* * *
Melbourne and the Sanfords trailing behind her, the queen stopped in front of Peregrine and Sara. With a gracious inclination of her head, she said, "A pleasure to see you, Lady Sara." Her voice was sweet and very clear, like a nightingale.
Sara curtsied. "This is an unexpected honor, Your Majesty."
"Your husband was presented to me at the last Levee." She turned to Peregrine. "Prince Peregrine. I hope that relations between your country and mine will be fruitful."
He bowed and murmured, "As do I, Your Majesty."
As Peregrine straightened up, Charles Weldon emerged from the crowd, his eyes gleaming with triumph.
After bowing to the queen, Weldon said in a ringing voice, "I beg Your Majesty's pardon, but I must tell you that this man is an imposter. He is not a prince, not even a native of Kafiristan. He is not worthy of being presented to you."
A gasp rippled through the onlookers who were close enough to hear. Startled by this departure from protocol, Victoria turned to the man who dared interrupt her. Melbourne stepped forward and whispered in her ear, probably identifying Weldon.
With a sick feeling in his stomach, Peregrine realized that Weldon had found a perfect place to discredit him. Peregrine could try to lie his way out of it, of course, and he lied very well. But who would these staid Britons believe, an English gentleman who was one of them, or a foreigner of dubious background? The answer was obvious.
For himself, Peregrine did not much mind being disgraced, but his friends were part of this world. They would not relish being publicly humiliated for having sponsored him. Ross and Haddonfield would feel betrayed, and justly so. And Sara, dear God, what would Sara think?
Knowing that all eyes were on him, Weldon continued, "The man calling himself Prince Peregrine of Kafiristan is an imposter. In fact he is English, the illegitimate child of a cockney barmaid." He turned to Peregrine, vicious satisfaction in his eyes. With a wave of his hand, he thundered, "And this fraud, this insolent East End gutter rat, dares try to deceive the whole of British society."
The queen's jaw dropped, and for a moment she looked like a startled young girl rather than a monarch. The room was so silent that a carriage could be heard rattling by outside. Then Victoria's blue eyes narrowed to icy slits, and her head swung around to Peregrine. An insult to royal dignity was not something she would forgive. The royal voice cold and clear, she asked, "Is what Sir Charles says true?"
Peregrine should have been thinking of the best way to escape disaster, but instead his gaze was fixed on his wife. Sara's face was pale and her wide, stunned eyes regarded him with shock. Helplessly he wondered if she believed Weldon's charges. More to the point, how she would react if she did believe?
"I have spoken to you, sir," Victoria snapped, no longer according Peregrine the courtesy of his nominal title.
He turned to the queen, wondering if he had any chance of lying his way out of this. Perhaps he should just admit the truth and be done with it, but he supposed he owed it to his friends to try to avoid disgrace.
Then another cool voice entered the conversation. "I believe that Prince Peregrine is stunned at such a wild accusation, Your Majesty."
Lord Ross Carlisle emerged into the circle of open space around the queen and bowed. With his golden hair and bone-deep elegance, he was the perfect English gentleman to counter Weldon. "Sir Charles must be jesting. I myself have visited the prince's palace in Kafiristan and seen how his people revere him."
Ross's answer broke Peregrine's paralysis. "Please excuse my slowness in answering, Your Majesty. I sometimes have trouble with your language," he said in his thickest accent. "There is some justice to Sir Charles's statement that I am not a prince, for Kafiristan does not have princes in the European sense. In Kafiri, I am called," he hesitated, "I suppose 'war hawk' is closest. My title would best be translated as leader or chief. If I stay in England, I think I will drop the title altogether, since it is not formally recognized in this country."
"I was the one who suggested that he call himself a prince, Your Majesty," Ross said. "While the translation is not exact, Peregrine was the greatest and most respected man in Kafiristan. I myself can vouch for that."
