Chapter 18
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“ T his is it?” Philip nudged his mule beside Melisende’s as she drew their small caravan to halt below a neat inn perched on the mountainside.
He’d spotted several of these tiny Alpine huts in their crossing, where shepherds lived in the summer while pasturing their animals in the high mountain fields. They’d taken their ease at other Alpine inns catering to travelers, warm, smoky places where one found food he’d never tasted the like of and heard tales of travelers from any number of countries, all bound for or returning from the rich cities of Italy.
But Melisende regarded this inn with a different expression, and Philip, though he’d come to know so much more of her during their travels, couldn’t quite read her face. This inn wasn’t like the others, though it appeared much the same. The dark wooden walls were worn and weather beaten, but beneath the steeply pitched, overhanging roof, the corbels were painted bright yellow, and similar trim lined the windows and door. Woodsmoke drifted through the air, with the welcome scent of meat roasting, and behind the building, a goose honked in outrage.
“This is it,” she said. “We are in Merania.”
Melisende didn’t look a grand duchess-to-be returning to her lands. With her dark hair tucked beneath a woolen shawl and a long woolen cloak draping her gown, rose color in her cheeks from the early summer breeze, she looked like any weary traveler reaching the end of a long journey.
It had taken them seven days from Luxembourg to reach the foothills of the Alps, their itinerary including pauses to shelter with friends of the family and known supporters. At each of their stops, Melisende combined friendly dinners with subtle probes for information and support. She’d built a swath of admirers and advocates for her cause in France, Luxembourg, and several German principalities. In their four days crossing the Alps, following rivers that had cut their way through the soaring peaks, twining through valleys tucked under mountains that stunned his brain with their austere beauty, she’d established a network of Austrian loyalists, too.
Philip had to admire her finesse. She made an excellent diplomat and spy. She would make an excellent grand duchess.
But a wife—his wife—ah, that was the rub. It stabbed his heart each time they stopped and she introduced him as her husband. Every time she explained he was the son of an Irish gentleman, the Baronet Devlin of Roscollen, an admirer of hers sized up Philip with a look that said, that’s all ? Some hid it better than others, but the puzzlement that he, a mere Philip Devlin, would have won such a prize was clear.
He was her protector, keeping a tireless watch so another assassin didn’t come at her from a quiet corner or a blind turn on the road. He was her companion at meals ensuring an enemy didn’t slip poison into her food.
He was her lover at night, touching her as he’d dreamed, reveling in the sight and feel and taste of her, but even the pleasure couldn’t bridge that final chasm and secure her to him completely. She was the queen returning to her lands, and he was the accomplice and aid. An accessory she would put aside when the goal was achieved, and now the end was in sight.
“It’s very—” Philip craned his head to gaze about as she turned her mule up the mountainside and climbed the gentle slope toward the inn. “I understand Burke’s argument now in his treatise on the sublime.” The landscape defied any words Philip had to capture the sheer size, the forbidding grandeur, an awe that drew close to terror at the incomprehensible age and magnificence.
“And you grew up here,” he added. He understood now why she had never seemed to quite fit in among English drawing rooms. She’d stood out like a golden eagle among a flock of fat pheasants, surrounded by game birds when she was a bird of prey. In Luxembourg, seeing her become the focal point of the equivalent of a royal court, he’d understood where she belonged. They’d sheltered at chateaus the size of St. James Palace—more luxurious, too—and instead of being overwhelmed by the opulent grandeur, Melisende came into a room and made it complete. She was like one of the slender mountain ibex, lithe and stealthy, their horns a barbed crown, a unique and powerful creature made for the highest elevations. And she’d been penned among sheep.
Now she’d returned to her natural element these soaring mountains, their heights still capped with snow even in early summer, their knees thick with the verdant green of Alpine meadows and the blue of icy streams. A landscape from a fairytale, like nothing he’d known.
“And this is Merania,” he said.
“All this.” She swept her arm to encompass what they could see, the ring of mountains and the basin of a valley below. Three valleys intersected, beginning with the one they’d traversed beside a babbling, rocky river, which Melisende called the Passeier. A second ran with a fresh river from the west to join its fellow, and their combined forces flowed south in a broad, deep valley dotted with tiny hamlets and the occasional lone hut climbing the side of a mountain.
Where the rivers joined a city had grown, houses and buildings clustered along paved roads lines with trees. Roofs of wood and tile were broken by occasional towers and domes, and the enormous spire of a church thrust into the sky. A stone bridge crossed one of the rivers, beside it a medieval-looking tower watching over a broad town square dotted with the colorful flags of market stalls. The whole town looked tidy and prosperous, a marriage of Italianate baroque and German symmetry, and beyond the outskirts, edging the sheltering valley, cultivated terraces layered the sides of the mountains like tiers of a cake.
