§ § § - January 8, 2009
The cessation of the ferry's slow, rhythmic rocking seemed to bring Leslie back to consciousness, midmorning of January 8, and Christian smiled at her when she blinked awake. "Welcome back to the world," he teased.
"Are we there yet? I don't feel any more rocking," she noted. "It was like being in a big cradle, and I guess that knocked me out."
Christian laughed. "I never thought of it like that before. Perhaps it has to do with your being pregnant. But yes, we're back on the jordisk coast, so once the train pulls into the Klarhamn station, we'll disembark, and there should be a castle car waiting for us."
He was right; within about half an hour they were being driven back to the castle. The car was toasty warm and there were flurries whirling past the windows from time to time; they stopped in a town called Furuborg, about halfway between Klarhamn and their destination, to have a light lunch. Up till now neither had said very much from the time they had settled into the car and greeted the driver; now, studying her husband across the table, Leslie began to think back and realize he seemed a bit distracted. "Are you all right?"
As though pulled back from some reverie, he blinked and focused on her. "I'm fine, why do you ask?"
"You seem...well, spaced out," she said, hitching a shoulder. "You've been thinking about something ever since we got into Klarhamn. Is something wrong?"
Christian heaved a sigh. "You're right," he admitted, "I have been thinking. It goes back further than that, though. When you fell asleep on the train out of London two nights ago, it first occurred to me to wonder what you meant when you asked me why we were suddenly playing tourist with so much enthusiasm."
Leslie worried a corner of her lip with a tooth, met his gaze and murmured, "I guess I was wondering if you were starting to get homesick."
"Only when you're not with me, my Rose," he assured her with a soft smile, which faded after a few seconds before he lifted his glass of the country's indigenous apple wine and swirled it, staring into the golden liquid. "Maybe it's only that we've been here long enough that I'm settling in again, speaking my native tongue more than English, finding myself being asked for advice again, returning to the old places..."
"You miss being able to speak jordiska, and having easy access to the food and drinks you grew up with, and playing Dear Abby to your nieces and nephews?" Leslie prompted.
Christian chuckled, drank some wine and set the glass back onto the table, relaxing back in his chair. "Let me put it this way, Leslie. It's more of a round of nostalgia for me, I think. It's much the same as when you reminisce about your early childhood in Connecticut. It's nice to relax a bit and go back to what I was raised with. That doesn't necessarily mean I'm getting homesick; it just feels good to..." He shrugged. "I can't quite name the feeling in either language, but I think you understand."
"Besides, we haven't gotten around to visiting your friend Ernst's horse ranch," she said with a grin. "At this rate, the longer we stay, the less you'll want to leave."
He studied her seriously. "Leslie, I have friends on Fantasy Island too, you know. In many ways I'm closer to them, more comfortable with them, than I am—or may ever truly be—with Ernst and Pelle. I may have known them first, but remember, we were out of touch for over thirty years. Too often, that large a gap creates a distance that can never quite be bridged again." Once more he stared into his wineglass. "At least, not completely. People change too much between their childhood and their adulthood. You'll remember that even when I was kidding around with them at our house, it all had to do with stupid things we did as young boys. It's hard to find that same footing, when you no longer know what you may still have in common with them, when you realize that all you seem to feel at ease discussing are those old memories. So you see, if we had to move here, I'd have to adjust to a certain extent—perhaps not as much as you, but I'd miss my friends as you would miss yours. I could be happy anywhere really, as long as I'm with you, but I've come to understand that since moving to Fantasy Island to live with you, I've been living the best years of my life. So if you think I've been showing you the countryside here in an attempt to prepare you to live here, you should know that wasn't my intention. My motive was the same as yours when you showed me the places you lived in Connecticut and California."
"Oh," she said softly. She could feel her face heating with a blush and knew from his smile that he was watching the color rise in her cheeks. "I guess I was thinking that to some extent. I'm glad you set me straight."
Christian grunted with amusement and tipped back the last of the wine. "I simply wanted to clarify things. At any rate, Anna-Kristina still hasn't decided whether to come back with us and take the amakarna serum, and I think it may be time to start pushing her to let us know one way or the other. I think it's better that we go home as soon as possible after our anniversary, so she'll have to be ready with her decision."
They reached the castle about two hours later; the triplets, playing tag in the great entry with Matti, Toria, Natalia, Lisi, Katta, Staffan and Erika, yelled in delight at sight of their parents and abandoned the game to smother Christian and Leslie with hugs. "We missed you, Mommy!" Susanna said happily.
"Yeah, it was fun sleeping over at Matti's house, but we wanted you to come home," Tobias said. "How come you were gone so long?"
"Two whole nights," added Karina. "I still want to see where farmor was a little girl."
