Bride to the King Read online

  It would be intolerable to endure the impertinence and familiarity of the King’s friends night after night!

  Then she told herself reassuringly at least he could not have them at the Palace, not all of them at any rate. That would be too outrageous even for him to contemplate.

  Perhaps gradually she could have her own friends, men like Prince Vladislav, who, although he was old, was charming and interesting.

  Her whole being cried out at having to make such decisions on her own and, after what the Lord Chamberlain had said tonight, she wondered apprehensively if there would be anybody stable and sensible left in the Palace.

  To her relief, when they were escorted to the front door, she found that the Regent was accompanying them home.

  The Lord Chamberlain therefore changed to another carriage and, as the Regent sat opposite her, Zosina felt that if she was not careful her hands would go out towards him and she would be unable to prevent herself from holding onto him.

  ‘I am frightened!’ she wanted to say, ‘frightened of tomorrow, of having my engagement to the King announced to the world, of knowing that then there will be no going back, no escape and, when I return to Dórsia, it will be as a bride.”

  She felt her heart crying out to the Regent with an irrepressible agony and, although he did not look at her, but only at the Queen Mother, she knew he was feeling the same.

  There were huge crowds outside the Palace and the Regent said,

  “I thought we would not go in by the main entrance, ma’am, but once we are in the Palace, if you and Her Royal Highness would appear on the balcony, it would give the people who have been waiting for hours for a glimpse of you, very great pleasure.”

  “Of course we will do that,” the Queen Mother replied.

  Zosina thought it was a sensible idea that instead of the crowds seeing only their backs walking up the steps to the Palace, they would see them waving and smiling from the balcony on the first floor.

  Inevitably her mind told her that the King would never think of greeting the people in that way, then she rebuked herself again for being critical.

  They stepped out at the side door which, in fact, was very impressive and was used on formal occasions for those being entertained in the Throne Room.

  There was a wide passage covered with a red carpet and as the Queen Mother walked ahead followed by Zosina and the Regent, a second carriage drew up to the door.

  The Lord Chamberlain and other members of the Prince’s party staying at the Palace, began to alight.

  By this time the Queen Mother had reached the huge painted and gilt doors which led into the Throne Room itself.

  As she did so, there was a sudden loud noise of voices and laughter, followed by several pistol shots.

  It was so unexpected and so startling that the Queen Mother stopped and looked back to the Regent.

  “What can have happened, Sándor?” she asked. “Who can be shooting inside the Palace?”

  As if the Regent was also perturbed, he walked forward and opened one of the Throne Room doors.

  Both the Queen Mother and Zosina followed him to look inside.

  What she saw, made Zosina draw in her breath.

  The gaslights were lit, but not the huge chandeliers, which, as in the State Banqueting Room, hung from the centre of the ceiling.

  On the throne sat the King and at her first glance Zosina realised that he was very drunk indeed.

  His white tunic open to the waist was stained with wine and his legs were thrust out in front of him and, seated partly on his knees and partly on the arm of the throne, was the same girl who had been with him last night and who was even drunker than he was.

  Her skirt was up above her knees and her bodice had fallen from one shoulder to reveal her breast.

  On the floor in front of them were the King’s friends and Zosina saw they were lying on the red velvet cushions from the gilt chairs and stools which stood against the walls.

  She recognised most of the men who had been with the King the night before, and they were the same women who had surprised and shocked her with the dyed hair and crimson lips.

  Even in her innocence Zosina was aware that the men and women on the velvet cushions were behaving in a grossly immoral manner, the majority of the men having discarded their coats and in some cases their shirts.

  She seemed to take everything in, in the passing of a second, then the King lifted his hand that was not encircling the woman on his knee and there was a pistol in it.

  He shot at one of the gas lamps and the glass from it crashed down on the polished floor and this shot was followed by two more, while the men not too engaged with the women in their arms shouted encouragement.

  There was a yell of triumph as another gas bulb crashed to the ground. It was a sound, Zosina thought, like that of wild animals baying at the moon.

  Then sharply the Regent shut the door.

  “His Majesty is entertaining his friends privately,” he said, but he was unable to repress the anger in his voice. They went on down the corridor in silence.

  The Lord Chamberlain escorted the Queen Mother and Zosina to the reception room on the first floor, footmen opened the huge centre window and gas lamps illuminated them as they stepped out onto the balcony.

  A great roar of sound like the breaking of waves on a rocky shore went up as the crowd saw them and hats, flags and handkerchiefs fluttered in the air as the Queen Mother and Zosina waved.

  It would have been an inspiring and exciting sight if Zosina had not felt as if someone had struck her on the head.

  By the time she reached her own bedroom, she felt physically sick.

  All she could think of was the scene in the Throne Room. She had no idea that men and women could look so degraded, so utterly disgusting.

  Last night had been bad enough, but tonight, with the King’s friends behaving in a manner that she had never been able to imagine, let alone see, she was disgusted to the point where she herself felt degraded because she had witnessed their behaviour.

