Homage and Honour

by Candy Rae

  “Do they really expect me to wear this?” she demanded, holding up the dress. It was of heavily brocaded velvet, a dark green colour and looked very long and very heavy. On the floor under the chair were matching green slippers. The undergarments too were of superfine quality.

  “It’s wear that or meet our host naked,” replied David who was eyeing his own garments with dismay, “mine aren’t much better.”

  His tunic and trews were also of green velvet and with them were some strange half-boots, also in green.

  David helped Anne struggle into her dress.

  “Wonder how the children are faring?”

  Two of the said children arrived shortly afterwards, ushered in by another plain-dressed woman.

  Annette’s dress was a miniature version of her mother’s; Xavier’s was like his father’s but much fancier. His was trimmed with shiny sequins and he looked very uncomfortable.

  “Where’s Ruth?” asked Anne.

  “She didn’t want to get dressed,” answered Annette with a giggle, “and if you think we look strange, just wait until you see her!”

  At last, a very hot and flustered servant girl half-carried the youngest Crawford into the room.

  They couldn’t help it; Anne and David laughed aloud.

  Ruth was dressed in a profusion of pink lace.

  Her dress was shorter than Annette’s; it fell halfway to her ankles and was a mass of flounces with an inordinate amount of frilly petticoats showing underneath the pink velvet skirt. Anything less suited to the tomboyish Ruth would have been hard to imagine. Her curls bubbled round her face (which was one red-visaged scowl) and a large pink silken flower had been pinned to it.

  As she squirmed out of the girl’s arms she wrenched the flower off, dropped it to the floor and stamped on it with angry petulance.

  “Wants me twousies and me boots,” she announced.

  The girl looked at Anne and David.

  “My Lady,” she began in her slow drawl, “I tried to explain that she is a girl and that girls of a certain station in life never wear trousers. She would not listen.”

  “I will speak to my daughter,” said Anne, feeling sorry for the girl, “but perhaps you could find something a bit plainer for her to wear, without all the frills and flounces?”

  The girl looked relieved.

  “I will try My Lady and thank you for not being angry with me.”

  Anne looked at Ruth, “will that do?”

  “I surpose,” replied that young damsel before she added, “soon, velly soon.” She stamped an angry little foot.

  “I’ll go and arrange it,” said the girl and fled.

  “She is a slave,” whispered David to Anne, “she had a slave tattoo on her wrist. No wonder she was nervous.”

  The original woman brought in a tureen of hot cereal at that point. Placing it on the table, she informed them that the Duke would attend on them within the candlemark.

  “Perhaps we’ll get some answers,” replied David, helping himself to the hot maize, “all this is starting to get on my nerves.”

  “Does he wish to meet the children or just us?” asked Anne.

  “All of your Ladyship’s family,” she answered, curtsied and left.

  “Why did that woman curtsy to you Mummy?” asked Xavier through a mouthful of mouth-watering, crusty bread.

  “Don’t talk with your mouth full,” she chided.

  “We’ll know soon enough,” decided David, a burgeoning suspicion in his mind. He knew something of the succession crisis, having read a news pamphlet not long ago.

  “Did your mother ever say anything to you about a relationship with the South?” he asked his wife.

  Anne shook her head, “I’m sure Uncle James knew something but he never said more than a few words to me. I was never much interested you see.”

  “Go on.”

  “Last leave from the Vada he talked to Mother for hours. Not the last time we saw him and Siya, the time before, when he was still with the Vada.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “You were at market.”

  “What did they say?”

  “I only overheard a little. He was asking her, no demanding that she tell you something and she was answering not yet. She said we didn’t need to know and then she asked him to destroy all her possessions when she died. He left the next day, he was going west into Lind on some mission or other.”

  “Her possessions? The ones in the strongbox under her bed?”

  “I asked her what was in it once and she told me it was memories.”

  “It was papers,” said Xavier.

  “How do you know?” asked his mother.

  Xavier went red.

  “I peeked,” he confessed, “I’m sorry.”

  “What kind of papers?” asked David, ignoring this infringement.

  “Funny papers, with names and dates and things. They crackled when I touched them.”

  “Were they old, these papers?”

  Xavier nodded, “some of them were, they were brown round the edges.”

  “Did you read any of them?”

  But Xavier knew nothing more.

  David drew Anne away from the table, “I believe I know what these papers are.”

  “What?”

  “Documents proving your lineage. You know of the story of the Hidden Princess?”

  That’s a tale for children, there is no truth in it.”

  “I’m not so sure.”

  Anne’s face was filled with alarm.

  “But that would mean …”

  “Yes,” he answered gently, “You are her descendant!”

  Anne burst into tears.

  When Duke William Duchesne and Count Charles Cocteau entered Anne was standing gazing out of the window embrasure, David by her side. The three children sitting at the table were wrangling over some toys the servants had brought to keep them amused; Ruth, still dressed in her pink flounces, remained mutinous.

  David turned a grave face in their direction.

  “We know,” David’s greeting was quiet, composed. He felt Anne trembling, “at least we think we know why you have brought us here.”

  William bowed deeply to Anne, a gesture followed by Charles.

