“It is natural to be overwhelmed,” the baroness said kindly. “But you will do this and you will do it with dignity and confidence, I have no doubt.”
Her voice said she had no doubt but her eyes were not so certain. I smiled at her and squared my shoulders. “I will do my best.”
I raised my chin imperiously. “Now, let us go. It will not do to be late.”
CHAPTER
23
If my own metamorphosis from lepidopterist to princess had been dramatic, Stoker’s was scarcely less impressive. I emerged from the bedchamber to find him standing at the hearth, posture erect, costumed in the full dress uniform of the Alpenwalder guard of honor. The livery was black, piped with brilliant alpine blue. The trousers had been changed in favor of knee breeches with white stockings, displaying the splendor of his calves as effectively as the tight coat paid compliment to the breadth of his shoulders and the slimness of his waist. The shako had been replaced by a soft cap of black velvet with a long blue plume secured with a jeweled pin. A wide riband of blue and white crossed his chest, and a black silk patch was secured over his eye. Spotless white gloves completed the ensemble.
He had been speaking to the chancellor when I entered, but when he caught sight of me, he stopped, and for a moment we were the only two people in the room, perhaps even on earth. I paused and he advanced, bowing low as he swept off the cap. I realized then that he wore a short velvet cape that swung as he moved with a sort of Elizabethan swagger.
“Most effective,” I murmured.
“Dazzling,” he said, brushing his mouth over my fingers.
“Yes, if you don’t mind, I think we really could get on,” said Maximilian, not troubling to conceal his peevishness. He was wearing a costume nearly identical to Stoker’s, only trimmed with quantities of silver braid. The garments suited him, but when compared to Stoker, he seemed a penciled copy of an oil painting, and I did not begrudge him his sulkiness. He was accustomed to being accounted one of the handsomest men in the Alpenwald, and now he had competition.
I smiled at him as graciously as I could as I took his arm. In strict accordance with protocol, I was accompanied by the duke while the chancellor escorted the baroness. Stoker and J. J.—pressed into service for the evening and now changed into a stark and pristine uniform of white and black—brought up the rear. As we made our way down to the lobby, the chancellor explained the arrangements for the evening.
“We will leave from the back entrance,” he said, directing Maximilian. “It is not precisely a secret where we are bound, but neither is it publicized. Discretion is key,” he stressed. “Our hosts have sent a pair of private carriages and we will travel by these conveyances instead of by train.”
The waiting carriages bore no crest or distinguishing marks, but it was apparent that the owner was a person of immense wealth. Every detail was of the highest quality, from the tufted silk of the squabs to the delicate Tudor rose motif on the glass panes of the lamps. The first was just large enough to admit the four of us—the baroness, chancellor, duke, and I—once my train had been folded carefully around me. The baroness and I traveled facing forward with the duke while the chancellor took the center of the opposite seat. Stoker and J. J. were relegated to the second carriage as befitted their station for the night.
The night was clear and cold and the journey took much longer than expected as we bowled briskly away, through the city and into the dark countryside of Berkshire. My aunts and I had moved often during my childhood, exchanging one country village for another very like it, all in a bid to avoid those who might seek out the Prince of Wales’s semi-legitimate child. I had neither known nor appreciated their reasons for uprooting my tender self at the time. Instead, it had been an endless round of beginnings and partings. Most of the hamlets I had forgot, but one stayed fresh in my memory—a tiny settlement in the shadows of Windsor Castle, just beyond the meadows of Runnymede. I remembered the broad fields, lushly green and dotted with the fleecy clouds of sheep grazing on the spring grass. I had fallen from an apple tree there and broken my arm, I recalled. That was when I had received my first butterfly net as a gift from the aunts for my birthday. Enchanted, I had taken it on a long walk, netting my first specimen in the ring net now long replaced by a professional’s. But I had loved that net, loved the feeling of the wind in my hair and the earth under my feet. It was in those meadows, chasing the lazy flap of a lepidopteron, that I had learnt my trade.
And one afternoon, late in the autumn of my twelfth year, I wandered further than usual in pursuit of Cyaniris semiargus, the Mazarine Blue, a pretty little Palearctic butterfly. I hopped over streams and scrambled over stiles as the afternoon drew to a close. The butterfly—a male with delectably blue coloration—eluded me, lifting itself on gossamer wings to freedom. Dejected, I stood for a long moment, collecting my whereabouts. And there it was: just ahead on the horizon. Windsor Castle. I stared up at the castle, the proud stone enormity of it rising above the landscape like something out of myth. The afternoon light lay softly upon it, gilding the cold grey battlements to a glimmering sheen that would have suited King Arthur himself. It was the most glorious thing I had ever seen, and I stood, rooted to the spot like a meadow flower, wondering about the princes and princesses who sheltered within its walls. I knew our queen was Victoria and that she lived there, wrapped in widow’s weeds. Her children must have been largely grown by then, but I imagined them still in the nursery, dressed in sailor suits and lawn dresses, attending their lessons and eating milk and bread from porringers marked with a crown. Oh, how I envied them! Not their royalty, I realized with a pang. I envied them each other. I envied the sense of belonging to a family with more brothers and sisters almost than one could count, of knowing a mother’s touch, of a home that stood, resolute and unchanging in the mellow autumn gold of that afternoon.
Little did I realize that I had almost as good a claim upon the place as those who dwelt within its walls, I thought as the carriages bore us out of London into the west. Such were my thoughts, and I was aware of a rising excitement, not at visiting a castle, but at setting foot in what was my family home. My ancestors had built the place, stone by stone, and had lived there, had died there, loved and hated and borne new generations within its walls. And at last, I would come home.
So lost in my own reflections was I that I did not realize we had reached Windsor until the castle loomed above us in all of its grey majesty and I felt a sudden thrust of longing for Stoker. I had told him once, as we lay curled together in the dark, of my memory of the place, of the wrench I felt that afternoon when I returned home to find the aunts had packed us up and were moving us on once more. I never saw the castle again except in memory, and each time I embellished it more, raising the towers a little higher, the battlements a little wider. I fashioned of it a faery castle, and I had confided in Stoker that the frisson of feeling that day in the water meadow had been unlike anything I had experienced before or since. Long after discovering my father’s identity, I recalled that day, and I marveled at my experience, wondering if somehow the memory of my ancestors, deep in my bones and blood, had stirred at the home they had built. It was the sort of thing one could only speak of in the dark, fast in a lover’s arms, safe in the shelter of his kindness. He had not ridiculed me. There had not been even a hint of a smile in his voice. Only his broad, capable hands, gently stroking my hair as I talked. He would understand what coming to Windsor meant to me.