A Queen's Match

Chapter One

Hélène

“Come on, Amélie!” Hélène shifted her weight, her feet warm on the platform’s wooden boards. Bathing machines were like carriages designed for discomfort. Or perhaps they were more like closets on wheels? Behind them, plodding toward the shore on a sleepy-­looking dray horse, was the coachman who’d driven their bathing machine into the surf. A lot of work, all so that the Orléans sisters could swim without compromising their virtue.

As if Hélène had any virtue left to compromise.

It was maddeningly slow, being bundled into that ridiculous machine and dragged into the ocean. But Hélène had swallowed her complaints. Amélie’s husband, Carlos, the Crown Prince of Portugal, had tried to be thoughtful by arranging this outing. And it was hardly his fault that men were allowed to stroll around the beach in one-­piece bathing costumes while women had to keep themselves hidden.

Hélène lowered herself onto the top step of the ladder and shivered. The water was chillier than she’d expected.

“They should make these costumes warmer,” Amélie grumbled, nudging open the door of the bathing machine. Like Hélène, she was dressed in a white camisole and bloomers: not the beautiful silk bloomers they wore under their gowns, but a simple pair made of cotton.

“You’ll warm up once you get in the water,” Hélène fibbed.

Amélie lifted a skeptical eyebrow, wrapping her arms around herself in the ocean breeze. So Hélène dived in.

The water closed over her head, cold and dark. It was so blissfully quiet that she couldn’t hear anything but the far-­off roar of the surf, murmuring like a distant heartbeat.

Here in the water, Hélène could forget it all. The mistakes she’d made, the secrecy and the joy and the unbearable pain she’d endured over the past year and a half: when she had fallen in love with Prince Eddy, then lost him.

As she broke the surface, Hélène looked up. Amélie was still standing on the back platform, watching her closely.

“I’ll join you,” Amélie declared, and began descending the ladder built into the back of the machine. The water wasn’t deep; Hélène could dig her toes into the sandy bottom.

Amélie drifted toward her, moving her arms in circular motions to keep her head above the surface. “You look like a little mermaid with your hair all wet,” she teased. Une petite sirène, she’d said; the sisters were speaking French, as they always did together.

Hélène bristled at the phrase; it made her think of that awful Hans Christian Andersen story. “I don’t like the little mermaid.” What a foolish decision, to give up everything for a man. Small surprise that the prince had left the mermaid the moment her back was turned, breaking her heart forever.

Though, to be fair, Hélène’s heartbreak came from the fact that she was the one who’d left Eddy.

“You’re right, of course. You’re more like Mélusine than the little mermaid,” Amélie amended.

Mélusine, the water spirit who had married a mortal man, a beloved French children’s story. The ancient House of Anjou had claimed her as their ancestor; and since the Anjou were earlier French kings, succeeded by the Valois, then by the Bourbons, then by Hélène’s own family, the Orléans—­well, perhaps she was an ancestor of Hélène’s, too.

Though Hélène was really a princess in name only. If history had played out differently, her father, Philippe, might have sat on the French throne; but France was a republic now. The Orléans family lived in exile in England.

“It’s been so long since I went swimming.” Amélie was moving more eagerly, kicking her legs up so that the tips of her toes emerged from the water. “Remember when we all used to go into the canal?”

“Philippe pretended to be an eel.” Hélène elongated her body to mimic her brother’s movements, pleased when Amélie smiled. “That feels like so long ago,” she added softly. She didn’t miss France, exactly, but she missed the simplicity of childhood. She missed those summers at the château in Normandy, before her family’s exile.

Swimming like this—­without heavy lace dragging her steps, without a corset constricting her movement—­she felt a bit like a child again.

Hélène plunged beneath the surface and stayed submerged as long as she could, until her lungs were in agony.

When she emerged, her sister sighed. “Are you ready to tell me what’s wrong?”

Hélène kicked her feet above the surface, staring at the pale half-­moons of her toenails to avoid Amélie’s gaze. “What do you mean?”

“You’re hiding from something. And as much as I love having you here, you’ll have to go back eventually, and face whatever—­or whoever—­it is.”

Hélène had been with her sister for months, since Prince Constantine and Princess Sophie’s wedding in Athens. The morning after the wedding, Hélène had asked her parents if they could stop in Portugal to visit Amélie and her baby. Her parents had been surprised; they knew that Hélène was secretly engaged to Prince Eddy of England. Didn’t she want to return to London and make a wedding announcement? But Hélène had been adamant. She needed her sister.

After a few weeks in Lisbon, Marie Isabelle and Philippe had returned to England, but Hélène had lingered. Now it was April, and she still had no plans to return.

Eventually, Amélie had suggested that they go to Albufeira, on the southern coast, so that Hélène could “see the Mediterranean.” As if her sister hadn’t just been at a royal wedding in the Mediterranean. Clearly, Amélie had sensed that something was amiss, and hoped that the ocean air, and solitude, might help.

