“Together,” Irene said softly, as if rehearsing fellow actors who were about to make a joint entrance. “We will be announced as one party. That should raise Tatyana’s eyebrows.”
“Irene,” I protested. “You have become obsessed with this woman. What of the Rothschild commission?”
“Oh, Rothschilds come and go. One does not encounter an adversary as cunning and dangerous as Tatyana every day.”
“I do not intend to allow that woman a moment’s conversation,” Godfrey put in, eyeing Irene sternly. “You wished my feeble attentions to make the King jealous, and all you have accomplished is setting that dreadful woman on me.”
“I don’t doubt that you will be most divinely surly to her this evening, Godfrey,” she replied. “That will only encourage her, I assure you. Perhaps you should direct your attention elsewhere tonight.”
“To you? That would inflame her further.”
Irene assumed an innocently demure look that was irresistibly wicked. “I was thinking of someone less incendiary than myself: poor Clotilde, who has been publicly set aside in favor of another woman, one with no legal or moral claim to the King’s affections. Surely no one can take offense if you pay polite attention to this neglected lady.”
“Brava!” I put in. “An excellent suggestion, Irene. Tatyana will not dare venture too near Godfrey if he dances attendance on the Queen.”
“Speaking of dancing,” he added. “Must I?”
“You dance well!” she responded in surprise.
“But I don’t like it.”
Irene unfurled her fan of crimson feathers. “I do not see how you can command the Queen’s time unless you offer to dance with her. I—or Lady Sherlock, rather—shall dance with those who ask me. No doubt even Nell will take a sedate gallop or two around the room with a respectable gentleman, should he ask. We must all appear as if we were mere merrymakers at a festive affair.”
Godfrey donned an even more dour expression, now looking a most satisfactory and brooding Hamlet.
At that moment the footman leaned near him for our identities. A half-minute later we heard our names, or what passed for them among some of us, shouted to all the world within earshot.
“Mr. Godfrey Norton. Lady Sherlock. Miss Penelope Puxleigh, of Paris, France, and London, England.”
Into the bright lights and chatter we swept again to do battle. Irene suggested that we repair first to the supper table, as a good army marches on its stomach. How she could consider eating when laced until her waist seemed encompassable by a necklace I do not know; I can testify that her appetite never dwindled, no matter the circumstances.
I, of course was too nervous to take more than a bite of cake, and Godfrey had decided to brace himself with the punch, a vile lizard-green brew no doubt steeped in ardent spirits.
Around us people milled, the men in penguin perfection, the women a rainbow of rich color and fabric. Each of us unintentionally searched among the myriad shades of hair color, hunting the russet-blond locks of the woman we all feared, each for his or her own reason.
“Oh!”
“Yes, Nell?” Irene swiftly turned away from making free with the goose-liver pȃté.
“The King,” I said.
Who could mistake his gilded head shining in the candlelight of twenty chandeliers, rising above the common crowd like an alpine peak?
“Oh.” Irene swallowed her disappointment with a last bit of pȃté. “I thought you had noticed someone interesting.”
“Such as the formidable Tatyana?” Godfrey suggested.
Irene’s smile was secret and impudent. “Such as the Queen.”
“Clotilde? Interesting?” I demanded. “Irene, it becomes you greatly to consider her welfare and self-regard, but I can think of no person in this entire assemblage who is more futilely present than that pathetic figurehead.”
“Oh?” Irene answered skeptically. She stepped aside so that both Godfrey and I could have an unimpeded view, could in fact see past the glories of Irene’s gown and person to something else.
That something else was Clotilde, abandoned by her husband after the obligatory joint entrance, moving into the room on a cloud of dazzling white silk-velvet and tulle, like a bride.
I can pay no greater tribute to my friend’s skills and altruism than to say that Clotilde had blossomed from ugly yellow duckling into a showy white swan. Now that pale complexion and long feckless neck seemed possessed of felicitous grace. Now that pallid hair, piled away from the narrow face, seemed a gilt lace frame for a master sketch of sweetly underlined femininity.
