The Princess Plan
London, Julia
FICTION/Romance/Historical/Victorian
Mass Market | HQN Books | A Royal Wedding
On Sale: 11/19/2019
9781335041531
$7.99
$10.99 CAN
SUMMARY:
Princes have pomp and glory—not murdered secretaries and
crushes on commoners
Nothing gets London's high society's
tongues wagging like a good scandal. And when the personal secretary of the
visiting Prince Sebastian of Alucia is found murdered, it's all anyone can talk
about, including Eliza Tricklebank. Her unapologetic gossip gazette has
benefitted from an anonymous tip about the crime, prompting Sebastian to take
an interest in playing detective—and an even greater one in Eliza.
With a trade deal on the line and
mounting pressure to secure a noble bride, there's nothing more salacious than
a prince dallying with a commoner. Sebastian finds Eliza's contrary manner as
frustrating as it is seductive, but they'll have to work together if they're
going to catch the culprit. And when things heat up behind closed doors, it's
the prince who'll have to decide what comes first—his country or his heart.
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EXCERPT:
CHAPTER ONE
London
1845
All
of London has been on tenterhooks, desperate for a glimpse of Crown Prince
Sebastian of Alucia during his highly anticipated visit. Windsor Castle was the
scene of Her Majesty’s banquet to welcome him. Sixty-and-one-hundred guests
were on hand, feted in St. George’s Hall beneath the various crests of the
Order of the Garter. Two thousand pieces of silver cutlery were used, one
thousand crystal glasses and goblets. The first course and main dish of lamb
and potatoes were served on silver-gilded plates, followed by delicate fruits
on French porcelain.
Prince Sebastian presented a
large urn fashioned of green Alucian malachite to our Queen Victoria as a gift
from his father the King of Alucia. The urn was festooned with delicate ropes
of gold around the mouth and the neck.
The Alucian women were attired
in dresses of heavy silk worn close to the body, the trains quite long and
brought up and fastened with buttons to facilitate walking. Their hair was
fashioned into elaborate knots worn at the nape. The Alucian gentlemen wore
formal frock coats of black superfine wool that came to midcalf, as well as heavily
embroidered waistcoats worn to the hip. It was reported that Crown Prince
Sebastian is “rather tall and broad, with a square face and neatly trimmed
beard, a full head of hair the color of tea, and eyes the color of moss,” which
the discerning reader might think of as a softer shade of green. It is said he
possesses a regal air owing chiefly to the many medallions and ribbons he wore
befitting his rank.
Honeycutt’s
Gazette of Fashion and Domesticity for Ladies
The Right Honorable Justice William
Tricklebank, a widower and justice of the Queen’s Bench in Her Majesty’s
service, was very nearly blind, his eyesight having steadily eroded into
varying and fuzzy shades of gray with age. He could no longer see so much as
his hand, which was why his eldest daughter, Miss Eliza Tricklebank, read his
papers to him.
Eliza
had enlisted the help of Poppy, their housemaid, who was more family than
servant, having come to them as an orphaned girl more than twenty years ago.
Together, the two of them had anchored strings and ribbons halfway up the walls
of his London townhome, and all the judge had to do was follow them with his
hand to move from room to room. Among the hazards he faced was a pair of dogs
that were far too enthusiastic in their wish to be of some use to him, and a
cat who apparently wished him dead, judging by the number of times he put
himself in the judge’s path, or leapt into his lap as he sat, or walked across
the knitting the judge liked to do while his daughter read to him, or
unravelled his ball of yarn without the judge’s notice.
The
only other potential impediments to his health were his daughters—Eliza, a
spinster, and her younger sister, Hollis, otherwise known as the Widow
Honeycutt. They were often together in his home, and when they were, it seemed
to him there was quite a lot of laughing at this and shrieking at that. His
daughters disputed that they shrieked, and accused him of being old and easily
startled. But the judge’s hearing, unlike his eyesight, was quite acute, and
those two shrieked with laughter. Often.
At
eight-and-twenty, Eliza was unmarried, a fact that had long baffled the judge.
There had been an unfortunate and rather infamous misunderstanding with one Mr.
