Chapter Six Hélène
Chapter Six
Hélène
The Orléans carriage was still behind at least four others, part of the long line that wound up to Marlborough House.
Ordinarily, Hélène would have been impatient at the delay: tapping her foot, perhaps even slipping out of the carriage to run up the drive herself, skirts in hand. Tonight she was subdued.
Her mother must have noticed, because she leaned over and murmured, “You can turn right around and head back to Sheen House. No one even knows you’re in town.”
That was precisely the point. Since Hélène had only just arrived back in London, she would catch everyone by surprise. Particularly May of Teck.
When their carriage finally made it to the front, Hélène stepped out quickly, forcing a smile in her parents’ direction. “I’ll catch up with you both later?”
“Hélène, wait,” her father began. She pretended not to hear, hurrying through the grand hallways and onto the back terrace.
It was a glorious party. Colored lanterns hung every few feet, casting the guests in a jewel-toned glow, making them resemble a flock of tropical birds in their silk gowns and gleaming dinner jackets.
Star-shaped flowers twined around the iron railing.
In the center of the garden stood a marquee tent, where servers carried trays of honey-colored champagne.
“Hélène.”
She turned slowly, heart pounding. “Eddy,” she managed, though it came out as a whisper. Why had he been waiting near these double doors? Had he been looking for her—or for someone else?
“I hoped you would come,” he said, answering her unspoken question. “I told the footmen to let me know if they saw a carriage emblazoned with a fleur-de-lis. When they did, well…”
He ventured a step closer, lifting his hand, then lowered it again. That gesture nearly broke Hélène—that after so many nights together, their breaths and bodies intertwined, Eddy now hesitated to touch her.
“Can we talk?” he asked, voice rough.
Hélène darted a glance in each direction. They might feel alone, standing together on the terrace in relative privacy, but at a party this crowded, you never knew who might be watching.
“Not now,” Hélène said helplessly. “There are so many things I need to—”
“Hélène!”
At the sound of her father’s voice, she and Eddy both stood up a little straighter. Hélène hadn’t even realized they were leaning toward each other, drawn together like plants desperate for sunlight.
“Your Royal Highness,” Philippe said stiffly, in Eddy’s direction. “You’ll forgive me, but I require my daughter’s presence.”
Eddy cast Hélène a beseeching glance. If only she could give him a nod, a whispered I love you. But Hélène didn’t dare, not when May was probably nearby.
Not when the secret that could ruin everything was still in her enemy’s possession.
She and her father didn’t speak until they were halfway down the steps, heading toward the lawn. “You didn’t need to interrupt,” Hélène muttered resentfully.
Philippe smiled for the benefit of the guests who drifted past, but his reply was tense. “You looked miserable! What was I supposed to do, let you keep talking to the young man who broke your heart?”
“That isn’t what happened!”
“Then what did?” he demanded. When Hélène said nothing, Philippe sighed. “No matter. Please just try to be cordial, all right? There’s someone I’d like you to speak with.”
Hélène stopped right there in the middle of the lawn, her cheeks hot. Did her father honestly think he could push her toward a new suitor tonight? When they were at the home of her former fiancé’s family, celebrating his parents’ anniversary?
“I think I feel indisposed.”
“I’m not asking you to get engaged tonight! Please, just talk to him. He’s a nice young man.” Her father put a hand awkwardly on her shoulder, evidently trying to console her. “At the very least, he won’t make you cry.”
“I wasn’t crying,” Hélène retorted, though perhaps her eyes had been a little misty. If so, it was May’s fault—not Eddy’s. Though her father could have no way of knowing that.
“Your Imperial Highness!” her father exclaimed, tightening the hand on Hélène’s shoulder. “It’s good to see you, I trust you had a safe journey, have you met my daughter Hélène?” The sentences came out in a single breath, rushed and frantic.
Hélène turned slowly, coming face-to-face with a young man in a dark jacket. Her eyes widened.
Though she had never met Nicholas, she knew him at once. He looked so much like his cousin George that they could have been brothers.
“It’s a pleasure,” the tsarevich murmured, reaching for her gloved hand. Hélène was so shocked that she let him press a polite, utterly chaste kiss to her wrist.
Her father wanted her to marry the future Tsar of Russia?
