Another Scandal in Bohemia (44 page)

“I don’t think that I am a cherry-velvet person, Irene.”

“Tonight you must be. Don’t forget; I’ll be drawing the vast majority of the attention to myself, but you still have a part to play.”

“What of Godfrey?”

“I have advised him to wear simple black and white,” she said impishly.

“Men’s formal dress is always black and white. I meant, what part will he play?”

She sighed and stalked away. “One I do not like, but one that he has been cast in nevertheless.”

“And that is?”

She turned in a whirl of skirts and scowling brows. “Target.”

“Target? Of what? Not an air-rifle as Colonel Sebastian Moran used?”

“One can never be sure,” she added glumly, pacing again. “But it is more as target of Tatyana. Oh, how tiresome that I must pause to deal with this unexpected issue, when so many other crucial events unfold!”

“What crucial events?”

She swooped close in a crackle of taffeta skirts as if to confide in me, but merely patted my cheek.

“You will see, Nell, you will see.
If
—you dress properly for me. There’s a good girl....”

And off she went, like a rather well-gowned governess about her mysterious duties.

I had no one with whom to consult. Allegra was at the castle with the Queen. Why had I not been invited on such a mission? Godfrey was in the town, investigating the city’s subterranean blueprints. Even such an uninspired errand would have been more profitable than regarding the cherry velvet gown in my room and wondering what revelations awaited us at the castle that night.

Poor Godfrey! Caught between two formidable women. Poor Clotilde! Ignored by everyone but Allegra. Poor Irene! Forced to defend her husband while hampered by the guise of a fictitious person. Poor Penelope! Forced to gad about and know nothing. And lastly... poor Golem! The object of everyone’s search and no one’s sympathy. At least I would extend the poor hunted thing a modicum of pity. I had an absurd notion that the Golem was kept as much in the dark these days as... as I was.

If I thought the cherry velvet gown I wore that night a bit extravagant, the color faded to pearl pink next to the port-colored plush-velvet creation that floated down the hotel hall as Irene approached my door on Godfrey’s arm.

I had been unable to wait meekly in my room, and—on hearing a grandiose swish in the passage—I opened my door to peep out.

Irene’s gown had no sleeves, no neckline, merely a bodice as bare as a corset-top, like that of the notorious Madame X in Mr. Sargent’s portrait of that name. A swath of rose-purple tulle swathed one bare shoulder and draped the full skirts. Sweeping designs in jet and a red stone that glimmered ruby-bright encrusted the hem and bodice. The Tiffany corsage slashed across this bloody ground in a glory of diamond-studded fire: snowflakes lit by an ever-passing comet of stars.

Despite her immodest elegance, Irene only had eyes for me. “Nicely done, Nell! But, quickly: I must have you inside for a small adjustment... here. And there!”

In front of my mirror I watched my long-labored-over curls prodded lower on my forehead, higher on my crown, and looser over my neck and shoulders.

Irene tugged my neckline over the precipice of my shoulders.

I shrugged it back up.

She frowned and jerked it down, past repair.

“There! Do not fret. Hardly anyone will look at you with myself and Tatyana present, but it never hurts to be presentable... One never knows whom one might encounter.”

“Irene!” Godfrey waited discreetly in the hall, as he was so expert at doing. “You behave as if you were going to a duel with that woman, not unraveling the political conundrum as the Rothschilds desire.”

“You are right.” She called out, then allowed herself to lean against the sofa back for a moment’s rest. She lowered her voice so he could not hear us. “I have become diverted by another woman’s artificial ploys. For this Tatyana can have no real regard for Godfrey, can she, Nell?”

I licked my lips, a cue for Irene to pull open her black velvet reticule and produce a pomade that both moistened and colored them.

“Irene... she is strange, this woman. I do believe that she is dangerous.”

“Oh, I know that she is dangerous... but is Godfrey susceptible?”

‘‘You ask me? You know these things far better than I.”

Irene smiled, sadly. “I know these things in the abstract, down the street and across the wide world. As for my own neighborhood—we will see, Nell, what we see tonight. Much will be plain, and much still veiled. Keep watch, as I bid you before. Watch closely; much depends upon it”

“Can’t you say more? Can’t you be more specific? Irene, must you always play the sibyl?”

