“You are most welcome.”
She saw the briefest hint of a smile on his handsome face. Please and thank you, she thought. Magic words.
She found her husband in the big library bent over one of the four long walnut tables, books scattered around him, the green shaded lamp on while he sketched on a pad of paper.
“Hello,” she said when he didn’t look up. “Did you have dinner? What are you doing?”
He rubbed his eyes and smiled at her. “Come here, honey, and look at this.”
He showed her a drawing of gears and pulleys that meant nothing to her. She moved closer to him as he began to explain his ideas for bringing the grapes down from the hills via a motorized pulley system. He planned to use the motors of the derelict cars rusting in the fields of Lanconia to run the pulleys. “That’ll free more people to dry the grapes,” he explained.
“Dried grapes?” she asked.
As he explained about the raisins, she looked at him—and realized that she loved him. This was where she wanted to be more than anywhere else in the world: sitting here at night close to him and talking about future plans. She wished she were wearing a nightgown and they were in their little Key West home.
J.T. was asking her a question. “What?” she asked.
“Yo
ur little count mentioned a radio. Is there a two-way radio around here that I can use to call the States?”
“I guess so. Who are you going to call?”
J.T. pushed his chair back and stood, and when she stayed seated he took her hand and pulled her up. “Come on, let’s go find the radio. I’m going to call my father and see if he can get Frank out here.” Before she asked, he explained. “Frank is my seventeen-year-old Taggert cousin—knows more about cars than anybody else alive.” He was holding Aria’s hand as he strode down the long library then out into the corridor. “Last I heard Frank was mad because his father refused to let him join up. Frank in a good mood is difficult enough but Frank in a bad mood is not something I’d like to see.”
“And you’re going to invite him here?”
“We need him. If you had ships, I’d be able to help, but cars I don’t know too much about.” He stopped and asked one of the guardsmen where the radio was. Of course the guardsman knew and Aria led J.T. down to the northeast chamber of the vaulted cellars.
Chapter Twenty
ARIA came awake slowly, rubbing her eyes and yawning. She had been up late last night with J.T. and the man who she found out was the Royal Herald. His predecessors had cried the news throughout the towns but now he radioed his news. It was the first Aria had heard of him.
It took two hours to get through to Maine in the U.S., then they had to wait while someone drove to J.T.’s father’s house and got him. Aria got to speak to Mr. Montgomery for a moment to ask him to say hello to Mrs. Montgomery.
Later, J.T. had mumbled something about his parents making his life miserable when this was over.
Mr. Montgomery said he would send young Frank out as soon as possible.
It was midnight before J.T. walked Aria to her bedroom. He glanced at the two guards flanking the doors and abruptly left her standing alone.
Now she stretched and wondered what he had planned for today. She knew that at ten A.M. she had to be sixty miles south of Escalon at a vineyard for the blessing of the harvest. She wondered what J.T. would do and say today, how he would make the day interesting.
Her dressers drew her hair back into a perfectly neat and tight chignon. They snapped the steel fasteners of the long Merry Widow and dressed her in a somber black suit with a big diamond brooch on the left shoulder. For a moment, Aria considered exchanging the brooch for the gaudy enameled parrot she had bought in Key West on a shopping spree with Dolly, but she didn’t have enough courage to carry out her idea.
Outside her room, J.T. was not waiting for her and he wasn’t in the dining room. She was beginning to learn to ask a guardsmen if she wanted to know anything. J.T. had left the palace before six A.M. and had given no hint as to when he would return.
She waited until the last minute but she had to reach the Blessing Festival on time. She tried not to let her face fall when she saw Count Julian standing by the car door. His expression was stern.
“I thought perhaps you were going to discard your obligations again today,” he said in reproach.
She didn’t answer him because she felt too guilty about yesterday. She had had a good time yesterday. But princesses weren’t supposed to have fun. They were to fulfill obligations, not play with the peasants’ babies and exchange gossip about American movie stars.
“Aria, people are beginning to talk,” Julian began once they were in the long black car. A Royal Guardsman sat beside the chauffeur behind the glass partition, and a carful of guardsmen followed them. “The king is too ill to take the firm hand with you that he should so I am left with the duty. You are behaving like a…a woman of the streets with that crude, vulgar American. You spent every waking moment with him yesterday and it is all anyone could speak of this morning. If you care nothing for your own family, think of what the servants say. They do not want a princess who is one of them—they want a princess. I hear you even dared to invade the Royal Guard’s training ground. Have you no respect for the privacy of those men?”
Aria sat in the seat, her hands tightly clasped in her lap, feeling more awful with his every word. Then, to her utter astonishment, the guardsman in the front seat turned and winked at her! She came very close to giggling. What especially surprised her was that he had obviously heard every word Julian had said—and she had always believed the partition to be soundproof.
Julian kept fussing and Aria kept listening, but she wasn’t worried any longer. Maybe her family was ashamed of her, but it didn’t look as if her people were.