§ § § - November 20, 2006
Ulf opened his mouth as if to provide an automatic response, but was arrested at the sight of everyone staring at him. Only little Susanna seemed oblivious, snuggled happily in her grandmother's lap. Queen Susanna took advantage of the charged silence to warn him, "Tell him the truth, Ulf. After all this time and all that's happened, you owe him that."
Reflecting that that certainly wasn't what she'd expected to hear—she had thought he'd complain about the arranged marriages—Leslie shifted slightly in her seat and resettled Karina in her lap. Ulf rubbed his badly marked-up forehead and heaved an enormous sigh that echoed softly in the room. "Perhaps I did, Christian," he admitted heavily at last. "I'll confess to certainly having hated you when you were born and we learned you were a boy. It had been our hope you would be a girl. Carl Johan suggested it when your mother and I reacted badly to the news of her pregnancy with you, and we seized on that and clung to it from then till your birth."
He stopped because Christian was now staring at his mother, a betrayed, pleading look on his face. Queen Susanna closed her eyes, her delight in her grandchildren falling away. "Is that true, Mother? Both of you resented me?"
She swallowed, opened her eyes and gazed at him. "I was forty years old, Christian. In those days it was considered ill-advised for a woman to become pregnant at that age, and with my pregnancy history I certainly believed it. I was very, very sick, perhaps from the very day you were conceived. In honesty, your father and I thought I was too old to become pregnant again, so you were a shock. And when you were born…" She winced. "I passed off your care to a nanny for three months, until you landed in the hospital with pneumonia. It was only then that I realized how much you had grown on me, and I made it clear that from then on I myself would care for you. I wanted to make up for my mistakes with you, and I wanted to be sure you knew I loved you."
"You should have seen your mother shout me down at the dinner table," Ulf said with a glance at the queen. "She was enraged by my suggestion that perhaps it was better if you were allowed to die." He slanted a glance at Christian as he said this, but Christian's features were a mask of tight control. "It was a hideous thing to say, yes. But that was my mindset at the time—that we already had enough sons and didn't need yet another. Your mother stood up and made it clear to the entire castle that she was taking full charge of you from that day on, and that nothing I said would change her mind. I knew she meant her words, and I let her edict stand. Not," he concluded with a self-deprecating smirk, "that I didn't resent it."
"Christian lilla, did you ever find my diaries?" Queen Susanna asked then.
Christian's mask cracked with surprise. "If you've watched us, as you say, then I'm surprised you didn't know that. We did—even the first ten diaries that you hid in the curio cabinet you left me." He grinned. "We owe Karina for that. She somehow discovered the panel in the cabinet, and when Leslie saw what she was doing, she went in herself and brought all ten books into the light of day."
The queen smiled. "Then you must know already that this is what happened."
"I do," Christian admitted. "But sometimes you find yourself wondering what was really going through someone's most secret mind. Not even a diary necessarily contains its keeper's deepest, darkest thoughts."
His mother said quietly, "I gave you every thought in those books, my son. I was so guilt-ridden and so angry with myself and my own callousness, I decided I needed to pay penance by exposing myself in that year's diary."
Christian nodded, as if satisfied, and turned back to his father. "All right, so you did hate me when I was born. I was convinced you never stopped."
"Ach," Ulf grunted. "Your grandfather did his damnedest to make up for that, and after a while, once you began learning to talk, I could see your latent intelligence. I began to think you could be an asset to the family after all. But my father—ah, that eternal prankster, he just couldn't resist having his fun with me, his uptight, self-important son. He made sure to nurture that maverick streak in you. By the time he died, it had taken firm root, and any influence I might have had was forever gone." He sighed and met Christian's gaze at last. "The fact, son, is that I didn't hate you, but rather that independent bent. I couldn't control you as I did your brothers, and that endlessly frustrated me."
"So you tried to squash it by reverting back to the centuries of brutal protocol and no personal freedoms, political machinations and manipulations," Christian said.
"Including those arranged marriages, yes," Ulf said, obviously seeing what was coming next. "Well, I know that's bothering you, go on, then."