She shook her head, her black-dyed curls shifting into a gleaming torrent.

“I don’t know more, Nell,” she confessed, donning her white velvet gloves. “I am a mere impresario. I have set the orchestra in motion, all its many sections and instruments of different voice. Now I have no notion what tune it will play. I thrive on instinct, on panache, as does your despised acquaintance, Oscar Wilde. I throw bright balls into the air, in hopes that I will learn something from where they land. I am no Sherlock Holmes, my dear Nell; I am not so cold and calculating. So when circumstances conspire to threaten the center where my heart lies, I make a most unreliable compass. Watch for me tonight. Look for that which is not what it seems to be. See through the façades. Watch for the anomaly. Above all, protect Godfrey.”

“I? Irene, you must speak more plainly—”

“No time,” she said, pressing a white velvet fingertip to my lips.

I parted those lips to remind her of the colored pomade she had herself applied, but it was too late. A pale pink stain tinged the tip of her velvet-gloved finger.

The longer and farther abroad I traveled with Irene, the less I came to recognize myself. The figure I had glimpsed in my mirror tonight was a far cry from the timid dismissed drapery clerk Irene had rescued from the streets of London seven years before.

Yet no matter how I evolved, Irene was always ahead of me, as a comet outruns its dissipating tail. I could never glory in my modest transformations, for they were pale imitations of Irene’s mercurial self-manipulations.

Still, I set out that evening with Irene and Godfrey well satisfied that my new splendor should protect me from the moment I most dreaded, when the King of Bohemia would stare straight at me and declare: “It is she! The mousy woman who accompanied Irene Adler on her escape from Prague, Miss... What’s-her-name?”

Then he would frown and bellow, “That is such a patently ridiculous coiffure. Off with her head!”

At least Allegra was safe at the hotel; Irene had remained adamant to all her pleadings.

Our carriage ride up Hradcany hill was silent. Godfrey brooded in the opposite corner, gently slapping his white kid evening gloves against one loose fist. I could understand the Russian woman’s obsession; Godfrey gloomy was even more attractive than Godfrey at his charming best. His mental abstraction permitted one to admire the well-drawn lines of his dark hair and moustache, even his charcoal eyelashes over the dreamy pale silver eyes ordinarily so sharp and perceptive.

Irene, preening in the carriage until the last moment, shook her matching garnet bracelets down her gloves and admired the effect by the intermittent street lights.

Yet she watched her husband, as I did, with an odd mix of fondness and fear. Nothing makes one more protective of one’s possessions than the knowledge of another’s obsession with them.

We all dreaded the next encounter with Tatyana, but it couldn’t be helped. That was our mission in Bohemia: to face the facts, however fearsome, be it the Golem or a more contemporary monster in a monstrous fair guise.

I felt that the evening would prove to be momentous. I resolved to make as many notes as I dared in my dance case. I hardly needed worry about covering the sheet of thin white bone with the names of would-be escorts.

Once again we passed under the naked, straining bronze bodies of the gate’s guardian statuary. A struggle as dire would soon transpire within, but the conflict would be far more subtle, and perhaps more deadly.

After we had bustled in and been relieved of our outer garments, we stood with a knot of other guests awaiting our turn to be announced.

“Together,” Irene said softly, as if rehearsing fellow actors who were about to make a joint entrance. “We will be announced as one party. That should raise Tatyana’s eyebrows.”

“Irene,” I protested. “You have become obsessed with this woman. What of the Rothschild commission?”

“Oh, Rothschilds come and go. One does not encounter an adversary as cunning and dangerous as Tatyana every day.”

“I do not intend to allow that woman a moment’s conversation,” Godfrey put in, eyeing Irene sternly. “You wished my feeble attentions to make the King jealous, and all you have accomplished is setting that dreadful woman on me.”

“I don’t doubt that you will be most divinely surly to her this evening, Godfrey,” she replied. “That will only encourage her, I assure you. Perhaps you should direct your attention elsewhere tonight.”

“To you? That would inflame her further.”

Irene assumed an innocently demure look that was irresistibly wicked. “I was thinking of someone less incendiary than myself: poor Clotilde, who has been publicly set aside in favor of another woman, one with no legal or moral claim to the King’s affections. Surely no one can take offense if you pay polite attention to this neglected lady.”