Excitement burnished Clotilde’s cheeks, but I recognized the inroads of the rouge pot and the hare’s foot. Irene’s hand lay in every blond silk curl, in every shimmering bead, in the very white-gold aura that radiated from the Queen’s figure.
“By Jove,” Godfrey said, standing to attention. “What has happened to her?”
“Allegra,” Irene said happily. “That child has enormous potential. I tutored her a bit, of course, but the results are as spectacular as I had hoped.” She glanced roguishly at Godfrey. “It will not be such punishment to avoid the importuning Tatyana by paying court at this Queen’s side?”
“If the assignment involves dancing, it will be punishment,” he said. “Not many women would reconstruct a former rival,” he added in a teasing tone.
“Clotilde was never my rival; her only claim was aristocratic precedence.”
“You’re foolish to believe that the King will be swayed by a cosmetic improvement,” he warned her. “From his past and present preferences, he craves more challenge than an ordinary woman can provide, and seems determined to find it one way or the other. Clotilde’s transformation will not capture his regard.”
“Perhaps not.” Irene ducked her head like a schoolgirl caught out in a fond daydream. “Yet she will feel better about herself, and that is half the battle in any match, marital or royal.”
He smiled ruefully. “You never needed to learn that skill.”
Irene shrugged, a gesture that did wonders for the Tiffany diamonds, not to mention her poitrine. “Some are born knowing what is needed in life; some must be educated, even queens.”
“It will be a pleasure,” Godfrey said, “to contribute to the Queen’s more favorable view of herself. Your pardon, ladies.” He set down his glass on a tray, bowed, and moved toward Clotilde. No one had yet dared approach her and her eyes lit up as Godfrey’s agreeable form came toward her.
Irene watched from the wings like a fond nanny. “She looks even more splendid than I could imagine. It is far from easy, Nell, to redesign a personage that is so opposite to one’s own type. Women spend their lives learning their own best points; finding another’s is most taxing.
“I am glad that I am not blond,” she added, a new, stringent tone in her voice, and I knew she had spied Tatyana.
The object of our fears was regarding Godfrey, naturally, as he paid his respects to the Queen. The woman did nothing to disguise her avid interest. She watched like a hawk from near the doorway, awaiting her introduction.
We studied her, Irene and I, intently but with vastly different approaches, I imagine.
Tonight was one in which to be dazzled, and I admit that I was. How could the poor gentlemen withstand the separate but equal blandishments of such a trio of women? Clotilde in her new shimmering pale splendor carried the power of queenship like a scepter for the first time in her royal life. Irene, in regal red, with all her theatrical instincts and beauty polished into one apparently imperviously resplendent facade, was like the fire that melts the snow of Clotilde’s icy dignity.
And Tatyana. I loathed the woman, but that night I could no longer deny her personal power. She wore black, as Irene had on her debut as Lady Sherlock. For Tatyana to venture into any arena Irene had already declared her own was a bold move. That she was as successful as she was, in a fashion sense, at least, said even more for the woman’s personal power and ambition.
Where
the subtle sheen of coq feathers had clothed Irene in a glamorous armor, Tatyana’s gown was a cage of intricately beaded net and jet. It shifted around her as sensuously as a Liberty silk, glittering, glittering in tiny increments, like snowflakes of coal. I thought of Hans Christian Andersen’s lethal yet seductive Snow Queen. Tatyana was the Cinders Queen, donning the dark as a contrast to her golden coloring, burning with the embers of emotions too black to bring into the light of day.
Was Godfrey poor Kay into whose heart the Cinder Queen would cast a lump of corrosive coal? Was Irene faithful Greta who would scour the world over to save his soul from that of the devouring woman who craved it?
Who was I in this drama? The knife-bearing robber girl who aided Greta? I hardly think so. The day I hefted a knife other than the table variety would be the day the Golem not only walked, but knocked politely and sat down to dinner at Prague Castle!
I studied Tatyana, that implacable, corrupt, wise, and evil woman who may even have caused Quentin ill luck in Afghanistan almost a decade before, and I shuddered to my soul, as I had not shuddered at the sight of the Golem. That had been a brute beast, if I indeed had seen what I thought.
