A Kiss for the King Read online

  The King laughed.

  “You are very voluble on the subject, Yvette. In a few hours we shall be able to ascertain if you are correct in your assumption, or whether Queen Victoria has been slightly cleverer than either of us anticipated.”

  “Cleverer? What do you mean by cleverer?” the Comtesse enquired. “Are you suggesting that your bride will be anything different from what I have described? Mon Dieu! I know the English, and their women have no feelings, none at all. Look at the Englishmen who come to Paris. What are they seeking? The amusement, the gaiety and the pleasures of the body which they cannot find in their own country.”

  “Perhaps you are right,” the King said good-humouredly, “and undoubtedly Paris, as we well know, caters very extensively for what you call ‘the pleasures of the body’.”

  “But where you are concerned there is no need to go to Paris,” Yvette said softly.

  As she spoke, she held out her arms, but the King made no move to accept her invitation.

  “It is too late for you to be here, Yvette,” he said. “Go home. You must not be too fatigued to be pleasant to your husband when he arrives.”

  “I am always pleasant to Henri,” the Comtesse said crossly, dropping her arms as she spoke. “Only the English cause scandals because when they are in love they have not the common sense to be pleasant to their marriage partners.”

  “I agree with you, it is a mistake,” the King said, “and that is why I am telling you once again, Yvette, that you must return to the Embassy.”

  With a sigh the Comtesse le Granmont rose from the divan, then, as she stood draping her diaphanous green gauze around her, she gave a little cry and ran across the room to the King.

  She reached up her arms and put them round his neck to draw his head down to hers.

  “Je t’adore!” she sighed passionately.

  Just for a moment her lips were against his, then he released himself from her clinging arms. She pouted at him and proceeded to pick up the rest of her clothes that were scattered on the floor.

  When finally she was dressed in a negligee, which did little to conceal the nakedness of her figure, the King lifted from a chair a long cloak of black sables and placed it over her shoulders.

  It covered her completely from her neck to her feet, and she pulled a green scarf over her loosened hair and tucked it under the fur.

  “When shall I see you again?” she asked, and there was no doubt about the anxiety in her question.

  The King shrugged his shoulders.

  Then he answered her almost drily,

  “Doubtless when with the rest of the Diplomatic Corps you receive the Princess tomorrow morning and at the Procession of Flowers in the afternoon.”

  “You know I do not mean that sort of occasion.”

  “When it is possible for you to come here,” the King answered, “I will send you a message in the usual manner.”

  “You know I will be waiting to hear from you,” she murmured softly.

  She paused and then added,

  “I am naturally consumed with jealousy! How I wish that I could be your bride instead of this milk-faced foreigner with whom you will have nothing in common.”

  “You are also a foreigner, my dear Yvette.”

  “But think how much we have in common,” she countered quickly.

  He laughed.

  With his arm around her shoulders, he drew the Comtesse across the sitting room and opened the door in one corner. It revealed a staircase down which they could descend only in single file. At the bottom of the stairs was a very small square hall and a door opening on to the garden.

  As they reached it, Yvette put out her arms and once again drew the King’s head down towards hers.

  “Bonne nuit, Roi de mon coeur!” she whispered. “Dream only of me. If nothing else, I claim priority in your dreams!”

  “Goodnight, Yvette, and thank you for an enchanting evening.”

  He kissed her and then raised her hand to his lips.

  He opened the door and she stepped out into the garden. Already the stars had faded and there was the first faint diffusion of light to herald the dawn.

  It was easy to see the narrow flagged path leading down the avenue of cypress trees to where, at the end, there was a door in the Palace wall.

  In the distance beside the door the King could see the cloaked figure of a man.

  “Will you be all right?” he asked.

  “My servants are waiting for me,” the Comtesse replied. She walked away, her feet in her satin slippers making little sound on the flagstones.

  After he had watched her for a few seconds, the King closed the door and went up the staircase to his sitting room.

  The dented cushions looked somehow untidy and suggestive, and there was also the fragrance of Yvette’s heavy, almost Oriental perfume on the air.

  The King stood still for a moment as if he was thinking. Then he pulled open the door on the opposite side of the room and walked briskly towards his bedroom.

  He imagined he would fall asleep as soon as his valet, who had waited up, had helped him undress, and he was lying in the huge canopied bed surmounted with a gilt crown in which the Kings of Maurona had slept for over two hundred years.

  But sleep eluded him and he found himself thinking of Yvette and what she had said about his future bride. He wondered if she had been prophetic.

  All the anger that he had felt since the moment he had learnt the Queen of England wished him to marry one of her relatives came surging over him like a flood tide that could not be controlled.

  He had always intended to marry sooner or later, and was well aware that it was expected of him to breed sons to carry on the Monarchy.

  But he had not expected to be dictated to or find himself in a position where it was almost impossible to refuse the directives of a foreign power.

  But his country needed England’s assistance both commercially and politically, and the price England had extorted for her favours was that one of Queen Victoria’s descendants should sit on the throne of Maurona.

