"It can't be you, Sister," said Ulrik cheerfully. "Look! He's giving me the same stare."
Anne Cathrine planted her hands on her hips. Very shapely hips. She was fully past puberty now, but still had a completely teenage female figure. Fifteen going on Eddie-if-you-ever-lay-a-finger-on-her-your-ass-is-grass.
Fortunately, he'd managed—so far—to avoid that one and only idiocy. But unless Admiral Simpson steamed into the Øresund with an icebreaker before the winter was over, Eddie wasn't sure how long he could hold out.
The problem was that Anne Cathrine wasn't exuding any of the well-known signals from Eddie's past that informed him in no uncertain terms that this girl ain't interested, buddy, so forget it. If she had, his course would have been easy. Miserable, sure, and pining away with unrequited love—but he was used to that. His high school experience had been four almost solid years of pining away after girls whose titles might as well have been You-Gotta-Be-Kidding or In-Your-Dreams, Buster.
What he wasn't used to was a princess—fine, "king's daughter"—who planted those same very shapely hips on the bed right next to him, leaned over, spilling her gorgeous red-gold hair, took his cheeks in her hands and gave them a little shake. "Stop looking at me like that, I tell you."
Ulrik laughed. "Sister, you're being forward. If I tell Father, he'll scold you."
"No, he won't," she said serenely.
"Yes, Princess," Eddie said, not serenely at all.
That got him another cheek-shaking. "How many times must I tell you! 'King's daughter.' Not 'princess.' My mother's marriage to my father was morganatic." She twitched her head toward her half-brother. "Ulrik is a prince because he is in the royal line. I am not. Just a 'king's daughter.' "
Eddie nodded, simply thankful that he'd escaped disaster. He'd almost said "Yes, dear."
He wondered what might have resulted from that. Would they just satisfy themselves by removing his cheeks with hot tongs, or would they add all his teeth into the bargain?
Ulrik laughed again. "Eddie, you always cheer me up. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because you can do melancholy better than any Dane."
"Well, sure. I read the book. I don't know if it's been translated into Danish yet."
"What book?" the king's daughter asked.
"It's the one I told you about," her half-brother explained. "I read it in English. The play that Englishman wrote about a Danish prince in Helsingør—he called it 'Elsinore'—who finds out his father was murdered and can't decide what to do."
"Oh, that one." She released Eddie's cheeks and waved a dismissive hand. "I don't want to read it, even when my English gets better. What a silly fantasy. Any Danish prince—princess, too, even a king's daughter—who found out that someone had committed such a crime would have his head by the morning."
Chapter Eight. Did I mention the jailbait will inherit the jail? Well, at least one or two cells in it. With a share of the tongs and the pincers and the what-not.
Chapter 17
Whitehall Palace
London, England
February 1634
"Three more!" shouted King Charles, holding up the middle three fingers of his left hand. With his right, he pointed accusingly in the direction of the palace's servants' quarters. "A cook and two cleaning women. That's quite enough! The city has become a pesthole. The queen and I depart for Oxford on the morrow."
Sitting in his chair, the king lowered his head, gazing up at the earl of Strafford in the way that a stubborn child will make clear to his parent that he is most displeased. The royal expression combined sullenness, petulance, anger and resentment—and was about as unregal as anything Thomas Wentworth could imagine.
He took a breath, but before he could speak Charles snapped: "That is all, I say! There will be no further discussion on this matter. Simply see to the arrangements. I want a full escort out of the city, mind. London has become as infested with unruly apprentices as it has with vermin and disease."
Thomas bowed his head, bowing to the inevitable at the same time, and left the royal chamber. Outside, in the corridor, he took several deep breaths. Partly to control his anger; partly to give himself time to decide what steps he might still be able to take to alleviate some of the political damage that would be caused by the king leaving the capital for Oxford.
He considered, for a moment, simply biding his time and approaching the king with a proposal to reconsider later that day, or in the evening. That had worked twice before, after all.
Almost instantly, he discarded the notion. On the two previous occasions, the king hadn't been as set in his course. And, what was more important, his wife hadn't been involved. But Thomas had already learned from one of his assistants that Queen Henrietta Maria had been in hysterics this morning, after she heard about the latest outbreak of disease in the palace. With the queen in that state of mind, there was simply no chance any longer of persuading Charles to remain in the capital. The king doted on his wife. It was a personal characteristic that Thomas might have respected and even found attractive, had the king's doting not been so excessive and the wife herself such a blithering fool.