Christmas Nights (14 page)

‘You really think I would take that money for myself when the people need it so much, to pay for education and health care and a better infrastructure?’ Tears burned her eyes.

‘You had no real reason to come back to Fortenegro,’ Max pointed out. ‘You must have known that by doing so the feudal law of atonement would be invoked against you.’

‘I knew it existed, yes, but it never occurred to me that a modern man of the twenty-first century would be governed by it. Were you the ruler you should be, you would have such antiquated laws repealed.’

Her unexpected attack on him hit a raw nerve. He would already have repealed those laws had he felt that the people would accept such changes. He still intended to repeal them—once he had won their trust.

‘Such an act would merely have been empty words,’ he felt obliged to tell her. ‘It takes the will of the people to make a law work, and as you must know there any many people here on Fortenegro who, either through fear or ignorance or pride, or a mixture of all those things, are not willing to relinquish the control and power they believe such demanding laws give them. Do not deny it. That mindset is operating here within this castle and its lands every time a father refuses to allow his child an education. You have as good as said so yourself.’

‘They do that because they have no choice.’ Ionanthe immediately defended her people. ‘Because they cannot afford to take their children off the land. Because the law allows landowners to demand a set number of days of work per year from their tenants.’

When Max didn’t respond she shook her head in angry despair.

‘Oh, it is hopeless trying to make you understand.’ Tears of frustration gathered in her eyes. ‘The other night when we were discussing education you let me think that you shared my views and my hopes for the people,’ she accused him. ‘But you were just deceiving me. Why would
you do that if not to lull me into a false sense of security? To make me think that we shared a similar purpose?’

‘I could just as easily use that argument against you,’ Max told her curtly.

He shouldn’t be doing this, Max knew. As Fortenegro’s ruler, he knew he had a duty of care to his people which involved questioning her motives and acting on his suspicions. But he wasn’t just Fortenegro’s ruler. He was also a man. And as that man who had held her in his arms, who had known whilst holding her there that he never wanted to let her go, surely he had a duty to that feeling?

There was only one thing he could do now—one question he had to ask. The whole of his future personal happiness was balanced on the answer.

Ionanthe possessed strength of will, she possessed courage, and she was passionate about what she believed in. He could think of no one better to share both his personal and his public life. But he also had to know that he could trust her with Fortenegro’s future; he had to know that she would put what was best for the island above her own personal gain. He could not and would not blame her for wanting to realise the wealth beneath the surface of her land for herself. From what he had learned, it was her grandfather who was to blame. He had taught his granddaughters to value wealth and pride, and to follow his example of always putting himself first.

‘If you are not lying about the mineral deposits, then tell me that you had no ulterior motive whatsoever in agreeing to marry me other than the need to protect your own safety.’

Ionanthe looked at him, her expression anguished. She desperately wanted to win his trust, but lying was an anathema to her. She hesitated, and then admitted, ‘I did have an ulterior motive, yes. But—’

Max didn’t want to hear any more. He had been a fool to hope that he might be wrong. He turned back towards the door, but Ionanthe moved faster.

‘You will listen to me,’ she told him. ‘Because for the sake of my people I cannot allow you to think what you are thinking. I did have an ulterior motive, yes, but it was
not
the one of which you are trying to accuse me. This island has a long history of rulers who have abused their position, and its people have suffered as a result. As you have said yourself, they are set in their ways and bound by ancient customs and laws which imprison them in a feudal system that denies their children so very much. I grew up witnessing that. I saw my parents’ attempts to change things, and I saw the power of those who opposed those changes—including my own grandfather. I saw greed and pride and a lack of compassion. And I saw too that what this island needed more than anything else was a ruler strong enough and courageous enough to lead his people to freedom.

‘When I heard that Fortenegro had a new ruler in you, I hoped so much that you would be that man—but then you married my sister, a woman I knew to be rapacious and selfish. Had you married her because you shared her belief that the island existed merely to fund her expensive lifestyle? I wondered. Or did you love her without sharing her views? I knew she did not love you. She wrote to me and said so. But then Eloise loved only
herself, and the blame for that lay with our grandfather. I watched to see what changes you might make to benefit the people of Fortenegro, but I could find none. So I compared you with the man I admire more than any other man who walks this earth and I found you wanting.’

