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‘Have you told the Dowager Princess how you feel?’
‘Not yet. We have agreed to have further meetings in February. By then I should have formulated my terms for accepting the Crown.’
‘So you do intend to accept it?’
‘I don’t see that I have any option.’ That much was true, although Robert knew that Drogo would interpret his statement as meaning that he felt he had a duty to step into his father’s shoes for the sake of the people, rather than because he had a driving need to take up the challenge for himself.
‘Oh, Robert, no. I can’t believe you are giving in to that old harridan and letting her persuade you into accepting the Crown, after the way she’s behaved,’ Emerald announced coming into the library in time to hear Robert’s comment.
She went over to kiss the top of Drogo’s head. ‘And I can’t believe how difficult it is to get this family organised. I’ve had to take Jamie out this morning and buy him new Wellingtons, he’s grown so much whilst he’s been at Eton. Emma is still fussing about what she’s going to take to Italy with her when she goes back there with Polly after the Christmas holiday, Katie isn’t even home from Oxford yet, and we’re supposed to be leaving for Macclesfield tomorrow morning.’ Whilst Drogo smiled indulgently at his wife, Emerald warned her elder son, ‘It’s your decision – I know that, darling – but once she’s got her claws into you Alessandro’s mother won’t rest until she’s taken over every aspect of your life, including finding you a wife. All she wants you for is to produce future heirs.’
Robert smiled, looking unfazed by his mother’s comment. Emerald sighed inwardly: why was it that her eldest child, conceived in the wild passion of her youth, should be so lacking in that wild passion himself? Like any mother she wanted to protect her children from emotional pain, but sometimes she found herself almost wishing that Robert would fall passionately and even hopelessly in love, if only so that he would know what passion was. Emerald couldn’t imagine how anyone’s life could be fulfilling without having tasted that emotion, even though as a mother that wasn’t something she would ever say to her children, especially not to Robert, who sometimes looked at her as though he was the older and wiser of the two.
‘The country has a population of three million, most of whom are scratching a living under the burden of a feudal system,’ Robert told his parents. ‘It’s practically bankrupt financially and the governing élite are certainly bankrupt morally.’
‘But that doesn’t mean you have to become Saint Robert and go riding to its rescue,’ Emerald pointed out.
Robert laughed. He knew his mother, and he knew all about the old enmity that existed between her and his paternal grandmother. They were both very strongminded and determined women who liked getting their own way.
‘I’ve agreed to go back and talk with my grandmother again in the New Year, once I’ve had a chance to think things through. The country does have potential, its people could be so much better off if things were handled differently. All the royal and government buildings in the old city are early eighteenth century and desperately in need of renovation. As an architect I’d love to get my teeth into that challenge.’
That was true, but Robert was deliberately promoting that project as a means of concealing from his mother how he really felt.
‘Think of it,’ he teased her. ‘All that scope for using Denby Mill silks. Surely that would be a form of revenge worth having? The mill could do with the business, after all, from what you’ve been saying.’
Emerald sighed, distracted, as Robert had intended that she would be.
‘That’s true. This current fashion for glazed chintz swagged everywhere has affected our sales, although we have had some success with the new Sweetpea design. I envy Angelli Silk, and their historical connections with Italy’s opera houses, which mean that they get the commissions when they need refurbishment.’
‘Denby Silk has its contracts with the National Trust,’ Robert pointed out.
‘We do have some contracts with them, yes, but they don’t use us exclusively. The American market is where the future lies and where we need to succeed. I’m going to have a word with Ella whilst she’s over about seeing if we can get some of the top-rank New York interior designers to start using our silks…and it’s all very well you sidetracking me, Robert,’ she continued, returning to their earlier topic of conversation, ‘but if you go ahead and become Crown Prince you will have to marry, because it will be your duty to produce an heir.’
Robert had dated any number of young women over the years but hadn’t as yet shown any inclination to settle down, and for a very good reason, but it was not one he could communicate to his mother. The early years of Robert’s life, before his mother had married Drogo, had been very turbulent. Emerald had partied hard and lived life to the full, as the saying went. One of her lovers had been a notorious East End gangster, Max Preston. Robert had been seven then.