"Why in hell did you throw me at Johanna, knowing we loathed each other?" Christian demanded, leaning forward and making Tobias squirm for a better position in his lap. Intent on his questioning, Christian didn't seem to notice. "You must have seen…"
Ulf lifted a hand, silencing him. "What I was aware of, Christian, was that she did have a boyfriend of sorts—that overgrown ape you insisted on showing me that one night in the great entry." Leslie blinked, filing that one away in her memory to get Christian to explain later. "But her father loathed the creature and wanted something done about it. For my part, I saw you nearing adulthood without showing much interest in females, outside of that girl you were seeing when you were around fourteen or so. It bothered me, and as I watched you grow and you weren't taken with any particular girl, I became afraid that you were…well, queer." He flapped a hand in a certain way.
"And you were not only badly misinformed, you were also prejudiced," Christian said. "Why didn't you just ask me, for fate's sake? If you ever needed to know anything, you could have simply approached me and asked."
"Oh, hestebröss," his father scoffed, amused. "You and I were distant enough from each other that I knew you'd never tell me a damn thing." Christian snickered helplessly at that, and Queen Susanna blinked in surprise, telling Leslie that apparently Ulf had used some sort of jordisk curse word. She'd have to push Christian on that one as well.
Grinning, she interjected, "Don't forget, Sire, there are small ears in here."
Ulf goggled momentarily at her, then exploded with laughter. "Fate take me, girl, I like you!" he spluttered delightedly. Christian, too, was laughing, and Queen Susanna had an overjoyed look on her face. "No idea you knew any jordiska. My son must have taught you, eh?" He glanced at Christian.
"Under duress," Christian admitted cheerfully. "She insisted I teach her, but I had hopes of leaving out the objectionable stuff. I should have known better, with you around. Well, then, can we go on with it?" At his father's nod, he said, "Look…I wasn't that uncommunicative. You should have known better than to form your own conclusions and jump to them, and decide they were the last word on the matter. I suppose you were too convinced of your own rightness to descend so far as to ask your son about the truth of it."
"Would you have told me, then?" Ulf demanded.
"In something as important and life-altering as that, yes, damn you!" Christian spat. Tobias wriggled off his lap altogether and retreated to Leslie, trying to climb onto her beside Karina and making his sister push impatiently at him till Leslie managed to set each child on one of her thighs. Apparently unaware, Christian plowed right on. "If your ridiculous assumption that I was gay is what prompted you to throw me at the first likely-looking girl who came along, then you can bet your eternal punishment you should have come to me and gotten the truth before you took it upon yourself to do what you liked with me!"
"So I should have," Ulf admitted quietly, catching Christian off-guard and making the prince audibly swallow back the next angry salvo. "Mind you, by the time I jumped to that conclusion, you'd already met Johanna, but I hadn't yet gotten so far as to decide something must be done about it. Then her father came around to talk tariffs, and after some conversation, I had what I thought was a brilliant idea. Since Rollefsen wanted to get her away from the monster she was dating, he readily agreed." He shrugged. "I honestly didn't think you could resist her. She was the most beautiful girl I'd seen since your mother, and all I could think about was how good you two looked together and how you could hardly resist each other's good looks and eventually produce equally attractive children."
"Well, so much for that 'brilliant idea' of yours," grumbled Christian. "It took you far too long to see that that gorgeous exterior hid a rotten core. Did you listen when Arnulf's and Carl Johan's children complained that she was mistreating them? Were you ever really aware of how spoiled and selfish she turned out to be? She left me cold from the first time I ever met her, and then to find myself married to her…all I could see was misery for the rest of my days. You would never have had grandchildren by us, you know. We hated each other so much, we couldn't stand to even be in the same room together." He sighed heavily and shook his head, then swept an apologetic glance across his mother and Leslie. "To tell you the truth, when she was killed in that train wreck, all I felt was sheer relief."
"The trouble with you, Ulf," Queen Susanna observed then, "is that you couldn't leave well enough alone. After Johanna died and Christian went off to do his military service, you found the chance to meddle again."
"Aha," Christian pounced on this. "Now what was the deal with Marina LiSciola? Of all the idiotic stunts you pulled on me through your life, that must have been the winner."
