Teresa Grant - [Charles & Melanie Fraser 01]

by Vienna Waltz

  “Lord Castlereagh has asked my husband and me to accompany him and Lady Castlereagh.”

  “Yes,” Otronsky said, “I thought he’d want Rannoch there.” He drew their linked hands overhead. “I saw you at Baroness Arnstein’s last night, but I don’t remember catching sight of your husband.”

  “Malcolm arrived late in the evening. He returned to Vienna sooner than he expected and came in search of me.”

  “And you left together to call on Princess Tatiana.”

  She kept her hand still in his own and her gaze as steady as water on a windless day. “I didn’t want Malcolm to go alone.”

  Otronsky’s smile gleamed white but didn’t warm his eyes. “I don’t know whether you’re a clever wife or a very foolish one, Madame Rannoch.”

  “One never knows that until one sees how events play out, does one, my dear Count?”

  Otronsky went on to talk of other things, but Suzanne was now quite sure he had sought her out at the tsar’s insistence. Castlereagh wasn’t the only one looking into the murder outside official channels. And she and Malcolm remained very much under scrutiny.

  “There you are, thank goodness.” Dorothée, disarmingly lovely in Carinthian dress, hurried to Suzanne’s side when she left the dance floor and Otronsky had moved off. “Masquerades are so exhausting. Gentlemen think a papier-mâché mask gives them license to take all sorts of liberties, quite as though one didn’t know perfectly well who most of them are. I must have dodged five sets of wandering hands already. My uncle actually intervened once.”

  “I wouldn’t like to be any young man who angered Prince Talleyrand.”

  “I’ve never seen him so fierce. I think he might have laid hands on the gentleman in question if I hadn’t stopped him.”

  “Why did you? It sounds as though the man deserved it.”

  “Because I wanted to avoid an international incident. It was Lord Stewart.”

  Suzanne groaned. “Oh dear, I should have seen that coming. My apologies, Doro, on behalf of my husband’s country. That man is a menace to diplomacy.” Lord Stewart, British ambassador to Vienna and plenipotentiary in the British delegation, was a former soldier ill-suited to his post for a number of reasons, including his drinking, his temper, and his wandering hands. But he was also Lord Castlereagh’s half brother, and one of the few people with whom Castlereagh was really at ease.

  Dorothée waved her hand. “I’ve lived in Paris for three years—I’ve known worse. Better me than some poor débutânte.” She snapped her silk fan open and fluttered it against the heat. “In truth, I’d rather not be here at all. I had the most dreadful news just before we left the Kaunitz Palace.”

  “What?”

  “Felix Woyna and young Trautmansdorff have both come down with mumps, of all things. Their doctor expects a full recovery, thank goodness, but they won’t be able to take part in the Carrousel.”

  Four-and-twenty of the best young riders from the cream of the Austro-Hungarian aristocracy had been chosen as the knights of the tournament. The elaborately choreographed plans for the joust rested on having all twenty-four riders take part, matched by the four-and-twenty belles d’amour. “There are still two days,” Suzanne said. “People have learned Hamlet in less time. We’ll have to find two more excellent riders.”

  “But where? I’ve been racking my brain. If—”

  She broke off as Geoffrey returned Aline to Suzanne’s side. Aline was pink-cheeked from the exertion of the dance and laughing at something Geoffrey had been saying to her.

  “I don’t suppose you’d like to be in a tournament, Dr. Blackwell,” Dorothée said.

  “My dear Comtesse, it’s my life’s work to patch up the ravages of battle but not to engage in it myself. Even the ceremonial sort. I thought you had all your knights for the Carrousel.”

  “So did I,” Dorothée said, with a sigh that was only partly mock tragic.

  Geoffrey’s attention was claimed by a military acquaintance, and the three ladies moved into one of the columned recesses that ran the length of the ballroom.

  “You seem to have enjoyed your dance,” Dorothée said, linking her arm through Aline’s.

  “So much more agreeable than dancing with the sort of young man who thinks it’s his duty to flirt and expects one to flirt back,” Aline said. “We actually had a rational conversation.”

  “A rational conversation while waltzing. My idea of romance.” Dorothée leaned her gloved arm against a pillar and flexed a satin-slippered foot.

