Another Scandal in Bohemia (29 page)

“Not disappointed, Nell. Interested. No matter what disguise I had donned, Wilhelm von Ormstein should have seen through it, had one red corpuscle remained among the many blue in his blood.”

“My dear Irene! I question neither your arts of disguise nor your effect on the King of Bohemia, or indeed, on the whole of the opposite sex. I have seen the success of both too often. But why should the King remember you after an interim of almost two years when he is now wed and you are got up like a Spanish dancer?”

“Spanish dancer? Nell, you wound me.”

“I’m sorry, Irene, but there is nothing subtle about raven hair, and you are on occasion less than subtle.”

She mock-pouted for a moment before adopting a preening gesture that ended in her petting the glossy locks in question. “At least Godfrey does not agree with you.”

I sighed. “Godfrey may be a paragon among men, but I imagine that he is typical enough of his gender that the sight of his wife in a radical new light may give him the safe illusion of variety without risk.”

“That is a rather profound observation, Nell, and quite worldly. A good thing that I whisked you away from wicked Paris and off to stodgy old Prague.”

“Old, but not stodgy enough for my taste.”

Another voice answered me.

“Are you talking about the King?” Allegra inquired, joining us on the settee. “He seemed utterly, too, too stodgy to me, though he is the first King I have met. Of course, he is old, as you observe, Miss Huxleigh, and perhaps I expect too much of royalty.”

We both stared at Allegra’s eager, innocent face. Old? At one-and-thirty? And the King was exactly Irene’s age. Irene herself had keenly noticed the implication, as was shown by her next remark.

“My dear ‘little sister,’ you will soon find that age is relative, and especially relative as one ages oneself. The King of Bohemia is in the prime of life.”

“Perhaps, but he struck me as a stuffy old sofa.”

“What was your impression of the Queen?” I asked.

Allegra made a face. “Quite, quite ordinary! So disappointing. A milksop, although she seemed pleasant enough. But Irene... I mean, Mrs. Norton... was the only regal person present. And Mr. Norton would make a most distinguished King, with all those medals glittering on his frock coat It is too awfully bad that the right people never are born to the right parents.”

“Adorable child!” Irene said, kissing Allegra’s cheeks in turn in the French fashion I found so affected. “What impeccable taste you have.” Her impending hilarity broke out so flagrantly that we ended by laughing with her until tears filled our eyes.

“You must understand,” Irene continued, taking Allegra’s hands and becoming serious, “that the Queen may seem so colorless and stiff only because she is deeply troubled. In fact that is a secret reason for our presence here in Bohemia. So you must not judge where you do not know the entire case. Do not forget, we are the Queen’s women here, and we owe her at least the benefit of the doubt.”

“Oh, I am sorry,” Allegra said, contrite. Real tears sprang as quickly to her eyes as those caused by laughter. “How easy it is to mock those apparently more fortunate than we. I never dreamed that the Queen could harbor a Secret Sorrow. Does... Mr. Norton know?”

Irene shook her head and put her finger to her lips. “Some things even the best of men cannot be privy to. The Queen’s trouble is our sole knowledge. She risked much to tell even us.”

“Oh, it is tragic!” Allegra wrung her hands. “I had no idea that such unhappiness could exist under a diamond tiara, in the face of such ceremony and bright light. I will say nothing to anyone, not even to Mr. Norton, I swear!”

Irene nodded, satisfied that Allegra knew as much as necessary, and no more, and that the girl was sufficiently impressed by Irene’s melodrama to quell any youthful tendency to... blurt out... untimely revelations. Poor Godfrey! Now he had three women determined to keep him in utter ignorance, all for his own good.

As usual, Irene had invented a fiendishly clever and simple method to gain us an entry to the Queen. She had written a note the first thing that morning and asked for an audience.

“The Queen has no reason to know us from Eve,” I pointed out when she confided this fact.

“No,” Irene admitted. “But I write a most persuasive note. You do recall my masterful epistle on the occasion of leaving the King and Mr. Holmes an empty safe in St. John’s Wood?”

