Coronets and Steel (12 page)

“Vienna. Whoa,” I said, the tingle changing to one of those chills of apprehension that get you along the backs of your arms and your neck.

When I shifted my gaze to the ruin, there was the tower again.

I turned in my seat so I couldn’t see it.

“Vienna,” he repeated, again with the hesitation, almost reluctance. “For a time,” he said slowly as he tracked the drifting hawk. “The war halted communication from the homeland. She fled to Paris.”

My guts tightened, and I rubbed my hands together, trying to shed tension. “To Paris?”

“Yes. With a daughter. Who was called Marie, in the French manner.”

Golden fire tipped the edges of the hawk’s wings as it rode the high currents. The bird’s head flicked back and forth, back and forth, scanning the ground for prey. The chill had frozen me.

“Right before the war ended, the house she’d lived in was found gutted by flames from a nearby bombing, and Lily and the child had disappeared without a trace. It was impossible to ascertain whether or not they had been inside the house when the bombing and fire had occurred.”

Numbly I said, “So that Princess Lily was my grandmother, is that what you’re saying but not saying?”

“It’s possible.” He pushed away the beer. “Did she ever mention anything at all about any of this? Speak German, even?”

“Never. I never heard one word of German from her.” I shook my head firmly. “Even when I was studying it and practicing it. All she said about Europe was how beautiful Paris had been in the spring, and how much good French was an asset to a young lady. But Gran had saved a single Viennese memento: a pair of concert tickets.”

“Which is what brought you to Vienna?” His voice was sympathetic.

“Yes. Well, that and a vague memory my mother had, of a . . . conversation about Vienna, Germany, the east. More like an argument, not that she understood any of it. Anyway, when I had zero luck in Paris, off I went to Vienna to put a genealogist on the trail. Well.” I took another deep breath. If I decided to believe that his princess was Gran, how to tell Mom? Call? E-mail? Wait until I got home and tell her face-to-face? I said, “She must have adopted France as her new country when she married Grandfather Atelier. That is,
if
Gran is your missing princess. It would explain my resemblance to your Aurelia, who I’m going to think of as Ruli, so my brain doesn’t explode. Who is she, Rose’s granddaughter?”

“Yes.”

“So she has good French. Too. Taught by somebody of Gran’s generation, am I right? So our accents and vocabulary are pretty much the same?”

“Yes.”

“Well! You’ll certainly have a great story to tell her when you do catch up with her. Funny, how genes will do that. I wonder if her mother looks at all like mine, and for that matter, what all the various fathers and grandfathers have in common.”

“Would you like something more to drink?” he asked.

“Not beer. Despite my performance the other day, I don’t drink much and rarely during the day.”

He indicated his untouched beer. “I think I’d better switch to coffee as well. Shall we order lunch?”

“Now that you mention it . . .”

The humid air was motionless, heavy. We ate the savory Slovenian food and talked easily on a range of subjects, discovering odd things we had in common (a fondness for early Beatles’ music—his favorite tutor had played it all the time, like my Dad had when I was a kid); a partiality for Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas, whose works we’d both devoured as teens, and how much funnier Dumas was read in French; oh, I don’t remember what all, because I was mostly trying to impress the sound of his voice on my memory.

Behind him, the fog slowly whorled around the ruin, but that did not explain why I saw the outline of a castle, and then a ruin. So I turned my chair so that my back was to it.

When I straightened up, I found him regarding me in silent question. I blurted, “Have you ever done any fencing?”

His expression blanked. “A little. You mentioned sport. You took up fencing?”

Guys with blades—paging Dr. Freud!
“A lot. With the trophies to show for it.” I threw in my trophies to get away from any possible imputations of Freudian symbolism, but now I sounded like a blowhard. So I blathered on, “I wanted to be Geena Davis in
Cutthroat Island
when I was a kid.” He gave me the expected laugh, then I changed the subject. “Do you like swashbuckler movies?”

