Chapter Thirty-Four #2
“Oh, it can,” I started, but then hushed. I had the sense of déjà vu, and then I understood why. Up ahead, through the trees, I saw a coach. With royal insignia. And it was headed in the direction of our drive.
“Hurry,” I urged Elin.
Up to that point, I had gone through the night as if in a muted kind of stupor. I hadn’t fully marveled at the impact of what we had done. To change the course of a kingdom. To alter history. I realized I might die because of it. Would die, if I were found out.
I took the cart over from Elin and we broke into a run.
Stayed along the embankment. The cart was horribly noisy, but so was a carriage, and the retinue that accompanied it.
We stayed out of sight, slipping back across the road and through the hole in the hedge.
I discarded the shovel in the middle of the laurel but kept the cart.
“We won’t have time to change,” Elin panted, beside me.
“We aren’t changing,” I told her, veering toward the cellar house. I scrambled inside and grabbed what I needed. Overturned the bushel of apples into the cart. Licked my thumb and used it to wipe the blood from Elin’s face.
“Chin up,” I told her. I could feel the mud drying on my hands. I took hold of the cart once more. The apples jostled as I moved forward. “We’re going to meet the queen.”
Sigrid’s carriage was first in a long line that stretched down the driveway.
She was already alighting from the coach with the help of two gloved footmen when Elin and I pushed our way through the trees.
The queen’s dress barely fit through the opening of the carriage and the footmen had to reach in to squeeze the hoops of her skirts.
She landed in the gravel, took a cautious step forward and looked around with distaste.
Behind her, the guards and riders were dismounting.
A few courtiers emerged from their own carriages, sniffing the air.
My daughters stood on the front steps, waiting to receive them.
They wore the same gray and yellow fine dresses they’d donned to welcome the messenger just a few weeks before.
Rosie’s hair had been swept into a net. Mathilde had borrowed my stomacher.
I couldn’t see a trace of the fear they no doubt felt.
All of them turned and saw Elin and I simultaneously. Rosie’s eyes widened in alarm. Mathilde winced. But Sigrid’s lip curled—perhaps the closest thing to her real smile I had ever seen. I continued forward, the cart ahead of me. “Good morrow, Your Majesty,” I called.
Agatha reared her red head then, telling me—demanding—that I drop into supplication.
Expressing shock at my mess. Little frissons of disgust and need.
But I had had enough of Agatha. I could stand her in my head no longer.
I did not sink into a curtsy for my back was already bent with effort to move the wheelbarrow.
I called to Sigrid: “Can I please you with an apple?”
I was aware of the full line of guards and courtiers watching me. I paused, straightened, plucked another apple off the tree nearest to me, and tossed it into the cart.
“You’re covered in mire,” Sigrid observed.
“We were not expecting visitors.” I stepped around the wheelbarrow, revealing the extent of the mud on my skirts.
“You’ve kindled a fire.” The queen nodded toward the remnants of the night’s flames—a smoldering pile of ash on the lawn.
“A pyre,” I said, lightly. “For our house. Our roof fell in.” I waved a hand in the air, in the direction of the sky. “Quite a sight if you’d care to see from the rear. Lots of debris to rid ourselves of.”
The queen looked back and forth between Elin and I, and to the fire.
Sigrid could not make sense of what was in front of her—the mud, the labor.
She shook herself, as if she were a dog ridding water, and focused on Elin.
“You cannot look like that.” The first word came out with venom.
You—the one betrothed to the prince. You—the great Trojan horse.
“The last of the apples must be picked,” I told Sigrid.
“Industry is the forge where success is wrought,” Elin agreed, clasping her hands like a young girl.
Sigrid glanced back at her long line of courtiers, her guards. The velvet and the jewels looked incongruous in our scrabbly orchard. Following her gaze, I saw, on the back of his horse, Otto. He gave me an almost imperceptible shake of the head, and I looked away.
“We’ll go inside,” Sigrid announced.
I brushed my hands on my dress. “Girls!” I called to my daughters on the steps. “Tell the kitchens we have…” I eyed Sigrid with distaste. “A guest.”
In the entryway, my shoes squelched on the floor. Sigrid wasted no time; out of sight of her retinue, she declared: “She clearly cannot spend more time in this household.” To Elin, she added: “By gods, get ahold of yourself. Appearing before all of court like a pig in the mud.”
