by Лорен Уиллиг
Charlotte managed a sickly smile. There was something funny about the image of a strapping army man cowering in terror from the amorous advances of a diminutive debutante. “Demmed fierce things, those debutantes,” she could hear them telling one another in their clubs. “Gotta watch out for the little ones. Get you around the knees and don’t let go.”
Charlotte swallowed a laugh that sounded a bit too much like incipient hysteria for comfort.
That would cause a scandal, wouldn’t it? “Queen’s New Maid of Honor Goes Batty at Buckingham House.” Charlotte glanced carefully left and right as she slipped out of the Queen’s apartments, but no one seemed to have noticed anything out of the ordinary.
Charlotte’s train whispered along the marble stairs behind her as she descended to the ground floor. She no longer found its swishing quite so satisfying as she had before. All around her, painted into the walls along the Great Stairs, murals depicting the sad career of Dido and Aeneas leered down at her.
Had Aeneas simply been amusing himself, too? Beguiling the long hours on Carthage with the first willing woman who came to hand? Given the smug expression on Aeneas’s face, just where the double flight met and turned into a single one, Charlotte rather suspected as much. Like Robert, Aeneas had simply turned and run in the middle of the night. And yet men called him a hero. Surely there was something wrong with that?
According to legend, England had been founded by another Trojan, a comrade of Aeneas’s named Brutus. If Robert was any indication, the old strain bred true.
Charlotte winced at the recollection of how slavishly adoring she had been, doting on his every word and painting pretty daydreams about knights in armor. She had, she realized, had an entire romance with an object out of her own imagination. Take one reasonably handsome man, paste on armor, and, voilà! instant hero.
He had even tried to warn her, with all that business about rotten apples. But she had been too intent on being adoring to pay the least bit of attention to what he was actually saying. No wonder he had decided to take what was so willingly offered! Until the novelty of playing hero palled. Was that why he had left so abruptly? Did he find her adoration too stomach-turningly cloying to bear for another hour?
Well, she was no Dido to fling herself onto a pyre, even if she felt dazed and battered, as though she had just tumbled off the edge of a fairy tale into a strange new world where none of the old happy certitudes held sway.
Crossing into the complex of rooms that housed the King’s apartments, Charlotte maneuvered her hoops through the doors of the Great Library, just one of three vast rooms constructed by the King to house his remarkable collection of books. Court dress might be charming in a drawing room, but it vastly complicated one’s interactions with doorways and furniture. Narrow dresses might not be nearly so glamorous, thought Charlotte, squishing her hoops as she squeezed through the door, but they were a good deal easier to move about it.
Charlotte breathed in the library smell like a tonic, the comforting scent of fresh leather bindings and decaying old paper. At this time of day, there were no visitors to goggle at her in her Court dress, no scholars to glower at her for invading their intellectual precinct. Even the King’s librarian had left his post at the vast desk on one side of the room. Even the desk had been designed to do its part for storing books. The sides housed immense folios, each as high as Charlotte’s hips.
It wasn’t the folios Charlotte was after. Taking her candle, she held it up to the long rows of books that lined the walls. She was in search of a heroine.
All her life, Charlotte had picked books on which to pattern herself, trying on heroines the way other girls sampled new dresses. All through the four long years of successive Seasons, she had worked so very hard to turn herself into Evelina — eager, wide-eyed, innocent Evelina — in the assurance that, in the end, virtue would reap its own reward and patience would be rewarded with true love, just as Evelina was rewarded with Lord Orville.
Charlotte felt bitterly betrayed, and not just by Robert.
Evelina had lied to her. Evelina and Pamela and all the other companions of her solitary hours at Girdings, all the dusty books of her mother’s youth with their dewy-eyed heroines whose unassailable virtue won the affections of the hero and drove the villains to long death-bed speeches of abject repentance.
