A Royal Affair (37 page)

I tried to put myself in his position. He knew I was a man of huge appetites—when it came to this, at least. I could easily take him three or four times a night and still want more upon waking. I wore him out, and he was almost twelve years younger than I. Would he believe that I had needed more than he could give me, that I had strayed? There were nights, of course, where he had been absent, days when he had been too busy to meet with me. There had even been times when he had been too tired to want me, and I had not been all that accommodating to his wishes. I now cursed every time I had teased him about finding a younger lover, made a joke about other men that he did not get, implied things I’d done that were not true. I wished I’d been the perfect lover, the perfect man, and swore I would be
now
if only given the chance.

I had nothing in my cell except a straw pallet and a bucket. I asked for writing materials. I demanded to see a priest. I had no intention of making confession—I wanted the priest to convey my distress to Aleksey. All requests and demands were ignored.

The hours passed in slow misery.

My thoughts were the worst companions I could have.

At one point I discovered myself twiddling pieces of straw from the bedding. I had made a tiny man—head, legs, arms. It resembled a straw soldier my mother had made for me in another time and upon a distant shore. I could not see this little man well then and pressed my face to the pallet so my distress was not audible to the guards.

But I made another man and lay them together entwined under the pallet where they would be safe.

Those days in the cell were very miserable, thinking Aleksey thought so of me. I looked back upon them rather fondly once my torture began.

I
SUPPOSE
,
li
ke a lot of men, I was tortured for no good reason. They didn’t seem to want me to confess anything, as they had already determined my guilt. They didn’t want me to name names. Prince John, they told me, had made a full and honest confession, was in seclusion and likely to be exiled. Which was odd, considering he came to visit me and watch.

I had once lived with a people who saw torture as a way to project power over their adversaries. If a man is unhinged by fear before you attack him, your victory is assured. The settlers were so afraid of the Powponi and their methods that fear was palpable in the air when we attacked. Also, if you torture your enemy, you test his mettle and raise the value of your own victory over him. Why these semicivilized Europeans were torturing me, therefore, I have no idea. I did not need to be more afraid before my execution, and I did not raise them up in their own estimation by my resistance. I angered them more than anything else because I would not speak or give them satisfaction. I think they were just men who enjoyed the infliction of pain. Suffice to say that for many days I did yearn for my quiet, pain-free time in the cell when all I had to worry about was if Aleksey still loved me.

It does not help a man stay sane to hear his own scaffold being erected outside his cell, but in my case it was a relief. At least I knew the pain was going to end soon.

The day I was dragged out into the sunshine was one of the most perfect summer days I could remember. I smelled new-cut grass, and the ocean was so blue I could hardly bear to look at it. Not a breath of wind stirred the pennants that hung limp and lifeless along the walls.

The scaffold had been erected up on the ramparts, right against the battlements, so I would be in full sight of everyone who had come to witness my death. And they had all come. Once my eyesight adjusted to the light, I could see a temporary grandstand full of people. I kept my eyes averted for a moment, then looked more closely. He was sitting up front and center.

At that moment, I was glad to be on my way. I mounted the scaffold and faced the spike. I needed assistance, for my legs would not support me, more from my recent treatment than from the fear of what I was approaching. Fear almost unmanned me, however; I could not deny that. I wondered how this was going to happen. The guard who had mounted the platform with me cut the bindings fastening my wrists. He pulled my shirt off and let it fall. I watched it pool at my feet. It was better than looking at the spike, which drew the eye as forcibly as if it were beautiful, which it was not. They had built it tall. Perhaps I should not have told my hanging story to amuse, for it had clearly been listened to and the Saxefalian fault rectified: my feet would not touch the ground this time. Perhaps my legs would not need to be broken. I was considerably heavier than the young man I had tried to rescue, and I thought my own weight was well sufficient to lower me, slowly, onto the agony.

I looked over at Aleksey, wondering if these thoughts were going through his mind too: how long it would take me to die; how much pain he thought I was owed for betraying him so. He was staring at his boots. I almost laughed but looked away, my vision suddenly fogged. I turned to blink and clear my sight. I could see right out over the bay now, and it was incredibly beautiful. A little boat rocked gently on the azure water, fishing nets strung out behind the sunflower-yellow hull.

The guard was undoing my laces now and wanted me to step out of my breeches. I wobbled, as I was not very steady, and I felt the platform beneath me shake. It seemed fitting somehow that everything was so uncertain, so unstable, for I now saw just how shaky my life with Aleksey had been. We had been so innocent, so naive in our belief that we were inviolate in our little affair, our royal affair. This was more like it: naked, broken, wobbling. This was how we had really been.

Suddenly a priest was at my side. I had not seen him approach, for I had been watching the little boat. He told me this was now my opportunity to repent my sins. He told me I could save my soul and my life, and his hand hovered, waiting for me to say the words that would see me taken off the scaffold, the words that would save me from the spike.

Was this what Aleksey was waiting for? Was this what it had all been about? He knew if I repented, I could save myself. He’d signed the revision to the law, after all. Perhaps this was his intention, to punish me by this hideous humiliation. I’d go into “exile” like John. I would become a wraith, drifting around the castle, pretending all was well, broken in spirit. And then he would… revive me—offer me pitiful love in return for my submission. It amazed me how much went through my mind in that second, staring at him, at a face I thought I’d seen in every contingency: passion, ecstasy, grief, pain—love. But I had never seen
this
Aleksey, the one who hated me and sat like stone, staring at his boots.

I opened my mouth. I wanted to say
the devil take you all
, but it seemed a waste, somehow, to have those be my last words. Instead I said, “I repent of nothing. I did everything I did deliberately and would do so again. Love is not love unless you hold fast even unto death, and I have loved that much.” At that, Aleksey lifted his face for the first time and looked for me. He seemed to have trouble finding me, but then his gaze settled, sure and fixed.

