Irene extracted the dog from Allegra’s arms and thrust it at the unhappy footman. “Here. You must keep this darling dog from running out with us, although we would love to keep the sweet thing.”
The dog’s open maw displayed impressive teeth for its tidy size. With a last pat on the head, neatly avoiding a snap of those active jaws, Irene led us from the ancient huddle of Prague Castle into the daylight of an inner courtyard.
She breathed a sigh of utter relief as the footman, struggling to contain the dog, shut the heavy doors behind us. “At least the miserable dog recognized me, although I had rather he hadn’t. You recall Spaetzl, don’t you, Nell?”
“Not until now,” I said grimly. “A dog as unmannerly as his master.”
“You don’t like the King?” Allegra inquired innocently. Irene flashed me a cautioning glance, though she needn’t have bothered.
“I am not much impressed by royalty,” I told Allegra. “That is what I love about you, Miss Huxleigh; you are not impressed by anyone. I admit that I am not so advanced. I am foolishly elated at having spent the afternoon with a Queen, and at having met a King in private, even if he did not acknowledge my presence.”
She pranced ahead of us in high spirits.
“King Wilhelm is very good at not acknowledging presences of late,” Irene said cryptically.
“Although you have done all you could to announce yours,” I muttered. “Disguise indeed!”
“That makes his ineptitude all the more telling,” she answered with a smile I could only describe as smug.
“It proves that royalty are deaf and blind when it comes to commoners,” said I. “Even the Queen barely remembers us after mere weeks. Still, your luck with the King may not hold forever,” I added softly as Allegra rejoined us.
We were walking through the various courtyards to the drive where our carriage awaited, Irene setting a brisk pace.
I couldn’t help thinking of the Three Musketeers again, though we made a poor substitute for those dashing swordsmen of Old France. Still, we compared impressions of our interesting afternoon, and thus shared an air of camaraderie seldom come by.
“You are quite right, Mrs. Norton,” Allegra began. “The Queen is quite different in private. She was so gay when we discussed the fashions, and shy in a rather touching way. How fortunate that you convinced her to settle on the kinder colors and styles; she has the instinct of a chicken for fashion, poor thing.”
“We cannot all of us be young, beautiful, and supremely confident, my dear Allegra,” Irene retorted mischievously.
“That is true,” the silly girl responded. “It is comforting to know that a Queen can be gauche.” She tripped up the step leading to the carriage without waiting for the driver’s assistance. Irene shrugged, and we “older ladies” installed ourselves within in a more orderly manner.
And so we returned to the Europa, Allegra still chattering about our tea party with the Queen, and Irene uncommonly quiet.
Not until we had arrived in the hotel hall near our separate chambers did Irene speak, and then only to tell Allegra to go to their rooms.
“I wish to speak to Miss Huxleigh about her impressions of this afternoon, then I shall see if Godfrey has returned from his, er, outing.”
Allegra went on down the hall without a murmur while I unlocked the door to my chamber.
Irene rushed in on my heels and shut and locked the door behind us.
“Thank heavens!” she said, throwing herself into the room’s sole upholstered chair and clawing through her reticule.
I sighed to see her extract the mother-of-pearl cigarette case, a cunningly made and lovely thing, but always a precursor of her favorite prop, the abhorred and reeking cigarette.
“Well, Nell,” she began, innocently parroting Godfrey’s unfortunate habit. Perhaps wedded people exchange each other’s peccadilloes as well as vows. “Surely you were as conscious as I of the extremely provocative developments this afternoon at the palace.”
“Ah... yes, of course, but I did not want to say anything in front of Allegra.”
“Very wise. Offer your observations first.”
I watched her fiddle with the case. A mechanism opened a small compartment that held a set of lucifers tiny enough for the Queen’s fashion dolls.
“Well?” Irene demanded.
