To Marry a Prince

Chapter 13

‘Can this Last?’ – Royal Watchers Magazine

The entrance to Camelford House was more forbidding than the Palace’s, with huge blank black gates. But once inside, it felt a lot smaller and a great deal friendlier. The gates opened as soon as Richard’s car approached and closed noiselessly behind it, as a security officer came out of the small guard house to check them in.

‘Good evening, Sir. I don’t have a guest on my list for tonight, Sir.’

‘Spur of the moment, Fred. Bella meet Fred, who keeps the bad men out. Fred, this is my lady, Bella Greenwood. I’ve no doubt you know all about her by now.’

Fred smiled. ‘Very nice to meet you, miss. I’ll add Ms Greenwood to the Approved Visitors List, shall I, Sir?’

‘You bet. Good night, Fred.’

‘Good night, Sir. Miss.’

Richard drove round a corner into a sort of square formed by an substantial eighteenth-century house, a small Jacobean block, and what looked like a nineteenth-century school house, its front covered in ivy.

‘You’ll need to check in with Security whenever you come here, if you’re not with me. If I’m not around, just poke your head though the guard-house door and the guys will sign you in. You’ll need keys, too. I’ll organise that.’

He led the way into what Bella was privately thinking of as the school house. Inside it was warmer and more comfortable than the Palace. The ceilings were lower and the art was less warlike. There was even an elevator, with gilded bars and a leather-covered bench seat around three sides of it. Richard flung open the doors for her.

‘You must take a ride in Gertrude. Don’t look down if you get vertigo, but Gertrude is a work of art. They wanted to put in something modern and silent that opened straight into my apartment, but I said no. She’s part of my childhood, Gertrude.’

He patted the leather seat as if it were a friendly dog and swung the hands of a floor indicator as big as a grandfather clock face. Gertrude clanked into life and juddered sedately to the top floor.

Richard’s apartment was a shock. Bella had seen him in someone else’s cottage, in Lottie’s flat and in the shared houseboat. All those places were friendly, book-filled, cosy. This flat was enormous. The main room ran the entire length of the building, as far as she could see, with a pale blond-wood floor and minimalist furniture: deep ivory-coloured sofas surrounded a low wooden table inlaid with an intricate pattern of pale woods. There was a cocktail cabinet at one end, currently closed up to reveal its flowing Art Deco lines, and a floor-to-ceiling bookcase at the other. No flowers or knick-knacks here, but a spotlit alcove housing a beautiful urn, the colour of the sunlit stone of the Acropolis, and a huge painting occupying the whole of one wall. At first glance it looked like a black-and-white architectural study of a ruined castle in the middle of a mediaeval town. But the longer you looked at it, the more you saw anomalies: tiny touches of colour, staircases that couldn’t possibly exist, hints of people just out of sight, a shoe, a drifting scarf.

‘That,’ said Bella, staring, ‘is amazing.’

He stood beside her and looked too. ‘I never tire of it. Every time, I see something different.’ He put an arm round her. ‘The Palace is full of stuff. People are always giving you things and some of my ancestors were avid collectors, too. And you never throw anything away, on principle, in case the next generation would like it. So my mother lives in an upmarket junk yard and tries to hide it with flowers. I didn’t want that.’

‘You haven’t got it. This is beautiful.’

There were windows all along another wall. She went to them and saw that they looked out across lawns to another building.

‘Is that part of Camelford House too?’

He shook his head. ‘Government building.’

‘So you’re in this great big place all on your own?’

His eyes started to dance in the way she loved; the way they hadn’t for too long. He took her hand and pulled her towards him.

‘Not,’ he said, ‘tonight.’

*


It was a good start but things went wrong almost immediately.

Richard had to leave to take a flight to Edinburgh the next morning, so he left before Bella did. And no one had told her that she had to sign out when she left Camelford House. So in the middle of the day she got a frantic phone call from someone in Richard’s entourage of the day, asking her to call the Guard House. She did, and a meticulous functionary insisted that she come back at once and sign out. She would do well to apologise to the Officer of the Watch as well, he said. Bella suspected that he was the Officer of the Watch. But she remembered that these were people whom Richard saw every day, and liked, so she complied.

