At the King's Command

by Susan Wiggs

  “He is sick. I know that. But he is also a boy. He wants desperately to be treated like a boy. To be loved—not with lavish and expensive gifts, but with your heart. Let me love him if you will not.”

  Her soft plea scourged him like a knotted whip. “Madam,” he said, whispering to keep himself in control, “if you knew how close I am to throttling you, you would be diving for cover on the instant.”

  She threw back her shoulders and tipped up her chin. “How can you keep him at a distance—your own flesh and blood, the child of the woman you love beyond the grave?”

  Stephen was taken aback. He wondered where she had gotten that notion. Then he remembered the day Juliana had found him at the shrine. Good God, could she truly think he went there out of love? In truth, he went to the shrine because he knew no way to remedy a failed love.

  The grief of losing his wife and elder son had never healed. Sometimes he bore it; other times he would hear the furious roar of a storm and only belatedly realize it was the tempest inside him. A part of him had been torn away. Oliver was the only intact portion of the past, and Stephen was terrified of the day the pattern would be altered by the lad’s passing.

  “I treat my son like a prince,” he said.

  “You treat him like he is on his deathbed! He spends every day waiting to die! Each day he lives should be a gift, Stephen. Why can you not understand? He is alive now. Every life is precious. Every hour, every minute, every breath Oliver takes. Each day should be a celebration, not a vigil. Not endless hours waiting for death to come.” Her accent became more pronounced and her breathing quickened. How could she care so compassionately for a boy she did not even know?

  “You speak a pretty case, Juliana,” Stephen said harshly. “However, your pleas impress me not. I know my son. Oliver is simply too fragile to celebrate life, whatever that means. Unbridled revelries would only hasten his death.”

  Vivid color shot to her cheeks. She stood on tiptoe, her small fists gripping the front of his jerkin. “The way you entomb your son in that hideaway, my lord, he already is dead.”

  Juliana Romanov de Lacey lived a double life. With her husband she was distant yet decorous, as a proper lady in a loveless marriage should be. She accepted his interdict against acknowledging the existence of Oliver.

  Yet each day, she defied Stephen in thought and in deed. Flouting the dictates of her husband, she wended her way through the maze and visited Oliver.

  At first they simply talked, for he was as wary and skittish as an untamed colt.

  “Your father must not know I come to see you,” she had said on her first visit, only minutes after her hurtful argument with Stephen. “Dame Kristine agrees with me.”

  She did not mention what it had cost her to extract that agreement. For the rest of her days, she would owe indulgences to the Roman church.

  Oliver had glared at her through narrowed eyes. “I might tell him.”

  “That would be a pity.” She heaved a great sigh. “I was going to bring Pavlo to meet you—”

  “Who is Pavlo?” Oliver had asked, struggling to appear uninterested.

  Juliana had eyed him mysteriously. “The strongest, swiftest and bravest friend in all the world. But I needn’t say more, since you’re going to tell your papa—”

  “I never said I’d tell.”

  Juliana had hidden a smile of satisfaction. The promise of meeting Pavlo had been enough to buy Oliver’s complicity.

  On her next visit, she found the lad as usual, lying in his darkened room, a painted chessboard on his knees and a scowl of ill humor on his pale face. A bowl of gruel sat untouched on a tray beside the bed. Dame Kristine dozed in the box chair in the next room.

  Oliver looked up at Juliana. “Where’s Pavlo?” he asked.

  She took a deep breath. “He will be up anon.”

  “You said you’d bring him.”

  “I wanted to make certain you were … awake.”

  “You mean alive,” the boy said baldly, without censure.

  Juliana was glad for the darkness in the room, for she knew her eyes would betray her alarm. “Were you not hungry?”

  He wrinkled his nose. “I hate gruel. Hate blancmange, hate watered wine and ale, hate mashed turnips. That’s all she gives me. She says anything else makes me wheeze or gives me a rash.”

  Juliana took a warm, ripe plum from her apron pouch. “Try this.”

  He eyed the fruit suspiciously. “What is it?”

  “A plum.” She held her breath. Dear God, what if she was wrong? What if the fruit did bring on an attack?

