by Лорен Уиллиг
He confirmed her hunch with a distant nod.
Charlotte soldiered on. “Lord Henry was in attendance on the King. If someone — like your Wrothan — were to give Lord Henry something and tell him it was a nerve tonic or a cure for stomach upsets — ” From the expressions of the others, Charlotte could see they understood. She hurried on. “I saw the King the night he was first taken ill, before the doctor was called. He didn’t act quite as he was reported to in his other illnesses. Rather than being hurried and agitated, there was something almost . . . dreamy. His eyes didn’t seem to want to focus quite properly.”
Lieutenant Fluellen looked at Robert. “Sounds like opium to me.”
“But why” — Miles leaned forwards, bracing his hands on his knees — “would your Frenchie kill Wrothan? Wrothan was his entrée into the palace.”
“Unless,” suggested Charlotte wildly, “he had another false Dr. Simmons lined up. There might be a whole regiment of them. A monstrous regiment of Dr. Simmonses.”
“Or,” countered Robert in a voice that effectively quelled Charlotte’s desire to giggle, “he had already extracted what he wanted. I overheard the two of them talking tonight. Wrothan was bragging that he had removed something from the palace.”
“Did he say what?” asked Henrietta.
Robert held up both hands in a gesture of defeat. “He compared it all to a game of cards. He kept talking about having the King in his hand.”
Charlotte remembered the King as she had seen him: entirely helpless, strapped into a straight waistcoat, denied the use of his limbs, weak and wasted.
“What else did he say?” Charlotte asked urgently, shoving her lap rugs out of the way.
Robert smiled grimly. “Wrothan was waxing poetic today. When the Frenchman asked his price, he demanded a king’s ransom. I imagine Wrothan thought he would get more if he left it to the imagination.”
“Turn the carriage around,” Charlotte said breathlessly.
“What?” said Miles.
“Please.” Reaching out, Charlotte caught at his arm. “Tell your coachman to go to the Queen’s House. As fast as he can.”
“Isn’t it a bit late to go calling at the Palace?” said Miles cautiously, in the sort of tone one uses with small children and excitable maiden aunts.
Looking around the circle of faces in the carriage, Charlotte encountered identical stares of incomprehension. Didn’t even one of them see what she saw? Perhaps it was because they hadn’t been there. Or perhaps it was because they didn’t read as many novels. On the face of it, she realized, it did sound absurd, but she couldn’t think of a better explanation for the events of the evening. And if she was right . . .
Charlotte squashed her hair back behind her ears with both hands and stared imploringly at her companions. “Don’t you see? They can only have been talking about the King. Not a king, the King.”
As they all stared at her uncomprehendingly, the level of her voice rose. “If the false doctor was planted by the French spy to secure something that the doctor then ran off with to hold it for ransom — not just any ransom,” Charlotte continued relentlessly. “A king’s ransom.”
“No,” said Robert flatly. “No. It can’t be.”
“What else can it be?” Charlotte twisted the lap rug so hard that it nearly ripped in two. “Your Mr. Wrothan has kidnapped the King!”
Chapter Twenty-Four
“We don’t know that,” said Robert forcefully, when the furor had died down enough for him to make himself heard. “We don’t know anything of the kind.”
Charlotte’s small hands were clasped as if in prayer. “What else is there in the Palace worth stealing?”
“Aside from state papers, priceless art, a king’s ransom in silver and jewels . . .”
Charlotte waved all that aside. “Why else drug the King into a state of insensibility?”
“I can think of a number of reasons,” said Robert grimly. “You can have your pick. There’s simple theft, the Prince of Wales’s reversionary interest, or an attempt to sow discord by our friends across the Channel.”
“Any of those might have been the original plan. But,” Charlotte took a very deep breath, “what if your friend decided to take it a step further?”
“He wasn’t my friend.” Robert wasn’t sure why he felt the need to specify that, but he did. “He was never my friend.”
