Your Royal Hostage (3 page)

More enthusiastic boyish confidences. Then: 'Both of them?' Jemima paused. 'Just her might be better. Or one at a time. It
is
exclusive? Perhaps you'll tell me just how you worked this magic when we meet.'

Some time later as Jemima poured the last drops of the whisky into the glasses of her knights, now installed quite cosily in her flat, with no sign of leaving, she was able to remark quite innocently: 'As for myself, I think I'll open a bottle of champagne. If there's one in the fridge. No, I'll keep the one you kindly brought 
for another day, when it's cold, thank you very much After 
all, I really do have something to celebrate, don't I? ... No, not
freedom
exactly, more like a new life. I'm working on the Royal Wedding. For
tus
. With Rick Vancy. Didn't you know? Well, of course I had to keep it absolutely quiet from Megalith. This is all strictly off the record, I need hardly say, please keep it to yourselves, at any rate till the public announcement. It would be so embarrassing if it leaked out. You will promise I won't read all about it in the papers tomorrow morning?'

There
was
some cold champagne in the fridge. After the first knight had opened it with a flourish, Jemima sat sipping it with a most innocent expression on her face. It crossed the mind of the second knight that her expression was in fact not unlike that of the elegant black cat purring loudly on her lap. The third knight was busy wondering how soon he could get away and telephone his paper from the call box he had noticed at the corner of the street.

He tried to imagine the headline.

royal wedding sensation?
 

Yes, why not?

CHAPTER THREE

Amy Means Trouble

Princess Amy, breakfasting in bed at Cumberland Palace, read the headline
royal wedding sensation
with an agreeable quickening of interest and was correspondingly annoyed to discover that the story actually concerned rival television companies.

She pouted. When she was alone Princess Amy's pouts made her look sulky if sensual; her full lower lip extended and drooped, and her nostrils - perhaps already a little too wide — flared. In public, however, Princess Amy had quickly learnt how to transform 'the pout' into something not so much sulky as sweetly disappointed, and thus rather delightful.

The Princess was wearing a short cotton nightdress in the form of a man's shirt, trimmed with white lace. The nightdress itself was her favourite colour, known to the Press as Amy Blue ('Amy Loves Blue — and so will you' promised one feature in a woman's magazine). In fact the colour was nearer to turquoise or even green. The open front of the nightshirt revealed Amy's surprisingly large and full breasts - surprising, that is, only because they did not accord with the girlish image the Press were busy imposing upon her, and thus even when discreetly covered up by day or safely moulded in evening dress, generally took observers by surprise.

The rest of the bedroom, including the narrow wooden four-poster in which Amy herself lay, was decorated in shades of the same colour, something with which even Princess Amy's healthy twenty-two-year-old complexion found it difficult to contend.

On the walls, a set of watercolours in oval frames showed a series of eighteenth-century princesses - Amy's relations - in white muslin and blue sashes. Their costumes acted as an unintentional reminder of how much more flattering this kind of garb was to a young girl than a turquoise nightshirt.

There was a quick low knock at the door and a dark-haired girl who looked to be some years older than Amy, poked her head round the door. The Princess dropped the paper and gave a shriek.

'I
one, don't tell me you're here already - what on earth's the time?'

'Good morning, Ma'am. No, it's early, honestly it is, I thought I'd get on with all those letters, and then something came up — '

Amy interrupted her with a groan. She had just looked at the pink enamel and g
old clock by her bed. 'Oh God, I
one, I
know
I promised to be down. We were going to plough through them together, I
know
we were. For God's sake, don't tell Mama when she wakes up, please, please, please -'

'The Duchess has gone to Plymouth, Ma'am, to the naval base.'

'Goodness gracious: she actually went! No headache?' The Duchess of Cumberland's inability - through sudden 'illness* - to carry out public engagements was celebrated in her family.

'Well, what would
you
do if you were a royal widow with nothing to do?' charitable Princess Harriet had once asked of her more critical younger sister.

'I'd take a lot of lovers,' replied Princess Amy bracingly. 'It's so
wet
of Mama to be boringly faithful to Papa's memory. With the aid of the bottle.'

