Cold Stone & Ivy Book 2: The Crown Prince (The Empire of Steam)

by H. Leighton Dickson

  Valerie swore at them in German. Christien grinned again through the smoke.

  “What about Rudolf’s wife, then?” Ivy asked. “Could she have shot him? That must have been a terrible embarrassment for her at the party.”

  “Stephanie is an oaf,” said Valerie. “She would not have the courage to shoot him. Besides, she has her own Liebhaber.”

  “Liebhaber?”

  “Lover,” said Christien.

  “Right. So do we know for a fact that he was shot?” Ivy frowned. “Because I’d very much like to know how. I mean, was it a distance shot like from a rifle? It is a hunting lodge, after all. Or if it was close, how close? Were there powder burns? What was the angle of the bullet?”

  “Mein Gott!” snapped the Archduchess. “This is my brother and the Crown Prince of Austria!”

  “These are important questions, Valerie,” said Christien. “It used to be my entire world.”

  “Your world is gone, without a hand.”

  “So is yours, without an heir.”

  Ivy thought a moment longer.

  “So we really need a necroscopy report, yes? Remy, how could we get that?”

  “Hm. Let’s think that through. A necroscopy report for a Crown Prince suspected to have been killed by foreign anarchists, to be given to those same foreign anarchists? Not bloody likely, Ivy.”

  “Drat.” She made a face. “Well, if we are denied forensic evidence, we must move on to circumstantial.”

  “God, I’d forgotten how your brain worked.”

  She grinned, threw a glance at the Mad Lord. During the entire conversation, he had stared blankly out at the road and she wondered if he was thinking about his dogs back at Lasignstoke. She took a deep breath.

  “Because, on the night of the party, Sebastien looked into an orb.”

  “I looked into a bottle of Scotch,” said Christien.

  “An orb?” asked Valerie. “Like those in the ballroom?”

  “Exactly,” said Ivy. “He saw the girl die. She was trying to steal the locket and they struggled at the top of a set of stairs and she fell. That’s why I asked about the stairs in the lodge.”

  There was silence in the cab.

  “This is true?” asked Valerie. “This is what you saw?”

  “If I say yes,” grumbled Sebastien, “May I have the blanket back?”

  Ivy sighed but passed it over. It was over his head in a heartbeat.

  Christien blinked slowly, blew out a long thin stream of smoke.

  “So who killed Rudolf then, Bastien?”

  “Arclight,” said Sebastien from under the blanket. “Arclight and love.”

  “You said that before, “ said Christien. “What does it mean?”

  “He is a madman,” Valerie snorted.

  “A moment ago, he was a miracle,” said Christien.

  The Archduchess looked away.

  “We don’t know much about Mary but we know even less about Arclight, so we still have a mystery,” said Ivy. “You seemed to know about the lockets, Remy. What do you know?”

  “Just what the Ghost Club told me,” he said and he flicked the cigarette while he thought. “That there were three made centuries ago by a French metallurgist in Holland. Or perhaps it was a Dutch metallurgist in Normandy. I remember the name Tycho Brahe and someone named Ashmole. It was months ago.”

  “I wonder who the third one is,” mumbled Sebastien. “I can’t wait to meet her.”

  “Archelicht,” murmered Valerie, “Is the Habsburg locket. Gisela told me—”

  “It’s not a Habsburg locket,” said Christien.

  She ignored him.

  “Gisela told me it was appropriated from an estate in Normandy, France—”

  “The de Lacey estate in Normandy,” said Christien.

  “—by Louis XVI and given to his wife Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna von Habsburg as a wedding present.”

  “Marie Antoinette?” asked Ivy.

  “And you bloody Habsburgs have had it ever since,” said Christien,

  “Habsburgs preserve history. The French Empire fell during their reign. It was one of the few pieces that wasn’t chopped up and sold for cake.”

  “Spoken like an Imperialist,” said Ivy. “Blaming the people for not wanting to starve to death.”

  “As I said, Habsburgs preserve history. It is not our duty to preserve people. My grandmother gave it to my father, and my father gave it to Rudolf when he was born. Maman told me the locket spun rooms of gold, and was therefore the perfect christening gift for a Gilded prince.”

  Ivy swallowed, remembering the night in the Engineworks house at St. Katharine’s Docks. In a matter of moments, Ghostlight had turned every gear, every piston, every copper wire, into gold.

  Valerie sighed.

