The Runaway Princess

  “You didn’t tell him about the six-month suspended sentence?” I rounded my own eyes in pretend shock. “What sort of fiancé is he?”

  “Did you tell your fiancé about it?” she flashed back. “Clearly not, or I wouldn’t have had reporters banging on my door offering me a small fortune for the true story of Prince Leo’s so-called squeaky-clean bride-to-be!”

  “I didn’t put my family through hell!” I snarled. “And for your information, Kelly, it might be part of your past, but it’s very much still part of my and Mum and Dad’s present! They live with the consequences of your selfishness every day! And do you have any idea what I’ve had to give up, just to stop them being dragged through the mud again?”

  “It’s always poor little you, you, you, isn’t it?” sneered Kelly, and if Jo hadn’t turned round and banged on the panel, I think I would have clattered her.

  “Save it till we get there,” she yelled. “I don’t want to miss any of this, thank you. It would be like coming in halfway through a really good television drama.”

  “Fine with me,” said Kelly, and folded her arms.

  I folded mine, and we stared at the bags of Gro-Rite for the rest of the journey, and listened to Ted and Jo bicker about the right way to overtake an Eddie Stobart lorry.

  Just like old times.

  *

  If I’d ever doubted Jo’s organizational abilities—and her gentle but firm touch—I had the ultimate confirmation of them when we arrived in Rothery.

  She’d guessed that Mum’s house would be surrounded by prying eyes, so she’d somehow got word to Dad and had arranged to meet them in a place they’d feel safe and private. After what felt like an eternity, we finally pulled up at the Wilde Family Summit location: the allotments where Dad grew his prizewinning vegetables, just beyond the crematorium.

  Ted parked, and we trailed through the various patches to reach Dad’s rows. It was a bleak Yorkshire autumn day, but I was impressed by the foliage on show—lots of veg, and some splashes of orange and yellow where enthusiasts were training chrysanthemums up canes. The handful of retired men in flat caps digging their potatoes barely registered our presence, apart from a few sniffs at Jo and Kelly’s lack of suitable footwear.

  Just before we got to the shed, Ted stopped and looked awkward. “I’ll wait here,” he said, sitting down on the nearest bench. “I’ll, er, let you know if I see anyone coming.”

  He tapped the phone in his jacket.

  Jo’s curiosity was fighting an open battle with her English reserve, all over her face. “I should too. It’s a family moment.”

  Kelly started to agree with her, but I cut in.

  “No,” I said suddenly. “Jo, I’d really like you to come in.”

  I didn’t trust Kelly not to start refashioning her London life to suit the new reality. Not lying, just missing bits out. And I also needed Jo to referee things, in case I really did clatter Kelly.

  “Okay,” said Jo very quickly, and with a deep breath I pushed open the door to the shed.

  Mum and Dad were wedged on the two chairs inside, next to the potting table. It was the biggest shed on the allotments, but even so, it was a squash for five of us, especially since Dad stored his beekeeping stuff in there. When Kelly squeezed in behind me, Mum let out a gasp as if she’d seen a ghost, and her eyes widened so much I thought she might be having a heart attack.

  The earthy air hummed with tension, and then Mum held out her arms, and Kelly let out a loud sob and flung herself into them. Dad hovered next to them for a second, and then threw his arms round the pair of them, and they all howled together.

  I could hear Mum sobbing, “Kelly, oh Kelly, my baby girl,” and Dad patting them both rather awkwardly, and Kelly sobbing, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” over and over again.

  It was like I wasn’t even there.

  I looked at Jo, dumbfounded. She shrugged, embarrassed, as if she hadn’t foreseen anything else happening.

  I’m ashamed to say this, but a hot wave of fury swept over me. I was the one who’d supported Mum and Dad for the last ten years! I was the one whose relationship with the most amazing man in the world had been jeopardized because of this! All the pain and shame of the past week bubbled up inside me and burst out at the best available weak spot: Kelly.

  “Hello?” I yelled furiously. “She ruins our lives and gets the prodigal welcome? How about, ‘Are you all right, Amy, I hear you just broke off your engagement’?”

