by Joan Wolf
"Go ahead," he said to the others. "I will join you in a moment." As the rest of the company moved toward the big room that served as the villa's main gathering space, he opened the letter and read it through. Then he read it through again. Slowly he folded it and tucked it inside his breast pocket. At last he followed the others into the room.
Charity and her ladies were inside, comfortably ensconced in front of a big fire. Lady Stefanie Havek had a book in her hands, which she evidently had been reading aloud for the entertainment of the women.
Charity looked up from her seat on the sofa in front of the coffee pot and smiled when she saw him.
The Prince's heart leaped and he moved directly toward Charity's sofa. The lady who had been sitting next to her quietly moved to another seat and the Prince took her place and asked his wife, "Is there any coffee?"
"I'll send for a fresh pot." She leaned forward and rang the bell on the table in front of her.
A servant came in with a fresh pot of coffee and the Prince had just taken his first swallow when the door opened once again, this time to admit his personal bodyguard, Kurt, who was accompanied by a stranger.
"Your Highness," Kurt said, and the note in his voice caught the attention of the entire room. "I am sorry to interrupt you, but this man says he has a message of extreme urgency."
The Prince stared at the burly middle-aged man who was standing beside Kurt and thought he looked vaguely familiar. He felt Charity move infinitesimally closer. "What is your message?" he said.
The man took a few steps forward, then fell on his knees. "I bear a letter for you from Baroness Zais, Your Highness." And he brought forth from beneath his coat a much-folded piece of paper.
Charity stiffened.
"Bring it here." As Augustus reached for the letter, he recognized the man walking toward him as one of Eva's most trusted servants. He accepted the letter, opened it, and read:
They are going to arrest you, Augustus. I heard it from Marc Luska last night. He told me he was going to be the new marshal. There is a cabal of noblemen and they are sending Colonel Luska with his cavalry regiment to arrest you. Franz is behind this. Augustus, you must get away before they catch you. God knows what Franz plans to do.
Augustus stared at the familiar handwriting of his old mistress in shock. Franz, he thought numbly. I can't believe it.
His eyes went over Eva's note one more time, struggling to comprehend. Arrest you . . . regiment of cavalry . . . Franz.
As if from a great distance he heard Charity's voice. "What is it, Augustus? Is something wrong?"
He froze. Charity, he thought. Dear God in heaven, Charity is here. His heart began to pound. He had never been so frightened in his life. He will kill her too. She may be with child. He can't take the chance. He will have to kill her too.
Stefan's urgent voice cut through his paralysis. "For God's sake, Gus, what is it?"
He focused his eyes on the man who was now kneeling before him. "Do you know what is in this letter?"
"I do, Your Highness. I left Lipizza as soon as I could. I would estimate that I am about an hour ahead of them."
He heard the fear in Charity's voice. "Ahead of whom? What is happening, Augustus?"
At last he turned to look at her. "This is information that a regiment of cavalry is on its way to Zosi to arrest me."
She went white to the lips.
Stefan said sharply, "Who is the letter from?"
He looked away from Charity. "It is from Eva Zais. Colonel Luska confided the plot to her last night. Apparently he was trying to impress her—he told her he was going to be the next marshal."
Stefan's round, cherubic face looked as grim as it was possible for it to look. "Does she say who is behind this?"
"Franz." Even as he said the name he couldn't believe it. He could feel the shock run through the room.
Kurt, who had been standing at the door, spoke up. "Your Highness, if you remember, Marshal Rupnik chose me to carry out his assassination plot because he knew I had been helped by Franz and he thought I would be loyal to him."
Emil let out his breath in a long hiss.
Charity's hand clutched his arm. "Augustus, he must have been behind Rupnik's plot." Her voice wavered, then steadied. "He will kill you, Augustus. He wants to be the prince himself."
At last his brain began to function. "I don't plan to wait around to find out what Franz intends to do." He looked from Stefan to Emil. "We'll ride to Namek."
