Let's Get Married
Spring arrived a little earlier in Lutz, the imperial capital that lay south of Carlsbard. The roses of Arvis would only just be forming their buds, yet here in Lutz the entire city was steeped in their fragrance.
Matthias realized it only when he was walking through the gardens of the Crown Prince’s palace. The moment he stopped, the other officers walking with him halted as well.
“Something wrong?”
“No.”
Matthias answered briefly.
“Nothing.”
He lifted the corner of his mouth, offering a slight smile and a show of ease. When he began walking again, the brief silence ended.
The young noble officers of the Royal Guard continued their chatter with bright faces and lively voices. Their talk of how to spend this fine spring weekend always reached much the same conclusions: parties, the races, or a spring outing with a lover.
“The captain will have a lonely spring, with his fiancée so far away.”
A light laugh rose at the joke tossed out by one of them. Matthias answered it in kind.
Near the end of the previous summer, the engagement party of the Duke of Herhardt and Miss von Brandt had been held with great success. They had become officially engaged, and for a time the fact had been the hottest topic in society.
Yet Matthias had felt no particular change. The week after the engagement ceremony he had been posted to the Berg Imperial Royal Guard and come to the capital; Claudine, who had been staying at Arvis, had returned to the House of Brandt. The Brandt estate lay near Carlsbard, a considerable distance from the capital of Lutz.
So, apart from the public announcement of their engagement, nothing at all had altered. During the social season Claudine still spent stretches of time at the Brandt town house in Lutz, but that had always been the case and held nothing new. Even then they had attended the same gatherings together, just as they did now. The only difference was that they now possessed the clear title of each other’s fiancé.
“I’m thinking of finishing my officer’s service now. What about you, Matthias?”
The question from the fellow officer walking beside him drew every gaze to Matthias.
“I may extend it another year or so.”
The unexpected answer left them all looking startled.
“Weren’t you planning to marry and turn your attention to family affairs?”
“The wedding will be… next year, most likely.”
“I thought the season when the Duke of Herhardt’s wedding would set society talking had already passed—so you postponed it?”
Matthias merely tilted his chin in place of an answer. It was less that he had postponed it than that circumstances had flowed that way. He had wanted another year in the capital; the Brandts had wanted their daughter to begin married life at Arvis.
When the House of Brandt first requested that the engagement be prolonged another year, the Herhardts had agreed. Claudine was still young; there was no need to rush. Above all, both families wished the marriage to be perfect from its very start.
Leaving the palace, Matthias went straight back to the mansion.
The old stone town house in the heart of Lutz was, among all the residences belonging to the House of Herhardt, second only to Arvis itself in age. Because successive heads of the family had stayed there when attending to capital business, it felt simpler and more austere than Arvis, which brimmed with the tastes of its mistresses.
“The two madams have arrived, Your Grace.”
The attendant who approached as Matthias stepped down from the carriage made the report.
“Mother and Grandmother?”
“Yes. They arrived this morning. They have come to attend Her Imperial Highness the Princess’s wedding, which is soon to take place.”
Matthias nodded and entered the mansion at an unhurried pace.
The princess, wounded in pride after being displaced from her prospective place as Duchess of Herhardt, had hastily found a match and pressed forward with an engagement. Her bridegroom was the grand duke of a neighboring principality—a partner who did not fall far short of a Herhardt.
“It’s been far too long, Matthias!”
Catching sight of him as he entered the lobby hall, Katarina von Herhardt spread both arms wide, her face bright with a full smile.
“We have to come looking for you ourselves if we ever want to see your face.”
As always, Elyse von Herhardt’s manner was far more reserved.
Wearing a smile that matched theirs, Matthias stepped toward the two women. It was an ordinary weekend afternoon, and the roses were in bloom.
“The evening breeze is wonderful today, Leila.”
Kyle came forward with a soft smile after stopping his bicycle. Leila, who had been helping Bill put the cart in order after returning from the garden, turned her head toward the familiar voice. Bill’s gaze, shovel still in hand, followed the same direction.
“Let’s get married.”
The words she had heard so often they no longer surprised her trailed after the bland greeting as if they were the most natural thing in the world. After a brief pause, Leila and Bill simply went back to their work with unruffled calm.
“Hello, Kyle.”
Leila greeted him brightly while carrying the leftover seedlings that still needed transplanting.
“I’m not marrying you.”
The added reply was so gentle it only sounded all the more resolute.
Khuh.
Bill let out a sigh as though the pain had reached his own chest. But Kyle, long since immune to rejection, only chuckled lightly and began helping Leila as if nothing were amiss.
“All right. Today’s rejection received. Then I’ll ask again tomorrow.”
“No. Don’t ask.”
“I will. A person’s heart is different today from what it is tomorrow.”
The shameless, unshakable spirit of the young pup was easily the finest in the entire empire.
Bill struggled to hold back a laugh while stealing glances at Kyle and Leila.
The freeloading Etman boy’s proposals, which had begun near the end of the previous summer, had continued without a break through several changes of season.
When Bill first learned that Kyle had proposed to Leila, he had been certain of one of two possibilities: either the youngster had gotten drunk on liquor he could barely handle, or he had gone mad. That was why he had not taken a shovel to the boy’s head. Yet the next day Kyle had reappeared looking perfectly sound and spoken the same words.
How many times had it been by now?
