The Runaway Princess (20 page)

“Amy,” she said in a melodious low voice, as if I were a top new perfume by Estée Lauder. “How wonderful to meet you.”

The Internet said Princess Eliza was a princess but not
the
Sovereign Princess and so I didn’t have to curtsy, but I found myself bending my knee a little anyway, and Liza seemed pleased.

“Ah-ha, it’s the runaway date!” Boris was pointing at me, then did a weird boxing gesture at me which I guessed was meant to be a greeting. “Got your passport ready this time? You’re going to have a hard time getting away from us on this island unless you’re a good swimmer!”

I turned red. Red-hot red.

“I beg your pardon?” Liza inclined her head and a mass of mane tumbled to one side, revealing her small ear and her huge diamond earring. “Is this something I should know about?”

Boris winked at me. “Gotta keep an eye on this one, Liza. She might decide to go home if we’re not being entertaining enough.”

“No, no, that wasn’t what happened!” I protested, mortified. “It was—”

“It was one hundred percent Rolf’s fault,” said Leo. “He’s lucky Amy is incredibly forgiving, as well as everything else. Are we in time for lunch? Because I want to show Amy the gardens while the weather’s good.”

“Sure.” Liza seemed to be filing the runaway thing for later. “Come this way, honey.”

My luggage had already vanished as we made our way into the castle, and I had to make a conscious effort not to let my wide eyes dart around me too obviously. Everywhere I looked there was something old and interesting: I guessed the massive swords and spears that usually hung on the walls of places like this had been kept for the main tourist areas, because these airy apartments were much more like a stylish art gallery. If the art gallery had stone-flagged floors and walls filled with medieval frescoes of various battlefields.

“I thought we’d just have a light lunch,” said Liza as we swept down the corridors at some speed. Large oil paintings of blue-eyed blondes in hats slithered past in my peripheral vision. “I’ve got some appointments this afternoon.”

“As have I,” Boris added.

Liza shot him a look that said, “Yes, dear,” more acidly than words could have done.

A liveried staff member ushered us into a bright dining room with a huge bay window looking down into the tiered beds and trimmed hedges of an English country garden. I wondered if there were any English-speaking gardeners who could tell me how they’d managed it, given that we were three worlds away from the soggy English climate here.

“Is Sofia joining us?” Leo asked. “I heard she was around this weekend.”

There was a microscopic pause before Liza smiled and nodded. “She said she’d try. She has some meetings herself today.”

It was Saturday. Did everyone have meetings on the weekend?

“Not work meetings,” Leo said, sensing the question threatening to burst out of me. “Sofia’s writing an article for
Time
magazine about our family. For the bicentennial. She’s doing some research this weekend with Uncle Pavlos and Granddad.”

Boris let out a short bark of amusement, which Liza closed down fast.

“But she’s very much looking forward to meeting you, Amy,” she added, with another gracious smile.

The large table in the center of the room was set for six, and Leo held the elegant mahogany chair out for me, beating the two footmen to it by seconds. I was relieved to see just eight pieces of cutlery in front of me to negotiate. Jo had thoughtfully hidden a guide to social etiquette in my bag, in case they sprang any royal galas on me over the weekend.

“Is Granddad joining us?” Leo asked, nodding at the sixth space.

“We don’t know. He might just arrive. He’s so busy at the moment. Anyway, Amy, Leo tells me you’re a garden designer?” Liza began as a starter of scallops materialized in front of us, and with some discreet boosts from Leo, I managed to tell Liza and Boris about the wildflower mini-meadows now taking shape on Leo’s roof and my plans for (or, through the Leo-filter, my “fantastic transformation of”) the Trinity Square rose beds. I was halfway through a sentence about how the original designer had cleverly managed to create a subtly shifting cloud of fragrance all summer long, when the sound of high-speed marching ricocheted down the tiled corridor, and a woman dressed in several shades of beige swept into the room.

Her narrowed eyes took in the scene at the table and settled on me. I had a very real sense of how Goldilocks must have felt when the three bears popped home unexpectedly, and found her mid-snore.

“Ah, Sofia,” said Boris jovially. “Are we early or are you late? Actually, no, don’t answer that,” he added, as the smile faded from his face under the thundercloud of her gaze.

