Marrying Up (28 page)

There was a flurry at the throne room’s gilded entrance and everyone sat up. The footmen strained even straighter to attention.

One of the household servants was whispering in Monsieur Hippolyte’s ear. Max watched the private secretary’s red face pale,
and Hippolyte reel across the doorway to where the Lord Chamberlain stood sentinel on the other side. As he received the tidings,
the old man started, then went grey in the face. A yellowed hand shot up to his throat, as if freeing constricted breathing
passages.

‘What’s the matter?’ snapped Engelbert, watching this dumb show with annoyance.

Hippolyte was sweating even more profusely than usual. His face, as he walked towards the thrones, wringing his fat hands,
was almost purple.

‘Your Majesties, your Royal Highnesses . . .’ He was practically in tears, the Queen saw.

‘What?’ snapped the King.

‘I’m afraid . . . I’m very much afraid . . .’

Actually, he was terrified.

‘Out with it, Hippolyte.’

‘It appears there’s been a slight confusion about dates and times,’ the trembling private secretary stammered.

‘Confusion about times?’ The King looked outraged. There was never confusion about time in Sedona. Unpunctuality was against
the law – well, it would have been had he been able to get it on to the statute books. ‘What on earth do you mean, man?’

‘Lady Florence will unfortunately be unable to join us this morning.’

‘Unable?’ repeated the King, surprise temporarily suspending his anger. Then his anger kicked in. ‘
Unable?
’ He glared at the private secretary. No one had ever before been unable to ‘join’, as that fool Hippolyte put it, the royal
family at a state levee. To be invited as Lady Florence had been was a royal command.

Hippolyte’s expression was a mixture of sickly ingratiation
mixed with mortal fear. On top of the already outraged Lady Annabel, he was now about to experience the full ire of the enraged
King, following which he would face the fury of a Jason Snort denied his special-access pictures.

‘It seems,’ Hippolyte stuttered, wondering if his heart was about to give way, ‘that Lady Florence has disappeared.’

The direct way to Sedona was by bus, Polly discovered. A bus that, by the time she had acquainted herself with its existence
and location, she had almost missed. She clambered on board to discover that, besides her, it contained a great number of
middle-aged tourists brandishing guide books with pictures of a fairytale castle on the front. She felt a surge of excitement.
Max’s home!

It was blisteringly hot on the bus – the tourists had immediately bagged the shade and left Polly the frying-pan side. But
she was too happy to notice.

As a route to bliss, it was an unlikely one. Having chugged through the city back streets, they crossed a ring road and began
climbing a wide motorway leading into the hills. A series of orange-lit concrete tunnels led to more motorway, then suddenly
they turned off and the landscape changed beyond all recognition.

It was wild, stony and sun-blasted territory, a land of dry, rocky, steep-sided mountains. They were, Polly saw, travelling
along the sorts of roads that cars veered off in Bond films before exploding into a fireball at the bottom. Bends twisted,
steeply and suddenly, above yawning ravines. She had not realised the countryside behind the Cote d’Azur was so wild and elemental.

By the time they had reached the highest point of the road, Polly had counted fifteen hairpin bends offering heartstopping
views of dizzying chasms. From here the road wound gradually down beneath thin ash trees and turkey oaks. The panorama of
mountain peaks spread around them like the waves of a choppy sea; grey, green and, in the near distance, white-tipped: the
snow on the Alps.

Far, far below was the bottom of the valley. Trees grew out of the living rock at right angles, stunted and twisted affairs
for which life seemed in every sense an upward struggle.

If the bus driver miscalculated a bend, Polly thought, awed, there was a vertical plunge of hundreds of feet into the ravine.
Would she reach Max alive? She closed her eyes as another hairpin approached. The driver twisted the wheel and they went into
the switchback. At the back of the bend he forced the accelerator down to lift them out of it and the bus roared up on to
the straight again. Polly let out a groan of relief. The worst was over and they were still alive.

None of the tourists were taking the slightest notice of the view. The men seemed to be looking at each other’s cameras and
the women chatting to each other and consulting their guide books:
Le Chateau de Sedona, Der Schloss von Sedona
.

