“You say one more word and I’ll break your neck here and now, Aria. Everyone I’ve sent has failed at the job of killing you, so I might as well do it myself.” He was dragging her down the dark corridor away from the door leading to the garden. “They’ll find your body in a few days, and when they do, I plan to make myself king. All I have to do is get rid of Gena and I figure the old king will die of grief. I am next in line to the throne.”
She managed to move her head enough to speak. “Why do you want to be king?” she gasped out.
“Dear, stupid Aria. You only looked at the peasants, nothing else. This is a dying country. Better to sell it to the Germans than to try to keep its independence. Uranium, my dear. The country is riddled with it. I shall sell the whole place to the highest bidder and live in France. Damn, but you have been hard to kill, Aria.”
“And she’s going to be harder” came a voice from the darkness.
Aria had seen several American movies and she imitated a western now by ducking while Freddie was distracted. Her flashlight fell and went rolling as she flattened her body onto the filthy floor. Shots rang over her head, the stone walls of the tunnel echoing with the deafening sound. Dirt and bits of stone rained down on her head.
She lay still for a moment until the air cleared. “Jarl!” she screamed, and she was as loud as the shots.
“Here, baby,” he said, and she ran to him in the darkness.
She held on to him with all her might.
“It’s over,” he whispered. “You’re safe and I can go home.”
It wasn’t easy to do but she pulled away from him. “Yes, you must return to your country and I must remain i
n mine. It will be better this way. Will you get a guardsman to see to my cousin?”
“Yes, Your Royal Highness,” he said mockingly as he turned away and left her in the darkness.
Chapter Twenty-two
ARIA walked erectly as she left the limousine and made her way to the field behind the Lanconian Academy of Sciences building. The white plastered walls glared in the sun and hurt her swollen eyes. Even though she wore a little veiled hat, she knew the redness of her eyes was still visible.
It had been two weeks since the encounter in the underground passage between Jarl and Freddie. Freddie had not been killed, only wounded, but the Royal Guard had given him time alone in the library with a loaded pistol and Freddie had taken the honorable way out by putting a bullet through his head. The official story had been that he had had an accident while cleaning his gun. Only Aunt Sophie had questioned that statement. “Freddie clean his own gun? Balderdash! I never heard of anything so ridiculous. What really killed him?” No one who knew answered her.
Lieutenant Montgomery had left Lanconia the next morning without a word of farewell to anyone.
Immediately after his departure, Julian had become so possessive that Aria had told him to leave Lanconia and her life. She wasn’t sure if he wanted her kingdom or the uranium. He certainly hadn’t wanted her.
Young Frank Taggert had remained in Lanconia to help with the engines, but for all his size, he was just a boy, and a sudden long rain had left many vineyards with moldering grapes and no way to get them down the mountains fast enough.
Hours after J.T. left, Aria was in her grandfather’s house and raging at him for not telling her about the uranium. He said she was more angry about that cowardly husband of hers leaving than about any secrets he had kept. She had defended J.T. but not for long. She had gone back to the palace to hear the news of Freddie’s suicide. She gave orders that a royal funeral be arranged for him.
She had met with the people involved in putting Kathy Montgomery in Princess Aria’s place in the War Room. Not even the groveling and apologies of the Lord High Chamberlain had cheered her from her deep depression. Lady Werta had looked as if she might faint and had whispered that she would like to resign from Her Highness’s service. Aria said that whatever her ladyship had done, she had done out of faithfulness to the true princess. She awarded the woman the Order of the Blue Shield for her patriotism.
She also met with her cousin Cissy and thanked her for what she had done for Lanconia. Cissy was glad Aria was alive and unhurt and all she asked in reward was a banquet. She had been put on a semifast by both the Lanconians who had switched her and later by the American government who had held her as prisoner. Everyone except Cissy believed she needed to lose weight. Aria ordered a feast that took Cissy three days to eat.
Then, as if Aria didn’t have enough misery in her life, a committee of Lanconians presented her with a petition asking for the return of the American, Lieutenant Montgomery, so he could continue helping them with the grapes. She explained to them that his return was impossible, that his own country needed him. To her horror, they wrote to the American president and, somehow, the story got into the American newspapers. The short article made the Lanconians look like incompetent, backward peasants and said that they needed a red-blooded American to run their country for them. Aria crumpled the paper in disgust. She would find someone else to teach her people about dams and wells and vocational schools and car engines and whatever else needed doing. She just had to find someone who could figure out what needed doing and where to start looking for that person. If she only had someone to ask for help—if she weren’t so completely alone.
Julian had been gone for three days now, Gena saw no one but her young American, and Aria had no one to talk to or laugh with. She had never felt lonely before she went to America and met that odious man, so what was wrong with her now?
She went about her duties without feeling. Now she was never tempted to break through crowds and drink goat’s milk, and she accepted every engagement proposed to her so she never had a chance to be alone to think—and to remember. The people of Lanconia noticed her dreariness and attributed it to the loss of her fiancé, Count Julian.
Today Aria was to unveil yet another statue of Rowan the Mighty, a twenty-foot-high stone sculpture of a square-jawed man sitting on a chair with lions’ heads for arms. She had not slept well last night or the night before, or the one before that for that matter, and her eyes were tired and red and her head ached.
There had been built a raised stand that held a podium with a microphone (newly imported to Lanconia) and six chairs containing the sculptor and his guests. Three hundred people stood in the audience.
Aria mounted the three steps up, opened her piece of paper, and began to read the prepared speech. She was halfway into the part about Rowan’s magnificent accomplishments when a noise to her left distracted her.
* * *
J.T. slouched in a chair in the big living room of his parents’ house on the coast of Maine. Outside he could hear the wind and not far off a ship’s horn sounded, but he had no desire to go see what ship was docking. In fact, for the last ten days he hadn’t had much interest in anything. He had caught a ride out of Lanconia on the first plane leaving with vanadium. He knew he was being cowardly in not saying good-bye to Aria, but he had said good-bye to her before and once was all he could bear.
He didn’t really have orders from the navy as to where he was supposed to be, so after landing in Virginia, he had thumbed a ride to Key West. There he had found his Uncle Jason doing a better job than he ever could have. He saw Bill and Dolly that night, but they reminded him so much of Aria that they made him feel worse than he already did. Everything seemed to remind him of her, and Dolly’s hundreds of questions about Aria didn’t help any. He ended up leaving in the middle of dinner and walking along the beach all night.