Shall We Dance? Read Online Free Page B

position…and a deep gravy boat for all his relatives to swim in as part of Caroline’s entourage.
    The Tories would destroy her, through Pergami. The pains would be clear, the penalties clearer.
    And England, under the Tories, would go down in the annals of history as one very large failure.
    Unless…unless he, Bernard Nestor, was right, and he was always right. For, in The World as Seen by Bernard Nestor, he was forever cast in the leading role, that of hero, savior. Why, when he thought of himself that way, he even thought of himself as being taller, wider. With a chin.
    He pushed himself away from the table and staggered, rather drunkenly, to the locked desk in his small sitting room. He shook his head to clear it (a fruitless effort, alas, for the fanatic in Bernard had evicted clearthinking years earlier), then unlocked the drawer that held everything he knew about one William Austin…and the other one.
    He turned pages in the slim portfolio, reading yet again that Caroline had been all but physically ejected from the royal household in 1797, all but barred from her own child.
    He read again that William Austin was believed born in the first month of 1801, and later adopted by the princess. Unlike the Tories, Bernard had done his best this past year and more to locate proof of William Austin’s legitimacy, that he had not been a bastard birth. Wouldn’t that turn everything on its head! It was brilliant, absolutely brilliant, a coup that would give Bernard everything he had always wanted.
    But he had found nothing that hadn’t already been discovered.
    About William Austin.
    He had, however, as he’d investigated, one by one, all the orphans Caroline had collected, been drawn to one Amelia Elizabeth Fredericks.
    Her mother supposedly perishing in childbirth, Amelia Fredericks had been brought up among the coterie of assorted waifs Caroline had accumulated, although she’d formally adopted only William Austin.
    Where better, Bernard had concluded, to hide but among a crowd? And how better to hide what must remain hidden than by allowing everyone, even steering everyone, toward another target altogether?
    The girl’s name was not at all significant. Everyoneseemed to name their children after royalty, and Caroline had probably had the liberty to do the same for the supposed orphaned child. This, in itself, was not remarkable.
    Bernard turned a few more pages, until he came to the pen-and-ink reproductions he’d bought, one from a hawker here in London, one he’d paid a pretty penny for, on his own, from a contact he’d made in Italy.
    On his left, Charlotte Sophia of Mecklesburg-Strelitz, mother of the new king and for whom his only daughter had been named, both Charlottes dead and gone these past two years. A handsome woman, not beautiful, but definitely striking. Regal.
    On his right the orphan, Amelia Elizabeth Fredericks.
    And then he located the third, a rude reproduction of George Augustus Frederick, now George IV, in his flamboyant youth.
    Squinting, Bernard Nestor looked for physical resemblances and, in his mind, found them.
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    A MELIA STOOD in front of the mirror in her bed chamber in the residence overlooking the Thames, her head tilted slightly to the left as she looked into the assessing eyes reflected there.
    She felt silly, the dreamer once again conjuring hopeful dreams.
    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 wentblond, 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