I saw before me now, in the guise of a woman of the world, a beast more terrifying than any creation of the Cabbala. I saw a creature who would have her will no matter whom it hurt. Against that sort of selfishness, be it in a child in the nursery or in a head of state on his throne, an honest person, an ethical person is always in mortal danger.
Then I recalled the reported prediction of the gypsy woman. I do not believe in such nonsense, but I do not forget it, either. Three queens, she had said, would contend in Prague, to the death.
Three queens. One white, one red, one black. Who would win—and what would be the prize? Or the cost?
Chapter Thirty
A WICKED WOMAN
As so often happened when Irene set a Grand Plan in motion, she overlooked the obvious: myself.
If Godfrey was avoiding Tatyana by paying court to the Queen, and if Irene planned to keep an eye on the Russian woman, that left them occupied. I was left to play the usual wallflower.
On the other hand, I was also free to wander where I would and observe what I could. So I did.
Several points of interest struck me. While Irene watched Tatyana, the King’s attention was all for Godfrey, who at the moment was sweeping the Queen around the dance floor in a most creditable waltz. Was fickle Willie becoming jealous of his neglected—and now newly magnificent— Queen?
Tatyana seemed aware of the supposed Lady Sherlock’s keen regard, but ignored it in favor of keeping her eyes on Godfrey, even though she crossed the King’s glowering glance whenever she did so. The Russian woman’s attention was so fixed on my dear former employer, in fact, that I was able to study her as a entomologist might some new species of loathsome bug.
I did not underestimate her. This woman was as compelling as Irene in her own way. Obviously accustomed to center stage, both the brunet Irene and the blond Tatyana circled each other at an apparently disinterested distance, all the while vying for position in their unspoken duel with one another.
Their gown colors that evening and current relationship to the King made Clotilde and Tatyana the most apparent rivals: White Queen and Black Queen dancing over the entire board to seize the King. Yet the gypsy woman had prattled of “three queens and two kings.”
Including Tatyana, I saw before me the queens in question, only one of whom actually bore the title, and she was the least likely candidate. But what had the reference to “two kings” meant? Could one be Tatyana’s “king?” Though Russians called their monarch by the title of Czar, the function remained the same.
Or did the cryptic comment mean that Wilhelm von Ormstein was of two minds? He had ever been so, pursuing Irene even while aware that he must marry Clotilde. Now he conducted an unsanctioned alliance with Tatyana, yet still publicly fretted over the Queen’s new popularity with Godfrey. Could Irene’s clever transformation of Clotilde have fanned the marital fires?
What a spoiled boy he was! And tiresome to regard; I had to crane my neck to watch him, even across the vast ballroom. I directed my analysis back to my original object, the Black Queen, Tatyana One-name, also, perhaps, called “Sable” during spy work in Afghanistan.
Irene’s excessive inclinations toward fashion had trained me to examine others from the outside in, as superficial as such a method was. Clothes might not make the man, but they can often make sense of the woman.
By this standard, Tatyana was as enigmatic as ever. The unstructured flow of her gown might suggest the new Aesthetic Mode of female dress, but its roots lay in something other: the fragile draperies of the dancer.
Yet the long, black skirt she wore was weighted with satin passementerie and beadwork, a bow to the venerable tradition of elegant widowhood that Queen Victoria had made so eminently imitable.
Knowing how Irene arranged to keep her throat unencumbered by instinct, I could not understand why a former dancer would wear diaphanous tissues over her shoulders, yet anchor her lower limbs with bejeweled skirts.
Moreover, the designs decorating this cumbersome article seemed... familiar. In fact, I had seen something like it in... at... on the occasion of... the precise memory eluded me, just as I glimpsed but always lost sight of the figures of Godfrey and the Queen threading among the dancers.
I looked back to where Tatyana had been, and found her gone. Then I glanced about for Irene. I could not see her, either. Alarmed, I studied the crowd until at last I picked out Irene’s vibrant scarlet from among a pastel press of well-gowned women.
