“Did they? How rude,” she sympathized. “Shall we have champagne?”
“Oh! Should I?” the butler said, looking side to side like someone might catch him being naughty. “You do not mind, fräulein?”
“On the contrary,” Vix assured him, nodding toward a footman with a tray. “I insist.”
He giggled, his mustache twitching, as they chose glasses of bubbling liquid and retreated to a fashionable corner to observe the arrival of other guests.
“Ach,” he said at one point, frowning at a matron. “Still with the bustle?”
“Perhaps we ought to send her a calendar,” Vix suggested, winning another titter from the man.
She considered him, a smile warming its way onto her mouth despite her most firmly held convictions to remain cool tonight. “Do you come from Canterbury as well, Mr. Zeller?” she asked, tilting her head over the rim of her champagne flute. “Did you accompany Mr. Aster when he moved to London?”
“Alas, no,” he said with a shake of his head. “Herr Ambrose won me in a card game from my former patron some two years ago. I tried to explain that service is not compulsory, but neither would hear it.”
She stared. “And yet you remained?”
The mustache sagged at the corners momentarily. “You must understand, fräulein,” he said seriously, “he needs me.”
“Yes,” she said, blinking. “I believe he does.”
It made the mustache perk right up. “You do not object? I do wish to stay on, of course, when you remake the staff.”
“Remake it?” she replied, blinking in surprise. “My good man, I would not dream of undertaking such a task without you.”
“Gott sei Dank,”he said, grinning. “I received the new curtains, but I would not hang them without your observation.”
She grinned at him fully then. “Why, Mr. Zeller,” she tutted. “If you insist on being so charming, I may have to marry you instead, and then you will have to explain yourself to Mr. Aster.”
He blushed, dissolving again into a charming series of giggles, shaking his head so firmly that the corners of his mustache trembled. “Ach, no,” he tittered. “Do not imagine it.”
So effectively distracted and charmed was Vix that she insisted he have another full glass of champagne before the gong was struck, herding them all into the next chamber for the beginning of the formal processions. She observed with some satisfaction that the color on the tip of his nose had risen by the time he reached the bottom of the second glass, though the perfect angle of his elbow and the precision of his escorting cadence did not at all suffer.
The particular guests of the honored were given devoted seating right near the front of the hall, and while Vix was aware that she could easily take Mr. Zeller and enjoy a place there, she nodded to him instead to a place with the general crowd.
She did not wish to reveal herself quite yet.
Instead, she stood and watched as Caroline Sedgewick—Caroline Redwynne now—entered the hall, spinning once with wide-eyed glee that she had been invited to such an elegant affair, with her husband the curate dutifully trotting next to her, looking equally smug.
Vix tilted her head as she observed him, having not seen the man since that disastrous Christmas almost a decade ago, when he had still been in the rosy-cheeked bloom of his late teens. It seemed the years had robbed him of both the roses and much of his hair, with the candlelight catching a glint of his scalp just at the crest of his head when they turned toward the seats at the front of the hall.
Pity, she thought with a smirk. He had been handsome back then.
Caroline herself looked much the same, still golden-haired and precious, with a propensity for slightly too many ruffles on every frock she owned.
Vix sipped her champagne and turned her attention to the platform, where the three men who were to be knighted tonight had just appeared, her own at the center of them.
She gripped the glass a little tighter, observing the very fine work Teddy’s tailor had done. The indigo coat, the buckskin breeches, the sash … every detail fit him with devastating effect. The coat in particular so enhanced the effect of those eyes of his that she could swear she felt them find her in the crowd, glowing in a perfect matching relief against the expensive textile at his shoulders.
He smiled so very slightly, she might have imagined it. And yet she shivered anyway, immediately dropping her gaze to the bubbling liquid in her glass instead of continuing to look at him.
The volume of the voice that came next, announcing Her Majesty, the Queen, was so unbelievably loud that several people in the crowd around Vix and Zeller murmured in scandalized shock.
Vix, however, had been unsettled enough times today that she barely felt it, instead only lifting her head to see the great monarch in all her glinting brocade emerge from the opposite side of the curtain and glide to the center of the platform where a sword awaited on a pillow.
It occurred to her, briefly, that this was all a little bit ridiculous.
The queen did not look like a creature chosen by the gods to Vix. She looked like any middle-aged woman, any lady who’d lived a life, just with a better gown and an outdated wig. She watched, more curious than anything else, as the first gentleman was called forward to kneel before her and the sword was taken up.
