The Runaway Princess

  I looked down and grinned at the magazine in my hands. Excitement mingled with pride at what this exposure might mean for my design consultancy dreams. Ted and I had a friend who’d had her copper water features spotlit in a magazine, and she’d sold her entire shedful almost overnight and been commissioned by Heal’s to design a line.

  “We should go out tonight to celebrate,” Jo went on, linking her arm through mine and shepherding me across the road. “After dancing class. Rolf says he’s found a great new restaurant in Ebury Street, and I’m trying to encourage him into tasteful ways. Which means restaurants with fully clad staff and no theme other than food.”

  “You’re spending a lot of time with Rolf,” I observed. “Have you changed your mind about the whole marrying-into-royalty ban?”

  Jo shot me a sideways glance. “I’ll see how you get on with it first.”

  “Ah-ha! That’s not what I asked!”

  I’d noticed that Jo’s merciless criticism of Rolf had changed over the past few weeks. It was no longer the disparaging tone she’d always used in the beginning, but had softened into the pointy banter she and Ted cheerfully slapped each other with.

  “I just see it as my duty to do what I can to save you from a brother-in-law who opens champagne bottles as if he’s just won a Grand Prix,” she said. “If I can knock some manners into Rolf before it’s too late, you never know, you might invite me to your principality. I could oversee work on your nursery.”

  I ignored that. “Last time I saw Rolf, he was wearing a plain blue shirt. Was that down to you as well?”

  Jo seemed pleased. “Perhaps. Listen, knocking men into shape is a family tradition. My dear mother Marigold’s grandmama was the same. She went out with a personage we cannot name as a sort of learner girlfriend. Taught him all she knew, and then was retired to a teensy little château in the Isle of Wight.”

  “So she didn’t listen to her father when it came to royalty either.”

  “No rings were involved. And …” Jo arched her eyebrow. “It depends who you mean by her father.”

  This was the sort of conversation I would really miss. I hugged my magazines to my chest and made a mental note to ask Leo to sort out a permanent guest room for Jo in the east wing.

  *

  Jo and I were enjoying a smoothie and the air-con in Pret a Manger when my phone rang. It was Leo.

  “Amy, is this a good time to talk?”

  “Just having lunch with Jo,” I said happily. “I’ve got something to show you later.”

  I was hoping he might respond to the sauciness in my voice, but he didn’t.

  “That’s great,” he said in a strained tone. “Listen, I need you to come and meet me and Mom in her suite at Claridge’s. There’s something we need to discuss.”

  The smile slid from my face. “That sounds … ominous. What does she want to discuss?”

  I guessed it was about my dress for the blessing. Zoë Weiss had been asking, but I wasn’t allowed to choose a designer before Liza had squared off her complicated series of favors owed between various international celebrity types. It was awkward, since Zoë had shown me the nearly finished dress she’d made for Mum, and it was so beautiful it nearly made me cry. (I had a feeling the finished invoice would make me cry too, having done some research, but I’d cross that bridge later.)

  “It’s a press thing,” said Leo. He sounded guarded.

  “Is this about Rolf?” I glanced at Jo. “Has he done—”

  “No. Look, I’d rather not discuss it over the phone. How soon can you get here?”

  I pushed my unfinished smoothie toward Jo. “Well, I’ve got to finish up in Passmore Street, and then I said I’d go round to—”

  “No, there’s no time for that. Can you get in a taxi right now?”

  “Okay,” I said, bewildered.

  It couldn’t be the dress. Maybe they’d found out Di Overend’s nephew Ryan was penciled in to take the Hadley Green wedding photos.

  *

  I borrowed twenty quid from Jo and hailed a black cab, which got me to Claridge’s in seventeen minutes, during which time I’d run through all possible options and decided it had to be something to do with my proposed therapy garden in Nirona. I’d worked through the night all weekend, and given the organizers a very detailed plan of the sensory stimulation areas I wanted to create—maybe it was too specific?

  Leo was waiting for me in the tiled lobby. His face was strained, as if he’d been listening without speaking for a long time.

