Petrus had already started making a list of all the things that might have startled Lady Jenny enough to have her out of bed so early in the morning, but those thoughts took on another shade of meaning when she glanced back to the family wing of the house, as if she’d come from there and not up the stairs from the public part of the palace.
“I…I…that is…I was just….” The poor woman turned bright red and began fiddling with the sleeves of her robe. After her one look back to the family wing, she seemed to deliberately not look in that direction. “I couldn’t….”
Petrus couldn’t allow the poor woman to continue to flail. “It is alright, Lady Jenny. As you see, I am up and about for my own reasons this morning as well.”
“Yes,” Lady Jenny said. She lowered her head and looked as though she might burst into tears.
Petrus couldn’t let that pass either.
“My lady, are you certain all is well with you?” he asked what he perhaps should have asked long before. “Only, you’ve seemed so distressed of late, and I would hate to think that I had a hand in that.”
His suspicions about Lady Jenny’s reasons for being upset seemed to be confirmed as she glanced woefully up at him. “It is not your fault, your highness,” she said in a tiny, hopeless voice. “It is just…I am stuck…you see….”
Petrus did not see, and when Lady Jenny lowered her head and let out a plaintive sob, it tugged hard on Petrus’s heartstrings.
“Please tell me all,” he said, inching closer to her, but without any real desire to touch her. “Perhaps the problem can be solved.”
“It cannot,” Lady Jenny sobbed, glancing up at him with glassy eyes. “For, you see, my father sent me here for a specific purpose.”
Petrus swallowed hard. He knew full well what that purpose was, and his part in it.
Lady Jenny seemed to know that he knew. The two of them stared at each other for a long moment before she continued with, “I have failed at that purpose, andFarhas said he will call me home before the new year if I am not engaged by Christmas.”
Petrus winced. He’d suspected something like that, but had deliberately avoided thinking about it because of the position it placed him—and Charlotte—in.
“I take it you do not wish to return to Sweden?” he asked quietly.
Lady Jenny started to look over her shoulder toward the family wing, but stopped herself at the last minute and shook her head. “I do not,” she said in a squeak. “I…I love….” She bit her lip and fretted with the hems of her sleeves. “I love Aegiria so, and I wish to live my life here.”
Petrus wondered if that was what she’d started out saying. He wondered if Lady Jenny had been about to confess something to him that would hurt for him to hear. She had come to Aegiria to be his bride, after all, and things like that could ignite in a woman’s imagination. He could not recall doing anything specifically to make the poor woman fall in love with him, but the promise of being a princess and living a fairy tale life could have made a home in her imagination.
And if Lady Jenny had somehow convinced herself she was in love with him, if her heart would be broken by being sent back to Sweden, he felt deeply responsible for that. The guilt of it was almost too much, particularly as he could never love Lady Jenny. He was Charlotte’s and she was his.
“Never fear, my lady,” he told Lady Jenny anyhow. “We will come up with something. I promise you that.”
The grateful way Lady Jenny looked up at him, with tears clumping her lashes, shot straight to Petrus’s heart—in a platonic way, a way that made him feel responsible.
“Go back to your room now and prepare to face the day,” he told her. “I will think on this matter and determine what can be done.”
Lady Jenny nodded, and without saying another word, she hurried on into the guest wing.
Petrus frowned and rubbed a hand over the lower half of his face. He started on to the family wing slowly, rolling the problem around and around in his head. His whole heart was with Charlotte, but his duty to his family could not be discounted so lightly. He owed so much to his family. If it came down to it, if the king ordered him to go through with his intentions for him and Lady Jenny, he wasn’t certain he would be at liberty to disobey.
Those thoughts were still rolling restlessly in his mind when he entered the family wing and spotted Brigitta coming out of her apartment. Of course, his intrepid sister was already dressed for the day and looking as though she were ready to take on an invading army, like some sort of Viking princess, like their mother.
Brigitta took one look at Petrus and burst into a snorting laugh. “Well, well. What have we here? Wandering the halls of the palace in your nightclothes, are you?”
Normally, Petrus would have joined in with her joking, but his heart was too troubled.
“I’ve just encountered Lady Jenny in the corridor,” he said, gesturing back toward the staircase so that Brigitta would not get the wrong idea. “She’s told me something quite disturbing.”
Brigitta lost her teasing demeanor and strode down the hall to meet him.
“What is it?” she asked. “Is something wrong? Is she ill?”
Petrus vaguely knew that Brigitta and Lady Jenny had become close friends, but he hadn’t realized how deep that friendship was until he saw the concern in his sister’s eyes.
That only added another layer to his pressing sense of responsibility.