An Unexpected Peril

by DEANNA RAYBOURN

  The duke gave him a grudging nod and smiled, a flicker of his usual insouciance playing about his mouth. “A worthy adversary, Templeton-Vane. I might duel you yet.”

  “I look forward to it,” Stoker said, holding his gaze for a long moment. “Did the princess give you any indication of how long she meant to be away?”

  The duke shrugged. “She said only that she had something she must do and that I would have to trust her. And she promised to announce the betrothal upon her return.”

  “A carrot to secure the donkey’s cooperation,” I said blandly.

  The duke raised his glass and made a braying noise. He was noticeably more intoxicated than he had been, and I wondered if inebriation might loosen his tongue.

  “Did it ever occur to you,” I put it to him pleasantly, “that your villainous little friend from Deauville might have followed you and seized the opportunity to abduct Gisela to hold her for ransom?”

  A look of horror came over him and he drank off the last drops of his brandy in a single swallow. “No, that cannot be.”

  “Unlikely, I grant you. But possible. Miss Butterworth followed you that night. Why not this fellow? He must have kept rather a close eye upon you during your time in London?”

  He licked his lips, his tongue brushing the hairs of his moustaches, which had gone limp from the dousings of brandy. “He owns a flat in Belgravia. I stayed there when I first arrived. He likes to know where I am, at least until the money is paid back. He might, that is to say, I don’t know, but I suppose he might have followed us. Oh, Gisela,” he said, falling to muttering something in impenetrable German.

  Stoker elaborated on my theory. “Or Gisela mayn’t have left of her own volition at all. We know she entered the station in your company. What if you delivered her to this man on his instructions?”

  “I would never!” the duke cried in outrage.

  “But you might have,” Stoker persisted. “You could have taken her to the club on the pretext of retrieving the rope, pretending to help her, only to hand her over to this fellow. He may be preparing a ransom note as we speak, ready to take his money from the Alpenwalder treasury if he cannot get it from your pocket.”

  “That is monstrous,” Maximilian said.

  “Not as monstrous as the fact that if anything were to happen to her, you would be the Hereditary Prince of the Alpenwald, in your own right,” I suggested. “In fact, what if that was your plan all along? Hand Gisela over and let this miscreant demand money for her, then kill her, eliminating all of your problems at one stroke. Excellent thinking, Stoker.”

  The duke surged out of his chair. “Enough!” he said, flinging his glass into the mantel looking glass and shattering both. “Gisela is not a problem for me to solve. I am in love with her!” Brandy dripped from the shards on the mantelpiece, dropping softly to the carpet. For a long moment, it was the only sound in the room apart from the duke’s heavy breathing.

  As quickly as the rage had come, it left him. His shoulders sagged and his face crumpled as he sank to his knees and buried his face in the chair cushion. He let out a low, mournful noise, rather like a very sad bull elephant, and I looked at Stoker. “What is he doing?”

  Stoker bent to peer at the duke. “I think he is weeping.”

  “Well, that is awkward,” I murmured. I knelt next to the duke and patted his back.

  “There, there,” I said in my best soothing voice. “We do not really think you want Gisela dead.”

  Stoker mouthed over the duke’s head at me. “Yes, we do.”

  I pulled a face at him as the duke continued to weep loudly. He turned to me and lay his head on my shoulder, clutching me as his shoulders heaved and his tears soaked my gown. “Now, Maximilian, pull yourself together. Do try,” I urged.

  “Let him cry,” Stoker suggested. “He might feel a good deal better if he gives vent to his emotions.”

  I put out my tongue at him. It was very well for him to encourage such a thing. He did not have the duke’s not inconsiderable weight bearing down on him. My arms were beginning to cramp, but Maximilian was undeterred. He wept on, great heaving sobs, and in between he talked, or at least tried, the words choked out in gulps. There was a good deal of remorse and far too much self-pity for my taste, but he did seem genuinely sorrowful for the poor decisions he had made.

