“The rest of the family is well. But you must understand the Prince will be away for a time, and all your pretty holiday amusements will be cancelled.”
“Of course,” Nellie said, forcing a smile through her disappointment. She could do without the parties, but she had looked forward to the theater and the symphony. The streetlights were so pretty against falling snow as she rode in her carriage, especially since she didn’t have to find shelter from it. Would Albert’s death mean anything financially advantageous for Bertie? Would he have money to hire her a footman?
“I’m afraid you will be quite dependent on me for the near future’s entertainment,” Ecton said, stepping quite close to her.
She felt crowded. Surely Ecton wasn’t going to make an inappropriate comment, or even a gesture. The prince was her master, after all. Rubbing her aching arm, she let her fingers dance against the cool tiles around the fireplace, wondering where the poker was. The prince was her protector, and even away from Windsor Palace she knew that meant something.
But she was no fool, and she recognized the lust in Ecton’s dark eyes. Smiling politely, she stepped to the side, attempting to go around him. “I’ll just ring for tea, shall I? You must be chilled. Something spirited to go in the tea, I think. I don’t keep a bottle in here, but the housekeeper will have something in her closet.”
“I would dislike it very much if you started speaking the Queen’s English,” Ecton said, licking his lips. “That lilt is so alluring. Very stirring.”
She had to control a shudder as she reached for the bellpull, realizing belatedly she couldn’t grasp the embroidered panel with her fingers already curled in a fist. Then Ecton’s hand was on her shoulder, pulling her away.
“No tea, my dear. I have a flask if you need a nip. Girls like you often do.”
She whirled around. “Girls like me? I’m no gin-soaked whore, Mr. Ecton. I am a prince’s mistress.”
“Currently. His life will change now with Albert dead,” Ecton said. “I suspect he won’t have time for you. And I find myself unable to leave you alone. You’re too pretty to wind up on the street. Why, you can’t even have learned your way around London yet. You need a protector.”
She straightened. This couldn’t be. She wouldn’t let it happen. “I have not been given my congé,” she said. Now there was a word she’d learned since she’d been in London—another example that the English were clearly mad. A French word for something that was an English happenstance. The Irish would yell and scream and throw things, but the English? They had to go across the channel to describe the act of giving someone their walking papers.
Not that she was going to let it happen to her, not yet. “There is no chance you will have even spoken to the prince under the circumstances.”
“My dear, you must be realistic.” His finger went to her chin, lifted it. She didn’t like that at all, it made her skin crawl. “The rent is only paid through the end of the month. Without word from the prince I shall be unable to continue the expense of you. Unless we come to some sort of arrangement.”
“My arrangement is with the prince.”
“Your arrangement was with Cornet Mills, who transferred responsibility to me once you reached London. He is my cousin, you know. The prince is merely the beneficiary of our arrangements, and is quite ignorant of them.”
Nellie couldn’t believe it. “So he comes to this pretty house, and sees my fancy dresses, and sends me gifts, and never questions any of it?”
Ecton shrugged. “You never questioned where any of it came from.”
She could have sworn there were scales up and down his body that rippled when he did moved his shoulders like that.
“My dear, the prince was sent to Germany this last September to meet Princess Alexandra of Denmark. It is a certainty that the Queen will have him married off within the year. Your time with him is short. You must make other plans.”
Nellie thought of the child growing in her belly and panic bubbled. Did the prince have no money of his own? Was she truly in thrall to the snakelike Ecton?
Was that why the prince hadn’t been to visit her in days? Had Ecton been telling him lies about her devotion, undermining her future?
Well, of course he hadn’t. Why should he? She was only the rented poppet, making the prince happy for Ecton’s benefit. Damn the English and their toadying to princes. How had she fallen into this trap? Why had she thought the prince had funds of his own, had made any of the decisions about her keeping? How had she been such a fool? She’d been caged by this snake and hadn’t even noticed. Meanwhile the coming child made her more vulnerable by the day.
“For that matter,” Ecton went on, ignoring her attempts to evade his touch, “I have some ideas on the subject.”
Of course he did. “As do I,” she answered. She just didn’t know what they were quite yet.
“My dear, I can name half a dozen things to Sunday you could do.”
The serpentine sneer on the man’s face repelled her, but she answered steadily, “I’m sure, but you do not know me well enough to predict my decisions.”
She could have ignored the innuendoes and the inappropriate touching, but what he did next left nothing open to interpretation. Just as she was about to turn away, saying, “If what you say is true, I do have plans to set in motion,” Ecton grabbed her by her throat.
For a second, she was paralyzed by the man’s boldness, but instinct won out over caution. She slapped Ecton in the face with as much strength as she could muster, scrambling away. “You take liberties, sir!” she shouted. “I would not have you at any price!”
But if she was no lady, he was no gentleman, for he slapped her back, sending her reeling. “I know your price, and it is a pretty penny, madam!”
