The Runaway Princess

  Ted beamed his laser tape measure over to the massive chimney stack and scribbled down a figure.

  “Are you listening to me?”

  “Yeah, course. Roses. Lots of them.”

  “It was planted so cleverly, for color and fragrance, in so many layers,” I went on, because I was almost as dazzled by the meticulously sketched plans as I was by Leo. The thought of bringing it back to life, with some updating, was making me giddy with excitement. “The varieties were arranged so the place must have been a cloud of gorgeous scent from April through—what are you doing?”

  “Working out how much this roof space is worth per square foot. Do you have any idea how much this house would be on the market for?”

  This was possibly the first time Ted had ever used the quantity surveying portion of his course, and it made me feel awkward. I’d never wondered how much the houses we worked at were worth. I knew they cost millions, and that the rooms I glimpsed through the sash windows were stunningly designed; but I also noticed that the staff lurking in the background often seemed bored, and the residents never seemed to have much time to enjoy the shady green oases I created for them in the precious pockets of outside space. The white Kensington mansions like this one of Leo’s had always felt like a different world from the one I lived in, one I wasn’t actually envious of because it wasn’t a life that I wanted. Or had had anything to do with, until now.

  “No.” I pushed myself off the railings. “And I don’t need to know either, thanks. Let’s measure for the wildflower beds.”

  The gardens in the center of Leo’s square were worthy of Kew, but I was secretly thrilled that he’d allowed me to create a hidden corner of wildness up on his roof, where no one would ever guess there were poppies and buttercups and long grasses.

  *

  When I met Leo for dinner a few nights later, he was surprisingly interested in my notes about the rare roses I’d tracked down—or at least, if he was pretending to be interested, I was keen to believe he meant it.

  “You don’t have to ask questions,” I said with a blush when I realized I’d been rhapsodizing about the delicate perfumes of old English tea rose varieties for so long that the waiter had had to be waved away twice.

  “But I am interested,” he insisted with an eager smile. “The roses are my favorite part of the gardens at home.”

  “At home … in the palace?” I was going to have to practice saying that until it sounded a bit more casual.

  Leo nodded easily, and poured me some more wine. “There are formal gardens all round the palace and they’re all themed. You’d like them. My great-grandmother was very keen on

  gardening—she was one of those pioneer women who had to be doing something. There’s an English country garden for the English side of the family, and an Australian garden because she was from Australia, and an alpine rockery part for the German side.” He grinned. “Good job we’re a mongrelly sort of family—gave her plenty to do.”

  “Were they gardens you could go in? Not just for show?” I asked, trying to imagine what it must have been like, growing up in a stately home.

  “Oh, definitely. We spent hours there as kids because we weren’t allowed to run around inside. The head gardener used to lay treasure hunts for us—it’s still disappointing for me that chocolate eggs apparently don’t grow under rosebushes.”

  “It can be arranged,” I said, pretending to make a note on my pad.

  “Can it?” His eyes twinkled. “It might make me do more gardening.”

  “It all sounds very fairy-tale. Well, it would be, with the castle.”

  I’d seen pictures of the Wolfsburgs’ Nironan castle on the Internet. I wasn’t going to let him pass that off as a holiday home.

  Leo shrugged. “We didn’t think of it as a castle; it was just where my grandparents lived. Our apartment there is quite modern, not like the state rooms that tourists can go round. I liked the gardens best, though. Some of my happiest childhood memories are of lying on the grass with my cousins, watching clouds and drinking this mint tea that my grandmother used to make. Just the smell of hot mint takes me right back. Very embarrassing when I get misty-eyed in Turkish restaurants.”

  I couldn’t stop myself smiling at the romance of it all. The fact that Leo loved the gardens more than the palace made me like him even more. We’d reached that stage of falling upon shared interests as if we were the only people in the world ever to hate black currant Jelly Babies, and childhoods in gardens was Amazing Coincidence number eighty-one, after proper cotton hankies (love of), recorder (as first instrument), etc.