"I don't suppose Arnulf ever explained it to you," Ulf ventured. "He was present for the entire negotiation of the contract that bound you to Marina."
"Ach." Christian shrugged and made a face. "We had a talk, he and Leslie and I, the day before he died. He claimed you were backed into a corner, forced to it."
"We were," Ulf said, a little defensively. "That much is fate's truth, Christian. The count used his position as the world's only grower and supplier of amakarna to box us into a deal we simply couldn't turn down. He was nothing like his father. The man we previously dealt with was as honest as good earth. His successor had far fewer scruples and didn't hesitate one moment to use his position to elevate his own status in life."
"Oh, we knew well enough he was a worthless social climber," Christian said, sweeping a dismissive hand through the air. "What I really want to know is why you insisted on selling me. You could have easily matched Marina with Rudolf, for example. They were the same age, and might very well have suited each other."
"Because I didn't want one of my grandchildren contracted to be married before all my children had spouses, plain and simple. You were an anomaly that had to be corrected. And since you and Johanna had always been so antagonistic, how was I to know whether you really weren't gay after all? You'd still shown me nothing that would have proven other-wise. So I decided it would be you, and I signed the contract on your behalf."
"Illegally," Christian fired at him. "Or didn't Mephistopheles see fit to tell you?"
"Yes, he told me," Ulf said, "and took great glee in it too. The only explanation I have for that is that I was king, sovereign ruler, and had the final word. My signature should have been enough."
"No one, not even the king, is above the law," Christian informed him icily, "and the law stated that you had to sign yourself as acting signatory. That, you didn't do. You just scrawled my name over that page, knowing damned well that you had no right—not just because you weren't acting signatory for me, but also because I was of age and should have had final say as to whether I was married to that child or not."
"LiSciola would never have stood for it," Ulf said. "You weren't due back from your service for a few weeks yet, and he would have refused to wait that long. We needed that spice, Christian, you know that."
"You should have known better than to barter me off for it," Christian persisted, stubborn to the very last. "Again, you acted without consulting me and trying to find out the truth. Had you left me alone, I would eventually have found someone."
"Ah, you can believe the family read me the riot act at dinner that evening," Ulf told him wearily. "Every one of them condemned me for what I had done, and Kristina blamed Arnulf for doing nothing to stop me." He considered it for a moment, while Christian sat there glaring at him, and then peered at his son with interest. "What actually happened, then? I was gone, of course, before the contract came due."
"Where you left off, Arnulf gladly picked up, and then some. He was more than happy to enforce that sham marriage. I'll tell you what galled me: first of all, that I never knew a jot about it till Arnulf announced that I must return home to prepare to be married; second, that when he said this, I was right here on Fantasy Island, had just met Leslie and was in the process of falling in love with her." Ulf looked so shocked that Christian nodded with eminent satisfaction. "That's right, Father. I came here soon before my birthday that year to do a website project for a couple who turned out to be friends of Leslie's. Fate save us, if they had seen fit somehow to introduce me to her, perhaps I never would have had to worry about being saddled with a little girl I didn't know. I met Leslie literally days before that damned count brought Marina to Lilla Jordsö and left her at the castle with the family. I proposed to Leslie while I was here on my second trip to create a website for the island and her father's business, and then flew back home to start the process of moving here to marry her and make my life with her. And what did I find upon coming back? That my own brother had deliberately married me to a child, by proxy! I came as close as I ever got to killing someone that day. Leslie thought I was playing cruel games with her, and it took her weeks to realize what had really happened and to forgive me."
"That, Ulf, was purely medieval," Susanna said sternly. "It was the twentieth century and such things just are not done any longer. Christian and Leslie were forced to wait more than four years before Mr. Roarke's young cousin finally took on the task of growing and selling amakarna himself, and was able to sway Arnulf into terminating LiSciola's contract and freeing Christian to marry Leslie."
"Heilige hjusande ödet," Ulf breathed. By now he was quite pale, making the marks on his forehead stand out in grotesque fashion. "I never…" His voice trailed away and he made a helpless gesture with both palms up.
