Another Scandal in Bohemia (31 page)

The Queen waited politely, not her first mistake. Irene could have told her that only the bold get answers, and so she leaped into the breach.

“A lovely name," she told the woman, “but I believe that Her Majesty was inquiring as to your surname.”

“I have none,” Tatyana replied icily. “Nor title. I am... Nobody.”

Nobody in the chamber believed that for a moment, least of all Tatyana herself. Irene’s lips curved in a musing smile. She liked nothing better than a mystery and Tatyana was providing her with a tempting one.

“Haven’t I met you at Ascot, perhaps?” Irene continued. “You were wearing a wonderful bonnet of black tulle and calla lilies?”

“I fear not. I have not been to Ascot. I have not been to London. And I would never wear such an obvious bonnet.”

“I have seen you in Paris, then!”

“I have not been to Paris... recently.”

“Neither have I,” Irene blithely lied. Her swift skill at falsehood was most disturbing to one reared to speak only the truth. “I must be laboring under a delusion,” she conceded.

“And now my young sister and I must bid this lovely palace adieu. Thank you for your hospitality, Your Majesty.” She bowed to the Queen, then turned to the King and his strange guest. “Your Majesty. No doubt I shall dine out lavishly when I return to London, with my tale of meeting a King and a Nobody at Prague Castl e.
Au revoir
, Madame Nobody.”

With a last nod, she swept from the room, myself and Allegra at her heels. Something else was at her heels, or at her skirt hem, to be precise: an aggressive dustball of gray fur, yapping wildly for attention.

Irene froze like a housebreaker caught in the act, looking into the room we had left. The archway framed a vignette of King and Queen and mysterious interloper watching us leave.

Impulsively, Irene stooped to capture and elevate the annoying animal. “What a little darling!” she exclaimed, holding the flailing bundle of yapping fur at arm’s distance as if to admire it. “Such an unusual dog. Have you seen the like, dear Allegra?”

“No,” Allegra answered slowly, looking even more surprised when Irene thrust the ill-behaved creature into her arms.

“My sister is fanatically attached to dogs of all sorts,” she explained to the royal party. “They sense her instantly. I am sorry if her affinity has caused a commotion.”

“Not at all,” the King said, looking further bewildered.

“Perhaps Allegra can carry the darling thing until we leave the castle,” Irene suggested.

“As you wish, Lady Sherlock,” he said.

“Thank you. Your Majesty is most gracious. Come, Allegra. Oh... what an adorable creature—”

We proceeded on our way, Irene cooing over the struggling burden in Allegra’s arms all the length of the hall. Luckily, Irene knew the Castle like a guardsman. She whisked right and left in various sequences until we reached the main entrance, where a footman stood on duty to admit visitors.

Irene extracted the dog from Allegra’s arms and thrust it at the unhappy footman. “Here. You must keep this darling dog from running out with us, although we would love to keep the sweet thing.”

The dog’s open maw displayed impressive teeth for its tidy size. With a last pat on the head, neatly avoiding a snap of those active jaws, Irene led us from the ancient huddle of Prague Castle into the daylight of an inner courtyard.

She breathed a sigh of utter relief as the footman, struggling to contain the dog, shut the heavy doors behind us. “At least the miserable dog recognized me, although I had rather he hadn’t. You recall Spaetzl, don’t you, Nell?”

“Not until now,” I said grimly. “A dog as unmannerly as his master.”

“You don’t like the King?” Allegra inquired innocently. Irene flashed me a cautioning glance, though she needn’t have bothered.

“I am not much impressed by royalty,” I told Allegra. “That is what I love about you, Miss Huxleigh; you are not impressed by anyone. I admit that I am not so advanced. I am foolishly elated at having spent the afternoon with a Queen, and at having met a King in private, even if he did not acknowledge my presence.”

She pranced ahead of us in high spirits.

“King Wilhelm is very good at not acknowledging presences of late,” Irene said cryptically.

“Although you have done all you could to announce yours,” I muttered. “Disguise indeed!”

“That makes his ineptitude all the more telling,” she answered with a smile I could only describe as smug.

