Shy Queen in the Royal Spotlight

by Natalie Anderson

  “Why is that obvious?” Dorothea asked icily.

  Angelina knew where this was going immediately. She settled into her seat, crossing her ankles demurely, because Mother was always watching. Even when she appeared to be concentrating on her needlepoint.

  Petronella cast her eyes down toward her lap, but couldn’t quite keep the smug look off of her face. “I have certain attributes that men find attractive. That’s all I’m saying.”

  “Too many men, Pet,” Dorothea retorted, smirking. “He’s looking for a wife, not used goods.”

  And when they began screeching at each other, Angelina turned toward her mother. “Am I meant to know what they’re talking about?”

  Margrete gazed at her elder two daughters as if she wasn’t entirely certain who they were or where they’d come from. She stabbed her sharp needle into her canvas, repeatedly. Then she shifted her cold gaze to Angelina.

  “Your father has presented us with a marvelous opportunity, dear,” she said.

  The dear was concerning. Angelina found herself sitting a bit straighter. And playing closer attention than she might have otherwise. Margrete was not the sort who tossed out endearments willy-nilly. Or at all. For her to use one now, while Dorothea and Petronella bickered, made a cold premonition prickle at the back of Angelina’s neck.

  “An opportunity?” she asked.

  Angelina thought she’d kept her voice perfectly clear of any inflection, but her mother’s cold glare told her otherwise.

  “I’ll thank you to keep a civil tongue in your head, young lady,” Margrete snipped at her. “Your father’s been at his wit’s end, running himself ragged attempting to care for this family. Are these the thanks he gets?”

  Angelina knew better than to answer that question.

  Margrete carried on in the same tone. “I lie awake at night, asking myself how a man as pure of intention as your poor father could be cursed with three daughters so ungrateful that all they do is complain about the bounty before them.”

  Angelina rather thought her mother lay awake at night wondering how it was she’d come to marry so far beneath her station, which seemed remarkably unlike the woman Angelina knew. Margrete, as she liked to tell anyone who would listen, and especially when she’d had too much wine, had had her choice of young men. Angelina couldn’t understand how she’d settled on Anthony Charteris, the last in a long line once littered with titles, all of which they’d lost in this or that revolution. Not to mention a robust hereditary fortune, very little of which remained. And almost all of which, if Angelina had overheard the right conversations correctly, her father had gambled and lost in one of his numerous ill-considered business deals.

  She didn’t say any of that either.

  “He’s marrying us off,” Petronella announced. She cultivated a sulky look, preferring to pout prettily in pictures, but tonight it looked real. That was alarming enough. But worse was Dorothea’s sage nod from beside her, as if the two of them hadn’t been at each other’s throats moments before. And as if Dorothea, who liked to claim she was a bastion of rational thought despite all evidence to the contrary, actually agreed with Petronella’s theatrical take.

  “We are but chattel,” Dorothea intoned. “Bartered away like a cow or a handful of seeds.”

  “He will not be marrying off all three of you to the same man,” Mother said reprovingly. “Such imaginations! If only this level of commitment to storytelling could be applied to helping dig the family out of the hole we find ourselves in. Perhaps then your father would not have to lower himself to this grubby bartering. Your ancestors would spin their graves if they knew.”

  “Bartering would be one thing,” Dorothea retorted in a huff. “This is not bartering, Mother. This is nothing less than a guillotine.”

  Angelina waited for her mother to sigh and recommend her daughters take to the stage, as she did with regularity—something that would have caused instant, shame-induced cardiac arrest should they ever have followed her advice. But when Mother only stared back at her older daughters, stone-faced, that prickle at the back of Angelina’s neck started to intensify. She sat straighter.

  “Surely we all knew that the expectation was that we would find rich husbands, someday,” Angelina said, carefully. Because that was one of the topics she avoided, having always assumed that long before she did as expected and married well enough to suit her mother’s aspirations, if not her father’s wallet, she would make her escape. “Assuming any such men exist who wished to take on charity cases such as ours.”

  “Charity cases!” Margrete looked affronted. “I hope your father never hears you utter such a phrase, Angelina. Such an ungrateful, vicious thing to say. That the Charteris name should be treated with such contempt by one who bears it! If I had not been present at your birth I would doubt you were my daughter.”

  Given that Margrete expressed such doubts in a near constant refrain, Angelina did not find that notion as hurtful she might have otherwise.

  “This isn’t about marrying,” Petronella said, the hint of tears in her voice, though there was no trace of moisture in her eyes. “I’ve always wanted to marry, personally.”

  Dorothea sniffed. “Just last week you claimed it was positively medieval to expect you to pay attention to men simply because they met Father’s requirements.”

  Petronella waved an impatient hand. The fact she didn’t snap at Dorothea for saying such a thing—or attempting to say such a thing—made the prickle at Angelina’s nape bloom into something far colder. And sharper, as it began to slide down her spine.

  “This isn’t about men or marriage. It’s about murder.” Petronella actually sat up straight to say that part, a surprise indeed, given that her spine better resembled melted candle wax most of the time. “We’re talking about the Butcher of Castello Nero.”

  Invoking one of the most infamous villains in Europe—maybe in the whole of the world—took Angelina’s breath away. “Is someone going to tell me what we’re talking about?”