“Your enemy, then. Suppose your enemy double-crossed his conspirator and, finding himself in a position to do so, made off with the King. It needn’t have been a well-thought-out plan,” she added, as an afterthought. “He might simply have seen the opportunity and seized it.”
“Like a boy with a plate of unguarded jam tarts?” Robert saw the quick flash of recognition before Charlotte’s eyes dropped again.
“Rather larger, but otherwise the same idea,” acknowledged Charlotte, not quite meeting his eyes. “He saw his opportunity and seized it.”
It would be like Wrothan to snatch up whatever fell conveniently into his path, whether it belonged to him or not, but Robert had difficulties with the logistics of it. One didn’t just walk off with a monarch.
“It’s one thing to seize a jam tart and quite another thing to seize a King,” Robert pressed. “As you said, the King is larger. And, one would presume, would be more likely to protest at being carried off.”
“You have to admit that he has a point,” said Miles, who had been watching the exchange like a spectator at a sporting match. “My pudding seldom protests. People do.”
“Not if they’re bound and drugged. The people, I mean, not the puddings.” Charlotte cast an imploring glance around the carriage. “None of you saw the King I did. Anyone could have walked in, tossed him over his shoulder, and walked out with him.”
“With the King,” Robert said incredulously. “Aren’t there guards? Attendants? Something?”
Charlotte shook her head. “The King prides himself on not surrounding himself with guards. He says he doesn’t like to be separated from his subjects. As for attendants, as soon as he fell ill, all his pages were dismissed. His most loyal gentlemen of the bedchamber were barred from him. The Queen, too,” she added. “We were told it was all by his own orders.”
Miles pounded with one large fist on the hatch leading to the box.
“The Queen’s House,” he instructed the coachman. Looking sheepish, he said, “I suppose it doesn’t hurt to check. Just to set Charlotte’s mind at ease.”
“Charlotte is all appreciation,” murmured Charlotte, although she looked anything but at ease. Her hands were clasped so tightly in her lap that it was a wonder they didn’t crack. She looked, Robert thought, like the more fragile sort of porcelain shepherdess, in danger of shattering at a careless touch.
“How do you intend to get in?” asked Robert brusquely as the carriage drew up by St. James’s Park. He knew he was being surly, but he couldn’t seem to help it. Too much had happened, and none of it the way he had planned it. Wrothan was meant to be dead by his sword, not by an assassin’s knife. And Charlotte . . . Charlotte was meant to be safe at home not tracking murderers by moonlight. “I imagine one can’t just stroll in to the King’s apartments.”
“One can, actually,” Charlotte said demurely. “If one knows how to go about it.”
“Lead the way, O Captain, my Captain,” signaled Miles, with an extravagant salute.
And she did. It was Charlotte who took the lead, Charlotte who guided them through the snow and the slush, down a long avenue shaded by lime trees to a square courtyard. They passed a dry fountain, the stone statues around its edge huddling in on themselves against the cold. Locating an entrance half obscured in the shrubbery, Charlotte guided them downstairs, through a warren of subterranean rooms that smelled pungently of glue and leather.
“This is the King’s personal bindery,” Charlotte explained in a whisper. “It connects to the library.”
“Rather careless of him, isn’t it?” asked Robert, thinking of sentries
and pickets and the hosts of armed guards attendant on Eastern potentates.
Charlotte shook her head, looking very serious. “It was quite intentional. He wanted his library to be available to scholars at all times, without their having to go through the Palace. Dr. Johnson used to study here,” she said proudly.
She led the way up a narrow flight of stairs to the center of a vast wing that seemed entirely made up, as far as Robert could tell, of rooms filled with books, levels upon levels upon levels of books of all shapes, colors, and sizes. It made the library at Dovedale House look positively puny by comparison. Charlotte, however, appeared to know exactly where she was going. Ignoring an octagonal room with a soaring ceiling that looked more like an observatory than a library, she shepherded her flock into a rectangular room with a square desk that itself appeared to be constructed largely from books.
