Christmas in Paris

by Jackie French

  She took the last slice of toasted cheese with her as she left.

  Chapter 2

  Middle-class girls dream of being wives and mothers. Girls of the upper echelons know that others will care for their children, their meals, their clothes. They dream of alliances, and their families plan them. Those alliances bring power.

  Miss Lily, 1913

  SHILLINGS, 18 JANUARY 1929

  SOPHIE

  ‘Pardon the intrusion so early, your ladyship, but the Prince of Wales is in the breakfast room.’

  Sophie opened her eyes. She had been dreaming: gold grass that crackled underfoot and white-trunked trees; a green-eyed man with sun-kissed skin, bare chested as he sat on a stump of wood and carved his crosses.

  She blinked at the small, nervous maid in the doorway. Beside her Nigel woke and yawned. The room smelled of the apple-wood flames twisting up the fireplace, her own perfume and the bay rum Nigel used after shaving. Outside the wind stroked the old stones of Shillings Hall. ‘Did you say the Prince of Wales, Amy?’

  ‘Yes, your ladyship. In the breakfast room, your ladyship. Sorry, your ladyship.’ Amy bobbed a curtsey.

  Well, thought Sophie, today at least would not be boring.

  Three years earlier she had flown across the world to save the man yawning beside her. Her reward: a husband she loved, twins she adored, an estate run by the excellent agent she had appointed, a household that ran perfectly.

  She was beginning to realise that a happy ending might be a slightly dull one.

  Though, of course, she now had a title too, and a prince who felt free to inhabit their breakfast room.

  ‘Did His Royal Highness say what he wanted?’ asked Nigel sleepily. Presumably not breakfast, thought Sophie. The Prince of Wales rarely ate breakfast or luncheon, convinced, despite his acute thinness, that he was chubby.

  ‘His Royal Highness said he was due to launch a ship at Southampton this morning, your lordship.’

  ‘Which is probably why David has vanished in the other direction,’ murmured Nigel. The heir to the throne’s habit of not appearing at official functions was legendary to those who knew him, though of course never mentioned in the press. The public wanted a prince charming, and should have one.

  ‘Tell His Royal Highness we will be there immediately.’ Nigel swung his legs out of bed.

  ‘Nonsense. Stop pandering to him,’ said Sophie. ‘You need to shave and Green needs to do my hair properly. James and Hannelore are coming to lunch, remember?’ She turned back to Amy. ‘Please tell His Royal Highness he has to have a cup of coffee and a bowl of porridge before I get there. Tell him he’s as thin as a match with the wood shaved off and that I will be seriously annoyed if I don’t see a nearly empty bowl in front of him.’

  Amy looked even more terrified.

  ‘Just tell him we will be there as soon as we can,’ Nigel assured her. ‘Would you mind seeing that his guards get breakfast too? In the library, I think. His Royal Highness always forgets they need to be fed.’

  Nigel turned to Sophie as Amy shut the door. ‘Darling, he is the Prince of Wales.’

  ‘And I am an ignorant colonial and so I don’t know one is not supposed to order a prince to eat his porridge. Besides, David likes women ordering him around.’

  Nigel paused, his hand on his brocade dressing grown. ‘Has David made a pass at you?’

  ‘Of course, darling. It would have been rude of him not to. David does like married women. How do the Americans put it? Married women never tell, rarely swell, and are grateful as hell. But he was sweet when I said no.’

  ‘You should have told me.’ It was impossible to interpret Nigel’s emotions from his words.

  Sophie hesitated. Intercourse had become an impossibility for Nigel since the surgery shortly after their wedding. Nigel, of all people, knew that did not mean the end of physical satisfaction for Sophie, and nor had it. But Sophie knew that even a touch anywhere abdominal could mean agony for Nigel. Although managing well, he still had days when pain from what the surgeon diagnosed as growing adhesions — places where the scar tissue was growing into other organs — made it difficult to leave his bed. The condition was not usually dangerous, but that did not lessen the pain, or the exhaustion pain brought with it.

  Sophie suspected that sexual desire might lead to pain too. She was the one now who subtly warded off Nigel’s even subtler sexual overtures.

