The Lost Prince Read online

  THE

  LOST

  PRINCE

  ALSO BY SELDEN EDWARDS

  The Little Book

  SELDEN

  EDWARDS

  THE

  LOST

  PRINCE

  DUTTON

  DUTTON

  Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.); Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England; Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd); Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd); Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India; Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd); Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First printing, August 2012

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Copyright © 2012 by Selden Edwards

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Edwards, Selden.

  The lost prince / Selden Edwards.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-59097-3

  1. Wives—Fiction. 2. Family secrets—Fiction. 3. Time travel—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3605.D8985L67 2012

  813’.6—dc22 2011050079

  Printed in the United States of America

  Designed by Nancy Resnick

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  ALWAYS LEARNING

  PEARSON

  For Nan, Bruce, and Paula

  My wonderful children

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  PART ONE

  1. A Secret Destiny

  2. The Man from Chicago

  3. Mrs. Frank Burden

  4. Out West

  5. Two Works of Significance

  6. Mr. Honeycutt

  7. “Disaster Averted, It Appears”

  8. Prima Materia

  9. The Wrong Man

  10. A Celebration

  PART TWO

  11. “Motorcars, Mr. Honeycutt”

  12. Steady Rose

  13. “We Are Not Gamblers”

  14. Dr. Hall’s Conference

  15. Mahler

  16. Putnam Camp

  17. A Romantic Idyll

  18. A Companion of the Soul

  19. “We Shall Meet Again”

  20. Arnauld Arrives

  21. Grandiose Conjectures

  22. A Most Auspicious Meeting

  23. The Unspeakable Averted

  24. Heart of Darkness

  25. Moving Out

  26. The Lady in White

  27. A Higher Calling

  PART THREE

  28. Something Unpredictable

  29. Arnauld and Will

  30. Just This Once

  31. A Yearning for the Fight

  32. The Horrors of War

  33. “If Not You, Who?”

  34. The Battle of Caporetto

  35. Undeniable News

  36. Edith

  37. Influenza

  PART FOUR

  38. Armistice

  39. An Image of Peace

  40. “I Have Educated Myself”

  41. “I Am Herr Jodl”

  42. City of Ghosts

  43. Berggasse 19

  44. The First Hospital

  45. “Very Much Among the Living”

  46. A Lingering Curiosity

  47. Trieste

  48. Gorizia

  49. Gone to Udine

  50. A Rough Bunch

  51. The Universal Language

  52. The Trouble Begins

  53. A Very Well-Placed Nephew

  54. The Confession

  55. “We Have Come to the Last”

  56. Reborn

  57. Odysseus and Achilles

  58. A Sad Parting

  PART FIVE

  59. Because of the Boy

  60. The Missing Piece

  61. A Less-Than-Sanguine Report

  62. “You Are Jonathan Trumpp”

  63. Eleanor’s Dream

  64. Rowing Home

  65. To Tell Stories

  66. An Exquisite Friendship

  67. A Few More Days

  68. The Folly of Men

  69. Homecoming

  PROLOGUE

  BOSTON, 1918

  All of those who attended the memorial service in the chapel at St. Gregory’s School that May afternoon in 1918 knew well the elegant woman in her midforties who sat up near the front beside her staunch banker husband, one of the school’s most prominent alumni and its greatest hero, whom they also knew well. Frank Burden had represented his school splendidly in the classroom and on the playing fields of Harvard College during the early 1890s and had won two gold medals in the first modern Olympic Games in Athens in 1896. His wife, Eleanor, had become over the past two decades one of the most respected and active figures in the social and charitable life of Boston—wife, mother, patroness of the arts, social activist—but no one came even close to guessing her secret life, or the curse she had borne daily for the past twenty years.

  A few were aware that it had been entirely Eleanor Burden’s doing that the subject of the service, Arnauld Esterhazy, this school’s former teacher killed in the war, had come to St. Gregory’s School in the first place. Her godfather and confidant, William James, was the only one who knew the whole story. But he was now eight years gone, so no one among those congregated that day for the sad event knew or guessed at the depth of her connection to the man being eulogized or the complex grief she was now barely able to contain.

  For her, Arnauld Esterhazy could not be dead. Eleanor Burden was cursed by knowledge of the future, at least part of it. She had known the world war was coming and that Arnauld, safe in Boston, would be swept up in it, and she knew also that a second war was coming in twenty years, one that would also have a profound effect on her life. This death simply did not fit into the ordained future, and yet the word had come from the Italian front and had been verified by her friend Carl Jung, a source she trusted for thoroughness. “Killed in action,” he had said, “absolutely no doubt.” The news had been devastating to her, not just because she loved the man, but because this fateful turn confounded everything she had been working to promote over the past twenty years, everything for which she had made her fortune, for which she had stood toe-to-toe with powerful men, among them Sigmund Freud, and, yes, even J. P. Morgan.

