The sudden silence was harsh and ugly, unlike the sweet, companionable silences that had fallen between them so often.
‘How did you know?’ he asked at last, in a voice that seemed to come from a great distance.
‘Your operatives were very good, but not quite good enough. A few things were out of place. I noticed because I tend to keep things as my great-aunt left them. I didn’t believe it at first, but when I questioned my neighbours I learned a lot. Like that they entered by the front door. That’s why nobody was alarmed. They looked so respectable.’
Her eyes were very cold as she said, ‘I wondered how they got a key to my house. And then I remembered the ball, and how you danced me along the terrace, taking both my hands so that I had to leave my purse behind. You did the “heady passion” bit very well, I’ll give you that. And you judged the time so well. Just long enough for someone to open my purse and take a wax impression of the key.’
She waited to see if he would answer, but he stood silent, looking at her with eyes full of pain.
‘But why?’ she said at last. ‘You could have asked me for those letters when we first met in London. You thought I was negotiating. So why not come right out with it there and then? Why invite me here at all?
‘That was the question I should have asked myself a long time ago, but I wasn’t thinking straight. And why? Because of all that romantic claptrap you showered on me. There wasn’t a word of truth in it. You just wanted me in a daze so that I didn’t know whether I was coming or going, because that way you could keep me here as long as it suited you. And I fell for it. Me, who prides herself on her cool, logical mind. I could laugh when I remember how I actually lectured you about the lessons of history, but I forgot the most important one, didn’t I? Put not your trust in princes!
‘And all the time I was here your people were going through my house. You didn’t want to buy, you wanted to steal.’
‘That’s not true,’ he said harshly. ‘I always meant to pay you for those letters, but I was afraid you might have copies, or keep some back.’
‘Oh, boy, you were really thorough, weren’t you? You even tried my bank. But I don’t have a safety deposit box, as I gather the manager told you. Of course, there are a lot more banks to try. Who knows what I might be hiding in some little out-of-the-way branch-?’
‘Stop!’ he said harshly. ‘I deserve all you say of me, but let me tell you the truth-’
‘You don’t deal in truth. You’re a king; you have other priorities. You as good as warned me about that, and I ignored it because-’ She choked suddenly. He reached for her but she turned away quickly, throwing up her hands. ‘Because I’m a fool.’
‘No, because you love me, as I love you.’
‘Oh, please!’ she cried. Then her manner changed, became formal. ‘Your Majesty can abandon those tactics now. They’ve served their purpose very nicely.’
‘That’s enough,’ he shouted, seizing her shoulders and giving her a little shake. She tried to pull away but he tightened his hands. ‘No, you’re going to listen to me. I may not deserve it, but you’re going to.’
She stood still in his hands, her eyes burning. ‘Get it over with, then. It’ll be a relief to us both to be done with this.’
‘Everything you say was true about me in the beginning. I didn’t treat you well. I mistrusted you, I deceived you, I lured you here and I had you burgled. I thought you were an adventuress and that was the only safe way to deal with you. I’m not proud of it, but I thought it was necessary.
‘I was wrong. I came to realise that you weren’t as I’d thought. I called my people in London and pulled them off the job.’
‘Except that they’d already been through my house by then.’
‘Unfortunately, yes. I did what I could. I was in love with you by that time. I tried to tell you about this the day you left, to prepare you. But I lost my nerve. I prayed that you’d never find out how I’d behaved, and that you and I could make a new and honest beginning.’
‘But you planned to hide the truth about what you’d done. How honest is that?’
‘Not very,’ he admitted. ‘But I was afraid. I couldn’t face the thought of losing you.’
She didn’t relent. ‘The King is never afraid,’ she said. ‘You should remember that.’
‘I’m afraid now,’ he said quietly. ‘More afraid than I’ve ever been in my life. At one time I couldn’t have admitted to fear, but now I can. You did that for me. Now I see us drawing further apart and I don’t know how to stop it.’
‘There is no way to stop it,’ she said wretchedly. ‘And I don’t want to.’
‘Don’t say that.’ In an instant his fingers were over her lips, trying to silence the terrible words. But she shook herself free.
‘It’s too late,’ she said fiercely. ‘And you don’t have to bother any more because I’ve got what you wanted. Here!’ Near her on the floor stood a large canvas bag with two leather handles. She dumped it on the table between them and pulled it open to reveal the contents. Daniel stared at the mountain of papers within. ‘There they are,’ Lizzie said. ‘Take them, and then we need never see each other again.’
‘What-are these?’
‘Alphonse’s letters.’
‘You had them all the time?’
‘No. Only since yesterday. “Liz” gave them to me.’
‘But she’s been dead for years.’
‘No. Dame Elizabeth has been dead for years, but she wasn’t “Liz”. We’ve all been barking up the wrong tree. It was Bess all the time.
‘Her name is Elizabeth too, and people used to call her Liz for short. But Auntie ordered her to change it, because it was confusing to have a Liz and a Lizzie. So she became Bess, and of course I never knew her as anything else. But your grandfather did. She was always “Liz” to him. Look.’
