“Really, Mama, you look as if you were going to a Court ball. Sometimes, when I am getting slack in the heat of India, I think of you and hurriedly change, even when I am dining alone!”
“So I should hope, George!” Lady Medwin had said. “You must remember that an Englishman should always set an example to the lesser nations, especially those we have conquered.”
“You are quite right, Mama,” Sir George said meekly.
But Angelina noticed that his eyes were twinkling as he poured out the small glass of sherry that was all Lady Medwin allowed herself to drink before dinner.
Therefore Angelina walked into her grandmother’s bedroom, having taken off the tulle scarf that she had worn at dinner to deceive Ruston.
“How nice you look, dearest!” Lady Medwin said. “I am glad we bought that gown. It certainly suits you.”
“I am glad you think so, Grandmama.”
“I have decided that as soon as I am well enough,” Lady Medwin went on, “I shall give a ball for you. Tomorrow we will start making a list of all the people we wish to invite. Not only the young, of course. That makes a dance so boring.”
“It will be lovely to have a ball, Grandmama!” Angelina exclaimed.
She tried to sound as enthusiastic as she had the first time her grandmother had suggested such an idea.
But unfortunately with repetition the pretence had grown rather thin, especially as Angelina knew that such an effort would be quite impossible as far as her grandmother was concerned for a very long time.
“We will make out a list tomorrow,” Lady Medwin had said in a tired voice. “Goodnight, dearest child. I feel I am going to sleep well tonight.”
“I hope you will, Grandmama,” Angelina replied. “Is there anything I can get you?”
“No, thank you, dear. Hannah has given me everything I want.”
Angelina kissed her grandmother again and slipped away from the room.
Then she sped up the stairs to find that, while she had been having dinner, Emily had prepared her bedroom as usual.
The greatest difficulty had been to eat as little as possible downstairs.
Not only was she looking forward to dining with the Prince but Angelina was so excited that she felt, at the moment, that food would choke her.
For almost the first time, she found herself wishing that Twi-Twi were not a fastidious pernickety Pekingese, but a greedy spaniel who would have golluped up everything she did not wish to eat herself.
But she knew of old that, if Twi-Twi was presented with titbits, he would turn his nose up at them and walk away, leaving them lying conspicuously on the floor.
She had, however, a better plan. As soon as old Ruston had served one course, he would walk laboriously down the stairs to the basement to bring up the next one.
This enabled Angelina to put back on the dish most of what she had taken on her plate.
It was easy with the soup, which she merely tipped back into the large silver tureen. It was rather more difficult with the fish, but she managed to make it look as if an extra slice had been cut from it by mistake.
But the apple pie was the worst of all.
There were no more courses since Angelina had decided that unless there was a party, there was no need to add a savoury to the dinner.
As she took the smallest piece of pastry, she knew that this was the last thing at the moment that she wished to eat.
‘It would stick in my throat,’ Angelina decided.
She was therefore forced to cut it into small pieces and merely ‘mess about with it on her plate’ as her Nanny would have said.
She hoped that Ruston would not notice, but of course, he did.
“You don’t eat enough, Miss Angelina! You’d think all that fresh air you gets would give you a healthy appetite.”
“It has been hot today, Ruston,” Angelina replied, “and I am never hungry when it is hot. Papa says the same and that is why, since he has been in India, he has grown so thin.”
She had been clever in starting Ruston off thinking about her father.
The old butler adored ‘Master George’ as he usually called him.
“Thin as a rake!” he said now. “I tells him when he was home, ‘It’ll cost you a fortune at your tailor. General,’ I says, ‘if you gets much thinner!’”
“You will have to speak to him when he comes on leave again,” Angelina said, “and you know he always enjoys Mrs. Brooks’s cooking.”
“She’s got all his favourite dishes planned for him already, Miss Angelina,” Ruston smiled. “She never forgets what Master George fancies.”
The old man was still reminiscing as Angelina left the dining room.
One thing, she thought a little later, as she slipped down the stairs, that there was no chance of Ruston creeping up on her silently.
He too had lost weight as he grew older, but he had never changed the size of his shoes. Now, as they were too big for him, he could be heard slip-slopping along the passages long before he came in sight.
The hall was in darkness except for one gas light, which Ruston would turn out last thing.
The front door was already bolted and Angelina with Twi-Twi in her arms walked swiftly along the passage off which opened the study and the dining room.
Between these two rooms there was the door that led out into the small paved garden.
On the wall that backed onto the mews and faced the house there was some green trelliswork up which climbed a rather anaemic-looking wisteria.
In the centre of the courtyard there was a lead statue of a child holding a large dolphin in his arms.
It was meant to be the centre of a fountain, but a fountain would have caused too much trouble and it was therefore surrounded by ferns.
When these died they were replaced, but otherwise no one paid much attention to their well-being.
The only people who could see into the small garden were those living in her grandmother’s house and on the top floors of the houses on either side.
