The Runaway Princess

  There was a burly protection officer lingering by the gate when I arrived; he was dressed as a normal passerby, but most locals near Trinity Square didn’t look as if they’d recently been discharged from the marines.

  With a nod, he let me in, and I walked down the gravel paths that led to the summerhouse. Even on an autumn day like today, the lawns were immaculate, without a single leaf lying around to mess up the green velvet, and the glossy box hedges were dark and still fragrant. Nostalgia swept through me along with the familiar smells, as I remembered all the chatty picnic lunches, and drinks, and sweet, soul-exploring moments we’d had here, with my bare feet up on Leo’s lap on the bench, or his head resting near mine as we lay near the rose beds, breathing in the scents of the flowers and the warmed summer air.

  This was the last time. This was the very last time I’d be able to wander in this hidden garden where Wolfsburgs fell in love. That broke my heart almost as much as what I knew I had to do.

  Leo was waiting in the summerhouse. The table was spread with a white cloth, and three silver domes were arranged on top, just as it had been on our first date. I smiled weakly.

  “Lunch?” he said.

  He seemed thinner, and though he smiled back at me, I could see deep shadows under his eyes. I’d never seen Leo with stubble, but he had a very fine crop of it on his chin, and it rather suited him.

  I sat down, and he whisked the domes away to reveal two club sandwiches and two packets of crisps.

  “Good-quality ones,” he added, and the crack in my heart deepened another notch.

  I asked him about the coronation, how it had gone, and he told me, describing the events with his usual mix of courteous and dry wit. Now it just reminded me of something he’d once said, about being trained to chat, to put people at ease. It was more of an effort for me to begin with, but his manner coaxed me into almost normal conversation. I confessed that Jo and I had watched it, and played Fashion Police Bingo on the guests, and he looked tickled.

  “You’ll have seen Sofia’s hat, then?” he added with a raised eyebrow.

  “I did. Was it a bet?”

  “It was her way of making sure no one looked at me and Rolf.” He popped a crisp into his mouth. “For which I’m actually grateful. There was enough of that already.”

  I looked down at my plate. It had the Wolfsburg crest on it: two lions rampant, gold ribbons, white roses. White roses, like the white rose of Yorkshire. “I’m sorry.”

  “The official line is that you’re still with your sick relative,” he said, his tone deceptively light. “That’s why the palace hasn’t sent out the invitations to the wedding yet. Are you … ?” The pause seemed to stretch out forever.

  I couldn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to.

  When Leo spoke again, there was a distinct crack in his voice. “Are you coming back with me?”

  A tear dropped onto my plate, and I shook my head.

  Leo said nothing. Then he said, a little stiffly, “Can I ask why?”

  Haltingly, I began to tell him the whole story about Kelly, and my family. About my childhood and why I cared so much about what people thought of me, and how I’d tried to be true to my old life and my new one. Why my parents deserved a life too, after giving up so much of theirs to put right Kelly’s mistake. And more than that, why he deserved someone outgoing to fit the job he’d been born to do, instead of a lifetime apologizing for me.

  I went on for ages. I didn’t want to miss anything out. Leo didn’t say anything when I’d finished, and I struggled to find a way of explaining what was trying to burst through my chest, and in the end, as usual, I could only find one way of doing it.

  “The thing is, Leo,” I said, waving a hand toward the garden outside, “this place is you. It’s elegant and measured, and every bed blooms at the right time because someone’s planned the flowering seasons. It’s lovely, but I couldn’t live in it. I love those wildflower meadows I plant because that’s what I feel like inside—I look at meadow banks and I see butterflies and bees and all the rhythms of the seasons, but with a freedom that there just isn’t here. And you could never combine the two. It would spoil what someone’s taken years to create.”

  Leo looked up, and his gaze moved slowly around my face, as if he was trying to print my eyes, my lips, my cheekbones, on his memory. We were both nearly in tears. He reached into his pocket and brought something out, sliding it across the table.

  I thought it was my diamond bracelet or the diamond ring, and was about to refuse it, but it wasn’t either. It was a Yale key.