Then she had a call from someone who described himself as working in the King’s private office. Please would she give him her date of birth, her social security number and her passport number? Also her parents’ and her stepfather’s. And, in future, would she remember that it was not permitted to stay overnight in a Royal residence without three days’ prior notice?

‘They’re not exactly making you feel welcome, are they?’ said Lottie, hearing Bella’s side of that particular conversation.

‘I know. It’s odd. Both the King and Queen Jane were very nice to me.’

But she rounded up the passport numbers, as instructed.

‘You know, I think you ought to check with Richard,’ said Lottie. ‘I mean, it’s odd. Maybe Wormtongue doesn’t work for the King at all. What’s his name?’

‘Madoc … Julian Madoc.’

‘Well, find out if Mr Madoc is legit before you send him anything.’

So for once Bella called Richard. He answered immediately.

‘How’s Day Two of being the First Girlfriend going?’

‘Odd actually.’ And she told him about the messages she’d had from the Palace.

He exploded. ‘Bloody Madoc! Officious little toad! Know what he’s doing, don’t you? He’s trying to get you positively vetted.’

Bella gasped, coughed and couldn’t stop laughing. ‘Sounds a bit agricultural and rather nasty.’

But Richard wasn’t amused. ‘It’s security clearance for people who have to read government secrets. How dare he? How dare he?’

But Bella was still bubbling with mirth. She went into a very bad Russian accent. ‘I am Olga the Beautiful Spy. You will tell me all your secrets.’

Richard laughed reluctantly. ‘Yes, very funny. But Madoc needs kicking. I shall speak to my father. What else has the House of Horrors thrown at you today, my love?’

She told him about the Officer of the Watch and her decision to grovel without protest. ‘I look on it as an investment in future good-will.’

He groaned. ‘And I thought it would be the Press that were the problem!’

‘Well, I’ll probably do better now. Your mother is providing me with a mentor.’

‘A what?’

‘A mentor. You know, someone who’s already done something and guides the faltering footsteps of a new recruit.’

‘Hell’s teeth,’ he said blankly. ‘The woman’s got a mind like a corkscrew. Has she really wished one of my old girlfriends on to you?’

Bella giggled at the idea. ‘I don’t think so. She’s called Lady Pansy, and when she called me this morning she sounded like Celia Johnson. Must be a good seventy-five.’

‘Oh, Pansy.’ He sounded more relaxed. ‘She’s harmless. She’ll probably give you long lectures about orders of precedence and teach you how to curtsey.’

‘Coo-er.’

This time Richard laughed as if he really meant it. ‘I love you,’ he said before ringing off. ‘Dream Girl.’

Lady Pansy didn’t give Bella lectures on orders of precedence. She gave her a booklet, bound in shiny Royal blue, with the Royal coat-of-arms on the front and gold lettering. And a book on protocol at the Court of St James’s, revised edition, and a book on the Royal Families of Europe, plus a ring binder about the organisation of the Royal Household (London) with the internal telephone numbers of, as far as Bella could see, everything and everyone from the King’s Private Office to the Head Groom.

‘Just a few memory joggers,’ she said sweetly. For Lady Pansy was very sweet indeed.

Bella found her way to a sitting room off a back staircase in the Palace for, as she thought, a friendly chat, and came away feeling as if she had gone ten rounds with the Cookie Monster.

The woman who had summoned her was tall and rangy, with a profile like a horse’s and a lacquered backcombed helmet of beautifully tinted grey-brown hair that would, thought Bella, have withstood a Force 10 gale. She was elegantly dressed in a dark blue dress and short jacket worn with a triple string of pearls, matching pearl earrings, and a pair of well-polished shoes. So far, so Golfing Ladies. Except that Lady Pansy smiled all the time and never stopped talking. She did not so much gush as swirl like the tide. She was, in short, unstoppable.

She also called Bella ‘dear’ a lot. It set Bella’s teeth on edge.

‘I have known the dear Queen since she came here as a bride. And the Dowager Queen before her. Indeed, I was brought up with His Majesty’s father. My own father was what is called an Equerry. You will find out about the Court in here.’ And she added another tome to Bella’s extensive pile.

‘Thank you.’