  Kelly kept her head buried in Mum’s bosom, but Dad and Mum looked up at once. Mum’s face was red and suffused with guilt. Dad reached out his arm and smiled at me. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen him so happy. How could he be so happy? I was heartbroken!

  “Come on, love,” he said. “Plenty of room for you too.”

  But that wasn’t enough. There was a very angry sixteen-year-old in me, determined to get out after years of being pushed down.

  “No! I want her to apologize first. I want her to explain to us where she’s been for the past ten years and why she’s never shown any interest in anyone but herself. Until now, when she’s got her own skin to save.”

  Kelly withdrew her tearstained face at that and looked balefully at me. “That’s so unfair. I’ve been looking out for you all this time I’ve been in London.” Her dignity was being compromised by that hiccupy sobbing, so she pointed at Jo by way of explanation. “Why do you think she’s been working on my house for so long? You think anyone needs three wet rooms?”

  “What?”

  “It was my only way of keeping in touch. Jo was the project manager for a friend a few years ago, and she mentioned this young gardener from Yorkshire who was looking for work. I put two and two together, and then when I hired Jo, bingo.” She wiped her eyes, smearing her heavy makeup. “It was really hard sometimes, hearing what a great time you were having, you two,” she whined. “Your parties, and the interesting people in your house. You always did fall on your feet, Amy.”

  “I wondered why she kept making all her friends hire you and Ted,” Jo pointed out. “I mean, you’re good, but it was a bit weird that she didn’t want you to do her own garden.” She sighed. “And I thought it was for my benefit. Never mind.”

  If she was trying to lighten the mood, she was wasting her time.

  “Back up there, Kelly,” I snapped. “I always fell on my feet? Hello? Did you miss the part where I worked my arse off for three years at college to get my degree? And then dug gardens till my nails went black to get my business going?”

  Kelly screwed up her face. She looked a lot less polished now. “But you were clever. It was easy for you, it wasn’t like you had a social life to distract you.”

  “I had no social life because you made me a total outcast!” I roared.

  Mum and Dad were doing a Wimbledon-worthy back-and-forth head swivel.

  “Oh, you were always a swot.” Kelly waved a hand. “Yes, I messed up my A levels, get over it. That’s why I wanted to believe all the stuff Chris told me about the investment—I wanted to do something to make Mum and Dad proud of me too, instead of having them remind me how much homework you did.”

  “Oh, Kelly,” said Mum, but Dad was looking stern.

  “And then when I realized how stupid I’d been, I thought leaving was the best thing to do. I didn’t want to hear about how I’d messed up again.” Kelly wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “I had this big plan to go away and get a great job, then come back and show you I wasn’t the letdown everyone thought I was.”

  “But look at you, love!” Mum stroked Kelly’s cashmere-clad and gym-toned bicep. “In your lovely clothes with that dear handbag. You’re obviously doing well for yourself.”

  Kelly opened her mouth to lie, but caught me and Jo glaring at her. “It’s not really my money, Mum,” she admitted. “I got married to a guy who was a bit older than me—”

  Oh, it was all coming out now.

  “—but it didn’t work out and, um, Greg
gave me a generous settlement when we separated. I was going to use the money to retrain at something,” she added very quickly, in Dad’s direction, “and then I met Harry, and he wanted me to stay in London and then he proposed. …”

  “You’re getting married too!” Mum’s face lit up; then the happiness extinguished almost as quickly when Kelly said, “When his divorce comes through.”

  “Oh,” said Mum. Dad didn’t say anything.

  Kelly looked down at her feet. “I don’t know if that’s going to happen now, though. Some journalists have been pestering me, and if I don’t give them a story, they’re bound to get hold of Chris. … I don’t think Harry’s going to want to be married to someone with a criminal record.”

  “He’s a barrister,” Jo supplied helpfully.

  “Dear me,” said Dad under his breath. “What a pair.”

  Silence descended over the shed as the dust settled around us. (Metaphorically. Dad kept a spotless shed.)

  Eventually, Kelly reached out to me. I didn’t want to take her hand, but everyone was looking at me, so I had to.

