Her parents and the Queen believed he had done so because he’d been jilted by Maudie and therefore couldn’t bear the pain of constantly seeing her at family events. Everyone else believed that things had simply got too hot for Frank, where his gambling debts were concerned, and that he had fled abroad until things had cooled down.
Most painful of all, to May, had been Maudie’s heartbroken despair. In Marlborough House’s secluded summerhouse she had said, between hiccupping sobs, ‘I thought Frank loved me, May. And he didn’t. Knowing that he didn’t – that he never had – was far worse than knowing he had been unfaithful to me.’ Tears had streamed down her face and dripped onto her dress. ‘I could have forgiven all that – did forgive all that – but I couldn’t accept a proposal he was only making under duress. I couldn’t marry him, knowing how unhappy I would make him. I couldn’t bear the thought of making Frank unhappy. I love him far too much to do that to him.’ And she had leaned her head on May’s shoulder and, with May’s arm sympathetically around her, had cried and cried until she was too exhausted to cry any more.
At the end of June the Queen made Eddy a duke, which puzzled May. ‘I don’t understand,’ she had said as she accompanied her mother to yet another Needlework Guild event. ‘Duke of what? And why? I’ve never heard of a prince being demoted to a duke before. Surely the only possible change of title is when the Prince becomes King?’
Princess Mary Adelaide fussed with the arrangement of her gossamer-light shawl. ‘It’s all to do with politics. The Prime Minister has made it quite clear to the Queen that if Eddy is to take a seat in the House of Lords – something he is, apparently, very keen to do – then it is necessary for him to be a peer of the realm. And a prince is not a peer. Only a duke – and of course earls, marquesses, viscounts and barons – are peers. I expect,’ she added, ‘that within the family we will still always refer to dear Eddy as “Prince Eddy”, and not as the “Duke of Clarence and Avondale”, which is the title the Queen has decided upon.’
Later, when she was on her own, May tried saying the title aloud. It seemed very cumbersome, and her private opinion was that either ‘Duke of Clarence’ or ‘Duke of Avondale’ would have been better than a double title, especially when the only historical Duke of Clarence she could remember was the duke who had so ignominiously drowned in a barrel of Malmsey wine.
In July there came a bright spot: an invitation to cousin Marie-Louise’s eighteenth birthday party, which was to be held in the Belgian Suite at Buckingham Palace.
‘I imagine it will be a very small, informal party,’ Princess Mary Adelaide said, ‘for your Aunt Lenchen and Uncle Christian are not the world’s best party-givers. Both of them are homebodies. The only contribution Christian makes to any social activity is to take his glass eye out and replace it with one of a different colour. I remember ten years or so ago, at Osborne House, he showed Ducky, Missy and Alicky his entire glass-eye collection. Aunt Marie told me Missy had nightmares for weeks.’
In reply to a letter May sent to Alicky, telling her of Eddy and Hélène’s romance, of Eddy’s new title and of Marie-Louise’s imminent birthday party, Alicky had written:
Dearest Kindred Spirit,
So glad you told me Eddy has found happiness with someone who truly loves him and that he isn’t going to have to settle for one of Granny Queen’s loveless arranged marriages. I know it caused a lot of hurt to his confidence when he carried out Granny Queen’s wishes and proposed to me, and when I didn’t accept him.
As for Uncle Christian and his glass-eye collection, I remember that incident so well! It was at that particular Osborne family get-together that you and I became Kindred Spirits – and that we became Kindred Spirits with Willy, although I have to admit that the Kindred Spirit thing with Willy is very hit-and-miss and I haven’t seen him since last year, when Irène and Heinrich’s baby boy was christened.
Marie-Louise sent me an invitation to her birthday party and although I count her a very dear friend and would have loved to come to England and meet up with her (and with you), it just isn’t possible, as Papa is not very well at the moment and relies on me very heavily.
