The Diamond Slipper Read Online Free PDF

heat of four thousand candles. Normally, she enjoyed dancing, but tonight she was distracted. Christian had given a recital earlier, his exquisite music transporting his audience. Poligny had nodded benignly throughout and had blatantly claimed the credit both for the composition and for his pupil’s performance for himself. The empress had given Poligny a heavy purse at the end, enjoying the impression her musicians had had on her visitors. The patronage of geniuses was a royal obligation, but it was very satisfying to have it acknowledged. She would expect Poligny to share the purse with Christian, but Cordelia knew as well as Christian that he’d be lucky if he saw so much as a guinea.
    Christian now circled around the gallery, dancing when he was obliged to do so, accepting compliments when necessary, making himself agreeable as a man who lived on patronage must do. He kept his angry chagrin at Poligny’s treatment well hidden from the crowd.
    The entire palace now knew that Lady Cordelia Brandenburg was to be married to a Prussian prince, ambassador at the court of Versailles, and the archduchess Marie Antoinette wouldn’t have to make her journey into her new life alone. But Christian was desolate. Paris was awhole world away. Since the moment when he’d come upon an angrily weeping little girl in the orangery five years earlier, Cordelia had been his best friend. He’d comforted her on that occasion and on many another since, just as she had supported him, bolstering his confidence, always believing in him however many times Poligny cut him down, mocked him, made use of him. Only when he was with Cordelia did Christian believe truly in his own genius.
    Cordelia avoided Christian as she always did in public, but she didn’t seem able to be so discreet when it came to Viscount Kierston. Her eyes constantly searched the room for him. He was never on the dance floor, preferring to stand to one side in conversation with some high-ranking French or Austrian courtier. She noticed that he didn’t seem to look much at the women, who for their part couldn’t take their eyes off him—so distinguished in a pale gray silk suit, black striped waistcoat, and ruffled cravat, his unpowdered black hair confined at his nape with a gray velvet ribbon.
    Was he married? Did he have a mistress? She couldn’t stop thinking about him … couldn’t stop looking at him. His image tormented her, the questions hurled themselves at her brain. She felt as if she were in the grip of brain fever, hot and cold alternately, and unable to concentrate on anything. Her partners found her distracted and almost brusque and rarely asked her for a second dance.
    Cordelia didn’t realize that the viscount was observing her as closely as she was observing him. Leo was thinking that she bore no physical resemblance to Elvira, who had been fair and statuesque, unlike this spritely dark beauty with the creamy skin and deep-set eyes that were sometimes blue as turquoise and sometimes gray as charcoal. But he was convinced that the two women shared something else. Passion and a sensual appetite that would drive a man wild. He had watched Elvira before her marriage work her magic with her rich laugh of pleasure and a careless tossof her blonde mane. Prince Michael had not been the first in her bed, but that was only to be expected when a woman as lively and sophisticated as Elvira waited into her twenties before accepting a husband. She had insisted that Michael had never questioned her about her past. He was a man of the world; he wouldn’t have expected a woman of the world to be a virgin. But sometimes Leo wondered how true that was. Michael cultivated a smooth diplomatic courtesy and Leo had never seen it crack, but it was hard to believe there weren’t some other currents beneath the surface.
    Leo sipped champagne and watched the prince’s destined second bride go through the motions of the minuet, gracefully but without enthusiasm. Her partner was