Princess Annie (36 page)

The hammering echoed in her ears and in the very marrow of her bones. While the sound repelled Annie, it also drew her, in some inexplicable way, and she followed it like a child enchanted by a piper. In the great hall, preparations for the wedding feast had already begun—long, rustic tables were being carried in, while servants bustled about with feather dusters and scrub brushes.

Annie’s stomach clenched painfully.

Outside, the sunlight was dazzling, the air fresh and faintly salted with the scent of the sea. The gallows, an object Annie had avoided successfully until then, loomed against the shimmering blue sky, an ugly monument to all the graces humankind had yet to acquire.

She stood looking at it, one hand shading her eyes, her thoughts divided. On one level, she considered the execution that would take place the following morning, while another part of her lingered in the infirmary, where Mr. Barrett was interrogating Tom and Josiah, She felt like a mother hen, separated from her chicks.

“Terrible-looking thing, isn’t it?”

Annie started, then turned her head and saw Lucian standing beside her. It gave her the chills, the way he could sneak up on a person. “Yes,” was all she managed to say.

She shivered when her eyes adjusted and she saw Rafael on the scaffold with another man, both of them framed in sunlight. They were crouching to inspect the trapdoor that would spring open beneath Peter Maitland’s feet.

“It’s ironic, don’t you think?” Lucian asked smoothly. “Rafael ordering that monstrosity built, I mean. He’s an intelligent man, my brother—surely he’s aware that he himself might be forced to stand up there with a noose around his neck.”

Annie put a hand over her mouth, for the image Lucian’s words engendered was a vivid one, and burning nausea rushed up from her stomach to scald the back of her throat. She recovered quickly, but not before Lucian noted her reaction and smiled a bitter little smile.

“This is not a game, Annie, or a fairy tale. Sooner or later, you must stop playing nurse and pretending that everything is going to be all right. It isn’t. Bavia is doomed, and so is Rafael.” He gestured, taking in the castle itself and the walls that surrounded it. “And all of this is an illusion. Escape, Annie, before it crumbles into rubble around you.”

Tears stung Annie’s eyes. “I can’t,” she said.

“Then you’re a fool.”

She sniffled and squared her shoulders. “Perhaps.”

“Do you love my brother so much? More than your own precious life? More than the children who will never be born because you insist on sacrificing yourself on Rafael’s altar?”

Annie didn’t want to die, and for a moment she felt the loss of the children Lucian mentioned as keenly as if they already existed, flesh and blood testaments to her love for Rafael. “I don’t have to explain to you,” she said bluntly. “And I won’t.”

“Convenient,” Lucian said with a sigh, “since you probably can’t even explain it to yourself.”

Annie kept her gaze fixed on Rafael and felt the familiar stir of excitement, deep in her middle, when he sensed her regard and raised his head to look at her. In that moment, Annie understood her commitment to this man completely, but it was still too great a thing, too marvelous and elemental, to be confined to words. Her only answer to Lucian was a shrug.

Rafael made no move to descend the scaffold stairs but instead returned to his conversation with his companion.

“Perhaps I should kidnap you, since you won’t listen to reason,” Lucian said.

The remark struck Annie with the impact of a stone hurled from a slingshot, all but knocking the breath out of her. “What did you say?”

“You heard me,” Lucian replied succinctly. He stood like a soldier, his hands clasped behind his back. “If you refuse to save yourself, I might be forced to do it for you.”

A wild, nervous rage surged within Annie, heating her blood and making her head feel light. “I will warn you once and only once, Lucian,” she said, when she could speak. “Don’t attempt such a thing, don’t even
think
about it, because if you try anything remotely like that, I will tear out your liver and roast it on a spit. I am not nearly so helpless as I look!”

Lucian laughed, but no note of humor rang in the sound. “You? Helpless? I’m a man of many delusions, Annie, but I never indulged in that particular one.” His gaze moved back to Rafael, who remained occupied on the scaffold, rimmed in an aureole of sunlight. “Still, even the strongest among us have their weaknesses.”

The observation gave Annie another chill. “Is that a threat?” she demanded.

Lucian shrugged. “More of a premonition,” he said. “Watch out for kidnappers.”

