Shall We Dance?. Kasey Michaels

into your cheek.”

      Perry spared a moment to think of his good, once hot-headed friend (hence the dueling scar on Perry’s cheek) and their very recent coup of routing Jarrett Rolin after the rotter had attempted to kidnap Westham’s beloved.

      “Never mind that. Rolin is a bastard. A pretty bastard, but a bastard all the same. The man lives to seduce innocents. You can’t think to use him.”

      “Can’t we? He’s perfect, Nevvie. An outcast from Society for the nonce, hiding out on his estate in Surrey. The princess adores outcasts, feels an affinity for them, I believe. But, as I said, he would be our second choice.”

      “You know, Uncle, if I have a failing in life it has always been in underestimating you.”

      “Only that, Nevvie? If you applied to me, I could provide you with a detailed list of your shortcomings. Now hurry along, dear boy. Miss Fredericks awaits. Oh, one thing more. Report here tomorrow and I’ll explain.”

      “I could be on the continent by tomorrow,” Perry suggested, his hand on the door latch.

      “True, but you won’t be. I do so enjoy honorable gentlemen. And you are that, Perry, for all that you’re also an idiot. Tomorrow at two, agreed?”

      Perry inclined his head slightly, then departed, carrying off the broadsheet he’d grabbed up, hoping the artist had at least gotten the slim female figure right.

      “I COULD BE SKINNY and bony like you, you know, instead of more fashionably plump,” Her Royal Majesty said as Amelia Fredericks entered the small salon overlooking the Thames. “If I so wished.”

      “Yes, ma’am,” Amelia said, smiling at the queen as she placed a fresh dish of boiled sweets on the table beside the woman, then retook her seat in front of the window. “A lovely day, isn’t it, although the sun doesn’t seem quite as bright here as it did in Jerusalem.”

      “Nothing seems quite as bright here,” the queen said, her scowl warning Amelia that another fit of hysteria was knocking on the door of the woman’s consciousness, eager for admittance. She had, just minutes earlier, climbed up into the boughs of the queen’s injured pride and dragged her down with the promise of the boiled sweets. “Rainy, dreary, damp. And that pile they call a palace? Blow your skirts up over your head, just walking down the hallways on a windy day. I hate it. I hate it all. I hate them all. And I’m old, and I’m ugly, and I’m fat. I hate me!”

      The dish of boiled sweets landed on the fireplace grate and smashed into several pieces, the candies skittering everywhere.

      Amelia suppressed a sigh. “I’ll ring for someone.”

      “No! Leave it.” The queen blinked rapidly, her kohl-darkened eyes already tearing. “I must stop this. I must collect myself. That sniveling selfish bastard will not do this to me. I am queen!”

      “Yes, ma’am, that you are,” Amelia said, her gaze shifting toward the thick pages of vellum sitting on the table in front of the queen, all stiff and important and covered in official seals. “This means nothing, ma’am, less than nothing. His Royal Majesty is desperate, and desperate men make mistakes. Mr. Brougham said as much before he left us.”

      “Henry Brougham, Amelia, wants what he has always wanted, to use me to further his own ends. It has been this way for years. I could have settled for a sizable allowance and exile, you know, but Brougham talked me out of it, talked me into coming back here. He’s still talking, damn his eyes. You think he cares a fig for me? Tories, Whigs. They fight each other, using me as their battlefield, their cannon fodder.”

      Amelia nodded. That was her role, to agree, to silently nod, and she knew her place. Chafed at it, but knew it.

      “I should never have come back here. Even the old king tried to use me, damn his soul. Sick? That’s what they said, that he was sick, off his head. And I still say that the old madman tossed me down on a couch soon as he came back from opening Parliament—when was that? Oh, I remember. Back in ’02, while George and I were still pretending. Threw me down, Amelia, and would have had his way with me, were it not that the couch had no back and I was able to kick him off, roll free of him. I never moved so fast, before or since. Filthy Hanovers, the worst of our family. Users. And they all did their best to use me. Me, and my poor Charlotte, lost and gone these two terrible years. They kept her from me, you know, even when she cried for me, begged for me. And now she’s gone. My own child…”

      Amelia’s soft heart was touched. Her Royal Highness could be crude, could be cantankerous, could be ridiculously generous one moment and horribly selfish the next; dangerously free with her affections and her words. Mercurial. But, at the bottom of it, at the heart of it, the woman hadn’t had the best of lives, and Amelia loved her dearly.

      And, loving her dearly, she said the first thing that sprang to her tongue, “We can leave again, ma’am. The world awaits, all of it eager to please you.”

      The queen, her coal-black hair fresh from another visit with the dye pots, nodded fiercely, the childish curls bouncing around her rouged cheeks. “Yes, yes. We could go. Pergami would fly to me, I know it, if I were to abandon this damn, damp island. Byron left, you know. Ungrateful England all but tossed him out.” She blinked back tears. “He was such a pretty boy, even with that twisted foot. I could have had him, you know, if I’d but crooked a finger in his direction. Chose Spencer Perceval instead. He was helpful, but not pretty. Sir Sydney Smith? Ah, he was almost pretty, and reportedly hung like a—”

      “Yes, ma’am,” Amelia said placidly.

      “But you know, Amelia, I only really committed adultery the once—three or six times, in truth. But that was with the husband of Maria Fitzherbert.”

      Amelia couldn’t help but smile at Her Majesty’s reference to the king’s morganatic bride. The queen’s outrageous statements, as well as her rather erratic behavior, had lost the power to embarrass her years ago. Still, she had to steer the woman back on point, even as she’d stupidly let it slip that she wished to put England behind them once and for all. “So, dear ma’am, shall I give the order? We can set sail by week’s end. Paris. Rome. Anywhere your heart desires.”

      The queen snorted. “I doubt we could make Dover on what’s left of my allowance. That hangs in the balance, you know. The king—I spit on calling him thusly—holds the purse strings now. That’s another part of this Pains-and-Penalties business. My pain, the penalties he’d order. I have to win, Amelia, or else he’ll control every aspect, every penny in my purse, every bite that goes into my mouth. He’d like nothing more than for me to live in penury.”

      “Then we stay,” Amelia said, continuing to guide her queen back toward the correct, the only, path, without letting the woman see the leash. Amelia had been against their return, but also knew they had no choice but to stay and fight now that they were here. But it had to be the queen’s decision, at the end of it.

      The queen’s sigh ended in a curse that had a lot to do with hungry mice finding a home in her estranged husband’s bowels. “Yes, we stay. We stay and we fight. Oh, Amelia.” She moaned piteously, holding out her hands so that Amelia left her seat and took those hands in her own. “I do it for you, my dearest girl. Not for me, for I am old, and ravaged, and have no future save pain until death. For you, for my dear William, for all of you. And for England! England needs me! England loves me!”

      With the queen’s many rings painfully biting into her skin, Amelia smiled and dropped into a deep curtsy. “And England thanks you, my queen.”

      “Yes, yes, of course, there’s all that drivel, too,” the queen said curtly, releasing Amelia’s abused fingers as the pendulum of her mood swung once more. “Look at that mess. For God’s sake, girl, get someone in here to clean it. Am I to live in filth as well as penury?”

      “Yes, ma’am,” Amelia said, hiding a smile as she gave the bell rope a tug, then returned to gather up the official notice of the Pains and Penalties that had made for an exceedingly hysterical morning. “With Your Majesty’s permission, I shall retire