Castle Rouge (36 page)

Although I felt like a rabbit assuming a discarded snakeskin, I must admit that the fine silk and lawn of the borrowed linens were far kinder to my abused skin than the rough peasant weaves I had been wearing.

If I ever got back to Paris
…when we
got back to Paris…I believe I would shock Irene by visiting Worth on the Rue de la Paix for some outrageously expensive fripperies.

The gown was as I had expected: one of those Sarah Bernhardt, tartar-style robes banded in costly gold braid and held shut by a heavy brass and copper belt that would look magnificent in an Alphonse Mucha poster. I only thought what a fine weapon it would make unclasped.

I had to light the candles from the flames we kept going in the fireplace. I stood before the mirror and reluctantly unbraided my coiled hair, a necessity that I had found deliciously unencumbering and practical.

I gasped my dismay at the result of loosening them after several days. Every hair was crinkled like strands of hemp. I wore a snuff-brown haystack. How could I tame such a clutter without a comb?

A discreet knock at the connecting door to Godfrey’s suite undid me.

“Go away!” I burst out in panic.

“What is wrong, Nell?” he called back, alarmed. “You are still alone?”

“Yes. No!”

That “no” brought him bursting into the room, looking for villains to engage.

“It’s only me,” I said meekly from my corner by the mirror. “I am not a vain woman, but I do not know what I shall do with this dreadful hair!”

He approached me gingerly, like a man well used to a woman at war with her own annoying image, as I suppose most women are. Except, one would think, Irene.

He stood behind me in the mirror and leaned left and right to seek out my face amid this explosion of unbridled hair.

“Why do anything at all with it?” he said at last. “You look like one of Burne-Jones’s medieval maidens, which seems oddly appropriate for the gown.”

“That shows you what you know of women’s dress, Godfrey. We are not all actresses. I have not worn my hair down since I was sixteen. Only loose women and children do so, and I have no desire to masquerade as either one.”

“Only loose women and children wear their hair down?” Godfrey mulled that. “An odd juxtaposition of innocence and sin for the same act. Irene—”

“It does not matter what Irene does. I do not approve of half of it, and you do not approve of one-quarter of it, and don’t deny it.”

He chuckled. “That’s quite true, but that is what makes life with Irene so interesting. If she were here, she would suggest you forget your hair and concentrate on what we wish to learn at our dinner tonight. It may be that your…ungoverned hair is the very thing to distract Tatyana from the danger we pose to her. She enjoys putting people on strange ground and then watching them stumble to overcome it. You will offer her amusement. I suspect she is most dangerous when she is bored.”

“You think that my disgraceful hair could function as a ruse, then?”

I frowned at myself in the mirror. I looked like a hedgerow with a face peeping out of it. An elfin face. A faery face. They were both treacherous races, fey and unpredictable. Could I be fey and unpredictable? It would be a first, but it might be useful.

Godfrey rested his hands on my shoulders, like a comrade in arms. “I am sure of it.”

“You certainly look quite dashing and not at all disheveled,” I said, taking in for the first time the diplomatic grandeur of his white tie and tails and the subtle glint of gold studs and cufflinks.

“I was supposed to conclude the Rothschild transaction in Transylvania at a formal dinner party. I believe that tonight is that occasion. Shall we find our way downstairs to whatever room has been designated as the dining chamber?”

He offered me his arm, which I took.

The weighted hem of the brocade gown brushed the toes of my bright leather Gypsy boots, which I found quite comfortable and light to wear. So I was Romany at head and toe, Russian in between, and utterly English underneath.

Perhaps Tatyana had never yet encountered such a formidable foe as I after all.

After we had descended a huge curving stone staircase unnoticed, Godfrey, who had managed that clandestine foray through the castle in the dead of night, steered me in directions that might lead us to another part of the castle.

Each time he was foiled. A Gypsy with a greasy leg of roasted fowl in each hand blocked our way to the kitchens, from whence floated exotic odors and came the clang of many pots.

A return to the staircase and a charge straight ahead found the front hall…which was occupied by more Gypsies sitting on empty wooden food crates, tuning their battered violins.

Again we swept left of the staircase, through a series of rooms fitted with rotting tapestries and broken furniture. A bay of shattered glass windows promised a way to the outside…save that two grizzled men in tattered uniforms were playing a game of dice on the stone floor, a pottery bottle of spirits making a third between them.

We circled back to the stair and the mammoth hall that surrounded it like a chapel, all lofty stone arches lost in the dark above. I was struck by how much castles and cathedrals resembled each other: vast, forbidding, formal, cold buildings built to elevate God and man above the common throng in a medieval society where one was either peasant or aristocrat.

From the smaller front hall came the screech of slaughtered violins. From the kitchens the clang of the brass cymbals. I could not hear the percussion of rattled and thrown dice from the solarium, but from another room not yet seen I heard the murmur of human voices speaking a language other than English.

Godfrey heard that, too. He looked at me, shrugged, and turned us in that direction. It was now time to face the music and join Tatyana’s bizarre dinner party.

The room was the library Godfrey had told me about, a long, narrow space with three stories of books reached by a series of spiral stairs.

Lighted candelabras made the old gold bindings glisten like rich veins of ore along the dark shelves. It felt like being in a dwarves’ undermountain mine or on the stage set of a Wagnerian opera. I admit to being charmed, and charmed also to see the sturdy library table laid with a tsar’s ransom in table linen, porcelain, and silver.

