Chapter Eleven #2
“Your father was a strange boy,” Arturo said after a moment, which was perhaps the last thing Tadeo would have expected anyone to say about King Hugo.
“Oddly still. Decent to all, if robotic. But one does not speculate about such things, not if one wishes to remain in the palace. I watched him grow up and he was always the same.”
“He valued constancy,” Tadeo said, agreeing.
He realized he was frowning and forced himself to stop.
The older man looked at him, a canny sort of light in his gaze. “Did he value it, or was it all he was capable of?” he asked, in his quiet way.
And something inside Tadeo went terribly still.
He had a sudden flash of memory then. It was something he had overheard his mother say when he was very young.
Tadeo had been playing in a part of the palace where he’d been told many times not to go.
He’d heard his mother with her voice raised, which usually meant she was talking to his father.
Just because you can’t feel anything doesn’t mean you should dictate to the rest of us who have the full spectrum of human emotion, she had thrown at the King.
In return, he had heard his father’s slow, measured tones, but not the words he’d used.
His mother had responded with a wild laugh. I would never wish to be like you, she had said. I would rather die.
Tadeo had known better than to get caught listening to his elders without their knowledge. He’d ducked back down one of the servants’ stairs and had hurried away.
Now, here in the portrait room, Arturo shifted from one foot to the other. “I cannot excuse what your mother did extramaritally,” he said, and sounded as if he was being very careful. Almost judicious. “But I will tell you that it was done deliberately. To prove a point.”
“I don’t know what that means,” Tadeo managed to get out, though his jaw felt like granite.
“My understanding is that her first affairs were in private,” Arturo continued in that same, measured tone.
“And the King, may he rest in peace, did not care at all. He only cared when her affairs were public. Because what he cared about was not the infidelity, if you catch my meaning. It was that other people knew of it.”
Tadeo felt himself getting…overly warm. As if he was sweating. As if he was flustered.
As if a pedestal was crashing to the ground and taking him with it.
It was as if Arturo knew it. As if he could see it too. “What I am trying to tell you, Your Majesty, is that I am not certain that King Hugo—for all his many virtues and may he rest in peace—was capable of caring about anything besides the kingdom. Or if he was, I never saw it.”
The full import of those words took a moment to settle on Tadeo. When they did, they landed hard. He felt as if the old man had taken a swing at him. And had landed a knockout punch.
“Including me, is what you mean,” he said when he was able to speak.
Though his voice sounded unlike his. Too rough. Too raw.
Arturo looked him straight in the eye, which was revolutionary and upsetting itself.
“It is my observation that your father went to great lengths to teach you how to tamp down the emotions that he never felt himself, Your Majesty. Not because he truly felt that they would impact on your ability to be a good king, but because he didn’t like them. ”
Tadeo knew, then, what he would say. He knew, and yet he could do nothing to stop what was coming. He could not repair that widening chasm inside him. He could not breathe.
“They reminded him too much of your mother,” Arturo said, inevitably, and Tadeo let that settle on him too, like so much granite and despair.
“King Hugo preferred things tidy and always precisely the same. Do you see what I mean, sir? He never thought of himself as empty. So he emptied out those around him instead, so that they would match.”
And Tadeo had no idea how long he stood there, staring in something that wasn’t quite as simple as shock at the portrait of his father on the wall.
Yet all he could see was Esme.
All he could hear was Esme. All the things she’d said to him over the years, and today. All the accusations she’d laid at his feet that he’d swept away, so certain that she was the problem.
Because a man who couldn’t feel at all had told him that he felt too much.
And then it was as if Esme was a great swell inside him, growing like a wave, taking him over, knocking him down—
But Tadeo did not fall.
Instead, he ran. He ran through the halls of his own palace, leaving stunned and shocked courtiers in his wake—and for once he did not care at all. He could not have been less interested in what message he was sending.
Tadeo ran until he found one of his vehicles parked out by one of the garages, ignored his guards, and jumped behind the wheel.
He set off for the manor house, driving the roads of the royal estate far too quickly. Time seemed to press in on him, and inside himself, he felt certain that it was running out.