Where was the heroine for her now? She didn’t want to be Dido or Cleopatra, dead by their own hands. She rather liked living, even if her knight in shining armor had turned out to be an asp. Somewhere in the King’s wealth of books there had to be another model to be found, a heroine scorned who didn’t bury her knife in her breast or fling herself off a parapet or go mad when told to get herself to a nunnery.
Dismissing the books in front of her, Charlotte turned restlessly, holding her candle high, only to fall back with a cry as a hideous apparition shambled into the light. With a harsh, indrawn breath, Charlotte managed to get control of herself and the candle, which danced a little jig in her hand before she managed to grasp the base. In those moments, shape separated from shadow, making it clear that it wasn’t a beast after all, but a man, and not just any man.
It was the King, but the King as she had never seen him. His jacket was undone and his shirt had come untucked from his breeches, the ends trailing untidily down. His silk stockings were rumpled, and his hair stood up sparse and gray on his poor, wigless head. He looked like a broken old man, turned out on the parish, but for the great Star of the Garter that shone on his breast.
“Emily?” he called out in a wavering voice, his pet name for his youngest daughter.
The Princess Amelia was exactly of an age with Charlotte, slight and fair. It was an easy enough mistake to have made, but it still made Charlotte feel like an imposter intruding on a private moment, especially with the King in such disarray.
“No, sir.” Charlotte stepped out into the light of the fire and dropped a hasty curtsy. “It’s Lady Charlotte. Lady Charlotte Lansdowne. You said I might use the library.”
“Lansdowne . . . Lansdowne.” The King mulled over the name. “I knew a Lansdowne once. A good fellow, Lansdowne.”
“I believe you refer to my father, sir,” ventured Charlotte.
For a moment the King looked confused. “Yes, yes,” he said at last, shuffling closer and squinting at her as though he were having trouble seeing. Appropriating Charlotte’s candle, he held it so close to her face that it was all Charlotte could do not to flinch back. Against the dancing flame, his pupils were oddly distended, turning the King’s protuberant blue eyes nearly black. “You are the little Lansdowne, eh what?”
“Yes, sire.” Charlotte kept her spine straight and her voice soft.
The candle wavered in the King’s hand as he mercifully fell back a step. Dark spots danced in front of Charlotte’s eyes where the flame had burned on the retina. “The little Lansdowne,” he repeated. “The little Lansdowne who likes Burney. You do like Miss Burney, eh what?”
“Very much, sir.” Now did not seem to be the time to voice her latent reservations about Fanny Burney’s portrayal of human nature. “You were kind enough to make me a very pretty present of her books.”
“Miss Burney was a friend to me, a true friend.” To Charlotte’s shock, tears began to wander along the weathered cheeks. “Where is one to find such friends again? Lost, lost, lost, all lost.”
The sheen of tears in the folds of his face glittered in ironic counterpoint to the gleaming Star of the Garter on his breast. An icy weight settled in Charlotte’s stomach. She felt frozen in horror, watching the broken shambles of the monarch who had only hours before affably received various notables and asked after her grandmother’s dog.
Had it begun this way before? No one at the Palace liked to talk of it, but the memory of it was like a palpable presence in the Palace at all times, there in the quick, sideways glances when the King began speaking too quickly, or the strain that sometimes entered the Queen’s face when she looked at him when she thought no o
ne else was watching. Although the royal household had tried to keep it quiet, Charlotte knew that the dreadful mania had emerged again only three years ago. Leaving state acts unsigned, the King had been taken off to Kew, “for a rest,” it was said, but the mad-doctors had gone with him.
“Sire . . . ,” said Charlotte helplessly. “Are you . . . are you quite well?”
The King pressed a trembling hand to his stomach. “The foul fiend does bite me in the belly,” he whispered hoarsely. “The little dogs and all, Tray, Blanch, and Sweetheart, see, they bark at me.”
The dogs were clearly straight out of King Lear, but the grimace that transfigured the King’s face left no doubt that the stomach pain was more than a literary allusion. “Sire,” said Charlotte again, “if you are ill — ”
“No!” he said, so violently that she fell back a step. “I will not be ill. Don’t let them make me ill, Lady Charlotte.”
