"A long journey in the company of the princess," Leo responded with an amused smile.
"As it happens, Toinette and I never have the slightest need to cheat with each other," Cordelia said with a dignified tilt of her head, slipping easily into the role he was dictating. Light, slightly flirtatious banter was enjoyed by everyone at court. "We developed the strategy, as I told you, to combat the underhand dealings of others. Fight pitch with pitch, my lord." She glanced over her shoulder as she said this, and her eyes held a very different meaning. Leo merely smiled, bowed, and moved away into the main body of the room.
Tables were being set up for gaming. The children seemed to have vanished with the royal sisters. Michael was sitting at a whist table. It seemed to Leo that the man was having difficulty sitting up straight in his chair. His shoulders kept slumping. For the first time, Leo remembered Mathilde's potion and how Cordelia had said it had kept Michael from the boar hunt. So many momentous things had happened since then, he'd completely forgotten.
There were as yet only three people at the table just behind Michael's. Leo went over. "May I join your rubber? Or are you waiting for someone?"
"Not at all, dear fellow. But all means, sit." A snuff-stained whist player waved jovially at the empty chair. Michael glanced over his shoulder and acknowledged Leo's smiling greeting with a stiff bow. He looked ghastly, Leo thought. And then he thought grimly that if Michael was ill, he couldn't be expected to fight a duel. Leo would be expected to hold his challenge until his opponent was fit and well.
But he could still issue it. Once the challenge was issued, Cordelia would be beyond danger. The matter would fall under the king's jurisdiction until it was resolved.
He picked up his cards and sorted them. He intended to make his accusation in the most dramatic way possible. The following afternoon, after the play, on stage, he would speak out. He had his speech prepared and it would create a stir that would live in the memory of this court into the next generation.
He laid an ace of spades on top of the ten and took the trick. A hand touched his arm. A tiny dimpled hand. "Monsieur Leo."
He looked down at the twins, standing together at this chair. They curtsied as his eyes fell upon them, and then they gazed at him solemnly, as if a little unsure of their welcome. "Madame Cordelia said we could come and pay our respects, sir. We have something most particular to ask you.
"These are your nieces, I understand, Lord Kierston." A dowager duchess put up her lorgnette and examined the children, who were so fascinated by the ostrich plumes in her powdered mountain of hair that for a moment they stared unabashed as the feathers bobbed perilously close to the rim of a glass of champagne.
"Make your curtsies," Leo reminded them softly, and they did so hastily.
"May we watch?" Amelia inched closer against his arm, gazing up at him with Elvira's eyes, where appeal and mischief mingled.
"If no one else objects," he said, glancing at Michael's back at the next table. He didn't seem to be aware of his daughters' somewhat unorthodox arrival.
"Not in the least," the duchess said airily. "Have a comfit, mes petites." She selected two chocolate dragees from a silver dish. The girls, experienced now, opened their mouths to receive the sweet and smiled politely at their benefactress.
"What's a passport, Monsieur Leo?" Sylvie asked when she'd swallowed her chocolate.
Leo's hand froze in the act of scooping up his new hand. "Why do you ask?"
"You said to Madame Cordelia that you were going to get us one," Amelia put in. "Is it a present?"
"I don't know what you're talking about, Amelia," Leo said with a slight, dismissive laugh, examining his cards-"And children with big ears certainly aren't given presents.
They both looked crestfallen, but that couldn't be helped-
"Go back to your stepmother now," he instructed. "You're disturbing my play."
They curtsied disconsolately and scurried off, but recovered sufficiently to take strawberry tarts from a salver that a footman obligingly held down to them.
"pretty little things," the dowager duchess said. "So like their mother. The same eyes." She leaned sideways and bellowed at Michael's averted back. "I was just saying, Prince. Your daughters… such pretty little things… the image of their mother-may she rest in peace," she added piously, crossing herself.
Michael looked over his shoulder. His eyes were blank. "How kind of you to say so, madame." He turned back to his cards.
Michael took a glass of burgundy from a passing footman and drank deeply. It was his fourth glass in an hour, but contrary to medical opinion it didn't seem to strengthen him after the bleeding he'd undergone that morning. He still felt weak and his hands had an uncharacteristic tremor to them.
"I trust you are feeling better, my lord." His wife spoke at his elbow. Her eyes were more gray than blue this evening, reflecting the almost opalescent misty gray of her gown. The side panels of the gown were drawn up over her hoop to reveal an emerald green undergown sewn with seed pearls. A tiara of emeralds nestled in the black hair, a matching collar was clasped at her throat, and on her wrist she wore the serpent bracelet; the diamond slipper, the silver rose, and the emerald swan caught the candlelight whenever she moved her gracefully rounded forearm.
Elvira had worn the intricate bracelet with its strange, almost sinister medieval design with flamboyance. She had worn it constantly and flourished it as she flourished the male admiration that flowed over her. Admiration that she had played up to with all her seductive wiles. Cordelia was also never seen without the bracelet. She touched it frequently but almost absently, as if it were a kind of talismanic ritual.
Whenever he looked at the bracelet, he became superstitiously convinced that some dreadful mischance had brought it into his life. Both women who wore it with such constancy were corrupt. Both were as devious, as faithless, as manipulative as the Eve it represented.
A wave of dizziness washed over him, and he grasped the back of a chair.
"You are unwell, my lord. Perhaps you should retire." Cordelia spoke again, not that she gave a damn whether he was on his deathbed. One thing was certain, he was not going to come to her bed tonight, not in his present state. The relief made her want to sing.
And then he looked at her and the familiar nausea and tremors began anew. He loathed her. The malice in his eyes was worse than she'd ever seen it. He seemed to look right through her, into the darkest corners of her soul. "I will retire in my own good time, madame," he said. "And I will come to you in my own good time. You will await me."
Cordelia turned away, unable to bear those eyes. She didn't think he was capable of hurting her tonight, but she was no longer certain of it.
Michael's mouth twisted. He moved around the chair he held without releasing his grip and sat down heavily. Passports. The child had prattled to Leo about passports. A promised present from her uncle.
Leo Beaumont had escorted Michael's wife all the way from Vienna. Twenty-three days in her company. More than long enough to form a liaison. Had she since confided the dark secrets of her marriage? Of course, she would have confided in a lover. And the impulsive lover would scheme to take her away.
The fat maggots of suspicion writhed in Michael's head as they had done since he'd overheard his daughter's question that afternoon. Elvira had been deceitful. Elvira had been unfaithful. Why should her brother be any different? Michael had never liked Elvira's brother. He had made use of him, but he had never really trusted him. And most particularly not since Elvira's death. There was a slyness to him. And definitely something peculiar about his besotted attention to a pair of infants. What grown man without an ulterior motive would be so attentive to such unrewarding objects?