Love by the Morning Star

by Laura L. Sullivan

  Which brought her to her other worry. On their last night together, things had not gone nearly as well as she’d hoped. Yes, they’d danced nearly every dance together, even after that embarrassing interruption from Hannah, who looked like some kind of tart but who did have some rather nice pearls, after all. Then, before parting for the night, he’d whispered to her to meet him in their usual place.

  Well, if one could say “usual” when they’d only met there once. But, oh, that once! Her body still tingled with the passion of it. She’d never thought it would be so wonderful, so natural. In fact, thoughts of “it” had hardly entered her considerations. She hadn’t improved herself, raised herself so high, for “it.” Any poor handsome boy could give that to her—the florist she’d been so in love with, for example, the one she’d spurned because of course Anna Morgan could never be a florist’s wife. Or that manly gardener with his broad shoulders and dirt beneath his nails . . .

  All she cared about now, she’d lectured herself, was to marry a wealthy lord and be set and safe for life.

  But that night in the greenhouse had set her afire.

  She’d never dreamed that cheerful, charming Teddy could be so romantically aggressive. He seemed to hold her in chaste respect during the day, but when they were alone in the hothouse, in the pitch blackness where they could know each other only by touch, he’d possessed her with a passion that amazed her, and she responded in kind. Almost wordlessly, they had made love, and when near morning they’d gone their separate ways there was only a murmured “I love you.”

  After the Servants’ Ball, she’d gone back for more. But Teddy never showed up. Instead she found the under-gardener, Hardy—who would have been even better-looking than Teddy if only he hadn’t been so poor—and the Duke of Kent with a slim, willowy housemaid who Anna instantly decided was trashy-looking. Answering the lure of a warm, secret place, some of the younger guests had joined them. They’d chatted, and shared swigs from a bottle of champagne the royal supplied, but all the while Anna looked out for Teddy, ignoring the gardener’s impertinent winks and ham-handed attempts to get her alone. She and Teddy might not have the time or privacy for a reprise of the previous night, but surely as soon as he got her alone, he’d propose.

  But he never came, and in the morning he was gone before she woke.

  He’d written to her since, but she had an odd feeling there was something missing from his letters, something he was not saying, or perhaps waiting for her to say. They were a little dry, telling her about his classes, his professors, his friends. There was nothing really intimate.

  He’ll be back in May when he graduates. Surely things will be finalized then.

  Those two things troubled her. The one thing she scarcely worried about was the NAFF. The preposterous idea of murder was now vague and distant. Naturally her father had thought better of that. She’d written that the king would be visiting Starkers soon. Probably the NAFF would give her a secret treaty to present to him.

  “I would like my hair down today, Hannah,” she said when she sat in front of her vanity. “Gathered over my right shoulder. No, my left.” She frowned, then smoothed her brow when she noticed the little wrinkles in the mirror. “Which side do you think, Hannah?”

  “Does it matter?” asked Hannah, who had never learned the handmaiden’s proper demure behavior.

  “Of course it matters. Well, not so much now, as there’s no one to see it. But in general, yes, a great deal. Is one side of the face better than the other? Hair on the right shoulder exposes the left profile, you see. I have a beauty spot on the left side that I like to play up. But then, my left breast is also slightly better than my right, and the line of hair draws attention down to the bosom, so perhaps the curls should be gathered to the left side.” She looked at Hannah in the mirror behind her. “Now do you see how important it is?”

  “Oh, yes,” Hannah said with only the slightest smirk. “In the grand scheme of things it is very important indeed.” But she did not mock Anna outright. For all her ignorance and her many foibles, there was something refreshing in her unthinking self-centeredness. You knew where you stood with Anna. There was no guile. She was not good, but to be bad required the ability to notice things besides oneself.