  “I’m like that with lavender! Dad used to grow it for the bees, and every time the dogs ran through the bushes you’d get a gorgeous gust of lavender on the breeze. I plant it everywhere I live, in pots, so I feel at home.” It was lovely sharing things with Leo. I couldn’t think of the last person I’d talked to like this. “That’s why I like planting herbs in people’s window boxes—I think smells are such a big part of memories, even in London. Cut grass, and rosemary, and sweet peas. I like the idea of tying them into people’s lives so that whenever they smell hyacinths or something, they get that nice aaah memory.”

  Leo smiled soppily at me as if I’d said something profound, and I felt self-conscious. “What?”

  “I love the way you talk about your job,” he said. “It’s so much more than getting the perfect lawn for you, isn’t it?”

  “Ted does lawns. I want to create somewhere peaceful for clients. Somewhere they can go to get away from everything. Somewhere they can see that no matter how crap their day was at work, this little plant will keep growing, and even though that tree looks dead now, in three months’ time there’ll be green shoots, and in five months’ time there’ll be apples again. It’s good to be reminded of the seasons in London. Smelling the roses now and again is good too. You can’t stop and smell the roses unless you’ve got some to smell.”

  That was definitely a family thing. Dad had said it a lot, during the grim times after the move, his face set with defiant dignity—“The tree might look dead, Amy, but the roots are still there. It’ll be flowering again before you know it, love.” He hadn’t needed to add, “And so will we.” I heard it anyway.

  I pushed down the fierce pang of homesickness for Dad, and our old garden, and those familiar things. Leo was talking, his hands moving animatedly, long fingers playing with the silver saltcellar.

  “We’ve got some amazing photo albums of my great-grandmother directing operations in her gardens,” he said. “Someone’s written ‘Rolling up the royal sleeves!’ underneath one photo, although to be accurate, she’s in a crinoline and an enormous veiled hat, with about forty sweating workmen behind her, trying not to fall over her various Pekinese dogs.”

  I blushed. “I’d really love to see that.”

  “I’d love to show you the gardens—you’re the only person I know who’d appreciate some of the rare plants they’ve still got. I mean, I’d love to show you the whole island.”

  Leo looked up at me with the sweet sideways glance that sent the blood shooting faster through my veins. He did everything else with the easiest confidence I’d ever seen—ordering food, directing Billy, tipping—but sometimes, like now, a self-consciousness peeked through, as if he wasn’t quite sure how I’d react.

  “Are you inviting me back to your place?” I said cheerfully, without quite thinking it through.

  “I suppose I am. No, I’m inviting you back to my palace.”

  We grinned, and it hung in the air between us. I shivered: I’d been chatted up before, but never on such a glamorous scale. I’d wished for something new, but this was more than new.

  “Just the gardens, mind,” he said seriously. “You have to pay extra to get into the castle.”

  I thought for one awful, crushing second that he meant it, and then a mischievous smile twinkled into his blue eyes, and I swatted him, the same way that Jo swatted me.

  *

  Leo kept
finding excuses to call me, and I kept finding excuses to discuss plans for his garden, and pretty soon we were seeing each other nearly every day, even if it was just for a lunchtime coffee in the frosty square while Billy read the Racing Post in the Range Rover.

  Each time Leo revealed a little more about his family. Within a few lunches I’d learned that his mother, Liza Bachmann, spent half her time in New York directing her fitness DVD and control lingerie empire, which currently made her the seventh richest model in the world; that his dad, Prince Boris, the fourth in line to the throne of Nirona, was currently in London to raise funds for his feral-cat charity; that Leo had just flown home for the night to celebrate the twenty-ninth birthday of his sister, Sofia, who worked for a big international law firm and specialized in family inheritance dispute resolution.

  “Sofia doesn’t like being mistaken for a royal freeloader like Rolf either,” he explained. “But it helps that she also enjoys a good legal wrangle.”

