A Prince Without a Kingdom

  But a princess was even better.

  Upstairs, in the silent bedroom, a ghost was becoming restless. The corner of the gray-and-pink eiderdown that covered Ethel’s bed began to twitch. A body emerged from underneath the bed. It was Andrei. He lay on the carpet for a moment before pulling himself up on his elbows. His face was covered in sweat. He went over to the fireplace, grabbed a log, and stirred the embers. Then he made for the chest of drawers. He opened the relevant drawer, lifted up the strip of wood at the back, and found the hiding place. He went back to the fire, then back again to the chest, where he inspected every nook and cranny.

  Ethel’s arrival had caught him by surprise, just as he was about to search the drawer. From his hideout under the bed, he had seen her remove the little bundle of envelopes and throw it on the fire.

  Had he just missed out on his first opportunity to track down Vango? He couldn’t be sure. What about Nicholas? Were they his letters that she had burned with such indifference? He hoped that was it, yes: the letters of the gardener’s son gone up in smoke. This idea made Andrei feel better about things. But he didn’t really believe it. Did that good-for-nothing Nicholas even know how to write? Did he have a talent for anything other than worming his way into ladies’ hearts, driving their cars, and setting up secret trysts in barns?

  No, the letters were bound to be from Vango Romano. Andrei had been trying to locate them for ages. Where had they been posted from? If he’d been able to find them in time, their discovery would have been enough to appease Vlad the Vulture. Andrei and his family would have been saved.

  The worst was that Ethel had probably burned them at Nicholas’s request. Angrily, Andrei thrust his hands into the bottom drawer, hoping to find something there.

  “Don’t move.”

  He tried to stand up.

  “Don’t move!”

  The voice was as chilling as the barrel of the hunting gun that someone had just slid inside his ear.

  “Now, lie down flat on the floor. Slowly.”

  Andrei bent down and pressed his other ear against the wooden floor.

  “Arms out wide, please.”

  His head to one side, Andrei made a cross shape with his arms.

  He stayed like that for a few seconds before daring to look up at the person threatening him.

  It was Mary, the housekeeper, who had entered without making a sound.

  Andrei wasn’t the least bit reassured when he recognized the face of his assailant. He should have guessed: this woman was capable of anything. Some days earlier, in the back kitchen, he had seen her slitting a pig’s throat while breathlessly recounting the love story between King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson.

  “What are you looking for, Andrew?”

  The vibration of Mary’s finger on the trigger traveled down the length of the gun and reverberated inside Andrei’s skull. She was going to kill him, and would have no scruples about doing so.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “Nothing.”

  Not satisfied with this answer, Mary let out a long sigh.

  “How does it make me look, when I give Miss Ethel my word that no one else will go into her bedroom? How does it make me look, eh?”

  Andrei wanted to move his head, but she thrust the barrel in a bit deeper.

  “How does it make me look, Andrew?”

  “Not good.”

  “That’s right. Not good. Not good at all.”

  She glanced at the clock.

  “Another four minutes and the Lawrence brothers will be knocking on the door. They’re coming to mend the floorboards.”

  She pressed hard enough with the gun for the floorboard beneath his head to creak.

  “Can you hear that?”

  “Y-yes,” stammered Andrei.

  She started again.

  “I’ve understood,” he gasped.

  “You can hear it, can you?”

  “Yes.”

  “So let’s wait nice and patiently. And they can escort you off the premises.”

  A minute went by. Andrei was about to give up when he had an idea. He knew Mary, which gave him a head start. Master Ochtchepkov, who had tried to teach him the art of fighting in Moscow, used to say that half the battle was knowing your enemy. He closed his eyes.

  “What did you want to steal, Andrew?” Mary grilled him.

  Andrei opened his hand.

  “That.”

  A haze of white cotton spread around his fingers.

  On letting go of the drawer when the gun had pushed him down, Andrei had accidentally kept a bit of fabric in his hand.

