The Golden Prince (33 page)

Her lips were as soft as velvet, her body supple and pliant against his. As he thought of how long it could be before she became his wife he groaned, hardly able to bear the thought of such an agony of waiting. He wanted to marry her now. This minute. He wanted to make her irrevocably his before negotiations for a wedding between himself and Olga got under way.

“I love you, Lily darling,” he said thickly. “I love you with all my heart. You are my peace and my future, and I simply have to get the King’s permission for us to marry. I
have
to!” He ran a hand through hair so blond that in the twilight it looked silver. “How am I going to manage all these months away from you? First at sea? Then in France?”

“We may not have to be separated all the time you are in France. My mother is the Marquise de Villoutrey. She and my stepfather have a home in Paris and a chateau about twenty miles southwest of Paris, near Versailles. I could stay with them for the whole of the time you are a guest of the de Valmy family.”

It was so unexpected it took a second for him to register the enormity of what she’d said. When he did, his mood changed instantly. He sprang to his feet, dragging her upright with him.

“But that’s
brilliant
, Lily! I’m not going to be in France as the Prince of Wales. I’m to go there incognito, as the Earl of Chester. It’s one of my lesser titles. It means I won’t be under constant scrutiny as I am here. Do you know what that means, dearest darling Lily?”

Jubilantly he swung her round and round off her feet. “It means that the King has unwittingly given us the most fabulous present. It means we’re going to have time alone together in the most romantic city in the world!”

It was the
dog days of August. At 95 degrees in the shade, the heat was almost unbearable. All Marigold’s friends had left London for long vacations elsewhere. Everything was stagnant. Nothing was happening. Marigold’s boredom threshold—always low—had not only been reached, but was no longer in sight.

“Iris is no company because all she can talk about are her wedding plans,” she said indignantly to Strickland as he worked on the portrait she hoped would one day hang in the Royal Academy.

The other painting, the Persephone/Pluto painting, was propped against a wall, and her nudity looked so scandalously glorious Marigold found it hard to take her eyes away from it.

She continued with her list of complaints. “The bridesmaids’ dresses are to be swooning lilac. Lilac! Rose’s hair is a rich mahogany color and so it will probably suit her, and the color will be perfect on Lily, but it won’t be perfect on me. It will make me look a fright. As if all that isn’t bad enough, Rose is hardly ever around. She’s too busy with her journalism work. The editor of the
Daily Despatch
was so pleased with her report of Prince Edward’s investiture that he’s asked her to do a piece on the strike at the Victoria and Albert docks.”

Strickland laid his brush down and reached into his smock pocket for his Turkish cigarettes. “A strike is a bit different from a royal event. She won’t be going down to the docks in person, as she went to Caernarvon, will she?”

Since Strickland was taking a break, Marigold relaxed her pose. Unlike the pose she had adopted for Persephone, it was very modest. Strickland had positioned her seated daintily on the studio’s chaise longue, a bouquet of tea roses in her lap, her hair swept up in a fashionable chignon. The evening gown he had considered appropriate was one her aunt had bought for her. It was of yellow satin overlaid with silk net heavily embroidered with silver thread and silver bugle beads. She looked soigné, very beautiful, and, in a pinch, respectable.

She said, “Going down to the East End was the first thing she did. But not to speak to the dockers—though she will be doing that. The people she’s gone to speak to first are the wives. There is no strike fund, you see, and they are the ones who are going to have to earn enough for food and rent. Rose,” she added a little unnecessarily, “is on the side of the strikers. She’s a socialist.”

“Most militant suffragettes are.” He blew a plume of blue smoke upward. “I take it she didn’t go into the East End alone?”

“I don’t think so. I think she took her friend Daphne Harbury with her.”

“She should have taken a man. She’ll certainly need a man with her when she visits the docks. Your cousin Rory would be a good choice. I take it her editor doesn’t know what she intends doing? If he does, and if he hasn’t warned her against it, he’s a damned fool.”

Something close to a glazed expression entered Marigold’s eyes. She had met Mr. Hal Green and had known instantly that though he was many fascinating things, he was certainly not a fool.

