Another Scandal in Bohemia (52 page)

Back into the streets. Back into the dark and the damp. Back into anxiety and mystery. I scuttled alongside Irene, barely keeping up with her unladylike long strides, unable to speak for the speed of our strides, my breath huffing onto the chill air like Red Indian smoke signals.

I could not follow the turnings of our route, and knew not if river or Old Town was on our right. Irene knew exactly where she was going, doubtless a result of her solitary expedition yesterday. When she paused before an old, sprawling structure, I knew it for our destination.

She headed directly for the rear. While I shivered at the clangor of ignominious discovery, she forced the servants’ door open and slipped up the stairs with the confidence of a practiced housebreaker.

Once we were upon the muffling carpet of an upstairs hall I tugged her sleeve. “Irene, how do you know where to go?”

“I have previously spied out the lay of the land. Be still now. I wish to catch our opponent unawares. Surprise is our most powerful weapon.”

I doubt that she meant to include
my
surprise in this armament, but it certainly was there.

At a particular door she stopped. Why she chose this door of several along the passage, I cannot say. She reached into her pocket for the same implement that had opened the servants’ door, and applied it to the lock. Such a small but telling clatter! I expected a mob of servants to be upon us. No one came. In moments the door swung open on mute hinges.

Irene’s hand on my arm dragged me into the dark beyond.

We stood for some time, listening to our own breathing while our eyes grew accustomed to the darkness. At length the furniture showed itself as blacker blots on the dim landscape before us, and we began treading carefully between these barriers.

Another door was unlocked. Irene turned the knob so slowly that it made no sound. We shortly after squeezed through the opening into another dark chamber.

“Stay.” Irene’s command was a hot whisper in my ear.

I felt rather than heard her move away. For a moment I heard nothing, then a rustle, a scratch of nails on cloth— the gasolier above us burst into light. In the violent glare a swath of bedroom furnishings leapt into being. I felt as if I watched a stage storm, or saw a photograph taken at the moment the powder flashes as bright as brimstone.

A figure moved in the ornate bed; another perched upon the upholstered foot like a leprechaun....

"Not a centimeter,” Irene’s voice ordered from the bed’s foot. “Not a millimeter, Madame. Stay still, or my pistol shall speak out of turn and, I assure you, you will not like what it has to say.”

“Who are you?” the figure demanded in the same language that Irene had used—English.

“Who do you think?” Irene asked.

A pause. “Lady Sherlock, I presume. A most innovative pseudonym, if a trifle obvious. But, then, the opera was your métier.”

“The pseudonym was no worse than ‘Sable,’ ” Irene answered.

“I was young then, and impressionable.”

“Yes, I see that. That is no excuse now.”

“And it was another country.”

“Too bad the wench is not dead.”

I knew not what they spoke of, save that the woman in the bed was Tatyana, and that the first duel of the new day was already well underway in this room.

“You trespass on my portion of the board, Madame,” Tatyana noted.

“I have visited Bohemia before,” Irene said blithely.

“Yes, I know.”

“You know?”

“Of course. Do you think that we didn’t investigate the past of your tiresome king?”

“It is possible; you do not seem to have thought out your plan very well. And who is ‘we’?”

Tatyana, who had gathered the covers to her shoulders at our lightning-like arrival, smiled and let the sheets slip away. She wore a most unconventional nightdress of brunet lace against which her pale complexion shone like candle wax and her red-gold hair was the flame.

“I am not allowed to say.”

“I imagine that you do much that you are not allowed.”

“Always. But not in this instance.”

“I care little for your tawdry conspiracy,” Irene said. “In hours my husband fights a duel with your King. Godfrey must live.”

“We are in utter harmony.”

“He must not be so much as wounded.”

“I concur completely, Madame. In fact, I have taken steps to ensure that very outcome. Can you say as much?”

“I am still taking steps.”

“Worry not.” Tatyana piled a great quantity of lace-covered pillows behind her and leaned back. “I have anticipated you, as usual. Your dramatic visit is only so much melodrama. Godfrey was always safe. I would not see a hair upon his head—or anywhere else—so much as shifted by the errant wind of a gunshot.”

“How would you accomplish this?”

“Why did you advise your husband to choose pistol over sword?”

“Because a pistol can be tampered with when a sword cannot.”

Tatyana shrugged, a gesture that set the lace on her strong shoulders ebbing.

“You planned to fill the King’s pistol with blank shot?” Irene sounded unconvinced. “Why disarm your most potent weapon in the game to come?”

“Because the game is nearly over. I do not need him anymore and... he was growing tiresome.” She eyed Irene slyly. “I do not think that Godfrey grows tiresome, does he?”

“You must ask someone other than I; someone who is not so biased, such as Miss Huxleigh there.”

“There? That is Miss Huxleigh? Such an admirable assistant you and he have found. I have long searched for one who would blend so perfectly into the woodwork and have had little luck. No, I do not care for Miss Huxleigh’s opinion on Godfrey’s lack of tiresomeness. She is not an expert witness. I require personal testimony, and most often must... see for myself.”

“A pity.” Irene sounded not at all sorry. “I fear that we will not linger long enough in Prague for you to obtain any evidence of a personal sort. It is not enough that you have the King’s pistol loaded with false shot. I too must see that for myself.”

“If you wish to jeopardize the entire encounter—”

“I wish it. And I wish one other thing.”

“You may express whatever you wish; that does not mean that you will get it.”

“I wish the King to emerge unscathed as well.”

“The King? Why should you care for this pawn who wears a false crown?”

“I do not,” Irene said, “and him I leave to you and your confederates’ tenderest mercies. It is the true King I would have walk away from that encounter
—after
the shots have been fired.”

“A nice thought, but impractical. The King is missing.”

“Yes, and now the King is missing from where he was when he was missing.”

