Princess Mary, always so calm, was as disarrayed as her mother, her fair face flushed and her usually immaculately arranged hair straggling in wisps around her face. Dropping her mother’s hand, she made her way to Charlotte.

“You’ve heard, I take it?” she asked, in a low voice, as the Princess Elizabeth continued to hover over her mother’s shoulder, patting her arm and making soothing noises.

“Princess Sophia just told me.”

“It’s dreadful,” said Princess Mary heavily. “Just dreadful. Worse than last time, even. It was so sudden.”

Charlotte thought of what she had seen the night before, but held her tongue. There could be no use in mentioning it now.

“They won’t let Mama in to see him,” Princess Mary continued despairingly. “Papa has dismissed all his pages and his Lords of the Bedchamber. At least, they say it’s by his own wishes.”

Charlotte’s eyes widened. “Surely, the doctor — ” she began.

“They have appointed a new doctor,” said Princess Mary. “They say Papa doesn’t want the Willises anymore, not after the way they treated him last time. They wouldn’t allow Mama’s physician in to see him.”

“They?”

“He, rather,” Princess Mary corrected herself, with a shrug to show the futility of syntax at such a time. “My brother’s man, Colonel McMahon.”

“Oh,” said Charlotte. And then again, “Oh.”

The Prince of Wales had apparently lost no time in securing his hold over the household.

“Mama is frantic for lack of news. And,” the princess admitted, “so are we. Poor Papa!”

“Have you sent to the Prince of Wales?” asked Charlotte tentatively.

“He is probably too busy celebrating to take any notice,” said Princess Mary, who was usually quite fond of her brother, bitterly. “Why must this happen again and again? Papa is so good. Why must he be afflicted so? Why must we be afflicted so?”

“Is there anything at all I can do?” asked Charlotte. “Any assistance I might render?”

Princess Mary sighed. “Unless you can persuade my brother to lift his ban . . .” With a shrug at the futility of it, she suggested, without much enthusiasm, “Perhaps you might read to Mama. Mama?”

“I should not do the listening justice.” The Queen’s voice was hoarse and cracked, as frail as her skin. “Not now.”

It was enough to make anyone think decidedly nasty thoughts about the Prince of Wales. How he could he be so abandoned to filial feeling, much less common human decency? He had done the same before, grabbing charge of the King’s household and forbidding his mother and sisters access to the King. It was said that on those previous occasions, the Prince had done everything possible to arrest the King’s recovery in the hopes that if his father’s mind remained deranged, he would be granted all the powers of a regency.

The notion that someone would be willing to sabotage his own parent’s sanity for personal gain made Charlotte’s skin crawl.

Looking at the pathetic figure of the Queen, a germ of an idea fluttered through Charlotte’s brain. “The King’s bedchamber is next to the Great Library!” she blurted out.

The two Princesses looked at her as though she were the one to have run mad.

“Yes,” said the Princess Elizabeth. “Where it has been these thirty years.”

“If Your Majesty were to desire me to read to you,” Charlotte suggested haltingly, “a new book might need to be procured for your amusement. It is the merest coincidence that the library opens directly into the King’s chamber. . . .”

The Queen’s dull eyes lifted to Charlotte’s, comprehension lighting in their depths. The royal spine straightened.

“Fetch me a new book, Lady Charlotte,” the Queen commanded in her charmingly accented English. “I find I desire to be read to.”

Chapter Sixteen

To promise daring deeds was one thing; to actually accomplish them quite another.

Even though it was the same route she had walked a hundred times before, Charlotte felt dreadfully conspicuous as she made her way from the Queen’s apartments to the Great Library. How did proper spies manage? Charlotte couldn’t help feeling like her purpose must be blazoned in fireworks above her head for all to see. But no one else appeared to notice anything out of the ordinary. They were all too busy whispering about the King’s health to bother with her — “I heard he jumped right out of bed and built an ark in the middle of the night!” she heard one footman whisper excitedly to another. “Calls himself Noah and runs around looking for animals to put on the ark!”

With news of the King’s madness already spread, the library was completely deserted. It would, Charlotte supposed, take rather a lot of cheek to go on reading Plautus or Livy with the King suffering in the next room.