Max was shocked by the violent surge of savage male jealousy that gripped him to hear Ionanthe speaking of admiring another man.

In a manner that was completely out of character for him, he demanded contemptuously, ‘And who
is
this paragon you so admire? Some Brussels eurocrat who makes laws he himself will never have to obey and plays God with other people’s lives?’

Ionanthe’s breath hissed out in furious denial.

‘No. He is not. He is a man who works selflessly for the benefit of others. Through the auspices of the foundation which he heads he has heard and answered the cries of the poor and the sick. He has viewed them with compassion and understood their need. He has provided money for wells for clean water, for schools to educate, for hospitals to heal, for crops to grow and for peace, so that all those who use what he has given them can flourish.’

The passion in her voice showed how she felt, and Max had to look away from her. What she had just told him changed everything—but he could not tell her that.

Ionanthe’s throat hurt, and her eyes ached with the tears she was not going to let Max see.

‘Once it was my dream and my hope that I might work for the Veritas Foundation and learn from such a master. That was not to be, but there is
something
I can
do for the people of Fortenegro, even if it is merely a small shadow of what he has done. Just as he educates the children of today so that they can grow to be to the leaders of tomorrow, I thought that as your wife
I
could provide Fortenegro with the ruler it so desperately needs.’

‘You planned to convert me to follow the teaching of this… this man you admire so much?’ he suggested.

Ionanthe shook her head.

‘No. I hoped to conceive and raise a son who would be all the things that he will need to be to help this island.
That
was my hidden agenda in marrying you. No scheming to sell off the minerals that lie beneath the mountains,’ Ionanthe told him on a slightly shaky breath.

She had wanted those last words to sound proud and scornful, but she was miserably aware that in reality they sounded closer to tearful and upset.

Battling through the complex mass of emotions Ionanthe’s speech had aroused in him, for the first time in his life Max simply did not know what to say or do to make things right. He knew what he wanted to say; he knew what he wanted to do. But he also knew that the very last thing Ionanthe would want to hear from him right now was that her hero—the man she admired more than any other, the man she had placed on a pedestal and at whose feet she had openly and proudly confessed she yearned to sit and learn—was no other than himself.

Giving her that news now would hurt her dreadfully. Fiercely Max blinked away the telltale moisture that would have betrayed how much the thought of her pain hurt him.

It wasn’t that he had deliberately set out to deceive her. No, it was simply that it had never occurred to him
that it might be necessary for him to tell her about the foundation and his role in it.

He breathed in, and then exhaled.

‘So you agreed to marry me hoping that I would give you a child—a son who, with your guidance, would in time become the ruler you believe the island needs?’

He sounded remarkably accepting of her plan, Ionanthe acknowledged, but instead of reassuring her that only served to increase her hostility and pain.

‘Yes,’ she confirmed.

‘And those times when you lay in my arms, when my body possessed yours, for you it was only because you wanted me to give you my child?’

Ionanthe’s heart bumped treacherously into her ribs. She looked at Max, and then wished she hadn’t.

‘Yes… of course.’ Something about the way in which Max was looking back at her drove her into adding recklessly, ‘What other reason could there be?’

Max’s silence made her nerve-endings prickle with tension.

Please God, don’t let him tell her mercilessly and truthfully that he
knew
from the minute he had touched her she had had no thoughts in her head for anyone or anything but him and the need he aroused in her.

‘And now—if I have? If you
are
carrying my child?’

The question slipped under her guard and made her eyes widen and her heart thud.

‘It’s… it’s too soon to know,’ she protested.

‘That was not what I asked you,’ Max pointed out. ‘You have told me of your plans for my son’s adult future, but what of his childhood? You have said nothing of that.’

Ionanthe frowned.

‘What I want to know is how will he grow up?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You and I both lost our parents before we were fully adult. You were pushed into the shadows by a grandfather who lavished all his attention on your sister. You must know as I do how much every child yearns for the security of being loved?’

