Beloved of a King

Chapter 25 - Their Last Communion

“Curse you Henry.”

Madeleine was fetching her husband his cup of wine.  She was now living at the St. Johns Castle, together with the Duchess St. Johns and her husband’s younger sisters.  Now more than a week married to the Duke’s son, her status as princess royal is now being put into question, as she had married below her rank.

“What happened, my lord?  Is there—“

Lord Maximilian threw the letter sent from the frontiers at the fireplace.  He did not know how to properly react to this news he just received, but he knew what he wanted out of it.  He wanted revenge, and he wanted to have it right now.

“Your father killed my father.”          

The princess stopped at her tracks.  She knew it was his father’s best friend and counsel the Duke Percival they were talking about, but she could not believe what she just heard.  She was certain it cannot be, and her father would never kill his beloved cousin.

“Surely now that wasn’t—“

The younger Phillodrow ran to her and grabbed his wife’s neck.  The anger and betrayal he could feel in his heart was translated into a brute strangling of his older spouse.  He was looking straight at his wife’s pleading eyes when he realised she nearly choked and colour drained off her lovely face.  He had himself loosen his vise-like grip and pushed her away.

“Maximilian…”

The Princess Madeleine coughed hard as she tried to reach for her cousin and husband.  She used to know him as a sweet and caring cousin, and later a husband and another companion to her. But now, as she crawled towards him, she saw a disgusted look in his face that it distorted her delightful impression of him.

“Do not touch me, you daughter of a murderer…  Leave this castle!”

Madeleine, with her neck still throbbing from the forceful strangulation of Maximilian, tried still to talk him out and pulled herself up holding on to his breeches.

“I am your wife.  You cannot send me away now that you’ve consumed our marriage.”

He looked down at the woman and held her by pulling her hair up, her hands trying to remove his hold on her head.

“Maximilian, put me down, you’re hurting me…”

He just pulled her further up as retribution to the king’s abominable actions.

“You’re right, you are my wife.  You’re still useful to me, you and the child you will bear me.”

Madeleine could only weep at what she has slowly been becoming: a pawn for men and their ambitions.  The Lord Maximilian, now to be called the Duke St. Johns, kissed her warm cheeks and threw her down, allowing the foremost princess of Gaerdin to be humbled beneath his feet like a common servant.

“You will fancy an audience with my mother.”

~

“How dare they step where you stood?” said Marius, collecting the necessities needed for Hélène’s nighttime travel.  He was anxious to pack her things away and send her out of Montmercy already.

Hélène too was caught up in the upheaval of activities happening inside her lowly cottage.  The men who worked for Marius kept asking her for more things to be packed up in a horse.

“I wish to consult with my brother as to where I should go.  It’s freezing cold outside and I might die in the roadside.” she said, standing beside Marius, “He must have planned for things such as these somehow.”