The Adventuress (22 page)

“Miss Penelope Huxleigh,” Irene said quickly.

“Then you are English by ancestry, if not by birth,” the youthful duchess said quickly, still taking me for Irene’s sister and thus assuming that Huxleigh had been Irene’s maiden name.

Apparently it suited Irene to have her think so. “Not—quite,” said she.

“But you were born in America. Sarah says so.”

“The North.” Irene said no more.

“I lived in the South, the penultimate south of New Orleans. If you have seen it, you understand why I love the French, and love particularly Monte Carlo. Perhaps you know New Orleans?”

“No. My travels have been predominantly abroad.”

“You must have been young when you left the States. I detect no accent.”

“As a singer, I am at home in many languages.”

“I see.” Again the lively blue eyes pecked at Godfrey and myself, darting from buttonholes to gloves to faces to empty chairs about the chamber. “You must be seated and we will have tea. Are you enjoying Monte Carlo? Mr. Norton? Miss Huxleigh?”

“Splendidly,” Godfrey said, “although I am now engaged in poring over obscure documents rather than strolling in the sunshine.”

“Indeed, I have heard that your grasp of both English and French law has been useful to many in Paris. It is becoming a fluid world, is it not? We are all mixes of this and of that and live in this land and that.”

A maid appeared among us and began quietly laying out a tea fit for an emperor.

“Certainly, Your Grace,” Irene said, “but our roots remain. I detect a New Orleans glide over your vowels in both English and French.”

Alice smiled so sunnily that I revised my opinion of her beauty. “I am an utter mélange, it is true: half French, half Jewish and of the Catholic faith!” She laughed at her self-contradictions. “I am a young woman still, but a mother and a widow. I am wealthy, yet unable to buy my heart’s desire. I am a friend to starving writers and artists, yet would be a princess. Can you help me, Mrs. Norton? Sarah said you are a mistress of the awkward situation.”

Irene sipped the exotically colored tea in a Sevres porcelain cup. “How awkward?”

“Very,” replied the duchess. “I am, you see, an impetuous woman.”

I stared, recalling that Irene had discerned that very characteristic in her handwriting.

The duchess went on as one accustomed to talking and being heeded, not from vanity but from the effervescent force of her personality.

“I wed just two weeks past my seventeenth birthday and bore my first child within the year.”

“That is indeed impetuous,” Irene murmured into her teacup.

“Armand died in Athens scarcely more than four years after our marriage. In the meanwhile, my father had left New Orleans to join his family’s banking firm in Paris, Heine Frères, second only to the Rothschilds in prominence. Father would say the Rothschilds are second.” Irene nodded sagely. “Sarah Bernhardt credits your father for the fact that any of her wealth accrues at all, given her spending habits.”

“Sarah is an artist. She holds nothing back, especially money. When she comes to Monte, my father bombards me with letters pleading that I keep her from the gaming tables.”

“Do you?” Godfrey asked.

She regarded him for a long moment, during which she both measured his attractions and read his imperviousness. “No, Mr. Norton. Only one thing would distract Sarah from gaming, and then not for long enough. Besides, my father asks the wrong persuader. He has had scant luck at dissuading me from my, ah, intense interests.”

“How intense?” Irene asked softly.

Alice sighed, folded her hands in her lap, then tilted her head to eye us each in turn. The maid had long since departed. In the silence, a cheerful trill came from a cage of canaries almost lost from view against the yellow silk-covered walls.

“Sarah knows, of course, the entire story. Did she tell you?”

“No,” Irene said. “Sarah is discreet about her friends.”

Alice smiled. “A pity she cannot be discreet about herself. Neither can I. You are an odd triumvirate in whom to entrust my deepest secrets. I feel that by rights, Mrs. Norton, we should be rivals; and that we, Mr. Norton, should be romantic intriguers; and that we, Miss Huxleigh—” she leaned forward to fix me with a long stare “—should be sisters. Yet there is something steady and reassuring about you all. I sense perhaps that you also have seen more of the world than most.”

I did not know whether to resent more being taken yet again for a harmless sister or the assumption that I was hardened to the world’s uglier side.