“
O
h, please start,” said Sofia sarcastically, even before Leo and Boris could rise to their feet. “No, really. I’ll just jump in when the main course arrives, shall I?”

Liza made an imperceptible motion to a footman, who produced another porcelain plate of scallops from nowhere.

“Sofia, honey, do sit down, we’d barely started.”

Sofia rolled her eyes but moved so the footman could pull out her chair, then sank into it with a dramatic sigh. Even without being introduced, I’d have known who she was. She was the image of Liza, but not quite as polished; her eyebrows were quite bushy, for a start, and she wore a pair of stern glasses that reminded me of Jo’s “don’t mess with me” prop glasses she put on to bully architects. I wasn’t 100 percent sure Sofia’s had prescription lenses in either.

“Don’t bother, Mom, Oprah’s
gone home,
” she huffed. “Yeah, yeah, hi.” She waved a hand in my direction. “Carry on.”

Everyone’s eyes turned back to me, but I’d totally lost my place. “Um, I …”

The ormolu clock ticked loudly on the magnificent sideboard behind me.

Silence. Silence in my head. Horrible silence in front of me.
Say something. Anything.

For one awful second I was back on the balcony with Jo,
listening
to her Max Barclay chat tutorial and fighting my mental shutdown.

“So, Sofia, are you named after Sophia Loren? Or is there a special connection with the city?”

Oh, God. That was my voice saying that. I wanted to sink my head into the scallops.

“Are you asking if my parents conceived me in Bulgaria?” asked Sofia with a deadpan expression. “I don’t know. You’d better ask them. Mom? Can you remember where you conceived me?”

Boris roared with laughter. “Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! What a question! If it was down to that, we should have called you HMS—”

“Boris!” snapped Liza at the same time that Sofia yelled, “Have you people never heard of a rhetorical question?”

“Sofia is named for our great-great-grandmother, Anna-Sofia Diedrich, the opera singer,” said Leo over the chaos. “She was a famous diva.”

“Oh, go on, say it,” snapped Sofia. “
Too
. She was a famous diva
too
.”

“I had no intention of saying that. Would you like me to?”

“Kids! Kids!” Liza raised her hands and laughed a lovely caramelly laugh with just a hint of steel underneath. “Honestly! I know it’s healthy to be able to tease each other with love, but come on! You’re going to make Amy think we need family therapy!”

“Not at all,” I mumbled.

“Pavlos’s kids don’t argue like this,” Liza carried on, making a cute pointy gesture with her fork.

Jo’s book said you weren’t supposed to gesticulate with your cutlery, but I supposed royalty got a pass on that one. As Sofia had so correctly observed, Oprah had gone home.

“That’s because they’re not allowed to talk unless it’s all been cleared by Pavlos’s Speech Police,” replied Sofia. She polished off all her tiny scallops as if they were scampi in a basket. The second she stabbed the last one, our plates were removed and replaced with the main course of perfectly cooked white fish and tiny vegetables carved out of the original-size ones. “Oh, my God, I was talking to him for an hour this morning and I can’t remember a single thing he said. I hope the people of Nirona are looking forward to their robot leader and his tiny robot army.”

“Sofie!”

“Well, it’s ridiculous. I know you’re twins, but did you get all the charisma as well as all the hair, Dad? Did you suck it all out through the umbilical cord?” She wriggled her fingers at him.

Boris shrugged modestly. “He got the crown, I got the personality. That’s how it goes in most royal families, my darling. Only fair to share things out between the siblings.”

Leo glanced at me, and I quickly closed my mouth, which had dropped open in surprise.

“Well, Rolf certainly got all the personality in our family,” he said with the amiable charm that seemed to defuse tension at a stroke. Well, usually. “What did I get?”

“A penis,” snapped Sofia. “And because of that, everything else.”

Liza’s eyes widened so far I thought her cheekbones would crack.

But Boris seemed to be considering. “Hmm, I’d have said Leo got the empathy, and you got the smarts, Sofie.” He nodded. “But yes, a penis. Who could ask for anything more?” he added tunelessly.

My eyes darted from Sofia to Boris to Leo and back again to Liza. I wanted to imprint it all on my brain to text Jo later, but they kept talking so fast. What was it like when there were more than four of them here? At least the relentless back-and-forth meant I didn’t have to say anything. I’d never be able to keep up with this.