“How can I speak when your attention is on that revolting ritual? First you will remove a cigarette and then hunt for the holder. Next you will screw the cigarette into the holder and drop one or more of those ludicrously tiny lucifers. When you finally strike one on the rough spot on the case, you must light the cigarette end in haste so as not to scorch your fingertips. Then you will rush to extinguish the lucifer in a dish and huff out a noxious stream of smoke, which makes you look like a hibernating dragon. It is too distracting.”
“Indeed,” said Irene, going through just the gestures I had described, until she leaned back against the upholstery and sighed deeply. “You forgot the final aspiration, my dear Nell, but I admit that your description of my pantomime is accurate enough. Now. You have my full attention. Lay all your suspicions and conclusions before me, and a tempting lot they should be.”
She smiled magnanimously.
No route remained to me but Irene’s favorite device: bluff.
“I find it quite amazing that no one recognized you, or me, for that matter.”
“Whose dullness do you find most hard to countenance—the King’s, the Queen’s, or that of the King’s mistress?”
“Mistress!”
“Surely even you suspected.”
“I did think their behavior rather improper for Allegra’s observation.”
“And consorting with her in the Castle under the Queen’s nose! Willie has grown quite brazen for one who wished me whisked to the wilds of the country not long ago. What do you suppose has given him such courage?”
“The Queen’s utter fecklessness.”
Irene flourished her cigarette holder with the entwining, jeweled gold snake as she expelled a matching spectral serpent of smoke. “And this was the woman he was so terrified of scandalizing! So terrified that he had me hounded across Europe, that he came to London himself to set Sherlock Holmes on my trail. All to reclaim a mere photograph of the two of us together that he feared might compromise him with his royal bride-to-be. I have heard that marriage changes a man, but Willie has changed into something of a monster. He openly caters to his own gratification at others’ expense.”
I pleated the folds of my skirt on my knee. “I told you that a king is not like other men. You were too American to understand at the time.”
“When we return home, you must teach Casanova the phrase, ‘I told you so.’ Then you will not have to wear yourself out reminding me.”
“Irene, I seldom carp upon your past miscalculations.”
“That is true. The present ones offer you enough material for correction. Well. I am not overestimating His Majesty now. Again I ask you, why were we so unrecognized?”
I sighed and forced myself to think. “We had seen the Queen most recently. Although you have altered your name, your voice, and your appearance, I am hardly so easy to disguise. She should have remembered us, except that I am often overlooked.”
“And,” Irene added, “the Queen was greatly distressed when she interviewed us at Maison Worth. She could barely look us in the eye as she described her most embarrassing difficulty; no wonder we didn’t make much of an impression upon her. When she received my declining note, I am sure all hope of help went out of her head. No one is more unobservant than a person lost in the maze of her own difficulties."
“She recognized us the moment you assumed your proper persona.”
Irene nodded. “She may not be completely hopeless, or helpless. But what of the King? How could he have failed to know me, no matter how much hair-black I use, or in what kind of accent I clothe my voice? The man intended at one time—when he was deluding himself, no doubt—to marry me, after
all! How could he forget, no matter the guise, and I am told on good authority that this is not one of my more successful impersonations.”
“If you would be more willing to camouflage your beauty you might be more impenetrable.”
“I am not returning to Bohemia looking like a frump!”
“Of course not. You wish to fool the King, but you wish him to yearn after you nevertheless, even if he doesn’t know who you are. Vanity will be your downfall.”
“Perhaps, but it will provide such a lovely exit!” Irene airily brandished her elegant cigarette holder. “And you fail to mention the unlikelihood of a little hair dye and a different accent in concealing a woman from a man who once loved her, if he loved her. Godfrey would never be deceived by me in my present guise.”
“Then why did you use such a fragile façade for the King? I will tell you. You wanted him recognize you to salve your vast vanity, and this he has totally failed to do. It has been almost two years since he last saw you, after all. He has grown so heartless in the interim that he neglects his Queen, his bride of less than a year. Now you tell me that he consorts with foreign women. I never did like King Willie, but he has descended to depths of depravity even I never imagined.”
