A Royal Affair (35 page)

“Quite right, Colonel.” She did not seem the least put out by my attempt to annoy her. I didn’t know why I was doing it, for I was not a Christian and agreed with her about the women. “It also says whoever would be great amongst you must be your servant. I’ve always taken that to mean men should be subservient to women.”

I sensed I was outclassed and retreated from the field to lick my wounds.

Pia had joined us, and she and Anastasia now formed a small, militant group of two on the other side of the table from our more rational, mature group. I was tempted to tell Anastasia this was how I viewed her, but my moral high ground was low enough as it was.

I got my revenge on Aleksey for his lack of support when Anastasia asked him, seemingly in all innocence, whether he was aware of any houses of ill repute in the city. She believed he should extend his plan of an orphanage for boys to include girls as well and thus save many from a potential life of moral ruin. As a direct beneficiary of the moral ruin of women, Aleksey was somewhat stumped for a reply.

Johan was the only man at the table that night spared Anastasia’s wit and wrath. He, likewise, didn’t engage with her once. He seemed entirely unsure what to make of her.

One thing we all agreed on was that most of the poverty and ignorance in Hesse-Davia could be directly linked to the unhealthy influence of the church.

All of us saw that poverty and excessive power of priests were the flip side of the same coin. Not only did the church demand huge tithes from the peasantry, it peddled superstition so its power stayed absolute.

Aleksey wanted to lessen the power of the church by divorcing his rule from its influence, but this desire, unfortunately, coincided with the return of his uncle, Prince Harold, to court.

All I knew of Aleksey’s uncle was that he had been visiting someone in the south. I’m not sure what I’d pictured—perhaps a slightly younger version of the old king on a tour of interesting ruins with a group of charming acquaintances.

Prince Harold had, in fact, been on a visit to the Vatican.

He was the papal representative in Hesse-Davia. Prince Harold was His Eminence, Cardinal the Prince Harold, head of the church.

I had an unfortunate first introduction to the concept of His Eminence’s return, which may have colored all our subsequent interactions.

I don’t know what Aleksey had in mind when he made me chief minister. I suspect he focused a little too much on the many hours we would necessarily spend sequestered together in small dark rooms, making policy. Making something, anyway.

I don’t think he really considered my suitability for the job. I was head of his government. I
ran
Hesse-Davia.

When he said to me one day, “My uncle returns at the end of this month. Will you arrange everything?” I replied with a grunt. I could not speak, given what I had in my mouth.

When, a few days later, he asked, “Are all the arrangements sorted?” I had murmured that everything was in place, for it was—inside him and very nicely situated.

So when he summoned me the day before the expected return to inspect and approve all my arrangements, he was somewhat nonplussed to find… nothing.

“Where are the plans?”

“Plans? For what?”

“Niko! For the banners? The parade? The jousts? The tournaments? The masque? The feasts? What have you arranged for this week of celebration? Where is everything?”

My eyes strayed to the bottle of wine I’d remembered to order—I thought the old man might be thirsty after his trip.

His gaze followed mine, and I saw him visibly pale.

So Aleksey wasn’t speaking to me when Harold returned, and this, I suspect, affected the way I viewed His Eminence from then on. When Aleksey wasn’t speaking to me, he wasn’t doing anything else with me either, of course.

It seemed to me at that time that I had all the disadvantages of being tethered with none of the advantages that should accrue from that possession.

Harold arrived home with five hundred retainers on a windswept day that would have made the banners spectacular had there been any. It was cold; a feast would have been very welcome too.

I watched him from the window of the council rooms as he descended from his horse and greeted Aleksey. It was not how I’d pictured a man greeting his new king. Whilst Harold had been absent, his brother, the king, had died; his nephew, the heir, had died; his country had won a spectacular war and gained a principality; and his nephew, Aleksey, had become his king.

So why was Aleksey kneeling to Harold in the snow?

Why was Aleksey kissing Harold’s hand?

We weren’t speaking, so I couldn’t ask him.