'Her Royal Highness went by helicopter at six o'clock this morning,' confirmed
Ione
, to whom all these facts were well known; she spoke without expression. 'From the lawn. I'm surprised you didn't hear it.'

'Of course I didn't hear it,
Ione
, you coot. A helicopter would have to land on my
bed
at six a.m. to wake me, as you perfectly well know.' Amy stretched so that her breasts half fell out of the open nightshirt; she did not bother to button it up.

'
Ione
, my angel, my good angel, listen, I've
got
to telephone 
Ferde
l. Then I promise I'll be right with you. All morning.'

'No problem,' said
Ione
Quentin easily, 'I'll be downstairs.' She turned and stopped. 'There is just one thing, Ma'am -'

But Princess Amy had already turned to the telephone.

'It can wait,' said
Ione
after a moment, seeing that the Princess was already chattering away.

'royal wedding sensation
'
, she was reading from the headline of the
Daily Exclusive.
'And then nothing about
one
at all. Que! drag, Ferdel, yes?'

Her fiancé
, corralled for the pre-wedding season in the Eaton Square flat of an absent aunt - an aged foreign Royal who had played some discreet part in the promotion of the marriage -laughed in what he hoped was a sympathetic manner and did not pursue the subject. He was wondering whether Amy had noticed the latest instalment about his previous relationship with Mirabella Prey in the gossip column of the same newspaper.

'Don't forget -
amy means i love you
,' Amy was saying now as a light farewell, quoting the familiar text of the buttons (although
she had quite failed to make Fe
rdel himself wear one).

'Nothing about one at all.' Pr
ince Ferdinand sighed. That Amy
should be so fortunate It was all very well for Amy, cast as
the public's favourite virgin (although that certainly wasn't true in private as Ferdel had every reason to know, Amy having admitted to one lover, with Ferdel suspecting at least one other). But Ferdel, aged thirty-three, was somehow expected to exhibit the man-of-the-world allure derived from an exciting past, without actually having lived this past with any specific individuals. These kinds of ridiculously unreal expectations could only be harboured by the British public, he reflected mournfully.

Ferdel sighed again and thought of Mirabella Prey.
Hilas.
He would miss her. That is to say, he would miss the nights, all of them. He certainly would not miss the days, hardly any of them. No one could possibly want to spend their days with Mirabella Prey, except as a prelude to the nights: Mirabella, with her well-publicized passion for wild animals, Mirabella who was inclined to stock her house with pets some of whose mating habits were even more savag
ely exotic than those of Mirabel
la herself.

That confounded cheetah, for example. It was the cheetah which was the peg for this morning's story in the
Daily Exclusive
(generally, but not always accurately, known as the
Clueless).
trouble royal
it read,
will ferdy cheet-her
? ran the second headline. The writer then went on to enquire with pseudo-innocence whether foreign Prince Ferdinand intended to bestow a second cheetah on his young English bride Princess Amy, following that first cheetah so generously bestowed upon the foreign film star Mirabella Prey, she of the noble passion for the animal kingdom. For most people, however, the headline with its nasty implication of post-marital betrayal on the part of sophisticated Europeans, would be the point of the story. Ferdel hoped that his young English bride had failed to notice the item.

Naturally Princess Amy had noticed it: this was because she read the gossip column of the
Clueless
(as well as those of the
Mail
and
Express)
sedulously each morning. She had done so since her early teens, relying on this method of keeping up with the doings of her friends, much as a stockbroker might turn to the
Financial Times
for the movements of the market. But Ferdel would have been interested to discover that Amy, far from being shocked, was actually in a curious way rather turned on by the Mirabella Prey saga.

That is to say, it was the actress's amorous connection with Ferdel which excited Amy (after all, she had been watching Mirabella Prey's films since she was
so
high, as she put it with a little bubble of malice to
Ione
, never dreaming that one day ...). Amy found the actress's public posturings and declared warm love for the animal kingdom, on the contrary, slightly irritating. Where animals were concerned, Amy thought there should be lots of nice ones about, preferably dogs, just as she thought there should be a lot of nice servants about, preferably of dog-like devotion. Towards both dogs and servants, Amy was demonstratively and genuinely affectionate - in private. She just did not think this a proper subject for boasting about in the newspapers.