“Brava!” I put in. “An excellent suggestion, Irene. Tatyana will not dare venture too near Godfrey if he dances attendance on the Queen.”

“Speaking of dancing,” he added. “Must I?”

“You dance well!” she responded in surprise.

“But I don’t like it.”

Irene unfurled her fan of crimson feathers. “I do not see how you can command the Queen’s time unless you offer to dance with her. I—or Lady Sherlock, rather—shall dance with those who ask me. No doubt even Nell will take a sedate gallop or two around the room with a respectable gentleman, should he ask. We must all appear as if we were mere merrymakers at a festive affair.”

Godfrey donned an even more dour expression, now looking a most satisfactory and brooding Hamlet.

At that moment the footman leaned near him for our identities. A half-minute later we heard our names, or what passed for them among some of us, shouted to all the world within earshot.

“Mr. Godfrey Norton. Lady Sherlock. Miss Penelope Puxleigh, of Paris, France, and London, England.”

Into the bright lights and chatter we swept again to do battle. Irene suggested that we repair first to the supper table, as a good army marches on its stomach. How she could consider eating when laced until her waist seemed encompassable by a necklace I do not know; I can testify that her appetite never dwindled, no matter the circumstances.

I, of course was too nervous to take more than a bite of cake, and Godfrey had decided to brace himself with the punch, a vile lizard-green brew no doubt steeped in ardent spirits.

Around us people milled, the men in penguin perfection, the women a rainbow of rich color and fabric. Each of us unintentionally searched among the myriad shades of hair color, hunting the russet-blond locks of the woman we all feared, each for his or her own reason.

“Oh!”

“Yes, Nell?” Irene swiftly turned away from making free with the goose-liver pȃté.

“The King,” I said.

Who could mistake his gilded head shining in the candlelight of twenty chandeliers, rising above the common crowd like an alpine peak?

“Oh.” Irene swallowed her disappointment with a last bit of pȃté. “I thought you had noticed someone interesting.”

“Such as the formidable Tatyana?” Godfrey suggested.

Irene’s smile was secret and impudent. “Such as the Queen.”

“Clotilde? Interesting?” I demanded. “Irene, it becomes you greatly to consider her welfare and self-regard, but I can think of no person in this entire assemblage who is more futilely present than that pathetic figurehead.”

“Oh?” Irene answered skeptically. She stepped aside so that both Godfrey and I could have an unimpeded view, could in fact see past the glories of Irene’s gown and person to something else.

That something else was Clotilde, abandoned by her husband after the obligatory joint entrance, moving into the room on a cloud of dazzling white silk-velvet and tulle, like a bride.

I can pay no greater tribute to my friend’s skills and altruism than to say that Clotilde had blossomed from ugly yellow duckling into a showy white swan. Now that pale complexion and long feckless neck seemed possessed of felicitous grace. Now that pallid hair, piled away from the narrow face, seemed a gilt lace frame for a master sketch of sweetly underlined femininity.

Excitement burnished Clotilde’s cheeks, but I recognized the inroads of the rouge pot and the hare’s foot. Irene’s hand lay in every blond silk curl, in every shimmering bead, in the very white-gold aura that radiated from the Queen’s figure.

“By Jove,” Godfrey said, standing to attention. “What has happened to her?”

“Allegra,” Irene said happily. “That child has enormous potential. I tutored her a bit, of course, but the results are as spectacular as I had hoped.” She glanced roguishly at Godfrey. “It will not be such punishment to avoid the importuning Tatyana by paying court at this Queen’s side?”

“If the assignment involves dancing, it will be punishment,” he said. “Not many women would reconstruct a former rival,” he added in a teasing tone.

“Clotilde was never my rival; her only claim was aristocratic precedence.”

“You’re foolish to believe that the King will be swayed by a cosmetic improvement,” he warned her. “From his past and present preferences, he craves more challenge than an ordinary woman can provide, and seems determined to find it one way or the other. Clotilde’s transformation will not capture his regard.”

“Perhaps not.” Irene ducked her head like a schoolgirl caught out in a fond daydream. “Yet she will feel better about herself, and that is half the battle in any match, marital or royal.”