An Adventure of Love Read online

  She had also some knowledge of Albanian and Serbian as well as the languages of other Balkan countries.

  It was only when she had grown older that she had said to her mother,

  “I feel, Mama, that the reason you are so insistent on my learning languages is that you are hoping that the Queen will find me a husband. I have been told that Her Majesty is known as the ‘Matchmaker of Europe’!”

  “Really, Zorina, you must not talk like that,” her mother replied sharply.

  Then, after a moment’s pause, she added,

  “But, dearest, you are right and, of course, I am praying that you will find somebody as attractive and charming as Papa.”

  She sighed and went on,

  “I want you to reign over a country that is as beautiful as Greece and where you will be able to help the people, who will all love and admire you.”

  Zorina had thought at the time that it sounded like one of her own Fairytales and she had the uncomfortable feeling that it would never come true.

  It was obvious that the Queen, of whom everybody was very frightened, was not at all impressed with either her mother or herself.

  Occasionally Princess Louise was invited, as if it was a great concession, to luncheon at Windsor Castle.

  But they were not included in the Christmas parties that were the highlight of the Season for every Royal in the country.

  They did not receive a Christmas present from the Queen, although they were sent a Christmas card, which went out to a great number of other people as well.

  That was all.

  Although she did not say so to her mother since she was afraid that it would hurt her feelings, Zorina thought to herself that she had no wish to be married to a man she did not love.

  In turn he would doubtless marry her because her father had been Royal and her mother English.

  This for foreign countries entailed the support of the Union Flag and the blessing of the most powerful Queen in the world.

  ‘I want to marry somebody I love and who loves me,’ she thought wistfully and hoped that by some miracle it would happen.

  At the same time, because it pleased her mother, she worked very hard at her languages.

  She knew that Princess Louise had scanned the names of those who had Grace and Favour houses to find someone like the Baroness.

  She had found a Prince who came from Romania, but Zorina found it difficult to make him discuss anything but sport.

  Although she enjoyed being with him, for the simple reason that even if very old, he was a man.

  It made a welcome change from being with so many women.

  Their own household was a very small one. There was her mother, herself and Nanny, who had been with them ever since she was born.

  Then there was Jessie, who came in to clean the floors on every other day and was extremely garrulous, too much so, the Princess thought, except that she was cheaper than many of the women who worked in The Palace.

  So it was not surprising that Zorina had to rely on the stories that she made up for her own amusement.

  Everybody round her seemed very old and there were no people of her own age.

  Yet, she was, in point of fact, very happy, finding it interesting to watch the sightseers who flooded into The Palace later in the day.

  She would watch them wandering around wide-eyed and challenged herself by trying to guess what they did and where they came from.

  They were continually getting lost in the maze, which was a great feature of The Palace gardens and every visitor wanted to see it.

  She knew that even the attendants employed at The Palace would have wagers amongst themselves to see how quickly they could find their way to the middle.

  At the moment the winning time was five minutes, but then they discovered that the way out took very much longer.

  Zorina loved the maze and she loved too to stand watching the barges and ships move up the River Thames. She told herself tales of what cargoes they conveyed and from which far-off countries they had been carried to London.

  ‘One day’ she decided, ‘I will travel. I will sail up great rivers, climb high mountains and ride through impenetrable forests.’

  In her daydream she was not alone.

  There was always someone with her, someone she laughed with and who understood what a thrilling adventure it all was.

  But the man who was her companion and, of course, he was a man, but he had no face.

  He was just there in her thoughts, a being who she could not identify.

  When she arrived back at home after her German lesson, she did not tell her mother about the strange encounter she had had with the gentleman in the Cartoon Gallery.

  She knew that the Princess would be shocked and it would have been impossible for her to explain why she had spent so long talking to him.

  ‘But he was very interested in what I had to show him,’ she excused herself.

  She was aware that her mother would have been horrified at her talking to a stranger, especially a man who was of their own class.

  She had been instructing Zorina on the correct procedure for a young woman who was to all intents and purposes a debutante, but Zorina had argued fiercely against this description.

  “How can I be a debutante, Mama,” she asked several times, “when I have not been invited to a single ball and have not been presented at one of the Queen’s Drawing Rooms?”

  “I am going to talk to Her Majesty about that the very next time I see her,” the Princess promised.

  She did not, however, sound very hopeful and Zorina told herself sensibly that the best thing she could do was to forget the whole idea.

  But she looked back and remembered the dinner parties and Receptions that her father and mother had given before the Revolution and she wished that she had been a little older and could have taken part in them.

  She used to peep through the upstairs banisters at the guests, the ladies in their tiaras and beautiful gowns and the gentlemen in full evening dress,

  When her mother came to say ‘goodnight’ to her, she thought that she looked like a Fairy Princess.