“Sofia’s spent the morning chatting about the rights of succession with her Uncle Pavlos’s advisors,” Liza explained across the table. “For her wonderful
Time
magazine feature, which is coming out around the time that my television series premieres. You’re going to stress how important support and unity are in a modern royal family like ours. Right, honey?”

Sofia turned her attention toward me, and I leaned back involuntarily in my chair as she addressed me directly. “Don’t you think it’s ridiculous, in this day and age, that women are passed over in the line of succession?”

I swallowed. This wasn’t the sort of lunchtime conversation I was used to, even when those lunchtimes were spent sitting with my feet on a prince’s knee.

“Um, yes?”

She turned to Liza, flicking her hand in dismissal. “See? Even the gardener thinks it’s ridiculous.”

There was an uncomfortable pause, in which I wondered if I’d heard her right. I heard Leo take a sharp breath, but I didn’t want to make things any more awkward, so I spluttered, “Is that not the case here?” in as intelligent a tone as I could muster.

“No, it is not.” Sofia looked about to launch into a long speech but Leo coughed before she could get going.

“And even if
the gardener
is ethically correct, it makes no difference, because
the lawyer
would have to knock off not just her Uncle Pavlos but Serge, Will, and her own father before she got anywhere near the throne. And that’s quite a food-poisoning incident to engineer,” said Leo. He patted his lips with the crisp linen napkin and pushed his chair back, even though he’d eaten only half his fish.

“Would you mind if Amy and I took our coffee into the garden?” he said, turning to his mother. “I’d really like to catch the groundskeepers while they’re there, so they can answer any questions Amy might have.”

I hurriedly put my knife and fork together.

“Have you finished, Amy?” asked Liza. “Don’t let Leo rush you out!”

“Oh, I, er, don’t eat pudding,” I lied, even though my inner pudding scoffer was wailing for whatever delicate confection was doubtless being plated behind the scenes. I knew that would be the one thing Mum would ask about—what had the royal pastry chefs created for pudding?

“Just as well. Don’t forget, dinner with Pavlos tonight,” said Boris.

“And his tiny robot army.”

“Sofia!”

I wondered if she was like this in court. I wouldn’t know whether to be relieved or very concerned that she was on my side.

*

L
eo took my hand and led me back down the corridor toward the main area of the palace, past a crocodile of tourists in shorts who stared at us as we ducked under the red velvet rope separating the private apartments from the public tour.

I could hear the guide talking as we carried on through the state reception hall.

“… site of a Greek myth in which a peasant girl was turned into a rosebush by Zeus, in order to escape ravishing. The rosebush, which flowers all year round, can be found in the gardens to the front of the grounds. The castle, now the elegant villa you see around you, has been inhabited continuously since 1092 AD …”

“All nonsense,” whispered Leo. “I made up the bit about the Greek myth when I was fifteen, slipped it into the guide’s spiel. No one noticed.”

“You’re joking!” I whispered back.

“No, I had a bet with Sofia—she tried to get them to say that the peasant girl foretold that when a princess named Sofia was born, the rosebush would flower yellow, the succession would change, and a wise woman would inherit.” He paused. “Kind of gave herself away by telling them the future female ruler’s name would begin with
S
.”

“Good on her for trying, though,” I said. “At least she didn’t have some sea monster carrying you all off.”

Leo raised his eyebrows. “Don’t think she wouldn’t try.”

We were in the main hall now, an impressive open space with marble pillars, filled with oil paintings and huge vases—and tourists taking photographs of everything.

“It’s rush hour,” he explained. “We only let visitors in for three hours a day and during certain months, so it gets busy. Let’s take a shortcut.” He guided me down a black-and-white-tiled passage, past a sign in seven languages for the Princess Eliza Costume Collection one way, and the gardens in the other.

The palace smelled calm, of figs and sun-warmed stone, but the air changed the second I stepped into the gardens. At once the saltiness of ozone from the shimmering sea hit me, fizzing over a tumultuous rainbow of floral fragrances—old-fashioned roses sweetening the greenish notes of broad tropical leaves I’d never even seen before. I spotted copper markers in the soil picking out each plant, and if Leo hadn’t been by my side I’d have been nosing around each one, making notes and taking pictures for Dad.

