Away from Yvette’s hearing, genteel whispers drifted among clustered debutantes:

“Isn’t he divine? We’ve misjudged the French—Mr. Fisher’s nothing like his boorish uncle. He noticed the Byzantine jasmine in my perfume! First gentleman to name it properly. Said it matched my eyes… Oh, he’ll break hearts someday.”

“Typical Gallic charm,” another sniffed. “They all play coy with Sir Ulysses, but who refuses him? It’s a dance: feign indifference so defeat doesn’t sting.”

A third laughed. “No wonder we hire French valets—they’re decorative. Real work’s done by invisible drudges, like household gremlins.”

Unnoticed, Yvette approached her next partner: Veronica Faulkner, sister to the grim novelist dubbed “the Upas Tree.” Expecting a gothic statue, she found a vivacious brunette with fawn-like eyes.

“You’re the Mr. Fisher!” Veronica gushed, ignoring etiquette. “My brother’s novelizing your Red Mill case! His draft’s thrilling, but he says reality was wilder. Please, tell me everything!”

Yvette reddened. How to explain slaying a monster with a magic sword? She deflected—these fencing enthusiasts would spot lies.

The Faulkners were fifth-tier nobles—Albion’s power elite. Veronica, fan-girling hard, spilled secrets between waltzes, even critiquing Crown Princess Margaret:

“She treats the King’s madness… clinically. Let him ride indoors! My friends call it devotion, but I smell duty, not love.”

A messenger scurried to Margaret, who staged believable (but overlong) shock. Music died as she announced the King’s death.

Veronica muttered, “Awful timing—just as I met you!” before enacting the noble faint. Around them, ladies dropped like flies, men scrambling to juggle grief and damsels.

Later, Yvette confronted Ulysses: “The King was poisoned—arsenic in that green wall dye!”

“Clever girl.” He burned his toxin-research notes.

“Why?!”

“Shall we crown our Queen a murderer? Stability trumps truth. Besides—” He gestured to a cholera outbreak headline. “The poor drink poison daily. Poverty’s the incurable malady.”

On the morrow of the old king's death, his coffin rolled through London's fog to St. Paul's Cathedral, guards in scarlet flanking the hearse as bells knelled his passage. Though reviled in life – a mad monarch turned tabloid caricature – death miraculously sanctified him. Now crowds queued to glimpse their suddenly indispensable sovereign, scrambling to invent posthumous merits where none existed.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

Princess Margaret's coronation proved brief. The golden mantle she wore during her ascension now gathered dust, replaced by widow's black – osiander silk darker than a starless night, complemented by jet jewelry that absorbed all light. Across the realm, tailors cursed under their breath as mourning edicts emptied their shops of vibrant silks.

In the frost-laced garden, Queen Margaret IV confronted not her handmaid but Lady Delaine – the hawk-eyed falconer who once raced stallions through Windsor's meadows. Their breaths crystallized in the cold: the Queen's measured, her lover's ragged.

"You'd abandon me now?" Margaret's voice held the lethal precision of a crossbow cranked taut. "When I've burned every bridge between us and our freedom?"

Father should've died years ago.

The childhood whisper had become a battlecry these recent months.

Young Margaret always knew her tastes ran contrary to Albion's expectations. While playing the porcelain princess, she fantasized about tearing palace tapestries with her teeth. Then came Delaine – all windswept hair and hawking gauntlets – teaching her heart forbidden geometries of desire.

Last autumn's hunt shattered their private Eden. The bloated king spotted Delaine astride her Friesian mount and bellowed his lust across the grounds. Royal stewards scurried to explain propriety – Continental paramours required marital pretense.

"Marry her off then!" the king roared through wine-stained lips.

The Delaine house, overstocked with sons and hungry for influence, sold their daughter to an attaché content to keep Parisian beds warm for eternity.

Margaret's vengeance unfolded in brushstrokes. Scheele's Green – that arsenic-laden hue – blossomed across every royal chamber she knew her father nightly inhabited. She watched his skin mottle, his breath shorten, until death's rattle interrupted wedding preparations.

Now crowned, her first decree was love unmasked – only for Delaine to recoil.

"You frighten me," the falconer whispered, tears freezing on her cheeks. "This queen who poisons..."

"Go." Margaret watched her retreat, realizing courage comes in differing measures.

As shadows lengthened, a voice broke her reverie:

"Black becomes Your Majesty, but not when chattering teeth mar the effect."

Lynna – the handmaid supposedly banished to Edinburgh – materialized like a revenant.

"How long have you haunted me?" The Queen's fingers itched for a dagger.

"Since you first admired green wallpaper's transformative properties." Lynna's smile revealed teeth too sharp for servants. "My order's protected your bloodline since before Stonehenge's stones stood upright."

When Margaret scoffed, the maid grasped her hand. Golden light pulsed between their palms – the Queen's self-inflicted wounds vanished, reappearing on Lynna's skin.

"We are... caretakers." Lynna produced a diamond that seemed to drink moonlight. "The Koh-i-Noor's true inheritor. Your father's crown held glass."

"The cursed stone!"

"Curses are reciprocal." The maid unrolled a scroll older than the Magna Carta. "Your ancestors traded danger for dominion. 'Who holds this diamond rules empires, yet pays in blood.' But women... women temper its hunger."

Margaret traced signatures of dead queens – Elizabeth, Anne, Victoria – her fingertip pausing at her mother's shaky hand.

Lynna offered a raven-quill. "The price of empire awaits your signature."

The diamond's facets flashed, showing Margaret Armadas burning and tea-scented opium dreams.