by Wendy Holden
If Maxim didn’t get married . . .
Hippolyte pushed the hideous prospect away. His main skill – and he was far from alone among palace employees in this respect – had always been ensuring his own survival.
Monsieur Hippolyte had been counting on royal benevolence well into his dotage. He saw himself, like many a cherished retainer before him, putting his feet up in one of the grace-and-favour flats belonging to the Palace and situated in grand apartment blocks all over Sedona. But how cherished a retainer was he at the moment?
The thought of leaving his comfortable – literally palatial – palace life brought a surge of terror to the private secretary’s plump white breast. This was followed by one of pure panic. He could no more imagine life outside a royal residence than a snail could imagine life without a shell.
Was it any wonder he had found himself, of late, treading the path he had sworn he would never tread again, down a certain Sedona back street and up a certain pink-carpeted strip of pavement to the glossy black door of Madame Whiplash? There, anonymous in a black leather mask, he could enter an entirely different world, where partners were plentiful and no one judged anyone. Although the tall, silver-haired figure who had propositioned him the other night had been very reminiscent of a certain eminent French justice who had dined at the chateau on more than one occasion . . .
But who could blame him for being driven to such lengths? Hippolyte demanded angrily of himself. What other relief was there? He felt utterly crushed under the weight of his problems; it wasn’t even as if they concerned Prince Maxim alone. Prince Giacomo had returned in the early hours and subsequently spent some considerable time shouting from the palace windows at his departing fellow carousers. They had left eventually, but not without a great deal of horn-blasting which only by a miracle failed to wake his royal parents.
For Hippolyte, the sound had been the now-familiar reveille; he must get up, ring the manager of La Cage Aux Princes and spend an hour trying to persuade the nightclub owner not to release information to the press about what Giacomo had been doing, who with, and at the cost of how much. Hippolyte cleared his throat. ‘Sir!’ he said again to Prince Max’s bedclothes.
All hell now broke loose. Maxim’s wretched dog, which had apparently been asleep, woke up and exploded into a frenzy of yapping. Hippolyte leapt back in terror as it danced along the bed barking at him and glaring with its one eye. It was amazing how much malevolence could be packed into a single small orb. Thank God it was too old and lame these days to be able to get off the bed and bite him – but Hippolyte had thanked too soon. Still yapping furiously, the spaniel now slid itself off the end of the bed and lowered itself by hooking its claws into the bedclothes. Once at ground level, it skittered over the Savonnerie and sank its sharp teeth into Hippolyte’s plump ankle.
‘Ow!’ shrieked the panicking private secretary.
‘What’s going on?’ The Prince’s dark head appeared from beneath the heap of crumpled sheets. He sat up in his white pyjamas with the royal monogram on the breast. His handsome face hardened when he saw his father’s factotum. ‘What do you want, Hippolyte?’
‘Your father would like to see you in an hour, Your Highness. You are expected in the throne room at ten o’clock.’
Having delivered his message, glancing nervously at the dog, Hippolyte retreated. Max fell back on his pillows and sighed.
Beano looked at him sympathetically with his good eye and loyally wagged his tail. Max tickled the red and white curls beneath the animal’s chin. Beano apart, he wished with all his heart that he had stayed in England.
On arriving home, Max found he had miscalculated badly. His assumption that his parents were merely suffering from stress could not have been further off the mark. His father had meant every word about forcing him into marriage for the good of Sedona. There was, Engelbert announced, to be no more studying. Sedona expected a wedding, and a wedding there must be.
Even his mother, to whom he had instinctively turned for sympathy, seemed to be keeping her distance and to be resolutely on the side of his father. There seemed no escape, none.
Max thought about the girls who had been paraded before him over the past couple of weeks. It had all been too excruciating for words. They had trotted past him like prize heifers; if only they had been heifers. He would have found them infinitely more interesting.
And like a prize bull himself, he would, Max had gathered, be expected to impregnate any bride in short order. Although the medieval ceremony when this process was witnessed by a bevy of bishops had been allowed to lapse – even Engelbert drew the line somewhere – there was still the horrific prospect of becoming a father just as he emerged from childhood himself.