That it might very well be too late already.
The night was dark but clear, and the stars were so bright they felt very nearly blinding.
He felt almost as if he was drunk, though he knew full well he was not.
The road wound down the hillside, cutting through the fields on the back side of the palace, and Tadeo took one turn so fast that when he saw the headlights coming in the opposite direction on the single-lane road he had no choice but to drive off to the side, narrowly missing a stout, medieval hedge.
The oncoming car stopped. He heard the window roll down.
“Are you all right?” came Esme’s clear, concerned voice through the dark.
Tadeo felt that wave wash over him all over again. That chasm in him seemed to stop growing. Time released its pressure.
She didn’t even know it was him, he thought. It could have been anyone. And yet she, the Queen, stopped her vehicle and inquired after his safety when she was the one who was six months pregnant.
The fissure had stopped growing, he realized then, because it had torn down all the armor he’d worn, all the walls he’d built, all the things he’d built his life around because he’d thought that was the proper way to do it.
Everything she had said to him was true. Her emotions didn’t inhibit her or diminish her. They only made her stronger. They made her better. They made her…her.
The bright light that was her—far brighter than her headlights that picked up the wide expanse of royal acreage on either side of them.
Tadeo pushed his way out of the car. Esme was getting out of hers, more awkwardly these days with her pregnant belly. She stopped when she saw him, her jaw dropping open a bit.
“Tadeo?” Her voice was little more than a whisper, as if she didn’t believe her own eyes.
But finally he thought that he believed his.
There were stars above, and Esme was here, and for the first time in so long—ten whole years—everything made sense.
He hadn’t realized how empty he’d felt until now, when he finally felt whole.
When he finally understood the whole story of not just his life, but his father’s and his mother’s and all the ways they’d led him here.
“I was coming to look for you,” Esme said after a moment, sounding…thrown, perhaps. But she rallied. He saw her square her shoulders. “I have something to say to you, Tadeo.”
“Say it,” he bade her, and he leaned back against the boot of his car and folded his arms, because if she wanted to talk to him, he would listen.
This time he would listen as if his life depended on it and he would keep his father out of his head while he did.
“The manor house has been desecrated,” she told him, very seriously. “It smells like new paint and regret. It’s pale and sad and diminished.” She moved closer to him and then she pointed her finger directly at his chest. “That’s what you want to do to me, Tadeo. And I won’t allow it.”
She wasn’t wrong, and he would have to live with that. But that was for later.
Now, he shook his head. “I doubt you could ever be diminished, Esme.”
He did not expect her to scowl at him, much less so ferociously.
“Don’t patronize me, please. I have no intention of letting you shuffle me off again.
I don’t know why I put up with it for seven years.
I kept thinking that if I was perfect enough, if I was dutiful enough, I would somehow live up to whatever paragon it is you have in your head.
I thought that I could prove that even though we were blessed with the chemistry that drew us together, I was also capable of being the perfect queen for you.
I think I did that, Tadeo. I think I pulled it off.
” She pulled in a deep breath. “It still wasn’t enough for you. ”
He said nothing, but she moved closer still. He watched her as her gaze searched his, and could not begin to imagine what expression he wore.
She frowned, so he assumed it was unusual.
“On the night of your father’s funeral, I only wanted to comfort you.
But it turned into something else and I realized the truth.
That was the real reason you never wanted to be alone with me.
Because there was no getting away from it, is there?
There’s never been any escaping who we are to each other.
” Another breath, like she was preparing herself.
Her chin rose. “And I’m not going to facilitate it anymore. ”
She was even closer now and Tadeo felt nothing inside him but that great wave and swell that was all her, always her.
It was beautiful Esme, the mother of his child.
Esme, his queen. Esme, who had knocked his world off its axis by smiling at him outside a Boston restaurant on that fateful first evening.
Esme, the woman who had loved him when he most certainly did not deserve it for the past ten years.
He reached over and pulled a thick lock of her dark hair between his fingers, then rolled it back and forth.