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Authors: Selden Edwards

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The Lost Prince

BOOK: The Lost Prince
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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

A
ll 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

W
hen 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.

BOOK: The Lost Prince
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