  In return, I told him carefully selected details about my own family: how my dad was a retired bank manager who’d won every prize going in the local vegetable show (not for nothing was he the Marrow King of Hadley Green, which Leo pointed out made me the Marrow Princess); how my mum had run the kitchens at the local school and invented several new puddings that were now on the national menu. I told him about my town councilor gran, who’d left me Badger, and mentioned my older sister Kelly again, who’d left home while I was at school.

  And, of course, we always had Rolf to talk about. Rolf and/or Jo. I tried to pass on Jo’s message about the iPod with as much tact as I could, but Leo scratched his chin thoughtfully.

  “The thing is, I’ve never known Rolf to make so much effort for a girl before. Normally he’s bored by now. You say he’s sent an iPod? With songs on it? He can’t even work his own. Is she really not interested?”

  “I don’t think so.” I wasn’t sure what the tactful way to convey Jo’s reaction was. She did seem to be enjoying the outrage quite a lot, given that she could quite easily make it all stop with a simple restraining order. Maybe she saw something in Rolf I couldn’t. Maybe her outrage was an advanced version of the insulting banter she and Ted enjoyed. I was much happier to make excuses for her double standards, since it was Leo’s brother causing them. “If it’s just the challenge Rolf’s looking for, can’t he take up a new language? Or learn to knit?”

  “Or maybe he really likes her.”

  We both looked shocked at that.

  “She could be the making of him. He needs someone with a bit of common sense,” Leo added. “Jo doesn’t take any of his nonsense seriously.”

  “Well, if that’s the case, I think what would impress Jo more,” I said very carefully, “would be if he stopped trying to impress her. If he could make it less about himself and more about her? A lot less about himself, actually.”

  Leo nodded solemnly. “I’ll pass it on.”

  What I really wanted to say was that Rolf should start being a bit more like Leo. Although he answered my predictable questions about heating in castles and whether it was weird seeing your family on postcards with good humor, Leo seemed determined to make our dates as normal as possible. We ate out at simple French restaurants near his house, and he wouldn’t let me pay for anything, even though I tried. And at the end of the evening, even when I was literally trembling with the sort of desire I’d only ever read about in Kelly’s Judith Krantz novels, rather than whisk me back to his luxury townhouse for a princely ravishing, he kissed me—slowly, until my knees turned weak and the blood raced round my veins—and sent me home with Billy.

  “I don’t want to rush things,” he said, in the long phone calls in the dark that followed. “This is special.”

  I agreed. The time Leo and I spent together was special, but in a way that had nothing to do with him being fifth in line to the throne of Europe’s most exclusive island tax haven, after Pavlos, Pavlos’s sons, Serge and Guillermo, and Boris.

  Twelve

  I got my first glimpse into just how different Leo’s life was from mine at the start of February when he rang me at work one morning, to ask if he could take me to a charity gala event at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden.

  He was using the same sort of voice Jo used when she begged me to go to one of her actor friends’ plays—the “I don’t really want to go to this on my own, and I’m not saying it’s going to be any good, but I said I would, and it’s only for a couple of hours, and you never know, there might be chips” sort of voice.

  “It’s one of Dad’s charities,” he explained. “Sofia’s bailed out because of some hearing she’s got at the European Court of Human Rights, and Dad doesn’t want to have to talk to Rolf all night on his own, so I’m getting a fair bit of pressure to turn up and support the old man. Will you come and support me, please?”

  “Of course!” I said, without even thinking. Leo made it sound very run-of-the-mill. In fact, he sounded more worried that I’d be put out by going. “What’s the charity?”

  “The Boris Wolfsburg Foundation for Feral Cats.” Leo coughed. “I know. Dad’s got about five foundations, and all of them are a bit … out there, but there weren’t many left. Granddad’s got all the serious ones, and Uncle Pavlos bagged any interesting ones that were left, since he’s the official heir. At least Dad’s got some of Mom’s friends on board for his. I think Elle Macpherson might be coming. And Lulu.”

  “Really?” I was impressed. I’d heard of them. “And will she be there herself?”

  “ ’Fraid not. She’s in New York this week, launching her Valentine’s control lingerie range. Don’t ask about that either.”

