Kasey Michaels - Shall We Dance?

The queen had been correct in what she’d said. They looked quite unalike in their form, their figure.

But the eyes were the same soft brown, a common enough color. The hair was the same auburn…although the queen’s had gone silver years ago, and now went blond, black and even red, depending on the woman’s whim and her choice of dye pot or wig.

Her nose was not quite so long as the queen’s, but bore the same rather aristocratic line; her top lip more full, her cheeks and chin not quite so rounded.

And yet, at times, during the bad times, when the queen cried into her cups, she still would cling to Amelia and call her “sweet daughter,” so that the very first thing Amelia had done upon their return to England was to send a maid off to procure a copy of Memoirs of Her Late Royal Highness Princess Charlotte Augusta.

She’d devoured every word of the thick tome, inspected every illustration; even compared the sampling of the princess’s handwriting with her own…and she’d wept for Princess Caroline, the banished mother, now the unwanted Queen of England.

She wasn’t at all like Charlotte, Amelia had decided, was no more or less than the grateful orphan who had been taken in, made to feel a part of the household, the way William had been, the way the others had been. But, like the others, she’d dreamed. What if the rumors were true? What if William really was the bastard son? And if not William…why not one of the others? Why not she herself?

Amelia had been both ignored by the queen and doted upon by the queen, had been taken into the queen’s confidence on many occasions. She acted now as companion to the queen, she mothered the queen, as it were. How marvelous it would be if there was more than this lifelong connection of proximity. How marvelous if she were not an orphan, if the woman she so worried for and yet admired was her own mother.

Stupid. Stupid, stupid, wishful dream…

William had seen Princess Charlotte, been in her company, until her father the then Prince Regent had found out and begun the horrible campaign to completely keep the queen from her only child, removed her from her mother’s household forever by the time she was eight years old.

Although only slightly younger than William, Amelia had never been allowed to be in the same room as Princess Charlotte. She’d only catch glimpses of her, confined to the housekeeper’s quarters until the royal heir had been denied further visits to the household. Amelia had been moved Abovestairs then, and into near-constant association with the then Princess Caroline, even as William was given shorter and shorter shrift.

And thus the childish hopes, the childish dreams…

The only painting Amelia had seen of Princess Charlotte had been one of Caroline, then Princess of Wales, and her infant daughter, that had traveled everywhere with them; from England, to the Continent, to Italy, to Jericho.

And the dream had remained…

Until the book. Until the illustrations. Any childish hope, any lingering silly, romantic dream she had still harbored that the queen could be her own mother had been dashed when she’d seen the illustrations of a grown Princess Charlotte. They were nothing alike. Not really. And William, wherever he had taken himself off to this time, was no more alike to Princess Charlotte than chalk was to cheese. William had let his dream die; and so should she.

Ah, childish dreams. Childish hopes. Silly yearnings.

They had no part in her life, and had to be vanquished, set aside, for she was a woman grown now, and beyond childish things.

And she had a Responsibility to the queen, that poor, frightened, persecuted creature who had not given Amelia life, but had, in her way, watched over that life.

Her thoughts returned to the book she had read, read again and then hidden away at the very bottom of her traveling trunk, beneath a cloak she’d long ago ceased to wear.

What a sad story, what a heartwrenching commentary. The prince who married without love, the princess who had been exiled almost the moment she had expelled the heir from her womb. The determined campaign to show the princess in the worst of all lights, to besmirch her name, brand her a harlot, keep her from her daughter, exclude her from Society.

Only the king, poor mad George III, had dared to champion her, but poor mad George had forgotten her, as he had forgotten the world, and now he was gone. Caroline’s sole protector from her husband’s determined campaign to destroy her no longer stood in the way of that destruction.

If the princess—now the queen—had decided to remove herself overseas and at last live up to her terrible reputation, to enjoy life after her near imprisonment by her husband…? Well, what of it? Her only child was dead, her grandson dying with her. Why shouldn’t she seek some happiness for herself?

And they had been happy, hadn’t they? The traveling, the adventures, all the glorious people they had met. Even Pergami; laughing, teasing, lighthearted Pergami. They’d frolicked on the shore of Lake Como; the princess had danced the nights away, laughed the days away, hidden her sorrows, her demons. They’d ridden into Jerusalem on donkeys, visited all the Holy Places, gone by water to Syracuse. The princess had been happy, or at least as happy as she could be.

But then she became the queen.

“And now this,” Amelia said aloud, turning away from the mirror, to glare at the official document that had so disrupted their small household. “The lengths to which he will travel to humiliate and debase his own wife. How can anyone hate so much? Why the horrible man doesn’t simply find a way to have her beheaded and be done with it is beyond me.”

Amelia, startled at her own words, turned back to the mirror, to confront her reflection. “My God. Would he? Would he dare…?”

“SHE BELIEVES THIS? Stap me, Mama, next she’ll be telling us she sees multicolored elephants copulating on the ceilings.”

“Nathaniel, don’t be crude,” his mother said. “And be quiet, for goodness sake, or your father will overhear us. You know how he always manages to be around just when I want him elsewhere.”

“Yes,” Sir Nathaniel Rankin, baronet, said as he split his stylish coattails and sat down beside his mother in a small anteroom located in Lady Hertford’s town mansion. “I imagine he’d order coaches to Bedlam for the pair of you. Blister it, Mama, Aunt Rowena’s a nice enough old tabby, but—”

“My sister is not a nice old tabby,” his mother interrupted.

“Grandfather should have insisted she marry, Papa says. A husband and a gaggle of children may have settled her.”

“I know, I know,” his mother said, sighing. “And Edmund was such a nice man, even with the squint. But Rowena would have none of him. She has always been much more enamored of her dogs.”

Nate closed his startlingly blue eyes, pinched at the bridge of his nose. “I’m little more than an infant, Mama. Should I be hearing this?”

His mother’s ivory-sticked fan smacked against his forearm even as the woman giggled. “You’re so naughty, Nate. Shame on you. Now, to be serious.”

“Do we have to be?”

“We do, yes. I told you Rowena’s fears, but I didn’t tell you their foundation.”

“Now that’s a thought I’ve never had. Aunt Rowena needs a reason?”

“She can be silly, I know. But this time? This time she may be right.”

“Someone wants the new queen dead. She read it in her tea cup, or Tarot cards, or maybe saw it in some clouds. I remember. You only said it the once, but I remember. Did her tea leaves also line up to spell out a list of suspected assassins? Only seems fair.”

“No, they—I mean, she did not, but the answer should be obvious,” his mother said, then leaned closer, to whisper into his ear. “The new king, of course. He loathes the poor thing.”