A Queen's Game

Chapter One

May

May of Teck hated weddings.

It hadn’t always been this way: she used to stare in girlish awe at the white-­gowned brides, dreaming of when it might be her turn. And May had seen plenty of brides in her day. Say what you would about Queen Victoria, she’d certainly been prolific in the childbearing department; the family tree of the British royals was vast and tangled, and some family member or other was always getting married. Today it was May’s cousin Princess Louise.

May had long ago stopped enjoying these occasions. Now every wedding she attended felt like a reproach, a reminder of her own dwindling possibilities. For six years she had been out in society: rotating around London’s ballrooms and reception halls, always gowned and perfumed and stupidly hopeful. Yet no one ever took a bite, as if she were some appetizer that had grown stale on the platter.

May saw the future stretching mercilessly before her, a bleak existence filled with charity work and Sunday church and, worse, forever living under her father’s roof.

She forced herself to smile and sit up straighter. The ballroom at Marlborough House, the home of the Prince of Wales and his family, wasn’t as grand in scale as the one at Buckingham Palace—­no private ballroom was—­but today it was the only place worth being. Women in dresses and men in tailored suits spun around the dance floor, the musicians struggling to be heard over the low hum of gossip and flir­tation.

May wasn’t a part of it. Like all the unmarried, unwanted women, she’d been relegated to these chairs tied with awful pink bows, tucked away along the ballroom’s edge.

She noticed John Hope across the dance floor, and her smile softened, became more genuine. Perhaps her prospects weren’t entirely bleak. Before she could question herself, May stood.

“John,” she said warmly, when she’d come to stand near him. She and the earl’s son had known each other for long enough to dispense with the formalities.

“May. It’s always a pleasure.” His smile revealed a turned canine tooth, though somehow the effect didn’t diminish his attractiveness. “How are your parents?”

Bad, and getting worse. “They’re doing well, thank you. And Dolly is still at Sandhurst,” May added, naming her brother Adolphus—­one of the few people in the world she actually trusted. She hurried to change the subject. “I wish Estella could have made it. I miss her.”

May had grown up visiting the Hopes at their estate every summer; her parents were friends of the earl and countess. John’s sister Estella was a few years older than May. She hadn’t come to the wedding today, stuck at home with her newborn son.

“Estella sends her regards,” John said absently, already searching for someone else to talk to. Panic fluttered in her rib cage.

“Of course. I’ve been writing to her, and love hearing about little Alfred.” May strove to bring the conversation back to their shared history. “Soon enough he’ll be romping through the piles of hay in the barn just like we used to!”

“The hay is still there,” John agreed. This struck May as a rather dumb thing to say.

Before she could think of an appropriate reply, John cleared his throat. “I have some news. You may have heard that I’m engaged to Camilla St. Clair.”

No, May most certainly hadn’t heard, though she knew all about Camilla: a seventeen-­year-­old debutante with no title to speak of, but an expansive bosom and even more expansive dowry.

“Congratulations.” May forced out the words and fled before John could see her tears.

She was so weary of putting herself out there: begging men for their approval, then pretending it didn’t hurt when they passed her over. The thought of starting again from scratch—­facing all the house parties and dinners and shooting weekends of next year’s Season, still as unmarried as ever—­made her feel sick.

At times like this, May wished she weren’t royal, or—­more accurately—­quasi-­royal. A fringe, borderline member of the extended royal family.

As a great-­granddaughter of King George III and Queen Charlotte, May should have grown up in a palace, or at the very least on an estate with countless servants at her beck and call. Yet May’s mother had chosen to marry Francis of Teck, a nobody prince from the backwater territory of Württemberg.

May knew that her mother’s prospects had been slim. Even in her youth, Mary Adelaide had been a mountain of a girl, so large that she famously broke a chair at her own debut ball. Mary Adelaide had longed to get married, and it had been Francis or no one.

If those had been her choices, May would have stayed a spinster forever.

Her royal cousins, Princess Louise and her siblings, were always courteous to May while making their difference in status abundantly clear. They were Royal Highnesses, and May was just a Serene Highness. Two small syllables that changed everything. May and her parents existed on scraps of charity from the real royals: the grace-­and-­favor house bestowed on them by Queen Victoria, the trips to St. Moritz hosted by the Waleses.

When she was young and foolish, May used to think she might marry a prince. Her grandmother had broached the subject with several German princes—­Friedrich of Anhalt, Günther of Schleswig-­Holstein—­but nothing came of it. There was even a brief discussion with the Russian Grand Duke Michael Michailovitch, yet that, too, fizzled out.

May had felt a flurry of excitement at age eighteen when the Prince of Naples came to London to “see the sights,” though everyone knew it was a bridal interview for May. She sat next to Prince Vittorio at several dinners, and then two weeks later he left without a goodbye.

In some elusive, intangible way, May had failed.

Things might have gone differently if she had been wealthy or beautiful. But her parents had long ago squandered what little fortune they had, and May couldn’t marry on her looks alone. She wasn’t ugly; she was just . . . ordinary-­looking, with eyes too close together, and ash-­blond hair that she struggled to tease into fashionable ringlet curls.

No, May would bring nothing to a marriage: no fortune, no lands, only a tenuous connection to the British throne. And her razor-­sharp mind, which she was careful to keep ­hidden.

Society was very cruel to women who let on that they were smarter than men.

After her third Season ended with no prospects, May’s parents had quietly given up on the foreign princes and started searching closer to home. As a Serene Highness, May couldn’t marry just any aristocrat, but what about someone high-­ranking enough for her—­a widowed duke, or Lord Euston?

May hadn’t told her parents about her secret plans for John Hope; they would have dismissed him as “not good enough.” He was only an earl, and a Scottish one at that. But what other choice did she have?

She walked slowly around the reception hall, trying to gather her thoughts. The setting sun poured through the floor-­to-­ceiling windows, making the air inside feel stuffy. Before the fireplace stood the wedding cake: a multitiered confection over seven feet high, topped by a Greek temple done entirely of sugar, columns and all.

“May!”

At the sound of that voice, May sank into her deepest, most reverential curtsy. “Your Royal Highness.”

She looked up and met the blue eyes of Prince Albert Victor Christian Edward, or as everyone called him, Prince Eddy. The heir to the British throne.

Standing there in his military uniform, medallions gleaming on his chest, Eddy looked like a prince from a child’s storybook. His features were so fine and delicately carved that he would almost be pretty, if he didn’t radiate such intense masculinity.

Eddy frowned, noticing the tears that still clung to May’s lashes. “Are you okay?”

“Oh, yes. Just overwhelmed with joy for Louise,” she demurred.

Eddy nodded, accepting this. He wasn’t the most perceptive, but only because his blithe, carefree energy was always skipping along from one thing to the next.

A bold warmth was curling in May’s chest, like when she snuck sips of her mother’s sherry. Her eyes darted toward the couples in the center of the ballroom, and she decided to risk it.

“Have you danced much this evening?”

“Oh, of course!” Eddy grinned at her sheepishly. “I should have asked. May, would you like to dance?”

Dancing with Eddy would be like stepping into the glare of a spotlight, which was precisely what May needed right now. She had lost John, but there were other eligible men here, men who might take notice once they saw her with the prince.

Eddy’s hand fell to her waist as they started forward. Other couples moved in a slow orbit around them, the wooden floor hidden beneath swishing skirts and shining dark shoes. Standing with Eddy, May felt that she reflected back some of his royal aura—­that she looked brighter and prettier simply by being near him.