  “Hi, Leo,” I said, reaching up for a kiss. “What’s happened? Are you all right?”

  He grabbed my arms. “Amy,” he said, “I just want you to know that I—”

  “Amy!”

  We spun round to see Liza at the bottom of the sweeping staircase. She was wearing a coral sleeveless shift with bare legs, and I marveled anew at her perfectly golden tan and the effortless way her mane was today swept into a messy updo, held in place by huge sunglasses.

  But while her clothes said warm, her expression said cold. Very cold indeed.

  Behind her was Giselle, the press officer. Giselle was the embodiment of that expression “she looked like a bulldog chewing a wasp” (or the less polite variants), but in navy separates.

  “Shall we go up to my suite?” said Liza, and it wasn’t really a question.

  *

  Liza had taken the Brook Penthouse, which was, as far as I could see without craning my neck into all the rooms, a complete Art Deco flat at the top of the hotel.

  She steered me into the soft lilac sitting room, which had a lavish panoramic view of London over the private roof terrace, and then pointedly positioned me on the sofa facing the fireplace, not the distracting window.

  Leo sat down next to me, and Liza and Giselle faced us.

  I took a deep breath and tried to smile. I’d been sitting in a garden all morning moving plant pots around, and I wasn’t even well-dressed enough to be a staff member here.

  Liza did not return my tentative smile. “I won’t beat about the bush. We have a problem, Amy.”

  A million terrible thoughts flashed through my mind. Well, a couple of headline ones and several thousand minor ones.

  What had I done? What had she found out about me? Had Leo been involved in one of those big banking crises? Had Dr. Johnsson told her I’d been cheating on the diet in Pret a Manger? Had Martin Ecclestone sold his story to YoungHot&Royal?

  The pause stretched out across the glass coffee table.

  “Don’t play mind games, Mom,” snapped Leo. “This isn’t CSI: Mayfair. There’s going to be something in the paper, Amy,” he said, turning to me. “Something about you.”

  I actually thought I was going to be sick.

  Liza looked at us both. Her immaculately lined eyes had the furious gleam of a woman whose elaborate plans have been derailed by a loose paper clip. “Giselle keeps close tabs on all news outlets, as you know, and she’s brought it to my attention that two newspapers are intending to run with this. Giselle?”

  Giselle pursed her lips and pushed her black-rimmed glasses farther up her small nose. She took a leather portfolio out of her bag, unzipped it, and pushed a piece of paper across the glass toward Leo.

  I felt a shameful rush of relief that Leo seemed to be the one who needed to deal with it.

  Then she removed another and pushed it toward me.

  Slowly, and with Liza’s eyes burning twin holes in the top of my head, I began to read.

  As my eyes moved down the page, a furious buzzing noise started up in my ears like a swarm of angry hornets, and my tongue suddenly seemed too big for my mouth.

  The headline was “How to Marrow a Millionaire!” and beneath it was a photograph of me at Hadley Green Agricultural Show, aged about six, going by the missing front teeth. I was standing next to Dad and his prize marrow for that year, which was about the same size as me. Dad had been en route to the Gardeners’ Club comedy dancing display, and was sporting a flat cap with his
fancy dress trousers belted with twine—something that was not explained in the caption.

  Next to that was a photo of Leo at a premiere in black tie, and then a long-lens paparazzi shot of me leaning against the Botham & Wilde Gardens van, swigging from a bottle of water. The photographer had managed to make it look as if it wasn’t necessarily water, and had also captured Badger apparently peeing against someone else’s hedge.

  “I would never let Badger do that,” I gasped. “And my dad was a bank manager! He was in a costume in that photo!”

  Leo and Liza said nothing.

  Well. They were embarrassing photos, sure, but did they warrant this level of drama?

  I looked up, and Giselle snapped, “Read the copy.”

  My eyes skimmed over the text, but I couldn’t make them engage with the words. Phrases were familiar—“Amy is a jobbing gardener in London … parents live in an ex-council house in the down-at-heel former mining town of Rothery … Prince Leo, banker and millionaire heir to the principality of Nirona, met at a no-holds-barred party thrown by society actress the Hon. Jo de Verais, former on-off girlfriend of Leo’s brother Rolf …”—but other parts were so weird I couldn’t believe they were talking about me. Like the things I’d allegedly said.