  She only knew, when at last Gisela had left her and she was alone, that she wanted to hide because she could no longer face the world or rather the people in it.

  ‘How can he be like that? How can any man, let alone a King, think that sort of behaviour enjoyable?’ she asked herself.

  The King’s puffy face and half-closed eyes, his mouth slack and open, his soiled and crumpled clothes and the woman on his knee were vividly pictured in her mind and would not be erased.

  It seemed as if in a split second of time when the Regent had opened the door the whole scene was fixed in her memory so that she would never be able to forget it.

  She tried not to think of what she had seen, the women half-naked, the men’s bare backs, with overturned bottles of wine rolling about on the floor.

  It was all horrible, disgusting and vulgar and she was ashamed.

  Ashamed for the King, ashamed that any man could so debase himself when he was the Monarch of a country as beautiful as Dórsia.

  Then her own personal involvement was there to frighten her even more than she was already.

  ‘His wife!’ she whispered to herself. ‘Oh, God. How can I be his wife when I loathe and despise him?’

  Because there was no answer to the question, she buried her face despairingly in the pillow and felt that even God had deserted her.

  *

  All through the night Zosina, unable to sleep, tossed and turned and tried to escape from her own thoughts.

  No exercise of willpower, she thought now despairingly, could change the King, and it had been only a child’s idea culled from Katalin that anything she could say or do could improve him.

  Zosina was, in fact, so deeply shocked by her first encounter with impropriety that it was impossible for her to think clearly or be certain of anything except the longing to escape.

  The hours were ticking by and she told herself that soon it would be the morning of the day when her engagement would be a
nnounced to that foul creature she had seen sitting on his throne.

  After that it would be only a short time before she became his wife and would be competing for his interest, if that was the right word, with the women he obviously preferred, women unashamedly naked who would debauch the Palace as he was doing.

  ‘What can I do? What can I do?’ Zosina asked and again there was no answer.

  Finally because she could not sleep and felt as if she could not breathe, she walked to the window to pull back the curtains.

  It was still very early, the mountains were silhouetted as the first faint glow of the dawn rose behind them. There were still stars in the sky.

  There were no longer crowds outside the Palace, only a deep quiet while the City slept.

  It was then that Zosina felt as if the Palace was closing in on her, the walls crushing her so that, like a rat in a trap, she was slowly being suffocated by them.

  ‘I must think! I must think!’ she told herself.

  But her brain seemed a jumble of impressions and nothing was clear except wherever she looked she saw the King’s drunken face.

  Hardly aware of what she was doing, driven by a wild desire to leave the Palace and the man she loathed, she went to her wardrobe.

  The first thing she saw was one of the riding habits she had brought with her to Dórsia, but which she had not had the opportunity of wearing.

  She was so used to dressing herself at home without the help of the overworked Gisela that it only took her a short time to put on her habit, find her short summer riding boots, her hat and her gloves.

  She glanced at the clock and saw it was only a little after four o’clock.

  The sky was lightening every moment and the stars were receding until there were only a few of them visible.

  Zosina opened the door of her bedroom and went down the passage.

  She realised that there would be a night footman on duty in the hall, just as there would be sentries outside the main doors.

  She knew in which direction lay the stables and rather than ask for a horse to be brought round for her, she intended to choose one for herself.

  The side door was heavily bolted, but the key was in the lock and with some difficulty Zosina managed to pull back the bolts.

  She found herself in the garden and saw the roofs of the stables in the distance. She walked there quickly.

  As she expected, everything was very quiet.

  Then, as she opened a double door of the main stable building, a young groom appeared rubbing his knuckles in his eyes and yawning.

  When he saw Zosina, he stared in surprise and she said, “I am going riding. Please saddle me a horse.”

  He was obviously too astonished to speak, but he hurried away and she heard him calling for somebody who she suspected to be one of the Head Grooms.

  Realising she had caused a commotion, but still intent on riding away from the Palace, she inspected the stalls close to her and then in the third one, she found a magnificent black stallion.

  It was the finest horse she had ever seen and she had opened the stable door and was patting him when the young groom came back with an older man.

  “Good morning!” Zosina said before he could speak. “I am the Princess Zosina. I wish to go riding.”

  “Certainly, Your Royal Highness,” the elderly groom replied, “but I think that stallion would be too much for you.

  Zosina smiled.

  “This is the horse I wish to ride,” she said firmly.

  “Very good, Your Royal Highness, but any groom I send with you will find it hard to keep up with Samu.”

  “That is his name?” Zosina asked. “Then your groom must do his best. I am sure Samu will give me a most enjoyable ride.”

  The old groom looked doubtful, but he was too well versed in his duties to argue.

  He sent the boy to fetch somebody called Niki and began to saddle Samu quickly and with a deftness which came from long practice.

  Zosina went outside into the yard.