I stared at her with the anxious reassurance of a nanny who has found her favorite nursling. I expected danger tonight, for no cause I could name, expect perhaps the gypsy’s dire predictions.
“You are English, are you not?” a dry voice inquired beside me.
Too startled to take proper offense at being addressed by a strange man, I regarded my interrogator.
A strange man indeed, albeit not very dangerous-looking. His salt-and-pepper hair and beard were seasoned with the occasional wiry red strand. Indeed, his facial hair had been trimmed like topiary into an intricate pattern, with no apparent purpose save to underline his eccentric features, the most striking of which was an overbearing nose that could have competed with Cyrano de Bergerac’s famous but unfortunate appendage.
A monocle tinted slightly blue clung to one eye socket. The silk ribbon that linked it to his lapel was of the color purple, but otherwise nothing royal clung to his person. He had a large wart on the back of one hand, and wore undistinguished evening dress, which could indicate that he was either rich and distinguished and did not care about appearances, or that he was an upstart nonentity who knew no better.
My head began to throb. Irene’s system for character analysis by dress was highly ambiguous. I decided to answer his impertinent question in the interests of investigation.
“I am English, yes,” I said coolly.
He nodded. “I as well. That enchanting lady who entered with you, she is English as well?’
I abhor untruths, but committed one then. “Yes, but I cannot see what affair it is of yours.”
“Pardon, dear lady.” He bowed, running a wart-decorated hand over his springy hair. “I am not used to royal receptions. Lazarus Hampshire at your service, Madam.” His smile exposed not very white teeth.
“I am not a Madam, but a Miss,” I said sharply.
“Oh, indeed! Now that you mention it, I can see that it is so. “Well, Miss—?”
“Huxleigh,” I conceded in the interests of interrogation.
“Well, Miss Huxleigh, I am an itinerant banker abroad, and so hunger to see an English face and hear an English cast of phrase, that I have presumed to address a stranger. May I also presume to suggest that guests at such an elevated occasion must by nature be respectable?”
“You can suggest it, sir, but I am not convinced. Sometimes the most eminent
persons behave in the least respectable way of all.”
“How true, Miss Huxleigh. You have that English acerbity that I so miss among all these smiling people who bow and kiss hands and say everything but what they mean.”
I couldn’t help sighing agreement. “Yes, indeed... Mr. Hampshire. What banking interests bring you to Prague? Pray do not be too specific; I do not understand financial matters in the slightest”
“An honest woman,” he said with a low laugh that I quite detested. “A client in Leeds has inherited land from a distant connection in this city. Do you know it?”
“Prague?”
“Leeds.”
“Dear me, no. I am from Shropshire originally.”
“And now?”
“Paris,” I replied shortly. Where another might take pride in residing in such a notorious place, I was annoyed to admit to it.
“Paris,” he repeated, in the way of barristers and businessmen everywhere. Casanova owed his most irritating habits to human behavior, I fear. “And she—our fellow Englishwoman? Where does she live?”
I glanced, surprised, to Irene, who was sipping the bilious green punch with a tall gentleman wearing a much-outmoded long, flowing white beard, like that of an Old Testament prophet or a Lake poet of a few decades ago, and tinted spectacles. When had she made the acquaintance of this unpromising fellow?
“I don’t know,” I replied. “I had not met Lady Sherlock until recently.”
“Lady Sherlock,” he repeated with a strange tone of satisfaction. “I’m not familiar with such a title, and my work requires me to know DeBrett’s Peerage backwards and forwards.”
When lost for words, I always follow Irene’s dictum now: ask a question. “Your work, sir?”
He nodded, retaining the unsettling monocle at his eye with the practice of long usage. “No one is more interested in the peerage than bankers. Do you know what county the lady calls home?”
“Why, sir? I told you that I hardly knew her.”
The foolish face became sheepish. “I am a bachelor, Miss Huxleigh. In fact, I have never married, though I am long past the age for it. I must admit that your lovely acquaintance caught my eye. I do not suppose you know if Lady Sherlock is attached?”
Another Scandal in Bohemia (A Novel of Suspense featuring Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes) Page 33
