Princess of the Midnight Ball - Jessica Day George [35]
Rose was just thinking of something she could say, something to break the comfortable silence that she was enjoying far too much, when she heard the hothouse door open and close. She and Galen stepped apart; he gave her a little bow and slipped away.
Prince Alfred came huffing down the path, red in the face and irritable. “No one in the palace seems to have the faintest idea what that half-witted gardener was talking about,” he complained.
“Perhaps he misheard,” Rose said. She was still gazing down at the perfect flower cupped in her hand.
“And on the way back, an old man with a peg leg accosted me, trying to get me to wear some smelly herb on my lapel!” Alfred blew through his wet lips. “In Breton—”
“Perhaps I was the one wanted back at the palace,” Rose interrupted. “I’d best return.” Tucking the rose into the sash of her high-waisted gown, she got up and walked past the still-blathering Prince Alfred, pulling her cloak tight around her.
That was another thing about Prince Alfred that drove Rose—and everyone else—to distraction. He never stopped talking. He talked about himself. He talked about his prize- winning hounds and his prize-winning horses. He talked about Breton, and how everything there was superior to everything in Westfalin, from the weather to the pigs. By dinner, Rose was ready to stuff her handkerchief in his mouth to silence him.
She settled for not listening. In fact, she didn’t even pretend to listen. No one did. But either he didn’t notice or it didn’t bother him in the slightest. After dinner Alfred followed the sisters to their rooms, where he talked all through several games of cards. In fact, the enchantment caught him mid-sentence, and he went from babbling about his hounds (again) to snoring, with his cheek on the ace of spades in the space of a heartbeat.
“Whew!” Poppy threw down her cards. “What a nightmare! I wasn’t sure if the magic would even work on him.”
“I thought he was going to keep talking, even if he fell asleep,” Orchid said.
“Now, now,” Hyacinth chided them, “we should be more charitable.”
“I agree with Poppy,” Rose said, to everyone’s surprise. “I was ready to knock him over the head with a vase if the spell didn’t get him.” She tossed down her own cards in disgust.
Prince Alfred’s snores were particularly loud in the silence that followed Rose’s outburst. They almost harmonized with the snores coming from the two maids in the other room, and a tinkling sound, like wind chimes or bells, that seemed to be coming from outside.
“What is that noise?” Daisy looked around, puzzled. “I’ve been hearing it all day.”
“One of the gardeners put bells in the ivy outside our window,” Lilac said.
“Why?”
“Why do the gardeners do anything?” Lilac shrugged.
“We might as well go now,” said Rose. The bells couldn’t drown out all the snoring, so what good were they?
“Why are you in such a hurry?” twelve-year-old Iris wanted to know. “You’re the one who’s always moaning and complaining about the Midnight Ball.”
“Because I want this night to be over with,” Rose snapped. “I want all these nights to be over with.”
Her dislike of Prince Alfred had given her a hectic energy. She knelt on the carpet and stroked the pattern, opening the door into the world below. She took a lamp and started down, not looking back to see if her sisters followed.
Shawl
Prince Alfred came and Prince Alfred went, just like all the others. Within a week of his return to Breton, he was trampled by one of his prize horses and killed.
King Gregor sent gifts for the royal family and a letter expressing his deepest regrets. The Bretoner king responded by sending the letter and gifts back, unopened, along with the Westfalin ambassador, who was no longer welcome at the royal court in Castleraugh.
“Sire! This is an outrage! A blatant slap in the face!” Lord Schilling, the prime minister, was scarlet with rage. “It’s practically a declaration of war—”
“No!” Now it was King Gregor’s turn to grow red and