And now I want to let you into a very great secret. I have made friends with a lady who can contact those who are in the spirit world, and she has contacted my mama. Mama has sent a message to me asking that I never forget my confirmation vows, and so I have now become a very good Lutheran and go to church through the week, as well as on Sunday; and, as Mama did, I visit local hospitals and orphanages and give what help I can to the poor. I am so happy knowing that, in doing so, I am pleasing Mama.
The letter had gone on to say that Ernie was under increasing pressure to find a suitable bride; that Alicky knew, with all her heart, that Nicky was her one true love; and that so far Waldemar – Irène and Heinrich’s little boy – was showing no signs of having inherited the family bleeding disease.
That Alicky, who always carried her enthusiasm to extremes and was far too fey and fatalistic for her own good, was now dabbling with spiritualism deeply disturbed May. She had been eleven when Alicky’s mother had died, and she remembered her Aunt Alice as being very practical and full of brisk common sense. Not at all the sort of person who would have thought it helpful to be sending messages to her highly susceptible daughter from beyond the grave.
The spacious Belgian Suite was on the ground floor of Buckingham Palace’s north-facing Garden Wing. Entering it with Dolly, May heard music playing and saw at once that as well as Toria, Looloo and a shockingly pale Maudie, there were cousins she hadn’t seen for quite a while: Ducky and Missy – Missy looking alarmingly sophisticated for a soon-to-be fifteen-year-old – and Ernie Hesse, and Ernie and Alicky’s eldest sister, Vicky.
With a slam of her heart May saw Eddy standing by one of the French windows that led into the garden. Hélène was with him and, even though his father was only yards away, in conversation with Marie-Louise’s father, Eddy’s arm was around Hélène’s waist.
There couldn’t have been a more public statement that they were a couple, and that their romance had his parents’ blessing. Before they should see her looking towards them, May looked swiftly away, intending to cross the room towards Maudie.
Ducky forestalled her. ‘I thought that eye-catching Romany-looking brother of yours might be here, May, but Marie-Louise says he’s in disgrace over something or other and has left the country. Is it true? I don’t want this party to be a complete waste of my time.’
She was thirteen and whereas Missy, only a year older, could have passed for being seventeen or eighteen, Ducky was still every inch a plain, awkward-looking adolescent.
Trying not to look as taken aback by Ducky’s bluntness as she felt, May said a little stiffly, ‘If you are referring to Frank, he’s abroad improving his foreign-language skills.’
Ducky looked glum. ‘I don’t suppose he would have taken any notice of me, even if he had been here. It’s always Missy who gets all the male attention.’
Looking across to where Missy was fluttering her eyelashes at a bemused Louis of Battenberg, May absolutely believed her. She looked round to see where Georgie was and, although he had been in the room when she had entered it, couldn’t see him anywhere. Wondering if Maudie had got it right about Georgie being in love with Missy, she said, ‘I understand Missy is quite smitten by Georgie.’
Ducky made a rude snorting sound. ‘If all Georgie’s wishes came true, she would be. Missy just enjoys teasing him and making him think she’s smitten by him. He’s so dull –– and for the last couple of years has stayed with us on Malta so often – that Missy says it was the only way of relieving the tedium of his company. Missy,’ she added, ‘can be very naughty when she wants to be.’
May didn’t doubt it and was quite relieved to see that Vicky had now joined Missy and Louis, and that Vicky had slid a hand proprietorially through her husband’s arm.
‘Mama wants Missy to catch the eye of a good marriage prospect, now that she’s fourt
een, going on fifteen,’ Ducky continued, showing no desire to walk away and startle someone else with her racy conversation, ‘and so she’s wasting her time flirting with Louis of Battenberg when he already has a wife.
‘Your mother must have been hoping she would accept a proposal from Georgie.’
‘Lord, no! Mama says it was bad enough her having married into Granny Queen’s Saxe-Coburg-Gotha clan, without Missy or me doubling up her error, although she might have made an exception where Eddy was concerned – I think Mama would quite like for Missy to be an empress one day as well as a queen. As it is, it looks as if Eddy is taken and I know that, even if he wasn’t, Missy wouldn’t fancy him in a month of Sundays. She likes men with Russian chutzpah and masculine aggressiveness. Eddy Wales is too polite to excite Missy.’
