Shall We Dance?

“Sir Nathaniel Rankin, miss, delighted to be at your service. Now, if you could just, um, boost yourself toward the door? The coach is listing rather dangerously over the ditch, and I’d hate to see it entirely tip over before I can yank you, er, assist you out of there.”

“I most thoroughly agree!” said the young woman, and more of her appeared in the doorway, minus the now-crushed straw bonnet he’d glimpsed earlier, revealing more of her face. “Hallo.”

Nate smiled. “You know, miss, there really is no entirely polite way to do this. So, if you don’t mind?” Before she could answer, he took her slim waist in both hands and lifted her out and up and then down, once her feet had cleared the bottom of the door.

Her hands were on his shoulders, his still on her waist, as she looked up into his face, her spectacles hanging only on a single ear, so that one rather lovely eye was uncovered and seen to be rather unfocused. “Oh,” she said, but she didn’t let go.

She was slim and rather tall, and with a mass of honey-blond hair that probably fell to her waist when it wasn’t locked inside that thick coil at the back of her neck. Her eyes were blue, like his, but much larger; appealingly large and innocent. She had lovely lips on a rather wide mouth, a tip-tilted nose, and she smelled like violets. He thought it was violets.

“Sir Nathaniel was it?” she prompted in a very pleasant voice. “You…you can release me now.”

“Hmm? Oh, right. Yes, of course,” Nate said, then grinned. “You first?”

Twin flags of color appeared in her cheeks at once, and she dropped her arms to her sides, as if his shoulders had just caught fire. “How…how rude of me, Sir Nathaniel. I should by rights introduce myself.”

“I would like that above all things,” Nate said, surprised to realize he not only sounded sincere, he was sincere. “Let me fetch that dratted bonnet, shall I?”

“You heard me,” she said, adjusting her spectacles.

“I’m afraid so, Miss—?”

“Penrose. Georgiana Penrose.” She took the bonnet, scowled at it, punched it back into some semblance of shape and jammed it back onto her head, tying the pink ribbons beneath a rather determined chin. “Are you on your way to see the queen, Sir Nathaniel?”

Opportunity rarely knocked to such advantage. “Yes, I am, as it happens, Miss Penrose. May I suggest I have my tiger bring my curricle over here and we might travel the remainder of the drive together?”

Georgiana looked to the curricle sitting across the roadway. “The entrance is only a hop and a skip—but arriving on foot wouldn’t look quite the thing, would it? That would be nice, Sir Nathaniel, thank you.”

Nate made short work of summoning the curricle, putting his tiger to assisting the coachman right the coach, handing Miss Penrose up onto the seat, and then a few moments later depositing her on the ground once more—again by the simple expedient of picking her up at her tiny waist, as she didn’t seem to mind.

Offering his arm, they climbed the front steps, and Nate lifted the knocker, twice, then waited for someone to answer the summons.

That took some time, during which Nate tried for something else to say to Miss Penrose and could think of nothing. How unusual.

The door opened, and a liveried footman eyed them curiously. “The queen, she is not receiving today,” he said with a thick Italian accent, and attempted to shut the door once more.

“Oh, no, wait!” Miss Penrose said, actually putting out her arm to press her palm against the door, an action that classified her, in Nate’s mind, as a real Trojan. “I am Georgiana Penrose, here to see Miss Amelia Fredericks. At her invitation. Please, tell her I’m here?”

The footman looked at Georgiana, looked at her hand, pressed against the door, looked at Nate. “Also to see Miss Fredericks?”

“Naturally,” Nate said as he handed the footman his card, still allowing fate to guide his moves. After all, anything was better than “Would you like to buy some apples.”

“Miss Fredericks, she’s in the bath. Always in the bath, Miss Fredericks. You’ll have to be waiting.”

“We can do that,” Nate said, looking around the marble-lined foyer, wondering how this indiscreet fellow had been set loose to attend to visitors. “Where is the major domo?”

“Scusi?”

“The butler, man. Your superior?”

“Cane grosso!” The footman made several gestures with his hands, none of them flattering. “He has put the tail between the legs and run off.”

“I see,” Nate said, his Italian rusty, but not beyond knowing the footman had called the absent butler a big dog, which he imagined was some sort of insult. “But enough chitchat, my good man, riveting as it has been. Lead on.”

The footman twisted his face into an expression half confused, half amused, and motioned for them to follow him.

Nate once again offered Miss Penrose his arm.

“I thought you said you’d come to have an audience with Her Royal Majesty.”

“I did? Well, curse me for silly. You must have misunderstood,” Nate said smoothly, avoiding her gaze.