  “I don’t want it,” he said.

  “Well,” she said airily, “if you will not eat it, then there is only one thing to do.”

  “What?” He glared through narrowed eyes.

  “Juggle.” She took two more plums from her apron pouch and tossed them from hand to hand. Within seconds, three fruits were spinning in a tall arc while Oliver watched in rapt fascination.

  “Where did you learn that?”

  She plunged her hand into the apron and added a fourth plum to the whirling fruit. “From Rollo of the gypsies. He’s much better at it than I. You could see him someday, but …” She let her voice trail off.

  “I want to!”

  “Then perhaps you will.” She caught one plum in her teeth, biting into the soft flesh and letting the juice run down her chin while she caught the other three.

  “You’re not like any baroness I ever heard of,” Oliver muttered.

  “Goodness, I should hope not. In Novgorod, my mother used to have a great baroness as a friend. She smelled of camphor and never smiled. And her eyes were all twitchy, like this.” Juliana blinked to demonstrate. Oliver smothered a giggle. She took another bite. “Are you certain you won’t try one?”

  He took a plum from her and cupped it in his small hands, seeming to enjoy the warmth and smoothness of it.

  “You should not eat it,” she said. “Only smell it.”

  He brought the plum to his nose, closed his eyes, and inhaled. Then, with a defiant smirk, he bit into it, and his eyes opened wide. “ ’Tis sweet and tart all at once.” The juice dribbled down his neck. Juliana watched him closely as he devoured the plum. She saw no sign of labored breathing, heard no warning rasp in his throat.

  “Why did you think eating fruit would make you wheeze?” she asked.

  He rubbed his stick hands on the counterpane. “Dr. Strong said so. My humors are unbalanced.” Oliver seemed eerily adult when he discussed his condition. “Dr. Strong said I have too much blood on my left side, and eating red foods would only make it worse.”

  “I see. Well, perhaps your humors are better balanced of late.” She put her hand over his and watched his face. For a moment he sat frozen; then he turned his hand palm up and squeezed hers.

  “Oliver?”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you like living here?”

  “Of course I do. It is my own world here. Dame Krissie is ever so learned, and she’s never cross with me. And Papa—well, he comes every night, and he always brings presents.”

  She remembered the insult Oliver had scrawled on his writing tablet. “Does your papa ever get cross with you?”

  “No. Well …”

  “Yes?”

  “Sometimes when I’m wheezing, he makes a fist like so.” Oliver clenched his. “And he slams it against the wall.”

  “I see.” She tried to appear pleasantly interested, though the image broke her heart.

  “My illness makes him cross,” Oliver said.

  “No,” she said quickly. “He is frustrated, because he wants to help you.”

  “Perhaps.” Oliver shrugged.

  “Do you never wish to go to the manor house? To see other boys and play with them?”

  He tugged idly at his lower lip. “I think not. I can’t run and play.”

  “Why not?”

  He rolled his eyes, clearly thinking her an idiot. “Because I am sick. I could fall down dea
d any instant. That’s what happened to Dickon.”

  “Your brother.”

  “Aye. Dame Krissie says my father didn’t speak for weeks afterward.”

  “He must have loved Dickon very much.” Juliana ducked her head to hide the bleakness in her eyes. “Would you like to meet Pavlo now?”

  Even in the dim amber shadows she could see his teeth flash as he grinned. “Oh, yes!” Then he seemed to catch himself and slid back into insolence. “I suppose so.”

  “Pavlo doesn’t like the dark.” Juliana crossed to the first shuttered dormer window.

  “But I’m not supposed to—”

  “You’re not the only one in this room,” Juliana said over her shoulder. “Do not be selfish.” She spoke lightly, though her entire body thrummed with nervous anticipation. What if she were wrong?

  But she had been right about the plum. She would pit her common sense and instinct against the wisdom of Dr. Strong any day, her knowledge of gypsy cures against those of any alchemist.

  “I’ll go fetch Pavlo,” she said, turning to look around the light-flooded room.

