Singer from the Sea (38 page)

“Only a nightmare,” he said to her and himself, clammy skinned and sweating. “Only a nightmare.”

A
UFORS AND
G
ENEVIEVE RETURNED TO
H
AVENOR, NEITHER
hurrying nor delaying, but with deliberate inevitability. Despite the intensity of the passion that had overmastered them in Weirmills, Genevieve allowed them only that one night, insisting that their love must be held in abeyance. Not now, she said. Not yet. “Not yet” became words bitter on Aufors’s tongue, particularly on the twenty-fifth day of their travel when he caught Genevieve in tears.

“What is it?” he asked, reminding himself to be as gentle as possible. Shouting at her would not help, so he had proven to himself early in the journey, and lately she had seemed tired and listless.

“I’m pregnant,” she said. “I think.”

He staggered, forgetting himself to shout, “Oh, by the deepsea, Genevieve. We must be married. We must!”

“Shh,” she said. “No, Aufors. Not yet.”

He heard himself pleading, “If not now, it may be never!”

“That will be as it will be. And I don’t want you to tell Father when we get to Havenor!”

“It’ll become apparent, soon enough.”

“Maybe not. I have a kind of idea. Don’t ask me. Just let me … deal with it.”

“At least I’ll be there to care for you.”

“You mustn’t. I can’t take that. This trip is hard
enough, being so close to you without …” She drew a sobbing breath. “You said Father had a new equerry. You must live somewhere else, do something else.”

“Genevieve, for the love of heaven, your father expects us to be married.”

“Well, I’m not saying no. I’m just saying not now.”

“Why?”

“You’ve asked me before. I can’t explain it. I have some other thing to do, something I was born for. I can’t deal with my own life until I’ve dealt with that!”

“But you don’t know what it is!”

“No. Not yet.”

Not yet. The bitter words. He was beginning to lose faith in not yet. He was beginning to seek reasons thay lay outside the reasons she gave. Though he would have denied it, a tiny seed of doubt had germinated and sent down a hairlike root to find sustenance in his guilt over not being with her on that journey, in his fury at her father, in all the mystification and double talk that went on around him. Perhaps something had happened to her that should not have happened.

They had come through Barfezi by way of a boat upon the Potcherwater, through County Vanserdel, where Lorn, Duke Barfezi had his seat, where they had hired horses and gone north to the ferry across the Reusel. This brought them into Langmarsh, where they rode upward along the same road where Aufors had begun his journey. Though it would not have hurt Genevieve to travel faster, Aufors was in the grip of an obsession, and he insisted upon a slow, untiring pace as they climbed to the pass above High Haven. Two more days brought them to Havenor, where they went first, at Aufors’s suggestion, to the home of the Duchess Alicia. She was, so the servants said, still in Merdune, with her granddaughter, grieving the loss of her daughter. They did not expect her return to Havenor at any proximate time.

“I wanted to see her,” Genevieve confessed, when they had remounted. “I thought she might make some things clearer to me.”

“Then, I, too, would like to have seen her,” Aufors said, bitterly. “I much need things made clear to me.”

“Aufors …” she said pleadingly.

“Genevieve,” he mocked. “My darling, I love you. But I am mightily out of temper with you, all the same.”

They rode to the Marshal’s house, finding him not at home. “Blessedly,” said Genevieve. “Now, dearest, go away. First let the Prince know that I would not marry you, and therefore you have promised him nothing.”

“The Prince will not like those words.”

“Dress them how you will.”

“And you won’t relent?”

She shook her head, faced him with a puzzled frown. “Never doubt that I love you, Aufors. Please. Never doubt it. Even when … when things seem strange. Everything is strange. I am doing everything wrong, so it seems to my senses, and yet in my mind, it feels … that I am doing the right thing.”

“What
are
you doing?”

She laughed, saying with a catch in her voice, “Well, right now I’m going to sit down with Della and let the seams out of my dresses.”

After finding himself a place to stay in Havenor—which he had no time to do before leaving—Aufors shortly begged an audience with the Prince.

“I presume you found her,” the Prince said in an uninterested voice that covered a fully satisfied mind.

“I did, Your Highness. And asked for her hand, as I said I would. She has, however, refused me.”

