Chapter 10
Margaretha
My tutor’s head drooped to his chest, and Belinda and I exchanged looks. We waited for his gentle snoring before creeping from the room and toward Father’s library. I only hoped Friedrich had found his way there safely.
Tiptoeing down the hall, we rounded a corner and nearly bumped right into Father, followed by a smiling Carrera with two soldiers.
“Margaretha.” Father’s brow wrinkled, his worn face looking more weary with each day since the fall of the Reformation. “I was just in search of you. But why are you not at your studies?”
“Taking a small bit of exercise,” I answered with a nervous laugh, glancing between the soldiers. “Why should you seek me?” Normally I looked forward to Father’s visits, to the snippets of information he would share about Samuel’s whereabouts. But with the soldiers here, this seemed ominous.
“I came to tell you I’m leaving for Augsburg.” He looked down at his hands. “The kaiser has summoned me.”
I sucked in a sharp breath.
“Do not worry yourself, senorita.” Carrera stepped forward. “All will be well.”
His words did nothing to soothe me. I wouldn’t trust the Spaniard as far as I could spit, which I had half a mind to do if it could discourage that leering smile of his.
Father took my shoulders in his hands, drawing my eye. “The kaiser won’t even be there. I’m to meet with his representative, Bishop de Granvelle.”
“Why should that bring me any comfort?” My nose tickled, warning me that tears were not far behind. Drat my propensity for crying.
“If he had any intention of making an example of me, he’d want to witness it for himself.” He gave a sad smile.
“Oh, Father.”
Pulling me into his arms, he quickly whispered into my hair, “Dalwigk brought word. The kaiser and his court will not return to Brussels until winter.”
Winter? I bemoaned the setback. What would my brother suffer in the months between now and then? Was there nothing I could do to help him?
Of course there was. And I was on my way to do it now, though I still hated the idea of deception. But how else would I save my brother? Or save myself and Belinda?
“Do what you must to make yourself ready.” Father gave me a squeeze, kissing my hair and whispering his goodbye. “I’ll be here with you again in three or four weeks’ time.”
“Promise me.” I clung to his overcoat, refusing to let him go.
“I promise.”
Watching my father’s retreating back, I swallowed down my fear, clinging to his vow to return.
And focusing forward. Five months from now I would be in Brussels.
It seemed so far away, but that kind of thinking would do me no good.
The time to prepare was now, and so I took firm steps down the hall, leading the way toward Friedrich.
Just outside the library doors, Belinda put a hand on my arm and wished me luck.
“Are you not coming with me?” I asked.
“I must remain here to serve as guard. We can’t have anyone happening upon you tutoring the huntsman’s page.”
The idea of being alone with Friedrich made me instantly anxious, but I thought of Samuel, put my hand on the knob, and pushed into the shadowy room.
Friedrich stood at the desk thumbing through the first tract of Luther’s To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, but he flopped it closed when I entered. Tossing the pamphlet onto the desk beside the fruit bowl, he faced me.
“I wasn’t sure you’d actually come.” He frowned, but his tone was teasing.
I rolled my eyes and walked past him to the fireplace. “Well, at least you wouldn’t be waiting in the rain this time.”
“Where is your companion?” The question was casual, curious. Not accusatory, as it might have been in the past. It seemed Friedrich was putting on his best behavior since our reconciliation Midsummer’s morn.
“She is keeping watch at the door,” I answered. “Come. Sit down.”
Belinda had managed to order a small fire burning, but the room was otherwise already perfectly arranged with Father’s two substantial oak chairs angled toward the hearth.
I took my seat, leafing through my papers for the alphabet I’d penned, as Friedrich haltingly lowered himself into the other chair.
He leaned his elbows on his thighs, clasped his hands together, and bounced his leg furiously.
I’d never seen Friedrich nervous before, and I found I rather liked it.
His nervousness buoyed my own confidence.
Pressing my lips together to accentuate their color, I held out the page to him.
“Here you are.” I tugged my lip between my teeth, hoping it wasn’t too overt a display.
