The King’s unbound hands lifted as if to shelter his now-naked face from such facts, from such truths.
“A double,” she went on, “would duel with my husband within three hours, and slay him.”
“Your—husband. I recall ....”
“You recall the truth. I will give you your life back. I will restore your Queen and your throne, but you must be absolutely ruled by me for the next several hours. You must do as I say. You must be my subject.”
He was silent for several moments, then looked up from red-rimmed eyes. “I have always been your subject, Irene; why do you think I tried to make you mine? And I do not want my Queen back,” he added with the old fierceness. “She is as nothing compared to you?”
“She is a Queen,” Irene said softly, unflattered, “and she has been treated abominably, both by you and your substitute. If you want your throne, you will have to win her back; it is that simple.”
“And, in the meantime, I must march to your tune.”
“Yes,” Irene said. “I do appreciate your putting that in musical terms, Willie.”
“I’ve always been fond of music.”
“You will become even fonder of it when you dance to my tone,” she promised.
Irene glanced at me. “The time, Nell!”
“Four o’clock.”
“We have no time to waste. Back to the Hotel Europa.”
“The Europa? Why?” I wondered.
“We must install the King in a safe place.”
She eyed me steadily, her glance dropping to my hands, each of which still clutched a knife. “Then, Robber Girl, we must hasten to a very unsafe place and perform a miracle of politics, intimidation, blackmail, and eleventh-hour salvation.”
Chapter Thirty-four
BLACK RUSSIAN SABLE
During the long return trip to the hotel, I mused upon Irene’s eerie reference to the same Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale that I had been contemplating, “The Snow Queen.” I, the Robber Girl?
Certainly I carried the knives for the role. Irene had insisted that the guard’s confederates would find him soon, and that we dare not leave even a bread knife with which he might sever his bonds.
The King, weakened by his weeks of confinement, was barely capable of carrying himself, much less pointed objects.
Such a sight we three must have made through the dim Prague streets: the King lurching between us, an arm thrown over our shoulders; we staggering forward despite the burden, Irene lustily singing a slurred tavern song in the deepest basso she could produce.
She instructed the King to “hum” along, and he complied meekly, adding a wandering but surprising tenor to the tune.
I remained silent, for my quavering soprano would have done nothing but attract suspicion—or thrown footwear.
Our disguise was perfect. No one questions a tipsy trio about Prague at four in the morning. To do so would be unpatriotic, and would harm the business of the ubiquitous U Fleků and its ilk, and such establishments are national monuments to the renowned Bohemian fondness for fermented hops.
Once we reached the hotel, Irene and I battled the King up the back stairs. Our efforts were similar to shoving a sack of feed up a ladder into a loft. The walk had exhausted the King, and he was nearly drunk from confusion, elation, and mystification.
Imagine the picture we presented when Irene scratched discreetly on Allegra’s door, and the poor child finally heard and came to admit us.
Her eyes were already round as buttons when she edged the door open a crack: who would call at four in the morning but madmen and villains? When she saw us three, she immediately took us for the latter, and would have slammed the door shut, save that Irene thrust her booted foot in the way.
“Piano, Allegra, piano!” she begged, wincing from Allegra’s sturdy attempt at door closing. “We have brought someone in need of tending.”
Allegra eyed the figure slumped over our shoulders. “Oh, is it Godfrey? The duel was not to be fought until six!”
Irene led us in and to the sofa, on which we let His Majesty collapse like the animated lead weight he resembled. His head fell against the sofa back, so it basked in the light of the gasolier that Irene had turned on.
Allegra examined the King, not much impressed. “Not Godfrey, thank God! Where did you find this scoundrel?”
Irene looked both amused and satisfied as she sat down to extract her cigarette case from her apparently bottomless side pocket. “Within desecrating distance of a graveyard, but he was not up to much mischief, being chained like the ghost he should be. Meet Wilhelm Gottsreich Sigismond von Ormstein, King of Bohemia.”