It was beautiful. He had the oddest sense it would make a wonderful home.
“But we’re not going down there.”
She didn’t dismount her mule, through Bruyit was on his feet and unloading luggage with the help of the chairmen they’d hired on the German side of the mountains. Their journey had drawn to its natural end, and Philip feared something else was ending, too. The intimate moments they’d stolen in roadside inns and the curtained four-poster beds of her friends’ palaces would be no more. The gentle whispers and low moans that had been their secret communication for days and weeks, theirs no longer. Ending too was the sense that they were a step out of the world, apart from it, caught up in one another and their dream, like any other honeymooners.
The sense that she belonged to him, and he to her. They were in Merania. She belonged to her country, now.
And here—once they followed the map and she had the patent in hand reinstating their father—there was no place in her life for him.
He slid to his feet and held out his arms to help her dismount. She leaned against him as he lowered her to the ground, and his blood heated instantly.
Minx. She knew what she did to him. She took every opportunity to touch him, as if she relished his body as much as he did hers.
And he took every opportunity to draw close to her, to encourage her to touch him, to use his body in every way he could to break down her defenses. He loved when she didn’t resist the impulse to brush against his arm as they walked together, to lean too close as she whispered in his ear so her breath whispered across his neck.
If only he could persuade her to tear down that final wall completely. But it would take more than his body to win her hand. And what else did he have to offer?
Melisende climbed the wooden porch of the inn, pausing once more to look around the valley. A queen surveying her kingdom.
“I see several castles,” Philip noted with surprise. “Which one is yours?”
“There have been many rulers and lords who built their homes here over the centuries. That one, Castle Auer—” she pointed to a square, stern medieval tower rising out of the trees across the Passiere Valley “—that was built by a Lombard prince to help guard the pass. It’s a ruin now. That—” a larger, sprawling edifice, more properly a castle with curtain walls and towers— “That is Tyrol Castle, seats of the Counts of Tyrol before Margaret ceded her lands to the Habsburgs for their own protection.” That was four centuries ago; she spoke of it like a business decision made a few years back, something still close to memory.
“The archdukes built that one for their residence. They like to vacation in Merania.” She pointed to an opulent chateau near the top of the town, not far from the stone bridge. “We call it the Prince’s Castle. If you follow the river south to Bolzano, you’ll find more castles in that valley, a whole ring of them. But there.” Her hand turned palm up, a softer gesture, to indicate an enormous villa in the Italian style, where the castellated roofs and towers were clearly built for aesthetic purposes and not for defense. It was a fairy-tale palace, the yellow gold of a cake, set inside an expanse of colorful gardens.
“That,” Melisende said softly, “is the Friedenplatz. My mother’s favorite home. She preferred it to Schloss Meinhardin.”
The sadness in her eyes sank tiny claws into Philip’s heart. Her return was not wholly a triumph; Merania also held grief, the graves of her lost brothers and sisters, the crypt where her mother was interred.
The grief of betrayal by an uncle who should have loved and supported her, and a cousin who ought to have been a friend. But then, in Philip’s experience, the highest families did hold the bitterest rivalries, with lands and wealth at stake.
“Which is your castle?” he asked, hoping to draw the shadow from her eyes.
She brushed his chest as she turned—on purpose, he knew—and craned her neck to look up the mountain, towering above them like a fortress against the sky. Dark gray walls sheared up from the slopes, hewn from the ancient stone. The sharp brown roofs were peaked like the caps of the mountains, as if in imitation, while small square windows stared out over the valley like slitted eyes.
“Rather imposing,” Philip muttered, feeling cold in the shadow of that place.
“So thought my mother. It hasn’t been kept up since my grandfather’s time. You’ll find it in need of repairs.” Her mouth quirked in a smile, her face not entirely free of its sadness. “Hardly proper quarters for a man of your station. I’m sure you’ll be disappointed.”
“Give me a willing colleen and a bottle of usquebaugh , and I will complain of nothing,” he said, letting the Irish inflections roll through his words. “None of your dainty schnapps, neither. I want good Irish whiskey.”
She smiled in full. And then something crashed to the floor.
A woman stood in the center of the common room of the inn, hands pressed to her cheeks. A basket bristling with asparagus and radish greens lay tipped on its side at her feet. The woman’s eyes took up half her face.
“My lady?” she whispered. “Lady Melisende?” The woman’s smile broke into uncontained wonder and joy and she dropped into a deep curtsy. “Your highness! You’ve returned.”
“ Hallo, Frau Huber ,” Melisende said with a gentle nod of her head. “How have you been?”