"We still have time for that, lillan min, and I promised you I'd take you there," said Christian, smiling. "Perhaps tomorrow if the weather forecast isn't bad. But your mother and I were traveling quite a bit after we saw the musical in London, and we're tired from that. You can play more tag with your cousins if you like."
"I don't want to play anymore," Karina said as her brother and sister ran back to join the other children. "I'm always It."
Leslie giggled and hugged her. "That used to happen to me a lot too," she said. "If you want, you can come back with me and Daddy and help us unpack."
Anna-Laura emerged from the east corridor at that point and smiled at the sight of her brother and sister-in-law. "Oh, good, you're both back safe. The children insisted on a telephone call to Mr. Roarke a couple of hours ago or so, and all they could say was that they missed the two of you. So, Leslie, did you enjoy Mamma Mia! in English as much as you did in jordiska?" Leslie nodded, grinning, and they all laughed.
"It seems we aren't finished running around yet, either," Christian observed, lifting his overnight bag and starting for the west corridor, farther down the great entry. "Karina here wants to see where Mother grew up, and I did promise her we'd go out to Sjöstrand, so I suppose we'd better make some time for that."
So the following day, the family piled into a couple of cars to make the trip to the east coast—about a ninety-minute drive—to see where Queen Susanna had lived till meeting Ulf as a teenager. Christian had gone once to see it, but couldn't quite remember the way and had to concede to the GPS system that had been installed in all the castle cars the previous summer. There were four small, shabby Cape-style buildings with fairly steeply pitched roofs huddling on each side of the narrow lane, which was labeled with a listing green sign that read Kung Johans Grend; the house where the former Susanna Helgesson had once lived was the first one on the left, separated from the corner of the main drag through Sjöstrand by a clutch of tired, scrawny, weatherbeaten pine trees.
"It looks as if it's been here forever," remarked Carl Johan, staring at the house once Christian had pointed it out. There was a black iron numeral 1 nailed to the wall at the right of the doorway on the ground floor; two small dusty windows flanked the door, and there was a third, even dustier, window on the upper floor directly over the doorway.
"Looks like it's tired of being here, to be honest," Esbjörn commented with a grin in Anna-Laura's direction. "What's at the other end of the lane there?"
"A dock," Christian replied. "I think it's still in use, but it was in dire need of repair the last time I saw it. Suppose we take a little walk?"
"Is that farmor's house?" Karina asked, pointing at the building in question. She was the only one of the children who had wanted to come; the rest of the kids had decided playing in the snow in front of the castle was far more appealing.
"Yes, it is, sweetie," Leslie said, taking the little girl's hand and falling in beside Christian, whose eyes were roaming the street. "Wow...this looks so—so crowded, so jammed in together. And it feels eerie that nobody's coming outside to see who's invading their turf."
Christian grinned. "According to Mother's diaries, that was normal for here, even if the neighbors recognized the royal vehicles. Apparently things haven't changed very much since then, in spite of our much more celebrity-obsessed society."
They paced down the road as a group—Christian and Leslie with Karina; Carl Johan with Amalia, Rudolf and Louisa; and Anna-Laura and Esbjörn—passing the other houses and fetching up at what was essentially a dead end, looking out over the water in the direction of Norway. The day was gray and promised more snow; the ocean reflected a dirty pewter hue, and small waves lapped listlessly onshore under an exhausted wooden dock. The steps leading to it were half rotted, though in some places new boards gleamed incongruously yellow amid the nearly blackened older slats. The reek of fish and aging seaweed filled the air, and Karina pulled her hand out of Christian's to pinch her nose shut. They could make out the lumpy dark shapes of fishing trawlers, half enshrouded by a light mist, some distance out on the water.
"Herregud, did farmor have to smell this stench every day, growing up here?" Rudolf complained, peering uneasily around him. "What a bleak place to grow up—she must have had a terminal case of culture shock when farfar decided to marry her and she and her father moved into the castle."
"Hard to believe," Carl Johan agreed, studying the houses around them.
"I have the feeling we're on display here," Leslie mumbled. "Like there are people peeking at us from behind their curtains, wondering what under the sun we're doing here, but refusing to come out and actually ask."
Christian chuckled shortly. "As I mentioned, it was the same way in Mother's day. People here live hard lives." He turned to his sister. "Did you ever happen to find out whose idea it was originally for Grandfather and Father and Great-grandfather to come out here in the first place? I mean, look around. This isn't the sort of place where royalty would choose deliberately to come out and spend an afternoon fishing for fun. It was Grandfather Helgesson's livelihood; sport fishing would probably have been an alien concept to him."
"I don't know," Anna-Laura admitted. "One would have thought Mother would have asked Father and then recorded it in her diary, but I don't remember seeing anything like that in any of the books. I'd like to think that perhaps Great-grandfather Erik had it in mind to try to meet some of the most hardworking and least privileged people in the country, so that the royals seemed less...less distant, less mythical."
