by Лорен Уиллиг
Robert looked curiously down at her.
“Faraway lands and glorious places,” translated Charlotte dreamily, abandoning Othello.
“And dust and flies and dung.”
“That’s not terribly romantic.”
“Neither is the wider world,” Robert said, with an attempt at lightness that didn’t succeed at all. Propping his chin on one hand, he regarded her seriously over the plucked bones of the swan. “I just don’t want you to be disappointed. There is far more dust and dung than there are knights in shining armor left in the world.”
“For one good knight in shining armor, might not the kingdom be saved?”
“That depends on how much tarnish there is between the greaves,” said Robert grimly. “He might be too rusty to do any good at all.”
“Rust is removable,” said Charlotte blithely. “Just ask the downstairs maids.”
“Unless it eats away to the basic fabric until there’s nothing worth saving.”
There was no longer any use pretending that they were speaking in abstracts. A chance phrase from the night before teased at Charlotte’s recollection.
“Like a rotten apple?” Charlotte asked, watching him closely.
Robert nodded, his lips twisting with a dark sort of amusement, sickly sweet as fruit rot. “Exactly like a rotten apple.”
Planting both hands on the table, Charlotte leaned forwards. On an impulse she couldn’t quite explain even to herself, she asked, “Why did you leave when you did?”
Robert shot her a quick, startled glance. “What?”
Charlotte caught his gaze and held it. “All those years ago. You just disappeared. What happened?”
“I did leave a note. I understood that was the usual procedure.”
Despite herself, Charlotte couldn’t help smiling. “You forgot to leave bedsheets dangling from your window.”
“I certainly wasn’t going to risk my life rappelling off linen twenty yards from the ground when there was a perfectly good staircase to be had. I was running away, not committing suicide.”
Charlotte might be amused, but she wasn’t diverted. “Why run away, though? I know Grandmama was being awful to you, but . . .”
Robert stared at the glass in front of him for a very long time. He stared at it for so long that Charlotte was tempted to take a look herself, just in case she was missing something interesting in there.
“It was a long time ago,” he said abruptly. “It’s hard to remember just what I was thinking. Ah, look, there come the cakes.”
“You do know that you’re not very adept at changing the subject,” said Charlotte, to Robert’s wineglass. “And you’re not a rotten apple. Or a rusty greave.”
“Cake?” said Robert blandly.
Charlotte took the cake. There was no need to punish the pastry just because Robert was being provoking.
In the proper Twelfth Day tradition, Cook had sprinkled colored sugar over the top so that it glimmered like a dragon’s hoard. Charlotte poked experimentally at the center of her cake. In one of the little cakes was hidden a small gold crown for the Twelfth Night king or queen, in another an equally diminutive jester’s staff for the Lord of Misrule. In most households, it would be a bean and a pea, but the Dowager Duchess had no truck with legumes.
A great shout arose from the other end of the table as Freddy Staines pumped one hand into the air, spraying crumbs across the table and down more than one lady’s décolletage. A tiny golden staff glinted in his fist.
“All hail your Lord of Misrule!” he cried, thrusting his arms over his head with an enthusiasm that did serious damage to the high-piled coiffure of the lady on his right.
“Do we bring you your pipe, your bowl, and your fiddlers three?” drawled Medmenham.
“Devil, take the fiddlers, bring me wine!” shouted Freddy, getting right into his role. Two footmen hastened to obey, smartly cracking decanters. The misrule was getting nicely underway.
“At least it’s not Penelope this year,” began Charlotte, turning back to her dinner companion. “Last year — ”
She broke off as she noticed a blob of dough on her plate that decidedly hadn’t been there before. Poking out of one corner was the unmistakable glint of gold. Next to her, Robert’s cake bore a suspicious crater in its middle that just happened to be exactly the shape of the piece on her plate.
Charlotte looked hard at Robert.
Robert smiled benignly back.
Charlotte wasn’t the least bit fooled. “Did you just give me your crown?” she demanded.