  Besides, she knew that Anna was in the same position she was. Her beloved was gone. She noticed that Anna began moping as soon as Hardy left for his training at Windsor. She never thought Anna would succumb to Hardy’s charms, but evidently she had, and missed them. Hannah certainly sympathized. Until that day, she wondered if she’d made the right decision, putting her faith in Teddy’s love instead of going to London with Waltraud and looking after herself. Since the mysterious note, though, she had fresh hope.

  “Speak to me in German,” Anna said. “I need to practice.” She had kept up with her studies in a desultory way, even though Teddy had never seemed to want to practice with her. To her surprise she was getting quite good. She did not have a brain for reasoning, but she could memorize and parrot any information that would help her fit in with the world she coveted.

  Hannah was still dwelling on the mysterious letter the grocer had given her. She didn’t want to take anyone into her confidence, exactly, for she’d read too many stories about elopements being thwarted at the last moment. But if perchance it wasn’t Teddy, she did think it might be a good idea to let someone know she was meeting a mysterious stranger far from help at midnight.

  “Here,” she said, “I have a note. I will give you the German, and you will translate to English if you please. And we will dress your hair on the right. Your bosoms do not need any more attention, neither the right one nor the left.”

  She read the first line.

  “The hour is . . . on top of me?” Anna ventured.

  And the second.

  “To be in readiness?”

  Close enough. And then:

  “Meet me on the . . . Tor? Does that mean the Glastonbury Tor? My father was in Somerset giving a talk and I so wanted to go to the top of the Tor, to see if I could feel the ghost of King Arthur, but my father said it was a waste of time.”

  This was the first Hannah had heard of Anna’s family. She had rather thought Anna must be an orphan, to live in close proximity to Lady Liripip voluntarily. “What does your father do?” she asked.

  “Oh, he lectures, mostly,” Anna said with a wave of her hand, letting Hannah think he might be a kindly professor, not a vitriol-spitting hatemonger. “Did I do well with the translation?”

  “Very, only it means meet me at the gate. Now one more. Sonntag um Mitternicht.”

  For an answer, Anna gave a long and lusty sigh. How she wanted one more meeting at midnight!

  “Wait,” she said, catching sight of the paper in Hannah’s hand. “Is that a real note, to you? Who are you meeting?” She snatched the note away. “Come on, tell me. Is Hardy back? I hadn’t heard. Not that I . . . I mean . . .” She flushed. Why was she thinking about Hardy when it was Teddy she wanted?

  “Anna, you don’t have to pretend that you . . .” But she broke off. We all have our secrets, and if Anna felt it was safer to hide her relationship with Hardy by implying that he belonged to Hannah, why, let her. Hannah was sick to death of secrets, but this one wasn’t hers to reveal. “No, it’s not Hardy, I’m sure of that.”

  “Who, then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re going, right?”

  “I—”

  “You have to!” Anna shrilled, clapping her hands. “You simply must! How romantic. Who could it be? The chauffeur, do you think, or the boot-boy?”

  “I don’t think—”

  “I’ll come with you. Oh, how exciting!” She was bored, restless, and the small adventure of a midnight walk, a tiny breath of scandal, would at least provide some diversion.

  WITH NO TEDDY TO DISTRACT HER, Hannah had been getting months of uninterrupted sleep, so she was fresh and lively when they crept out of Starkers at a quarter till midnight and made the
ir way beneath a moon-filled night sky toward the gate.

  Anna felt like a schoolgirl—which she never really had been. She’d been to school, of course, early on, but for the most part she was self-taught, and that was more in comportment than actual knowledge. She’d never had close friends at school. Even as a little girl she had resented and disliked other girls. They were competition. She would bristle if the teacher praised them or someone admired their dimples. Then, sneakily, she would put tacks on their chairs.

  But Hannah was different. Anna felt unaccountably easy with her. Hannah had a knack for friendliness, and then she was so different physically that Anna never worried that someone would look at the little dark sparrow rather than the grand white swan. Hannah never said sharp things to her. True, she had an idea Hannah gently mocked her from time to time, but it was so gentle, after all, and Anna didn’t understand what Hannah was talking about half the time, with her obscure references to poets and artists and writers and politicians. (Anna was never sure which one Goethe was, since Hannah seemed to have a quote from him on practically every subject.)

