Linda Needham (22 page)

“There, you see, Your Highness,” Drew said, wincing slightly as Marguerite dug one of her sharp elbows into his ribs. “I pledge myself to you as your minister of hedgehogs.”

“You do me great honor, Lord Wexford.” Caro would have stood up, but Oscar had fallen fast asleep across her lap again. “But I do think it’s time for all good ministers to be safely in their beds.”

“Let me give you a hand, Princess.” Drew stood up with Marguerite in his arms, shuffling her comfortably over his shoulder, not seeming to mind that the girl had a stranglehold on his neck cloth.

“Bedtime, children.” Caro slipped the sleeping Oscar over her shoulder then took hold of Drew’s outstretched hand and pulled herself to her feet.

They trouped up the stairs to the east wing and into the sitting room, where Karl’s wife was embroidering the edge of one of the traditional Boratanian neck cloths for the ceremony.

“Ah, Princess Caroline!” The woman stood up smiling, setting aside her needle as she reached out for Oscar and Marguerite. “You and Lord Wexford have been awfully good to the children.”

“They’re a pleasure, Mistress Brendel.” Caro gave Robert Frederick’s dark hair a tousle. “I see a bright future for Boratania.”

“We’re gonna be ministers to the princess,” Robert Frederick said, puffing up his chest.

“Yes, and my ministers need their sleep.” Caro bent down for her kisses. “Good night, children.”

Drew followed her silently out of the sitting room
but caught her elbow as they started down the corridor.

“I think the princess needs her sleep as well,” he said softly, stopping her at the top of the stairs.

“Where have you been, Drew? I was worried to death.” She leveled a finger at him, still so glad to see him safely home that she wanted to throw her arms around him and not ever let go. “And don’t give me that spurious tale about Palmerston. You went off to investigate something with Jared and Ross, and you didn’t want me to get in the way.”

He shook his head, looking far from innocent. “You caught me, Caro.”

“And was it worth the trip? Did you learn anything from your breakneck junket into London?”

“You gave me the idea, Caro.”

“I thought so!”

He folded his stubborn arms across his chest and frowned at her with one eyebrow. “I was looking for a connection between the waiter and the bricklayer—”

“Did you find one?”

“Possibly.”

“Then, sir, if you’ll come down to the library with me and tell me everything you know, I’ll show you what I found today among my treasures.”

“What do you mean?”

Drew wasn’t sure he liked the slyness of her smile as she hurried past him down the stairs, didn’t like ambushes or dangerous surprises.

“It’s probably nothing, Drew.” She stopped at the base of the stairs and waited for him with a smile, only to speed ahead the moment he reached her side. “But I do like the mystery of it all.”

“Mystery?”

“Do you recall that very old coffer I showed you in the orangery that first day? The one with the carved bees along the edge.”

“Not particularly, Caro.” What in all of Boratania wasn’t decorated with bees? “I’m afraid that one of your artifacts runs together with the next.”

“It was from the lot I rescued from Lord Peverel.” She was waiting for him at the library door, and he couldn’t help thinking that she was leading him down some rosy path.

“What about the box?”

“It was empty when you and I looked inside.” She smiled again and flounced off to her desk. “So I logged it as an ordinary reliquary and packed it away.”

“And then what?” He stood in the doorway, not sure that he wanted anything to do with this particular mystery.

“Then yesterday, Karl saw the listing in the logbook and remembered a rumor that the coffer had a hidden compartment.” She turned back to him, holding the old coffer in her hands.

He remembered the box for its primitive simplicity. “And did it?”

Her eyes took on a smoky blue, her smile like a cat with a canary. In two moves with her thumbs, the front of the box opened to reveal a dark slot.

“Just as Karl remembered it, Drew!”

Yes, but thankfully empty. Barren of any dreadful secrets. His heart thumped to life again.

“A neat trick, Caro.” Relieved to his bones, Drew started toward her as she closed the compartment and returned the box to its original shape. He was about to reach for it when she flipped open the lid of the main chamber to a pack of folded papers.

“But the neatest trick of all, Drew, is that I found these tucked inside the secret compartment.”

He had no idea of the content of the papers, but a wintery breeze seemed to wash through the room, flickering the lamps and riling the ends of Caro’s hair.

“What are they, Caro?”

“I don’t know.” Grinning at him, she put the coffer on the desk. “The children were helping me when I opened the compartment out in the orangery. It was too dark and too crowded to read more than one page at the time.”

His heart stopped again. “But you did read one of them?”

“I somehow expected that an old reliquary coffer with a secret compartment would be hiding something at least a few centuries old.” She handed the paper to him with a sigh, then peered at its florid script overtop his elbow while he tried to keep his hand still. “But as you see, it’s a letter from the Earl Marshal’s office at the College of Arms to King George the Fourth. A confirmation of the way my family tree should officially read after my birth in 1830.”

A fabrication, my love.
A letter between two men who thought nothing of playing with your life for their own purposes.

And yet a harmless-enough record in itself, a set of facts that have been taken as common knowledge through the years, fortifying her identity as the heir to Boratania.

“You can add this to your collection, madam.” He handed the letter back to her, wondering how long Peverel had been in possession of the coffer. Moreover, who had stuffed these pages into it, and when? Certainly some time after 1830, after the royal con
spirators had decided on the story they were going to tell the rest of the world about the fictional newborn Boratanian princess.

“With pride, Drew. After all, a king doesn’t usually put himself out to memorialize a fellow king.” She looked up at him with hopeful mischief in her eyes as she carefully laid aside the letter. “Exciting, isn’t it?”

“Indeed.” Though exciting wasn’t the word he would use. He wanted to grab the folded sheets out of her hand and vet them alone, without the woman looking on. The rest could be anything from prattle to a cannonball.

