Masque (The Two Monarchies Sequence)

  Masque

  The Two Monarchies Sequence

  W.R Gingell

  Masque

  by W.R. Gingell

  Copyright 2015 W.R. Gingell

  Smashwords Edition

  Cover images courtesy of prometeus, lenm, 3DClipArtsDE & canstockphoto.

  Cover by Joleene Naylor

  This one is for me. It was written entirely for my own selfish amusement.

  You can still enjoy it, though. That’s okay.

  Contents

  Part One: Chapter One

  Part One: Chapter Two

  Part One: Chapter Three

  Part One: Chapter Four

  Part One: Chapter Five

  Part One: Chapter Six

  Part One: Chapter Seven

  Part One: Chapter Eight

  Part One: Chapter Nine

  Part One: Chapter Ten

  Part Two: Chapter One

  Part Two: Chapter Two

  Part Two: Chapter Three

  Part Two: Chapter Four

  Part Two: Chapter Five

  Part Two: Chapter Six

  Part Two: Chapter Seven

  Part Two: Chapter Eight

  Part Two: Chapter Nine

  Part Two: Chapter Ten

  Coming Soon: Wolfskin

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Ambassadors’ Grand Parties are usually huge, glittering, boring affairs at best. One daren’t do anything untoward (comment upon how fat a grandee of state is getting, for example, even – especially – if he is). Despite this tacit prohibition, the hosting ambassador usually spends the evening in a red, sweaty lather, madly running here and there in a desperate bid to be sure that all his distinguished guests are comfortable and sufficiently flattered. Ambassadors’ wives, on the other hand, tend to watch the proceedings with an amused eye, and pat their husbands affectionately upon the head every time a harried dash brings them sufficiently close to do so.

  There were a great many important guests at this particular Ambassador’s Grand Ball; more, in fact, than I knew personally, which was unusual. The daughter of New Civet’s ambassador, I had spent most of my life meeting foreign dignitaries, and there was scarcely a noble family in Civet, Glause or the Triumvirate that I was not on nodding terms with.

  I was at present talking to the Ambassador of Glause’s wife, both of us fanning ourselves with our masks. I could not think that a masquerade was the best idea for an Ambassador’s ball, and said so in no uncertain terms.

  “The most ridiculous conceit, my dear!” Lady Quorn said, a little pinker than an ambassador’s wife is wont to be. “There is nothing more uncomfortable than to dance in than a mask! I was dancing with goodness only knows whom, and it felt as though my face were baking! I can only imagine the upsets bound to occur if one of Harroll’s precious foreign dignitaries offends another because they don’t recognise each other.”

  “You were dancing with Lord Morsten,” I told her, mischief dancing in my eyes. Lady Quorn disliked Lord Morsten.

  “I wish I had known! Why, I was positively polite to the man! How did you know, Isabella?”

  “Only Lord Morsten would think that pink and turquoise are admirable shades for a man to wear together,” I said dryly, plying my mask a little more briskly to fan my heated face. “Besides, he wore that particular mask when he tried to kiss me at the Winter’s Eve masquerade.”

  “My dear! Did he really? Why have I never heard of this?”

  “Because, Delysia, despite your vast network of spies, we were not seen. I slapped Lord Morsten, who most inconveniently chanced to be at the edge of the Markworth’s lily pond. It’s not a tale he would be willing to tell.”

  “Lady Markworth told me he had gone home indisposed,” Lady Quorn said appreciatively. “I did hear that he was dripping wet, but I thought he’d gotten drunk and fallen in. How wonderful!”

  “You wouldn’t have thought so if he tried to kiss you,” I remarked. “But really, Delysia, why the masks? What was Harroll thinking?”

  “Well now, Isabella, that’s something that might interest you! Lord Pecus made it a condition of his attending.”

  “Fascinating! And who is Lord Pecus?” Lord Quorn was nothing if not decided, and the man who could manipulate him was someone I was frankly interested in meeting.

  “His family is absolutely ancient: they’ve had a Lord of the manor since before Glause split from Parras,” Delysia informed me. “Lord Pecus doesn’t usually attend public functions, he’s quite a recluse, in fact.”

