The Robber Princess

Chapter 3. The Queen Turns Human

Chapter 3

Brickelstein lay awake most of what little night had remained by the time he finally had retired to bed. He had given the next day off to those of his staff who had accompanied the delegation and had decided not to go into the office himself either.

But Queen Gertrude had other plans. An eleven a.m. knock woke him up. "Enter," he called absent-mindedly as he pulled himself upright.

It was his personal valet Horst, accompanied by Major Streichwitz. "Very sorry to wake you, sir," said the Major. "The Queen has summoned you at fifteen hundred hours today. And, sir" -he hesitated with apprehension-"you probably would like to read these." He laid a stack of newspapers on the overstuffed chair opposite the bed.

"Thank you, Major," said Brickelstein and his subordinates withdrew. When the door latch softly behind them, Brickelstein rolled out of bed and picked up the top newspaper, the Eidelmarker Zeitung. The incident's press coverage was even worse than he had feared. The headline read "Nightmare fiasco at Rochevaux Palace derails treaty" and the front page featured an enormous, particularly unflattering picture of Queen Gertrude so angry that her eyeballs bulged out of their sockets. The article pilloried Eidelmark's delegation for its over-indulged displays of national pride. Brickelstein sighed; the writer was right. The Great Recession had hurt both countries and a commerce treaty would have benefited both. The full story took three pages; Brickelstein read it in full, put the paper down, and drew a deep breath. The story recounted the previous night's events accurately and with a surprising amount of detail, right down to which hand Gertrude had used to slap Rega. It embarrassed him to read such an honest, candid account.

Brickelstein eyed the rest of the stack with dread. If the mainstream paper's coverage was so negative, then the more partisan opposition papers' coverage would be devastating. The leftist Tägliche Progressiv excoriated the Queen for her cavalier disrespect of Eidelmark's national treasures and accused Brickelstein of dereliction of duty to failing to protect the artifact. The communist Arbeiters Manifest was even more vicious, not only reiterating its call for revolution against the monarchy (which it did every other week anyway, almost like clockwork) but also mocking the nobility for their extravagance and haughtiness. Against the latter point Brickelstein also found difficult to argue.

Brickelstein then took up the royalist paper, Völkersweltanschauung, hoping that its coverage would be more sympathetic, but even the Queen's most supportive journalists called out her taking the Eidelstein out of the country as "irresponsible." A paragraph about Brickelstein buried in the second page caught his eye; the story claimed that Brickelstein had been distracted all evening by his infatuation with the Rochevauxian elder princess. Brickelstein blushed, for the assessment was spot on; he had been very distracted and he wondered if he could have done more to prevent the theft. Apparently his private "bubble" with Princess Regina had been pierced more thoroughly than he thought. Another wave of resentment came over him as he realized that the reporter's source had to have been one of those insidious noblewomen who relished in gossiping at other peoples' expense. It troubled Brickelstein that not even the royalist paper was defending him, or even the Queen.

The rest of the stack were foreign papers. Both Eidelmark and Rochevaux were so small and insignificant compared to their neighbors that they tended to be forgotten-yet the events of the previous evening had made the front pages of the Frankfurter Allgemeine, Le Monde, and even The Times of London. Every story made him more and more anxious about his scheduled audience with the Queen. Thinking Folkering might know better her mood, he picked up his telephone and called him. "Have you seen the papers?" he asked, trying to hide a slight quiver in his voice.