by Fiona Monroe
"Did he become a Papist, then?" Margaret asked.
"Yes, as far as I know. The other big problem was that his father, the old king, was—at least according to Leopold—a worse tyrant than Contarini. He was convinced that his father would never forgive him a Venetian commoner as a bride, quite apart from the issue of religion. In fact, I think there was talk of his being lined up as a match for some fairly senior foreign princess, and that was one reason he was hiding in Venice. His plan, insofar as the fool had any plan, was to wait until his father died and throw himself on his older brother's mercy, and in the meantime, not to consummate his marriage. Well, that is not so easy."
Margaret blushed. She pressed his uninjured hand and glanced at Lady Crieff, but her ladyship seemed too interested in the story to pay attention.
"I should imagine not," she said.
"He succumbed to temptation, and of course, before too long, it became necessary for Lady Lucia—I suppose, properly, I should call her Princess Leopold, at this point—anyway to preserve her honour, it became necessary for her to confess her married condition to her family. Leopold was ready to bite the bullet and face Count Contarini, when the blow fell."
He paused and sipped the medicinal brandy.
"You tell a good story," said Lady Crieff. "This is better than a play, is it not, Lady John? Go on."
"Truth to tell, it was not unlike a play. It happened in the middle of the night. A rider came and battered on the door of the Palazzo d'Argento. Crown Prince Frederick of Swabia was dead. Neck clean broken in a hunting accident."
Margaret put her hand over her mouth.
"His Serene Highness Prince Leopold, now Crown Prince of Swabia and Heir Apparent to the throne, was to return to Swabia immediately, by order of his father, His Majesty, King Ferdinand. Well, that changed everything. It was a disaster. Leopold was suddenly heir to the throne of a Lutheran kingdom, who had converted to Rome and married a foreign commoner. His father would not, he said, ever forgive him. He was thrown into a complete panic."
"He should have taken his wife back with him to Swabia and made a full confession," said Lady Crieff firmly. "What else could his father have done but accept the fait accomplit?"
"Perhaps, but that did not seem to be a course of action that even occurred to him. Instead, it was Lady Lucia, herself, who came up with the solution. She suggested that I should be the one to go to her brother and claim that I was her husband, while Leopold quietly and swiftly departed for Swabia, as the king had commanded him. At first, I thought the idea was completely crazy, but between them, they managed to persuade me that it was likely to succeed. The old priest who had married them had poor eyesight. Leopold and I are both of similar age, physique and colouring, and as far as the ancient priest was concerned, we were both foreigners—who could tell one blond foreigner from another? We visited the monsignor to test this supposition and he was quite unsuspicious when we presented me as the man he had married to the lady. Nobody else but us three knew about the marriage. The hope was that Contarini would accept me as his sister's husband, however reluctantly, and that the princess and I would stay on in Venice, affecting to be a married couple, until such time as King Ferdinand died and Leopold succeeded to the throne."
"Oh, John," said Lady Crieff, shaking her head. "What a ridiculous scheme."
"What else could I do but agree? Leopold was my friend, and I thought that his future, and his wife's very life, were in grave danger. I swore an oath that I would protect them both, by always maintaining the fiction, until such time as it became possible for Prince Leopold and his wife to reunite. Leopold left for home, and I prepared to confront the count and confess to the marriage. But before that, the very day before we planned to make the explanation, the count discovered that his sister was with child. I think one of her lady's maids betrayed it. She was left to carry out the burden of explanation by herself, and as far as I know, she did her best. She named the priest, and she told her brother where to find me. Unfortunately, instead of sending a messenger to summon me, he sent assassins to kill me as I slept. Instant widowhood was his plan for dealing with his sister's inconvenient marriage."
Margaret shuddered.
"By the grace of God, I awoke in time and escaped, but I fled Venice for my life that very hour. I left with nothing but my stallion, and I sometimes think I didn't stop galloping until I reached the gates of Dunwoodie."