Robert adopted an air of beatific innocence that wouldn’t have deceived a five-year-old. “It must have been tree spirits.”
Charlotte narrowed her eyes at him. “Next you’ll be telling me it was a unicorn.”
“It went out by the other door.”
Flaking off the remaining cake crumbs with a gallantry worthy of Sir Walter Raleigh, Robert placed the gold crown on her palm and folded her fingers firmly around it.
“No arguments,” he said, squeezing her hand. “It always belonged to you.”
Releasing her hand, he stood, pushing back his chair so abruptly that it tottered back and forth behind him and had to be quickly rescued by the waiting footman.
“We have a monarch!” he thundered, in the sort of voice that Charlotte imagined must have brought whole regiments to heel. “Queen Charlotte!”
“I say, does he mean the real one?” demanded Turnip Fitzhugh, craning to see over his shoulder. “Didn’t know she was coming.”
“Oh, do be quiet,” said Penelope, whacking him on the shoulder with her fork. The fact that the fork still had some cake on it was entirely beside the point. “It’s our Charlotte — that Charlotte. Over there.”
Robert ignored them both. “If my Lord of Misrule would provide the crown?”
“With pleasure, Your Majesty.” Essaying a sweeping bow — a little more sweeping than intended due to the amount he had already imbibed — Lord Freddy swept up the gilded circlet on the point of his jester’s staff and swaggered down the length of the table. Brandishing the garland in the air for the benefit of the audience, Lord Freddy wafted it about like a gypsy with a tambourine while the others at the table hooted, applauded, and called for a coronation.
While Freddy postured, Robert neatly snagged the crown.
Charlotte had to bite her lip to keep from giggling at Lord Freddy’s expression of indignation. Laughing at a subject in distress would be decidedly unqueenly.
“I say!” protested Freddy. “Highway robbery, by Gad!”
Robert smiled blandly. “Nothing of the sort. I merely claim my ducal prerogative.”
The wine had already been flowing a little too freely. Someone called out, “Is that like the droit du seigneur?”
The Duchess’s cane came down with a loud thump, followed by a yelp of pain.
Charlotte could see Robert’s lips twitch, fighting to maintain an expression of due solemnity as he lifted the crown high above her head.
Charlotte bowed her head in a pretense of humility, knowing that if she were to meet his eyes, the laughter welling in her own throat would break out and shatter any pretense of composure. Something snagged on her hair and prickled against her scalp. Cautiously, Charlotte raised her head and felt it slip and catch, pulling painfully at her upswept hair. Like so many of her grandmother’s ideas, a crown of gilded mistletoe worked better in theory than actuality.
Moving very carefully, so as not to dislodge her crown, Charlotte rose to her feet to acknowledge the cheers of her subjects.
“Allow me to be the first to felicitate you on your ascension.” Once again exercising his ducal prerogative, Robert lifted Charlotte’s hand to his lips. “Congratulations, Queen Charlotte. Long may you reign.”
When he bowed in obeisance over her gloved hand, Charlotte felt like a queen. Her spine straightened, her shoulders moved back. She was Gloriana, the Virgin Queen, resplendent in silks and velvets, confounding foreign ambassa
dors and dazzling the eyes of her courtiers. And Robert? He was Sir Walter Raleigh, promising her new worlds and new kingdoms and strange little brown leaves called tobacco. Or maybe he was Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, the Queen’s Master of the Horse and secret love, ready to whisk her off for a clandestine tryst behind an alcove within yards of the courtiers milling about.
Charlotte thrilled to the romance of it, feeling gloriously imperious and utterly unlike herself.
Facing down the long table, Robert lifted his glass high, commanding the attention of the unruly revelers at table. “To Her Majesty, our Queen of the Feast — Queen Charlotte.”
Crystal glittered in the candlelight as a a chorus of slightly inebriated voices echoed, “Queen Charlotte!”
In front of her, all down the long table, mouths opened to hail her, hands raised to toast her, and the ruby red of a dozen rings gleamed like fireworks in the air. Charlotte beamed down on the lot of them, giddy with more than wine.