His face darkening, Weldon snapped, "Lord Ross is part of the plot to deceive society, Your Majesty. Without his help, this guttersnipe would not be able to bring his masquerade off. They are both laughing at the rest of us."
The queen's brow furrowed as she weighed Ross and Peregrine's words against Weldon's accusations.
Then Sara spoke up. "You have known me for many years, Your Majesty," she said in a soft voice that could not be heard more than a few feet away. "Do you think I would dishonor my name by marrying a man who was not of suitable rank?"
The two women's gazes met, and for a moment warmth for her old friend showed in Victoria's eyes. Perhaps she was also remembering that Weldon had been betrothed to Sara and might feel malice to her new husband. Then the queen resumed her regal formality. Turning to Weldon, she said in a voice that would cut glass, "If that was your idea of a joke, we are not amused."
Victoria inclined her head to Peregrine and Sara. "Prince Peregrine, Lady Sara. I trust we shall see you at court again soon." Then she turned and resumed her progress.
His face white with rage, Weldon spun on his heel and stormed out of the ballroom, people drawing away from him as if he was a plague carrier.
The attention of the other guests stayed on the queen and her entourage, leaving Peregrine facing Ross and Sara. His eyes filled with unholy amusement, Ross said, "You are right, Mikahl, we must talk in the next few days. Good night, Sara." Then he turned and left.
Peregrine looked down at Sara. Her face was still pale, and he could read nothing in her expression. As for himself, he felt that he would explode if he stayed at this damned ball a moment longer. "Come, we are leaving," he said roughly.
He would not have been surprised if Sara had balked, but instead she just nodded.
As Sara collected her evening shawl, Peregrine summoned his carriage. Neither he nor his wife spoke on the short ride back to the Park Street town house, but the atmosphere in the coach was thick with tension.
And with every revolution of the carriage's wheels, Peregrine heard his wife's cool, aristocratic voice ringing in his head: "Do you think I would dishonor my name by marrying a man who was not of suitable rank?"
Chapter 21
After the silent journey home, Sara was undressed by Jenny. Then she dismissed the maid and entered the main bedroom. This was one night when she might have welcomed separate chambers, but here, as at Sulgrave, the master and mistress had only one bed between them.
Sara considered crawling between the sheets and pulling the pillow over her head, but that seemed impossible in such a fraught atmosphere. Warily she sat down in a wing chair facing her husband, sure that a blazing great row was waiting to happen. She would have preferred to face it rested and composed, but rows, like childbirth, took place in their own time.
Mikahl had already undressed and wore his flowing black caftan as he stared out the window and sipped a glass of brandy. When he had made love to her at the ball, his mood had been volatile but good-humored. Now he seemed dark and dangerous, and very foreign. He turned to face Sara when she entered the room, his expression rigid with suppressed anger.
"Why are you glaring at me?" she asked, hoping to appeal to his sense of humor. "After all the different things I heard about your past tonight, I should be the one seething."
Her lame attempt at a joke failed. "So Weldon did say something appalling when you were dancing," Mikahl said grimly. "What did he accuse me of then— the same things he told the queen, or worse?"
So he was going to the heart of the trouble; Sara would have preferred a meaningless quarrel, which would be forgotten when it was over. Talking about what had happened tonight could open a Pandora's box of her husband's dark secrets, and she was terrified that what was revealed might destroy their marriage. Taki
ng a deep breath, she said, "Worse. Charles claimed that he first met you in Tripoli."
Her husband's body went taut as a drumhead. "What else did dear Charles say?"
Sara wanted to drop her eyes, but didn't. "He said that when he met you, you were a male whore, and the reason you hate him is that he kicked you out of his bed."
Rage sizzled through the room like St. Elmo's fire. Sara shivered; if ever she was to fear her husband, now was the time.
But he did not move or threaten her, just stared with ice in his eyes. "Do you believe him?"
"He was acting from malice, and he probably thought it was safe to be outrageous because I would be too horrified to discuss his accusations with you." She hesitated, choosing her words. "But in spite of that, I did think there was a grain of truth in what Charles said."