Memories he preferred to keep safely locked away would surface abruptly against his will: his mother’s frightening changes of mood; the sound of slammed doors and screaming arguments; the sounds from her bedroom one night when he had woken up in the dark feeling afraid and alone, and had gone there seeking comfort. He had been afraid for her when he had heard the noise, the man’s voice thick and harsh, his mother’s begging over and over again, ‘Please…please…please…’
He had opened the door and seen…
Perhaps every child inadvertently witnessing a parent having sex retained the same feeling of revulsion that he felt. Perhaps, like him, they put those memories in a box and buried that box very deeply with a stone slab on top of it. Perhaps they also grew to adulthood too sharply aware of the danger of out-of-control passion, fearful of it and determined, like him, never to let it take control of them. Perhaps. But Robert didn’t know, because it wasn’t the kind of thing that anyone discussed.
Now, whilst sexually his taste ran to intelligent, feisty, exciting, passionate and even challenging women, his experiences as a child meant that he had decided that he would never want to commit permanently to such a woman. They were too intense, too adversarial, too demanding and high maintenance emotionally and mentally for the men who loved them, and to their families. Life with them was a roller coaster that mowed down everything and everyone in its path. Robert had no intention of allowing himself to ride such a roller coaster. Better to enjoy the passion and the excitement, but to keep the woman who provided it at a safe distance, to make sure she was dispensable. For that reason he had decided that he would not marry. There had been, after all, no need. But the death of his father and his grandmother’s approach to him had changed all of that. If he was to satisfy his now driving ambition to become Crown Prince of Lauranto then he would have to marry, as his mother had just pointed out.
His mother and his paternal grandmother would fight – virtually to the death, he suspected – to be the one to select his bride for him, so it was far better that he selected his own bride. He had, in fact, already done so. The right wife for him, as Crown Prince of Lauranto, would be a wife whose whole loyalty was to him, who supported him unquestioningly, and whose temperament was such that she would accept that her role must be a supportive rather than a leading one. She must love him and only him, but at the same time she must not be passionately possessive or openly sexual in her attitude or behaviour. She must have the intelligence, the education, the confidence and the right kind of nature to be his consort, and she must, of course, look good. It was a long list of requirements but Robert knew someone who filled them all.
Olivia, the cousin he knew already loved him. Olivia, who was elegant, well groomed, well educated, calm, and whose loyalty to him would be absolute.
However, he had no intention of telling his mother what was in his mind – yet.
It was only later, when Robert had returned to his own home – the penthouse apartment in a stylish new block for which he had been the lead architect – that Emerald showed Drogo how anxious she really was about her son’s future.
‘Is it selfish of me to hope that Robert will turn down Alessandro’s mother, and refuse the Crown?’
‘I don’t know,’ Drogo replied carefully, ‘but I do know that it won’t help if you keep running her down to him, because ultimately if he does decide to accept that could put him in an awkward position.’
Strong-willed Emerald might be, but she hated feeling that her husband disapproved of something she’d said or done.
‘But she is such a horrendous monster,’ she insisted, turning on the slender heel of her damson-coloured Charles Jourdan court shoes and walking towards the window, the cut of her Chanel tweed suit, flecked with lilac, damson and white against a black background, discreetly outlining her curves.
Even with the sharp winter light falling on her, to Drogo she still looked as stunning as she had done when he had first seen her.
When she finally turned and saw the look of love and concern on her husband’s face, she walked back to him and put her head on his shoulder.
‘I only want Robert to be happy, Drogo – is that so very wrong?’ She paused and then added in a voice shorn of her normal confidence, ‘Sometimes I wonder if it’s true what they say about being careful what you wish for.’
‘Meaning?’ Drogo invited.
‘When Robert was born I felt triumphant because no matter what Alessandro’s mother might choose to think, Robert would always be Alessandro’s first-born son and his rightful heir. Since then I’ve wished so often that you had been his father. That way he’d always be here, with us, part of us and our way of life.’
It was so unlike Emerald to show any hint of vulnerability or regret, that Drogo took her in his arms, wanting to comfort her.