Tatyana scrambled upright among her pillows. “You have him? Where?”

“Where you will not get him. A subtle exchange of Kings suits my purpose, and ultimately yours. If you refuse to provide the occasion, I will be forced to produce the King publicly to renounce the conspirators. That will cause such a stir. St. Petersburg will buzz with it, as well as Vienna, Paris, and London. That, I think, would not suit the great and glorious bear, your icy northern master.”

Tatyana’s handsome face curled into an expression of foiled rage. Her fingers curved like claws into the lace flouncing her pillows as she pummeled the feathers in a catlike rhythm. After just such bouts of purring and pummeling, the black Persian Lucifer would lash his tail and suddenly pounce, his fangs snapping at my arm.

Tatyana snapped with words, but they were fiercely spat. “You have interfered with me and my companions before, Madame, and know what a fatal outcome such meddling had on the Hammersmith Bridge. Do not mistake my... personal interest in the admirable Godfrey for a sign of weakness. My associates would not hesitate to kill anyone who stood in our way.”

“The bridge was as disastrous to your side as ours,” Irene said calmly. “What I propose here is a truce. Come, I have captured the King, You have no choice. Withdraw peacefully, with an appearance of good grace, and you will live to fight another day. Resist, and you will be unmasked, along with the false King.”

“And your price for permitting us this quiet withdrawal is Godfrey’s life? You already had that, fool.”

“Perhaps, but now I am sure of it.”

“The true King betrayed you,” Tatyana said with a snarl. (I hesitate to resort to such sensational description, but the woman was a wildcat, what can I say? I have never before seen such an uncivilized specimen, and indeed, she gives her entire sex an injurious name. Even Irene at her most bohemian was a mere amateur compared to the primal possessiveness of this willful feral female.)

“Why should you care to save him?” Tatyana demanded. “He is not worth either of us, or even your redoubtable Miss Huxleigh.”

I was not enamored of that “even,” either.

Irene considered the question with far more seriousness than I would have shown. “He is the true King; a certain nobility attaches to that alone. Even Willie, poor creature that he is, would not have behaved as abominably toward the Queen as your substitute. That is how I knew instantly that a dupe had taken his place, as well as by his most amazing indifference to myself, and even Miss Huxleigh.”

Another “even” applied to my humble self, which was growing less humble and more indignant by the minute.

“The real King knew me instantly,” Irene went on without a pause. "Despite my raven hair and our reunion in a most peculiar place. Despite his own not insubstantial privations these past months. You may have inadvertently made a better man of him, Madame Tatyana, perhaps even a finer King, despite your worst efforts.”

The woman threw back her head and laughed silently, then drew a deep breath. “A small improvement,” she scoffed, “for King Will-he... will he what—amount to anything? He is beneath the both of us, no matter his stature or rank—and no matter the heights to which imprisonment and suffering might loft him. Such penances are always overestimated by the sentimental. I wonder that you bothered to claim such a pathetic conquest in the past.”

Irene’s smile was as serene as her opponent’s silent laugh had been stormy. “He is still better than his substitute, who was so besotted with you that he failed to lull my suspicions. Apparently you overlooked me.”

“Not at all. The fool was informed of the King’s past alliances. He merely... forgot. And you are right about the reason for that. He is utterly, madly besotted with me. Unfortunately, I do not find that appealing.”

“You are perverse, Madame,” Irene said. “I’d rather stand accused of your charge, mere sentimentality. Let us say that if my innate beneficence does not explain my rescue of Willie, you forget another motive for my meddling in your political intrigues: I’d grown fond of the Bohemian people during my previous stay. They may deserve better than a foreign satrapy, better than King Willie and the Austrians, but they do not deserve the domination of yet another foreign power, and one as devious as the master you serve.

“And,” Irene finished, lifting the pistol as if she contemplated using it, “you forget that my mind might rest easier with you removed from the board. You are valuable to me only if you are able to preserve Godfrey and the true King from harm on the morrow. If you fail in either object, be assured that the next dawn will be your day of reckoning on quite another plane than this earthly vale of tears and woe.”

Irene pointed the pistol at Tatyana’s form, and sighted down the barrel....

The woman exploded from her bed like a leopard springing for prey. I have never seen a human being move so quickly. Irene was off her perch in an instant, keeping her distance, while Tatyana crouched—I can only describe her feral posture thus—on the floor and watched her with predatory fury.

“I am dancer,” Tatyana said, lifting her leonine head. “You are singer. We will see who survives.”

“Not... now,” Irene answered. “Not in Prague. Tomorrow we’ll arrange a quiet end to this charade. We will lie down together like the lion and the lamb, because it suits both our purposes. As for later—”

“You will not always be armed.”

“You will not always be surrounded by fellow conspirators.”

“You would kill, if you had to?” Tatyana said in her mocking voice. “I already have.”

“I am close,” Irene answered, so quietly that a chill sped down my arms.

Yet I was glad for the knives I carried.

“I look forward to our meeting tomorrow,” Tatyana threatened.

“And tomorrow and tomorrow,” Irene said sardonically. She backed to the door, where I waited.

When I opened it, we slipped through it like air eager to leave a noxious room. Only when we were safely back on the street did I speak.

“Can you trust her?”

“Not in the slightest, but she is better than her associates.”

“Why?!”

“Because she has a weakness.”

“Godfrey.”

Irene nodded and drew me to a stop in the misty light of street lamp. “What time is it, Nell? Rather, how much do we have?”

“Five o’clock. An hour.”

“Much remains to be done. I have only you and Allegra. Godfrey must go to this duel knowing no more than he does now. If he loses that innocence, if he shows his unshakable alliance to us, she will destroy him as the lion does the lamb indeed. It is you and Allegra and I against her. Godfrey is the prize.”