  She wanted to breathe the fresh air and it was an effort to speak, even to give her orders to the groom.

  In a surprisingly short time Samu was brought out to her and from elsewhere in the yard a groom appeared on another stallion by no means as magnificent or, Zosina was sure, as fast.

  The old groom helped her into the saddle.

  “Your Royal Highness will remember,” he said, “that Samu is the fastest horse in the stable. He belongs to His Royal Highness the Regent and he says that he has never owned such a horse in his life.”

  Zosina thought she might have guessed that the Regent would have found a horse to which she had been drawn instinctively.

  She did not reply to the groom, she merely moved forward, aware that Niki on the other horse was following her.

  She had some idea of the direction she wanted to go in and, as soon as there was room, Niki drew alongside her.

  “I’ll show Your Royal Highness a good ride!” he said eagerly. “We cross the river, then you’ll be in the wild country below the mountains. They tells me it’s like the Steppes in Hungary, but I can’t believe there’s a better place for horses than you’ll find here in Dórsia.”

  The groom led her in the direction he described and, as he chatted on, talking of the rides there were around the City and the horses they had in the stables, Zosina did not listen.

  She was back with her own problem, feeling that it was pressing in on her and worrying at her brain like a dog with a bone so that she could not escape from it and could not force herself to understand anything else that was happening.

  She was aware in one detached part of her consciousness of the excellence of Samu and the manner in which he moved obediently to her wishes.

  Niki was still talking when they reached the open country and she felt she could bear it no longer.

  She had to think, she had to!

  An idea came to her and without really considering it, she acted.

  She drew a lace handkerchief from her pocket and as they were moving at a trot it floated away from her in the wind. She drew Samu to a standstill.

  “My handkerchief!” she said. “I have dropped it!”

  “I’ll fetch it for Your Royal Highness,” Niki offered. Zosina reached out to take the bridle of his horse and he slipped to the ground.

  When he started to run back to the handkerchief, lying white against the green of the grass, she spurred Samu forward taking the groom’s horse with her.

  She deliberately moved very quickly so that he should think that she had lost control and only when she had broken into a gallop for nearly a quarter-of-a-mile, did she release the reins of the other horse.

  Then spurring Samu again, she settled down to ride at an almost incredible speed over the soft grass that was fragrant with flowers.

  She rode until Samu rather than herself slowed the pace and when she turned to look back, not only was Niki and his horse out of sight but so was the City.

  She was in what seemed to be an enchanted land, the mountains peaking high above her and the green valley in which she was riding empty save for the flights of wild birds, which rose at her approach.

  ‘At last I can think,’ Zosina mused. ‘At last I can consider what I can do.’

  She brought Samu down to a trot and tried to make her mind work clearly as it had been unable to do in the Palace, but the confusion was still there.

  The impossibility of marrying a man like the King and the equal impossibility of refusing to do so was an unanswerable dilemma.

  Round and round, over and over and up and down, it seemed to Zosina that her brain considered every aspect of the situation she found herself in, but, instead of the problem becoming clearer, it seemed only to become more involved.

  There was the threat of the German Empire, the hope not only of Dórsia retaining her independence but also of her own country, Lützelstein.

  She visualised only too well her father’s fury as well as her mother’s if she shou
ld go back home having refused to accept the duty that had been imposed upon her.

  Even if she tried to refuse, she had the feeling that her father, or rather her mother, would force her into obeying them.

  And apart from that how could she lose the respect and admiration of the Regent?

  He might love her, but he had given his whole life to his country on behalf of the King in a manner which she knew now was exceptional, and was admired by all other countries which were aware of the progress Dórsia had made.

  The British particularly, Zosina knew, would want Dórsia and Lützelstein to remain independent because more than any other Monarch in Europe, Queen Victoria had tried to maintain the balance of power.

  ‘How can I fight all these people?’ she asked.

  Once again the picture of the King was in front of her eyes and she could almost see his coarse friends inveigling themselves into positions of power and, in doing so, ruining everything that the Regent had built up in the last eight years.

  ‘They must be stopped!’ Zosina thought. ‘But how?’

  She felt as if she was trying to hold back an avalanche with her bare hands, but being crushed and smothered in the process.

  She rode on and on. Suddenly, after many hours had passed she found the sun was high in the sky, it was very hot and she was thirsty.

  She pulled off her riding coat and laid it on the front of her saddle.

  She looked for somewhere to drink and thought that, if she drew nearer to the mountains, there might be a cascade of cool pure water running down from the snows.

  The mere thought of it made her lick her lips and she turned her horse’s head, riding towards the great fir-covered foot of a mountain on whose peak there was still snow.

  ‘It is all so beautiful!’ she told herself, ‘but the man who will rule is ugly and horrible.’

  She felt if the Regent was with her, she would say, ‘every prospect pleases and only man is vile’ and he would understand.

  Then she was back repeating over and over again,

  “I love him! I love him!”

  CHAPTER SEVEN