‘Of course, I have retired now. The King has very kindly given me a little Grace and Favour apartment in Hampton Court but I come in to the Palace most days, to give what service I can. Old habits die hard.’ She had a tinkling laugh, that didn’t sit very well with the horse-like teeth or a strident upper-class voice that could have stripped paint.

‘I suppose they must,’ murmured Bella.

‘Royal service is my inheritance. I am very proud to serve. I have my little corner here,’ Lady Pansy explained, indicating a sitting room the size of a suburban house, full of eighteenth-century furniture and a goodish collection of porcelain. ‘And I am always available to help new people who join the Court with any little pieces of advice that I can. Just ask me anything you like, dear. My card. My phone number.’

She gave Bella two small pasteboard cards, one simply inscribed with Lady Pansy’s name in flowing gold script, one more businesslike with phone and fax numbers but no email address.

‘You will find it all bewildering at first,’ instructed Lady Pansy. ‘But I shall be here to guide you. You may call on me at any time. I suggest we meet regularly.’

Taking a surreptitious glance at her watch, Bella realised that the interview had already taken two hours. Her discussions with Lady Pansy, she resolved, would henceforward take place on the telephone. But she murmured more grateful thanks. And Lady Pansy launched into a terrifying account of the hounding she could expect from the Press.

Bella finally staggered out with two cloth bags full of books and papers, three hours after she’d gone into the Palace.

She went straight back to the flat and lay down in the sitting room, in blessed, blessed silence.

‘Thank God I took the day off,’ she told Lottie that evening. ‘The woman made my head ring – and scared the wits out of me. She made me think the journalists and photographers would be knee-deep outside the flat. But there wasn’t one.’

As it turned out, the Press were relatively uninterested in Bella. There were a couple of pointed questions asked of Richard at his next public appearance, but he evaded them neatly. And a single photographer turned up outside Bella’s office. But that was it.

‘Of course, you’re not one of the candidates to become his Princess,’ explained Lady Pansy on the telephone. ‘The serious Royal correspondents know that and won’t waste their time. But the riff-raff can be intrusive. When would you like to call on me this week?’

‘Thank you, but I think I will save that pleasure for when the riff-raff get worse,’ said Bella, and put the phone down before Lady Pansy could object.

Lottie, however, agreed with the courtier.

‘There’s a lot of celebrity action at the moment,’ she said darkly. ‘You wait till the dead zone between Christmas and New Year. That’s when we’ll get all the pieces about “Isabella Greenwood, Is She Right for Our Prince?”’

‘So what?’ said Bella, who had just come off the phone with Richard and was still basking in his ‘Good night, Dream Girl’. ‘I’ve got my love to keep me warm. I can handle it.’

She and Lottie were both wrong.

The trouble started when an undercover freelance journalist approached Bella’s mother in Town. Of course, she didn’t say she was a journalist. She said she’d heard the news about Bella and the Prince of Wales, and just had to stop and tell Janet how pleased she was. And then she switched on her mini tape recorder and let Janet burble.

Bella’s mother didn’t say anything untruthful. She said that they hadn’t met Prince Richard yet but hoped to soon. She also said they were very much looking forward to meeting the King and Queen – at this point, reading the article, Bella put her arms over her head and groaned loudly – and that she hoped to invite Queen Jane, a noted amateur golfer, to a round at her own club. Yes, she agreed, it would be lovely if Bella and Richard got married. Following your heart was so important. Only then the journalist asked if she thought that the family would object, and Janet got completely the wrong end of the stick. Her ex-husband, she said, could keep his silly opinions to himself and not jeopardise his daughter’s happiness. Who cared whether he thought the monarchy should be abolished or not? He was never in the country anyway.

It went round the wires in seconds. The next day a journalist turned up in Cambridge, asking about Finn’s behaviour when he was an undergraduate there. Someone found an incendiary article he had written as a student coming back from Paris, praising the French événements of 1968. A man he had fallen out with badly on his Pamirs expedition sold a highly coloured account of Finn’s alleged anarchist ravings while they were in the mountains together.

The headlines were grim. ‘Prince Woos Revolutionary’s Daughter’ was the mildest of them. ‘Trotskyist Totty in the Palace’ screamed the Daily Despatch.