  When I am the lady of Starkers, I will be kind to her, Anna decided. How terrible to be so despised that you accept the idea of being put in a subservient position by your own relatives. She still didn’t know why Hannah stood for it.

  The walk was farther than Anna expected, and she had foolishly worn heels in case the secret admirer turned out to be worth her while.

  “Here, take my arm,” Hannah said, and helped her limp along.

  When they got to the gate, there was not a soul to be seen. Disappointed, Anna sat down heavily inside the little decorative guardhouse just behind the iron bars and took off her shoe. She felt the fat, fluid-filled blister with her fingertip. If she’d been dancing—with anyone in particular, that is—she would have gone on no matter how much her shoes hurt, until her feet were bloody. She felt a sudden mad desire never to wear heels again. How lovely it would be to dress in trousers and clogs and nice thick socks and never have to totter again. She hated heels. She hated dieting. She hated having to always think about maintaining a posh accent. But there was no rest for her. Not until she said I do. No, better wait until he’d said it too, just to be safe.

  “Who’s there?” she heard Hannah ask from outside the guardhouse. She heard tires crunching through the gravel—a bicycle—and then heavy footfalls approaching the gate. “What do you want?”

  “You’re the newest kitchen maid?” a Manchester voice asked, incredulous. “You’re supposed to be a drop-dead looker, innit? Well, to each his own. Listen: The king is coming soon. Give him a salad of bitter herbs, with yew. Got it? Say it back.”

  “Look, I don’t know what this is about, but—”

  “You’re the kitchen maid what isn’t one, really, eh?” he asked. Anna peeked through the clouded guardhouse window and saw the burly man look around nervously. “The one what been to Germany and that?”

  “I am,” Hannah said uncertainly.

  “Then the message goes to you. Give the king a salad of bitter herbs,” he repeated as if reciting from a script. “Sprinkled with yew. Just for the king, see. A special dish just for him. Now say it so I know you got it.”

  “A salad of bitter herbs,” she repeated, “with yew, for the king. But what . . .”

  He’d already hopped onto his bicycle. “Ta-ra,” he said, and pedaled into the night.

  “Oh god, oh god, oh god,” Anna moaned, calling on a deity more primal and powerful than the benevolent uncle of the C. of E. For this, she needed one of those old gods who came to earth with their spites and jealousies and vengeance. She needed Zeus. She needed Loki. Nothing less than divine intervention would save her from this.

  For now the third of her troubles, the thing she should have worried most about but had hardly considered all these months, had come to pass. She had been given her orders from the Von and Lord Darling and the NAFF, that great and terrible thing only she—a great devotee of the cause who happened to be placed in one of the greatest houses in the land, one that the king frequently visited—could accomplish. And only if she were ensconced in her menial position as a kitchen maid.

  Anna’s brain was rarely swift and clever, and then only when it immediately concerned herself. Now she knew exactly what they intended her to do—kill the king.

  Were they mad?

  She’d rarely listened to her father’s rants. They all sounded the same to her, and she had other, much more important things to think about. But she did recall one common thread that popped up again and again—Edward, who had briefly held the throne before abdicating for that crass American Simpson woman (whom Anna pretended to despise but envied with every fiber of her being), would make a much better king than his brother, the second son, King George. (Who wasn’t Georgie, the fourth son, whom she’d met before, but Bertie . . . so perplexing, these royal names.)

  Edward was known for his Nazi sympathies. He had shaken hands with Hitler, and was openly in favor of appeasement. The papers said that was only because he’d seen the horrors of the last war and for the sake of humanity couldn’t bear to have them repeated. But her father assured his followers that Edward and Hitler were like that—here he crossed his fingers in intimate digital embrace—and in a perfect world they would work jointly for the betterment of the people who mattered. There were a great many people who wanted Edward to rule Britannia again.