She opened her purse and took out a picture. It was about ten years old, an amateurish family shot, showing the teenage Lizzie with the actress, standing haughtily, every inch the grande dame. Standing just behind them was a thin little woman with slightly untidy hair. Her dress was nondescript, her face was bare, its only adornment a cheerful smile. Daniel stared at her in disbelief.
‘But she’s-’
‘Exactly,’ Lizzie said. ‘She’s nothing to look at. Not beautiful or glamorous, not a titled lady or a star, not at all the sort of woman you’d expect to be a king’s mistress. And she was his mistress. His letters leave no doubt of it.
‘She was a servant, illegitimate, and in his world she’d have been called a nobody. But she has a great, generous spirit, and she was the love of his life.
‘She’s kept her secret all these years. But now she’s dying, and when she had that attack she called me home so that she could give me these. She said I could do whatever I liked with them. So here they are. Take them, and forget I exist. You’ve got all you ever really wanted from me.’
In a daze Daniel began to draw the letters out, recognising his grandfather’s handwriting even though there was something subtly different about it. It was larger, freer, and Alphonse, a man of few words, had covered endless sheets of paper, as though pouring out a soul.
Daniel went through one letter after another, glancing at each briefly, just long enough to still the last of his doubts.
‘What did she say when she gave them to you?’ he asked.
When there was no reply he looked up and found himself alone. Lizzie had gone.
Hurriedly he went out into the corridor, but it too was empty. A dreadful suspicion sent him to the window. She must have had a cab waiting all the time, he realised. All that could be seen of it now was the rear vanishing down the long avenue, until it reached the huge wrought-iron gates.
There was still time to stop her. All he had to do was call the gatekeeper. He reached for the telephone, but then checked himself. The habit of command was strong, but right now a command would lose him everything. Whatever he might say, she did not want to hear.
He stayed motionless, undecided, and as he watched the iron gates opened, the car went through, turned and vanished from sight.
CHAPTER SIX
I T WAS very quiet in the King’s private rooms. The great clock in the corner silently proclaimed midnight, and the only sound was the rustling of paper on the big table that had been cleared of everything else. Outside the door Frederick sat with orders to permit nobody to disturb Daniel.
Nothing in his life had ever been so important as what he was doing now, fitting together the letters that had passed between two people for thirty years, until one of them had been cruelly struck down so that he could not even utter his beloved’s name. It was more than a correspondence. It was a testimony of powerful, enduring love that awed him as he read.
Lizzie had said there was no doubt that they had been lovers in every sense of the word, and Daniel had already discerned as much from the ‘Liz’ letters. Yet they were relatively restrained. Alphonse’s were totally frank. He had loved this woman with his heart, his soul and his great, vigorous body. He had loved her fiercely, sexually, without false modesty or pride, and she had stimulated him to ignore his advancing years and love her with the urgent desire of a much younger man. Daniel, no prude, found himself blushing at some passages.
Yet this in itself was not the greatest surprise. That had come with the discovery that his grandfather, a strictly traditional man where ‘a woman’s place’ was concerned, had turned to Liz for advice. As time passed she had become more than his lover. She had been his counsellor.
Suddenly Daniel grew still. His own name had leapt out at him from the paper.
I try to do my best by the boy, but what am I to do when he takes such wild ideas into his head? Why piano lessons? He’s going to be a king, not join an orchestra.
Daniel read the phrase again and again, and suddenly time turned back and he was a boy of ten, wanting to learn the piano because it was only in making music that he could find the strength to cope with the pressures that were already threatening to crush him. But all authority had lain with his grandfather, who didn’t understand, and who was impatient of explanation.
And then, out of the blue, Alphonse had yielded. A fine music master had been engaged and a new joy had entered Daniel’s life. Yet even while he’d rejoiced he’d puzzled over his grandfather’s volte face.
He went to the secret drawer where he’d kept the other side of the correspondence since Lizzie’s first departure, yanking it out in a violent movement quite different from his usual restraint. The letters spilled all over the floor and he dropped to his knees, searching as though his life depended on it.
At last he found what he wanted: a letter from Liz in response.
Say yes to what he asks, my dearest. His life will be so hard. Indulge him and make his coming burden a little easier. Let the poor child have some pleasure. However much it is, it still won’t be enough.
There was more. For years Alphonse had laid his personal problems in his darling’s hands and trusted her answers. Daniel found the story of his childhood and teenage years relived in these letters.
He remembered his father’s death. How stiff and distant Alphonse had seemed over the loss of his only son. It was only to Liz that he had released the rage and pain that consumed him. In letter after letter he’d let out a howl of fatherly anguish.
Now he realised how much he’d overlooked when he’d first glanced through these pages. The sight of his own name in Liz’s letters gave him a sensation that he’d never known before, and which at first he couldn’t identify. But it was a good feeling-of being able to let down his guard in a trusted presence. Where Alphonse had worried how he should rear the future king, Liz had seen only the bereaved child.
He’s just a little boy…let him be happy while he can…make him safe…tell him you love him…don’t let him be ashamed to cry…be kind to him…be kind to him…
Over weeks, months and years she had counselled love and gentleness to the child.