Asher Daughton-Cress, who the judge believed was despicable, but that had been
ten years ago. Eliza had once been demure and a politely deferential young
lady, but she’d shed any pretense of deference when her heart was broken. In
the last few years she had emerged vibrant and carefree. He would think such
demeanour would recommend her to gentlemen far and wide, but apparently it did
not. She’d had only one suitor since her very public scandal, a gentleman some
fifteen years older than Eliza. Mr. Norris had faithfully called every day
until one day he did not. When the judge had inquired, Eliza had said, “It was
not love that compelled him, Pappa. I prefer my life here with you—the work is
more agreeable, and I suspect not as many hours as marriage to him would
require.”
His
youngest, Hollis, had been tragically widowed after only two years of a
marriage without issue. While she maintained her own home, she and her
delightful wit were a faithful caller to his house at least once a day without
fail, and sometimes as much as two or three times per day. He should like to
see her remarried, but Hollis insisted she was in no rush to do so. The judge
thought she rather preferred her sister’s company to that of a man.
His
daughters were thick as thieves, as the saying went, and were coconspirators in
something that the judge did not altogether approve of. But he was blind, and
they were determined to do what they pleased no matter what he said, so he’d
given up trying to talk any practical sense into them.
That
questionable activity was the publication of a ladies’ gazette. Tricklebank
didn’t think ladies needed a gazette, much less one having to do with frivolous
subjects such as fashion, gossip and beauty. But say what he might, his
daughters turned a deaf ear to him. They were unfettered in their enthusiasm
for this endeavour, and if the two of them could be believed, so was all of
London.
The
gazette had been established by Hollis’s husband, Sir Percival Honeycutt.
Except that Sir Percival had published an entirely different sort of gazette,
obviously— one devoted to the latest political and financial news. Now that was a useful publication to the
judge’s way of thinking.
Sir
Percival’s death was the most tragic of accidents, the result of his carriage
sliding off the road into a swollen river during a rain, which also saw the
loss of a fine pair of grays. It was a great shock to them all, and the judge
had worried about Hollis and her ability to cope with such a loss. But Hollis
proved herself an indomitable spirit, and she had turned her grief into efforts
to preserve her husband’s name. But as she was a young woman without a man’s
education, and could not possibly comprehend the intricacies of politics or
financial matters, she had turned the gazette on its head and dedicated it
solely to topics that interested women, which naturally would be limited to the
latest fashions and the most tantalizing on dits swirling about London’s high
society. It was the judge’s impression that women had very little interest in
the important matters of the world.
And
yet, interestingly, the judge could not deny that Hollis’s version of the
gazette was more actively sought than her husband’s had ever been. So much so
that Eliza had been pressed into the service of helping her sister prepare her
gazette each week. It was curious to Tricklebank that so many members of the
Quality were rather desperate to be mentioned among the gazette’s pages.
Today,
his daughters were in an unusually high state of excitement, for they had
secured the highly sought-after invitations to the Duke of Marlborough’s
masquerade ball in honor of the crown prince of Alucia. One would think the
world had stopped spinning on its axis and that the heavens had parted and the
seas had receded and this veritable God of All Royal Princes had shined his
countenance upon London and blessed them all with his presence.
Hogwash.
Everyone knew
the prince was here to strike an important trade deal with the English
government in the name of King Karl. Alucia was a small European nation with
impressive wealth for her size. It was perhaps best known for an ongoing
dispute with the neighboring country of Wesloria—the two had a history of war
and distrust as fraught as that between England and France.
The judge had
read that it was the crown prince who was pushing for modernization in Alucia,
and who was the impetus behind the proposed trade agreement. Prince Sebastian
envisioned increasing the prosperity of Alucia by trading cotton and iron ore
for manufactured goods. But according to the judge’s daughters, that was not
the most important part of the trade negotiations. The important part was that the prince was also in search of a marriage
bargain.
“It’s what
everyone says,” Hollis had insisted to her father over supper recently “And how
is it, my dear, that everyone knows
what the prince intends?” the judge asked as he stroked the cat, Pris, on his
lap. The cat had been named Princess when the family believed it a female. When
the houseman Ben discovered that Princess was, in fact, a male, Eliza said it
was too late to change the name. So they’d shortened it to Pris. “Did the
prince send a letter? Announce it in the Times?”