Angelina often peeped from her own window into the larger front garden, also paved, which belonged to the Cephalonian Ministry next door.
Very occasionally she had seen grave-looking Statesmen or bespectacled clerks there, but otherwise there were only the gardeners who arranged flower decorations for special occasions.
There had been a delightful show in June when the Coronation had been designed to take place, but the roses, the delphiniums and the lilies had now been replaced with potted plants.
There were geraniums, which made Angelina think of the ones the Prince had laughed about in the square garden and some brilliant coloured begonias, which were grouped around a statue that Angelina was quite certain was Grecian.
Unfortunately it was partly obscured from her by a tree that was planted on the Cephalonian side of the dividing wall, but extended over her grandmother’s garden.
It made it impossible for her to see the adjoining garden as clearly as she would have wished.
She thought, from what she could see, that the statue was that of a Goddess, perhaps Aphrodite, and she thought that she must remember to ask the Prince who it was and if it had actually been brought from Greece to Belgrave Square.
But there was no time at the moment to think about anything but getting herself safely from the house to the door at the end of the garden that opened into the mews.
“You must be very quiet,” she whispered to Twi-Twi, “and not attract attention!”
There was really no possibility of her being seen or heard by anyone and yet the fear was there.
All the servants would be downstairs having their evening meal, but even so, Angelina ran quickly over the paving stones, reached the door in the other wall and opened it.
As she stepped into the mews, she felt as if she was going into a new world.
The stables where the horses were housed, the poky little windows of the rooms over them where the grooms lived, were all very different from the stately dignity of
Belgrave Square.
Then before she had time to look around her, she saw that only a few feet away from where she was standing was a closed carriage and, as she appeared, the Prince stepped out.
It was impossible then to see anything but the gladness on his face and the light in his eyes and not to be aware that in his evening clothes he looked even more dashing and handsome than he did in the daytime.
There was a gardenia in his buttonhole and he was bareheaded because he had left his top hat inside the carriage.
He did not speak, he just took her hand and helped her into the closed brougham and sat down beside her.
Then, as he pulled the door to, the horse started off and they drove down the mews, the wheels rumbling over the cobblestones.
“You have come!” the Prince exclaimed. “I convinced myself you would and yet I was half-afraid that something would stop you.”
“I am here,” Angelina said, “but I had to bring Twi-Twi.”
As she spoke, she put Twi-Twi on the seat opposite her.
“Alexis will look after him while we have dinner,” the Prince suggested.
“And perhaps,” Angelina went on a little breathlessly, “you had better keep – the key of the mews door for me. It is too big for my bag.”
She handed it to the Prince as she spoke, remembering that it was easy to open the door on the inside, but it required a key to get back in.
It was something that she might have forgotten had she not seen the key lying in a small dish inside the house when she opened the door into the garden.
It was kept there, she knew, for the convenience of the servants who might want to contact Abbey, who obviously had his own key.
The Prince took the key from her and slipped it into a pocket in the padding of the carriage.
“Do you want me to tell you how beautiful you look?” he asked. “I somehow did not imagine you with roses in your hair.”
Angelina put up her hand a little self-consciously.
She had put them on so quickly after she had said goodnight to her grandmother that she was half-afraid now that they were insecure.
“Don’t touch them,” the Prince begged her. “Don’t alter anything. You are just as I want you to be, only far more beautiful than I ever imagined!”
Angelina felt herself blushing and turned her face towards the window.
It was still light, but the sun had sunk in the West and the first evening stars had not yet appeared in the sky.
“Where are we – going?” she asked in a voice that did not sound in the least like her own.
“I am taking you somewhere very quiet, not because I don’t wish to show you off,” the Prince answered, “but because I want to talk to you without being interrupted by music and too many people chattering around us.”
“It will be – very exciting for me – wherever we go,” Angelina said. “I have – never dined in a – restaurant.”
“I know you ought not to be dining in one now, especially with me,” the Prince said. “That is why I think it is very brave and wonderful of you to do as I asked.”
“Grandmama would be very – shocked!”
“So would a number of other people,” the Prince answered, “and that is why I must take great care that no one sees us or tries to make trouble.”
“At the same time,” Angelina said, following her own thoughts, “it is an adventure – a very big – adventure for – me!”
“For me also,” the Prince said. “At the same time I am afraid.”
“Afraid?” Angelina questioned. “Why should you be afraid?”
“Because, if we are talking metaphorically, I am plunging deeper and deeper into a maze and I have no idea how to get myself out of it.”
Angelina looked at him in surprise.
“I don’t – think I – understand.”
“I don’t want you to,” the Prince replied. “Not at the moment at any rate. You are doing very strange things to me, Angelina. I am not certain if they are pleasure or pain.”
Again Angelina did not understand and the Prince watched her face.