  King George had an heir, of course—young Elizabeth. But if there was a strong enough movement behind Edward, it was just possible that he could retake the throne. There was no precedent for it, but it could happen. His marriage to Wallis Simpson could be annulled, and he could be king again. At the very least it would create such controversy and uproar that the nation would be in turmoil. Competing factions, a pubescent queen in the hands of her ministers. At the worst . . . civil war.

  And they would have me be the murderer who brings it all about.

  Anna didn’t feel a surge of heroism, not a trace of solidarity with her father’s cause. She didn’t want to kill anyone. She liked the new king. He looked like a gentleman, and she had cut out pictures of his daughters. Edward, on the other hand, was a funny-looking milksop of a man with bad taste in women. And he liked Hitler. Anna used to not know who Hitler was, vaguely assuming him to be a friend of her father’s, perhaps a like-minded grocer from back home. Now she knew better—from Teddy, from Hannah, and from the papers she occasionally read so she’d have some slight idea what each of them was talking about.

  She had come to the conclusion that Hitler was no gentleman. Not very attractive, either, and that was important too.

  I don’t want to kill the nobility, she thought wildly. I want to be the nobility!

  If they caught her—succeed or fail—she’d be shot. Or hung. Either of which would leave her a disgustingly mutilated corpse. Death is only attractive in a fashionable dress, with lilies and an open coffin.

  But she remembered the peculiar, feral intensity of the Von’s eyes . . . the way her father had struck her so savagely at the first sign of dissent . . . the alarming bulk of that night’s messenger. What will they do to me if I do not make the attempt?

  “What on earth was that all about, I wonder?” Hannah asked when the man was gone.

  Again, Anna’s brain worked with unaccustomed speed. Maybe I don’t have to do anything myself at all, she thought. Anything—anything—rather than that!

  “You are not familiar with English traditions,” Anna said carefully. “When the king visits he is given special ceremonial food. Things just for him that other people aren’t allowed to eat.”

  “Ah, like the nectar and ambrosia of the gods,” Hannah said. “And that Norse goat who gave mead from her udder. But why tell me about it? And why at midnight, with such secrecy?”

  “It is the English way,” Anna said, praying she could pass it off as one of the national eccentricities, like Morris dancing. “Commoners aren’t supposed to know, but as a kitchen maid
of course you have to. You are the newest, so you had to be told in this private ceremony.” She gave an unnatural laugh. “And here we thought you had a secret admirer! What a disappointment, only more work for you. But what an honor to serve the king.”

  “Bitter herbs,” Hannah said musingly. She thought of the maror of the Seder plate, the herbs symbolizing the bitterness of enslavement endured in Egypt. Her family did not celebrate Passover, but they were part of the community and were often invited to other people’s houses for the ceremonial Seder dinner. Hannah remembered her first stage fright as a little girl, asking, “Why is this night different from all other nights?” before hearing the story of the Exodus. She recalled the strange way the afikomen—just a piece of matzo—tasted unaccountably delicious just because it was treasured, and hidden, and called dessert.

  “Why does the king eat bitter herbs?” she asked. “Is it in sympathy for the sufferings of the world? So that although he is king, he can try to understand the bitterness of the rest of us? Or is it to show us that although he is king, he has bitterness of his own? Really, you English are surprising. I never dreamed you had such depths of tradition. Well, I will tell Sally, and together we will prepare the grandest bitter salad for His Majesty. With the yew. I must not forget the yew. I have such a soft spot for yew trees now.” She indulged in a secret little smile. “But I did not know you could eat the leaves. Sally will have to tell me how to dress it.”

  “No!” Anna cried. “It . . . it’s just meant for you. You were told in secret, so you must prepare it in secret. These are very old customs. They go back to . . . oh, I don’t know, but a very long way. That man who came was probably an equerry. It is royal protocol. You don’t question it, you just do it.”