CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The battlement of a castle that lay on the edge of the woods, just on the outskirts of Paris, was as washed out as the evening sky, one gray leaching into the other and each just as frigid without the sun. The granite was slick under the constant haze and robbed the heat of any man that dare lay next to it.
Nevertheless, two men did, backs flat to the unforgiving rock that protected their bodies from would-be arrows of enemy intruders. Two soldiers lay in wait to protect their Prince's estate and its inhabitants from intruders, greedy men who would seek to take away what was rightfully their Prince's.
The Prince's castle lay like an old man of the hill, the moonlight shining down on his craggy, tumbledown face. Moss clung in the shade of the ancient walls like a straggly beard. The once-proud turrets had crumbled in places, giving the impression that there was no one bold enough to consider caring for the estate, letting it instead fall to ruins. Before travelers could clear the woodland, the fortress dogs would bay to announce your coming.
Should you be foolish enough to travel by night, the Prince would merely send his best huntsmen to ensure your insipid little quest ended before the rising of the dawn. Delay until you are blessed by the rays of the Parisian morning and the guards will at least grant you the right to speak. Rested inside this castle, nestled within the cold stone walls of the East Wing of the proud estate, sat the Prince.
The young nobleman was so busy staring at the massive oil portrait of himself and he furrowed his brows in quandary, smiling in an almost unhinged manner, as he almost methodically and lazily turned over a silver dagger in the palm of his hand.
"S—sire. You sent for me." Prince Adam heaved a dejected little sigh before turning to face his advisor, Monsieur Cogsworth, knuckles bone-white and raised in mid-knock.
He didn't even have to look to imagine the elderly gentleman was probably wringing his hands painfully together in immense agitation, beads of sweat glittering upon his wrinkled and lined brow. Old Cogsworth had a fringe of gray-white hair around his balding, mottled scalp. He had a wizened face and a back that was slightly hunched over in pain. His lined and weathered, careworn face held the resigned look of one who knew that, at his age, life has stopped giving and only took things away. With each movement he made, there was the crack and creaking of old bones that suffered from a horrible stiffness of the joints. Arthritis, maybe.
"What is it," he slurred. By this point in the evening, considering how much wine he had consumed, he had quite forgotten his original request. His strong hands gripped the tin flagon of wine tightly as he poured himself another decanter of red merlot, his cobalt eyes swiveling towards the back of his head in a distressing sense of a horrible headache. He sighed as the walls blurred and distorted in the corner of his vision.
"The—the Judge has arrived, monsieur. Shall I send him inside?"
The Prince did not immediately answer Monsieur Cogsworth visibly flinched and shrank further back into the shadows of the corridor, lingering in the open doorway that separated the East Wing from the rest of the castle.
For the past two weeks, ever since that prickly little brunette had rejected his advances, thoughts of future bruises to impart on her unblemished, pale skin could not stop intensifying in his thoughts. How he wanted her to suffer.
"Yes, yes, Send him in, and then get out of my sight, Cogsworth," he snapped, hearing and choosing to ignore as Cogsworth emanated a tense exhale through his nostrils, and watching with something akin to amusement in his listless cobalt orbs as the advisor stepped back and stood off to the left, allowing for the distinguished Minister of Justice to enter the room, weeny snowflakes covering his set of billowing black robes and adorning his salt and pepper hair, cheeks and his spindly fingertips pinked with cold as he played with them to keep them warm as he pulled up a chair by the fire's hearth.
Monsieur Cogsworth murmured something inaudible and gingerly closed the door behind the pair of men.
The Prince did not immediately acknowledge the Judge as the pair of men sat in silence. Prince Adam looked to the roaring fire in the hearth, and for just a split moment, he thought he saw the girl, this Belle, in the flames.
She had safe eyes. Perhaps that was the best way for him to think of her eyes in those terms. How her dark chocolate locks had cascaded in natural ringlets to just past her shoulders.
If God is real, he told himself, then this woman in His masterpiece. He reflected on the last words he'd said to her.
To Belle.
"Don't speak. Don't look me in the eye. Don't ever say 'no' to what I want or even hesitate. you are mine to do with as I wish until I tell you to get out. Only ever show lust; always ask for more, never less, never 'stop.' Please me and good things will happen, disappoint and bad things will happen. I hope you understand me; I'm sure you'd like to stay pretty, Belle."
The Prince scowled and rested his head in his hands. What a night.
White knuckled from clutching onto his goblet too hard, and gritted teeth from the effort to remain silent, his rigid form as he collapsed back against his red velvet armchair exuded an animosity that he could tell was like poison—hunched over and brooding slicing, and potent. His face was white with repressed rage.