Max sank back into the pillows. Life seemed suddenly a series of prisons. The prison of marriage, the prison of parenthood and the prison of royal duty. Not for nothing, he thought bitterly, were there three keys on the Sedona royal standard.
Why had he – he – been born the heir to a throne? He felt both resentful and guilty. It was a waste for him to have this position when he didn’t want it, and when Giacomo clearly adored being royal.
Max almost envied his brother his breezy acceptance of a position in life that put him above other people. An egalitarian by inclination, he himself had attempted to avoid the hooray crowd at university, although not with absolute success. There had been a particularly determined social climber who had been hell-bent on an invitation to the chateau. Now what had been his name? Van something. Van Hoofer? Something like that.
‘Hey, boy!’ Beano now derailed this gloomy train of thought. The dog had, with considerable difficulty, managed to leap back up on the bed, and stood with his stiff legs shaking. The Prince stroked him, not without a twist of the heart. He had been amazed to see, on his return, the extent to which, so suddenly, Beano had aged. Gone was the bounding bundle of red and white curls. Beano’s legs were stiff and his one eye looked cloudy and sticky with macular degeneration. He was getting old, Max saw, sadly.
The dog licked Max’s hand, and the Prince tickled him fiercely in the way Beano had so loved when he was a puppy. He buried his nose in Beano’s long ears and felt like howling for the child he had once been, for whom life was just one long sunny day and who could not even imagine the existence of adulthood and its responsibilities.
The Prince swung his long legs out of bed, padded to the window and poked his head through the curtains. The sky outside was blue and hot as usual, but he could take no pleasure in it. He missed the grey, cloudy skies of England. He missed the great green rolling estate at Oakeshott. But more than this, he missed Polly. He missed her smile. Her shy way of talking, her unexpectedly loud and gleeful laugh. Her passion for her subject, her stories about the children, her amazing body . . .
He knew she must be wondering what had happened to him; but what could he tell her? He had, anyway, lost his mobile phone, although now, after days of searching, he was beginning to wonder if someone had taken it on his father’s orders. Since when was Sedona a police state?
He felt something soft and wet nudging his hand. He picked his dog up and buried his nose in the animal’s curly head. ‘Oh Beano. What am I going to do?’
Chapter 27
‘It’s looking good,’ Barney whispered as Alexa, aloft on swaying black heels, staggered up the stone path into Lord Bedstead’s estate church.
‘Suppose so.’ Alexa looked round. It was a beautiful blue day, and the lane was full of flowering bushes, which in turn were full of singing birds. The church was the small, ancient, grey type with arched mullioned windows and a square crenellated tower. But the shoes were killing her and the English countryside wasn’t really her thing. Not unless you owned it, that was.
‘Not the bloody scenery,’ Barney hissed. ‘Over there!’ He gestured to where, on the other side of the lichened churchyard wall, a gleaming line of black helicopters were lined up in the grassy meadow.
Alexa’s eyes widened. Lord Bedstead’s
business interests had evidently ranged as far and wide as his libido and his memorial service was attracting huge numbers of what Barney described as the great and the bad. The lane leading to the lychgate had become a positive showroom of Bentleys and Aston Martins.
All of which had made taking the bus humiliating – Alexa could hardly remember the last time she had been on one. But Barney had made a joke of it, saying they must speculate to accumulate. They had speculated on Alexa’s clothes, blowing the last of their combined savings on a tight black dress with a plunging cleavage, a vastly broad-brimmed black hat and the heels. ‘I look much too tarty,’ she had objected.
‘Nonsense,’ Barney riposted. ‘You can’t look tarty enough on occasions like these. Death always makes people horny.’
And it was true that, on her way up the path, she had attracted more than her share of attention. ‘Damned fine filly that,’ a tall, handsome man with an outdoors complexion, thick silver hair and very naughty blue eyes had commented as she wiggled past.
‘Stonker Shropshire,’ Barney had hissed excitedly.
