Royal Renegade (11 page)

The princess tilted up her obstinate chin and took issue with this, as she always did when, after a great effort, he managed to remember some detail in the code of conduct. "Why ever not? I will wager the best dancers would never pass muster. My dancing master Pierre Michelet—I did learn to dance, so you needn't think I am totally lacking in social graces—Michelet was a shocking loose screw, for example. He could barely stand by noon, for he hid a flask in his coat. But he danced like an angel, for all his inebriation, and recited lovely poetry at the same time. Now I should rather dance with him—three times!—than once with some estimable dullard who would step on my slippers and prose on about the hunt."

"If you are only going to discount everything I say, Your Highness, don't ask for my advice," Devlyn replied coldly. "If you want to risk social ruin by dancing seven times with Dishy Mitchelson, you are welcome to. Just don't tell me I should have warned you."

"Who is Dishy Mitchelson?" the princess asked, her green eyes alight with anticipation.

"An aging roue, fond of opium and innocents, in several combinations." Fortunately, she had no idea what he meant, only frowning prettily and then dismissing that as she dismissed most of his counsel.

"Well, you must admit, most of these rules are silly." She smiled at him, one sophisticate to another, her hand cupped in languid inquiry under her chin. "And I can't believe they are meant to apply to royalty. Aren't you English terrible snobs? Why, your princes get away with murder and bigamy and—and indebtedness! Surely princesses are also allowed a bit of latitude. Otherwise, what has happened to the divine right of kings?"

“If there is a divine right of princesses to disgrace themselves, I haven't heard of it," Devlyn replied dampingly. "It is most amusing, your highness, how you speak as a democrat, even an anarchist, until the subject comes to your own prerogatives. Then you are the most monarchical of royalists. Divine right! You might still believe that in Russia, but we English have long since discarded such naivete. Of course, naivete is rather your hallmark, isn't it?"

She was stung by his conflicting accusations of hypocrisy and naivete, but attacked the most insulting first. "I am not naive! I have read widely of society doings and gossip, and I daresay I know the major figures in London better than you!" She regarded him challengingly, and he raised one hand in surrender. "So I am sure I shall appear sophisticated and exotic to society, and no one will guess how isolated I have been. I shall be considered all the crack, and bang up to the nines."

"The heroes speak cant, too," she responded defensively, turning her little back just to punish him. "And some of them are fine as a fivepence." But after a moment, she added unwillingly, "You think I should not speak like that?"

"I suppose I must trust you," she conceded with a heavy sigh. And here I'd written out a dictionary and memorized it—a waste of time, you'll say."

"Perhaps you can publish it and sell it to unweaned pups at Eton," he suggested, and laughed when she took him up on the notion.

“Like Dr. Johnson's dictionary! I could call it 'Dr. Denisova's Dictionary of Thieves' Cant for the Elucidation of Unweaned Pups.' How would I go about finding a publisher?"

"I haven't the slightest idea," he replied chillingly and hastened to change the subject. "Whether you see yourself as naive or not, Your Highness, you must be wary of real sophisticates. That fancy title of yours is going to attract some true Spanish coin minters." At her bewildered frown, he added, "You must add that to your dictionary. Flatterers who will take advantage of you. Such as a social-climbing jezebel who will pledge her undying friendship when all she wants is entree to Carlton House."

“And the men?"

He let the horizon watch itself briefly and gave her a speculative glance. "Surely you know how a man may take advantage of a woman."

Her lashes swept down to hide her eyes; whether with coyness or shyness he couldn't tell. "I told you I was isolated. I have never been to a party, except at Versailles, and no one paid me any mind there, except Napoleon."

Except Versailles. Except Napoleon. Devlyn felt insignificant just standing next to this princess with her "excepts." He fought the urge to ask her what the Corsican monster was really like, and whether Versailles was as splendid as reputed, and what she was doing there anyway, if she had been so isolated.

