Coronets and Steel (24 page)

By lunchtime I’d worked through most of the books. The stories gave me a strong sense of spirit, a determination by independent-minded people striving to maintain independence. In the earlier books (two dated 1940 and 1942), the violent drawings and the gruesome ends to the conquerors expressed rage. On some pages, grade-school-scurrilous additions had been cramped into the margins by hands other than the original writer or copier, much of it fading. I wondered if school ink was thinned to make it last.

After I’d read through the stack, I sat cross-legged on my bed as rain washed down the windows. I had this weird sense that these little books were a gateway to some mystery. Maybe it was the way Theresa had been wary, had picked her words so carefully for no reason I could discern. But there was also that powerful, vivid experience of staring at the mural in the palace, the forest and mountains filled with detail that was almost Mannerist in form. One thing I knew about the Mannerists: every symbol was important, freighted with meaning.

I began to read more slowly, looking up every word I did not know. The storylines were pretty much the same thing over and over—Fyadar and his friends, or sometimes a friend had a solo adventure, fighting the invaders and defeating them. I began looking at the details, comparing Gran’s stories to these.

Most of the details matched my memory, except for the mysterious Xanpia, who was sometimes called Shanzana, especially when she appeared on certain mountains. She was occasionally called an angel in a few stories—I couldn’t tell if those were older or newer ones. My grandmother had never described what she looked like, so I’d pictured her like Tinkerbell in the Disney version of
Peter Pan.

As I thought back, I had a persistent image of it being a question about Xanpia that had resulted in an end to the stories: after that, Gran said I was a big girl, and she would read aloud to me from real books—George Macdonald and Andrew Lang and in French,
La Fontaine Con-tes.
They were all fiction, unrelated to real life. Responsible people never mixed fiction with real life.

Two things hit me on that second read. One, brief references to Saint Xanpia’s Blessing. It was so buried among mostly Roman Catholic talk (which you’d expect among mostly Roman Catholic people) and terse references to the different mountains that I nearly went past it. This Blessing was teamed up with the word
Vrajhus,
which was not defined in the dictionary. From the context, it seemed to translate as magic—except that they also used the word Magus.

Not for the first time I longed for access to the Internet. But there was no computer in the house. From what I could see, electricity of any kind was a relatively new thing—like hot and cold running water, from how the fixtures seemed to be jerry-rigged in the bathrooms, not matching the enormous, ancient porcelain tub on feet that probably had been filled by buckets lugged up from the kitchen until relatively recently.

I prowled around the room once, struggling against a strong wish to ask Alec. I wished he was there, but I didn’t wish he was there. I wished he would show up after I’d proved him wrong about Gran, and everything would be . . . would be . . . would be what?

I flopped onto the bed and picked up the next book.

By late afternoon the difficult Germanic handwritings began to look like
wmwmwmwmwm.
I kept at it, hoping to crack the mystery, until I heard running feet on the stairs.

Theresa knocked, and on my shouting “Entre!” she burst in, face red and sweat beading her hairline.

“Did you read them?” she asked.

“Wonderful!” I enthused. She beamed with delight, so I said, “But what’s Saint Xanpia’s Blessing?”

Her smile vanished. Both hands flew to her mouth.

Totally bewildered, I waited until she said slowly, in that wary voice again, “It is an old thing. Mere superstition, many say. Please. Do not trouble yourself over such things.”

She scooped up the books and fled.

W
ELL, THAT WAS WEIRD, I thought as I looked at the now empty desk. But it was time to get ready for Aunt Sisi’s party, so I couldn’t track Theresa down and ask for an explanation.

Like I said, I’d grown up with a serious shortage of relatives. Mom and Gran had been alone ever since their arrival in the United States, and Dad’s parents, who’d been even older when they had him than my parents had been when they had me, had passed away before I was born. If Dad had cousins, he’d never met them; his parents had come out to California after the war. So I was excited to meet my first relatives, but a little apprehensive as well.

