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‘Everyone has them at some point in their life, Roman. You know all about mine but I know nothing about yours. I mean, I know that your father died four years ago and that your parents got divorced, but I don’t know any more than that because you’ve never said.’
‘And don’t you think there’s a reason for that?’
She wriggled up the bed a little, so that her dark hair shimmered down, rather disappointingly concealing the rosy nipple which had been on display.
‘So why don’t you tell me what that reason is?’ she said.
The look in her eyes was compelling, the expression on her face serene as she calmly returned his gaze. And all at once it felt as if there was no hiding place. No place left to run—and the weirdest thing was that Roman didn’t want to run. He wanted to confide in her. To tell her things he’d never discussed with another soul. A pulse began to beat at his temple. Why was that? Why did he suddenly feel as if he had been carrying around an intolerable burden and this was his chance to put it down for a while?
But it wasn’t easy to articulate words he’d spent a lifetime repressing, or to expand on them, and for a while he just listened to the sound of silence, broken only by the distant ticking of a clock.
‘My mother left when I was three,’ he said at last. ‘After that, it was just me and my father.’
‘What was she like?’
It was a simple question but something he’d never been asked outright and, stupidly, he wasn’t expecting it. Forbidden images of a tall blonde woman with a worried face swam into his mind and Roman realised just how long it had been since he’d thought about her. Since he had allowed himself to think about her. ‘I don’t remember very much about her,’ he said. ‘Only that she used to read me bedtime stories in a low and drawling voice. She was American. She came from Missouri and she used to wear a necklace with a bluebird on it.’
‘What else?’
She looked at him and he wondered if her inquisitiveness was inspired by curiosity or horrified fascination. Because a mother who deserted her child always excited people’s interest—particularly women’s. A mother who left her child was seen as a monster and the child as unloved and unwanted. His preference would have been to have shut the subject down but suddenly he realised that some day he and Zabrina were going to have to explain the lack of a paternal grandmother to their own children, so maybe she needed to know. ‘What kind of thing do you want to know?’
‘Like, how did they meet?’
He raked back through the things he knew, which were surprisingly sketchy. ‘They met when my father was on a world tour. She was working as a waitress and I think he ju
st became obsessed by her and swept her off her feet. He proposed, she accepted and he brought her back here with almost indecent haste.’ His voice hardened into flint. ‘It’s why I became an advocate of arranged marriages, Zabrina. He should never have made her his wife.’
She pushed a strand of hair out of her eyes and blinked at him. ‘Because she was a commoner?’ she said slowly.
‘Almost certainly. She couldn’t deal with royal life or all the restrictions which accompany it. Or so my father told me afterwards. She never settled into life here—not even when she had me. I remember that sometimes she seemed too scared to hold me and seemed to leave most of my care to my nurse, Olga.’ He flinched as the memories came faster now. A black spill of memories he couldn’t seem to hold back. ‘Even when she read to me at night, she would slip into my room under cover of darkness. I noticed she started being around less and less and sometimes I would spot her heading towards me in one of the corridors, only she would turn away and pretend she hadn’t seen me. Don’t look at me that way, Zabrina, because it’s true. And then one day, she left. She left,’ he repeated, angry at the hot twist of pain in his heart. Angry with himself because surely it shouldn’t still hurt like this. ‘She just walked away and never looked back.’
She didn’t respond to that and he heaved a breath of thanks, thinking she’d taken the hint and would ask him no more. He was just about to pull her into his arms and lose himself in the sweetness of her body when she propped herself up on one elbow and screwed up her nose. ‘So what happened after that? I mean, how did you find out she’d gone?’
‘Is this really necessary?’ he demanded.
‘I think it’s important,’ she clarified quietly. ‘And I’d like to hear the rest of the story.’
‘I’ll tell you how I found out.’ His voice grew quiet now. So quiet that he saw her lean forward fractionally to hear him. ‘I woke up one morning and couldn’t find her and when I asked Olga where she was, she told me I must go and speak to my father. So I went downstairs and discovered my father calmly eating breakfast. He looked up and told me my mother had gone and wouldn’t be coming back, but I didn’t believe him. I remember I ran from the room and he let me go. I remember searching every inch of the palace until I was forced to accept that the King had spoken the truth and she really had gone.’
He tried to focus himself back in the present but the memories were too strong and they overwhelmed him like the heavy atmosphere you got just before a storm. He remembered the dry sobs which had heaved from his lungs as he’d hidden himself away in a shadowed corner. He hadn’t dared show his heartbreak or his fear, for hadn’t his father drummed into him time after time that princes should never show weakness or emotion? Olga had eventually found him, but he had turned his face to the wall as she’d tried to tempt him out with his favourite sweets, still warm from the palace kitchens. But the usually tempting smell of the coconut had been cloying and it had been many hours before he had relented enough to take his nurse’s hand and accompany her back to the nursery.
The silence which followed felt like a reprieve, but not for long because Zabrina’s soft voice washed over him with yet another question.
‘And did you ever hear from your mother again? I mean, surely she must have written to you. Sent a forwarding address so you could contact her.’
‘Yes, I had an address for her,’ he confirmed bitterly. ‘And I used to write her letters. At first they were simple, plaintive notes, asking when she was coming back.’ It made him curl up with disgust to think how he had humiliated himself by begging her to return, seeking solace from a woman who had rejected him outright. ‘After a while, I just used to send her drawings I’d made, or tell her about my horse, or my fencing lessons.’
‘But you never heard back?’
Was that disapproval he could hear in her voice, or incredulity? Or just the loathsome pity he had always refused to tolerate? ‘No, I never heard back,’ he clipped back and then shrugged. ‘So in the end, I just gave up. My father never remarried, and brought me up to the best of his ability. It wasn’t great. He wasn’t a particularly easy man and it certainly wasn’t what you’d call a normal, nuclear family but we adapted, as people do.’
‘And, of course, you had Olga.’
He didn’t answer straight away, just stared out of the window, noticing that the silver moon was almost full. ‘No. Actually, I didn’t.’
It was the first time she had looked truly taken aback. ‘But—’
‘My father sacked her.’
