Chapter 5

The gyspy caravan arrived midmorning on Saint Bronwyn’s eve. Their clothes and their painted wagons seemed more colorful than all the rest of the world put together. We gawked at them, I’m ashamed to say, every man Jack and woman Joan of us, as they tethered their horses and lit their luncheon fires.

“Do you suppose the king will fall in love with one of the village girls?” Priscilla asked me as we sat weaving flowers into wreaths. “It happens. Mary Grace is pretty enough.”

“Don’t be a goose,” I said. “Kings only fall in love with village girls in fairy stories.”

“Kings fall in love with whomever they like,” Priscilla said. “He’s a bachelor. He needs an heir. He could do worse than marry a strong, healthy country girl.”

I pricked my finger on a thorn. “You sound like a horse breeder.”

“Then what’s he coming for, if not to find his one true love?” Priscilla said. “He combs the kingdom, under pretense of royal duty, but secretly he’s searching for that face that will leap out from the crowd … ”

“He’s scouring for tax money, likely as not,” I said. “What’s gotten into you?”

“They say he’s handsome,” she said.

“Kings are always handsome.” I reached for more daisies. “Even when they’re half-dead, bald, and toothless. It’s a privilege of being king.”

“He’s not even thirty yet,” Prissy protested. “I’m sure he has all his teeth!”

“But is he as handsome as Matthew Dunwoody?”

Priscilla scowled at her lapful of blossoms. “That son of a butcher thinks he hung the moon in the sky, ever since he found those gypsies. You’d think he grew them from seed.”

“Matthew has fine, straight teeth,” I said. “A mouthful of them.”

“He needs them, too, tough as the meat they sell is.”

We rigged booths from sawhorses and planks and draped bedsheets over the top. The ice man’s wife practiced her song for the king until someone threatened to heave a skillet at her. The four Hafton brothers, famous for their hunting prowess, came whooping out of the woods with a massive boar trussed up by his ankles over a long ash pike. Ham and pork roast for tomorrow!

At last all that could possibly be done, and then some, had been done, and still there was no king in sight. No messenger to explain his delay, either.

We waited.

We fussed with our buttons and collars.

Butcher Dunwoody and the Hafton brothers gutted the boar until our stomachs flopped.

We ate bread and butter, saving the dainties the ladies had made all week for His Illustrious Arrival. All save Mayor Snow, who for once had no appetite.

Children fell asleep on the grass. The sun sank in the west. Night birds swooped through the soft twilight air.

I looped my arm through Grandfather’s. “Let’s go home before it’s too dark to see.”

“Well said, Evelyn, my duck,” Widow Moreau said. “I’ll go with you.” We headed home.

“Suppose he’ll never come?” Grandfather said. “A rude trick that’d be.”

“King’s privilege, I suspect,” Widow Moreau said. “The most trifling thing could make him change his mind, and still we wait upon his pleasure.”

“Not I,” Grandfather said. “These boots are laced like tourniquets. If I wait any more on his pleasure, soon I’ll have no feet.”

“For all that, you won’t walk any slower than you do now, Lem Pomeroy,” Widow Moreau said cheerfully. “You’re so thin Evelyn could carry you. I ought to fatten you up. Don’t you eat anything besides pickles?”

Grandfather stamped the butt of his walking stick into the dirt. “There’s not many foods more healthful than pickles,” he snapped. “They purge the digestion.”

“Grandfather!” I said. “Please!”

“Well, they do.”

Widow Moreau snickered. Then we stopped. Someone was crashing through the underbrush after us.

“Evie!” Aidan’s voice called.

I spun around, searching for him through the gathering gloom. “What’s the matter?”

He burst through the trees and stopped, panting. “King Leopold’s here,” he said. “One of his men grew sick on the journey. The king is calling for a physician.”

I felt cold all over. Heal one of the king’s fellows? From some malady I couldn’t guess? Now, if he was about to have a baby, that’d be one thing … 

In the dark behind me I heard Grandfather take a step forward. He cleared his throat. “What’s wrong with the man, son? Do you know? What are his symptoms?”

Aidan shook his head. “Fever, I think. That’s what I heard. He’s inside a carriage.”

Grandfather and I looked at each other.

I turned to Aidan. “Walk these two home, will you, while I run on ahead?”

Torches and fires from the gypsy caravan illuminated the common, where Maundleyans stood in anxious clusters, well back from the king’s coaches, as though they were full of contagion. And well they might be.

I approached the king’s carriage and stuck my head in the door. “Did someone inquire about help for a sick man?”

Half a dozen faces turned my way. I felt like a worm surrounded by robins.

“Yes,” a voice said slowly, from the darkness. “We did send for a medic or healer. Can you bring us one?”

“I am he,” I said boldly. “I mean, I am she.”

There were splutters of indignation, but no more. My patience wore thin. I could be home tucking into bed with my medical books. Like me or not, but I could help. At least a little.

“Where is the sick man?” I said. “Time is passing.”

The owner of the voice leaned forward in his seat and rose. I had no choice but to retreat from the carriage and onto the ground outside. I backed away before the man trod on my feet, and fell backward, landing hard upon my tailbone. I looked up at the man, now visible by the torch he carried, its light glinting off the medallion he wore at his chest.

“Oh,” I said. “You’re the king, aren’t you?”