But she was tumbling on. "So I have had no contact with men—Spanish coin minters or no. Except," she added softly, "for my cousin Count Korsakov.'

Another except. "Who is your cousin Count Korsakov?"

"Just an officer in the Kaluga Reserve Corps. He paid me special attention for a short time." A delicate blush rose in her golden cheeks, and she fumbled with the ribbons of her hood, refusing to look up at him.

As if he were a bystander in his own body, Devlyn was intrigued by the hot emotion that arose in him. "And what form did this attention take?"

"Oh, he would visit with me and tell me jokes. He was excessively silly, but he knew wonderful jokes." The toe of her red kid slipper drew a sequence of circles on the polished deck. "He told me he was going to ask my Uncle Dmitry for my hand. But I never saw him again. He was posted to the Kamchatka Peninsula—that's on the eastern coast, almost five thousand miles away. My uncle had other plans for my hand, I suppose."

Devlyn asked evenly, not sure he wanted to know the answer, "Were you very disappointed?"

The little red slipper continued its careful circling. "A bit. I thought I'd never get out of there, you see. I thought I'd probably die there in the west wing without ever having lived, without ever having anyone of my own. And Peter—poor Peter. He lost everything—of course, it would have been very wrong to marry him just to escape, wouldn't it?"

"Isn't that your primary motive for marrying Cumberland?" The words came out more harshly than he intended. "Or are you putting that down to patriotism?"

As usual, she ignored his question to pursue her own tangent on the issue. "Do you really think royal marriages make any difference at all? Why, the House of Hanover is linked to all the royal houses of Europe, and Britain still stands alone against Napoleon. All those royal brides and grooms seem entirely irrelevant to global matters. I can't imagine that Britain will support Russia only because our two families are linked." She gazed him earnestly, seeking some assurance he knew he had no right to give.

But he felt immeasurably better at her disinterest in this royal marriage, and didn't care to examine why. "Now who is being literal? Royal marriages are merely—what was your word? Metaphors. Unless, of course, kingdoms are linked in actuality by marriage, as happened when George I brought the kingdom of Hanover with him to Britain."

"I haven't any kingdom to bring with me, for my grandfather lost Saraya Kalin decades ago," the princess said with a sigh of relief. "I don't even have a dowry, only twenty thousand pounds in the Bank of England, and that's my own funds, which I shan't give away to a husband. I can't understand why any self-respecting prince would take me, can you?"

He forbore to answer, only commenting, "If it is in Britain's interest to become allied to Russia, that is what will happen, and the marriage will be a symbol. If it is not, no marriage will make a difference."

She regarded him solemnly from under those dark lashes. But with unusual tact, she did not acknowledge his last remark, which, they both knew, was far out of the purview of his duties as an escort. Then, as suddenly as she had appeared, she slid back along the deck, refusing on principle to hold on to the railing although the sloop tipped up under the force of a roller. When she regained her balance, she threw him a reassuring smile over her shoulder and vanished down the stairwell.

As he turned slowly back to the rail, Devlyn wondered if she knew how potent that smile was. Each time she smiled at him, it stopped him dead in his tracks. Her always pretty face became radiant, her eyes sparking like emeralds, her velvety skin glowing like pearls. That smile was the very personification of joy, coming entirely from within, from some warm little part of her.

He hoped no man would ever be fool enough to tell her about the power of that smile. If she knew how she dazzled, she would smile whenever she wanted to get her way. And then that smile would lose all its magic, and life would lose a little reason for joy.

As Devlyn entered his cabin a little later, Dryden followed him. After the hatch was shut, Dryden regarded him with embarrassment and Devlyn knew he was in for some friendly advice.

Theirs had always been an awkward relationship, though as boys they hadn't regarded it much. Then they had been merely a titled, if impoverished, youth and the more affluent son of the bourgeoisie. They had run together in childhood in the village of Devlyn on the south coast. In their later youth, their common alienation drew them together.