  “Guess this is the wrong time to give you a present,” he said.

  “What is it?”

  “I bought us a house.”

  “A house?”

  He nodded, wretchedly. “A house up in Yorkshire. One with a mature cottage garden, and an apple tree with a swing in it. A lovely place to bring kids, to see their grandparents.” He didn’t need to say it, but he did anyway. “In Hadley Green.”

  The breath choked in my throat. He’d bought our old house, as a surprise for me. It was the sweetest thing to do; but in that instant I realized how little Leo understood me, or my family. I couldn’t go back. Dad and Mum … they could never go back.

  Dad had been right, people like Leo did think that money solved all problems. It had probably been a petty-cash transfer for him, but it was something else entirely to my family.

  “But Leo,” I said carefully, “you know my parents could never ever go back. There are too many memories. Good and bad. Selling it …” I gulped. “Selling it was the only thing that let them keep any dignity after the court case.”

  “I realize that now.”

  I smiled through my tears. “And how often would we go there? A garden like that needs constant attention. Mum always used to say it was a full-time job on its own. It’s too nice a house to be wasted on a couple who’d only have time to visit twice a year. And I don’t want to move back. My life is in London now.”

  I pushed the key back over the tablecloth. The tips of our fingers met, and I felt a spark of electricity run up my finger, all the way into my arm. I leaned forward until our foreheads touched, and we sat like that for a while, tears dripping onto the thick tablecloth as all the lost possibilities of our future, the grandchildren, the gardens, the happiness we now wouldn’t have, ran through our minds.

  And then I knew I had to leave, before my heart gave out completely.

  I pushed back my chair and touched his shoulder. “It’s no one’s fault, Leo. We’re just the right plants in the wrong place. I’ll never forget this, though.”

  He stood up, pulled me into his arms, and kissed me with a terrible sad hunger, and I kissed him back, trying to fix the taste of him and the feel of his skin against mine in my memory forever.

  Then, before I had time to register any “last anythings,” I grabbed my bag and ran out of the garden.

  *

  As October turned into November, I tried to keep as busy as I could. Luckily, Ted and I had more business than we could pack into the working week, to the point where we were even talking about taking on another gardener. Paid for by our own profits.

  Well, loud talking. We got as far as defining a job description for a container gardening expert with lawn expertise and “good legs” (must like small dogs), but no further. But we talked about it a fair bit, since Ted was getting to be a regular visitor round at our flat for dinner. So regular that Dickon was sketching him in a selection of sheets, and Jo was finding it harder to convince me that their bickering wasn’t taking on a suspiciously cozy quality.

  I planted up Christmas bulbs in our kitchen, and watched the Japanese maples near Leominster Square turn from green to a flaming, luminous orange, while the beeches and oaks in the park dropped their leaves to reveal stark bare branches. That was exactly how I felt inside. As if my life had burst into glorious color, which had suddenly fallen away, leaving nothing but a bare outline of trudging work and sleep and once-a-wee
k Zumba, and a long wait until spring and the hope of new buds.

  To be honest, though I pretended to be positive for Jo, I wasn’t always sure there would be new buds. Sometimes plants had one bonanza year and were never quite the same. How could any man in the Fox and Anchor match up to Leo? I tried that gloomy metaphor on Jo one evening, and she told me that it depended entirely on the fertilizer you were using.

  Jo did her best to cheer me up, as did Ted. Since she and Rolf had amicably parted ways—more amicably on her side than his, I thought—she had more time to spend at home, especially since parties were off the agenda for a while. She tried to get me to work on a new version of Chicago-a-go-go, with me as Roxie Hart, and we had some fun evenings hoofing around the flat until Mrs. Mainwaring banged on the ceiling. Only Jo could have persuaded her to give the Mama Morton song a go, and now we only had to get Dickon into tap shoes to have nearly a whole company.

  And slowly the date of my abandoned wedding edged closer.

  *

  Mum and Dad had told so few family members about the wedding that those who had had a “save the day” assumed it was just a weirder example of our family instability. And Kelly’s second moment in the sun—also in the Sun and several other newspapers—had blown my wedding out of the minds of anyone who knew us, what with the stories she hadn’t told us about this Greg bloke she’d married.