  “I’m really sorry for doing this to you, Amy,” she said, in a humble voice I’d never heard from her before. “I didn’t want to think what was going on at home, I was just focused on the future and everything being okay somehow. I was so happy for you when I saw you’d started dating Leo. It made me think maybe I’d get a miracle in my life too, something good so I could come back and not feel like scum. Honestly, you looked beautiful in that Zoë Weiss ballgown. I showed everyone I knew, all my friends. …”

  My eyes filled up. Jo reckoned Kelly—Callie—didn’t have many friends. She always said she reckoned the ladies who lunched tolerated Callie because Harry was rich and she had a house near Harrods.

  “Do you want me to talk to Leo?” Kelly sounded pathetically eager. “I’ll tell him everything, if it would make him see that you had nothing to do with it. I’ll do an interview or something. Whatever you need.”

  “Actually,” Jo murmured, “that’s not a bad idea.”

  Mum and Dad looked at her in horror.

  “No, really,” she went on. “It’s going to come out anyway, much better to be in control of the story.”

  “But Liza’s got a press agent like a rottweiler,” I pointed out, “and they still printed …” I didn’t want to mention Whalegate in front of Mum.

  “But if we went to them direct, with Kelly and a tame writer and some exclusive photos …”

  Light dawned. “You mean one of those girls who covered your show?”

  She nodded. “Everyone loves a reformed sinner and a royal wedding. Imagine the two together!”

  Except there would be no wedding.

  The longer I spent at home, the farther away Leo’s world felt. Press agents. Ballgowns worth more than cars. For heaven’s sake. That wasn’t my life. It was Amelia’s. Amelia, the made-up princess.

  I felt my lip wobble, even though I was trying to hold myself together with every last shred of energy I had.

  Dad stretched out his arm to me, and I got a faint whiff of that familiar smell that took me back to the long wordless summer we’d spent together. Washing powder, and a bit of honest sweat; the smell of a man who’d worn suits for work for twenty-five years, and then found himself in shirtsleeves all day, with just his spade and what remained of his pride. My heart ran back to him, like a little girl stumbling over a lawn speckled with daisies.

  “If nothing else comes of it,” he said, his gray eyes shining with very un-Yorkshire-man tears, “you’ve brought our family together again, Amy. And that’s the most wonderful thing you could ever have given your mother and me.”

  “Stop it,” I said, but in another second I was enfolded in Dad’s arms, my head against Mum’s ample bosom, and even Kelly—who still reeked of Joy by Jean Patou, nothing bloody changed—was squeezing me as if we were in a storm and the shed was about to be whisked away.

  It didn’t feel right to be so happy when my heart was ripped to bits, but weirdly I was. Somewhere, a clock was starting to turn backward, one slow second at a time.

  Thirty-four

  Jo and I said we wouldn’t watch the live streaming of Boris’s coronation on the Internet, but obviously we did.

  “Better to know,” she said, as we parked ourselves in front of the laptop with the last of Rolf’s ridiculous bottles of champagne, and a fish pie that Mrs. Mainwaring had thoughtfully made for us.

  Mrs. Mainwaring owed me and Jo, in a roundabout way. She’d seen off a particularly persistent snapper with her handbag, and then a rival paper with very little news to print that day had paid her two thousand pounds to talk about her “paparazzi hell,” with Dickon in the background, looking suspiciously like a boy toy.

  The Saturday of the coronation, the photographers weren’t even bothering to hide behind bushes, because of course I was still supposed to be supporting an unnamed member of my family through an illness, and they were desperate to get a glimpse of me not ill, and not in Yorkshire. At least Mum and Dad were safe. They were up in Scotland at the remote hunting-lodge hotel belonging to a friend of Jo’s mother, where Kelly would be joining them, accompanied by Sukey the writer, just as soon as she’d finished bringing Harry the barrister up to speed.

  “The rule is, we can watch the coronation, but with no sound.” Jo passed me a glass and topped up her own. “I don’t want to know what they’re saying.”

