The Prince

by Katharine Ashe

  Looking into the bright eyes now, he saw that Miss Shaw was well aware of this.

  So this little woman of the earnest brow knew how to tease too. He should have anticipated that.

  His body’s reaction to this realization was, however, something of a surprise. Perhaps those slender legs were the trouble. Or thoughts of her breasts. Or the plump curve of her lower lip. Or the fact that she was standing before him dressed as a boy, duping everyone, yet apparently expecting him to keep her confidence.

  “You will not tell anybody, will you?” she said. “The duke or Amarantha?”

  “I believe they are in the countryside.”

  “That was a non-answer,” she said. “Will you?”

  “Your secret is safe with me.”

  “In truth?”

  He nodded.

  “Thank you.” With a swift sweep of her gaze up and down his body, she hurried off around the corner.

  Ziyaeddin walked the remainder of the route to his house slowly. Even when the way was long and his hip and back cramped, he disliked hiring a chair. Walking, he could study people.

  Yet when he entered the foyer of his house, which was cool in the damp Caledonian fashion, he realized he had seen nothing of his surroundings for many minutes. He had been thinking of her.

  Those lips.

  Those damnable lips.

  A letter sat on the silver dish on the foyer table, the name Ibrahim Kent written across its well-worn exterior. It had traveled many miles, and he recognized the hand that had addressed it. He had received such letters before.

  Greetings and blessings upon you, sir.

  His sister’s servant in the palace, Ali, never wrote anything in these letters that could identify any of them—no salutation, no name, no title—in the event that those unsympathetic to his mistress intercepted them.

  She bids me beg you remain as you are, for he fears your return and does not cease his threats against those loyal to you. She insists that a time will come soon when your return will place none in peril. Until then, she bids you peace, as do I.

  Ziyaeddin folded the letter and took it to the kitchen stove to burn. Then he went into his studio and penned a letter to London.

  Again and again in seven years the foreign secretary had made Britain’s position on the matter clear. Bide your time, Your Highness. The situation is too volatile, the Russians too powerful, the Ottomans too uneasy, and Iran too little prepared for another war. If the tsar believes his ally now ruling Tabir to be weak, it would disrupt every other land in the region. Britain will come to the aid of Your Highness in time. We only await the ideal moment.

  In seven years nothing had changed: Westminster was still refusing aid; his sister was still a prisoner in the palace in which their father had once benevolently ruled; and he, heir to that realm, was still helpless, thousands of miles away where fate had thrown him. Yet his sister bid him to remain here.

  After years of exile, captivity, and assassination attempts, the false identity he had adopted allowed him some peace. But he could not be content. What sort of man allowed his sister to be bound in a forced marriage with his enemy? What sort of son would not burn to avenge his father’s assassination?

  Disguise and fettered desire: these were the measure of his life now.

  He would not keep Elizabeth Shaw’s secret because she had asked it of him. He would keep it because he understood her.

  Chapter 2

  The Desire

  Libby slipped into the butler’s pantry, hastily pulling off her cap and coat. The lecture had gone overlong and then that man had further delayed her.

  That man.

  Two and a half years ago when she had first encountered him he had discombobulated her too. He knocked her off balance, which was absurd given that he walked on a peg, not she.

  He was too mysterious for her liking. Most people believed him to be Turkish, but he spoke many languages—Turkish, Persian, French, Russian, English, and some even said Arabic. He was a wildly popular portrait artist. Wealthy people commissioned his work for huge sums, and he appeared in the Edinburgh gossip columns as often as he went into society, which seemed to be infrequently by choice. Fashionable hostesses adored him. Gorgeously well-spoken and young, having fully adopted British dress and entirely eschewed whiskers, Mr. Ibrahim Kent was both exotically foreign and comfortably familiar. Apparently to high society that made him the ideal party guest.

  Yet he remained largely a mystery. Why didn’t anybody know from where exactly he had come? Why should it be secret?

