Because she was trembling with excitement at the touch of his hand, Laetitia could only murmur rather weakly,
“Y-you are going – too quickly!”
“Nonsense!” the King replied, “I am only emulating your own behaviour, my precious, by going bull-headed at what I want and what I intend to have.”
He laughed.
Then he said,
“You set me an example of determination that I can do nothing but admire and follow and you are hardly the right person to be lecturing me about the conventions or propriety!”
Laetitia blushed and took her eyes from his.
“When you talk to me like that,” she said a little provocatively, “I begin to wonder if I am the – right person to be – your wife – and a Queen.”
“It does not matter whether you are right or wrong,” the King replied. “I want you and I want you quickly.”
There was a note in his voice that she had not heard before and she said,
“I love you, and I suppose I shall do – anything you tell me to do, but are you – quite sure that you really – want me?”
“Can you ask me such an absurd question?” the King enquired.
“I was only thinking that what I did was to save Stephanie from having to – marry you and now that she is safe because the Grand Duchess is dead you do not – have to take a – wife from Ovenstadt.”
The King laughed and it was a very tender sound.
“I know exactly what you are doing, my darling,” he said, “You are safeguarding yourself against any reproaches I might make in the future about being pressurised into marriage by you or by magic.”
He laughed again before he added,
“But that is exactly what is happening and you or gypsy magic, it does not matter which, have made it utterly impossible for me to marry anybody else. So the sooner you fulfil your part of the bargain the better!”
He raised her hand to his lips as he went on,
“We are already married according to gypsy law which, whether people like it or not, is the law of my blood and yours.”
He spoke very seriously and Laetitia sighed,
“I love you for believing that – and please – I want to be your wife. I want it so – desperately that it is only because now it is possible that I am giving you a – chance to escape.”
“I realise that,” the King replied, “but there is no escape for you or for me, my darling, now or ever and I will make sure of that.”
As he spoke, he puts his arms around her and drew her close to him.
“S-somebody – may see us!” Laetitia murmured.
His lips were very close to hers.
“Let them!” he answered. “The only thing that matters is to convince you for all time that you are completely and absolutely mine.”
As he finished speaking, his lips were on hers and, as Laetitia felt her whole being melt into his, she knew that what he had said was true.
She was his and there was no escape for either of them.
*
The crowds were cheering madly, their voices rising higher and higher in their excitement.
The sound filled the air deafeningly as the carriage in which the King and Laetitia were driving became filled with flowers that were being thrown into it.
First the blossoms covered their feet and now, as they were almost waist-high, it was, Laetitia thought irrepressibly, like sitting in a scented bath.
It was impossible to speak, but the King was holding her hand tightly beneath the flowers.
While they waved at the crowds with their other hands, they were conscious only of their happiness and the love that had enveloped them like a blazing light ever since they had been joined as man and wife before the altar in the Cathedral.
It was typical, Laetitia thought, and therefore a portent of the future that the King should have got his way in every particular.
By pretending that the troubles in his country were far worse than they actually were, he had persuaded the Grand Duke and Princess Olga that he must not only be married to Laetitia within three months, but also that their marriage should take place in his own country.
He had been so eloquent that finally Princess Olga, then the Grand Duke, raised no more objections.
They all therefore arrived to stay in the King’s Palace, finding the elation of the Zvotanians a delightful relief after the mourning and gloom at home.
Nobody in Ovenstadt, as it happened, was privately mourning the Grand Duchess, whatever they had to pretend in public and Princess Aspasia had said frankly to Laetitia,
“They are longing really to hang out flags because she is no more! Now everybody can be as happy as they were before she brought her nasty Prussian ideas into our country!”
The Grand Duke, however, had to behave in a conventional manner and, while he agreed to allow Stephanie to marry Kyril, because he was now the Crown Prince, they were told that they must wait at least six months before they announced their engagement.
“It’s not fair!” Stephanie had complained when she learned that Laetitia could marry the King so quickly.
“You can see Kyril every day and be with him as much as you like,” Laetitia replied, “but you know that, as the King has so much to do, we can only see each other very seldom.”
It had in fact been almost impossible, because for the King to arrive in the Capital of Ovenstadt involved a great deal of pomp and protocol.
Instead on two occasions, when he said he could not go on any longer without being with Laetitia, she had, with Princess Olga, Kyril and Marie-Henriette, met him at Thor Castle.
They had stayed there with only the minimum number of attendants, and Laetitia had managed, because the King was naturally allotted the best room in The Castle, to be with him alone in the sitting room where he had first kissed her and where she had so nearly become his gypsy wife without the blessing of the Church.
“I love you!” the King said to her the first evening when Princess Olga had allowed them to be together for exactly twenty minutes.