Well, now Hélène understood her mother’s remark about converting. She had assumed that her father was considering a Protestant prince. Why hadn’t she thought of the Russian Orthodox Church?
“Your Imperial Highness, Hélène and I were just discussing the stars. Aren’t they lovely tonight?” Philippe prompted.
“They are,” Nicholas agreed, sounding a bit puzzled.
“Perhaps you and Hélène might look at them together? I find it’s easier to see the heavens deeper in the gardens, away from all the noise and the light.”
In other circumstances, Hélène might have laughed at how flagrantly her father was disregarding chaperonage requirements.
Nicholas hesitated, then held out an arm to escort Hélène. “I would be honored.”
Hélène’s body screamed at the wrongness of this; yet she forced herself to put a hand on Nicholas’s forearm, following him to the hedges that marked the Marlborough House gardens.
It was hard not to think of when she’d been out here with Eddy last year, the night of his investiture.
The two of them had slipped into these gardens and run around like children, chasing each other with suppressed laughter until they’d become tangled up together, and their giddy laughs had turned into something else entirely.
Realizing how long she’d been silent, Hélène cleared her throat. “The stars are indeed beautiful.”
They weren’t, actually. They were obscured beneath the hazy lights of London, a city now illuminated by so much electricity that it dimmed the heavens.
Nicholas drew to a halt near a rosebush. He stared out into the distance, his only reply a noncommittal mmm.
“It’s a beautiful party,” she added awkwardly. “How thoughtful of you, to come all the way from Russia.”
Again Nicholas huffed out a nonverbal response. He really was quite sullen, Hélène thought with sudden irritation. She didn’t want to be here either.
“Really, Your Imperial Highness.” Her tone was slightly teasing, though her annoyance crept through. “I have made two attempts at conversation; now it is your turn to remark upon something. You might say how happy you are for your aunt and uncle that they have been married for twenty-five years.”
“Nicholas,” he muttered, finally turning to look at her.
“Excuse me?”
“Please don’t use my title. Call me Nicholas.”
“Very well, Nicholas. Since you are clearly so undesirous of my company, perhaps we might both return to the party?”
“Wait, please.” His hand clenched into a fist, then unclenched. “I owe you an apology. Whatever our parents have decided among themselves, I need to…I cannot marry you.”
Hélène blinked at the turn this conversation had taken.
“I’m sorry to disappoint,” Nicholas continued awkwardly. “You seem like a charming young woman.”
He clearly didn’t know her at all, if he thought she was charming. “I assure you, I’m not at all disappointed. I do not wish to marry you, either.”
Nicholas stared at her for a moment. “You aren’t angry?”
“Would you prefer that I swooned at your rejection?”
That, at least, coaxed a half smile from him. “I’d rather you didn’t, actually.”
“What a relief. I’ve never swooned before, and fear I don’t even know how.”
Now he was definitely smiling. “I just wanted you to know that my decision isn’t a reflection on your…person,” Nicholas explained, with a vague gesture that encompassed her body and face. “My heart is promised elsewhere.”
What a funny, old-fashioned phrase. It struck her as the sort of thing Alix would say.
“If it makes you feel better, my heart is promised elsewhere, too,” Hélène assured him.
“Very well, I’ll inform my father. He’ll be livid,” Nicholas added under his breath. “He really was excited at the prospect of a French alliance.”
“You do know that my father has no throne, right?” Hélène arched an eyebrow. “There was a revolution, and we got sent away. A terrible inconvenience, really.”
“My parents don’t recognize the French Revolution.
” Nicholas spoke as if this were a reasonable announcement to make, like deciding to sleep late one morning, or wearing a jacket without a cravat.
“They refuse to treat with your nation’s republican government.
My father calls them a bunch of peasants, says that your father is the undisputed King of France. ”
Well, hadn’t the Romanovs stamped out all anarchy and rebellion in their own territories? It stood to reason that they would willfully ignore it elsewhere.
A sudden prickle of awareness traced down Hélène’s spine. She turned around to see May of Teck standing on the balcony above them.
Irritatingly, May looked better than Hélène had ever seen. She’d twisted her hair up into a knot, leaving a few pieces to fall around her face, and the soft blue-gray color of her gown echoed her eyes. Eyes that currently narrowed on Hélène.
Fine, then. If May wanted to lurk in corners and spy on her, then Hélène would give her something to spy on. Something that suited her own purposes.
