Page 18 of Awakened On Her Royal Wedding Night
Some unspoken light of knowledge entered his eyes. It was the same one from the portrait. “Let me show you her library.”
Her body prickled with awareness of danger as she followed him, but it wasn’t fear or dread. It was that other danger that made her nostrils sting while all the cells in her body seemed to swivel and align themselves to an awareness of him. Some involuntary part of her insisted on calling out to him.
She tried to tamp it down as she moved past him through the door he opened and entered the sort of room she’d only seen in movies. It was three stories of shelved books accessed by flights of stairs and narrow, railed galleries, and rolling ladders. There were reading nooks built beneath tall windows and big, comfortable chairs by the fire and a desk with inkpots and candleholders.
“This answers the question, ‘How did people survive before streaming services?’” she murmured, trying to imagine how much time one would need to read all of these. “You’re saying this castle isn’t a dungeon? She had all this? It was still cruel to keep her here, don’t you think?”
“It was,” he agreed with a nod. “She was not a woman who submitted to confinement without a fight, though. She wrote here.” He pointed to the desk. “Subversive, disruptive messages about rights that women still fight for today. She wrote her beliefs in many of these books, so many that her husband couldn’t find and destroy all of them unless he burned the entire library to the ground. She smuggled her writings off the island in various ways—often using her children and maids. They were published at different times, humiliating the King. When he finally said she could join him on Stella Vista, she insisted on staying here another three years, purely as a show of resistance. Eventually, she took her place beside him, mostly for the sake of her children. He was well known to have a mistress by then, so they had little to do with one another outside of their royal duties.”
“That’s so sad.”
“Do you think so? I find her inspiring.” He moved along a row of books, seeming to look for a particular title. He started to withdraw it, then left it stuck out halfway. A few books along, he pushed three inward an inch. “She found a way to assert herself despite the strictures of her life. She didn’t choose to be born a princess, and she didn’t choose to be married off to a king, but she found ways to live the life she was given on her own terms.”
“Is that how you feel?” She was taken by how the sunlight fell through the window onto him, allowing her to see him perhaps more clearly than she had before. “Are you trapped in a life you didn’t ask for?”
“Not trapped, precisely. I have more agency than she did and there’s a great deal of privilege that comes with my wealth and title,” he said with pithy self-deprecation. “But there are times when I feel cornered into a particular situation or action.”
He was working his way back along the shelf, doing the same thing to the row of books above the first, shifting some in, drawing some out so the spine was on the edge of the shelf. It looked like piano keys being played by a ghost.
“Do you do that to remind the staff to dust them?” she asked.
“No, they don’t know about this.” He reached the end and pressed into the bulk of the shelf. There was an audible ping, like a loud spring. An entire section of shelf next to the ones he’d been rearranging now swung open like a door.
“A secret passage?” she whispered in awe.
“Down to where the monks made their wine. It has an external entrance near the wharf where the supply ships docked. Queen Giulia would lock herself into her library to read, then slip down those stairs to let her lover in below.”
“Who was he?” Claudine couldn’t help inching closer to peer into the dark well of the stairs, catching a scent of cool, dank air.
“According to her diary, there were many. A captain, a guard, a sailor. Her children were conceived in this room, not her marriage bed. When she thought she might be pregnant, she would write to the King and insist he visit her.”
“Did he know?” she asked with hushed astonishment.
“He must have suspected, given the fact that all of his children favored their mother and didn’t look much like each other or him, but no one speaks of it. I learned the truth when I chose to make Sentinella my home. I hired a librarian to catalog the books and they found her stash of journals. One explains how she commissioned the shelf to hide the passageway and bribed the journeyman with sexual favors to take that secret to his grave. He would have been executed if he had admitted to touching a queen, so...” He shrugged.
“Why on earth are you tellingme? This isn’t just a family secret. You’re saying your family doesn’t belong on the throne!”
“The throne was stolen from her family, not his. Giulia was the sacrificial lamb married to her family’s conqueror to appease the masses so they wouldn’t revolt.”
“That still doesn’t explain why you would tellme.” How was she supposed to carry such explosive knowledge?
“I thought you would find it interesting. And I want you to have a sense of who we are as a family and what we’ll do for the sake of the throne. What we’ll do to keep the right person on the throne.” He closed the shelf and moved along, straightening all the books again. “I want you to understand that you have choices, even when it might seem as though you don’t. Most of all, I need you to trust me. That means I have to trust you.”
“I trust you.” A little. Her voice didn’t even convince herself. It caused him to send her a disparaging glance.
“When we were fifteen, our father made it clear that he would not recognize an illegitimate child from either of us. Nor would he accept Francois marrying before I have a wife and an heir.” He grabbed the edge of the shelf to give it a firm pull, checking it was closed securely. It remained firmly in place.
He brushed his hands together, then looked at her in a way that made her wilt on the inside. Fear? Premonition of some kind. He wasn’t a man who told stories and revealed secrets without expecting something in return. Something big. Something of equal weight.
“Are you toying with him? Why haven’t you married?” she asked.
“He does everything he can to stop me. It’s both spite and strategy. If I have children, he is pushed down the line of succession so he tells women that I’m a brute with a temper, one who encourages our father to hold Nazarine back from the modern world so our people are easier to control. He tells them I have our country’s parliament in my pocketbook. Or he keepstheminhispocketbook. That’s what happened with my first fiancée. The second one couldn’t take all this animosity and palace intrigue. I didn’t blame her for breaking it off. It was better to know early that she didn’t have the stomach for it.”
“But noteverywoman would be turned off by that!” He was a prince destined to be a king, for heaven’s sake.
“True, but I’m cynical when it comes to women and relationships. And I’ve always felt as though I had plenty of time. Until today.” He became unnervingly somber. “For reasons I can’t share with you at this time, our father lifted his embargo on Francois marrying and producing an heir before me.”
“Oh?” That strange sting on her arms was her own fingernails digging into her skin. Her ears were ringing, her breath backing up in her lungs. She didn’t know why she had suddenly grown so tense, but she was hanging on his every word.