Julian Madoc rang Bella and asked her for a list of all the clubs and societies she had ever joined, particularly any political ones. He was, he said in a smug voice, commanded by the King to ask. Lady Pansy said it was most unfortunate and that Bella should issue a statement, distancing herself from her father.

‘Can’t do that,’ said Lottie the guru. ‘Turns you into a sneaky little traitor, letting your dad down.’

‘I wasn’t going to do it,’ said Bella, more bewildered than anything else.

Richard was furious. A television interviewer stuck a microphone in his face at a Christmas Fair and he lost his cool. ‘I am a great admirer of Finn Greenwood’s work,’ he told a reporter icily. ‘I have read all his books. It will be a privilege to meet him.’

‘Prince Turns Anarchist’ trumpeted the Daily Despatch.

‘Oh, dear,’ said Lady Pansy, worried. ‘Maybe you ought not to see each other. Just for a bit, you know. Until all this dies down.’

But Bella was starting to get annoyed too. ‘The trouble is, people who buy the Despatch can’t read. They probably thought it said Anti-Christ,’ she said tartly.

And somehow that got out into the Press too. There were rumblings that the First Girlfriend was too big for her boots. Not being Royal or even aristocratic and sneering at the reading abilities of good working people.

‘Now I’m not only a Trot, I’m toffee-nosed,’ she told Richard, trying to make a joke of it. But it was starting to hurt.

She did not go to any official functions with him, and when they went to the same parties they arrived and left separately. It seemed to her that now they had acknowledged that they were seeing each other, they saw less of each other than they had when it was only in snatched, secret moments.

‘I know,’ said Richard. They were in his flat again, curled up together on the huge sofa after a long walk and a lazy evening with a DVD. ‘It’s like there’s a conspiracy to keep us apart.’

Bella propped herself up on one elbow. ‘Do you think …?’ But at once they both shook their heads. ‘Nah. Why would anyone bother?’

‘If I have the choice between cock-up and conspiracy, I go for cock-up every time,’ said Richard. ‘We need to spend time together, private time, that everyone knows about. I can’t get away for Christmas, but I could do the Saturday after next if your mother invited me. And you could come to Scotland for the New Year.’

‘Do you think that’s wise? Lady Pansy said maybe we should cool it.’

‘Pansy’s an old worryguts,’ said Richard disrespectfully. ‘I’m not feeling like cooling anything.’

He kissed Bella long and pleasurably to illustrate his point. After a long, complicated interlude, she could only agree with him.

‘Right,’ he said later, lying half-naked and wholly relaxed on his priceless Chinese carpet. ‘That’s agreed then. You square your parents. I’ll tell mine.’

Thirty-six hours entertaining the Prince of Wales on her own territory was all Janet Bray had ever dreamed of. She paraded him round the Golf Club and he behaved, as Bella told him later with heartfelt appreciation, like a complete star. He laughed at all their golf stories, even producing a couple of his own. He admired their charitable fund-raising, expressed interest in the club’s upcoming centenary – and spent long cold hours on the fairway playing a round with Kevin and smiling for the local paper, the curious, and children who came along hoping that the Prince of Wales would be in armour, or at least have a sword. His smile never faltered. Nobody would ever have guessed that he wasn’t riveted by golf and golfers or delighted with his day’s entertainment.

‘You’re really good at this, aren’t you?’ Bella said, walking beside him back to the clubhouse, her gloved hand tucked into the crook of his arm.

‘It’s my job,’ he said.

Janet’s stock had soared with the Ladies’ Section.

‘Good to meet the boyfriend that our Bella said she didn’t have,’ said the witch-faced Social Secretary, making certain that she was the first to shake Richard’s hand when they reached the clubhouse. Her husband’s new knighthood, as she had pointed out in the Ladies’ Cloakroom, gave her precedence.

‘It is a great treat to be here with her,’ said Richard, retrieving his hand and flexing it out of sight. The Lady Social Secretary’s Botox did not seem to have frozen her iron grip. ‘Such a privilege to meet family friends.’

Janet sent him a look of utter devotion and he smiled back at her.

‘Hope you’ll be here for the Spring Dance,’ said the Captain of the Ladies’ Section. She had changed out of her golfing clothes into a snazzy cocktail number, and was giving it lots of cleavage and flashing eyes.

