My Ex-Husband Brought His Mistress To The Royal Ball — He Had No Idea What My Youngest Son Carried In The Velvet Box

Part 2

He was standing near the throne, his new mistress clinging to his arm.

I did not turn my head to verify it.

I used the trick my mother had taught me at twelve, which was to slide the gaze sideways under the lashes while keeping the face forward.

It was a small theatrical thievery of a glance.

I saw him in the half-second I allowed myself.

He was standing at the foot of the dais on the left, wearing his dark blue coat with the gold at the collar.

His hair was shorter than I remembered.

His jaw was the same jaw, with the small old scar at the line of the cheek where he had fallen from a horse at twenty-two.

He had been embarrassed about that scar for a year and proud of it for the rest of his life.

I saw the woman on his arm.

The woman was not what I had expected.

She was older than I had expected, and plainer.

She was, in fact, a woman I had once spoken to at a garden party four years ago about the cultivation of late autumn roses.

I had liked her.

That was the part I had not been prepared for.

I had been prepared for someone I could despise on sight.

I had been prepared for a beauty so unkind it would simplify the evening.

I had not been prepared for a woman who, in another life, in a different room on a different afternoon, had laughed with me about the difficulty of getting a particular yellow rose to take in heavy clay.

The woman saw me.

She did not flinch.

She lifted her chin a small degree and looked back.

There was in the look something I read very quickly and filed away to consider later.

The woman on his arm had not, perhaps, known about the children.

She had certainly not known about all three of them, not in the row in which they now walked.

There is a particular small failure of the face that occurs in a person who has been told one version of a story and is now seeing another.

I saw it.

I filed it.

I walked on.

I did not look again.

I had used my glance.

The boys had been told nothing of who they would see.

There was no version of telling them that would have done anything but harm.

Thomas, who watched my face the way smaller animals watch the weather, had felt the small, unallowed glance happen at his side.

His small jaw had set further.

His hand had tightened on mine a fraction.

William had not noticed.

He was still looking at the ceiling.

Henry had stopped counting the squares and was, I realized with a soft inward pang, counting now the steps to the dais.

I had not asked him to do it.

He did it because Henry, when frightened, made small private games of arithmetic.

The games kept him steady.

He was at one hundred and forty-two when I reached the foot of the steps.

He whispered the number very softly, almost only to himself.

I heard it because I had become, over the year in the rented house, a woman who could hear her smallest son’s smallest sounds across any room.

I squeezed his hand.

He did not look up.

He was at one hundred and forty-three now, counting the steps he had not yet climbed.

The Dowager stood at the top.

She had not moved.

She was holding something in her left hand.

It was a thin dark folder of the kind used by clerks of the court to carry documents that were not yet technically in the public record.

Behind her on the dais itself, the King sat in the high-carved chair.

The Queen sat in the chair beside him.

Between them on a smaller chair sat a thin old man in a plain gray coat.

I recognized him with a small jolt as the Chief Herald of the kingdom.

Would the King actually accept a document that could strip a Duke of everything he thought he owned?