A Princess in Distress Read online

  Tall, handsome and with a number of duels to his credit, he had in fact been a young man whom Lord Arkley had personally disliked, but after the accident had every sympathy with.

  The ill-fated couple had, as was to be expected, disappeared from the public gaze and for at least a year Prince Friederich was expected not to live.

  Lord Arkley recalled now that he had heard that His Royal Highness travelled from Spa to Spa always hoping that some miracle would cure him.

  But it seemed incredible, whatever he was suffering, that he should have sunk to beating his wife who from her appearance at any rate was unlikely to have given him any cause to do so.

  The Eszterházys were one of the most ancient and noble families in Hungary and there was a large number of them scattered all over the country.

  Vaguely Lord Arkley remembered that the branch that Countess Mariska had come from was a minor one and not as wealthy as that of Prince Miklós, the Head of the Family.

  The marriage had been hailed as a great triumph for the girl who was not Royal to be elevated to the Monarchy, even though Wilzenstein was not of any great significance.

  Situated between Brandenburg and Saxony it was so small that it was only the Kaiser’s patronage of Prince Friederich that had brought it into any prominence.

  It was characteristic of the German Kaiser’s ruthlessness and egotistical interest only in himself that, after the tragedy had happened, Wilzenstein and its crippled ruler were forgotten at the Prussian Court in Berlin.

  ‘An anarchist’s bomb does not end with its explosion,’ Lord Arkley thought now.

  He was determined on the morrow to renew his acquaintance with Prince Friederich of Wilzenstein.

  *

  After a good night’s rest Lord Arkley awoke early and saw by his clock that it was not yet half-past-six.

  He knew of old that at that precise hour the King’s valet, Meidinger, who would have been awakened by the band that had begun to play under his window, would enter his Master’s bedroom to draw the curtains.

  It was a joke that Queen Alexandra often teased her husband with that without fail the King would always ask the same question,

  “What is the weather doing today, Meidinger?”

  As soon as he received a reply, the King would get up and dress himself.

  Soon after half past seven with his secretary on one side of him and an Equerry on the other he would be strolling briskly up and down the promenade known as the Kreuzbrunnen.

  Lord Arkley, who disliked staying in bed unnecessarily, thought that this would be a good moment to announce his arrival.

  Accordingly he rang for Hawkins, dressed himself and, having breakfasted in his sitting room, walked to the Kreuzbrunnen in pursuit of the Monarch.

  It was a brilliant summer’s day and Marienbad looked at its best. The broad avenue was lined with trees on one side and there was an extremely impressive colonnade on the other.

  This was the great social promenade and the waters were taken quite literally on the stroll.

  The gentlemen who mostly followed the King’s example by wearing grey suits, sported felt Homburg hats curled upwards at the brim.

  They carried, one and all, a walking cane or a slimly furled umbrella in the one hand and in the other a mug of Marienbad sulphurous water from which they took sips between strides and their conversation.

  It was usually later that the ladies appeared, dressed in elaborate and expensive gowns with huge hats trimmed with feathers or flowers, each one of them carrying beside their little mugs sunshades to guard against the sun as well as the rain.

  Delayed by only a dozen or so friends who all exclaimed how delighted they were to see him, Lord Arkley finally found the King.

  He was talking, as might have been expected, to an attractive woman, who had stolen a march on the others of her sex and had contrived to attract the King’s attention by rising exceptionally early.

  Lord Arkley drew near and then waited for the King to finish his conversation, which was obviously of an intimate nature.

  “At five o’clock,” His Majesty said finally. “I shall look forward to it.”

  This meant, Lord Arkley knew, that he would visit the lady in question at teatime.

  These appointments with the King were not only eagerly sought but specially prepared for. Tea gowns had been invented for such special occasions when a lady’s constraining corsets and innumerable undergarments could be discarded.

  It was usual for the air to be sprayed with scent and the curtains drawn.

  The King took the first step away from the charmer who had held his attention and saw Lord Arkley.

  There was no mistaking the pleasure in his expression as he held out his hand.

  “So you have arrived, Arkley! I was expecting you yesterday.”

  “I arrived after dinner, sir, and thought it might be too late for me to see you.”

  “It is never too late or too early for me to be interested in what you have to tell me,” the King replied. “Come, I cannot wait to hear your report.”

  He walked briskly away from the colonnade down a side path that was not so crowded.

  Having taken off his hat to two demi-mondaines, who cast inviting glances at him and nodded to several foreign dignitaries, he came to an empty seat set on a small lawn surrounded by flowerbeds that was occupied only by a number of tame and greedy pigeons.

  The King sat down and his secretary and Equerry withdrew tactfully out of earshot while keeping a strict eye on those approaching to see that His Majesty was not interrupted.

  “Well?” the King asked, seating himself as comfortably as his protuberant stomach would allow him and turning an attentive face towards Lord Arkley.

  “It is very much as you anticipated, sir,” Lord Arkley answered. “The Kaiser is deliberately inciting ill-feeling against England and the Officers of every Regiment follow him by being as rude and contemptuous as they dare about us.”

