Alix had dressed in a white shepherdess dress and matching bonnet, apparently opting for simplicity. Though shewasn’t standing with Eddy—she was talking with a pair of rather dour-looking women dressed as nymphs, or were they dryads?—countless guests stared at her, as if they had heard the rumors, and already considered her their future queen.
The unfairness of Alix’s beauty struck May all over again. The whole premise of fancy dress was that everyone mutually agreed to look ridiculous. Yet despite the rustic nature of her costume, Alix was resplendent.
“You never told me what happened at Balmoral,” Agnes prompted. “Do you think Alix and Eddy are still courting?”
“If they are, it’s at Queen Victoria’s insistence. She seems determined to see them married.”
“Ah,” Agnes said meaningfully.
May hesitated, then stepped past the dance floor to a pocket of silence near a window. Agnes followed eagerly in her wake.
“I tried what you suggested. I told Maud about Alix’s bizarre fainting spell, about how Alix was damaged,” May whispered.
That word,damaged,echoed cruelly in the silence. But Agnes beamed at May with unmistakable pride. “I’m so glad! I knew you had it in you!”
“I don’t know.” May swallowed against a roughness in her throat. “Don’t you think it was a little…harsh?”
“All you did was tell the truth,” Agnes said evenly. “Of course it would be different if you had lied; that would be slander. But you reallydidsee Alix in the grips of a psychological attack. If I were Her Majesty, I would want to know such a thing about a potential future queen.” She hesitated. “Are you certain that Maud told her?”
“I assumed she would, but the queen never seemed tochange her opinion about Alix.” Perhaps she simply didn’t want to hear something negative about her favorite grandchild.
Agnes digested this thoughtfully. “You could tell someone else…the Princess of Wales?”
“To what end? Eddy has shown no interest in me.” May sighed. “He hardly even knows I exist!”
“You didn’t manage to speak with him alone? You were gone for almost two weeks, in a remote castle in the Scottish highlands. If that doesn’t give you the space for a bit of flirtation, then nothing will,” Agnes replied, slightly teasing.
“There may have been flirtation, but it wasn’t with me.”
A pair of men dressed as knights shuffled past, the light gleaming on their false armor. Agnes and May drew further back into the alcove.
“Flirtation? I thought you said he and Alix didn’t seem interested in each other.”
May hesitated. Now she really was dealing in unfounded rumor; she had no proof of her suspicions save an incriminating flower. Still, she’d been dying to tellsomeonesince the moment she saw it tucked behind Hélène’s ear.
“I think Eddy and the Princess Hélène are secretly involved.”
Agnes gave her a startled look. “That French princess? The one with dark hair and a loud voice?”
May wouldn’t have thought to call Hélène loud, but perhaps it was true. At Balmoral she had certainly laughed more heartily and ridden more eagerly than any of the other young women. There was a restlessness to her that May recognized—because, like May, Hélène seemed to chafeagainst society’s bonds. Except that May kept her frustrations hidden.
And May knew better than to engage in flirtations with men who could never marry her.
She told Agnes about the flower in Hélène’s hair, and how she’d seen Eddy plucking it from the garden earlier that day. “I could be wrong, of course. Perhaps it’s just a coincidence. But it explains the feeling I had that Eddy was hiding something….”
“Coincidences are rarer than you think.” Agnes’s fingers drummed absently on the windowsill. “No, I would wager that you are right. You are clever, May; your instincts about these things are rarely wrong.”
A small part of May must have hoped that Agnes would call her ridiculous, because she sagged in defeat. “If it really is true, then I must give up my hopes for Eddy. There’s no use trying to compete with AlixandHélène.”
May’s eyes cut across the ballroom to Prince Eddy. As if on cue, he stole a furtive glance at Hélène, who was dancing with the Earl of Hertford.
Now that May knew what to look for, the attraction between Hélène and Eddy felt almost obvious.
“Do you think Alix knows?” Agnes asked, after a moment.
“About Hélène?”
“Yes! Do you think she suspects that the prince who has been publicly courting her is flirting with another woman, right beneath her nose?”
