As they stood in the outside doorway, Maggie could hear the meal was already in progress. “What’s the worst they can do—cut off my head?”
“Oh, we haven’t done that here for, well, at least a few hundred years,” Gregory answered gravely.
Maggie grasped the rose-and-dragon brass doorknob and opened the ornately carved wooden door.
It was a dark cavern of a room, with a high vaulted Gothic ceiling and the dim light from tapered candles glinting off the silver table service. Seated around the long, linen-covered table were Ainslie, Alah, and at least twenty other people with pale faces—the men in white ties and black dinner jackets, the ladies in long gowns—in the middle of their soup course. A black marble fireplace roared orange at one end of the room, which was, in fact, octagon-shaped.
One of the men, short and slender, with an Edwardian center part and a bulbous red nose, dabbed his lips with a linen napkin, then rose to his feet. “Miss Hope, I presume?” he boomed in a port-wine voice.
“Yes,” she said, taking a step inside. “Sir.”
The other staff members paused in their conversations to listen, and a tense silence fell over the room.
“You. Are. Late!” he intoned.
“Well, I’m here now,” Maggie said.
“I am Baron Clive Wigram, Governor of the castle. Meaning the Keeper—the Keeper of Time, among other things. We are all, always, on time. We”—he took in Maggie’s simple frock and coat—“dress for dinner. Do you understand, young lady?”
It had been a long day. Maggie was cold and hungry. And she wasn’t in the mood to deal with a pompous idiot. “I am dressed, Lord Clive. And I should think you wouldn’t be so quick to point out my supposed fashion faux pas. Wasn’t it Queen Victoria herself, here at Windsor Castle, who drank from her fingerbowl, when one of her dinner guests did by mistake? Obviously, she understood the difference between good manners and slavish adherence to etiquette.”
“Well, Miss Hope, I—I …” Lord Clive spluttered. At the table, there was soft whispering. One of the footmen standing near the wall, a tall young man in a powdered wig, gave her a discreet wink. From behind her, Maggie heard a snort, and then Gregory stepped into the room.
Lord Clive colored slightly. “Oh! Lord Gregory!” he said, in a much more cordial tone. “I didn’t see you there.”
Gregory gave a brilliant smile, which pulled at his scar tissue, causing it to turn white. “If you don’t mind, Lord Clive, I think I’ll take Miss Hope for a bite in town.”
“Why, Lord Gregory,” Maggie said, playing along with him, “that sounds just lovely. Since I’m already late. And not dressed for dinner.”
“Oh,” said Lord Clive, “oh, I didn’t mean …”
“No, of course you didn’t,” Maggie said. “Thank you so much, Your Lordship. Ladies, gentlemen—bon appétit.” And with that, Maggie took Gregory’s arm and walked out of the room with him.
“My hero!” she exclaimed, after the heavy door clicked closed. “Although now I’m hungry enough to gnaw on a table leg.”
“I’ll tell you what,” Gregory said. “Let’s get some real food and a pint—and then I’ll draw up a map of the old pile for you.” When he smiled, his scars were less noticeable. “Come on, then.”
Chapter Seven
They walked through the middle and lower wards, out the Henry VIII Gate and down the cobblestone walk to narrow and picturesque Market Street. It was another side of Windsor—as much as the castle belonged to the Royals and their community, the town was full of a different history: Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, the house where “pretty, witty” Nell Gwyn trysted with King Charles II, Christopher Wren’s Guildhall, the Crooked House.
At the Carpenters Arms, Maggie refused to let Gregory take her coat. “I don’t think I’ll ever be warm again,” she told him, trying to make herself heard over the cacophony of the crowd, as they walked over the worn red-flowered carpeting through the smoky warmth and past the throng at the long dark wooden bar, where a bartender in a white apron pulled on one of the taps. Next to him was a sign proclaiming “No Guinness. No Sausages. No problems.”
“It’s a good walk from the Upper Ward of the castle, true,” Gregory said. “Still, better than dinner with that crew. More snobbish than the Royals themselves, if you ask me.” He found them a rickety wooden table near a fireplace outlined with ceramic tile painted with red and pink roses.