  The school had lost a beloved teacher in the war, and she and her husband were there in the center of the mourners because the man had been a close friend of their family and a guest in their home on innumerable occasions, but no one guessed how much more he had meant to Eleanor, either in the innocent role in which he had
arrived in Boston eight years before or in the overpowering earthy connection of his departure, at the end. As Dr. Freud often said, all grief is representational, referring in its power back to some previous more primal event and forward to one’s own impermanence on this earth. And now with this quiet desperation, she was reliving the traumatic ordeal of twenty years prior, when she had lost the love of her life and then did not know how she could go on.

  She could not accept this death and yet she had to, as it stared her square in the face, here in the words of eulogy of this service and in the certitude in Carl Jung’s voice as he told her the fateful news—“unavoidable” was his assessment.

  Eleanor Burden, this woman of heroic strength, caught now between the past and an uncertain future, found herself once again not knowing how she could go on.

  PART

  ONE

  1

  A SECRET DESTINY

  When Weezie Putnam returned from Vienna in 1898 determined now to be known as Eleanor, she brought with her from her ordeal three items of inestimable worth: a manuscript, an exquisite piece of jewelry, and a handwritten journal. Each would change her life, she knew, and each would play a part in determining her destiny.

  The manuscript had been written in a cathartic fury at the end of her Vienna time, the completion of the commitment she had made in going there in the first place, to write “something of significance,” as her former headmistress called it, to be delivered as promised to the New York Times immediately upon her return. She brought the manuscript to the Times office in New York City, and the editor Henry Moss, whom she had known from before Vienna, held it in his hand and measured its weightiness with a satisfied smile. “As promised,” he said, “a significant body of work.”

  “That is my hope,” Eleanor said. “I am relieved to be done with it.” Then she concluded with, “It is to be called City of Music,” the title that she knew was meant to be.

  Mr. Moss also cabled her in the week after her return home to Boston and insisted that she travel back to New York immediately, he and two other editors having just completed reading the manuscript. “We are deeply moved,” he said, “by the vibrancy we have seen in these pages.”

  When she arrived in their offices, the other editors smiled at her as Henry Moss offered with enthusiasm, “You have launched yourself as a serious writer, Miss Putnam. Or, I should say, Mr. Jonathan Trumpp has.”

  Her response was more sudden than she would have wished, had she not been caught by surprise. “Absolutely not,” was what came out, in a burst. “I shall work with you to edit this project,” she said, “as I wish it to be as thorough and accurate as it can be, but it will remain the sole long work of Jonathan Trumpp, and Mr. Trumpp has written his last.” She said it with such conviction as to leave the Times editors speechless.

  “That is not the response we expected,” Mr. Moss said, disappointment obvious on his face.

  “It will be a waste not to follow this up,” a second editor said.

  “So be it,” she said. “It is what it is. I appreciate all that you have done for me, but there will be no more from Mr. Trumpp.” She expressed her gratitude even further and then left the New York Times office, not seeing fit to mention at that time or later the painful events that had led to the catharsis of writing, nor its fateful inspiration, which could never be replicated.

  The second item she brought with her from her Vienna experience was the piece of jewelry, a most extraordinary ring which had belonged to one of the most famous and most tragic figures in recent European history. The ring’s value was, she hoped, easily recognizable, as she knew she was meant to set about selling it immediately. She knew nothing of the fine art of selling extraordinary pieces of jewelry, and she knew that for purely emotional reasons parting with this particular piece would be most difficult, but it had to be done.

  And the third item, by far the most significant, was a remarkably detailed journal, a leather-bound handwritten volume that recorded in exactness all that had happened to and around her in Vienna. This volume also revealed forthcoming events well into the twentieth century, including events she knew she would have to make happen and others that would come about well beyond any of her doing. She had her own reasons for believing the journal’s recordings to be true and for following its prescribed tasks religiously, knowing all the while that Sigmund Freud, back in Vienna, had participated intimately in the journal’s origins and had thought it, with a certainty equal to her own, the product of a deranged mind. Because of the sensitive nature of the material in this extraordinary volume, she knew she was required to guard its many secrets with the utmost care, to show it to no one.