  The King nodded.

  “It is as I expected.”

  The Kaiser’s jealousy of his uncle, the way he had behaved during the Boer War and his unkindness to his English mother before she died had made the King as well as a number of other people in England apprehensive for the future.

  The King’s relationship with Germany had never been easy and the Kaiser had made himself extremely unpleasant, deliberately making trouble for his uncle at Cowes.

  He complained that the ‘perfectly appalling system of handicapping’ was unfair to him and made such a fuss about the yacht racing that the King had said to his personal friends,

  “The Regatta at Cowes was once a pleasant holiday for me, but now that the Kaiser has taken command, it is nothing but a nuisance with that perpetual firing of salutes, cheering and other tiresome disturbances.”

  The King had gone to Germany in 1901 to see his sister, who was dying of cancer at Friedrichshof.

  Having expressed the hope that his visit would be regarded as purely a family one, it was disconcerting on stepping from the train at Frankfurt to find his nephew in full dress uniform waiting to greet him with a Military escort.

  This, however, was not as annoying as the Kaiser’s reference to British Ministers as ‘unmitigated noodles’.

  Worse still happened the following year when the Kaiser came to England and, although everything had been done to make his visit a pleasant one with shooting parties and dinner parties, musicians and actors being brought from London to Sandringham to entertain him, he had done nothing but complain.

  If the Kaiser did not find the British congenial, they certainly did not find him so!

  They were appalled when some Military members of his staff drew their revolvers to shoot at hares and they were constantly irritated by his officious display of knowledge on every conceivable subject.

  Relations between the King and the Kaiser rapidly deteriorated and this year the Kaiser had made a bombastic speech at Tangier asserting Germany’s growing interest in Morocco.

  This was a desperate effort to create discord before an Anglo-French-Russian pact was finalised.

  The Germans, however, had badly mishandled the Moroccan Conference and left France, supported by Britain, the dominant power in the area.

  The Kaiser was convinced that his uncle was plotting the destruction of Germany and was in consequence more resentful of him than ever.

  “He is a devil!” he announced at a banquet in Berlin at which Lord Arkley was present. “You can hardly believe what a devil he is!”

  There were a number of other remarks of the same sort, which Lord Arkley thought that he must loyally repeat to the King.

  What, however, he kept to himself, was the fact that the Kaiser talked freely about the loose morals of English Society and in particular about the King’s relationship with Mrs. Keppel.

  Although he deliberately was silent on this, from remarks the King made, he was almost certain that someone had already repeated it to him.

  It was well known that His Majesty was very touchy on the subject.

  There was a great deal more that Lord Arkley had to relate. He mentioned Germany’s frantic building of Warships that would be bigger and better than the British and it was unpleasantly significant that the size of the German Army was increasing year by year, if not month by month.

  The King listened attentively, which was one of his most endearing characteristics.

  Then he thanked Lord Arkley and rising to his feet said,

  “You must tell me more. I want to know every detail of what you gathered was the feelings amongst my other relatives. But now I must take my exercise.”

  With a smile that beguiled not only people but nations he continued,

  “Thank you, Arkley. I knew that I could rely on you, and I shall undoubtedly need your services again very shortly.”

  He chuckled.

  “I will, however, allow you a brief holiday and you will find some very good-looking women here!”

  He laughed before he added,

  “But I expect you know that already, I have left you one or two!”

  “That is very generous of you. sir,” Lord Arkley said with a twinkle in his eyes.

  “Let’s stroll back to the colonnade and see who we can find,” the King suggested.

  They retraced their steps followed by His Majesty’s secretary and Equerry. Then, just before they reached the Kreuzbrunnen, coming down the path towards them Lord Arkley saw a man in a wheelchair.

  He thought that at a quick glance it would have been hard to recognise Prince Friederich as he remembered him.

  Gone was the handsome thin face with its clear-cut features. Instead the man sitting in the chair was bloatedly fat and the duelling scars on his cheeks were vivid against a red and coarsened skin.

  It seemed impossible that he should have changed so much in three years and yet undoubtedly it was Prince Friederich.

  Beside him was walking the slim figure dressed in white whom Lord Arkley had seen last night on the balcony

  One glance at the Princess’s face told him that she was as beautiful as she had been acclaimed at the time of the Wedding. She was, however, in contrast to her husband, very thin and her skin was like alabaster, so pale as to seem transparent.

  Her eyes were enormous and seemed to fill her face and it was impossible not to see the pain and a look almost of anguish in the darkness of them.

  Her hair was dark, although, because she was Hungarian, Lord Arkley would have expected it to be red.

  There was, he thought, something spiritual and at the same time shadowy about her, as if she was hardly human but came from another plane.

  At the sight of the King, the man pushing Prince Friederich’s wheelchair swerved to the side of the path and Lord Arkley saw that the Prince and Princess were followed by two men whom he suspected to be detectives.

  The King swept his Homburg, with its curved brim, from his head.

  “Good morning, Friederich,” he said in his most genial voice, “Good morning, Mariska.”