Devlyn was literally alienated, orphaned and destitute from the age of ten. On his holidays from school, he had no place to go but an abandoned forester's cottage on the estate that should have been his. John's estrangement was more spiritual than actual; the apothecary's son, he was a restless sort even as a child, but as the elder son he was expected to take up his father's profession. He wouldn't, he swore to Devlyn often enough, and he didn't. Proud as a prince and twice as able, he scorned all careful trappings of the middle class and early vowed to make his own way, legal or no.

The friendship, even then, was mostly John's doing. In the quiet viscount he must have sensed some corresponding need to take control of life. So every school holiday John would come to the forester's cottage with a cache of stolen food and supplies. Sometimes they would slip into the stables at Devlyn and take a couple of horses out, John telling him, "Mike, you owned the whole estate once and you were never the one who let the place to that damned nabob. So the horses are yours by right." John was always one for finding rights the magistrate would never have countenanced, and Devlyn, less righteous then, always went along.

Mostly they sailed, first on makeshift rafts and then on a sailboat they built painstakingly with scraps of lumber one summer. Devlyn liked it well enough—the carpentry work, the sea air, the illicit thrill of crossing the channel to enemy France. But he never had the passion for sailing that John did, and he knew someday his friend would find a real ship and leave dull Dorset behind for good.

They never talked much, but understood each other well enough. Of course, as they grew older, their different paths in life intruded on the quiet camaraderie. But they still raised a glass together when they encountered each other in the village, and occasionally John sought him out in London. Once, out of nowhere, he had appeared in the army camp at Torres Vedras with a case of fine cognac, insuring Devlyn's popularity as a dinner partner for a year or so. They still cared for each other, in the bemused, uncomprehending way men care for their boyhood friends.

But always between them was an issue neither felt capable of resolving or indeed even of discussing.

As he dropped onto the narrow bed, Devlyn covertly studied the lean and sophisticated captain. John looked nothing like his younger brother, who was typical of the broad-faced, fair yeomen of Dorset. John's hooded eyes and angular face, his graceful, long-limbed figure, had always been the cause of gossip in the village. A stranger might suppose him as a throwback to some unknown ancestor, an Egyptian or Assyrian shipwrecked two millenia before on the shores of Lyme Bay.

But that was not the answer the villagers of Devlyn had come up with when they first saw the lord's son and the apothecary's son together. And that wasn't what John had drunkenly proposed when they were fifteen and toasting
his decision to change his name to Dryden and run away to sea. "I look more like you than like my brother, you know. Do you think your father—my mother?"

Devlyn was drunk enough then not to take much offense, instinctively realizing that John searched for a connection that his own family couldn't offer. And Devlyn knew too much about his late father's proclivities to attempt a defense of his honor. "I'm only four months older 'n you. But I suppose some men take mistresses when their wives are unavailable. Your mother though?" They both contemplated the timid dumpling Mrs. Manning and shook their heads. "Perhaps you were my father's by-blow by another woman, and he switched you at birth with the Manning child. Can't imagine why. To keep an eye on you?"

"He never paid me any mind. Doubt he remembered my name."

"Don't take offense," Devlyn had said consolingly, for he rather liked the idea of a brother. "Toward the end he didn't remember my name either. Here." He wrenched off the signet ring with a sapphire in the center of the "D," the only legacy of value the bailiffs had allowed him to keep. "You can have half my debts too. You wear this half the year and I'll wear it the other half." And they did that first year, John punctiliously posting the ring back from Madagascar in August. But when February came about again, Devlyn didn't know where John was, and after that he never bothered to make the transfer. Now,
u
nconsciously, he twisted the ring on his finger and then gestured to John to sit on the hardback chair at the table serving as a desk.

The captain pulled the chair out and straddled it backward. He looked away out the porthole, speaking with the awkward impersonality that so often characterized their exchanges these days. "I won't tell you how to go on. But if you were on my crew, I'd be less than pleased with you for having a visitor on your watch."