In Daniel’s mind those years were a blur. But now scenes began to come back to him: himself at nine years old, fighting back the tears even in the privacy of his own room, because now he was heir to the throne, and a man, and men didn’t cry. Then his grandfather coming in, seeing the tears he was too late to hide. He’d waited to be blamed, but instead the stern face had softened, a kindly hand had rested on his shoulder, and a gruff voice had whispered, ‘I know, my boy. I know.’
Other things. The music lessons-understood now for the first time. And Tiger, the mongrel, his own special care and his dearest friend. So much owed to this woman he’d never known.
Daniel took out the picture that Lizzie had left behind. It was hard to see much of Liz, standing in the shadows behind the other two. But he could make out the gentle glow of her face. And suddenly he could identify the unknown feeling that had eased his heart. His mother had died when he was a baby, and he’d never known a mother’s love, but over the years and the miles Liz had tried to make up for that lack. And she’d succeeded more than any other woman could have done. Looking at her now, Daniel thought he could understand why.
He hadn’t noticed the hours pass until Frederick knocked on the door. He answered it, but didn’t allow him in. Frederick was startled at his pallor.
‘Speak to my secretary,’ Daniel commanded. ‘Cancel any appointments I have for tomorrow. Say I’m detained on urgent business. And send me in some food.’
Through the night he worked, and then through the following day. When he came to an end he was unshaven and exhausted. But now he knew what he had to do.
She would sell the house, Lizzie decided as the plane headed back across the English channel. She had kept it almost as the Dame had left it, but now everything would remind her of the man who’d won her love with a lie. Just because she was a historian that didn’t mean she must live in the past. With the house gone she would put everything behind her, abandon her book on Alphonse, and find a new life for herself.
Her anger lasted until she was indoors and under the shower. But the hot water couldn’t lave her grief away and she let the tears come freely. She was a woman who never cried, but she cried now for the magic that had been a delusion, and for a feeling that she knew would never come again as long as she lived. Tonight she would let herself mourn what might have been. Tomorrow she would put it behind her and become a different woman, a more resolute and, if necessary, a harder one. Her mourning was for that too.
She spent the next day making plans. By evening the house bore a ‘For Sale’ notice and she told herself that things were proceeding wonderfully. Now all she wanted was to get out of here fast. She obtained some tea chests and began packing things away. With luck she could be out in a few days, leaving an agent to sell the house.
She worked blindly while the thoughts thrummed through her head. Everything that had happened in Voltavia had been an illusion, including Daniel’s feelings. She’d been useful to him. Now he had what he wanted, and she was disposable. That was all there was to it. At least she had the advantage of knowing exactly where she stood. As she threw things into tea chests her anger mounted.
Midnight passed, then one, then two in the morning. With her mind in turmoil there was no point in going to bed. She was still working frantically when the front bell rang. She opened the door and at once a hand came through the gap, preventing her slamming it closed.
‘Don’t shut me out,’ Daniel begged. ‘Not until you’ve heard what I have to say.’
‘We’ve said everything. Please go away Daniel. Nothing can make it right, and why bother?’
‘Listen to me!’ As she turned away he seized her shoulders fiercely. ‘You have to.’
‘Don’t tell me what I have to do. I’m not one of your subjects.’ She wrenched free and went into the kitchen to put on the kettle. It was a way of not looking at him. If he saw her face he might also see the leap of joy she hadn’t been able to suppress at the sight of him. She thought she’d controlled i
t now, but she couldn’t be sure, and it was wisest not to trust him.
He followed her and stood watching as she moved about. ‘Not a word?’ he asked at last. ‘I turn up at this hour and you’re not even curious?’
‘What is there to be curious about? I’m sure you snapped your fingers and everybody jumped. Did they hold the plane for you?’
‘There wasn’t one. I chartered a special plane because all I could think of was getting to you. And I find a “For Sale” sign and you packing to leave.’ His voice became tinged with anger. ‘You really weren’t going to give me a second chance, were you?’
‘You don’t need a second chance,’ she cried. ‘You’ve got everything you wanted. And you were brilliant. I’ll give you that. You schemed and manipulated like a pro. But then, of course, you are a pro. A king would have to be. Well done, Your Majesty. But don’t expect me to applaud and say it’s all right.’
‘Do you really believe that?’ he asked quietly. ‘You think there was nothing in my feelings for you but scheming?’
She shrugged. ‘Why deny it? It’s a perfectly honourable position for a king. Not for a man, of course, but what does that matter? The man can always hide behind the king, and that’s what you’re good at.’
He was about to hurl an angry reply at her when he caught a look at her face and read in it the misery and exhaustion of the last thirty-six hours.
‘I’ll never forgive myself for hurting you,’ he said. ‘It’s true I wasn’t honest with you at the start, but I swear that was only for a short time. It didn’t take me long to see how good and true you are, how much better than my fears. If you’ll let me, I’ll spend my life making it up to you.’
But his words washed over her. She couldn’t answer. She could only look at him sadly, thinking of the chance that was lost for ever.
‘How is Bess?’ he asked.
‘Holding on, but she’s very weak. I’m visiting her today.’
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