“Do you know what I have realized, Augusta?”
Augusta bristled visibly at Charlotte’s use of her given name.
“I am living in a madhouse.” She paced a few steps to the left, trying to control her emotions. She failed. Whirling around, she practically screamed, “The King is mad, and I live in a madhouse.”
“You forget yourself,” Augusta warned.
“All this time I thought I was the damaged one, that somehow I was deficient. When he is—”
“The King is not mad,” Augusta hissed. In front of her, her hands froze into tight claws, as if she needed that moment, that tension to steady herself. “The King is merely exhausted from holding the greatest nation in the world on his shoulders,” she said, each word a precise clip of syllables and lies.
“Don’t—”
“No, you don’t,” Augusta snapped, shoving her chair aside as she came to her feet. “You come here as if you know everything. You do not. You are a child.”
“I am a pawn.”
“And perhaps you are. What of it? Are you going to complain? You have been made Queen of Great Britain and Ireland. How dare you complain about that?”
“No one told me—”
“Who cares?” Augusta spat. “I certainly don’t. What could you have known about it? What could you have understood? The weight of a nation on a boy’s shoulders? The weight on his mother as she watches her son start to crack? If, God grant, you ever do bear an heir, then you may start to learn, and your first lesson will be this: You would do anything to stop the cracking. You would engage hideous doctors and their thousand disgusting treatments.”
She looked Charlotte straight in the eye and said, “You would scour Europe for a queen grateful enough to aid him.”
Charlotte flinched. She wished she had not. She wanted to be strong and proud and unfeeling. More than anything she wanted to be unfeeling. Anything to not feel this.
“You think the color of my skin makes me grateful?” she said.
“I think you have changed the world.”
“I did not ask to change the world.”
“I did not ask for a son with rough edges. But that is what I have, and I will protect him with everything I am.”
“Rough edges?” Charlotte echoed in disbelief. “He was talking to the sky.”
“And what of it? You were nothing. You came from nowhere. Now you sit at the helm of the world. What matter is it if your husband has his peculiarities?”
“Peculiarities? You call this a peculiarity? Your Highness, you did not see him last night.”
“I have seen him before,” Augusta said in a low voice.
“He thinks I am Venus.”
“Then be Venus.”
Charlotte shook her head, barely able to comprehend what she was hearing. “I did not ask to sit at the helm of the world. I did not ask for a husband. But if I must have one, if I must leave my home, my family, my language, my life . . .”
“What, Charlotte?” Augusta asked. Her voice was oddly flat. “What?”
“It cannot be for a man I do not know. A man I am not allowed to know.”
“You know him now.”
“You fed me a lie!”
“And you ate it willingly.”
Charlotte almost laughed. What did it matter now if she had been willing or not? She was married to a king. There was no dissolving it. And she didn’t know if she wanted to dissolve it. She just wanted—
What?
What did she want?
Honesty?
Truth?
Trust?
She wasn’t going to get any of those things from Princess Augusta.
“Tell me,” Augusta said. “Are you with child?”
“I don’t know,” Charlotte lied. She was fairly certain she was. Doctor Monro had certainly thought so.
“You will tell me the moment you are sure,” Augusta ordered.
“I will tell you when I wish to tell you.”
“You will find that there is nothing to be gained by being obstinate for the sake of being obstinate.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Charlotte muttered. The pinched expression on Augusta’s face was the only bright spot of her morning.
The only bright spot in her whole damned life.
Neither woman saw the man standing in the hall just outside the sitting room. Neither heard his footsteps as he exited the palace and climbed back into the carriage that had brought him there from Buckingham House. And neither knew that he then traveled to Kew, where he found Doctor Monro in his laboratory.
“Your Majesty?” the doctor said. He had been packing his things. He had not expected to see the King.
George walked across the room and sat down in the ghoulish chair.
“Strap me back in.”
Agatha
Danbury House
Agatha’s Private Reading Room
12 January 1762
“Lord and Lady Smythe-Smith are here to see you, my lady.”
Agatha sighed heavily. She did not want to receive guests, but it had been a month since her husband’s death. Good manners dictated that she be left alone for the first few weeks of her mourning, but now it was time for society to pay their respects.
She stood, smoothing her black skirts. “I shall receive them in the drawing room.”
“Very good, my lady,” her butler said. “I have already put them there.”
“Of course.”
“Along with the Duke of Hastings.”
“What?” Agatha groaned. She had not liked the man when he was Frederick Basset, and she did not like him now that he was the Duke of Hastings.
“And Lord and Lady Kent.”
“Is the Tsar of Russia here as well?”
“No, my lady.”
The Danbury butler had never had a sense of humor. Herman had hired him, of course.
“But Lord and Lady Hallewell are here.”
Agatha regarded the butler with something approaching horror. “And they’re all in our drawing room?”
“I sent for tea, my lady.”
“But no biscuits,” Agatha said. “I don’t want them to stay long.”
“Of course not, my lady.” He opened the door to her reading room so that she could exit, and then followed her out.
“It is so kind of you all to call,” she said once she’d entered the drawing room. It was packed to the gills. It seemed like half the new ton were there.
She greeted each of them separately, then took a seat on her new sofa. Gold damask, of course. It had been ordered before Lord Danbury’s death.
“Agatha, darling,” Lady Smythe-Smith said. “We are devastated for you. For your loss. We grieve.”
Do you? Agatha wanted to say. No one had liked Herman Danbury, except maybe the new Duke of Hastings.
“He was a great man,” the duke said.
“He was a champion,” Lord Smythe-Smith said.
Rounded out by Lady Smythe-Smith once again chiming in. “We do grieve.”
Agatha waited for a moment. She looked to the Kents and the Hallewells, standing behind the Smythe-Smiths. Their faces were painted with their most compassionate expressions, but they seemed inclined to let the others do the talking.
“However,” Agatha finally said. The air positively strained under the weight of unspoken words. “There is a however here, is there not?”
Because surely they would not have all come at once to pay their respects. Condolence calls were normally made one by one.
Lord Smythe-Smith cleared his throat. “There is indeed a however. And we do apologize for descending en masse. But we need to know. What happens now?”