What ensured could only have its parallel in the clamor that attended the return of the biblical prodigal son, or the fuss at Bhaldraithe Castle when Philip’s eldest brother returned from his grand tour. Philip stood back and watched the chain of events unfold.
He made sure Melisende’s trunks, and his, arrived in their shared room, the best accommodations high up under the eaves, with a view of the city below. Bruyit and Gin set to their regular argument over who would sleep on a cot in the small room next door and who would stay in the servant’s loft above the stables. Philip didn’t know why they held the argument, since Gin always got the cot and Bruyit the stables, but the two lived to bicker.
He paid their bearers, who promptly removed to one of the wooden tables in the common room behind steins frothing with Frau Huber’s beer. Herr Huber was dispatched to ensure that one of the noisy geese in the back pen began roasting as soon as possible, and Melisende, settled into the single upholstered chair beside the fireplace, took her place in an impromptu court.
At first the stream of visitors was small as word spread: servants, a few nearby homesteaders, one shepherd, and another. Then the visitors became a steady trickle. Then the trickle became a flood.
Melisende, Philip realized, had been absent eight years. She had left a young woman, the age when a well-born maid in England would be making her debut in society. She must have changed drastically in the intervening years; Philip saw expressions of wariness and awe mingled with delight as the visitors came, each bearing a gift. There was more to their welcome, however, than gladness. Philip sensed relief, the kind of relief that followed desperation that had dwindled into despair and resignation.
He drew close under the pretense of bringing Melisende a cup of coffee, a brew stronger and more bitter-smelling than he was accustomed to in England. She took it with a soft smile and kept him close. He didn’t understand much German or Italian, even less of what must be Ladin, but Melisende translated for him when she felt the need.
She kept the same gracious smile affixed to her face, a kind and interested greeting for every person who approached her, but Philip saw growing signs of strain and distress. The sleepy slant to her eyes that he loved hardened to a sharp hood, and the soft curve of her mouth became brittle. He brought her another cup of coffee, then another, and the stream of visitors did not cease, even as Frau Huber and her maids began setting the tables for a feast.
Gradually, the truth dawned on Philip. These people weren’t coming to gladly greet a beloved daughter of their town, the old grand-duke’s heir. They were coming in supplication. They were coming as before a magistrate with pleas for help and for justice.
They were coming to beg for rescue from a woman who held their last hope.
He wished he could soothe the tightness in her face, the set of her shoulders, as if with each new report, she took a blow. “Merania has lost all of its allies,” she murmured in English. “The prince-bishops of Brixen and Trento. The rulers of Bolzano. All the appeals to Vienna have gone unanswered, and my brother-in-law, the Duke of Carinthia, has not delivered his promised support.”
“Why is there need of aid?” Philip murmured back, watching the stream of visitors grow until it stretched out the door and wound down the mountain trail. Each brought a small gift, mostly food, sometimes nothing more than an embroidered scrap of fabric. Melisende took each gift with elegant thanks and gave it to Gin, who handled the growing pile of tribute. People came but did not leave, instead forming a growing crowd outside the inn, and Philip wondered how the Hubers meant to feed all these people.
Bruyit stood one stride behind Melisende’s chair, his eyes moving over the crowd without ceasing, without even blinking, it seemed. No assassin’s blade would come from this crowd without Bruyit seeing it first. Philip admired the man’s devotion at the same time he wished someone—anyone—would give Philip credit for being able to protect Melisende.
“My uncle imposed high tariffs on goods passing through, and trade though Merania has all but stopped. Commerce runs through the valleys on either side, through Brixen and the Vinschgau, where the customs officers are less greedy. Shopkeepers are struggling. People are growing enough food to survive, but the goods they depend on are becoming scarce. Taxes grow higher each year. Some of this money goes to Vienna, but my uncle reserves much for himself.”
“To make improvements to the town?” Philip asked.
“To line his own pocket, it would seem,” Melisende responded after questioning a man who appeared to be a merchant, who wrung his black hat in his hands as he spoke with urgency. “He expanded the ducal guard to four times its size and drafted farmers and shepherds to create an army. Merania has never had more than a small militia, but it seems my uncle feared attack. He has lived in high style in the Freidenplatz, styling himself a king.”
She stopped with surprise and repeated something a woman beside the merchant said, his wife, decked out in hand-woven cloth and a beautifully embroidered apron.
“My uncle is dead,” Melisende said, stunned. “He died months ago. Rudolf has been reigning alone.” She asked another question of the merchant couple, who shook their heads sorrowfully, the woman looking pitiful, the man’s lip curling with distaste. “And not wisely nor well, it would seem.”