  After a good quarter of an hour’s sobbing, he began to subside to sniffles and moans, and eventually he pulled away, mopping his face on the large scarlet handkerchief Stoker provided for him.

  “Thank you,” he said, blowing his nose lavishly into the handkerchief.

  Stoker turned to me as the clock chimed. “You might as well go and let the baroness get you into harness.”

  “What will you do?”

  “I am going to help His Grace get sober,” he said, baring his teeth in a smile.

  “Good.” I did not envy Maximilian. Stoker’s ministrations, while highly skilled, were occasionally none too gentle. I turned to the duke. “A word of wisdom, Maximilian? Do not fight whatever Stoker does to you. It will go easier on you if you do not.”

  He groaned as I closed the door behind me.

  CHAPTER

  22

  Before I was dressed, the baroness sent down to the kitchens for food and I recognized the handiwork of Julien d’Orlande as soon as it appeared. Not content with his usual elegance, he had truly outdone himself for the repast of a princess. There was a selection of tiny sandwiches and cakes, each decorated more lavishly than the last. Tarts filled with frangipane and hothouse fruits were glazed to glistening perfection while icing sugar dusted the snowy peaks of miniature mountain-shaped cakes of vanilla sponge. I gazed at the vast assortment of food, from the shimmering spun-sugar nest with its clutch of gilded chocolate eggs topped with a marzipan peacock to the pile of narrowly cut roast beef sandwiches cunningly stacked to look like a mountain. Little sprigs of watercress had been tucked in between to give the impression of alpine plants clinging to the mountainside. In pride of place, an enormous wheel of fragrant, almost pungent cheese rested in a nest of grape leaves and tiny savory biscuits.

  “Our famous Alpenwalder cheese,” the baroness told me. “It is most delicious with a glass of wine or toasted onto bread.”

  I surveyed the groaning trays as Guimauve, stretched on the bed, lifted his head to sniff at the various enticing aromas.

  “Is it always like this?” I asked the baroness as Yelena presented me with a delicate china cup filled with clear chicken consommé. I sniffed appreciatively at the steam.

  The baroness smiled. “Of course. People like to demonstrate their gifts and it is natural to do so for royalty.”

  “Quite a way to live,” I mused, sipping at the soup. A single dumpling floated on the surface. I scooped it up and took a bite. It was full of minced chicken and some flavorsome herb—tarragon, perhaps? It was one of the most delectable things I had ever eaten, but I could scarcely force it past the corset.

  “You eat like a small bird,” the baroness said in disapproval. “Now, I must go and retrieve the jewels for tonight from the lumber room. Eat,” she ordered. She rattled off a series of instructions to Yelena in the Alpenwalder dialect—no doubt commanding her to force-feed me like a Michaelmas goose, I reflected darkly.

  But as soon as the baroness had left, Yelena turned to me. “Do not eat if you do not wish. I will eat your share.”

  “Yelena!” I exclaimed in an excited whisper. “You do speak English.”

  “Yes,” she said. She helped herself to a cheese tart.

  “But why do you pretend not to?”

  She shrugged. “It is not for them to know everything.” She ate the cheese tart in one bite and reached for another.

  “You know why I am here?” I pressed.

  She rolled her eyes heavenwards at the obviousness of the question. “You take the place of the pr
incess.”

  “Do you know anything about her disappearance? Where she might be?”

  She hesitated, darting a glance to the door. “Perhaps. I might know something about the night she left.”

  “I know you made her a loan of your cloak,” I said, and she gave a start before dropping her lids in a look of grudging respect.

  “Perhaps you do not require what I know,” she said in a demure murmur. Guimauve moved from the bed, putting out a paw in supplication. Yelena busied herself pulling a little chicken from a sandwich and feeding it to the cat.

  “Do not be tiresome, Yelena,” I said with governessy firmness. “Tell me!”

  Yelena gave me a sly look, her expression identical to Guimauve’s as he considered the spread of dishes upon the tray. “Such things are not free, Fraulein,” she told me.

  “You want me to pay you for information?”