‘If he accepts what Alessandro’s mother offers him,’ Emerald went on, ‘then he won’t be part of us any longer. I worry for him, Drogo. We’ve brought him up to be comfortable in the life he has here in England; Alessandro’s mother will want him to be Alessandro’s son, charming but weak, royal but malleable, a handsome puppet prince.’
‘You’re underestimating Robert,’ Drogo tried to comfort her. ‘He is his own man, Emerald.’
‘It would all have been so much better if he had been your son – not that I’d want James disinherited, of course – but, Drogo, how on earth am I going to face owning up to a son who is the Crown Prince of somewhere as ridiculous as Lauranto? Everyone who’s anyone knows that a European title is merely a joke compared with a British title.’ Emerald gave a small shudder, reassuming her normal mantle of assured superiority. ‘We can’t let him make even more of a Ruritanian comedy of himself by marrying some girl with the trumped-up title of “Princess” just because it suits Alessandro’s mother.’
‘No, better by far that he marries someone we have chosen for him,’ Drogo agreed straight-faced.
Emerald leaned back within the circle of his arms and looked up at him. It’s all very well you laughing, but these things are important, Drogo.’
‘I’m prepared to agree that if Robert does step into Alessandro’s shoes then it will be important that he marries someone he loves, someone who understands the demands of his role and her own, and who can deal with the problems those demands may cause them both, but as for us choosing that someone – just think how you would have felt if your mother had chosen your husband for you.’
Still looking up at him, Emerald told him derisively, ‘She did – she chose you, even if she has never said so.’
‘Mmm. Well, there are exceptions to every rule,’ Drogo allowed, with a grin, before bending his head to kiss her.
Chapter Three
‘It’s definite then, Nick? This separation, I mean. There’s no chance of the two of you…?’ Rose Simons asked her stepson sadly.
‘No, none. Sarah has made that more than clear. She’s even had the locks changed. Her father’s idea, no doubt.’
Nick’s voice might be as crisp as the shirt he was wearing – laundered, no doubt, professionally rather than by his wife – Rose thought wryly, but she knew her stepson, and she knew the vulnerabilities and insecurities Nick was so adept at hiding. Too adept? Was that part of the reason why he and his wife had separated? Because the experiences of the first twelve years of Nick’s life had made him wary of trusting others?
To the outside world Nick might be an aggressive and very successful corporate raider, whose photograph appeared regularly in the financial press, accompanied by articles praising his economic acumen, but to her he was still, in part, the troubled orphaned child she had taken to her heart.
Nick pulled out one of the matt chrome bar stools from the kitchen island unit where his stepmother had been chopping vegetables for the curry she planned to make for supper. The kitchen of the Chelsea town house Josh and Rose had bought together after their marriage, with its streamlined and highly individual chrome and glass décor, might not look as cosy and domesticated as the hand-painted, extortionately expensive Smallbone kitchen Sarah had insisted on having fitted in the overpriced house in The Boltons she had fallen in love with, but Nick knew which kitchen he felt most at home in and where he felt most valued.
His stepmother had her own unique style, which owed much to the fact that she was a very successful designer of both commercial and private house interiors, working from the family-run Walton Street shop, first opened by her aunt Amber, and something to the oriental genes inherited from her Chinese mother. To those who didn’t know her, from the top of her polished still-black pixiecut hair, to the hem of her strikingly simple black dress, Rose Simons breathed a style that appeared intimidating, but Nick knew the loving heart Rose concealed beneath her couture clothes and her businesslike manner.
He couldn’t think of any other woman he knew and he knew plenty – who, on opening her front door to a scruffy, dirty, snotty-nosed unknown boy of twelve, who was announcing that her husband was his father, would have reached out, as Rose had done to him, to say calmly, ‘Well, I am pleased to hear that because if there’s one thing this house lacks, it’s a boy living here.’
‘Nick…’
‘It’s all right,’ he told her now. ‘I’m not going to do anything stupid, like going round there and kicking up a fuss. I’ve already tried that, after all.’ He rubbed his hand against his jaw, the contact making a faint rasping sound. He was the image of his father, Rose thought, as she put the sliced vegetables into a bowl, and covered it, her movements practised, calm and minimal, in harmony with the pared-down elegance of the kitchen. Rose liked things to be easy to understand and assess instead of complicated; she liked things to be out in the open instead of hidden away, and all that was reflected in her designs. Just as a cluttered, overfilled mind could conceal forgotten secrets and thoughts that ultimately could grow and fester, so, she felt, could cluttered ‘space’ lead to the same potential hazards.