“No, sire,” Charlotte whispered, feeling tears well in her own eyes. “I shan’t let them, I promise.”
Surely it had to be a good sign that he had remembered her name? From all accounts of his previous illnesses, they had all begun with a rapid spate of speech. The King wasn’t speaking quickly now. If anything, his words had a sluggish quality to them, like a man who didn’t know whether he woke or dreamed.
The veined old hands closed around her own, weak as parchment. “You are a good friend, Lady Charlotte,” the King said brokenly. “A good friend.”
He spoke with such touching affection that it was all Charlotte could do not to give way to tears herself. “It would be hard not to be a good friend to Your Majesty when you have always been so good to me.”
Please let him not be mad, she prayed. Please let him just be tired and sick. Anyone might be tired and sick and confused . . . just not mad. If the King were to be mad again, the possibilities were horrifying. All state business to grind to a halt, the hideous struggles over who should take the reins of government, the Prince of Wales’s ghoulish glee at his father’s incapacity, and, worst of all, the sorrow of the Queen. It was said that last time her desolation had been terrible to behold.
“This is why it is best to have daughters.” For a moment, Charlotte thought that he had confused her again with the Princess Amelia, but he added, in a stronger tone, “Never have sons, Lady Charlotte, or they shall publish your letters in the papers.”
“Yes, sire.” The reference was clear. Not a month before, the Prince of Wales, in a fit of pique, had made public all his correspondence with the King, whining about the King’s treatment of him.
“Monstrous unnatural creatures, eh what? Eh what? Has the world ever seen such pelican sons?”
“No, sire.” It was all Charlotte could do not to rise up on her toes and wave in relief as the door to the King’s bedchamber burst open and a decidedly harried figure in knee breeches and plum coat came hurrying out.
She was less relieved when she saw who it was.
“Sire!” panted Lord Henry Innes, resting his large palms on his knees. “You haven’t finished your tonic.”
“A stomach tonic?” Charlotte asked hopefully.
Lord Henry dismissed her with a glance.
“This way, Your Majesty,” he said with forced joviality, as though she weren’t even there. “The doctor is waiting for you.”
Blinking in the light, the King followed him obediently enough, but the lost expression in his eyes was enough to make a stone weep.
As Lord Henry handed him over to a white-wigged attendant, the King glanced piteously over his shoulder at Charlotte. “You won’t let them make me ill again, will you, Emily?”
“No,” Charlotte whispered as the King was whisked away out of sight. “No, Your Majesty.”
With the King safely away, Lord Henry braced himself between Charlotte and the door, standing like Henry VIII with his legs spread wide and his hands on his hips. It was a pose that worked better in a doublet and tights, with a ham haunch in one hand.
“Apologies for that, Lady . . . er . . .”
Charlotte’s wide-skirted Court dress and single egret feather provided the indication of her rank, but otherwise he was at a loss. Charlotte imagined he didn’t spend much time looking at ladies’ faces, at least not if the way his gaze was angled towards her neckline was any indication.
“Charlotte,” said Charlotte. “Lady Charlotte Lansdowne. I’m in waiting to the Queen.”
Charlotte forbore to add that he had just spent the Christmas season living in her house. That would only cause unnecessary confusion, and Charlotte was far more concerned about the king than a man who had obviously been dropped on his head as a youth. Repeatedly.
And this was the sort of man with whom Robert chose to spend his time? That ought to have warned her, if nothing else had.
Lord Henry might only be capable of one idea at a time, but whichever he held, he held doggedly. “If you’re with the Queen,” he said, with the air of a man pronouncing a mathematical theorem, “shouldn’t you be upstairs?”
“I came down for a book.”
“Book?” Lord Henry looked blankly around the library as though it had only just dawned on him that that was what the room was for, and that the little rectangular thingies embedded in the walls weren’t just another decorating motif. “Ah, right. Don’t have much use for the things myself. Bit late for a book, isn’t it?”
