A King In Love

Chapter One-1

Chapter OneHis Majesty King Maximilian rose from the couch on which he had been lying and put down his glass.

“I must go back,” he said.

“Mais non, mon brave!”

The cry came from the red lips of the woman looking at her reflection in the mirror.

She was regarding not her face, which was very attractive, but the necklace of large rubies set in diamonds that encircled her white throat.

“You cannot leave so quickly,” she said.

Her fascinating accent transformed her slightly common voice into something very alluring.

Then, as if she thought the protest was not enough, she moved towards the King, letting her negligée of chiffon and lace fall open as she did so.

“Do you think your present becomes me, mon cher?” she demanded, standing in front of him.

His eyes were not on the necklace but on the exquisite figure below it, which had already enraptured most of Paris.

‘La Belle’, for that was the name by which she was known on the stage, smiled knowingly, and very slowly, with the smallest movement of her shoulders, let her negligée fall to the floor at her bare feet.

Her skin was very white, her waist tiny and her breasts and hips curved in the manner decreed by fashion, but rarely seen in such perfection.

She stood dramatically still, watching the King’s eyes roam over her body.

Then, with an inarticulate little sound, she moved towards him, folding her arms round his neck, her lips seeking his.

*

A long time later the King walked to the mirror to tie his cravat.

They had now exchanged places and La Belle was lying on the couch in an attitude of satisfied exhaustion, while the ruby necklace still gleamed against her white skin.

“You have made me late,” the King said, “but doubtless the Prime Minister will accept my explanation that I was engaged on important business.”

“What could be more important than me?” La Belle enquired.

“The Prime Minister could find quite a number of answers to that!” the King replied with a wry smile.

Having finished tying his cravat, he looked at the reflection of his own face mockingly, almost as if he enjoyed the cynical lines etched from nose to mouth.

Watching him, La Belle thought that even were he not a King she would have found him the most ardent and satisfying lover she had ever known and she could speak from long experience.

Seduced at the age of twelve, she had climbed to stardom by a succession of beds until she appeared in Le Théâtre Impérial de Châtelet, where the King had seen her.

Her lovers had included Dukes, Marquises and a somewhat obscure Italian Prince, but a King had a glamour that she found irresistible.

The fact that he was also wealthy and was prepared to make life very comfortable for her was enough to persuade her to leave Paris and come with him to Valdastien, the country over which he reigned.

There was a private theatre at the Palace where she could dance whenever she pleased to a distinguished audience.

But she found it more exciting to dance alone for the King in the ‘Château’ where he had installed her, which had been built a century earlier in the gardens of the Palace.

It was the King’s grandfather who had first housed a mistress there when he was too old to travel to the Capital to enjoy the pleasures that only a beautiful woman could give him.

To facilitate the arrangement even further, the Château was connected to the Palace by means of an underground passage, which could be entered from the Royal Study through a secret door to which only the Monarch held the key.

“When will you come again?” La Belle asked, seemingly innocently.

She listened intently for his answer, never being quite certain what he would reply.

Even as she waited, she knew that it was foolish to try to tie the King down to a time or even a particular day when he would visit her again.

Omnipotent, a law unto himself, he valued his independence above everything else and she knew that, if she had been wise, she would have said nothing, but merely waited impatiently as she had done before until he condescended to visit her.

In all her previous love affairs she had so dominated the men who desired her that she kept them on their knees and could either lift them to ecstasy or spurn them into a despond of despair.

The King, however, was different.

Although she knew she excited him and he certainly rewarded her for the enjoyment she gave him, she was never quite sure if tomorrow she would not find herself travelling back to Paris without being given any explanation of her dismissal.

As he turned from the mirror, she rose from the couch, pulling the soft folds of her negligée round her again, knowing with the wisdom of her trade that it was only foolish women who were abandoned when a man no longer desired them.

She stood appraising him with her dark eyes slanting a little as he shrugged himself into his tight-fitting coat, which revealed his broad shoulders and the athletic strength of his figure.

Then she said softly,

“You are very handsome and when you leave me I shall be counting the hours until I can tell you once again how violently my heart throbs for you.”

She spoke dramatically, but the King’s lips twisted a little as he recognised the lines from the show in which she had little to say, but which was a success due almost entirely to her dancing.

It was her dancing as well as her superb figure that had attracted him in the first place, and when he was with La Belle he had often thought that, as with many other women, the less she said the more alluring he found her.

His eyes flickered over her before he spoke.