Then he said,
“Stop me from talking like this. I want you to enjoy yourself tonight. I want your little bit of the Coronation to be something you will remember with happiness, very great happiness, for that is what I would wish you always to have, Angelina.”
“I hope I shall,” Angelina answered, “but I want you to be – happy too.”
“That may be impossible,” the Prince said, “but at least I have tonight and that is very important to me.”
“What are you doing – tomorrow night?” Angelina asked, because she felt a little embarrassed by the deepness of his voice.
“I have an engagement I cannot cancel,” he answered. “And the next night I must be present at the banquet at Buckingham Palace – if it takes place!”
“If it takes place?” Angelina repeated. “What do you mean by that?”
“Remember what happened the last time.”
“The King could not be ill again,” Angelina said. “It would be too disappointing.”
“There is no fear of that,” the Prince said. “I saw him yesterday and he was in surprisingly good shape after all he has been through.”
“Then this time the banquet – will take place,” Angelina said. “It would be terrible for all that food to go to waste a second time.”
“Waste?” the Prince asked. “What happened?”
“It was not exactly wasted,” Angelina answered, “but the newspapers reported that, when the Coronation was postponed, the officials at the Palace had no idea what they should do with the tons of food that had been ordered for the banquet.”
“So what did they do?” the Prince asked in an amused voice.
“There were two thousand five hundred quails for one thing,” Angelina said.
“Go on!” the Prince prompted.
“There were huge amounts of cooked chicken, partridge, sturgeon, cutlets, not to mention all the fruit and cream puddings, which would not keep.”
It was something that had never struck the Prince amid all the commotion of arriving in England and going away again.
“Tell me what happened?”
“They tried to think of a charity that could be relied on to distribute the food fairly and discreetly,” Angelina answered.
“And which one did they choose?”
“The Sisters of the Poor.”
She gave a little laugh as she added,
“It was the poor of Whitechapel and not the foreign Kings, Princes like yourself and Diplomats who ate Consommé de faison aux quenelles and Côtelettes de bécassines à la Souvaroff and many other dishes created by the Royal Chef!”
The Prince threw back his head and laughed.
“I can quite see the predicament of having so much food and no one to eat it. I must remember to tell my relatives about this when I go back to Cephalonia. They kept asking me details about the cancelled Coronation, but I had very little to tell them.”
“Well, now you will eat all those delicious dishes,” Angelina said, “and see the actual Ceremony in Westminster Abbey.”
“Those things are amusing only when one has somebody to laugh with about them afterwards.”
Angelina glanced at him quickly.
She thought perhaps he was going to say that they could meet after the Coronation and he would tell her about everything that had amused him.
Instead he stared ahead as if he was looking deeply into the shadows of the carriage.
Angelina realised that they were driving up Piccadilly and there were decorations on the lampposts and on the houses they were passing.
She bent forward but as she did so the Prince reached out to take her by the shoulders and turn her round to face him.
“No, I don’t want you to look now!” he exclaimed. “It’s more exciting by night when everything is lit up. Then we will have the carriage open so that you can see it all properly.”
&n
bsp; Every nerve of Angelina’s body was acutely conscious of the Prince’s hands holding her shoulders and the fact that because he had turned her round, his face was very near to hers.
As if he too was aware that they were close to each other and he was actually touching her, the Prince was very still.
In the quietness Angelina felt that he must hear her heart beating.
Then abruptly as he had taken her, he released her, saying,
“We are nearly there. I hope you are as hungry as I am.”
When they arrived at the restaurant, the Prince ordered a long and elaborate meal, but when it came he and Angelina kept sending their plates away almost untouched.
Afterwards Angelina found that it was impossible to remember anything she had eaten.
The restaurant, as the Prince had said, was very small and it was in one of the streets leading off Piccadilly.
The moment they arrived, the Head Waiter led them down a long narrow room to where at the end there was an alcove in which it was almost impossible to be seen.
The room was decorated in good taste and discreetly lit and had a luxurious air about it that made Angelina certain that the dinner would be very expensive.
“This is a place for connoisseurs who enjoy good food,” the Prince explained, “and also for people like ourselves who want to be quiet and not seen.”
Angelina smiled at him as he concentrated, first on ordering their meal and then on taking some time over the wine list.
When the wine came, Angelina thought that it was like golden sunshine, but except when her father was home on leave, she was accustomed to drink very little and she hoped that it would not go to her head.
They talked of the Coronation, of Greece, of Twi-Twi and a number of quite ordinary subjects until finally the plates were removed and there were only the coffee cups in front of them and the Prince’s glass of brandy.
He sat back in the comfortable armchair that was characteristic of the furnishing of the restaurant and said quietly,
“Now we can talk about ourselves and let me tell you, Angelina, I have been able to think of nothing but you the whole day.”
“I have – thought about – you too.”
She thought as she spoke that perhaps it sounded rather forward to admit such a thing.
Princes and Princesses Page 7