Bride to the King (17 page)

When he saw Zosina, he stared in surprise and she said, “I am going riding. Please saddle me a horse.”

He was obviously too astonished to speak, but he hurried away and she heard him calling for somebody who she suspected to be one of the Head Grooms.

Realising she had caused a commotion, but still intent on riding away from the Palace, she inspected the stalls close to her and then in the third one, she found a magnificent black stallion.

It was the finest horse she had ever seen and she had opened the stable door and was patting him when the young groom came back with an older man.

“Good morning!” Zosina said before he could speak. “I am the Princess Zosina. I wish to go riding.”

“Certainly, Your Royal Highness,” the elderly groom replied, “but I think that stallion would be too much for you.

Zosina smiled.

“This is the horse I wish to ride,” she said firmly.

“Very good, Your Royal Highness, but any groom I send with you will find it hard to keep up with Samu.”

“That is his name?” Zosina asked. “Then your groom must do his best. I am sure Samu will give me a most enjoyable ride.”

The old groom looked doubtful, but he was too well versed in his duties to argue.

He sent the boy to fetch somebody called Niki and began to saddle Samu quickly and with a deftness which came from long practice.

Zosina went outside into the yard.

She wanted to breathe the fresh air and it was an effort to speak, even to give her orders to the groom.

In a surprisingly short time Samu was brought out to her and from elsewhere in the yard a groom appeared on another stallion by no means as magnificent or, Zosina was sure, as fast.

The old groom helped her into the saddle.

“Your Royal Highness will remember,” he said, “that Samu is the fastest horse in the stable. He belongs to His Royal Highness the Regent and he says that he has never owned such a horse in his life.”

Zosina thought she might have guessed that the Regent would have found a horse to which she had been drawn instinctively.

She did not reply to the groom, she merely moved forward, aware that Niki on the other horse was following her.

She had some idea of the direction she wanted to go in and, as soon as there was room, Niki drew alongside her.

“I’ll show Your Royal Highness a good ride!” he said eagerly. “We cross the river, then you’ll be in the wild country below the mountains. They tells me it’s like the Steppes in Hungary, but I can’t believe there’s a better place for horses than you’ll find here in Dórsia.”

The groom led her in the direction he described and, as he chatted on, talking of the rides there were around the City and the horses they had in the stables, Zosina did not listen.

She was back with her own problem, feeling that it was pressing in on her and worrying at her brain like a dog with a bone so that she could not escape from it and could not force herself to understand anything else that was happening.

She was aware in one detached part of her consciousness of the excellence of Samu and the manner in which he moved obediently to her wishes.

Niki was still talking when they reached the open country and she felt she could bear it no longer.

She had to think, she had to!

An idea came to her and without really considering it, she acted.

She drew a lace handkerchief from her pocket and as they were moving at a trot it floated away from her in the wind. She drew Samu to a standstill.

“My handkerchief!” she said. “I have dropped it!”

“I’ll fetch it for Your Royal Highness,” Niki offered. Zosina reached out to take the bridle of his horse and he slipped to the ground.

When he started to run back to the handkerchief, lying white against the green of the grass, she spurred Samu forward taking the groom’s horse with her.

She deliberately moved very quickly so that he should think that she had lost control and only when she had broken into a gallop for nearly a quarter-of-a-mile, did she release the reins of the other horse.

Then spurring Samu again, she settled down to ride at an almost incredible speed over the soft grass that was fragrant with flowers.

She rode until Samu rather than herself slowed the pace and when she turned to look back, not only was Niki and his horse out of sight but so was the City.

She was in what seemed to be an enchanted land, the mountains peaking high above her and the green valley in which she was riding empty save for the flights of wild birds, which rose at her approach.

‘At last I can think,’ Zosina mused. ‘At last I can consider what I can do.’

She brought Samu down to a trot and tried to make her mind work clearly as it had been unable to do in the Palace, but the confusion was still there.

The impossibility of marrying a man like the King and the equal impossibility of refusing to do so was an unanswerable dilemma.

Round and round, over and over and up and down, it seemed to Zosina that her brain considered every aspect of the situation she found herself in, but, instead of the problem becoming clearer, it seemed only to become more involved.

There was the threat of the German Empire, the hope not only of Dórsia retaining her independence but also of her own country, Lützelstein.

She visualised only too well her father’s fury as well as her mother’s if she should go back home having refused to accept the duty that had been imposed upon her.

Even if she tried to refuse, she had the feeling that her father, or rather her mother, would force her into obeying them.

And apart from that how could she lose the respect and admiration of the Regent?

He might love her, but he had given his whole life to his country on behalf of the King in a manner which she knew now was exceptional, and was admired by all other countries which were aware of the progress Dórsia had made.

The British particularly, Zosina knew, would want Dórsia and Lützelstein to remain independent because more than any other Monarch in Europe, Queen Victoria had tried to maintain the balance of power.

‘How can I fight all these people?’ she asked.

Once again the picture of the King was in front of her eyes and she could almost see his coarse friends inveigling themselves into positions of power and, in doing so, ruining everything that the Regent had built up in the last eight years.

‘They must be stopped!’ Zosina thought. ‘But how?’

She felt as if she was trying to hold back an avalanche with her bare hands, but being crushed and smothered in the process.

She rode on and on. Suddenly, after many hours had passed she found the sun was high in the sky, it was very hot and she was thirsty.

She pulled off her riding coat and laid it on the front of her saddle.

She looked for somewhere to drink and thought that, if she drew nearer to the mountains, there might be a cascade of cool pure water running down from the snows.