  “The locket was always kept locked up. I had never seen it until that night.”

  Ivy sighed now, stared out the window at the snowy road, the black skeleton trees, the mountains. The Alps, if she remembered correctly. They had looked so different from an airship.

  “So who had the locket on the Stahl Mädchen?”

  “What do you say?” asked Valerie. “No one had the locket.”

  “Someone had the locket,” said Christien. “Where do you think those damned orbs came from?”

  “I – I don’t know.”

  “One of your sisters?”

  “How would they get it? It belonged to Rudolf and neither of us saw him before his death.”

  “That’s not true,” he said. “We all saw him the night in the Hofburg. He had a crackerjack barney with your father.”

  Her eyes flashed at him. “Are you suggesting—”

  “Nothing,” he said. “And everything. No one is above suspicion, Valerie.”

  “Rudolf is the heir to the Gilded Empire! The only heir! My father would never even consider what you are suggesting!”

  “Political assassinations happen all the time, love. And never bank on family loyalty. It can turn fatal over a crock of mummie’s china.”

  “Not in my family.”

  “A family of Black Swans?”

  She snarled at him.

  “I want to go home,” moaned Sebastien from the blanket. “And I will never leave Lasingstoke ever again. I promise.”

  Ivy wrapped her arm in his, leaned her head on his shoulder. But that did not, could not stop the racing of her mind.

  “So,” she continued, “If what Sebastien said is true and Mary died because they were arguing over the locket, then we need to find out what happened to the locket. We’ll know what happened to Rudolf once we find the locket.”

  “The German hunting party,” said Christien. “They were staying at a nearby lodge, weren’t they? Could they have been sent to steal it?”

  “Wilhelm is a personal friend,” Valerie hissed. “He would not have the nerve.”

  “He’s a very personal friend to Gisela,” said Christien. “So how about this? Mary tries to steal the locket but Rudy stops her and she dies. Then Gisela shows up, they quarrel, she shoots him and takes it to the Germans. It would have been suspicious but Bastien’s outburst gives her a perfect cover and we get shot down over Reichsland with French Anarchists to blame. Gisela divorces her husband, marries Wilhelm, and Germany and Austria are reunited at last. Well done all ‘round, I say.”

  Valerie swung again but he blocked it with the clockwork hand. They both stared, transfixed, before he slowly released his fingers, one by one. She folded her arms across her chest, sank back in the cushion.

  “I want to go home,” moaned the blanket.

  Ivy sighed.

  “Well, I’m afraid Her Most Royal Highness may be right. We may have to go to the Hofburg after all.”

  Christien stared at her flatly, blew the smoke out again. It was rather like punctuation, she thought. He could write entire paragraphs with that thing.

  “Bastien is not going to the Hofburg,” he said finally.

  “I don’t want to go to the H
ofburg,” Sebastien said. “I want to go home.”

  “We need Sebastien to see what happened,” said Ivy. “And he can do that if he has something of Rudolf’s. You and Valerie could go.”

  “Yes,” said Christien. “Fine. We’ll go.”

  “No. Not you,” said Valerie and she narrowed her eyes at Ivy. “Her.”

  “Her? Why?”

  “Me? Why?”

  Slowly, the Archduchess reached out a hand to caress his cheek. He watched her as one would watch a cobra, waiting for the strike.

  “This face,” she purred. “No one could forget this face. If a Habsburg sees you after such an unceremonious kidnapping in Strasbourg, you will be shot on sight. And that would be sad.”

  She smiled, though it was not a pleasant sight.

  “No, you and the madman will go to my cousin’s. The girl, however, will come with me. She is unremarkable. No one will recognize her.”

  “Jolly good,” said Ivy.

  “Besides, she is the clever one. And her arm does not lock.”

  Christien blew smoke into her face. She grabbed him and kissed him so fiercely that his cigarette dropped to the floor.

  Ivy rolled her eyes, looked back at the blanket that was Sebastien.

  “Will you be alright at Valerie’s cousin’s place? I’m certain there will be no saints for you to break.”

  “I didn’t break him, Miss Savage.”

  “Ivy.”

  “Yes, Ivy. I didn’t break him, I released him. And they weren’t saints, simply men who died a very long time ago. Although he seemed like a very kind fellow. He may have been a saint after all.”

  She smiled.

  “Is it Arclight?” she asked. “Is it because of her?”

  “The horses, I suspect.” He shrugged. “I don’t know. I only went into the church to pray but the dead had other ideas. They always do.”

