The Frog Prince (32 page)

“His Majesty is already downstairs in the Small Gallery,” says Johanna, hurrying me down the corridors. I slow my pace as I recognize the hallways leading to the side entrance. “His Majesty is waiting for you in the Small Gallery,” she explains. “The only way to get you there now is by taking you by car. Once you arrive you will both be announced and will enter the hall. His Majesty will lead you to the dance floor to open the ball by dancing the first waltz.” She gives my skirt a skeptical look. “Will you be able to dance in this?”

“My mother knew I was going to dance the waltz,” I tell her, beginning to worry.

“Be careful that you do not perform any moves that will expose your petticoat or your legs,” she says, shaking her finger at me.

I’m not sure if she thinks I plan to kick up my legs in front of the cameras like a can-can girl on a chorus line or what, but I’m too nervous to do anything other than nod and get in the limousine when she pulls the door open. The car makes its way slowly around to the back of Schönbrunn, and stops just in front of the curved staircase. I can see a camera crew at the top, ready to capture my every awkward move for posterity.

A tuxedoed figure pops the door open. “
Guten Abend
, Whiskey Tango.”

“Jason!” I say, eagerly grabbing his hand. “I thought you were taking the night off. What’s the matter…couldn’t melt the frost off the Ice Princess?”

He pulls me out of the car and to my feet. “His Majesty has asked that I be on duty any time you are outside the palace,” he says. He plays the part of the gallant escort, offering his arm as we climb to the doors leading to the Small Gallery. Under his breath he adds something in German. The feel of it is that he plans to use the road salt on her later tonight. He pauses and says, “Unless she finds a duke willing to renounce his citizenship.”

I stifle a giggle as two doormen wave us into the Small Gallery. Roman appears suddenly from a doorway to the left. A guard quickly closes it behind him, but not before I recognize the white and black décor of the Round Salon that leads to the hidden staircase and Maria Theresa’s secret rooms.

Roman stands out from the sea of tuxedos with that red sash bisecting his white military dress coat. He smiles when he sees me, and I have to fight the urge to look behind me to see who this jaw-droppingly handsome guy is looking at. Jason releases me just as Roman folds my arm into his.

“You look very regal in red,” he whispers in my ear. “I will save more scandalous comments for later.”

“And you look like my knight in …wait, did you leave your shining armor somewhere?”

“Must be in my room.”

“Speaking of that, wasn’t that the Chinese-y Room I saw you come out of?”

“The
Round
Chinese Salon,” he says. He points to a pair of closed doors directly across the hall. “Through there is the
Oval
Chinese Salon. They look exactly the same.”

“Did Chinese people come in two shapes two hundred years ago?”

Roman stiffens and clenches his jaw in the way he does when he’s trying not to laugh.

“So Maria Theresa’s rooms are right above us then?” I say, looking up at the ceiling.

“Yep.” He sighs. “Palace security is having a collective heart attack with this many people so close to it.”

Through three wide archways I can see fashionably-dressed guests in the Great Gallery, watching for Roman’s entrance. At some unseen signal, a blast of trumpets sounds, followed by a guy next to the middle arch bellowing: “
Seine Königliche Majestät, König
Römisch das Eerste, und sein geehrter Gast,
Leigh Fromm!”

This is our cue. We move into the Great Gallery, waving to the guests and TV cameras. Roman leads us to the middle of the football field-sized floor. My heart is thudding so hard that I can almost feel the translucent pressed powder shaking off my face like sifted flour.

“I assume you know that we’re about to dance?” says Roman.

“Yeah, no thanks to you,” I mutter. “I assume you know you’re supposed to bow to me out of courtesy first?”

“I would only do that if I were to assume that you knew how to curtsey to me out of courtesy.”

“You should bow!” I hiss at him. “Now!”

Roman does as I ask, immediately bending at the waist. And as the audience and press look on, I take a bit of the sides of my skirt in each hand, lift it ever so slightly, and bend at the knee in an elegant curtsey.

Just like Elfriede taught me.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

“Wake up, Sleeping Beauty!”