Then he seized her by the shoulders and jammed his lips against hers. She took the opportunity to bite. He screamed and tried to slap her again, but she was ready for him this time. Missing the poker—where was it?—she slammed her foot down on his and when he howled, she kneed him in his staff of life.
After that, it didn’t take more than a minute or two for her to make sure she had the upper hand and keep it. She grabbed the reptilian Ecton by the scruff of his neck and shoved him out, and then had the satisfaction of slamming the door after him.
A momentary rush of triumph was eclipsed by a flood of chagrin. What was she going to do?
She had plans. She just had to decide what they were.
The first thing she had to do was learn how to keep the likes of Ecton away from her. He could take away her pretty home, he could send away her servants, but he was not going to lay a hand on her again.
Thank the Virgin, she didn’t see the reptilian Ecton again after that, and in the flurry of the activities following Prince Albert’s demise—of the Irish flu, she found out, once more staining her kind with an unwarranted brush—she didn’t see Bertie either. But she didn’t really expect to. Even the English had to deal with death in some fashion, no matter how odd they were.
The death of the husband of the reigning queen, she found out, was observed with a funeral procession so that the people could say one last good-bye to their beloved prince. Why they used a French word—cortége—for the occasion, she didn’t know. But the English seemed to have a love/hate relationship with their French neighbors, and she didn’t understand that. And, she suspected, they didn’t either. But the one thing that the Irish knew how to do was pay their respects to the dead, so she put on her nicest black day suit—not really her shade, but it was appropriate, and the English were big on what was appropriate—and went out to Windsor and did her best to see the funeral procession.
Everywhere around her, Nellie saw the English mourn. The old women were crying, dabbing their eyes with tiny handkerchiefs, and they looked as though they were genuinely distressed at the passing of the prince consort. But it was clear they were also taking this opportunity as a social gathering, which she could understand, because the Irish did that too.
Eventually, she wormed her way to the second tier of those waiting on the street. It only took an hour, and waiting for those who grew impatient or tired of standing to go away. It wouldn’t be long before the procession came.
Across the street, she saw a prosperous-looking toff dressed in proper English mourning attire, black suit and hat and all. She noticed him because he looked vaguely Irish, with a great reddish mustache and a small goatee, standing right on the first tier, next to the street. On his shoulder was a small boy, his young son perhaps, with reddish-brown hair. The child was dressed in similar mourning attire as his father, but unlike his father, the boy was there for the spectacle.
“When will it be coming, Father?” she could hear the child say, nearly jumping up and down in his excitement. “Will it be soon?”
The man—the child’s father, as Nellie assumed—shifted the boy a little. “Won’t be long now, Lucas,” he said. “Won’t see the likes of this again. Only sorry your brother couldn’t be here to see this.”
From the expression on the boy’s face, the absence of his brother didn’t weigh on him one way or another. His head swiveled and for a moment his gaze touched hers. Nellie felt a jolt deep inside her, as if a giant had just stomped on her grave. Then the boy, an ordinary, upper-class boy, shifted his gaze and the sensation was lost.
Would her own child have such memories, she wondered, touching her waist again. Would she have her own recollections to impart about the day that the child’s grandfather’s body was trotted out through the streets of Windsor to his final resting place? Would she still be in London as she told the tale? Or back in Ireland?
That weighed on her as she watched the procession finally arrive and make its way through the crowds. The prince’s body was in a hearse drawn by six horses. White-frocked priests, men dressed in somber black coats, along with Life Guards and Scots Fusiliers, made up a crowd of humanity alongside carriages. It was the end of an era. Whether it was the end of hers, she couldn’t say yet.
As opposed to Ecton’s predictions, the prince didn’t promptly put Nellie aside after his father’s death. She was surprised to see him in her home pretty much on the same schedule after a week without communication. She gave him her condolences, he accepted them, and after that, the topic was rarely mentioned again.
The subject she wanted to introduce, that of the slimy Ecton and his predictions, was too delicate to mention. But one thing she could figure out was Bertie, while a good-natured sort, wasn’t the cleverest man-child. He didn’t know or consider how she was being cared for. In that, Ecton might have been telling the truth: she was there because the prince wanted her to be, and the logistics weren’t his concern. Royals. Did they know there was a world outside their own? Probably not. Bertie’s own mother either didn’t know or didn’t seem to care that the Irish were starving, and had been since the damned potatoes that she had decreed the Irish subsist on had become poison.
As always, the Irish had to make their own way in the world. She couldn’t ask her ma and pa for help; they had been horrified when they’d learned that she had taken up with Bertie, and refused contact with her. But she knew she could not stay dependent on Ecton. And the prince still seemed to have no money of his own, though his intentions were good.
When the theaters were up and open again after Prince Albert’s death, she inquired of them if she could somehow finagle a position in their repertories but she met with a wall. She had to find a sponsor, someone like Ecton, who could twist arms and extort something from the powers that were in the directorship of the theaters, but no one came to mind. And she would die before she went to Ecton for help. The price was far too high. One of the directors, recognizing her name, actually paid her a call at her home, but because he was curious about her, not because he had any role in mind.
