Chapter 8
Vix was tempted to arrive early, despite knowing better.
Anticipation had a way of making her silly that way. She had instead chosen to take a second loop around the park and observe the turnout from the window of the carriage like a sensible woman, smoothing her skirt lest it consider wrinkling or puckering in the fading light of the sunset.
She did not think about Ambrose Aster standing in that cluttered parlor, his pale hair disheveled, his collar open, his inky eyes grazing over her skin. She did not think about how warm and firm his body had felt when she realized she was clinging to it earlier.
She didn’t replay his voice, soft and dark, warning her that when he toyed with her, she would know.
She didn’t do those things because they would have been a waste of time.
She sucked in a breath so deep that it made her ribs creak against her stays, and blinked thrice, dispelling the way his fingers had clasped her chin and turned her face to his; at the memory of his wide, outraged eyes as her breath caught and stuttered with hysterical amusement in her lungs.
She hissed, flicking her fan open and waving at her face, batting away any creeping suggestion of the way his lips had curled at the corners when she’d told him about those simpering letters she’d gotten from her old classmates.
And then, mercifully, it was time to alight.
The carriage door opened to a twilight approach of St. James’s Palace, the torches along the staircase flickering in orange relief of the gray-blue light. She accepted the coachman’s hand and stepped carefully out, the satin of her gown pooling and swishing against her legs as she found the ground.
Had that been the first time he had touched her? Skin to skin? That little grip of her chin? Had that been the first time he had deliberately touched her?
She frowned, slipping her gloved hand from the coachman’s with a nod of thanks, and forced her attention up at the resplendent monument to excess ahead of her.
She breathed it in, the torch oil dancing on the air, and let herself enjoy the scent of victory, smoothing her hands down over the indigo satin that clung to her body with tailored precision.
It was time.
She started up the stairs, her head tilted up toward the two royal guards stationed on either side of the main entrance. Her hair was coiled around a diamond clasp she’d borrowed from Hannah, spilling down in careful, glossy brown coils that brushed against her mostly bare shoulders.
Even her shoes were new, imported and reinforced silk in black and silver, braided over pearl buckles.
She felt armored. She felt resplendent. She had prepared in every possible way for the evening ahead.
And yet she wished she had only one more moment to think before it started. She wished she’d thought of something else to ask Ambrose before she’d left him this afternoon, standing half undone in that gauche parlor of his.
How will you toy with me?
She shook her head.
Not now.
“Fr?ulein Victoria!” came a soft and enthusiastic greeting from the corner of the foyer, almost the instant she crossed the threshold into the richly appointed interior of the palace.
She turned to see Mr. Zeller, combed and neat in a set of black tails, hurrying toward her with a wide smile under his curled white mustache, and could not help smiling in return.
His bright blue eyes twinkled with so much enthusiasm that if someone had told her he was also being knighted tonight, she might have believed it.
“Good evening, good evening!” he cried upon reaching her. “Such a gown!”
“Oh,” she said, surprised to feel herself actually blushing in pleasure as she looked down at the thing, still glittering and fitted perfectly against her form. “It is, isn’t it? It was made especially for tonight.”
“They took Herr Ambrose away the moment we arrived,” he whispered to her, offering his elbow with such a perfect quarter angle that Vix suspected she could set a mathematical compass to it as she slid her gloved hand into the crook. “They took him from me! Shuffled away.”
“Did they? How rude,” she sympathized. “Shall we have champagne?”
“Oh! Should I?” the butler said, looking side to side like someone might catch him being naughty. “You do not mind, fr?ulein?”
“On the contrary,” Vix assured him, nodding toward a footman with a tray. “I insist.”
He giggled, his mustache twitching, as they chose glasses of bubbling liquid and retreated to a fashionable corner to observe the arrival of other guests.
“Ach,” he said at one point, frowning at a matron. “Still with the bustle?”
“Perhaps we ought to send her a calendar,” Vix suggested, winning another titter from the man.
She considered him, a smile warming its way onto her mouth despite her most firmly held convictions to remain cool tonight. “Do you come from Canterbury as well, Mr. Zeller?” she asked, tilting her head over the rim of her champagne flute. “Did you accompany Mr. Aster when he moved to London?”
