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Authors: Christine Trent

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“So one day you'll be noticed by one of their eligible second sons, who will whisk you off to marital bliss before heading off to his naval commission.”
“Hardly, Mr. Boyce. And you know my feelings on the subject.”
“Isn't it time you called me Put? After all, I know such personal details about you as your propensity to wield pistols at intruders. Surely we are on familiar terms.”
Yes, you are on familiar terms with someone else, too.
Why did it feel so comforting to be near this man, as full of dust and shavings and peculiar smells as he was? There was something very reassuring about his collection of saws, his jars of stains and varnishes, his stacks of planks, and his display of finely crafted furniture. But it wasn't the shop that was the comfort, was it? The comfort was in the owner.
Belle shook her head to dissolve the tears once again threatening to spill forth. Where was her pert attitude hiding? Really, she had to stop this infernal blubbering whenever she was around him. Except now she wasn't sure if she was crying for Jane or crying for something indefinable that was missing from her life. She loved her independent life, but it all seemed ethereal. Just the result of chance and of no permanence. Ultimately, her success lay in whatever Mr. Nash wanted it to be. Or what the prince wanted it to be. Or Mr. Crace.
She wanted warmth. And comfort. And stability.
And how in the world did an odorous, sloppy place like a cabinetmaker's shop make her feel any of these?
“I'm not sure we're as familiar as you think, Mr. Boyce. You seem to know everything about me, whereas I know little about you.”
“Easily rectified, if you'll join me for a walk through Vauxhall Gardens.”
No, she would not be his secondary bit of baggage.
“I'm very busy lately, and have little time for frivolities. Here, I'll show you the latest drawings for the prince's Pavilion. You'll easily see how much ordering has to be done for such an immense residence.”
She retreated to the counter, going to its other side and pulling her set of rolled-up sketches from behind it. At least she now had a barrier between her and Mr. Boyce.
Belle cleared a space on the counter and smoothed the drawings out on the wood top, and for the next half hour she pointed out details of the interior design for the palace. She distracted Put well, for soon he was caught up in suggestions for table heights, mirror frame patterns, and chair leg motifs.
Their examination of the drawings concluded, Belle moved to roll the drawings back up, but Put laid his hand down in the center of them to stop her.
“One moment, Miss Stirling. There's one thing we've not discussed. And that's the real reason why you came into my shop all those months ago resembling a warped walnut board: beautiful, but completely unmanageable. I left you alone, hoping you might return on your own once you'd overcome your feelings, but you're stubborn.”
Not stubborn, Mr. Boyce, just wary.
“My apologies, sir. I had a temporary lapse of judgment in coming to you. A weak moment. I'm sorry I troubled you, and assure you I won't allow it to happen again.”
“Hmm.” Put kept his hand in the center of the papers so that she couldn't move them. His gaze was intense, and she knew she would soon falter under it. She responded to him lightly.
“Must I remove your hand with one of those terribly dangerous blades I saw hanging on your walls?” she asked.
Something in his eyes shifted. He realized she wasn't going to lower her guard. “I'm terribly sorry about your friend. I remember when my brother died, many years ago. He was kicked in the head by a horse. Terrible how he suffered before he finally died. That's why today I won't ride one of the beasts if I can help it. I walk almost everywhere.”
“You walk? Everywhere?”
“I'm used to it.” Put shrugged and removed his hand from her papers.
“But we took a hack to your shop.”
“Wouldn't have been right to ask you to walk that far. You deserve better than the calloused hands and feet I have, Miss Stirling.”
But do I deserve better than your other young lady?
Belle picked up the sheaf and began straightening the pages. “I, too, am sorry for the loss of your brother, for I don't know what I would do if something happened to Wesley. And now, Mr. Boyce, I have one final question before I must return to work, as my day will soon be busy with customers.”
She finished tying the twine on the drawings and laid the rolled tube of drawings back under the counter before leaning over it as far as she could to stare at him, hoping that her eyes were half as penetrating as his.
He laughed uncomfortably but didn't step back. “This does sound serious.”
“It is. I know I'm being a bit impertinent, but I must ask. Why are your eyes so ... different ... from each other?”
And now Put did take a step backward, scowling.
Oh dear. I've erred in asking this question.
“What do you mean, different?”
I've waded this far in, I may as well soak my head.
“I don't know. Different in a way that is intriguing, I suppose. Both look at me, but you only focus one on me. It's almost ... unnerving. Do you do this on purpose? Is it a trick you are playing on me? Are you teasing me?” Belle had finally voiced the questions that had been bothering her.
“Teasing you? You think this amounts to an attempt to mock you?” Put pointed at his left eye. “If I didn't know you for a serious woman, I'd think
you
were teasing
me
.”
“Why in heaven's name would I tease you? I'm asking a civil question.” At least, it seemed like a reasonable question when she'd asked it.
But now Put was nearly belligerent.
“Questions are apparently civil only when
you
ask them, Miss Stirling. My questions are to be evaded at all costs.”
“Mr. Boyce, I—”
“Damnation, woman, I have great regard for you and I told you to call me Put!” His fist came down, sending everything atop the counter into tremors. Startled, Belle backed up against the shelves on the wall behind the counter.
How had he not broken his hand against the hard oak?
Belle could read many things at once in his face. Regret for having behaved boorishly. Embarrassment for admitting affection. Hope that his plea had not fallen on deaf ears.
But she was too stunned to formulate a response. She remained against the shelving, one hand on her waist and the other clutching an empty shelf behind her.
He shook his head sadly. “Very well, Miss Stirling, I'll answer your question. My left eye seems, well, weaker, then my right eye because it is. In fact, it isn't really an eye at all. I lost my real eye from a large splinter that kicked up while I was splitting a particularly knotty piece of wood. It felt like I'd taken an entire log into my eye socket. I'll spare you the details of what the surgeon had to do to me, but in the end I was left with a patch to cover the void.”
“Oh,” Belle said. It sounded like a squeak in her own ear.
“You recall that I do some work for Madame Tussaud, the waxworker?”
Belle nodded.
“I was helping her son set up a tableau of Lord Nelson one day, and she commented that the admiral and I had something in common, except that she could help me, whereas the good admiral was long in his grave. And so she did help me. She procured a glass eye for me; I have no idea where she gets them. She makes them herself for all I know. She matched the color as closely as she could, but said my shade of green was difficult.
“The surgeon helped to set it, and now I'm as good as new, except that I don't see as well as I used to, which is why you notice me focusing with my right eye.”
“Mr. Boyce, I mean, Put, I didn't mean to—” Belle stepped forward to the counter and tried to put her hand out to his, but he jerked away angrily.
“I don't want charity from you.”
Belle shuddered. Weren't those Clive's last words to her? What else of Clive might be hidden beneath the surface?
“And now, Miss Stirling, I believe we are fairly matched in confessions. You are a stubborn draper who will be very successful one day if you can manage to control your tongue, and I am a dented, scratched man of wood who has never learned to control his sentiments. A sorry pair we make. Good day, Miss Stirling.”
“Put, please, I—” But there was no use in it. He turned on his heel and left, tugging at his collar as he roughly pulled the door shut behind him.
 
