little black nose pressed against the vast oak panelling. Andreas was gone, and Deefer had the air of a pup who’d be faithful for years.
‘Come back to bed, Deef,’ she whispered, but the pup just whined and put his nose hard against the crack at the base of the door. She flung back the covers and padded across to him, picked him up and carried him back. She slid back down under the covers and held him close.
A real marriage. Huh!
‘You’ll like Australia,’ she whispered. ‘You can be a real dog on the farm. And me…I can go back to being the real me.’
The lonely me. The me who mourns a dead baby and a lost love.
‘Yeah, the Miss Haversham me,’ she said, blinking and sitting bolt upright as she heard the echoes of what she’d just thought. ‘Sitting alone for years in cobwebs and crumbling wedding cake.’
There was a knock on the door. A maid put her nose around, looking apologetic.
‘If you please, ma’am,’ she said. ‘Her Majesty, Queen Tia, has scheduled your deportment lesson at ten. She says breakfast will be served for you in the grand dining room at eight, and an etiquette master will be on hand to show you through the protocols.’
She closed the door.
‘Wow,’ Holly whispered. ‘Protocols, eh? We’re having protocols instead of eggs and bacon?’ She shivered. ‘You know, Deef, I want to go home.’
But…
‘I said I’d make a go of this marriage,’ she said, addressing a spine that was starting to sag. ‘Andreas says we need to be married and I believe him.’
But…
‘But nothing,’ she told herself. ‘Don’t even think about being homesick. Go bury yourself in…protocols.’
He was gone for eleven interminable days. Days when she wasn’t permitted out of the castle gates.
‘Everyone thinks you’re still on honeymoon,’ she was told by the bureaucrat who headed the public relations department for the royals. ‘The public doesn’t know Andreas has gone to Greece. Your honeymoon is a perfect front.’
A perfect front for a marriage. Sure. They were supposed to be on honeymoon, ensconced in their sumptuous apartments, gloriously in love. Andreas was in Greece. She was in…protocol hell?
‘You will walk three steps behind your husband at all times. Watch his feet-the moment he pauses, you pause. If he turns back, if he attempts to speak to you, come up to within a step of him, listen, smile, make your response brief, never look as if you’re disagreeing and then step back. Your husband is royal and you’re not. He takes precedence in everything.’
‘Yeah, but he’s not here to take precedence,’ she told Deefer on day eleven. She’d taken the little dog for a walk in the palace grounds-to the south because cameras could penetrate to the north and it was imperative she wasn’t seen walking disconsolately alone. Even here she didn’t feel at ease. There was music playing from the palace balconies. The princesses, she thought, wincing. She’d hardly seen them. They’d been too caught up with their own personal concerns to spend much time with her. And she didn’t like their choice of music.
She didn’t like this place.
‘It’ll be better when I get home,’ Andreas had assured her in the brief phone calls he made. He’d sounded stressed and tired, which was the only reason she couldn’t yell at him. Though eventually she’d yell. Quietly of course. In a very deferential manner. If he ever returned.
She’d been thinking for too long. She’d taken her eyes off her pup. She hauled herself to attention but it was too late. Deefer had headed off at a run towards the palace’s ornamental lake.
Uh oh. Deefer had found the lake a week ago and there’d very nearly been trouble. Swans…
‘Get back here,’ she yelled in her best authoritative voice. But whether he heard her over the music or not, Deefer wasn’t paying attention. He was bored. Holly had spent the morning in interminable lessons. The servants didn’t like him wandering. They seemed to have almost a phobia about pets, instilled by the old king. He wasn’t permitted anywhere Holly wasn’t, so he’d been locked in her apartment.
Border collies were bred to work. It was in him, an innate instinct to get out in the fields and round things up. And the only things here to round up were the palace swans, scattered on the far side of the ornamental lake, spread randomly over the grass as they searched for snails.
And now…Creatures randomly spread were an offence against nature for one highly bred collie. Deefer was round the lake in a blur of canine happiness, reaching the swans long before Holly could reach him; long before her yells had any impact.
He launched himself into their midst, yipping with high-pitched excitement, but working with the innate intelligence of his breed. After that first initial scattering he’d figured his mistake. Now he was racing round the outside of the entire group, causing them to rear up, flap their wings in alarm, back away, snapping, screeching…
A lesser pup than Deefer might be intimidated. These birds were three times his height. But a dog had to do what a dog had to do. He was darting in and out so fast the birds could hardly figure what he was doing. He had them totally bewildered. Amazingly they were even starting to cluster together. He was herding them like a professional. Why didn’t they fly away? Holly thought, racing past the massed bushes between her and her dog.
And it was no longer just Holly who was panicking. There were shouts from the palace balconies, audible above the music. Others were running as well-the man Holly recognized as the head gardener and two younger men.
She glanced sideways at them as she ran-and then her heart seemed to freeze in her chest. One of the men had a gun. A rifle. He was raising it. Aiming…
‘No,’ she screamed. ‘No.’
But the guy still had his gun levelled. He wasn’t looking in her direction and the music was louder where he was. Could he hear her?
‘No,’ she screamed again. ‘He’s mine.’ But the man was steadying. His companions had paused to give him freedom to aim.
She was so close. She rounded the last clump of bushes and launched herself in a flying tackle she didn’t know she was capable of. But too late? Too late? The gun exploded in a blast of noise. She felt a sting across her cheek and heard a man’s shouted expletive.
But she had him, Deefer, an armload of overexcited pup. She was lying full length, rolling with him under her, hugging him, weeping, while swans went everywhere. She didn’t care, she didn’t care, she had her pup. He was wriggling. He was okay. She closed her eyes…
‘Holly…’
And amazingly, miraculously, she heard him. It was a shout from far away, but even so she heard the terror above the music.
Andreas.
Her face stung. She could feel the warm trickle of blood seeping down her cheek.
But Deefer was safe. He was wriggling frantically in her arms, desperate to escape, to continue his very important task.
‘Holly!’ The yell was nearer now, and someone switched the music off. She opened her eyes and rolled over, still holding her pup in her arms.
Facing men. All of them seemed to be groundsmen of some description. The guy with the rifle was staring down at her with horror. He was backing away, and by the look on his face he was expecting to be shot himself.
