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Lady Anne had said this would be a “rustic picnic,” so Elwyn thought it would be entirely appropriate to wear one of her more comfortable riding dresses. She had several that were black, or at least dark gray, so she would still be in mourning. But Phoebe Simons, her lady’s maid, and Rohesia were both appalled by the very notion.
“A princess does not entertain a gentleman while wearing riding clothes,” said the queen.
“Yes she does,” replied Elwyn. “At least this princess does. I’ve talked to lots of people while wearing my riding clothes. I do it all the time, in fact.”
“That’s not really the same thing, my lady,” said Phoebe. “This is a private meeting in which you will be acting, essentially, as the hostess.”
“Go pick her out something nice, Phoebe,” said Rohesia. “Something that shows her to best advantage.”
“Shows me to my best advantage?” cried Elwyn. “I’m not seriously trying to be attractive for him, am I? What’s the point?”
“The point is that you should have some pride,” said Rohesia. “We must put our best foot forward.”
The end result was that when Elwyn went to supper, she was wearing one of her least comfortable dresses—a monstrous black and gray thing with a vast train and pleated skirt, along with a ridiculously tight velvet bodice that cinched her and lifted her in a desperate attempt to look like she was much better endowed than she really was. It barely succeeded, but at the cost of leaving Elwyn perpetually short of breath.
“I can hardly bend over,” she whispered to Rohesia on her way to the stairs.
“You shouldn’t be slouching, anyway,” said the queen. “Now good luck, and do your best.”
That would have been a perfectly understandable thing for Rohesia to say under normal circumstances. But the more Elwyn thought about it, the stranger and more ominous it seemed. She went down to the ground floor and headed out through the side parlors, and all the while, she wondered, “What did she mean by that, exactly?”
To Elwyn’s mind, this supper was clearly a ruse, a way to play for time and keep Cousin Broderick from doing something worse to them. But was that how Rohesia saw it? Was the queen expecting her to win Young Broderick’s love? Did she really think Elwyn ought to marry him? Why would Rohesia do that?
In the back of her mind, ever since Edwin had been born, eight years earlier, there had always been a faint hint of a worry. Rohesia clearly preferred her own children to her stepdaughter. But how far would she go to protect Edwin and Alice? Would the queen sacrifice Elwyn to save them? What if this was a way for Rohesia to ally herself with Cousin Broderick and save Edwin’s reign?
“Can I trust her?” Elwyn wondered.
She decided she did. She had to. But it was a little frightening how long it took her to answer the question.
Still worrying about her stepmother, Elwyn passed through the old festival pavilion and into Queen Maud’s Garden, where Lady Karlina Selberssen, one of Muriel Gramiren’s lady’s maids, was waiting to point her in the right direction. Not that she needed much guidance. Once she got around the corner of the shrubbery, she saw a big red and white tent staked out on the lawn. Half a dozen servants bustled around, laying out food on a low table and pouring drinks on a gilded sideboard.
“So much for rustic simplicity,” thought Elwyn.
Then she spotted Young Broderick pacing up and down under a grape arbor, and she almost burst out laughing. He had on a slashed blue doublet with gold silk ruffles and an enormous black eagle on the back—the symbol of his house. On his legs he had red and blue checkered tights, ending in bright red boots with gold tassels. Elwyn had seen jesters who dressed more somberly. He looked completely ridiculous. And to think that one of the few things she had ever liked about him was the fact that, like her, he tended to dress for the field, rather than for the court.
The thought crossed her mind that he might think she looked as absurd in her massive dress as he did in his clown costume. But she rejected any comparison. He had probably gotten to choose his clothes. She hadn’t. That made him vastly more ridiculous than she was.
If she was being honest, he was rather good looking, and he had been for some years now, ever since he had hit his growth spurt while they were both at Atherton. And if he aged like his father, then he promised to be handsome for decades to come. At the same time, she couldn’t get over the feeling of visceral dislike that had come over her the moment she had understood, as a young girl, that some people thought she should marry him.
The dislike wasn’t logical—she was fair enough to understand that. But the feeling was real, all the same. It wasn’t that he was three years younger than her. Or the fact that his father was a bastard, though that was an important part of it. No, mostly it was her sheer, bloody-minded hatred of being told what to do.
On top of everything, there had been that mortifying incident at Severn, but that had merely been a pretext to stop answering his letters. She had seized the opportunity and cut all ties with him. And to think that now his family wanted the match in earnest, and maybe her stepmother did, too, and they might be forced to marry! It was too, too horrible.
He saw her and walked over, red-faced, to bow. She curtsied back. Then Lady Karlina clapped her hands, and she and the servants filed off into the warm spring twilight. Elwyn and Young Broderick were now completely alone, or at least as alone as two unmarried people could ever be. Probably some other lady’s maids were watching from a discreet distance—maybe from the towers of the outer wall, looming overhead—to make sure nothing untoward happened. Not that they needed to worry.
“Can I...can I offer you a drink?” he asked, stepping over to the sideboard.
“Yes, you might as well,” she said. A proper young lady was supposed to demurely decline a drink until asked a second time, but fuck that.
The drink was Annenstruker Rodvin, no doubt from the royal vineyards of his mother’s relations. It tasted excellent, as were the pastries he then handed her, but everything annoyed her. She had had an idea in her mind of a genuine picnic—the sort of thing people had while out hunting. It would have been fun. Not that it would have made her want to marry the boy, but they could have passed their time in more relaxed and informal circumstances.
“If he wanted to have a picnic,” she thought, “then a flagon of ale and some cold chicken and ham would have been the thing.”
He led her over to the table, where two large, stiff-backed chairs were set up on either side. “I hope your mother and your brother and sister are well,” he said.
This was commonplace politeness, but she was in a foul mood now, and she couldn’t help saying, “They would be a good deal better if they weren’t being held prisoner in their own home.”
“I’m sorry for that,” he said. “If it were up to me, I would.... Well, what I mean to say is that it can’t be very fun being trapped up there in the same apartments, day after day.”
“It’s no way to treat a king and his family,” Elwyn said. “And Edwin is your king. You do see that, right?”
Young Broderick bowed in his chair. “Of course, your royal highness.”
“So you don’t believe my stepmother is a whore?” Elwyn demanded. “Or do you subscribe to the Duke of Haydonshire’s notion that we should choose our kings by merit, so that my brother’s extraordinary skill in deploying his toy soldiers means he’s clearly got the stuff to rule?”
“I...I....” He sunk down in his chair. “Elwyn, I’m sorry about all that.”
“Yes, just as I’m sure your father is sorry about shutting us up in the castle and sending Colonel Rath and Sir William Aitken to terrorize people in the middle of the night.”
“My father is trying to stop a war.”
Elwyn let out a shout of derisive laughter. “If he is, then he’s chosen a funny way to go about it. Tell me, did you and he dream up this little plan together? He slips into my brother’s throne while you try to slip into my bed?”
Suddenly his eyes flashed, and his jaw clenched, and he slammed his wine cup down on the table. “I’m sorry, Elwyn, but are you under the impression that I want to be here any more than you do?”
“I don’t know,” she said, slapping down her own cup. “All I know is that this certainly wasn’t my idea. This has all been a terrible mistake. Excuse me.”
She rose and stormed out of the pavilion, leaving him behind. It was one thing for her not to want him. She was a princess, and he was the son of a bastard. But for him not to want her—that was an insult too humiliating to bear.