17. People Person
17
People Person
JACOB
Though we never talk about it, we begin to gravitate to the common room. She’ll have materials relating to one of her patronages spread out on the coffee table, and I’ll bring my dinner over, nurse a beer, and read through packets of obscure Vorburgian history prepared by Karl.
I’m never told to push off. She never scurries away. While the small fire in the grate warms the side of my face and the winter wind howls, we hardly leave each other alone.
We talk about everything but this.
On a Saturday morning in early February, I wander out of my room, determined to eat three bites of Pankedruss, wondering if the day will come when I ever look forward to it. Heavy clouds crowd against the windows, and I stretch hugely, scratching my stomach.
When I open my eyes, Alma is standing in her doorway, looking up at the ceiling like I am working on her last nerve.
I’d ask her why, but her hat is decorated with a huge flower, and the brim is tilted at a sexy angle.
I emit a low, teasing whistle, and Alma laughs, tucking her handbag under her arm. She tilts her head at an even sexier angle, trying to put on an earring.
“Where are you headed?” I ask, pulling up the camera feature on my phone so she can use it as a mirror.
She tilts her head the other direction, and I revise my thesis. This angle is also sexy.
“An old friend is getting married a few hours south. We have to set out early.”
I feel for my back pocket with the top of my phone, sliding it in. Wanting to talk to Alma is bigger than how much I don’t want to talk about weddings with Alma.
“Another royal?”
“ Adel . That’s what we call the hereditary noble houses in Sondmark.”
“Are they combining their lands and wealth like you and Pietor?” I have to turn her wedding into a joke, or I’ll say something I mean too much.
Her smile falters but she moves on. “The bride is a primary school teacher for one of my cousin’s daughters. My brother set them up.”
“I thought he didn’t do commitment.”
“For other people, he does.” Alma looks uneasy. I open my mouth to offer her a glass of water or bite of Pankedruss when a knock sounds on the door.
“Coming,” she calls, skirt twirling against her legs as she turns.
That’ll be Noah.
It’s Pietor.
He spots me over her shoulder, and I flex my hand. Leaning forward, he gives Alma a brief kiss. “Ready, darling?”
“Mm,” she says, giving me a brief, polite smile before she goes.
The feeling of wanting a fight sticks to me throughout the day. In the afternoon, Karl brings me my limp suit, fresh from dry cleaning, and demands to see my wardrobe.
“Have you even tried on your new clothes?” he asks.
I lead him to the closet where they hang in garment bags and Karl emits a noise of frustration and despair.
“What are you waiting for?” he asks. “An embossed invitation?”
Thanks to weeks of fittings and endless instruction covering everything from the history of the bone button to the innovations of the canoe pocket, I realize the clothes are going to be nicer than anything I’ve ever worn before.
“New clothes, new man,” Mom used to say when we went shopping for back-to-school things at the department store in Blackberry. A twenty-four pack of pencils would sit in the cart next to stiff, dark jeans.
I cross my arms. “I don’t get why we’re trying to dress this up. We won’t fool anyone.”
Karl inhales through his narrow nostrils. “No, no, no…sir. You don’t get to have an existential kick-up now. Are you the crown prince of Vorburg?” he asks.
“By some cosmic joke, I am.”
“That’s it, then.”
“I didn’t know what I was getting into,” I counter.
Karl rips the plastic from the hangers and begins arranging the items by color and type. He lifts a blue suit and gives the hanger a shake. “This is your destiny,” he declares. “Figure it out.”
“Figure it out? A master craftsman taught me how to do carpentry. Where’s the illegitimate crown prince who is going to teach me how to do this ?”
“You have Princess Alma,” he counters.
“I don’t have Princess Alma,” I roar.
I don’t have her. My chest rises and falls with the enormity of it. I don’t have her, and I don’t want anyone else.
Karl looks at me for a long time. “Wear the clothes,” he says, “sir.”
That evening, after a solitary meal eaten standing up in front of the fridge, I retreat to the gym and scroll through a roughly translated Sondish gossip site for news of Alma’s day.
PAPZ has already posted several still images and a short video clip of her and Pietor attending the wedding. When she walks on the short path from the parking area to the small Lutheran church, she has her Sondish wedding handbag in a tight grip, the opal ring front and center.
In the video, Himmelstein fusses with his lapels, wobbling the umbrella over their heads. Alma has to skip to keep beneath it.
The contrast between her and her sister—the one on the honeymoon—couldn’t be more stark. Not once has the camera caught Pietor glancing at her, touching her arm or elbow. Sliding his arm around her waist to keep her close under the beating rain.
In one article, the PAPZ headline reads, “Pietor Got Jacked: Elegant Princess Alma arrives at the wedding of Count Aloysius Fogh van den Schackenborg and Vrouw Laura Fisker with fit fiancé.”
I descend into a plank position, forearms resting along the rubber mat, phone stopwatch counting off the seconds. The phone rings, and I tap my ear bud.
“My son and heir.” My father’s gravelly voice booms through the tiny speaker.
My jaw sets. “Your Majesty, how good of you to call.”
He doesn’t regard the distance I’ve placed between us. “Have you talked to Tiffani?”
