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Updated: June 27, 2025
"The councillors from Gefle claimed Your Majesty's immediate attention," Bjelke reminded him. "So you said at the time. But the business seemed none so urgent when we came to it. There was no other reason in your mind no suspicion?" His keen, dark blue eyes were fixed upon the pale masklike face of the secretary. That grave, almost stern countenance relaxed into a smile.
He did not seem to hear the announcement. His attention was all upon the letter, his lips drawn back from his teeth in a grin, and beads of perspiration glistening upon his brow. "His Majesty " the chamberlain was beginning to repeat, when he broke off suddenly. "Your Excellency is ill?" "Ill?" Bjelke stared at him with glassy eyes.
"I suspected no more than I suspect now," was his easy equivocation. "And all that I suspect now is that some petty enemy is attempting to scare Your Majesty." "To scare me?" Gustavus flushed to the temples. "Am I a man to be scared?" "Ah, but consider, Sire, and you, Bjelke," Armfelt was bleating. "This may be a friendly warning.
When he was gone, the chief of police turned to Bjelke. "It grieves me, Baron, that we should meet thus, and it is with difficulty that I can believe what is alleged against you. Baron Armfelt is perhaps rendered hasty by his grief and righteous anger. But I hope that you will be able to explain at least to deny your concern in this horrible deed." Very tense and white stood Bjelke.
"Very well," he said, and suffered them to thrust him back into his carriage and carry him away to the waiting Lillesparre. He found Armfelt in the office of the chief of the police, haranguing Ankarstrom, who was already there under arrest. The favourite broke off as Bjelke was brought in. "You were privy to this infamy, Bjelke," he cried. "If the King does not recover " "He will not recover."
Am I to be denied so ordinary a boon?" His voice quivered with sudden anger and something else. "Such are my orders, Baron." Bjelke pleaded for five minutes' grace for that leavetaking. But the officer had his orders. He was no more than a machine. The Baron raised his clenched hands in mute protest to the heavens, then let them fall heavily.
Stockholm was held by the widow of Sten Sture with a half-famished garrison. In Kalmar another woman, Anna Bjelke, commanded, but her men murmured, and the fall of the fortress was imminent. When Gustav Vasa, who had slipped in unseen, exhorted them to stand fast, they would have mobbed him. He left as he had come, the day before the surrender.
Like many another prince who has come to a violent end, he was born to the wrong metier. "I derived the notion," he continued, "from a sanbenito in a Goya picture." "An ominous garb," said Bjelke, smiling curiously. "The garment of the sinner on his way to penitential doom." Armfelt cried out in a protest of mock horror, but Gustavus laughed cynically. "Oh, I confess that it would be most apt.
"I inferred it from your absence from Court on such a night. What has been keeping you?" But, without waiting for an answer, he fired another question. "What do you say to my domino, Bjelke?"
They could not guess that Baron Bjelke, the King's secretary and favourite, carried in his hands the life of his royal master, or its equivalent in the shape of the secret of the plot to assassinate him. In many ways Bjelke was no better than the other profligate minions of the profligate Gustavus of Sweden. But he had this advantage over them, that his intellect was above their average.
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