The two men leaped to their feet, as if they would be away that very minute.
Augustus put a reassuring hand over Charity's clutching fingers and said to Kurt, "Have horses saddled for me, Lord Emil, Lord Stefan, Mr. Debritt, and the Princess. Immediately!"
"Yes, Your Highness." Kurt turned and ran out of the room.
Charity's hand had tightened convulsively when he said her name, and Stefan took a step toward him. "Gus! You can't mean to take the Princess! Namek is deep in the mountains. It will take us at least five hours to get there and the weather is getting bad."
"She is coming with us," he said.
Emil said, "She will be perfectly safe here. Franz is married to her sister, for God's sake!"
Then Charity spoke. "He is right, Augustus." The calmness of her voice belied the tense grip of her fingers on his arm. "I would slow you down. You must save yourself."
He turned to look into the large brown eyes that were regarding him so steadily. "I am not leaving you here to the mercy of my enemies."
"Christ, Gus, it's snowing!" Emil was almost shouting. "Believe me, she will be better off here."
"I will only get in your way," Charity said. "You must save yourself."
He tightened his hand over hers, glanced at the other people in the room, and said tersely, "Leave us."
Stefan and Emil looked furious, Harry looked worried, and the women looked petrified, but no one dared to protest. As the door closed behind Stefan, Augustus turned to his wife. "Charity," he said, "I have a very important question to ask you. Do you think you might be with child?"
Gold flared in the warm brown of her eyes. "I . . . I might be," she said. "I'm not sure."
The fear that had so paralyzed him before knifed through him again at her words. He shut his own eyes briefly so she would not see it. Then he said as calmly as he could, "I cannot leave you here if there is a chance that you are with child. Franz must know that the only way he will be able to replace me as prince is to kill me. Do you think he will let you live if he knows you are carrying my child? My heir?"
He heard her breath catch as he looked intently into her face. "Do you understand?"
Her chin came up. "I understand perfectly, Augustus. I know my duty to Jura as well as you. I will come."
"Thank God." He bent his head, kissed her hard. "Dress in your breeches and your warmest coat and take a change of clothes in a pillowcase."
She nodded soberly, jumped up, and ran out of the room.
Fifteen minutes later, the Prince, his wife, her brother, and his two closest friends galloped out of Zosi in the gently falling snow and headed north, toward the safety of the Jurian Alps.
Half an hour after their departure, Franz, accompanied by Colonel Luska and his cavalry regiment, rode into Zosi to find that the birds had flown.
Charity had never been so cold in her entire life. It had not been so bad at first; they had galloped along the main road north, passing small peasant villages of twenty or so houses each, and the exertion of the swift pace had kept her relatively warm. Then they had slowed down, turning eastward to smaller tracks as they began their climb into the mountains.
The snow kept falling, making their progress more and more difficult. Augustus assured her that the snow was a good thing, that it would hinder any pursuit, and that anytime she wanted to stop, they would.
But Charity was determined not to slow the men down, so she tied her woolen muffler across her nose and around the lower part of her face, and rode on.
The
snow continued to fall. It covered her muffler, then melted with the warmth from her breath and the muffler became wet. The higher they ascended into the mountains, the colder Charity became. Her feet were the worst; they were so cold that they hurt. After a while the pain was so great that tears ran down her face. She told herself that as long as she felt them she was all right; it was when she couldn't that she was in trouble. Despite the pain, she tried to flex her toes to keep the blood moving. She put her hands under her horse's mane to try to warm them up, but his mane was wet and the trick didn't work.
Augustus rode next to her until the track became too narrow for their horses to go side by side. By then they were high in the mountains, close to Mount Eisen, the highest peak in the Jurian Alps. There would be no place to stop until they reached Namek, the tiny village that had been Augustus's headquarters for a good part of the war.
Surely they must almost be there, Charity thought, as the track became steeper and steeper. The horses were laboring, up to their knees in snow, and the world was nothing but a blur of white.
