CHAPTER TWENTY #2
“I tried what you suggested. I told Maud about Alix’s bizarre fainting spell, about how Alix was damaged,” May whispered.
That word, damaged, echoed cruelly in the silence. But Agnes beamed at May with unmistakable pride. “I’m so glad! I knew you had it in you!”
“I don’t know.” May swallowed against a roughness in her throat. “Don’t you think it was a little…harsh?”
“All you did was tell the truth,” Agnes said evenly.
“Of course it would be different if you had lied; that would be slander. But you really did see Alix in the grips of a psychological attack. If I were Her Majesty, I would want to know such a thing about a potential future queen.” She hesitated. “Are you certain that Maud told her?”
“I assumed she would, but the queen never seemed to change her opinion about Alix.” Perhaps she simply didn’t want to hear something negative about her favorite grandchild.
Agnes digested this thoughtfully. “You could tell someone else…the Princess of Wales?”
“To what end? Eddy has shown no interest in me.” May sighed. “He hardly even knows I exist!”
“You didn’t manage to speak with him alone? You were gone for almost two weeks, in a remote castle in the Scottish highlands. If that doesn’t give you the space for a bit of flirtation, then nothing will,” Agnes replied, slightly teasing.
“There may have been flirtation, but it wasn’t with me.”
A pair of men dressed as knights shuffled past, the light gleaming on their false armor. Agnes and May drew further back into the alcove.
“Flirtation? I thought you said he and Alix didn’t seem interested in each other.”
May hesitated. Now she really was dealing in unfounded rumor; she had no proof of her suspicions save an incriminating flower. Still, she’d been dying to tell someone since the moment she saw it tucked behind Hélène’s ear.
“I think Eddy and the Princess Hélène are secretly involved.”
Agnes gave her a startled look. “That French princess? The one with dark hair and a loud voice?”
May wouldn’t have thought to call Hélène loud, but perhaps it was true.
At Balmoral she had certainly laughed more heartily and ridden more eagerly than any of the other young women.
There was a restlessness to her that May recognized—because, like May, Hélène seemed to chafe against society’s bonds.
Except that May kept her frustrations hidden.
And May knew better than to engage in flirtations with men who could never marry her.
She told Agnes about the flower in Hélène’s hair, and how she’d seen Eddy plucking it from the garden earlier that day. “I could be wrong, of course. Perhaps it’s just a coincidence. But it explains the feeling I had that Eddy was hiding something….”
“Coincidences are rarer than you think.” Agnes’s fingers drummed absently on the windowsill. “No, I would wager that you are right. You are clever, May; your instincts about these things are rarely wrong.”
A small part of May must have hoped that Agnes would call her ridiculous, because she sagged in defeat. “If it really is true, then I must give up my hopes for Eddy. There’s no use trying to compete with Alix and Hélène.”
May’s eyes cut across the ballroom to Prince Eddy. As if on cue, he stole a furtive glance at Hélène, who was dancing with the Earl of Hertford.
Now that May knew what to look for, the attraction between Hélène and Eddy felt almost obvious.
“Do you think Alix knows?” Agnes asked, after a moment.
“About Hélène?”
“Yes! Do you think she suspects that the prince who has been publicly courting her is flirting with another woman, right beneath her nose?”
May realized, a bit guiltily, that she hadn’t considered this from Alix’s perspective. “Surely you aren’t suggesting that I should tell her?”
“If not you, then who?” Agnes asked pointedly.
“It’s not my place!”
“Don’t you think she deserves to know? I thought you said that Alix was a romantic, and wanted to marry for love.”
“I don’t want to get involved! This is between Eddy and Alix.”
“But you already are involved! If you ignore this, then you’re making a choice on Alix’s behalf, without her consent,” Agnes said bluntly. “Don’t pretend that doing nothing frees you from any responsibility. Doing nothing is as much an action as doing something.”
Not to mention that if Alix found out about Hélène, it might end things between her and Eddy. Then, at least, May would be rid of one of her rivals.
It was a tempting prospect—but May thought of everything she’d already done to Alix, and shook her head.
“I’m done interfering in other people’s relationships. I tried it at Balmoral when I told Maud about Alix’s sickness, and it accomplished nothing.”
“I think you’re making a mistake,” Agnes insisted.
“That’s because you don’t understand how things operate here!” May snapped, more tersely than usual. “If I’m not careful, I could get a reputation as a gossip. No one wants to be known as the woman who’s always airing other people’s dirty laundry. It is so…tawdry. So low.”
Agnes drew in a sharp breath at the implication that she was tawdry and low. May winced, seeing the unmistakable pain in her friend’s bottle-green gaze.
“I’m sorry,” she blurted out, but Agnes interrupted.
“No, I’m sorry. You’re right, I shouldn’t have mentioned it.” Agnes gestured toward the terrace, where colorful Chinese lanterns led down into the gardens. “I heard there might be fireworks later. Should we make our way outside?”
May nodded, though she still felt guilty. This was why she’d never managed a real friendship—because she didn’t know how to navigate the difficult conversations that came with letting someone in. With trusting someone.
But lately, May had lost so much: her chance at befriending Alix, the prospect of winning Prince Eddy. She was determined not to lose Agnes, too.
AN HOUR LATER, MAY STEPPED into the ballroom alone; Agnes’s mother had stolen her daughter away, hoping to introduce her to some of her new acquaintances.