There was a light in the library, not from the coals in the fireplace, but from the brackets on either side of the door on the far side of the room. They illuminated, with pitiless clarity, the man lounged at the door connecting to the King’s personal chambers.
“No visitors!” barked the man, before Charlotte could say anything at all.
From behind her, Robert could see Charlotte’s back go very stiff.
“May I ask by whose authority?” she asked, in a dangerously polite tone.
The guard made no such attempt at civility. “No,” he said insolently.
Charlotte regarded the guard thoughtfully. Robert recognized that expression quite well. Without another word, Charlotte simply walked straight past him and reached for the door handle.
“Don’t,” said Robert, grabbing the guard by the scruff of the neck before he could make a move to stop Charlotte. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
“I wouldn’t do that if I were ’er!” whined the guard, but it was too late. Charlotte swept regally through the door, walking with all the assurance of four centuries of semifeudal power. The Dowager Duchess herself couldn’t have done better.
“Too late,” said Robert genially, letting him down as their small party bustled into the King’s chamber behind Charlotte. The guard, assessing the odds, wisely decided not to argue, shuffling in meekly behind. Robert doubted he was being paid anything sufficient to warrant his cutting up a fuss. Judging by the man’s slovenly attire, he was not on the ordinary palace payroll.
From inside the room came a low, keening moan, followed by a rustling that reminded Robert of snakes in the sand. Robert pushed his way through to Charlotte, who had come to an abrupt halt in the center of the room. There, in the royal bed, lay the figure of a man. He looked scarcely a man, twisted into a fetal position, slithering against the bed linens in a manner more animal than human. But, even bloated and ill, his features were still, Robert fancied, recognizably those that had been reproduced on thousands of coins across the realm.
“Oh,” said Charlotte.
The King was a pitiful sight, unshaven, sweat-stained, his limbs rapped around him like a baby in swaddling. “Help poor Tom,” he crooned, glaring at them through bloodshot eyes. “Poor Tom’s a-cold.”
“Ah,” said Miles, stopping short so suddenly that Henrietta and Tommy racketed into him.
There, thought Robert, went the kidnapping theory tossed into a cocked hat.
The attendant crossed his arms smugly across his chest. “His Majesty ain’t in no fit condition for visitors.”
Charlotte’s wide gray-green eyes roamed from the bed to the attendant and back again. “I know what visitor His Majesty would most like,” she said quietly, in a voice that didn’t sound quite like hers.
“Visits from Her Majesty are stric’ly forbidden!” barked out the attendant. “Order of the Prince.”
“Not Her Majesty,” said Charlotte, in the same singsong voice. “The Princess Amelia. The King is always calling for her, the poor thing.”
Miles shot her a puzzled glance. Robert hoped he had the sense not to let his own confusion show on his face. What in the devil was she about? That she was up to something, he had no doubt. Robert regarded her closely, but her placid countenance provided no clue. She exuded serenity. It made Robert distinctly nervous.
“That’s what His Majesty did last time,” Charlotte said conversationally, never removing her eyes from the King. “He called and called for Princess Amelia. It broke the heart to hear it.”
As if on cue, the figure on the bed began to thrash back and forth, bleating, “Amelia! Amelia!”
The attendant stumped forwards, thrusting out his jaw belligerently. “Now look what you’ve done!”
Robert hastily moved between them, prepared to intervene for his lady’s honor, but Charlotte appeared entirely unperturbed. There was something almost fey about her, as she tilted her head at the guard, staring him down with her wide, nearsighted eyes.
“Not me,” she said enigmatically. “At least, not that way.”
She gestured towards the pathetic figure on the bed, and Robert noticed that, for all her appearance of calm, her hand was trembling.
But there wasn’t the slightest quaver in her voice as she announced, with complete conviction, “That man is not the King.”
Even the King forgot to croon as everyone stared, open-mouthed, at Charlotte.
“Is she — ?” The attendant jabbed one finger at his temple in the universal gesture for “absolutely barmy.”