“Refused you!” Satisfaction vanished. The Prince seemed, for the moment, speechless.

Aufors gritted his teeth. “She is of the opinion, sir, that she should not have acted as she did. That to marry me would somehow make her … fall short in your eyes.”

After a long silence, the Prince said through gritted teeth, “So you’re back with the Marshal?”

“No, sir. I’ve taken rooms in Havenor. I had already trained a replacement to serve as equerry to the Marshal. I am seeking a command in His Majesty’s armies somewhere in Dania.”

Something in Aufors’s voice drew the Prince’s keen attention. Some quality of … what was it? Shame, perhaps. Embarrassment? Ah.

“Your ambition will have to be delayed,” said the Prince, now with the slightest curve of lip, a knife-edged smile of penetrating chill. “You may as well stay where you are. You promised to assist me on the Mahahm mission, and that mission has already begun. Planning is well along.”

“But sir … My agreement to do so was conditional upon my marrying the Marshal’s daughter. If she would not have me …”

Delganor snarled, “That was your condition, Colonel. I did not accede to it. Review what we said, please. You had my permission. She had my permission. In return for that permission, you and she were to accompany me. The fact that she chooses not to take advantage of my condescension makes no difference to our bargain.”

Aufors remained immobile and expressionless, though with considerable difficulty. “I am at Your Highness’s command. Since Genevieve is not my wife, however, I cannot speak for her.”

“The departure date has been scheduled. The Marshal will be accompanying us, at the Lord Paramount’s request. He can, no doubt, speak for the girl.”

Aufors bowed. “As Your Highness wishes.” He began to back, away, toward the door.

“You have not been dismissed,” said the Prince with vicious deliberation. He watched Aufors closely as he said, “Since she did not marry you, I may, perhaps, prevail upon her to marry me. That is, if she is still the kind of young woman a Prince would find suitable. Would you say that she is? To your certain knowledge?”

The threat was implicit. It was not a subject Aufors could lie about, or Jenny might find herself married to the Prince! Aufors remained bowed until he gained control of himself, thereby missing entirely the expression on the Prince’s face: one of avid and unpleasant glee.

Aufors managed to make the only reply possible. “Your Highness, I am afraid she would no longer be … suitable. I was guilty of anticipating our marriage. Genevieve is with child.”

“You are dismissed,” said the Prince in a bored voice
that covered the pleasure he was taking in this interview. Life held few moments as delicious.

“But, sir …” said Aufors.

“So? She’s pregnant,” the Prince drawled, eyebrows raised. “You must answer to her father for that, not to me. As for me, I am pleased at the news. It is said to be good luck to have a pregnant woman or new mother along on trips over the sea. Run along, Colonel. I’m sure it will all work out, in the end.”

Genevieve received Aufors’s report as calmly as she could, allowing herself no expression of distress that would further upset him. He was quite troubled enough, more than enough. It took several hours of talk and soothing before he would settle with any pretence of patience into the waiting game she was determined they should play. He was not left idle long, for he was soon drawn back into the Marshal’s employ during every moment he could spare from the duties assigned by the Prince. Though the mission to Mahahm was not to be a large or numerous one, there were many decisions concerning supply and logistics to be made. There were new weapons and devices to be tested and installed on the Lord Paramount’s airship. There were men to be recruited and trained in their use.

During the time that followed, Genevieve tried to maintain a discreet distance from him. She tried not to look at him directly, not to speak to him too lengthily or too personally. She did this out of conviction it was right, without realizing how her coolness enriched his distrust, not necessarily of her, for he loved her unreservedly, but of the situation, of something evil and amorphous that encompassed them both.

As the season wore by, as Genevieve’s let-out dresses gave way to more flowing ones that Veswees made for her—becoming her confidant in the process—Genevieve blessed the approaching mission to Mahahm, for it kept her father’s attention fully occupied elsewhere. Any notice he had to spare was taken up by a few minor skirmishes in Dania. “Women raiders,” he said, with a twist to his lips that forbade questions. “Thieves, stealing daughters!”

