Princess Daisy (5 page)

“No, you don’t”

“Oh, but I do.” Francesca entered an empty box in which blankets and tack were stored and sat down on a bale of clean straw that stood against one wall. She tilted her head back against the wall and let her wrap fall carelessly away from her shoulders, knowing exactly how the promise of the movement would affect him. He saw immediately that she was not playing the coquette or the tease. The look she gave him was so profound that it gathered together her entire ardent nature and offered it to him with artful purpose. In one stride, Valensky followed her, put his arm around her waist and turned her to him. He whispered into her ear, “The Tiger Moth was a basic training plane for the RAF.”

“Basic …” Francesca breathed.

“Very, very basic …” Valensky kissed the curve of her jaw, near her ear, moving his mouth softly until their lips found each other. At that instant something changed forever in both of them. They had crossed an invisible barrier and discovered themselves firmly planted on the other side of their lives. They knew almost nothing of each other but they were already beyond questions, reassurances or preconditions. It was as if they, two separate beings, had, in coming together, formed a third, quite different entity, that would never, now, be resolved back into the originals.

Francesca pulled away from his lips and, reaching up with both arms, unpinned her chignon so that all her dark hair fell down over her shoulders. She shook it loose impatiently and then, looking full into his eyes, she adroitly managed to unfasten her strapless dress and her crinolines,
throwing them as hastily aside as if they were made of hopsacking. Recklessly she flung herself out of her clouds of chiffon plumage only to appear in her resplendent flesh, lying totally naked on a pile of horse blankets, laughing softly as she watched Stash Valensky, momentarily bewildered and taken by surprise, struggle out of his dinner jacket. Soon, very soon, he was as naked as she. He savaged her abandoned flesh with an urgency, almost a cannibalism, he hadn’t known in years. This creature of roses and pearls had become, in a flash of magic, a demanding mortal who begged him, in hungry, hoarse tones, to take her as quickly as possible. She would not let him linger at any point; considerations of her own pleasure melted before her craving to have him inside her; deeply, fully, to possess him. When he mounted her and she opened for him, a queen joyfully squandering all her treasures, it was a primeval act. As he gave himself, shatteringly, to his climax, Francesca looked up at his face in the moonlight, his eyes tightly closed, an expression of intense concentration, almost of agony, furrowing his features, and smiled in a way she had never smiled before. Afterward they clung together under the horse blankets, their bodies radiating a triumphant heat, able now to touch each other with tenderness, to explore rather than plunder, to caress rather than raven. Again they made love and this time Stash would not permit Francesca to set the pace, but brought her with infinite skill to an orgasm so stabbing, so victorious, that it frightened her. They slept awhile and awoke to see the change of light, the unmistakable signs of approaching dawn in that fraction of the sky visible from their corner of the horse box.

“Your friends—my God, what will they think?” said Stash, suddenly remembering the Firestones.

“Matty will be making noises like an outraged father in a Victorian melodrama and Margo will be excited and curious and pleased with herself. Or they went to bed early and don’t even know I’m still out … which would be most unlikely. In two hours Matty will start to think about going to the police, but he won’t because he doesn’t want publicity.”

“I’d better let them know you’re safe.”

“But, it’s too early to phone … look, the sun is just rising.”

“I’ll just go and tell Jean to ring up the hotel and say you’re fine and will be back soon. Don’t move.”

He was back in minutes. “That’s done. Now we’ll make our plans and then we’ll find some breakfast.”

“Plans?”

“The wedding. As soon as possible and no fuss … or all kinds of fuss, if that’s what you’d like. Just so it’s soon.”

Francesca rose halfway out of the pile of blankets in astonishment, her nipples still tender and sore from the assault of his lips and teeth, bits of straw in her wildly disordered hair. She gaped in astonishment at this man who was looking down at her with utter conviction.

“Married?”

“Is there any alternative?” He sat down and took her in his arms, pressing her forehead to the place where the tan of his neck turned into the rosy-white skin of his chest. She lifted her head and asked again, “Married?”

