Shall We Dance?. Kasey Michaels

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СКАЧАТЬ they had met. Even Pergami; laughing, teasing, lighthearted Pergami. They’d frolicked on the shore of Lake Como; the princess had danced the nights away, laughed the days away, hidden her sorrows, her demons. They’d ridden into Jerusalem on donkeys, visited all the Holy Places, gone by water to Syracuse. The princess had been happy, or at least as happy as she could be.

      But then she became the queen.

      “And now this,” Amelia said aloud, turning away from the mirror, to glare at the official document that had so disrupted their small household. “The lengths to which he will travel to humiliate and debase his own wife. How can anyone hate so much? Why the horrible man doesn’t simply find a way to have her beheaded and be done with it is beyond me.”

      Amelia, startled at her own words, turned back to the mirror, to confront her reflection. “My God. Would he? Would he dare…?”

      “SHE BELIEVES THIS? Stap me, Mama, next she’ll be telling us she sees multicolored elephants copulating on the ceilings.”

      “Nathaniel, don’t be crude,” his mother said. “And be quiet, for goodness sake, or your father will overhear us. You know how he always manages to be around just when I want him elsewhere.”

      “Yes,” Sir Nathaniel Rankin, baronet, said as he split his stylish coattails and sat down beside his mother in a small anteroom located in Lady Hertford’s town mansion. “I imagine he’d order coaches to Bedlam for the pair of you. Blister it, Mama, Aunt Rowena’s a nice enough old tabby, but—”

      “My sister is not a nice old tabby,” his mother interrupted.

      “Grandfather should have insisted she marry, Papa says. A husband and a gaggle of children may have settled her.”

      “I know, I know,” his mother said, sighing. “And Edmund was such a nice man, even with the squint. But Rowena would have none of him. She has always been much more enamored of her dogs.”

      Nate closed his startlingly blue eyes, pinched at the bridge of his nose. “I’m little more than an infant, Mama. Should I be hearing this?”

      His mother’s ivory-sticked fan smacked against his forearm even as the woman giggled. “You’re so naughty, Nate. Shame on you. Now, to be serious.”

      “Do we have to be?”

      “We do, yes. I told you Rowena’s fears, but I didn’t tell you their foundation.”

      “Now that’s a thought I’ve never had. Aunt Rowena needs a reason?”

      “She can be silly, I know. But this time? This time she may be right.”

      “Someone wants the new queen dead. She read it in her tea cup, or Tarot cards, or maybe saw it in some clouds. I remember. You only said it the once, but I remember. Did her tea leaves also line up to spell out a list of suspected assassins? Only seems fair.”

      “No, they—I mean, she did not, but the answer should be obvious,” his mother said, then leaned closer, to whisper into his ear. “The new king, of course. He loathes the poor thing.”

      “Also not exactly mind-boggling news. He’s loathed her for decades. And done squat about it, may I remind you?”

      “But she hasn’t been queen for decades, Nate. Think on it. He detests her, we all know that. The crowd jeers him, cheers her. Not to mention having to share the coronation with her, place the crown on her head? Why else do you think he has postponed the ceremony for a full year?”

      “In hopes she’ll go away? Yes, I can see that. She’d get bored, cooling her heels here, hie herself off somewhere to see the muffin man, and miss the whole thing.”

      “You’re not nearly so amusing as you think you are, you know,” his mother said, snapping open the fan and waving it beneath her chin. “He plans to divorce her, strip her of any right to the crown.”

      “But Aunt Rowena believes he’s going to have her assassinated, not just divorce her. But why would he do that, if he can get Parliament to do his dirty work for him?”

      “Because it might not work, that’s why. At least that’s what your father says. He’s embarrassed to be a part of it.” She leaned closer once more. “He has heard that they’ll be examining evidence that is most distasteful. Stained bits of clothing snatched from hampers, dried residue from chamber pots, all sort of tawdry evidence.”

      “Well, that’s fairly disgusting.”

      “I should say so! Then your father foolishly said the king would be better served to just arrange some fatal accident for the queen and be done with it.”

      “And Aunt Rowena heard him? What a dust-up that must have caused.”

      “Exactly. Your father is a brilliant man, but can still be extremely obtuse, just like the rest of your sex. And now Rowena’s taken it into her silly head that the queen is in mortal danger. So you see, you have to do it.”

      “No.”

      “Nate.”

      “No.”

      “Nathaniel, Rowena is your godmother.”

      “Damn.”

      AS THE LAW OF AVERAGES (and Aunt Rowena) would have it, for every Perry Shepherd there is, also roped into the thing against his will and better judgment, a Sir Nathaniel Rankin.

      And for every Bernard Nestor, alas, there is also an Esther Pidgeon. As dedicated as he, as rabid as he, but with her motives and loyalties in direct opposition to his, Esther believed the only way for the king to reign easily was to have that totally unsuitable Caroline removed, permanently.

      To Esther the supposed queen is a slut, a whore, a flighty, unwashed animal, and her name must not be spoken in the liturgy each Sunday when the Crown’s loyal subjects were asked to pray for their king (pulling out and holding up religion like a sword was always such a marvelous rallying point for people like Esther).

      Sister of the publisher of one of the lesser newspapers in the city, she’d already been made privy to this magnificent Bill of Pains and Penalties, and had spent half the evening rejoicing at the news.

      This was her time. At last. She had been good, she had been patient, and now her time had come!

      It is amazing how a woman like Esther Pidgeon can take one evening’s casual tumble into bed at a house party a quarter of a century earlier and mold that night, twist it about, until the Grand Florizel has become the Love of One’s Life, sadly pining for his dearest Esther but kept from her side by his royal duties. Why, he has even spent those sad, lonely years trying to find substitutes for her…all his women aging, fat, motherly. Just like Esther. Really. Especially the “fat” part.

      But that was Esther, a woman who had dedicated her sad life to worshipping this oblivious man from afar.

      And so the Bill of Pains and Penalties filled Esther with joy. For a while.

      Now, as midnight neared, she paced the floor of her small chamber tucked into the second floor rear of her brother, Lewis’s, house and worried, then worried some more.

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