  I didn’t. I’d Googled it, though, with Jo. Though my slightly wobbly tum could have done with Liza’s help, I hadn’t invested in a Take Control Girdle. As Jo put it, even if your date was so impressed with your board-flat stomach that he took you home, that’d be about as far as it’d go, unless either of you had a pair of scissors handy.

  “So when is it, this do?”

  “Friday.” Leo sounded apologetic. “I know it’s short notice, but my assistant put it in my work diary, not my personal one, so I missed it. Will you have time to get something to wear?”

  “Of course!” I said. There were four shopping days to Friday. That was loads of time.

  “Great! I’ll have the invitation couriered round to you right now.”

  I put the phone down in a state of fluttery excitement. A gala! With film stars!

  Although, I thought, glancing down at the lingering aftereffects of my mother’s Christmas baking extravaganza, still making my jeans billow a bit, maybe it mightn’t be a bad idea to see if Liza did any girdles with easier access.

  *

  “You can’t wear that,” said Jo in a no-arguments tone.

  “Why not? What’s wrong with it?”

  We looked at my reflection in Jo’s mahogany cheval mirror. Neither of us looked very happy, to be brutally honest.

  “Darling, you’re going to the opera, not a piano lesson.” Jo tweaked my gray velvet knee-length dress, my second-best event outfit. I’d already worn my black dress in several different accessory permutations so I’d had to fall back on this, zhushed up with a pair of red shoes that I could walk exactly one hundred meters in before I started to limp. It was what I called a go-anywhere dress, and what Jo called my nun frock.

  “But it’s a charity night,” I protested. “I don’t want to look overdressed.”

  “It’s not that sort of charity,” said Jo briskly. “There won’t be a raffle for a fruit basket, it’ll be Katherine Jenkins singing selections from Puccini and everyone jangling their diamonds in time to the music. And his family will be there!”

  “I don’t want Leo to think I’m making a bigger effort for his family than I do for him,” I said stubbornly. “I don’t want him to think I think it’s a big deal for me. Him being a prince. He’s already said how refreshing it is that I’m not some prince-hunter type.”


  I paused, as the Other Voice in my head started to point out the stupidity of what I’d just said. Of course it was a big deal. Me deliberately not making it a big deal only underlined its big-dealness—and, if I was being honest, made me look a bit chippy.

  I prodded the messy emotional reasoning churning away inside me, stirred up even more now by Jo’s reaction. It wasn’t as if Leo’s family was just any old family. In fact, wasn’t it rude not to make an effort? For anyone’s family? God, it was so complicated.

  “Or have I got that all wrong?” I asked in a small voice. Any normal rules about dating had gone out of the window ages ago. I was literally clueless.

  By way of an answer, Jo swung open her wardrobe door and started to rifle critically through the hangers.

  I stared at my reflection in the mirror and tried to decide if I felt more excited or scared. On balance, I thought I was excited.

  *

  Leo sent a car to collect me at seven, but it wasn’t Billy in the Range Rover, and when I got in—quickly, because the huge blacked-out limo was holding up two taxis in the road outside our house—he wasn’t in the backseat.

  Rolf was. In evening dress, with his bow tie undone and his hair messy. He was texting, and barely bothered to look up when I slid in. A strong smell of expensive aftershave hung in the air, and I had an unwelcome mental blast of the “One Night with Rolf” playlist. Thankfully, it was in my head, not on the car stereo.

  “Evening,” he said, squinting at his phone. “Be with you in a second.”

  The backseat was so wide I wasn’t expecting him to lean across, but a wave would have been nice. Something to acknowledge the efforts I’d made to wriggle into Jo’s best full-length silvery silk evening dress, now carefully double-taped to my front and back to avert any embarrassing slippages.

  “Hello, Rolf,” I said pointedly, to avoid an embarrassing repeat of the incident in the club. The driver closed the door behind me with a discreet clunk.

  Rolf’s head turned and he did a double take, so hard his floppy fringe fell into his eyes.