by Ward, Tracey
“He’s acting odd,” I mumbled.
Kian nodded, looking down the hall after him.
“It’s all this growing up business,” he told me. “It makes you very odd.”
“Kian!” Bronwyn called. “I’m finished. Will you bring her in?”
He gestured for me to step into the kitchen. “I hope you’re hungry.”
When I walked in, I nearly fainted. The kitchen was so much smaller than I was used to at the castle, but it was infinitely cheerier. There was color everywhere, from the linens to hanging flowers, to fruit in bowels and baskets, to paintings on the walls. This room was eternal springtime in every corner. But what nearly knocked me dead was the large, round table in the center. It was covered entirely in every pastry I could ever have imagined and some I’d never seen or heard of. I felt saliva pool in the corners of my mouth simply looking at it.
“Happy birthday, Anna,” Bronwyn said happily.
“You did all of this for me?” I asked in disbelief.
“Oh you must be used to more than this for you at the castle.”
“Yes, but…”
I didn’t know how to finish that sentence. I didn’t know how to tell them that my birthday celebration was more for the Court than it ever was for me. It was a chance to have a ball, to have a feast, to have a drink. This was different. This was for me, all for me. Like when my mother woke me at midnight, sang to me and handed me my present where we sat hidden in the moonlight, just the two of us.
“Well,” Bronwyn said, filling the silence I had left hanging, “you might not be too pleased with me but you’ll just have to deal with it. I didn’t make all wild-berry tarts. I made all of my specialties and you’ll have to try each one. You might find something you like even more. Something you didn’t know existed.”
“Is she giving her the Try New Things speech?” Roarke asked from the doorway behind me.
“She’s building up to it,” Kian told him.
“Shush. Just because the two of you are lost causes it doesn’t mean I should give up on everyone.”
That night I ate my weight in pastry. Then I ate Roarke’s weight as well. I worried I would be sick by the end of it, but everything tasted so wonderful I couldn’t stop myself. This was Bronwyn’s magic, I decided.
Too soon it was time for me to return home. I was reluctant to go. I wanted to stay there at that table eating and laughing with Ro and his family, surrounded by Spring. Free and easy. But when the time came I reluctantly let Roarke drape my cloak over my shoulders, shrouding me in shadow once again. We waited outside for his father, watching the fireflies swirl in the trees. I secretly pretended they were pixies.
“It’s so lovely here, Ro. I would stay here forever if I could.”
“I wish you would.”
I snorted. “You’d grow tired of me.”
He shrugged. “Probably.”
“You’re mean! You’re supposed to say ‘Never! Please stay!’”
He grinned. “I won’t say that.”
“You’re mean,” I repeated.
“Only to you.”
That made me smile. If you were ever a child and a little boy pulled your hair for no apparent reason, you understand why.
“Do you like your presents?” he asked, gesturing to the two small wooden figures I held in my hands.
They were beautiful carvings, perfect for our games of war. What made them even better was that they were of us. Roarke and I.
“I love them,” I assured him, running my fingertips over their smooth surface. Then I looked at him sadly. “I can’t keep them, you know. If my father or any of the servants ever found them…”
“I know.” He reached out and gently took them from me. My hands felt especially empty without them. “I’ll keep them for you and bring them with me whenever I visit.”
“Are you ready, Anna?” Kian asked, appearing behind me.
“Yes, thank you.” I turned to Roarke and smiled. “Thank you for a wonderful birthday. I’ll never forget it.”
He smiled as well. “You’re welcome.”
“Goodbye, Ro.”
“Goodbye, Anna.”
Chapter Five
Roarke and I never played again in the orchard. That night, that goodbye, was it for he and I for a long time. It should have been more. I should have told him he was the greatest, purest friend I had ever known. That I thought him painfully good looking and rudely charming. That I loved him as dearly as anyone could love another human being. But I was young and those words would never have come. I was too unsure of myself then, but most importantly we simply did not know. And that’s the terrible truth of goodbyes. You never know when it’s the last one.
When Kian returned me to the castle, my mother was waiting for me near the gates. They exchanged quick hellos and goodbyes, then we walked casually together into the main courtyard as Roarke’s father returned home. It all went off perfectly without a hitch.
What wonderful liars and thieves were we?
My mother and I walked silently through the halls of the castle toward our chambers. They were deserted, which felt odd for this time of evening. Normally there were servants running around, turning down beds and helping ladies out of their dresses and hairpins. But all was eerily silent.
When we entered my chambers I felt my mother stiffen beside me. The room was cast in shadow, the only light a flickering candle on the windowsill. I quickly scanned the room to find my father sat at the end of my bed facing the door. Waiting.
“Charles, what are you doing in here?” she asked, her tone surprisingly even given her rigid posture.
“Where have you ladies been?” he asked softly.
I trembled involuntarily. His tone… it was dangerous.
“Out, as I told you. We had a dinner engagement.”
“With whom?”
“With Duke Walburton. Charles, I told you all of this. What is this about?” She stepped closer to him, surreptitiously sniffing the air. “Have you had a drink tonight?”
He looked at her with hard eyes. “You told me no such thing.”