“Certainly we
see
more than most,” Irene said. “Your Grace—”

“No, no! Alice. Simple Alice from New Orleans—though my title enraptures my father to the buttons on his spats. That’s what has always worried him, you see, that after the coup of capturing Armand, Duc de Richelieu, one of the oldest, most esteemed titles in
tout France,
I should waste myself on someone unworthy.”

Irene contemplated the chirping canaries. “Would ‘someone unworthy’ have precise hands and wear a beard?”

Alice drew back, surprised into silence for once. She regarded her entwined fingers and spoke on. “I was but twenty-two when Armand died. I did not show the proper spirit of wishing to vanish utterly from the sight of the world. My father exported me to the isle of Madeira, off the coast of Africa. There I was to bask in the sunshine, stroll lost in melancholy along the beach and in general wither for a decent period of time.

“Instead, I met Emile. He was a doctor and Jewish. Neither characteristic pleased my father. He descended on the capital city of Funchal like a well-dressed torrent, humiliating Emile and whisking me away to Biarritz to ‘recuperate’ in peace.”

Alice shrugged. “Biarritz also had doctors. I met Jacob, also Jewish, also a physician and also poor, relatively speaking. This time I was not to be swayed by my father’s wrath. My money was my own, as was my will.” Irene frowned. “Where does His Highness, Prince Albert, come into this?”

Alice dimpled, clearly delighting in recounting her shocking story. “I had met him briefly in Funchal. He was leading an expedition to conduct deep-sea diving experiments near Madeira. He was titled and rich, all that Father would want for me, but of course Father must rush me from Madeira to separate me from Emile.”

“Was the prince not also married?” Godfrey asked coolly. When she stared at him, he smiled. “Such facts are always recorded in cramped handwriting in dusty offices. I have spent my morning in such unpleasant places.”

“Albert’s wife left him years ago, while still carrying his son. The marriage had been arranged, and she was Scotch,” Alice added disdainfully, as if the last fact certainly explained all previous ones.

“But you have jumped to the conclusion of my tale,” she continued. “Albert was also a neighbor of mine in Paris. Our brief meeting in Funchal was not our last. His first marriage had been annulled in the church and dissolved by the divorce courts. We were free to marry, save that his father, Prince Charles, forbid it. He found me flighty. So it sits, with Albert and myself living our lives in Paris and Monte Carlo, waiting for... the inevitable, when we will do the inevitable, and marry as we wish.”

“What is your difficulty?” Irene inquired. “You are willing to wait, and worldly enough—both of you, from what I hear of the prince’s younger days—to make the wait pleasant.”

“The problem is Emile,” Alice said.

“The bearded man,” Irene prompted.

Alice appeared dazed. “You
do
know him then?”

“I have seen him, which is enough. You set him to follow us.”

“I wished to know more about those to whom I would confide such delicate matters. Then, too, Emile himself was suspicious. He thought you might even be the source of our problem.”

“Which is—?” Godfrey put in.

“Blackmail,” Irene answered promptly for the duchess. “Someone wishes to acquaint Prince Albert with your indiscretions. Though the prince himself had a scandalous youth—”

“He is a shy man who hides behind the worldly façade expected of princes. Has not the same phenomenon dogged your own Prince of Wales, Mr. Norton and Miss Huxleigh?”

I finally got a word in edgewise. “I am no apologist for the excesses of
England’s
prince,” I said smartly. “You must justify Monaco’s prince without my support.” Alice took in my stiff denial, then said, “So it stands, with Albert and myself peacefully waiting to formalize our love. Now some... unknown person... has determined to stir up the scandal of my earlier liaisons. I am not the mistress of my heart. Indeed, I am not certain I would not have been better off living an obscure life with my dear and glorious physician.”

“Physicians,” I corrected.

We regarded each other, the confident blond duchess and myself. I anticipated being asked to leave. Then she laughed.

“You are so very British, Miss Huxleigh, as bracing as a sirocco from the shores of Africa. I would keep you as a court critic if I could, a voice of rectitude to toll the minutes of my sins like some relentless clock upon a church tower. I cannot tell you how wearisome it is to have everyone agree with me.”

“Not everyone,” said a voice from the doorway.

The bearded man entered.

“Emile!” The duchess began to stand, but he moved quickly to lay a dissuading hand upon her shoulder. “Dr. Emile Hoffman,” she introduced him. He all too obviously knew who we were. “Emile doubts the wisdom of sharing our delicate situation with strangers.”