  Aline looked a bit confused at the word “romance,” then laughed. “Particularly in Vienna. The young men usually are trying to outdo each other with risqué comments of the undergraduate sort. Though there seem to be rather fewer double entendres tonight. Everyone’s talking about Princess Tatiana.”

  “Tatiana Kirsanova had a way of being the center of attention, even in death.” Wilhelmine, Duchess of Sagan, joined them, in Carinthian dress like her younger sister. She smiled at Dorothée. “Maman’s diamonds suit you, Doro.”

  Dorothée touched her necklace, perhaps uncertain how Wilhelmine felt about their mother lending it to her. In the presence of her eldest sister, twelve years her senior, she reverted to the schoolgirl she had been not so very long ago. “It hardly goes with peasant dress.”

  “No, but it’s in keeping with all the other glittering peasant girls in the room. Rather like Marie Antoinette playing at shepherdess. And there are some actual non-aristocrats present. Metternich gave me tickets for my maid Hannchen and her daughters. He even suggested we could switch masks if we liked, but I think that seems a bit too much like something out of a comic opera.” Wilhelmine slipped her arm round her sister and squeezed Dorothée’s shoulders.

  The two made a striking picture. Both were slender and delicately boned, but Dorothée was taller than her petite sister, and where Dorothée’s hair was a rich brown, Wilhelmine’s curls were as burnished and bright as her antique gold necklace. Dorothée, for all her Paris-fashion-plate gowns and stylishly cropped hair, still had the slightly coltish uncertainty of youth. Wilhelmine was as polished as their mother’s diamonds. She had the exquisitely fresh complexion of a débutânte, but the restless eyes of a woman who has seen much of the world and not found it up to her expectations.

  “Willie.” Dorothée fingered the border of her spangled scarf. “You are being careful, aren’t you? I mean, your rooms are only a few paces away from Princess Tatiana’s.”

  Wilhelmine removed the scarf from Dorothée’s nervous fingers and settled it over her younger sister’s shoulders. “I doubt Princess Tatiana was killed by a random madman, Doro. Horrible as it is, I suspect this murder was carefully planned.”

  “Why?” Aline asked.

  “One can’t live the sort of life Princess Tatiana lived without making enemies. I should know. I live much the same life myself.”

  “Precisely what I mean.” Dorothée sent her sister a meaningful glance.

  Wilhelmine gave a peal of laughter like the tinkling glass keys of the harmonium at the British delegation’s lodgings. “If you mean Prince Metternich, dearest, I assure you I can handle him. His refusal to recognize when a love affair has run its course is tiresome but not anything I haven’t coped with before.”

  “Princess Tatiana may have thought the same thing.”

  “Doro.” Wilhelmine flipped open a silk fan painted with a Carinthian scene. “You can’t think Prince Metternich had anything to do with the murder.”

  “You said yourself it was probably someone she knew,” Dorothée said. “Which means someone we know.”

  A shadow of unease crossed Wilhelmine’s face, but she shook her head. “I’m more cautious than the princess, Doro. And perhaps more ruthless. I don’t let my guard down.”

  “You always say that, Willie, but—”

  “Talking about Princess Tatiana, I see.” A white-haired man in an elaborate pink and gold mask stepped into the alcove. Even were pink not known to be his signature color, th
e Prince de Ligne was easily recognized. The seventy-nine-year-old former field marshal carried himself with an air that would stand out in any crowd.

  “How did you know, Prince?” Suzanne asked.

  “I might as well ask how you recognized me, Madame Rannoch,” the prince said, bowing over her hand. “Or how I recognized you. The insouciance with which you hold your fan is unmistakable, even without the clue of your Spanish dress. We’re all sadly predictable, I fear. Just as it’s predictable that everyone in the ballroom and the antechambers and the salons and the garden and anywhere else in the villa is discussing Princess Tatiana.”

  “Vienna feeds on scandal,” Wilhelmine said. “And what could be more scandalous than a murder?”

  “What indeed?” said the prince, who had been an intimate of both Voltaire and Casanova. “Especially when the victim happens to have been entangled with so very many illustrious personages. People are clamoring to be on the guest list for her funeral, as though it were a court ball. Though there are rather fewer spaces available.”