  ‘I refuse! I categorically refuse!’ the King had wanted to storm when he had been told what he had to do.

  But long years of controlling himself under his father’s rule had taught him to speak calmly and without heat, and to listen without comment to the arguments that were presented to him.

  His brain, which had always been very astute, told him that there was no escape.

  At the same time he disliked and resented the whole project to such an extent that it was hard to listen to the elation with which the alliance had been received and to accept the congratulations that had poured in from every side.

  No one would attend when he had said over and over again in Council that there was no danger from the French. Had not the Emperor promised him personally that he had no interest in making any other conquests in Europe or annexing any territories?

  “France is already large enough in all conscience,” he had said when the King was staying with him in Paris. “It is difficult enough to rule peacefully that which I now possess and to ensure that economically we are a prosperous nation with a chance of becoming richer. What would I want with England or Maurona?”

  “You are suspected of having designs on both!” the King had said with the frankness of a friend.

  “I have been accused of so many sins I have not committed,” the Emperor smiled, “so I suppose one or two more will not hurt me. But let us not talk politics, my dear Maximilian. While you are in Paris I have so many more beguiling subjects in which to interest you.”

  “So you do not want my throne?” the King had countered jokingly.

  “God forbid!” the Emperor exclaimed in mock horror. “My own is precarious enough!”

  They had both laughed and the King was now completely reassured that the fears of his Cabinet were as ridiculous and insubstantial as those that had caused the English to recruit a Volunteer Force and build iron fortresses in the Channel ready to repe
l a French invasion.

  He thought of the amusements he had found in Paris and a smile curved his lips, as he lay sleepless against his pillows. Never had he imagined such luxury, such extravagance, and such beguiling and enthralling femininity as he had found in the ‘Gay City’.

  When he remembered how until the age of twenty-two, he had been compelled to stay in Maurona, a prisoner in the dullest and most pompous Court in Europe, he could hardly bear to think of those wasted years.

  It was true that his father had allowed him to go abroad for the purposes of education, but always he had been accompanied by Tutors, Political Advisers, aides-de-camp and servants all chosen by his father and who, he was quite convinced, were also his father’s spies.

  He had never for a moment been allowed to enjoy himself freely. He had never been permitted to attend anything but the most formal parties that were arranged for him by his Political Adviser.

  He met only those people of whom his father approved and the guest lists were brought back on his return for his father’s perusal.

  It was incredible to look back now and see how restricted and how monotonous his life had been.

  Always he was supervised and controlled as he had been from the moment he left the nursery.

  He was not even allowed to entertain boys of his own age without his father being present.

  There were parties at the Palace to which sons of the nobility were invited to sit around while his father made conversation, or at special Festivals to watch Shakespearean or Greek plays chosen carefully by his father because they were of educational value.

  It was not surprising that, as soon as Maximilian came to the throne, he wanted to see the world – and a different world from the one he had so far been permitted to view.

  Three months after he was proclaimed King of Maurona he was in Paris and as the years went by his visits to the French Capital became more and more frequent.

  He had stayed with the Czar of Russia and enjoyed himself in St. Petersburg and he had been a guest of the King of Greece and of the Sultan of Morocco.

  He had found the protocol in the Palace of Schonbrunn in Vienna almost as stiff and as boring as in the Palace in Sergei during his father’s long reign. So he had never returned to Austria, although he had been invited.

  He had refused to visit England because he thought it would be a repetition of what he had endured in Vienna. He had been in England once when he was young, but he had found Prince Albert dull and formal and had hardly met Queen Victoria, as she had at the time been about to give birth to one of her numerous children.

  England, he told himself now, was very much as Yvette had described it and that meant that his wife would bore him to distraction.

  There was a scowl on his face as he thought of Anastasia. She was arriving late due to a storm in the Bay of Biscay.

  ‘What a pity the ship could not have gone to the bottom! Then at least there would be a year’s mourning before they could attempt to thrust another bride upon me,’ he said to himself.

  Trust an English battleship to come through safely!

  The scowl grew even deeper.

  He knew that those of his subjects with Spanish sympathies would think of the battleship bringing his bride to Sergei as a weapon of intimidation and warning to the French.

  To the King it was an insult to his French friends, while to his Prime Minister it would be a confirmation of his conviction that it was wiser for Maurona to be linked with England rather than with France.

  ‘Why are you so afraid?’ the King had wanted to ask jeeringly at yesterday’s Privy Council. ‘What have you to fear except your own timidity?’

  He had not spoken the words that trembled on his lips, but he had thought that the Prime Minister and those who supported him were like children scared of a ‘bogey-man’ which was nothing more substantial than a shadow on the wall.

  The Emperor Napoleon III had given him his word. He had no designs on Maurona!

  What else were they asking for and why should England be involved, and more intimately, himself?

  The sun was flooding over the Bay and shimmering on the sea when the King finally fell asleep, and it seemed to him that he had only just closed his eyes when his valet called him.

