A King In Love Page 3

  As she spoke, Zita remembered that Sophie disliked horses that were spirited and not very well bred.

  It was Zita who had inherited her grandmother’s horsemanship, which according to legend had made her acclaimed as an equestrienne, as well as a beauty, in her own country of Hungary.

  “I shall not be concerned with horses,” Sophie said in her prim little voice, “but with the people of Valdastien and I shall want them to respect and admire me. I know, Zita, that I shall make a very good Queen.”

  “I am sure you will, dearest,” Zita said impulsively, “but what is much more important than being Queen is being the wife of King Maximilian!”

  Sophie was silent for a moment.

  Then she said,

  “I don’t think Mama really approves of the King, but of course she wants me to have an important position. Otherwise I think she was considering my marrying the Margrave of Baden-Baden.”

  Her sister made a little grimace.

  “Oh, no, Sophie! He is so dull! The King never says anything one remembers after he has left or that really requires an answer after he has said it.”

  “I find him a nice man,” Sophie objected.

  As she spoke, Zita looked at her sister thoughtfully.

  From all she had heard, it would be impossible to describe King Maximilian as ‘a nice man’.

  It was not only the Professor who talked about him, but also Madame Goutier, who came to the Palace to give the two Princesses their French lessons.

  A Parisian from a good family who had married a citizen of Aldross and was now a widow, Madame had never lost her connection with the country of her birth.

  She paid regular visits to Paris, where she had innumerable relatives who told her all the gossip.

  Because Sophie found French a difficult language to learn, she never stayed to converse socially with Madame Goutier, but always hurried away as soon as the lesson was over, leaving Zita alone with the Frenchwoman.

  “Tell me the latest news from Paris, madame,” Zita would beg.

  Because she lived a lonely life, Madame Goutier was only too willing to respond.

  She told Zita about the Emperor and Empress, the gowns that Frederick Worth made not only for the aristocrats but also for the demi-monde, who were even more gorgeously clothed and jewelled than those who were entertained at the Tuileries Palace.

  From Madame Goutier Zita learnt of the world that was not supposed to be known, and certainly not discussed, by Royal Princesses.

  She heard of the wild extravagances of the women who used their beauty to lure men into throwing away fortunes just so that they could be seen with them and, because Zita was intelligent, it was not difficult for her to fill in what Madame Goutier left unsaid.

  Because the Emperor made no secret of his love affairs, Madame Goutier’s daughter wrote about him often, week by week, month by month.

  Prince Napoleon also flaunted his mistresses and Zita learnt that Baron Haussmann, who had rebuilt Paris, was seen unashamedly driving in his carriage with the young actress Francine Cellier.

  Too, she heard that the King of the Netherlands was infatuated with Madame Mustard and had spent an astronomical amount of money on her.

  Because Madame Goutier, like the Professor, chattered without thinking, she had not the slightest idea how much of what she said was stored away in her pupil’s mind.

  ‘If only I could see Paris,’ Zita said to herself.

  She thought that she would always have to be content with just dreaming about it, cataloguing what she was told into little compartments which she could draw out like books whenever she felt that the Palace was too dull and the Court too boring to be endured.

  Now, suddenly, almost like a meteor falling from the sky, the most handsome, the most dashing and certainly the most talked-about man in Paris, King Maximilian, was to be a guest at the Palace of Aldross.

  “I cannot believe it’s true!” Zita exclaimed again. “And, Sophie, if you marry him, it will be thrilling and exciting not only for you but for me. Promise me that you will sometimes ask me to stay with you in Valdastien, otherwise it will break my heart!”

  Zita spoke pleadingly, her voice deep with the intensity of her feelings.

  It was then that Sophie replied slowly in the same expressionless voice she always used,

  “No, Zita! I shall not invite you to stay with me in Valdastien or to come anywhere else with me. You are much too pretty!”

  Chapter Two

  How can you be so unfair, Mama?” Zita asked indignantly.

  The Grand Duchess was silent, as if she was choosing her words before she answered,

  “This is Sophie’s chance of a grand marriage, Zita, and I don’t want you to interfere or spoil it for her.”

  “Why should I do that?”

  The Grand Duchess did not answer the question.

  She only said,

  “I am not going to argue about it. You will stay upstairs and not take part in any of the festivities arranged for King Maximilian. If you disobey me, you will have to be sent away to stay with one of our relatives.”

  Zita was silent, knowing that if she sometimes found the Palace gloomy, it was nothing compared to the boredom and depression she had found with her aunts and cousins who lived in much more isolated parts of the country.

  Instead she rose from the chair beside her mother and went from the room, closing the door behind her with what was suspiciously like a slam.

  The Grand Duchess sighed.

  She had always found Zita difficult because she was like her father, while she thought Sophie, who was amenable, quiet and obedient, was exactly like herself.

  Because the Grand Duchess was English and a distant cousin of Queen Victoria, Zita had been speaking English while she was with her mother.