“You picked us,” I reminded her, leading the way into the great hall, Elin and Sigrid trailing behind me. “Unfortunately, we come with a bit of dirt under our nails.”
“A harvest cannot yield gold without a plowman’s furrow.” Elin settled on a chaise and primly arranged her dirty skirts around her.
Sigrid said: “A girl should not speak!”
I strode across the hall and began to open the window curtains, going down the row.
“I do not think you’ve made the journey so that we can all sit in silence.
” I used the activity—the time—to try to gather my thoughts and set them in order.
If Sigrid was still concerned with Elin’s comportment, particularly in front of courtiers, then she assumed Elin would still be marrying her son.
She did not yet know that Simeon was missing.
(Fists of dirt covering his fine clothes, his well-cut jaw.) It was impossible to guess exactly what Otto had said, or shared, upon his return home, but the safest course of action would be to presume that, in the queen’s mind, we had only just come back from successfully blockading the elopement.
I had expressly gone against Sigrid’s wishes by interfering.
She had threatened the future of me and my family, and she would be furious I had dared to test her wrath.
But the very fact of her arrival, at Bramley, in person, revealed something else—she still desperately needed Elin. In her own mind, at least.
Confirming my suspicions, Sigrid did not sit, but followed me along the row of windows, protesting like an agitated bird. “Stop that,” she commanded. She had probably never opened her own curtains. “I told you,” she said, when I turned, “what would happen if you obstructed the wedding.”
“So I have done all I can to preserve just that: a wedding!” I dropped the curtain pulls and faced her fully.
The trick would be to perform obstinance, but of a much lesser sort than murder.
It was easy to cast myself back to the mindset of two days before, easy to start believing, already, my own lies.
For they weren’t fully lies, but rather truths of an earlier self.
The conversation might have been genuine if Simeon had not appeared in the entryway the night before.
“Your son may be a prince, but he cannot abduct an unmarried girl on a whim.” I fixed her with a stare.
“Certainly, we can agree an elopement in a backwater hovel doesn’t serve anyone’s purpose. ”
Sigrid pulled herself upward, to her full height, the gesture belying some inner weakness. “I am not concerned with your purpose, and you’ve explicitly contradicted mine.”
“Forgive me, but your purpose, made clear by obfuscations that aid and abet your family members, is to keep good standing in the public eye. Is that not the reason for all this?”
Sigrid, not accustomed to being addressed in such a manner, swelled, ready to spew some venom. But she stopped herself, with great effort—feeling her need of me—and instead turned to look out the window.
Quietly, I added: “And however aligned or misaligned our purposes may be, I’ll remind you that your family needs mine behind which to stash your secrets.”
“I almost married my cousin,” she said, after a minute. “Sibling isn’t so different, is it? People make all these rules. It’s only the appearance of abiding that makes a difference. They’ll forgive anything if it’s behind a shut door.”
She had almost married a lot of people, by my memory, but I did not think it wise to say as much. “Nevertheless, you wanted Elin to be the door itself. And so she shall. But the door only remains effective if it believably appears to be a door! There must be an actual wedding.”
“To have a wedding there must be a groom, and he has not returned.”
“Maybe he’s taking a few days to nurse his wounds and treat his flea bites.”
“You just left him there?” Sigrid cried. “Like a common pauper?”
“We felt confident he could get himself home. After all, he’s the one that led the whole expedition in the first place.”
“Where is he?” she demanded.
Elin listened, face swiveling back and forth as we spoke.
“I haven’t the faintest notion. I’ll admit,” I continued, beginning to untie the strings of my cloak, “Elin’s retrieval was not without some resistance.” I took the cloak off, let it fall to the floor. “But Simeon came around. In the end.”
Sigrid paled, then turned a shade of green.
I looked past her, to the mirror above the mantel, and saw: As I’d expected, my neck was mottled and purple, bruised and welted.
The queen put a hand on her own neck, looking faint.
I wondered how many times she had felt similarly.
How often she’d had to face the unsettling, belly-turning evidence of her son’s wrongs.
Or maybe that was just it—she’d never had to see any kind of real evidence.
Her own point had been that transgressions were much easier to overlook, to ignore, when they were abstract.
“He seems capable of taking care of himself,” I added, to fill her silence.