‘Yes, of course I do. I shall love my son.’

‘But you do not love me, and he will sense that and be confused and hurt by it. Children always are when their loyalties are claimed by two parents who are opposed to one another.’

Both Max’s voice and his expression were grave and heavy.

He genuinely cared about the emotional welfare of a child who might never exist, Ionanthe realised, with a small ache of surprise and sadness.

‘You’ve been so long I’ve had to come and find you, and it’s a long walk from my kitchen.’

Ariadne’s arrival as she puffed towards them brought an immediate end to their conversation.

‘The men are still waiting for you to come and look at the tree,’ she told Ionanthe in a chivvying voice.

‘I’ll come and look now,’ Ionanthe said.

‘Christmas trees! A whole lot of fuss and bother, if you ask me,’ Ariadne complained.

T
HE
Christmas tree was a perfect fit, with the star which Max had placed on its topmost branch just touching the ceiling of the great hall. Its branches were now decorated with the homemade garlands and painted cones that she and the children had been busy making for the last two days, along with the familiar decorations Ionanthe remembered from her own childhood.

She touched one of the fragile glass baubles with a tender finger. It was from the set that her parents had bought one year when they had taken them to a German Christmas market. The bauble might be slightly tarnished, but Ionanthe saw it with the eyes of love and it was still beautiful. Just looking at it reminded her of the smell of warm gingerbread and the wonderful warmth of her father’s large hand holding her own.

So many happy memories of a childhood in which she had felt loved and safe until her parents’ deaths. Her mother and father had adored one another. Even as a young child she had somehow sensed that and been warmed by it. Ionanthe frowned. She was
not
going to allow Max’s comments underlining the fact that he did
not love her and that any child they had would suffer because of it to affect her.

They were still sharing the same bedroom and the same bed, but for the last two nights, since the confrontation between them in the library, they had slept in it as though they were miles apart. Max hadn’t made one single move to approach her, or to apologise for what he had said. She certainly wasn’t going to be the one to approach
him
. After all, she had done nothing wrong.

Except plan to bring up his son and heir to ultimately act against him and everything she thought he stood for.

It wasn’t easy trying to pretend that nothing was wrong, but for the sake of the children so excitedly waiting for Christmas, and for the sake of their parents and grandparents who had made it plain how thrilled and honoured they felt to have them both here, Ionanthe felt that she had to make an effort. It was hard when she was having to strive desperately to pretend that she felt nothing for Max other than anger and contempt when the truth was—

Blindly she stepped backwards, gasping in shock as she bumped into the heavy wooden step ladders she had forgotten were there, striking her funny bone against one of the steps. A wave of nauseating dizziness from the sharply acute pain surged over her, causing her to sway slightly.

Max, who had been talking to Tomas, saw Ionanthe bump into the ladders and then clutch at her elbow, her face losing its colour as she swayed giddily. Immediately he hurried to her side, taking hold of her hand and demanding, ‘Are you all right?’

‘Of course I’m all right,’ Ionanthe lied, trying to pull free.

The truth was that she felt terribly weak and sick, and would have given anything to rest her head on Max’s shoulder and feel his arms close round her.

‘All I did was catch my elbow,’ she continued, when he refused to let her go.

A surge of love for her so strong that it felt as though it was drawn from the deepest core of him rolled over Max. Initially, in the aftermath of their quarrel, he had handled things badly, Max admitted to himself. He had spent most of the previous night lying awake, longing to turn back the clock. And not just because of the suspicions they’d had, the misjudgements they had both made about one another which had led to their quarrel.

Ionanthe’s impassioned outburst about the Veritas Foundation and the man who controlled it, her obvious partisanship and admiration for both the organisation and the man behind it had, even if she herself could not know it, put him in a completely untenable position. He could not in all good conscience continue to withhold the truth from her—but how was he to tell her?

She was very angry with him, and her pride was hurt by his misjudgement of her. He knew that and he understood why. But that meant that this was not a good time to tell her that the man she so admired and had put on a pedestal, scornfully telling her husband of her hero’s moral and charitable achievements, and how far short of him he fell, was actually the same man—him. She would be justifiably angry and—far more important to him—she would also be hurt.