In an adjoining room, where the carpets had been rolled back, dance music was now playing.
‘Goody!’ Ducky brightened visibly. ‘Now I have to find someone I can bully into dancing with me. Have you seen Ernie Hesse anywhere? Ernie is always good fun. If Missy had any sense, she’d marry Ernie.’ And she darted off in search of him, leaving May wondering if it was their half-Russian blood that made the Edinburgh sisters so unnervingly uninhibited.
She looked across to the French windows, but the little group that had been standing there was there no longer. Maudie, too, was no longer anywhere to be seen and, remembering her party manners, May went in search of Marie-Louise.
‘Darling, darling May!’ An elated Marie-Louise almost squeezed the breath out of her. ‘Thank you so much for the little book of poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. I shall treasure it always. Isn’t it a shame that darling Alicky was unable to come? She’s very much her papa’s hostess, now that she’s the only daughter left at home. Dear Vicky is here, though, and so that is some compensation, but not Irène.’ She lowered her voice and said confidingly, ‘I believe Irène is expecting another happy event.’
Georgie Wales came up to them. ‘I don’t do dancing,’ he said to Marie-Louise, red-faced with embarrassment, ‘but I’ve been told it would be awfully remiss of me not to have a birthday dance with you.’
Marie-Louise giggled. ‘Thank you, Georgie. I’ll make it as painless as possible.’
Dolly then asked May to dance and, after Dolly, she had a satisfying number of other dance partners, including an uninspiring older German cousin of Marie-Louise’s, who never spoke a word to her and smelled unpleasantly of pear drops.
Because the dancing was taking place in a room far smaller than a ballroom, she was always aware of who else was on the makeshift dance floor. Missy seldom left it; even Uncle Bertie danced with her. Eddy had one dance with Marie-Louise and then danced only twice, both times with Hélène. After their second dance together they disappeared in the direction of the main drawing room.
After her dance with Uncle Christian, and feeling in need of a breather, May went in search of a glass of lemonade and Maudie. After a lot of looking, she found her standing at the set of French windows that Eddy and Hélène had been standing by earlier in the evening.
Maudie gave her a sad smile. ‘My poor broken heart doesn’t know how to mend itself. Do you know where Frank has gone, May? Have you heard anything from him?’
May shook her head. Frank had always been a poor letter-writer, but his not having let their distraught mother know where he was, or for how long he intended to be away, suggested a thoughtlessness that she wasn’t going to forgive lightly.
‘From as far back as I can remember, I always imagined I would one day marry Frank,’ Maudie said bleakly, ‘and now that I know that’s not going to happen, I don’t think I’ll ever marry anyone. Have you ever felt that way about anyone, May? Have you ever met someone you absolutely knew you could build your life around?’
May hesitated, and then she said slowly, ‘Yes, I have.’ She couldn’t possibly reveal that person as being Eddy, but there had been someone else who, although she had never had a crush on him, she knew she had liked and admired enough to have built her life around. That had been Thaddeus. She confessed, ‘It was someone I met when I was living in Florence. He was only a few years older than I was, and very attractive and talented. I always loved spending time with him, and for quite a while after my return to England I missed him enormously.’
Maudie’s jaw dropped. Nothing – absolutely nothing – could have amazed her more than that May, always so very correct and proper, had had a secret romance in Italy that no one knew anything about.
Frantically she tried to think of eligible Italian royals, but her knowledge of the Italian royal family was sketchy and the only name she could think of was that of Vittorio Emanuele, the Prince of Naples. But as he was only twenty and it had been seven years since the Teck family had been banished to Florence, May’s secret romance couldn’t possibly have been with him. Florence was, however, a very popular destination for sun-starved Russian royals.
The idea of May having had a secret romance with a hot-blooded Romanov was so mind-boggling that Maudie simply couldn’t get her head around it. She remembered that although all Granny Queen’s grandchildren had more than a generous dash of German blood in their veins, May was all-German, something that was easily forgotten, when she had been born and brought up in England.