“Watch out for your liver,” Annie retorted, as Lucian walked away.

She stared up at Rafael for a while, wishing they were both far from that place, then turned and went back into the castle. Mr. Barrett had already left the infirmary by the time she reached it, and both Tom and Josiah were alive and unmarked.

“He hanged us by our heels and beat us bloody,” teased Tom, when he read the relief in Annie’s face. “We told him all our secrets.”

Josiah, lying back against his pillows, was flushed and sullen. “It might be a joke to you, Tom Wallcreek, but I don’t look forward to spending the next twenty years rotting in the dungeons of St. James Keep.”

“You won’t,” Tom said, with utter confidence.

Annie offered no comment. If Tom and Josiah were freed in a rebel raid, as Tom probably expected, she would be glad for them. At one and the same time, Annie dreaded the prospect with the whole of her being, for it would mean almost certain death for Rafael.

She stayed in the infirmary for another hour or so, puttering about. When Kathleen came to relieve her, with a stern warning to eat something and lie down for a while, she made her way into the busy kitchen.

Here, as in the great hall, preparations for the wedding were well underway. With no attempt to enter into the conversations swirling around her or to draw attention to herself—in her plain clothes, with her hair tied back, she often went unnoticed—Annie walked to the washstand and scrubbed her hands with warm water and strong soap. Then she slipped into the larder, helping herself to a heel of brown bread and a small wedge of cheese.

There was stout tea brewing in a brown pot in the center of the crowded table, so Annie took a cup to wash down her food.

“They carted poor Miss Covington away this morning, you know,” one of the maids told another.

Annie didn’t react or even glance in the speaker’s direction but she was listening all the same. She crumbled the strong golden cheese into tiny pieces and began eating them one by one.

“Crazy as a bedbug,” commented a painfully plain girl, holding a tray full of small cakes sparkling under a coating of white sugar.

The sight reminded Annie of snowy mornings on Puget Sound, when the world was so still and beautiful that it nearly stopped a person’s heart. The yearning to be there, safe and warm under one of her grandmother’s colorful quilts, was so intense that it made her stomach hurt.

A ship had put in off the shore just as Rafael had predicted, and Miss Covington had been taken aboard. The vessel hadn’t been her father’s, obviously, for Patrick Trevarren would never have left Bavia without Annie herself. Even if the captain had been willing to leave her, Rafael never would have allowed it—he wanted to be rid of her.

“Do you know what ship it was?” Annie heard herself ask. She hadn’t meant to speak at all and was impatient with herself.

“Just some boat from England, bringing wedding guests and supplies,” answered the cook’s helper, who was used to seeing Annie in the kitchen fetching broth and filling pitchers with fresh water. “They’re probably waiting out there to take the fancy people away again, when all the excitement’s over.”

Annie nodded and went back to eating her cheese. It still surprised her that the St. Jameses’ friends and relatives were willing to risk their lives to attend a wedding, even if it
was
a royal one. That thought, in its turn, served to remind her that Phaedra wasn’t planning to go through with the ceremony in the first place—the princess had maneuvered Annie into posing as the bride.

She groaned aloud and covered her face with both hands.

Someone touched her shoulder. “Are you all right, miss?” asked a gentle voice. Perhaps because of her work with the fever victims, Annie was well-liked within the keep.

Annie raised her eyes and recognized Ellen, one of Kathleen’s friends. She answered with a fitful nod. She must look a sight, she concluded. Everyone seemed to think she was sprawled across death’s threshold, half in this world and half in the next.

“All she needs is a sweet,” said Cook, setting one of the glittering little cakes down in front of Annie. It smelled wonderful, warm and sweet and rich enough to tempt a saint in a horsehair shirt. “Here you are, miss. Swallow that down, and I’ll give you another. Nothing like a treat to restore a body’s hope.”

Annie had her doubts about the medicinal value of sugar cakes, but she wanted mothering so she ate the morsel and found it delicious. Before Cook could induce her to eat another, however, Annie’s fretful stomach rebelled. She clasped a hand over her mouth, bolted from the kitchen and threw up in a patch of morning glories growing beside the step.

Cook, the same matronly soul who had overseen the palace kitchen in Morovia, appeared at her side like a corpulent genie, holding a cup of cool water in one hand and a soft cloth in the other. The older woman touched Annie’s forehead and sighed.

