Another Scandal in Bohemia (27 page)

Allegra flicked a wistful glance to my oblivious friends, lost in champagne and other self-indulgences that it was better not to regard too long. “I had expected to be jealous, but there is no point, is there?

“No,” I agreed heartily, having never dared to cherish ambitions in that direction.

“At least,” Allegra went on in resignation, “I can learn a great deal from her.”

“I would not model myself upon her too much, Miss Allegra.”

“Whyever not? She is a paragon of wit and daring and fashion. I pine to grow old enough to wear black and drip with jewels as she does and have gentlemen—even Kings!—mooning over me. Did you see those diamonds—!?”

“You look more charming in white and pale colors, my dear. And mooning men swiftly become either maudlin or boring. I not only have seen those diamonds, but I carried them to Prague.”

I led her to a pair of chairs, as Irene and Godfrey seemed likely to stand and sip and stare indefinitely.

“You did?” Allegra asked. “You were the guardian of the diamonds?”

“Certainly. Of course, Godfrey was there should some unpleasantness arise. By the way, how did Irene retrieve them for tonight’s affair?”

“You and Godfrey had already left for the Castle when we arrived at the hotel, so Irene whisked into your chamber and fetched them.”

“How could she whisk into my chamber? The door was locked.”

“Not after she picked it.”

“Picked it? That is a new trick. With what?”

“A hatpin,” Allegra said ecstatically as she sat. “Irene says that a good, strong hatpin is a woman’s greatest glory and useful for ever so many things, including stabbing Mashers in crowds.”

“Gracious! She is telling you a great deal that she should not. A properly brought up young woman would never be in a position to repel Mashers because she would never be anywhere, alone, where she might encounter such individuals. And you must not call her ‘Irene.’ ”

“Why not? She told me to.”

“Still, you must not She is your elder and a married lady. You owe her the respect of a proper title.”

Chastened, Allegra’s tender brown head bowed. Then she looked up with a gleam in her bright eyes. “Then, since you are unmarried, I may call you ‘Nell’?”

“Marital status has nothing to do with respect between generations! You may call me ‘Miss Huxleigh.’ ”

“I am twenty!” Allegra burst out irrelevantly. She forced her clasped gloved hands to her lap, a much-advocated posture for proper young ladies that I was pleased to see her remember. “And I am so tired of crossing my feet at the ankles and twiddling my thumbs in the drawing room. It was only because Mama feared I had gone into a decline after the adventure of the summer that she permitted me to travel to Paris. I was escorted by my second-cousin Broderick.” She pronounced the name with a pucker, then brightened. “But he brought me to... Mrs. Norton’s doorstep. It was quite all right after that.”

“I am sure that it was quite not all right. You must understand, Miss Allegra, that your arrival at Neuilly was not properly announced and rather awkward. Your presence here is against everybody’s better sense, but we did not wish to send you home in disgrace. So you will refrain from being seen and heard in Prague, and keep yourself out of dangerous intrigues.”

“Of course. Miss Huxleigh,” she said quietly. “But you must remember that we are no longer in the schoolroom, and I am not your charge and you are not my governess. Therefore, you will call me ‘Miss Turnpenny.’ ”

I drew back, feeling insulted. “What have I been calling you, pray?”

“ ‘Miss Allegra,’ as if I were thirteen years old and still wore my hair down.”

“Oh. I was not aware. It is just that I am so used—”

“Well, Miss Huxleigh, I am used to being addressed as ‘Miss Turnpenny,’ unless I allow you to call me ‘Allegra,’ in which case I should call you ‘Nell.’ ”

Confused, I threw up my hands. Had I journeyed all the way to Bohemia to debate the fine points of address with a former charge? I think not.

“Since we are both unmarried,” I said pointedly, “we will be ‘Misses’ to each other.”

She glanced at my friends. “I should like to be married, if I could be sure of such a handsome and attentive husband as Mrs. Norton has.”

“You will be married,” I assured her, “in good time and to a man who will appear as handsome to you as Mr. Norton does now.”