  “That?”

  Mary bent over a little. She recognized the white brassiere that Ethel wore in bed on summer nights. A very long time ago, it had been part of her mother’s wedding trousseau.

  “That?”

  “Yes,” sobbed Andrei.

  The pressure from the gun eased off slightly. Mary sensed the beginning of the only kind of story that could make her lose her head.

  “Don’t tell me . . .” She gasped.

  A love story! She could smell a love story.

  “Andrew!”

  “I’ll never do it again, Miss Mary. Never.”

  Tears appeared in Andrei’s eyes.

  “Please don’t breathe a word of it to her,” he begged. “Just tell her that I wanted to steal some money.”

  Mary stared intently at the young man’s face.

  Does he love her, or am I going mad?

  “I don’t want her to find out. I’m ashamed. She won’t even look at me. A thief! Tell Ethel I’m a thief. I’d rather end up in prison.”

  Mary was losing her footing. This was glorious. She felt as if she were in the fifth episode of “Mists of Glory,” when the shepherd discovers the queen swimming in the lake.

  She had stumbled on the story in the kitchen one day, printed in the newspaper she was using to wrap the cheese. And she had started buying the latest installment each week, down in the village. From then on, Mary couldn’t get a whiff of old sheep’s cheese without thinking of the shepherd, hidden in the hollow tree, bemoaning his fate: “Why did I have to be born a shepherd?”

  And in her most uncensored dreams, Mary looked like the queen, swimming breaststroke in the lake. In those same dreams, Superintendent Boulard played the shepherd.

  “Kill me,” said Andrei.

  Mary came to her senses again.

  This time, the boy had gone too far. He shouldn’t take her for a complete fool.

  “Tell your stories to Miss Ethel, you dirty common thief. If you’re in love with Miss Ethel, then I’m in love with the viceroy of India! I don’t believe your lies for a second.”

  There was a knock at the door. The Lawrence brothers were there.

  “Wait . . .” Andrei whispered to Mary.

  More knocking.

  “Listen to me . . .” he pleaded.

  Mary wavered, affording Andrei the time to say, “Lift up my right trouser leg.”

  Mary was taken aback. The situation was becoming positively indecent, but her curiosity won out. This was definitely worthy of a plotline in “Mists of Glory.”

  “Stay on that side of the door!” she called out to the joiners. “I’ll let you in when I’ve finished tidying. This is a lady’s bedroom, gentlemen.”

  Keeping the gun pressed to Andrei’s face, she hitched up the fabric of his right trouser leg with her foot. If anybody had walked into the room right then, they would have seen a housekeeper of a certain age with her gun trained on a young man who was lying flat on the floor while she caressed his calf with her heel.

  “Good God!”

  There on the hock of Andrei’s knee, carved into his skin, she had just seen the five letters that spelled Ethel’s name. Yes, he loved her!

  Feeling as if she had been thrust into the spotlight of the talkies, Mary started to blush. She was horrified at being cast in the worst role of all: the shrew punishing the spurned lover. But all was not was lost.
In the audience’s eyes, she could still be the person to forgive the blunders of a first love.

  She could see them now, whole auditoriums rising to their feet and getting out their handkerchiefs.

  When the Lawrence brothers walked in they found Mary with a gentle glow to her cheeks and, behind her, Andrei, with three hastily rolled up bedroom carpets under his arms.

  “I’m taking this opportunity to get the carpets beaten,” Mary declared. “Hurry up. I don’t want the floorboards creaking anymore. There’s another bedroom to work on as well. The Princess of Albrac is coming tomorrow. I don’t want her to think she’s staying in a haunted house!”

  Then she turned toward Andrei.

  “For goodness’ sake, get a move on and go downstairs with that lot!”

  It had stopped raining.

  For the next hour, the castle rang out with the sound of hammers on floorboards and, outside, the thud of carpets being beaten with sticks in the damp grass. With each blow, Andrei disappeared in a cloud of dust.