  “A matter of inheritance I think you said?” David addressed this question to Charles.

  “What I said was true,” said Charles.

  “Up to a point.”

  “What made you realise?” asked Charles with interest.

  “The bows, the deference, the secrecy, take your pick. I began to think, put two and two together, I remembered listening to my mother-in-law’s wails of anguish when you found her strongbox. I realised then, I think, that it contained not merely what she called her memories.”

  “No,” admitted Charles, “it contained the proof we needed.”

  “So what now?”

  Duke William Duchesne spoke up then, “we should discuss this without the children present.”

  “What is there to discuss?” cried Anne, “you have brought us here, taken us away from our home and for what?”

  “To make you our Queen,” he answered.

  “No,” she replied in a low hard voice, “I do not want this, you cannot make me.”

  “It will be either you or your son,” he answered. “It is your choice.”

  Anne went white, all colour draining from her face as she fainted.

  A servant was summoned and the woman sped away to get some sal-volatile.

  Anne regained consciousness to find herself lying on the window settee.

  Regarding the two men she asked, “and if I refuse?”

  “We will put your son on the throne.”

  “He is only eight years old.”

  William Duchesne shrugged. “That is of no moment. It is the bloodline that is important. The security of the kingdom depends on it. Absolutely. Our treaty with the Larg states that our country is ceded to the Murdoch bloodline and none other. We will do this, must do this
, with or without your support.”

  He leant forward.

  “My Lady, accept the throne. You and your family can be happy here, you will live a life of luxury, untroubled by any worries.”

  “A figurehead you mean,” said David, “who would rule? Who would hold the real power?”

  During the next few days the family became more or less (mostly less) accustomed to their new life. They were not permitted to leave the tower rooms allocated to them. David especially felt the enforced idleness most strongly.

  He was a farmer born and bred and would, in the normal course of things, have been up at dawn and busy working until dusk.

  Ruth too felt the difference keenly and to a lesser extent so did Xavier. Quarrels erupted between the three children.

  Simpler garments had been procured for Ruth but she still hated the skirts and begged her maid each morning for trousers. Her pleas and tantrums were ignored.

  David and Anne spent the long hours ensconced with either the Duke of Duchesne or Count Charles and at last came to accept that they and theirs were doomed to remain in the South. There was only one alternative available to his wife taking the throne if the senior Murdoch line failed and that was to abdicate in favour of Xavier. Even if she did so and she and David were permitted to return to the North, it had been made clear that their two daughters would not be permitted to go with them.

  The original Elliot Murdoch’s treaty with the Larg was explained to them in some detail.

  “So I will have to accept,” said a bitter Anne, “there is no way out. At least Jessica has escaped it all.”

  “We will have to make the sacrifice to ensure the safety of the people of Murdoch,” said David in the relative privacy of their rooms.

  “I could become reconciled to it in time if it was myself only but it is the children I worry about. What kind of life will they have here?” fretted Anne, biting her lip.

  “A fairly comfortable one on the whole,” David replied, “food, palatial surroundings, beautiful clothes, wealth.”

  “At the expense of their freedom. I know life on the farm was hard and I used to dream of the time when we might be rich but I don’t like it here, the slaves, the fact that women have little freedom, why, they hardly even educate the girls. Look at how much of an ignoramus Jess told us Beth was when she arrived at Vada. She could hardly count past twenty.”

  “She could read.”

  “She could not write,” flashed Anne.

  “Both Anne and Ruth will receive an education, I promise.”

  “How long are we to be incarcerated in these rooms?”

  “We are being moved,” he answered, “closer to Fort. The fever is gone. I must say that William Duchesne is a well-educated man, polite and urbane. He wants us to like it here, I’m sure of that. He does not want civil war.”

  “Civil war?” Anne paled, “why would there be a civil war?”

  “Duchesne is trying to prevent it; he and another two Dukes, van Buren and Cocteau, they are the ones who set out to find us. He has Larg support for your claim to the throne. The other Lords are scrambling around trying to find a solution for when the King dies, Princess Susan, it is said, will not long survive him and that is if she doesn’t die first. We have to make the sacrifice. You see that, don’t you?”

  “Oh I see it all right but it doesn’t mean I have to like it.”

  “The King is dying. We are going to one of Duke Cocteau’s country estates which will place us near to the centre of government so that, when the moment comes, they can move quickly and so avoid bloodshed.”

  * * * * *

  Rakthed (Fifth Month of Winter) – AL156

  Crisis (7)

  In the Conclave Chamber at the Palace of Fort, three Dukes sat round the otherwise empty table.

  “Elliot is dying,” Sam Baker announced, “he won’t survive the night.”

  “Tomorrow morning then,” said Tom Brentwood with satisfaction, rubbing his hands together.

  “Yes, by noon tomorrow the Regency Conclave will rule in fact.”

  “No Lord will disagree,” agreed Tom Brentwood

  “Susan is a slender thread on which to base our future security,” said David Gardiner, “I would wish she was stronger. The illness took much of her strength.”

  “She will have the very best of care and the doctors see no reason why she should not survive.”

  “And if she should not?”

  “The King’s sister, Princess Anne is the next in line.”