“King?” Allegra came closer to peer into the King’s exhausted face. “Another?”
“The first and only,” Irene said on a breath of smug blue smoke. “You must tend him, Allegra, while Nell and I attend to other business. Godfrey mustn’t know, for now, of his presence, so we three must hide the King in the bedroom.”
“The bedroom?” Allegra paused. “My bedroom or your bedroom?”
“I doubt you will get much more sleep tonight, and I find it impolitic to store the King in my bedroom, for reasons that you might not fully appreciate, nor should you be expected to.” Irene’s turn of the room ended in her smashing her cigarette to ashes in a tray. “So your bedroom, dear girl, will do nicely.”
Allegra shrugged, a rude gesture that I feared that she had acquired from Irene. “As you wish.”
“I protest, Irene,” said I. “Allegra is an unmarried young woman; such an arrangement is scandalous.”
“No one will ever know, Nell. Scandal does not exist without knowledge. Besides, the King is hardly in any condition to initiate any new scandals in his bucolic kingdom of Bohemia.”
“And,” said Allegra, “my friends in London will be thrilled to hear that I concealed a king in my bedchamber.”
So much for averted scandal when the victim is eager to announce its existence to assorted friends and acquaintances.
Yet glad I was to have Allegra’s young back help us hoist the King and propel him into the room in question, where he collapsed upon the bed in a semiconscious state like the commonest drunkard.
“What shall I do with him?” Allegra asked herself as much as us.
“Watch him,” Irene instructed. “See that Godfrey does not see him, and that the King does not see anyone—not even a hotel maid. If he rouses, you could encourage him to clean up as much as possible—”
“—as far as is fit and proper for you to do so,” I added swiftly.
Irene eyed me, then shook her head. “The times do not call for ‘fit and proper,’ Allegra. You must do what you can, as best you can. We will return to take custody of the King before dawn—”
This was news to me, and most unsettling.
“—for he must play the role of his life tomorrow. He must rise from the dead, and no one must notice.”
“Yes, Madame Norton,” Allegra answered meekly. “I will care for him as if he were my Uncle Quentin.”
“Oh, you need not be that nice,” Irene added. “Kings respond better to high-handed treatment. They recognize it from their own history. Whatever you do, you must not be intimidated by him. He is your charge, and his fealty is pledged to me. Remind him of that if he should become troublesome and insist on returning to Prague Castle prematurely.”
“Indeed, Mrs. Norton, I will be as fierce a guardian to His Majesty as Miss Huxleigh was to me.”
Irene glanced at the King. He lay, in his dull, crude clothes, like a gigantic dead moth on Allegra’s delicate white linens, his limbs splayed and his mouth ajar, snoring softly.
“That should do nicely,” she said, jerking her head to the door as a signal that I should accompany her away.
“Do I still need the knives?” I asked breathlessly as I trotted after her into the hotel passage.
“Of course. In fact, if you have a nail file that is sufficiently sharp, I suggest that we take it. We go now to beard the m
ost dangerous beast of all.”
Back into the streets. Back into the dark and the damp. Back into anxiety and mystery. I scuttled alongside Irene, barely keeping up with her unladylike long strides, unable to speak for the speed of our strides, my breath huffing onto the chill air like Red Indian smoke signals.
I could not follow the turnings of our route, and knew not if river or Old Town was on our right. Irene knew exactly where she was going, doubtless a result of her solitary expedition yesterday. When she paused before an old, sprawling structure, I knew it for our destination.
She headed directly for the rear. While I shivered at the clangor of ignominious discovery, she forced the servants’ door open and slipped up the stairs with the confidence of a practiced housebreaker.
Once we were upon the muffling carpet of an upstairs hall I tugged her sleeve. “Irene, how do you know where to go?”
“I have previously spied out the lay of the land. Be still now. I wish to catch our opponent unawares. Surprise is our most powerful weapon.”
I doubt that she meant to include my surprise in this armament, but it certainly was there.
