by Speer, Flora
She didn’t allow herself time to think twice. If she stopped to mull over her decision, she’d be too scared to carry it out. Barefoot, wearing only her shift, she tiptoed down the hall to Dominick’s room.
She opened the door all the way and left it wide open, so she would have a quick exit available. Except for the addition of the clothing chest from her room, Dominick’s bedchamber was unchanged since the last time she had been in it. When she opened her clothing chest she discovered there weren’t many dresses available. Apparently, Ella had taken all the gowns worn at Regensburg to the laundry, to be spot-cleaned with fuller’s earth, then aired and ironed if necessary.
Gina plucked a plain, lightweight blue wool gown from the chest and grabbed her shoes, then looked around for her comb. It lay on the table under the window. She hurried across the room to pick it up.
She paused to look out at the mountains and the forest, now mellowing from summer greens into muted autumn shades.
“No wonder Dominick loves Feldbruck,” she murmured. “It’s so beautiful here.”
She hadn’t yet seen the larger bedchamber they were to occupy together, and as she headed for the door and the corridor beyond, she wondered if the view was similar to the one from this room. She hoped so, for Dominick’s sake. He liked to look at the mountains; she thought he derived some of his strength from their solid presence.
She was just a few steps away from the door when the ceiling opened.
It happened suddenly and silently, in the time between two heartbeats. Sensing that something was changed, Gina stared upward into a long, dark tunnel with no light at all to be seen in it. And she experienced again the dreadful sucking sensation, as if she was being drawn upward, off her feet, into the air, toward darkness.
“No!” She wasn’t close enough to the door to grab it and hold on, nor could she reach the bed-frame. No other object in the room offered a handhold or the weight to keep her at floor level, thus forestalling the inevitable. “No, please, don’t do this.”
In the terrifying silence that surrounded her she struggled to keep her feet firmly planted on the wooden floor, even as she acknowledged that she wasn’t going to succeed. She was on her toes. Then she was in the air. She saw her dress, shoes, and comb hit the floor, and she caught her breath on a panic-stricken sob.
“Gina? Where are you?” Dominick’s beloved voice sliced through the eerie stillness.
“I said, no!” Gina began to fight more vigorously against what was happening, waving her arms and legs like a frantic swimmer, trying to return to the floor and to Dominick. “I won’t go! You can’t make me leave. I belong here. There’s nothing for me back there. This is my home. Dominick is my love. Do you hear me? I won’t go!”
“Gina!” Dominick was in the room, flinging his arms around her legs, using his weight to try to pull her down to his level.
His efforts weren’t working. Both of them were being pulled upward with an inexorable force.
“Stop it! Leave us alone!” Gina screamed into the darkness of the tunnel. Then, realizing that neither her pleas nor Dominick’s strength was making a difference, she shouted at him, “Dominick, let me go! Save yourself!”
“Wherever you go, I go, too,” Dominick said, sounding remarkably calm. “I will not be parted from you.”
They had reached the gaping opening in the ceiling, and they hung there for a moment, suspended in time and place. Gina looked down at Dominick, who was clasping her knees in a grip so tight that she thought her bones would break. She touched his hair and tried to bend toward him, so she could kiss him one last time. To her despair, she couldn’t quite reach him.
“Oh, Dominick, I love you.” There was nothing else to say, nothing else that mattered, not in the entire world, not in all eternity.
“I love you, Gina. I always will. Nothing can separate us. Nothing!”
With a clap like loud thunder, the hole in the ceiling closed. Abruptly released from its pull, Gina and Dominick tumbled through the air to land on his bed.
“Are you hurt?” Dominick gathered her into his arms, holding her tightly, as if he feared she’d be pulled away from him.
“No,” she said in a shaking voice. Tm just scared out of my wits. Let’s get out of this room right away, before that thing comes back.”
Dominick didn’t get up and make for the still-open door. Instead, he lay back on the bed, so he could look up at the unblemished ceiling. He kept Gina firmly against his heart, and she let her head fall onto his chest until she felt a bit more steady.
“I don’t think we will see that gateway through time again,” Dominick said. “It is possible that our refusal to be separated is what vanquished it.”