Irene nodded, an odd expression on her face. “Yes, Willie is quite unlike himself. However, if one must revisit an old suitor, I suppose it is best to find him descended to depths of depravity. And that brings me to the third person who failed to recognize us.”
“Third person? There was no other... even the servants were strangers.”
“Yes, they were. Most telling.”
“What ‘third person,’ Irene? In a moment I expect you to inform me that the Maison Worth mannequins should have come to life and recognized us.”
“What a notion! No, at least they are exactly as they should be, something of a comfort in the Prague we find before us. I refer to the rather intimidating Tatyana. If she did not recognize us, and I am not so sure of that, surely you, Nell, recognized her.”
“Of course I did! She briefly approached Godfrey and myself at the reception.”
Irene sat bolt upright, wrenching her smoldering cigarette from its holder. “She did? Neither you nor Godfrey mentioned this. When did it occur?”
“When you and Allegra made your grand entrance, or, rather, when you entered and Allegra followed. This Tatyana could not keep her eyes off of you, especially when you dallied for some words with the royal couple.”
“And you mean to say that you never suspected her identity?”
“That she was the King’s mistress? How could I? And, besides, you have only your instinct to attest to that.”
“My instinct is apparently superior to yours. You truly cannot recollect where we have seen her before?”
“ ‘We?’ You and I? Irene nodded. “And Godfrey.”
I racked my brains, and then I applied thumbscrews, but could recall no occasion when we three had laid eyes upon the terrible Tatyana.
Irene tapped her fingers against her head while I watched, blinking. “Other women may dye their hair, Nell. Don’t let that loathsome strawberry blond fool you. Think!”
“ ‘Strawberry blond?’ ”
“An American expression for yellow-red hair. Imagine Tatyana without it.”
I shook my head. Imagining Tatyana bald did me no good whatsoever, except to make me a giggle to imagine the King with such a mistress....
“Where?” I asked.
“Paris, as I suggested today, although she denied it.”
“Paris—anywhere in Paris in particular?”
‘Twice, one publicly and once privately. But you only are aware or seeing her on one occasion, and that formal.” I loathed it when Irene pretended to greater knowledge than I, and then refused to demonstrate it.
“A formal occasion,” I pondered. “We have attended few formal occasions in Paris, unless one would consider that vile Bernhardt woman’s salons such an event.”
“Excellent, Nell,” Irene encouraged, rooting in her reticule for another cigarette.
While she was thus distracted I subjected my poor brains to the equivalent of St Lawrence’s hot gridiron, but produced nothing.
Irene, ensconced again with a smoking cigarette, was looking smug.
“Remember that tall blond woman present when I sang for the Empress of all the Russias?”
I frowned. “But she was... Irene, she was seen with the man passing himself off as the heavy game hunter, Captain Sylvester Morgan, that night! You mean to say that this woman is associated with that murderous wretch, Colonel Sebastian Moran! The man who before my very eyes plunged with Quentin Stanhope into the Thames only months ago! No....”
“You saw her before that night in Sarah Bernhardt’s salon,” Irene went on with the relentless air of a barrister, no doubt gained from her association with Godfrey. “I believe that she lingered on the cobblestones outside Notre Dame Cathedral when Quentin first approached us, when he fell at our feet subjected to a poisonous injection.”
“No! Irene—”
“I further believe that this ‘Tatyana’ is the Russian spy Quentin had heard of in Afghanistan just before the Battle of Maiwand nine years ago, when he was known by the sobriquet of Cobra and Moran that of Tiger. You recall Quentin’s cryptic reference to ‘Sable’?”
“Irene, no! I recall none of this. And now you say this creature is the King’s mistress? You will go to any length to preserve your pride and concoct some absurd scheme to justify that opinion. Impossible! I cannot believe that a woman associated with Colonel Moran nearly a decade ago would surface at one of Sarah Bernhardt’s soirees.
