At the King's Command

by Susan Wiggs

  And yet … She straightened and let her open hand rest protectively over her lower belly. From deep inside her, a woman’s secret joy rose up like a fount of warmth. She had not been prepared for the intensity of her feelings for this small, unformed life so completely within her care.

  Get rid of it.

  Stephen’s cold command echoed through time and across the miles.

  She plunged her face into the basin of water before the tears could start.

  A half hour later she emerged from her elegant chamber in Hampton Court and headed toward the royal lodgings. She was bathed, coiffed, gowned … and smiling.

  One did that at the court of Henry VIII. She had learned the custom quickly. No matter what misery tore at one’s heart, one smiled and played the gay courtier.

  As she walked through frosty courtyards and down wind-filled, cloistered passageways, she wished she knew where Laszlo had gone. Moments after she had told him the news about the miracle of Alexei’s survival, the gypsy had slipped away; she had not heard from him since. He was bound to be as uncomfortable as he was unwelcome at Hampton Court with its imposing gatehouses and walled yards, its guards armed with fearsome weapons.

  She had not seen Alexei, either, yet she knew he was about. The ladies of court chattered on about his handsomeness, his exotic, mysterious allure. Since he claimed to remember nothing of the slaughter at Novgorod, Juliana was content to avoid him.

  She braced herself for the day to come. Ending her full week of waiting, a herald had come to announce that the king would see her.

  The delay had not been a time of idleness for Juliana. She used the days to acquaint herself with King Henry’s court. The task turned out to be simpler than she had anticipated. She found many similarities to her father’s ducal household in Novgorod—the ceremony, the secrecy, the gossip, the pageantry.

  By listening carefully and discreetly in the ladies’ salon, she learned some of King Henry’s predilections. He enjoyed being king, yet performing a king’s duties was burdensome and tedious to him. Henry devoted only two hours each morning to ruling the realm. It was whispered that he did not even like signing his name to official decrees and documents. He used a stamp for that purpose. A very official, unique stamp with the raised impression of his seal and signature.

  Designed, years earlier, by a loyal baron called Stephen de Lacey.

  Each time she thought of Stephen, the wave of longing that swept over her was so vast and deep that it took her breath away. She told herself she should not miss him, but her heart wouldn’t listen.

  After each brief morning meeting with his council, the king left matters in the ruthlessly capable hands of Cromwell. Henry’s fondness for sport and entertainment was indulged through the rest of the day.

  And today, thanks to the cold, hissing rain, which in the night had hardened to pelting snow flurries, the king would indulge in indoor sport.

  A far more deadly game than hunting or archery.

  The courtly whirl was in full swing in the Presence Chamber. Long tables lined the walls. Wine and ale flowed as copiously as gossip from Havelock’s lips. And at the very center, like the hub of an ever-spinning wheel, sat King Henry himself.

  A troupe of mummers was performing. Juliana lost sight of the herald and stopped in the shadow of a wall sconce. Foolishly, she had neglected to break her fast, and a sudden hunger burned her stomach. She moved on unsteady feet to a table, but the smells of ale and meat reawakened her nausea.

  Her head spinning, she turned toward the door to leave and found herself facing Lord Spencer Merrifield, whom she had met some days before. A distinguished older gentleman with an air of splendid melancholy about him, he looked incongruous in full-court dress while jiggling a baby on his hip.

  Giving Lord Spencer a weak, polite smile, Juliana turned her attention to the play. It must be a daring troupe indeed, for it did not take Juliana long to divine that the farce being enacted was a familiar one.

  A ponderous fellow wearing a cockeyed crown pantomimed an argument with a stiff-backed older woman. She shook a rosary of exaggerated size in his face until he threw up his hands in disgust and turned to face the sloe-eyed beauty waiting in the shadows behind him.

  The moment she handed him a poppet with bright orange hair, he flung it away and in the same motion, lopped off the head of the young beauty. A paste-and-paper head with a startled, openmouthed face painted on it rolled across the floor.

  The huge crowd burst into gales of laughter, but only for a moment. It became evident that His Majesty was not amused and so, one by one, like candles being snuffed, the nobles stopped laughing.