By the time of their departure, Genevieve was some
220 days along—according to the midwife she had consulted on Veswees’s recommendation—with only fifty or so days to go. She, Aufors, and the Marshal were to join the Prince at the much-touted resort in Bliggen, a place that often served as the staging area for trips to Mahahm. Though the rest of the party would travel horseback, Aufors, concerned for Genevieve’s comfort, made arrangements for her to travel by river packet to Reusel-on-mere, by boat from there to Poolwich, and by another boat down to the shores of Bliggen, in Barfezi, where she could be met by a comfortable carriage and brought the rest of the way. It was this detail that finally caught the Marshal’s attention and let him, for the first time, focus on Genevieve. What he saw did not please him, and the outburst was notable for both volume and invective.

Ten days of bitterness followed, capped by the Marshal’s command that Genevieve and Aufors be married, forthwith.

“Now it’s a matter of duty,” Aufors told her caustically, when he went to inform her of her father’s decision. “He says the Prince assented to our marriage, the Prince insists we both go on this mission, and he, the Marshal, is not going to be gossiped about and have his family name put to scorn. Better marriage to a commoner, he says, than the shame of a totally uncovenantly child.”

“You’re sure the Prince doesn’t want me himself? Not anymore?”

“He wants you on this trip, Jenny! Seemingly that’s all he’s ever wanted, really.”

“I can’t understand that,” she cried.

“Maybe he’s had an omen, I don’t know! Maybe he’s consulted a seeress. Deepsea, Jenny, I don’t know what’s in the monster’s mind! Stop all this play! Unless you know, for certain, that our marriage is a bad idea, and why it’s a bad idea, then let us do it. Now. At once.”

Della, who had learned all of what was going on during the process of letting out seams, offered the opinion that Genevieve should do what both her father and Aufors wanted her to do.

“Your ma told you to go with Delganor, so you say.
So, you’ll be going with Delganor. Your ma never said marry Delganor, did she now?”

Genevieve shook her head. “No, Della. But she said the way would be hard, and if I’m married to Aufors, it won’t be hard at all. That’s what’s kept me from it, all this time.”

“Ha,”
snorted Della. “So that’s it! If you think being married isn’t hard, no matter to who, you’re still a child. Marriage is about the hardest thing in the world, girl. If people knew all about marriage in advance, likely they never would. They do it when they’re green in hope, like you, with the sap of passion flowing. So do it while you’ve got the incentive!”

Aufors had the necessary documents. He had had them with him since first leaving Havenor in search of her. He took them, as soon as they were filled out, to the archives to have them recorded, thus making it official. Under the laws of Haven, this was all that was required for commoners to marry.

Since Genevieve would be traveling through Bliggen, she considered stopping at the Ahmenaj estate, where Glorieta and Carlotta would no doubt be spending the impending holidays. After some thought, she decided against it. There was too much on her mind; her school friends were too perceptive not to see she was distracted and too pertinacious to let it be.

She had not figured on Carlotta, who had her own network of spies and informants. When Genevieve arrived at Poolwich, at the mouth of the Reusal, Carlotta was there, determined to accompany her the rest of the way to Bliggen.

“I had to get away from home,” she confided, almost at once. “I couldn’t bear it any longer. Glorieta is in mourning …”

“What? Who?” Genevieve cried.

“Oh, no one’s died, though you’d think the plague had taken half the family the way she goes on. No, it’s Willum. He grew tired of allowing Glorieta her youth and eloped with our schoolmate, guess who?”

“I had heard that from my dressmaker,” said Genevieve, remembering that last soirée but one, Barbara in
Willum’s arms on the dance floor. “There was evidently some gossip about it at court.”

Carlotta pinched her Ups together angrily. “Barbara’s pregnant already. Maybe she was pregnant before! She may have even had the child by now. Well, she said she’d elope and she did. She said she’d run off and get pregnant, and she did. I wish her the joy of it. If Willum could do that to my sister, I have no doubt he’ll end doing something worse to Barbara!”

“Did he explain? Did he offer any reason?”

Carlotta snorted. “What reason could he offer? His father, Earl Blufeld, wanted him married; Willum wanted a wife in his bed, and he didn’t want to wait ten years for her. All Glorieta does is sniff and say she’d have given up her youth for him, but he wouldn’t let her. All he did was tell her he loved her and ask her to have faith in him. Faith. Fah.”