A Royal Affair Read online

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  DREAMSPINNER PRESS

  5032 Capital Circle SW, Suite 2, PMB# 279, Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886 USA

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of author imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  A Royal Affair

  © 2014 John Wiltshire.

  Cover Art

  © 2014 L.C. Chase.

  www.lcchase.com

  Cover content is for illustrative purposes only and any person depicted on the cover is a model.

  All rights reserved. This book is licensed to the original purchaser only. Duplication or distribution via any means is illegal and a violation of international copyright law, subject to criminal prosecution and upon conviction, fines, and/or imprisonment. Any eBook format cannot be legally loaned or given to others. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Dreamspinner Press, 5032 Capital Circle SW, Suite 2, PMB# 279, Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886, USA, or http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/.

  ISBN: 978-1-62798-904-6

  Digital ISBN: 978-1-62798-905-3

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014943892

  First Edition September 2014

  Printed in the United States of America

  This paper meets the requirements of

  ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

  To Molly, my number one fan.

  PROLOGUE

  A HINT of snow chilled the air this morning—still air that brought the smell of woodsmoke. Worrying about the horses, I woke early from the cold. Leaves crunched under my feet as I walked to the barn. That simple thought about the cold and the approach of winter brought it all back. I remembered it all.

  I had come a long way to forget, a long way for a new beginning. You cannot have one of those, I suppose, without an ending, and there had been no real ending. I had the horror inside still, carried all the way from that accursed country to this new one.

  Like slow poison, it ate away at me, always there when I woke, a tendril of fear from yet another dream. It was there when I rode through the sweet-smelling pine: terror at what I would find on my return—an empty house with empty rooms where I might search endlessly for the one I would never find.

  As I stood in the crisp autumn air, I realized the time had come to rid my body of these poisonous memories. I would write it down and then it would be gone, and I could take this new life and make something of it. Something good.

  CHAPTER 1

  POISON TOOK me to Hesse-Davia. At that time, I was considered something of an expert on the detection and alleviation of various poisons. Whilst in reality only a country doctor, I had received unusual training that stood me apart from my contemporaries in the medical world. Consequently, I had the good fortune to be summoned to the house and estate of Lord Salisbury, who had been ill for some considerable time. He had tried all the various remedies suggested by doctors in London: visits to Bath to take the waters, a stay at the coast to benefit from the sea air. But for all this, his health continued to decline.

  His sister, Lady Caroline, who resided with him and his new young wife, listened to gossip. Her maid indulged her love of this harmless eccentricity and had told her about a doctor who was said to have knowledge of things he should not, who had studied his profession amongst heathens and had taken from them strange beliefs and even stranger ways. She was referring to me, of course, and to the years I had spent in the New World as a boy living with the Powponi. In England in those days, it was strange for a doctor to listen to his patient and consider how the world around him affected his health. But that is what I did. And so I was summoned by Lady Caroline to attend her brother.

  Lord Salisbury was a man with a very young wife. That I saw within my first few moments in the sick room. If Lady Salisbury were a man, she would be accused of having a roving eye. Her eyes roved to me immediately upon my being ushered into the bedroom by the anxious sister. They stayed upon me, and not in the way the eyes of a worried young wife should. She was sizing me up, slicing me open, and weighing me in the balance for consumption. I clearly found favor. I was treated to a dazzling display of tearful concern for her dear Arthur.

  Mindful of my place and the job I was there to do, I asked politely to be left alone with my patient. Reluctantly, she agreed and imperiously commanded her sister-in-law to accompany her to the chapel to pray for her darling husband. Before she left, she placed a tiny hand on my arm and through lowered, tear-dampened eyelashes begged me to make him better. She would have moved the heart of the stoniest of men. She was incredibly lovely, with the delicate pink and white beauty of the most fragile of shells washed up on a distant shore. I had my own reasons for being entirely immune to her power. She was not to know this, of course. I nodded and watched as her hand lifted from my arm.

  Lord Salisbury was a man who should have been in the prime of his later years. Past the most vigorous age for a man, he still had a good number of years stretching ahead of him to enjoy the bloom of his lovely wife, his wealth, and his extremely fortunate life. But that day I beheld a sad shell of a man. He looked hollowed out. Only his eyes had vigor. With a look of something like hope, they followed me as I approached his bed.

  I asked permission to sit alongside him, and it was granted. He glanced at my bag, expecting, no doubt, to see a potion or a purge or a jar of leeches. He was paying well for this consultation and was a man who from all appearances benefited greatly from all his money could buy him. I asked if I could examine him. He nodded and closed his eyes, resigned to yet another failure from yet another doctor. Instead of touching him, I began to talk to him. I asked him simple questions, which he answered readily enough: what he feared, things he enjoyed doing. When I deemed him ready, I moved our conversation on to his more recent history.