The others looked at one another; Louisa ventured, "Maybe they thought if they went fishing with people who did it for a living, they'd see what it was really like...try to get a better sense of what the people here had to go through every day. And they must have paid somebody to take them out with them—it would've helped the fishermen a lot, I'm sure."
"That's a good analysis, Louisa söta," Rudolf remarked. "It makes a certain amount of sense, because Great-grandfather Lukas became friends with Grandmamma, and I think it gave him the idea to introduce the off-season subsidies for fishermen, when they couldn't work in the worst part of the winter while we were being lashed by North Sea storms."
"I wonder if that house is still a bait shop, the same one Madame worked in," Amalia mused. She looked at Carl Johan with a twinkle in her eye. "Do you think perhaps we should poke our heads inside and find out?"
They all laughed at that, except Karina, who was huddled against Leslie and shivering in the damp cold rolling off the water. Christian knelt a little and picked up his daughter, settling her against him and squeezing her. "Are you tired, lillan min?"
"It's cold, Daddy," Karina said in a small voice. "It looks so old and yucky here. I'm glad farfar took farmor away from here."
"We are too," Christian assured her.
"There's a blanket in the car if she needs one," Anna-Laura said. "It's probably best that we go. We came here unannounced and we're ridiculously out of place here."
"It's a little creepy," Rudolf commented low.
"Foreboding was the word I had in mind," Leslie murmured. Christian glanced at her and half-smiled, shifting his weight as Karina dropped her head on his shoulder.
As though in tacit agreement, they turned as one group and made their way back up the forlorn little street to the waiting vehicles. Esbjörn produced the blanket Anna-Laura had mentioned from the trunk of one of the cars; and Leslie was in the process of wrapping it around Karina with Christian still holding her, when the door of the building marked number 4 opened with a long creak of protest and a very old man leaned out to stare at them. "What are you doing here?"
They all turned simultaneously to stare at him, and his eyes widened as recognition took hold. "I didn't realize..." he said and managed a stiff partial bow from where he stood. "So you must have come to see where Sanna Helgesson used to live."
"Did you know Mother?" Christian asked him.
The old man smiled a crooked, sheepish smile and nodded. "I admit to making her life hell back in the day, alongside my twin brother," he confessed. "I'm Alfdan Haraldsson."
"The terrible Haraldsson twins," Rudolf exclaimed with a startled laugh. "How Grandmamma ranted about you two when she was younger."
Haraldsson reddened. "I'm surprised she bothered. But I had a crush on her for years. I just refused to admit it, mostly because Albert would have made my life as miserable as he made hers. Secretly I was glad Prince Arnulf took her away from here. She could never have made a living in this benighted place." He cleared his throat with a prolonged hacking sound, punctuated by a few mucus-filled coughs, and ventured, "If you have time, perhaps I could offer you some tea, and hot cocoa for the little one?" He gestured at Karina, who had been watching warily from the shelter of Christian's arms.
"There are too many of us," Anna-Laura protested. "We'd put you out."
"Not at all," he insisted. "It's the least I can do—can't make up for what I did to your mother, Your Highness, but it's by way of apology."
"It would be petty of us to refuse in that case," Carl Johan said and smiled. "We thank you, herr Haraldsson."
Which was how they found themselves clustered in an uncomfortable crowd around a small, rickety wooden table, hands around mugs of tea. Leslie demurred, and Karina was clearly too leery of her strange surroundings to have any interest in cocoa; Christian, too, refused the tea, but consented to the cocoa his daughter snubbed, though he had a hard time sipping it since Karina refused to allow him to let go of her. Still, she listened as much as the others while Alfdan Haraldsson—now ninety-three years old—reminisced about Queen Susanna, holding the family's interest almost in spite of themselves.
Finally Anna-Laura said, "I always wondered from Mother's diaries whether you and your brother were fully aware of her situation. Mother's mother had died, and all she had was her father, who I think must have been sickly for quite some time. He died during the first year of my parents' marriage."
"I think we knew about her mother's death," Alfdan Haraldsson said slowly. "But I suppose in me, at least, there was a sense of...well, you know, there but for fate's caprice am I. Albert was a born bully, though. He loved to poke at what he perceived as weakness. He was always that way." His faded gray eyes lost focus. "He's been gone twelve years and I still find myself resenting him for what he did. Your mother wasn't the only one. Maybe he just wanted something better and was bitter at never being able to achieve it. It's no excuse, it's only a possible reason." He took in their faces, that sheepish look creeping across his heavily lined, weather-scarred features, and murmured hoarsely, "I'm sorry. I always knew I should have told her that, but at least I can say it to her children before I die."
