“For to be two things at once—both a guest and an official—means you are never fully either. May I make a suggestion?” I did not wait for him to reply. “You should alternate and enjoy each more fully.”
He did not respond immediately. On the other side of the dancers, I saw Rosie executing her steps with ease, smiling at something PrinceSimeon said into her ear. Sigrid had disappeared from the dais. All around the edges of the dance floor eyes followed the prince and ignored me and I was glad of it.
After a time, Otto said: “You may be correct, but I fear if I were only a guest and not an official, I would have no reason to be at the ball in the first place.”
“You dance but do not like to. Is it,” I wondered aloud, “that you do not approve of a ball?” I remembered how, the day he had escorted me from Sigrid’s chambers, he had scoffed at the delivery of invitations to women in fanciful dresses. Now he was surrounded by hundreds of them.
His face held a trace of a scowl. “My approval is irrelevant.”
“I disagree,” I said with false solemnity. “One’s approval is something they should hold in the highest of esteem; it’s a personal treasure! Mine, for example, is like a favorite pet. I tend to it and offer it to others only in very specific circumstances.”
I almost got him to smile.
“I am not a young girl of marriageable age,” he explained to me.
“Do not sell yourself short.”
“And I do not think it is the best way to choose a wife.”
Involuntarily, I looked over at Prince Simeon and Rosie.
“The determinants of success in a marriage have little to do with receiving lines and dancing and”—he glanced around the room—“white soup.”
“Do you really think this has no use?” I was surprised. “A kingdom has, at its center, a king, as Prince Simeon will become. And every tureen and candle and cream puff in this room is doing a part in ensuring he feels like a jewel at the center of it all.”
“And who does not want a jewel?” Otto murmured, more to himself than to me. The dance was coming to an end, and we slowed, turning to face one another.
“But we agree on one thing,” I told him, when the music stopped. “White soup is disgusting.”
Otto returned me to the same spot he had taken me from, bowed, and walked away. I was a little breathless—from the dancing and from the conversation—and took a glass of sparkling wine from a banquette. Our conversation was not a dialogue I had expected to have, nor with a person I ever would have expected to have it. But it was a distraction from the most important matter at hand. I needed to find Rosamund and hear her retelling of every moment on the dance floor, every sentence uttered by the prince.
Lavinia located me first. “Well,” she said, muttering, until she had sidled right up to my ear, which she whispered loudly into. “Who shall you dance with next? The prince?” She chortled.
“I think that was quite enough dancing for me,” I admitted. I scanned the room, looking, still, for Rosie.
“I have surveyed the powers that be—the little birds—and the man you danced with is held in high esteem. How did you manage it? He is even feared. And his jaw is handsome. Handsome indeed.”
I did not need to put quite the same stock in jaws as Lavinia. “He is a curmudgeon that does not recommend himself and does not like dancing.”
“Plenty of eligible men here for you, too, you know. Quite! Indeed.” She nodded to herself. “Widowers, for one. Take Sir Pike down there.”
I eyed the ailing man leaning on a cane at the end of the room. “Sir Pike is two hundred years old.”
“Brevity may be the point, dear Etheldreda,” Lavinia admonished.
“I have been married twice.” I took a swig from my coupe.Tiny sips, Agatha reminded me. “I am done childbearing, and the estate has expensive upkeep.” It was the closest I could acknowledge to the truth of my situation. I had spotted my daughters—again happily engaged in a group of young people—and wanted to get away from Lavinia’s needling. I held up my empty glass. “Too much wine, I believe. Excuse me, I am going to get some air.”
When I was out of her sight, I stepped into one of the recessed windows in the room, concealing myself behind the cascading drapes. I did not want to be asked to dance again. I did not want to be pestered by Lavinia. I wanted to watch my daughters in their happiness and to hope for the best and to believe, truly, that there was a way out of the squalor we lived in, that our circumstances would change, that this wouldn’t become the one ball we had once attended that we talked about until we were ragged and gray. There was so much wealth in the room—of beauty, of feeling—surely there was enough for us, too?
I cracked the window, enjoying the cool air on my neck. I felt a little lightheaded. As I watched Rosie dance, the hope in my breast had become so alive that it was painful—more of a needful kind of want than I had ever experienced. The pain of two dead husbands and a crumbling house and a life constructed on a thousand lies. Oh, to see her well. To see her secure.
I took another sip of wine, observing the movements and tides of the room from a crack behind the curtain. There was a break in the dancing. The guests milled, gossiping and squealing with each renewed acquaintance. Rosie and Mathilde appeared to be holding court with a gaggle of fashionable young people. Rosie was pointing to the stays of her dress, likely explaining its construction. A young man nearby vomited into a potted plant. A woman’s earring fell into her punch glass and had to be fished out.
My happiness also felt like a kind of sadness: the letdown of realizing a rehearsal was actually a final performance. We had done it. We had ended up here. My daughter, a few moments before, had been in the arms of a prince. But all her gains would be my loss. I did not want to give her up. I thought about Rosie’s sweet smile. I thought about Otto’s shiny shoes. And it was no sooner than I thought of them that I noticed them on the ground, in front of me. On the other side of the drapes.
“All is as expected,” Otto said. Not to me. Alarmed, I took a step back, completely concealing myself.
“He is behaving himself, at least.” A woman’s voice.