The meeting had been accidental.

Two days earlier she and Rose had been leaving St. James’s Street at the same time. Marigold had been on her way to the Savoy, to meet Prince Yurenev for lunch. Rose had been on her way to Clement’s Inn for a meeting with Christabel.

“We may as well travel as far as the Savoy together, Rose,” she’d said. “Though if we do, it will have to be in a cab. I’m not traveling on a bus. Not even for you.”

In London they seldom spent any time at all with each other and traveling the short distance down St. James’s Street and through Trafalgar Square and into the Strand together had been something of a novelty.

As the hansom drew to a halt outside the front entrance of the Savoy, Rose had said, “I’m getting out here with you. Clement’s Inn is only a short walk away.”

It was then, as they had been about to step from the carriage, that one of the most handsome men Marigold had ever seen strode up to offer them his hand.

She had instantly assumed she was the attraction. She had begun dressing in as Russian a way as was possible and instead of a hat in a color complementing her turquoise silk walking dress, she was wearing a matching exotic-looking turban with a white cockade. To say that she was eye-catching was an understatement.

As she had flirtatiously accepted his proffered hand she’d heard Rose, who was behind her, catch her breath, and Marigold had assumed it was in shocked criticism at her having allowed a stranger such an intimacy.

Then, to her stunned disbelief, Rose had allowed the man to help her from the hansom, too, and, though obviously cross about it, had even allowed him to pay their cab fare.

With the transaction over, she’d made introductions. “Mr. Green, my sister, Marigold,” she’d said, sounding unusually flustered. “Marigold, Mr. Green. Mr. Green is the editor of the
Daily Despatch
.”

Until then Marigold hadn’t given a moment’s thought to Rose’s editor and, even if she had, her mental image of him would have been totally at odds with the reality. Tall and loose-limbed—and with straight hair so black it had a blue sheen—he looked the kind of man it would be both exciting and a little dangerous to know. What he didn’t look to be was the kind of man Rose was likely to know.

“I’m very pleased to meet you, Miss Houghton,” he’d said with an easy smile and an even easier manner. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

“From Rose?”

He’d shaken his head and at the amusement in his eyes she’d known immediately that gossip had reached him of her Queen of Sheba appearance at the fancy dress ball.

Unfazed, she’d flashed him her most bewitching smile. “Are you about to enter the Savoy, Mr. Green?” she’d asked with her usual careless disregard for proper behavior. “Because if you are, perhaps you would like to escort me inside? Rose,” she had added, “is on her way to the WSPU offices in Clement’s Inn.”

It was then that the real surprise had come.

He hadn’t taken her up on her offer.

Instead he had said pleasantly, “I, too, am on my way toward the Aldwych. I shall look forward to meeting you again sometime, Miss Houghton.”

With that he had turned his attention from her to Rose, who, to Marigold’s amazement, seemed quite happy to be the object of it.

As she watched the two of them walk away together it occurred to Marigold that they were walking extremely close together and that though it couldn’t have been intentional, Rose’s dove-gray walking costume fitted her like a second skin, drawing attention not only to her wasp waist and the pleasing curve of her hips, but also to a pair of extremely neat ankles.

“I said that if her editor hasn’t warned your sister against going down to the docks, he’s a damned fool,” Strickland said again, aware that Marigold had gone off into a world of her own. “It’s time we got back to work.” He stubbed his cigarette out. “You haven’t griped about your youngest sister yet. What is she up to? Is the aristocratic boyfriend who cannot be named still on the scene?”

“Yes. In spirit if not in actual fact.”

He began painting again, saying drily, “He’s dead, then?”

Laughter fizzed in her throat. “No. He’s at sea.”

“Ah!” Strickland’s hooded eyes lit with fierce satisfaction. “Then I know who he is!”

“You can’t do!” Marigold tried to sound calm, but doing so wasn’t easy.

Strickland was on gossiping terms with everyone who was anyone in London. If he let the cat out of the bag none of her sisters would ever forgive her.

