A Kiss at Midnight

Page 59

He bowed yet again. Thank God, at that moment Wick touched him on the shoulder, so he turned to Tatiana and offered his arm. “Your Highness, may I accompany you to the dining room?”
She smiled at him, and he noticed that though she was shy, she wasn’t paralyzed by it. Someday she would be a composed and doubtless articulate woman. A perfect princess, in short.
Prince Dimitri fell in behind, with Gabriel’s aunt, Princess Sophonisba, on his arm, and they led the way to the dining room, followed by a great train of jewels, velvets, and silks. The women were exquisite, like delectable pillowy sweets. The men were groomed and polished, like the sleek aristocrats they were.
The only person he wanted to see, the only person he wanted to eat with, was upstairs, wearing a simple gown, a pink wig, and a pair of wax breasts.
Prince Dimitri was quickly swept into an argument with Lady Dagobert about whether the Portuguese court should remain in Rio de Janeiro or eventually return to Portugal, which left Gabriel to make conversation with Tatiana.
Except that his aunt Sophonisba was too old to care about rules dictating who spoke to whom, and so she barked a whole series of questions across the table at Tatiana. Sophonisba was a bad-tempered termagant, by anyone’s measure. His brother Augustus loathed her, and had thrown her onto the boat with the same satisfaction with which he discarded the lion.
“Youngest of four, are you?” Sophonisba said, as the first course was being cleared away. She paused and reached under her wig to scratch her scalp. “There were eight of us. Nursery was a madhouse.”
Tatiana smiled and murmured something. She was obviously kindhearted, and if a little taken aback by his aunt’s abrasive manners, wasn’t letting it affect her courtesy.
“You’re a pretty little thing,” Sophonisba said, picking up a chicken leg and waving it as if she’d never heard of a fork. “What are you looking at?” she snapped at Gabriel. “If it’s good enough for Queen Margherita, it’s good enough for me.”
Tatiana was giggling.
“ La Regina Margherita mangia il pollo con le dita ,” Sophonisba told her. “Can you translate that, girl?”
“I’m not very good with Italian,” Tatiana said, “but I think that Queen Margherita eats chicken with her fingers?”
“Good for you,” Sophonisba said. “How many languages do you speak?”
“My brother and I sent our children to be educated in Switzerland,” Prince Dimitri said, catching the question. “Tatiana’s one of the smartest in our brood; up to five languages, aren’t you, dumpling?”
“Uncle Dimitri!” Tatiana cried.
“Not supposed to call her dumpling anymore,” the prince said, grinning so widely that Gabriel could see every missing tooth. “Though she used to be the most adorable dumpling baby I’d ever seen. We love dumplings in Russia; they’re more precious than rubles.”
Tatiana rolled her eyes.
“I never married, you know,” Sophonisba barked.
She poked Gabriel and he jumped. His mind had drifted to Kate once again. “This fellow’s rascally father, my brother, never accepted an offer for my hand. I could have had anyone!” She scowled at the table, as if daring someone to disagree.
The truth was that Sophonisba had been betrothed to a sprig of a princeling in Germany, but after she had arrived at his court and he had spent a day or two with her, he fled. She’d been sent home in great disgrace, and the Grand Duke never again bothered to try to fix a marriage for her.
“Her Highness,” Gabriel told Tatiana, “was a famed beauty.”
“I still am,” Sophonisba said promptly. “A woman’s beauty isn’t just a matter of youth.”
Tatiana nodded obediently. “My grandmother always said that the greatest beauties in her day were so covered with powder and patches that one couldn’t tell if there was a woman or a horse underneath.”
There was a moment of silence. Sophonisba had four or five patches stuck onto her powdered face; one was coming undone and hanging from her cheekbone.
Tatiana’s mouth fell open and she turned pink as an autumn sunset. “Not that I meant to indicate anything of the sort about you , Your Highness,” she gasped.
“Wasn’t around when your grandmother was young,” Sophonisba said with patent dishonesty, since she had to be seventy-five if she was a day. “I wouldn’t know what she was talking about.”
She turned her head and barked down the table at Dimitri. “That’s utter nonsense, what you’re sayin’ about the Portuguese. Not a drunk in the bunch of them.”
“I do apologize,” came a quiet voice at Gabriel’s right elbow.
“My aunt took no offense,” he said, smiling down at Tatiana. She was bloody young.
“Sometimes the wrong thing just comes out of my mouth,” she whispered.
“Prince!” his aunt said, interrupting this charming, if tedious, revelation. “Not to put too fine a point on it, my bladder is about to burst.”
Gabriel rose to his feet. “If you will all excuse me,” he told the table, “the princess is experiencing a malady and I shall escort her to her chambers.”
“It isn’t a malady; it’s just old age,” Sophonisba said, waving her stick at Wick. He came immediately, drew back her chair, and helped her to her feet.
“You’re the best of them,” Sophonisba told him, as she always did. She pinched his cheek and then looked triumphantly around the table. “Born on the wrong side of the blanket, but he’s just as much a prince as his brother here.”
Lady Dagobert turned purple with indignation at this breach of decorum, but Prince Dimitri looked as if he was biting back a smile, which was a point in his favor.
As Wick was helping Sophonisba straighten her skirts and get her stick in the right position, Gabriel bent down at Tatiana’s shoulder. “You see,” he said quietly, “nothing you could say would ever embarrass me.”
She looked up, dimples in evidence. She’d make a lovely princess; even close contact with Sophonisba wouldn’t shake her composure. Plus, she knew languages.
She was perfect.
His aunt’s chambers were on the bottom level of the tower. It took them a good twenty-five minutes to reach the door of her room, as she constantly paused to rub her ankle and complain about the flagstones, the damp, and the way he held his arm—too stiff for her liking, she pronounced.
The moment the door closed behind her, he turned about and bolted up the stone steps.
He’d been gone for almost two hours. At this rate, Kate had had more than enough time to absorb each picture in Aretino’s book.
Thirty-two
M eanwhile, in Gabriel’s chamber, Kate had opened the salacious little volume, peered just long enough to ascertain that, yes, Aretino’s men provided little comparison to Gabriel in the most pertinent area, and closed it again. She didn’t have any wish to examine engravings of men and women intertwined on a bed. Or on a chair, or anywhere else.
She had the living, naked body of Gabriel in her mind, and nothing could interest her besides that.
She put the book down and walked over to a large table set up before the window. Gabriel had forgotten to show her the pot that once held a child’s toys, but she guessed it was represented by a carefully arranged collection of shards. To the right of these was a piece of foolscap, covered with precise, beautifully written notes about the pot.