His leg stopped mid-bounce as his gaze fell to my mouth, and a soft scarlet bloomed over his cheeks. He pulled the paper from my hand to study, rubbing the back of his neck and concealing his blush behind his raised elbow.
But his blush had betrayed the truth; Friedrich found me attractive.
I tucked back my smile. Though exciting a man’s admiration was not a novelty, I felt a thrill in my gut to see it from him. It was addictive, and I wanted more.
Moving closer, I caught his subtle scent of cloves and straw as I leaned over the arm of my chair and pointed to the first letter on the page. “This is A—pronounced ‘ah.’”
Friedrich repeated my pronunciation.
“B is ‘beh.’”
He echoed me again. We worked our way through the alphabet, and I took special care to pout my lips when pronouncing “o” and “ku,” but Friedrich kept his eyes down throughout the exercise, never once risking another glance at me.
My former excitement sagged as I riffled through my papers for the next piece to study.
He waved the paper in his hand. “I’ll just go over these again.”
Friedrich quietly mouthed each letter of the alphabet to himself, leaving me to glance around the room, unsure of how to occupy my time.
Remembering the bowl of fruit on Father’s desk, I picked out two red-cheeked apples and brought them back to the fire, holding one out to Friedrich as I sank into my chair. “Apple?”
He glanced up from his studies to the offering balanced on my palm, its shiny surface reflecting the flares of the fire.
When his eyes met mine, they were narrow and intense with a weight I couldn’t comprehend, as though my deed had some deeper significance.
Taking the apple, he muttered a quiet, “Thank you.”
I hoped I’d answered politely but was too distracted puzzling out the significance of his look to know what I said.
A long silence followed, interrupted only by the occasional pops and hisses of the fire logs. When Friedrich finally spoke, he was still staring down at the uneaten apple in his hand. “You don’t recall, do you? When we met as children?”
“We’ve met before?” From the beginning he’d seemed familiar, but why could I not remember him?
“I’m not surprised. It likely wasn’t significant to you. It’s just . . . you gave me an apple then too, and this sparked the memory, is all.”
“Tell me of it.”
He turned in his seat, facing me. “Your father came to visit the mines. You and your sister were there too.”
“Elizabeth?” I’d only ever accompanied Father to the mines once, just after I’d recovered from my illness. Just after they’d burned the healer. The hint of a memory stirred in my mind, of air heavy with heat and smoke, of dwarfs and men scurrying from the shafts like ants from their mound.
“I’d tried to talk with your father, but the overseer stopped me,” Friedrich said.
Now I recalled kneeling on the coach’s seat, knocking over the food basket as I watched the commotion from my window.
A beefy man had held a dirt-covered boy by the shirt front, cursing loudly, then cuffing the boy’s ear.
The boy crushed his eyes closed, hiding his face against his shoulder as he awaited the next blow. The blow never came.
“Your father intervened.”
Father had caught the man’s hand in the air, his voice carrying to the coach when he’d warned, “Not in the presence of my daughters.”
The man had glared down at the boy, waiting for Father to walk away before releasing the boy with a shove. He’d yelled at the gawking miners to get back to work, and the ants scurried again.
Left alone, the boy had begun to cry, and I remembered the pity I’d felt to see it. Enough pity that I’d dug a bruised apple from our overturned food basket.
“You climbed down from your coach, defying your sister when she tried keeping you inside. I was so surprised to see you walking toward me in your clean, fine silks.” He huffed a short chuckle. “But then . . .” He looked up as we relived the memory together. “You held out the apple for me.”
The boy’s eyes had met mine, and I was shocked by their color. Stormy gray. The same stormy gray I’d recognized upon our meeting at Walpurgisnacht.
The boy had wiped his nose on his sleeve, reaching out a tentative hand before grasping the apple and tucking it to his chest. He’d cradled it against him as though it was something precious, his thumb caressing its crisp, red skin.
Just as his thumb caressed it now.
We were quiet awhile, each lost in our reflections, until I murmured, “I remember you now.”
“Do you?” He pulled his chair so close our knees almost touched.