  The baby in Spencer’s arms mewed. He jiggled her and whispered, “Hush, Lark.”

  “Her name is Lark?” Juliana asked.

  “ ’Tis truly Guinivere Beatrice Leticia Rutledge Merrifield. Lark suits her.”

  Feeling the fascination of an expectant mother, Juliana peered at the baby. She had skin of ivory and roses, hair of the blackest down. “She’s charming, my lord. Your granddaughter?”

  He half turned to her, a smile of bitter irony curving his lips. “No. She is my wife.”

  “Your wife?”

  “Aye, but that’s another story entirely, and long in the telling.” Lord Spencer turned his attention back to the players.

  Juliana blushed, ashamed of herself for prying.

  With an imperious command, King Henry ordered the mummers out of the court.

  “Will they be punished?” Juliana asked Spencer.

  “A day in the stocks. If the fools don’t freeze to death, they’ll be free to go.”

  “Didn’t they know better than to lampoon the marriage woes of the king?”

  “They’re Irish.” Apparently in Spencer’s mind, that explained everything. When Juliana gave him a quizzical look, he said, “All Irish are fools. And they hate the English from the king down.” He pointed at the retreating mummers. “That one’s the biggest fool of all. Claims he had a vision. Claims he’ll found a line of Irish noblemen and that one of that line will sit in the lap of the English monarch. Pah!” Spencer spat into the rushes. “An Irishman’s visions have no more substance than vows made in wine.”

  Alexei and his hard-faced Russian gentlemen entered the chamber.

  “Indeed,” she murmured. “My compliments to you, my lord, and to your, er, wife.” Awkwardly she patted the infant’s downy black head and hurried to greet Alexei.

  As she wove a path through the milling crowd, she wondered anew at the strange workings of fate. The prophecy of the gypsy called Zara had been but a faint echo of memory, yet today it came rushing back in all its dark mystery.

  True, Juliana had traveled far in both time and distance, and yet something did not fit. When she looked at Alexei, she saw a sharply handsome, proud Russian boyar. He had many things, yet he was not the man she loved.

  But was Stephen?

  In a quandary, she greeted Alexei with a polite smile. His minions fell back. One of them stepped into a pool of torchlight, and the glow flickered off a shiny scar on his cheek. The sight raised the hair on Juliana’s arms, and for a blink of time, she faltered. She attributed her dizziness to her persistent mother-sickness.

  Alexei clapped his booted heels together and bowed. The torchlight caught some ornament he wore, and for a moment Juliana’s eyes were dazzled. She blinked, then saw the buttons on the front of his Russian jacket.

  Garnet buttons.

  “Alexei?” she asked.

  He brushed his knuckle under her chin. “I had always imagined you would be agreeable to look at,” he said, his cultured Russian a song in her ears. “I never dared to dream you would be so beautiful, and yet you are.”

  His words made her shiver. She could not take her eyes off those buttons.

  “You received my messages!”

  He slashed a dark brow up at her. “Messages?”

  “All of them,” she said, suspicion rising like bile in her throat. “I sent one button
with each message to your family, knowing they would pay in gold for my token.”

  He took her arm, seemingly with gentleness, but Juliana could feel the secret bite of his strong fingers grasping her just above the elbow.

  “You must have gotten the first one four years ago or more. Alexei, why did you wait so long to find me?” she asked.

  Still he did not answer, did not stop walking until he reached the dais where the king waited.

  Juliana could scarcely think for the confusion in her mind. Whirling, swirling thoughts, crystallizing and then disappearing like snowflakes on the water.

  “My good and loyal ambassador from all the Russias,” Henry said expansively. “You don’t know how glad I am to receive you.” His speech was florid with diplomatic niceties; Juliana recognized the high flattery from her girlhood, when she and her brothers used to hide beneath the marble stairs at Novgorod and listen to their father and the other boyars.

  The sudden memory of Boris and Misha made her eyes burn. She forced herself to listen to the conversation.

  “Prince Ivan is a boy child, only eight years of age,” Alexei was saying in his heavy, slow English. “His dear mother, the princess Elena, died earlier this year. But one day he will be strong. A prince for all the Russias. My father is his chief adviser.”