"She rejected me," he breathed, his first words to Minister and Judge Claude Frollo since the refined older gentleman had dared enter the East Wing.
Wrapping his fingers around the golden goblet, Prince Adam felt his heat leach into the drink. Wine. Sweet, sweet wine. The very elixir of his life.
He raised the cup to his lips to sip, feeling the keen burn on his tongue and throat as the alcohol poured down his throat—a burn that used to make him recoil as a young lad. Yet now, it was a feeling he longed for from the moment he awoke to the moment he collapsed on the pillow in his chambers.
Prince Adam heaved a heavy sigh as he without so much as a word to the Judge, passed the tin flagon and empty goblet towards the older man, assuming that he wished to pour himself a drink. He rested his head in his left hand, still mesmerized by the fluid swirling around in his golden goblet. He drank in silence as he mulled over what to do surrounding his troubling thoughts of making the Dupont widow suffer, for that was presumably why he had come.
He had received a raven but naught a few days ago from Claude, announcing Gaston Dupont's death and that there was another problem that would need rectifying immediately, one that was out of the Minister's hands.
Furrowing his brows into a frown, Prince Adam drank in silence, hoping that the answer to their mutual little problem that was currently that of widowed Belle Dupont, who was, if the rumors surrounding the inventor's daughter held any truth to them, was expecting Gaston's child in mere months.
Only a few weeks to a month or so along, but if the problem were not remedied immediately, then the Prince was going to have a much bigger problem on hand, for he fully intended to take the celestial-like creature as his bride. Raising the goblet to his lips and tilting his head back, no wine came.
His eyes flung open and, in his drunken haze and a cry of rage upon his lips, he let out a low guttural snarl that sounded more beast than man and flung the goblet clear across the East Wing's study, where it clattered with a loud clang and fell to the floor. Claude Frollo's gaze remained unmoving and stoic.
Unable to remain still any longer, he bolted from his chair and restlessly began to pace the floor, the heels of his black leather boots making permanent indentations into the bearskin pelt rug that lay beneath the men's feet.
"The—the wench can't insult me," he snarled through gritted teeth. "Who the bloody hell does she think she is? A saint? An angel?" he growled, snarling and hissing.
Not thinking about what he was doing, he flung out an arm in exasperation and only succeeded in upending clay vase that rested upon a small wooden shelf and sent the delicate thing crashing to the floor. This only added to the Prince's already frayed nerves and in a fit of agitation, he kicked out at the shards and send them skittering towards the fireplace, only for his wild kick to send the fragmented pieces across the other side of the room and shattered even more.
The Judge still had that look of impassive indifference plastered across unsmiling and gaunt features, though a glimmer of something unreadable darted in his glistening gray eyes. "Aye. She can and she did." His answer came steadily, as Claude Frollo's voice cut through the echoing snarls of the Prince.
He too rose from his chair and calmly set aside his goblet on top of Prince Adam's desk, clasping his hands together behind his back as he came to stand alongside Prince Adam, his eyesight following the Prince's movements as he continued to pace. Back and forth, back, and forth, in a repetitive motion.
Judge Claude Frollo snorted and watched with the smallest inklings of amusement as his acquaintance continued this incessant behavior, showing no signs of stopping anytime soon. The Prince's footfalls were sounding more and more agitated the longer the young, arrogant nobleman kept up this behavior.
The Judge sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger, heaving a heavy, haggard sounding sigh, as if he were fighting off a splitting headache, and for all the Prince knew, he was, given everything….
Prince Adam let out a strangely content muffled sigh from the back of his throat as the walls around him seemed to shift and morph into something unrecognizable, changing figures in the blink of an eye. He'd definitely indulged in a bit too much to drink at this point, though there was no going back. He was past that point of no return, and both he and the Judge knew it.
"What you did was foolish," Claude Frollo chastised, his voice faltering a little in his resolve as he fought back a slight cough, a result of a combination of the frigid winds outside intermingled with that of the wine he'd just drank.
The Minister watched as the handsome Prince's face blanched and turned an even deeper shade of mottled crimson. Claude inwardly growled in frustration as something darkened within the Prince's azure orbs, and the mood shifted. If the tension in the East Wing would have been color, the air would have been scarlet.
"I had presumed that after that little incident in the cathedral's library, that you were no longer interested in communicating again. I was…surprised to receive your raven within the fortnight, Your Majesty…" Claude began cautiously, eyes carefully regarding the young Prince.
But Prince Adam's focus was somewhere at a spot behind the Judge's head on the wall as if Claude had somehow become almost invisible to the young Prince, or he could not bear to look the refined gentleman in the eyes.
