After the funeral was done, after all the heads of state had departed, when she thought she would scream if she had to listen to one more heartfelt condolence, the Duchess Johanna wandered off to find her son.
Passing through the rooms of the obscenely large house—her house now, she thought—she threw aside pieces of her costume, littering the hallway with gloves, cape, hairpins.
She found her son curled up, fast asleep (or pretending to be) in the back of one of his closets where he often built himself a nest.
For a moment she considered joining him; it seemed like a sensible idea to curl up into a ball and hide in a pile of blankets. But she knew he would be distressed by her presence. She couldn’t remember the last time he had allowed her to touch him.
She was hardly in a position to complain. When her husband had his rendezvous with a bullet the week before, dying on a pile of leaves in the forest, he did so without any recent memory of her touch.
• • •
Johanna was acting as translator for the Danish ambassador when she first met the duke of Alorainn.
It was not lost on him how deftly she navigated the rocky shoals of the man’s use of language, nor how fetching was her figure.
When she was approached by the duke’s people to work as translator for a private luncheon, she thought little of it other than that she was pleased to be hired—her finances were, as usual, tenuous.
It didn’t take long to notice that no one at the party spoke anything other than French, German, or Italian, all languages in which the duke was perfectly fluent. He took every opportunity to interact with her. It was no time at all before he began to court her more conventionally.
But what was the point—other than the obvious one. She could hardly be seriously considered, being in only the most glancing way of any royal lineage. There are rules, after all.
But the duke was—like this queer little province of Alorainn—an unusual mixture of the traditional and unorthodox. The people of Alorainn did things the way they’d done them for generations, but what they did was as likely as not to be unconventional. The royal family, and the inhabitants as well, thought all this quaint. Johanna considered it undisciplined.
But she was tired of polishing the worn spots on her shoes. She longed for once, not to have money be the last thing on her mind as she fell asleep at night.
And, of course, there was Halick, her strange child, with his dark blue eyes and too-full lips. His father’s features, but combining to entirely different effect. A face impossible to read, and hard to trust.
She knew the boy would not be keen on a large family; she herself thought most of them fools. But a father and a brother might pull him out of himself, if it was not already too late.
• • •
But here she was instead, wearing widow’s black. Johanna leaned against the window frame and looked out to the twilit garden, fiddling with the glass stopper on a bottle of paregoric that sat atop the cabinet. She pulled it open, gave it a sniff and carelessly took a drink of the opium tincture. The bitter taste of it took her back to her childhood when it was often given to her for an upset stomach.
Johanna finished off the bottle and watched as the light faded to black.