Feeling like a poor excuse for an emissary, Charlotte placed a palm carefully to the surface of the door to the King’s room and pushed. The door gave without the slightest murmur, moving soundlessly. With the door merely an inch open, Charlotte paused, listening for all she was worth. There was nothing to be heard, no footsteps, no voices, nothing — except for a low mumbling monologue like water running over the rocks of a stream, an indistinguishable burbling punctuated by low sobs and a sort of rustling sound.

Throwing caution to the winds, Charlotte pushed the door the rest of the way open and beheld a sight to stir the hardest heart. In a sodden nest of disordered linens, the King lay curled into a protective ball, knees tucked up to his chest. The poor royal legs were bare beneath his nightshirt, pitted with goose pimples in the merciless cold of the room. Charlotte’s nose wrinkled at the reek of an unemptied chamber pot.

Had the servants never come? The fire was still banked from the night before and the room was dreadfully cold, with the bone-aching January chill that fires could keep at bay but never quite eliminate. With his covers off, the King was all but exposed to the elements, shivering and crying and sweating despite the cold, crooning to himself in a low, continuous monotone. Charlotte stood frozen with pity and horror.

How, oh, how was she ever going to tell the Queen? Surely, such things couldn’t be allowed to happen. Not to a monarch. The servants must be called and scolded, the fire stoked, the linens changed, a soothing draft of some sort prepared. . . .

But all that faded into insignificance next to the most horrifying sight of all. As the King floundered among his sheets, Charlotte at last saw just what it was that made him move so awkwardly and lie so strangely. His arms were twisted and tied around his chest in a hideous contraption of a waistcoat, holding his upper body all but immobile.

Charlotte must have made some noise, of horror or pity, because the King paused in his whimpering and, with an effort that made the veins of his neck stand out, twisted his head in a pitiful effort to try to see.

“Emily?” he called, in piteous echo of the night before. “Oh, Emily, why won’t you save your father? Take off this cursed waistcoat, my Emily! Emily . . .”

Charlotte didn’t know what she might have done. Her automatic instinct was to take the King away, free him from his bonds and spirit him up to the Queen, where his poor shrinking flesh would be covered with warm robes and his anxious daughters would lavish him with every attention that might sooth and heal. But in that instant the sound of another voice was heard through the door that led to the King’s dressing room.

“I say,” someone called. “What was that?”

It was too late to escape back to the library; the door lay clear across the room. Without stopping to think, Charlotte dove for a squat mahogany cabinet in the corner of the room, decorated with an elaborate design of garlands and flowers, all made out of tiny pieces of inlaid wood. The side curved inwards in the rococo style, leaving a space just large enough for Charlotte to crouch. On its squat, ormolu legs, the cabinet was nearly flush with the ground, leaving no telltale gap underneath.

The King thrashed uncomfortably in his bonds, jerking his neck from side to side in an attempt to see her. “Emily?” he called. “Emily?”

“This way, Doctor,” said a voice she didn’t recognize, a smooth, almost too-polished sort of voice. “And you’ll see what we’ve been telling you about.”

Charlotte scooped in the last, betraying fold of her skirt and pressed herself as small as she could make herself between the curve of the cabinet and the wall. She was ridiculously grateful that today wasn’t a Drawing Room day; the spreading hoops of her court dress would have been impossible to hide. There was nothing to be done about the white muslin of her dress, but at least her red spencer blended nicely with the crimson hangings of the wall behind her.

The floor, uncarpeted like most of the palace, vibrated beneath the sudden onslaught of footsteps. Charlotte could feel the floorboards quivering beneath her fingertips.

“Emily?” moaned the King, jerking like a fish on the line. “Emily?”

“As you can see, Dr. Simmons,” said the first voice again. A pair of booted legs strode past Charlotte’s hiding place, polished to a mirror sheen and smelling of leather, champagne, and horse. “The situation is dire.”

“How long has he been like this?” It must be the doctor this time, with snagged and dirty stockings and buckled shoes with the cross bar of one buckle missing. Mad-doctoring was seldom a lucrative calling.

More shoes, this time shiny buckled ones, attached to heavily muscled legs, every step thundering down like a giant trampling on a village. “Since last night.”