A massive stone fireplace at one end of the room was high enough to hold a complement of guards at attention with pike staffs.

The fire that blazed in it was strong but seemed a puny thing in comparison, and the room remained chilly. Despite the spring season, these high mountains hoarded their winter cold like old people did memories. No wonder Tatyana wore such heavy gowns. She was used to such chill climates.

A huge brass samovar, or urn, sat beside the fireplace and beside the samovar stood…a tiny man, handing out chalices of some heated cider. He was dressed in a starched white ruff and red velvet knee breeches and coat, rather like a Spanish court dwarf.

He beckoned us over like a conspirator, and spoke English when we got there. Cockney English.

“Oid ’ave a bit o’ this, Miss. Warm the cockles and the knuckles at the same toime.”

My pen chokes at recording the exact mispronunciations he offered with the warming liquid, but it was good to hear an honest English voice, no matter how garbled.

“How long have you served our hostess?” Godfrey asked affably. (No one was more affable than Godfrey when he wanted to know something without letting the subject know that he wanted it.)

The stunted creature was eyeing my wild hair with alarming approval. “Summer last. Quite a traveler, milady, to some strange plaices, but the grub is good and the pay is foine. ’Ave a good cupful, Miss. It’ll straighten the hefforts of yer curlin’ iron, all roight.”

“I do not resort to such implements as curling irons,” I said indignantly.

“Natural, is it? Quite a wonder.”

And he winked. Only men of the lower orders wink at women, so I turned away without answering and sipped the warm drink, which slid down my parched throat like heated honey.

The fire (and the dwarf) at our backs, our goblets clutched at our fronts like weapons, Godfrey and I surveyed the persons in the room.

They ignored us, which was rather disconcerting.

Tatyana herself sat in the high-backed chair at the far end of the library table, although it was rude to sit at a dinner table before the guests were summoned.

She wore a gown with a high starched halo of gilt lace around the bared shoulders, her yellow-red hair piled into coarse clouds atop her head. She reminded me of portraits of Queen Elizabeth: richly and exotically garbed in an embroidered fabric dripping jewels the size of dewdrops, imperious.

Behind her chair stood a rude servitor, and with a start I realized I had glimpsed him before, during Irene’s midnight confrontation with this very woman at her hotel in Prague, when we had visited there but a year before.

He seemed to be wearing the very same dusty, dingy blue peasant blouse, with its set of buttons on the single shoulder and the waist belted in by a scuffed brown leather belt. I was sure that equally dingy pantaloons were below the blouse, stuffed into equally scuffed brown leather boots.

The international cast of characters for this charade amazed me: a French maid, an English dwarf, this Russian oaf, the Gypsy caravan, the hungry Russian peasants guarding the kitchen, the Bohemian soldiers gaming in the solarium…and of course Godfrey and myself, fresh from London and Paris save for diversions to Bohemia and a portable coffin.

Tatyana was talking with a new figure, a tall, cadaverous man in a narrow black robe, rather like that effected by Mr. Sherlock Holmes when he impersonated a French clergyman. I can think of no more odious combination on earth than that of Sherlock Holmes and a French clergyman. Luckily, it was a disguise and temporary.

“A village elder, I gather,” Godfrey leaned inward to whisper to me. “I doubt he speaks English, but I know some German. If you will divert our hostess, I will try to get him aside and see what I can learn…see what he thinks Tatyana and this castle are all about. He seems to be the only local guest here.”

“Divert our hostess! Godfrey, that would require me to speak to the monster.”

“It would be a great help if you could manage it,” he suggested gently.

I sighed until my shoulders were squared with determination. “I can’t imagine how I shall chitchat with the woman.”

“Just pretend that she is Sarah Bernhardt.”

“Another person with whom I have nothing in common. Very well.”

Together Godfrey and I approached that end of the table.

I needn’t have worried. Like Sarah Bernhardt, and sometimes like my great and good friend Irene Adler, it seemed Tatyana was most taken with appearances.

“Why, Miss Huxleigh, you look quite…Serbian in that old gown of mine.”

I wasn’t sure what a Serbian was, probably a breed of dog, but I was quite sure it was far below a Russian.

Pretend that she is Sarah Bernhardt
. Godfrey was an adept diplomat indeed. The Divine Sarah, my friend Irene, and this woman had one thing in common: all were performers, or former performers. As long as I played their game—as Our Great Bard so perfectly put it, that assumption that all the world’s a stage—we should get on famously.

I did a mocking little curtsy like Mignon. “Serbian?” I said. “I would think that I was more Shavian.”

“Ah. You like your Socialist Englishman?”

I detested Shaw almost as much as I detested Wilde, but the play’s the thing.

“I like the gown,” I said, diverting her again to her play and the part I was to act within it.

I realized my role now: she was queen, I was courtier. But there is much conspiracy in royal courts. I noticed that Godfrey had edged next to the cadaverous figure in black and was directing his attention to the elaborate sterling silver centerpiece as big as a barrel, representing a battlement besieged by warriors on horseback.

Tatyana was watching him out of the corner of her eye, always, but she leaned her rouged cheek on her beringed fist and commented, “You do not look English any longer.”

“I have traveled far from home, and in…rough company.”