Augustus, who was riding right in front of her, was just a blur in the snow, but she heard him call encouragingly, "Just another ten minutes, Charity, and we'll be there."
She could hear the worry in his voice and opened her mouth to assure him that she was all right, but her teeth were chattering so badly she couldn't form any words.
Then, at last, the track leveled off and they reached what in the summer would probably be a mountain meadow. "We're here!" Augustus shouted back to her, and Charity blinked the snow away from her eyes and looked at the collection of five or six snow-covered huts that evidently formed the village of Namek. She heard Augustus's voice but couldn't understand what he was saying. Then he was beside her horse, reaching up to lift her down. Instead of setting her on her feet, he held her in his arms and began to walk toward one of the huts.
"Emil rode ahead and warned them we were coming," he said in her frozen ear. "Natalya has built you a big fire. We'll get you warm in a trice."
He pushed open the door and carried her inside the single-room hut where a fire was indeed blazing in a large stone fireplace. A woman was already there, making up the bed that, along with a rough-hewn table and chairs, comprised the hut's furniture.
"You had better get your wife into some dry clothes right away, lad," the woman said to her sovereign prince in a voice that was distinctly disapproving.
"I know, Natalya," Augustus replied. "Do you think you could bring her saddlebag and something hot to eat as well?"
"Surely," the woman said, and the flames briefly shot higher in the draft of air as she opened the door and closed it again.
When they were alone, Augustus put Charity on her feet in front of the fireplace. "You look like a mummy," he said as he briskly began to unwind her muffler. Charity's teeth chattered as the wet wool was peeled away from her face.
He kissed her cold wet nose. "You'll feel better once we get you out of these clothes." He tossed the muffler away from the fire and plucked off her hat. Her hair, which had started off the day in an elegant knot, cascaded down over the wet fur of her coat. The hat followed the muffler to the floor, then he stripped her wet leather gloves from her frozen fingers and tossed them aside as well.
"Can you hold out your arms?" he asked gently. She did as he asked and he eased off her fur coat, which was matted and wet with melted snow. Then he dragged a chair from the table to the fire and told her to sit down so he could take off her boots.
"I t-think my f-feet w-will c-come off w-with them," she said through chattering teeth.
"No they won't." He guided her to the roughly carved wooden chair. Then, matter-of-factly, he turned around, gripped her boot by the ankle, and said, "Push."
Without argument she set her other foot on his rear and pushed. Tears ran down her face as the boot came off her frozen foot. They repeated the same procedure with the other boot, then he pulled off her socks and inspected her toes.
"They're red, not white," he informed her as he began to rub them. "No frostbite. You'll be fine."
His rubbing was bringing the blood back into her toes, and the feeling was both exquisite and painful. "I'm s-so g-g-glad," she chattered.
He was still rubbing when a knock came on the door. "Come," Augustus called.
"I have Charity's saddlebag," she heard Harry say. "And yours too, Gus."
He left off rubbing her feet and went to the door to receive the saddlebags from Harry. Harry went out again and Augustus came back to the fire. "I have your extra clothing here," he said. "You'll feel much better once we get you into your nightgown. Then I'll wrap you up in a blanket."
"A-all r-right." She stood up and he helped her to strip down to the flannel chemise and drawers she had put on for warmth. Then he pulled her full white nightgown over her head, wrapped her in a blanket, and sat her once again on the chair. From his own saddlebag he extracted a pair of enormous woolen socks, which he proceeded to put on her feet.
Still kneeling in front of her, he said, "Natalya will be coming soon with something hot for you to eat. That will make you feel better."
"H-how about you? You are s-still wearing your wet clothes. You should change t-too."
"I will," he said, "but I must see to a few things first. Will you be all right if I leave you for a while?"
"I am f-fine, Augustus," she said, pulling the deliciously warm blanket more closely around her and holding her feet in their enormous socks out to the fire. "Go d-do what you have to do."
