Page 5 of Bridget & Gabe Are Not Okay

“As scintillating as that sounds to me,” Oakley said gently,“we cannot wait months and years for these plans to come to fruition. People need to know who you arenow. And that is why I have devisedthis.” She unfurled a horrifyingly long piece of parchment, covered in all manner of words and sentences that were as unappealing to Gabriel as a bunch of spiders holding hands. “My public relations strategy.”

Oakley was very nice. She was around five-and-forty years old, a widow with no interest in remarriage, and had campaigned to Gabriel herself for the job, pitching a new role that not only involved managing the royal household, but the public perception of the household too. He’d been so impressed (and frightened) that he’d said yes immediately, much to the dismay of half of his council. Oakley had a deep olive complexion, wore her mostly gray hair in a single, no-nonsense braid, cycled through exactly seven plain dresses each week, and gave Gabriel a stomachache almost every time he saw her.

Her public relations strategy dictated that he ought to be the common-sense king of the people; if he wished to trick them into actually wanting to be educated, he had to seem warm and reasonable, measured, even-tempered, demonstrating a firm but kind hand when necessary and a genuine connection to his subjects.

“Shall I tell you what your average fellow down at the inn would think of your education proposals?”

“Maybe not?” Gabriel tried, but she ignored him.

“Some jumped-up toff I’ve never met up at the castle thinks I’m stupid, my kids are stupid, and that I should pull them from laboring and cut our family’s income in half to send them off to sit in some stuffy room and be taught advanced numbers, reading, and writing, skills they’ll never need to use in real life.”

“Nobody will think that.”

“That was actually almost word for word what one man thought.” Oakley pulled out another thrice-damned bastard roll of parchment. “John Smith, from Essex. The word he used was not ‘toff.’ It was more anatomical in spirit. We’ve been out on the streets this week, running polls. Would you like to hear the rest of the responses?”

Gabriel would not. He’d taken her point though, and agreed to review the strategy.

He’d then steadfastly ignored it for many months, which meant that Oakley liked to ambush him with it whenever he dared let his guard down.

For example: right now, when he was peacefully perusing a stack of soothingly dusty books that smelled a little like stale bread. One moment he was reading about the history and politics of the Silk Road, and the next she was standing right in front of him, a jack-in-the-box from the depths of hell.

“Good afternoon,” she said, causing Gabriel to spill lemon cordial all over his lap. She curtsied, then sat down opposite him. “I wanted to discuss these Arthurian miracles with you.”

“Are we calling them miracles?” This wording had been officially nixed, but Gabriel knew that once it started slipping into everyday speech, the war was lost.

“That’s right, Your Majesty, we’re not,” Oakley agreed. “But I think we ought to get ahead of them.”

Gabriel supposed he owed her his attention. Things hadn’t been going well. The social engagements he had attempted had been disasters; the people of England remained entirely uncharmed, half of them still in a state of outrage over his heathenish ways.

This talk of miracles, however, was nonsense. There had been claims of an odd beast spotted by a few farmers—always in the distance, its exact physical features confused and blurred—andthat some sheep had died afterward, munched by a mysterious maw. Whispers that it was the work of the Beast Glatisant—the Questing Beast—had grown louder in volume until it was almost impossible to get through a feast without hearing snatches of speculation.

Gabriel refused to entertain it. It was wolves. It wasalwayswolves.

Now someone had apparently spotted the Lady of the Lake, rising ethereally from the waters. As soon as one person insisted they’d seen her, twenty more spawned from nowhere. That was the real magic trick; how instantly eyewitnesses appeared, swearing on their souls that they’d not been mistaken.

“This will all blow over eventually,” Gabriel said, and Oakley sighed.

“If you don’t want this country to be overtaken by rumor and speculation, we need to start telling people the story we want them to hear.”

“Actions speak louder than words.”

“My thoughts exactly, sire,” Oakley said triumphantly. Gabriel had somehow managed to corner himself. “Let me schedule some more appearances for you, farther afield. Attend some feasts, perhaps the rest of the tourney circuit. Get your face out there. Try again.”

Gabriel imagined setting out in the back of a carriage or on horseback, traveling far from everything that brought him meager slivers of joy. No library, no comfortable seat by his own fire. No perfect view of anybody else’s morning walks. “My face will be staying here, as will the rest of me.”

“If you’d just—”

“I’m grateful for everything you’re doing, honestly, Lady Oakley. And I wish I could be the king who could do… any of this. A public speaker, a true diplomat, an ambassador. But I’mnot. I only make things worse. Send somebody in my place. Lord Das, perhaps, or… you could go, although I don’t know how we’d get along without you.”

Lady Oakley considered him for a long time, her index finger tapping a gentle rhythm on the arm of her chair.

“Leave it with me,” she said ominously, and then she got to her feet, curtsied, and swept away.

Untold horrors awaited when she got her hands on a fresh piece of parchment and some ink. Gabriel couldn’t focus on silks and spices anymore. He exited the library, thinking of his bed, and a precious half hour spent with the curtains drawn and the blanket pulled up over his head until someone came to fetch him for his afternoon meetings—and found that he had cut directly across Arthur Delacey’s path.

He was wearing an inky blue doublet Gabriel didn’t recognize, and his skin was sun-soaked bronze after hazy summer days spent cavorting with Gabriel’s sister and Sidney Fitzgilbert. His gently curling hair shone like polished ebony, a glint of something warm in there where it caught the light.

Gabriel felt his traitorous heart leap. Arthur looked good. Really good.Hell.