"What. Did. You. Say?" The Prince growled, baring his white teeth, and snarling like a vicious dog who'd just had his precious prized bone taken away from him. The Judge resisted his urge to scoff and roll his eyes at the behavior.
Childish. The Prince, even now as a fully-grown man of twenty and one, had always been childish.
Judge Frollo coughed once to clear his throat and continued speaking. His baritone voice, while calm and resolute, was ice-cold, no warmth within his tones. "Consider this a moment to be counseled, Your Grace. You have brought this upon yourself, you know. Insulting the girl's very honor by attempting to force yourself upon her like some savage…beast." Frollo scrunched his nose in disgust and pulled a face. "You were not thinking your actions through and as a result, you have brought even further shame and embarrassment upon not only yourself and your family name, but me as well," he spat, turning away from the Prince and folding his arms across his chest, striding to look out the barred window, out near the balcony terrace. "When you attacked the Dupont girl, you have stepped across a non-negotiable line for which you, as Prince of these lands, must accept responsibility for your own actions. It is what is expected of you, Your Grace."
The low, threatening warning growl escaped from the Judge's throat before the distinguished older gentleman could stop it happening, and he watched, the corners of his mouth twisting upwards into a vicious sneer, as the Prince's face paled and the Prince's lips turned into a thin, rigid line of fear.
Claude, given his power and intimidating stature, was perhaps the only soul in all of France that Prince Adam even harbored an inkling of fear and caution towards, and as such, was the only person alive who could get away with speaking such words to their land's own Prince. Any other man would find himself flayed on the morrow and fed to his hunting dogs for a little snack.
The Judge, in a rare display of true aggression, seized the Prince by the man's crimson doublet and shook it in fistfuls, closing off the gap of space so that the bridge of his hooked, slender nose, was practically touching Adam's.
"I gave you an opportunity, Your Majesty, that you have squandered and made a fool of yourself. The task I set to you was made perfectly clear: seduce the girl, get her away from the cathedral and out of my ward, and mine's lives forever. But you could not manage to handle one little girl even on your own."
Claude paused, seeming to find the need to draw breath and compose himself before continuing. "You are…quite fortunate, however," he began slowly, relinquishing his grip upon the Prince's doublet, though not before shoving the Prince back towards the direction of the man's velvet armchair, where he bade the Prince sit with a cold, calculating look. Adam followed suit. "That I am a merciful man, Prince, and a relatively patient one. I think there is but a way to solve our mutual problem and both of us would benefit."
The Prince blearily lifted his head and regarded the stoic older gentleman with blurred vision, black spots dancing in the forefront of his line of sight.
"How?" he croaked out hoarsely, his voice sounding rougher, and yet much more subdued than it had before, and the vulnerability and brokenness in the younger man's tones and in the Prince's sad cobalt piercing blue eyes told Judge Claude Frollo everything that he needed to know: the girl would be out of his hair soon enough. "The girl has been brainwashed by your…."
But his voice trailed off and he did not complete his sentence as the Judge shot the Prince a quite literal stony expression that, had the man possessed said the ability to do so, would have turned him into one of the gargoyle grotesques that guarded both the outside of the cathedral and here in his castle, as well.
"I need not be reminded of the…recent developments, Prince," Judge Frollo spat harshly as he settled back into his chair, clasping his fingers together.
For the briefest of moments, Claude was held back as he lost himself in thought as he recollected back to the conversation but two nights ago when he had last spoken with Sister Alice Beaumont, and the cantankerous old nun had informed the Judge of the Dupont widow's pregnancy in its early stages.
As the Judge of the entire city of Paris, he was more than familiar with more ambitious women that someone of Belle's stature in life, as if it were some horrible curse or plague, anything that would put a wall between them and gold and the physical pleasures of their men. Not that he was particularly bothered by this revelation that women thrived in his city, walking around with abortifacients procured by means of witchcraft, or through their local apothecary, but with Belle Dupont and the increasing likelihood that there was every indication that he had to believe that this child was not that of her lord husband's, but instead that of his own, misshapen, wretched, accursed ward, well…
This, he could simply not allow, and he would be saving the poor child from a cursed life if they were to do away with the scandal that was currently growing inside the young brunette's stomach. For it would save them both the heartache. He merely wanted this heathen witch out of his life, and yet, as Minister, it was expected of Claude to maintain certain standards in life.
If the child were to be whisked away from the cathedral at the earliest opportunity the moment it presented itself, then the Dupont widow would torment his son no longer with her heathen ways and her trickery, and if the Prince truly was of sound mind and dead set on marrying this woman, then who was he to deny the man the sordid pleasure of taking another victim?