By the time Natalya returned, Charity's teeth had stopped chattering. She looked up into the beautiful clear pale blue eyes of her elderly hostess as she took the soup she was offered and said gratefully, "Thank you so much."
"I am glad to be of help," the woman returned. Her eyes looked fierce. "But it is a terrible thing that our prince must once more be in fear for his life."
"That is so," Charity replied. "But it is good that he has friends he can trust."
The woman's expression softened, then she left Charity alone with the wonderful hot soup.
She had finished it all and was feeling distinctly drowsy when Augustus came back into the room and joined her in front of the fire. "Warmer?" he asked as he shed his coat. Under it he was wearing a thick wool shirt with a collar. His hunting trousers were wool as well.
"Much warmer," she said sleepily.
"Good. The snow is stopping, but it has done its work. I don't think there will be any pursuit in this kind of weather."
She made an effort to come awake. "Are the horses all right?"
"The horses are fine. They have been put in a barn, toweled dry, and are now greedily eating hay."
He pulled a chair up next to hers by the fire, and bent to remove his boots. This was an easier operation than Charity's had been, since he was still wearing his hunting boots and not high riding boots like hers.
His damp hair had begun to dry at the edges and looked almost gold in the light of the fire. "How about you?" she asked. "Have you had some soup?"
"Yes." He stretched his feet in their thick woolen socks, which she noticed were dry, toward the fire.
"Where are Harry and the others?"
He wiggled his toes and sighed with pleasure. "They are staying with Natalya and Karl."
Charity looked around the one-room hut that was sheltering them. "Whose house is this, then?"
"It used to belong to Natalya and Karl, but after the war they built a larger house. They use this now as their guest house."
Charity's eyes moved slowly from his feet to her own, which peeked out from under her nightdress encased in an identical pair of wool socks. "Are these your extra socks, Augustus?"
"Yes." He smiled. "They're a little big on you."
"I brought an extra pair of my own socks. I don't like to steal yours."
"Charity, those thin cotton things are useless. No wonder your feet were so cold."
"These are much warmer," she admitted.
"Tomorrow I'll see if Natalya can find you a wool pair. Mine will never fit under your boots."
Her toes had ached when they first began to thaw, but now they felt blissfully warm. She sat straighter in her chair so she would feel less sleepy and asked, "Is this the house where you stayed during the war?"
"Yes."
Charity looked around the shadowy room, from the rough-hewn bed to the wooden table and chairs, to the single rag rug that adorned the unpolished wooden floor. There was one window, the ceiling was low, and the fire generated the only light.
"It is heavenly," she said.
He laughed.
They sat for a few moments, gazing at the fire in companionable silence. Then Charity said, "What are you going to do now?"
He turned his head to look at her. "Go to bed."
He knew perfectly well what she had meant, but she let him evade the question. "Amen," she said. "I am exhausted." She stood up and, still clutching her blanket, padded over to the bed, shuffling a little in her over-large socks. She slid her hand under the quilt to feel the sheets. "They're cold," she announced tragically.
He yawned and stretched and stood up. "We'll keep each other warm."
She watched in silence as he stripped down to his drawers and the linen shirt he wore under the wool one. "I would advise you to keep on your socks," he said as he approached the bed, still wearing his.
"Nothing on this earth would persuade me to give them up," she declared.
He reached the bed, pulled back the quilt, and lifted her in. Then he went around to the other side and got in himself, turning to her immediately and gathering her close. She cuddled close to him, nestling her head into the warmth of his shoulder.
He pressed his lips against her hair. "I'm so sorry, Charity," he said huskily. "I'm so sorry I had to put you through such an ordeal."
His voice was so tender. He had taken such exquisite care of her. She would have been so happy if his concern had been for her. She shut her eyes. What a terrible person I must be, to be jealous of my own child.
"Go to sleep," he said. "Everything will look better in the morning."