“Well, this is a grand-looking thing, Drew.” She had unfolded a much larger piece of parchment: formal, highly ornamented, illuminated in gold and bright colors. “And it’s dated the day of my birth!”

Drew read as quickly as he could, searching ahead for traps and pitfalls.

By Royal Writ and Universal Decree,

We, the Undersigned, For Our Mutual Protection,

Do Hereby Defend the Right of

and Grant to the Legal Issue of

King Alexander Ferdinand III of Boratania

and his Queen Genevieve Adelaide Teodora,

the Title of Empress

and Land enough to Include 10 Square Miles

to be Occupied in Perpetuity

Upon the Twenty-First Birthday of Said Issue.

“Interesting, Caro,” he said, exhaling in relief. Just another legitimizing document. With any luck, the others were as innocent.

“Look at all those signatures and ribbons and royal
seals!” she said with a joyful little laugh, running her fingertip across the very bottom of the page. “The heads of every royal family in Europe at the time! Which is amazing in itself, considering what a quarrelsome lot they were. Never agreed on anything!”

Except the creation of you, Caro.

“Except, Drew, they did seem to all agree that Boratania needed to be preserved.” She looked up at him, her brow furrowed in thought.

“So they did.”

“Guilt, do you suppose, for not coming to my father’s aid?”

“It’s hard to say.” Impossible, actually. May she never guess the truth.

“Whatever the reason, this is the legal deed to my kingdom.” She heaved a sigh and set the writ beside the Earl Marshal’s letter, then unfolded the next.

He knew the source without even looking at the signature. Two pages of vellum on Queen Victoria’s personal stationery, the crown of state with the highly ornate VR below that.

“Look, Drew. It’s a letter from the queen to Lord Peverel.” She gasped and looked up at Drew. “Which could only mean that he knew about the hidden compartment in the coffer. Because look. It’s dated 24 July 1850, last year. ‘My Dear Lord Peverel…’”

“My what? State Secret?” Caro looked up at Drew, shock and confusion alive in her face. “What secret could she possibly mean, Drew?”

But Drew could hardly breathe for the sudden, stifling tightness in his chest, for his blood sloshing through his veins like ice water.

Stop now, my love. Please, don’t ask a question of me that you’re not prepared to hear the answer to.

“I’m…not sure, Caro.” He wanted to read on ahead to try to protect her, but she had crimped the page and dropped her hand. “Come, let’s read on.”

Get it over with.

“I can assure you, Drew, that I don’t know any state secrets, Boratanian or otherwise.” In a defensive huff, she snapped the paper flat and Drew caught her hand to steady it, reading quickly.

“Dear Lord, Drew, is my entire family keeping some enormous secret from me?”

Christ, the evidence was as plain as day, as plain as the bewilderment in Caro’s beautiful eyes. And had the hearth been lit in the library, he’d have been tempted to toss it all into the hottest part of the flame and let it burn.

He could say nothing to her that wouldn’t be a dishonorable lie, and he just couldn’t bring himself to sully the trust between them.

So he said nothing at all, only read on, his stomach churning hot, his fingers cold as he clutched the queen’s letter.

It was signed with the queen’s distinctive
Victoria, R
.

“Treason, Drew?” She was shaking her head, still scanning the letter as she raked her fingers through the curls escaping their bonds at her forehead. “The queen has threatened Peverel with treason if he reveals whatever it is that I’ve done, or am, or might do, that has made me a state secret.”

“So it seems.” His jaw ached like fire.

“What secret? And how could it be so utterly treasonable, so capable of causing—what? A war? A plague? A scandal?—should it ever come to be known to the public. Or to me? Because, blast it all, I don’t know what it is.”

“The queen has certainly set forth serious consequences, Caro,” Drew said, measuring his every word for its truth.

“But why?”

He purposely ignored the question. “Is this all of the documents?”

“One more.” She shook herself from wherever her thoughts were heading, set down the queen’s letter and looked at her empty hand. “It was just here. A little piece of paper…”

She rustled between the three documents on the desk and then something else on the desk must have caught her eye.

“That’s very odd.” She picked up the Earl Marshal’s letter to King George and squinted as she scanned it. “See right here at the top:
This
letter is dated two days
before my birth and my mother’s death. The same date as the letter from the king to Captain R about my mother.”

Bloody hell, he’d been so distracted and defensive he hadn’t caught the glaring contradiction.

“Obviously an error, Princess.” And yet the starkness of winter had settled inside Drew’s chest, making it hard to swallow and nearly impossible to breathe.

“I know that’s it, of course. But still, that’s very sloppy work for the man in charge of the entire College of Arms and all its heraldry.”

Not if Queen Genevieve was already dead and you hadn’t yet been born and left by your real mother in the orphanage for King George’s most trusted minister to discover.

“Human failings, my dear. The College of Arms misspelled my own name repeatedly on my first letters of patent. Took three times to get it right.”

“Oh, here’s the other document; I must have dropped it.” Caro knelt down and picked up a smaller piece of paper, yellowed with age. A farthing sheet of pale green stationery that made the hair on the back of Drew’s neck stand on end.

“Oh, my Lord, Drew!” She looked up at him with horror in her eyes and then back at the page. “It’s from someone giving up a child!”

Delivered with you to the orphanage.
“Yes, it is, Caro.”

And all he could do was wait helplessly for his love to make the devastating connections, wait and watch her heart break in two.

“But why is it here among the other papers?”

Caro swallowed the shuddering sob that suddenly formed in her throat, that made her want to weep as she looked down again at the watery ink and the faltering hand.

“It’s so sad, Drew.” Now she could hardly see for the hot tears swamping her eyes, spilling down her cheeks. “I can feel the love right here in my hands.”