THE HAUNTED KINGDOM 3, CHARLES E.J. MOULTON [best desktop ebook reader TXT] 📗

/> She could see herself and her Steven kiss for the first time by that tree.
She could see herself make love to Steven last week under the Waterfall.
She saw herself dance a saltarello to Bantrard’s music at her wedding day.
She saw her father’s face as he met his horse Mercutio for the first time in a long time again behind that house by the monument.
She saw herself quarrelling with Steven and making up inside the chapel.
She saw herself skinny dipping under the waterfall and she saw herself singing songs on the field.
She saw herself reprimanding her own siblings and she saw herself hugging her own father.
Belinda felt herself walk into the cathedral and seek comfort inside the blissful sanctities and meeting the sweet angels again and again and also saving that old woman.
Tears and laughter passed before her inner eyes as she walked up that hill with the other women and she knew then and there, she went meant for this place. She was meant to live here, to stay here, to be here as an old woman, taken care of her friends and loved ones.
Belinda was content to be a Winsletenna and forever call herself a royal blessing.
As she sat down on the blanket and unpacked the wine and the bread, one of the women told her she had a husband that worked for the army and she blabbered on about why she felt so neglected. Well, Belinda told the woman that the reason why was that the woman expects the rivalry from her husband and his profession. She told the women to just expect more from her husband and the woman smiled and nodded that she might be right. For the first time in what Belinda expected was a long time the woman smiled and she could almost see how the two nuptials were brought together in that loving, sweet and very happy grin.
As Belinda looked up, she saw a very clear and blue sky, a sun that shone down upon the palace ground like a gift on a rainy day.
She had to smile, because she in her heart that after all the trouble and after all the nightmares she was home at last. Not in a haunted kingdom. But like her own father, home in her own heart.
Home in her own person. Home in her own mind.