  Ethel returned alone very late that night. She parked her car in front of the second stable that was used as a garage, and jumped out. Her Napier-Railton had no side door, so clambering out was rather like emerging from a cockpit. Ethel took off her leather helmet and goggles, leaving them on the seat.

  The castle was plunged in darkness. Just one window on the ground floor was still lit up. Ethel’s thoughts turned to her brother. Whenever she came back at night, she always hoped to see his window glowing under the roof.

  She’d had no news of Paul for several months now. He had returned to Spain in August, after learning of the deaths of four of his friends in the Castilian regiment in a massacre at Badajoz, close to the Portuguese border.

  Ethel had read in the newspapers about the international brigades springing up to support the Spanish republicans against the nationalist coup. For weeks now, young adventurers from all over the world had been enlisting in Madrid. Ethel feared for Paul’s life. She wanted him back, but this prospect also worried her. She knew he wouldn’t approve of what she was doing.

  Andrei heard Ethel pull up. He stayed lying flat on his bunk. The headlights were switched off. In the dark, he thought he could hear the sound of footsteps heading away over the gravel. He wrapped himself in his blanket so that all he could hear were the vibrations of the bats.

  Suddenly, the lights came on around him. There stood Ethel. She was staring at Andrei as he shielded his eyes with his hand.

  “Were you asleep?”

  He noticed that her woolen headband was as white as her complexion.

  “Follow me.”

  Andrei didn’t dare move. He assumed that Mary had told her everything.

  “Come on!”

  This time, he got up.

  He was standing opposite her now, and he had never been so close.

  She looked at him for a moment before striding off toward the back of the garage.

  “Hurry up!”

  Andrei followed her. She wore a raincoat that dated from at least the war. The filaments in the lightbulbs were crackling on the ceiling. Bats flitted among the beams.

  “Are you still tinkering about with the car?”

  Andrei didn’t understand. He felt cold.

  Ethel tugged at the tarpaulin covering the white Rolls.

  “I swear, I haven’t laid another finger on it,” protested Andrei. “I did as you said.”

  For a long time now, Andrei had been under strict orders not to repair the car.

  Ethel nodded.

  “Tomorrow evening, I want the engine to be running perfectly.”

  The boy’s face lit up.

  “Tomorrow morning,” Andrei corrected her.

  He was standing like a tin soldier, his arms by his sides.

  “Tomorrow morning, if you like. But I won’t be here very early. I’m leaving tonight. You can let Nick know when it’s ready.”

  “Nick?”

  “Nicholas.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Peter’s son.”

  “Why Nicholas?”

  “Because it’s for him.”

  Ethel noticed Andrei’s expression changing.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “I — I don’t understand,” stammered Andrei after at least twenty seconds had elapsed.

  Ethel took a step toward him.

  “Is this car being used by anybody?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “So I can do what I like with it. If I want to drown it in the loch, if I want to give it to my horse, if I want to plant chrysanthemums in the mudguards . . .”

  “But you told me —”

  “I’ve changed my mind.”

  “What about Master Paul?”

  “He’s playing at being part of the revolution in Spain. He’s not going to come back just for a ride in the Rolls. You have to choose in life.”

  She walked lightly away. Andrei couldn’t bear to think that he was going to have to repair this car for Nicholas.

  “What about your parents?” he called out.

  Ethel turned to face him.

  “Yes?”

  “Miss Mary told me that your father loved this car.”

  “Have I ever discussed your parents?” she replied, lowering her gaze. “Don’t talk about things of which you have no knowledge.”

  She remembered a trip with her father when she was five years old. At the top of a hill, on their way back from Glasgow, he had let the engine cut out, and the white car had sped down the hill in complete silence. Ethel had been standing on the backseat, behind him. The wind had flapped and whistled through her dress, making it move like a ghost.