I bathed, then took out the floral print dress that I’d worn to the wedding. As I brushed out my hair and pinned it up in a chignon I thought back over the day, wondering why that “Blessing” would upset Theresa. Should I pretend our conversation about the Fyadar stories had never happened? I’d take her behavior as a clue next time I saw her.

It was tall, sober-faced Tania, and not Theresa, who knocked on my door to say that the car was here for me. As I went downstairs, I looked around for Theresa. Nowhere in sight.

“Mam’zelle,” the chauffeur said, opening the car door.

We didn’t drive all that far—a couple miles of winding streets along which the houses got grander and grander. We pulled up in front of a handsome, fresh-painted house built along Roman villa lines, complete to the Corinthian columns. Remembering what Alec had said about Ruli’s habits, I waited where I was. Sure enough, the chauffeur came around to open the car door for me.

I was halfway up the tiled steps when the double doors to the house opened. The man who greeted me at a Proper Distance was an honest-to-Jeeves butler, right down to white gloves.

“Mam’zelle. By what name shall you wish to be announced?”

“Kim . . . Atelier.”

As soon as it was out, I grimaced. Stupid—the impulse had been to hide my last name so Alec wouldn’t find out I was here, but he was going to find out anyway, wasn’t he? The people I was about to meet were connected to him politically, and maybe by blood, and were supposed to be by marriage soon. The point being, one thing I’d learned through watching my friends who have large families—relatives talk.

But Jeeves was too intimidating for me to try a “No, wait, call me Murray.” So I figured, go with it. In a way, the Atelier thing was legit, and I could always explain later once I’d found a sympathetic new cousin or two.

Jeeves led me inside a handsome hall with gilt molding and eighteenth-century decorative motifs in ovals high under the ceiling, instead of the folk art patterns I’d seen in more humble houses, when glancing in windows.

The stairway was lined with portraits. Coroneted ancestors in silks and velvets with ribbons and medallions and diamonds gazed into eternity over my head as I trod up the stairs behind Jeeves. One fellow in handsome eighteenth-century garb was tall and blond, another in a military tunic and medals was tall and dark of hair; there was a third, a gorgeous woman brown of skin, her tilted dark eyes smiling, her black hair curling charmingly in Directoire ringlets. She was dressed magnificently in early nineteenth-century velvets; she and the ones whose dates came after her all had the single dimple.

When we reached the top of the landing, with great ceremony Jeeves opened doors carved in ancient acanthi, discreetly gilt. When I got to the threshold, he announced in a hieratic voice, “Mademoiselle Atelier.”

My first impression was of light and grace in fine eighteenth-century cabriole furniture. A crystal chandelier—with real candles—graced the rococo ceiling, and one wall comprised an exquisite eighteenth-century trompe l’oeil depicting a sylvan scene with elegantly brocaded and be-wigged ladies and gentleman frolicking in sedate groups on an island among Nature’s delights.

Aunt Sisi’s guests—my relatives, I mentally tested the idea—wore the elegant modern version of high fashion as they stood in sedate groups near the white marble fireplace. A few sat on delicate chairs with embroidered silk cushions that would have been kept behind museum ropes at home in LA.

Aunt Sisi stepped forward with her hands outstretched, and folded her fingers around my hand for a brief clasp. She was wearing a beautiful raw silk evening gown of sea green, and emeralds glittered around her neck. “My dear child. May I present to you your family?”

Silk and emeralds. My pretty floral print day dress—ostensibly something her own daughter would wear—was completely wrong for this gathering. Obviously what she considered informal was my major formal.
What’s formal to her? Wigs and brocade?
I thought as she made kind, set-the-girl-at-ease compliments on my appearance.
I should have let her send me a dress.

In the background a quick susurrus of whispers, and an audible “Good God! I don’t believe it!” was followed by a hasty “Hush, Percy!”

