“You cannot believe, after all this time, your friend is still coming to save you, Sir Cosmo Mahon?”
Cosmo managed to set the goblet on the table with a steady hand, despite his surprise at being addressed in English. But his surprise was not the nobleman’s ability to speak his tongue; he already knew that. It was the timbre of the voice. It was smooth, rich, and deep. He’d forgotten that. Not a female in male clothing, then.
“Yes, Your Highness. I do.”
The Margrave screwed up his mouth at such certainty.
“I do not think so,” he said sullenly. “Why would he? He is a fugitive in my country. He knows the consequences that await him once he puts a boot into this castle.”
“Nevertheless, he will come, Your Highness. And you must know he will, or I would not still be your captive.”
The Margrave chuckled, but he was not amused. “What a fool you are, Sir Cosmo Mahon! You do not even know what happened to your friend the last time he was here, do you?”
“No, I do not, Your Highness.”
“I had him tortured.”
Sir Cosmo flinched on the word, but he did not reply.
“You do not believe me?”
Sir Cosmo thought of the severed heads on pikes along the battlements, and the fact he had been locked up in a tiny room for almost two months with no company but the soldiers who guarded him. And the time he’d had his head shoved in a bucket of ice water and almost drowned, all to make him compliant. Oh, yes, he could readily believe this ruler capable of having another tortured.
“Yes, Your Highness, I believe you.”
“I do not see why he would choose you to be his best friend,” the Margrave complained, sitting back in his chair and staring over his goblet at his hostage. “There is nothing about you that is appealing. You are ordinary. Your nose is unremarkable. Your eyes are too small. Your features will never be immortalized in stone. And with that mange covering your face you look like an ape-man. You’re certainly not worth Alec Halsey’s attention.”
“Excuse me, Your Highness, but you mistake me for a woman. I am Alec Halsey’s friend, not his lover.”
“Lover?” The Margrave pulled a face. “Too true. I cannot imagine you would interest him as a lover.” He leaned forward and asked in a confidential tone, as one friend to another, eyes suddenly bright, “Tell me: Does he take many lovers? Keep a mistress? Taken an Englishwoman to wife? Are there children? Bastards, perhaps? Or does he still prefer to mount other men’s wives?”
“They are questions I cannot answer, Your Highness.”
“Of course you can,” the Margrave continued in that same confidential tone that was supposed to engender trust but which made Sir Cosmo’s feel as if his skin crawled with ants. “You are his best friend. Best friends know these things about each other. Best friends confide in one another. And as his best friend you would know all this, and more.”
“And even if I did know, I could not tell you, Your Highness,” Sir Cosmo apologized.
The Margrave waved a bejeweled hand dismissing such honorable intentions. The soldiers behind Sir Cosmo’s chair mistook this for a signal he was done with talking to the prisoner and grabbed Sir Cosmo by both arms and hauled him out of the chair.
“Sit him down! Sit him down, you fools!” the Margrave screeched in German and shot up out of his chair so fast he over-set his goblet. The wine splashed across the table. Everyone seated broke off their conversations and rose up as one. Margrave Ernst waggled a long bejeweled finger at the last guard in the line along the wall. “You! Yes, you! Come here and stand behind the prisoner. You two, get out of my sight!” He looked over his shoulder at his captain of the guard, who was setting the chair to rights. “Westover! Tell me why you are my captain when you allow imbeciles to guard me! No! Do not answer. But those two are dismissed. Take their uniforms and put them to work in the casements hauling filth!”
He flicked out the skirts of his gold and silver thread frock coat and sat again, and so did everyone else.
“You cannot tell me because you do not know,” he asked Sir Cosmo in English, and as if his outburst had not occurred. “Or because you are a stubborn fool. Which is it?”
“Neither, Your Highness,” Sir Cosmo replied politely. “It is because best friends do not break confidences.”
“Ugh! Have it your way then! You are as closed-mouthed as your female companion is a conversational rattle pate!”
“Emily?” Sir Cosmo hissed the name, and his sudden movement in the chair had the soldier’s hand hard on his shoulder lest he decide to leap up. “Is—is Miss Mahon well? Is she being accorded every respect and convenience? May I know how she goes on, Your Highness?”