At a particular door she stopped. Why she chose this door of several along the passage, I cannot say. She reached into her pocket for the same implement that had opened the servants’ door, and applied it to the lock. Such a small but telling clatter! I expected a mob of servants to be upon us. No one came. In moments the door swung open on mute hinges.
Irene’s hand on my arm dragged me into the dark beyond.
We stood for some time, listening to our own breathing while our eyes grew accustomed to the darkness. At length the furniture showed itself as blacker blots on the dim landscape before us, and we began treading carefully between these barriers.
Another door was unlocked. Irene turned the knob so slowly that it made no sound. We shortly after squeezed through the opening into another dark chamber.
“Stay.” Irene’s command was a hot whisper in my ear.
I felt rather than heard her move away. For a moment I heard nothing, then a rustle, a scratch of nails on cloth— the gasolier above us burst into light. In the violent glare a swath of bedroom furnishings leapt into being. I felt as if I watched a stage storm, or saw a photograph taken at the moment the powder flashes as bright as brimstone.
A figure moved in the ornate bed; another perched upon the upholstered foot like a leprechaun....
"Not a centimeter,” Irene’s voice ordered from the bed’s foot. “Not a millimeter, Madame. Stay still, or my pistol shall speak out of turn and, I assure you, you will not like what it has to say.”
“Who are you?” the figure demanded in the same language that Irene had used—English.
“Who do you think?” Irene asked.
A pause. “Lady Sherlock, I presume. A most innovative pseudonym, if a trifle obvious. But, then, the opera was your métier.”
“The pseudonym was no worse than ‘Sable,’ ” Irene answered.
“I was young then, and impressionable.”
“Yes, I see that. That is no excuse now.”
“And it was another country.”
“Too bad the wench is not dead.”
I knew not what they spoke of, save that the woman in the bed was Tatyana, and that the first duel of the new day was already well underway in this room.
“You trespass on my portion of the board, Madame,” Tatyana noted.
“I have visited Bohemia before,” Irene said blithely.
“Yes, I know.”
“You know?”
“Of course. Do you think that we didn’t investigate the past of your tiresome king?”
“It is possible; you do not seem to have thought out your plan very well. And who is ‘we’?”
Tatyana, who had gathered the covers to her shoulders at our lightning-like arrival, smiled and let the sheets slip away. She wore a most unconventional nightdress of brunet lace against which her pale complexion shone like candle wax and her red-gold hair was the flame.
“I am not allowed to say.”
“I imagine that you do much that you are not allowed.”
“Always. But not in this instance.”
“I care little for your tawdry conspiracy,” Irene said. “In hours my husband fights a duel with your King. Godfrey must live.”
“We are in utter harmony.”
“He must not be so much as wounded.”
“I concur completely, Madame. In fact, I have taken steps to ensure that very outcome. Can you say as much?”
“I am still taking steps.”
“Worry not.” Tatyana piled a great quantity of lace-covered pillows behind her and leaned back. “I have anticipated you, as usual. Your dramatic visit is only so much melodrama. Godfrey was always safe. I would not see a hair upon his head—or anywhere else—so much as shifted by the errant wind of a gunshot.”
“How would you accomplish this?”
“Why did you advise your husband to choose pistol over sword?”
“Because a pistol can be tampered with when a sword cannot.”
Tatyana shrugged, a gesture that set the lace on her strong shoulders ebbing.
“You planned to fill the King’s pistol with blank shot?” Irene sounded unconvinced. “Why disarm your most potent weapon in the game to come?”
“Because the game is nearly over. I do not need him anymore and... he was growing tiresome.” She eyed Irene slyly. “I do not think that Godfrey grows tiresome, does he?”
“You must ask someone other than I; someone who is not so biased, such as Miss Huxleigh there.”
“There? That is Miss Huxleigh? Such an admirable assistant you and he have found. I have long searched for one who would blend so perfectly into the woodwork and have had little luck. No, I do not care for Miss Huxleigh’s opinion on Godfrey’s lack of tiresomeness. She is not an expert witness. I require personal testimony, and most often must... see for myself.”