"And you left that poor girl to fend for herself," said Lady Crieff.
"Hardly! She was with her family—I don't think Contarini would have harmed her. I had allowed myself to be named as her husband, and they had a priest to back the story up, so her reputation was safe. And hang it all, she wasn't, after all, my responsibility. It was my addle-pated friend who insisted on marrying her and then got himself made heir apparent to a kingdom and went away and left her. They would have killed me, Arabella, had I stayed."
"I know." She patted his arm.
"And I know I shouldn't have got married in truth while I was still vowed to maintain the fiction of being married to Lady Lucia, but, well, Venice seemed a long way from Edinburgh."
Margaret decided to let that go for now and wait until they were alone. "So," she said lightly, "the old King of Swabia died, your friend became king, and now he can do what he wants?"
"Well, it's not quite as straightforward as that. There's a lot of opposition in court to having a Catholic queen, for instance. But Leopold is standing up to his courtiers and saying that unless they support him in changing the law, and unless they accept Lucia as their queen, he'll agree to the dissolution of the kingdom into Wuttemburg at the Vienna conference. That's why he's in Britain at the moment. And he heard about Contarini's attack on Gordon in London, and sent agents to find me—"
He was interrupted by the drawing room door banging open, and Jeannie, the scullery maid, half-falling into the room. "Oooh—my lady—my lord—my lady!" she gasped, eyes round and wide. "It's the King and Queen of Shady! An'—an' some ither yins, but they're no' comin' ben."
Margaret rose to meet her illustrious visitors. She was sufficiently composed now to observe that the King of Swabia was tall, fair and handsome, and did indeed resemble Lord John in those characteristics. In face, he was nothing alike, but there was a gentle amiability in his expression that pleased her.
She was intrigued to see the lady he handed in so tenderly. The woman whose very existence had cost her such pain over the past few days, whose stylised face she had glimpsed on the count's miniature, was tiny and slender. Everything about her was diminutive, except her liquid brown eyes, which were huge in her narrow, not especially pretty face.
In her arms, wrapped in a black lace shawl, she held a plump, docile, watchful baby.
"I rode to Padua with a squadron of the Royal Cavalry and demanded that the Mother Superior release my wife and child," the king explained. "It is amazing, the degree of cooperation accorded to one, when one is accompanied by a dozen mounted hussars. You should try it, Dunwoodie. In some ways, being a king makes life delightfully simple. In so many other ways, unbearably complex."
"No, thank you," said Lord John. "I am content, as I have always said, with being a fifth son."
"We arrived in Edinburgh only last night, and I had intended to wait upon you today and tell you in person that you were released from your promise to masquerade as my Lucia's husband. I confess, I did not expect to find you married."
Margaret almost expected Lord John to tell his friend bluntly that it had been a business arrangement, that he had been homeless and short of money and had seen no other way out of his difficulties. But to her surprise, her husband reached across her lap and took her hand warmly in his and drew her close against him. "Look at her, von Uexkull. Can you blame me?" He kissed her forehead.
The king's face broke into a warm smile. "Ach, I cannot. I am so happy, now that I have my beloved with me forever, that I want everyone else to be happy—especially you, my dear and devoted old friend. Any favour I ca
n grant you, you must name it. Ah, if only you were a Swabian subject, I could make you a duke!"
"No, thank you, Leo. I meant it, about the fifth son business."
Lucia, who had been watching everything carefully with her doe-like eyes but had remained silent up until now, spoke at last. She proved to have a clear, sweet voice, with only a light, lilting accent. Like her husband's, her English seemed perfect. "I think, caro mio, that perhaps Lady John has something in mind."
Taken aback, Margaret looked around at Lord John, saw amusement and encouragement in his eyes, and took the courage to make her request.
"Why did you lie to me?"