‘The Duke of Shropshire?’ Alexa gasped, reeling under a wave of money-and-title lust. The man who owned almost the entire county where her parents lived.
‘Yes, but don’t get too excited. He’s married. That’s his wife over there.’
Alexa regarded the short, plain woman with jealous eyes. Next to her tall, elegant and charismatic husband, she looked like a dull hen bird beside a peacock. How did a woman like that snare a duke?
Inside the chilly – amazingly chilly – church, Barney steered a shivering Alexa into a pew otherwise occupied by a boot-faced trout in a black straw boater and a man whose nose was so pointed and eyes so receding he resembled an eagle in a suit. They both looked her disapprovingly up and down.
Alexa ignored them. She knew that she looked beautiful with a rainbow of coloured light from the stained-glass window spilling across her breasts. Aware of a number of interested gazes, she stood as straight as her crippling heels permitted.
The pillared nave and the side aisles were rapidly filling up; it was standing room only at the back under the organ pipes. The sidesmen were running out of service sheets, a thick cream card affair printed by Smythson’s and bearing a photograph of Lord Bedstead looking like an enormous ancient baby in his floppy Garter bonnet and ribbons.
‘The grieving widow,’ Barney murmured, nudging Alexa in the direction of a woman with an obviously new facelift sporting a fascinator and an air of undisguised triumph.
Barney was making a great show of waving cheerfully at people, who, having stared back blankly for a few seconds, hesitantly waved in reply.
Alexa was by now shaking with the cold. ‘It’s f-freezing,’ she hissed at Barney, who was mouthing greetings at a heavy-faced woman in a pillbox.
‘Who’s that?’ the woman in the pillbox could be heard loudly demanding of her neighbour, a stooped-looking man in rusty black.
‘Here.’ Barney surreptitiously passed Alexa a small silver flask of brandy. ‘Keep your spirit levels up.’
They rose for the first hymn: ‘Abide With Me’.
‘I’m not sure I can.’ Barney sighed, after the obviously nervous organist fluffed the beginning twice and embarked on it a third time.
In the pew in front, various sleek-looking men had their heads bent respectfully. Leaning over slightly, Alexa could see that the entire row was working away on their respective BlackBerries. These, she assumed, were the helicopter owners.
The eulogy had begun.
‘The Lord Bedstead was, above all, a much-loved man . . .’
Alexa wondered if any old flames were actually present. She was particularly keen to see the one with the steel teeth. ‘From his very earliest years, it seems, the Earl was looked up to by his fellow man. He was known at school for his firm leadership of the younger boys . . .’
‘Beat them senseless whenever he got his hands on them, you mean,’ grumbled a fruity voice in the pew behind.
‘. . . and his unorthodox views during the war made him the focus of much controversy.’
‘Why was that?’ a young girl to the side whispered loudly. ‘Was he against the invasion of Iraq or something?’
Her father, next to her, shook his head. ‘He thought we should appease Hitler.’
The vicar was droning dutifully on.
‘He later became well known for the campaigning green management of his estates . . .’
There was a disturbance two rows in front. Alexa raised her chin to get a better view of a white-haired old lady with a hearing aid. ‘He was so stingy he made everyone use tea bags twice,’ she declared loudly. ‘There were notices in every bathroom telling you to use one square of loo paper only and not have more than three inches of water in your bath.’
There were more hymns for the organist to stumble through before a very small boy in a waistcoat led by a superior-looking blonde in a racily short purple tweed skirt, mounted the lectern and began to lisp ‘Jabberwocky’.
‘The grandson,’ sighed Barney. ‘How terribly moving.’
The child began. ‘’Twas brillig and the slithy toves . . .’
Some of the BlackBerrying helicopter owners looked up in astonishment. ‘What the bloody hell’s he talking about?’ Alexa heard one rasp to another.
‘Probably autistic,’ was the answer.
An anthem came next; the very small choir taking what seemed to Alexa an unconscionably long time to get through the handful of words on the service sheet. She had never known ‘Alleluia’ last so long, and by the time it was finished, her bottom was numb with the cold and she had long since lost contact with her feet.
