A Kiss at Midnight

Page 12

He came, and she gave him a piece of cheese.
“Tedious business,” Algie remarked.
“Yes,” Kate agreed with a sigh.
“But they do seem to be less noisy. I’m afraid Victoria has too soft a nature. Just look what happened to her poor lip.”
Once they were seated Algie said, rather unnecessarily, “That was my uncle. The prince.” His tone was reverent and hushed.
“He seemed princelike,” Kate agreed.
“Can you imagine what His Highness would make of Victoria’s background?” He sounded horrified at the thought.
“I wonder what his bride will be like,” Kate said, again picturing the prince silhouetted against the sun. He was the sort of man who would marry a glimmering princess from a foreign land, a woman wrapped in ropes of pearls and diamonds.
“Russia women are dark-haired,” Algie said, trying to sound as if he knew what he was talking about. “I might have introduced you, but I thought it was better that he not notice you until . . .” He waved a hand. “You know, until you change.”
As far as Kate could tell, he hadn’t minded a bit that Kate didn’t look as pretty as Victoria—until now.
“I’m sorry,” she told him.
He focused, blinking a little. “For what?”
“I’m not as much fun to have on your arm as Victoria. The prince would surely have noticed how beautiful she is.”
Algie was too young to dissemble. “I do wish she were here,” he said. “But it’s probably better this way, because what if she saw him and she decided . . .” His voice trailed off.
“Victoria adores you,” Kate told him, feeling very pleased with herself for suppressing an impulse to add “more the fool she.” They were perfectly matched, Victoria and Algie: both fuzzy and sweet and awed by anyone with two thoughts to knock together. “And remember, the prince would never in a million years marry someone like Victoria. I expect that he’s too high in the instep for even a duke’s daughter, let alone someone like my stepsister.”
Caesar growled out the window at a passing carriage. “On the floor,” she said sternly, and he hopped down. But Freddie put his front paws on the seat and whined gently, so she let him jump up and sit next to her. He leaned his trembling little body against her and then collapsed, chin in her lap.
“I say, that’s not fair,” Algie pointed out.
“Life isn’t fair,” Kate said. “Freddie is being rewarded for not barking.”
“He’s brilliant,” Algie said, rather unexpectedly.
Kate blinked down at Freddie, who was decidedly not brilliant.
“I mean the prince. My mother said that he actually took a degree at Oxford. I didn’t even bother going to university. But he took a top degree in ancient history. Or something like that.”
The prince had not only arrogance and royal blood and a truly beautiful riding coat, but brains ?
Not so likely. Weren’t all those princes inbred? “Likely they give every prince a top degree just for gracing the door of the university,” she pointed out. “After all, what else could they say? ‘I do apologize, Your Highness, but you’re as stupid as a hedgehog, and so we can’t give you a degree’?”
As they trundled the last miles to the castle, she carefully nurtured that sprig of disrespect for a man whose hair curled wildly around his shoulders, who spent his time careening about accompanied by scented courtiers, and who didn’t bother to greet her.
He counted her beneath his notice, which was humiliating but not exactly unexpected. She was beneath his notice.
In fact, thinking about the way he looked at her was almost amusing, in retrospect. She just had to get through the next few days. Then she could take all her newly altered clothing and go to London and find just the sort of man she wanted.
She could see him in her mind’s eye. She didn’t want a man like that prince; what she wanted was someone more like Squire Mamluks, whose property ran close by Yarrow House. He was a sweet man who doted on his wife. They had nine children. That’s what she wanted. Someone straight and true, decent, and kind to the bone.
The very thought made her smile, which caught Algie’s attention. “Did you see the waistcoat Mr. Toloose was wearing? He was the tall one, with the striped costume.” Obviously Algie had been experiencing some anxiety.
“Yours is very nice,” she assured him.
Algie looked down at his padded chest. “I thought so, I mean, I do think so. But that waistcoat . . .”
They had both found something to desire.
Nine
K ate didn’t know much about castles; she had only seen engravings in one of her father’s books. She had thought Pomeroy Castle would have airy flounces and furbelows, slender turrets, a pile of rose-colored brick in the setting sun.
Instead it was four-square and masculine, with the aggressive look of a military fortress. The two turrets were round and squat. There was nothing lyrical about it. It bristled, its walls thick and bossy, like a stout watchman with someone to scold.
The carriage trolled down a gravel drive, through the stone archway and into a courtyard. The door to the carriage swung open and Kate stepped down, taking the hand of one of Mariana’s groomsmen, to find that the courtyard was so crowded with people that she was tempted to turn and peer under the carriage to see if they had accidentally run someone over.
A confused stream of persons was clattering in every direction, heading for arched passages on all sides. As she watched, a donkey cart piled with sacks of laundry narrowly avoided a man holding a stick, from which hung at least ten fish, bound for the kitchens, no doubt. He was followed by a man carrying a crate of live chickens, their heads poking between the slats. Two boys were carrying bunches of roses bigger than their heads, and narrowly missed being drenched as a maid tossed out what one could only hope was nothing worse than dirty water.
Castle footmen, dressed in elegant, somber livery, quickly ushered them over the flagstones and through a second archway, into a second courtyard . . . where everything was transformed. Here was a quiet, beautiful space, as if the castle fiercely repelled those outside the walls, but celebrated its own occupants.
The last rays of the sun caught Kate’s eyes and dazzled them, making the windows look like molten gold, and the people strolling through the inner courtyard like denizens of the French court: beautiful, relaxed, noble.
The castle was sober outside, and drunk on champagne inside.
She felt a flash of pure fear. What on earth was she doing, descending from a carriage in an ill-fitting traveling costume, pretending to be—
She glanced at Algie and saw the tight anxiety in his eyes and knew that he didn’t belong here either: that this gathering of people shouting at one another in French and German, so carefully elegant and carelessly beautiful, was more than he had experienced before.
And he was her family, or he soon would be. “You look splendid,” she said warmly. “Just look how unfashionably that gentleman is dressed!”
In fact, she had no real idea what was fashionable and what wasn’t, but it was a fair bet. The man in question had almost no collar at all, whereas Algie had three.
He followed her gaze and immediately brightened up. “Dear me, just look at those buttons,” he remarked.