  “I am not a rich girl,” she said, her lips twisting bitterly. “But I want to marry. If I have money, it will be easier.” She flicked another look at the closed door, and I recalled what the baroness had told me about Yelena’s romantic inclinations.

  “You wish to marry Captain Durand,” I said.

  “His family are very proud. They think I am a peasant because I am Russian, but I am no peasant,” she told me, her eyes bright with pride or hostility, I could not tell. “My father was put into prison after the attack upon the tsar.”

  I blinked at her. “The attack upon the tsar? You mean the bomb that killed Tsar Alexander?”

  She pressed her lips together and nodded. “My father had nothing to do with this, you understand. He knew those involved, he went to a meeting or two, but nothing more. He did not know of the plot. He did not act,” she insisted. It sounded to me as if he had had rather more than nothing to do with the conspiracy to assassinate the tsar, and my blood ran a little cold at the idea of an anarchist’s daughter in the employ of the princess.

  “How did you come to work for the princess?” I asked.

  “My mother had a sister who married an Alpenwalder and I was sent to my aunt so that I would be safe. My aunt married beneath her, an innkeeper,” she said, fairly spitting the word. “He expected me to make beds and empty chamber pots, and one day I said, ‘If I am to do such things, I might as well do them in a palace!’ And I went into the princess’s household as a chambermaid. She noticed me and the way I dressed my hair,” she said, touching a hand to her neatly plaited locks. “When her maid was ill, she sent for me to dress her hair. She liked my way of talking, and from then on, she sent for me often. When her maid left her post to marry, the princess offered me the post. I do good work for her,” she added with pride.

  “But why hide the fact that you speak English?”

  She reddened. “They talk about me when they think I cannot understand. The nobles and the high servants, they all speak English. If I keep my mouth closed, they say things in front of me they think I cannot understand.”

  “And you blackmail them for it?” I hazarded.

  “It did not begin that way,” she said, her mouth thinning unpleasantly. “But often they let slip little things they do not want other people to know. I ask only for small sums and that they keep my secret. I have put aside ten pounds,” she said, bringing out a small bundle from her pocket. I recognized one of the princess’s handkerchiefs knotted into a pouch. She opened it to show me the assortment of coins and notes, some German, some French, even a Swedish krona or two.

  “Very resourceful,” I told her. The knowledge that Yelena was little better than a common blackmailer was distasteful; however, I had no wish to stem the tide of revelations.

  But Yelena had said all she came to say. She knotted the handkerchief closed again and tucked it back into her pocket. “If you want me to keep your secret, you will pay me a little. And if you want to know where the princess was going, you will pay more, I think.”

  “I suppose I would,” I said politely. “How much will you require?”

  “Ten pounds,” she told me in a tone that would brook no negotiating.

  I suppressed a sigh. I never carried so much money upon me; it was a month’s wages. Stoker, who was reckless with banknotes, his own or anyone else’s, might well have tucked four times as much idly into a boot, but he was not at hand.

  “My associate will pay you,” I assured her.

  She gave a laugh, a merry little trill that might have been pleasant under other circumstances. “I do not give credit. You will pay me,” she repeated. “And then I will talk.”

  Yelena wrapped up four more of the cheese tarts in a handkerchief and slipped them into her pocket. She left me then, and I was glad of it. She was a distinctly unlikeable young woman, although I was not entirely unsympathetic to her plight. Still, a gift for extortion was unattractive in a lady, I thought, deciding it best not to dwell upon my own particular talents in that regard.

  Whilst I waited for the baroness, I made a hasty search of the room in hopes of discovering some clue to Gisela’s whereabouts or her state of mind when she left. Guimauve was underfoot, nudging my hand and making a silken nuisance of himself until I settled him on the bed with one of the chicken sandwiches.

  “Do behave,” I ordered. “I am trying to find your mistress.” He gave me a long, cool look and then attended to the base of his tail, as if to indicate his complete indifference to the princess’s whereabouts. I pulled a face and made a quick survey of the room’s contents. There were no enticingly locked doors or diaries written in undecipherable code. The chancellor and baroness managed her state papers and schedule, and any private correspondence she might have kept was nowhere in evidence.