More death and disharmony followed on the heels of Jane's passing and Belle's explosive call from Put. This time, however, all of England suffered the effects.
On November 6, Princess Charlotte, daughter to the Prince Regent and Princess Caroline, was taken back to bed with severe stomach pains after fifty hours of labor, in which she was finally delivered of a dead baby boy. The princess then began to vomit uncontrollably, and soon lapsed into convulsions, dying herself before the day was out. She and her husband had been married just over a year, and by all accounts were very devoted to each other.
Belle remembered Mrs. Fitzherbert saying that the Prince Regent could hardly stand his daughter. It seemed incongruous to the newspaper reports of his hysterical outbursts and dramatic calls to be sealed away in his room forever. Apparently, Princess Charlotte's husband, Prince Leopold, had the unenviable and utterly ridiculous task of soothing and comforting his wife's father during his frenzied and frequent outbreaks of dramatic lamentation.
Charlotte was buried at St. George's Chapel in Windsor, and the entire country joined her husband and the Prince Regent in mourning, for the princess had been immensely popular with the public. George's own sense of empathy and suffering was not so great, though, that he even bothered to send a letter to Princess Caroline, now residing in Italy with a lover, to inform her of her own daughter's passing.
The public was shocked to hear that Caroline learned of her daughter's death only because George's letter to the pope informing him of such was intercepted from the courier passing through her town.
For George, the good news was that with his daughter now departed, Caroline had little hope of regaining her standing in the royal house by virtue of her daughter's succession to the throne.
The rest of the country also realized this, and wept silently.
Belle imagined, however, that the Prince Regent was enormously heartened by Caroline's weakened position.
 
“My suffering is great, too great for someone as gentle and sensitive as I am.” The Prince Regent, seated before a writing table, waved away the servant carrying the carafe. It wouldn't do to have wine poured while he was working himself up into a righteous state of self-indignation. Others might misconstrue his sincerity. He settled for a quick bite of one of the pastries on a platter at his elbow.
And perhaps he should have chosen a different location than the Circular Room inside Carlton House. It was too vast a meeting place for the men before him to adequately appreciate his distress.
He'd summoned Lord Liverpool, Speaker of the House Charles Abbot, and Sir Francis Burdett to once again drum up support for a divorce from that screeching, grubby trollop he'd been forced into an unholy alliance with. She was now cavorting about in Pesaro, Italy, and rumored to have publicly taken a mere servant into her bed.
Good Lord, how did the man climb in bed with her each night without retching?
And how could the men seated before him not understand how ghastly the past year had been for him? Must he reiterate it again?
“Gentlemen, as you know, this year has been particularly difficult for us. First was that distasteful delegation trying to submit their nitwit petition to me for parliamentary reforms. As though that was of any concern to me. In fact, it was apparently more the concern of one particular person here.” He purposely avoided looking at Burdett.
“Then there was the shooting incident that occurred while I was driving out to Westminster to open the new session of Parliament. I've said it before: We were perilously close to a crisis. Had whatever deranged person who took the shot at me had any sort of good aim, I might not be here to address you this day, and England would be adrift without my steady hand.
“Parliament's messages to me of loyalty after the incident were, of course, greatly appreciated, but then I had so much more to endure after the passage of the Gag Acts, since the public, having no comprehension of the danger to the nation's stability, reacted so violently to the suspension of Habeas Corpus and the suppression of reforming societies and clubs.”
Lord Liverpool sat before him like a statue.

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