  The following year, on seeing an airplane flying over the castle, Ethel’s father had stroked the car’s bodywork and remarked, “Look at this poor car: it’s worse than a plow compared with that bird!”

  But in his eyes, the Silver Ghost had remained the most beautiful of plows.

  “Let Nicholas know when the engine’s working,” Ethel told Andrei flatly. “And you can start by giving me some petrol; I’m leaving right away.”

  Andrei put a can behind the seat of the little Napier-Railton.

  “I don’t want to wake Mary. If she needs to know where I am, I’m heading north, to Ullapool. I’m going to collect someone off the boat, an old friend of my parents: the Princess of Albrac. I’ll be back tomorrow.”

  When Ethel started up the car, the racket it made in the dead of night must not only have woken Mary and everyone else in Everland Castle, but also Lily the doe, who was sleeping far away in the bracken.

  Andrei worked through the night. In the morning, he collapsed onto the straw. The Rolls had just started up first go.

  When he awoke two hours later, the car was no longer there. He let out a cry, ran as far as the castle steps, couldn’t find anyone, and headed for the kitchens. Scott saw him storm in, beside himself with anger.

  “Where’s the car?” Andrei roared.

  The cook looked astonished. He wiped his hands on his trousers. He was preparing for the arrival of the Princess of Albrac that same evening.

  “Weren’t you here this morning? Peter’s son, Nicholas, has repaired it. Everybody came out to see.”

  “Where’s he gone?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Andrei slammed his hand down on the table, knocked over a bench, and stormed out through the service door. He walked down a path hedged with boxwood. Peter was in the rose garden, hacking out the rotten wood and deadheading the roses before the first blizzards of September did their worst.

  Andrei grabbed him from behind.

  “Where’s your son?”

  Moments later, Andrei had mounted a horse; attached to his belt was a wrench that weighed more than two pounds. He jumped over two gates before joining the path through the beech trees that led down to the lake. In the muddy ruts, he recognized the tracks made by the Silver Ghost. He coaxed his horse into a gallop again.

  R
eaching a rock where the path forked, he wavered. Ethel’s car must have taken one of these turnings in the night, but it was the spacing of the Rolls’s wheels that he recognized. Andrei took the left fork. His horse was becoming as nervous as he was. In under ten minutes, he was close enough to the lake to have a decent view of its shores strewn with rocks and gorse. He had never come this far before.

  The path seemed to lead to a boathouse built close to the water’s edge. Andrei brought his horse to a halt when they were still a way off, in order to survey the premises.

  So it was here that Nicholas had his trysts with Ethel: a hut on the shores of a lake. Andrei thought about those interminable days when they disappeared off together. Well, it wouldn’t happen anymore. He gripped the heavy wrench in his fist.

  He noticed a few silver birch trees just behind the boathouse. They had already lost their leaves. And, behind the white curtain of their trunks, he could see the car. Andrei dismounted and patted the horse’s rump, so the animal understood to head home. It set off, turning back several times to check if it shouldn’t stay on a while, but it ended up trotting back in the direction of Everland.

  Andrei hid the wrench behind his back and circled the building, keeping his distance. He flanked the hedge, without ever taking his eyes off the main door. A metallic noise could be heard from time to time, together with the sound of someone singing to himself. Nicholas was in there — no doubt about it.

  Andrei approached the white Rolls.

  It took him a long time to make any sense of what met his eyes. The car’s hood was open wide and the contents had been ripped out. All that was left was a gaping hole, through which Andrei could see the grass. Gasoline oozed over the metal bodywork, which had been butchered by an ax. The white paint of the Rolls was smeared with greasy black stains. And yet none of this was the result of an accident: the engine had been deliberately extracted, like the heart from a corpse in an anatomy lesson.

  Andrei ran his finger over a piece of ripped-out tubing.

  There was nothing left. Where had all the components of the engine gone? Henry Royce himself, pipe in mouth, would have fine-tuned them with a nail file in his Manchester workshops.