Free A Foreign Affair by Evelyn Richardson

him.”
    “Perhaps.” He did his best to sound noncommittal.
    “If you cannot get away from your duties, you might write me a note so that I do not think you find my company distasteful. I am very sensitive by nature, you know.”
    He was certainly not going to write anything, Brett resolved, no matter how innocent it seemed. Any correspondence could be portrayed in a compromising light given the right innuendo. “I beg your pardon. Princess, but my time and my life are not my own. If I do not haunt your doorstep, believe me, it is duty rather than inclination that keeps me away. And it is duty now that forces me to bid you adieu.”
    He rose, lifted the hand that still clasped his arm, bowed over it, and was gone before she could frame a response.
    Pursing her full red lips in a moue of frustration, the princess also rose and returned to her boudoir to continue her much interrupted toilette while Brett, his mind seething with a turmoil of conflicting possibilities, hurried back to the British delegation where he spent the next several hours at his desk capturing his thoughts in reports to Wellington and Castlereagh before the impressions he had received during his visit to the Palace began to fade.
     

Chapter Seven
     
    Meanwhile, a few streets away in the library of one of the palaces on the Braunerstrasse, someone else was examining her own impressions. Helena was curled up in a comfortably upholstered bergère reading the pamphlet Saxony and Prussia recommended to her by the Princess von Furstenberg. As she read, however, the old enmities and various political complexities that the pamphlet was trying to explain receded into the background and the memory of intensely blue eyes alight with interest in a dark angular face took their place.
    Who would have thought that the sort of man who could win her mother’s approval would also have been the type of man to admit to her daughter that it was because I held beliefs much like yours that I joined the cavalry? And who would have thought that someone who could dance and flirt as divinely as her mother claimed Major Lord Brett Stanford did would even care that Prussian territorial ambitions could be as destructive as Napoleon’s wars had been.
    Or at least he had seemed to care. He had certainly spoken eloquently enough about the depredations of the French army in the Peninsula, and seemed to sympathize with her concerns about the Prussians taking over the rest of the German states the way they wanted to take over Saxony.
    But perhaps he had just been doing his best to charm her as he had charmed her mother. If the major was as adept as her mother seemed to think, he would know that the way to win Helena’s approval was to be as knowledgeable and interested in topics that were of concern to her just as he knew that dancing and flirting were the way to win her mother’s. Perhaps he was actually no different from her mother’s many other gallants who were irresistibly fascinating to women because they focused all their energies on learning what was particularly appealing to them. The fact that in Helena’s case, her interests were serious and political rather than frivolous and social might make a man who discussed them appear to have more substance than those who confined themselves to the social. But perhaps he was just more clever. A truly clever man would be able to charm all types of women while her mother’s gallants only charmed women who were bent on enjoying themselves, women like her mother.
    Helena had always scornfully dismissed her mother’s admirers as self-satisfied cicisbeos, for whom the game of flirtation was far more compelling than the actual people involved in it. For them, flirtation was more about power, about establishing the superiority of their own graceful appearance and captivating manners than it was about using them to bring happiness and pleasure to another person. Helena had considered this self-absorption to be the height of vanity,