“And I – love you!” Laetitia had replied.
“If only I was a gypsy instead of a King,” he continued, “we would not have to do all this damned waiting. We could start off in our caravan and I could make love to you and tell you how much you mean to me all day and night without half-a-dozen minions knocking on the door and telling me that I have another engagement!”
He spoke angrily and Laetitia laughed.
“It will not be long now,” she said, “and oh, darling, wonderful, magnificent Viktor, I want to be with you just as much as you want to be with me!”
“I don’t know what you have done to me,” the King said, “or whether it is the magic that the Voivode gave us, but I can think of nothing but you.”
His lips were on her cheek as he went on,
“While I am passing laws and listening to the most serious debates, all I can see is your face and feel your mouth beneath mine.”
It was impossible to answer him because as if what he had said excited him he was kissing her.
It was so rapturous and they were so close to each other that she thought it would be impossible for any ceremony in a Cathedral to make them closer.
Now, as they drove on through crowds of people all waving flags, she thought that a new chapter in her life was beginning and it was so wonderful that there were no words in which to describe it.
When she walked up the aisle on Kyril’s arm to where the King was waiting for her, followed by Stephanie and Marie-Henriette as her bride’s maids, she sent up a fervent prayer of thankfulness.
It was not only that it was now possible for her to marry the man she loved, but also that Kyril had taken the place of the spoilt, tiresome Otto and one day he would be the Grand Duke of Ovenstadt as she had always wanted her father to be.
She remembered how the Voivode had said,
“You must follow your heart.”
That was what she had done and it had broug
ht her everything she had longed for and which she had thought she could never have.
The carriage in which they were travelling had now reached the gates of the City.
As it drew to a standstill and footmen began to clear some of the flowers away so that they could step out, Laetitia saw waiting for them a phaeton drawn by a superb team of horses.
She knew that was the way they would travel to the King’s Summer Palace where they were to spend the first nights of their honeymoon.
After that she was not certain where they would be going and he had told her that it was a secret.
When they had said goodbye to the Civic dignitaries, the King helped her into the phaeton before climbing into the driving seat. As he picked up the reins, Laetitia felt as if once again she was living in a dream.
Now at last she could be alone with the man she loved and, as they drove off, the King turned to look at her and she knew that he was thinking the same as her.
Keeping well behind them was an escort of four troopers of the King’s Cavalry, but otherwise they were to be as free as was possible.
“There is no need to be afraid of anything, my darling,” the King had said to Laetitia last night. “The authorities have assured me that the man they captured and who has been executed for the deaths of the Grand Duchess and Prince Otto was the last real danger in this part of Europe.”
“Are you – sure?” Laetitia had asked anxiously.
The King shrugged his shoulders.
“Of course there will be others, but this man had been pursuing me for some time and was, they tell me now, responsible for the bomb that injured but did not kill King Frederick.”
“I shall always worry about you – ”
“We shall have to ask for a magic spell which will keep us both safe,” the King smiled. “But I believe our love is a better protection than anything else and your beauty will certainly provide my subjects with something better to talk about than the revolutionary ideas that have occupied them in the past.”
The reports from the Capital were confirmed, Laetitia found, that the troublemakers had all been spurned and ignored because the majority of the populace were only interested in the King’s wedding and in seeing his bride.
It delighted her to notice when she was driving to the Cathedral that there were a number of gypsies amongst those in the crowds waving to them, for, as the King had told her, he had kept his promise.
He had brought in a law that the gypsies were not to be harassed, but were to be welcomed everywhere they journeyed in his country.
‘That should bring us luck,’ she told herself, knowing that the gypsies of every tribe would give them a very special blessing on their wedding day.
The King drove quickly and with an expertise that Laetitia had expected and they reached the Summer Palace in only a little over an hour from the Capital.
It was a white building, set on the side of a large lake and with the mountains of the same range that extended into Ovenstadt rising behind it.
It looked very beautiful in the afternoon sunshine and, as they drew near it, Laetitia put her hand on the King’s knee to say,
“Our first home – together.”
“A home, my precious, which we shall fill with the magic of the love which I shall give you tonight.”
She blushed at the passion in his voice and the fire in his eyes.
Then, as they drove on, she said,
“When we arrive, I want you to take me into the garden. I have something very – special to – show you.”
“In the garden?” the King questioned.
“Yes.”
He did not ask any more, but merely moved his horses on a little faster as if he wanted to reach his Palace and have her to himself.
He had given instructions that there were to be only the normal number of servants to greet them when they arrived.
The house was cool after the heat outside and at first glance Laetitia saw that it was very beautiful.
She went upstairs to take off her travelling cloak and bonnet and found that her bedroom was lovelier than she could possibly have imagined.