Hélène kept floating, buffeted by the sway of the waves. The air smelled of salt and lemons. Overhead, the sky was a brilliant blue.

Eddy is looking at this very same sun, Hélène thought, and instantly felt ridiculous. That was the kind of sappy thing that heroines of operas sang about—­right before they died of a broken heart.

“It was Prince Eddy,” she heard herself say.

Amélie’s mouth fell open in surprise. “Prince Eddy, as in the future King of England?”

“We don’t know any other Prince Eddys. So, yes.”

It was a sign of Amélie’s shock that she didn’t chastise Hélène for the sarcasm. She just stared at her, droplets of water gathering in her dark eyebrows. “All those letters you got were from him?”

Eddy knew Hélène well enough to guess she would run to her sister. He’d written a series of letters to her in Portugal, begging her to change her mind.

If only Hélène could risk a reply.

“You’d better start at the beginning,” Amélie said incredulously. So Hélène told her.

She explained how last year, she and Eddy had begun seeing each other in secret. They met up late at night, at the rooms he kept in London for that exact purpose, or at crowded parties, where they stole away for a few illicit moments. Eddy wasn’t the first man Hélène had been involved with—­earlier, she’d had an affair with Laurent, her family’s coachman.

“Laurent?” Amélie interrupted. “I had no idea!”

“It started after you were married.” Hélène waited for Amélie to scold her, but her sister just lifted a hand from the water, gesturing for her to continue.

Eventually, Hélène and Eddy had realized that their relationship was far more than a fling. They loved each other. When Eddy proposed, Hélène had been elated—­except that Eddy wasn’t free to marry. At least not according to his grandmother Queen Victoria, who had already matched him with Princess Alix of Hesse. And Her Majesty’s opinion was the only one that mattered.

Eddy’s request to court Hélène had been met with laughter at first. As his grandmother had reminded him, Hélène was a princess without a country, a princess whose value on the marriage market was a matter of constant debate. But then Hélène had done the impossible, and convinced Queen Victoria to give them her blessing.

Until May of Teck ruined everything.

Somehow May had intercepted a letter from Laurent to Hélène. She was now using it as blackmail, threatening to show the highly incriminating letter to Queen Victoria unless Hélène ended things with Eddy.

So at the wedding in Athens, Hélène had told Eddy that she’d changed her mind, and couldn’t convert to the Church of England, as she’d promised. As a future Queen of England would need to do.

Eddy hadn’t flinched. He’d just reached for her hand and said, I’ll renounce my place in the line of succession.

He’d offered to give up the throne for her, and still Hélène had turned him down.

She wanted so desperately to tell him the truth. But she feared that it would ruin everything—­that Eddy’s impulsive temper would get the better of him, and he would confront May head-­on. He might succeed in exposing May’s cruelty, but in the process, he would inevitably expose Hélène’s secret. And then she could relinquish any hope of marrying him; because a formerly Catholic queen was one thing, but a queen who was not a virgin . . . Queen Victoria would never allow it.

No, Hélène needed to keep this mess to herself, and let Eddy go on thinking that she’d left him. It was their only hope of ever being together.

When she finished her story, Amélie was silent. Hélène braced herself for her sister’s judgment. She doubted that her sister had even kissed Carlos before their wedding night, let alone slept with him—­and as for Laurent, Amélie wouldn’t have dreamed of it.

But to Hélène’s surprise, her sister swam forward and flung her wet arms around Hélène’s shoulders, her tiptoes perched on the ocean floor.

“You cannot keep blaming yourself,” Amélie murmured. “Do not regret anything you did out of love, all right?”

Hélène’s eyes stung. It must be from the salt water, because she couldn’t be shedding any more tears over her mis­takes.

When Amélie drew back, her hair had utterly fallen from its knot, damp tresses floating like seaweed over the waves. “I can’t believe May did such a thing! You know, I used to feel sorry for her, showing up at parties in those awful old dresses. When, the entire time, she wasn’t just a shy relation of the Waleses; she was a—­a lying, two-­faced snake!”

Hélène was a bit startled to hear such vehemence from Amélie, who rarely spoke ill of anyone. “Now you understand why I can’t go home.”

“But that’s exactly why you must. Did you hear what you just said? You called England home.”

Hélène hadn’t even registered her own words. She had lived in England since she was fourteen, yet she’d never thought of it as home until now. Until she fell in love with Eddy.

It hurt, thinking of him—­of how his eyes lit on hers across a crowded ballroom. The impatient warmth in his voice when he said her name. The sensation that the world had become sharper, or brighter, or somehow vaster, simply because he was in it.

“You love him,” Amélie observed, watching Hélène’s face.