Her Grace, Lady Krystal, the Markgrafin von Velegrad, was experiencing great difficulty in becoming accustomed to the incessant bows and curtsies with which she was greeted wherever she might choose to go in the Archbishop’s huge palace. No whit less hard to bear for the gregarious young woman was the constant deference with which former friends and acquaintances now treated her. Aside from Pete, Bud Webster—convalescing in York while his broken leg knitted, and fretting that he could not be with the army as it retraced its way south to deal with the Spaniards on the south coast— Carey and Susan Carr, the only person with whom she found she could have a normal, give-and-take discussion was Archbishop Harold.
On a misty April day, she found the wh he-haired churchman immured in the extensive alchemical laboratory-workshop that he maintained.
After a few moments of polite chatter, she suddenly said, “Oh, dear Father Hal, why can’t things be as they were? I had so many good friends, back at Whyffler Hall and when I first came to York, too. Now there’s only Pete and Bud and Carey and Susan and you; all the rest either seem scared to death of me or are so clearly sycophantic that it’s sickening. I don’t begrudge Bass his rewards,- you know that, he earned them. But . . . but my life was so much simpler and happier when I was just the lady-wife of a captain of dragoons.”
Harold scribbled a few words on the vellum before him, then turned his craggy face to her. “My dear, deference to one’s superiors is the hallmark of good breeding, and it is deference your friends show you now, not fear; they rejoice with you in your deserving husband’s elevation. As regards sycophants, self-seeking persons are oft in attendance upon the noble and the mighty; that you can quickly and easily scry them out be a Gift of God. Too many of your peers lack that perception and so are victimized or deluded.
“I was aware that you had not the benefit of gentle upbringing and so understood very little of your present and future privileges and responsibilities; that is why I assigned noble maids and ladies to attend you.”
“Dammit, I’m pregnant, but I’m not helpless, Hal,” Krystal snapped. “I don’t need a gaggle of girls and women to wake me and bathe me and dress me and follow me around all day and finally tuck me into bed at night like some idiot child.”
He shook his head slowly. “No, my dear, you do not need such care, but you had best learn to live with it, all the Kane.”
“But, why?” demanded KrystaL
Harold sighed then patiently explained, “For the nonce, my palace is beome the King’s court, though His Majesty and most of his nobles be in the field with his army. You represent your husband at court and must comport yourself accordingly. The war will not last forever, and many a man’s fortunes are made or dashed by his and his kin’s conduct at court.
“Already are you considered rather odd by some folk, since you so abruptly dismissed your attendants, but I and your other friends have bruited it about that your condition has rendered you capricious as is common to gravid women. But such is a shallow untruth and will not bear long scrutiny. You must conform, my dear, must do and act and say what is expected of you here, at King Arthur’s court.”
“But what does it matter what people here think of me, or of Bass, for that matter?” queried Krystal, adding, “After all, we won’t be in England once the war is done. Bass wrote me that the lands he holds for Wolfgang are, as best he can reckon, somewhere in the area that people of our time called Czechoslovakia.”
“The fortified city of Velegrad guards an Important pass through the Carpathian Mountains, Krystal,” Harold informed her, but then admonished, “Not that you ever will see h, I suspect.”
“What do you mean, Hal? Wolfgang struck me as definitely a man of his word, and he really likes Bass, too.”
Harold smiled. “Oh, I have no doubt that the esteemed Reichsherzog would like nothing better than to install you and your husband as nobles of his seigneury, for the Empire is eternally at war with some nation or some people, and Bass is a superlative cavalry officer. But for that very reason, Arthur will never allow him to leave England to serve another monarch, even the Emperor.”
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