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all women wanting to be a princess. But now that she had met Ella and Alix, she wasn’t so sure. She
thought of Alix, so weighted down in her borrowed silver dress that she could hardly lift her fork, and
Ella, far from home and married to a man who ignored her. Their royal births did not seem to have
guaranteed them any particular happiness. In fact, you could argue that in many ways these real-life
princesses enjoyed fewer freedoms and pleasures than Emma herself.
Konstantin put down his water glass and held out his arm. Practice was evidently resuming and
as they walked back to the center of the dance floor it suddenly occurred to Emma why he had really
asked if she and Tom were lovers.
“You needn’t worry about what Tom and I saw,” she said quietly. The pianist did not appear to
be interested in their conversation, but one could never tell. “He may not have a mistress himself but
I assure you he will keep your secret. I have never met anyone who cares so little for conventional
morality.”
“So he is this modern man.”
“I suppose he is,” she said. “I suppose they all are.” She realized she had almost slipped with
the word “all,” so she hastily continued. “Those of us who travel with the Queen, that is. Her
bodyguards and messengers and private physicians.”
He took a moment to absorb this information, but did not ask why the famously traditional
Queen Victoria might have chosen to surround herself with such a pack of godless wolves. “And it
makes you happy, to depend on no one or nothing and to always think for yourselves?”
“Trevor and I are the ones who suffer the most with it,” Emma said. “We want the whole world
to change, or at least we say we do, but I suspect there will always be something in us that will mourn
the death of the old order.”
Talking with Konstantin always seemed to have this effect on her. She found herself blurting
out things she had never consciously thought about, but the minute the words left her mouth she knew
that they were true. Tom rushed toward the novel, embracing scientific advancement with every fiber
of his being, and in his own way Davy displayed equal aplomb, playing the cards he’d been dealt
with the posture of a man who knows he has little to lose. Rayley of course had his characteristic
reserve, his constant sense of standing back from a situation and watching it unfold as if all were a
play staged for his benefit. This detachment, Emma knew, was the sort of mental state that true
modernity required. She and Trevor were the ones in trouble. They could not help reacting to the
people and events around them. As many times as they declared themselves to be creatures of logic,