We went from movies to music, and the awkward moment passed.

Meanwhile the fog had retreated, replaced by a menacing army of thunderheads stealth-marching overhead. When the sky was covered, they loosed their arsenal in a spectacular bombardment of lightning, thunder, and hail.

The waiters hastily closed up the terrace against the rising wind. We climbed back into the green Daimler and, shutting the noise of the storm out, began the return drive.

Daimler. Why did he have to drive such a cool car? Why couldn’t he dress in plaid pants held up with a cowboy belt and wear his hair in an honest-to-eighties mullet?

We were silent as he maneuvered through the few cars and hurrying pedestrians on the narrow, rain-streaming streets. After he turned onto the smooth and uncrowded main road I watched the
swish-
s
wish
of the wipers in their hypnotic sweep as I struggled not to stare at his hands.

Geez, why wasn’t he shorter than Napoleon, round as a beachball, balding, a cheery avuncular guy? Except a short, beachball-shaped, balding, cheerfully avuncular guy in a mullet and cowboy belt who spoke with that
voice
—warm melted chocolate when he was smiling, the whisper of silver when his mood had shifted beyond that invisible wall of good manners, hiding whatever he was feeling, the smooth edge of steel when he was angry—would be exactly as compelling.

Lightning-bright rain scattered across the windshield in diamonds; the thunder was merely a distant muffled rumble in this car. Tension seemed to ride between us, slow lightning on the sensory plane, as I tried not to remember his laugh from the night before, slightly husky, sparking gold with delight—I’d heard many guys laugh, but not once had anyone with a single sound managed to whack me behind the knees.

I thumped my arms across my chest and dug my nails into my palms. Concentrate, Murray! Okay. So I had trouble believing Gran had been, like, a
princess,
for heaven’s sake. But when on impulse I half turned, meaning to ease the atmosphere with a joke about California and kings, my gaze zipped straight to the tight grip of Alec’s hands on the wheel, and then to the tightness of his shoulders.

Then the problem wasn’t me, surging with enough pheromones to fuel an entire high school cheerleading squad. Something was wrong, I sensed it, but didn’t even know how to ask. Or if I had a right to ask.

And so I shut my eyes and forced myself to think through what I’d been told so I could repeat it coherently to my mother. But what might be her questions? Would I be able to get Alec’s e-mail address, or was this the last I’d see of him, and this connection with Gran’s past, tenuous as it seemed, would vanish like it had never happened?

My trip was to find missing family, and here was the possibility Gran had had a twin, leading to a real family somewhere in this part of the world. There could be nothing wrong with family questions. Right?

I said, “Back to the Wicked Count. You did say he married Rose, so your Aurelia, Ruli, is their granddaughter.”

“Yes.”

“I’m glad—if Lily was Gran—she got over him, and found Grandfather Atelier.”

Sw
ish-
s
wish.
Lightning flickered. Thunder rumbled.

I said, “I know Gran loved him a lot. That picture I mentioned. I wish more than ever my copy wasn’t lost, so I could show you. Anyway, she’s kept it on her bedside table all these years, and she used to smile at it, both Mom and I grew up seeing that. But anyway, the sinister duke, or count, or whatever he was, I’m glad he was forgotten.”

Lightning again. The rain was so heavy it was nearly impossible to see beyond it, though the airtight car kept most of the noise out. I felt a curious sensation, as if the car was a ship and we were shooting through water (or maybe through space) with no land or civilization within light-years. Alec’s silence as he drove magnified the quietness of our little space in the eye of the storm.

I’d run out of words, my mind running a private YouTube of dancing princesses, evil counts, duels, desperate cross-country races against the backdrop of war. But this wasn’t movie clips, it was real—it had happened—and my quiet, piano-playing grandmother had been at the center of wrenching changes as a desperate, loving sixteen-year-old girl.