  And so, because of this journal, whose provenance for the time being shall remain unexplained, whose contents had become for Eleanor inseparable from her very sense of herself, she would know the role she needed to play to ensure the future she knew had to be. It was for her lifelong commitment made during an indelible time to the love of her life.

  She knew of the great events coming in the years ahead. She knew she was to marry, for better or worse, Frank Burden, a man she didn’t love; to raise with him three beautiful and talented children; to become a great social and cultural force in Boston; to count on the support of two extraordinary men, first William James and then Carl Gustav Jung; to watch helplessly the emergence of two horrific worldwide wars; to suffer great loss; and to die an old woman in the same house she had been born in, on Acorn Street on Boston’s Beacon Hill. She even knew the date and time.

  And from the pages of this Vienna journal, she foresaw from the time of her return from Vienna that her principal business associate was to be a man named T. Williams Honeycutt, and that this Mr. Honeycutt, whom she had never heard of, was to play a crucial role in coaxing Arnauld Esterhazy to come to Boston and to remain there for the rest of his life. She knew that Arnauld Esterhazy, in his position as revered teacher at St. Gregory’s School, well into the twentieth century, was to shape and change the lives of many Bostonians, playing as he did so an indispensable role in the destiny of her family.

  These developments concerning Arnauld Esterhazy are the main substance of this story.

  2

  THE MAN FROM CHICAGO

  As she contemplated the magnitude of what lay ahead, she realized she must abandon her girlish diminutive name Weezie and adopt permanently the adult persona implied by her given name, Eleanor. It was a momentous transition understood by no one but her. And she would set about performing the tasks, of which the most immediately challenging was dealing with the selling of the ring. For advice back then, she had begun with the director of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Jackson Peard, a close friend of her family. It was Jackson Peard, this man who had spent a lifetime examining exquisite pieces of art, who gasped upon opening the fine linen handkerchief and recognizing at once the item’s significance. “Rather takes one’s breath away, doesn’t it?” he said, looking at the ring, then at Eleanor. It was beautifully jeweled, white gold, with tiny diamonds and emeralds and a large sapphire in the center, an item of great craftsmanship and inestimable monetary worth. “How ever did you come upon something like this?” he said.

  “Extraordinary circumstances,” she said calmly.

  “You know its history, I assume,” he said.

  Eleanor nodded. “I do, and I suppose that improves its worth.”

  “Most definitely. Everyone by now knows of the great tragedy and its mysteries.” Then Jackson Peard, an authority on fin de siècle Europe, added, “Scandal increases value, no question. Tragedy increases value. It is a sad but intriguing story.” He paused and shook his head, then looked back at the object in his hands. “But an enhancement of the value of such a piece of jewelry as this remarkable one we have before us, no question.”

  “And the handkerchief?” Eleanor asked.

  “And this fine linen handkerchief with its embroidered seal,” the director said, “very good. It authenticates things.”

  �
�That is my hope,” Eleanor said.

  “It most certainly does,” the director said as he examined both the linen and the ring. “You could donate this item to us,” he said, and then seeing from the look of consternation on Eleanor’s face the inappropriateness of his remark added quickly, “Or you could sell it at auction.” He held the ring up to the light, as if to ascertain if he was in fact holding what he thought he was holding. “Something of this value would merit an auction,” he repeated, “in London.”

  “How does one do that?” she said.

  “Oh, we can help. We do it often—discreetly, of course.”

  Then the director looked at Eleanor seriously. “In order to sell this item,” he said slowly, “you must reveal how you came to possess it.”

  Eleanor rose up in her chair, her back stiffening. “I will not be able to do that,” she said.

  “Then it is questionable that there can be a sale.”

  “Then,” she said, “I shall have to prepare myself for that eventuality.”

  With Jackson Peard’s help, she went ahead with plans and made contact by cable with the famous auction house of Sotheby’s and decided to travel to London herself to accompany her precious acquisition, fully aware that at any time her refusal to provide background on the acquisition might bring an end to any deal.

  Then, as she was beginning to make plans for the long and involved trip to London, she received another message from Jackson Peard, another discreet one. “This is not within our usual protocol,” he said, pausing respectfully.

  “Because of my failure to disclose details?”

  “In this case,” Mr. Peard said, “disclosure might not be as much of an issue. I am assured that you will treat our involvement with the strictest confidence, but we have someone in New York whom you should see.” He handed her a small business card. “There is interest in your object, but it cannot pass through the usual formal channels. It is on Maiden Lane. Are you familiar with it?”

  “I am not,” Eleanor said.