It flashed through Zita’s mind that it would be very difficult to keep off that particular subject because it would be in the thoughts of them both, whatever else they said in words.
Because she found it hard to refuse him completely, she answered,
“I promise I will come if I can, but it – may be impossible – I don’t know. This morning I was lucky – and I was able to slip away before – anybody else was awake.”
“As I did,” the King said with a smile. “Give me your hand.”
Zita put out her hand towards him and, because the horses were standing still after so much exertion, he pulled off her riding gloves and lifted her hand to his lips.
She felt the hard pressure of them against her skin and instinctively, without her meaning to, her fingers tightened on his.
“There are no words, and anyway they are not necessary, to tell you how much I want to see you again,” he said softly, “and I shall also add that if you don’t come, then I will get in touch with you and we will meet, however many difficulties there may be, or however many people try to prevent it.”
There was something in the way he spoke that made Zita feel afraid.
“I am aware that I can get in touch with you at The Golden Cross,” he went on, “but I would prefer for you to tell me where else we can meet or at least where I can write to you without anybody being suspicious.”
“There is – nowhere – except for – The Golden Cross,” Zita said quickly.
“That is not true,” he replied, “but I suppose I must be content with knowing that at least I can find you there.”
She did not answer and the King, who was still holding her hand, lifted it once again to his lips.
“You know as well as I do, Zita, that, although you have tried to remind me of my duties as a King, I am still a man and entitled to the feelings and emotions of one.”
He kissed the back of her hand again and then he turned it over and his lips were on her palm.
It gave Zita a strange feeling she had never known before.
She felt as if his lips sent a streak of lightning up her arm, into her breast and then it touched her heart.
It was thrilling and yet there was something spiritual about it that she could not explain.
Because she was shy and at the same time alarmed by her own feelings, she took her hand away and as she did so Pegasus moved restlessly so that it was impossible for the King to hold onto her.
She looked at him, her eyes wide and very green in the sunshine.
“Goodbye,” she said softly.
“Au revoir, Zita,” the King answered in French.
For a moment they looked at each other and Zita thought that they were saying so much more than could ever have been expressed in mere words.
Then, because she knew that time was passing, she turned Pegasus and set off, knowing that she could approach the Palace from a different direction and there was no likelihood of her encountering the King, who would go in at the front entrance.
She rode very quickly, being determined to put Pegasus into his stable long before the King reached the front door, where the grooms would be waiting for him.
*
Only when she was in her own bedroom did she realise that it was not yet eight o’clock and the housemaid had therefore not yet called her.
So much had happened and she had passed through so many strange emotions since meeting the King that she was prepared to believe a day, a year or a century had passed since she had slipped out of the Palace as the stars were still fading.
She took off her riding clothes and lay down on her bed, but all the time she was thinking of the King and of his suggestion that she should go with him to his Castle in the Clouds.
‘If I was not who I am,’ Zita told herself, ‘it would be very exciting to do so.’
Then she knew that if she did, she would become like La Belle and all the other women whom Madame Goutier had told her had captured the affections of the King for a very short while and whom he discarded apparently quite callously for the next pretty face which attracted him.
Zita wondered if they felt humiliated and unhappy.
Then she was sure that anybody who lost the King after they had been close and intimate with him would feel as if the sun had gone out and they were in darkness.
‘It is an outrageous suggestion!’ she tried to tell herself.
But she knew, however much she might try to incite herself to anger against him, that, if one played with fire, one must expect to get burnt.
‘I shall never again know such an attractive fascinating man,’ she reflected.
Just to be with him made her feel as if her brain was unusually alert and her whole body was alive with a strange mysterious excitement.
She wondered if that was the way the other women had felt, knowing that their time with him was short and they could hold him only as long as he found them beautiful and desirable.
She knew that he ‘made love’ to them, although she was not quite certain what that meant and she wondered what she would have felt if the King had kissed her lips instead of her hand.
When he had kissed her palm, it had been like a streak of lightning, half-pleasure, half-pain, shooting through her.
Perhaps, she thought, that was what people meant when they talked about the ecstasy of love.
Quite suddenly she was still.
The word ‘love’ seemed written on her mind in letters of fire.
Could it be possible that what she felt was love? If so – then what sort of love?
Although the King had suggested that she should go with him to his castle and he wanted to make love to her, he had not said that he loved her.
Nor – and it now seemed strange – had she thought at the time that that was what he had meant.
Love!
It was a word that had been so often in her dreams and yet when she had been with the King somehow it had not arisen.
She wanted to see him, to look at him and it was exciting to listen to him. But, because he was a King, she had not thought of him as a man, a man she might love and who would love her.