“I’m not taking any chances.” Pushing away from him, Gina sat up. She sent a fast, shuddering glance toward the ceiling, then turned her attention to Dominick. “I will never set foot in this room again. I don’t want anyone else to come in here, either. That includes you. Especially you.”
“Agreed.” Dominick sat up, too. “We don’t need this room. I’ll have it closed up, and I will personally lock the door and keep the key in my possession. Unless, of course, someone we don’t like comes to visit. Then I may open it again.”
“It isn’t funny,” Gina said.
“No? Then explain to me why I suddenly feel like laughing uproariously, like running barefoot through the forest, like taking you up to the attic to make passionate love to you again.”
“I have no objection to laughter, or to making love, not even in the attic,” she said, “but I don’t think I’m in any shape to run anywhere.” She placed a hand on her abdomen.
“We’ve won,” Dominick said. “I’m certain of it. Whatever the force was that brought you to me, I cannot believe it will separate us now.”
“Alcuin did tell me once that he believes I will remain in this time so long as I am linked to you.”
“Here is a link that can never be broken,” he said, laying his hand over hers, over the place where the child they had engendered out of love was growing.
Dominick kissed his wife again. When, after a long and increasingly warm period of time he broke off the kiss and looked upward, he saw a small, star-shaped area in the ceiling, just where the opening to the tunnel had been. It pulsed twice, with an intense golden glow, and then it vanished.
Dominick grinned. Not wanting to alarm Gina, he said nothing about what he had just seen. He helped her to her feet, making sure that she wasn’t trembling any longer. Then he took her hand and led her out of his old bedchamber. When they were both standing in the corridor, he closed the door very firmly behind them and locked it.
Author’s Note
Part of the fun of writing historical fiction lies in the opportunity to combine actual events with make-believe characters. Gina, Dominick and his people at Feldbruck, Lady Adalhaid, Hiltrude, and Father Guntram are all fictional characters. However, the plot against Charles and the trial that followed its discovery did occur in the year A.D. 792, for the reasons Pepin explains to Dominick.
The plotters were overheard by Deacon Fardulf, as I describe, though he did not have the help of a Gina or a Dominick, and after the traitors abused him, he was forced to make his way unprotected to the palace to reveal what he had learned. Fardulf’s loyalty was well rewarded by Charles, who from then on kept a watchful eye on the deacon’s progress through the Church hierarchy.
Every historian who mentions Charles’s fourth wife, Fastrada, speaks of her incredible beauty. No one has anything good to say of her character. The Frankish queens of this period were in charge of the treasury, and they ruled the land while their husbands were away fighting wars. Fastrada’s misuse of the power entrusted to her was so outrageous that I actually toned down her character for this book, to make her more believable. The lady was addicted to intrigue, with most of her schemes aimed at ruining anyone who dared to cross her. There is no question that she loathed Pepin Hunchback and tried to convince Charles to have him sen
tenced to death at the treason trial.
Charles had always been an overindulgent husband to Fastrada. He even remained at home with her for several years, rather than touring his lands or waging war along the borders of Francia, as he usually did in the summer seasons. But something happened between them during or shortly after Pepin’s trial. It is tempting to speculate, as I do in this book, that Charles had reached the limit of his patience with his temperamental, bloody-minded wife, but didn’t want to divorce her, because a divorce would create problems with the Church, which was at that time tightening the rules on marriage and divorce.
Whatever the truth of his marital circumstances, before the end of that summer Charles was on the move, traveling around Francia as the king was expected to do, and he left Fastrada behind. From then on he seldom visited her. Two years later, in A.D. 794, when Fastrada fell ill and died, Charles was not with her. He did provide a funeral suitable for a queen and buried her at the Church of St. Alban at Mainz.
Three months after Fastrada’s death, Charles married his fifth and final wife, Luitgarde. According to the historians, she was a sweet, gentle noblewoman who quickly restored the loving family relationships and domestic harmony that Charles found necessary for his happiness.
As for Pepin Hunchback, he lived on quietly in the monastery at Prum for twenty years after his trial, until he died a natural death.