  His wife, Sophie, was an orphan. Her parents had opposed her match to him, he being nearly forty years older than their only child, but they had died within a few days of each other, leaving her bereft and in need of his protection. They had married within the month. They had been blissfully happy (his words), despite his increasing ill health. I did not ask him directly what symptoms he suffered but learned of them indirectly as he told me of his honeymoon period with his beautiful wife. For the first time, he had become fastidious with his diet. Even favorite dishes upset his constitution. He had become easily tired, something which only received a wink and a ribald comment from friends if he mentioned it. I noticed bruising upon his skin and a telling pigmentation around his eyes as he spoke. I was by now fairly certain of what I was seeing, but in cases such as this, the patient is his own worst enemy. Lord Salisbury adored his wife. To be told she was systematically poisoning him would not be well received. I would save my theory that she had probably murdered her parents to tell him later.

  He was well enough to leave his bed and sit for a while in the window. He always felt better, he said, away from the damn bed, but all his previous doctors had told him complete bed rest was his only hope. He was short of breath as I helped him to the chair. I sat alongside him, both of us apparently looking at the view. After a while, I felt his eyes upon me.

  “So, what’s your opinion, Doctor? Am I long for this world? I’m not ready to go, you know. Got lots to do yet.”

  I took the plunge and lied to my patient. “
It’s not your life I am worried about, sir. It is Lady Salisbury I fear for. I believe her life is in grave danger.”

  “What, man! What are you talking about?”

  I laid a hand reassuringly on his arm. “She must be got away from here as soon as possible. Is there another house she can go to?”

  “She’s the best damn nurse I could have! Devoted! Barely left my side since this blessed illness started. She’ll be—”

  “She must be brave, sir. As must you. She must leave this day. This very minute.”

  “I’m contagious? No one’s said it’s bloody well contagious before!”

  “And you have not got better before. I do not believe you have been given good advice.”

  “What about my sister? The damn servants? Must they leave as well?”

  This was tricky. I shook my head. “Your wife’s beauty is my real concern. She is a delicate, fragile flower that could….” I waved my hand at the pallor and yellow tinge of his skin, at the bruise marks and discoloration of his hands. He paled and nodded. I tapped his arm gently. “Do not let her come and see you before she leaves. You must be very strong—for her sake. Can you do that?”

  He nodded.

  She was gone within a few hours. I heard later from a servant that she had put up something of a fight. True colors, perhaps. I wasn’t overly concerned. I had my patient to myself, and now the real work could begin. By the end of the day, I had Lord Salisbury in a new bedroom, a room formally a nursery, now bare and stripped of all decoration. New bedsheets, new mattress, and new bedclothes were all the room contained. He wasn’t staying there long, but I needed a day to prepare his next treatment. The new room had caused the servants considerable confusion; my next orders almost caused a mutiny. It was only when I enlisted the support of Lady Caroline that I saw my orders obeyed. The servants built a straw hut—so they called it—in the formal garden outside Lord Salisbury’s room. I thought of it as a healing lodge, a sweat lodge, but they grumbled about heathen ways and dark arts. In their presence, therefore, I called it a straw hut too. I didn’t care what it was called, as long as it worked. When it was ready, I took Lord Salisbury into his new home. He stayed there many days, sweating, drinking pure water, and eating as much seafood and raw liver as I could persuade him to consume.

  To say he was skeptical of my methods was an understatement, but on the third day, when he felt well for the first time in many months (for the first time since his wedding day, but I wasn’t quite ready to point this out yet), he became a convert. I allowed him to return to his new room to sleep, but he still spent many hours in the hut every day, sweating out the poison. When he was strong enough, we started walking, and soon he was well enough to ride. The fresh air combined with the healing foods and the constant sweating out of the poison saw him turn from a graying, yellowish man near death to something resembling his former self.

  That had been the easy part. Lady Salisbury was begging to return to her beloved darling. I could hardly justify banning her from writing to her husband or him from returning her loving correspondence. My argument that she was still in grave danger was wearing thin. I needed an ally.

  I approached Lady Caroline one day in the park as she was walking with her two little spaniels. She had taken something of a shine to me, I knew. I had helped her brother, to be sure, but it was more than this. For my own reasons, I never wanted to admit the effect I always had on women, but I could not avoid seeing it. This woman was a good ten years my senior, but still it was there: the flush of expectation and longing. This one time, I used my power shamelessly. It was a matter of life or death for my patient. I walked with her around the grounds. We must have walked for hours, and by the end of our walk, we were in complete accord. It had not, in the end, taken much to persuade her. She adored her brother, was wholly dependent upon him and his generosity toward her, and she despised his wife.

  She was more than willing to be persuaded that her brother had suffered from systematic poisoning. Indeed, when finally convinced, as with many others who have been similarly persuaded, she reinforced her own belief by recalling circumstances, coincidences, and oddities that now all made sense. Lady Salisbury had insisted on sleeping separately but had been responsible for buying new bedding for her husband’s bed. She had insisted on private meals for the two of them where she would prepare his favorite dishes with her own hand. The sister realized her brother’s decline in health had exactly coincided with his marriage. Periods of recovery aligned with times when his young wife was absent, enjoying the season in London or Bath. It is easy, as they say, to be wise after the event.