Now wasn’t the appropriate moment to give him her speech on how good fiction transcended time. Other matters demanded more immediate attention. Charlotte felt slightly sick at the thought of it, but it had to be faced.
“Is his Majesty” — Charlotte couldn’t bring herself to voice the dreaded word — “in need of assistance? Should I fetch the Queen?”
“No, no,” Lord Henry said heartily, waving his huge hands in negation. “No need to disturb the Queen. Don’t want to raise a ruckus, eh what?” Apparently, the King’s speech habits were catching.
Charlotte carried on doggedly. “But if — ”
“Nothing of the sort!” exclaimed Lord Henry, a little too hastily. “His Majesty only had a bit of a stomach upset. Took a little too much rich food today. Doctor’s on hand. Nothing to be worried about.”
“But he seemed to be wandering in his speech. . . .”
Lord Henry shrugged in a way that implied a little woman had no business bothering an important attendant of the King with trivialities. “Nothing like pain to make us all a little loopy, eh? Don’t want to keep you. Best be going back to the Queen, what?”
Stepping back across the threshold into the King’s rooms, he started to push the panel closed.
“One thing, Lord Henry.” Lord Henry’s hand stayed on the door panel and his eyes rolled back in his head in an oh-no-here-it-comes gesture. “Should his Majesty’s . . . stomach upset worsen, you will send word to the Queen, won’t you?”
What Lord Henry really wanted to send for was a muzzle for use on interfering maids of honor. He did not exactly have the most guarded of countenances. He must, Charlotte thought irrelevantly, lose a fortune every time he sat down to cards.
“It’s just a stomach upset,” he repeated. “No need to concern yourself.” He didn’t exactly add “bloody interfering female,” but the words were implied. And, then, in a last burst of lucid speech, “Tell that cousin of yours I’ll be seeing him next Thursday!”
With a concatenation of wood against wood, Charlotte found herself staring at a closed door.
She felt a powerful urge to kick it.
Chapter Fifteen
The next day dawned clear and bright. In the light of morning, with the sunlight streaming through the east-facing windows of her borrowed bedroom at Loring House, the events of the night before seemed nothing more than a hideous phantasm, too outrageous to be real.
Curled up in her comfortable nest of linen and down, with the branches of the trees in the square waving a cheerful good morning, Charlotte couldn’t help but feel that she had been extremely silly. She indulg
ed in a moment of gratitude that she hadn’t acted on her first impulse and run tattling to the Queen. With her spirits already in turmoil from her interview with Robert, carried away by the Gothic atmosphere of books and candlelight, she had given way to exaggerated imaginings fueled by — what? Nothing more than the King confusing her, in a dark room, with his daughter Amelia, and complaining of stomachache, albeit in somewhat florid terms. Candlelight played all sorts of tricks.
Goodness only knew her powers of perception hadn’t been anything to boast about of late.
Rolling over, Charlotte buried her face in her pillow. The down billowed comfortably around her face. Perhaps she could just stay here. For a year or so. She felt sore all over, in that hollow way one did after an emotional crisis once the storm had already flooded through. It was easier to be angry than to be hollow, but the anger just wouldn’t seem to come. Oh, but she had been an idiot!
With a resolute shove, Charlotte emerged from the bedclothes flushed but determined. No more calling herself names — even if she had been utterly, entirely idiotic to have believed . . . well, that was all beside the point now, wasn’t it? She had had a long, teary session with Henrietta the night before, but that was all over now. There was nothing to be done but to take the whole, sorry incident as a salutary lesson and never, ever behave so foolishly ever again. No more tears, no more regrets, and absolutely no more Robert.
She supposed she would have to see him again from time to time in the normal course of things, but there was no reason to dwell on it. Girdings had twenty-two bedrooms and twelve major reception rooms; they could live in the same house for years without so much as passing each other in the hallway.