Garrett Investigates (15 page)

She seemed a sort of between thing, in a manner that Sebastien found fascinating. She was neither slender nor heavyset, but had a good Dutch sturdiness about her. Her hair was neither a carroty vermillion nor the ember-red of the Swedes, but a soft ash-and-cinnamon color that matched the powdered-over freckles on her cheeks. She was a Queen, but her American informality and impatience with protocol made it seem a role—a
job
—that she picked up and put down at need.

Now, as they sat at table, she was playing her part to the hilt—keeping the conversation smooth and fast-flowing, like light flashing on a brook. But Sebastien did not miss the sly smiles she turned on the king now and again, as if to say,
See how clever I am?

It endeared her to him as no self-serious monarch could have managed.

He and Mary did not dine, which gave him more opportunity to observe his tablemates. The king ate with the manners of one bred and born to the public table and the state dinner. Abby Irene mostly pushed food around on her plate, though he saw her pick her way through most of a crab salad. Her appetite heartened him. The queen had a heavy hand with the salt shaker, though Phoebe seemed to find the food perfectly seasoned. And Mary, being Mary, turned a teacup on a saucer and frowned down into the brown liquid within.

He wondered if it was still strange for her to sit at table with kings and queens and her former employer. She seemed at ease, if pensive, which led him to thinking of the change in perspective for one who had spent so many years as a servant, to become one of the blood, a social outcast—or a social entertainment—in a completely different fashion.

There were salons that gathered around his kind, after all, people who would meet with them for sheer exoticism. And Mary, a Negro American, was more exotic than most.

She caught him staring, and gave him a look that said she’d read his mind. He smiled.

They were blood together, and she was his grandchild.

She smiled back.

When the meal was over and Sebastien and his companions had been excused from the Presence, she came to him in the hall. Phoebe was pushing Abby Irene ahead: they would remain here until after the triumphant ceremony scheduled for that afternoon. Mary had already sent a footman to retrieve appropriate clothes from Mrs. Moyer, a kindness for which Sebastien, incapable as he was of dignified travel by daylight, was most grateful.

As they walked, he lowered his voice. She had a predator’s hearing; she would pick out words the mortal women a few steps ahead would not notice.

He cleared his throat and whispered, “It was your idea, wasn’t it, to have Phillip summon us? He wouldn’t have done that on his own.” Sebastien would have spat on those bare scarred flagstones to clear the bitterness, if he’d had the moisture to spare. Abby Irene’s loyalty and service to the Crown had never, in particular, been returned.
And how different is that from the manner in which any Crown treats its servants?

She did not look at him. “If anybody can figure out what’s wrong with his wife, it would be you and your friends.”

“Wrong with his wife? She seems delightful to me—”

“Oh, for sure,” Mary said. “But her blood tastes of poison, and though the best doctors in America can find nothing wrong with her, despite all of their efforts, she does not conceive. And the king—” she sighed “—now that it matters, the king is under pressure to set her aside. And then there’s the matter of me—”

“Of course,” Sebastien said. “Who would want a king who seemed to be under the thrall of a wampyr?”

“Thrall,” she said. “If only it were so easy. I’d have him give Abby Irene her Enchancery back, with a big bow stuck to the slates.”

***

In addition to sending for clothes, Mary had requisitioned quarters in the half-assembled palace interior where Phoebe and Abby Irene might nap until they were required to dress for the gala. She had her own duties as the king’s advisor—and whatever other roles she served for both the royals.

But this left the wampyr himself at loose ends. Mary addressed this by showing him into a library whose shelves the Prussians had somehow not entirely stripped, and bid him make himself comfortable. He could have waited—a few hours was nothing for one whose experience stretched back before the Black Death—but there was no percentage in it. Especially in a room full of books, a few dozen of which he found he had not even read before.

But he had just settled himself—well back from the thankfully heavily-curtained window—when long-ago familiar footsteps paused in the hall, and a long-ago familiar scent filled the room as the pocket door slid open again. Sebastien laid his book—a collection of American ‘tall tales’—upon the table, allowing his fingers to stroke its rich leather binding in reluctance before he drew his hand away.