  Libby didn’t like mysteries. They made her feel itchy and unsettled.

  But she believed he would not expose her. The Duke of Loch Irvine had always been very kind to her, and Mr. Kent was his close friend. She trusted Mr. Kent’s word.

  She was peeling the side whiskers from her cheeks painfully when Iris Tate appeared in the doorway and burst into laughter.

  “Whiskers and muslin! Mama needn’t take me to London for a season after all, for I’ve seen everything there is to see now.”

  “Come button me up.” Grabbing a pot of oil from the hiding spot, Libby shoved her trousers, shirt, and all the other bits of her disguise under the empty wine rack and started cleaning off the adhesive. “Have the movers finished?”

  “They are loading your father’s trunks onto the carriage now. They’re to take yours to Miss Alice’s house afterward. By the by, Alice’s housekeeper has the fever and she is worried you might take it too.”

  “I never take fevers. I have a strong constitution.” It made her the ideal candidate for the medical profession, if only the profession allowed women. “Thank you for helping me with this, Iris. You are a dear friend.”

  “I would invite you to come stay with me while your father is gone, but I would never inflict Mama on you. There! You look like a woman again, except for the red splotches around your lips.”

  Libby rubbed salve into her raw skin. “I must find a less abrasive adhesive. And more comfortable trousers.”

  “You cannot attend again anyway, not as a boy,” Iris said. “Now that you will be living two miles away in Leith at Alice’s house, you will be too far away from the college. And where would you change into those clothes without detection? At Tabitha’s shop?”

  “I cannot. She was wonderful to make these clothes so I could move secretly about the docks.” When Libby and her father had lived in Leith, Tabitha had applauded Libby’s need to treat the wounds and minor illnesses of poor sailors off the merchant ships. “But after Thomas discovered it and told my father, I cannot ask Tabitha to keep this secret from him. An intimate relationship between a wife and husband must be built on trust.”

  “I suppose,” Iris said with the blithe shrug of a fifteen-year-old.

  “It really must, Iris.” Yet here she was, keeping the secret from her father, whom she loved more than anyone in the world. “It is positively criminal that I cannot apprentice with a surgeon as myself.”

  “Elizabeth?” her father called from the front of the house. “Is that you?”

  “Coming, Papa!”

  The foyer was a familiar scene: her father surrounded by luggage. Through the open doorway she could see men hauling a traveling trunk toward the coach. She and her father frequently changed residences, following his aristocratic patients and projects for the police. Now they were moving again, this time, however, separating: he to London and she back to Leith to live with their friend Alice Campbell.

  “I am here, Papa,” she said.

  At sixty, Dr. John Shaw had health and intelligence and kind, wise eyes, and now also a yearlong invitation from the Royal College of Physicians in London to lecture on his expertise: medical forensics.

  “The driver wishes to depart. Where have you been?”

  “At the bookshop.” It wasn’t untrue.

  “Libby,” Iris said, “I will call on you at Miss Alice’s. Bon voyage, Dr. Shaw.”

  Libby cast Iris a grateful look as she went out.r />
  “I am very excited for you for your grand adventure, Papa. You will be splendid at the Royal College.”

  “I hope I can be of use there,” he said with the customary humility she admired.

  “Allow me to go with you.”

  “You will be happier here, Elizabeth. Among friends.”

  In familiar places, he meant.

  “I could be happy with you in London.”

  He withdrew a kerchief from a pocket, and from another pocket the lorgnette he used for examinations, and began to polish the glass. This was difficult for him too.

  “You must remember what happened the last time we lived in London,” he said.

  What happened. An understatement. Plunged into unfamiliar places, with all of her daily habits upset, she had felt overwhelmed and had swiftly lost weight, could not leave the house, and eventually refused to allow him to leave it either.

