been set to airing a room for Eliza, putting out bedding and wall hangings of equal quality to the ones in Belinda’s rooms, and Belinda had gone to await her new housemate.
Eliza arrived with almost nothing. A stand for the wig made of her own lustrous black hair, a trunk barely touched with clothes. Her men’s wear was blatantly folded on top of the few items within the trunk, and she shook them out now, as Belinda watched. “Nina will do that,” Belinda offered softly. Eliza’s lip curled.
“I don’t need a servant, Beatrice. I’ve done for myself all my life.”
“I know. But if we’re to make the best of this, there’s no harm in settling into the house like you belong, is there?” To her surprise, Belinda meant the question, oddly hopeful she could make a friend of the prince’s beautiful friend. “Nina honestly won’t know what to do with herself if she finds all your things already put away.”
“Nina knows I’m a guttersnipe,” Eliza snapped. “Just as everyone else does.”
“Eliza.” Belinda took a few steps forward, putting her hand on the taller woman’s shoulder. Eliza flinched away, jaw set again. Belinda dropped her hand, but not her voice. “Have you noticed the prince has a friend from each obvious class, in you three? The nobility, the merchants, the poor. You were all too young, I think, for him to make that choice deliberately, but if you play it right now, it could make him even more beloved than he is. No one expects you to become something you aren’t. You know where you’re from, and God knows the nobility will never let you forget it. But if you’re generous with your time and your money and bring the poor to Javier’s attention, even the nobility won’t be able to despise you outright. And the poor will love you for it.”
Eliza spat, the sound so violent Belinda expected to see a glob of moisture land on the bedpost. “The poor will hate me as much as my father does for living.”
“Javier loves you,” Belinda said steadily. “The poor will see you as one of them who touches the stars. You can give them all a dream. Dreams are more precious than coin, sometimes.”
“What would you know about it?” That was spat, too, but Eliza had stopped putting her own belongings away.
Belinda drew her lower lip into her mouth, searching for an answer honest enough to ring true without belying the persona she’d assumed. “I could see it from the prince’s face,” she said after long seconds. “That to him, sleeping with the pigs was a colourful expression. That it was outside the possibility of reality. I wasn’t born to nobility, Eliza. My title came with my marriage bed.”
Eliza’s shoulders stilled as if she dared not breathe until Belinda’s confession was through. For her part, Belinda took a deliberately deep breath, speaking to those squared shoulders. “We were landed, though not generously. No Ecumenic seems to be well-endowed now, not after a half century of Walter rule. My husband was old, his wealth a gift for loyal service to the Reformation queen. We had no dowry to offer him, not even my beauty.”
Eliza’s shoulders pulled back, a twitch as loud as words. Belinda cast a smile at the floor. “Don’t bother,” she murmured. “You’re beautiful, Eliza. I’m pretty. I don’t need protests to other ends. Besides, it wasn’t beauty my husband desired. It was a girl wellborn enough to not cause comment and ordinary enough to…not cause comment. He had certain pleasures,” she said to the slight turn of Eliza’s head. “Pleasures a beautiful bride might have dared object to, or that a father with his daughter’s beauty to sell might have found ways to avoid. Pleasures a young man might risk saving a beautiful woman from. I…didn’t offer those risks. I never slept with the pigs,” she added more clearly, and out of all of it, that was the lie that stung to speak, “but I know more of that life, from my childhood, than I do of this one.” She fluttered a hand at Eliza’s room.
“Your husband,” Eliza said in a high voice, “died of old age.” There was a question around the edges of her statement, one that neither woman would allow to come to the fore. Belinda’s heart went tight, internal expectation that she didn’t allow near her features.
“I was fortunate.” Her voice, too, was high and soft. “Perhaps there’s someone you know whose age is creeping up on him.”
Stillness, as profound as any Belinda knew, settled over Eliza again. When she spoke, it was not to the topic at hand, its weight too heavy in the afternoon-lit bedroom. “Do you really think they could be made to see me as something other than Javier’s whore?”
“I think that if that’s what you want, you’d better begin by growing your hair out.”