As soon as the bedroom door closed behind them, the question exploded from Margaret. She had not even intended to confront him. She had thought her happiness in finding herself to be a properly married woman after all—and almost more importantly, married to Lord John—and her escape from the night's captivity must overwhelm her resentment. The visit from the King and Queen of Swabia, who had now departed across the bridge for state apartments in Holyrood Palace, had provided a distraction and gone a long way toward clearing away her remaining confusion. And yet, there was a core of hurt.
Lord John removed his jacket carefully and examined the bandage around his upper arm. "I made a promise. It was as simple as that."
"But you also made a promise to me, at the altar!"
"Yes, and I intend to keep those promises, too."
"But you shouldn't have—you shouldn't have married me at all if you were supposed to be masquerading as someone else's husband."
"Would you rather I hadn't married you, Margaret?"
"I… no. Of course not."
He rubbed the back of his neck. "I was masquerading as Princess Leopold's husband, or had been intending to do so at any rate, only to the Contarini family and Venetian society at large, had it got out. As it is, I don't believe the count allowed news of his sister's marriage to spread far, after I fled Venice. He hid her in a convent, outside the city, to disguise her situation, and he was probably intending to marry her off as a virgin, not a widow, once he could be sure he had disposed of me. Maybe I shouldn't have married you, but at the time, I thought we were both agreed, it was merely an arrangement for mutual convenience."
"You very quickly seemed to decide otherwise, sir."
"Yes. Dammit." He removed his waistcoat.
She folded her arms and sat on the edge of the bed. She had made no moves to undress as yet. "You have not apologised."
"I have no need to apologise. When I do, I will, but I do not. I did my best to do my duty. You, on the other hand, have some explaining of your own to do."
Part of the tension she had still been feeling was something to do with the crawling, nagging sense of guilt—of foreboding—in her stomach. She had known at the back of her mind that this was coming. She tossed her head. "For what, sir?"
"You know quite well for what. But let's be explicit. First of all, for throwing a damn vase at me. I won't have chinaware turned into projectile weapons in my household. It's expensive, and it makes extra work for the servants. But somewhat more to the point, for explicitly disobeying my orders to stay indoors and keep clear of suspicious-looking characters."
"But—"
"There's no 'but'! If you'd wandered out into the street alone in the daytime to go shopping and you had been kidnapped by Contarini's agents, that would have been bad enough, but you deliberately went right up to the ruffian—after dark—and handed yourself over! Of all the stupid, reckless things to do!"
"But I was trying to help you!"
"I wrote you a letter. I couldn't tell you everything, but I could not have been more explicit in what I did tell you! You knew these were dangerous people. I told you to trust me."
"It's because I knew they were dangerous that I was afraid for you," she cried, getting more heated and upset, the less in the right she felt herself to be. "I wanted to save you!"
"And instead, you allowed yourself to get taken as a hostage, so that I was obliged to save you and nearly got me killed!"
Margaret hung her head and put her hand over her mouth.
"If Leopold von Uexkull had not turned up just when he did," Lord John added in a quieter tone, "Count Contarini would almost certainly have had me killed. I don't think the Cavaliere was going to give the coup de grace, but those ruffians would have obeyed the count's orders. He wanted me dead and his sister widowed."
And she would have watched it happen. "I'm sorry!" she gasped. "I will never, never disobey you again."
"And yet you said that before, after you disobeyed my orders not to snoop in my private papers."
"Oh—but this is different—and I mean it this time, truly, I do."
"We'll see. Come on. Over the bed."
Part of her wanted to continue to protest, to justify herself. Mostly, however, she knew she had been foolish, and she knew that she deserved to be punished for it. She was so thankful that he was still there for her, still her husband and still alive, that she was almost glad to have the chance to show him how willingly she would submit to his authority. Though her legs felt suddenly tremulous and her stomach fluttered, she slipped off the bed, turned to kneel beside it, and leaned face first over the edge. The bed was a four-poster and rather high. When Lord John took hold of her waist and pulled her up so that the edge of the mattress was tucked under her stomach and her bottom was protruding neatly, her knees were bent against the wooden frame.
