Shall We Dance? Read Online Free PDF Page B

postponed the ceremony for a full year?”
    â€œIn hopes she’ll go away? Yes, I can see that. She’d get bored, cooling her heels here, hie herself off somewhere to see the muffin man, and miss the whole thing.”
    â€œYou’re not nearly so amusing as you think you are, you know,” his mother said, snapping open the fan and waving it beneath her chin. “He plans to divorce her, strip her of any right to the crown.”
    â€œBut Aunt Rowena believes he’s going to have her assassinated, not just divorce her. But why would he do that, if he can get Parliament to do his dirty work for him?”
    â€œBecause it might not work, that’s why. At least that’s what your father says. He’s embarrassed to be a part of it.” She leaned closer once more. “He has heard thatthey’ll be examining evidence that is most distasteful. Stained bits of clothing snatched from hampers, dried residue from chamber pots, all sort of tawdry evidence.”
    â€œWell, that’s fairly disgusting.”
    â€œI should say so! Then your father foolishly said the king would be better served to just arrange some fatal accident for the queen and be done with it.”
    â€œAnd Aunt Rowena heard him? What a dust-up that must have caused.”
    â€œExactly. Your father is a brilliant man, but can still be extremely obtuse, just like the rest of your sex. And now Rowena’s taken it into her silly head that the queen is in mortal danger. So you see, you have to do it.”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œNate.”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œNathaniel, Rowena is your godmother.”
    â€œDamn.”
    Â 
    A S THE LAW OF AVERAGES (and Aunt Rowena) would have it, for every Perry Shepherd there is, also roped into the thing against his will and better judgment, a Sir Nathaniel Rankin.
    And for every Bernard Nestor, alas, there is also an Esther Pidgeon. As dedicated as he, as rabid as he, but with her motives and loyalties in direct opposition to his, Esther believed the only way for the king to reign easily was to have that totally unsuitable Caroline removed, permanently.
    To Esther the supposed queen is a slut, a whore, aflighty, unwashed animal, and her name must not be spoken in the liturgy each Sunday when the Crown’s loyal subjects were asked to pray for their king (pulling out and holding up religion like a sword was always such a marvelous rallying point for people like Esther).
    Sister of the publisher of one of the lesser newspapers in the city, she’d already been made privy to this magnificent Bill of Pains and Penalties, and had spent half the evening rejoicing at the news.
    This was her time. At last. She had been good, she had been patient, and now her time had come!
    It is amazing how a woman like Esther Pidgeon can take one evening’s casual tumble into bed at a house party a quarter of a century earlier and mold that night, twist it about, until the Grand Florizel has become the Love of One’s Life, sadly pining for his dearest Esther but kept from her side by his royal duties. Why, he has even spent those sad, lonely years trying to find substitutes for her…all his women aging, fat, motherly. Just like Esther. Really. Especially the “fat” part.
    But that was Esther, a woman who had dedicated her sad life to worshipping this oblivious man from afar.
    And so the Bill of Pains and Penalties filled Esther with joy. For a while.
    Now, as midnight neared, she paced the floor of her small chamber tucked into the second floor rear of her brother, Lewis’s, house and worried, then worried some more.
    What if it didn’t work? What if Caroline slipped freeof justice, as she had done the first time? Men, left to their own devices and shortcomings, often bungled things, badly.
    Esther stood in front of the mantelpiece in her night rail, gazing up adoringly at the colored print of her dearest Florizel, a print she had surrounded with sprigs of