May was scanning the crowds for a friendly face—Princess Maud, perhaps—when she was startled by the approach of Prince George.
She couldn’t place his costume; was he a Renaissance king, with those slashed sleeves and the ruff around his neck?
He was wearing a crown, because of course he was exempt from the silent ban.
You were allowed to dress as British royalty when you already were British royalty.
“Good evening, May.” He wasn’t smiling, but there was a softness to his expression that gave the impression he wanted to smile.
“George—hello.” For some reason she didn’t curtsy the way she would have for Eddy. Not because George was the younger brother, but because she sensed it would put him ill at ease.
He surprised her by holding out a hand. “I was wondering if you’d like to dance?”
“With me?” May winced at her own clumsiness; what was wrong with her? “I just meant, after our dances at the Ghillies Ball, surely you don’t want to risk it. I’m afraid I stumbled all over your feet.”
“Those dances are a bit wild for my taste, too,” George admitted. “Which makes sense, given that they were invented as a martial exercise.”
“Martial exercise?”
“Warriors used to perform them as training for battle. All that complicated footwork of the jigs? It traces back to swordplay.”
“That explains why I was so abysmal at it; I have no experience in swordplay.” May was surprised to hear how lighthearted her words came out, almost teasing. She placed her hand in his, and George led her onto the dance floor.
As the music started up, May realized with a flush of self-consciousness that it was a waltz.
Waltzes were nowhere as scandalous as they once were—thirty years ago a young woman needed her parents’ permission before she could dance one—but it was still the most physical dance on offer.
Unlike the quadrille or the minuet or any of the other assembly dances, a waltz required the gentleman’s hands to fully encircle his partner’s waist. And stay there.
In other words, the waltz was the perfect dance for sneaking a few illicit touches between lovers, especially on a crowded dance floor like this one, full of warm bodies in crushed proximity.
George’s hands settled a bit hesitantly over the green boning of her gown. “You make a wonderful Livia,” he mumbled.
“Livia?”
“The Roman empress—Octavian’s wife, deified after her death. She’s not your costume?”
“I didn’t actually have anyone in mind. I just wanted to wear this gown, and then I thought a laurel wreath might look nice with it….” May trailed off self-consciously.
“Better a laurel wreath than a crown. Those are heavy,” George said, gallantly changing the subject. The music shifted and they drifted toward the center of the dance floor, George’s hand pressing a bit more steadily on her waist.
“I’m just grateful that I didn’t come as Marie Antoinette.” May nodded to where two different women were dressed as the French queen, each glaring at the other’s costume.
“They rather look like they want to guillotine each other, don’t they?” George asked, following her gaze.
“I wonder what the real Marie Antoinette would say, if she could see us now. Probably she would be insulted that we hadn’t all dressed like her.”
“ ‘Thus we play the fools with the time, and the spirits of the wise sit in the clouds and mock us,’ ” George said softly.
May wasn’t one to moon over fictional characters like Alix, but even she recognized the cadence. “Is that Shakespeare?”
“Henry IV, Part Two.” George nodded down to his costume.
“Oh. Of course.” May couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen Shakespeare performed.
The steps of the dance pulled them apart for a brief moment. When they came back together, George bent his head. The small movement brought their lips dangerously close.
May blinked, flustered. George pulled back, leaving an appropriate amount of space between them.
“I actually wanted to be a highwayman tonight, but Mother refused to let me,” he said gruffly, clearly trying to resume their normal conversation.
May chuckled. “I’m sure the Countess Cadogan would faint if she saw a highwayman in her ballroom! Though I have to imagine you’d have been more comfortable. Your ruff looks like an ordeal.”
“It does make me grateful for modern fashion.”
“At least you’re not wearing a sword. That might have caused safety concerns.”
“Funny that you say that. Eddy wanted us to borrow prop swords from the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, but I told him it was more trouble than it was worth.”
That sounded like Eddy, still eager to play with toy weapons.
“Besides, if you were a highwayman, you would have been forced to wear a mask,” May went on.
George nodded emphatically as he spun her into one of the turns of the waltz. “Exactly! I wanted to wear a mask. It’s so rare I get an excuse to keep my face hidden.”
“Really?” Why on earth would George, a prince, want to walk around as an anonymous nobody?
“It would have been nice to escape notice for once. People are always talking to me because of who I am—because they want to use me to get to Father, or to Eddy.” George attempted a cavalier tone, but May heard the hurt beneath.
She had never considered that aspect of his position, had she?
George’s entire self was defined in relation to someone else: his grandmother, his father, or most of all his brother.
Eddy was the heir, the One Who Mattered, while George was just the other prince, brought into the world in case, god forbid, anything ever happened to Eddy.
The laws of succession weren’t meant to be cruel; they were an incontrovertible part of life, as impersonal and unchanging as the turning of the planets. Still, they meant that George was imprisoned by his own identity. Just as May was.
“Well, I don’t want to use you to reach someone else. I’m glad to talk to you for your own sake,” May declared.
It shouldn’t have been a bold statement, yet it somehow came out that way.
George smiled, not so shyly this time. “I feel quite the same.”
Long after the party was over, May kept replaying those words in her mind. Her quest for Prince Eddy had reached a dead end, but maybe she shouldn’t have gone after Eddy in the first place.
Maybe she had focused all her energies on the wrong brother.