  Kelly apologized well, I had to hand it to her, and I think she was telling the truth about going back to college to study fashion. I only skimmed, I didn’t want to read the interview, but Mum seemed okay with it. Sort of. She didn’t go into a Victoria sponge baking frenzy afterward, put it that way, and Dad said that a couple of people he hadn’t spoken to in years had stopped him in the street to shake his hand in a gruff, sympathetic manner.

  And being from Yorkshire, they also commiserated with him on having such a rough time of things with his womenfolk, then asked about the marrows.

  We were all inching toward feeling normal for the first time in years, and for that I was grateful. Sad, but grateful.

  *

  I was at home early one morning at the end of November when the intercom buzzed while I was drying my hair. I yelled at Jo to get it.

  She broke off yakking on her phone to shout, “I’m in the bath! You go!”

  I grumbled under my breath—I hadn’t heard the hot water pipes clunking, so I knew she wasn’t actually in there yet—and went to pick up the intercom.

  “The sooner we can train you to do this, the better,” I informed Badger, who was waiting for his morning lap round the block. “Hello?”

  “Hello, miss, it’s Billy.”

  I frowned. “Billy with the wisteria?”

  “Yes, miss. I’ve got a parcel for you.”

  My belongings had arrived back from Nirona in a suitcase weeks ago—it couldn’t be that. (Leo had insisted that I keep the bracelet, but I’d couriered the ring back; it was too precious a part of their family for me to keep.) Was it a plant of some kind? A cutting from Billy’s own wisteria?

  Scrunching my damp hair into a bun, I pulled on my big sweater and trotted downstairs to open the door.

  Billy was at the door, holding a small parcel wrapped in brown paper. When he saw me, he smiled broadly, but wouldn’t hand it over. “I’ve been told you’ve to open it in the car,” he said, and gestured toward the Range Rover parked outside the flat.

  “What? In the actual car?”

  “You might want to get a coat,” he added, with the reluctance of someone spoiling a surprise.

  I looked at him for clues, but he was giving nothing else away. I narrowed my eyes in pretend annoyance. “Hold on,” I said, and yelled up the stairs to Jo, “I’m nipping out! Don’t forget to take Badger out for his pee break!”

  I didn’t hear what she said, but Mrs. Mainwaring banged on her ceiling.

  *

  I half-expected to find Leo in the back of the Range Rover, but the seat was empty apart from a jacket and a gray jumper. Were they for me? Or—my heart gave a pang—did they belong to Leo’s new girlfriend?

  Billy closed the door after me and set off while I stared numbly at the package on my knee. It was beautifully wrapped, the brown paper folded crisply, the flat white ribbon knotted at exactly the right angle.

  “Open it, miss,” said Billy over his shoulder, “or else the timing’ll be off.”

  I didn’t want it to be something I’d have to give back. I didn’t want it to be something that would test my pathetic resolve. But I steeled myself and pulled the ribbons off, unfolded the paper, and discovered a plain walnut box.

  Plain but perfect, with whorls and loops, and dovetail joints you could run a finger over, polished to a deep sheen. I took a deep breath and pushed open the lid.

  The inside was lined with red velvet and contained a single red velvet pouch. I lifted the pouch out—it was very light—and tipped the contents into my hand.

  A key on a fine gold chain.

  I looked up to ask Billy if he knew what the key was for, and suddenly I saw where we were, and I knew.

  He parked directly outside the gate to the private garden in Trinity Square, and leaped out to open my door.

  I weighed the key in my hand. It was a nice gesture, but would I ever want to go in there again, if I couldn’t be with Leo? It was like being given the freedom of a city where I couldn’t speak the language.

  Billy was smiling encouragingly, and I didn’t want to upset him since he was clearly in on the whole thing, so I got out and fitted the key into the old Edwardian lock.

  The gate swung open, but what I saw when I walked in wasn’t what I expected.

