Julia Quinn & Shonda Rhimes
Queen Charlotte
For Lyssa Keusch.
I’m not going to miss you because we’ll always be friends.
And also for Paul. I’m saying it right here: IT WAS ALL YOUR IDEA.
To my daughters. Each of you is a queen.
Disclaimer
Dearest Gentle Reader,
This is the story of Queen Charlotte from Bridgerton.
It is not a history lesson.
It is fiction inspired by fact.
All liberties taken by the authors are quite intentional.
Enjoy.
Dearest Gentle Reader
Dearest Gentle Reader,
This coldest time of year has become that much colder with the sad news of the death of the Princess Royal. The granddaughter of our dear King George III and Queen Charlotte died in childbirth along with her baby.
And while our hearts grieve for the loss of the Princess Royal, our heads grieve more for the future of the monarchy itself. For the Crown now has a crisis on its hands. A crisis one can only imagine that Queen Charlotte must find galling after ruling over the matchmaking efforts of the ton and the marriage mart with such an iron fist.
This Author and all of England can only hope Queen Charlotte finally turns her matchmaking energies onto her own family. After all, Her Majesty has thirteen children, and now not a royal heir from any of them. At least not a legitimate one.
It causes one to wonder: Is the Queen’s knowledge of how to make a good marriage nothing but talk?
Fifty-Six Years Earlier . . .
Charlotte
Essex, England
The London Road
8 September 1761
Like all members of the German aristocracy, Princess Sophia Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz was in possession of a great many names. Sophia for her maternal grandmother, Sophia Albertine of Erbach-Erbach, a countess by birth and a duchess by marriage. Charlotte for her father, Charles Louis Frederick of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, who was born a second son and had died before he could assume the position of head of the family. Then there were the many and sundry double-barreled lands and properties that made up her heritage. Mecklenburg-Strelitz and Erbach-Erbach, of course, but also Saxe-Hildburghausen, Schwarzburg-Sondershausen, and, if one wanted to go back far enough, Waldeck-Eisenberg.
She enjoyed all of her names, and she was proud of every last one, but the one she liked best was Lottie.
Lottie. It was the simplest of the bunch, but that wasn’t why she liked it. Her tastes rarely ran to the simple, after all. She liked her wigs tall and her dresses grand and she was quite certain no one in her household appreciated the complexities of music or art as keenly as she did.
She was not a simple creature.
She was not.
But she liked being called Lottie. She liked it because hardly anyone ever used it. You had to know her to call her Lottie.
You had to know, for example, that in spring her favorite dessert was raspberry-apricot torte and in winter it was apple strudel, but the truth was she had a taste for fruit, and for sweets, and any sweet made of fruit was her absolute favorite.
People who called her Lottie also knew that when she was a young girl she’d loved to swim in the lake by her home (when it was warm enough, which it rarely was). They also knew that when her mother had banned the practice (stating that Charlotte was too old for such frivolity), Charlotte had not spoken to her for three weeks. Peace was reestablished only after Charlotte had written a surprisingly thorough legal document outlining the rights and responsibilities of all involved parties. Her mother was not immediately persuaded by Charlotte’s arguments, but her older brother Adolphus had intervened. Charlotte had made a good case, he’d said. She’d shown logic and intelligence, and surely that should be rewarded.
Adolphus was the one who’d coined the pet name Lottie. And that was the true reason it was her favorite name. It had been bestowed upon her by her favorite brother.
Pardon, her former favorite brother.
“You give the appearance of a statue,” Adolphus said, smiling as if she had not spent the last three weeks begging him not to marry her off to a stranger.
Charlotte wanted to ignore him. She’d have liked nothing better than to never utter a word in his direction for the remainder of both of their lives, but even she recognized the futility of such stubbornness. And besides, they were in a carriage in the southeast of England, and they had a long ride both ahead and behind them.
She was bored and furious, never a good combination.
“Statues are works of art,” she said icily. “Art is beautiful.”
This made her brother smile, damn his eyes. “Art can be beautiful to gaze upon,” he said with some amusement. “You, on the other hand, are ridiculous to the eye.”
“Is there a point?” Charlotte bit off.
He shrugged. “You have not moved an inch in six hours.”
Oh. Oh. He should not have gone there. Charlotte leveled her dark eyes on his with a ferocity that ought to have terrified him. “I am wearing Lyonnaise silk. Encrusted with Indian sapphires. With an overlay of two-hundred-year-old lace.”
“And you look beautiful,” he said. He reached out to pat her knee, then hastily withdrew his hand when he caught her expression.
Murderous.
“Apparently too much movement could cause the sapphires to shred the lace.” Charlotte growled. She literally growled. “Do you want me to shred the lace? Do you?”
She did not wait for him to answer. They both knew he was not meant to. “If that were not enough,” she continued, “the gown sits atop a bespoke underpinning made of whalebone.”
“Whalebone?”
“Yes. Whalebone, Brother. The bones of whales. Whales died so I could look like this.”
At that, Adolphus laughed outright. “Lottie—”
“Don’t,” Charlotte warned him. “Don’t you dare call me Lottie as if you care.”
“Come, Liebchen, you know I care.”
“Do I? Because it does not feel as if you care. It feels as if I have been trussed up like a prized sow and placed upon an altar as sacrifice.”
“Charlotte—”
She bared her teeth. “Shall you put an apple in my mouth?”
“Charlotte, stop. You were chosen by a king. This is a great honor.”
“That,” Charlotte spat. “That is why I am angry. The lies. You will not stop lying.”
She could not stand it, these endless lies. This was no honor. She wasn’t sure what it was, but certainly not an honor.
King George III of Great Britain and Ireland had appeared out of nowhere (or rather, his people had; he had not deigned to make an appearance) and inexplicably decided that she, Sophia Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, should be his next queen.
Mecklenburg-Strelitz. They had traveled all the way to Mecklenburg-Strelitz. Charlotte loved her home, with its placid lakes and verdant lawns, but she was well aware that Mecklenburg-Strelitz was considered one of the least important states in all the Holy Roman Empire.