He had built one such house for himself, of course—a very grand edifice of limestone he dubbed the Villa Victoria, being nothing if not a loyal subject. Behind and around its classical grey walls he set a botanic garden, filled with exotic specimens impossible to grow in the English climate. It was a perfect place for parties, and for assignations among the palms; for larcenous negotiations and amicable se-ductions. Lately, he had ordered a croquet lawn to be established there—for the use of Prince Leopold and his circle.
Fitzgerald and Georgiana were standing together, under one of the palm trees, with a gargantuan jardinière of jasmine scenting the air around their heads, watching Leopold as he carefully aligned his square-headed mallet and with considerable finesse, whacked his dark blue ball. It rolled with perfect momentum across the shaved grass of Sir Thomas's perfect lawn, and struck Louisa's yellow ball with a dull thud.
“Huzzah!” he cried, swinging his stick into the air. “Now I must send you, Louisa!”
“Of course you must,” she sighed, “and we shall all of us be probing among the plumbago for the next quarter-hour while you go merrily around the wickets. I should like to win just once, Leo, before I return to London!”
The boy grinned at her, but utterly without mercy; he set his black ball close to hers, put his boot firmly upon it, turned his mallet in the direction of the dense growth of plumbago, and whacked again. His stroke, reverberating through his ball into Louisa's, sent it careening wildly off the shaved grass and into the jungle of Sir Thomas's garden.
“I'm afraid of you now,” Georgie declared, as she lifted her mallet. “You're going to dispatch all of us in a similar fashion, aren't you?”
“If you will but give me the opportunity,” Leopold said with dutiful politeness. “I always play by the rules, you know. I'm not a poor sport, either. I should like for Louisa to win—truly I should—but I do not think she is cut out for it. She doesn't want victory enough. I do. I suppose it's the blood of kings that runs in my veins.”
He uttered the words offhandedly enough; but for an instant, as he stood in a blaze of southern sunlight with his head high and his jubilant gaze surveying the company, Leopold looked invincible. The tentative boy of yesterday, too terrified to handle a fretsaw, seemed a chimera of a nursery fable. What mightn't the lad do, Fitzgerald mused, if he could shake this illness off his back?
Then Louisa uttered a groan of despair from deep within the shrubbery, and the moment dissipated.
It was a tradition, at the Villa Victoria, that Gunther and Leo formed a team. Georgie and Fitzgerald were designated another. Louisa was left to Sir Thomas, who, while not old enough to be her actual late father, was certainly old enough to be a father of some kind.
“Good Lord!” he cried, as he set down his whiskey and soda on one of a group of small tables that lined the croquet lawn. “Miss Bowater! How are we to set a fashion for croquet in Cannes, my dear, if the ladies observe you to be perennially on your knees in the flower beds?”
“It is unfortunate that Lord Rokeby could not have formed another of the party,” Georgie murmured to Fitzgerald. “He's exactly the sort of person Louisa Bowater ought to marry. Well-breeched, no more than thirty, ambitious in his career—none of your Bond Street Beaux—but an intelligent fellow and exceedingly well-bred. I quite like him.”
“I never knew you for a matchmaker, Georgie,” Fitzgerald chided. “As I recall, you hated the well-meaning busybodies who attempted to order your life.”
“Am I a busybody, Patrick?”
Her chin lifted imperiously. He was pleased to see colour in her sunken cheeks; even her voice was less hoarse than it had been yesterday, at the Château Leader Christmas feast. The sun of Cannes agreed with her, as did the light muslin gown she had unearthed somewhere in a shop, impossible to discover at such a season in England. She had worn black gloves in respect of Leopold's loss, of course. Fitzgerald, like all the men present, sported a crepe armband.
His hand moved involuntarily to cup the nape of her neck, to draw her mouth to his, to kiss away her outrage, and silence the mere suggestion she was matronly—but his fingers clenched in midair.
“Of course not,” he said. “You're right about Louisa. Rokeby's a fool. Of what possible use is a diplomatic career if it ties one everlastingly to a desk?”
A cry of triumph emanated from the plumbago; Sir Thomas's debonair moustache and side-whiskers emerged from the foliage, with Louisa's yellow ball held high. Leopold, Fitzgerald noticed, had nearly circled the course in the interval. Sir Thomas's shout, however, put the boy off his stroke; the ball glanced away from the final hoop, and with an exaggerated look of agony, the Prince tossed his mallet over his shoulder and fell to his knees.
“Your turn, I think, Miss Armistead,” Dr. Gunther said with a punctilious bow.
“The boy should not engage in dramatics,” she murmured. “He'll be bleeding from those knees by bedtime.”
In the event, however, Georgie was proved wrong: Leopold was in good enough form that evening to steal away from the Château Leader, and the party of men who unexpectedly called upon Lady Bowater, just after dinnertime.
The eight-year-old understood only part of what was said. He was supposed to be in his nursery, and was forced to hang over the balustrade of the grand limestone staircase in order to catch Lord Rokeby's conversation. His Royal Highness had been in France long enough to recognise the uniforms of the gendarmes. He was worried they'd been sent to carry him back to England—but quickly realised his mistake when the talk turned to murder.
“Louisa,” he whispered urgently through her door a few moments later. “You must help me. We must warn them.”
“Who?” she demanded, looking up from the book she was reading by the nursery night light.
“Dr. Armistead and her friend. Rokeby means to arrest them. Do you think we can saddle the donkeys by ourselves?”
It was Louisa who sent up a note to Georgiana, while she and Leo waited uneasily in the main reception room of the hotel on the Toulon road, trying not to draw attention. As Leo had spent several nights there while Louisa's father died, it was likely the staff would recognise him and fuss. He had very nearly elected to remain outside with Jacques and Catherine, who were tethered to a hitching post; but resolution and courage seemed demanded by the peculiar circumstances. Leopold had endured pain enough in his short life to fully comprehend that such things as discomfort and fear were temporary; on no account should they be allowed to dictate his choices or behaviour. He was, had he known it, singularly like his father Albert in this respect; far more than his brothers, he could subsume the physical to a higher mental purpose. But Leopold, as he grasped Louisa's hand and pulled his soft hat lower on his forehead, thought only that Affie and Bertie would call him poor-spirited if he hung back; and such a thought was insupportable.
“Tell me the tale from the beginning,” Fitzgerald said. “Lord Rokeby is come from Nice, with a party of gendarmes, expressly to arrest me?”
“And Dr. Armistead,” Louisa said unsteadily. She looked, Fitzgerald thought, as though she had been crying. “There was a telegram from Paris, I gather—with some sort of information—I didn't hear all the talk myself. It was mostly Leo—and we were afraid to linger any longer. It was imperative that we not be discovered overlistening Lord Rokeby's conversation. Else we might have been prevented from warning you.”