“Do you have any pronouncements for your loyal subjects?” called out Tommy Fluellen, from the lower end of the table, where he was seated next to the pudding-faced Miss Dempsey.
“That I do!” called back Charlotte, deploying her fan like a scepter. “Go forth and enjoy yourself mightily.”
Tommy grinned at her down the table, “A good and wise queen if ever I saw one, eh, lads?”
The lads all agreed.
“Shall we open the dancing, Your Majesty?” suggested Robert, holding out an arm.
Charlotte considered the guests streaming towards the gallery. There would be the usual jostling for place as they formed up for the dance, the endless polite inanities exchanged with dozens of dull acquaintances. That was all very well for the workaday world, but tonight she was Queen, daring and reckless, able to command Armadas with a single word. It was too soon to have to go back to mundanity, to being quiet Charlotte in the corner of the ballroom. “No,” Charlotte said decidedly. “I have a better idea.”
“Unicorn hunting?” suggested Robert, seeming perfectly content to follow whichever way she should lead.
“It’s the wrong season.” She tugged at his hands, drawing him after her. “Come with me. I want to show you my very favorite place at Girdings.”
Chapter Nine
When his Queen commanded, what was a loyal subject to do but obey?
Swept up in her enthusiasm, Robert found himself hurrying along as Charlotte grabbed his hand and pulled him in the wake of the departing guests. At the door of the dining hall Charlotte veered sharply to the left, down a narrow and barren corridor lit with tapers at long intervals. Despite the gloom, Charlotte moved with the assurance of familiarity, one hand still holding his as she urged him along, her skirts making a cheerful swishing noise as she danced ahead of him. Robert had to half run to keep up with her, his boots skidding on the marble tiles of the floor. For a small person, Charlotte could move very quickly when she wanted to. Robert grinned at the thought.
“Where are you taking me?”
Charlotte glanced back over her shoulder, spinning a bit to make the scalloped edge of her skirts flounce. “You’ll see.”
“Kidnapping, is it? What do you think you can get for me?”
“Seven swans a-swimming?” suggested Charlotte blithely.
“Just so long as we don’t have to eat them.”
“No, that wasn’t one of Grandmama’s better ideas, was it?” said Charlotte, stopping short so unexpectedly that he nearly toppled right over her.
“Does the oubliette open here?” asked Robert, catching at the wall to keep himself from falling over her.
“We’re going up rather than down,” said Charlotte, not the least bit discommoded by being hemmed between Robert and the wall.
Given certain of his thoughts at the moment, Robert was afraid that he was going very far down indeed, straight to the realms of pitch and brimstone reserved for those entertaining carnal thoughts about young ladies in dark alcoves. Their present position was as dark and secluded as any rake could desire, far from interfering chaperones and indignant duchesses.
Charlotte tilted her head up at him at an angle that would have been perfect for kissing, had Robert been considering kisses, which he most certainly was not. That was the tale he was telling to his conscience, and he was sticking to it.
“Don’t you know where we are?” she asked.
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” Robert said, and meant it in more ways than one.
He could see only the outlines of her smile in the general gloom, like a portrait done in charcoals, emphasizing the Cupid’s bow curve of her lips.
“You should,” she scolded. “We are directly between your bedroom and dressing room.”
From anyone else that might be construed as an invitation. From Charlotte . . . it was nothing more than a geographical observation. It had to be. Didn’t it?
“And these,” continued Charlotte, blissfully unaware of the implications her last words had engendered, “are the back stairs.”
Groping along the wall, she located a knob and turned it. A door swung smoothly open on well-oiled hinges — there would be no unsightly creaking noises permitted to disturb the Duke’s slumbers. Robert had to execute an inelegant hop to get out of the way before the wooden panel made straight for his nose, bowling him safely out of the way of his companion.
There was nothing like a blunt block of wood in the face to dispel lascivious thoughts.
Turning to face him, Charlotte beamed up at him in the way of an illusionist producing silk flowers out of a hat. “This is how the servants get down to your rooms.”