“You think so?” she asked with a touching trace of uncertainty. What a child she was, under her excessive airs and impatience!

“I know so! But you will never be ‘Mrs.’ Anybody if you poke that inquisitive Stanhope nose into the wrong business.”

“Oh!” She covered the offending feature. “Do I really have my mother’s Stanhope nose?”

“Yes. It is a splendid nose, only highly curious. Quentin has it too.”

“You mean Mr. Stanhope.”

“I mean your Uncle Quentin,” I said severely. “Since we are adults, and old acquaintances, we have decided to use our first names.”

“And don’t you mean ‘had’?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I mean—” Allegra’s honest brown gaze (so like another Stanhope’s of my acquaintance) fell. “You speak in the present tense. My Uncle, my dear Uncle Quentin, is... dead. Pleasant as it is to speak of him to another who knew him, we mustn’t forget that.”

I could have strangled myself. No one but I, Irene, and Godfrey knew evidence existed that might indicate Quentin had survived the deadly trap Colonel Sebastian Moran had set for him. I had nursed that hope in my secret soul, and seeing this engaging child again, forgot what a slender hope it was, and that I must not encourage it in Quentin’s relations without greater proof.

“No,” I agreed in a throttled voice, “we must not forget that he is dead.”

Silence fell upon us both: mine because of my possible deception of this dear child who deserved to share the hope I cherished; hers because she feared, with a youngster’s wisdom, that her elder had failed to reckon with reality.

Into this awkward pause came Irene and Godfrey, among the conscious again, bearing champagne glasses.

I eyed the flute my friend presented to Allegra.

“Miss Turnpenny is too young,” I objected, still seeing in her the schoolroom miss.

“Then is Miss Huxleigh too old?” Irene demanded so mockingly that I accepted the glass Godfrey offered me in patient silence.

Indeed, I needed a distraction. Meeting Allegra again had been unsettling. She set me vibrating between two separate poles: my long-ago role as governess to her and as no one of significance to her uncle, and my new role as friend to her long-lost uncle and herself. A gulf of years and social position separated us, yet was rapidly shrinking in both cases. If only I could give Allegra a hopeful word of her uncle’s survival!

Irene, as usual, apparently read my intemperate thoughts. I found her admonishing eye upon me. A particularly dark eye. She had again been using the preparation that enlarged her pupils for a disguise.

“We traveled long today,” Irene noted, myopically watching Allegra sip her champagne with flushed cheeks. “One glass, my dear girl, and then to bed.”

“Shall you retire also?” Allegra asked ingenuously.

“I am retired,” Irene said into the awkward silence. “From the stage, from the opera house. One glass, then Godfrey will see you to your room.”

“He will?” Allegra brightened immediately and downed her champagne with the same desperate speed as if it had been as repulsive as cod liver oil.

Chapter Eighteen

THE MAKING OF MONSTERS

Irene sighed
, then unfastened her cloak and let it collapse over a vacant chair. The Tiffany corsage burned upon her bosom like incendiary ice.

“Can you come help me loosen this diamond anchor, dear Nell? I am quite weary from traveling all day.”

I rose promptly to accompany her to the bedchamber, suspecting that more than a need for a maid was behind Irene’s request She turned to shut the door behind us as soon as I entered and then smiled wryly.

“And I’m weary from spending five days and nights with Allegra’s chatter, dear child that she is, is also enormously taxing. I pray that with Godfrey seeing her to her rest, later she will sink into blissful peace, quiet, and long, long sleep when we share our suite tonight.”

“She is somewhat taken with him,” I said carefully. “She is utterly mad about him! Can I blame her? Girls of tender age often fix upon an older male acquaintance, even a cousin or an uncle, as a romantic target.” She eyed me inquiringly.

“I’m glad that
I
am not young any longer, and prone to embarrassing misattachments.”

She smiled. “I am glad that I am not young any longer, and prone to embarrassing misattachments. Did you see the King? What did you think of him?”

