Princess of the Midnight Ball - Jessica Day George [26]
“I’m sure he did,” Poppy said airily. “He escorted me back from the garden the other day, when Fernand arrived. He’s very kind. And handsome.” She wiggled her eyebrows at Rose, who chose to ignore her. “Don’t get a new ribbon; they look more interesting this way,” she told Lily, adjusting the cord twisted around the slim stems of her namesake. “Galen made the cord, too, I think. He sits on the rocks just beneath our windows to eat his lunch and knit. I think he knits his own socks.”
“He does?” Lily looked up from the dressing table.
“Yes, but Rose would know better than I,” she said mischievously. And she wandered out with her nose in her flowers.
Lily looked at Rose, who just shrugged, hoping she wasn’t blushing. “He’s an odd young man,” she said.
“But handsome,” Poppy shouted through the door.
Her two older sisters rolled their eyes.
After those who were well enough had gone to dinner, Rose closed her eyes and took a nap. She slept better than she had in weeks, months even, with the bouquet of roses propped up on the pillows near her cheek. Like Poppy, she liked the little knitted cord that held the flowers together, fingering it as she drifted off.
When she woke, Prince Bastien was leaning into her bedroom, leering at her. Startled, she clutched at the bouquet too hard, and pricked her finger on a thorn. Most of them had been stripped away, but Galen had missed one.
“Ouch!” Rose sucked at her finger, then sneezed into a handkerchief.
“Oh, poor princess,” Prince Bastien said from the doorway. “You are still the sick?”
“Yes, I am still the sick,” Rose retorted, irritated. She blew her nose, hard, not caring if it wasn’t attractive or ladylike. She was in her nightgown; what was he doing leaning into her bedroom and staring at her like that?
“Prince Bastien?” The ever-conscientious Lily appeared at his elbow, an apologetic look in her eyes for Rose’s benefit. “Why don’t you show us that card game you spoke of at dinner?”
“Will not the Rose join us?”
“No, I’m afraid the Ro—my older sister is too tired,” Lily said.
Lily artfully guided Prince Bastien away, and Rose spent the remainder of the evening listening to the merriment through the open door of her bedroom. At ten o’clock, their maids readied them all for bed and prepared a cot for Prince Bastien in the sitting room. At a quarter to eleven, the maids and the Belgique prince were all fast asleep.
They would not wake until dawn, no matter what sounds the girls made. The hounds of Hell could run baying through the sitting room, but the sleep that had come over Bastien and the servants could not be disturbed.
Leaning on Lily’s arm, Rose looked down at Prince Bastien as she passed him. With his mouth hanging open and a line of drool trickling onto the satin pillow, he was not as handsome as she had thought earlier. She shook her head and sniffed her flowers as Lily opened the secret passage and they went to the Midnight Ball.
Three days later, Prince Bastien left in disgust.
Hothouse
I’m not sure how many more princes they can find,” Walter said. He and Galen were in the tropical hothouse, pruning exotic fruit trees that were too delicate to grow outside in Westfalin during any season. “We’ve gone through, what, six now?”
“Seven,” Galen said.
He had been keeping careful count. Poppy, and some of the younger princesses who were feeling better, had occasionally stopped in the gardens to whisper their unflattering opinions of the princes to Galen. Rose had not come out, though Galen often saw her at the windows. She looked so pale, with her golden-brown hair crowning her wan face. He had wanted to send more bouquets, but there were rather too many princesses for such a thing to go unnoticed, and it wouldn’t be proper for Galen to be sending flowers to Rose alone. He had excused his first gift by saying that they were the flowers from the hothouse that needed to be thinned out anyway.
“And every one of