The Princess Plan. Julia London

he croaked. “Find him and bring him at once.”

      More people left the room. More people came in. A maid to clean up the mess he’d made. Egius to dress him. He couldn’t undertake a murder investigation in a dressing gown.

      “I want to see him,” Sebastian said to no one in particular.

      “I would advise against it,” said Rostafan.

      “I want to see him,” Sebastian insisted. He signaled Egius to follow him into the dressing room. When he was dressed, he entered the crowded sitting room again and looked at his field marshal. Without a word, Rostafan went to the door and opened it.

      Sebastian followed him, striding down the carpeted hall to a door at the end. He braced himself, then stepped inside the small bedchamber and looked toward the bed. The first thing he saw was Matous’s gloved hand hanging off the side of the bed. He’d been born with the deformity, a misshapen stump of a hand with no fingers. And while one would scarcely notice his hand, as Matous had adapted quite well, there were some things that were difficult for him. Sebastian would imagine that fighting off an attacker would be one of those things.

      His belly churned, but he stepped closer. There was a massive amount of blood, and a gaping wound across Matous’s throat. But Sebastian was surprised that his friend looked so peaceful in death, his face free of the creases of worry. He looked as if he was sleeping, his dreams gentle, and below his gentle, dreaming face, an ugly, bloody gash.

      Who would have done this?

       Who?

      The English guards had arrived, and the Alucian guards were insistent that Sebastian leave the room. He was escorted back to his sitting room, which had filled with more people. Alucians, mostly, including the foreign minister’s wife, who was quietly weeping in a corner, consoled by Rostafan. There were two Englishmen in heated conversation with Anastasan. Sebastian was surrounded, and yet, he had never felt so alone in his life.

      He’d never felt such guilt, either. Matous had wanted to speak to him, but Sebastian had been ruled by his cock, too intent on relieving it with Mrs. Forsythe. He needed a moment to himself. He wanted to mourn his secretary and friend privately.

      He would not be allowed that opportunity. He would be watched by everyone. Even now, as he tried to absorb the shock, a frail Englishman had inched forward. His moustache was in need of a trim, and his skin was a peculiar shade of gray. “I beg your pardon, Your Royal Highness, but if I may inquire as to the last time you saw Mr. Reyno alive?”

      Sebastian felt sick, as if his breakfast would depart his body at any moment. He swallowed down the nausea. He’d been taught from the time he was a lad to put on a face to the public. “Last night, at the ball,” he said calmly and prepared himself to answer more questions.

      He would do anything to find who had done this to Matous.

       CHAPTER SIX

       Commissioned for a dear sum from the most prestigious milliners and modistes of London, the masks worn at the Royal Masquerade Ball were a sight to behold. Some of them defied the laws of gravity in their precarious perch upon unknown faces. Some defied the laws of fine taste, and in particular a keen eye was cast upon the bird’s nest that sat upon a lady’s head as if she expected her chicks would come home to roost at any moment.

      —Honeycutt’s Gazette of Fashion and Domesticity for Ladies

      ELIZA, CAROLINE AND HOLLIS had returned to Caroline’s lovely Mayfair home at a quarter till five in the morning, and slept like angels until one o’clock in the afternoon. When at last they did rise, they carried themselves down to the dining room, still in their nightgowns and dressing robes and their hair unbound. They had breakfast, lazily picking over the food as they reviewed the masquerade ball in detail.

      “Did you see Lady Elizabeth Keene?” Hollis asked with much excitement. She’d drawn her legs up under her nightgown and wrapped one arm around them as she nibbled toast.

      “Who?” Eliza asked.

      “Lady Elizabeth Keene, darling. If you’d come with me to the recital at the zoological gardens, you would have seen her.”

      “I leave the gathering of gossip to you, Hollis, you know it very well. I am better use to you in putting the gazette together.”

      “Well, she and Lady Katherine Maugham are fierce rivals and she’s livid she’s not yet been noticed by Prince Sebastian when everyone said she would be. She was quite attentive to a certain English gentleman for spite.”

      “The bodice of Lady Elizabeth’s gown was cut so low, I should think she might have had all the attention she pleased,” Caroline said, waggling her brows as she bit off a piece from the slice of ham that she held delicately between two fingers. She had taken two chairs—one for sitting, one as an ottoman for her legs.

      “But I thought Lady Katherine was livid she’d not yet been noticed by Prince Sebastian,” Eliza said, confused as to who was livid about what.

      “I hardly noticed Elizabeth’s bodice at all,” Hollis said. She was studying a bit of paper she’d smoothed on the table. It contained her notes. “I could not tear my eyes away from her mask. It looked like an awful bird’s nest perched on her head.”

      Eliza gasped. “I did see her! I didn’t know who she was, but I feared the poor thing had lost her fortune and had been forced to fashion her own mask.”

      Caroline giggled.

      “Lady Elizabeth has forty thousand pounds a year, you know,” Hollis announced without looking up from her notes. “Lady Katherine has only thirty thousand pounds a year.”

      Eliza and Caroline looked at each other. Their silence prompted Hollis to look up, too. “What?” She was clearly surprised by their surprise. “Did you think you’re my only source of information, Caro?”

      “I assure you, I was under no such illusion,” Caroline drawled.

      “All right, darlings, we must decide what will be recorded in the gazette about the ball!” Hollis said brightly. “Firstly, we must make comment on the gowns. I’ve made a few notes.”

      “There was a peculiar mix of them,” Caroline began. She leaned to one side to allow a footman to pour tea into her cup. “Some of them so beautiful and some of them rather plain. I especially liked the Alucian gowns.”

      “Oh, they were beautiful,” Eliza agreed. “But if I had to choose which gown dazzled more, I would say Hollis’s.”

      Hollis gasped with delight. “Would you?”

      “I would!” Eliza reached for a blue ribbon in Hollis’s hair, which was so darkly brown it almost looked black. The ribbon had been missed in their blurry-eyed disrobing this morning. Hollis’s gown, currently draped over a chaise upstairs, was made of the most gorgeous sapphire blue silk, trimmed in black, with a dramatic skirt that cascaded to the floor in panels. Poppy had worked several nights to bead the bodice with tiny black crystals. Hollis had added a stunning collar necklace made of black onyx, a gift from her late husband.

      “The mask suited her, too, didn’t it?” Caroline agreed, smiling at Hollis. “Mrs. Cubison was right about the blue. She was quite right about everything, really. If only she’d told me who was behind which mask! Now I’m cross all over again.”

      “So tight-lipped,” Hollis agreed, also appearing to be cross with a modiste whom she’d never met.

      “I’d hoped she might give me a hint of how certain people would be disguised, but alas she was a soul of discretion. She said, ‘Lady Caroline, what is the point of a masquerade if you know the identity behind every mask?’” Caroline mimicked Mrs. Cubison’s apparently deep voice.

      “A