“A pity.” Irene sounded not at all sorry. “I fear that we will not linger long enough in Prague for you to obtain any evidence of a personal sort. It is not enough that you have the King’s pistol loaded with false shot. I too must see that for myself.”
“If you wish to jeopardize the entire encounter—”
“I wish it. And I wish one other thing.”
“You may express whatever you wish; that does not mean that you will get it.”
“I wish the King to emerge unscathed as well.”
“The King? Why should you care for this pawn who wears a false crown?”
“I do not,” Irene said, “and him I leave to you and your confederates’ tenderest mercies. It is the true King I would have walk away from that encounter—after the shots have been fired.”
“A nice thought, but impractical. The King is missing.”
“Yes, and now the King is missing from where he was when he was missing.”
Tatyana scrambled upright among her pillows. “You have him? Where?”
“Where you will not get him. A subtle exchange of Kings suits my purpose, and ultimately yours. If you refuse to provide the occasion, I will be forced to produce the King publicly to renounce the conspirators. That will cause such a stir. St. Petersburg will buzz with it, as well as Vienna, Paris, and London. That, I think, would not suit the great and glorious bear, your icy northern master.”
Tatyana’s handsome face curled into an expression of foiled rage. Her fingers curved like claws into the lace flouncing her pillows as she pummeled the feathers in a catlike rhythm. After just such bouts of purring and pummeling, the black Persian Lucifer would lash his tail and suddenly pounce, his fangs snapping at my arm.
Tatyana snapped with words, but they were fiercely spat. “You have interfered with me and my companions before, Madame, and know what a fatal outcome such meddling had on the Hammersmith Bridge. Do not mistake my... personal interest in the admirable Godfrey for a sign of weakness. My associates would not hesitate to kill anyone who stood in ou
r way.”
“The bridge was as disastrous to your side as ours,” Irene said calmly. “What I propose here is a truce. Come, I have captured the King, You have no choice. Withdraw peacefully, with an appearance of good grace, and you will live to fight another day. Resist, and you will be unmasked, along with the false King.”
“And your price for permitting us this quiet withdrawal is Godfrey’s life? You already had that, fool.”
“Perhaps, but now I am sure of it.”
“The true King betrayed you,” Tatyana said with a snarl. (I hesitate to resort to such sensational description, but the woman was a wildcat, what can I say? I have never before seen such an uncivilized specimen, and indeed, she gives her entire sex an injurious name. Even Irene at her most bohemian was a mere amateur compared to the primal possessiveness of this willful feral female.)
“Why should you care to save him?” Tatyana demanded. “He is not worth either of us, or even your redoubtable Miss Huxleigh.”
I was not enamored of that “even,” either.
Irene considered the question with far more seriousness than I would have shown. “He is the true King; a certain nobility attaches to that alone. Even Willie, poor creature that he is, would not have behaved as abominably toward the Queen as your substitute. That is how I knew instantly that a dupe had taken his place, as well as by his most amazing indifference to myself, and even Miss Huxleigh.”
Another “even” applied to my humble self, which was growing less humble and more indignant by the minute.
“The real King knew me instantly,” Irene went on without a pause. "Despite my raven hair and our reunion in a most peculiar place. Despite his own not insubstantial privations these past months. You may have inadvertently made a better man of him, Madame Tatyana, perhaps even a finer King, despite your worst efforts.”
The woman threw back her head and laughed silently, then drew a deep breath. “A small improvement,” she scoffed, “for King Will-he... will he what—amount to anything? He is beneath the both of us, no matter his stature or rank—and no matter the heights to which imprisonment and suffering might loft him. Such penances are always overestimated by the sentimental. I wonder that you bothered to claim such a pathetic conquest in the past.”
Another Scandal in Bohemia (A Novel of Suspense featuring Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes) Page 38