  “And one can only hope there won’t be as many uninvited guests slipping in as there have been at most balls at the Hofburg.” Wilhelmine stirred the air with her fan. “It’s amazing how many people I’ve heard claim the princess as a great friend tonight.”

  “Just so,” said the prince. “I hear her spoken of with considerably more approbation than when she was alive.” He turned back to Suzanne. “You’re a generous woman, Madame Rannoch. You appear genuinely distressed by the princess’s death.”

  Suzanne summoned a smile that had all the sweetness of lemon ice. “I didn’t know the princess well, but how could I not be horrified by what happened to her?”

  “You have the makings of a diplomat, chère madame.”

  “She lived life on her own terms,” Aline said. “One can’t help but admire that.”

  “Princess Tatiana was an enterprising woman,” the prince murmured. “She’d even found a way to turn the ruins of the empire to her advantage.”

  Suzanne looked at him in inquiry, as did Dorothée. Wilhelmine raised her brows.

  “What on earth do you mean?” Aline asked.

  The prince regarded each of them in turn, savoring his audience. “My dear ladies, it’s no secret that Bonaparte and his soldiers had—ah—liberated numerous art treasures in the course of their conquests. We hear a great deal about the collection in the Louvre, but a number of treasures also remain in private hands. There’s considerable squabbling about whether these treasures will be returned to their rightful owners, not to mention just who those rightful owners happen to be.”

  “And Princess Tatiana—?” Dorothée asked.

  “Princess Tatiana had come into possession of several of these treasures,” the prince said. He paused a moment, smoothing the shiny silk of his domino. “But she didn’t seem overly concerned with identifying the rightful owners. She was selling them. To the highest bidder.”

  11

  Ashout of laughter and a flirtatious giggle from the ballroom echoed through the suddenly silent alcove. “Good God,” Aline said. “How do you know?”

  The Prince de Ligne flicked open an enamel snuffbox and took a pinch of snuff. “Because I bought a piece from her myself.” He sneezed behind a lace-frill-covered hand. “She drove a hard bargain.”

  “How did Princess Tatiana come to be in possession of these art treasures?” Suzanne asked.

  “I never inquired,” the prince said, “and I doubt she’d have told me. Or if she had, I doubt it would have been the truth. But just as Bonaparte helped himself to the treasures of the countries he conquered, a number of his soldiers helped themselves to them as well.”

  “And sometimes they fell into the hands of the opposing army,” Aline said. “Only think of Vitoria.” The Bonapartist Spanish government had been fleeing Spain with a number of treasures, including the Spanish crown, when the British and French armies met at Vitoria. In the chaos after the British victory, British soldiers had looted the French baggage wagons. A number of soldiers had made a tidy fortune that day.

  The Prince de Ligne inclined his head. “Just so, mam’selle. And in the course of her eventful life, Princess Tatiana had formed close acquaintances with a number of gentlemen who fought on various sides. I can only imagine such gentlemen put these treasures in her hands. Or she took it upon herself to liberate the treasures from them.”

  “I wonder if that has anything to do with why she was killed?” Aline said. “There are fierce quarrels about who rightfully should end up with what.”

  Suzanne saw Dorothée dart a quick glance at her sister. Dorothée had said she’d heard Wilhelmine use the word “exorbitant” in her quarrel with Princess Tatiana.

  “Oh, look,” Wilhelmine said in a crisp, bright voice. “I think it’s time to go in to supper.”

  They joined the throng moving toward the stairs to the supper room below. “Not that we’re likely to get food any time soon,” Dorothée murmured as they inched forward.

  The supper room was really a spacious hall, which was fortunate with something approaching fifteen hundred guests. Buffet tables ringed the vast room while supper tables bedecked with carnival masks were set up in the middle. As at the Metternichs’ Peace Ball the previous month, the ladies sat at the tables while the gentlemen fetched them delicacies from the buffet. Wilhelmine quickly disappeared on the arm of her lover, Alfred von Windischgrätz, but Suzanne, Dorothée, and Aline shared a table. Malcolm materialized out of the crowd, juggling a plate of oysters and three glasses of champagne, then slipped off as they were besieged by young attachés from the French embassy paying court to Dorothée.

