“But what shall that be?” he asked softly.
“What do you care about?” Stoker put in.
Eddy considered a long moment. “I do like horses. I am very fond of polo.” He thought some more. “I like Alix of Hesse, my cousin,” he added with a blush. “She is a lovely girl, just what a queen ought to be.”
“Very nice,” I said encouragingly. “But what of politics? What change would you like to see in the world?”
He stared at me as if he were hearing the question for the first time, and I realized with a start it was entirely possible it was. A prince in the direct line of succession would not be so much asked his opinions as given them, and I had little doubt what reactionary views he had been fed with his daily bread.
To my everlasting astonishment, he spoke with sudden authority. “I should like to see Ireland free.”
Stoker dropped his pear. “You support Home Rule?”
“I do,” Eddy said with even more conviction. “I do not know how it may be achieved, one must consult ministers and men of learning for that, I suppose. But there seems no good reason to me that they should not be able to govern themselves under supervision from London.”
I suppressed a smile. It was not the complete and free Home Rule that the Irish themselves wanted, but he was a good deal more amenable than any other member of the royal family, I suspected.
The mood had turned companionable; perhaps our shared captivity had created a sort of attachment that is possible only in times of peril. I had often found it to be so during the course of my travels. (A forced interlude with a Corsican bandit of great charm had ended with him vowing to give up his errant life of villainy and take holy orders. He still sent me regular missives from the monastery where he devoted himself to the making of pungent cheeses.) As I looked at this kindly, charming, and slightly moronic young man, it occurred to me that our shared blood might account just a little for our sympathy with one another.
He turned to me suddenly, as if intuiting my thoughts. “Would you mind if I were frightfully rude? Just a little?”
I brushed the crumbs from my fingers and sat back. “What would you like to know?”
“How long have you known? About Papa. That he is your father, I mean.”
“The week of the queen’s Jubilee,” I told him. “My mother died when I was very young and I was reared by friends of hers. When the second of them died, I discovered the truth about my birth. Some people had already known of it.”
“Your uncle de Clare?” he guessed.
“Among others,” I temporized, not wanting to invoke the names of Lady Wellie or Sir Hugo just yet. “In any event, my uncle had devised a ridiculous plot to produce proof of my parentage and put me forward as a sort of alternative queen. He thought the pope might like it,” I added with a smile, but Eddy’s expression remained sober.
“And you refused?”
“Naturally. I am answerable to no one,” I told him gently. “If I were queen, even a puppet, pretender queen, I should have no life of my own.”
“As I do not,” he finished, the full mouth curving into a rueful smile. He sobered suddenly. “Wait a dashed minute—what proofs?”
“There were documents,” Stoker explained. “A marriage contract, registry page, baptismal certificate. That sort of thing.”
“Yes, that would be enough to put a good deal of doubt in the right quarters,” Eddy agreed.
“But we burnt them,” Stoker told him. I did not betray the lie by looking at him. We had, in point of fact, burnt a packet of forgeries created by Stoker to serve as a facsimile of the originals. Unbeknownst to me at the time, he had switched the documents, allowing me to make a public and convincing show of burning the pages in front of my uncle while still retaining the proof of my identity. I turned to Stoker in puzzlement.
“Uncle de Clare saw me burn what he believed were the original papers. How on earth can he expect to carry out such a ludicrous scheme without them?” I asked.
Stoker shrugged. “No doubt he has some fresh deviltry in mind.”
Eddy cleared his throat gently. “I was wondering, have you ever met Papa?”
“I have not. I met your aunt Louise last year, and your mother—when was it? Yesterday? The day before? I have lost track of time now,” I told him.
I did not mention the tiny jewel our father had sent me at the conclusion of a particularly challenging investigation. It was the nearest I had come to a gesture of acknowledgment from him, and I was not certain if I wanted more. My feelings towards my father were ambivalent in the extreme. I vacillated between craving his attention and hoping never again to hear his name. Love and hate are not incompatible emotions, I reflected. And while I neither loved nor hated him, I would never be indifferent to the man who had sired me.
Eddy spoke again. “I will make certain you meet him when this is finished. I give you my word.”
I resisted the urge to smile. It was the promise of a child and I would not hurt his dignity for the world. “Thank you, sir.”
“I think perhaps, just as long as we are all captives together,” he said with a matey smile, “we should be familiar. You may call me Eddy. And you are Veronica, are you not?”
I nodded, my throat too tight for speech.
Stoker liberated the last apple from the tray. “Excellent. Now that we are refreshed and acquainted, let us create a plan.”
“For what?” Eddy blinked at him, the slow blink I was beginning to understand meant that he was struggling to understand or anticipate a line of conversation.
“For escape,” I told him with a grin. “For escape.”
* * *
• • •
It will never work,” I told Stoker flatly.
He folded his arms over the breadth of his chest and stared at me with challenge in his gaze. “Have you a better idea?”
“No, but I suspect Huxley could conjure a better scheme,” I protested. After finishing our simple meal, we had worked together to arrange as much privacy as possible for visits to the porcelain apparatus in the corner—another circumstance that leads to greater intimacy in friendship, I have discovered—and then proceeded to create and discard twelve different plans for escape. The last was, in my opinion, entirely the worst.
Upon searching our garments for possible tools or weapons, Stoker had unearthed the paper twist of sedative he had originally thought to administer to the porter at the Club de L’Étoile. He had hit upon the notion of putting it into the dregs of the beer in his cup and giving it to Quiet Dan when next he appeared.
“To what end?” I demanded. “It will get us past this one door, if we are lucky. There is no way of anticipating what further obstacles lie on the other side.”