The Almighty Dominance novel Chapter 788

"Baroness," Alexander said politely. "May I ask you something?"

Four hundred people held their breath under the three gold chandeliers.

The Baroness put down her oyster fork. Beside her, Pauline's face went smooth and still, like a pond freezing.

"You may not," the Baroness said coldly. "Married-in men do not ask. You were told."

"I was told," Alexander agreed, calm. "I'm asking anyway. It isn't for me."

"Oh, he's asking, Mother!" Cordelia laughed, high and delighted. "At your birthday! In a waiter's jacket!"

"Be quiet, Cordelia," the Baroness snapped. She looked at him. "Well? You've stopped my quartet. Ask."

He picked up one of the gold-edged cards that lay beside every plate.

Under the menu, in curling letters, it said: The Tiffany Foundation: eighty years of care for the sick and the needy of the coast.

"Your foundation helps the sick," he said quietly. "It says so on every table. There's an old man on Harland. His name is Tom. He's seventy, and his heart is failing. The hospital in the capital won't book his surgery without a deposit of ten thousand dollars, and the island has given everything it has." He put the card down. "Ten thousand, Baroness. From the foundation. For one old man."

The silence went on for a long time.

The Baroness looked at him the way she might look at a stain.

"The foundation," she said, cold and clear enough for the back tables, "is for people who matter to this coast. Even if I had ten thousand to spare tonight, Count, I would rather spend it on a sick dog. Or a cat. A dog is loyal, and a cat is clean." She picked up her oyster fork again. "An old fisherman is neither. He has had his life."

Then the ballroom laughed.

It started at Hugo Bellamy's table and spread outward in rings. People laughed until they had to hold the backs of their chairs.

"A dog!" Hugo roared, delighted. "She'd sooner pay for a dog!"

"Woof!" a young man barked, and his table shrieked.

"Who's Tom?" somebody asked, amused.

"A fisherman!" Preston howled. "He wants the Tiffany Foundation to pay for a fisherman!"

…

Pauline leaned down and murmured in her mother's ear. The Baroness listened, and something in her old face loosened, almost into a smile.

"My daughter has a suggestion," she said dryly.

Pauline straightened. Her voice was smooth and pleasant and reasonable.

"The foundation doesn't give to married-in men's charity cases, Your Highness," she said gently, as if to a child. "It's a rule. But the guests are generous people. Take a tray. Go round the room, table by table, and ask each guest yourself." She smiled thinly. "On your knees, of course. A man who begs should look like one. Whatever the room gives you, the house will match it."

"Crawl to every table," Alexander repeated slowly.

"And ask," Pauline said sweetly. "If they pay, we'll match it."

Patricia, in her wine-stained white silk, clapped softly.

"Oh, Aunt," she breathed, delighted. "That's perfect."

Alexander looked at the empty silver tray on the table beside him, and picked it up without a word.

…

He went down on his knees at the first table and held the tray up in both hands.

"For Tom," he said quietly. "His heart."

The first table laughed. A man in a velvet jacket put his shoe on Alexander's shoulder and pushed, gently, so that he tipped sideways and had to catch himself.

"Next table, boy," the man said lazily.

He crawled to the next table. And the next.

"Look at him go!" someone shouted.

"Faster, Your Highness!" a girl giggled. "There are forty tables!"

"Does he do tricks? Sit! Beg!" A young man was crying with laughter. "Oh, he is begging!"

"For Tom," Alexander said, at every table, in the same low, steady voice. "His heart."

At the table by the pillar, a thin man with a capital accent was filming him without laughing, the phone held very steady. At the table by the doors, a woman in grey was typing a message under the tablecloth. Alexander had marked them both before the first oyster. His brothers' eyes. The First Prince kept people in every great house on the coast, and the Third Prince kept people watching the First Prince's people.

Good, he thought. Film it all.

By morning the capital would have the video: the Tenth Prince on his knees, begging for a fisherman, polishing shoes for nothing. His brothers would laugh, and then they would do the sensible thing. They would move their watchers to someone who mattered. Nobody wastes a good spy on an idiot.

Tom would have understood. He used to say the sea doesn't argue with the rocks; it just keeps coming. An old sage had put it better, long ago: There is nothing in the world more soft and weak than water, and yet for attacking things that are firm and strong there is nothing that can take precedence of it.

So be water, Alexander thought, and crawled on to the next table. Let them look down. A man nobody watches can do anything.

Nobody put anything in the tray. At table nine a girl of about twelve took a coin out of her little evening bag.

"Mama, can I — " she whispered.

Her mother slapped her hand sharply, and the coin went back in.

"We don't encourage them, darling," the mother said coldly.

At table fourteen, Hugo Bellamy was waiting.

He had turned his chair all the way round to watch, with a fresh plate of oysters on his knee and his black shoes polished to a mirror. When Alexander reached him, he stuck out one foot and set his shoe on the edge of the silver tray.

"Service first, son," he boomed cheerfully. "Then we'll talk about the fisherman." He nodded at the white cloth in Alexander's pocket. "Go on. You're good with that cloth. The whole room saw."

Alexander took out the cloth and polished Hugo Bellamy's shoes, one and then the other, while the ballroom roared.

Hugo admired them in the light, turning his foot like a lady with a new ring. Then he took it off the tray.

"Service was slow," he announced loudly. "No tip!"

"Thank you, sir," Alexander said gently.

"Thank you, he says!" Hugo slapped the table, delighted. "He thanks me!"

Alexander looked up at Hugo's red, laughing face, and he remembered it. Very carefully. Every line of it.

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