“Har-har,” I mutter, throwing a pillow over my burning eyes just as a newspaper is lobbed my way.

“You’re going to be pi-issed!” says Kat, trilling out the word in two syllables.

“What?” I cautiously lift the pillow and open one eye. Kat points to the newspaper, which has fallen off onto the floor. Next to her I see Menen, looking morose. I lean over the edge of the bed and see the cover of
Der Standard
.

I’m not entirely sure what the headline says, but in this case a picture is worth a thousand words. The close-up picture of Roman and Isabella in her jeweled tiara is so big that it takes up the entire front page—above and below the fold.

“
Wiener Zeitung
and
Die Press
are just as bad,” she says.

I groan and roll onto my back. “Didn’t anyone cover my curtsey? Elfreide made me practice it for two hours yesterday…my quads are still burning.”

“You are on all the covers of American newspapers,” says Menen, a note of hope in her voice.

“That’s not really going to help me win the hearts and minds of the Austrian people.”

Kat has fallen silent, always a suspicious state for her. I sit up. “What?” I say. “There’s something even worse, isn’t there? Tell me!”

The two of them exchange a look and Kat dives for the newspaper on the floor. I twist off the bed and throw my body on it like a linebacker on a fumble. I flip to the first page where there is an article with sidebars containing what look like poll numbers. “How did you understand any of this?” I say.

Menen wordlessly hands me a copy of
The Austrian Times
which is helpfully written in English and has the exact same table.

Who should be the next Queen of Austria?

Princess Isabella 82%

Leigh Fromm 8%

Someone Else 10%

“Great,” I say. “I even lost out to ‘someone else.’”

“Well, everyone knows
Frau
Else is hot and has a great ass,” says Kat.

“When are you leaving?” I say to Kat, my voice heavy with sarcasm. Out of the corner of my eye I see Menen smile behind her hand. I turn my attention back to the newspaper. Finally I find a picture of me on page A24 …dancing with Mikhail Romanov.

“Not until tomorrow,” says Kat.

“Where’s Roman?” I say. With the nosy press sniffing every nook and cranny, it was impossible for me to sneak through the Round Salon and off to his room after the ball without people noticing.

“You mean
Römisch
?” says Kat, exaggerating the German pronunciation of his name. “Jason says he barely went to bed and is currently giving an interview on tree houses.”

“Tell me he didn’t really give a speech yesterday on Disney World,” I say snapping the paper as I make my way back to the front page.

“He did,” says Kat. “The Swiss Family Robinson Initiative.”

I raise one eyebrow. “He’s tearing down Schönbrunn and building a tree house in a concrete tree?”

Kat tears the paper from my hands and flips to the second page. “‘…Swiss Family Robinson Initiative, a plan to preserve Austrian forests by incorporating trees into housing expansion.’”

“Will there be roller coasters and people wandering around in animal costumes?” I ask.

“God, I hope so,” says Kat. “Otherwise, what’s the point?” She folds the paper up. “So you need to get up and show us around. Roman says that there’s a secret spiral staircase in one of Sisi’s rooms that takes you right out to the gardens.”

“Who’s Sisi?”

Kat rolls her eyes, leaving Menen to answer. “Empress of Austria, Queen of Hungary and Bohemia. She was married to Emperor Franz Josef. Her apartments are part of the palace tour.”

“You should see the portraits of her,” says Kat. “She never cut her hair and it would drag on the floor when she walked.”

“She was very beautiful,” Menen adds.

“And had a twenty-inch waist,” says Kat.

“She was said to exercise obsessively.”

“And would diet until she was emaciated. If you’re trying to wow the Austrian people, you might want to at least know a little bit about their most famous anorexic Empress.”

“Okay, I’m getting dressed,” I say, opening a dresser drawer and reaching for some jeans. I hesitate. “The palace is still closed to tourists, right?”

“Yeah, but you might want to throw a little makeup on anyway. Mikhail is prowling the corridors looking for you.”

I blush. “He’s just a friend, Kat.”

