Page 31 of A Queen's Match
“I know you hate it—seeing me and Nicholas together.” Hélène’s voice darkened as she added, “I hate it, too. I keep thinking about Eddy. What must he think of me right now?”
They were walking the marble corridor, its walls lined in great windows that reflected the light of the chandeliers. Alix glanced outside. Osborne House looked out over the Isle of Wight, its dark slope dotted with houses, all currently rented out for the regatta. In the distance, moonlight glittered on the waters of the Solent.
“I’m so sorry,” Alix murmured, because what else could she say?
“It’s all right. I have a plan.” Hélène’s reply was bright, but Alix heard a quiver of fear underneath.
“How can I help?”
“You can’t. If things end in disaster, I don’t want you suffering for my mistakes.”
Alix drew to a halt. “That sounds dangerous.”
“Don’t worry! Come on, let’s rejoin the party. I should get back to Nicholas,” Hélène declared. “And you need to rejoin that nice German man your grandmother found foryou.”
Alix felt a stab of guilt at the thought of Maximilian. Yesterday on the ferry, when he’d seen her shivering and damp with sea spray, he had wordlessly shrugged out of his jacket and draped it over her shoulders. Not in a romantic way, but with tenderness, the way he might care for a younger sister.
He had offered to be a friend, and here she was, using himto distract Grandmama from the truth of who she wasreallyoccupied with.
“Maximilian is sweet,” she told Hélène, wondering why she was defending him. “It’s just that he’s not…”
“Not Nicholas, I know,” Hélène finished for her. “Good thing you and Nicholas are meeting up later.”
“What?”
“At leastoneof us should be getting some time alone with our beloved.” Hélène’s voice was still determinedly bright. “I need to deal with May before I can find Eddy again. But there’s no reason you and Nicholas shouldn’t be together.”
Alix had flushed at what she’d thought Hélène meant. “How would we do that without getting caught?”
“You won’t get caught.” Hélène had smiled, and there was a touch of mischief in it. “Don’t worry, I’m an expert in sneaking around at crowded parties. I know all the tricks.”
Which was how Alix had wound up here, waiting for Nicholas at the servants’ staircase.
He and Hélène had made a very public exit just half an hour earlier. Hélène had complained of a stomachache, but assured her parents and Vladimir—who were all enjoying the party, most especially the drinks—that they should stay. She would return to the yacht with Nicholas and her lady’s maid, Violette.
Once they had entered the long drive that snaked toward Osborne’s main gates, Nicholas would slip out of the carriage—an easy feat on a road lined with such thick foliage. He would head back uphill to the main house, where Hélène had opened one of the ground-floor windows earlier in the evening.
Alix had waited a few minutes after their departure, thencomplained of a similar stomach pain. Perhaps it had been the prawns, she said, to enough people that no one would check on her.
From downstairs she heard the roar of the party, the gossip and music and clinking of glassware.
“Alix?” a voice whispered from the bottom of the staircase.
“Nicholas!” She hurried down a few steps, hardly believing that Hélène had arranged this for them. “You came.”
“You didn’t think I would? I’m quite sneaky,” Nicholas said softly.
“You? Sneaky?” He was the most painfully forthright person she knew.
He gave a nervous smile. “You’re right, I’m not. But I try to do the things that matter; and you matter a great deal to me, Alix.”
They needed to get off this staircase before someone appeared. “Will you come up?” Alix asked.
Still, Nicholas hesitated. “I didn’t realize—I mean, I thought we could go to a sitting room, or—”
“Please, Nicholas. There’s nowhere else in this house that we can be alone.” Feeling shockingly bold, she padded down the stairs to where Nicholas stood, then led him up to the hallway.
Each door was mounted with a small brass frame that contained a card—a card that was lined, as all Her Majesty’s paper goods were, in an inch-wide band of black. Nearly thirty years since Albert’s death, and the queen still observed his mourning.
