A Masquerade in the Moonlight - By Kasey Michaels Page 0,27

stop there. If Shakespeare were alive today, he too would have to die. Writers, thinkers, softhearted visionaries who believed man was best served by helping his fellowman. What emotional, wrongheaded rubbish!

It was survival of the fittest, of the strongest, of the ones who deserved to live, not those that were either a drain on a country’s coffers or a thorn pricking at sensibilities with avowals of equality and justice and all that softhearted drivel. These men, too, would be dealt with, destroyed—just as soon as he was done with them. The moment he had used them to his own benefit, drawing them to his side with his impassioned speeches in Parliament that unflaggingly appealed to what the fools believed they needed to hear.

Lastly, outsiders must go; the Irish, the Jews, the Gypsies, all the impure. England for the English!

It was perfect; it was all thought out; it was preordained.

The divine right of kings—that was the real order of the world, a truth for too long misplaced, so that now all that was left was a drooling, idiot, secondhand “king” of German ancestry wandering the balconies of the royal palace, his tangled gray beard dragging on the ground. A mad king, and his brood of scheming, weak-chinned children, led by the worst of the lot, George, Prince of Wales, who knew the cut of a fine coat but could not rule his own harlot of a wife!

The country was already on the edge of revolt. War with Napoleon Bonaparte, the growing threat of war with America, the royal treasury depleting at a furious rate while the Prince of Wales threw thousands of pounds at yet another ridiculous round of building in Brighton and consulted with his chefs rather than his Cabinet ministers—all these things threatened the possibility of the Prince ever becoming George IV.

There was fear mad King George might die, and equal fear he would live forever. There was talk circulating again about elevating the vain, vacuous, expensive Prince of Wales to the position of Prince Regent, and handing the reins of the government into those patently incompetent hands.

The time wasn’t coming for a new order based on the sanity of raising the chosen few to the rank they deserved and weeding out the best of the worst to serve those few, aid them to build the British Empire into the most envied power in the world. The time was now!

And he would be the one to rule that empire. He would be king one day. No, more than king. He would be All. Everything. The supreme power. Men would one day soon tremble at his feet. And Marguerite, the fair, fiery Marguerite, would be his. All his. The way Victoria had always been meant to be his.

Damn fate! Fate had taken him from home long enough for Geoffrey Balfour to turn Victoria’s pretty head with his poetry and foolishness. Who would have thought her father would be silly enough to allow her to wed at sixteen, before she had even been presented at court? It had mattered at the time, losing Victoria, but it hadn’t mattered as much as losing her to Geoffrey Balfour, his inferior in every way.

He had lost again last year when his calculations had proved wrong and Victoria had shown she was not the woman he had always believed her to be. But he should not have lost his temper. It had been a silly thing to do—foolish, actually, and potentially dangerous. She had been already almost too old, and most certainly too feeble—and had turned stupid into the bargain in the years since that dangerous debacle with Geoffrey. She had been a part of his dream for so long that he hadn’t stopped to consider the consequences of taking on a possibly barren, most probably mentally unbalanced consort.

But he wasn’t hidebound. He could adapt to some small changes in his plan. He had even, in this last year, improved upon it.

For he wouldn’t lose a third time. What had been lacking in the mother was present in abundance in the daughter. Where Victoria had been weak, Marguerite was strong. Where Victoria had let her youth, her promise, slip away, Marguerite fairly brimmed with life and energy and passion.

Soon he would come out into the open, let her know of his growing admiration and affection for her, and begin to gently, subtly ease her toward the thought of a marriage between them. What a dynasty they would found together as he slipped between her silken