  “Living up to royal standards is a nightmare,” confesses Amy, 26. “I haven’t eaten for days and I’m going mad. But when your mum-in-law’s a supermodel, you can’t expect anything to be normal!”

  “I never said that!” I protested. “I mean, I said I was starving, but it was a manner of speaking.”

  “So we’ll sue for fabrication,” said Leo. “Giselle, get on the phone right now, tell them we’ve got lawyers on the case. We’ll want to see tapes.”

  I raised my eyes very slowly from the page. Liza was staring at me, and I felt her eyes burning my face.

  “Amy?” she said. “Don’t even think about lying to me. Have you been speaking to the press?”

  I opened my mouth, but then closed it. There was no point. I already looked guiltier than Badger next to an empty packet of biscuits.

  Amy, who only achieved average results at her local comprehensive, now sports diamond bracelets worth more than fifty thousand pounds from exclusive jewelers-to-royalty Chaumet and high-end designer sunglasses when she returns to slum it in her former home. …

  “I did—” My voice cracked. “I did do a very informal interview with my local paper. I think that’s where that photograph has come from.”

  “What?”

  “I knew it,” said Giselle. “It’ll be on tape. We can’t sue for fabrication. Shit.”

  “I don’t understand—it ran weeks ago,” I spluttered. “I didn’t even think it was worth mentioning. I mean, it was just with a girl I knew from school.” I was babbling now. “It didn’t say any of those things! It was just ‘Amy works in London, she’s really excited about marrying a prince, she’s met Keira Knightley at a premiere.’ It didn’t even make the front page—they probably thought Jennifer was making it up.”

  “So who is the ‘close friend of the princess-to-be’ who’s supplied these quotes?” demanded Liza. “The ones about you being terrified of offending me because I’m so high-maintenance? And how you’re being crushed by the responsibility of what you’ll have to take on as a ‘top international princess’?”

  She sounded concerned, but I honestly couldn’t tell if she felt sorry for me or wanted to murder me now. Her politeness was like a suit of armor.

  “I have no idea—I don’t have any close friends apart from …”

  Jo wouldn’t. Jo just … wouldn’t.

  Leo was staring at me now. Or he was, until he put his head in his hands and groaned.

  “Jo would hardly describe herself as a society actress,” I protested. “And she wouldn’t get her own name wrong!”

  “It’s probably the original journalist,” said Giselle through gritted teeth. “I bet she’s tried to sell them the story, and they’ve done a deal for the pictures, interviewed her, then airbrushed her out of the picture.”

  “Liza, I’m really sorry.” I was mortified. “I never said anything like that. Yes, I might have said it was a strain not eating carbs—we met at a café!—but I was just making conversation. I certainly didn’t say you were high-maintenance or that I didn’t want to take on any responsibilities. …”

  … except when you were showing off to Jennifer about how many staff your mother-in-law had, and telling her how you had to come up with a list of four charities to take on as your personal mission. …

  I was struggling to breathe now. Was this it? Was this where I had to break off the engagement for real this time? I glanced across at Leo, but his face was a steely mask too. I hadn’t felt so sick with shame and panic in a long time. The thought of everyone reading that and thinking I’d said those things—here in London, and up at home—was so monumentally humiliating that my brain wouldn’t let me contemplate it all at once. It was an iceberg of embarrassment.

  Although, said a little voice, right at the back of all the white noise, there’s no mention of Kelly and what she did. I’d take being called a gold digger over some of the other possible options.

  I kept my eyes glued to the pale oak flooring in case Giselle and Liza could read my mind.

  “Can we stop them running it?” Leo directed his question to Giselle.

  She shook her head. “I had to call in every favor I had to stop that photo of Rolf in the tank last year. If we try to spike this, they’ll only try to run it again with new stuff.” She cast a beady eye at me. “Didn’t I make it clear enough, Amy, that all press communication has to be run past me, and I will run it past Liza and Boris?”