“In fact I did. We talked about it. I told you the Duke had asked us to eat with him tonight. You told me, rather bitingly, to have a wonderful time.”
“I don’t recall any of this.”
“It doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”
My father stood abruptly. His shadow moved violently with him, filling the room, falling over me.
“Mind your tongue, Evelyn.”
“Father, please,” I begged uselessly, stepping to my mother’s side. “We only had dinner with him. We’ve done it before and you never minded.”
He looked down at me, his face dark. “You’ve asked my permission before.”
My mother and I remained silent. There was no use in telling him that we had had his permission. It would only make him angrier.
“What are you wearing?” he asked me, gripping my cloak. He pulled it roughly from my shoulders, grabbing a section of my hair as well. I cried out as he yanked it.
“Charles!” my mother exclaimed, reaching out for me.
He pushed her easily aside. When he saw my simple green dress he sneered. “What is this?”
“It’s just a dress,” she said quietly.
“This is a peasant’s dress. What is she doing in a peasant’s dress, Evelyn?”
“She saw one on a girl in the city once and she wanted to try one on. It was her birthday wish. That’s all.”
He continued to glare at me, his eyes raking me over. “You look like a commoner. Like a whore. Is that what you want to be, Annabel Lee? A common whore?”
Tears began to stream down my face. They flew off my cheeks as I shook my head violently. “No, father. No!”
He brought his face down level to mine. I could see nothing but his eyes, I could smell nothing but his breath. Both were clean and hot.
“Then you shouldn’t dress as one. Or I know some men who would love to treat you like one,” he
growled.
My breath froze in my throat. I couldn’t breathe or swallow. I could only nod my understanding.
He straightened then threw my cloak across the room toward the fire.
“Burn it,” he told my mother harshly. “And when you have her in her nightdress, burn the dress on her back. There’ll be no more of this. No more dinners out, no more playtime, no more dress up. She’s thirteen. It’s time she starts acting like a woman and fulfilling her duties as such.”
When he left the room he took all of the air out with him. I collapsed in a heap on the floor, my face buried in my hands as hot tears scalded my cheeks. I was flushed with shame and embarrassment. I heard my mother take a shuddering breath then she was there beside me on the floor. She wrapped me up in her arms, rocking me as though I were a toddler, not a teenager.
We never spoke a word of it. Hours later we were lying together in my bed, our hands clenched together tightly.
By morning, my simple green joy was nothing but ash on the hearth.
***
I was not allowed back into the kitchens even in passing. Mrs. Pomphel caught me in the halls with my father one afternoon months later and asked me why I hadn’t visited her lately. She mentioned, with greater meaning than my father could understand, that I was terribly missed.
“Annabel Lee is a lady now. She has more important matters that require her attention than playtime,” my father told her firmly.
When she looked at me her eyes were full of sadness and pity. It made me ache with embarrassment.
The loss of Roarke and the time we spent together sank heavy inside me, like a stone in my belly. For the first few months it pulled me under the surface, suffocating me. I cried every night and every day I imagined myself in the orchard with Ro. I shouldn’t have done it, it only made it worse. One day when I was fourteen I foolishly walked past the entrance to the maze. I knew what would happen. I knew what ghosts it would resurrect and send to haunt me, but I wanted it. I wanted the pain. I wanted to remember him. To try to feel again, even just for a moment, how I felt when I was with him. Free, happy, loved.
What I got instead was a terrible heartache that landed me on the cold stone floor of the hall in a dark corner. I cried uncontrollably feeling weak and stupid.
“Are you alright?” a quiet voice asked.
My head jerked up to find a girl my age with blond hair and round, brown eyes looking down at me worriedly. She was small like her voice. Sweet looking.
I shook my head, wiping at my eyes. “No, I don’t think so.”
“Oh dear.” She came to kneel in front of me, surprising me. She locked me in with her earnest stare, something so foreign and unfamiliar at Court. “What’s happened?”
“I lost my friend,” I wept, wiping my face with the silk sleeve of my dress. Father would love that. “My best friend. My only friend, really.”
The girl handed me a crisp handkerchief with a large lavender E embroidered in the corner. I took it gratefully.
“You can’t only have the one friend. You’re Annabel Lee, for goodness sake.”
I looked at her in surprise, wiping my eyes. “You know me?”
“I know of you. Everyone does.”
I groaned, burying my face in my hands. I felt a small hand on my shoulder begin to rub slow circles.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you. But your mother was very close with the Queen, wasn’t she?”
I nodded, my face still hidden. “They were children together.”
“As were you and Prince Frederick.”
It wasn’t a question. I understood how she knew of me, how everyone knew of me, but there’s a difference between being known and being known of. I wanted to be known. To be seen, to be heard.
I lifted my head suddenly, desperately catching the girl’s eyes. “What is your name?”
“Elaine.”
“Elaine, can I tell you something that I’ve never told anyone?”
She looked uncomfortable. I couldn’t say I blamed her. She was already sitting on the dusty floor with an emotional stranger, one who lived and breathed in close proximity to the Royal Family. In the Court, this was a dream come true to a schemer. But to an innocent, to one as sweet and earnest as I believed this girl to be, it held the potential of becoming a nightmare. My secret could pull her into a dark, tangled web from which she might never escape.