His voice low and over-controlled, Mikahl said, "Of the different things Weldon said, what do you think is true?"
"I'm not sure," Sara said slowly. "I just had the feeling that what he said was not wholly invented."
The temperature in the room seemed to drop ten degrees. "If I deny his accusations, who will you believe, me or your aristocratic former suitor?"
"You are my husband," Sara said, an edge to her voice. "I would hope that I could believe you."
"But you aren't sure," he said bitterly. "What a touching vote of confidence from my own wife."
Beginning to feel angry herself, Sara snapped, "I am trying very hard to have faith in you, Mikahl, but you are giving me damned little to work with. I think it's time you told me the truth about your past."
There was a flicker of surprise in his eyes at her unaccustomed profanity. Then he tossed back half the contents of his brandy glass. "Surely you know all you need to know. An aristocrat like you would never dishonor your name by marrying a man who was not of suitable rank. Ergo, I must be of suitable rank, and Weldon was lying from sheer bloody-mindedness."
"That is no answer," she said, exasperated. "Why don't you answer a few questions instead of just asking them?"
Her husband banged his glass down on a table and stalked across the room to brace his arms on the wings of her chair.
"What questions do you want answered, sweet Sara?" he said in a low, menacing tone. He loomed above her, his face a foot away, and his eyes glittering like emerald shards. "Do you want to know if I am really a whore or a London gutter rat? What would you do if the answer is yes? Will you return to your father's house and look for a lover who is 'of suitable rank' once you learn what I am?"
Insight struck Sara like lightning. Mikahl's underlying fury was for Weldon and tonight's near-humiliation, but some of his anger was for her, and now she knew why. Amazingly, her powerful, confident husband feared that Sara would reject him if she knew the truth about his origins.
Sara raised one hand and slipped it around his neck, her fingertips caressing the tight muscles. "I know what you are, Mikahl," she said softly. "That is why I married you. But I admit that I am also curious about what you were."
His angry expression shattered, leaving desperate vulnerability in its wake. Then he straightened and spun away, unable to face the tenderness in her eyes. He stopped at the window and stared out, showing only his broad, black-clad back. Sara felt the energy currents swirl through the room, changing tone like light refracted through cut glass.
Minutes passed before he said in an almost inaudible voice, "Most of what you've heard tonight is true."
Walking to the table that held the decanter and glasses, Mikahl poured himself another drink, his hand less than steady. "Would you like some brandy, Sara? If you want to hear the sordid story of my life, it is going to be a long night."
"Please." Sara closed her eyes with a shuddering sigh of relief, passionately grateful that Mikahl was once more the husband she knew and loved.
When he placed a glass in her hand, she opened her eyes. "The part about you being a male whore and madly in love with Charles—that is the part that is false, isn't it?"
He stared at her a moment. "Sometimes, Sara, you make my blood run cold. Why do you say that?"
"I cannot believe it of you," she said simply.
"You are quite correct—he was lying about those things." He began pacing the room, too restless to sit. "However, just about everything else Weldon said was true: I was born less than five miles from here, near the East End docks."
Sara shook her head in amazement. "So you are really English. Incredible."
"I was born in London, and spent the first eight years of my life here, but that does not make me English," he corrected sharply. "The England I knew is very different from the world you grew up in."
She knew that he spoke the truth, yet still, he was as English as she was. Perhaps more so; her privileged life was the exception rather than the rule. "Who were your parents?"
"No one you would know," he said dryly. "My mother was a country girl from Cheshire who ran away with a soldier. After he abandoned her, she became a barmaid in a London dockside tavern. My father was a sailor in the Royal Navy. He lived with her when he wasn't on duty. He had an estranged wife so he couldn't marry my mother even though he loved her, or so she told me. Perhaps that was so. It pleased her to believe it."
"What happened to them?"