“Right,” said Robert. Well, that did rather put paid to any thoughts of assignations. Coal scuttles and water buckets weren’t exactly among the harbingers of romance.
Gathering her heavy velvet skirt in both hands, Charlotte started up the steps, the gold thread on her emerald slippers winking in the occasional glare of the candles placed at infrequent intervals along the stairway. “My rooms are just above.”
“Are they?” Robert’s eyebrows engaged in the sort of acrobatics that would have done credit to Drury Lane.
“Right through here.” With a sweeping gesture, Charlotte indicated a door that led off the next landing — and kept right on climbing. Robert wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or disappointed.
“I used to come up and down these stairs all the time when my father was in the Duke’s rooms,” Charlotte’s voice echoed cheerfully down the stairwell. Ahead of him the velvet train of her gown dragged against the steps, the gold threads in the hem an incongruous splash of luxury against the worn wood. “It was the easiest way to get in and out without Grandmama seeing me.”
The underside of her train caught on a break in the stair where the warped old wood had cracked. Bending, Robert freed the fabric for her, and was rewarded with a grateful smile from on high. Three steps above him, she still looked like a queen, even with her garland tipping down over one ear.
“I forgot those were your father’s rooms.”
“It was my father’s idea to have me right upstairs — so I wouldn’t feel so alone in a strange house. Our house in Surrey was much smaller, you see.”
She spoke without the slightest hint of bitterness. It would, thought Robert, be like Charlotte to have mastered the trick of remembering without rancor, picking out the good and discarding the bad. Bottle that and she could make a fortune.
“Do you ever miss it?” They were four flights up and still she kept climbing, her train swishing behind her like a mermaid’s tail.
Charlotte paused with her hand on the rail, an emerald bracelet glinting on her gloved wrist. “I miss the idea of it, but I don’t think I would want to go back.” She smiled jauntily down at him from the lofty heights of the top step. “I rather like where I am.”
Robert’s heart squeezed in a very inconvenient way. “I think that it would be very hard not to like wherever you are,” he said, and meant it.
What the
implications of that were, he couldn’t quite bring himself to work out. Fortunately, he didn’t have to. With the air of a conjurer displaying a new trick, Charlotte threw open another door. “Then wait until you see this!”
The immediate results were not auspicious. Cold air barreled down the stairway and walloped Robert in the chest, cutting through layers of wool and linen.
“Where are we?” he asked as neutrally as he could. He had expected a conservatory, blooming with carefully preserved plants, or a library, blanketed in books. Instead, Charlotte appeared to have brought him to the North Pole.
“The roof,” said Charlotte, skipping over the threshold and taking a long, deep breath of frigid air. “Mmmm.”
“Mmmm” wasn’t quite the expression that came to Robert’s mind. The word that presented itself was just as short but far more profane, so he didn’t voice it. Instead, he moved with a great deal of cautiousness over the small bump at the base of the door onto the glacial surface of the roof.
“Welcome to my kingdom,” said Charlotte cheerfully, flinging her arms wide in welcome.
The tip of her nose was already beginning to turn pink, but otherwise she didn’t seem to notice the cold at all. Robert made an attempt to remember how many times he had refilled her glass at dinner.
“Come see!” His extremities might be beginning to turn blue, but her enthusiasm was infectious, even among the frost-scarred stone.
Up close, the pale gold stone was pitted by the elements, scarred by past storms and stained by soot from the chimneys. But there was an odd charm to the landscape, nonetheless. A terrace ran waist-high along the edge of the roof, high enough to provide an illusion of security. Along its length perched a fanciful collection of historical and mythological personages, hectoring, lecturing, and gesturing to hypothetical persons in the gardens below.
Charlotte greeted each as an old friend.“This,” she said, giving Aristotle a brisk pat on the arm, “is my first minister of state. And this” — she moved on to another robed gentleman whom Robert didn’t recognize, although he had no doubt that Charlotte could — “is my Chancellor of the Exchequer.”