“He’s not a bad-looking friend to have, that’s all I’m saying…”

An hour later and the four of us are standing in the Stairs Cabinet, part of Empress “Sisi’s” royal apartments. The spiral staircase appears anything but a ‘secret.’ Directly under a blazing chandelier, it’s also lit up from the inside with bright white lights. A chest-high Plexiglass partition separates us from it.

“Well, this is a problem,” says Kat.

“No problem at all,” says Mikhail. He takes a padded chair from a nearby alcove and lifts it over the Plexiglass. He looks around before disappearing into an adjoining room. A few minutes later he returns with a very non-Baroque stool that looks like something used in a ticket booth at a carnival. He slides that up to the partition and holds out his hand to me. “May I help you over?”

I take his hand and try not to think about how I’m probably stepping down onto a priceless artifact of Austrian history. I smack the chair padding after I’m safely on the parquet floor, releasing a cloud of dust that smells like a three-hundred year old grandmother’s house. I see a sign for tourists next to the partition and read the English part of it aloud for everyone’s benefit:

“
The spiral staircase in this room was installed for the empress in 1863 and led down into her private apartments on the ground floor. These apartments were not furnished according to court guidelines but to the empress's personal taste. They had violet silk wall-hangings and also contained an ‘odorless, elegant place of easement in the English style
.’”

I turn to Mikhail. “What’s an ‘odorless, elegant place of easement in the English style?’”

“I believe that would be the lavatory,” he says. “They were very new to Europe in the eighteen hundreds.”

“Oh, gross,” says Kat, stepping over the partition with Mikhail’s help. “I hope we didn’t come all this way to see a toilet. Can we get down the stairs or what?”

I pull my hand away from the red-flocked walls and peer over the staircase railing. It seems intact.

“Please allow me to go first,” says Mikhail, following Menen over the Plexiglass and jumping lightly to the floor.

The treads seem to hold his weight, and we follow him one by one. Below it’s pretty disappointing, the rooms being both bare and damp. The violet silk wall hangings are nowhere to be found, and there isn’t a toilet in site, odorless or otherwise.

“Well, this was sort of anti-climactic,” says Kat, looking around at the emptiness.

“Not at all what I expected,” Menen says sadly.

“The door to the gardens must be here somewhere,” says Mikhail. He walks into the next room and returns just a few seconds later. “Maybe this way…” he says to himself, disappearing down the hallway on the other side. “Aha!”

I make it just ahead of Kat and Menen. Mikhail stands in front of what looks like just another window. He pulls the heavy curtains aside to reveal door handles. Between the slats of closed horizontal blinds I see daylight. With a triumphant smile, Mikhail puts his hand on the door.

“Wait!” I yell.

Mikhail freezes.

I’m thinking furiously, trying to think of how to explain. “At lunch yesterday Roman’s mother told me about a hidden passageway inside the Chinese Salon.”

“The one that goes to Roman’s suite?” says Kat.

I shake my head. “That’s the
Round
Chinese Salon. I asked her that same question. Elfriede specifically said ‘the other one.’”

“
What
other one?”

I walk back and forth across the room, thinking. “And last night Roman said there were two kinds of Chinese: the Oval and the Round.’”

Kat exhales loudly in exasperation. “Leigh, I’m about to push you headfirst into the easement and give you a nineteenth-century swirlie.”

I smile. “Follow me.”

*****

“It’s got to be around here somewhere.”

I’m down on my hands and knees in the Oval Chinese Salon, which is directly across the Small Gallery from its fraternal geometric twin, the Round Chinese Salon. I’m careful not to touch any of the porcelain vases or lacquered tables on the floor of the oval room. I press carefully on the wall panels, waiting for something to pop open.

“Maybe we should move one of these—”

“Ssh!”

The deep echo of footsteps can be heard coming from the far side of the Great Gallery. A walkie-talkie crackles in the distance. “
Dieses ist Wimmer. Ich überprüfe die Galerien
.”

“Jason?” Kat whispers.

I shake my head. “Palace security,” I whisper back.

My co-conspirators spring into action. Mikhail starts moving tables and vases out of the way. Menen and Kat follow behind him, pushing desperately on the wall panels. I’m just about to suggest that we walk out with our hands up when I remember something.