It was at the back of her thoughts to wrangle an introduction from Bertie to some powerful theater personage when by chance she received a request to meet him at a St James' Street fencing salon. She had made an off-hand comment that she wanted to learn more about the sport sometime before, so she was pleased that he remembered.
Of course, she had wanted to make sure she had more than one method of protecting herself from the likes of Ecton. That it was an interest of her paramour was a lucky coincidence.
The fencing salon was bright and, not surprisingly, filled with prosperous-looking men and even women, most of them dressed in white shirts and leggings. When she arrived, she was whisked away to an anteroom, where there was a similar white outfit for her.
The prince was in a good mood as she arrived in the practice room. He was dressed in the odd suit that was apparently requisite in the sport. That was the English for you. “There you are,” Bertie greeted her, nodding. “Think you’ll like this. Helps if you’re light on your feet, and you are.”
“I’ll try, Your Highness,” Nellie said with a smile. “En garde, isn’t that what you’re supposed to say?”
She took to fencing like a duck to water, and by the end of a few sessions over the course of a week, she had got the hang of it without much trouble. She liked it enough that she took a lesson or two when the prince was not in attendance, just to make sure she continued to improve. Never know when it was going to come in handy, after all. She’d do it as long as she could, before the baby made her too big to move quickly.
Even better, fencing seemed to bring her closer to the prince again, and the week after Christmas was filled with exercise, followed by amorous exploits at home. Nellie found it hard to sleep as she wondered what would happen when she became awkward and ungainly, but from what she had discovered, British royals liked their mistresses and some of them had ten children by their men. If she kept her personality pleasant and learned enough about society to be a good hostess to the prince and his friends, she should be all right.
Even better, she needed to figure out how to help Bertie choose his friends, so that she was surrounded by people she wanted to be around. That would make the situation far more pleasant, rather than simply luxurious.
On December thirtieth, she was pleased when her parlor maid announced the prince. He had promised to bring her news of what party they would be attending the next night, to celebrate the New Year.
But when he came in, his mien was grave, his posture ramrod-stiff. Instead of holding out his arms to her in the customary fashion, he kept his hands clasped behind his back. She might have asked another man if he was missing his father, but her lover had not gotten along with Prince Albert before his death. The old stuffed shirt hadn’t believed in sex outside marriage and thoroughly disapproved of her. Well, he was gone now.
“What is it, Bertie darling?” she asked, rising gracefully, allowing her red shawl to flutter behind her as she went to him.
He stepped back, and his expression didn’t change. “Madam.” His tone was cold.
“Bertie?” she asked, her hackles rising. This didn’t bode well. “What is wrong, my love?” She reached out a soft hand to his smooth cheek. At least he had shaven before he came to her. But his eyes narrowed as she touched him.
Oh, not good at all.
“Mr. Ecton has reported some disturbing doings in this house.”
Her heart skipped a beat. The punishment she had feared since that night Ecton had attacked her had finally arrived. “I don’t know what you mean, darling. Disturbing doings? Do I have an immoral servant?” That little parlor maid. Please.
His eyes bulged. Never had he looked more righteous than he did now, so much like his father. “Do I?” he countered. “Ecton t
ells me you made advances toward him.”
The cur. She should have known. “Never,” Nellie gasped. “How can you think such a thing? You are everything to me, everything I need.”
“Cornet Mills warned me that the likes of you was no better than you should be,” he said, his gaze flinty in a way she’d never seen before. “That you’d had other men, and that a whore had to be kept amused or she’d stray.”
“How could he say that? I was a virgin. There was blood, you saw! You know I adore you.”
He sneered. “And to think, I was away a week because of my father’s death, and you couldn’t keep your skirts at your ankles. Under such circumstances!”
She put her hand to her stomach. Her pulse had sped up now, her heart making up for the skipped beat with an increased rhythm. “Please,” she whispered. “It’s all lies. I have no interest in Mr. Ecton. I only care for your well-being, sir.”
“Who was the man?” Bertie asked, eyes blazing. “The man with the long black beard and red trousers?”
Who? She had to think a moment about whom he was referring to. Then she remembered. “A theatrical producer,” she stammered. “I inquired about work in his new production. I didn’t expect him to come himself.”
“You were looking for work?” the prince thundered, forgetting or not caring that most of the world had to make their way by working for a living instead of suckling at his royal mother’s teat.
Still, her outrage warred with her senses, surprised at the sight of her milquetoast prince so fired up. She’d never seen him so commanding before. Maybe he was a man after all. “Mr. Ecton made advances toward me. I was afraid he’d tell you lies. I’m a poor girl, sir, at your mercy, and I looked for work in case of this. He told me you’d be giving me my leave.”
“You looked for a new protector,” he sneered.
She shook her head. “I did not. Simply a position in a theatrical company. I was an actress, you know.”
Dancing in Red (a Wear Black novella) Page 3