Eliza turned, a startled hand going to her shorn locks, protest blackening already dark eyes. “It’s that or wear your wig all the time, and hair’s cooler than a wig. You’re acting out of defiance.” To her own surprise, sorrow curved Belinda’s lips. “You’re throwing it in their faces, that you’re a woman protected by the prince and so you dare to do the unconventional. I know you don’t like me, but I have no reason to lie to you when I say you aren’t physically capable of being conventional. You’ll be beautiful when you’re sixty, when all the rest of us are merely old. Wear the wig,” she said softly. “Grow your hair. Put aside the men’s clothes and dress in your own gowns. Set convention. Be generous to where you came from, and yes, Eliza, they will see you as something other than Javier’s whore. Not all of them. There will always be small-minded and bitter people. You’ll have to be stronger than they are. But you are beautiful. You’ll be able to make most of them love you.” She sighed. “And you’ll be able to make Jav regret all his life that he’s not the one who can have you.”
She kept her hands relaxed at her sides, against the impulse to curl them. The card she played was a dangerous one, using simple words and an unexpected truthfulness to ally herself with Eliza. The more-or less; she was as yet uncertain as to which it was-subtle manipulation of emotion lay within her capabilities, but Belinda found herself unwilling to indulge in that game. Alliances forged with words were better-known to her, more trustworthy, and would leave no mark of molding on Eliza’s mind. Whether that was even a risk worth considering, Belinda didn’t know, but better to avoid it if she could.
Besides, she admitted in a rare moment of honesty, she simply wanted the dark-haired beauty to like her. Friends were a luxury she was unaccustomed to indulging in, and a hazardous one at that, but Beatrice felt the lack more than Belinda ever allowed herself to.
“And will I have to share him with you?” Eliza’s voice was still careful, her body still held in statuesque quietude. Belinda coughed out a derisive breath.
“A Lanyarchan provincial? His fascination for me is fleeting, Eliza. You’ll have to share him with someone, but it won’t be me. My sights aren’t set that high.”
“He’s never shown even so much fascination for me.” Strain cracked Eliza’s voice now, making her sound more youthful than she was. Belinda finally dared move, taking herself to stand before Eliza and offer her a hand.
“There are four of you, and none of those men are your brothers. Giving yourself to any one of them changes the balance. Gives weight to that couple’s desires over the other two. Javier is a prince. Royalty does not afford friends easily. It may be easier, and wiser, to refuse to see you, than to risk the only friendships that go back so far as to withstand the test of sovereignty. You were children,” Belinda whispered. “Parents might care for the rank of person their children associate with, but children care nothing for it. You, I would think, most of all, more than Sacha or Marius, even, would stand that test. All you wanted was some pears.” Her smile was fleeting and sad.
“How do you know us so well?” Eliza didn’t take Belinda’s hand, but her question lacked accusation, filled instead with resignation. Belinda lowered her eyes to the floor, self-same smile turning wry.
“Envy, perhaps,” she replied, discomfited to find a degree of truth in that. Only a degree; the larger part was in needing to know, to see clearly, for her own survival. For the survival of her queen. “That, and I’ve been made a satellite around a body that works. Perhaps it’s easier to see you from the outside, looking in.”
Eliza sighed, turning her gaze away, and after long moments swore under her breath. “Have you ever had to grow your hair out from this length, Beatrice? It looks and feels horrible.”
Belinda’s mouth quirked, eyes bright. “We’ll just have to find someone skilled enough with scissors to make it bearable. Or buy you a sheerly impossible number of wigs.”
“With Javier’s money.” A note of bitterness sounded in that and Belinda, despite the earlier rebuff, deliberately reached for and caught Eliza’s hand.
“Not if you don’t want to. I have money of my own.”
“I don’t.”
Belinda tilted her head, curious; Javier had accused Eliza of stealing more than a palmful of coin off him, and Eliza had claimed to him that she had cash. But that might have been a fob to make a prince cease worrying; there was no reason to suppose the cheapside beauty still had the money. “Well, then. We’d better set about doing
