Mermaid_ A Twist on the Classic Tale - Carolyn Turgeon [30]
“You housed the son of my enemy. Of all our enemies. There is no room for such a man in the kingdom of God.”
The abbess looked up at him, and her expression was strong, despite her submissive posture. She spoke calmly. “It is our code, Your Royal Highness. We must take care of the ill, the wounded. He was not armed. He was almost dead when we found him.”
The king stepped forward. “We do not care for the enemies of God. Do you dare to think you know better than I, your king? I sent my daughter to you for safekeeping.”
Margrethe cringed. It was excruciating to watch. The others stood around, wide-eyed, shocked at the display before them. Margrethe prayed that no one would reveal how close she’d been to the Southern prince. She had no idea what her father would do if he knew that she’d been in his room alone with him, in the garden alone with him, that he’d kissed her hand by the ancient wall.
Margrethe looked to the others, who dropped their gazes when their eyes met hers. Of course. No one else would look at her. They would all feel betrayed by her, nervous about what they had said in her presence.
“Forgive me,” the abbess said. “But, Your Highness, in the eyes of God we are all equal …”
Her words made the king angrier, and his guardsmen stood, waiting for his instructions. But Margrethe could see their discomfort: they did not know what the king would have them do here, in a house of women and God. Even she, his own daughter, no longer knew what he might be capable of.
He responded to the abbess slowly, doing nothing to hide his contempt. “You are fortunate, Reverend Mother,” he said, “that my mother thought so highly of you.”
“We have loved your daughter as one of our own. Broken bread with her, knelt with her in prayer.”
“She is not one of you,” he said, his voice booming against the stone walls. “The prophets said at her birth that it would be she who would bring forth the next heir to the kingdom.”
Many of the nuns visibly started to hear such blatant heresy from the mouth of the king.
He looked around, indifferent to their shock. “Did any of you collaborate with the enemy, or have knowledge of him?”
Panic moved through the room, a sense that something horrible was about to happen. Margrethe did not know what to think. She’d never paid much attention to the stories about her father: what he’d done in battle, the ferocity for which he’d been praised and rewarded. The rumors about how he had come to the throne. She realized now that he was capable of anything.
“Father, please!” Margrethe said. It was unbearable, watching this. These were holy women. She was shocked to see the abbess spoken to this way. It was she who oversaw these women who spent their life in devotion and prayer, for the whole kingdom, for all of them.
He turned to her, his face red and eyes bulging, his cape whirling behind him, and she willed herself not to shrink from him. No matter that he was her father: he was the king, appointed by God to rule over His favored land.
But she was his heir. Her child would one day be a great ruler, greater than he.
“Father,” she repeated, “I am the one who found him nearly drowned, on the shore. Do not blame these women!”
“What?” He stared at her in disbelief.
It was like the whole world was crumbling apart and it was up to her, her words, to stop it.
“He was not here to hurt me,” she said. “He did not know who I was. I found him on the shore, and I ran to the abbess for help. I begged her to help him.”
“You were alone, unguarded?” he asked. His rage like a physical presence in the room.
“I was outside, getting fresh air, and I saw him. Barely alive, all his men dead, brought here by …” She did not know how to tell them. Her father would think she had gone mad, living here by the sea, and the nuns would think she was a heretic, first a child of prophecy and then a girl who spoke to mermaids.
The men rushed back into the