Polly had put her sunglasses on by now, but they made little difference. The light was so white and bright, it was difficult
to see anything properly, which was why, at first, she thought the dark shapes standing on an approaching bend were trees.
It was only as the bus ground closer and the trees could be seen to be moving, waving, even, that Polly realised that they
were in fact people.

It was a young blond couple. They were flagging the bus down frantically, possibly desperately. Had they, Polly wondered,
set off for a walk in this hot mountain landscape and suddenly realised what trouble they were in?

Neither of them, she saw as the vehicle slowed, seemed particularly well equipped for walking. The bus driver stopped and
opened the doors; without even waiting to be asked they leapt aboard. The girl had high heels on; her very short dress was
flashing and glittering in the brilliant light. Her make-up, Polly saw, was smudged and her very long pale hair tousled. She
looked as if she had just stumbled out of an all-night party.

The boy was strikingly good-looking, with large pale eyes and full lips. He had shoulder-length blond hair and wore skinny
black leather jeans, pointed black boots and a silver shirt open almost to the waist. His self-confidence was striking; he
grinned as he walked up the bus, pulling himself along by means of the seat tops as the French and German matrons looked on
admiringly.

‘Good morning, ladies and gentlemen!’ he announced cheerfully, flashing a set of beautiful teeth.

The bus driver was craning round in concern. Then the girl, who had remained at the front of the bus, sashayed over, leant
a long, creamy thigh against his ticket dispenser and smiled at him. The driver stared up at her, dazzled, all thought of
intervention gone.

‘Going to Sedona, right?’ The boy beamed confidently around.

‘
Ja, oui, ja
,’ came the panting chorus.

‘You want a sneak preview of the castle? Well, if you get off the bus just here, you can see down the mountainside right into
the back garden. The private back garden,’ the boy added with another flash of his impossible teeth. ‘You might see the King
in the hot tub if you’re lucky; he generally has one at this time of day.’

Within seconds, it seemed, the entire coach was empty, the ladies fighting each other to disembark. The bus driver had gone
too, in pursuit of the beautiful girl. Polly was left alone.

The young man peered in from the entrance. He called down the bus. ‘You don’t want to see?’

‘No thanks. I think the King’s entitled to have a bath unobserved.’

The handsome youth leapt on board and came up to her with a swinging walk. He bent and looked searchingly into her eyes;
his own, Polly saw, were intensely blue. ‘You might see the young princes too,’ he murmured. ‘Very good-looking young men.
Charming young men. They often chat to their father while he’s in his hot tub. Get through quite a lot of state business that
way, or so I’m told.’

Polly was up in a second and scrambling out of the bus. ‘Steady on,’ said the youth lightly.

Outside, the midday heat hit her like a fist. Wild herbs grew in the scrubland along the route and the perfume pulsed upwards
in the heat. Her fellow travellers, crowded under the scorched and weatherbeaten remains of a pine tree, were peering into
the chasm below. They were making puzzled noises.

‘You can’t see the garden at all,’ one indignant woman was saying to another.

You couldn’t, Polly saw. All that was visible from the clifftop was the shadowy and distant bottom of a ravine. As she stared
downwards, an engine roared into life behind her. She whirled round, but too late. The bus, with the silver-shirted youth
driving it, was pulling away and disappearing round the next bend.

It was eleven o’clock, and Alexa was taking her now accustomed place in the corner of the bar of the Hotel des Bains. During
the last two days she had surveyed most positions, and this table combined excellent eavesdropping with relative discretion.
Also, as it directly faced the entrance, anyone entering from the lobby could be instantly assessed.

The third and final of the table’s virtues was its distance from the white-coated waiters behind the long polished bar. They
were impeccably polite, but persistent, and Alexa had found that there was only so long the cheapest glass of white wine could
be made to last. Two hours was her record.

That the staff suspected her morals was obvious; a grey-suited manager came to frown at her every now and then. But she gave
them all a sweet smile, rustled her newspaper and generally faced them down. Alexa was made of stern stuff. And when on the
hunt for money, she was made of the sternest stuff of all.

Seated, she fished her copy of the
Financial Times
out of her imitation designer holdall. This choice of reading matter was meant to send subtle signals to any passing captain
of global industry that she understood his world; his fortune would be safe with her. So far, though, the signal had been
neither seen nor heard.