  “Curmudgeonly?”

  “Oh no! Still the right side of forty, I believe. But no one has ever seen him without his mask.” Lady Quorn looked distinctly unsatisfied. “I’ve never seen his face.”

  I hid my smile with my mask. “Despite every machination to the contrary?”

  “My dear! Every one a failure!” she assured me, vexation and amusement battling for prominence in her face. Amusement won: Lady Quorn had no misapprehensions as to her nosiness, and she was sportswoman enough to appreciate anyone who could outwit her.

  “If I’ve stumbled into him once, I’ve done it a dozen times! Not to mention popping up behind him unexpectedly, and jarring his elbow when he reaches to adjust the thing. Harroll thinks the man makes me nervous, and now he holds my hand comfortingly whenever Lord Pecus is in the vicinity.”

  “How trying for you!” This time I didn’t hide my smile, and Delysia grinned an enchanting little grin back at me.

  “It is, my dear! It prevents me from stumbling into him. Never mind, forget about the exasperating Lord Pecus, and tell me who the group in blue is.”

  I threw her a disapproving look. “Really, Delysia!”

  The group comprised of five in all, each with a short blue cloak that was both fashionable and serviceable, and a blue velvet half-mask trimmed with silver braid that accentuated and protected the cheekbones while exposing the mouth. They wore blue, silver-trimmed tunics that split on either side below the belt: to allow for riding, if I were not mistaken. These five, elegantly battleready denizens must be the Glausian Horselords, the riding regiment of Glause’s militia.

  “Horselords,” I said. “The First Regiment, I believe.”

  Lady Quorn clicked her tongue in vexation. “Of course they are! I forgot that the ladies don’t wear skirts; I thought they were all young men.”

  “They’re very graceful about it,” I said thoughtfully. I knew a little something about clothes, and the female horselords were dressed to the best advantage; their short cloaks set back in a line that emphasized the feminine set of their shoulders and, more subtly, their breasts. The women did not care to be taken for men. I was a little surprised that Delysia had made the mistake; but then, she hadn’t been married to Harroll for so very long, and she had never been one to care for learning names.

  “Speaking of clothes, how do you like my new dress?” Lady Quorn did a pert turn, showing off a tight, dusky pink bodice, from which sprang an exuberant froth of the finest rosy netting. It set her inky black curls off to advantage and bought out the roses in her cheeks, and the netting wreathed her diminutive figure to admiration.

  “It’s a creation, as you are well aware,” I told her, and two dimples appeared for a moment. “But it does make us clash rather.”

  “Well, if you will not take advantage of colour spells, you must put up with the disadvantages of red hair,” Lady Quorn said firmly. She was a great believer in aids to beauty: her hair had been in quick succession fashionable gold, daring blue, and handsome chestnut before its present raven black.

  My own hair, long and immensely thick, could never be worn in the high, elegant style that Lady Quorn af
fected: instead, I wore it in a great, plaited rope down my back. My freckles had all but vanished over the years, but my hair remained a profound, almost fiery, red. Now that I was old enough to be considered an old maid, it was viewed more in the light of whimsy than disadvantage.

  “If you are going to insult me, I shall leave,” I said loftily. It was time for me to circulate anyway.

  Delysia bestowed a twinkling smile upon me and allowed me to leave, waving carelessly. I continued onwards to chat with a black-masked individual I knew to be the king-consort of my home country of Civet, and was surprised to find him alone. I had arrived in Glause some months before the royal party, and had been under the impression that the Queen would be part of the second group.

  “Has Annabel abandoned you?”

  “Hallo, Carrots!” he retorted, grinning. “Still an old maid, I see.”

  “I could say ‘I’ve ’ad me chances!’” I said frankly: “But I haven’t! However, if we’re being complimentary, Blackfoot, you’ve gained a few more silver hairs since last I saw you!”

  Melchior grinned again, more roguishly.

  “I could have you executed for using that name,” he remarked, seizing my hand to pull me into the dance.