  The rose garden at the center and its Nironan statue fountain were still there. But the manicured lawns had gone. The beds of regimented bedding plants had gone. In their place were newly dug banks of soil, and sprouting from them like alien flowers were big photographs on bendy wires, as high as my waist.

  Wild poppies, cornflowers, vetch, campion, buttercups, sorrel, oxeye daisies, all waving gently in the breeze.

  I turned round slowly, taking it in. Beneath the big trees were wobbly photos of crocus drifts and wild daffodils, and long grasses waved where the croquet lawn had once been. Someone had been through the whole garden and turned it into a virtual meadow.

  When I’d turned a full circle, I saw Leo standing in front of me. He was dressed in jeans and a peacoat, and though his expression was eager, I could see some jumpiness in his blue eyes.

  I had to struggle not to touch him, even now. Seeing him made me feel as if something had clicked into focus.

  “They’re just sown,” he explained. “Hence the photos. And you can change things if you want. You’re the expert.”

  “But your lovely lawns,” I breathed, shocked at what he’d done. “What would your grandfather think? What about the croquet?”

  “Willi would love the idea of long grass to lie in right in the middle of town. No woman would have been safe. And he loathed croquet. As do I.”

  Leo took my hands and gazed deeply into my eyes. “Amy, you’ve always been so good at seeing what other people can’t. You were right—this garden, it was just like my life in Nirona. Planned out by other people. Beautiful, but limited.”

  “That wasn’t a criticism,” I began, but he shushed me.

  “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking since I saw you. What you said about your parents … it made me weigh up what was really important to me. What I couldn’t live without. There’s only one thing I can’t live without, and that’s you.” His expression softened. “So I spoke to Dad, and to Sofia, and I told them it was time we overturned that ridiculous male primogeniture business.”

  My mouth dropped open. “What?”

  Leo cleared his throat. “Sofia’s overseeing the documents—obviously—but the act should be ratified in the first parliament of Dad’s reign. Sofia gets what she always wanted, and she’ll be very good at it.”

  “But what about you? You won?
??t be the crown prince!”

  I knew how much it meant to him. I knew how much he loved being part of a chain reaching back into history. He’d given that up. For me. To make my life more normal.

  “I’ll still get to be part of it all. I just won’t have to make it my entire life. And do you think I could enjoy all that, knowing you hated it? And knowing it was because of that that I’d lost you?” His fingers threaded through mine. “I’d have ended up hating every minute. This way, I’ll keep my job in London, and I’ll still have duties and charities, but it’ll give me more time to get properly involved with them, like your therapy

  garden.”

  “That’s …” I didn’t know what to say. “That’s a bold step for feminism. Sophia must be thrilled.”

  Leo nodded wryly. “She certainly is. I’ll need some help, though. I don’t know much about therapy gardens. Or dogs.”

  There was a moment’s pause as we gazed shyly at each other, neither of us wanting to spoil the moment, and then Leo clapped a hand to his pocket. “Nearly forgot, sorry. Soooo, what I suppose I have to ask you is …”

  He dropped to his knee and took my left hand, looking up with the most appealing expression I’d ever seen. White noise buzzed in my head like a million bumblebees, and I felt faint with excitement.

  “Will you do me the great honor,” said Leo, “of sharing your life with me?”

  I nodded. And then I said, “Yes. Yes, please.”

  I hadn’t even looked at the ring Leo was holding, but now he was putting it onto my left hand I realized it wasn’t the priceless ring his grandfather had given him to give me: it was a much smaller one, a circlet of perfect rose-red rubies set on a gold band. Smaller but beautiful. More me.

  “A poppy,” he said simply. “For the most precious garden-variety flower in the whole world.”

  I didn’t have any more words. Instead, I reached out for him, and as Leo’s arms wrapped round my waist and mine curled around his neck, I felt as if our souls had clicked into place, like a key in a lock.

  We stood there kissing and kissing while the fields of photographic flowers behind us flickered in the wind, and as the breeze passed over the flowerbeds, I wondered if it picked up some of our happiness like the meadow mix Leo had sown, and carried it on the currents to spread all over London.