Page 113 of A Queen's Match
Alix tried to assuage May’s guilt on that point, too. “Missy is excited to marry Ferdinand, did you know that? Ducky tells me that they are happily planning the wedding.”
May had saved the most difficult apology for last. She turned to Hélène and, tears stinging her eyes, said, “I’m sorry that I kept you apart from Eddy.”
Hélène’s eyes flashed. “That seems a very easy thing foryou to say, now that Eddy is dead. Now that you’re engaged to his brother. Youwon,May.”
“It doesn’t feel much like winning, since I’m in love with a man who doesn’t love me back!”
May wasn’t sure why her eyes kept betraying her like this, sending tears sliding down her cheeks. She wiped at them angrily. “I love George,” she repeated, looking back at Hélène. “You may not believe me, but it’s true. I have done so many things that I regret; I schemed and manipulated, and in the end I wound up, impossibly, engaged to a man I love. But thanks to you, he despises me. So perhapsyouwon.”
“I did not win! The man I love isdead,or did you forget that?” Hélène exclaimed, and May flinched.
Of course. That had been thoughtless of her to say.
“I think we’re done here,” Hélène said heavily. “Goodbye,May.”
May twisted her engagement ring back and forth beneath the leather of her glove. “Goodbye,” she repeated.
The three of them stood there for a long moment. They had been so many things to each other over the years: enemies, rivals, and for a fleeting moment—before Eddy came between them, before May made all her mistakes—friends.
But Eddy was dead now, and there was nothing connecting them anymore. May would run into Alix at family events over the years, since Nicholas and George were cousins, but she suspected that they would keep their distance.
As for Hélène, May doubted they would cross paths again.
May knew, with sudden certainty, that the three of them would never again be in a room together. They had reached the end of it—the era where their lives had been so hopelessly, heartbreakingly entwined.
Hélène was the first to go; she stormed from the room in a whirl of satin skirts and outrage. But Alix lingered on the threshold. Her enormous blue-gray eyes met May’s, luminous with sympathy.
“I’m sorry about George,” Alix said softly. “For what it’s worth, I think he still loves you. He’s just hurting from everything that happened, and perhaps he feels that he needs to punish you, for Eddy’s sake. But I saw the way you two were together, when you thought no one was looking. He just needs to remember that feeling.”
Then Alix was gone, and May was alone, Alix’s words echoing through her mind.I think he still loves you.
What if Alix was right, and some reluctant corner of George’s heart still cared about her? After all, he’d never told the queen about May’s blackmail of Hélène. Surely if he despised May, he would have unearthed that secret—would have listed every last one of May’s transgressions in an effort to avoid marrying her. But he had held it back. May had assumed he’d done so to prevent further scandal…but what if he’d been protecting May?
If he’d loved her for as long as he said he did, then surely there was something left. Surely he would fall in love with her again, if only he remembered.
May wouldmakehim remember. She hadn’t survived this long and climbed this high to fail when it really mattered.
She tilted her chin up in a gesture she’d unconsciously learned from Hélène, and headed back into the party to find her fiancé.
She was May of Teck, after all, and could do anything she set her mind to.
Chapter Forty-Two
Hélène
“Perhaps we should rejoin yourparents?” Violette walked alongside Hélène, valiantly attempting to hold a parasol over her mistress’s head, but Hélène was moving too quickly.
“Just a bit farther. I want to see the ships headed to America.”
The docks at Genoa were hardly the sort of place a young lady should stroll about, but then, Hélène had never been like other young ladies. She felt a restless flutter in her chest that only movement could dispel. Which wasn’t surprising, after the events of the previous week.
“Move along!” barked a man, ducking past her as he held one end of a heavy wooden crate. Along the docks, massive steamships loaded and unloaded their cargo: boxes labeled in Italian or French or English, trunks monogrammed with their owners’ initials. Hélène saw crates of chickens and livestock on lead ropes. Travelers hurried to nearby inns or onto ferryboats that would take them upriver; sailors clustered in groups to smoke cigarettes, gossiping in half a dozen languages. Everything was rowdy and dirty and wonderfully full of life.
It felt so cosmically unfair that she was here without Eddy. He would have loved this, would have been running ahead of her, eager to show her around.
“Hélène?”
She turned around in surprise, shrugging deeper into her heavy cloak. “Emanuele?”