  The Shuiskys used to be a minor family. How had they risen to such power in just five years? Suspicions crowded into Juliana’s mind.

  “Your reunion with Lady Juliana is a most happy occasion,” the king said, and with the relish of a gifted bard, he told the court a tale of young lovers torn asunder by tragedy, separated by leagues and years, and finally and joyfully reunited in the presence of a powerful and benevolent king.

  Except I feel no joy, she thought.

  “Lord Privy Seal assures me your marriage is bound to form a matchless dynasty,” the king concluded.

  “Marriage!” The word burst on a wave of disbelief from Juliana. “But—”

  “I assure you, the wishes of your father, the great boyar Gregor Romanov, will be honored at last.”

  “But—”

  “And in the interest of cementing our new trade agreements with the Russias,” Henry blithely continued, “the nuptials will take place here at my court, with full honors.”

  Juliana could not believe her ears. Nausea pushed bile up to the back of her throat. If Alexei had not been holding her arm in a death grip, she would have slid to the floor. Vaguely she became aware of a commotion behind her: a voice raised in harsh protest, gasps of outrage, and finally the clink and whir of spurs as heavy footsteps strode toward the dais.

  The king’s face hardened until he looked like a graven image. “I did not hear you announced, Wimberleigh,” he drawled in a bored voice.

  Juliana wrenched free of Alexei and whirled to face Stephen. “Oliver,” she whispered, sick with dread.

  “Recovered,” he said simply. With icy hatred in his eyes, he looked at her, then at Alexei and finally he bowed to the king.

  “Forgive me, sire,” he said in a voice that was anything but apologetic. “I’ve come to fetch my wife.”

  “Wife,” Alexei said in Russian, speaking through clenched teeth. “What is the meaning of this?”

  “Excellent timing,” Henry said, seeming to find a perverse satisfaction in the situation. “We were just discussing your predicament, Wimberleigh. It seems Lady Juliana has been betrothed to Lord Alexei for many years.”

  An ironic smile curved Stephen’s mouth. “Most interesting. But surely the betrothal ended when, at your royal edict, the lady wedded me.”

  Outside, the winter wind shrieked through the courtyard. Juliana looked from her husband to the man her father had chosen for her so long ago. Stephen’s tawny good looks, enhanced by redness from the cold, contrasted sharply with Alexei’s dark, lean handsomeness. Like day and night they were, one golden, one dark, both pinning her where she stood with their fierce, possessive stares.

  “A marriage entered into so blithely is easily ended.” Henry drummed his fingers on his chest. “Now. Will it be an annulment, or divorce?”

  “Neither,” Stephen snapped. “We were wed in the eyes of the state and the church and—” He stopped himself. Juliana knew he was remembering their gypsy wedding. “The union is as strong and inviolable as a bond of blood.” His hand, clad in a rough leather gauntlet, tightened around her wrist.

  King Henry’s grin was deceptively casual. “Are you saying, my dear lord of Wimberleigh, that I lack the authority to declare a marriage null and void?”

  The silence was heavy and filled with the words the king did not need to say. He had defied the pope in order to dissolve a twenty-year marriage to Catherine of Aragon. A man who could fly in the face of hundreds of years of tradition need not justify himself to a minor noble.

  Henry gave his stomach a satisfied pat and beamed at Alexei. “He who has been wronged shall find restitution in our court. You may marry Lady Juliana as soon as arrangements are made.”

  Stephen lunged toward the dais. “Your Grace, I—”

  The razor tip of a blade at his throat stopped him cold A woman screamed and fainted in a rustle of skirts. Juliana felt the color drain from her face.

  Stephen did not flinch as a filament of blood scored his neck. For a moment, no one even breathed.

  Then, with frosty calm, Stephen placed one gloved thumb on the wickedly curved tip of the blade, moved it aside, and stared impassively at Alexei. Juliana recognized the fire in Stephen’s eyes. He was spoiling for a fight.

  “By God’s body, that was rude of you, sir,” he said.