She knew from what the King had told her that it had been redecorated for her.
The blue walls, the pink curtains and a painted ceiling with cupids rioting amongst Gods and Goddesses were part of the beauty not only of her dreams but of the bright colours the gypsies loved.
But she could not wait to look at anything while she was longing to be with the King and, when she ran downstairs, he was waiting for her in a room filled with flowers and with huge windows opening into a Rose Garden outside.
He was standing by the window and, as she ran towards him, he held out his arms to pull her close to him and kiss her wildly, passionately, demandingly so that they were both breathless with the wonder of it.
“I thought that the day would never come when no one could ever dispute that you belong to me!” he sighed. “But now we have been married twice, my darling one, and you are mine as I always meant you to be.”
Then, as if he knew that he must control his desire for her a little longer, he said,
“You told me that you wanted to go out into the garden.”
“Yes – and it is – important,” Laetitia said. “Do you remember what this is?”
As she spoke, she showed the King what she held in her hand.
He looked at it curiously for a moment before he said,
“I think it is the bunch of twigs that the Voivode had beside him when we were married, but he did not do anything with them.”
“It is clever of you to remember,” Laetitia said. “He left them for me in the caravan and I know now why he did so.”
“Why?”
“Because, although I never thought it could happen, the Voivode knew that we were to be man and wife – for ever!”
In case the King did not understand she added,
“These twigs come from seven different kinds of trees and, if he had broken them as he would have done in a marriage of the Kalderash, he would have thrown them one by one to the winds.”
“And then?” the King asked.
“He would have told us they typified the true meaning of the marriage bond,” Laetitia replied, “and it would be impossible for us to break our pledge to one another until either of us has died.”
The King smiled.
He took the twigs from Laetitia. And snapped them one by one and then threw them among the roses in the garden until there were no more.
Then he put his arms around her and said,
“Now I know you believe that we are married for ever, not only by the vows that we have just made in Church, but by the magic of the gypsies.”
“I knew – you would – understand.”
“I understand, my lovely wife,” he breathed and kissed her.
*
Later they dined in the dining room lit by candles and ate delicious dishes accompanied by a soft ruby-coloured wine that Laetitia thought tasted very like the wine the gypsies had given them.
She saw the King was watching her as she drank and, when she looked at him enquiringly, he said,
“You are right, it is the gypsy wine!”
“How did you come by it?” Laetitia asked.
“Three bottles were left at the Palace yesterday evening,” the King replied, “and the servants were told by the gypsy woman who left them that they were to be given to me personally.”
He smiled as he continued,
“As you can imagine, the servants were far too afraid of being cursed by the gypsies if they disobeyed and did not bring the bottles straight to me. There was also a note with them.”
“What did it say?” Laetitia asked eagerly.
“It said,” the King replied quietly, “‘with the blessings of the Kalderash to a King who has kept his word’.”
Laetitia clapped her hands.
“They were thanking you for making them welcome in Zvotana.”
“That is true,
” the King said, “and, when I undid the covering of the bottles, I found that there was something for you in the parcel.”
“What was that?”
The King drew three bracelets from his pockets.
“These were round the necks of the three bottles.”
Laetitia gave a little cry of delight, for each bracelet was fashioned with the exquisite workmanship that she had seen on the gold goblets of the Kalderash.
She knew that not only were they of gold, but the precious stones set in each one were real, one being set with rubies, another with diamonds and the third with emeralds.
Then, as she looked at the three bracelets, she gave an exclamation and the King said,
“I noticed it too – the colours of the flag of Zvotana!”
Laetitia slipped them over her wrists and she sighed,
“If the gypsies are grateful, I am ecstatically grateful that thanks, I am sure, to their magic, I have been able to marry you.”
“That is what I thought,” the King said, “and now, my darling, because I, too, am grateful, I have something to show you.”
He moved from the table as he spoke and, taking her hand, drew her to her surprise not through the door by which they had entered the dining room, but out into the garden.
It was a different part from where they had been before and they walked past shrubs rather than flowers with trees towering overhead, which gave it a feeling of mystery in the fading light.
The sun was sinking in a blaze of glory below the far horizon and overhead the stars were just coming out, one by one.
It would not be long, Laetitia knew, before it was dark and the stars would fill the sky, as they had the night she had danced round the gypsy fire and been married by the Voivode.
There had been a moon that night and she knew that tonight there would also be one which would make them remember the magic and music they had shared together on the plateau below Thor Castle.
The King was not talking, but he put his arms round her and she wondered where they were going until suddenly they came to a little clearing among the trees.
It was then she realised that the trunks were so close together that they seemed to form almost walls round them.
But there was one clear space where they could look over the lake.
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