“Alas, no,” he said with a shake of his head. “Herr Ambrose won me in a card game from my former patron some two years ago. I tried to explain that service is not compulsory, but neither would hear it.”
She stared. “And yet you remained?”
The mustache sagged at the corners momentarily. “You must understand, fr?ulein,” he said seriously, “he needs me.”
“Yes,” she said, blinking. “I believe he does.”
It made the mustache perk right up. “You do not object? I do wish to stay on, of course, when you remake the staff.”
“Remake it?” she replied, blinking in surprise. “My good man, I would not dream of undertaking such a task without you.”
“Gott sei Dank,” he said, grinning. “I received the new curtains, but I would not hang them without your observation.”
She grinned at him fully then. “Why, Mr. Zeller,” she tutted. “If you insist on being so charming, I may have to marry you instead, and then you will have to explain yourself to Mr. Aster.”
He blushed, dissolving again into a charming series of giggles, shaking his head so firmly that the corners of his mustache trembled. “Ach, no,” he tittered. “Do not imagine it.”
So effectively distracted and charmed was Vix that she insisted he have another full glass of champagne before the gong was struck, herding them all into the next chamber for the beginning of the formal processions.
She observed with some satisfaction that the color on the tip of his nose had risen by the time he reached the bottom of the second glass, though the perfect angle of his elbow and the precision of his escorting cadence did not at all suffer.
The particular guests of the honored were given devoted seating right near the front of the hall, and while Vix was aware that she could easily take Mr. Zeller and enjoy a place there, she nodded to him instead to a place with the general crowd.
She did not wish to reveal herself quite yet.
Instead, she stood and watched as Caroline Sedgewick—Caroline Redwynne now—entered the hall, spinning once with wide-eyed glee that she had been invited to such an elegant affair, with her husband the curate dutifully trotting next to her, looking equally smug.
Vix tilted her head as she observed him, having not seen the man since that disastrous Christmas almost a decade ago, when he had still been in the rosy-cheeked bloom of his late teens.
It seemed the years had robbed him of both the roses and much of his hair, with the candlelight catching a glint of his scalp just at the crest of his head when they turned toward the seats at the front of the hall.
Pity, she thought with a smirk. He had been handsome back then.
Caroline herself looked much the same, still golden-haired and precious, with a propensity for slightly too many ruffles on every frock she owned.
Vix sipped her champagne and turned her attention to the platform, where the three men who were to be knighted tonight had just appeared, her own at the center of them.
She gripped the glass a little tighter, observing the very fine work Teddy’s tailor had done.
The indigo coat, the buckskin breeches, the sash …
every detail fit him with devastating effect.
The coat in particular so enhanced the effect of those eyes of his that she could swear she felt them find her in the crowd, glowing in a perfect matching relief against the expensive textile at his shoulders.
He smiled so very slightly, she might have imagined it. And yet she shivered anyway, immediately dropping her gaze to the bubbling liquid in her glass instead of continuing to look at him.
The volume of the voice that came next, announcing Her Majesty, the Queen, was so unbelievably loud that several people in the crowd around Vix and Zeller murmured in scandalized shock.
Vix, however, had been unsettled enough times today that she barely felt it, instead only lifting her head to see the great monarch in all her glinting brocade emerge from the opposite side of the curtain and glide to the center of the platform where a sword awaited on a pillow.
It occurred to her, briefly, that this was all a little bit ridiculous.
The queen did not look like a creature chosen by the gods to Vix.
She looked like any middle-aged woman, any lady who’d lived a life, just with a better gown and an outdated wig.
She watched, more curious than anything else, as the first gentleman was called forward to kneel before her and the sword was taken up.
She wondered if it was sharp.
The queen tapped the first gent lightly on either shoulder and instructed him to stand back up to polite applause, then deposited the sword back on the pillow with a little sigh, as though she’d just put in a day’s work at the mines.
Vix took another sip of her champagne to avoid laughing while Mr. Zeller enthusiastically applauded next to her.