“Would you mind if we waited to share this with our parents? If we let everyone think that we really are courting, just for a little while?” Hélène dared another glance at the terrace, but May had vanished.
Nicholas followed her gaze. “You want to make him jealous, don’t you? The man you love.”
“It’s more complicated than that.”
“I see,” the tsarevich added, though he clearly didn’t. Then he shrugged. “As it happens, I think your proposal might help me, too.”
“Because you want to make your secret lover jealous?”
He winced at her phrasing. “No, because I want my parents to think I’ve forgotten her. They don’t approve.”
Probably a ballerina, Hélène thought. Or a married woman.
“She should be arriving in London soon,” Nicholas went on softly. “If my father thinks I’m here to court you, then I can stay longer. See the woman I love without consequence. Otherwise he’ll drag me back to Russia.”
Drag him back? “Doesn’t your father allow you more freedom than that?”
“He is my tsar much more than my father,” Nicholas said flatly.
Hélène played with the skirts of her gown, folding the crimson fabric over itself. “It seems we are equal in that, then. Both of us subject to the commands of our fathers. Both unable to be with the person we love.”
“For now,” Nicholas pointed out, and those two words heartened her.
A silence fell between them, but it was an easy, amiable silence.
Nicholas wasn’t surly at all, Hélène realized.
She was just so accustomed to Eddy, whose attention spilled outward, eager and excitable.
Nicholas had a stillness that reminded her more of George.
His introspection seemed to invite her to join in, to be silent with him, rather than shutting her out.
Hélène shifted; though May had disappeared, she couldn’t shake the feeling that they were being watched. “If we’re going to do this, we might as well put on a good show.”
A bark of startled laughter escaped Nicholas’s chest. She recalled, belatedly, that young women weren’t supposed to speak so bluntly.
“I suppose we should,” he agreed. “I don’t make a habit of doing things by half measure.”
“No, it hardly seems the Romanov way.”
Hélène saw that a few of the guests had noticed them together. After all, it wasn’t every day that the princess of an exiled royal house flirted with the man who would someday rule Russia.
Nicholas came to stand behind her, tucking his head over the top of hers—he really was quite tall, taller even than Eddy. Then he ran his hand down her arm to lace their fingers, lifting Hélène’s gloved hand to point into the air.
“What are you doing?” Hélène hissed. She felt rather than saw Nicholas smile in response.
“I’m doing what I told your father I would do. Showing you the stars.” He adjusted the position of her hand. “See that grouping of stars just over your finger? That’s the evil bear.”
“The evil bear?”
“I suppose I could translate the Russian as ‘the merciless bear,’ ” Nicholas amended. “The cruel bear? In any case, he kills the peasant who tries to trick him into eating a turnip.”
Hélène stepped back and turned, breaking their physical contact. “The Russian bear sounds quite violent.”
“Let me guess, in French stories the bear is sweet and gentle?”
“He’s just a simpleton who gets outwitted by the fox.
” At Nicholas’s questioning look, Hélène recounted the fable her childhood nurse had told her.
“The fox persuades the bear to go fishing during the winter, by sticking his tail in the lake as bait. When the lake freezes around the bear’s tail, he has to rip it out, leaving half behind. That’s why bears’ tails are so short.”
“Ah. The fox is the hero in French stories, since the French value wit and cleverness.”
He didn’t mean anything by the statement, but it still made Hélène pause. Maybe life was more like that fable than she’d realized. Maybe the people who came out on top were those who used subterfuge, who manipulated others, who were clever and sly and self-centered.
Maybe Hélène needed to be a little more foxlike, if she was going to beat May at the game that May had been playing all along.
She would do it. She would go to every party and social gathering, and smile up at Nicholas as if he’d hung the stars, and let May think she had completely moved on from Eddy.
Footsteps sounded behind them.
Hélène whirled around, and saw the figure standing there—and then she saw the look on Nicholas’s face.
The truth hit her all at once.
She should have figured it out months ago, when she and Alix were at the wedding in Athens, exchanging secrets. His parents won’t let us marry. They hate me, Alix had murmured. Hélène had wondered who could possibly disapprove of Alix as a daughter-in-law.
The Romanovs, of course. The most excruciatingly stuck-up family of them all.
Alix was in love with Nicholas—and now she had walked in on him, alone with Hélène.