“Oh yeah?” Aria said. “Watch this, honey.” She strode across the little room until she was inches from Lady Werta’s face. “You will address me as Her Royal Highness and nothing else. And I will not tolerate such insolence of manner again. And you”—she whirled to face the Lord High Chamberlain—“how dare you sit in my presence? Now bring me my tea.”
“Yes, Your Highness,” they said in unison, then looked in shock at Aria as she grinned and blew a bubble.
“I used to be an actress. I can play a part real good.”
“Humph!” Lady Werta sniffed. “Perhaps she is trainable after all.” She left the hut.
“Old biddy,” Aria said under her breath. “Well, I got the part or not?”
“We will give you two days of instruction and we shall see at the end of that time.”
“You’ll be amazed at how fast a learner I am.”
“Mrs. Montgomery, I am beginning to believe you cannot further amaze me. Now, shall we discuss details?”
* * *
Aria sat in her hotel room, sitting utterly still, and waited for J.T. It had been a hideous afternoon. Her instruction in being Princess Aria had begun immediately and it had been as if she were training for prison. Her few short weeks in America had made her forget the loneliness and isolation, the rigidity of being a princess. Rules, rules, and more rules. Lady Werta had spit out one rule after another, all the things a princess was not to do. With each word the haughty old woman spoke, Aria could feel herself getting closer to being the crown princess than to being Mrs. Montgomery.
Tomorrow Lady Werta said she would bring corsets and see if they could fit Aria’s expanded body—too much good American food—into them.
Right now, more than anything, Aria wished she could return to America and go with Dolly to Ethel’s Beauty Parlor and cook J.T. some
spaghetti for supper.
The thought of J.T. made her stiffen. She didn’t like to think how much his words hurt her. She had grown fond of him while all she had been to him was a pain—no, a royal pain—in the neck from beginning to end.
When the door opened and he entered the room, she was sitting as she had been taught to sit for hours at a time: back utterly rigid, seated away from the back of the chair. “Good evening,” she said formally.
“It’s Her Royal Highness,” he said sarcastically, then pulled his suitcase from out of the closet and opened it. “You pack this?”
“Yes,” she said softly. “Wives pack for their husbands. You taught me that.”
He didn’t turn around and his shoulders were hunched as if in protest of something. “Let’s go down and get this over with. I’d like to go home.”
She rose stiffly and formally.
“Did they contact you today?” J.T. asked on the way down the stairs.
“Yes.”
He took her arm and halted her. “Look, I feel some responsibility toward you. I’m worried they’ll find out you’re the real princess. Somebody tried to kill you before, they may try to again.”
“There will be people there to save me. People who will not be so burdened with my presence as you have been.”
He looked at her for a long while and Aria held her breath because he looked as if he might kiss her. “Sure. You’ll be fine. You’ll have your country and you’ll get to sit on your gold throne—I assume you have a gold throne.”
“It’s only gold leaf.”
“Such hardship. Come on, baby, let’s go have our last meal together.”
Aria had a great deal of difficulty trying to maintain her guise of obnoxious American. They were to wait for the waiter to spill soup on one of them before leaving in anger.
“The embassy was to take you on a tour of Escalon today,” Aria said. “Did you see anything of interest?”
“I saw a country living in the nineteenth century. No, maybe it was closer to the eighteenth. As far as I can tell, the newest car in town, not owned by an American, is a twenty-nine Studebaker. People don’t even have wells, they carry water from the rivers. I can understand this in some poor, uneducated country, but you have schools and you have access to modern communication.”
“But we have no money. We are a poor country with no resources except the vanadium, and when the world isn’t at war, there is the tourist trade.”