"I cannot allow my son to be anywhere near the child. You still wish to marry her, then the simple matter remains that the cretinous demonic seed growing inside of her must be dealt with accordingly before you would even entertain the thought of marriage, would I be correct in that assumption, Prince?" he drawled, swiveling his head almost lazily to better regard Adam.
The Prince mutely nodded, but then furrowed his light blond brows into a dark frown and his cobalt orbs flashed indignantly, dangerously, as the light from the glowing fire in the hearth's fireplace sent shadows of orange and red dancing across his pallid features. The Judge repressed the urge to shudder.
In this dim light, he almost looked…beastly. Unkempt hair, darkening circles underneath both eyelids indicating lack of sleep, his gaze cold, listless.
"Yes." The Prince's voice was soft, tinged with the hint of melancholia. "I have the best healers in this castle that anyone in Paris could ever ask for."
But before Prince Adam could grow excited at what it was exactly that Judge Frollo was proposing, the older gentleman held up a weathered, slightly shaking hand to stop him.
"They say that love is the death of man's duty, though you need not worry about that, my Prince. It is clear to me that should anyone wish to kill you," here, the Judge sneered, "they would need to aim for your head, as you have no heart. The girl is not of a sound mental state and is not capable of making any current decisions for herself," Claude explained glibly. "My plan, while admittedly unorthodox," he commented, shrugging his shoulders in a nonchalant way, "is quite brilliant, and I believe that it is worth the risk. I know of a man who is up to the task that I need. It will not kill the babe but will induce cramps. Enough so that the healers of the cathedral will not be able to provide adequate enough care that the child will so require to be out of danger. It is under this guise that I will arrange for a carriage to deliver her to you, wherein once she is here within these walls," he commented, glancing around at the dimly lit East Wing and repressing the urge to snort in disgust, "you may do with Belle Dupont what you wish. Kill the wretch that grows within her, marry her, impregnate her with your own spawn, it matters not."
The Judge heaved another heavy sigh as he rose from his chair, faltered only slightly in his footing as a result of the copious amounts of red wine he'd poured down his throat, turning his back on the Prince as he prepared to leave.
"You cause yourself too much trouble, Your Honor," the Prince called out, following the Judge down the hallway as he escorted him down the grand golden staircase. "You had mentioned the girl spoke to the nun of strange bleeding. Why not just let the seed bleed out while she's unconscious? It would make your life much easier and then bring her to me. But this? You would secretly wash out this unborn child albeit under the guise of helping her heal?"
When the Judge turned to regard the Prince, Adam scowled, as he watched the refined older man don a huge grin that told of how pleased Claude was with himself by coming up with this elaborate scheme to deal with her.
Claude was fairly confident that he could detect the faintest tones of revulsion in the Prince's tones, though that would not impede him in his mission. "I would. This agreement is one where both parties benefit, Your Grace. Do not question my methods, monsieur. It will work. I assure you. And my…ward will be accompanying the girl as well. It is clear to me that my teachings on Quasimodo have been wasted. Such a pity." He clucked his tongue in mock disappointment and shook his head. "I can think of no other way but to ensure this one final lesson remains rooted in his mind for the rest of his wretched, miserable life than to have him watch as everything he claims to 'love' is ripped apart from him. Starting with this girl, this child. You cannot stand there, Prince Adam, and tell me that you have not done the strangest things throughout your life, simply to gain their trust, old friend, and all in the name of power. Power is so much more advantageous over love."
Leaving the Prince alone at the foot of the stairs to ponder his words, Judge Claude Frollo turned away and felt the beginnings of a twisted grimace contort his sallow features into the widest grin that, when witnessed by Monsieur's Cogsworth and Lumiere as they escorted Paris's judge outside and to where his black carriage lay in wait, the two men could not help shuddering.
Lumiere had overheard just enough to know that the Prince was in trouble if his soul and heart continued down this dark path of festering evil.
As Lumiere slammed the door to the Judge's carriage, and the driver clucked his tongue and snapped the reins of the huge black Friesian beast into motion, the two men stood in silence for a good long moment, staring at the carriage's rapidly fading silhouette until it became engulfed in the night mist.
Cogsworth and Lumiere sighed, stretched, grumbled amongst themselves as they retreated up the castle entryway's steps and made to head back into the warmth of the indoors, both unable to stop thinking about what kind of man they had just allowed into their Prince's company, and who this Belle was.
For all their talk of scheming and whatever it was that the Judge and their Prince was planning, the possibility of a single woman within the castle walls, the next possible unfortunate soul to fall prey to the Prince's attention, did not unnerve them nearly as much as Judge Claude Frollo's wide smile had.