  Now, as she ran down the corridor towards her father’s rooms, she was thinking in her own language.

  She burst into his study and found him alone, as she had expected.

  She ran across the room to say angrily,

  “I cannot believe, Papa, that it is with your approval that I am not to come to the dinner given for King Maximilian or to the ball, in fact, I am not even to meet him while he is here!”

  The Grand Duke looked up from the newspaper he was reading and his eyes took in the fiery sparkle in Zita’s green eyes, the flush on her cheeks and the way her auburn red hair, after the haste in which she had run, seemed to be rising almost like flames over her well-shaped head.

  His eyes were soft and his voice very affectionate as he replied,

  “I am sorry, my dearest, I was afraid it would upset you.”

  “There, you did know!” Zita said accusingly. “Oh, Papa, how could you be so unkind?”

  The Grand Duke put out his hand and Zita took it to kneel down beside his chair and look up at him pleadingly.

  “You know how dull it has been here lately,” she said. “To dance with anybody would be exciting, but most of all with King Maximilian, whom I have always wanted to meet.”

  The Grand Duke’s fingers tightened on hers as he said,

  “I am afraid, my darling, that Sophie and your mother’s decision that you will not be presented to His Majesty is the penalty you must pay for being so beautiful.”

  Zita stared as if she could not believe what she had heard.

  Then she said quickly,

  “Oh, I know Sophie pretends she is jealous of me and Mama disapproves of the way I behave when I am with you, but surely what they feel is not serious enough to have me isolated in the schoolroom as if I was infectious!”

  The Grand Duke smiled, but his voice was sad as he said,

  “When I was told that this had been decided, I knew it would upset you. But really, dearest, there is nothing I can do about it.”

  “Why not?” Zita asked aggressively.

  “Because,” the Grand Duke explained patiently, “it is of great importance, as you will understand, that small countries like ours should unite togeth
er against the greed of Germany and, if King Maximilian should marry Sophie, it would mean that both our countries would be immeasurably stronger than we are at this moment.”

  As he spoke, he recognised that Zita would understand exactly what he was saying, because they had so often discussed the political problems of Europe.

  “I thought Germany had their eyes on Austria,” she remarked after a moment.

  “Austria first, then Bavaria, then perhaps us and after that why not France?”

  Zita drew in her breath.

  She knew that her father was not speaking lightly.

  It was what she had reasoned out anyway might happen if Bismarck put his ambitions into action rather than words.

  She laid her cheek against her father’s hand and said,

  “All the same, Papa, I would still like to come to the Court ball and, if you will allow me to attend, I shall promise not to dance with the King.”

  “But he might want to dance with you, my precious,” the Grand Duke answered, “and that is exactly what your mother and Sophie are afraid of.”

  Zita did not move, but, with her cheek still against her father’s hand, she was thinking that this was the first time any of the family had actually said that she was beautiful.

  However, she would have been very stupid if she had not been aware that she closely resembled her famous Hungarian grandmother.

  The former Grand Duchess had been acclaimed throughout the length and breadth of Europe and could, Zita had always been told, have made a far more significant marriage than accepting the hand of the Grand Duke of Aldross.

  “Your grandmama fell in love the moment she saw your grandfather,” the Grand Duke had explained to Zita when she was very small and they were looking at the large portrait of the former Grand Duchess, which hung in the Throne Room.

  Zita had replied almost without a pause,

  “If Grandpapa looked like you, Papa, then I am not surprised. He must have been very handsome.”

  “Thank you, my dearest,” the Grand Duke answered. “But I am glad to say that, although I resemble my father, I also have inherited many characteristics of my beautiful mother, especially her love of horses and her skill in riding the most spirited animals and I have been clever enough to create in you a replica of her.”

  It was perhaps because the Grand Duke had loved and admired his mother so much that he had adored his third child from the moment she was born.

  He already had a son, Henrich, and a daughter, Sophie, and he had hoped, although he had not said so, that the third baby would be another son.

  Yet as soon as he saw Zita he knew that somehow, in a way that he could not explain, she meant more to him than his two elder children.

  As Zita grew older and became alluringly pretty with her red hair and green eyes, he had spent more time in the nursery than he had ever done before.

  When she was eight, despite the protests of the Grand Duchess, he took her away with him on one of his trips into the mountains, which had always infuriated his wife, although she could do nothing about it.

  “I wish to get to know my people and the easiest way is to move amongst them,” the Grand Duke had said firmly.

  Dressed in short leather trousers, a green jacket and a Tyrolean hat, which was almost a uniform amongst the Aldross people, as it was amongst the Bavarians, the Grand Duke would go off alone.

  He would stay at small inns, drink the wine that was made in the local valleys and sing with his subjects the songs that they all knew and which somehow expressed better than words their thoughts and their emotions.

  The citizens of Aldross adored him because they thought that in consequence he understood their troubles and problems.

  That he had other reasons for making these occasional excursions into the mountains just made them smile and say that he was ‘very much a man’.