Then he said, as he moved towards the door,

“I might arrange a performance at the theatre next Saturday evening. I will think about it and if it is possible I will let you know in time for you to arrange a new dance I have not seen before.”

Before La Belle could reply, he went from the room, closing the door and walking without hurry down the staircase towards the entrance to the secret passage, which was situated at the back of the hall.

Once she was alone, La Belle flung herself petulantly down on the couch, drumming with her long thin fingers on the curved frame.

She knew quite well why the King had suggested a dance that he had not previously seen.

It was because she would have to rehearse it and plan a new costume and thus would be kept fully occupied during the time he had no need of her.

It infuriated her that he should plan her hours, while she had not the power to draw him magnetically to her so that he could think of nothing else.

She was well aware, for there had been plenty of people to tell her, that she was not the first woman who had tried to capture him completely and had failed.

She was the latest in a long line of beautiful mistresses who had come to Valdastien and left, if not in tears, certainly with their egos deflated and forced to realise that they were not as irresistibly attractive as they had believed themselves to be.

“You will find the King generous, considerate and delightfully passionate,” one of her friends had told La Belle before she left Paris, “but he is also elusive, indifferent to female suffering and invariably and infuriatingly out of reach.”

La Belle had not believed her, being quite certain that even if the whole world of women had failed to capture the heart of Maximilian, she would succeed.

Now she knew that while he loaded her with jewels, while he aroused her desire as she was able to arouse his, he was still completely and absolutely his own master.

She had the uncomfortable feeling that if she died tomorrow, he would order flowers for her grave and then never think of her again.

She walked to the window, swearing beneath her breath in the argot of the gutter.

She looked out, but she did not see the beauty of the towering pine-covered mountains or beneath them the green valley with a silver river running like a ribbon through the meadowlands bright with flowers.

Instead she saw the boulevards filled with people, the gas lamps gleaming above the cafés and the audience piling into the theatre ready to applaud noisily and wildly as she finished her dance.

‘I am a fool!’ she said to herself. ‘Why do I not go back and leave him?’

Because the answer frightened her, she turned petulantly away from the window to gaze again in the mirror at the rubies round her neck.

She was afraid – like so many other foolish women before her – of losing her heart to a man to whom she was only a beautiful body and a sublime dancer.

*

The King, having walked along the thickly carpeted passage decorated with fine walnut panelling from the forests of Valdastien, opened with a gold key the door at the end that led into his study.

As he locked it behind him, his thoughts were not on La Belle, as she would have wished, but on his Prime Minister, who he was aware would be waiting for him impatiently.

He was over an hour late for the appointment made earlier in the day.

However, he had no intention of apologising, for the simple reason that he believed that he ruled by the divine right of Kings and in accordance his subjects from the Prime Minister downwards must accept him as he was without complaint.

He passed from his study into the enormous Baroque hall, which was one of the finest in the country and famed throughout Europe.

The Palace had been rebuilt and added to through the centuries and there was little left of the original building erected in the sixteenth century.

Each Monarch had striven to make it more impressive than the last and other rulers when they came for the first time to Valdastien were filled with envy at the beauty of the Palace and the treasures it contained.

The King climbed a magnificent gilt and ivory staircase to the anteroom where he knew the Prime Minister would be waiting.

It had always been traditional that the King received his Ministers there.

As if to make them realise that they were only a small part of history, the walls were covered with tapestries depicting victories won by previous rulers and the painted ceiling was the finest work of a local craftsman inspired by Italian Masters.

As the King entered the anteroom expecting to find not only the Prime Minister but also at least a dozen of the Cabinet waiting for him, he was surprised to see that there were only two men standing at the window in the sunlight, but not in fact looking at the view.

They were talking in such an earnest manner to each other that for the moment they were not aware of the King’s presence.

Two flunkeys in powdered wigs had opened the door for him and he had the impression, although he could not hear what they said, that they were speaking gravely and almost apprehensively.

The King had, when he wished to use it, an astute perception about other people and he knew, almost as if a bell rang a warning in his ears, that the Prime Minister’s urgent request to see him was not a courtesy visit but entailed something really important.

He advanced towards the two men and instantly they stiffened to attention until as he grew nearer they bowed their heads from the neck in the prescribed manner, which was now customary in all the Royal Courts of Europe.

“Good afternoon,” the King said to the Prime Minister.

“Good afternoon, Your Majesty. It is very gracious of you to receive the Chancellor and myself at such short notice.”

The King nodded to the Chancellor, Count Hole, who was a man he did not particularly like and the Prime Minister continued,