§
Few miles from the Danish Channel, Northern Coast of Prosperania

Tuesday April 30th 1435

Four times before he had been here in all his life. The first time had been with his Father when the channel had been reopened for harbour traffic. His father had taken him along to meet the Generals of the Channel Trade and he had been impressed with them. The king had taken him alone to this place and showed him the lovely, endless sandy beach with its weed and straw and they had thrown stones into the water and bonded like never before. He added that Olandus was on the other side of the ocean. When the Roman Empire decided to dig this channel under Emperor Constantine’s rule it was obvious that they decided to take a very unorthodox road. The northern states had just become annexed and the province of Dania let off some steam about the channel. Constantine however said it would be easier to ship goods along the coast with the channel there. It was much due to the fact that Dania had been very well treated by the new Christian elite that started to emerge in Rome. They were mostly volunteers from the upper class who found God in the help of others.
Alexander’s father claimed that he could remember how the ships passed by here and how he would stand with his father and wait when they went through the channel and into the night. The splashing of the waves always reminded him of his father, somehow that experience of hearing him talk on that day left an undying trace in his mind that his father had some special relationship with the sea.
He had been just a boy then, sometime in the end of the 1370’s.
Looking back on his long life, he was struck by his own health. He came from a long line of long living people. He was 66 now and still not any more tired and worn out than ten years ago.
The timeless sea made him think about how time worked.
The second time he had been here was after Lucinda was sent into exile. He had known that the newly appointed servant Rolf had waited for two weeks in the neighbouring hut whilst Alexander took a walk every day from the mansion by the water and contemplated what had actually happened and why it happened at all.
He returned to the soothing atmosphere of this place to have his affair with Grand Duchess Madeleine de Lamberville. For two months he had been gone and Sieglinde had only thought that he was on errands to negotiate with the Channel Guard. Being a woman, however, she felt when something was wrong and she left Iuventus Sacrum in her own coach and headed for the most probable place to find Alex Winsletenna. She found him making love to Madeleine and soon enough she was gone, pregnant with child and angry at her dearest. Rumours spread and Madeleine was sent away back to Vindobon where she stayed for the rest of her life. She married and was never heard of again. It was the luck of the angels that made Sieglinde return from her home country to battle it out with her loved one. She claimed to be underestimated, betrayed and knew that the relationship had gone on for quite a while, ever since the bad days of 1392, when Lucinda was destroying their lives.
Alex stayed away after that.
It was not until 1412 when he brought his daughter Belinda here to spend a month in the mansion by the sea. When he left he told his wife that the woman he was going with was no rival and she sniggered. She didn’t laugh. Belinda fell in love with the place and went on her own four times after age 17 just to think, to rest and to eat well.
This was the fifth time he sat on this very spot.
He remembered this very stone being here since, well, since 1379.
The wind was blowing in his hair and he knew that somewhere in the distance an angel was watching him, protecting him.
“Come to me” she said. “Feel my love.”
When the wind blew around his greying black locks he felt like a sailor on leave at the shore. A man with a home far, far away with his family right by his side. There was something wonderful about watching those waves gently crash against shore, the sand under his bare feet. He was the emperor of a large land, but wasn’t it extraordinary. He didn’t feel like that at all. He felt like what he was. The same little boy who had been here at this very spot for decades, singing to himself.
The colour of the sky was light blue, some clouds were drifting and a seagull or two landed on a rock outside in the green giant named the sea. “Find my love” the angel said. “Feel my deepest heart.”
An old bible quotation came to mind. He had read it over and over as a child, being tutored in the chapel of Iuventus and he had learned it by heart.
The fifth chapter of the first Corinthians had an eighth verse:
”Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.”
Right here, right now, this was what he felt. Truth was in him and outside of him. He remembered fond memories and he found that he had all along only done one thing. Sought the truth.
The warm weather soothed his skin, the wind tickled his nose, the sky made him calm, the seagulls made him soft. A woman came to him from behind. She was barefoot just as he was. She embraced him and said: “Hearken, I am here at your side!” and he answered that he was so happy that this was the truth and still would be so many more years to come. God had brought them all together to prosper in this most prosperous of kingdoms, in this most blossoming of lands.
Sieglinde laid him down on the sand and lay down next to him.
Without a word, she took his hand.
A spider crawled up between her toes and left without a reaction coming from her at all.
The spider tried the same with the bare feet of the king and left when no proved reaction was due.
So, it came to pass that the emperor and the empress, the king and queen of the greatest nation under the sun, lay under the blue sky watching the clouds for the rest of the day holding hands, not having to prove anything to each other, not fathomed in insatiable lust, not wildly drinking mead at a loud party, but just laying there, happy, quiet, content and with just that much of a calm smile on their faces to make the whole world light up in streams and rays of purely angelic magic.
The woman took his hand, smiled and raised one eyebrow. The man understood the hint. It was what she had done back when they were young. They had met in their teens and in the Grand Hall they would dance to old songs to the ensemble of fidicula and psalterium.
Would she know him in another life? Yes, she would. This woman was the woman of his dreams.
So, the royal couple danced on that beach to the cool sound of waves splashing against the shore. It was delicious to hear those waves splash against the sand. There was a coolness to that sound that warmer than the promises of the gates of heaven.
The king knew why he had gone through hell: he had travelled through Hades only to come into the arms of his love.
He knew that the crown meant nothing without his wife.
That was why he was here.
Not for fame, not for fortune, not for hate, not for fear.
He was here to love.
That was the only reason he was incarnated as a spectacular king of an everlasting empire born to meet the God of the alternate reality.
The couple danced a slow dance to the sound of nature and they knew that they found the sun of their own beach not in the sky. They found the solar bliss in each other’s everlasting iris.
Peace, that eternal peace, had arrived at last in their lives.
God loved them not for their fame, but for the shape of their souls.
What was the summary of his life?
He had chased fortune, but found that in truth he needed himself and his own love for humanity in order to survive. Not for other people’s sake, but for his own so he could save even those who thought themselves lost in the face of unreal danger.
Heaven was the real enigma of faithful belief in the hearts of those who knew how to love others. Love was not a crazy and sweaty or sensual frolic to him anymore. Love was a true response in his heart to fear and the solution to every problem. Life as they had known it was returning.
In the face of love no