  “Aren’t the sovereigns supposed to be supping in their own room?” Aline said. “I swear that’s Tsar Alexander and the King of Prussia moving between the tables.”

  Dorothée surveyed the two gentlemen in black dominoes. “Not losing a chance to flirt. I rather hope they don’t come over here.”

  After supper, the orchestra seemed to play at a faster tempo. Breathless and laughing—though it was very hard to carry on any sort of useful interrogation while dancing so quickly—Suzanne found herself relieved when it was time for the polonaise. The long formal dance had, along with the waltz, become the signature dance of the Congress.

  Geoffrey Blackwell arrived to claim her for the dance, while Tommy Belmont partnered Aline. The orchestra struck up the stately notes of the polonaise. At least it was usually stately. Tonight the line was already wavering as Suzanne took her place beside Geoffrey. The freedom of the masked ball was at odds with formality. Several couples had their arms entwined as though they were waltzing. She saw one couple actually steal a kiss while another gentleman’s hand strayed beneath the laced bodice of his partner’s dirndl.

  “Rather less stuffy than an event at the Hofburg,” Geoffrey murmured as they began to move forward. His gaze went to Tommy and Aline ahead of them. Tommy could be an outrageous flirt, but he was holding Aline’s hand in a very correct clasp.

  The dance was supposed to be an elegant progress, led by the sovereigns, but the long, unwieldy column swayed even with the first steps. Two couples got tangled up and bumped into a pillar, sending a vase of roses crashing to the floor. Water, flowers, and broken glass spilled over the walnut parquet. The dancers dodged out of the way, falling out of line.

  As they wound through the salons, Suzanne lost sight of either end of the column. Suddenly, the dancers came to such an abrupt halt in front of her she nearly stumbled. Shouts and laughter cut the air.

  “I think the head and tail of the column have collided,” Geoffrey said, tightening his grip on her arm to keep her from falling.

  Ladies tripped over their trains. Their partners steadied them and took advantage of the excuse for touching. A man with rumpled white hair collapsed on a sofa, doubled over with laughter.

  “I think that’s the King of Denmark,” Suzanne said to Geoffrey. Across the room she saw Lady Castlereagh also overcome with l
aughter, her husband’s Order of the Garter slipping dangerously to one side.

  The formal dance had dissolved into chaos. Tommy returned Aline to Suzanne’s side and went off in search of the Hungarian countess who was his latest flirt. The salon was still crowded with dancers—laughing, retrieving fallen reticules and hair ornaments, shaking out crushed skirts. Suzanne anchored her mantilla, which had begun to slither backward.

  “Suzanne,” Aline said, “there’s a man watching you.”

  Suzanne tugged the mantilla smooth and turned to find a tall, fair-haired man with his gaze fixed on her. He was dressed as a Cossack, his face covered by a black and silver half mask, but she would know the proud line of his shoulders and the arrogant tilt of his head anywhere.

  He gave a smile that sent a chill to the toes of her Córdoba slippers. “Mrs. Rannoch.” He crossed to them in three easy strides. “What a delightful surprise. I should have realized you’d be in Vienna. I swear I’d know you anywhere, mask or no.”

  Suzanne smiled into the blue eyes of the man who could bring her fragile life tumbling down about her ears. “Captain Radley—No, it’s Colonel now, isn’t it? My congratulations. I didn’t realize you were in Vienna.”

  Colonel Frederick Radley bowed over her hand. “I arrived this afternoon. Wellington sent me from Paris with dispatches for Castlereagh.” Beneath the half mask, his skin was paler than she remembered, no longer tanned by the constant Spanish sun. “I’ll call round on Castlereagh tomorrow. I’m staying with Lord Stewart.”

  “Of course,” Suzanne said. “You knew him in the Peninsula. I can quite see how you’d be friends.” Radley had a great deal in common with Castlereagh’s half brother, from military courage to wandering hands and a tendency to lose his temper.

  “We fought together at Busaco and Talavera. Stewart’s a capital fellow.” Radley turned to Geoffrey. “Unless I’ve lost my skill at looking behind masks, you’re Blackwell. The last time we met you were putting my arm in a sling.”