"That leads me to another question," Christian said, crossing one leg over the other and regarding his father with a hard stare. "Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that Leslie and I had met earlier than we did. Say…in 1993, when she made a trip to Lilla Jordsö." He caught his parents' surprised looks and smiled fleetingly. "I'll let Leslie tell you about that. Anyway, suppose we had met and fallen in love at that time, and I had brought her to the castle to meet you and the rest of the family. Suppose I had proposed to her and she had accepted, and we had come to inform the lot of you that we intended to get married. What would you have done about LiSciola and his dreams of seeing his daughter become royalty?"
Ulf scowled. "Believe me or don't, Christian Carl Tobias, and I have no doubt you won't. But had you found your Leslie before Marina came of age and her father demanded we fulfill our end of the bargain, I would have been more than happy to rain my blessings on your marriage. I would have paid every expense for the damned thing and been delighted to do it. It was always my intention to tell LiSciola that he would have to discuss which of my grandsons he wanted for his daughter, if you had managed to find someone before Marina's twenty-first birthday. I was merely waiting for it to happen, but by fate, you were just too damned picky. As I said, believe me or don't, but it's the truth. Your mother told me to tell you the truth, and while it does me no good whatsoever, the fact is that I still love her and I want her to be happy. And she's right, I owe you that much."
For a moment a startled silence held sway; then Christian looked at Leslie, and saw tears in her eyes. "We almost did meet, Sire," she said in a shaky voice that kept dropping into a thick whisper. "I ate at the café where Christian used to have breakfast all the time. If I'd gone in for breakfast instead of brunch…" She squeezed her eyes closed and began to cry, despite herself. She knew deep down that she was, as always, getting too emotionally involved again; but she had no idea how not to.
She heard Karina and Tobias begin to whimper in fright, and then an arm slid around her. "My poor dear girl," Queen Susanna said softly. "You know it's not your fault nor anyone else's, don't you? It's nothing but fate's caprice, you must realize that. Fate plays crueler games with people's lives sometimes than even Christian's father could have dreamed up."
"But Christian had suffered enough already," Leslie protested tearfully, looking at her mother-in-law in pleading. "If I'd only had the sense to go in at a reasonable hour…I slept late those mornings, both times I went. Think what could have happened. Christian would never have had to worry about being married to Marina and having to endure her father's constant gloating, and we wouldn't have had to wait so long…and maybe the triplets would be ten or twelve years old by now. They could have known Sire at least, even if they…" She choked off her own words and shook her head, tears flying loose as she did. "I wish it could have been different, Madame, that's all…"
"I know, I know," the queen soothed her. "We all do, my dear. Fate does things for strange and absurd reasons. We'll never know why; she and her sisters don't see fit to tell us. But be grateful that you did meet. I can see that you're the best thing that ever happened to my son. I hoped and hoped he would finally lose his heart to someone special, and I see that he truly did, with you. You've done my son so much good, Leslie, you'll never know how grateful I am to you for that."
By then Christian had knelt beside her, and reached up to brush at her wet cheeks with his thumb. "We've been over this before, my Rose," he reminded her gently. "I still remember the shock we had when we discovered how close we came to meeting almost three years earlier than we did. But I've thought about it since then, and somehow I have a feeling you wouldn't have been ready. You'd been a widow only three years at the time, and I suspect if we had met and I'd approached you, you would have found a way to rebuff me."
"I don't know," Leslie said helplessly, wanting desperately to deny it but unable to bring herself to do it, for fear he was right. She would have to carefully consider it later on, she guessed. "All I know is, it wasn't fair."
"That, I'll agree with," Christian conceded ruefully, smiling at her. "But as Mother said, fate sometimes plays very cruel games with our lives. It's all right, my darling. In the end, we did meet, and here we are, right?"
She managed a smile. "Right. Well, I'm wasting your time, you're supposed to be getting answers to all those nagging questions of yours."
He chuckled, kissed her cheek and returned to his chair; meantime Queen Susanna dragged her own chair to sit directly beside Leslie and sat down again, lifting Susanna back into her lap and then reaching out to smooth Tobias' hair and smile at Karina. "You must forgive me if I can't keep my hands off them," she said apologetically. "I'll never have another opportunity to know them. Christian's children. I'm still in awe."