Leo turned to me with a proud glint in his eye. “What does the English gardener think of the Italian gardens?”

“She loves them.” I couldn’t stop grinning. I really did. So many unusual flowers, tropical plants—it was how I imagined Jo felt when the new clothes arrived in Harvey Nichols. My fingers tingled, longing to touch everything.

“I want to show you the English garden.” Leo guided me down a set of steps, and I blinked at the spectacular view of the harbor below us, white yachts bobbing gently in the aquamarine water next to multicolored umbrellas. “I’ve asked the head groundsman to contact you about some of the roses you planted in London. I’d like to have the same ones shipped here.”

“Isn’t someone else in charge of decisions like that?” I asked, taking in the croquet-lawn smoothness of the pocket-size English garden. I had no idea how they’d managed to make cottage garden hollyhocks and lupines grow in one corner, with tea roses in another and scented wisteria climbing up an old brick wall; it was like something from
Alice in Wonderland
. “Don’t you have to go through your grandfather?”

“He’s a busy man. And he likes it when someone takes an interest in the gardens—the rest of the family tend to be more focused on the crown jewels and who’s got the apartments with the best views.” Leo put his arms round me and pulled me close. There was no one else around, but I cast an anxious glance toward the palace; I didn’t want to be spotted doing anything untoward.

And to be honest, I was twitchy about photographers. There’d been a particularly mortifying shot on YoungHot&Royal.com of me and Leo leaving the neighborhood bistro near his house; from the angle it was taken, it looked as if I was doing something very rude to his trousers. Which I wasn’t, seriously.

“Don’t worry about tonight,” Leo murmured into my hair. “Sofia will be on much better behavior when the rest of the family are around for dinner.”

“Is it a big dinner?” Nerves gripped my stomach as a mental image of a table full of tiaras and sashes flashed before me. The lunchtime banter squared with formal wear. “I mean, when you say the rest of the family—”

“That’s all it is, a family meal. Nothing official. Pavlos is here with his wife, Mathilde, and my cousins. They’re a bit younger than us. And Granddad will be here—just remember to be nice to his greyhounds, if he brings them.”

By now, the greyhounds were the only family members I felt at all comfortable about meeting.

“And if Mom tries to get you to—” He stopped. His phone was ringing inside his linen jacket. “Sorry, hang on.”

Leo’s expression changed as he picked up the call, and to my surprise he rattled off a stream of fluent Italian. I’d never heard him speak Italian before. It was
very
sexy. I decided I wanted to learn Italian ASAP.

Whatever the call was about, it made him tap his brow testily, and then hang up.

“Would you excuse me for a minute?” He touched my arm. “The office is trying to get hold of me, I need to send a quick e-mail. Can I get a drink sent down to you? Some lemonade? Iced coffee? What would you like?”

“It’s fine! I’m more than happy to potter round here.” I gestured toward the glorious flowerbeds. “You could leave me here all day.”

“Oh, but I won’t.” Leo grinned, then bounded up the stone steps and vanished behind the tall palm trees.

The Mediterranean sun was warm, and fat bees were buzzing around the lilac spikes of the lavender bushes. The honey from this garden must be the sweetest ever, I thought, full of sunshine and colors. I closed my eyes and smelled the pink roses nearest me, inhaling the powdery fragrance, then opened them to check the slate labels next to each one. I was so fascinated by the lengths to which someone had gone to bring the Cotswolds to the Mediterranean that I didn’t even notice there was someone else in the garden until a cultured voice said, “Are you a gardener?”

I looked up with a start. An elderly gentleman in a white linen suit was standing over me, his face shaded by an ancient gardening hat. Judging from the deep tan and the lines on his face, he’d spent a fair bit of time outside, as had the hat. I could make out a pair of sharp blue eyes underneath the floppy brim. The sharp eyes were taking me in, but not in an unkindly way.

“I’m admiring these slate labels,” I said. “I’m too disorganized to label my own borders, but I always mean to. Then I forget what I’ve planted.”

“Ah, one must always label. It’s like photographs. One never thinks one will forget names and places, but one always does.” He had a slight accent that I couldn’t quite place beneath the genial plumminess of an old-fashioned public school, and there was something devastatingly charming about his manner.