Foster stood before the mirror in the master bathroom of his home, bare to the waist, removing the stubble from his cheeks with slow, even strokes of the rotary razor. Through the connecting closet space, he could see Krystal, still sleeping on their big bed, her fine, exciting body concealed now by the blanket, her raven hair still in the wild disarray in which their early-morning bout of love had left it. Beyond the bed, in an intricately carved and richly inlaid cradle, slept his son, Joseph Sebastian Foster.
He had always been of the opinion that all babies looked alike … but that was before he had first held little Joe, gazed into the dark-blue eyes under the already thick shock of blue-black hair, felt the surprising strength of the grip of that tiny pink fist. My son, he had thought with fierce pride, my son; it all has been worth ft—the pain, the cold, the heat, the privation, even the death—you, my son, have made ft worthwhile for me, simply by being.
The two marriages of his salad days had never been happy or secure enough for him to even consider children. He and Carol had often discussed having a few, as they often had discussed formalizing their relationship with marriage, but they had continually put off both projects . .. and then, one day, Carol was dead.
As he stood beneath the scalding spray of the shower, he thought, “Arthur must find a way to mollify Church and Pope, if I’m to see” this son of mine a man. Only a handful of my original troop are left alive, and if more Crusaders come in the spring, if the war drags on for another year, it can only be a matter of time until a swordswipe or an ounce of lead makes me one of the majority, for all that I don’t see as much hand-to-hand anymore as I did when I led only a troop or a squadron.
“Of course, I could say ‘to hell with it, I’ve done my bit and take my sword and my family and my stallion to Europe with Wolfie after London falls, and no man would think any less of me for it; after all, I am a nobleman of the Empire and Wolfie’s vassal, and I’m as safe from the Church there as I would be here, at least as long as Egon is Emperor.
“That Egon is quite a boy, but then I always thought highly of him. Took a leaf from Arthur’s book, they say, de£ clared his Empire was no longer a Papal feoff and flatly refused to go to Rome to be crowned by the Pope . . . and the Electors backed him up too, to a man. Crowned himself, he did! Then sent Cardinal Eugenic de Lucca back to Rome with a message that it’s said sent the Pope into screaming fits. Emperor Egon I solemnly promises that when he can win the support of a majority of the Imperial Electors, he means to enter into a formal alliance with the Kingdom of England and Wales and, if any Crusade is preached against him or the first foreign Crusader sets foot over his boundries, he will make peace with the heathen hordes on his eastern borders and grant them free passage over his lands that they may descend upon Italy, France, Iberia, and Scandinavia. Obviously, Rome believes him, for they now are playing a very tight game, where Egon is concerned.
“And the buggers should take him seriously, too, because he already has a big minority of those Electors on the hip. When he informed them that he meant to not only pick his own empress but that she’d be the daughter of a simple country Freiherr, and English to boot, he got majority approval on the first vote.
“So now, dear old Sir Francis and Arabella are enroute to the King’s camp, and the escort who came to deliver Arthur’s summons and bear them back was already fawning over the old man and addressing him as ‘Your Grace’ and ‘My Lord Duke,’ and the ladies of the party were all a-flutter over ‘Her Imperial Highness.’ Sir Francis seemed to be bearing up well enough—I can’t think of any possible circumstance that would rattle that stout old soldier—but poor little Arabella looked dazed. I guess she thought she’d never see Egon again.”