"Yes. He looked... splendid.”

“Oh! All starch and pomposity. How I ever—No matter. Clotilde seems even more distraught than when she approached us in Paris. I must arrange a rendezvous with her.”

“You are here on Rothschild business!” I said sternly, at last unfastening the heavy yet fragile diamonds.

“Rothschild business will benefit from my worming my way close to the throne. Would you rather I closet myself with the King?”

“No!”

“Then Queen Clotilde it is. Did you and Godfrey learn anything interesting?”

I sat on the adjoining chair, the Tiffany diamonds a glamorous doily across my lap, watching Irene fan herself until the fringe of black curls lifted from her face. Inactivity was death to her; physical fidgeting only indicated the constant working of her mind.

“We’ve made the acquaintance of two Rothschild agents.”

“Two whole days in Prague, and that’s all you have accomplished?”

I bridled. “And... we have made an expedition to a beer cellar.”

“Indeed! Most daring.” Irene wafted the corsage from my lap into its harbor in the lid of her traveling case. “I am impressed. For what purpose?”

She drew me up from the chair as she passed and herded me back to the sitting room, where Allegra and Godfrey waited. I immediately saw that Allegra’s glass was brim full again; even superior men may overindulge pretty young girls. The minx herself sat demure and silent, content with her hero’s recent sign of favor and not eager to attract Irene’s attention to her forbidden second glass of champagne.

“What purpose?” Irene repeated as she sat and lifted her empty glass in both toast and request to her husband.

“To meet with the first Rothschild agent,” I said. “What transpired afterward was more... unexpected.”

“Nell, when one is spying, one must expect the unexpected. What was this untoward event?”

“We saw the Golem,” Godfrey put in. ruining my careful introduction to the subject.

“At the beer cellar?” Irene demanded incredulously.

He approached Irene’s chair to collect her glass. “Outside the beer cellar.”

“Even a Golem must crave to have its thirst slaked,” she observed, while Godfrey poured her another full flute.

He delivered it with a flourish, glancing at my nearly untouched glass. “Perhaps that was why the fellow squawked so, Nell. He craved champagne instead of beer.”

“He squawked?” Irene asked.

I endeavored to give a more rational report of the encounter, “He tried to speak, Irene, but was somehow prevented. The Golem is supposedly a mute creature, but this... figure struggled to speak, and failed. It was quite heart-wrenching, really, as if an animal should attempt speech.”

Irene’s eyes grew sober. “What would a pseudo-man who had been created only to serve say? The Golem was not made to speak, but to serve. Yet our servants will always insist on speaking, eventually. It is most inconvenient of them.”

“This was not the Golem!” I said impatiently. “Some fraud, some figment—”

Irene looked to her husband, who became the compleat barrister.

“Tall,” he said as if testifying in a court of law. “Perhaps seven feet. I felt... diminished. Insufficient. A massive figure blindly reaching out—with his legs and arms, with his smothered, inarticulate voice. Such raw energy, contained power, pain I have never before seen. Had it been a beast, I would have shot it to put it—and myself—out of its misery.”

Irene had sat to attention during Godfrey’s compelling—and unexpectedly vivid—description of our encounter with the Golem of Prague.

“This... figure was truly that large, that... awesome?” she asked.

He nodded, sipping champagne from the narrow apse of the glass. “I hope never to see such a wounded creature again. I—we—could only watch, stricken to silence more than fear. This was not a thing one tries to capture, or describe. One only experiences it and lives to speak of it if one can bear it.”

She turned to me. “Nell?”

Godfrey’s description had shaken me. Hitherto, I had forced my mind to dismiss what I had seen as a delusion or a mistake. Now I felt it, felt the blind flailing center of that manifestation, felt the inhuman, yet human, hurting heart of it. I knew that voiceless fear and rage, knew it for the thin, small voice of humanity arguing hopelessly in the face of universal dissolution and death. I had been such a sightless, soundless, raging creature myself during moments I dared not remember on a bridge outside London not very long ago.