‘Was he a German royal?’ she asked. ‘Or perhaps a Russian royal?’
‘Good heavens, no! He wasn’t royal at all. And he was Irish.’
‘Irish?’ Maudie put a hand on the back of a convenient chair to steady herself. ‘Irish?’
‘Yes.’ Having gone so far, May didn’t see why she shouldn’t go the full hundred yards. ‘And he was – is – an artist.’
It occurred to Maudie that she was having her leg pulled. ‘You’re teasing me, May. You have to be.’
‘No, I’m not. And we didn’t have a romance, although I think we came very close to having one. We still keep in touch by letter.’ She paused and then added, ‘He’s married now and living in America.’
Through the wide-open doors leading into the adjoining room they could see chairs being laid out for a game of Musical Chairs.
Maudie said. ‘Have you ever told anyone else, May?’
‘Absolutely not. And I shan’t.’
Maudie understood. Just as the truth about how far things had gone between her and Frank was something she knew May would never, ever speak about to anyone, so May trusted her with her secret.
The game of Musical Chairs was apparently only for girls, and as Marie-Louise, Vicky, Toria, Looloo, Ducky, Missy and Hélène began racing like mad things around the chairs to music from a phonograph, Eddy strolled back into the principal drawing room and looked around, as if searching for somebody.
May looked away from him quickly, but not quickly enough. Their eyes met and, with a relaxing of his shoulders, he began threading his way through knots of relatives to where she and Maudie were standing.
‘Oh dear,’ Maudie said. ‘Eddy’s going to do the caring-brother thing and ask me why I’m not joining in with anything.’
He didn’t. Instead, when he reached them, he said to May, ‘I was hoping you would be here tonight. I expect you’ve heard the good news about Hélène and me, but I wanted to tell you myself.’
It was so unexpected, and she was so overcome at his having sought her out in such a way, that all May could manage in response was to say stiltedly, ‘I’m very happy for both of you.’
‘I knew you would be.’ He smiled the slow, languid smile that turned her knees to water. ‘I remember unburdening myself to you about my love life when everyone expected me to marry Mossy, and when I was determined not to. You were a very good listener, May. I appreciated it. I also know that when I talk to you, nothing I say goes any further.’
May was aware that Maudie had moved away and they were on their own. With her heart feeling as if it was beating somewhere up in her throat, she said, ‘When will there be an official announcement?’
‘When the Queen has give
n us permission to marry – and we can’t ask her for permission until the Roman Catholic thing is got out of the way.’
May said faintly, ‘Roman Catholic thing? Is Hélène Roman Catholic?’
‘Yes. I expect that was why, when Granny Queen was matchmaking, she never added darling Hélène’s name to her list of possible brides. It was a silly oversight, when the RC thing can so easily be sorted.’
‘Can it?’ May frowned, and then said in puzzlement, ‘Then why couldn’t Georgie marry Julie?’
‘Oh, that was completely different. Julie was a commoner. Hélène is a royal princess.’
The game of Musical Chairs had come to an end and the breathless participants were making their way back into the drawing room.
As Eddy saw Hélène walk into the room, arm-in arm with Marie-Louise, he said, bringing their conversation to an end, ‘Hélène’s father has written to Cardinal Manning informing him of our forthcoming engagement, and so you see, May, there is no need for any anxiety. Manning is the Archbishop of Westminster and the highest Catholic authority in England. Once he gives his approval – and the Count of Paris is certain that he will – everything will be straightforward.’
And with an aching heart and all her pleasure in the evening extinguished, she watched him cross the room to Hélène’s side and slide his arm once more lovingly around her waist.
Chapter Seventeen
AUGUST 1890, MARLBOROUGH HOUSE
‘I simply can’t feel the same about Maudie, after the way she has broken poor Frank’s heart and driven him out of the country with grief,’ Princess Mary Adelaide said emotionally to May a few days later, as they travelled by train from Richmond into central London in a private carriage. ‘And why you are spending even more time with her now than you did before she turned down Frank’s proposal of marriage, I can’t imagine.’
The Summer Queen Page 17