  More things. Poppet dolls, whistles, games, books and every manner of plaything a boy could desire.

  Then why did the room seem so empty?

  Putting aside the depressing thought, she went to the top of the stairs and whistled. Pavlo came bounding up, a streak of shimmery white.

  He trotted down the hall beside her, and when he entered the room, Juliana wished suddenly that she knew how to draw pictures. The expression on Oliver’s young face was priceless—shocked beyond words, sharply fascinated, and infused with intense, boyish yearning.

  “That is Pavlo?” he whispered, pointing a shaking finger.

  “Indeed it is.”

  “I thought he was a person.”

  “I never said that.”

  Juliana patted her thigh. “Come, Pavlo,” she said in Russian. The dog had always adored children. Eagerly he leaped on the bed, a slim foreleg on each side of Oliver, a long pink tongue lapping at the lad’s face.

  “No! Help! He’s trying to eat me up!”

  “Do not be foolish.” Juliana smiled. For the dog, at least, it was love at first sight. “He is saying hello.”

  “I—I’m having an attack,” Oliver gasped. “Get him off me. I demand that you get this brute off me!”

  Horrified, she started forward.

  A firm hand held her back. She turned to see Dame Kristine, her face alight with interest. “Leave them, my lady,” she whispered.

  “But Oliver says—”

  “Hush. Look at him.”

  Juliana looked. The lad grappled vigorously with the huge dog. Thinking it a merry game, Pavlo yelped in delight and nuzzled Oliver’s forehead.

  “He is not wheezing or coughing,” Dame Kristine said. “His color is a healthy pink.”

  “Off!” Oliver shrieked. “Get him off! He’ll kill me!” But the boy’s shouts dissolved, suddenly and sweetly, into helpless giggles. Within moments, he was hugging the dog fiercely, laughing into his furry neck and looking for all the world like a boy who had found a long-lost friend.

  Juliana looked around the room again, and now it did not seem empty at all.

  “Where is that dog of yours, Juliana?” Stephen asked one day. She was with him at the village well, where he and the smith had set up a rather strange, screwlike pump to draw water. “I’ve not seen the beast for a fortnight or so.”

  Juliana dropped her gaze, pretending close inspection of a cog at the top of the pump. “Pavlo is never far, my lord. Perhaps he is down with the gypsies.” It had not been a fortnight, she reflected, but three weeks since she had taken the dog to visit Oliver. She closed her eyes for a moment, remembering the lad’s surprise and delight. They played for hours each day, and she noticed a new vigor in Oliver.

  “It’s a high wonder to me,” Stephen said, only half attending his own words as he worked the windlass of the pump, “that the great beast manages to find his way home each night to sleep in your bed.”

  Juliana slid a tentative glance at him. At moments like this she found him most fascinating, when he forgot he was lord of the manor, when his whole attention was absorbed by some invention. He seemed heedless of the water-cooled breeze stirred by the pump even though the wind lifted his golden hair away from his face and neck. “Since when do you trouble yourself over who—or what—sleeps in my bed?”

  He did not even glance up at her, but she saw the sun-browned flesh draw tight over his cheekbones. “Whether we like it or not, you are my baroness, and I won’t have my good name besmirched.”

  “The fact that I sleep with a borzoya dog would make for very choice gossip indeed,” she said with a sniff.

  Stephen scooped up a handful of water and drank. He looked up at her for a moment, his face bland and inhumanly handsome; then he set to work on the pump again, muttering something about a Greek named Archimedes. Honestly, he could be as infuriating as his son.

  Juliana wished she could discuss her progress with the boy. She had, item by item, put an end to Oliver’s lackluster diet of gruel and watered ale. Now he dined on oranges, salad, fresh meat and mare’s milk. The new food added girth to his painfully thin frame. She managed to coax him out into the garden at least once a day, and the sunshine put color in his pale cheeks. A tea made from a special herb called ephedra, brought by gypsy sea-traders from remote Asia, eased his breathing.

  She and Dame Kristine hardly dared speak of it, but Oliver had suffered only a few attacks of late, and those seemed to pass quickly.