“Oh! Oh! Now you come alive! Well if you want a report on your female companion you had best be more forthcoming with answers to my questions.” The Margrave lifted his penciled brows. “If you are very good, I may let you see her…”
“Thank you, Your Highness.”
Margrave Ernst smiled mischievously. He looked about at his dinner guests and addressed them in their own tongue. “See how this hairy ape becomes animated when I make mention of his female companion! What beasts these English are! It is as well they have been kept in separate cages or we’d be expecting our first hairy infant, to be sure!”
There was a moment’s silence and then one of the guests let out a forced hard laugh, and the others joined in, nudging one another and egging each other on to laugh harder at their ruler’s weak bon mot. Baron Haderslev tried to catch Captain Westover’s eye as he mentally rolled his eyes, but the Captain of the Guard was preoccupied with his own thoughts.
The Captain of the Guard was thinking that the son would never measure up to the father as a man, or as a ruler. Margrave Leopold had been an excellent ruler, a brave soldier, and a just and able administrator. And while his son Ernst was a fierce and brave soldier, capable of leading men into battle, he was not the administrator or the honorable head of state Leopold had been. There were many whispers about Ernst’s fitness to be ruler and the increasing amount of time he spent visiting with his soft-brained sister the Princess Joanna. But none of this was enough to depose a Margrave who came from a long line of Herzfeld princes who ruled through the grace of God. Westover had sworn an oath of allegiance to Ernst, as he had to Margrave Leopold, and he would honor that oath until the last breath left his body.
And while Westover was convinced it was God’s will Ernst was Margrave, Baron Haderslev, who had served the old Margrave, and was now an old man himself, was wondering how many more hours, days, weeks, perhaps months, he would need to endure listening to Ernst’s inanities before his half-brother Viktor stormed the Castle and took the throne for himself. It was not that he particularly supported Viktor’s claims to the throne. After all, he was the product of a morganatic marriage, and thus could not legally inherit. But the more time Haderslev spent in Ernst’s company, the more he was all for throwing out the legalities in preference for a ruler who was sane, and not under the influence of a sister who had been locked up since her fifteenth birthday. When Leopold was alive he had controlled Ernst, and he had certainly kept Joanna under lock and key…
Perhaps winter would allow for the nobles to get up the courage to stage a coup. But Haderslev knew this would be impossible without the support or the capitulation of the doggedly loyal captain and his household guards.
“Haderslev! Haderslev! Are you daydreaming?”
It was the Margrave, and Baron Haderslev quickly banished his treasonous thoughts and stood.
“Where is this ape’s female companion? Have her fetched!” Ernst turned to Sir Cosmo with a dazzling smile and continued in English. “While your companion is being fetched, perhaps now you will tell me more about our friend…?” When Sir Cosmo nodded he sighed his satisfaction and steepled his fingers, elbows on the table, and asked, “Tell me about his mistress, or his wife, or both. My sister is desirous of knowing with whom he fornicates, thus making a mockery of his vows to her, as her husband.”
Sir Cosmo was certain he had heard correctly but wondered if in his translation into English, the Margrave had muddled his words. So politely corrected him.
“I beg your pardon, Your Highness, but Alec Halsey is not married, and never has been.”
“Ha! Then you do not know him at all, and cannot possibly be his best friend if he did not confide that he is indeed married, very much so, to my sister the Princess Joanna. They were married here in the Castle, with my father and the Court Chamberlain as witnesses to the union. Is that not so, Baron?”
He repeated in German to the Court Chamberlain what he had just said to the prisoner, and Sir Cosmo turned to look at the Baron, who bowed and nodded in confirmation of his ruler’s assertion. Sir Cosmo looked about at the diners, and as not one appeared surprised and continued on with their eating and drinking, he turned back to Ernst and said quietly,
“If that is indeed the case, Your Highness, then yes, you are quite correct. He did not confide this in me, or, for that matter, any one else in England.”
The Margrave looked smug but then his mouth fell into a frown.