All the time they had been together, she had enjoyed her subterfuge of deceiving him into thinking she was a waitress from The Inn of the Golden Cross and had been intent on making him curious and parrying his questions with the skill of a duellist who had met somebody worthy of his steel.
Now what had been a fantasy, a game, had suddenly become serious.
The King had asked her to go with him into his own country, to the castle she had heard about because of the part it had played in the history of Aldross as well as Valdastien.
She had the idea that even her father had never visited it.
“A Castle in the Clouds!”
She said the words to herself, thinking how exciting it would be to see it and be alone with the King as she had been this morning when they had sat in the arbour talking, as she would never have been able to talk with him in the Palace.
‘But it is all over,’ Zita told herself, ‘and it would be a great mistake for us to meet again tomorrow morning.’
Then, as she thought of how he had extracted a promise from her, she could feel again his lips on the palm of her hand.
She looked down at the hand he had kissed, almost expecting to see the imprint of his lips there.
As she thought of his mouth against her skin, she felt run through her a little echo of the thrill his kiss had evoked.
“Am I in love?”
“Is this love?”
“What is love?”
The questions followed one after another and as it was impossible to lie in bed because she felt too restless, Zita rose and went to the window to look out at the mountains.
She wondered what it would be like to be alone with the King with the snow-capped peaks above them and the great vista of the country of Valdastien below.
She could hear his voice.
“I want to make love to you!”
*
The day seemed to pass slowly, almost interminably, from the moment her maid came to call her, to the time when she knew that the King would be meeting the Prime Minister and the Statesmen to discuss their national affairs.
By this time she was sure that her father and mother would have realised that he had no intention of proposing marriage with Sophie and so would Sophie herself.
Almost as if by thinking of her sister she conjured her up, Sophie came into the room.
She was wearing one of her new gowns that had been bought especially for the King’s visit and her hair had been arranged in the manner which Zita had suggested and had been snubbed for her pains.
But the expression on Sophie’s face was not in keeping with either her gown or the style in which she wore her hair and she looked, Zita thought, dull, disappointed and resentful.
“Tell me what is happening, Sophie,” she asked as her sister crossed the room to sit down opposite her in an armchair.
“Papa is taking the King to a dinner and I have been left behind with Mama.”
“That does not sound very exciting,” Zita replied. “You don’t like politics, Sophie, and that is what they will be talking about.”
As she spoke, she realised that Sophie was not listening, but after a moment she said and the words seemed to come from her lips in a rush,
“The King has not spoken to Papa and he has not proposed to me!”
“I am sorry. Are you very disappointed?” Zita quizzed her sympathetically.
“Not really,” Sophie replied. “Mama is very angry and says he had no right to come here raising our hopes, but I find him intimidating and very dull. When he talked to me, he always seemed to be thinking about something else.”
She looked at her sister and added,
“I shall now ask Mama to invite the Margrave to stay and I feel quite sure that he will wish to pay his addresses to me, which is what I would really like.”
“Then I hope he will marry you and you will be very very happy,” Zita said sincerely.
“I don’t think that anybody could be happy with the King,” Sophie remarked. “Mama says that he is not only selfish but has a very bad reputation and I would not like to be married to a man like that.”
“I agree that he could make a woman very unhappy,” Zita murmured.
“I must go back to Mama. We are dining together,” Sophie said, rising to her feet. “You had better stay up here just in case the King should come back unexpectedly and see you.”
“That is unlikely,” Zita replied, “but anyway I am quite content to be here with my book.”
She spoke lightly, thinking her sister would smile at the idea, but Sophie merely walked from the room, closing the door behind her.
“So the King has escaped being trapped into matrimony,” Zita said beneath her breath.
For the first time it flashed through her mind that, if he did not wish to marry Sophie, perhaps he would like to marry her.
She had never thought of such an idea in the excitement of meeting the King by her subterfuge in defiance of her mother’s instructions.
Then she remembered what he had said about taking a Hungarian wife and she knew that, although he might wish to have her with him in his castle in the mountains, he was quite determined that the Hungarian temperament, ‘impetuous, impulsive, wild and emotional’, as he had described it, was not desirable in his Queen.
‘I suppose I am all of those things,’ Zita thought ruefully.
She had always found it impossible to be quiet, prosaic, unemotional and controlled, like her mother.
‘The true fact is,’ she went on to herself, ‘I have no ambitions to be a Queen. If a King was the man I loved, I would share his life as if we were ordinary people and not as Rulers over a country permanently at the beck and call of our subjects.”
Zita thought of how her father loved to go off on his own and be free of all the trappings of Monarchy.
That was what the King did in a different way when he went to Paris.
Once Sophie was married to the Margrave, perhaps she would be able to find an unimportant Grand Duke or Prince who would be as impatient of pomp and circumstance as she was.