“Caro says,” Hollis countered, as if that
were quite obvious to anyone with half a brain where she got her information.
“She knows everything about everyone, Pappa.”
“Aha. If Caro
says it, then by all means, it must be true.”
“You must
yourself admit she is rarely wrong,” Hollis had said with an indignant sniff.
Caro, or Lady
Caroline Hawke, had been a lifelong friend to his daughters, and had been so
often underfoot in the Tricklebank house that for many years, it seemed to the
judge that he had three daughters.
Caroline was the
only sibling of Lord Beckett Hawke and was also his ward. Long ago, a cholera
outbreak had swept through London, and both Caro’s mother and his children’s
mother had succumbed. Amelia, his wife, and Lady Hawke had been dear friends.
They’d sent their children to the Hawke summer estate when Amelia had taken
ill. Lady Hawke had insisted on caring for her friend and, well, in the end,
they were both lost.
Lord Hawke was
an up-and-coming young lord and politician, known for his progressive ideas in
the House of Lords. He was rather handsome, Hollis said, a popular figure, and
socially in high demand. Which meant that, by association, so was his sister.
She, too, was quite comely, which made her presence all the easier to her
brother’s many friends, the judge suspected.
But Caroline did seem to know everyone in London, and
was constantly calling on the Tricklebank household to spout the gossip she’d
gleaned in homes across Mayfair. Here was an industrious young lady—she called
on three salons a day if she called on one. The judge supposed her brother
scarcely need worry about putting food in their cupboards, for the two of them
were dining with this four-and-twenty or that ten-and-six almost every night.
It was a wonder Caroline wasn’t a plump little peach.
Perhaps she was.
In truth, she was merely another shadow to the judge these days.
“And she was at Windsor and dined with the
queen,” Hollis added with superiority.
“You mean Caro
was in the same room but one hundred persons away from the queen,” the judge
suggested. He knew how these fancy suppers went.
“Well, she was
there, Pappa, and she met the Alucians, and she knows a great deal about them
now. I am quite determined to discover who the prince intends to offer for and
announce it in the gazette before anyone else. Can you imagine? I shall be the
talk of London!”
This was
precisely what Mr. Tricklebank didn’t like about the gazette. He did not want
his daughters to be the talk of London.
But it was not
the day for him to make this point, for his daughters were restless, moving
about the house with an urgency he was not accustomed to. Today was the day of
the Royal Masquerade Ball, and the sound of crisp petticoats and silk rustled
around him, and the scent of perfume wafted into his nose when they passed. His
daughters were waiting impatiently for Lord Hawke’s brougham to come round and
fetch them. Their masks, he was given to understand, had already arrived at the
Hawke House, commissioned, Eliza had breathlessly reported, from “Mrs. Cubison
herself.”
He did not know
who Mrs. Cubison was.
And frankly, he
didn’t know how Caro had managed to finagle the invitations to a ball at
Kensington Palace for his two
daughters—for the good Lord knew the Tricklebanks did not have the necessary
connections to achieve such a feat.
He could feel
their eagerness, their anxiety in the nervous pitch of their giggling when they
spoke to each other. Even Poppy seemed nervous. He supposed this was to be the
ball by which all other balls in the history of mankind would forever be
judged, but he was quite thankful he was too blind to attend.
When the knock
at the door came, he was startled by such squealing and furious activity
rushing by him that he could only surmise that the brougham had arrived and the
time had come to go to the ball.
Excerpted from The
Princess Plan by Julia London, Copyright © 2019 by
Dinah Dinwiddle. Published by HQN Books.
AUTHOR
BIO:
Julia London is a NYT, USA Today and Publishers Weekly bestselling author of
historical and contemporary romance. She is a six-time finalist for the RITA
Award of excellence in romantic fiction, and the recipient of RT Bookclub's
Best Historical Novel.
SOCIAL
LINKS:
www.julialondon.com/newsletter
www.facebook.com/julialondon
www.twitter.com/juliaflondon
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