prince of Wales” and “Hip, hip, hurrah!” were taken up.

Lily’s eyes were fixed on David, but she wasn’t joining in the chanting and she wasn’t laughing with delight. Instead, the expression on her delicately boned face was that of someone poleaxed, of someone stunned by a sudden, terrible realization.

Concerned, Rory bent his head to hers, his mouth close to her ear. “What’s the matter, Lily?” He cupped his mouth with his hand so that she would be able to hear him above the din all around them. “Is it all too much for you? Are you feeling dizzy?”

She shook her head, not taking her eyes from David, boyishly handsome in his Knight of the Garter robes and coronet, his blond hair gleaming as pale as barley beneath the sun that had, at last, made an appearance.

“No. It’s just … it’s just that for the first time I’ve realized just how far removed from our world David is. When I saw him in the procession, it was just as if he was in a pageant. Just something that was splendidly good fun. But now …” She turned her head away from his, looking around her at the vast throng that stretched in an unbroken sea all the way back down the Mall as far as Admiralty Arch. “But now I see that we’ll only ever be able to be friends at Snowberry. I’d never truly realized what being royal meant before.” She looked stricken and he thought he knew why.

If she, too, had been having stirrings of first love, seeing the prince in full royal regalia, instead of his naval cadet uniform, would have been quite an eye-opener. As would seeing him the object of adulation of hundreds of thousands of people—millions if British subjects overseas, listening in to accounts of the coronation on the wireless, were taken into account.

He said sympathetically, “Snowberry is just a novelty to him, Lily. As is his behaving as if he can be friends with you and your sisters just as if he were an ordinary young man. He isn’t an ordinary young man. He never can be. One day, like his father, he’ll be King. Queen Victoria has only been dead ten years, and she was
ruler of a quarter of the human race—I don’t imagine the numbers have gone down much.”

He didn’t add that looking at Edward now it was impossible to believe he was destined for such a momentous place in the world’s history books. Young-looking for his age, without the Garter robes and coronet he could more easily be taken for a choirboy than heir to the greatest throne in the world.

Of all his cousins, Lily was Rory’s favorite. The place she held in his heart was of such complexity he had never trusted himself to examine it too closely. He didn’t now, but the look of devastation on her face turned his heart over and he said gently, “If you had any romantic notions about yourself and Prince Edward, it’s best you forget them, Lily love. Heirs to thrones marry where they are told to marry—and I rather think King George and Queen Mary will have already drawn up a short list of names for Edward to choose from.”

“
So what it
really comes down to, May,” an exhausted George said late that evening when he and his wife were, at last, blessedly alone, “is a Dane, a German, or a Russian. The others are all just too problematical.”

Queen Mary, for whom the day had been just as exhausting and just as emotionally draining as it had been for her husband, had not the least desire to embark on a conversation as to which court of Europe would be the best hunting ground for a bride for their eldest son, but she didn’t say so. George was her king as well as her husband. It was something she never allowed herself to forget and she always subjugated her wishes to his, no matter how mundane those wishes might be—as now, when she simply wanted to go to bed.

“The Danes.” She kept her voice free of any inflection of disapproval, well aware that it was very difficult to be disapproving of the Danish royal house. That she
was
disapproving was only because they were such a happy-go-lucky, informal lot. In Queen Mary’s opinion, informality was a far from desirable requirement when it came to being royal. The difficulty in saying so was that George’s mother, Queen Alexandra—still alive and well and living at Sandringham—had been, prior to her marriage, a princess of Denmark, and the British royal family’s ties with the Danish royal house were close.

“Another Danish princess, as Princess of Wales, would be a very popular choice,” she said diplomatically. “The people took Motherdear to their hearts the instant she set foot on British soil.”