“When I saw you at Walpurgisnacht, I recognized you almost instantly. You were older, of course, and even more—” He swallowed, looking at the apple he rolled between his palms as he rushed through the rest. “Even more beautiful than I remembered.”
I froze, unsure I’d understood him rightly. It was such a bold admission.
“But your eyes,” he continued. “They haven’t changed. As a child they were colored with sadness, almost a private despair. I see it there still.”
He looked up at me then, and I darted my gaze to the fire, working to keep my breath steady. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.” My voice was too pleasant, too light.
I felt Friedrich’s scrutinizing stare for a time until he sighed and leaned back in his chair. “Of course you don’t.” He took a bite from his apple and lifted his alphabet for study.
While my breath returned to its steady rhythm, my mind wandered back over our conversation, one point striking me. “You worked in the mine shafts? I thought only grown men and dwarfs worked in the shafts.”
Friedrich raised an eyebrow and gave a surprised chortle. “Dwarfs? There are no dwarfs in the mines.”
“I remember them quite distinctly. They wore the driving hoods and breech leather aprons of miners. They even carried pit picks.”
His smile faded. “Those aren’t dwarfs; they’re boys. Or men who’ve worked in the mines since they were boys.”
“But it’s a man’s work. Why would they employ children?”
“Because some of those tunnels are barely higher than my knee.” He put a flattened palm out beside him.
“Only children are small enough to fit, and that’s only if they’re lying down.
They have to crawl through the shafts to fill a trolley heavy with ore, then shoulder it back up the tunnels on their hands and knees or pull it with a strap across their chests.
The weight of the work makes their spines grow curved.
And while their legs stay short and weak, their shoulders and chest grow to the size of a man’s.
Working twelve hours a day in almost total darkness, never seeing the sun, they end up pale and sickly. The shafts are like a living tomb.”
“How dreadful! How did you manage to escape it?”
“A lot of things combined that allowed me to escape, but a small part of it was . . .” Friedrich ducked his eyes, “. . . was because of you and your apple, actually.” He turned away, his jaw flexing as he watched the fire.
“As a noble child, you had no business worrying about me, spoiling your gown for a poor orphan boy. Yet you disobeyed your sister and helped me anyway. You lived outside your class, not bound by expectations.”
His prejudice was showing again, exposing his wrongheaded ideas about how nobility behaved, but I let it pass.
“I decided to do the same,” he continued, “ignoring all the expectations of an orphan boy’s fate and finding my own way. That act, that apple . . . it was a chance to choose something better.”
I very much liked the idea of young Friedrich drawing such grand and grown-up conclusions from my simple deed.
And the notion that my small kindness had changed the course of his life created a strange sensation in my heart, like the tingling of blood flowing to a limb once numb.
I thought of so many things to say, but none seemed quite right.
Friedrich filled the silence. “But those dwarfs are good men. They took me in and cared for me when I was sick, then found me work. I do my best to repay their kindness when I can.”
“You still see them?” I asked.
“When I’m not away at war,” he muttered. “My friend, Ernst, is in a bad way. I try to make time for him.”
“He’s ill?” I drummed my fingers against the chair’s arm, pondering an idea. “I could help him, Friedrich. You should take me with you the next time you go.”
His head jerked back. “To Bergfreiheit? I’m not sure how the miners would feel having a countess in their cottage.”
“They needn’t know I’m a countess. I could go in servants’ clothes.”
He shook his head. “They work into the evenings, and I haven’t a horse to ride anyway.”
“I can arrange for a horse.”
“What about your father? What excuses would you make to him?”
“Father is gone.” I touched the back of my hand to my nose, preempting any spring of emotion. “And will be for the next fortnight, at least. Now is the time to make our visit.”
He still seemed uncertain. “I don’t think it’s wise—”
“Friedrich, let me help your friend.”
His eyes studied mine, the scrutiny slowly softening into something else as the moment stretched on. His gentle gaze released another swell of fluttering in my stomach.
“Very well.” He sighed. “On Saturday eve I’ll wait for you in the clearing. Meet me an hour before sunset, and we may get to the mines before dark.”
I blinked. “I’ll be there.”