"Me too," Leslie said with a little smile. "Indulge yourself all you like, Madame. I know I would if it were me. I wish…oh, I so wish we could…"
Queen Susanna gently shushed her. "I as well, but it's not possible. Fate makes no exceptions even for royalty. We must accept what is. But be assured I'll revel in this memory forever." They smiled at each other.
While they were quietly talking, Christian and Ulf watched for a moment or two, without the women's awareness of it; then Christian turned to Ulf, only to be astonished by his father's wistful expression. "What?" he asked.
Ulf blinked but didn't take his eyes off his son's face. "I never saw that side of you," he said. "You seemed quite…well, cavalier with the women you dated before you met this one. I saw you escorting them on various occasions, but never once did you look at any of them as you look at Leslie. That alone tells me you did indeed fall in love, after all."
"And you never thought I would, hm?" Christian filled in.
Ulf smiled that wry smile again. "As fate witnesses me, I had given up. I thought you had the world's most impenetrable heart. Now I must admit, it was a great relief to me to realize you were never serious about that Astrid Franzén, but I had especially high hopes for Karin Grimsby. It simply astounded me when you turned her loose."
"I liked Karin fine," Christian said with a shrug, "but somehow, whatever we had between us in the beginning just failed to catch fire. Here…do you see this?" He deliberately displayed his wedding ring at his father. "You must have thought I was going along with tradition when I didn't bother with a ring at my wedding to Johanna. I would have worn one if I had felt as though it were a true marriage, but it felt so wrong to me that I refused to sully the symbolism that a ring means to me. I refused to wear one during my marriage to Marina either. This ring is my way of telling the world that this is my one real, true marriage, and that I want everyone to know I'm married to the woman I truly love."
Ulf made a grunt of surprise, and Christian could see he was impressed, even if it was unwillingly so. "Well, I said it before, but I tell you again, if Karin Grimsby had been the one you really wanted, I would have given all the go-aheads you needed to be married to her." He caught Christian's surprised look and grinned. "You'll probably laugh at this, but I really believed I had done the right thing until you started running around with Ingela Vikslund." He paused a moment, questions in his eyes, when Christian's levity visibly died at mention of this name, but made a half-shrug and continued. "Not that I really thought the two of you suited all that well, but I watched you anyway, just to see what would develop. And then there was a lot of brouhaha about her having been seen leaving your flat in the dead of night, just before you split up with her. I realized then that you must have finally lost your virginity and I was positively thrilled. Ah, I thought, he's not gay after all, fate be thanked! As time slipped on, I considered the contract and the deal I had made with that scoundrel LiSciola, and I thought what a wonderful joke on him should you find your ideal woman before his child matured. Oh, I see the disbelief in your eyes. I know you take me for the most selfish, cold-hearted man who ever lived, my boy; but don't forget, it was your brother who ultimately made you marry that little girl. Had I managed to live to hear about your meeting Leslie there, I would have been the one who called you in regard to the contract; and yes, by fate, when you said you had met Leslie and you were falling for her, or whatever it is you told Arnulf, then I would have wished you the best of luck, asked that you keep me informed, and put off LiSciola until you made an announcement—or else given Rudolf to him. The boy was a free agent, I doubt he would have cared much."
"I wouldn't be so sure," Christian remarked. "Rudolf's a lot like me. Carl Johan and Amalia have said on any number of occasions that sometimes they're not sure he isn't my son rather than theirs."
"Well, then, Gerhard perhaps," Ulf said with a shrug. "Roald was too young, that wouldn't have worked out. I expect Gerhard would have settled into it without fuss. But the fact remains that if I could have stayed alive that long, you and Leslie would have been married for ten years now, rather than only these six or so."
"Hmph," Christian grunted, then peered narrowly at his father. "So…it took Ingela Vikslund to convince you I was attracted to women and not men."
Ulf's gaze grew wary. "Why do you say her name in that tone of voice?"
"Oh, that's right, evidently you don't have the privilege Mother does of knowing what's happening with the family. Well…suffice it to say that…" He waited a beat, then said deliberately, "We know." He watched the slow shock of realization gradually fill Ulf's face and nodded. "Yes, we all know."