“It proves that royalty are deaf and blind when it comes to commoners,” said I. “Even the Queen barely remembers us after mere weeks. Still, your luck with the King may not hold forever,” I added softly as Allegra rejoined us.

We were walking through the various courtyards to the drive where our carriage awaited, Irene setting a brisk pace.

I couldn’t help thinking of the Three Musketeers again, though we made a poor substitute for those dashing swordsmen of Old France. Still, we compared impressions of our interesting afternoon, and thus shared an air of camaraderie seldom come by.

“You are quite right, Mrs. Norton,” Allegra began. “The Queen is quite different in private. She was so gay when we discussed the fashions, and shy in a rather touching way. How fortunate that you convinced her to settle on the kinder colors and styles; she has the instinct of a chicken for fashion, poor thing.”

“We cannot all of us be young, beautiful, and supremely confident, my dear Allegra,” Irene retorted mischievously.

“That is true,” the silly girl responded. “It is comforting to know that a Queen can be gauche.” She tripped up the step leading to the carriage without waiting for the driver’s assistance. Irene shrugged, and we “older ladies” installed ourselves within in a more orderly manner.

And so we returned to the Europa, Allegra still chattering about our tea party with the Queen, and Irene uncommonly quiet.

Not until we had arrived in the hotel hall near our separate chambers did Irene speak, and then only to tell Allegra to go to their rooms.

“I wish to speak to Miss Huxleigh about her impressions of this afternoon, then I shall see if Godfrey has returned from his, er, outing.”

Allegra went on down the hall without a murmur while I unlocked the door to my chamber.

Irene rushed in on my heels and shut and locked the door behind us.

“Thank heavens!” she said, throwing herself into the room’s sole upholstered chair and clawing through her reticule.

I sighed to see her extract the mother-of-pearl cigarette case, a cunningly made and lovely thing, but always a precursor of her favorite prop, the abhorred and reeking cigarette.

“Well, Nell,” she began, innocently parroting Godfrey’s unfortunate habit. Perhaps wedded people exchange each other’s peccadilloes as well as vows. “Surely you were as conscious as I of the extremely provocative developments this afternoon at the palace.”

“Ah... yes, of course, but I did not want to say anything in front of Allegra.”

“Very wise. Offer your observations first.”

I watched her fiddle with the case. A mechanism opened a small compartment that held a set of lucifers tiny enough for the Queen’s fashion dolls.

“Well?” Irene demanded.

“How can I speak when your attention is on that revolting ritual? First you will remove a cigarette and then hunt for the holder. Next you will screw the cigarette into the holder and drop one or more of those ludicrously tiny lucifers. When you finally strike one on the rough spot on the case, you must light the cigarette end in haste so as not to scorch your fingertips. Then you will rush to extinguish the lucifer in a dish and huff out a noxious stream of smoke, which makes you look like a hibernating dragon. It is too distracting.”

“Indeed,” said Irene, going through just the gestures I had described, until she leaned back against the upholstery and sighed deeply. “You forgot the final aspiration, my dear Nell, but I admit that your description of my pantomime is accurate enough. Now. You have my full attention. Lay all your suspicions and conclusions before me, and a tempting lot they should be.”

She smiled magnanimously.

No route remained to me but Irene’s favorite device: bluff.

“I find it quite amazing that no one recognized you, or me, for that matter.”

“Whose dullness do you find most hard to countenance—the King’s, the Queen’s, or that of the King’s mistress?”

“Mistress!”

“Surely even you suspected.”

“I did think their behavior rather improper for Allegra’s observation.”

“And consorting with her in the Castle under the Queen’s nose! Willie has grown quite brazen for one who wished me whisked to the wilds of the country not long ago. What do you suppose has given him such courage?”

“The Queen’s utter fecklessness.”

Irene flourished her cigarette holder with the entwining, jeweled gold snake as she expelled a matching spectral serpent of smoke. “And this was the woman he was so terrified of scandalizing! So terrified that he had me hounded across Europe, that he came to London
hims
elf to set Sherlock Holmes on my trail. All to reclaim a mere photograph of the two of us together that he feared might compromise him with his royal bride-to-be. I have heard that marriage changes a man, but Willie has changed into something of a monster. He openly caters to his own gratification at others’ expense.”