The mere thought of it made her lick her lips and she turned her horse’s head, riding towards the great fir-covered foot of a mountain on whose peak there was still snow.

‘It is all so beautiful!’ she told herself, ‘but the man who will rule is ugly and horrible.’

She felt if the Regent was with her, she would say, ‘
every prospect pleases and only man is vile
’ and he would understand.

Then she was back repeating over and over again,

“I love him!
I love him
!”

It grew hotter still and she was beginning to think that she would have to try and find her way back to the river which she knew flowed through the valley a long way away.

She was now in the foothills of the mountains and there were huge boulders of rocks and also a lot of scattered stones that might have come from an avalanche.

But, although she kept looking, there was no cascade of clear water that she had hoped to find.

She told herself that what she ought to do was to return to the Palace, but every instinct in her body fought against facing the problems that awaited her there.

She was still finding it hard to think, she only knew that somehow, somewhere, there must be a solution and yet if there was one it escaped her.

“I cannot go – back,” she whispered beneath her breath.

And yet she was aware that time was passing and, although she had no idea what hour it was, soon the groom she had left behind would report that she had ridden on without him and she supposed that the Regent would send a search party.

‘He will be – angry with me,’ she thought and felt a little tremor of fear go through her.

But even to endure his anger would be better than to be without him and know instead the indifference of the degraded and drunken King she hated.

She felt as if her dislike and abhorrence of him, which was very foreign to her whole nature, was degrading her so that she was losing her self-respect and becoming a reflection of him.

‘I cannot live such a life, I cannot become like the women he admires.’

She was back with the same problems that had beset her all night and had taunted and haunted her so that she had been unable to sleep and inevitably, as she asked the same questions over and over again, she could find no answer.

Her lips were so dry and she was so thirsty that her need for water seemed for the moment to sweep away everything else.

And yet she was not certain whether the reason for her thirst was the heat of the sun, the hard riding or just fear.

Then, as she rounded a huge boulder of rock, she saw just ahead of her smoke rising on the warm air.

Instinctively she urged Samu forward, thinking that perhaps she would find a party of woodcutters.

Then, as she drew a little nearer the smoke, she saw a fire and round it were seated a number of gypsies.

It was not difficult for Zosina to recognise who these people were, for there was always a large number of gypsies in Lützelstein and she and her sisters had been interested in the Romany people, Katalin finding them very romantic.

Zosina had at one time, tried to learn a little of the gypsy language, but had found it too difficult.

Frau Weber had taught her their history and had pointed out that, as they had originally come from India, much of their language was derived from Hindi.

Moving nearer to the gypsies, Zosina thought of what she had learned and was sure that, as Dórsia marched with Hungary, their customs would be much the same as those of the Hungarian gypsies who were the predominant tribe in Lützelstein.

When she reached the gypsies, she saw that they were poorly dressed, but in other ways with their dark hair and eyes they were much the same as those she had seen at home.

As she rode up to them, they looked at her in astonishment and she thought too that the men who rose slowly to their feet were nervous.

To put them at their ease, she greeted them in one of the few sentences she had learned which meant ‘good day’. “
Latcho ghee
,” she said.

Instantly the gypsies’ apprehension was replaced with smiles, as they replied,

“
Latcho ghee
!” and a great deal more that she did not understand.

She dismounted from Samu’s back and, holding his bridle, went nearer to the fire, saying slowly in Dórsian, “Would you be kind enough to give me a drink?”

To make it clearer she mimed the act of drinking and the gypsies gave a cry to show they understood and a woman hurriedly brought a goatskin bag from which they poured out water into a rough cup made of antelope horn.

It tasted slightly brackish, but Zosina was too thirsty to be particular and she drank all the cup contained and the woman refilled it.

Then she pointed to Samu feeling that he must be as thirsty as she was and again the gypsies understood and one of the older men, who she thought must be a
Voivode
or Chief, took Samu by the bridle and led him to where their own horses were tethered by a large gourd from which they could drink.

Zosina stood watching the stallion move away, then one of the women speaking in a mixture of Dórsian, Hungarian and Romani, which she could just understand, offered her food.

She saw then that they were all eating from a great pot of stew, which was cooking over the fire.

It smelt delicious and Zosina was certain that she recognised the savoury fragrance of deer or young gazelle and perhaps of other wild animals, which the gypsies could hunt in the mountains.

She accepted the invitation eagerly and because she was no longer thirsty, she was now very hungry.

She had missed her breakfast and, although she had no watch on her, she guessed by the height of the sun in the sky that it must be getting on for midday.

A thick stew was ladled onto a wooden plate and, while the gypsies ate with their fingers, mopping up the gravy with a rough brown bread which the peasants ate in every country in that part of the world, for Zosina they produced an ancient silver spoon.

It bore, she noted with a smile of amusement, an elaborate crest which she was certain must have belonged to some nobleman.

She presumed it had been stolen, but she was not prepared to challenge her hosts’ possession of it.

She ate what was on her plate finding it excellent, the meat seasoned with herbs, which she was sure had been known to the gypsies for centuries.

She wished fervently that she had persevered with the study of their language, but unfortunately she could only communicate in broken sentences with a great deal of mime.

Zosina understood that they were travelling East and she presumed that they would be leaving Dórsia because it was their nature to wander and never to settle anywhere.

The women were attractive, their huge dark eyes reminding Zosina of their Indian ancestry. The children, small, dark and full of high spirits, were adorable.

Only the men seemed rough and surly and she thought that they regarded her suspiciously as if they could not understand why she was alone and not accompanied by grooms or soldiers.

As they looked at her and whispered amongst themselves, she wondered if they suspected that she was trying to trap them in any way.