"My father died at Trafalgar when I was two years old. I don't remember him, but my mother used to say I looked just like him." Mikahl perched on the edge of the windowsill. "Her name was Annie. She was casual and good-natured. She never complained and could always find something to laugh at.
"She wasn't a prostitute, but after my father died, she had a series of male 'friends' who stayed when they were in port and who helped with the bills. When I began to run wild, she sold the gold necklace one of her lovers had given her, and used the money to put me in a dame school. That helped keep me out of trouble and saved me from being completely illiterate."
"What was your original name?"
"Michael Connery, after my father. He was Irish." His face was pensive. "I suppose I'm not really entitled to the Connery name since I'm a bastard, but my mother called herself Mrs. Connery. I never knew what her maiden name was."
Michael Connery. Pronounce it with a different accent, and it became Mikahl Khanauri. Sara examined her husband with fresh eyes: the height, the black hair and fair skin, the green eyes, the ability to charm the birds from the trees when he chose. "Irish. I should have guessed," she said with dawning understanding. "The first time I met you, you said that green eyes were not uncommon among your father's people."
"Which is the truth." His expression was sardonic. "You may not believe this, Sara, but I've tried to avoid lying to you."
Sara cast her mind back over their conversations. At length she said, "I do believe you. Thinking back, I don't recall you ever actually saying that you were Kafiri. And there were many other times like that, when my expectations shaped what you said. You certainly are a master of selective facts."
"A minor skill, but one that I excel at." His voice was self-mocking.
Sara's brows knit as she thought of a new question. "What about your accent? It is impossible to place. If I had to guess, I would have said that you speak like an Asiatic who had attended Oxford University. Certainly not like a cockney."
"After I left England, I was exposed to standard English. Then for many years I never spoke my native tongue, though I read it whenever I found an English book. I didn't want to forget the language because I always knew that I would need it again someday," he explained. "When I went to India and had the chance to speak English again, I found that my original accent had been modified by the other languages I had spoken over the years, so I cultivated the new accent as a way of covering up the cockney. I knew that when I returned to London, I would be accepted more readily as a rich foreigner than as an East End slum rat who had made good."
He smiled a little, for the first time since they had separated at the ball. "I can still speak a cockney so thick you wouldn't be able to unders
tand more than one word in three. It's another foreign language."
Sara pulled her legs up under her in the chair, tucking her blue robe around her ankles. "You said that you lived in England for your first eight years. Why did you leave?"
"My mother died of a fever. By chance one of her friends, a sea captain, was in port. Knowing that if I was turned out on the streets I'd probably end up on the gallows, he took me on as a cabin boy." Mikahl sighed, his face deeply sad. "Captain Jamie McFarland, from Glasgow. If you listen hard, you'll probably hear a trace of Glaswegian in my accent. Most of my mother's lovers thought of me as an unavoidable nuisance, but Jamie McFarland actually liked me. He would bring me small gifts from his travels and always had time to talk. He was the closest thing to a father I ever had."
Sara had never imagined her husband as a child. He seemed too elemental, too fully formed, ever to have been small and helpless. But now his words conjured up a picture of a girl called Annie, who had followed her heart and who had given her resilience and good nature to her son. It was equally easy to envision the fatherless child who had been eager to love a man who gave him the protection and love all children deserved.
Her heart ached for him, but she guessed that it would be better to change the subject, for Mikahl hated showing any weakness. "How did you end up in the wilds of Asia?"
His face closed. "That is a long story, too long for tonight. The summary is that after my seafaring days, I wound up working on the caravans through Central Asia. When I was about twenty, I was captured in a raid and made a slave."
She winced. "That is when you got the scars on your back?"
He drank some of the brandy, his expression impenetrable. "Some of them. It was my second stint in slavery, and most of the scars are from the first time. After about a year, I managed to escape with a fellow slave, a Kafir named Malik. Once we were free, he wanted to return to his mountains. Since I had no better ideas, I went with him."
"And you stayed?"