“Alright,” she said finally, her voice and eyes hesitant.
I took a deep breath. “I don’t like lamb.”
She blinked. “What?”
“My father told Prince Frederick once that I favored lamb. Frederick was going on at dinner about how delicious the lamb was and my father told him that it was my favorite meal as well. It’s not. I don’t care for it at all, but I have to pretend that I love it every Tuesday when it’s served and Frederick raises his glass to me in a toast to ‘our favorite meal’ when all I can think about is that this thing in front of me used to be a sweet, white lamb running free through a field. It had a mamma and siblings and a name and now it’s sitting here next to green beans waiting for me to choke it down all to please a Prince.” I took her hands fervently in mine. “I hate lamb, Elaine. I want roast pig and lots of it!”
Elaine giggled with what sounded like relief. It was infectious. I laughed as well, feeling my sorrow and tension spill out of me and evaporate into the air. It was a small secret, one silly little thing, but it meant the world to be able to tell someone. It was the sort of thing I used to tell Roarke. The kind of thing we would laugh at as I was laughing with Elaine now.
And that was the moment that I knew I would be alright. I would miss him every single day and my heart ached for him as I grew older. As I realized just what he’d meant to me. But he was not the sun, the moon, nor the stars. His company was not the breath in my lungs or the strength in my limbs and eventually I would recover. Though I never forgot.
My father took a much greater interest in my life. While before I had been a child my mother was raising for him, I was now a young woman, the finished product he had been waiting on. I was a fully formed card he could play in this never ending game at Court, and while my father was a hard man, this was the one game that he loved to play. And I must admit, he was exquisite at it.
Chapter Six
Just after my fifteenth birthday I attended the annual Tournament of Games. It took place in the Spring time beside the lake. The men at court participated in a number of challenges both in the water and on the field while we ladies stood beneath parasols and behind fans, smiling at our champions. I had always attended, it being one of the rare out of castle gate excursions my father allowed, but this year was a different experience for me. Before I had been a child watching excitedly with my mother. Now I was a young woman surrounded by other young women from Court, laughing and batting our eyelashes. My father watched, he was always watching me now, but it was from a distance. It gave me a strange freedom I’d never known. One I found I rather liked.
“Annabel Lee, The Governor is frowning,” Suzanne told me, nudging my shoulder with hers.
I groaned. She was right. My governess, or The Governor as we all called her, was standing just outside the circle of ladies I was mingling in. While my father kept his distance with anything but his eyes, my governess stayed physically near at all times. He had brought her into service only a few months ago when my mother began to suffer from violent headaches. My mother and I both resented her presence.
“What have I done wrong now?” I muttered.
“I’d say it’s the buttercream smeared on your cheek, but what do I know?” Elaine said.
I quickly swiped at my face but my fingers came back clean.
I narrowed my eyes at her. “Very funny.”
“I thought it was.”
“It could be anything,” Suzanne said dismissively. “Maybe her shoes are pinching or her stockings are too tight.”
I glared at the Governor’s taught face. “Her everything is too
tight.”
Suzanne laughed, her throaty voice carrying across the field, turning heads. Everything about Suzanne turned heads. Her height, her curves, her chocolate brown curls. She was built to be noticed and she knew it. I had met her at a ball not long after I met Elaine. She had walked straight up to me, met my eyes and asked if I knew who she was.
“An Amazonian?” I had asked, not liking her haughty tone. “Truly, how tall are you?”
“Tall enough to squash you. Can you hear me from down there? I asked a question. Do you know who I am?”
I did.
“I don’t,” I said.
She’d cast me a feline smile that ran deep in her eyes. “I’m your new best friend.”
“I’m sorry?”
“You heard me. We’re going to be friends.”
“I don’t believe I want to be friends with you.”
“No, you shouldn’t. And I don’t want to be friends with you either. But here’s the thing,” she said, leaning in closer, towering over me. It was an intimidation method, one my father used often. I met it head on, never flinching. Never cowering. Not anymore. “You’re close with Prince Frederick. Rumor has it that you’re the favorite at Court to marry him. But you won’t. I will.”
“Congratulations,” I replied dryly.
“Thank you. Now here’s where you come in. I’m going to stick to you like glue so that every time Frederick is with you, he’s also with me. You’ll never have a moment alone with him again, I promise you that.”
I snorted. “Then you really will be my best friend.”
Her face shifted for just a split second, only a faint glimmer of uncertainty before she mastered herself.
“What do you mean by that?”
“You’re going to stick to me no matter what I say or do, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Then you’ll have to wait and see.”
What Suzanne saw was that I had no desires to marry Prince Frederick. She was true to her word and followed me everywhere. From dawn to dusk, if Suzanne could be with me, she was. She was a natural at Court, playing the game with the same skill as people twice her age, a master of conniving and flirtation, and while it made me hate her at first, I grew to love her. I made no secret of my disinterest in becoming Queen. It wasn’t long before she dropped her mask and showed me her true colors. They were bright, brilliant and a little scary. But at least they were honest.