Bride to the King Read Online Free PDF Page B

mother and, of course, herself.
    Every moment she was not concerned with choosing, discussing and fitting clothes, Zosina spent in thinking how much the company of her sisters meant to her.
    It had been hopeless to try to explain to them that she felt the sands were running out and that once she had left the schoolroom life would never be the same again.
    Strangely enough it was Katalin who realised that she had something on her mind. She came into her room when they had all gone to bed to sit down and say,
    “You are not happy, are you, Zosina?”
    “You should not be up so late,” Zosina replied automatically.
    “I want to talk to you.”
    “What about?”
    “You.”
    “Why should you want to do that?”
    “Because I can feel you are worried and I suppose apprehensive. I should feel the same.”
    Katalin made a little grimace as she went on,
    “Helsa and Theone really want to be Queens and they don’t care what they have to put up with so long as they can walk about with crowns on their heads. But you are different.”
    Zosina could not help laughing at her.
    Katalin was such a precocious child and yet she was far more sensitive than either of her sisters and more understanding.
    “I shall be all right, dearest,” she said, putting out her hand to take Katalin’s. “It’s just that I shall hate leaving all of you and I am frightened I shall have nobody to laugh with.”
    “I should feel the same,” Katalin replied. “But once the King falls in love with you, everything will be all right.” “Suppose he does not?” Zosina asked.
    She felt for the moment that Katalin was the same age as she was and she could talk to her as an equal.
    “You will have to try to love him,” Katalin suggested, “or else the story will never have a happy ending and I could not bear you to be like Mama and Papa.”
    Zosina looked at her in surprise.
    “What do you mean by that?”
    “They are not happy, anyone can see that and Nanny told me once before she left that Papa loved somebody very much when he was young, but he could not marry her because she was a commoner.”
    “Nanny had no right to tell you anything of the sort!”
    “Nanny liked talking about Papa because she had looked after him when he was a baby. She thought the sun rose and set on him because he was so wonderful!”
    That Zosina knew was true. Nanny had been already elderly when she had stayed on at the Palace to look after the girls when they were born.
    Although it was reprehensible, she could not help being curious about her father and she asked,
    “Did Nanny say who the lady was that Papa loved?”
    “If she did, I cannot remember,” Katalin answered. “But she was very beautiful, and Papa loved her so much that the people were even frightened he might abdicate.”
    “How do you know all these things?” Zosina asked.
    At the same time she could not help being intrigued.
    “Nanny used to talk to the other servants, who had been here almost as long as she had and, because they never liked Mama, they used to say all sorts of things when they forgot I was listening.”
    Zosina could believe that.
    Nanny had been an inveterate gossip. She had only retired when she was nearly eighty and died two years later. “Perhaps King Gyórgy is like Papa,” Katalin was saying, “in love with somebody he cannot marry. In which case, Zosina, you will have to charm him into forgetting her.”
    “I am sure he is too young to want to marry anybody.”
    Zosina spoke almost as if she was putting up a defence against such an idea.
    “I expect when they said that he was wild, they meant that there were lots of women in his life,” Katalin said, “but they may be what Nanny used to call ‘just a passing fancy’.”
    “I cannot imagine what Mama would say if she could hear you talking like this, Katalin.”
    “The one thing you can be sure of is that she will not hear me,” Katalin replied. “I am just warning you that you will have to be prepared for all