“Better than sharing it with friends,” Irene put in crisply. “Why is he involved, pray? You said that your liaison was long over.”

The doctor flushed, as if less inured than the duchess and Irene to such frank realities. “It was I who was contacted by these wretches. The first letter threatened to damage Alice’s reputation with the prince, and with the public.”

“My reputation,
cherie,”
she said with a smile, “is partly why I am so well regarded.”

“So said Marie Antoinette once,” the doctor returned. He eyed us all in turn, then sat down on a tapestry- upholstered chair.

Unlike most men taking the Riviera air, he wore dark, sober clothing. Even his vest was of charcoal-striped sateen. Perhaps professional dignity was why he chose to wear a beard. He was much better-looking than first glimpse promised, with dark, curly hair and a set of keen, twinkling eyes that gave him the look of an amiable schoolboy rather than a dignified medical man. Yet even while uneasy, he radiated an energetic charm that would explain the duchess’s attachment.

Godfrey had been studying the pair himself, for quite different reasons. His mild gray eyes sharpened as he leaned forward to address them.

“These are very serious blackmailers, I suspect. They approached the doctor first to impress the duchess with how much they know and to amplify your mutual fears. I assume, Doctor, that it would not harm your practice if all—”

“I am now in Nice.”

“—if all Nice knew of your former relationship with the duchess?”

Dr. Hoffman’s smile was rueful. “Indeed, it might enhance it.”

“Then she alone is the target,” Godfrey declared. “Although using you as intermediary has the interesting effect of renewing your association and further compromising her.”

The duchess sighed. “Yes. It is most unfortunate. Albert’s and my wedding has not only been forbidden by Prince Charles, but by the Bishop of Monaco as well. We will marry when Charles dies, but a scandal before then will not convince the bishop or the people to accept me as Princess of Monaco. I am already hampered by being an American and half Jewish.”

“You believe that the prince will stand by you?” Irene asked. “Once his father dies, he may decide he must serve the line and marry into the aristocracy.”

Alice’s bright blue eyes clouded, then cleared. “I
am
the aristocracy, Irene. The aristocracy of New World money. American heiresses are becoming quite the fashion for European noble houses to marry.”

Irene answered drily “Kings and princes can be fickle.”

I knew she recalled her disastrous encounter with the current King of Bohemia, who had pursued her as a prince but was ready to disavow her when he inherited the throne.

“Anyone can be fickle, my dear Irene.”

“Unfortunately, not blackmailers,” Godfrey said. “We know what they propose to reveal. What do they want?” The duchess and the doctor exchanged a quick, uneasy glance.

‘That’s just it,” she said at last. “They won’t say. Or rather, they say they will tell us when the time comes. You see why it is so distressing.”

“When the time comes?” Irene was suddenly alert. “What time? For what?”

“Alas...” The doctor spread his hands with a medical man’s precision. “We are told only to wait and see.”

“How do they convey this extraordinary instruction?”

“By letter,” the doctor answered.

“May I inspect it?” Irene’s gloved hand was extended. Dr. Hoffman reached into his breast pocket and withdrew a sadly wrinkled document. Irene scanned it quickly.

“In French, but execrable French. Cheap paper, and filthy. This is not the handiwork of a society blackmailer.”

“Perhaps some servant thinks to grow wealthy on forbidden knowledge,” Godfrey speculated.

Irene shook her head. “This is an ignorant, crude attempt, but not pointless. Or without guile.” She eyed the doctor. “How did it come?”

“By post.”

“You have the envelope?”

“I... not here.” He seemed confused. “I left it, ah... in Alice’s sitting room.”

“May I see it?”

“Of course.” He rose, bobbed the women a bow and darted off.

The four of us carefully avoided regarding one another. Obviously, Dr. Hoffman still enjoyed a certain familiarity with the duchess.

Hurrying footsteps announced the physician’s return. He brought the envelope directly to Irene, who snatched it eagerly. She ignored the address on the front and turned it over.

“As I thought!” she announced, her eyes shining as if she had just received an ovation at La Scala in Milan.

We stared, uncomprehending.

“The sealing wax! The scent of sandalwood. The senders of the mysterious letters to Louise Montpensier’s uncle!”