The Lost Prince (A Midwinter Prince #2)

Chapter One

A deep

hush held the audience of the Queen’s West End theatre. The most

indifferent and bored among the young dilettante crowd were sitting

forward in the best seats in the circle, where they formed a

glittering half coronet. Fortnum’s peppermint creams remained

poised en route to glossy O-shaped mouths.

The lights were down. Only the thinnest silver gleam lit the

stage. All’s Well That Ends

Well, the theatre programme declared, but

the title—always a challenge, irony wrapped round the very roots of

the play—had never seemed such a mockery. Shakespeare had kept the

wedding of Bertram and Helena well off-stage, glossed over and

presented as a fait accompli. Now it was restored, and the audience

conscripted as unwilling, fascinated guests.

The

actors played it out in dumb show. The lights came up slowly to

reveal only three of them—a crooked, crabbed little priest in a

dirty surplice, the upcoming RADA grad Gem Lloyd in her role as

Helena, and Laurence Fitzroy, now playing Shakespeare’s least

loveable hero.

Fitzroy

had done nothing to make Bertram any less of the heartless coward

he was. And yet he pulled in—night after enraptured full-house

night—a huge swathe of London’s theatre-going population. They came

to see how Fitzroy, quiet and pale in street clothes for this

modern-dress version, could rise up out of his own stillness and

become a monster. That was one half of the enchantment. The rest of

it lay in his terrible ability to make them love him

anyway.

The

stage lights had tightened to a circle around the priest, bride and

bridegroom, marooning them on a cold silver island, plunging the

rest of the house into darkness. The priest signalled to Bertram

that he should step up and take his bride’s hand.

Laurie

did so. He towered over Gem Lloyd by a foot, but that was nothing.

The light turned his skin to marble, cast his hair and eyes to

unfathomable black. He seized the girl by the wrist.

Gem

recoiled. Helena was a smart, ambitious healer who had traded her

skills to get what she wanted. She was worth a million of her

bridegroom, but still she shivered to her very bones. Wordlessly,

without a movement of his beautiful lips, Bertram revealed to her

what she might expect of their wedding night, of all the years

ahead.

Nothing, nothing, nothing.

Laurence Fitzroy’s silent nothing would resound through the

theatre and the heads of his audience for weeks. The rest of the

play could not redeem it. The strangely tacked-on happy ending only

underscored Helena’s fate, her chances of happiness with this man.

Bertram was a mean, callow puppy who had somehow captured one good

woman’s heart.

And yet her heart was

caught. Along with it were captured, every night,

nine hundred others, male and female, fresh and jaded, each one of

them forced against taste, self-preservation and good sense to see

Helena’s point, to love what was unloveable, just because a young

actor—barely twenty one, only in his second West End season—had

decreed it should be so. Laurie took the ring the priest held out

to him. He raised it so that its stone turned to cold fire. He

looked into the audience, and each one of the nine hundred

felt seen—seen

into, seen through, that bleak, brilliant gaze slicing deep,

insisting that they too could fall as Helena had done. He turned

back to his bride. The ring had a plain band, but one critic had

already claimed that it was made of tiny knots of barbed

wire.

The

lights snapped to black.

***

A

riptide of applause roared through the wings. Laurie turned his

back to it, grabbed at the wheel of a giant prop cannon, symbol of

Bertram’s sexual and soldierly adventures in Tuscany. The sound was

enough to sweep him away. Briefly it lessened, and he wondered if

Bertram had pushed his luck too far tonight, but the change was

only the drop of the vast velvet curtain behind him, dipping to

stage as if giving its own bow back to the cheering crowd. He

tightened his grip. His vision would clear in a moment and he would

stop seeing everyone around him—stage hands, fellow actors

gathering for curtain call—as tiny scurrying specks, microbes in

the cold sea of Bertram’s ego.

“Laurie! Laurie! Mr Hamlin!”

That was

Alison Jones, in her best whisper, which would carry across a

crowded backstage area better than anyone else’s scream. She had

followed Laurie passionately from his debut at the small suburban

theatre in Rayne’s End, bulldozing her way onto the production team

of his every performance since. Her career had risen with his and

here at the Queen’s she was in charge of backstage admin, timing

with fierce exactitude entries and exits, lining up soldiers, kings

and tinkers to step forward at the moment of their cue. Arnold

Hamlin, Laurie’s manager, was bustling out of the shadows to meet

her.

Arnold

stopped her by main force, her skinny frame rebounding off his

bulk. “For God’s sake, Alison,” he hissed, steadying her. “I wish

Parolles had half your projection. They’ll hear you in row

Q.”

“I know, I know. But I’ve got to talk to Laurie. Didn’t you

see?”