  “As if Annabel would let you!” I scoffed. I enjoyed dancing with Melchior; and an intimate knowledge of his and Annabel’s past made it possible for them to talk to me without reserve. My father had been one of the first statesman to receive a position in the court when Annabel became queen; moreover, she and I had spent some years at school together.

  “How is she? And why is she not here, more to the point?”

  Melchior, eyes dancing, leaned forward to murmur in my ear. “Annabel is in an, er, interesting situation.”

  “Again? Aren’t you getting too old for that sort of thing?”

  “Apparently not,” he said cheerfully. “Annabel says it’s a girl. Keep whispering, Carrots, Lady Marlow thinks I’m flirting with you.”

  I peeked over his shoulder at a figure in magnificent red-and-gold. Through the slits in her mask, she was watching us narrowly.

  “Do you think she knows who we are?” I asked in a theatrical whisper.

  Melchior chuckled appreciatively. “I’ve missed you at court, Carrots. Annabel wants to know when you’re coming home.”

  “If Annabel wants a merger of our militia, she’ll have to do without me for a few more weeks. Even I cannot perform miracles.”

  “How do you find the local wildlife?”

  It was my turn to smile appreciatively. “Amusing, on the whole. A little more reclusive than in Civet. I’ve yet to meet scions of the houses of Gabor, Topher, and, I’m told, Pecus.”

  “Gabor is the one dripping with gold fringe,” Melchior said, curling his lip. He dressed plainly, most often in black, and much to his advantage. The court at Civet had never looked so handsome as it did now that the young men had taken to following his lead. “Pecus is around here somewhere- green velvet waistcoat and matching mask. Shall I introduce you to Lord Topher? He hasn’t got a wife, you know!”

  “Certainly,” I said loftily, disdaining his grin. “Lord Topher is brother-in-law to Sir Coraline, one of the Horselord Fourth, not to mention a distant relative of the king.”

  Melchior’s eyebrows twitched together briefly, then cleared. “I wish they wouldn’t knight females in this place!” he complained. “It makes conversation more than usually difficult.”

  “I’ll be sure to bring the matter up with Lord Topher,” I promised, smiling saucily as he bowed to end the dance.

  Lord Topher was a rather awkward, gangling boy of not much more than twenty years, and very many freckles. He had to tilt his head to look up at me, but he did so with a touching, boylike admiration, and asked me to dance anyway. Melchior, the wretch, left me with him and sauntered away with his hands in his pockets and a grin below his mask.

  “I should be happy to dance with you, Lord Topher,” I said kindly. Unmarried indeed! As if I would trap a poor boy almost ten years my junior into matrimony! Melchior would hear a few words from me when next I saw him.

  “Do call me Wilfred,” he said. His plain face was made rather more beautiful by liquid brown eyes, but they were his one beauty. “Everyone does, you know.”

  I replied with the obligatory ‘That’s very kind of you’, resolving crossly not to do so even if I were forced to the expedient of ‘Hey you!’. I disapprove of familiarity with young men. They tend to fall in love far too easily, and Lord Wilfred Topher was already showing distressing signs of admiration despite my red hair.

  Fortunately, he was not familiar with the dance he’d chosen for us. If he had been so, he would have known that Raina’s Folly was a four-square dance with two couple to a set, and that most of our dancing would be limited to our opposites rather than each other. My opposite, an immensely tall man with splendidly wide shoulders and thick tawny brown-gold hair tied neatly in a green velvet ribbon, was partnered by a tiny waif of a child, beautiful to look at, but entirely unsuited to dance with such a mastodon. He was too well bred to show his relief at dancing with someone closer to his own height, but the strong, easy grip he held me with was very different from the painstakingly gentle hold he used with his partner. I noticed with some amusement that she looked up at Lord Topher with almost worshipful eyes; and with further amusement, that it didn’t take long for him to look back down at such a beautiful child instead of at me.