And then he smiled and turned and stood, to greet a man he had not seen since before the war.

Dyachenko was a decade or so younger than Abby Irene. When Sebastien had first met him, he’d thought him fiftyish. A closer acquaintanceship had taught Sebastien that the then-Imperial Inspector was barely forty, but the worry lines were evidence of a life lived hard. And here he was now, seventy-eight if he was a day, stooped and white and—judging by the row of medals pinned to his tailcoat breast—dressed in Ambassadorial finery.

He had been dressed by a valet. Sebastien had no doubt of this: Dyachenko was not in the least rumpled, and the creases in his handkerchief and trousers were knife-sharp. There was no way the old man could have managed that on his own. As a young man, he had been an idiosyncratic—and sloppy—dresser.

—Yuri Danylevich, Sebastien said in Russian.—Of all the pleasures I did not anticipate in this palace, your presence is chiefest among them.

“Sebastien,” the man answered, in nearly-impeccable English. “As soon as I heard you and the ladies had survived the war in England, I knew I could not wait to greet you.”

He came across the little distance between them; Sebastien held out his arms. Dyachenko thumped his back with surprising strength—or perhaps not so surprising, for a man who had survived the death of the Tsar he served, a people’s uprising, Prussian conquest of half of Russia, and the pogroms that followed the Tsar’s daughter’s return to power and the crushing of the Prussian invasion in the aftermath of the Chancellor’s death.

“How did you wind up here?” Sebastien asked, gesturing Dyachenko to a chair while he, himself went to fix his old friend a drink. There was no vodka on the sideboard: they would have to make do with cognac. In Sebastien’s experience, Russians excelled at making do.

“Rankest cowardice,” Dyachenko said. “When Tsar Aleksandr fell, I was sent to serve a prison sentence in the military. But the Prussians invaded, and those of us serving our labor there were told that if we fought willingly, at the end of the war we would be pardoned.”

He shrugged and sipped his cognac. “But by the end of the war, the Undying Tsarina had seized command of the government. So I was pardoned out anyway and stayed on as military police, with the rank of Major-General. Eventually, I found myself in the political corps.”

“And here you are.” Sebastien resettled himself in the less comfortable chair opposite. His bones would not mind the stiffness as Dyachenko’s would. “You were a good detective.”

Dyachenko swatted Sebastien’s arm with the spotted back of his hand. “I still am.” He frowned at the fluid in his glass as if it were a scrying pool, twisting the garnet-set ring on his left hand in evident discomfort. “You have heard, of course, that Irina Stephanova did not survive the war.”

“I had not heard,” Sebastien said. “But I am not surprised.” She, too, had been of his court in Moscow. She had been a revolutionary and an artist and the lover of Jack Priest, his then-protégé.

“She died of tuberculosis,” Dyachenko said. “It is ironic, because she was one of
snipyeri zhenshin—
the women snipers—and she had been sent to Pavelgrad, where the siege was worst. But she died of something a little sorcery or antibiotic could have cured.” He drank, tossing his head back. “I am sorry you must hear it from me.”

“It is a pity.” Sebastien reached out and laid a hand on Dyachenko’s knobby wrist. His pulse fluttered under Sebastien’s fingertips like a trapped and frantic animal. “But I am glad to see you again. So tell me, Yuri—the Undying Tsarina. Is it true what they say of her? Or do you serve her out of love?”

“Which part?” Dyachenko shook his head. “That she was a sickly child, inbred and haemophiliac? That is true. That she has worked some sorcery for a cure, and seems forever twenty-one and inhumanly lovely? That, too, is true. That she has hidden her heart in a needle, in an egg, in a duck?” He smiled, for the cognac more than for Sebastien. “You would have to ask the duck. But yes, she is a sorceress. And not a tame one like your Abby Irene.”

Dyachenko set his glass aside with his free hand, then reached out and placed the palm against Sebastien’s throat. The fingers curved to embrace his neck, thumb stroking the corner of his mouth. “I thought it would be hard,” he said. “Getting older while you stayed young.”