“I don’t think so, but it would be likewise silly to argue, wouldn’t it? How do you know Amelia?” Georgiana asked as they followed the footman to a small reception room just to the right of the foyer.

“I don’t,” Nate said, waiting until Georgiana had seated herself before taking up a position of power—he hoped—in front of the cold fireplace; it had always seemed to work for his father. “Would you care for the truth?”

Georgiana looked at him curiously. “You were going to lie? Oh, don’t tell me you’re some nasty journalist, or one of those horrid men determined to destroy the queen’s reputation.”

Nate looked down at himself, then frowned at Georgiana. “I look like a nasty journalist? In this coat? Well, that’s lowering, isn’t it?”

“I’m sorry,” she said, then that determined chin rose once more. “No, I’m not. Why are you here? Amelia is my good friend, and I would be devastated if I’ve somehow aided you in entering an establishment you have no business entering.”

“I’m no bogeyman, Miss Penrose,” Nate said, and gave up telling her anything but the embarrassing truth. “I’m here because my aunt Rowena, a considerable admirer of the queen and missing more than a few slates off her roof, if you must know, believes that the king may be out to murder her. The queen, that is, not Aunt Rowena, although, with my aunt, you can never really be sure. I couldn’t turn down my aunt’s request that I come save the queen from a dire fate—disky heart, you see—and was sitting across the road, cudgeling my brain on how to get myself past the butler when you came along. So, when you get down to the bottom of it, I suppose I’m here to save the queen from the king’s axman, which you have to admit is dashed brave of me.”

Georgiana slowly took off her spectacles, then just as deliberately replaced them. “I see. You’re a madman, Sir Nathaniel, and a very bad liar. Would you mind terribly if I screamed for help now?”

“Oh, must you? Don’t be so chickenhearted, Miss Penrose. I’d really much rather you allowed Miss Fredericks to believe that I am your very persistent suitor, welcomely so, which would give me a jolly solid reason for accompanying you here today, and every day you visit with Miss Fredericks. You do plan to come here often, I most sincerely hope? Aunt Rowena would be over the moon if you do.”

Then he grinned again, knowing that grin to be one of his more appealing attributes (his mother always said so). “Besides, although I’ve only just come up with the idea, it’s rather good, isn’t it? If we don’t look at the thing too closely.”

“You…you want to pretend to be my suitor? Are you mad? We don’t even know each other.”

“True,” Nate agreed, trotting out his smile for another airing. “But that can always be remedied. Please, Miss Penrose, have pity on this desperate man. We’ll visit with your friend, then drive back to town to make a call on my aunt. Five minutes in her presence, Miss Penrose, and I promise you, you will understand everything. Oh, and pity me greatly into the bargain.”

He kept smiling, attempting to look harmless, as she stared at him, seemed to be measuring him up against something or other. “What was that saying about looking a gift horse in the—” She closed her mouth firmly, then began again. “Very well, Sir Nathaniel, I agree. But only for this one time, unless your aunt can convince me to the contrary. Otherwise, my mother will accompany me on future visits here. And you’ll behave yourself? You won’t make a fool of me?”

He sat down beside her, lifted her hand to his lips. “Georgie, my sweet—I can hardly call you Miss Penrose, now can I, and you can call me Nate—Miss Fredericks is going to believe you are the happiest, most adored woman in the world.”

“That’s enough sloppiness for now,” Georgiana said, pulling her hand free. “Our meeting has probably been inevitable. We’re both quite insane, you know. Nate.”

“True enough, Georgie, but no one will notice if you do something about that hair,” he said, pleased with himself. “Fetching color, but it’s sort of falling apart thanks to that dratted bonnet.”

Georgiana hopped up and went to the mirror hanging above a small table. “Yes, I can see that. My brains are leaking out. You wouldn’t happen to have a comb, Nate, would you?”

AMELIA STOOD looking out one of the windows in her bedchamber, rhythmically pulling a silver-backed brush that had been a present from King Joachim himself through her still-slightly-damp hair while she watched the parade of boats. If anything, there were more of them this afternoon.

Queen Caroline had decided to take to her bed for the day, clutching a locket with a lock of Princess Charlotte’s hair inside it, twined with a lock of her stillborn grandson’s hair. The new king had such a keepsake, and Caroline had bribed at least a half-dozen individuals and threatened several more with revealing their past indiscretions, and had at last been delivered of a similar locket only three months earlier. Whether or not the hair truly had come from the princess and the young prince Amelia didn’t know, and didn’t inquire.

Still, rather than cheering her, comforting her, the locket had reduced the queen first to tears, then to anger at the world (and her husband and his family in particular), and then had settled into a deep melancholy that worried Amelia no little bit.