Alec spoke. “I don’t know if this is a bad idea or a good one. But I wonder if you’d consider a plan I’ve in mind.”

“A plan?” I repeated, thinking of Gran, mustachioed dukes, and Paris.

“Yes.” He glanced quickly at me, his face impossible to read. “It would require a week or so of your time, but I’d pay for it.”

“A week—where?”

“A couple of days in Zagreb. A beautiful city. Maybe a day or two in Split, then to Dubrovnik, known for its ancient fortress and polished marble streets. Ruli likes the night life. From there you could go on to Greece, or Italy.”

“What? Wait!” It was then that I thought of Rudolph Rassendyll, and shook free of the shroud of emotions, of questions I could not ask. Shades of
Prisoner of Zenda!
I said recklessly, “You want me to impersonate your Aurelia? How cool is that?”

“Yes,” he replied in a neutral voice. “What could be cooler?”

M
Y RECKLESS MOOD lasted about ten seconds. After all, I was no Rupert of Hentzau.

So who was?

My mind bloomed with questions. I reached for the most immediate one. “At least it’s not a coronation. Maybe I should be asking why you can’t let Aur—er, Ruli go her own way, treaty or no treaty.”

“It’s not so simple,” he said, scanning the road.

“You keep saying that. The way I see it, she apparently doesn’t want to marry you, so you let her go. I’ll bet there are plenty of other titled ladies who’d be happy to take her place, if you have to have titles.”

“First I find her,” he said. “Then she tells me what she wants to do—ah,” he exclaimed with satisfaction. “There it is.”

“What? We’re not going back to the inn?”

“No, I thought we’d take a short detour. Take in the view of Verezc from the Cheneska ruin.”

“The ruin?” I tried to hide my complete lack of enthusiasm. That place gave me the creeps, though maybe it was only fog and tiredness making me see things. “In a thunderstorm?”

“It should lift any time. Look. Behind us there’s blue sky.” He glanced at me in mild question. “You have an objection to the ruin?”

I was not about to say I’d been weirded out by fog tricking my eyes. “No, I’m fine with it.”

He drove smoothly and without apparent effort up a narrow road of hairpin turns; I wondered if narrow roads and hairpin turns were as normal in Dobrenica as traffic is in LA. The storm pounded us in unabated strength, occasional blasts of wind rocking the car and splashing torrents of rain over the windows. As he drove he gave me a short history of the ruined castle. I only half-listened; I wanted to get back to his switcheroo idea. But he avoided discussing it, and I began to wonder as the green car at last nosed smoothly into a wide, clear space ringed by a low stone wall, if it had been a kingly joke.

Or maybe he remembered the story of
The Prisoner of Zenda
and realized his part would have to be one of the villains. Ha ha.

Alec drove up to the wall. “. . . and so it was abandoned as an outpost in 1848 and left to stand. The family could not afford to rebuild it and live in it. The succeeding governments have claimed it since.”

“Interesting.” I peered into the purple gray rain-shrouded hilltop parking lot. “And affords an awesome view of twenty-five feet.”

“Look over here.”

He pointed southward, through his side window. Sure enough, the long, pale gray mass retreated, leaving patches of sky of that peculiar light aquamarine color I’ve always thought of as swimming-pool sky. Appropriate enough, considering I’ve only seen it before or after thunderstorms. To the north the slate- and green-tinged clouds roiled toward the horizon.

All right. I was here. Let there be mysterious walls and towers if it dared.

I opened the car door and was met by a rush of heavy, wet grass- scented air. The last splatting drops of rain stung my face and hands, tickled my scalp. Then a fresh, pure breeze seemed to end the rain, like a magic hand waving benignly. The clouds broke up and straight ahead a rainbow arched ethereally bright and clear across the valley. To my left shafts of golden sunlight touched the mossy, gray crumbling walls of the castle, stippling the contours with warm color. I stooped and rubbed my fingers over the solid wet stone.