Nick wasn’t like that, though. Nick was a child damaged by the misery of the early years of his life, and Rose’s heart ached for him.
Although he was trying to conceal them, she could see his bitterness and his anger over the draining, long-drawn-out misery that had been the ending of his marriage, even if those emotions were now banked down under a thin seal of acceptance.
‘What…what’s going to happen about the children?’ Rose had dreaded asking. She and Josh adored their grandchildren, and Rose considered herself fortunate to see as much of them as she did, thanks to the fact that she and Josh lived virtually within walking distance of Nick and Sarah’s house.
‘Sarah’s agreed that I’ll be able to have reasonable access. Reasonable access. Hell, they are my kids, I made them, I—’ He broke off and pushed his hand into his hair. ‘Sorry…but when I think of what this is doing to them, and all because of Sarah’s ruddy father. The poor little sods were crying their eyes out when I left. Bloody Sarah – you think she’d have spared them that, at least until after Christmas.’
Christmas.
Rose bent her head over the bowl, not wanting Nick to guess what she was thinking. For her Christmas meant going ‘home’ to Denham Place, near Macclesfield, and to Amber, her aunt. It meant being part of the large gathering of siblings, cousins and parents that now spanned three generations. But Nick had never truly been comfortable within that group, always holding himself deliberately outside it, and since the boys had been born he had opted out of going altogether, ‘because Sarah wants to go up to Scotland to be with her parents.’
‘Will you be seeing the boys over Christmas?’ Rose asked.
‘Not a hope in hell. Sarah’s taking them to her parents. They’ve never liked me, especially her father. No doubt they’ll have some kilt-wearing chinless wonder waiting in the wings to offer her the comfort of a male shoulder and the right kind of background. Jesus,’ Nick exploded, ‘when I think of the way I’ve bloody half-killed myself to give her the kind of lifestyle she kept on whining that she wanted, only to have her turn round and say that she wants us to separate because I’m always working.’
Rose didn’t say anything. How could she? She knew as well as Nick did himself that there was some justification in Sarah’s accusation, and that the reality was that he loved his work. It enabled him to express the aggression within him that came from his struggle to withstand the cruelty of his childhood, living with a stepfather who had beaten both him and his mother, until the man had fallen into the road after a heavy bout of drinking and had been hit by a bus, dying of his injuries in hospital. Nick’s work gave him not just financial independence, but also something he needed very badly, and that was the triumph that came from out doing others who, for one reason or another, considered themselves to be his betters.
Rose loved her stepson but she wasn’t blind to his faults or the inner demons that drove him.
There was one thing, though, about Nick that filled her heart with pride and gratitude and that was his abhorrence of physical violence. He could so easily have developed the same behaviour patterns as the man he had once believed to be his father. Even at twelve, with the deprivation he had suffered, he had been a tall, muscular boy. Rose knew she would never forget the evening the headmaster of the excellent local school they had got Nick into had come round to tell them about the taunting Nick had suffered from a group of boys in his class, and the way that Nick had endured that taunting and walked away from it without resorting to the violence they were obviously trying to goad him into.
When Rose had talked to him about it later, he had confided to her that his mother had made him promise before she died that he would never use his fists on anyone, ‘because him that beat us both up isn’t your proper dad, and I want to be proud of you when I think of you with your proper dad when I’m gone.’
Later that night, Rose had cried in Josh’s arms. ‘I can’t bear to think what Nick’s had to go through,’ she had told him. ‘He’s only twelve and he’s had to watch his mum dying, and then come and find you, not knowing how he’d be treated.’
‘Well, I could hardly deny him, could I?’ Josh had said bluntly. ‘Not when he’s the spitting image of me. But I’d still not have taken him in if you hadn’t been willing to have him, Rose.’
The thin, dark-haired boy had indeed been unmistakably Josh’s son when he’d knocked on their door and announced that Josh was his father from, as they’d discovered later, a brief fling he’d had with a young married woman, way back before Rose had even met Josh.