"Herr Haraldsson, never you mind about it," Anna-Laura said kindly. "It's all past us now, and we understand and appreciate the spirit in which you pass it on to us. Rest easy about it now, please, and know that we're grateful you took the time to say it."
Ten minutes later they were back on the road to the castle, all of them quiet with introspection. Karina, still wrapped in the blanket and clutching Christian like a limpet, had fallen asleep soon after they'd gotten under way, and he was still absently stroking the child's hair. Leslie glanced at him, wondering what he was thinking; he caught her movement and lifted the arm that wasn't holding onto Karina, sliding it over her shoulders and snugging her close. His smile was brief but warm.
"Never thought that'd happen, huh?" she murmured.
"The mere possibility would have been the farthest thing from my mind," he agreed. "I just hope he has some peace now." She nodded and rested her head against his, and they fell into a comfortable silence for the rest of the journey.
§ § § - January 14, 2009
Christian, Leslie and the children had finally had their tour of Ernst Wennergren's thoroughbred ranch on the twelfth, and stayed overnight in the spacious house at Ernst's and his wife's insistence; on this day a huge snowstorm had finally thundered in from the North Sea after making threats for most of the morning, and the triplets were mesmerized by the sight of the scudding snow and the near-whiteout conditions. It was all Christian could do to get them out of the atrium and back to their suite, where Leslie had gone a little earlier to check e-mail and see if there was any news from Fantasy Island.
When he entered the living-room half of the suite, he knew instantly that something was very wrong. Leslie was sitting at the computer staring blankly at the screen; in the light from the windows, he could see her pale face. "My Rose, are you all right?"
She didn't move, and alarm bloomed within him. Leaving the children to hunt up some toys to play with in the bedroom, he half-ran to her chair and cradled her face between his hands, turning her head so that she had to look up at him. "Leslie, what's wrong?"
"I got an e-mail from Rogan," she told him in a thin monotone that raised his fear for her even higher. "Something happened to Father...something Rogan can't do anything about. He...consulted something he called a tribunal. He didn't say what was wrong, but he...the way he wrote about it, it isn't good at all."
Christian pulled a chair over beside hers and sat down to read the message, which was still on the screen. "Leslie, I hate to do this to you when you and Christian are on such a well-deserved holiday—but I came to the main house this morning and found uncle in a bad way. It's like he's not all there—I don't like that particular turn of phrase, but I couldn't think of any better. I've made a request for a tribunal so we can find out what's happened and what to do from here. If uncle can contact you himself later on, I'll see to it that he does. He hasn't injured himself and I don't think he's ill, but if I learn differently, you'll know right away. Don't make yourself sick worrying—I know you have a bad habit of doing that, and assuming the worst. There's no need for you to cut your trip short. If that changes, I'll tell you so, but don't let this ruin your time off. I'll send more news when I have it. Rogan."
"Rogan does know you rather well," Christian said, studying his wife's face. "Leslie, if only you'd stop imagining the very worst. Aren't you the one who scoffed at my gut feelings when Briella was taking the amakarna serum?"
"Yes, but then look what happened," Leslie pointed out. Her eyes got unusually shiny, and he could see they had filled with tears.
"My darling, you must have known that even Mr. Roarke isn't immortal," he said, as gently as he could. "He's never said any such thing to you, has he?"
"No," Leslie murmured with enormous reluctance; she blushed, putting some color back into her face. "But I guess I just sort of...assumed. I mean...he hasn't changed in all the years since I first went to live with him. When I came back after Teppo died, he was still just the same. I...I just...it was easy to let myself believe he'd always be there."
"Has Rogan said specifically that he's dying?" Christian asked her in the sort of overly patient voice that bespeaks the loss thereof. "Look at his message again, Leslie. He said only that something has happened, and it doesn't sound as if he knows just what it is, since he doesn't describe it and says he's called for help." He leaned forward and squinted at the message again, then added, "Whatever he means by a tribunal."
"I don't know myself," Leslie said. "There's a big part of me that wants to call home and just let the phone ring and ring till someone picks up, so I can get some answers."
"I know you'll worry," Christian conceded, stroking her arm, "but you can't dwell on it to the exclusion of all else. Rumor has it around here that the family may be planning something for our anniversary, and I don't want you so hung up on this that you can't enjoy it. Try to think positive—tell yourself you'll have more details and there will be good news, will you, please? Otherwise you're likely to frighten the children."
She swallowed hard, and she knew he saw it, for a smile flitted across his face. "Right now I'm the one who's scared." She lifted pleading eyes to him. "Just hold me for a while, please, my love?"
He stood up, pulled her to her feet and hugged her, smoothing her hair. "Whatever happens, my Rose, you're not alone, ever. I'm always here for you."