With a guiding hand on my elbow, Aunt Sisi took me around and introduced me. Most of them were von Mecklundburgs, but not all.

Robert von M. was a bulky middle-aged man who flashed a big smile as his manicured hand closed around mine. I gathered he was younger brother to the current duke, who was not there. “Quite a miracle, your popping up,” he said in upper-crust English.

His wife put out a languid hand and murmured, “How charming,” in Gran’s French accent.

Parsifal (“We call him Percy”) von M. was an awkward redheaded beanpole around my age with an enormous chin that hinted at Hapsburg connections. He seemed too stunned to speak after his earlier outburst.

I went around the circle, shaking hands when offered, nodding and smiling at those who didn’t put out a hand. The names began to blend, especially as everybody said some variation on “charming” or “miraculous.”

By the time I had made the circuit of the room, that “miraculous” began to tweak at the back of my neck. As a kid I was the skinny book-worm nobody noticed. My after-school hours were taken up with books and ballet, so I reached junior high pretty much oblivious to the complicated signals of in-crowds and out-crowds.

My initiation happened in eighth grade, after I was picked to dance the lead in a school production over a popular girl who had expected to be picked because she was popular. Her posse acted super-friendly.

I was thrilled to find myself one of the in-crowd until I finally started cluing in to the extra edge to smiles, the extra meaning to compliments, to quick looks when I wasn’t supposed to notice. Then suddenly I was supposed to notice—that’s when they started in on me with the word needles about my dorky clothes, my dorky hair, my dorky books falling out of my backpack, my dorky house and dorky dad with a beard and my dorky life, until I was emotionally bleeding.

They fed off that, like a bunch of thirteen-year-old vampires. Their enjoyment of my humiliation hurt far worse than their insults about my dorky everything. Mom made my favorite foods and said they must not have happy lives at home to want to make my life unhappy; Dad told me that the less I showed of the hurt, the sooner they’d leave me alone; and Gran had assured me that living well, and with grace, was the best answer. All of which was sensible, but life isn’t sensible at thirteen.

Right before they went for blood—when I was wondering if I’d imagined those looks, the extra in voices and smiles and gestures—my neck got tight with warning.

I felt the same grip of warning now.

Supermodel-skinny Cerisette von M. gave me a long up and down. You know how usually when you catch people staring they look away, or smile, or at least blink, but she didn’t do any of those things. She gave my print dress—which had been expensive, by the way—a look like I’d been caught Dumpster diving, and then asked what I’d seen so far in Riev. Her tone was polite—barely.

Honoré de Vauban (not a von M.) was tall and slender, with slicked-back black hair and elegant clothes—he looked to me like a cross between Christopher Lee and Bertie Wooster. He wanted to know how I thought the city compared to Paris. They seemed to find that question funny, for there were quick exchanges of looks, and a politely fake chuckle or two.

Then Morvil Danilov drawled, his pale blond eyebrows lifted, “Was it amusing, to take the public tour?”

“Yes.” I fought the urge to back away from them. What had I done wrong? Was it against the law to wear a day dress at a fancy shindig?

Danilov’s version of the dimple quirked the corner of his lopsided smile so that it seemed more sneer than smile. His voice was soft, his drawl cultured. “And Paris? What amusements did you find there?”

“Whom do we know in common?” Cerisette asked, leaning against Danilov as she blew cigarette smoke past my shoulder.

“Atelier,” Robert’s wife repeated. “I don’t believe I’ve met the name in Paris. How odd it is, that we never knew about one another. You did say you live in Paris, Mademoiselle?”

A servant passed by with drinks on a silver tray with a coat of arms worked into its elaborate frame. I reached somewhat blindly for a drink that I didn’t want as I fumbled mentally. I’d been two seconds from asking their advice—from telling them about my experience in the palace, and winding up with my question about Saint Xanpia. After all, these were my cousins. I’d thought they’d be thrilled to discover that Gran wasn’t killed in the war.