her cloister.
“Thank you, your Majesty,” she said.
“The library,” he said, “will be catalogued and archived.”
She cleared her throat. “Excuse me, your Majesty.”
Raising his eyebrows at her, he nodded. “Speak your mind.”
“Will the library not be returned to the Enchancery? It was for that purpose that I preserved it—”
“That remains uncertain,” he said. “Frankly, there are not enough of your former colleagues remaining—”
She felt Phoebe shift beside her. Sebastien was too well-practiced to give so much away. “Your Majesty,” Garrett said urgently. “Allow me, if there is no other.
“Lady Abigail Irene. I will take it under consideration.” He turned his attention to her right. “And as for you, Mrs. Smith, I should like to create you Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and offer you a full pardon for whatever was done during the late war with the colonies.”
“That is very gracious,” Phoebe said.
The king said, “Don Sebastien, I am afraid that there is little service I can do you in return, but you have my word that so long as I am King, you and your kind will be welcome on British soil, and subject to the same laws as any of my subjects.”
Garrett glanced over her shoulder in time to catch the quirk of Sebastien’s smile. There was a hook there, of course: for his kind to reproduce required a murder. But he nodded, and seemed about to speak when the door opened without so much as a knock and a ginger-haired woman in an elegant cream silk dress entered. She might have been in her mid twenties, a little more than half the king’s age, and modestly pretty—but she was doing everything possible with that prettiness.
Her clothes and hair were impeccable, her matching shoes pristine to the soles. She extended a hand with the nails painted shell-pink and curtseyed to the King.
“Darling,” she said, in cultured American tones. “Pardon me for interrupting. But a supper—or perhaps a breakfast—or some sort of food in an hour usually reserved for sleeping—is being served.”
He cocked his head at her, but smiled. “And you could not send a page?”
“It was faster and more forceful to do it myself.” She waved his concern for protocol aside, and turned to Garrett and her companions, much animated by mischief. “Besides, it was my opportunity to meet Mary’s friends.”
The king stood, and so perforce did Phoebe and Sebastien. “Ladies,” he said, as Mary stepped away from the door and dropped a curtsey. “Gentleman. My royal wife, Queen Sofia.”
***
Sebastien recalled from his tabloid reading that the Queen was a distant relative of the royal family of Holland, a descendent of the Dutch peerage left behind when New Holland had been given over to England during Holland’s tenure as a French subject state. Phillip had married her in his exile, when it seemed possible that he would never reclaim his throne. Now, seated across from her at a breakfast table set with mismatched porcelain and silver that had obviously only just been polished until it shone, Sebastien thought that perhaps he had brought home a better Queen than anyone could have anticipated, from such a hasty love-match.
She seemed a sort of between thing, in a manner that Sebastien found fascinating. She was neither slender nor heavyset, but had a good Dutch sturdiness about her. Her hair was neither a carroty vermillion nor the ember-red of the Swedes, but a soft ash-and-cinnamon color that matched the powdered-over freckles on her cheeks. She was a Queen, but her American informality and impatience with protocol made it seem a role—a job—that she picked up and put down at need.
Now, as they sat at table, she was playing her part to the hilt—keeping the conversation smooth and fast-flowing, like light flashing on a brook. But Sebastien did not miss the sly smiles she turned on the king now and again, as if to say, See how clever I am?
It endeared her to him as no self-serious monarch could have managed.
He and Mary did not dine, which gave him more opportunity to observe his tablemates. The king ate with the manners of one bred and born to the public table and the state dinner. Abby Irene mostly pushed food around on her plate, though he saw her pick her way through most of a crab salad. Her appetite heartened him. The queen had a heavy hand with the salt shaker, though Phoebe seemed to find the food perfectly seasoned. And Mary, being Mary, turned a teacup on a saucer and