  She wondered if Stephen noticed the improvement. Probably not. Though he visited his son frequently, he took pains to avoid discussing Oliver’s health. According to Dame Kristine, Stephen heard nothing but gloomy predictions from visiting physicians and herbalists.

  The thought made her angry, the deception uncomfortable. Perhaps now was the time to admit she had been interfering with Oliver’s treatment.

  “My lord,” she said, “about your son—”

  Still he did not look up, but she noticed with some satisfaction that his shoulders tensed. “We agreed not to speak of the boy.”

  “The boy has a name. It’s Oliver, or have you forgotten?”

  He glanced up at last, and his eyes were dead. “I have not forgotten. Damn you to hell, Juliana.”

  She faced him, hoping she looked braver than she felt. “I think you are damning yourself. For pity’s sake, Stephen. Let yourself love him.”

  “Why?”

  And then she understood clearly. Stephen was afraid.

  Terrified of losing Oliver. How deeply Stephen must have grieved when his wife and first son had died; now, it seemed, he meant to spare himself if anything happened to Oliver.

  She must not let herself pity him. Must not begin to think like him. Oliver was alive now. He should not suffer because his father was afraid of losing him.

  “Stephen, do you remember the horse fair in Chippenham Tuesday last?” she asked.

  He frowned, no doubt confounded by her change of subject. “Of course I remember it.”

  “And the roan mare Laszlo bought?”

  “Aye, half-dead on her feet she was.”

  “To you, that is how it looked. Come.” She took his hand and led him away from the village, pausing now and then to greet people. A cheery atmosphere pervaded the cluster of half-timbered cottages. The weaving house had received a large order from Flanders, and the looms worked constantly these days.

  Stephen and Juliana descended toward the clearing by the river where the gypsies camped. The day was sweet and clear, the grass dry and crackling beneath their feet, the changing leaves creating a riot of color against the marbled blue sky.

  A glorious day, she thought. A good day to be in love.

  They reached the gypsy camp and she brought him to the horse run where animals on long tethers grazed.

  “There is your half-dead horse, my lord.”

  Stephen stared at the mare, a
nd Juliana savored the progression of expressions that transformed his face: surprise, disbelief and finally open wonder.

  He touched the gleaming neck of the roan. “What in God’s name did he do?”

  “The Romany people have a talent for curing illnesses of horses that others discard. The farmer who sold this mare thought she was ready for the knacker’s yard.”

  “Yet Laszlo healed her.”

  “Yes. Perhaps she will never be perfect. She will never run races like your Capria. But she will prove useful and be content enough.” She chanced a squeeze of his hand. “Don’t you see? What one man has discarded as hopeless, rejecting any chance of healing, another has made whole.”

  Stephen yanked his hand away. “It’s not the same. My son is not a goddamned horse.”

  “Exactly.” She refused to flinch from his cold fury. “He is a little boy. You have given him everything he needs except the one thing he truly wants—your love.”

  “What possible difference can that make?”

  Juliana now knew the answer to that. At first she had merely brushed Oliver’s hand with hers. Then, while he was giggling at Pavlo’s trick of balancing a crust of bread on his muzzle, she had squeezed his shoulder. Day by day, hour by hour, she moved closer to him until they were embracing, his cheek against her bosom and his little hands clinging around her waist.

  “I think it would make a great deal of difference—to your son … and to you.” Juliana stroked the thin horse. The animal flattened its ears, and she spoke to it in Romany, the language that had been used to train gypsy horses since time out of mind. The horse dropped its head and snuffled into her shoulder. She turned and smiled at Stephen. “I think it would make a very big difference indeed.”

  “Damn you,” he said through his teeth. “All my boy wants to do is breathe, and I can’t help him. I would give my entire fortune and my very life—the surety of my soul—to heal him. If I thought owning the moon were a cure, I would devise some way to snare it. How dare you imply that I am withholding something from my son?”

  “You are.” How fearsome he looked, his eyes as cold and shining as marble, his face flushed with fury and his fists clenched hard. And yet she did not fear him. He could hurt her, aye, and she had no doubt that he would—but not with his fists.