  “Papa, that was years ago.” Before she learned to love medicine—before she had found such satisfaction in studying the bones, muscles and nerves that made the human body move and run and dance and swim in rivers and climb mountains. “I believe I could be happy in London if—”

  “If you could apprentice with Charles Bell.” He tucked the lorgnette and linen in the same pocket. “Elizabeth, what makes you believe that Mr. Bell will take you on as an apprentice when no surgeon in Edinburgh will?”

  “I have read every one of his books and essays,” she said, plucking out the kerchief, folding it, and replacing it in the correct pocket. “I know more about anatomy and practical surgery than many surgeons you know. You have said so your—”

  “Women will never be admitted to the medical profession, Elizabeth. You are twenty, old enough to accept this finally.”

  Words died in her mouth. She shook her head.

  His features softened.

  “I have upset you,” he said. “And only minutes before I must leave.”

  “You have not said anything I do not already know, of course. You are weary of me,” slipped from between her lips before she could catch it.

  “Elizabeth.”

  “Are you?” It was unfair of her to ask, but the need for reassurance pressed at her urgently, as needs often did—questions that required immediate answers, worries that sought immediate reassurance. The mother she never knew had suffered from the same small madness. Unchecked, the unrelenting need had eventually driven her to her death. “Are you, Papa?”

  “Of course not.” But his tone hinted at impatience. He had long believed she would grow out of this too. Rather, he had hoped it. Yet she had disappointed him in that hope.

  He took her hands into his, the dry and warm and wonderful hands of a physician. Raised entirely by her father, cared for and given ample affection, she adored him.

  “Daughter, you must accept reality.”

  “Papa, how will the profession begin to even consider admitting women if qualified women do not seek admittance?”

  “I have no doubt there has never been a woman more qualified to apprentice to a surgeon than you, my brilliant child. I wish I could change the world for you. It pains me that I cannot.”

  She could bear his pain no more easily than her own.

  “You are the best father imaginable.” She squeezed his hands. “I will miss you.”

  “You know what you must do now, Elizabeth. Here in Edinburgh and in Leith are young women of conversation with whom you can make friends so that your days will not be so aimless.”

  “They are not aimless. I am studying, Papa. You know that. And Iris, Tabitha, and Alice are the best friends a person could wish.”

  “Iris Tate is a child, Tabitha Bellarmine has a husband and shop now to concern her, and Alice Campbell, while an excellent person, is forty years your senior. You need friends of your own situation.” Taking up his light medical case, he paused at the open door. “The choices you make, Elizabeth, affect others.”

  She hated the worry etching his features. He needed reassurance now too.

  “I will try to make new friends, if you wish. I promise.”

  He started out.

  “Papa,” she said to his back, the need tightening her throat. “Please tell me that you are not weary of me.”

  “How could you ever imagine it?”

  “Say it, please.” She needed to hear the words.

  “I am not weary of you,” he said patiently. “God be with you, my dear child.”

  But God was never with her, only that fierce need telling her what to do and say.

  When the carriage drew away from the house she watched until it disappeared from view, because the need told her to do that too.

  Ziyaeddin awoke from the dream in much the same manner he always did: soaked in sweat and probably shouting.

  He wasn’t entirely certain about the shouting. He had not kept a manservant in years. Now in the middle of the night there was no one to rush into his bedchamber with a worried frown asking ridiculous questions and begging to aid him. The housekeeper came daily except Sundays, and the manservant came thrice weekly. He lived humbly and preferred it that way, especially when the dream came.

  Yet the usual images did not linger before his eyes now open to the darkness: fire and wicked smoke against a sapphire sky. No scent of desperation filled his nostrils. No panic compressed his lungs. Instead his bedchamber was redolent of the coming winter, and before his eyes was a pair of lips.

  Rubbing a hand over his face, he shrugged into his dressing gown.