  Was this a mistake? They had never discussed his limitations or desires. They should have, Sophie realised, just as she should speak of the man who was as likely as Nigel to have fathered the twins who were now probably spitting out their own porridge in the nursery down the hall.

  Sophie had slept with John just once, a night of desperation and joy in his hut at Thuringa, before her wild flight across the world to be with Nigel before the operation that might have killed him. That extraordinary man with dark green eyes, so different from the dapper Prince of Wales. And from Nigel, whom she loved . . .

  ‘You will never need to reassure me,’ said Nigel quietly. ‘If you wish to have an affair —’

  ‘I don’t.’

  Nigel reached for his dressing gown, rather than ring for Brooks, his valet. ‘You will one day.’ He spoke with the confidence of a man who knew women well.

  Sophie thrust away the memory of the scent of gum leaves and fresh sweat. This was not the day to discuss the complications of sex, not with a prince of the realm hopefully now scoffing porridge below. ‘Well, if I do have an affair,’ she said lightly, ‘it wouldn’t be with David. I am far too outspoken to be a prince’s mistress.’

  ‘You’d demand Home Rule for Ireland and legal contraception instead of a diamond bracelet?’

  ‘At the very least.’ She smiled at him, this darling man she would never regret marrying, despite her longing for deep blue sky and blue-hazed hills — and the occasional slow burn of a body that longed for love. Sweat and twisting limbs, not discreet, soft loving touches in the night, the call of a mopoke as if it were laughing at them, the thud of a wallaby startled by the sounds of human passion . . .

  She thrust the memory away again. Nigel had always known Rose and Danny might not be his. He knew she had loved the man who had called himself John to honour his twin brother, dead in the Great War. Some had called ‘John’ a saint. Sophie knew that he was not, or not if sainthood demanded celibacy.

  Sophie had loved Nigel for years; she had loved Miss Lily even longer. But she had not married him when he had first asked her, after the war, but almost a decade later when he had needed her to save his life, and Shillings. She loved Shillings too, the isolated estate wrapped in its ancient hedges and stone-walled fields. But this cold grey morning she longed for the scent of the billy boiling on a campfire of eucalypt branches, of summer sweat, and for the uninhibited yelling of cicadas.

  ‘Homesick?’ Nigel asked.

  Darling Nigel. He always understood her. ‘A little. It’s the long winter days.’

  ‘You used to love snow.’

  ‘That was before I got chilblains in makeshift hospitals in France and Belgium,’ she said drily.

  The door opened. A good lady’s maid never knocked. Green was the perfect lady’s maid. She was also one of Nigel’s oldest friends, almost as close as Jones, who had once been the Shillings butler and was now Nigel’s secretary, godfather to the twins and, since Green’s return from Australia, once again her lover. Green was entirely happy for others to have husbands. She merely did not want one for herself.

  Green placed the tea tray on the side table. Three teacups, not two. A maid who was a friend drank tea with you. ‘The Prince of Wales —’

  ‘Is in the breakfast room. I know,’ said Sophie, pouring the tea, smoky and fragrant and imported from Japan, then handed Nigel and Green their cups. She took a Bath Oliver and nibbled.

  Green sipped her tea. ‘Actually he’s up in the nursery playing horsey with the twins.’

  Sophie grinned. David was impossible. Moody, dema
nding, irresponsible, but how could you not like a prince who appeared at dawn to play horsey with your twins?

  ‘With a bit of luck Nanny will order him to eat up his porridge too.’ Nanny had once had her own name, but had been shocked when Sophie had used it. Sophie had not made that mistake again. ‘The green wool dress and jacket?’ she added to Green, as Nigel crossed the room to the door that connected to his dressing room, where Brooks would be waiting, today’s tweeds warming by the fire.

  ‘The claret silk dress with the ruby beading,’ said Green firmly. ‘After all, he is the Prince of Wales. You might not get a chance to change for lunch either and the prinzessin always dresses beautifully.’

  ‘Royal poise. Hannelore would make a hessian sack look stunning.’ Sophie gazed out at the snow. ‘Motorcars,’ she muttered. ‘I liked it better when it took most of a day to get here by train. Now people can invite themselves whenever they like.’