I pleated the folds of my skirt on my knee. “I told you that a king is not like other men. You were too American to understand at the time.”

“When we return home, you must teach Casanova the phrase, ‘I told you so.’ Then you will not have to wear yourself out reminding me.”

“Irene, I seldom carp upon your past
mis
calculations.”

“That is true. The present ones offer you enough material for correction. Well. I am not overestimating His Majesty now. Again I ask you, why were we so unrecognized?”

I sighed and forced myself to think. “We had seen the Queen most recently. Although you have altered your name, your voice, and your appearance, I am hardly so easy to disguise. She should have remembered us, except that I am often overlooked.”

“And,” Irene added, “the Queen was greatly distressed when she interviewed us at Maison Worth. She could barely look us in the eye as she described her most embarrassing difficulty; no wonder we didn’t make much of an impression upon her. When she received my declining note, I am sure all hope of help went out of her head. No one is more unobservant than a person lost in the maze of her own difficulties."

“She recognized us the moment you assumed your proper persona.”

Irene nodded. “She may not be completely hopeless, or helpless. But what of the King? How could he have failed to know me, no matter how much hair-black I use, or in what kind of accent I clothe my voice? The man intended at one time—when he was deluding himself, no doubt—to marry me, after all! How could he forget, no matter the guise, and I am told on good authority that this is not one of my more successful impersonations.”

“If you would be more willing to camouflage your beauty you might be more impenetrable.”

“I am not returning to Bohemia looking like a frump!”

“Of course not. You wish to fool the King, but you wish him to yearn after you nevertheless, even if he doesn’t know who you are. Vanity will be your downfall.”

“Perhaps, but it will provide such a lovely exit!” Irene airily brandished her elegant cigarette holder. “And you fail to mention the unlikelihood of a little hair dye and a different accent in concealing a woman from a man who once loved her, if he loved her. Godfrey would never be deceived by me in my present guise.”

“Then why did you use such a fragile façade for the King? I will tell you. You
wanted
him recognize you to salve your vast vanity, and this he has totally failed to do. It has been almost two years since he last saw you, after all. He has grown so heartless in the interim that he neglects his Queen, his bride of less than a year. Now you tell me that he consorts with foreign women. I never did like King Willie, but he has descended to depths of depravity even I never imagined.”

Irene nodded, an odd expression on her face. “Yes, Willie is quite unlike himself. However, if one must revisit an old suitor, I suppose it is best to find him descended to depths of depravity. And that brings me to the third person who failed to recognize us.”

“Third person? There was no other... even the servants were strangers.”

“Yes, they were. Most telling.”

“What ‘third person,’ Irene? In a moment I expect you to inform me that the Maison Worth mannequins should have come to life and recognized us.”

“What a notion! No, at least they are exactly as they should be, something of a comfort in the Prague we find before us. I refer to the rather intimidating Tatyana. If she did not recognize us, and I am not so sure of that, surely you, Nell, recognized her.”

“Of course I did! She briefly approached Godfrey and myself at the reception.”

Irene sat bolt upright, wrenching her smoldering cigarette from its holder. “She did? Neither you nor Godfrey mentioned this. When did it occur?”

“When you and Allegra made your grand entrance, or, rather, when you entered and Allegra followed. This Tatyana could not keep her eyes off of you, especially when you dallied for some words with the royal couple.”

“And you mean to say that you never suspected her identity?”

“That she was the King’s mistress? How could I? And, besides, you have only your instinct to attest to that.”

“My instinct is apparently superior to yours. You truly cannot recollect where we have seen her before?”

“ ‘We?’ You and I?
Irene nodded. “And Godfrey.”

I racked my brains, and then I applied thumbscrews, but could recall no occasion when we three had laid eyes upon the terrible Tatyana.

Irene tapped her fingers against her head while I watched, blinking. “Other women may dye their hair, Nell. Don’t let that loathsome strawberry blond fool you. Think!”

“ ‘Strawberry blond?’ ”

“An American expression for yellow-red hair. Imagine Tatyana without it.”

I shook my head. Imagining Tatyana bald did me no good whatsoever, except to make me a giggle to imagine the King with such a mistress....