A Masquerade in the Moonlight(25)
“Why, I in turn must wonder,” she countered, her voice low but intense, “would you persist in wishing for my company when I have made it so abundantly obvious that you and I are incompatible in the extreme?”
Thomas grinned, shaking his head. “Ah, my argumentative aingeal, isn’t it clear to you yet? Whether we like each other or not, whether we are compatible or not—or if we are as unalike as chalk and cheese—is totally beside the point. I’m mad for you. And you’re mad for me.”
Marguerite closed her eyes and raised a gloved hand to her mouth. A moment later Thomas saw that her shoulders were shaking, and when she opened her eyes they were alight with laughter, “Ah, Donovan,” she said intriguingly, just as Lord Chorley stopped beside her, obviously eager to claim his partner, his starched neck cloth so tight his face was an alarming shade of puce, “perhaps we’re both simply mad.”
“Mad?” Lord Chorley wrinkled his nose in thought. “Whatever are you two mad about, dear Marguerite? The supper not to your liking? I agree. The crepes were depressingly soggy. Hullo, again, Donovan. Leaving so soon? Best to do so quietly, as the better man is here now, for all your bragging. Ain’t I, Marguerite?”
Marguerite looked quickly to Lord Chorley, then to Thomas, and then back again to his lordship. “What are you talking about, Stinky? What sort of bragging?”
Thomas winced and lifted a hand to scratch at a spot behind his left ear. That would teach him to open his potato trap just to get a rise out of his audience. Who would have thought the man would be blockheaded enough to repeat such an insulting tale to the woman in question? He had meant to upset the gentlemen, not infuriate Marguerite.
A prudent retreat seemed a good idea. “Well, now, I believe I must be going,” he said, bowing. “Lord Chorley? Miss Balfour? Your devoted servant. Good evening.”
And then Thomas took himself off before “Stinky” Chorley could repeat the stupid boast he had made earlier, the one that would undoubtedly cost him dearly tomorrow, when he took Miss Marguerite Balfour out riding.
What lies, he wondered as he climbed the stairs to the ballroom, would they tell each other then?
CHAPTER 4
We desire nothing so much as what we ought not to have.
— Publilus Syrus
He stood just beside the window overlooking the square, not in front of the window, but three paces back and slightly to the right, so that only he could see, and not be seen in return. He stood there often in the early morning hours before the majority of the world was awake, mentally constructing his empire and arranging it to suit him.
During those hours of contemplation he dealt with the worthless by means of France’s single grand invention, the guillotine, and gained a near sexual release by contemplating the terror he would one day see in the eyes of all those he deemed unworthy—the poor, the lazy, the flawed—as he ordered their elimination from his perfect world.
And the very intelligent. They too must go. “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers,” Shakespeare had written. A laudable sentiment, but it would be foolish to 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.