  “I invite you to call our guest that vile nickname to his face, Petronella,” Margrete suggested, her voice a quiet fury as she glared at the larger settee. “If he really is what you say he is, how do you imagine he will react?”

  And to Angelina’s astonishment, her selfish, spoiled rotten sister—who very rarely bothered to lift her face from a contemplation of the many self-portraits she took with her mobile phone—paled.

  “Benedetto Franceschi,” Dorothea intoned. “The richest man in all of Europe.” She was in such a state that her bob actually trembled against her jawline. “And the most murderous.”

  “Stop this right now.” Margrete cast her needlepoint aside and rose in an outraged rustle of skirts and fury. Then she gazed down at all of them over her magnificent, affronted bosom. “I will tolerate this self-centered spitefulness no longer.”

  “I still don’t know what’s going on,” Angelina pointed out.

  “Because you prefer to live in your little world of piano playing and secret excursions up and down the servants’ stairs, Angelina,” Margrete snapped. “This is reality, I’m afraid.”

  And that, at last, made Angelina feel real fear.

  It was not that she thought she’d actually managed to pull something over on her mother. It was that she’d lived in this pleasant fiction they’d all created for the whole of her life. That they were not on the brink of destitution. That her father would turn it all around tomorrow. That they were ladies of leisure, lounging about the ruined old house because they chose it, not because there were no funds to do much of anything else.

  Angelina hadn’t had the slightest notion that her mother paid such close attention to her movements. She preferred to imagine herself the ignored daughter.

  Here, now, what could she do but lower her gaze?

  “And you two.” Margrete turned her cold glare to the other settee. “Petro
nella, forever whoring about as if giving away for free what we might have sold does anything but make you undesirable and useless. Wealthy heiresses can do as they like, because the money makes up for it. What is it you intend to bring to the table?”

  When Petronella said nothing, Mother’s frosty gaze moved to her oldest daughter. “And you, Dorothea. You turned up your nose at a perfectly acceptable marriage offer, and for what? To traipse about the Continent, trailing after the heirs to lesser houses as if half of France doesn’t claim they’re related to some other dauphin?”

  Dorothea gasped. “He was Papa’s age! He made my skin crawl!”

  “The more practical woman he made his wife is younger than you and can afford to buy herself a new skin.” Margrete adjusted her dress, though it was perfect already. Even fabric dared not challenge her. “The three of you have done nothing to help this family. All you do is take. That ends tonight.”

  Angelina found herself sitting straighter. She was used to drama, but this was on a different level. For one thing, she had never seen her sisters ashen-faced before tonight.

  “Your sisters know this already, but let me repeat it for everyone’s edification.” Margrete looked at each of them in turn, but then settled her cold glare on Angelina. “Benedetto Franceschi will be at dinner tonight. He is looking for a new wife and your father has told him that he can choose amongst the three of you. I am not interested in your thoughts or feelings on this matter. If he chooses you, you will say yes. Do you understand me?”

  “He has had six wives so far,” Petronella hissed. “All have died or disappeared under mysterious circumstances. All, Mother!”

  Angelina felt cold on the outside. Her hands, normally quick and nimble, were like blocks of ice.

  But deep inside her, a dark thing pulsed.

  Because she knew about Benedetto Franceschi. “The Butcher of Castello Nero,” Petronella had said. Everyone alive knew of the man so wealthy he lived in his own castle on his own private island—when the tide was high. When the tide was low, it was possible to reach the castello over a road that was little more than a sandbar, but, they whispered, those who made that trek did not always come back.

  He had married six times. All of his wives had died or disappeared without a trace, declared dead in absentia. And despite public outcry, there had never been so much as an inquest.

  All of those things were true.

  What was also true was that when Angelina had been younger and there had still been money enough for things like tuition, she and her friends had sighed over pictures of Benedetto Franceschi in the press. That dark hair, like ink. Those flashing dark eyes that were like fire. And that mouth of his that made girls in convent schools like the one Angelina had attended feel the need to make a detailed confession. Or three.

  If he chooses you, came a voice inside her, as clear as a bell, you can leave this place forever.

  “He will choose one of us,” Petronella said, still pale, but not backing down from her mother’s ferocious glare. “He will pick one of us, carry her off, and then kill her. That is what our father has agreed to. Because he thinks that the loss of a daughter is worth it if he gets to keep this house and cancel out his debts. Which man is worse? The one who butchers women or the man who supplies him?”

  Angelina bit back a gasp. Her mother only glared.

  Out in the cavernous hallways, empty of so much of their former splendor, the clock rang out the half hour.

  Margrete stiffened. “It is time. Come now, girls. We must not keep destiny waiting, no matter how you feel about it.”

  And there was no mutiny. No revolt.

  They all lived in what remained of this sad place, after all. This pile of stone and regret.

  Angelina rose obediently, falling into place behind her sisters as they headed out.

  “To the death,” Petronella kept whispering to Dorothea, who was uncharacteristically silent.

  But it would be worth the risk, Angelina couldn’t help but think—a sense of giddy defiance sweeping over her—if it meant she got to live, even briefly.

  Somewhere other than here.

  Copyright © 2020 by Caitlin Crews

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  ISBN: 9781488059568

  Shy Queen in the Royal Spotlight

  Copyright © 2020 by Natalie Anderson

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

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