  I nodded meekly. “I didn’t think the Rothery Gazette counted as … press.”

  “Everything counts with the Internet,” said Liza.

  She put her hands to her head and let out a yowl of frustration. “I have been working so hard recently. So hard, just to get the family on message for the coronation. I’ve flown back and forth from New York to Washington to London to Italy pushing the Be an Everyday Princess campaign, I’ve written all Boris’s speeches for the next six months, I’ve even hired a press agent for Rolf. But I do not expect to have to deal with being called a control-freak anorexic in the pages of the British gutter press, by the real-life princess I’m supposed to be coaching myself! Do you have any idea how this will play in the US?”

  “But I didn’t—!” I began.

  “And what the hell is a top international princess?” she demanded crazily. “Is there any other kind? Your journalists are so sloppy!”

  “We can handle this.” Leo shifted forward on the sofa and started to count off his fingers, as if he were in a business meeting. “Amy, this is a great moment to launch your therapy garden. We can do a photo call, you and me, planting vegetables with kids. Say you’ve always loved getting your hands dirty, play up your normal-girl roots. They’re nothing to be ashamed of. In fact, let’s get your mum to send us more photos of you with your dad.”

  He glared at Giselle, who paused and then, under the weight of his stare, began writing.

  Leo turned to Liza. “Mom, I’m sure you and Amy can do a little shopping this afternoon together? There should be plenty of photographers in town today—there’s a garden party at Buckingham Palace. Maybe you two could pop into Ladurée for macaroons—that ought to kill the anorexia and the animosity in one go.”

  “We need more than that,” said Giselle. “We need a bigger statement.”

  Liza had been thinking, moving her diamond rings up and down her fingers, alternately pouting and squinching her glossy apricot lips. Finally she looked up and stared straight at me.

  “The Coronation Ball,” she said.

  I nodded. It was only a few weeks away now, and to be honest, I wasn’t massively looking forward to everyone staring at me, commenting on my outfit, my ability to waltz, my fitness to marry Prince Charming, and now my apparent obsession with marrows. I was secre
tly hoping that Sofia would demand to take center stage in all the available diamonds. I fully intended to

  let her.

  Liza’s gaze didn’t waver from my face. “Amy will recite the grace at dinner,” she said. “And she can be the girl who brings in the golden slipper.”

  I heard a sharp intake of breath to my left.

  “Mom—” Leo began, as Giselle failed to speak, and Liza raised a hand to silence him without looking.

  Then I heard a voice say, “I’ll do it. Of course I’ll do it,” and to my absolute horror, I realized it was mine.

  The stroppy Yorkshire voices in my head had finally taken control. And they seemed to be making a point.

  Twenty-eight

  Of course, I found out soon enough that while being asked to read the grace and present the golden slipper that started the Coronation Ball was a significant honor, it was also a significant honor that had originally been earmarked for Sofia, as the eldest daughter of the soon-to-be-crowned Sovereign Prince.

  It also meant being the center of attention not once but twice, and being expected to fulfill both tasks without slipping up or saying the wrong thing, but I didn’t let myself think about that.

  I was relieved—and a bit surprised—when the note the courier delivered from Sofia was cordiality itself. She was very busy with a landmark ruling involving a sizable estate in Geneva, said the monogrammed card clipped to the manila file of instructions, so she was more than pleased to hand over the duty to me. And the slipper ceremony, the note went on in her firm handwriting, had always felt rather degrading to women, with its patriarchal Cinderella overtones, and when many women in the third world had no shoes at all, it was obscene to have one made of gold studded with Swarovski crystals.

  Rolf, though, was positively gleeful about the possibility of a giant catfight between me and Sofia. He rubbed his hands when I told him and Leo about the Swarovski crystal comment.

  “I’d watch your coffee if I were you,” he said. “Sofie’s got form in the area of sabotage.”

  “As have you,” Jo pointed out.

  His thick brown eyebrows shot up. “I have no idea what you mean.”