  ‘You could have said no,’ said Green mildly, sipping her tea.

  ‘Hannelore is my oldest friend, even if she keeps inviting me to Germany to meet this miracle politician of hers. I am never going to Germany again, and she should know why. And James . . .’

  Sophie took another biscuit. James Lorrimer, public servant in the most literal sense, spymaster and confidant, had once asked her to marry him. Through most of the Great War they had both assumed that she would. Now he too was a friend. ‘James will want something too.’

  ‘He hopes you’ll open the London house again so you can keep an eye on upper-class bolshevism,’ said Green.

  Sophie sighed. ‘I have attended six extremely cold and very boring meetings with Lady Mary, and given James my report. The British communists are good hearted, ineffectual and carefully ignorant of what is really happening in the Soviet Union. As far as I am concerned Nigel and I have done our duties to our countries, and more.’

  ‘Nigel would say that one’s duty continues till one dies,’ said Green.

  ‘And what would Miss Lily say?’

  ‘The same,’ said Green, who had known Nigel and Miss Lily for far longer than Sophie had, a fact Sophie only sometimes resented. ‘Noblesse oblige.’

  ‘I am not noble, even if Nigel has given me his title. I am an Australian of working-class stock and my factories feed the Empire. I’ve done enough duty for one lifetime.’

  Green eyed her shrewdly. ‘But you are bored.’

  ‘Oh, dear. Greenie, darling, do I show it?’

  ‘I don’t think Nigel has noticed, or Jones. Jones is happy with a quiet life at last. And Nigel . . .’

  Green grew silent. Both women knew Nigel had hoped to win political influence when he finally took up his seat in the House of Lords after the war. But while Miss Lily had quietly commanded the respect of most of the most influential women — and some of the men — of the great houses of Europe, Nigel was . . . unremarkable. Not a bad speaker; a sound man, but not compelling.

  Nigel had not been sorry when increasing illness had forced an end to an unspectacular career. He showed no signs of wanting to resume it. Perhaps he had accepted he had neither the charisma nor the connections to influence government policy. Perhaps he simply no longer had the stamina.

  Did he wish for more? Sophie had never asked him. Nor had he asked her.

  ‘I can tell because I’m bored too,’ said Green, her blue eyes frank and friendly under her bobbed hair. As a lady’s maid, Green did not wear a maid’s cap, just a black dress — a subtly more glamorous one than other ladies’ maids, created by a Paris fashion house to be unobtrusive, but fit her still most excellent body in the most flattering way possible.

  Green had been Miss Lily’s maid and companion in adventure for decades, often in the service of their country. She had left only when Miss Lily had been forced to vanish during the war, but returned to Shillings at Jones’s request to support Sophie’s rescue of Hannelore from the rebels after the war. Green had shared Sophie’s life in Australia as her maid there too, as Sophie tripled the vast business empire her father had left her then campaigned for her ‘almost’ success in the election.

  ‘Back at Thuringa you’d have seduced a handsome young stockman.’

  ‘I can’t do that here,’ said Green regretfully. Like nearly all the Shillings servants and tenants, except for Jones, she had been born on the estate, and was related to almost every household. ‘I’m not even sure I’d want a young stockman any more.’ She hesitated. ‘I miss Lily. I thought I wanted routine after the war. But life with Lily was . . . eventful. I miss that too.’

  ‘But Miss Lily has gone,’ said Sophie softly, trying to ignore her own pang of loss for the woman she loved. So Green was bored too. ‘We both know why.’ She put down her teacup. ‘At least we have a royal prince to entertain us this morning. That will be diverting, at least. And I will wear the claret silk.’

  ‘With pearls,’ said Green. ‘The long ones, in a double drape.’

  ‘And pearls. Or maybe I will call Ethel’s nephew and have him whisk us off to Paris or Istanbul in his aircraft.’

  ‘Not in a snowstorm,’ said Green practically.

  ‘Bother the snow,’ said Sophie.

  Twenty minutes later, clad in the low-waisted claret silk and looped pearls, her hair shining, her make-up light and perfect, Sophie emerged into the corridor just as the Prince of Wales, on all fours, thudded past with her not quite two-and-a-half-year-old daughter on his back, followed by Jones bearing Danny.