  The only truly personal effects in the room were the stack of books upon the night table. There was a selection of political volumes—one on constitutional monarchies of the world, another on English history viewed through the lens of Continental perspective—and the memoirs of Benjamin Disraeli. A few books on alpinism and a selection of travel guides to mountainous regions (Baedeker’s, of course) were stacked with a slender collection of poetry and Le Livre de la Cité des Dames by Christine de Pizan. There was also a weighty biography of Queen Christina, the sixteenth-century monarch who had traveled the Continent dressed as a man and abandoned her Swedish throne after embracing Catholicism. I thumbed through it at random, noting the passages highlighted in pencil. There were notes in the margin, little drawings and the odd exclamation mark or notation about a point of law. The princess had been particularly effusive in the chapter regarding Christina’s incognita adventures, and I was not surprised. There was a stifling element to court etiquette, to the endless round of formal engagements and appearances, the restrictive clothing, the requirements of behavior and expression of opinions. I had spent only one evening in harness and found it exhausting; I could not imagine how weighty the burden of state must be when it must be endured for a lifetime. I flipped through the rest of the book, my attention drifting during a heavily annotated section on Christina’s abdication.

  I replaced it in the stack of books, surveying the various volumes of policy and history and political biography. Together they suggested a woman deeply conscious of her place in history and who must have felt the pressures of her position to be at times insupportable. I had theorized to Stoker that Gisela might have removed Alice as a threat to her future as a monarch, but my eyes fell again upon the assorted Baedeker’s and the biography of a queen who gave up her throne. It was possible that Gisela had had a hand in Alice’s murder, but it was just as possible that she had considered abdicating to begin a new life with the woman she loved.

  I considered this as I thumbed through the Baedeker devoted to the Alpenwald. It was a slender volume, and I had almost reached the end when the baroness bustled in, clearly vexed. Her color was high and her monocle, screwed firmly in her eye, was fairly vibrating as she peered at me.

  “Where is
that dreadful girl?” she demanded.

  I looked up from my reading. “What girl?”

  She huffed as she plucked the book from my grasp and stacked it neatly with the others, shooing Guimauve from the bed and brushing a few stray cat hairs and crumbs from the silken coverlet.

  “Yelena! She has gone out, apparently, and no one knows where—just when I actually have need of her.” She huffed. She plumped a few of the pillows with a vigorous gesture, and I hastened to settle her feathers.

  “Do you wish to send someone to find her? To make inquiries?” I asked.

  “Absolutely not,” she told me with Teutonic firmness. “We have a timetable to meet and we will not be delayed by the likes of her.” I deeply regretted the fact that Stoker and I had as yet had no chance to search the rest of the suite or hold a proper tête-à-tête after our conversation with the duke, but there would be no opportunity now. The baroness was bent upon her task and sent downstairs for one of the hotel maids to assist her. I was not at all surprised when J. J. appeared. I had learnt respect for her resourcefulness. She was quick and deft, doing exactly as the baroness instructed with a meek promptitude that seemed wholly out of character for her until she shot me a wink when the baroness’s back was turned.

  “How did you arrange this?” I asked J. J. hastily as the baroness left to retrieve a box of jewels. “Did you crack Yelena over the head? Is she tied up in a broom cupboard somewhere?”

  J. J. pulled a face. “What on earth are you talking about?”

  “Yelena. The princess’s lady’s maid. She disappeared this afternoon and is not to be found.”

  J. J. shrugged. “Nothing to do with me. But if I were you, I would be careful.”

  “Why?” I demanded.

  “Because if Alpenwalder women are disappearing, there is a very short list of prospective victims.”

  I put out my tongue at her, resuming my decorum just as the baroness returned, looking a little relieved. “At least the jewels are still here,” she said grimly. Then she looked at J. J. and stiffened. It would never do to air soiled Alpenwalder laundry in front of a mere hotel maid, I realized, and I made no reply.