Miles rested a brotherly hand on Charlotte’s shoulder, although whether for support or restraint was unclear.
“He does look like the King,” Miles said awkwardly. “Sounds like him, too.”
“But he isn’t.” Charlotte quite literally dug her heels into the floor, setting her chin at an angle that brought back memories from that summer all those years ago. Charlotte, Robert remembered, was the most accommodating creature in the world — until she wasn’t. She never fought; she never screamed; she just refused to budge. When something touched her stubborn streak, nothing in heaven or earth could move her. Not even the Dowager Duchess. A mere hospital orderly didn’t stand a chance.
“This isn’t the King,” Charlotte repeated. “If he were, he would have called the Princess by his pet name for her. He would never have called her Amelia like that.”
Was it Robert’s imagination, or had the creature on the bed modulated his thrashing in order to listen?
“But you don’t know that, do you?” Charlotte continued gently, addressing the pathetic figure on the bed. “They never told you.”
“Poor Tom’s a-cold,” whimpered the creature that might be King, reverting to King Lear.
Miles, who had been squinting down at the King, suddenly jabbed a finger at him. “Prendergast!” he exclaimed.
“Prendergast?” Robert echoed. Was that like “eureka!”? He really had been away from England far too long.
Miles rubbed his hands together happily, his hair flopping all over the place. “Horatio Prendergast! I thought you looked familiar. I saw your Edgar at Drury Lane,” he informed the thing on the bed. “Brilliant! For what it’s worth, I think you ought to have wound up with Cordelia in the end rather than that King of France chappie.”
“Help poor Tom?” ventured the creature on the bed, but it lacked conviction.
“So what you’re saying,” Tommy said slowly as the attendant backed away towards the wall, “is that this man is an actor.”
“A very good one,” declared Miles, scrupulously awarding credit where credit was due.
“Which is why,” said Charlotte, never taking her eyes from the squirming creature on the bed, “he was chosen to play the King. Tell me, Mr. Prendergast, how did they persuade you to take the part?”
“The foul fiend doth bite me in the back!” whimpered Mr. Prendergast, who did, indeed, look greatly afflicted, mostly by Charlotte.
Not, however, nearly so greatly afflicted as he pretended to be. “Has anyone else noticed that those blisters on his forehead are lip rouge?” chirped Henrietta, leaning forwards to swipe
out one of the offending splotches.
The “madman” jerked indignantly away from her hand, but not before she had managed to create a long, red smear across his forehead, effectively proving her point.
A good actor knew when it was time to bring the curtain down. Dropping the mad act, the false king struggled to swing into a sitting position, but his straight waistcoat made him flop about like a fish on a hook. Ever the gentleman, Miles put out a hand to help him up.
“Many thanks, sir.” Prendergast inclined his head, the one part of his body he could move freely, in gratitude. “Both for your aid and for your good notices for my performance. My other performance,” he added, with a wry glance around his audience.
“Well, you were rather hampered in this one,” Miles said generously.
Henrietta waved her husband to silence. “Then you are an actor?” At his nod, she asked intently, “Why?”
He didn’t pretend to misunderstand. “I was in prison for debt. Rather large debts,” he admitted. “It is not always easy to live in the style to which one would prefer to be accustomed. A man came to me. He told me the King was ill.”
“Yes?” urged Charlotte, like a child being told a bedtime story.
The actor smiled wryly at Miles. “Like you, sir, he had seen my Edgar. He told me he wanted . . . a proxy of sorts to stave off speculation that might undermine the government and compromise the war with France. I was told,” he added, “that it would only be for a few weeks, while the real King recovered elsewhere, free from the baneful influence of prying eyes.”
“So you agreed to play the King,” Charlotte summarized.
“For the good of the country,” the actor said piously, before adding, “and my debts paid in full.”
“Who hired you?” demanded Robert.
The actor shrugged, nearly overbalancing himself in the process. “A doctor. Dr. Simmons.”
“Who was as much a doctor as you are a King,” murmured Robert. “Was there no one else?”