O
UR
NEW
palace would take many months to complete, but while it was being built, Aleksey decided that he would make the break with the castle and the court and move into the officers’ summer quarters. It only took a month for the builders to make this villa more suitable for a king’s residence. In the middle of February, therefore, he moved out of his dead brother’s rooms and into his new, airy, and spacious villa a mile or so from the capital.

I do not deny that it was mainly his association with me that led him to make this decision to leave the court. Our relationship was agonizingly difficult, for we both risked so much and seemed to have so little for it: the occasional kiss, the touch of a hand in passing, a secret message relayed in an innocuous comment. We both wanted a great deal more. Even in the summer villa, we had to be careful and discreet. A king is never wholly alone, for servants and guards are necessary features of his life, but there we could close and bar the door to his apartments whilst we held our ministerial meetings, and no one dared to disturb us. It was a wonder Hesse-Davia was not the best-run kingdom in the world, for we held many lengthy ministerial meetings that spring.

Aleksey was now twenty-four and I thirty-six. We had been intimate longer than not, and we knew each other very well. Perhaps, both being men, we had an advantage, for our desires sprang from the same source. We were wholly compatible in our passion for each other. He wanted me, I wanted him, and in this we excluded the rest of the world and created for ourselves the tiny kingdom of two that I had once promised him. Perhaps I should have had it foremost in my mind that he was a
king
, but I never thought of him in that way. To me, he was always just Aleksey, and I treated the rest of his life as an aberration. It helped him, as well, for me to treat his life like this, for then he did not let the stresses and strains of being king affect him. He no more saw himself a monarch than he had a prince or a general or a spy or a savage warrior. They were all roles he put on like a mask when he left our bed in the morning and then took off again when he returned.

If I had taken my duties as chief minister more seriously and not just seen them as a way to be closeted privately with my king whilst we conducted our own business, I might have seen the warning signs before it became too late.

I had created a bubble, our perfect little world, but we were two men sinning, and the world has a habit of seeking out its sinners and calling them to account.

T
HE
FIRST
real rumblings of discontent came when Aleksey passed a law forbidding the death sentence for condemned prisoners. This included condemned witches, traitors, murderers, and… sodomites. He had wanted to make sodomy legal, as he claimed that, being so pleasurable, every one of his subjects should enjoy it freely. I suggested he make it compulsory, but as we were both only joking, this law did not make it to the statute books. The abolition of the death sentence, however, did.

Within two days of it being made law, the cardinal, his uncle, summoned Aleksey to his residence in the city. I truly did not understand how Aleksey could be summoned by anyone other than me, but he said it was complicated, given Harold was his uncle and his spiritual father. I remembered the scene in the snow, and told him I was coming with him. As chief minister, it was my prerogative.

One cold April day, therefore, we rode from the villa toward the city. The building work on the new palace was coming along very well. Many men had been given good solid work on this project, and we enjoyed spending Saxefalian coin on their wages.

The cardinal’s residence was, ironically, in the same wealthy part of the city as the brothel Aleksey had taken me to in the early days of our acquaintance. We could laugh at this incident, now that we knew where we stood with each other. He, especially, found this amusing, as he recalled my expression on being manhandled by the young lady of ill repute. As we rode, he assured me that the whores he’d left with had only fondled him as well, and that upon completion by hand he’d left. It suited me to believe this slightly unlikely claim, and so this episode joined a fairly long list of things we enjoyed discussing, which had once given us such pain.

One thing we always found hard to do was to switch from being Aleksey and Nikolai to being King Christian and his chief minister when required. Riding together, our thighs brushing, laughing at the brothel incident, we arrived at the residence and had to become formal and correct. How I had not slipped yet and called him one of the various derogatory names I used to keep him in his place, I do not know. How he had not slipped yet and hit me or kissed me or thrown himself impulsively upon me—all things he did when we were alone—I do not know either. I think entering the palace of a cardinal sobered us both, and it was as well it did.