  ‘Gee-gee!’ yelled Rose, who had not yet achieved much intelligible vocabulary, one hand clinging to his shoulders, the other waving in triumph as she and the prince reached the end of the corridor first. A Ming vase threatened to topple off its console table.

  ‘We racing, Mama!’ announced Danny.

  Sophie steadied the still rocking vase. She smiled at the prince, a slow meeting of eyes, an even slower moistening of her lips, just as Miss Lily had taught her all those years back, so that for three long seconds the prince knew he was the only person in her world. ‘Should I curtsey, Your Royal Highness, or present you with a rosette and a nosebag of hay?’ Sophie offered her cheek for a kiss, swan-like, graceful. Impossible after Miss Lily’s lessons to be less.

  The prince smelled of something spicy. His lips were cool. ‘Coffee?’

  ‘I think we can manage that. Rose, darling, go with Nanny now.’

  Rose met her mother’s eyes. ‘More gee-gee!’ she demanded.

  ‘Breakfast.’

  ‘Gee-gee!’

  Sophie’s hazel eyes met her daughter’s defiant green ones. Gum-tree green. Danny had already obediently taken Nanny’s hand. ‘Breakfast,’ stated Sophie.

  Rose accepted the inevitable. ‘Bye-bye.’ She patted the prince’s immaculately trousered leg and toddled after her brother, carefully ignoring her mother.

  ‘She’ll have forgiven me by mid-morning,’ said Sophie, taking the prince’s arm. ‘Breakfast for you, too.’

  ‘I’m banting.’

  ‘You are doing no such thing. You are positively skinny, David. Stop all this too fat business immediately.’

  ‘Yes, Sophie.’

  ‘And don’t “Yes, Sophie” me like that. I’m serious.’

  ‘Yes, Sophie.’

  Sophie grinned at him, then sobered. ‘What’s wrong? Nigel said you were supposed to be launching something or other this morning.’

  ‘A useless job for a useless prince.’

  ‘David —’ She stopped at the sudden despair in his voice.

  ‘You know it’s true. My father only allowed me to even see cabinet documents last year because the doctors told him he was dying. Now I am useful for display purposes only.’

  ‘And you want more?’

  ‘By Jove I do. I need more. The country needs more. Sophie, last month, up in Wales, seeing those families starving — men working twelve-hour days in the pits and yet their families can’t buy enough bread to eat. I cried,’ he said simply. ‘Twelve years ago I saw men like that die for t
heir country in a stupid, useless war. Now the warmongers rise again and my people starve and I can do nothing.’

  It was true. She had no comfort to give him. ‘I’m sorry, David. One day . . .’ It was scarcely tactful to say his life would change when his father died. That might be forty years away, now that the king had recovered. And how much power could a king wield these days?

  ‘Yes,’ David said quietly. ‘One day. But by then there may be no monarchy to inherit. My grandfather once told me that kings are no doubt important people, but they can all too easily lose their thrones. And they are too apt to think of themselves and not other people.’

  ‘Your grandfather was wise man.’

  ‘A wise king, though my mother did all she could to stop our chats in case he gave me ideas about being a truly effective king one day. I am supposed to be a puppet prince, good for opening bazaars and mouthing platitudes. But the old man was right. The people shot my godfather, the tsar of all the Russias. It could happen here. Remember the English soviets proclaimed by the troops during the ceasefire?’

  ‘The English soviets only lasted a few days before the men all went home. The people love you, David. The newspapers adore you.’ And you should still do your duty and launch that thingummy, she thought.

  But just now it was more important that he eat, and be comforted with all the charm a student of Miss Lily could provide. Hereward appeared to open the breakfast-room door for them, just as the footmen carried in the silver chafing dishes of kedgeree, devilled kidneys, bacon on fried bread, eggs coddled and eggs scrambled with smoked salmon, the silver porringer, and set them on the sideboard next to the ham, the cold game pie, the piles of apples, tangerines, grapes.

  ‘David, old chap,’ said Nigel, appearing in sombre tweed. ‘So good to see you, sir.’

  The day had formally begun.