Weighed in the Balance by Anne Perry Page A

were—” She stopped. “Oh, dear. That is very uncharitable of me, isn’t it?” They were standing in the conservatory in the early autumn sun. It was a charming room, full of white-painted wrought iron furniture and shaded by a mixture of potted palms and large-leafed tropical plants. The air was filled with the sweetness of several late, heavily scented lilies. “That was a terrible business about her family,” she added sadly. “I expect it has ruined her chances, poor thing.”
    Naturally, she was referring to Victoria’s chances of marriage. There was no other desirable life open to a young woman of breeding, unless she had a great deal of money, or some remarkable talent, or excellent health and a burning desire for good works. Hester did not tell her that Victoria’s chances for any of these things had been ruined long before her family’s disgrace. That was Victoria’s secret to keep or to tell as she wished. Were Hester in her place, she felt she would never tell anyone at all. It was about as private a tragedy as could be imagined.
    “Yes,” she said bluntly. “I expect it has.”
    “How very unfair.” Dagmar shook her head slightly. “You never know what is going to happen, do you? Six weeks ago I could not have imagined Robert’s illness. Now I don’t know how much it will change our lives.” She was not looking at Hester, perhaps deliberately. After only a moment’s hesitation, as though she did not want to allow time for an answer, she hurried on. “Poor Princess Gisela must feel the same. This time last year she had all she cared about. I think every woman in the world envied her, at least a little.” She smiled. “I know I did. Don’t we all dream of having a handsome and charming man love us so passionately he would give up a kingdom and a throne simply to be with us?”
    Hester thought back to being eighteen, and the dreams she had had then.
    “Yes, I suppose so,” she said reluctantly, oddly defensive of the girl she had been. She had felt so wise and invulnerable, and she had been so naive.
    “Most of us settle for reality,” Dagmar went on. “And find it really quite good in the end. Or we make it good. But it is still natural to dream sometimes. Gisela made her dreams come true … until this spring, that is. Then Friedrich died, which left her desolated. To have had such a … a unity!” She turned to Hester. “You know they were never apart? He loved her so much he never grew tired of watching her, listening to her,hearing her laugh. He still found her just as fascinating, after twelve years.”
    “It would be natural to envy that,” Hester said honestly. She would not have found it easy to watch such happiness and not wish it for herself. And if she had at one time been in love with the Prince, it would never really stop hurting. She would wonder why she had not been able to awake that love in him, what was lacking in her. What gaiety or charm, what tenderness or quickness to understand, what generosity or honor did she fail to have? Or was it simply that she was physically not pleasing enough, either to look at or in those areas of intimacy of love in which her only experience lay in the imagination and the longing of dreams? Was all that the wound which had festered in Zorah Rostova all these years, and perhaps driven her a little mad?
    Dagmar was absentmindedly picking off the occasional dead leaf and fiddling with the bark around the palms.
    “What was the Prince like?” Hester asked, trying to picture the romance.
    “To look at?” Dagmar asked with a smile.
    “No, I meant as a person. What did he like to do? If I were to spend an evening in his company—at dinner, for example—what would I remember most about him?”
    “Before he met Gisela, or afterwards?”
    “Both! Yes, tell me both.”
    Dagmar concentrated her memory, forgetting the plants. “Well, before Gisela, you would think first how utterly charming he was.” She smiled as she