Chapter Five
LEAVING THE MANOR house was painful.
Esme found herself close to tears, when really, she should have been celebrating.
Steps were being taken, finally. She was moving closer to Tadeo, which was the right direction to be moving in.
She knew that it was better for their baby.
She hoped it would give them a chance to be…
something different from this cold storage of marriage they’d been in all this time.
But it didn’t matter what she knew or what she hoped.
It still hurt, because this house of exile and the staff who’d helped her make it a home had been her world for seven long years.
She said goodbye to each member of her staff personally.
There were many hugs and promises that this would not change a thing, though Esme wasn’t sure if any of them believed it.
They all knew better.
The housekeeper walked her out to her car after all the determinations had been made about what would go with Esme and what would remain at the manor house. Esme assumed that the palace would come and restore the house back to its previous elegant austerity, but she could not bear to ask about it.
“You are doing the right thing, of course, Your Majesty,” the older woman said as Esme slid behind the wheel, her gaze knowing and kind. “Whether it feels like it today or not.”
Esme blew out a breath. “I know that it is right. I know it.”
The housekeeper nodded sagely. “At the end of the day, if I may be so bold, His Majesty the King is only a man, my lady. And sometimes they have to be shown things that are obvious to anyone else.” She smiled. “If you’ll pardon my temerity.”
Esme found she held that closely to her heart over the course of the next few days.
Moving into the palace required nothing of her.
All she did was walk into her new bedroom and situate herself there, as part of the palace at last. As promised, her rooms adjoined the King’s—but it wasn’t as if that afforded them any particular intimacy.
The king’s compartments took over the better part of one wing of the palace. The queen’s rooms were what was left along that same wing. This was no small thing. Esme had a bedchamber, but the rest of her compartments provided her with more rooms than the manor house had.
She could wander around in them all day and not feel the least bit confined.
What made her feel as if someone had curled a fist around her were the rules.
Because there were so many rules. Not simply Tadeo’s rules, but the general palace rules too.
Who could speak to whom first. When certain gestures of obeisance were to be observed, when perhaps all she wished to do was walk through the house she lived in of a morning.
It wasn’t that protocol was new to her, but in the manor house, they’d all relaxed into informality. She found that reversing course was harder than expected.
Esme was grateful that moving back into the palace coincided with the resumption of her official duties.
It also happened to take place during Tadeo’s absence, as he was touring a new hospital complex in the far side of the country and was staying there for those days.
She suspected he’d planned it that way. So that she could ease into the palace, and back into her duties, without having to worry about him in the mix as well.
Though, of course, if he had planned it that way, that would suggest a level of emotional intelligence that he professed not to possess.
Esme thought about what her housekeeper had said and tried to focus her energies on more important things.
Like concealing her pregnancy, as it had not yet been announced widely.
She hadn’t even told her parents, something she felt stranger about by the day, but she had wanted to come to terms with it all first. She’d wanted to make sense of the reality of her marriage—and maybe figure out if she’d still have a marriage—before sharing the fact that she was having a child.
Only her best friend, Hilary, knew, and as Hilary was a research scientist at one of the world’s premier research universities, always neck-deep in her work, Esme was certain that no one else had the faintest idea.
She really had been nesting these last months.
The real truth was that she’d missed her official responsibilities.
Esme quite liked the access her position gave her to people and groups that might not have found her otherwise.
She liked the shaking of hands and all her interactions with the kingdom’s subjects.
She accepted their condolences on King Hugo’s death and listened to their own stories about their feelings about the late King or their interactions with him over the years.
She smiled when they told her of the hopes they held for the new King, having watched him grow up.
It was a way to connect, and Esme hoped she never took it for granted. While she felt certain that Tadeo had not brought her back to the palace to engage in any kind of healing exercise, that was what happened all the same.
And if she found herself at loose ends in the queen’s compartments at night—wandering from the well-stocked library to the media room to the separate reading rooms to the salon arranged for a phantom high tea to the five different seating areas nestled here and there to the balcony that overlooked the sweep of the valley that comprised the bulk of the kingdom out toward the mountains in the distance—wondering if she really should have pushed for an escape back to America, she thought about her baby instead.
She thought about the fact that whatever her relationship was or would one day become or would never be with Tadeo, it was her child’s legacy that she was securing here.
This was her child’s birthright—this palace and everything in it, not to mention the kingdom that surrounded them.
She could no more run away from that than she’d run away from her own duty, back in the day.
Some responsibilities outweighed personal considerations.
That was what her parents had raised her to believe, and she did.
She still did.
By the time Tadeo returned from the other side of the kingdom, Esme felt settled in. If not at home, necessarily, she was comfortable. Better still, she was resolved.
Though it seemed to her that everything in the palace changed when the King was present. When he was finally in residence and back home. It was as if the air changed, becoming electrically charged, making everything inside the palace walls seem to hum.
Including her.
Even before he called her into his office the afternoon he returned, she felt that shift inside her own body.
As if all her flesh and bones ever wanted to do was get ready for him, no matter what she might have to say about that.
No matter what she might think was a better course of action. It was humbling.
It was also dangerous.
His office was in the public part of the palace, and the walk to reach it involved seas of glossy marble, lashings of armored statues, and kingly possessions dating back centuries.
The interior of his office was a vast affair, and as stark and unwelcoming as she remembered it from before their wedding.
There was the great wide desk that was kept largely empty, because the point of it was its forbidding granite massiveness.
It was meant to imply that the King himself was no more tractable than the many-acred expanse of that desk of his.
If the desk itself was not enough of a focal point, there were also the pieces of art on the walls, all of them grim-looking kings from throughout Bellaza’s history, looking down at their descendants with what always looked like deep dismay to Esme.
Though she kept that observation to herself.
Once she was grandiosely bowed inside by his guards, she found Tadeo already there, applying his official, slashing signature to a selection of documents in front of him.
He stopped as she came in, then stood, and she offered him the curtsy that protocol demanded when she saw him for the first time in a day.
Tadeo inclined his head in return.
And then, for what felt like an intense and overlong moment, they stood there and gazed at each other.
“Does this count as mandated silence?” she asked, when the intensity felt as if it might choke her. “Since we’re in your office, I assumed that this would be a work-related discussion, not something having to do with our private life. You will have to let me know.”
“If it was mandated silence, you would have broken it,” Tadeo replied after a simmering moment or two. “As usual.”
“If you cannot explain what it is you wish me to do, I’ll be forced to assume that you don’t know what you wish me to do,” Esme said with a shrug.
“You set all this up, Tadeo. Once again, we are here in service to your wishes and your demands.” Though she did smile as she said it. “I believe the onus is on you.”
“You would believe this, of course,” he replied in his typically chilly manner, yet always with all that brooding beneath. “As believing it suits the narrative you tell yourself.”
“In any case,” she said, as calmly as possible, which did not feel particularly calm today, particularly when he said such things to her, “have you given any thought about when and how you would like to make the announcement?”
Tadeo did not exactly frown, though it seemed to suggest itself somewhere in the vicinity of his brow. “I do not think that anyone in the kingdom needs to know our precise living arrangements, Esme. Why do you?”
“I’m referring to the impending birth of your child and heir, Your Majesty,” she replied, with scathing courtesy.
“There will come a point—and that point will be soon—where even the most ingenious fashion in the world will not be able to hide my belly. I imagine it would be best to get out ahead of speculative articles in the press, don’t you? ”