“Every word,” I said fervently, hearing again Mr. Holmes’s somewhat high and grating yet impeccably expressive voice, reading Irene’s ironically corrosive syllables as if he were casting literary acid at the King. I do believe that he disliked the man as much as I did. The real mystery was why—and how—Irene, the most discriminating of women, had become even momentarily enamored of the Bohemian monarch.

“I do not know why you expect the Queen to be so accessible to intrusive strangers.”

“I know Prague Castle, Nell,” Irene said with a rueful smile. “It’s vast and ancient, and the Queen is isolated and lonely. In her state, she’ll welcome any kind of attention.”

“Poor thing,” I commented tartly.

The answer came after lunch on the heavy paper I found to be favored by royalty. We were all invited for tea at Prague Castle the next afternoon.

“Why?” I demanded, taken aback. “Surely we must seem an unlikely triumvirate.”

“Nothing more natural,” Irene said in blithe triumph, waltzing around the room with the proof of her victory. She ended by fanning herself with the imperial paper. “You are English. I am English—at least in this persona—and Allegra is English. No one is more clannish on foreign soil than the English,”

“But you are Lady Sherlock and the Honorable Allegra. I am a mere secretary!”

“Secretary to an emissary of the Rothschilds. That alone is worth... oh, seven thousand pounds, say. Half the royal houses of Europe owe their continued existence to the enterprise and support of the Rothschilds, even and especially, I suspect, the Saxe-Meningens.”

“Do you mean to say, Irene, that in this spurious and inferior role I am now Somebody?”

“I fear so,” she said contritely.

“Oh.”

“Dearest Miss Huxleigh.” Allegra approached me most docilely. “You are always Somebody in any role, as I remember clearly from your time as our governess.”

Her use of the word “dearest” reminded me most disastrously of her uncle, Quentin Stanhope, now presumed dead. I dared remonstrate no more against Irene’s imperious plan with my usual objections, for I quite hung on the brink of a lamentable emotional collapse.

We dined that night with Godfrey, who instructed us on the political ramifications of the situation. We heard a great deal of Russian ambitions, which were not restricted to the lust for the English possession in India, but wished to stretch outward to Europe’s eastern edge.

“Poland. Bohemia. Transylvania,” Godfrey explained enthusiastically over the sweet. “Even Austria itself. You see how simple, and diabolical, the progression is, Napoleon has inspired imitators.”

He rubbed his hands together in a gesture quite foreign to him. “You see how matters of great moment brew in this bucolic corner of the world? I fear our island England blindfolds itself. Since I have lived abroad, since I have glimpsed the hidden maneuverings of crowned heads and bankers, I have come to see that our globe, our world, our lives are all caught up in an international game of catch-as-catch-can. The Great Game extends to playing fields Great Britain has never imagined. We are the advance guard, like Maclaine’s guns at Maiwand, only it is not Tiger who confronts us, but the great, greedy Russian Bear.”

We could say nothing, we women who knew nothing of such global matters. Only I saw a similarity in Godfrey to Quentin, that both saddened and satisfied me. I wondered what the Rothschilds had drawn us into, and where it would end.

I felt a sudden sympathy for the Golem, poor thing, made and manipulated at its master’s command, then unmade as easily. What blind force was marching across Europe, and where would it stop, if it ever did? Tea with the Queen of Bohemia began to seem the better part of valor.

Chapter Twenty

SCENE OF THE CRIME

I cannot
speak for Irene, but our return to Prague Castle was the most difficult pilgrimage of my life.

We entered by the public gates, an instant reminder of our former intimacy with the Castle and its residents.

Bless Allegra! The girl’s innocent wonder in the vast and ancient stone edifice distracted both Irene and myself from painful memories.

Had it only been eighteen months before that Irene had been a bedazzled innocent expecting to become Queen of Bohemia by the grace of a besotted King? That I had journeyed here alone to witness Irene’s illusion collapse like a house of cards, with the Jack the most fickle face card in the deck?