  Prince Friederich growled something in his throat, but the Princess curtseyed and the King with a grace that was somehow always surprising in a man of his size, raised her hand to his lips.

  “It is a lovely day,” he said, “and you are a lovely person to be in it.”

  The Princess smiled and it seemed for a moment to drive the sadness from her face.

  “Your Majesty always says such very kind things to me,” she replied.

  Her voice was soft and musical and the King said,

  “Let me present to you a delightful Englishman who has just arrived here. I have promised Lord Arkley that he shall meet some of the beautiful women in Marienbad and you have appeared!”

  The Princess gave Lord Arkley a shy glance and the King, putting his hand on Prince Friederich’s shoulder, said,

  “I expect you know Arkley, Friederich.”

  Lord Arkley, who had bowed to the Princess, now said,

  “I came to Wilzenstein some years ago, sir, and you were extremely kind to me. I remember an excellent day’s sport we had after chamois.”

  “I remember,” Prince Friederich said in a somewhat surly tone. “There is no sport for me now as you can see.”

  “I can only offer Your Royal Highness my deepest sympathy,” Lord Arkley said in a low voice.

  The King was talking animatedly to the Princess and Lord Arkley was aware that he found the Prince’s surly attitude a bore.

  Feeling that he ought to make an effort he then said,

  “I have just been staying in Brandenburg and Saxony, sir.”

  “You have?”

  It seemed that the Prince was interested and Lord Arkley continued,

  “In fact I had quite a tour and enjoyed particularly my time in Hesse.”

  There was no doubt that the Prince’s interest was now captured and he talked for a moment almost animatedly.

  Then he said sharply,

  “It is time for my massage.”

  He spoke not to Lord Arkley but to the man pushing his wheelchair.

  “There is five minutes yet, Your Royal Highness,” the man replied.

  “Don’t answer me back but move!” snarled the Prince. “Move quickly.”

  It was a command that might have been given on the Parade Ground and immediately the wheelchair was pushed forward.

  Lord Arkley had at once recognised the voice of the man who was pushing him.

  He knew that he had heard him last night exhorting his Master to give him the whip and he must then have pushed him from the room leaving the Princess fainting on the floor.

  She was smiling now at something the King had said to her and for the moment she looked young and happy.

  Almost perhaps as she had looked when she set out for her Wedding envied by all her friends because she was to be a reigning Princess and a Grand Duchess of a small but prosperous country.

  It was unlikely that she had been in love with her bridegroom, although undoubtedly he must have loved her to choose a wife who was not Royal.

  There had been something very un-Germanic about such a choice, yet the Eszterházys were of such importance in their country that there was nothing very surprising in the fact that one of their number should espouse a Monarch.

  In love or not in love it must have been an agony to any girl to endure such an experience on her Wedding Day and to have her whole future life completely changed by a bomb from an assassin’s hand.

  “You must come and dine with me one evening, my dear,” the King said to Princess Mariska.

  “Friederich would not let me go alone,” she answered, “and he never goes out these days.”

  “We must try to persuade him,” the King insisted. “It does no good in such circumstances to sit at home in gloom.”

  “You try and persuade him to come one evening, please, Your Majesty,” the Princess added.

  Then she looked in consternation to where her husband’s wheelchair was rapidly disappearing down the end of the path.

  “I must go,” she said in a frightened voice.

  She curtseyed to the King and looked up for one second at Lord Arkley who was standing beside her. Then with the graceful movement of a young fawn she hurried away.

  “Poor child,” the King said softly and then went on, “poor devil! What a life. In his place I would rather be dead!”

  Lord Arkley agreed, but there was no time to say so.

  They were back in the Kreuzbrunnen and now as it was later in the morning the ladies were there, looking like exotic flowers and so attractive that it seemed as if their conscientious sipping of the Spa water was quite unnecessary.

  The King was in his element. There was nothing he enjoyed more than having an audience of beautiful women to listen to him and being deservedly the life and soul of the party.

  Because he was off duty there was always the chance of some exciting adventure.

  Lord Arkley remembered how the previous year an American actress, who was not invited to dinner parties in London by those hostesses generally known to entertain the King, had arrived in Marienbad.

  She took rooms in a hotel near the Weimar and soon learnt the King’s routine.

  One fine morning the exquisitely dressed figure of the most beautiful woman on the American stage was to be seen sitting on a bench near the Kurhaus apparently absorbed in a book.

  The King that morning was attended by Sir Frederick Ponsonby and two of his closest friends.

  As he walked past her, Maxine Elliott raised her large dark eyes from her book and they met those of the King.

  The Royal party walked on.

  A minute or so later one of the King’s attendants returned to the bench with a message.

  “His Majesty believes you are Miss Elliott. He admired you so much in your play and His Majesty would be delighted with your presence tonight at a dinner that Mrs. Arthur James is giving in His Majesty’s honour. Seven forty-five at the Weimar. An invitation will be delivered to your hotel.”

  The end of the story was, of course, Lord Arkley thought with a cynical smile, exactly what Maxine Elliott had planned.

  But the King was not the only person to find friends outside the Kurhaus.