It was plain he had my father's favor also. "Perhaps Valentine provoked him."
I thought it hardly likely. "Pray, when has Andrew Logan needed provocation to begin a fight?"
"When it would make an enemy of someone who could see him lose his place at court, that's when," my father said. "It is a rare honor to be a King's Messenger, one that no man would lose lightly, and only a very great insult indeed could have made him take such a risk."
I raised one shoulder in a half shrug. "I'm sure Valentine told him no more than the truth."
In his place, I'd have thought of a great many things to tell Logan—that he was a bully, for one, and uncultured, and—
"You think too harshly of the lad," Aunt Agnes said in her mild tone that held the firmer edge designed to shape my manners into something more polite.
I said nothing, though I might have pointed out that Andrew Logan was a lad no longer. The sullen sixteen-year-old who had come here from Scotland was a grown man now with two more years beneath his belt than my own twenty-four, and at the conduit he had fair towered above me, or so it had seemed. I'd been forced to look up, all the daggers of my own gaze being deflected by his stubborn chin.
Plainly my aunt and father had not faced that side of Logan yet, else I would have more of their sympathy.
My father, for his part, was fully focused now on dressing in a way I had not seen him do in some days, and that fact diverted me from my small inconveniences and minor squabbles.
As he fitted on his hat, the one with the fine feather and the polished gilded clip shaped like a rose, I said, "You are called to the palace."
"I am."
"Then the king has returned?"
"He has."
My aunt said, "But the Princess Elizabeth has not yet sailed for the continent. You would think her own father might wish to stay by her till her ship leaves, so she's given a proper farewell."
With one glance, my father reminded his sister the king was not someone to criticize.
Returning his attention to the angle of his hat brim, he asked, "What would he gain by standing on the shore and weeping while the ship sails off? It would not make their parting any easier. The king owes no one any such display of his emotions, for it is in truth a private pain, to lose the ones we love."
Aunt Agnes had no argument to offer, knowing well my father knew that pain himself, and deeply. As did I.
The king had also suffered loss. Of his seven children, only three survived their infancy, and one of those had fallen just this past winter—handsome Prince Henry, the Prince of Wales, pride of our nation—struck down by an illness so sudden the gossips still crouched in their corners and whispered strange theories.
So yes, the king might be forgiven for turning his face from another loss.
Except, "The princess has not died," I told them. "She has only married."
My aunt said idly she saw little difference between death and marriage. "I've observed some women wish for death the longer they are married." She was teasing, but it drew another sidelong look of warning from my father.
"Agnes," he rebuked her. "Do not fill my daughter's head with nonsense. She will marry a fine man of a good family, who will give her healthy children and—"
"—a life of ease at court." I spoke those words with him in unison, an easy thing to do when I had heard them said so frequently. I did not share my father's faith in almanacs and stars, nor in the doctor of astrology who'd cast a figure of the hour of my birth and made that bold prediction.
But I hoped.