And, of course, Rose, childless by choice because of all that she’d suffered herself because of her mixed race, had taken Nick straight to her heart. Josh had taken a bit more convincing that the boy should stay, but within a month Nick was walking like his dad and talking like him, and Josh, when he thought Rose wasn’t looking, had been bursting with pride in his son.
‘Well,’ Rose said now, ‘you’re welcome to come to Macclesfield for Christmas with us, you know that, Nick’
‘What, and have Saint Robert sympathising with me, whilst secretly they’re all thinking that they don’t blame Sarah. Because, let’s face it, Ma, I don’t fit in with them and I never have. Posh people with posh kids, that’s what they are. No offence meant. As it happens I’ve got a mate who’s going to be spending Christmas in the Bahamas and he’s invited me to join him. Sun, sea and pretty girls – what else could a man want, eh, Ma?’
Rose wished she could do more to help him but she knew how independent he was. Nick had inherited Josh’s sharp instinct for a good business deal. After university he’d studied for an MA and then gone to work on the trading floor of the London arm of an American bank. The Gordon Gekko world of money and Nick had almost been made to go together, Rosie recognised, and neither she nor Josh was surprised that he’d become so successful.
She also understood perfectly well why he had fallen for Sarah, then a newly qualified young accountant, whom he’d met through work, and why Sarah had fallen for him, but she had worried that they were rushing into marriage with expectations that couldn’t be met.
Rose knew there had been differences between them for a while – arguments that had caused problems between them, which neither of them had seemed willing to resolve. Sarah’s father was a wealthy titled Scottish landowner, who, Rose privately thought, was inclined to bully his wife and daughter and who didn’t like Nick. But Rose suspected that Nick sometimes went out of his way to provoke his father-in-law into hostility towards him. Rose actually felt sorry for Sarah, guessing that there were times when the young woman felt torn between her father and her husband.
‘Of course, Sarah’s father is going to be crowing, but if either of them think that I’m going to allow my sons to be packed off to his old public school then they can have another think.’
Rose sighed. She knew that the subject of the education of Nick and Sarah’s two young sons, Alex and Neil, had led to the most bitter of their quarrels. Sarah’s father felt the two boys should be educated at his old public school, as boarders ‘to make men of them’, whereas Nick wanted the boys to attend his own old school.
Nick might like to come across as a bit of a cockney wide boy when it suited him, and in order to infuriate his father-in-law, but the reality was far more complex than that.
‘Cup of tea?’ Rose went to fill the kettle when he nodded. ‘Remember when you first arrived here, Nick?’ she asked him as they waited for it to boil.
‘Do I?’ he laughed. ‘I was nearly crapping meself as I stood on the step, not knowing what to expect. Christ, I hadn’t even known Bert wasn’t my father until my mother told me when she was dying. When you opened the door and saw me there I bet you felt like sending me packing, a snotty-nosed scruffy kid, claiming that your husband was his dad.’
‘What I saw, Nick, was a young boy with more courage than a man three times his age. Not that it wasn’t a shock.’
‘You’re the one with courage,’ Nick told her, going to the fridge to get the milk. ‘We both know that Dad would have had me out on my ear and handed over to Social Services, if he’d had his way. But you wouldn’t let him do that. You told us both that my place was here.’
‘Josh was just shocked. He’d never really have turned his back on you. He simply had no idea that you existed.’
‘It was you, though, who swung things in my favour, Ma. You who loved me before Dad did.’
Rose put her hand on his arm. ‘I was so grateful to your mother, Nick. I still am. When she sent you to us she gave me the best gift I could ever have had, aside from your father’s love.’
‘But…’ Nick challenged ruefully. He knew his stepmother. He knew how much she loved him, how protective she had always been of him, knowing from her own experience how hard it could be to find acceptance when you were ‘different’. He had gone from living on welfare, to having a father who could afford to give him the very best of everything. It had been Rose, though, who had understood that he needed to find his own level, and who had supported him.