The position made her feel very vulnerable. She was still wearing the gauzy muslin evening gown in which she had dined with the royal couple, and it was made of a material so fine that it was almost transparent. The petticoat below was almost as fine. She was aware of the fabric clinging around her bottom and thighs, as it was designed to do.
She swallowed, a reflexive action, as she waited to see what he was going to do. She was determined that this time, she should not plead, but accept whatever he deemed a suitable means of chastisement for what had been, she now fully understood, a very foolish action. And she was also resolved to take the punishment bravely, without screaming or crying, to prove to him that she was truly repentant and humble.
All the same, she waited with extreme trepidation. Was he going to use the slipper again, which had stung so badly before? She could hardly hope that he was only going to use his hand. The offence was too severe, and in any case, he would have put her over his lap and not positioned her like this. It was the same way her aunt had made her bend over to take her hiding with the hairbrush.
At the very memory, she clenched her buttocks together and made an involuntary soft whimper in her throat. It was not a good start.
"I said that next time I'd take my riding crop to you," said Lord John. "And it's tempting, but I left the thing with the stable boy. Should I send for it?"
Margaret closed her eyes. "I-if you feel I deserve it, sir." Her voice was tight with nerves.
"No. You do deserve it—my arm hurts like the blazes—but I know you thought you were coming to my aid, rather than putting yourself and me in danger. I think we'll save the riding crop for when you do something as stupid, without good intentions."
"I won't! I promise!"
"You won't if you just do what you're told, Margaret. Can you do that from now on?"
"Y-yes, sir."
"All right. But today's adventure certainly does merit a proper, grown-up punishment, not a wee walloping. Let's see. Ah, yes."
Margaret dared to raise her head to see what he was doing. Her insides swooped with alarm as he picked up the sword and sword belt which he had been wearing when he had come to Contarini's lodgings to rescue her. She had noticed it at the time, but he had divested himself of it by the time they had received their royal guests. She supposed he had taken it off while the surgeon was tending to his wound and left it on the chair at the side of the bedroom.
He slid out the sword from its sheath and placed it carefully back on the chair, then held up the belt in
the light of the bedside candle. The part which fastened around the waist was a narrow strip of brown leather, with a brass buckle. Lord John flexed it a couple of times, so that Margaret could see the leather was oiled and supple, then he doubled it up with the buckle held securely in his hand.
"Just as well the Cavaliere got my left arm, not my right," he said. "Even so, I cannot hold you down, so I charge you to stay still."
Margaret had no idea whether she would be able to do that, but she resolved to try. She squeezed her eyes shut again, bunched her fists in the counterpane, and held her breath.
She heard the belt whip through the air with a terrifying swooshing sound, then she gasped in sheer shock as it landed across her muslin-covered behind. The loop of belt was long enough to strike hard across both nether cheeks simultaneously, and at once, she wanted to jump to her feet and dance away from the cruel lash.
But she had promised to do what he had ordered her to do. She wanted to obey. And she wanted to show him that she could take her well-deserved punishment bravely. She gritted her teeth and endured two more white-hot lashes in silence, but the next—the fourth—felt like it fell right across the weal left by the first stroke, which was already throbbing. A groan escaped her throat, and when the strap came down relentlessly twice more in rapid succession, she cried out and jerked upright.
"Ooohh, please."
"Bend over again, Margaret. I haven't finished."
"I know. I know. Just—not so hard. Please!"
"It's as hard as it needs to be, to get the lesson across. Come on! Back into position."
She burst into tears and buried her head into the quilt to hide her sobs but got herself obediently back into position across the mattress.
Then she had cause to regret her protest as she felt him tweak the hem of her gown and lift both skirts clean over her back. The cooling air of the bedroom hit her stinging rear.
He was going to finish her punishment by leathering her bare, unprotected backside. She felt his hand running over the injured cheeks and winced.