She opened her purse and took out a picture. It was about ten years old, an amateurish family shot, showing the teenage Lizzie with the actress, standing haughtily, every inch the grande dame. Standing just behind them was a thin little woman with slightly untidy hair. Her dress was nondescript, her face was bare, its only adornment a cheerful smile. Daniel stared at her in disbelief.
‘But she’s-’
‘Exactly,’ Lizzie said. ‘She’s nothing to look at. Not beautiful or glamorous, not a titled lady or a star, not at all the sort of woman you’d expect to be a king’s mistress. And she was his mistress. His letters leave no doubt of it.
‘She was a servant, illegitimate, and in his world she’d have been called a nobody. But she has a great, generous spirit, and she was the love of his life.
‘She’s kept her secret all these years. But now she’s dying, and when she had that attack she called me home so that she could give me these. She said I could do whatever I liked with them. So here they are. Take them, and forget I exist. You’ve got all you ever really wanted from me.’
In a daze Daniel began to draw the letters out, recognising his grandfather’s handwriting even though there was something subtly different about it. It was larger, freer, and Alphonse, a man of few words, had covered endless sheets of paper, as though pouring out a soul.
Daniel went through one letter after another, glancing at each briefly, just long enough to still the last of his doubts.
‘What did she say when she gave them to you?’ he asked.
When there was no reply he looked up and found himself alone. Lizzie had gone.
Hurriedly he went out into the corridor, but it too was empty. A dreadful suspicion sent him to the window. She must have had a cab waiting all the time, he realised. All that could be seen of it now was the rear vanishing down the long avenue, until it reached the huge wrought-iron gates.
There was still time to stop her. All he had to do was call the gatekeeper. He reached for the telephone, but then checked himself. The habit of command was strong, but right now a command would lose him everything. Whatever he might say, she did not want to hear.
He stayed motionless, undecided, and as he watched the iron gates opened, the car went through, turned and vanished from sight.
CHAPTER SIX
IT WAS very quiet in the King’s private rooms. The great clock in the corner silently proclaimed midnight, and the only sound was the rustling of paper on the big table that had been cleared of everything else. Outside the door Frederick sat with orders to permit nobody to disturb Daniel.
Nothing in his life had ever been so important as what he was doing now, fitting together the letters that had passed between two people for thirty years, until one of them had been cruelly struck down so that he could not even utter his beloved’s name. It was more than a correspondence. It was a testimony of powerful, enduring love that awed him as he read.
Lizzie had said there was no doubt that they had been lovers in every sense of the word, and Daniel had already discerned as much from the ‘Liz’ letters. Yet they were relatively restrained. Alphonse’s were totally frank. He had loved this woman with his heart, his soul and his great, vigorous body. He had loved her fiercely, sexually, without false modesty or pride, and she had stimulated him to ignore his advancing years and love her with the urgent desire of a much younger man. Daniel, no prude, found himself blushing at some passages.
Yet this in itself was not the greatest surprise. That had come with the discovery that his grandfather, a strictly traditional man where ‘a woman’s place’ was concerned, had turned to Liz for advice. As time passed she had become more than his lover. She had been his counsellor.
Suddenly Daniel grew still. His own name had leapt out at him from the paper.
I try to do my best by the boy, but what am I to do when he takes such wild ideas into his head? Why piano lessons? He’s going to be a king, not join an orchestra.
Daniel read the phrase again and again, and suddenly time turned back and he was a boy of ten, wanting to learn the piano because it was only in making music that he could find the strength to cope with the pressures that were already threatening to crush him. But all authority had lain with his grandfather, who didn’t understand, and who was impatient of explanation.
And then, out of the blue, Alphonse had yielded. A fine music master had been engaged and a new joy had entered Daniel’s life. Yet even while he’d rejoiced he’d puzzled over his grandfather’s volte face.
He went to the secret drawer where he’d kept the other side of the correspondence since Lizzie’s first departure, yanking it out in a violent movement quite different from his usual restraint. The letters spilled all over the floor and he dropped to his knees, searching as though his life depended on it.
At last he found what he wanted: a letter from Liz in response.
Say yes to what he asks, my dearest. His life will be so hard. Indulge him and make his coming burden a little easier. Let the poor child have some pleasure. However much it is, it still won’t be enough.
There was more. For years Alphonse had laid his personal problems in his darling’s hands and trusted her answers. Daniel found the story of his childhood and teenage years relived in these letters.
He remembered his father’s death. How stiff and distant Alphonse had seemed over the loss of his only son. It was only to Liz that he had released the rage and pain that consumed him. In letter after letter he’d let out a howl of fatherly anguish.
Now he realised how much he’d overlooked when he’d first glanced through these pages. The sight of his own name in Liz’s letters gave him a sensation that he’d never known before, and which at first he couldn’t identify. But it was a good feeling-of being able to let down his guard in a trusted presence. Where Alphonse had worried how he should rear the future king, Liz had seen only the bereaved child.
He’s just a little boy…let him be happy while he can…make him safe…tell him you love him…don’t let him be ashamed to cry…be kind to him…be kind to him…
Over weeks, months and years she had counselled love and gentleness to the child.
In Daniel’s mind those years were a blur. But now scenes began to come back to him: himself at nine years old, fighting back the tears even in the privacy of his own room, because now he was heir to the throne, and a man, and men didn’t cry. Then his grandfather coming in, seeing the tears he was too late to hide. He’d waited to be blamed, but instead the stern face had softened, a kindly hand had rested on his shoulder, and a gruff voice had whispered, ‘I know, my boy. I know.’
Other things. The music lessons-understood now for the first time. And Tiger, the mongrel, his own special care and his dearest friend. So much owed to this woman he’d never known.
Daniel took out the picture that Lizzie had left behind. It was hard to see much of Liz, standing in the shadows behind the other two. But he could make out the gentle glow of her face. And suddenly he could identify the unknown feeling that had eased his heart. His mother had died when he was a baby, and he’d never known a mother’s love, but over the years and the miles Liz had tried to make up for that lack. And she’d succeeded more than any other woman could have done. Looking at her now, Daniel thought he could understand why.
He hadn’t noticed the hours pass until Frederick knocked on the door. He answered it, but didn’t allow him in. Frederick was startled at his pallor.
‘Speak to my secretary,’ Daniel commanded. ‘Cancel any appointments I have for tomorrow. Say I’m detained on urgent business. And send me in some food.’