  Now that the diamonds had all been sold and the gowns her mother put on when they ate their supper together were very simple and she had made them herself.

  Sometimes the Princess would receive pathetic letters from Greece from one of her old friends who was suffering dreadfully because of the Revolution.

  Then she would walk round the apartment in an agitated state and saying,

  “Is there nothing more that we can sell so that we can help somebody who really needs it?”

  “We need it too, Mama,” Zorina would counter.

  Her mother would not listen.

  Her last small sable then was sold so that she could send the proceeds out to an old woman who was badly crippled.

  It was then that Zorina thought that no one in England appreciated just how poor her mother was and how kind despite it.

  Walking back from the Baroness’s apartment to their own, Zorina had wondered if she would see the gentleman called ‘Rudolf’ again.

  But now there was just the usual crowd of sightseers who were allowed to visit The Palace on every day except Sundays.

  Princess Louise had often been told by older people living in the other apartments that the idea of free admission to the public had produced outraged protests from a great number of upper class people. They had been astonished and shocked.

  How could their nineteen-year-old inexperienced Queen open a Royal Palace for those whom they referred to as ‘the lower orders’?

  They predicted that the invaders would undoubtedly wreck the place, carry off anything that was movable and valuable and generally behave like hooligans.

  To everybody’s surprise, however, ‘the lower orders’, although they poured out of the streets of London in droves, behaved impeccably.

  Some came on foot, others in dogcarts and pony traps and then later in horse-drawn charabancs.

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bsp; Before long the annual attendance for visitors to Hampton Court Palace was over eighty thousand and the number was still growing.

  This, the Princess was told, was a grave disappointment to all those who had voiced hysterically their forebodings that the ‘working class families would behave abominably’.

  Instead The Palace and its treasures gripped the visitors’ imaginations.

  Before long everybody was declaring that Queen Victoria had been right since Hampton Court had opened up new horizons for those who really needed inspiration.

  ‘How could anyone not be better and more motivated for having seen something so beautiful?’ Zorina asked herself a thousand times.

  Now, as she walked back slowly because she wanted to savour everything around her, she wondered if Mr. Rudolf was thinking of The Palace and perhaps a little about her.

  ‘He cannot really expect me to come and meet him tomorrow morning,’ she ruminated to herself in her bedroom.

  Yet she recognised that, when she went to bed without telling her mother of her strange encounter in the Cartoon Gallery, that she would rise earlier than usual in the morning.

  Even if he was there, she would not have to apologise too profusely to the Prince.

  The old man would be waiting to tell her about his horses in Romania and the Castle he had owned before for family reasons he had been forced to exile himself in England.

  She now wished that she had been brave enough to ask Mr. Rudolf what was his native language.

  Then it would have been a challenge to talk to him and perhaps surprise him with her knowledge of it.

  But, she thought despairingly, it was very unlikely that he would be waiting for her as he had promised he would be.

  People said that sort of thing on the spur of the moment. But when the time came, they had another appointment, they overslept or perhaps would no longer be interested.

  She wanted to talk to him about the Great Hall and how on special occasions King Henry VIII had entertained there lavishly.

  She thought it would amuse him to learn that within the carved foliage of the hammer-beam roof there were the Royal Arms and in some places intertwined with those of Anne Boleyn.

  Zorina had always felt very sorry for Anne Boleyn.

  The King had been so angry and frustrated when her child was born a daughter instead of the longed-for son he craved.

  She had read in her history books that, when Anne was taken to the Tower of London on a number of trumped up charges, she had begged one last favour of her cruel husband.

  Could she, she had asked, be beheaded in the civilised French manner by a sword instead of an axe?

  This King Henry had granted her and on the 19th May 1536, poor Anne was beheaded by a swordsman brought over especially for the occasion from France.

  Always when Zorina read about this it brought tears to her eyes and she felt shocked and angry when she read that on the same night the King had dined merrily with Jane Seymour, later to become his third wife.

  And yet it was all an intriguing part of The Palace and she wondered if Anne, like Queen Catherine, also haunted the rooms, although nobody had reported that they had seen her.

  *

  She took a little extra trouble in arranging her hair the next morning.

  She put on what she thought was one of her prettiest gowns, although there were not very many to choose from.

  She always helped her mother to make her gowns and she then wore them until they were either too tight for her or else had been washed so often that the colours had faded.

  The Princess was busy on another gown, but this, Zorina knew, was an evening gown just in case she was invited to a party at Windsor Castle.

  Or indeed, more exciting, if the Queen allowed her to be presented at one of her Drawing Rooms.

  It had taken a great deal of their savings to afford the material and Zorina realised despairingly that it meant there would be no luxuries and certainly no other additions to her wardrobe for a very long time.

  The gown she put on now fitted very closely into her small waist and the skirt was drawn back into a tight and not very impressive bustle at the back.

