The Prince's Chambermaid

With the money she made from letting out her home she was able to rent a modest little studio flat just down the road from the bookshop. It was small, the heating was haphazard and it took a hundred and eight rickety steps just to reach it—but once you did, the view over the city was worth…

Worth what? mocked a voice in her head. A prince’s ransom?

Heart racing, Cathy tried to shift the taunting thoughts her mind seemed determined to hang onto—but it was far from easy. She missed Xaviero. Really missed him. This felt like a broken heart. Like the real thing—while her break-up with Peter had been forgotten in a couple of days. This felt uncomfortably like love—even though she tried to tell herself again and again that she couldn’t possibly have been in love with the golden-eyed Prince. It had just been a wonderful sexual awakening, she reasoned—and all she was doing was seeking to put a respectable label on the way she’d behaved.

And Cathy soon realised that being the spurned lover of a prince was a hopeless situation to be in. People always said there was no point in bottling things up—but she had little alternative. She couldn’t tell anyone what had happened; quite apart from anything else—who in their right minds would ever believe her? Maybe the healing hands of time would help the vivid memories fade. And even though she enthusiastically threw herself into her new life, each night she cried softly into her pillow for the man who had captured her heart and her body so profoundly.

Autumn was approaching and she took to walking round Green Park in her lunch-hour and watching as the leaves began to turn golden brown and scrunched beneath her feet. And she drank her morning coffee in the dark staffroom at the very top of the building, and tried to make friends with the rest of the staff. There were all kinds of people working there, because bookshops seemed to attract a strange mixture. Lots of them were would-be writers, but there was also an ex-soldier, a hand model and a man who had once trained in Paris as a clown. And a part-time girl called Sandy who painted portraits of cats, which then went on to grace the covers of greetings cards.

It was Sandy who was beside her on the day Cathy turned on the Internet, and—when she thought nobody was looking—typed ‘ZAFFIRINTHOS’ into the search engine the way she did every morning. And Sandy who gripped her by the elbow as the world swam horrifically before Cathy’s eyes and the large London bookshop became a blur.

‘Cathy? For heaven’s sake—what’s the matter?’ Sandy demanded. ‘Cathy, are you all right?’

But Cathy barely heard the voice, which seemed to come from a hundred miles away; she was too busy waiting for the dizziness to clear from her eyes and she uttered a small, disbelieving whimper as she took in the words which leapt out at her.

‘Young royal fights for life: Zaffirinthos waits.’

‘No!’ she whimpered, shoving her fist into her mouth and feeling her knees begin to sway.

‘Sit down!’ urged Sandy.

Her head was placed between her knees and water was fetched for her to drink—and when the colour returned to her cheeks the section manager insisted that she go home for the rest of the day. She wanted to read the rest of the article but she could hardly start browsing the Internet in the store if they thought she was sick. Better get outside and buy a paper, or go to an Internet café or something.

‘Are you pregnant?’ muttered Sandy.

Cathy flinched at the unwitting hurtfulness of the remark. Actually, no, she wasn’t—and hadn’t that discovery proved unbearably poignant? For hadn’t there been some crazy little part of her heart which had longed to hold onto some precious part of him, and to feel his child growing inside her belly? A hope banished when she’d stood in her tiny bathroom looking at a trembling stick which had stubbornly refused to turn blue.

‘No, I’m not pregnant,’ she said flatly.

Outside, the autumn wind was blustering in a cold funnel along the street, turning the newspaper she bought into a wild, flapping creature. She took it into a little café and ordered a cappuccino and then raked her way through the windblown pages. Zaffirinthos was a relatively small principality which was rarely newsworthy, but a young prince hovering between life and death would always make the international pages.

Her teeth chattering, she read:

King Casimiro of Zaffirinthos was today fighting for his life following a violent fall from his horse.

Cathy began to shake as the first thought which washed over her in a wave of intense relief was that…it wasn’t Xaviero. But this was quickly followed by a second—a lurch of terrible guilt and sorrow—to realise that his brother should be lying stricken.