A lumpy, black-clad woman now stepped up to the lectern.
‘The daughter,’ Barney whispered to Alexa.
‘Remember me when I am gone away . . .’
‘Husband’s a gambler,’ Barney added with relish, ‘so she really needed the dosh, but he’s left everything in trust for the grandchildren. She hasn’t got a brass farthing.’
‘Better by far you should forget and smile . . .’ the daughter concluded through obviously gritted teeth.
‘Than that you should remember and be sad.’
She shut her book with a grimace and stomped down the lectern steps with a face like thunder.
As the service neared its end, Alexa felt nervous. Once outside there would be only the briefest window to make her move and get her man before everyone started climbing back in their Bentleys. If Alexa failed to get inside a Bentley herself, it would be back on the bus.
‘Take your marks . . .’ Barney muttered, as the service ended with ‘In the Mood’ by the Glenn Miller orchestra from a CD player at the back of the church operated by one of the sidesmen. In a matter of seconds, Alexa, clinging to her companion, was down the aisle and outside amongst the gravestones.
‘Now listen.’ Barney was casting an expert view over the stream of alpha males issuing from the church porch. ‘Wharte-Hogge’s your man,’ he whispered, as a Humpty Dumpty-like figure came wobbling out and stood blinking for a moment or two in the sunlight. ‘Not gorgeous,’ he hissed, ‘but he’s just come into thirty thousand acres and a Vermeer.’
Alexa needed no second urging. Apparently overcome by emotion, she swooped on Lord Wharte-Hogge quicker than a seagull on a child’s ice cream. Weeping prettily, she asked to borrow his handkerchief. The rest – the sudden, further attack of grief; his assumption that she was a close member of the deceased’s family; her asking him to give her a lift home to London – had all been well rehearsed. By the time ‘In the Mood’ drew to a close, Alexa was shutting the door of the Wharte-Hogge Bentley and purring away.
Chapter 28
Things had changed overnight on the dig. The discovery of a skeleton had transformed everything. The small, shallow trench on which previously only Polly and the children had worked was suddenly buzzing with new people. A university archaeology department took charge. Funding was found. There was a
site director. Experts converged from all directions, as did speculation. Was it a murder? The outer edge of a Roman graveyard? A small, previously unsuspected settlement?
Or just a skeleton somewhat inexplicably located by an ancient lavatory block? Various and disparate though the new individuals on site were, it seemed to Polly that they were united in their determination that whatever it was, it should be more than that.
The Duke of Shropshire was keeping in close touch with developments. His hopes of a world-class site on his land were, Polly gathered, once again rampant, quite compensating for the fact that half his lawn was being dug up.
More people turned up every day. They seemed to Polly to fit more or less every category of archaeologist she had ever known or worked with. Paunchy and bearded (Neil, the site director), red and scrubbed (Rosamund, his deputy), fastidious and bespectacled (Sven from Sweden who spent all his time working), crusty (Marcus and Sam, students with an MP3 player and speakers in a plastic bag). And inevitably, site bunnies (Rose and Amber, who spent most of their time standing on the sidelines shaking their hair at Sam and Marcus and successfully avoiding heavy work).
Polly missed Kyle, Poppy and their friends. She had pleaded with Neil for them to stay, but the extra personnel on site, as well as new machinery, meant an increased and unacceptable level of potential danger for small people who didn’t always stay in the places they’d been told to.
‘Sharp tools, heavily laden wheelbarrows, you get the picture. It’s fairly risky insurance-wise,’ Neil said, shaking his head.
Kyle in particular had taken the news badly. ‘It’s not fair. I found the skull in the first place,’ he protested, stretching the truth unashamedly and making wild claims for himself. He was, Polly could see, going to make an excellent archaeologist one day.
‘Better to have them off site really,’ Neil added, after Mrs Butcher had taken her charges away for the final time. ‘Kids get a bit worried about bodies, you know. Think they’re scary and all that.’