The Lost Prince
THE
LOST
PRINCE
ALSO BY SELDEN EDWARDS
The Little Book
SELDEN
EDWARDS
THE
LOST
PRINCE
DUTTON
DUTTON
Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
First printing, August 2012
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Copyright © 2012 by Selden Edwards
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Edwards, Selden.
The lost prince / Selden Edwards.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-101-59097-3
1. Wives—Fiction. 2. Family secrets—Fiction. 3. Time travel—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3605.D8985L67 2012
813’.6—dc22 2011050079
Printed in the United States of America
Designed by Nancy Resnick
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
ALWAYS LEARNING
PEARSON
For Nan, Bruce, and Paula
My wonderful children
7. “Disaster Averted, It Appears”
11. “Motorcars, Mr. Honeycutt”
45. “Very Much Among the Living”
55. “We Have Come to the Last”
61. A Less-Than-Sanguine Report
BOSTON, 1918
A
ll of those who attended the memorial service in the chapel at St. Gregory’s School that May afternoon in 1918 knew well the elegant woman in her midforties who sat up near the front beside her staunch banker husband, one of the school’s most prominent alumni and its greatest hero, whom they also knew well. Frank Burden had represented his school splendidly in the classroom and on the playing fields of Harvard College during the early 1890s and had won two gold medals in the first modern Olympic Games in Athens in 1896. His wife, Eleanor, had become over the past two decades one of the most respected and active figures in the social and charitable life of Boston—wife, mother, patroness of the arts, social activist—but no one came even close to guessing her secret life, or the curse she had borne daily for the past twenty years.
A few were aware that it had been entirely Eleanor Burden’s doing that the subject of the service, Arnauld Esterhazy, this school’s former teacher killed in the war, had come to St. Gregory’s School in the first place. Her godfather and confidant, William James, was the only one who knew the whole story. But he was now eight years gone, so no one among those congregated that day for the sad event knew or guessed at the depth of her connection to the man being eulogized or the complex grief she was now barely able to contain.
For her, Arnauld Esterhazy could not be dead. Eleanor Burden was
cursed by knowledge of the future, at least part of it. She had known the world war was coming and that Arnauld, safe in Boston, would be swept up in it, and she knew also that a second war was coming in twenty years, one that would also have a profound effect on her life. This death simply did not fit into the ordained future, and yet the word had come from the Italian front and had been verified by her friend Carl Jung, a source she trusted for thoroughness. “Killed in action,” he had said, “absolutely no doubt.” The news had been devastating to her, not just because she loved the man, but because this fateful turn confounded everything she had been working to promote over the past twenty years, everything for which she had made her fortune, for which she had stood toe-to-toe with powerful men, among them Sigmund Freud, and, yes, even J. P. Morgan.
The school had lost a beloved teacher in the war, and she and her husband were there in the center of the mourners because the man had been a close friend of their family and a guest in their home on innumerable occasions, but no one guessed how much more he had meant to Eleanor, either in the innocent role in which he had arrived in Boston eight years before or in the overpowering earthy connection of his departure, at the end. As Dr. Freud often said, all grief is representational, referring in its power back to some previous more primal event and forward to one’s own impermanence on this earth. And now with this quiet desperation, she was reliving the traumatic ordeal of twenty years prior, when she had lost the love of her life and then did not know how she could go on.
She could not accept this death and yet she had to, as it stared her square in the face, here in the words of eulogy of this service and in the certitude in Carl Jung’s voice as he told her the fateful news—“unavoidable” was his assessment.
Eleanor Burden, this woman of heroic strength, caught now between the past and an uncertain future, found herself once again not knowing how she could go on.
ONE
1
A SECRET DESTINY
W
hen Weezie Putnam returned from Vienna in 1898 determined now to be known as Eleanor, she brought with her from her ordeal three items of inestimable worth: a manuscript, an exquisite piece of jewelry, and a handwritten journal. Each would change her life, she knew, and each would play a part in determining her destiny.
The manuscript had been written in a cathartic fury at the end of her Vienna time, the completion of the commitment she had made in going there in the first place, to write “something of significance,” as her former headmistress called it, to be delivered as promised to the
New York Times
immediately upon her return. She brought the manuscript to the
Times
office in New York City, and the editor Henry Moss, whom she had known from before Vienna, held it in his hand and measured its weightiness with a satisfied smile. “As promised,” he said, “a significant body of work.”
“That is my hope,” Eleanor said. “I am relieved to be done with it.” Then she concluded with, “It is to be called
City of Music,
” the title that she knew was meant to be.
Mr. Moss also cabled her in the week after her return home to Boston and insisted that she travel back to New York immediately, he and two other editors having just completed reading the manuscript. “We are deeply moved,” he said, “by the vibrancy we have seen in these pages.”
When she arrived in their offices, the other editors smiled at her as Henry Moss offered with enthusiasm, “You have launched yourself as a serious writer, Miss Putnam. Or, I should say, Mr. Jonathan Trumpp has.”
Her response was more sudden than she would have wished, had she not been caught by surprise. “Absolutely not,” was what came out, in a burst. “I shall work with you to edit this project,” she said, “as I wish it to be as thorough and accurate as it can be, but it will remain the sole long work of Jonathan Trumpp, and Mr. Trumpp has written his last.” She said it with such conviction as to leave the
Times
editors speechless.
“That is not the response we expected,” Mr. Moss said, disappointment obvious on his face.
“It will be a waste not to follow this up,” a second editor said.
“So be it,” she said. “It is what it is. I appreciate all that you have done for me, but there will be no more from Mr. Trumpp.” She expressed her gratitude even further and then left the
New York Times
office, not seeing fit to mention at that time or later the painful events that had led to the catharsis of writing, nor its fateful inspiration, which could never be replicated.
The second item she brought with her from her Vienna experience was the piece of jewelry, a most extraordinary ring which had belonged to one of the most famous and most tragic figures in recent European history. The ring’s value was, she hoped, easily recognizable, as she knew she was meant to set about selling it immediately. She knew nothing of the fine art of selling extraordinary pieces of jewelry, and she knew that for purely emotional reasons parting with this particular piece would be most difficult, but it had to be done.
And the third item, by far the most significant, was a remarkably detailed journal, a leather-bound handwritten volume that recorded in exactness all that had happened to and around her in Vienna. This volume also revealed forthcoming events well into the twentieth century, including events she knew she would have to make happen and others that would come about well beyond any of her doing. She had her own reasons for believing the journal’s recordings to be true and for following its prescribed tasks religiously, knowing all the while that Sigmund Freud, back in Vienna, had participated intimately in the journal’s origins and had thought it, with a certainty equal to her own, the product of a deranged mind. Because of the sensitive nature of the material in this extraordinary volume, she knew she was required to guard its many secrets with the utmost care, to show it to no one.