On the other hand, if he didn’t tell her, now that he knew how she felt, wasn’t he going to be guilty of an
even less excusable offence? One which in the long term would cause even more damage to their relationship because it would inflict a wound that would fester? They needed to be able to
trust
one another if the love Max was sure they felt for one another was going to be able to grow and flourish.

His only excuse for his omissions and failures was that he had never loved before, and that therefore everything he was learning was new. No matter how careful he was, no matter how much he wanted her happiness before anything else, he was fallible and liable to make mistakes.

Right now what they needed more than anything else was the two things they did not have: privacy and time. He looked round the hall; the ebb and flow of everyday life was going on around them but at that moment they were in some sense isolated from it in this shadowy corner of the great hall. The time was far from perfect, but Max admitted to himself that he couldn’t trust himself to endure another night of the torture of sharing a bed with her—knowing that she was so close and yet at the same time so very far away from him, without reaching for her. He might not know much about love, but he did know that breaking down Ionanthe’s barriers so that they could share the intimacy of sex without telling her that
he
was Veritas would be unforgivable.

He had to tell her now. He couldn’t endure another day of cool silence, during which he was deprived of those small, sometimes silent exchanges of mutual awareness to which he had become accustomed without knowing it until the intimacy was denied him. He had misjudged her, and without meaning to he had also misled her.

When she made to pull away from him a second time, Max bent his head and begged in a low voice, ‘Wait. There’s something I have to say to you.’

Ionanthe’s heart lifted. Hope swelled and rose inside her. He was going to tell her that he loved and needed her more than life itself. He was going to apologise and beg her forgiveness.

She looked over his shoulder. Although the great hall was busy with people, none of them were paying them any particular attention. The hope that he was going to say the words she most longed to hear grew inside her and took wing—only to crash to earth to die painfully when he said, ‘You won’t like it, I know, but it has to be said.’

The words were enough to send an icy trickle of despair down her spine. She couldn’t, she
mustn’t
let him see how she really felt.

‘If you’re going to make more accusations,’ she threw back at him, rallying her pride to her defence, ‘then I dare say I shan’t.’

Max shook his head.

‘No, I’m not going to accuse you of anything. The truth is…’

His voice died away as he struggled to find the right words. He was still holding her hand, and now he played with her fingers, stroking them and holding them, his actions such that, had he been a different kind of man, Ionanthe might have thought they betrayed uncertainty. But Max was never uncertain—about anything, she decided bitterly.

‘The truth is what?’ she pressed him.

‘You may remember that you mentioned the Veritas Foundation to me?’

Ionanthe nodded her head, although she couldn’t imagine what her praise of Veritas had to do with Max telling her something she wasn’t going to like hearing.

‘You said how much you admired the… the man who runs it?’

‘Yes, I did,’ Ionanthe agreed, her eyes darkening with anger. ‘You want me to retract what I said because if offends your pride? Is that it?’ she guessed.

‘No.’ Max’s voice was terse. His fingers interlaced with her own. ‘The truth is—’

‘Yes?’

‘I should have told you this before, but at the time I didn’t think there was any need. It never occurred to me that you’d even
heard
of Veritas, never mind…’He said the words. ‘The Veritas Foundation was originally set up by my father. I inherited it from him.’

‘No…’
Ionanthe protested, but somehow she knew that Max was telling her the truth.

‘I’m sorry. I never imagined… If I’d known…’

This was so humiliating, so shaming. Hot blood forced its way up under her skin, but she couldn’t afford to give way to the chagrin she was feeling. She had made a fool of herself, but Max surely had made even more of a fool of her. Her pride stung, as though it had received a thousand savage cuts.

‘You never imagined
what
?’ she demanded angrily. ‘You never imagined that I might be someone who admired everything I believed Veritas and the man in charge of it stood for?’

Red flags of angry pride might be burning in Ionanthe’s face, but because he loved her Max knew that what she was really feeling was pain—the same pain he himself would have felt had their situation been reversed. More than anything he longed to hold her and to take that pain from her.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘For what? Misjudging me? Destroying my illusions? Believing that I wasn’t good enough to know the truth? That I wasn’t worthy of sharing your ideals?’