“That may explain why he sent for you,” Philip said. “You were trained to run Merania, and he wasn’t. He needs your expertise.”
“He certainly does.” Her tone grew sharper, and he sensed the agitation and increasing anger curbed beneath her diplomatic smiles and soft tones. “Harvests have been poor for years. Profits have dropped on outgoing goods because merchants must ship them elsewhere. Decisions made by the town council haven’t been supported because my cousin won’t give his approval. He’s limited the power of the guilds, crippling trade.”
Her mouth tightened as more people passed before her, as the litany went on. “Repairs are needed to buildings and roads. Whole flocks have been lost or stolen because there are not enough shepherds to look after them, too many recruited to be my uncle’s personal bodyguard. Did he fear my father that much?”
“Perhaps he feared his own people, if his policies were ungenerous,” Philip said.
“Ungenerous indeed,” Melisende muttered, listening to a young mother, holding the hand of two small children, who related a tearful tale. A shawl covered her dark hair and a long apron covered the bodice and skirt that the women here wore. The children regarded Philip with solemn faces.
“Rudolf’s men have been harassing Protestants and Jews. He is not enforcing the emperor’s Edict of Toleration,” Melisende said as the young woman gave her a tremulous smile, then backed away. Melisende didn’t demand protocol, especially not in this impromptu court, but the people seemed to greet her with near reverence. A few asked to touch her robe. She was asked to give blessings to children and babies as if she were a saint.
Melisende’s jaw was hard as she looked over the crowd of people milling about the common room. Outside the windows, men leaned planks to create makeshift tables, over which women threw clothes woven in bright prints. Children gathered spring wildflowers from the mountain slopes for impromptu decoration.
Merania meant to celebrate. Its daughter had returned, and from the talk Philip overheard, the few scraps of German he understood, they had been waiting for her. Praying for her and her father to return.
Or, more correctly, they had been praying for a savior, and they wanted Melisende to be it.
Philip took her coffee cup, long empty. She had been sitting in the same chair for hours, without rising to stretch or visit the necessary. She must be in physical discomfort, none of which she allowed to show on her face or in her manner.
But the fingers that brushed his hand were those of a mortal woman. Those were the shoulders, that the mind of a mortal woman—a fine mind, and fine shoulders, but a mortal woman nevertheless. How could she be everything they wanted her to be, savior and saint, queen and deliverer?
He would do everything in his power to help her. It dawned on Philip, without fanfare, without shock, that he would do anything for this woman. Sacrifice his own peace and happiness for hers. Put his body between her and the assassin’s blade. He would live anywhere, simply to be near her, to be touched by the same air that moved over and through her.
And he would, if it were necessary to her well-being, live apart from her, though it very well might kill him.
Perhaps this was love, what the poets talked about. But poets wrote of sleepless nights and burning sighs, as if a man became wan and limp and listless in the grip of infatuation. This was different, a knowledge deep and powerful, dug into him like the roots of the pines that dotted these mountains.
He loved Melisende of Merania, and he would be hers for the rest of his life. It was that simple.
She stretched out her hand to him, as if she felt the same need he did for their bodies to be touching. Her gaze met his, her eyes bright and alert, and Philip recalled the moment they stood before the Anglican priest in the drawing room of Fauconberg House and said vows neither of them meant to keep. Here in this chalet tucked into the hip of the mountain, with its dark resinous wood meant to withstand the elements and the wall hangings redolent with smoke, her hand in his was a promise of another kind, of something lasting.
Something likely to swallow him whole and spit him out ruined. Love changed a man, wrecked him, most often; he’d seen it again and again with friends, with his brothers. Love was treacherous territory and rarely did a man emerge from it unscathed.
“What?” she asked, her voice quiet.
“Hmm? Nothing.”
She reached out her other hand, and he took that, too. They held hands as if at an altar, a wedded couple in truth. About them the room was packed to the rafters with people, and Philip heard only her voice and the soft, quizzical inhale of her breath.
“It’s something,” she said, watching his face.
He didn’t know what rattled him more: to know that he loved, or consider that nothing had changed for her. He was still the Irish rogue she’d hired to help her on a quest, the man whom unlucky circumstance had bound her to in a ruse. He might know he’d been changed irrevocably by holding her in his arms, and to her, he might simply be the next in a line of useful accessories.
He brushed his thumbs over her hands, her skin smooth and dry. A hundred people had touched her hands today, some pressing her knuckles to their lips. They clung to her as if she were a saint who walked among them, yet Philip felt how narrow and slight her fingers were, how close her bones to the skin.
“We can talk later,” he said, wondering how much he dared reveal to her. “At the moment, I believe your people are throwing you a feast.”