Marrying Up (19 page)

‘He died as he’d have wanted to,’ Barney told her. ‘Breathed his last in the arms of a seven-foot-tall transsexual with steel
teeth.’

Alexa rubbed her face. ‘What’s all this got to do with me?’

‘Lord Bedstead’s memorial service,’ Barney said slowly, in the emphatic tones of one speaking to an idiot, ‘is certain to
be attended by a great many male aristocrats of similar rank. Not all of them will bring their wives. Not all of them will
be married, even.’

In the silence after these words, Alexa felt the pistons in her brain break through the rusty coating left by the last few
weeks and start to pick up speed. She could see what Barney was getting at. A cathedral full of peers. Some unattached. Sitting
ducks. The service would be of a length to allow her to pick her target from the discreet distance of the pews.

It was ingenious.

There was only one problem.

‘I never knew Lord Bedstead,’ she admitted. ‘Did you?’

‘No, actually.’

‘So how will we get in?’ She felt irritated that he had raised her hopes whilst overlooking this crucial factor.

‘Anyone wishing to pay their respects can apply for a ticket,’ Barney said gleefully. ‘I’m applying for two.’

Alexa’s smile broadened into a grin. It was inspired, it really was. You didn’t have to be invited into this social inner
sanctum. You only had to buy a ticket to be back in the swim.

‘Lord Wimble will be there,’ Barney added.

Alexa nodded. Wimble was the earl she had all but lap-danced on the way to Willoughby Hall. His family fortune was negligible
and his generous proportions gave a whole new meaning to ‘family seat’. But he was a start. Once back on the ladder, she could
trade him in for two wings, a dome, fishing rights and a villa in Umbria.

The white and gold double doors of the Crown Prince’s bedroom swung tentatively open. The anxious, smooth red face of Monsieur
Hippolyte, the royal private and press secretary, peered in and looked nervously about for something small, hairy and ferocious.

Was the blasted dog there? It had a nasty habit of nipping the ankles of anyone who stepped over the threshold.

‘Your Royal Highness?’ he murmured.

There was no answer. Hippolyte could make out little in the gloom of the Crown Prince’s bedroom. At the tall windows, the
thick lined curtains were pulled shut, but with apparent crazed haste and with no eye for aesthetics. Not in a manner, Monsieur
Hippolyte concluded, that suggested the Prince’s valet had done it, but then the Prince had not allowed his valet near since
he had come back from England. He had allowed very few people near, in fact. To say that the heir to the throne was unhappy
was not dissimilar to saying that the King was ever more short-tempered and the Queen increasingly tense.

Hippolyte cleared his throat. ‘Sir?’

There was no answer.

The press secretary felt horribly hot. Summer was gathering its full force in Sedona, blasting the mountainous Mediterranean
kingdom with scorching rays even at this time of the morning. Hippolyte fished a crumpled white hanky out of his pocket and
wiped his sweating brow. Squinting into the darkness, he pressed his fat little hands together and flexed his flabby biceps
beneath his crisp white shirtsleeves. Gingerly, he touched his head. The increasing stress seemed to be increasing the size
of the bald patch in the centre. Certainly, arranging the hanks of determinedly black hair that covered it was getting more
complicated.

But nowhere near as complicated as dealing with Prince Maxim. It was all that wretched PR consultant’s fault. It was easy
for him to demand the Crown Prince come home and get married for the good of the economy, then to flounce off to his next
lucrative engagement, leaving others to actually manage the reluctant heir and find him someone to marry.

Others like Hippolyte. Together with Maxim’s parents, he had scoured entire forests of royal family trees and thumbed from
dawn till dusk through every gazette of lineage and peerage he could lay his hands on. He had pondered lists of quadruple-barrelled
archduchesses until his eyeballs twisted. Life at the Chateau de Sedona recently had been a whirl of entertaining as every
eligible daughter in Europe came to stay. But to no avail.

Engelbert, as the entire castle staff knew, was at his wits’ end with his son. ‘He’s just not making an effort,’ the King
would rant, pacing up and down the same patch of carpet in his private secretary’s office. ‘There was nothing wrong with that
Spanish girl. She did have a strange laugh, but I told Max the trick was not to tell her jokes, that was all.’