“I will tell you then what he did not tell you. My father ennobled him the morning of the ceremony—for we could not allow a commoner to marry into the family—and then they were married here, in the castle chapel. And what did he do? How did he treat us? He abandoned my poor sister. He fled in the night, leaving my sister heartbroken. She remains heartbroken. Such callous treatment of a bride—
my sister
—is beyond forgiveness. And yet,
she
would forgive him and have him back as her husband, I know it, were he to offer up his apologies to her upon his return. Ha! What do you think of your best friend now, Sir Cosmo Mahon?”
Sir Cosmo was at a loss as to how to respond. He was still trying to comprehend the astounding news that Alec had married the Margrave’s sister and then abandoned her. His friend would never be so offhand about such a life-altering decision, or so cruel as to marry and then abandon his bride—he was too much the gentleman. That is, unless he’d been forced into such a union. That seemed within the realms of fantasy, until Cosmo remembered where he was, and who he was with, and how he had been locked up for more than two months, waiting for Alec to rescue him. Never again would he dismiss out of hand something that he considered could only be from the quill of an author of fairy tales. He was living one now, and it was becoming more peculiar by the day.
And sitting before this beautiful man with his blond ringlets, surrounded by his court of soldiers and sycophants, stuffing themselves as if food were in plentiful supply, Cosmo realized two things: He himself had not gone mad—he was as sane as the day he was arrested in the antechamber. Secondly, and more alarmingly, the Margrave was most definitely mentally deficient, particularly where Alec was concerned. Trust his friend to become the object of an infatuation! But it wasn’t only the sister who was obsessed. It was more than a decade since Alec had been to this country, and in the company of this nobleman, and yet the Margrave spoke as if it were only yesterday. Time had moved on for everyone, it seemed, except for Margrave Ernst.
“Come forward! Come forward!” the Margrave was saying to the newest guest to the banquet hall, which drew Cosmo out of his introspection and turning in his chair in expectation of seeing Emily. “Here is your companion, Sir Cosmo! As you see, she has been well looked-after, and is being accorded every civility due her position as the granddaughter of an English Duchess. Come closer, my dear! Come closer!”
Sir Cosmo’s smile froze and his heart missed a beat at this reunion.
This poor creature could not possibly be Emily! She was being led into the room on a length of chain attached to the manacles on her wrists, but it was at her head that he stared in horror, for it was enclosed in an iron-ribbed cage. He knew what it was. It was a scold’s bridle, and he had seen one on display at the Tower. It was said to have belonged to some long-ago lord and used for the subjugation of wives who were thought by their husbands to be scolds. He had been told that the barbarous contraption was still in use in parts of Scotland and on the Continent. He had never seen anything so hideously medieval and could not believe such a torture device had ever seen the light of day. But here was one now, in Midanich, very much in use.
The creature stared out from behind the iron frame, large dark eyes wide with fright and looking about her. But when she saw Sir Cosmo, her gaze became fixed and her eyes filled with tears of recognition. In response, Sir Cosmo burst into tears and covered his face with his sleeve to stifle his sobs and quickly dashed the tears away.
“Ah! Our hairy ape is overjoyed to see his mate!” the Margrave announced with applause, which was quickly followed up by applause around the tables.
Without permission and not a thought for his surroundings, Sir Cosmo strode forward and held the woman’s hands. He stared down at her, trying to recognize in the terrified expression any semblance of his Emily. She blinked up at him and stared hard, as if wanting his undivided attention, and when he nodded in recognition, she smiled. He saw that the contraption protruded into her mouth and held down her tongue so that she could not speak. And although she could not say it in words, he knew what she was trying to tell him, and he knew who she was. This was not Emily; he’d known that from the first, staring into her eyes, which were dark, not blue. But until this poor creature smiled, he was unsure as to her identity. It was Mrs. Carlisle, Emily’s companion, and she had somehow taken Emily’s place. He could have wept, for her, and for joy, that it was not Emily being tortured in this detestable way. And with a huge relief for Emily came guilt and concern for her companion.
“You see that she is well-fed and healthy, but as she would not keep her mouth shut,” the Margrave complained, “my sister found a way to stop her talking altogether.”
“Surely five minutes wearing such a contraption would have been time enough for her to have learned her lesson, Your Highness?” Sir Cosmo asked quietly, fighting hard to mask his emotion.