Shall We Dance? Read Online Free Page A

hysterical morning. “With Your Majesty’s permission, I shall retire to the kitchens to personally order strawberry tarts for tea. Your favorite, ma’am.”
    The queen was suddenly girlish, her cheeks coloring even beneath the spots of rouge, her smile shy. “I really shouldn’t indulge, not when I must prepare to meet my subjects. I needs must look my best.”
    â€œYou are always at your best, ma’am, and dear in the hearts of everyone,” Amelia said, knowing the words sounded old and worn but unable to think of new ones, and the queen waved her away, toward the kitchens.
    Â 
    B ERNARD N ESTOR sat at the rude table in his ruder kitchen, devoid now of even the single servant he’d had to turn off, and studied the copy of the Bill of Pains and Penalties he’d stuffed into his coat just after Henry Brougham had given him his congé and told him never to darken his door again.
    Gratitude. There was none in this cruel and unenlightened world. He’d been a loyal Whig, a loyal employee of Henry Brougham’s, a diligent worker.
    And what had he gotten for this devotion?
    He’d gotten the sack, that’s what he’d gotten.
    Too rabid. Too rigid. Too intense. Too much of a danger when clear heads, not hotheads, are needed. That’s what Henry Brougham had said.
    Five years. He’d worked, slaved, and with little financial remuneration, for five long years, monitoring Princess Caroline’s movements, warning Henry Brougham in time to head off at least a half-dozen disasters as the woman made a fool of herself across the continent.
    And now, now when the queen really needed him, he’d been cast aside as too fervent, too volatile, too dangerous.
    England needed their new queen. England needed the Whigs back in power. England would become another France, with its own bloody revolution, if the king and those damn Tories were left to their own devices.
    The world was black or white to Bernard, right or wrong, innocent or guilty and with no shades of gray. The world was reasonable this way for Bernard, and it was so much easier to tell the Good from the Bad without having to invest in any heavy thinking.
    He stared at the rather dirty tumbler of inferior wine that was all the penny-pinched younger son could afford before his hand shot out, sweeping the thick glass off the table, only to have the thing thunk against the floor-boards; not even giving him the solace of smashing into a thousand pieces.
    Fools! They were all fools! Didn’t they know how much danger the queen was in, the Whigs were in, now that this damned Pains-and-Penalties nonsense was fact?
    He grabbed at the pages, glaring at the crabbed, hurried writing, as he’d had to take Henry Brougham’s copy into a dark closet with only one candle to aid him as he’d copied it, word for damning word.
    He found what he was looking for and read the words aloud:
    â€œâ€¦to deprive Her Majesty, Caroline Amelia Elizabeth, of the Title, Prerogatives, Rights, Privileges and Exemptions of Queen Consort of this Realm; and to dissolve the Marriage between His Majesty and said Caroline Amelia Elizabeth.”
    Bernard picked up the wine bottle by the neck and drank deeply. “Treason. Blasphemy.” He frowned,then decided he was right. Yes. Even blasphemy, if he sort of tipped his head and squinted as he looked at the thing. “But how to stop it? God knows the wretched woman is guilty of every charge against her, and more.”
    And Bernard knew, because it had been Bernard’s job to know.
    Pergami. Bartolomeo Bergami, now Pergami; now even—courtesy of the then Princess Caroline—Knight of Malta, Baron de la Francine. There was one for the books: the upstart Italian paramour, elevated to such a station by reason of what could only be assumed was his talented cock. For the privilege of servicing a loud, overblown, ridiculous creature, he had been given money, titles,