Page 43 of The Girl Beneath the Sea

Here we are again.

Before I have time to sit down, the door opens without a knock. Prime Minister Reinhardt looks as though he has been up for hours and I expect that he has.

He stops when he sees me. Then he gives me a perfectly correct bow.

“Highness,” he says. “It is good to have you back.”

Behind him the two men from the corridor come in and take up positions by the door. Reinhardt turns his head a fraction and they go out again and the door closes.

So it is just us. And the camera.

He comes closer. He does not touch me. He never has, of course.

He walks around me instead, slowly, all the way around. I stand still and let myself be inspected.

He looks at my face for a long time. Then my hands. He lifts one by the blanket, not the skin, and turns it to the light and looks at the wrist, where the cuffs were. The marks have gone. Reinhardt lets the hand fall.

“You are not injured.”

“No.”

“You were fed.”

“Yes.”

“You have lost a little weight. It is not a great deal.” He frowns, almost as if disappointed, then steps back, then nods. “Good.”

Good. It is as if I have been returned to the palace from a loan to a museum and he has checked the crate for damage.

“You will bathe. Your clothes are laid out. I will send for the dresser to come in one hour.” He indicates the bedroom without looking at it. I look, and there they are, on the bed. I have been given a navy suit with a silver sash folded beside it. My medals are beside them in an open case. My shoes are on the floor at the foot of the bed with the toes together.

“I have arranged a recording at ten. Short. Here in the suite, one camera. You will stand at a podium beside me and you will read.” He puts a hand inside his jacket and takes out cards and lays them, one after the other, on the low table beside the chessboard. My lines. “You will read these while the doctors are with you. You are grateful to be safe. You are grateful to the American agencies for their support. You are grateful to your own people who never stopped. You do not remember very much. You were kept in the dark and you were frightened and it is over.”

“Was I?”

He looks up from the cards.

“Frightened,” I say. “The whole time?”

“I would think so, Highness. Yes.”

“Where is Havel?”

It comes out before I have decided to say it. I hear it in the room and I do not take it back.

Reinhardt straightens the last card so that its edge is in line with the others.

“Colonel Havel was responsible for your safety on the night you were taken from us. He has been relieved and he has been sent home. It was his own request.” He looks at me. “It was the honorable thing. You would not have wanted him to stay. Not after what happened.”

“I trust Colonel Havel.”

Irritation flickers across the prime minister’s face. “Read the cards. Get clean and get yourself dressed.” His nose wrinkles. “Take off that filthy hoodie and that blanket. You are a prince of the realm.”

For a moment, I do not move. I don’t want to. The moment I drop the hoodie and the blanket, he will see my neck.

But I can’t hide it.

I shrug the blanket from my shoulders and let it drop on the carpet, then I put my hands to the hem of the sweatshirt and pull it up and over my head.