Stash pulled a blanket over her shoulders against the morning damp. His strong hands, accustomed to obedience, grasped the top of her arms and when he spoke his voice, though low, had the ring of a cavalry charge.

“I’m old enough to know that this sort of thing doesn’t happen twice in a lifetime. At my age there’s no such thing as infatuation. It’s love and, damn it, I’m
no good
at love—I don’t know the right words, I can’t tell you what I feel because I’ve never done it before. I haven’t used the real words, just other words, play-love words, seduction words—”

“But I have used
all
the real words, the most beautiful ever written—and
never
been good at love either—so we’re equal,” Francesca replied slowly, realizing a truth she had not said out loud before.

“Have you ever felt like this? Can you imagine feeling like this again?” Stash demanded.

Francesca shook her head. It was easier to turn her back on everything that had made up her life until yesterday than it was to think of life apart from Stash in any way.

“But … shouldn’t we get to know each other?” she said, and then laughed deeply at the conventionality of the question.

“Know each other? Oh, God—we’d just end up in the same place. No, we will tell them we’ve decided to get married and that’s that. Francesca, say yes!”

All of Francesca’s romantic nature rose up within her. She didn’t say yes but she inclined her queen’s head and passionately kissed his hands in a fury of submission and possession. She wept and he kissed her wet eyes.

The sun was up and all the noises of the farm suddenly burst into their consciousness.

“You’d better dress,” Stash grinned like a boy.

“Dress? Have you any idea …?” Francesca pointed to a heap of crumpled chiffon and silk flowers lying on the dirt floor of the stable. “To say nothing of this!” She flourished a white lace undergarment which had worked its way under the horse blankets. It was called a Merry Widow, a corselette which started at a strapless bra, continued to form a fashionably tiny waist and reached halfway down the hips where garters were attached to hold up her stockings.

“I’ll help you—but you got out of it so quickly.”

“There are ways and ways—but getting back in is another story. No, Stash, I just can’t put this all back on,” she implored. “Look, my fingers are shaking.”

They both froze, startled by the whistle of an approaching stable hand.

“I’ll head him off,” Stash whispered, trying not to laugh. “Get back in there.” Francesca dove into the blankets
giggling
. The transition from high romance to farce was complete, as, with one eye, she could see the pony in the next box stretch his head in her direction and snort as if in shocked indignation, no doubt she thought wildly, trying to alert the entire stable to their carryings on. Before long Stash was back, holding a pile of clothes.

“I made a deal with that boy,” he said, handing her a pair of well-polished old riding boots, a frayed blue shirt, and a pair of shabby riding breeches. “He’s about your size and I think he had a bath this morning—but I don’t guarantee it.”

While Francesca managed to dress in the boy’s clothes, mercifully clean and only two sizes too big for her, Stash brought her evening bag from the car. She peered into the mirror of her compact and saw that no trace of make-up remained on her face. She decided not to bother with repairs. Francesca loved her scraped and reddened skin, her bruised lips, her unfamiliar, excited eyes.

“I need a belt,” she discovered.

Stash inspected the variety of tack hanging on the wall. “Martingale’s too long. The bridle? No, it won’t work, nor the curb chain. I’d give you my bow tie if I could find it, but it’d be too short. Here, this should do.” He handed her a long length of material, doubled over.

“What’s that?”

“Tail bandage—keeps the pony’s tail from catching on the polo stick.”

“Who said romance was dead?” she asked.

“Tell them it was an Act of God.” Francesca laughed at a stupefied Matty.

“You’d have to be pregnant for that!” the agent exploded. “You don’t even have a decent excuse! You’re throwing away a great career to marry some Russian polo player out of nowhere and you’re as fucking light-hearted as ten thousand goddamned angels dancing on the head of a pin.”

Francesca flung clean defiance in the teeth of his logic.

“Matty, how many years does a person have to live at the peak? The sky-rocket years, Matty? The firework years? I’m in love with a real man for the first time, so be happy for me!” She made her demands with an infuriatingly carefree smile. “We want everything, Matty—all—all there is, and we want it now. Why shouldn’t we have it? Can you give me a single reason that will mean anything—even in ten years?” she challenged him.