  The house was narrow, flanked on either side by similar houses. He had not purchased it for its fine wood paneling in the parlor or elegant façade or lofty foyer, but for this single-story hexagonal chamber with north-facing windows and two adjacent smaller chambers. He lived entirely here, where the light was clean.

  Crossing the studio past his current piece, a trio of fair Scottish maidens, he went into the little chamber he used as a workroom. He reached for a portfolio tucked behind the worktable and drew forth the pages within.

  In the lamp glow her features in pencil and pen were as familiar to him now as they had been in the daylight of Surgeons’ Hall, the bookshop, and the alley. The whiskers notwithstanding, he would have been a fool not to recognize her.

  On their first encounter at Haiknayes she had entered the library where he was reading, and he had seen her standing there beneath a grotesque of Saint George and told her she resembled nothing less than an angel at the feet of the triumphant Lucifer. She had departed as abruptly as she had appeared.

  Then he had drawn these.

  Mobility. Feeling. Thought. They were all so thoroughly on the surface of her features, as though, unlike all others in this land of curious constraint, she alone had never learned to mask her thoughts and emotions, or simply did not care to.

  But he had never gotten the lips right.

  He carried the drawings to the easel, set the lamp beside him, and found a pencil.

  By the time he finished, dawn was arriving. It was too late to return to bed, and the pain was too great from sitting for so long. But satisfaction hummed through him now and he required no sleep.

  He dressed, donned his hat and coat, and went in search of coffee. For in this city thousands of leagues from his home he was not Ziyaeddin Mirza, Prince of Tabir, surrounded by servants and sycophants to do his bidding. He had not been that in seventeen years.

  Here he was simple Ibrahim Kent, portraitist. And honest labor made a man hungry.

  Chapter 3

  Inspiration

  “How do you manage to contrive such clever golden curls, Miss Shaw?” The speaker was young and fashionably gowned. Her lips smiled, but her eyes did not.

  The little group of society maidens had been discussing the clothing and hair of other people at the party for a quarter of an hour already. None of them had spoken to Libby since she had approached them, until now.

  “I haven’t anything to do with the qualities of my hair, actually,” Libby said. “Children
naturally possess the physical traits of their parents. For instance, you and your brother share the same straight brown hair and hazel eyes, due to your father and mother’s similar traits.”

  “Is that so?” the girl drawled without any evidence of interest, then turned her body, blocking Libby from the circle entirely.

  “Sister,” a man said laughingly at Libby’s shoulder, “you are snubbing Miss Shaw.”

  “Dear me, brother, how beastly of me.” Her painted lips shaped an insincere smile. “What would you like to converse about now, Miss Shaw? Teeth and chins, I daresay?”

  Her friends tittered appreciatively.

  “Come now, sister,” her brother said with a grin. “Play nice.”

  “This isn’t play,” Libby said. “This is the most common form of social dominating. Your sister has brought attention to a trait of mine that others consider attractive, my blond curls, and wishes to be noticed instead of me. So she noted it first, aloud, while however insulting me to show others she has power over me. But I have no ambitions so she needn’t worry. None of you have read A Treatise on Exclusion by Mr. Harper of the Plinian Society, have you?”

  They all stared at her as though she had grown floppy ears and fangs.

  “No. Of course not,” she muttered, feeling the hated heat rise in her cheeks. “Good evening.” Pivoting, she heard one of them whisper, “She is such a child.”

  Walking swiftly past the clusters of people, Libby left the drawing room.

  She had come to this party solely so that she could write to her father that she had, and to please her half-sister, Lady Constance Sterling, who liked to bring her along to parties hosted by physicians, like this one, so Libby might become acquainted with young men who shared her interest in medicine.

  Now Constance was chatting merrily with a cluster of lawyers and politicians who, though she was married, still enjoyed flirting with her. Constance was very beautiful, heiress to a duke, and delightful. She did not know that the last thing on earth Libby wanted was a beau, and that her father’s wish for her to marry was so painful that she could barely think about it without her palms growing damp.