But the Prince had been unmoved by the Spanish infanta, as well as the Austrian archduchess, the German baroness, the Italian
contessa
and the female Scottish laird. Likely candidates were running out. But Maxim had to marry someone. The people of Sedona wanted
a wedding. The King wanted a wedding. Everyone wanted a wedding, except the person expected to be the groom.

If Maxim didn’t get married . . .

Hippolyte pushed the hideous prospect away. His main skill
– and he was far from alone among palace employees in this respect – had always been ensuring his own survival.

Monsieur Hippolyte had been counting on royal benevolence well into his dotage. He saw himself, like many a cherished retainer
before him, putting his feet up in one of the grace-and-favour flats belonging to the Palace and situated in grand apartment
blocks all over Sedona. But how cherished a retainer was he at the moment?

The thought of leaving his comfortable – literally palatial – palace life brought a surge of terror to the private secretary’s
plump white breast. This was followed by one of pure panic. He could no more imagine life outside a royal residence than a
snail could imagine life without a shell.

Was it any wonder he had found himself, of late, treading the path he had sworn he would never tread again, down a certain
Sedona back street and up a certain pink-carpeted strip of pavement to the glossy black door of Madame Whiplash? There, anonymous
in a black leather mask, he could enter an entirely different world, where partners were plentiful and no one judged anyone.
Although the tall, silver-haired figure who had propositioned him the other night had been
very
reminiscent of a certain eminent French justice who had dined at the chateau on more than one occasion . . .

But who could blame him for being driven to such lengths? Hippolyte demanded angrily of himself. What other relief was there?
He felt utterly crushed under the weight of his problems; it wasn’t even as if they concerned Prince Maxim alone. Prince Giacomo
had returned in the early hours and subsequently spent some considerable time shouting from the palace windows at his departing
fellow carousers. They had left eventually, but not without a great deal of horn-blasting which only by a miracle failed to
wake his royal parents.

For Hippolyte, the sound had been the now-familiar reveille; he must get up, ring the manager of La Cage Aux Princes and spend
an hour trying to persuade the nightclub owner not to
release information to the press about what Giacomo had been doing, who with, and at the cost of how much. Hippolyte cleared
his throat. ‘Sir!’ he said again to Prince Max’s bedclothes.

All hell now broke loose. Maxim’s wretched dog, which had apparently been asleep, woke up and exploded into a frenzy of yapping.
Hippolyte leapt back in terror as it danced along the bed barking at him and glaring with its one eye. It was amazing how
much malevolence could be packed into a single small orb. Thank God it was too old and lame these days to be able to get off
the bed and bite him – but Hippolyte had thanked too soon. Still yapping furiously, the spaniel now slid itself off the end
of the bed and lowered itself by hooking its claws into the bedclothes. Once at ground level, it skittered over the Savonnerie
and sank its sharp teeth into Hippolyte’s plump ankle.

‘Ow!’ shrieked the panicking private secretary.

‘What’s going on?’ The Prince’s dark head appeared from beneath the heap of crumpled sheets. He sat up in his white pyjamas
with the royal monogram on the breast. His handsome face hardened when he saw his father’s factotum. ‘What do you want, Hippolyte?’

‘Your father would like to see you in an hour, Your Highness. You are expected in the throne room at ten o’clock.’

Having delivered his message, glancing nervously at the dog, Hippolyte retreated. Max fell back on his pillows and sighed.

Beano looked at him sympathetically with his good eye and loyally wagged his tail. Max tickled the red and white curls beneath
the animal’s chin. Beano apart, he wished with all his heart that he had stayed in England.

On arriving home, Max found he had miscalculated badly. His assumption that his parents were merely suffering from stress
could not have been further off the mark. His father had meant every word about forcing him into marriage for the good of
Sedona. There was, Engelbert announced, to be no more studying. Sedona expected a wedding, and a wedding there must be.

Even his mother, to whom he had instinctively turned for
sympathy, seemed to be keeping her distance and to be resolutely on the side of his father. There seemed no escape, none.