‘No buts,’ Rose assured him. ‘Just don’t let your pride lead you into doing something you might regret, Nick. You’ve got two sons—’
‘You mean I’ve provided Sarah’s father with two grandsons,’ he interrupted her bitterly, ‘because that’s what she thinks is more important. It’s no use. I’ve tried…Sarah would probably say that she’s tried as well, if she were sitting here, but all the trying in the world can’t put right what’s gone wrong between us and, to tell the truth, I don’t even think that I want it put right any more.’
‘Oh, Nick…’ Rose hugged her stepson tightly.
In so many ways he was the image of his father, and she would have loved him for that alone. But there were other ways in which he was uniquely himself and she loved him for that as well. Josh had grown up as an only child of loving Jewish parents, who had themselves grown up in the East End of London. His childhood had given him self-confidence and an optimistic self-assurance. Nick had been brought up in an atmosphere of male violence and female fear. He had Josh’s self-confidence, but in Nick that confidence had a much harder edge to it, twinned with cynicism and sometimes even suspicion about the rest of the human race. Where Josh was exuberant and physically affectionate, Nick found it difficult to show his feelings. Whilst Josh had always been ambitious, Nick was far more driven. The so-called ‘big bang’ in 1986, when the financial system in London had become deregulated, had made Nick a very wealthy man, taking him from the trading floor to heading up his own department within one of the world’s most successful merchant banks, but it was rare to see Nick smiling and even more rare to hear him laughing.
‘When’s Dad due back?’ Nick asked, changing the subject.
‘He said he’d be home in time for dinner, but you know how these sessions with the advertising people run on.’
Out of the success of his original hairdressing salon Josh had built up his business, mainly by lending his name to hair-care products and merchandising, and these days he was more of an entrepreneur and businessman than a hands-on hairdresser, although he still insisted on cutting Rose’s hair himself.
‘Black gold, that hair of yours was,’ he often told her. ‘That style I cut for you and the photographs Ollie took of it were where it all began for me, Rosie. You’re my good luck.’
‘Why don’t you stay and have dinner with your dad and me?’ Rose suggested.
Nick shook his head. ‘I’ve got a client to see this evening, and I need to sort myself out with a decent flat before Christmas.’
‘I can’t give you your Christmas present yet because it hasn’t arrived,’ Rose told him.
Nick had come to them with no possessions, and when Rose and Josh had gone round to the house where he and his mother had been living, they’d found a handful of photographs of Nick as a baby with his mother. Recently Rose had sent the best of these photographs to Oliver in New York, and he had promised to produce some new photographs from them, to be framed and given to Nick as his Christmas present. They were Rose’s way of saying to him that neither she nor anyone else had the right to exclude his mother from his life, nor to ignore all that she had done for him, and Rose knew that when Nick saw them he would understand that, just as she knew that beneath his sharp-edged exterior he could be both vulnerable and sentimental.
Christmas presents…Nick looked away from his stepmother. He hadn’t had time to go with Sarah when she’d taken the boys to Hamleys and Harrods at the beginning of December. He’d stopped going Christmas shopping for the boys with her after he’d bought them both battery-driven child-size cars. He’d been thrilled with the cars. As a child he hadn’t even been able to dream of things like that. He’d raced home from work the day they were due to be delivered, only to find that Sarah had sent them back.
‘But, Nick, that kind of thing is so dreadfully vulgar,’ she had told him.
‘Like me, you mean?’ he had fired back, and she hadn’t denied it, simply turning away from him, saying quietly, ‘Daddy says that we really ought to be thinking about getting the boys used to riding. He’s sorting out a couple of ponies he thinks will suit them.’
‘Ponies? They are my sons, not some ruddy little Lord Fauntleroys,’ he’d told her before he’d stormed out of the house.
‘Hurry up, you two, otherwise Katie is going to miss her train.’
The sound of her best friend’s brother’s voice from the bottom of the stairs had Katie making a grab for her case whilst Zoë put her finger to her lips and mouthed, ‘Let’s pretend we aren’t here. He’ll have a heart attack. You know what he’s like about being on time for things.’
Katie could have said that since, on this occasion, what he wanted to be on time for was the train she needed to catch for London, teasing him didn’t seem very fair. But long experience of Zoë had her shaking her head instead, whilst downstairs Tom swore audibly. Zoë burst out laughing and called out, ‘Ooooh, Tom, fancy you using such naughty words.’
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