“See what? Give him a minute, will you? You know he

needs—”

“In the audience. The Blood

Moon producer is here!”

Arnold scratched his balding head, where beads of sweat formed

every night as Laurie stepped onstage. It wasn’t that Arnold didn’t

trust him. He was just aware that he had on his hands the hottest

theatrical property since Olivier, even if Laurie was oblivious to

this fact himself, and every time Arnold exposed his asset to the

world, he ran a chance of losing him. “Blood Moon,” he repeated slowly, as

if the name meant nothing to him. “The film? That pack of camp

vamps my ten-year-old daughter squeals over?”

“Blood Moon, that

multi-billion-grossing movie phenomenon that’s made every teen girl

in the Western hemisphere want to die of the vampire’s kiss.”

Alison darted round Arnold’s own considerable hemisphere and ran up

to Laurie. “You’re gonna be the next Valentine Frost, Laurie! I

know you are!”

“Over my undead body,” Arnold growled, putting a meaty hand

between the girl and his treasure. Laurie was staring at her

blindly, silver lights fading in his eyes. “Mr Fitzroy here is a

stage actor. And he needs you to leave him alone, young lady. It

takes him a while to come back.”

Alison spun to face him. “Bollocks! Don’t you young-lady me.

I’ve known Laurie since he walked off the streets into Paul Jacobs’

theatre and turned into Hamlet. Then Claudius, then Gertrude, then

bloody Ophelia, one after the other. He can switch it on and off

like a tap, because he’s...” She heaved a breath in a frustrated

sob. “Because he’s Laurie. Oh, darling, for God’s sake

give me a kiss!”

Laurie

stepped back from her. It was less a deliberate retreat than the

reflex of a cornered, confused beast, but her hug misfired and she

pulled up short as if slapped. Arnold took her none too gently by

the arm. “Right! That’s enough. Long-time groupie or not, you’re

staff around here, missy, so just go and do whatever it is they pay

you to do. Laurence, it’s all right. Come over here with me for a

minute, then you’ll have to take your curtain call before there’s a

riot.” He paused, smiling, the waves of applause breaking over him.

“Just listen to that! It’s like the fucking Colosseum.”

Laurie’s

gaze focussed. He smiled too—an ordinary, tired grin. “Doesn’t that

mean the lions get to eat me, Arnie?”

“Well, there’s one from the Guardian in the cage tonight.

The Independent too, and as far as I could see they were eating you up

wholesale. All right now? Feeling better?”

Laurie

couldn’t remember anything being wrong. Alison Jones was storming

off into the wings, her head down, hands shoved into her pockets.

“Alison,” he called. “What’s the matter?” She threw him one

flushed, tearstained look over her shoulder, then disappeared into

the dark. “What did I say to her?”

“Oh, nothing. She’s just being a diva.”

No. That wasn’t true. Helena had asked Bertram for a kiss

after their wedding. Just that—one kiss, before he deserted her in

favour of freedom, philandery and the soldiering life. He’d turned

her down flat, shaming her in front of that arrogant,

rattling-empty gourd of a hanger-on, Parolles. Strangers and foes do sunder, and not kiss...

“Arnie. I need a minute.”

“Darling, you’ve just had one. Several, actually.”

“Everyone else is here. Can’t they take the call without

me?”

“Not on the last night.”

“A minute. Please.”

Arnold

sighed. He made a dismissive gesture, and Laurie slipped past him.

“Don’t worry, they’ll wait!” Arnold called after him, then added,

for his own bittersweet entertainment only, “The whole bloody world

will wait for you, Mr Fitzroy. God help me when you work that out

for yourself.”

***

Laurie ran down the corridor, jostling against the tide of

players and support staff headed the other way. He returned their

smiles, caught a high-five off the lighting guy who’d come up with

the deadly silver circle. He wanted to find Helena. God, no—Gem was

up in the wings, waiting to take her bow. Alison, that was right.

What had she said? He can turn it on and

off like a tap.

That had

used to be true, but it wasn’t any more. All the years of slipping

under his father’s radar to act, the panto roles, horsing around to

entertain his little sister in their great gilded rat-trap of a

family home, and even during his first year as a serious stage

actor—yes, he’d dived painlessly into a hundred other skins,

inhabited them painlessly, shrugged out into his own. And now it

took longer, and it hurt.

Hurt. He’d hurt Alison’s feelings. Blindly he shoved open his

dressing-room door. He slammed his hands flat on the makeup table,

shaking his head, trying to free himself from short, red Bertram

thoughts. Aye, if the wench will flaunt

her desires before the whole court, what trouble is’t of mine? Pin