Max thought about the girls who had been paraded before him over the past couple of weeks. It had all been too excruciating
for words. They had trotted past him like prize heifers; if only they
had
been heifers. He would have found them infinitely more interesting.

And like a prize bull himself, he would, Max had gathered, be expected to impregnate any bride in short order. Although the
medieval ceremony when this process was witnessed by a bevy of bishops had been allowed to lapse – even Engelbert drew the
line somewhere – there was still the horrific prospect of becoming a father just as he emerged from childhood himself.

Max sank back into the pillows. Life seemed suddenly a series of prisons. The prison of marriage, the prison of parenthood
and the prison of royal duty. Not for nothing, he thought bitterly, were there three keys on the Sedona royal standard.

Why had he –
he
– been born the heir to a throne? He felt both resentful and guilty. It was a waste for him to have this position when he
didn’t want it, and when Giacomo clearly adored being royal.

Max almost envied his brother his breezy acceptance of a position in life that put him above other people. An egalitarian
by inclination, he himself had attempted to avoid the hooray crowd at university, although not with absolute success. There
had been a particularly determined social climber who had been hell-bent on an invitation to the chateau. Now what had been
his name? Van something. Van Hoofer? Something like that.

‘Hey, boy!’ Beano now derailed this gloomy train of thought. The dog had, with considerable difficulty, managed to leap back
up on the bed, and stood with his stiff legs shaking. The Prince stroked him, not without a twist of the heart. He had been
amazed to see, on his return, the extent to which, so suddenly, Beano had aged. Gone was the bounding bundle of red and white
curls. Beano’s legs were stiff and his one eye looked cloudy and
sticky with macular degeneration. He was getting old, Max saw, sadly.

The dog licked Max’s hand, and the Prince tickled him fiercely in the way Beano had so loved when he was a puppy. He buried
his nose in Beano’s long ears and felt like howling for the child he had once been, for whom life was just one long sunny
day and who could not even imagine the existence of adulthood and its responsibilities.

The Prince swung his long legs out of bed, padded to the window and poked his head through the curtains. The sky outside was
blue and hot as usual, but he could take no pleasure in it. He missed the grey, cloudy skies of England. He missed the great
green rolling estate at Oakeshott. But more than this, he missed Polly. He missed her smile. Her shy way of talking, her unexpectedly
loud and gleeful laugh. Her passion for her subject, her stories about the children, her amazing body . . .

He knew she must be wondering what had happened to him; but what could he tell her? He had, anyway, lost his mobile phone,
although now, after days of searching, he was beginning to wonder if someone had taken it on his father’s orders. Since when
was Sedona a police state?

He felt something soft and wet nudging his hand. He picked his dog up and buried his nose in the animal’s curly head. ‘Oh
Beano. What am I going to do?’

‘It’s looking good,’ Barney whispered as Alexa, aloft on swaying black heels, staggered up the stone path into Lord Bedstead’s
estate church.

‘Suppose so.’ Alexa looked round. It was a beautiful blue day, and the lane was full of flowering bushes, which in turn were
full of singing birds. The church was the small, ancient, grey type with arched mullioned windows and a square crenellated
tower. But the shoes were killing her and the English countryside wasn’t really her thing. Not unless you owned it, that was.

‘Not the bloody scenery,’ Barney hissed. ‘Over there!’ He gestured to where, on the other side of the lichened churchyard
wall, a gleaming line of black helicopters were lined up in the grassy meadow.

Alexa’s eyes widened. Lord Bedstead’s business interests had evidently ranged as far and wide as his libido and his memorial
service was attracting huge numbers of what Barney described as the great and the bad. The lane leading to the lychgate had
become a positive showroom of Bentleys and Aston Martins.

All of which had made taking the bus humiliating – Alexa could hardly remember the last time she had been on one. But Barney
had made a joke of it, saying they must speculate to accumulate. They had speculated on Alexa’s clothes, blowing the
last of their combined savings on a tight black dress with a plunging cleavage, a vastly broad-brimmed black hat and the heels.
‘I look much too tarty,’ she had objected.

‘Nonsense,’ Barney riposted. ‘You can’t look tarty enough on occasions like these. Death always makes people horny.’