‘It sounds delightful,’ Richard assured her, avoiding the cleavage like a professional.

‘Do you play darts?’ said Janet, with an indignant look at the Mercedes-driving houri, and swept him off to the Ladies’ Bar, where he had a very jolly time allowing himself to lose by not too much in matches against the Junior Mums until Janet relented and took them home for dinner.

She had wanted to invite her usual complement of guests but Bella had begged her not to.

‘Let it just be us, Ma, just this once? Ask Neill and Val, if you like. But nobody else.’

Janet was disappointed. ‘But I was going to hire a butler.’

‘No-o-o-o.’

It was a cry of anguish.

‘But it must be what he’s used to?’

Bella sat her down in the kitchen and took both her hands. ‘Ma. This is me. Forget him. Me. If he were anyone else, would you hire a butler? Did you hire a butler when Neill brought Val home?’

‘No,’ said Janet, struck.

‘Well, then. Just treat him like you treated Val. Please. I just want us to be normal for once.’

‘You’re a funny girl,’ said Janet, succumbing to her desperate tone. ‘But if that’s what you want, darling, of course.’

So supper was for the six of them. Neill and Val had driven over from Dorset, but after a good meal and plenty of wine they would not be driving back again. Which made redundant the nice problem of whether Janet should allow Richard and Bella to sleep together under her roof. The Brays had two fully appointed guest rooms, with en suite showers. Neill and Val would have one. Bella the other. There was also a box room which doubled as Janet’s sewing room and was fully of spooky dressmaker’s dummies and rolls of fabric. And there was Kevin’s study.

Kevin, who had given silent thanks to be relieved of the burden of a butler, was enough of a traditionalist to suggest that you couldn’t put the Prince of Wales on a couch in the study.

‘Bella could go on the couch?’ mused Janet doubtfully.

‘Don’t think he’d like that. Not very chivalrous.’

So Janet had given in and Richard was to share Bella’s room and en suite shower room.

‘Thanks,’ she muttered to Kevin, as she passed him in the hallway. ‘We owe you.’

It turned into a fun party. In the end Neill pushed a coffee table into the middle of the floor and taught them all how to row to Viking rhythm. Kevin threw himself into the part, roaring out what he swore were Anglo-Saxon incantations. Even Val joined in, looking happier and more at home than Bella had ever seen her.

And when they all said good night, Richard kissed Janet’s cheek with genuine affection.

‘I like your mother,’ he told Bella, sitting on the end of the bed to take his socks off. ‘She’s scared but she’s still in there, punching her weight.’

Bella was sliding out of the dress her mother had bought her last month, but paused on hearing that. Janet had been so pleased to see her in it that Bella completely forgot the thing made her look like a middle-aged golf wife.

‘What do you mean, she’s scared? What has she got to be scared of? Kevin takes care of everything.’

‘No, he doesn’t,’ said Richard. ‘He can’t take care of her getting things wrong, being ignored, becoming a laughing stock.’

Bella dismissed that, half angry at the idea. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

But hadn’t her mother said, ‘I wish I were competent like you’?

‘I told you, love. This is my job. I meet people who are scared of doing or saying the wrong thing all the time. And, believe me, Janet’s a bad case. She’s terrified.’

‘Nonsense.’

‘Didn’t you see her when we were all playing Vikings this evening? She was never quite sure whether she was doing the right thing by joining in. Not sure we wanted her. Not sure she wasn’t pushing in and spoiling it. Wondering whether she ought to be making coffee while the rest of us did what people like us do?’

Bella sat down on her side of the bed. ‘No!’ she said. But not because she still disbelieved him. ‘Oh, poor Ma.’

Richard turned and gathered her up into his arms, as if he knew she needed comforting. ‘She’s like her daughter. She’s brave. She took a chance and joined in.’

‘You’re quite a psychologist, aren’t you?’ she said slowly.

But he shook his head. ‘I’m not anything. I just know what I see.’

Bella leaned against him, muzzy from wine and the pent-up anxieties of the last weeks. ‘And you’re kind. So very kind.’

He let her go, flipped down her bra strap and said in quite another voice, ‘Also a half-trained Viking and randy as hell. Get your clothes off, woman.’