  “Surely you don’t intend to declare her the heir presumptive? She is a nun. Is there no-one else?”

  King Elliot was very thorough in his cleansing policy.”

  He looked at Sam Baker who was sitting back in his chair with the air of ‘one who knows something you don’t’.

  “Out with it man,” he ordered.

  “There was a rumour, a rumour based on fact,” began Sam Baker in a low voice. The Dukes of Gardiner and Brentwood leant closer the better to hear what he was saying.

  * * * * *

  Dunrhed (First Month of Summer) – AL157

  Crisis (8)

  The King was dead.

  He was buried with due pomp and ceremony in the royal vault. All the nobility who lived close to Fort were present and, under the Lord Regent’s eagle eye, all paid homage and fealty to the infant queen.

  The Fealtatis (homage) ceremony, where promises were given and received by Queen Susan, was surreal. Everyone present in the throne room knew her days were numbered. She had a pallid skin, large eyes in a thin face and she was growing weaker with each passing day.

  The Queen, who had celebrated her second birthday not a tenday before, sat on the overlarge throne, a thin, pale figure wrapped in a superfine blanket to ward off chills.

  As she had been taught, the tiny mite held out one tiny claw-like and trembling hand over the head of each vassal in turn and suffered him to take the hand and kiss it in visual homage watched over by Lord Regent Brentwood who spoke the traditional words on her behalf.

  Duke William Duchesne could not help but compare her to his own brood. His granddaughter would not have sat so. Queen Susan did not have the energy to jump up and down, she didn’t even wriggle, her hand was raised mechanically and just as mechanically dropped to her lap as each vassal backed away. He watched, waited and made preparations for the day they knew was coming, the day when he would march on Fort and proclaim the new Queen, one with three healthy children.

  He had all the documentary proof to sustain their claim and the Larg had accepted that Anne Crawford was the true blood descendant of Murdoch.

  The Dukes of Gardiner, van Buren, Brentwood, Graham and Baker would just have to accept it.

  * * * * *

  “He will ask us for closer ties for his support,” opined Charles Cocteau who was trying to explain some aspects of the Kingdom of Murdoch to a still resentful David Crawford, but a David Crawford who was gradually coming round to an acceptance of the situation. “I think we must be prepared to make some concessions.”

  “Explain.”

  “The noble houses and the royal are all interrelated through marriage. It is probably the only thing that keeps us from each other’s throats.”

  A suspicion was forming in David’s mind, “closer ties?” he encouraged.

  “Marriage to one of your children,” said Charles.

  “An arranged marriage?”

  “It is usual.”

  “They are children.”

  “I myself was betrothed for a number of years and from a young age. If your oldest girl had remained with you, she would have been offered to one of the ducal houses in exchange for support. As things stand, my father will offer Princess Annette. The icing on the cake however is marriage to Xavier. All the Dukes and some Counts and Margraves too, would give much to have a daughter betrothed to the heir. You must be prepared; my father is likely to offer Xavier to Baker’s granddaughter. Baker would prefer a grandson on the throne rather th
an a grandson-in-law but he’ll accept. It is a pity you don’t have more children, royal children are a valuable commodity here in Murdoch.”

  “I am glad that we do not,” said David with some heat.

  “You must start thinking as a southerner if you are to survive here,” warned Charles, “both Annette and Xavier will be betrothed and there is nothing you can do about it. Get used to the idea. You and your wife are simple farmers no longer. You are the future Lord Prince Consort to the Queen, you will hold a ruling seat on the Conclave as your wife’s representative.”

  “Me, not Anne?”

  “Have you not been listening? Anne is a female and she will not be permitted to take an active part in government. It is the way it is.”

  “A King can command, a Queen cannot, is that what you are telling me?”

  Charles nodded, “we have never had a Queen Regnant before Susan and there are no laws set down about it but, mark my words, any major decisions will still require a majority in Conclave, just as if it is a regency. Anne will not be permitted to vote.”

  * * * * *

  Crisis (9)

  Duke William Duchesne knew that Sam Baker was planning to put his grandson Richard on the throne. He had a very efficient intelligence network, one that rivalled the official network of the King’s, now Queen’s government. He needed to take steps to stop him.

  He spoke to Henri Cocteau about how he had decided to engineer the solution.

  The two sent for Charles.

  “Take Moonlight,” said Henri Cocteau, “he’s the fastest horse in the stables,” grabbing a relm of parchment and dipping his pen in the ink in a dual movement. “I knew the then Princess Anne, Queen Susan’s great-aunt when she was young and vows or not, she will not like what Sam Baker is planning.”

  “What do I ask her?”

  “I very much doubt that the Reverend Mother will let you speak to her personally. It’s a secluded order Charles; they take perpetual vows of silence. No, you must speak to the Reverend Mother and ask her, nay beg her, to allow Anne to read this. She was a pretty little thing, always pious, always wanting to do the right thing. She was only about five years old when Elliot the Third murdered all but his closest legitimate line. I always thought that it was that, as much as anything, which led her to her vocation as a nun. Honour and duty mean a lot to her. She will not like an impostor laying claim to her brother’s throne.”