“I didn’t actually have anyone in mind. I just wanted to wear this gown, and then I thought a laurel wreath might look nice with it….” May trailed off self-consciously.
“Better a laurel wreath than a crown. Those are heavy,” George said, gallantly changing the subject. The music shifted and they drifted toward the center of the dance floor, George’s hand pressing a bit more steadily on her waist.
“I’m just grateful that I didn’t come as Marie Antoinette.” May nodded to where two different women were dressed as the French queen, each glaring at the other’s costume.
“They rather look like they want to guillotine each other, don’t they?” George asked, following her gaze.
“I wonder what the real Marie Antoinette would say, if she could see us now. Probably she would be insulted that we hadn’talldressed like her.”
“ ‘Thus we play the fools with the time, and the spirits of the wise sit in the clouds and mock us,’ ” George said softly.
May wasn’t one to moon over fictional characters like Alix, but even she recognized the cadence. “Is that Shakespeare?”
“Henry IV, Part Two.”George nodded down to his costume.
“Oh. Of course.” May couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen Shakespeare performed.
The steps of the dance pulled them apart for a brief moment. When they came back together, George bent his head. The small movement brought their lips dangerously close.
May blinked, flustered. George pulled back, leaving an appropriate amount of space between them.
“I actually wanted to be a highwayman tonight, but Mother refused to let me,” he said gruffly, clearly trying to resume their normal conversation.
May chuckled. “I’m sure the Countess Cadogan would faint if she saw a highwayman in her ballroom! Though I have to imagine you’d have been more comfortable. Your ruff looks like an ordeal.”
“It does make me grateful for modern fashion.”
“At least you’re not wearing a sword. That might have caused safety concerns.”
“Funny that you say that. Eddy wanted us to borrow prop swords from the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, but I told him it was more trouble than it was worth.”
That sounded like Eddy, still eager to play with toy weapons.
“Besides, if you were a highwayman, you would have been forced to wear a mask,” May went on.
George nodded emphatically as he spun her into one of the turns of the waltz. “Exactly! I wanted to wear a mask. It’s so rare I get an excuse to keep my face hidden.”
“Really?” Why on earth would George, a prince, want to walk around as an anonymous nobody?
“It would have been nice to escape notice for once. People are always talking to me because of who I am—because they want to use me to get to Father, or to Eddy.” George attempted a cavalier tone, but May heard the hurt beneath.
She had never considered that aspect of his position, had she? George’s entire self was defined in relation to someone else: his grandmother, his father, or most of all his brother. Eddy was the heir, the One Who Mattered, while George was just theotherprince, brought into the world in case, god forbid, anything ever happened to Eddy.
The laws of succession weren’t meant to be cruel; they were an incontrovertible part of life, as impersonal and unchanging as the turning of the planets. Still, they meant that George was imprisoned by his own identity. Just as May was.
“Well, I don’t want touseyou to reach someone else. I’m glad to talk to you for your own sake,” May declared.
It shouldn’t have been a bold statement, yet it somehow came out that way.
George smiled, not so shyly this time. “I feel quite the same.”
Long after the party was over, May kept replaying those words in her mind. Her quest for Prince Eddy had reached a dead end, but maybe she shouldn’t have gone after Eddy in the first place.
Maybe she had focused all her energies on the wrongbrother.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Alix