I had met Harold, of course, many times by now, but always very formally at court. Bluntly, I did not like him, and he loathed me. I know this for he told me so once, and that is not something a man forgets. This was not for my relationship with Aleksey. I believed he did not know about that. He loathed me as a man of science and a heathen, although I had stopped being one and did not really think of myself as the other. I was not a Christian, but I certainly had a very strong faith: I believed in Aleksey. I felt myself far more fortunate than the cardinal, because I had a living god whom I could love in person, whereas he had only a book and a set of rules through which love could be denied. My sympathy for the man, however, did not stop me disliking him intensely.

We were shown into the large room he used to greet supplicants. If it had contained a piano and some whores, Aleksey would have been right at home. He did not find this funny when I murmured it to him as we waited for his eminence’s presence.

When Harold entered, Aleksey went to one knee and kissed his ring again. This was always expected. I turned away and went to look out of the window. He could kiss my ring, and not the one on my finger, if he thought I was going to kneel to him. Aleksey was always good like that: knowing when to play his part and how to make people like him. He lived for the moment with no thought for the future. He thought our little bubble, our perfect world, would last forever. So did I.

Perhaps if I had kissed the ring it would have.

Harold was not happy about the witches. He wasn’t crazy about the sodomites either, but he started with the witches. A witch had to die; God commanded it. He quoted his book of rules, and although Aleksey tried to argue his case, he could not sway the cardinal. The king had to agree that if a witch did not repent her sin, then she must be put to death. The predator had now smelled blood, and he went sniffing for further weakness. He went for the sodomites. His book had a lot to say about us, apparently. I had never read the bible much, so I had to take his word for it. Eventually, Aleksey had to concede that if a man refused to admit that his sodomy was a perversion and an affront to God, then he must also be put to death.

When we were riding away, Aleksey said sadly that there probably would be no one who would
not
recant, faced with burning or impalement, and that at least they had the
chance
to survive now, whereas before they had not. I felt so sad for Aleksey that I did not ask him
who is king in this country
? as I wanted to. I was his first minister, but this role paled into insignificance compared to being his lover, and I would not upset Aleksey more by highlighting his impotence in this regard.

So the law was amended once more. We had now stirred the hornets’ nest; the buzzing should have alerted us to run.

O
VERALL
,
THIS
was a superb time for both Aleksey and me. We were completely in love with being together. I did not dare risk thinking the obvious—that we were in love with each other. We were, but neither of us was able to actually come out and say it. My previous experience of love had scarred me too deeply to allow me to form these words and let them escape my lips, although I did think them many times, saying in my head
I love you, I love you, I love you
. I should have told him so. He often looked as if he were on the point of saying it, especially at certain times, but he was still very young, even at twenty-four, and what young man says those words easily, even to a woman? What we were
doing
was uncommon enough. To add declarations of love to the mix would have been very problematic for us both. So we kept our own counsel, waiting for the other to speak first.

This did not affect the fact that physically we could not have been more in love. I was utterly entranced by his body and craved it like a drug. There would have been no government in Hesse-Davia at all if I had had my way, for their king would not have been on his throne but spread-eagled in our bed, accommodating me. Of course, we had progressed some way in those months since the fateful voyage from Saxefalia. Aleksey had still not been able to persuade me to allow him inside my body, but he’d had some fun trying.

I… tolerated this. I allowed him to play and explore and amuse himself at my expense, but when he got too eager, I slapped him down. Naturally, he didn’t take to this too well. He very quickly lost patience with my continual excuse that I had not enjoyed it then and I would not enjoy it now. He would enjoy it, and that, he informed me, should make me overcome my reluctance. He was a young man and not one who would naturally take the woman’s role in these things. Had I been more accommodating, he would have thrust into me as often and as enjoyably as his contemporaries were no doubt doing with young women everywhere. He was unfortunate with me in that respect. I pointed this out to him and told him he could probably find other men who would accommodate him more willingly. I offered to take him into the capital one night so that we could seek them out together. I’m not sure he ever quite got my sense of humor, and he did not find this funny at all. Once or twice, his frustration nearly won me over. I wanted to allow him. I wanted it for his sake, as how could I deny that it was the best sensation in the world, when I indulged my passion for it whenever he would allow?