“You mean my mother? Yes. She calls her son from time to time.”
“What do you mean?” he barks. “I call my son. I’m calling him now.”
“Is there something you wanted?”
My relationship with His Majesty King Otto of Vorburg is cool. He doesn’t mind that, he tells me. A number of Vorburgian kings seized the throne from their fathers. Drawing and quartering them in the aftermath was a family tradition. We’re doing fine.
The king cuts to the chase. “Karl reports that you’re not wearing the clothes they made for you. He says you’re fighting them every step of the way.”
My grandma would sit Karl on the bottom step of her staircase for being such a loathsome tattletale.
“I’m doing everything that’s being asked of me.” I’ve spent hours familiarizing myself with the fussiness of royal protocol. The bowing. The forms of address. The endless practice that has me mirroring every gesture Alma makes, watching her move, feeling it drive me insane.
“You haven’t cut your hair, son.”
“I’m not cutting my hair, sir.”
The old man growls. “You want to look like a girl?”
I look down at my muscled thighs, the sweaty tank top, and work-callused hands.
“You’ll look like a fool when you take your place on the world stage,” he barks.
This is rich coming from a man as gaffe-prone as my father. There’s video footage of him on stage at a music festival, wearing a dress shirt and tie, pumping his arms like the wheels of a locomotive. It’s one of the most famous GIFs in the world, and people use it when they want to specify precisely how drunk they got last night.
“Since when does Vorburg submit to Sondmark?” I ask.
A pause. I can almost visualize the internal wrestling. In the end, national pride wins out over the need to make his son obey. “I like to hear it. Give those zeklen Sondish royals a taste of Vorburgian will.” His approval is like a dead sun. It doesn’t warm me. “Have you made any progress with any of the princesses? You chose the engaged one to be your tutor.” He releases a pungent curse. “This is no way to get married.”
I can’t talk about Alma and how she’s taken.
“What do you know about getting married?” I don’t know much, but I do know that the only way to deal with my father is to stand my ground and fight.
“Cut it, Jacob,” he bites, his tone a throwback to when his country had an empire.
Vorburgian power came without respect for what Alma would call propriety. I remember a lesson from Karl about a Vorburgian queen, blessing her husband’s mistress on her deathbed and meeting his bastards, blessing them each in turn. She’s hailed as a saint, but so is her faithless husband. There is no contradiction in the Vorburgian mind. Few of my ancestors understood anything about keeping one woman happy.
My Gardner forefathers were different. Carving civilization out of the wilderness is all they knew. Along the staircase in my grandparents’ house, generations of them, Scotsmen and Germans with full mustaches and piercing eyes stare into the camera from the bosom of a large family.
My mind goes to Alma, dressed for a wedding, the brim of her hat revealing her mouth and the curve of a cheek, skipping after her fiancé in the rain like she didn’t matter and didn’t expect to matter. I swallow past the knot in my throat.
“Wear the clothes. Make us proud,” my father says.
“Yes, sir,” I say, finishing the call.
He’s not going to let this question of a bride go, but royal or not, I can’t change my nature. I have to love my wife. Gardner men do. Maybe it’s an idea which isn’t useful for the life I’ve accepted. Maybe Karl would say I am thinking like a peasant. Maybe Alma considers it middle-class or simple. But I can’t choose my wife strategically. It’s not how I’m made.
I return to my suite, change, and return to the hall, not even hiding the fact that I’m waiting for her. If Pietor comes, I’ll have sense.
I lean against the wall, releasing a breath when she mounts the stairs with her sisters. Clara peels away to her suite, but Ella sends me a wave.
Alma stops in front of our door, looking at me across the width of the hall. “What are you doing out here?”
“Waiting for you, boss.” I can’t tell her the truth—that I can’t stop thinking about her—but I can’t lie either. I bump away from the wall.
“It’s late.”
I hear the slam of a door and hurrying footsteps. Clara, having already changed, sprints down the hall, fishing her keys out of her purse. When the commotion passes, I look at Alma. Her lips are pressed together.
“It’s late,” I say.
“Max sails this week,” she explains, opening the door.
I follow her into our suite and flip the light on in the kitchen. I wait for Alma to hustle me out, almost hoping she’ll go so far as to place her palms against my back. She’ll tell me that she’s tired and doesn’t want to talk.
Alma unfastens her coat. “Heat up a kettle, will you?”
She heads to her room. Grinning, I open and shut cupboard doors, watching the steam rise from the kettle. I call to her, “What kind of tea?”
“No caffeine at this hour,” she says, returning. She looks at the tea caddy over my shoulder, bracing her hands on the backs of my arms. This room is tiny. All I have to do is turn around.
“No caffeine it is,” I say, scooping the loose-leaf chamomile into an infuser.
I pour the hot water and feel her soft breath against my neck, warming the skin. Setting the kettle down with a thump, I put a lid on the infuser and escape her light grasp.
“My father called,” I say, gripping both counters, trying not to notice that she looks as good in a pair of boxy silk pajamas as she did in the wedding clothes. Her hair is down, her make up hastily scrubbed off. There’s a dark line she missed on the rim of one eye. It doesn’t matter.