“But I do. It was obvious right from the first that you wouldn’t be fighting shy of scandal in order not to lose a mere marquess or an earl as a brother-in-law. Knowing you as I do, I don’t think you’d even be fussed at losing a duke as a prospective brother-in-law. So your insistence on remaining scandal-free until your sister has been walked down the aisle can only be because she has snared a prince and when it comes to a prince of the right age—especially one who is currently at sea—only one fits the bill.”

Marigold wasn’t given to panicking, but she was on the verge of doing so now. What was going to happen at the next dinner party Strickland was invited to and at which the prime minister or the foreign secretary was present? Would he be able to resist becoming the center of attention by revealing the riveting information that the Prince of Wales was in love with—and wanted to marry—Miss Lily Houghton? It was a secret so explosive she doubted if anyone would be able to keep it, unless they had a vested interest in doing so.

Queasily she said, “Well, since you know his identity, you can well understand why it needs to be kept secret until there is a public announcement.”

Strickland stopped painting, his interest intense. “So how near is that to happening? Has royal permission been given?”

“Not exactly.” There were times when Marigold was astonished at how truthful she could be. “But King George does know they want to marry.”

“I wouldn’t have thought it was too much of a problem. I think royals having to have the King’s consent to marry is carried a bit far at times. If Prince George of Battenberg wants to marry Lily, the only consent needed should be that of her legal guardian. Which is probably your mother, though it may well be your grandfather. I’m not
au fait
with guardianship legalities.”

“Prince George of Battenberg?” Marigold was so stunned—and
relieved—by the realization that Strickland hadn’t been talking of David she nearly betrayed the fact by the tone of her voice.

His eyes sharpened and she said swiftly, “How bright of you to have guessed so correctly.”

He lit another cigarette, plastering it to his lower lip. “You gave it away when you said he was at sea. Prince George is in the navy—not surprising when you consider that his father is a vice admiral and commander in chief of the Atlantic Fleet. Which is an odd thing for a German to be,” he added, “even though he is related to the King.”

Marigold wasn’t interested in royal genealogy. Her relief that Strickland had got things so wonderfully wrong was too vast.

“Where are you spending the weekend?” he asked, suddenly changing the subject. “Are you going down to Snowberry?”

“To be bored to death by talk of Iris’s wedding? No, thank you. Maxim has been invited to Marchemont. A Romanov aunt of his has taken it for the summer, and he’s wangled me an invitation.”

Strickland began painting once again. “You Houghton girls do have a lot of leeway, don’t you? I don’t know of any other single girl of your age and class who could go haring off to a house party in Dorset given by someone unknown to her family. I’m painting a portrait of Lady Diana Manners at the moment, and she complains bitterly that she can’t even have a meal out with an admirer without having a married couple accompanying them as chaperones.”

“We have leeway because our father is dead, our mother lives in France, and our grandfather is blissfully unaware that the freedom he gives us is anything out of the ordinary.”

Strickland chuckled. “It’s out of the ordinary enough for your baby sister to be unofficially betrothed to a prince; for your eldest sister to be in paid employment by a national newspaper, wandering around such places as the East End and docklands; and for you to be spending a weekend at a house party with a Russian lover. It seems to me the only one of you four girls doing things by the book is Iris.”

“Iris always has done things by the book. She’s very pleasant and very dull. And Prince Maxim Yurenev is not my lover. Though he may well be so after this weekend.”

Marigold had never understood the fuss that was made about losing virginity before marriage. To her, virginity had always seemed an unnecessary encumbrance, and she had been ecstatically happy when Theo had relieved her of it.

The problem, now she knew how delicious lovemaking was, was that not making love was extremely tedious, especially when she had an admirer as ardent as Maxim. And she wouldn’t be risking scandal by going to bed with Maxim. He was a Russian royal prince. He wouldn’t tell. In which case, all that would happen was that her reputation would remain exactly as it had been ever since her debutante year. She would be regarded as being “fast” and “not quite the thing,” but nothing worse. It was a conclusion that could lead to only one decision.

Two days later, as Marigold packed her weekend case, her excitement was at fever pitch.