  Lady Caroline agreed with me that telling Lord Salisbury he must renounce his wife was not going to be easy. He was an old man with a beautiful young wife. What man would want to give that up? How many men would rather die to have that young wife for even a few weeks, when renouncing her meant a lifetime of celibacy?

  As it happened, we did not have to explain any of this to the old man. Lady Salisbury solved our problem for us by running off with a lieutenant in the militia. Scandal and disgrace naturally followed, and Lord Salisbury’s infatuation very quickly turned to anger at the humiliation and betrayal. I suspected he half knew what his wife was, but as with many men in his position, he only allowed himself to know the half he liked. Now he was free to see her in her entirety. Her absence, coinciding as it did with his return to health, worked so on his mind that he began to see her as the metaphorical poison in his life. Neither his sister nor I pointed out the obvious.

  Should I have told the authorities of my suspicions about Lady Salisbury (now, I believe, calling herself Mrs. Hannigan and living in cheap lodgings in Yorkshire with her lieutenant)? Perhaps. But I had no proof of my belief that she had murdered her parents and then attempted to murder her husband. My methodology was unusual, and my remedies hinted at black arts. Few men would be willing to have a heathen sweat lodge built in their herb garden or be willing to sweat naked in it with another man whilst eating strange combinations of foods.

  Besides, I hardly had time to consider a course of action as regards the delightful Sophie Hannigan. Events happened very swiftly over the next few days, so swiftly that I hardly recall quite how it came about that I agreed to travel to a country I had never heard of to treat another man who might be suffering from Sophie Poisoning, as Lady Caroline now liked to call it.

  Lord Salisbury and Lady Caroline had a younger sister who had married very young to a dashing (Lady Caroline’s word) foreigner. She was now living in some state in Hesse-Davia, a small kingdom in northern Europe, the wife of a king’s advisor. King Gregor, however, was believed to be dying. And yes, the symptoms were uncannily similar to those I had recently treated. None of the doctors summoned to treat him had been able to do anything. I wasn’t surprised. Leeches and violent purging rarely did much for cases of poisoning, especially if the root cause of the affliction—someone trying to kill you—was not discovered.

  Within a few weeks, therefore, I was crossing the English Channel toward France and a new life, with a letter of introduction in my valise and a desire in my heart to make this new start. I knew, of course, that my demons would follow me wherever I went. It was inevitable. None of us can truly run from the evil we carry in our hearts, but the crossing gave the illusion of escape, and that was enough.

  Would I have boarded that ship if I had known what was awaiting me in Hesse-Davia? Of course I would. Despite what happened, all the pain and all the horror, I would not unlive one moment of my time in that terrible place. I would not lose one moment of my time with him. I cannot claim, as I sat huddled and sick on the deck of that small ship, the wind blowing cold in my face, the salt tempting as sin on my tongue, that I had any kind of premonition that I was traveling toward something that would change me so profoundly. But I did feel as if the tiny strip of water we were crossing was more than just a divide between two bodies of land. It was a separation between my old life and what I yearned for in a new one. I did no
t even have words for this vague yearning, but it called to me in the cry of the gulls, the roll of deck beneath me, the voices of the sailors, and the cracking of the waves against the old wooden hull.

  Perhaps if I had listened more closely, I would have heard them all whispering his name. For it is his name I hear still in my nightmares and in my waking dreams. It is the everyday hum of my new life in this vast country. But it began there, on that ship, in the sense of longing in my heart. Even my heartbeat murmured his name.

  I should have listened more closely.

  CHAPTER 2

  I TRAVELED for over three months from the coast where we landed in France to the small distant kingdom of Hesse-Davia. The flat plains of France and the Low Countries had gradually given way to forests—endless green vistas of sweet-smelling conifers—and then to mountains and deep gorges, which were rumored to contain bandits or worse.

  Sitting around campfires at night with travelers I met on the road or in inns when the nights turned especially cold, I heard tales of things that lived in the forests and fed on men’s souls. In my view, I saw more horror in the actual world around me, but the storytellers seemed able to overlook the disease, poverty, and degradation that surrounded them in favor of the imagined or mythical, which did not. The farther I traveled, the more desperate became the plight of the poor people I encountered. In the civilized Europe I had left behind, new ideas had begun to permeate everyday life, making a difference to the health and happiness of all. Here it was like entering medieval superstition made manifest. I saw men whose condition appalled me, laboring in the forests. They lived in squalid huts, barely more than hurdles stuck in mud. The women were worse, for they had the added burden of childbirth and rearing in these fetid, awful conditions.

  Life seemed little better in the villages and few towns I traveled through. I saw whipping posts and stocks, not wholly unfamiliar in England still, but rarely used and never in the savage way they were employed here. In one village, I was treated to the ghastly sight of a burning. A witch. I could do nothing so chose not to see too much. What I did see looked more like a terrified old woman being burned alive than it did a witch being purified. Given the avid, greedy faces of the crowd, however, I knew I was the only one thinking this.