In this buttoned-up two-piece pajama set, she’s even more covered up than she was before. It doesn’t matter. My hands ball into fists. There’s nothing to do while we wait for the tea to steep.
Alma takes a chocolate digestive, nibbling along the edge. “Do you get along?” she asks.
I trace the rim of the counter with my thumb. “I thought we weren’t supposed to ask questions. I thought we were supposed to go through life as vanilla robots.”
“Robots don’t have flavors.” She smiles, playing with one of the buttons on her top. “I withdraw the question.”
“I’ve met my father in person twice. The first time was when he opened a new wing at the Royal Academy. He’d come to glance over his bastard whose school fees he was paying.”
“Jacob.” My name is a whisper—gently admonishing.
“The second time, he called me to Djolny Castle to congratulate me on a successful legal campaign.” I remember the exact words. “That’s when he told me I’d be learning the family trade and that he was shipping me off to Sondmark.”
Alma plucks her lip with her teeth.
“You have a question?” I ask.
No response. I release a breath and run a hand through my hair. “You have my permission to ask.”
“Why didn’t he just teach you himself?”
“Can I be honest?”
She nods. “Always.”
“My father is a people person, not a… person person. Crowds love him, and he’ll go down the line, shaking every hand and kissing every baby in Vorburg.” Watching him do it is like watching a master woodcarver coax concentric circles of water and the half-submerged form of a sea otter from an inanimate object. If you let your eyes relax, you can almost believe it’s the real thing.
“But if he’d married my mom, I don’t think he would have known what to do with either of us. For now, he just wants me to find a wife.”
Her brow lifts, and I want to kiss the curve of it, to have her lips press into my neck. To go beyond the scope of our assignments. Wouldn’t my father love that. My blood goes hot and cold.
“He actually told you so?”
“He suggested I get Ella to mentor me.” I nod, pouring out two cups of tea. Handing hers over, I lean against the counter at her side. “I know. It’s crazy.”
She blows on the surface of the liquid and gives a low laugh. “Not at all. He’s being strategic, and you had to go and choose the engaged princess. Your father must be furious.” She bumps my shoulder, setting off a wave of electricity that rolls through my veins but never breaks. “Ella’s not dating anyone at the moment, and you get along. I could set you up if you—”
I raise my eyes to the ceiling. This girl will be the death of me. “Don’t. It’s not why I’m here.”
She gives another light laugh. “Good thing, because—who would have thought?—Sondmark is running out of princesses.” Her mouth sobers, and she takes a swallow of tea.
“How have you done it? Find someone when you’re hampered by the, uh…”
“Massive generational wealth? Sense of entitlement? Burden of rule?” Her eyes dance. “Clara practically threw herself at Max’s feet, and if he wanted to back out, I don’t think she’d let him. She tells us that being in the military makes it easier for him to understand things like constraints on his time and how he’s supposed to behave in public.”
“And Freja?” I sip slowly, cooling the liquid with my breath.
“Oskar wants nothing to do with royalty, and we haven’t sorted out how he’ll fit into the institution because they moved too fast for us to figure it out.” She taps her cup and gives me the kind of smile where I know her throat hurts. “Can I be honest?”
My stomach tightens, but I clink my mug on hers. “Always.”
“My mother never would have figured it out if Freja had waited. Like the goddess she is, my sister acted first and let the chips fall where they may.”
Is this my by-the-book princess?
“They look happy,” I say.
“They’d better be.” She looks into her mug, eyes unfocused. “It’s going to get rough before it gets better.”
“How did Alma find Prince Charming?” I ask, trying to lighten the mood. I don’t want to hear the answer, but it serves me right, being attracted to a woman who belongs to someone else.
Attracted?
Sure.
This will be my punishment.
Alma takes a gulp of tea. “You have to understand that my mother was brought up in the old days, when marriage alliances were worked out decades before they were executed. Even after the Pavian monarchy was toppled by a dictator, she fulfilled the marriage contract with King Zeren’s second son.”
“Your father?”
She nods. What does all this ancient history have to do with her and Pietor?
“She has spreadsheets maintained by Caroline, filled with eligible partners who know the rules of operating in a monarchy. You know,” she says, like I might actually know, “heads of friendly nations, men who don’t need the money, people from an impeccable bloodline… everyone gets a ranking.”
Her cheeks flush as she gets into her story, using words like bloodline and eligible . They’re foreign to me. She dips her head, a curtain of dark hair falling between us, and my chest feels like it’s caught in a vice grip turned tighter and tighter. A question forms, but I can’t dislodge it.
Alma’s eyes dart to my face and away. This is not one of those times I can be trusted to draw my own conclusions. I have to ask.
“Are you talking about an arranged marriage?”
I’m right. I know I’m right. Chol nia, Alma. My heart hammers in my chest. I can’t be right. She wouldn’t throw herself away like that. She wouldn’t try to make me understand and agree. As different as we are on the surface, underneath we’re the same. Same loyalty to our family, same seriousness when we approach our jobs, same way we have to be with each other.
I scrub my face, praying I’m wrong.
She shakes the hair away and exhales. “That’s it. Pietor was top of the list.”