  Alexei’s nostrils flared. “In my country, one does not challenge one’s sovereign.”

  Stephen’s smile was as thin as a sickle. “Nor do we in England. However.” Without taking his eyes off Alexei, he bit down on his middle finger and tugged at his glove. “We do,” he said, removing the glove one finger at a time, “challenge foreign, wife-stealing upstarts.”

  The gauntlet sailed through the air and struck Alexei on the chest, right atop the garnet buttons. Then the glove hit the floor with a gentle slap.

  Alexei’s eyes blazed with rage. He lifted his booted foot and ground his heel down on the gauntlet. “You are a fool, my lord.”

  “Do I take that as an acceptance?”

  “Immediately.”

  “No!” Juliana snapped, covering her fear with anger. “My fate will not be decided by fools on the field of combat.” She felt someone—a gentleman pensioner—grasp her arm to hold her back.

  The king lifted his hand. “Peace, madam. Let us have done with the sport.”

  With a regal wave, he set the game in motion. Courtiers fled to the inner courtyard where the swordplay would take place. Manly cheers went up from Alexei’s entourage.

  Juliana wrenched away from the pensioner and latched onto Stephen’s arm. “Do not do this,” she whispered. A shiver of foreboding caused her fingers to tremble. For no good reason save the sick foreboding in her heart, she did not trust Alexei.

  Stephen stared at her for a long moment. Something flickered in his stone-blue eyes. Confusion. Pain. Yearning. He had all but cast her bodily out of his life and yet—

  “Don’t worry, madam,” he said crisply, his face expressionless. “I might humiliate your precious Alexei, but I won’t kill him. If I did that,” he muttered, striding away, “I might have to keep you.”

  The short days of deep winter reminded Laszlo of the old country, when the sun would hide after only a few hours of daylight. The waning light, combined with Russian voices in the tavern, peeled away the years.

  Fixing a genial smile on his face and eyeing his drinking companions with secret scorn, Laszlo went to work. He was barred from the palace by gypsy-hating officials, so carousing with Alexei Shuisky’s entourage was the only way he could keep watch over Juliana.

  And what easy Gajo louts they were, surrendering information with the eagerness of overaged brides on their wedding night.


  Over the first round of ale, Laszlo learned that the four members of Alexei Shuisky’s entourage had been members of a forced labor party on a Baltic trading ship.

  “What kind of man lets another man force him to work?” Laszlo mumbled into his cup as he drained it.

  He had his answer by the third round of ale, and the answer made him nervous. Feigning admiration, he grinned through his beard. “Convicts, you say? Convicted of what, gentlemen?”

  The Russians laughed and nudged each other.

  Laszlo called for more ale. “Ah, I am just a stupid gypsy. It is beyond my grasp why a great ambassador should surround himself with convicts.”

  His companions’ laugher crescendoed. “Stupid as an Englishman, is he not, Dmitri?” one of them said. “Lord Alexei has everyone from the king down believing he’s the ambassador.”

  Though Laszlo’s every instinct told him to flee, he forced himself to paste on an idiotic grin. “You mean Alexei Shuisky is not the ambassador from Muscovy?”

  Dmitri picked up the flagon and peered, disappointed, into the emptiness. “Dead,” he muttered. “Didn’t even reach the gates of the Kremlin.”

  As the laughter of murderers rang to the timbers, Laszlo told them he needed to piss, and excused himself from the table.

  Striking steel clanged and echoed in the snow-covered courtyard. Juliana stood watching with her hands pressed protectively against her middle. She ignored the activity around her: men tossing back cups of hot wine, courtiers placing bets on the outcome of the duel. She was only vaguely aware of a commotion at the gate between the inner and outer yards.

  Her rapt attention was fixed on the two men who were trying to kill each other. With all her might, she tried to summon the fierce gypsy she had become during the five years of hardship. Juliana of the gypsies would have flung herself between them, screamed at them to stop. But she was different now. Nauseated, light-headed, confused. Her spirit seemed made of thin crystal sheltering the tiny life inside her. She felt that if she moved, she would shatter into pieces.

  “You stupid, stupid fools,” she whispered, her breath puffing in the icy air.