  My opposite and I danced in silence: he seemed to prefer it so. At all events, he made no effort to speak to me, and I have never been one to foist my conversation on an unwilling partner. His mask was green, as was his waistcoat, and I did wonder for a brief moment if this were the reclusive Lord Pecus: but there were many men with green waistcoats and matching masks, after all. He looked down at me through his mask with uninterested green eyes, and I, enjoying the sensation of dancing for once with a man who was not shorter than myself, remained content not to ruin the dance with conversation. It was only at the close of the dance, when I complimented him on his mask (the trademark of an obscure Glausian folk hero) that a spark of interest came into his bored green eyes. The arm encircling me stiffened, and he looked down at me properly for the first time, his lips parting to speak, just as the dance ended. I disentangled myself, not without difficulty (the man was carelessly strong) and curtseyed; whereupon he bowed, and closed his lips on whatever it was he had been going to say. I gave a token curtsey to Lord Topher, who looked as if he were pursuing a closer acquaintance with the lovely young blonde, and threaded my way through the crowd to find Father. Perhaps it was my imagination, but it seemed as though I could feel the green-eyed man’s gaze still on me. Silly, of course.

  I sighted Father in the crowd, earnestly discussing something with the Bromian prime minister, and was making my way leisurely to his side when I was overrun by a pincer movement of blue-and-silver horselords that flanked me on either side and then closed ranks. I had met the First Regiment only a few months ago, during the preliminary talks for the proposed militia merger, and they had taken an immense and wholly bizarre liking to me despite the fact that my seat on a horse was, at the best, laughable.

  “Lady Farrah!” They made their bows, and I looked them over with an amused eye.

  “What is it you need, horselords?”

  “Your company, my lady,” said Curran immediately. He was the youngest, at twenty-three or so years, and an unrepentant charmer.

  The other horselords exchanged guilty grins, and Curran was swatted.

  “Actually, lady,” Miryum said apologetically, “We were hoping it would not be too early for us to leave. We wouldn’t like to offend, but we have maneuvers in a few hours.”

  “My goodness, why are you still here!” I said promptly. “You are not indispensable to the party, and besides, everyone is masked. Ambassador Quorn won’t feel any insult; in fact, I doubt that he will notice.”

  “Ah, but will you notice?” Curran said soulfully, taking my hand
and pressing it to his heart. I flicked his nose sharply with my other hand, and he released me to a chorus of horselords snickering.

  “Certainly I will notice: there will be one less buzzing nuisance in the ballroom,” I told him, unable to repress a smile. There are advantages to being an old maid; not the least of which is being able to flirt with an amusing man without the matrons of the court coupling your name with his. “Follow me, I’ll smuggle you out.”

  There was an unassuming side door cunningly concealed in an alcove between the musicians and the punch bowl. Delysia had shown it to me just yesterday: it opened into a small, dark library that in turn led to the great hall; and, as she said, there was no telling when one might need a quick exit. It was through this exit that I led my merry band of horselords.

  Curran danced me through the great hall to the strains of a waltz in the ballroom, much to the butler’s disapproval; but the footmen seemed to enjoy the spectacle and since it seemed unfair for them not to have some amusement in their night, I allowed myself to be waltzed to the front door. When I left the horselords, laughing and joking in the moonlight, Curran was trying to persuade them to visit the nearest alehouse on the way home.

  I strolled back through the great hall, smiling to myself. It was pleasant to be in the company of the horselords; they made me feel young again. Twenty-eight was not precisely old, but I had been accompanying Father to ambassadorial functions since the age of seventeen, and hosting them myself for at least as long. I hadn’t felt really young for years.

  The library was pleasantly quiet when I wandered idly back through it. Someone had lit a fire in the grate, and orangey shadows flickered over the walls, pearlescent and warm. A comfortable-looking settee was set back a little from the fire, big and plush and just right for reading in, and somehow I found myself sitting down. It was comfortable, and before I knew what I was doing I had slipped out of my dancing shoes and tucked my feet beneath me as I did at home on a rainy day. I was stretching back luxuriously with a guilty thought that I shouldn’t stay too long from the ballroom, when I realised with something of a shock that I was not alone. Green eyes gazed at me from an identical chair opposite mine, and a familiar green waistcoat glowed rich emerald in the firelight: it was the man I had danced with.