Perhaps, Alexa thought, it was too subtle. And yet there wasn’t much else subtle about her, and in particular about the
thigh-skimming leopardskin dress that had once belonged to Florrie and which Alexa had borrowed and conveniently forgotten
to give back.

She had settled for careful make-up, a re-Fake Baking of her legs and brushing her hair until it fell like a sheet of oil
over her shoulders. Her new footwear was extreme: high, shiny, open-toed, black and impossible to walk more than five steps
in; the flip-flops in which she had made the actual journey from the flat were stowed in her holdall, along with her make-up,
mobile phone and rapidly lightening purse.

But as yet, there were no takers.

Barney wasn’t doing any better. Late last night, over the roar of the helicopters, he had glumly related how the sole occupants
of the Casino’s main gaming room were a group of tourists from the West Midlands who, on the signal of their tour guide, had
departed to rejoin their coach.

Alexa was increasingly, gloomily certain they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. ‘Everyone must be on their yachts,’
she grumbled.

‘Quite possibly,’ Barney agreed serenely. ‘We just have to find a way of getting on them.’

Defeatedly, Alexa opened the newspaper. Then, aware of a disturbance, she lowered it. Someone had come in – stormed in was
more the phrase – to the empty bar. Horrified, Alexa swiftly raised her
FT
barrier. It may not have attracted a billionaire, but it provided a protective screen from this most dangerous of enemies.

The unmistakable figure at the bar was resplendent in a tight-fitting white silk suit and high silver heels. She wore white
gloves, carried a silver clutch and her wrists, throat and fingers were positively ablaze with diamonds.

Lady Annabel! Lady Annabel Trevorigus-Whyske-Cleethorpe! Unable quite to believe this stunningly unfortunate blow, Alexa raised
her head and peered in terror over the newspaper’s peachy ridge. Lady Annabel would have no difficulty in guessing exactly
what Alexa was doing here, and absolutely no qualms about denouncing her as a gold-digger to the bar staff, the lobby and
anyone outside who happened to be passing. In short, if Lady Annabel knew she was in Monte Carlo she would move heaven and
earth to run her out of town.

‘I’M LOOKING FOR MY DAUGHTER!’ Lady Annabel announced in a very loud, very slow voice.

Alexa gasped.
Florrie
was here too?

She risked another peep over the top of her paper. Lady Annabel was peering over the bar as if Florrie might be concealed
among the cocktail onions. ‘SHE’S VERY BLONDE!’ she was bellowing. Lady Annabel was clearly of the persuasion that if you
shouted in English to non-English speakers, they would somehow understand it. ‘SHE’S VERY BEAUTIFUL. YOU’RE QUITE SURE YOU
HAVEN’T SEEN HER?’

‘No, madame,’ the obviously terrified waiters were assuring her.

‘HER NAME IS LADY FLORENCE TREVORIGUSWHYSKE-CLEETHORPE!’ Lady Annabel thundered as she rapped the bar. ‘HAVE YOU GOT THAT?
LADY FLORENCE TREVORIGUS-WHYSKE-CLEETHORPE!’

‘Yes, madame, oui, madame,’ the waiters gibbered. ‘Lady Florence . . . erm . . .’

‘AND IF YOU DO SEE HER YOU MUST LET ME KNOW IMMEDIATELY!’ Lady Annabel roared, rapping the bar again. ‘I AM IN SUITE 404.
LADY ANNABEL TREVORIGUS-WHYSKE-CLEETHORPE.
CLEETHORPE
. HAVE YOU GOT THAT?’

Alexa ducked behind her paper again as Lady Annabel turned to face the room and cast a final furious stare round. With a last,
audible snort of frustration, she stormed out of the bar.

Alexa waved for a waiter. She looked shakily up at him. ‘I’d like a gin and tonic please. A double. No, make it a triple.’

For all the brightness of the day outside, the King’s study was dimly lit. Its three overlapping layers of chintz curtaining
had been all the rage when installed some thirty years ago. Rising in the centre like a carved wooden island was a desk piled
with books, crystal paperweights, jewelled letter-openers, silver-gilt inkstands, small statues and red leather boxes containing
state papers. Before the fireplace two long, worn damask sofas faced each other. It was on one of these that Max was sitting,
leaning forward with his arms crossed as his father angrily held forth from the other. On the worn carpet, his feet beat out
an accompaniment to his ire.