  “A lovely day, Your Majesty!” he called cheerily after he had drawn back the curtains, “and the crowds have been assembling all night.”

  “What for?” the King asked drowsily.

  “Why, to welcome the Princess, Your Majesty! The Officer on duty has just informed me that the battleship has been sighted and should anchor in the Bay just before eleven o’clock.”

  The King did not reply, but after a few moments he flung back the bedclothes and got up in ill humour.

  He was in what his nanny would have called one of his ‘black moods’ as he ate his breakfast, hardly tasting the food that went into his mouth. He glanced with a jaundiced eye at the newspapers, which carried large portraits of himself, and a sketch of the Princess surmounted by a heart and garlanded with flowers.

  The King looked at the picture without interest. It would not have been a very clear sketch in the first place and was badly printed, making her hair and eyes seem dark and the face somewhat heavy.

  It was difficult to tell if the description of her as being pretty was, as Yvette had suspected, a diplomatic evasion, or the truth.

  ‘Anyway,’ the King thought to himself, ‘it is immaterial. We shall have little to say to each other and certainly few interests in common.’

  It was with bad grace that, after he had dealt with his correspondence with his secretary, he put on the resplendent uniform he knew would be expected of him.

  “If you add many more decorations to the present collection,” he snapped at his valet, “I shall look like a Christmas tree!”

  “You must wear the Order of the Mauronian Martyrs, Your Majesty,” the valet protested.

  The King’s mind caught on the word.

  ‘That is what I am,’ he told his reflection in the mirror, ‘a martyr!’

  Then he thought that whatever else happened as regards his marriage, he had no intention of being manipulated by his bride or dictated to, as her relative the Queen of England had done in forcing her upon him.

  ‘If she is bossy and autocratic, she has a surprise coming to her,’ he thought angrily. ‘I will be master in my own Palace, even if I have some difficulty being master in my own country!’

  Because he was feeling angry and aggressive he did not walk down the steps of the Palace until the very last second. He knew that his aides-de-camp were worried by the fact that, far from showing the eagerness expected of a bridegroom, he was deliberately delaying his appearance even in the hall of the Palace until the carriages arrived.

  “The procession is turning in at the gates, Sire,” one of his aides-de-camp said and there was no mistaking the agitation in his voice.

  It would be an insult, as they all knew, if the Princess should descend from the carriage and start to climb the steps of the Palace before the King was even in sight.

  When all those around him were looking at him imploringly and the carriage door had actually opened to allow Anastasia to step out onto the red carpet, the King passed through the Palace door.

  With a slowness born of angry reluctance within himself, which he could not control, he started to walk down the red-carpeted steps between the ranks of the Guard of Honour.

  Below him he could see a patch of pale blue and a figure that was definitely smaller than he had expected.

  Down he went, step after step, and now the patch of blue was moving upwards towards him.

  Anastasia was turning her head from side to side to acknowledge the greetings of the distinguished guests.

  The women were sweeping low in their crinolines in a graceful billowing movement like the waves of the sea, while the gentlemen bowed their heads.

  The same thing was happening on either side of the King as he descended, but he looked straight ah
ead. Now with almost perfect, if accidental, timing, King Maximilian and Anastasia met on the steps exactly half way.

  She was conscious of the glitter of his decorations and then she lifted her face to look up at him. He was much taller than she had expected and as their eyes met for the first time Anastasia gave a little gasp.

  Quite involuntarily she exclaimed,

  “Oh, you look so much nicer than I had expected!”

  For a moment the King was too astonished to reply.

  Then, with a smile that swept away the scowl between his eyes, he said,

  “May I be permitted, Your Royal Highness, to welcome you to Maurona? I am deeply honoured that you should come to my country and I can only pray that God will bless our union and that you will be happy here.”

  He took her hand as he spoke and raised it perfunctorily to his lips, but his eyes were still on her face. He had never imagined that anything, other than a piece of Dresden china, could be so pink, white and gold.

  Anastasia’s eyes were the blue of the wild forget-me-nots that grew on the alpine plateaux and her lips were smiling as, instead of replying to his formal speech of greeting, she, stammered in embarrassment,

  “Forgive me for what I – said just – now, and please do not – tell Mama.”

  “She would not approve?” the King asked in amusement.

  “She would be very angry. I had a formal speech prepared which I had learnt very carefully – but the awful thing is – I have – forgotten it!”

  “I will not give you away,” the King said good-humouredly.

  “Please don’t,” Anastasia pleaded, “you have no idea how shocked they would be.”

  “Indeed I have a very good idea!”

  Then they could say no more.

  The private exchange between the Royal couple that had seemed deliberately contrived was now at an end, and the Grand Duchess took her place immediately behind Anastasia, the British Ambassador at her side.

  “May I present to Your Majesty the Grand Duchess of Hohlenstein?” Sir Frederick said formally.

  The King bowed over the Grand Duchess’s hand as she rose from a curtsy and he then offered his arm to Anastasia. As she put her fingers lightly upon it, he led her up the steps and into the hall of the Palace.