Through autumn and winter, and on into this ripening spring, Kyle had appeared without missing a single day, said the same thing, and been refused every time. At first Bill had cheered for Leila’s firmness; lately he had begun to feel a little sorry for Kyle. If the boy had merely been babbling under the influence of his own feelings, Bill would long since have raised the shovel. But Dr. Etman had given his permission, and so Bill was starting to wonder whether he ought to shift his stance a little.
The previous autumn Dr. Etman had come to the cabin to see Bill. Why not send Leila to university? Bill had hesitated, answering that he would love nothing more but that circumstances did not allow it. The doctor had smiled exactly like his son and said: if the two children held each other in their hearts and wished to become husband and wife, would it not be good to marry them and send them to university together?
It had been a moving proposal, yet Bill had been so unable to believe it that he had only stared blankly at the doctor’s face. To him Leila was the finest child in the world, but Bill was not ignorant of the world’s measures. He knew perfectly well what standing the Etman family held in Carlsbard.
As though reading that thought, the doctor had spoken first.
Kyle told me that Leila is the person who made the good parts of him, and that he wants to live as a good man at her side.
Bill had been more than a little astonished that the little freeloader who used to sit in the cabin eating meals had spoken such words to his own father.
It was a rather sincere heart—too sincere to dismiss as the thoughtless feeling of children.
But Doctor, our Leila is…
When Bill could not finish the sentence, Dr. Etman’s smile had grown even kinder.
I am not without interest in a bride with a fine family and fine prospects, but I know very well that Leila is a good child even without those things.
His smiling face had looked exactly like his son’s.
If, by next year when they decide their paths, Kyle’s heart has not changed, I should like to give the two children my blessing. What do you think, Mr. Remmer?
As for Mr. Remmer’s heart that day, Bill Remmer had felt so joyful and grateful that he could have carried the man who was clearly an angel in human form on his back and run all through Carlsbard—no, all through the Berg Empire. He had held himself back for Leila’s dignity, but that had truly been how he felt.
And yet Leila—what was he to do with that stubborn girl?
Resolving that he would somehow have to devise a plan, Bill set the shovel he still gripped down with a clack in the shed.
“By the way, Matthias. You know Dr. Etman’s son as well, don’t you?”
The Duchess of Herhardt, who had been stringing out tedious chatter about the princess’s marriage, lowered her voice a little as she asked. Katarina von Herhardt had already retired early, so only mother and son sat at the broad dinner table.
“Yes, Mother.”
Matthias set down the glass of water from which he had taken a sip and answered calmly.
“Kyle Etman. Dr. Etman’s only son.”
“That’s right. That boy Kyle is getting married, it seems.”
Her voice took on an edge that foreshadowed how little she welcomed the match. Matthias waited quietly for her to continue.
“The orphan raised by the gardener of our estate—her name was Leila, I believe.”
Leila. Matthias silently shaped the name with his lips alone.
“She is hardly a bride of the sort the Etman family would accept.”
Having swallowed the name, Matthias continued in a voice that had grown even lower and drier.
“That is why it is so preposterous. Even Grandmother’s earnest efforts to find him a good match have been made to look ridiculous.”
Her tone turned still more irritable.
Matthias added no further reply, yet his mother, as though she found the subject delightful, went on at length about the talk of Kyle Etman’s marriage that was currently heating all of Arvis. Mrs. Etman, who had strained every nerve to secure a titled in-law, still found Leila unsatisfactory, but it seemed she had been unable to overturn the will of her husband and son.
Unless something unforeseen occurred, Leila would marry the doctor’s son and go to university. They would set up their newlywed household here in Lutz and study together—after the coming summer had passed. After that season of blooming roses had gone by.
“Grandmother was deeply disappointed as well. She had always been so fond of Dr. Etman’s son.”
“Yes. She was.”
Matthias took the napkin in the hand that had set down the cutlery. His knuckles stood out white.
“Mrs. Etman has become truly pitiful. She was a lady of far more refinement than her station, and now she will lose the social foothold she worked so hard to establish by taking in a ridiculous daughter-in-law.”
She moistened her lips with a sip of wine.
“What lady of quality would wish to cultivate a friendship with the wife who has made so base an orphan the partner of her heir?”
“The situation may yet change.”
Matthias faced his mother with an upright posture.
“They have not married yet.”
“I rather doubt it, Matthias. If the situation could change, Mrs. Etman would not have taken to her bed. Dr. Etman’s will is extremely firm, and above all Kyle is said to be utterly smitten with that orphan.”
His mother expressed her pity for the doctor’s wife—who would soon be cut off—by clicking her tongue.
“She is a strikingly pretty child, to be sure. Letting her son keep company with a girl like that was the root of the trouble.”
When she rang the bell, the waiting maids brought in dessert.
“To snatch Mrs. Etman’s place in that fashion—that girl is quite bold. Or should one say clever?”
She gave a light shrug of her shoulders and took up her dessert fork.
“It is rather absurd to blame the girl, though. The greatest fool is Mrs. Etman’s son, who has blinded himself over a single woman and brought disgrace upon his family.”
Having reached the conclusion she desired, Elyse von Herhardt turned the conversation at that point.
While talk of society and its familiar, tedious names resumed, Matthias kept his place in quiet stillness.
Leila.
The name lingered on the tip of his tongue like the flavor of the wine he had just sipped.
Leila. Leila Lewellin.