Here then was Mirabe
lla Prey on the subject of her famous cheetah: 'I'd die for him,' she was quoted as saying, 'I'll never give him up.'

'How fatuous,' thought Amy. (For Amy, unlike most readers of the
Daily Exclusive,
assumed Mirabella Prey was actually talking about the cheetah.)

'I'd certainly never give you up, you silly old dogs. I just don't need to tell the whole world about it.' Princess Amy patted the grizzled snout of one of the two middle-aged cocker spaniels lying huddled beside her bed. 'You darling, darling old doggies.' Happy stirred and snuffled; Boobie did not move. Year ago they had been enthusiastically christened Hapsburg and Bourbon by Amy's historically minded governess, a woman much moved by the thought of Amy's grand European ancestry. In view of Amy's future grand European marriage, it was perhaps just as well that the dogs' original names, like the dynasties themselves, had receded effectively into history.

Sitting, still at breakfast, in the gloomy dining-room of the Eaton Square flat, Prince Ferdinand read to the end of the cheetah story and gave yet another sigh, the third of the morning; where Mirabella was concerned, he had a feeling there might be more sighs to come. Unlike Amy, he picked up the message of the piece - from 'cheet-her' to 'I'll never give him up' — perfectly well. It was bad news, not so much that Mirabella was talking to the Press, something she had never been averse to doing, her career in a manner of speaking demanding it, but that she was now condescending to gossip columnists. Unlike Amy again, Ferdel had never heard of Little Mary, she of the
Daily Exclusive
who was alleged to double as Miss Mouse of the Mousehole column in
Jolly Joke;
but he recognized trouble when he read it.

Trouble. Royal Trouble, to adapt the words of the gossip column's headline. There was more than one kind of royal trouble this morning. Ferdel took a letter from the pocket of his silk dressing-grown and then put it back. Where women were concerned, he decided that he was inclined to suffer from a sense of guilt first thing in the morning, a kind of emotional hangover; it might therefore be better to ponder this particular missive a little later on, say after the first Bloody Mary of the day at noon. Besides, threats were so tiresome, especially threats from women, when Ferdel was precluded from stifling them - the threats, that is - by a well-established method. This consisted of a quick immediate telephone call, a short passionate declaration, a more prolonged passionate embrace at a date to suit both parties, followed by a handsome gift bestowed by Ferdel. By the time this ritual was completed, the subject of the threat was quite forgotten; so that the threatener seldom noticed that Ferdel had not actually succumbed to it.

He could not carry out any of these steps now. Could he not? No, he really could not. Not even the first one? Not even the third one, followed discreetly by the fourth one? No, he really could not. Under the circumstances it might be better to throw the letter away, after the others, and forget about it. Probably Amy was too busy chatting on the telephone to her innumerable English girlfriends to read this diatribe from the so-called Little Mary. Ferdel took the letter out of his pocket and threw it, barely crumpled, into the wastepaper basket. He gave no thought as to what might become of the letter; that would have been as uncharacteristic as wondering who washed up his breakfast things, still standing on the heavily polished table before him.

'Trouble,' said Taplow, the English butler/chauffeur of Ferdel's absent aunt, when he later retrieved the letter from its resting place and flattened it again without difficulty. (It was Taplow who had cleared the Prince's breakfast table and re-polished the heavy table.) 'She's still writing to him. That's the third this week. Horrible, the things she says. I told you there'd be trouble.'

'She's foreign,' commented Mrs Taplow without looking at him. She was polishing the silver, a task which traditionally fell to the butler; but in the case of the Taplows, it had sometimes been commented upon by employers that Mrs Taplow was really the more masculine of the two. Although she referred on occasion briefly to 'Jossie', most people assumed unthinkingly that the Taplows were childless. Certainly Taplow, a big, soft, stately man, had something of the feminine about him; there was thus an impression, only a vague one, but vaguely disquieting, that there was some kind of sex reversal in their relationship.

'A foreign spitfire,' added Mrs Taplow after a pause.

'Spitfires aren't —'