“All right, I’m happy, I’m thrilled, I’m overjoyed—my best client, like a daughter to me, is getting married to some bozo she met yesterday—who could ask for a better reason for feeling happy? And what does she say when I ask her why it has to be so sudden, why she can’t go home and just do
Robin Hood
first and then get married? What does she say when I tell her that nobody wants to stop her from marrying her prince, but maybe she should get to know him better?”

“I said,” Francesca answered dreamily, “that it
felt right
. I said I’d never been really sure of anything before—that I’d been waiting for him all my life and now that I’d found him I’ll never leave him.”

Margo heard a note in Francesca’s voice that told her that whatever the girl was doing, it could not be delayed nor denied.

Matty threw up his hands. “I give up. I never had a chance anyway. All right, you’re going to do it, so that’s that and I’ll cable the studio. So they’ll sue—they have every right. And they’ll win, too. I knew we shouldn’t have come to Europe. It makes people
crazy!
”

3

F
rancesca had lapsed from Catholicism years before, but, like all Catholics she remained familiar with the rites of the church. In contrast to her Berkeley Sunday-school days, the marriage service in the Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Paris seemed like a phantasmagoric Hollywood production, Byzantine and bizarre. She almost expected to hear the director’s voice calling “Cut” as, after an interminable service, she and Stash drank three times from a cup of red wine and were led by the priest three times around the lectern. Clouds of incense billowed around them in the light of hundreds of candles, and the unreality was underscored by the majestic, deep bass notes of the male choir singing without instruments, their only counterpoint the celestial sound of a choir of children. Two of Stash’s friends held golden crowns over their heads as they walked and it seemed to Francesca that the circle of fascinated spectators was a crowd of dress extras.

Although they had tried to keep the date of the service secret and had invited only a small group of friends, word of their intentions had spread and the entire cathedral was jammed with the curious, standing, as was the custom, throughout the wedding and barely keeping order, so great was their desire to catch a glimpse of the ceremony.

Stash, for all his early talk of no fuss, had wanted this service, in all its grandeur and lengthy ritual, remembering the hasty insignificance of his first marriage in wartime London, at a Registry Office. He wanted to see Francesca doubly crowned, first with flowers in her hair, then with the heavy nuptial crown, held in the air over her head. He,
who had only spent the first forgotten year of his life in Russia, wanted all the rich symbolism of the noble public service, atavistic, but still fully alive. He had even asked the superbly bearded and solemn priest wearing a silver chasuble and a sacerdotal head dress to link his hand with Francesca’s in a silk handkerchief as he led them around the altar, rather than merely taking their hands in his.

Francesca consented to everything. No detail seemed of the slightest importance to her from the time she had made her decision in the stable. She existed on a plane of sublime indifference to everything but her concentration on Stash and her inner vision of the two of them together forever.

Margo was in her element, making arrangements which no one else could have managed. She gloried in Francesca’s triumphant marriage and she made the most of the occasion, admitting to herself that at heart she thoroughly detested and mistrusted tasteful simplicity.

The wedding reception at the Ritz was certainly the greatest Margo Firestone production ever recorded. Afterward, Prince Stash Valensky and his new princess disappeared. Not even the Firestones knew that they were staying in Stash’s large villa in the countryside outside of Lausanne where, at last, they could begin the never-to-end, not-to-be-rushed exploration of each other. As they rode or walked or lay together they told each other long tales of their childhoods and marveled that, but for the chance remark of a man neither of them knew, in the bar of a Paris hotel, they might never have met.

Francesca often stayed awake at night, although her body, bathed in the halcyon weather of satisfied passion, told her to sleep. She preferred to watch over Stash, brooding over his features in the flickering light of the tiny lamp lit beneath an icon that hung on the far wall of their bedroom. He was the hero, she told herself, of all the stories she had ever read. Bold, gallant, fearless … he was all that and something more. She searched for the word and finally found it. Imperishable.