“It isn’t the fever, then,” she said, shaking her head.

Annie rinsed her mouth and wiped her face with the cloth. Her skin felt clammy, and her knees were unsteady. Her eyes widened as a possibility struck her, and she sat down hard on the step.

“When did you last have your woman-time?” Cook asked, in a sympathetic whisper.

Annie couldn’t remember the date—she wasn’t regular anyway—but it didn’t matter. She knew instantly that she was carrying Rafael’s child, and both jubilation and despair rode the crest of that realization.

Still seated on the step, she bent until her forehead touched her knees.

“Miss Trevarren?” Cook queried, worried. “Shall I send someone for His Highness?”

Of course everyone probably knew Annie and the prince were intimate. She didn’t take the trouble to work out her feelings about that. “No,” she answered, without raising her head. “And please don’t speak of this to anyone else.”

“You can be sure I won’t,” Cook insisted, somewhat huffily. “Never let it be said that Elnora Hayes is a gossip.”

Annie didn’t know whether she could trust the woman or not. Her thoughts and emotions were caught up in a staggering, reeling tangle, impossible to separate one from another. “Leave me,” she said. “Please. I’ll be all right.”

Exuding reluctance, Cook retreated into the kitchen, and Annie sat with her head down until her heart stopped pounding and her breath settled down to a reasonable rate. She didn’t want to speak to anyone, but neither could she bear to go to her room, so Annie rose, crossed the yard and began following the keep’s outer wall.

As she walked, she thought of nothing. It was business enough, for the time being, just to exist.

Presently, Annie came to the place where she’d found the hidden passage. It was still invisible, behind its shield of climbing vines and bushes. She waded through them, uncovered the gate and opened it.

As before, it took several moments for her eyes to adjust. When they did, Annie got another shock. Someone had been staying in the cavelike chamber; the stub of a tallow candle was stuck to an upended crate, and there was a pallet in the corner, rumpled and recently slept upon.

Annie panicked, then calmed herself with a series of deep breaths. She had neglected, with so much going on, to tell Rafael about this place. She didn’t intend to make the same mistake twice; she would go straight to the prince and correct the oversight.

In the meantime, though, she had to see if the outer gate would open. She broke the tallow free of the box, lit the wick with one of several matches found nearby and moved deeper into the cave.

The other gate sprang ajar with ease, opening into a dense thicket of blackberry bushes. Annie could see that someone had been hacking their way through the thick, spiky vines, but the task had not been completed. A hand scythe lay abandoned on the ground.

She blew out the candle and peered through the foliage, seeing bits of green land and sparkling sea beyond. At a small sound behind her, Annie whirled and found herself face-to-face with Phaedra.

“You found our hiding place,” she said, with such brave resignation that Annie felt a stab of pity for her. “I should have known you would.”

Annie suppressed a need to confide her own momentous news. It must remain a secret until she found the right time to tell Rafael. “Is this where you’ve been meeting your secret lover?” she asked, without judgment or derision. Annie was in no position to throw stones.

“Yes,” Phaedra answered, folding her arms in a sign of stubbornness that presaged another refusal to divulge the man’s identity. “And don’t ask me his name, because I’m not about to tell you.”

“I should think it would be safe enough to speak of him—there’s no one else to hear besides the mice.” Annie made this observation without any real hope of persuading her friend. She and the princess were cut from the same cloth in many ways, and obstinance was a trait they shared.

“You’ll know soon enough,” Phaedra said, with a small smile and a twinkle in her gray eyes. “Everyone will. I almost wish I could be there to see Rafael’s expression—not to mention Chandler’s—when my clever deception is uncovered.”

“Don’t be overconfident,” Annie warned. “We’re about the same size, it’s true, and there’s no doubt that your wedding gown will fit me perfectly. But what about the difference in our coloring? My hair is much lighter than yours.”

“The veil is made up of layers and layers of net. As for the color of your hair, that can be fixed easily. We’ll simply dye it.”

For a brief moment, Annie forgot her pregnancy, the imminence of war, and tomorrow’s hanging. “Dye my—now just a minute, Phaedra. I didn’t agree—”