“Your Highness,” she greeted her, dipping a curtsy.
Princess Charlotte turned about, smiling as if she had won a prize. “Oh, cousin,” she greeted the duchess, both hands out to her, “the mostromanticsituation, is it not? We knew, of course, of Miss Knight's regard for our dear Drummond, but to see its fruition before our very eyes! I am intransports. IinsistI be allowed to help.”
Pip felt as if she were strangling.
“Just your being here at the announcement of our engagement is more than we could hope for, Your Highness,” Beau said, looking a bit pale himself. “Is that not right, Pip?”
Pip thought her smile probably resembled a rictus. “Indeed, Your Highness. And when my parents return from St. Petersburg, we would be honored to have you witness our wedding.”
The princess waved her off. “Nonsense. There is no reason at all to wait so long. Why, if I could, I would run away with my Leopold this minute. But I am a princess. You are not. And I would dearly love to see you joined to the man of your dreams before my very eyes. For if you must wait, who knows what could interfere?”
Indeed, Pip thought in growing despair. Who knew?
“It is too much,” she protested.
“Don't be silly,” the princess scoffed. “You have a chaplain, do you not, cousin?”
The duchess gave a half-hearted nod. The princess smiled and clapped her hands. “Excellent.The only time the dear Archbishop of Canterbury usually hears from me is when I find myself in a scrape. He would be delighted to heargoodnews from me for a change. All you must do is provide Mercer with your full names and birth dates, and she and a few of my guard can hurry to see it done.”
“I must beg you not to put out such an effort,” Beau protested, his posture growing increasingly stiff.
“And I,” the princess retorted, suddenly every inch a royal princess, “must insist that I do.”
It was the duchess who finally admitted the inevitable. “And so it shall be, Your Highness.”
Pip had an overwhelming urge to look to Beau for support. For sympathy. She couldn't. She could see too well with her spectacles on, and she was terrified that what she would see was rage, betrayal. Resentment. And a woman should never see such emotions in the eyes of the man she was about to marry.
Marry.
Oh, St. Swithin’s scissors, how could this have happened?
And she hadn't even had a chance to explain to Beau about the plans she had lifted.
* * *
Pip heldBeau's hand when the duchess made the announcement. After that, she wasn't allowed within twelve feet of him, not just during the remainder of the ball when she was whirled from one avidly curious guest to the next, but all the next day. It was probably better for her nerves that way, she admitted. She was having trouble enough with the course her life had suddenly taken without having to face Beau's outrage.
But she still needed to tell him what she had heard. She needed to help him find the real plans. She needed to do a bit of searching herself, since she didn't think Beau would believe her about where she was sure the plans had been hidden.
The silver-haired man had said that the plans were in a woman's room. There were a lot of women at the house party; at least twenty. But only one woman had been walking with the silver-haired man when he had discovered her with Beau. Beau's mistress, Lady Pamela.
Perhaps it was no more than wishful thinking. After all, who wouldn't want to face the man she loved with proof that his mistress was an enemy agent? There had to be a certain amount of satisfaction in that. Even if Pip made Beau even more angry at her. It was inevitable, after all, that Beau would be angry at her. Why not gain at least a little satisfaction from it?
She wanted Lady Pamela to be an enemy. She wanted, basely, to know that Beau had made such a mistake in his assessment of his mistress's character. Even in the privacy of her own mind, Pip wanted to be able to gloat that he hadn't merely been so stupid he couldn't see Pip's qualities. He had been so stupid, he had seen qualities in Pamela Smythe-Smithe that simply didn't exist.
But instead of sneaking into Lady Pamela's room to retrieve the real plans or sneak into Beau's room to return the false plans—with an explanation that would exonerate her in his eyes—and humble him in hers—Pip was caught up in emergency wedding preparations. Not only did she have to approve any wedding plans the duchess was hatching with the princess (Pip categorically refused to set doves loose to celebrate the vows. With her luck, she would end up wearing the doves' opinion of the whole business in her hair), she was forced to assess her wardrobe for an appropriate wedding gown and fight back all attempts to style her like a porcelain doll, all frills and lace and orange blossoms. First of all, there were no orange blossoms in November. Second, she would look like a rearing caterpillar in all those flounces. Third, she did not feel celebratory in the least. She decided to settle for solemn.
She finally put her foot down and insisted on a simple white silk gown with a cross-over bodice, puffed sleeves supported by an evergreen ribbon that also appeared in her hem. Her bonnet was white with green lining and one egret feather that brushed her cheek, and her bouquet was to be made up of white roses and holly.
Joyful sniffled as she finished adding the ribbon, her thin fingers dipping at lightning speed as she sewed. “This wasn't the way it was supposed to be,” she protested. “What'll happen to us now, Miss Pippin?”
Pip had no idea what would happen to them. So far, the only correspondence she had had with her fiancé was the note he had sent to notify her that the special license had come through with blessings from the Archbishop of Canterbury, blast him. It had been twenty-four hours, and Pip was still sequestered in her room. The wedding was scheduled to take place at ten in the morning in the old manor chapel, which was seeing the cleaning of its life. In fact, if Pip looked out her window, she could see the candles bobbing through the windows of the little church, as if ghosts hovered impatiently waiting to get out.
Which was much the way she felt. She was expected to stay in her room alone, as if she were a penitent preparing for confession, and she had no idea what Beau was up to. She had no idea what he had intended to do about the fake plans, or if he even knew that the real plans were somewhere else. She had read the papers, but they were obviously in code. She had copied them again just in case anything happened to these.
If she had had her schoolmate Fiona Ferguson there right then, she could have made some sense of them. Fiona loved puzzles like this. She had taught Pip quite a lot about codes, but this didn't look to be one of the easier transposition codes they had used at Last Chance to pass information. Pip almost smiled at herself at the idea that people who were so diabolical as to overthrow the British crown would use codes simple enough for schoolgirls.
Still, she wondered what the code hid.