‘Ionanthe, don’t—please…’

He’d hurt her, and she was justifiably angry. Max understood that, but there was something he still had to tell her. ‘I was a fool for not realising that you—’

‘No,
I
am the one who was the fool. But not any more, Max,’ Ionanthe cut across him bitterly.

Before she could continue Tomas was approaching them, looking self-conscious and uncertain as he addressed himself to Max.

‘Highness, the people are asking if you will lead them in the sled race tomorrow, Christmas Eve morning.’

‘What sled race is this?’ Max asked, looking at Ionanthe. But she shook her head, leaving Tomas to explain whilst her heart sank like a lead weight inside her chest. Her father had led the traditional sled race, and now she wanted to protest in bitter anger that Max should be asked to stand in her father’s place.

‘It is a tradition of the estate that on the day before Christmas there is a sled race from the top of the ridge behind the castle, and that the race is begun by our lord,’ Tomas was explaining eagerly to Max. ‘For many years
we have not had anyone here to do it, and the old ones are saying that it will bring us luck to have our Prince commence the race for us.’

The people—her people—were showing their approval of Max and their willingness to accept him. Ionanthe felt very alone. Alone and unloved, deceived and misjudged.

Max
had
misjudged her and hurt her, but she had also misjudged him, honesty compelled her to admit. Yes, that was true—but at least he had always known who she was. She hadn’t hidden her true self away from him. She hadn’t let him talk about his dreams knowing that in comparison to her achievements they were as a child’s drawing compared to the work of a master. That was what hurt so badly: knowing that he had excluded her from such an important part of his life; knowing that he had already done all those things she longed so much to do.

Now she could admit to herself what she hadn’t really known before. That it was important to her that they met and recognised one another as equals. In her grandfather’s eyes she had always been a poor substitute for Eloise. Knowing that, growing up with it, had diminished her. She couldn’t allow herself to love a man whose very existence and achievements could not help but do the same.

Their marriage would have to be brought to an end. There was no purpose to it now, after all. Max was the perfect man to rule Fortenegro and to give its people all that they needed. He was also the best role model there could be for his son. Max—the Max she now knew him to be—could achieve far more than she had ever envisaged
being able to achieve. There was no purpose in her staying—no need, no role for her, nothing. Ionanthe prayed that fate had been wiser than she had herself, and that she had not yet conceived Max’s child.

Max looked towards Ionanthe for guidance as to how he should answer Tomas’s request, but her expression was remote and cold. Tomas’s interruption had come at the wrong time.

‘I shall be pleased to begin the race,’ he told Tomas, when Ionanthe continued to ignore his silent request for advice.

The beaming smile with which Tomas received his reply told Max that at least one person was pleased with his response.

She would have to wait until they returned to the palace—until she was sure that she was not carrying Max’s child—to inform Max that she wanted their marriage brought to an end, Ionanthe decided. Or maybe she should just leave the island and then tell him. Although of course that would be cowardly. And what if she had conceived? The frantic despairing leap of her heart told her how easy it would be for her to clutch at the excuse to remain married to him.

How Max must have inwardly laughed at her when she had confided to him her admiration for the head of Veritas, unknowingly extolling his virtues, for all the world like some naive teenager filled with hero-worship. All she had to hold on to now was her pride. But she had survived before without love, without anyone to turn to.

That had been different, though. Then she had had hope. Now there was nothing left for her to hope for
other than that she did not make even more of a fool of herself than she already had.

Max had married her because his very nature impelled him to want to improve the lot of the islanders. Every move he had made
had
to have been part of a carefully orchestrated plan designed to eliminate what stood in the way of his progress and to move forward with his plans. She couldn’t argue with or object to his underlying motivation—after all, she had married him with her own agenda. She couldn’t either logically or clinically refuse to understand why he’d had to be so suspicious of her. But pretending to want her—and he
had
done that, even if he had not said the words—allowing her to believe that they shared a mutual desire for one another, that was unforgivable.