Then she had the uncomfortable feeling that no man in whom she was interested and who was interested in her would be able to excite her in the same way as the King did.
He looked so majestic, he rode so magnificently and there were those inescapable vibrations between them and the magical way that they could read each other’s thoughts.
‘I am not in love! I am not! I am not!’ Zita wanted to shout aloud.
But she had the uncomfortable feeling that it was all bravado and that when she rode away from the King to hurry back to the Palace she had left her heart behind.
*
Zita finished her dinner, which she had eaten alone, waited on by a footman who had difficulty in repressing his yawns after the lateness of last night’s ball.
As he brought in the coffee and set the silver tray down beside her, he said,
“There’s a note from His Royal Highness which I regret I forgot to bring up earlier.”
Zita looked in surprise at the note and saw that it was in her father’s handwriting.
She opened it quickly to read,
“I wanted to come upstairs to see you, dearest, before we left for the dinner, but I have been delayed and it is impossible.
I have decided we will go off on our explorations tomorrow morning, as soon as the King has left.
If we linger, there is every chance of our being prevented from leaving at the last moment, which would be very disappointing.
I suggest therefore you ride to meet me at The Inn of the Golden Cross, accompanied of course by a groom and wait for me there.
The King will be driving straight on into Valdastien and, when I have changed my clothes, we will set off on our ‘adventure’.
I will leave a note for your mother and I suggest you do the same.
Bless you, dearest child,
Yours affectionately,
Father”
Zita stared at what her father had written and read a great deal between the lines.
It was quite obvious that her mother was going to make a great fuss if he proposed to take her away on one of his expeditions as he had said he would.
Therefore, if her mother was not aware of what was happening until after they had left, there would be nothing she could do about it.
It was really very clever of her father, Zita thought and it was the way she might have planned things herself.
He would drive with the King to The Golden Gross, his valet would have the native costume he always wore on his expeditions ready and waiting for him and, as soon as he had changed, they could set off together before anyone had any idea of what was happening.
‘Papa is as good an intriguer as I am,’ Zita reflected.
She wished she would tell him how she had intrigued and confused the King by appearing first as a waitress, then alone on Pegasus and how, as he had not the slightest idea that she was Royal, he had suggested taking her with him to his Castle in the Clouds.
It was a fascinating story, but she reckoned that her father would be very angry at what he would think was a great impertinence on the King’s part.
He would also feel insulted that his daughter should be mistaken for the type of woman who would accept such an invitation when it was offered to her.
‘Unfortunately, it is something I shall have to keep from Papa, but I know he would in a way enjoy hearing how clever I have been,’ Zita told herself.
Now she had a lot to do before she went to bed and she left the schoolroom to get everything ready.
When she had returned to the Palace yesterday, she had put her peasant dress away in a locked drawer in her bedroom.
Now she took it out and found that in her haste to change back into her riding habit when the King had driven away with her father, she had packed the apr
on trimmed with lace Gretel had lent her.
‘I must return that,’ she thought.
It would be easy to do so, as she would be leaving her riding habit at The Inn of the Golden Cross for her eventual return to the Capital.
When she was with her father in the mountains, she always wore her peasant dress even when she was on horseback.
This was much easier than to keep changing and it meant that all she required could be rolled up and attached to her saddlebag.
These comprised simply a nightgown, two fresh blouses, underclothes, her brushes and combs and her washing things.
Now she packed everything she thought she would require, including the ribbons for her hair and several pairs of the long white stockings, which reached to her knees.
They were much more comfortable, as were the low shoes with their silver buckles, than the riding boots she wore with her habit.
Because she felt so free and unrestrained in her peasant clothes, she thought that they were symbolic of her own feelings when she had been with her father in the past.
Imagining that they were both incognito, they would go off to meet much more amusing and certainly happier people than they met at the Palace.
Now she told herself that there was no possibility of her taking Pegasus out early in the morning to meet the King.
The horse would have a long day in front of him and it would be quite enough for him to ride first to The Inn of the Golden Cross and then ride again for many hours.
It would in fact be very much longer than usual, if her father was going, as he had proposed, to the mountain at the far end of the range.
They might perhaps have to stay a night on the way, but Zita was not certain of the exact distance.
She thought perceptively that her father would have chosen it because, as he had never been there before, there would be nobody there whom he knew or who would knew him.
She could understand how it might be embarrassing for him to meet his ‘special friends’ if he had his daughter with him.
Then she thought that if her father had secrets, so had she, and she would have to be very tactful.
If he wished to flirt with some pretty innkeeper like the ones she remembered in the past, she would certainly make herself scarce and not interfere with his enjoyment.
A King In Love Page 10