  To Zita it was the most exciting thing in the world to go away alone with her father and look after herself without being cosseted, scolded and interfered with by nurses, Governesses and of course her mother.

  She and her father would ride halfway up some mountain he wished to visit, then, having left their horses, they would climb through the pine woods and onto the barren rocks and walk until Zita’s legs ached.

  Although she tried not to complain, sometimes she found herself forced to confess that her small legs were tired.

  Then they would find a lake and the Grand Duke would suggest that she swim in the cold clear water until she felt rested and invigorated again.

  After the first trip with her father, Zita learnt to swim and on subsequent trips she swam like a small fish.

  But it was an achievement she never mentioned at the Palace, knowing how much her mother would disapprove of her swimming naked, even though there was nobody but her father to see her.

  Every year she and her father would go off somewhere together and nothing the Grand Duchess could say could prevent them from slipping away for perhaps a week or ten days.

  They would return brown from the sun in radiant good health and good spirits, but they had very little to say about where they had been and what they had done.

  It was when Zita was fifteen that the Grand Duchess had prevented her from going on any more trips and no amount of pleading with her father had prevailed on him to take her.

  She could not understand why a sudden embargo had been set like an iron screen on something that made her so happy and which she knew pleased her father too.

  It was in fact only when she began to hear about the gentlemen in Paris who spent so much money on the beautiful ladies of the demi-monde that she vaguely had an idea why her father, when he did escape from the constriction of the Palace, went alone to that beautiful City.

  It was then that half-forgotten words came back to her, words that had been spoken in the past and which had meant nothing to her at the time.

  “I will not have any daughter of mine associating with women like that!” she had heard the Grand Duchess say once, then she had frozen into silence as she realised that Zita had come into the room.

  On another occasion she had heard her mother storm,

  “What sort of reputation do you think you have? Consorting with creatures you meet in – ”

  Again there had been no end to the sentence and gradually other memories came back to help to solve the puzzle as to why she had been left behind.

  One night she had been asleep in a small room with a low ceiling and a breathtaking view of the mountain peaks stretching away into the distance.

  Because the moonlight came through the open window onto her face, Zita had stirred from a very deep sleep of sheer physical exhaustion.

  She and her father had walked all day, swum in an icy cold lake and moved on to reach an attractive little inn high up in the mountains where he had never taken her before.

  When they had arrived, a fair-haired young woman with skin like strawberries and cream and eyes as blue as gentians, came running towards them with a cry of sheer joy on her red lips.

  “You have come back!” she said almost breathlessly to the Grand Duke. “I thought I would never see you again.”

  He smiled, put out his hand to touch her cheek and replied,

  “I always keep my promises, Nevi, and this time I have brought my daughter to meet the prettiest woman in the whole of Aldross!”

  They had eaten a delicious dinner and Zita had been allowed to sip a little of the special wine of the district.

  Then, because she could barely keep her eyes open, she had contentedly gone up to bed to fall asleep the moment her head touched the pillow.

  Now with the moonlight on her face she thought how happy she was and she was just slipping back into her dreams when she heard a very soft gentle laugh, then her father’s voice, deep and somehow different from any way she had ever heard him speak before.

  It seemed strange, but she was too sleepy to worry about it and in the morning she had forgotten what she had heard.

&nb
sp; When she did remember, it fitted in with her mother’s anger when her father went off on his trips and, although Zita was no longer allowed to go with him, he continued to go alone and Zita was aware of how bitterly her mother resented it.

  Slowly, because children are rarely very intuitive where their parents are concerned, she began to see her father and mother in a very different perspective from the one she had viewed them in as a child.

  She realised that their marriage had been an arranged one and that it had been greatly to Aldross’s advantage for the Grand Duke to marry into the British Royal Family, for it meant that they could call on a certain amount of British friendship and support should the necessity arise.

  The Grand Duchess, very English in appearance, very stiff and shy and, as Zita thought when she grew older, cold and unemotional, was very different from the warm, extroverted, fun-loving people of Aldross.

  They laughed because they were happy and they sang while they worked.

  When it was dusk, the voices of the labourers going back to their cottages from the fields would ring out like bells and seem somehow to rise towards the snow-capped mountains as if carried on wings.

  It was only this year, when she was nearly eighteen, that Zita was aware that her mother loved her father not because she was his wife, but because she was a woman.

  It gave her a shock when she realised inadvertently and knew almost as if he had told her so, that, while her father treated his wife with respect and attention, he was not in the least what the poets would call ‘in love with her’.

  ‘Oh, poor Mama!’ Zita had thought to herself.

  She decided then that when the occasion arose, she would categorically refuse to be pressured into marrying a man she did not love and who did not love her, however important he might be.

  Looking at her parents with new eyes, she saw that her father, so handsome, so extremely attractive to women, must often feel desperately frustrated.

  The country over which he ruled was small and his marriage constrained him from wandering over the world, as he would have liked.