She hadn’t known Godfrey then; I felt a twinge of traitorous guilt to know that he was now kept ignorant, if not of our destination, at least of its true significance.

“Keep alert for any tidbit of gossip that might shed light on the political situation,” he had advised as we left the Europa Hotel that day. “You may even unearth some rumor of the Golem, though I doubt such superstitions penetrate the castle stones.”

Indeed, such raw concerns seemed remote within those aloof, impenetrable walls. Irene was the usual mistress of her emotions, engaged in playing the part of the fictional Lady Sherlock. Her choice of name was hardly lost upon me. Irene knew that Sherlock Holmes had despised the King and his treatment of her.

 So she came here again, attired in a remnant of the man’s scalding persona: investigating, observing, judging, as she had failed to do before until too late. Now, she was impervious rationality, when she should have been raw emotion.

We were shown to the Queen’s private rooms, formerly those of her sister-in-law, the Duchess Hortense, as she explained endlessly when we arrived.

“The moment we wed, the King resolved that in-laws should not inhibit our married life. His brothers, even his dear mother, were banished to distant castles. They were not overjoyed to leave the capital, but Wilhelm was King and they could not contest his will. I cannot understand that such an authoritative bridegroom should prove such a... hesitant husband.”

“Kings are ever arbitrary beings,” Irene said, with good reason to know. “So the royal relatives have been sent packing. Interesting. The King has a genius for exiling inconvenient persons.”

“Perhaps I am another,” the Queen said.

Clotilde was as pale and impossibly shy as I remembered. She seemed pathetically eager to see us, leading us to a pair of eighteenth-century sofas. Why did I resent in a queen the characteristics that resided so much in my own soul?

“Tea is vital to the English, I hear,” she said in a rush that implied a fear of silence. “I have arranged for some Viennese trifles, but I fear I lack the proper—” She eyed me as if I were some social arbiter. “What are they called, Miss Huxleigh? Sandwiches of cucumber?’

“Cucumber sandwiches are unnecessary,” Irene said, “and vastly over-rated. I myself adore Viennese pastry.”

“How kind of you to say so, Lady Sherlock.” The Queen sounded as if even she did not believe her own words. “I am new to Prague and its customs. Foreign visitors set me at ease. Perhaps it is because they are as at sea as I am.”

I cringed during her self-abasing chatter. She was, if anything, even more pathetic than in Paris. How could Irene tolerate sitting in this palace where she had hoped to rule, watching this inept creature stutter through the most everyday motions?

Allegra, following the precept that the young should be seen and not heard, remained admirably silent. Yet I saw her open, honest face showing wonder at this woman who was so little mistress of herself.

Irene kept deliberately unreadable. Cool, contained, in utter control, she was the exact opposite of the queen. Even her false raven coloring seeming more genuine than the Queen’s pallid, natural blond hair. And the more the Queen dithered, the more icily regal Irene became.

How could she not lash out with her anger and contempt, as she had with the silly women at Worth’s?

“I do not entertain many guests,” Queen Clotilde chattered on. “I am most fascinated by Englishwomen. So eccentric, yet not at all offensive, as are American women. I must say, Lady Sherlock, how much I admired your Worth gown at the reception. Only an Englishwoman would have had the grace to carry off such an extravagant toilette.”

American-born Irene smiled her tightest smile and sipped from her overpainted teacup. “Your Majesty is most gracious. If you recognized the source of my gown, you must be a client of Monsieur Worth.”

“Indeed I am,” the Queen confessed, avid for anything in common with her guests. “The King insists that I be fashionably attired. It was he who urged me to Paris and Maison Worth, although I loathe to travel, and I speak French so poorly...”

“You speak it exquisitely,” Irene declared, “as you do English. But surely you cannot be immune to the wonderworking of Worth?”

“Our Scandinavian court was more conservative, and I was among... my family.” A sudden wrench distorted the Queen’s voice. “Here, I am expected to set a standard. I am... new in my role. I much prefer, in fact, to commission my gowns by way of fashion dolls. In fact, a shipment from Worth has just arrived.”