“It’s even more ludicrous that she would hie to Bohemia and become the King’s mistress. Why? Simply to spite you? You have far too grand an opinion of your importance in the world, of your effect on kings and other foolish men, and of your memory and impressions.”
“Perhaps,” she said in a suspiciously meek manner. “I do depend a great deal upon your diaries for enlightenment. You are most precise about details, Nell, even if you do not fully comprehend them. I know you travel with these delicious little volumes. Please consult the proper volumes and we will shortly see how grievously I have erred on this occasion.”
She directed a stream of smoke as thin as a stiletto in my direction.
Chapter Twenty-one
GUESS WHO’S COMING TO DINNER?
Once again we had been forced to play false with our hotel rooms. Godfrey and I roomed in separate chambers. Irene as “Lady Sherlock” and her “sister Allegra” maintained their own suite.
Irene managed to intercept Godfrey when he paused at the hotel after a day of consultation among the bankers and financiers of Prague, before he was off for the evening. He was indeed to dine with the King at Prague Castle that evening, he had told her, upon His Majesty’s especial invitation.
When Irene, with Allegra in hand, collected me for another hotel dinner later that evening she informed me of this arrangement.
“Apparently, no interlopers—that is, women—are allowed. Not even the Queen will be tolerated for dinner.” Her melodramatic sigh of disappointment did much for her décolletage. “I should so like to observe Godfrey and the King at dinner together!”
“No doubt,” I responded, appalled. That was the last thing in the world that I cared to see, and the second-to-the-last thing would be the King and Irene together again in the same room.
“We shall simply have to plan our own adventures over dinner,” Irene added, linking arms with Allegra and myself on our way downstairs, and leading us off at a brisk pace.
I began to harbor deep doubts about this Bohemian venture, but dinner was pleasant enough, thanks to the company, although largely inedible—until we retired upstairs again. Allegra once more was banished to their suite while Irene slipped into my room for a consultation. She intended to stop last at Godfrey’s chamber, to which she had a spare key.
“I suppose that you will interrogate him mercil
essly,” I noted as I turned up the lamps.
“That depends on how forthcoming Godfrey is. I must say that he is taking an unusual relish in this masquerade. He seemed actually... enthusiastic about his tête-à-tête with the King.”
“A man seldom has an opportunity to study his former rival. Besides, Godfrey takes his assignment for the Rothschilds most seriously. He will not let personal matters intervene.”
“Do you think that I will?” Irene indignant was especially impressive.
“What scheme have you in mind for us tomorrow?” I asked narrowly.
“Nothing of much consequence. It seems that bankers, kings, and barristers have so much in common that we poor ladies must fend for ourselves, and are condemned to minor matters. I propose an outing to the Old Town to hunt this convenient Golem of yours.”
“Do you imply that Godfrey and I were diddled by the Rothschild agent, that it was arranged for us to see a false monster?”
She shrugged. “The Golem is a Gothic element that adds a picturesque quality to a common and sordid political intrigue. I am sure that Baron Alphonse is well aware of my attraction to the exotic. So, no, I do not expect to find serious traces of the Golem, but I would like Allegra to see more of Prague than the autocrats on Hradcany hill. The streets teem with color and music, and I have missed them.”
“The streets are as dangerous to us as any Golem! We will be three women alone.”
“No, four.”
“Four?”
“I managed a discreet word with the Queen during our visit yesterday. She has agreed to join us—in disguise, of course.”
“The Queen! She is not suited for such expeditions.”
“Neither are you, Nell, but you go.”
“What are you up to, Irene?”
“Have you forgotten my first mission: to help Clotilde? I want to show her Bohemia, the real Bohemia, that she rules by a quirk.”
“How will this revelation solve the problem of the King’s indifference?”
“I don’t know, but it will aid the problem of the King’s and Queen’s indifference to their subjects.”
Another Scandal in Bohemia (A Novel of Suspense featuring Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes) Page 23