  It made her look, however, very young and very lovely.

  White was exactly the right colour for her when her hair in the sunshine shone with deep red tints that her mother always said came from her grandmother, who had been Hungarian.

  Perhaps that same grandmother was responsible for the translucent purity of Zorina’s skin. She never sunburned even in the hottest days of the summer.

  Her eyes were green, except in certain lights, but they had a strange mysterious darkness about them if she was worried or unhappy.

  At other times they had the blue clarity of a mountain stream.

  They seemed to fill her small face with its pointed chin and little straight Grecian nose, which she had most certainly inherited from her father.

  Because she was so unselfconscious and had never been paid compliments except by the stranger she had met yesterday, Zorina had no idea that her mother would often look at her and sigh.

  The Princess would be wondering what was to happen to her lovely child and if she would ever find happiness when Queen Victoria continued to ignore them.

  There was nothing that Zorina could do meanwhile but to go on learning from the old people who lived, as they did, on the charity of Her Majesty.

  Zorina hurried along the corridors that led from their wing to the centre of The Palace and the Cartoon Room.

  She was telling herself excitedly as she walked along that this was quite an adventure.

  It was the first that she had had for a very long time and different from anything she had ever known before.

  She was meeting Rudolf so that she could tell him about Hampton Court Palace and show him its many wonders and treasures.

  Surely, she told herself, to show consideration towards a foreigner and a visitor was only being thoughtful and even her mother could not be angry if she found out about it.

  At the same time Zorina thought that it was perhaps better for her to remain in ignorance.

  She went towards the Great Hall with its high ceiling and she planned how she would try to make him visualise the dais.

  This had been set one step above floor level and lit by the great bay window where King Henry VIII sat at a high table for his banquets.

  Below him his guests would be seated at tables ranging round the walls and she could see them all so vividly in their magnificent brightly coloured costumes.

  She thought as well that she should take Mr. Rudolf to the Presence Chamber, where Cardinal Wolsey acted as the host at what was called ‘Minor Occasions’.

  She had found in reading the history of The Palace that it was not in the least unusual for the Cardinal to entertain hundreds of friends at a single meal.

  In the Presence Chamber there had been scores of candles, their light reflected and magnified by the marvellous display of gold and silver plate decorating the banqueting table.

  Zorina had learnt that the silver of a pair of great candlesticks had alone cost more than two hundred pounds.

  ‘I know Mr. Rudolf will be most interested in this,’ she thought as she went over it again in her mind.

  She recalled how the Cardinal, halfway through the meal, would lift a golden bowl of hippocras, which was a wine flavoured with several spices, to toast his important guests.

  She was thinking so intently of what she ought to relate that, as she walked in through the open door of the Cartoon Room and saw Mr. Rudolf waiting for her, she was instantly tongue-tied.

  She could only stand there rooted to the spot and staring at him.

  She had no idea that, in the spring sunshine streaming in through the windows, in her white gown and the flames of red in her hair, she looked like a glorious apparition from another world.

  For a moment it seemed as if he too was tongue-tied and then he moved swiftly towards her to take her hand in his.

&nbs
p; “You have come!” he enthused. “I was so afraid that you would forget me!”

  “I-I am – here.”

  Zorina wondered why it was so difficult to say the words.

  Because he was touching her, she had a strange feeling in her breast that had never been there before.

  “You are even lovelier than I remember,” he said in his deep voice. “I thought last night I must have been under a spell and that it was not possible that anybody alive and breathing could look like you.”

  “I – don’t think you should – say things like that to me,” Zorina stammered.

  “Why not?”

  “Because – they make – me feel shy.”

  It was not only what he was saying, but he had not released her hand.

  Although she tried to take it from him, he was holding it in both of his.

  “I just adore your shyness,” he smiled at her, “and I had forgotten that, when a woman blushes, it can be like the dawn coming up over a far horizon.”

  Because of the way he spoke, Zorina felt a little quiver run through her.

  “I-I want to tell you about – the cartoons.”

  “I just want to look at you!”

  Now because he knew that she wished it, he released her hand and they walked almost the length of the room without speaking.

  For some reason that she could not ascertain, it was no longer so important to tell him about Hampton Court Palace.

  He was here, she had found him again and it was becoming difficult to think about anything else.

  Only when they came to the door at the end did they both stop and look at each other.

  Then Rudolf said,

  “Show me, show me anything you like, as long as you stay with me! I want to hear your voice, I want to watch your eyes. I have thought of nothing else since you left me yesterday morning.”

  chapter two

  Zorina and Rudolf wandered through The Palace and they were not talking about what was around them but of themselves.

  He paid her many more compliments and all of them made her blush.

  Equally she found herself unexpectedly telling him stories about her life and how dull it was to be living amongst so many old people.