I took a sharp breath, so sharp it hurt my ribs, which had been damaged during the torture. Aleksey’s eyes were the tiny pinpricks of a man deep under the spell of laudanum. It was like looking at him again as he had sat upon his camp bed during our march: loose, malleable. I wanted to stroke my finger over his eyelids again and tell him that all would be well and that he should sleep—but I could not. And I could not cry out, for who would listen? Who would believe me?

I saw it all then, the plot that had defeated us. Aleksey separated from me and drugged to acquiescence, my arrest and torture, done without his knowledge, my execution—with him as witness. I began to struggle, which I had not done until that point. The guard seized my arms and attempted to drag me to the spike. The executioner mounted the platform hastily upon seeing his difficulties. The thumping of his heavy footsteps upon the hollow structure sounded as a child’s nightmare, and I could not now stand unaided. Fear and horror were defeating me. He needed me standing, so two more guards were summoned. They trooped up after him. How was I to be got up onto the spike? They wrestled and manhandled me, and another guard was called forward. Finally they thought to bring a box for me to mount.

At the end, therefore, six of us stood upon the scaffold: the
executioner, three guards, the priest, and me. But the great collapse did not happen until they tried to lift me, for it was only then that they all stepped toward the back where the spike was—and
then
everything tilted. The whole platform swayed toward the battlement. Unlike the Saxefalian grandstand, my scaffold had not been built to
support
people. It had been built to collapse when too much weight was put upon its rear supports. So we did not sway back and fall like a pack of cards; we carried on tipping. All of us—executioner, guards, priest, and I—tipped right over the wall and plummeted forty feet or so into the sea below us.

I hit the water.

It was harder than frozen earth after a fall from Xavier, and there was no breath in my body to cry out, which was good, for then I was under the water and sinking.

It seemed the easiest thing to just let go and float on the numbness seeping into my mind, but my brain began to scream for air, and I responded desperately, struggling as best I could toward the sunlight, which I could see filtering through the surface.

I made it to the air, but I could not remain there, the struggle too much for my broken, winded body, and I began to sink once more and welcomed this.

My hair was seized.

I swung my arm to bat away the pain. A viselike grip fastened upon it, and I was pulled face-first against a sunflower-yellow hull. More hands, grunts, and then I was on my back on a deck.

Before I could attempt to speak, to tell them about Aleksey, something was thrown over me, covering me, and a gruff voice muttered, “Lie still if you want to live.”

I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to do that or not, but I had no choice in the stillness—I passed into blessed unconsciousness and knew no more until waking in a bed at Gregory’s inn.

The waking was sudden. I was in the grip of delirium. Vague, shapeless people tried to hold me down, soothe me. They expected me to be in pain, for I was grievously injured, but they did not expect me to wake raving that Aleksey was being drugged, that he still loved me and that I must save him. Why was no one listening to me? I feared I had reverted to Powponi in my extreme distress and screamed in German that he loved me, that he must be told I had not betrayed him.

I heard a whisper, soft, tortured words, but they meant nothing to me.

They were not in any language I understood, for they told me Aleksey was dead.

That was utterly beyond my comprehension, and I passed back into that twilight world of shadows for a very long time.

A
LL
THE
bells in the city were ringing, and the news was being openly announced: the king was dead. King Christian X’s reign was over, the shortest reign of any monarch in Hesse-Davia’s history.

I lay in bed, listening to their faint song, which reached me even here at the inn on the coast.

I knew everything now—how Gregory as minister of works had been commissioned to build the scaffold and how he had built it high and weak on the seawall side so its inevitable collapse would carry me over the wall and into the sea, where he waited for me. I should have recognized the sunflower-yellow hull. I knew I was the only one to survive the fall but that I was counted amongst the missing, presumed dead, for only two bodies had been fished from the sea, the others washed out on strong currents. I knew they wanted me to leave Hesse-Davia—that no one would now be safe.

I knew everything and I knew nothing, for Aleksey was dead, and so I listened to nothing and understood nothing and lay in a world of pain where no kind words or healing touch could reach me.

Johan was to come that day. I had refused to see him, but I watched as he rode into the courtyard. He had Xavier with him.

For a moment the world blurred, as it had been doing maddeningly often for some days.

I went down to see my horse.

If Johan was shocked by my appearance, he did not show it. I was sadly grieved by the evidence of his suffering but likewise did not allude to it. We walked slowly together down to the shore, no words needed between us. He had loved Aleksey for longer and possibly as well as I, and there were no words that could convey how we felt.

Eventually he stopped. Looking at his boots, he said, “It was very quick. He fell ill, took a fit, after your ex—after you—that evening. The doctors were summoned, but it was too late. He—”

“No!” I could tell from his sudden glance at my face that he’d been told about my ranting and raving and was fearful that I would make a scene. I concentrated on a tiny glint in the sand at our feet so that my voice would stay calm, and elaborated, “He was
murdered
.”

Johan snapped back angrily, “This does not help, Colonel. You were not the only one who—you weren’t there!”

“I saw him from the scaffold! He was
drugged
.”

“I was there too, and you, sir, were in no fit state to see anything at all.”

“Do you seriously think Aleksey would send me to my death on a spike?”

At that he swung away from me and began to pace toward the surf, but turned back just as suddenly and poked me painfully in the chest. “You know the answer to that better than I.”

And I saw it then. He had at last answered his own question.
Can he be trusted
? He had weighed me in the balance and found me wanting.

I was too grieved to talk more and began to walk away from him, back to the inn. He caught me up and said with less acrimony, as if he knew he’d gone too far and was making apology, “He is lying in state, Nikolai, and you are to come with me and see him.”