Sebastien leaned forward to kiss him. The man
was
old, but his heart beat strongly under the skin. Their lips brushed, and Sebastien smelled the cognac on him, the sweetness of blood beneath. When he leaned back again, Dyachenko’s eyes were closed, his breath caught with his lip between his teeth.

“Oh,” he said, when that breath came out of him.

“And is it?” Sebastien asked.

Dyachenko shook his head. “What amazes me is that any of you survive beyond a hundred years. So much room for mistakes in a life so long. So much room for mistakes, and the pain of living with mistakes. How do you have time for anything else?”

Sebastien could not miss the flush of embarrassment and distress that colored Dyachenko’s features.

“You were never a mistake,” Sebastien said, and stood to latch the door before Dyachenko could contradict him.

***

For the gala, Garrett dispensed with her lap-robe. She doubted she’d be cold within the expected press of bodies, and if it came to the worst her beaded gown was equipped with a convenient burnt-velvet shawl. She didn’t need it to keep her shoulders free of drafts—her dress had sleeves long enough to tuck her wand inside of, which incidentally concealed the ropy, striated flesh of her upper arms. She might be an old wreck but she wasn’t an old fool, though gone with her commission was her right to be armed in the presence of the king.

She couldn’t do anything about the fact that in her chair, her head was navel-height to most of the crowd, and she couldn’t see a damned thing around whoever she was talking with at the moment. And she wanted badly to get another long look at the queen, given what Sebastien had whispered in her ear as he sent her and Phoebe off to bed.

The queen is under a spell.

Sebastien had left her with an old—and unexpected—friend, the Russian police investigator for whom she’d often consulted when they lived in Moscow. Yuri Dyachenko was still spry enough to push her chair around on a flat floor, for which she was envious and grateful in equal measure, because the press of bodies and Garrett’s burgeoning deafness in noisy crowds made navigation difficult for her.

Dyachenko was pleased enough at her company to not complain too much when she asked him to find her a place near the dance floor, where she might observe the royal couple when they arrived. Fashionably late, of course, because it would be impolite in the extreme for anyone to arrive
after
them, and so they would give stragglers every chance to avoid embarrassment.

The queen is under a spell
.

There was plenty of warning when the royal couple arrived. They could all hear the cheers from outside, where Phillip addressed his people one last time. They could hear the band strike up a processional. They arranged themselves in tidy lines, and footmen took hold of the handles on the great double doors.

Even Garrett, who considered herself entirely too old for this sort of theatrical nonsense, felt the thrill of tension in her chest. Dyachenko reached over her shoulder and put his hand against her collarbone. She reached up and squeezed—a feeble squeeze, but she hoped a comfort nonetheless.

The king would pension me off. He thinks nothing of me. But the queen is under a spell.

And then the doors swung wide, and Garrett saw Henry’s face over Phillip’s shoulders, his wife sturdy and smiling at his side. And she cursed herself for an old fool after all, and did not hear a word of the pretty speech King Phillip made.

***

Sean Cuan found her later, by the table where Dyachenko had parked her before going off to fetch champagne and pastries. He cleared his throat; she glanced up, surprised to find herself staring at a face that should have been familiar if it wasn’t so damned old, and framed by a neat white beard.

“DCI Garrett,” he said, and his voice was all the clue she needed.

“DCI Cuan,” she said. She would have started to her feet, but it was beyond her. So instead she waved to a chair beyond the one Dyachenko had claimed. “Sit. My god, it’s been a long time.”

He glanced over, but did not sit. He had never had what she thought of as a classically Irish face, and the years had stretched it long and gullied it with hard-work lines.

“It’s good to see you,” she said. “But it’s not DCI anymore.”

“Ah,” he said, distress creaking through every word. “I’m an idiot, ma’am.”

“You’re a man,” she said. “You came back with the king?”

He smiled. “Not exactly. I was in Africa, fighting the Prussians there. But I came back because of the king. You know we’re shy of Crown Investigators now.”

He’d been a skinny kid when she met him, a skinny knob-eared Detective Sergeant with the newly established Criminal Investigations Division. She had been the only woman among the Crown’s Own. He’d impressed her on a jointly-worked case, and she’d written him a letter of introduction to the Dean of Sorcery at Oxford University.