  “You wouldn’t, it’s in Italian,” I said, as the TV news station live feed from Nirona flickered into life. The island was quite small, but it seemed everyone had turned out to see the pageantry. Cheering crowds lined the narrow cobbled streets around the cathedral, and the camera was panning along the various dignitaries arriving at the Gothic entrance. I recognized some famous model friends of Liza’s, and a couple of royal princes, and some prime ministers and, blimey, that was the American First Lady, wasn’t it? And that was definitely Elton John. Elton John never missed a good royal do.

  “There are some really famous people there,” I said, surprised.

  “Yeah.” Jo looked up from her phone. “It seems you were the last person to realize that the Wolfsburgs are kind of a big deal.”

  “Maybe.” I searched for Leo’s face but couldn’t see him. I spotted Giselle, though, and Nina, Liza’s assistant, in a mad green hat that looked like an alien frying pan. It was weird to see such familiar faces on television like this. In a parallel universe, I was there too. I wondered what I’d have been wearing.

  Something hideous, if it had been down to Sofia.

  “Oh, look out for Sofia’s hat,” said Jo. “Apparently looks like she got her head stuck in a ceiling tile but came along anyway.”

  “Don’t read Twitter!” I tried to grab the phone off her. “I don’t want to know what they’re saying about—”

  I stopped as a subtitle went across the screen. I didn’t speak Italian, but I guessed fuggitiva and principessa meant what I thought they did.

  “At least they care,” said Jo, with a pretend solemn look on her face.

  The camera spun back to a parade of horse-drawn carriages and cars arriving, and suddenly, getting out of a shining Daimler was Leo.

  My heart expanded in my chest at the sight of him. He looked so handsome. So clearly the sum total of a supermodel and a prince, with his broad shoulders and winning smile and the modest wave he did to the crowds. Rolf was behind him, playing up to them a bit more with a bigger wave, but even he had toned things down. His hair was a little shorter, and his suit a little quieter.

  “Leo looks good,” said Jo kindly. “But tired.”

  “He looks affranto, apparently,” I said, reading the subtitles. “What’s that?”

  There was a pause while Jo checked online. “Heartbroken. I thought you started an Italian course.”

  “I only had time for a few lessons.” I couldn’t tear my eyes off the screen as Leo walked into the cathedral with Rolf, pausing to speak to the officials who beamed at him a
s he passed.

  I’d have to be doing that, said the little voice in my head, and I shrank inside. What would they be scrolling across the screen if I were there? What mean things would they be saying about my hat?

  Half of me longed to be by Leo’s side, feeling the tender pressure of his hand resting protectively in the hollow of my back, as I had done at the glittering gala nights we’d attended. But half of me was beyond relieved not to be there.

  As the ceremony carried on, and I saw the banked cameras and the sea of faces in the cathedral, and then Boris and Liza arriving like the starriest Hollywood stars of all time, decked out in velvet robes and proper crowns, the half dwindled to a quarter, and finally, when Jo was telling me that Sofia’s hat had gone viral and already people were linking to satirical web pages devoted to how she was keeping it on her head with magnets, I had to acknowledge that I’d done the right thing.

  If I’d been there, I’d have slipped on some horse dung, or blanked the bishop from nerves. Not like Liza, who sailed through the whole thing as if she’d been born to it, all the while casting tiny, camera-friendly, admiring glances Boris’s way. The perfect princess wife. Not normal. Not in the least bit normal.

  I felt sadly envious of whoever Leo found to fit that role. She was going to be the luckiest woman in the world, as well as one of the most nervous.

  *

  I had arranged to meet Leo Monday at lunchtime, as agreed in his e-mail, and I didn’t sleep at all on Saturday night or Sunday.

  I owed him an explanation, but I didn’t really have one. Well, not one that really covered everything in a way I felt did any justice to the soul-searching that had been keeping me hollow-eyed and sleepless.

  Instead I worried about where we could meet without anyone seeing us, but as ever he had everything under control; he texted me early on Monday morning to say he’d be in the summerhouse of the private garden in Trinity Square at 1 p.m. Leo kept such a low profile in London that I didn’t even think the press knew where his house was.