Perdita's Prince: (Georgian Series) Read Free Page B

faithful husband and lived according to his code of honour he could be serene .
    The Queen was not listening to Mr Handel’s excellent music; she was thinking how handsome her eldest son was looking in his frogged coat and hoping the King would not notice how elegant he was and question the price of his garments. Charlotte was alarmed when she saw the lights of resentment against his father flare up in her son’s eyes. She had to face the fact that the relationship between them was scarcely harmonious. She had adored the Prince of Wales from the first time she had first held him in her arms – ‘A perfect specimen of a Royal Highness, your Majesty …’ Oh yes, indeed. He had bawled lustily, this wonder infant, and his health had always been of the best – except of course for the customary childish ailments. At the age of four it was true he had given her a great scare by contracting the smallpox. But he was such a healthy little rascal, he had even shrugged that aside. She liked to tell her attendants how when he was kept in bed someone asked if he were not tired of lying abed so long and he had replied: ‘Not at all. I lie and make reflections.’ The brilliance of the child! There was no doubt that he was a genius. He was clever at his lessons. He spoke and wrote several languages, French, German and Italian, fluently; he was familiar with Horace and delighted in Tacitus. He learned with ease and had a command of English which astounded his mother and dumbfounded his father on those occasions, which were becomingmore frequent, when they were involved in verbal battles. The Queen was a little anxious about this beloved son and his relationship with his father. Oh dear, she sighed, I hope they are not going to follow the family custom and yet another Prince of Wales is going to quarrel with the King. Not George, she assured herself, not her handsome son George.
    She often looked at the wax image on her dressing table and thought of him as a baby. He was no longer that. She sighed, wishing that he would visit her more often and now and then ask her advice.
    What would she advise him on? On the sort of shoe buckle he should wear? He was mightily interested in shoe buckles. Or on the colour of his coat? Or about those matters which her woman Schwellenburg was always hinting at – his amours. ‘De Prince very much interests selfs in mädchens …’ declared Schwellenburg in her execrable English. ‘Nonsense, Schwellenburg, he is a natural gentleman.’
    Was he too interested in young women? No, of course not. She refused to believe it. She refused to believe anything against George; and though she deplored the passing of his childhood when she had had some control over him, she was glad in a way that he was too old for whippings, for she had suffered to think of that delicate flesh being slashed with a cane.
    Oh, George, come and speak to your mother, she implored silently. Not just as a duty. Not to bow, kiss the hand, murmur a few meaningless words and be off as quickly as you can. Not that, George, speak as a son to a mother.
    She thought of the next child she would bear; but such happenings were commonplace with her. The thirteenth!
    A boy or a girl? she wondered. What did it matter now? She already had seven boys and five girls. No one could say she had not given the country heirs. But she had not felt so well with this pregnancy. Perhaps it was time to give up child-bearing. The King would never agree to that, she was sure, and yet what had she been doing in the nineteen years since she came to England? Bearing children, was the answer. Thirteen of them. Oh, yes, the time had certainly come to call a halt. Not that she could bear to part with any of them. But with fine strong boys like George,Frederick and William at the head of the family – surely they had enough.
    The Prince of Wales was pensive tonight. Was he wrapped up in the music? Frederick was beside him. They were inseparable those two and it was