  She didn’t know what to say to that, leaned her head back onto his arm.

  “I don’t understand how you saw them,” he muttered from the blanket. “No one ever sees what I see. Ever.”

  “Everyone saw them because their bodies were actually there. You literally called dead men out of their crypts.”

  “Like Ezekiel and the Valley of Dry Bones,” he said.

  “How biblical.”

  She threw a glance at Remy and Valerie. They were clearly engrossed, bussing it up and not caring who watched. This was not the man who had been her fiancé so many months ago and it made her wonder if this was the real Christien de Lacey or if now, like then, he was playing a part. Perhaps she would never know. Perhaps he didn’t know himself.

  And they sat for a long moment, Ivy’s mind spinning in so many different directions and she wondered why she should be thinking of crimes when she was wrapped around the Mad Lord’s arm. She wished that once, just once, she was a normal girl and that it wasn’t always such a war between her head and her heart. Still, she had never been anyone other than herself with Sebastien and he seemed quite fine with it. Perhaps Christien was right once again. Perhaps she didn’t have to make a choice. Perhaps, she could reach a little higher, take what she wanted, with or without those very fine boots.

  She slipped under the blanket, let it fall over her own head.

  Sebastien looked down and her heart soared to see both eyes brown as chocolate.

  He smiled.

  “You see? It’s very peaceful in here, isn’t it? No dead. No spirits. No mountains rushing by. And now you. Marvelous things, blankets.”

  She grinned and leaned her head on his shoulder, letting her body enjoy his while her brain continued to spin and for the first time in months, there was no war inside.

  ***

  Illustrated Grazer Special Edition

  Graz, Austria

  Funeral preparations for our beloved Crown Prince continue with public viewing of His Imperial body, now moved from St. Stephen’s Cathedral to the Court Chapel at the Hofburg. Reports from Vienna say the crowds that came to pay respects were so numerous that the chapel could not be closed at the regular time and prelates were forced to maintain public viewing throughout the night. In a solemn ceremony, the Crown Prince will be interred in the Church of the Capuchin Friars on February 5.

  In an unrelated story, young Viennese socialite Baroness CENSORED has reportedly died this week in CENSORED, and has been laid to rest in CENSORED.

  Chapter 15

  Of Tuscan Princes, Turkish Delights and Bergl Elephants in a Viennese Palais

  It was twilight when the coach plowed into the snowy streets of Vienna. Twilight and grey and very sad. Black flags flew half-mast from every post, window shades were drawn like closed eyes. There was no music. There was no Carnival. There were no cakes or coffee or flowers for sale. Vienna was mourning her beloved Crown Prince in a monochrome of smoke and steamcabs and funeral black.

  They had driven in using back roads but soon, the monumental buildings of the Ringstrasse slipped past the cab windows. Narrow laneways alternated with stained glass, gothic spires with Greco-limestone, all of it thick with industrial soot. It seemed as if fate was closing in and Ivy began to fear none of them would escape the Silver Hussars or their sabres. Finally the coach rattled to a halt in the courtyard of a city palais that reminded Ivy of the aristocratic white homes of Pall Mall and Piccadilly.

  “Wait here,” said Valerie. She pushed open the cab door and disappeared into the shadows thrown by the gaslight.

  They sat for a moment before Christien leaned forward.

  “Bastien,” he said. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

  Sebastien pushed the blanket up on his head, leaned forward as well.

  “Kill the driver and make off with the coach?”

  “No killing!” Ivy snapped. “That won’t improve our chances!”

  “Valerie telegraphed someone before we left,” said Christien. “I’d say our chances couldn’t get much worse.”

  “You promised, Sebastien,” she growled. “No shooting.”

  “I wasn’t going to shoot him,” said Sebastien. “I have no bullets left.”

  “No killing.”

  She sighed and sank back, folding her arms across her chest but to be honest, Christien was right. Their chances couldn’t get much worse than they were now, sitting in a coach mere blocks from the Hofburg. Suddenly, her plan to uncover this murderous plot didn’t seem nearly as clever as it had only hours ago.

  Despair, it seemed, was a contagious thing.

  “This could all go very wrong very quickly,” said Christien. “Whatever you do Ivy, don’t trust her. Not one bit. She is a Black Swan, as dangerous as she is clever and she may just sell you out for a page in her father’s good book.”

  “A Black Swan?”

  “I’ve told her that I personally know the London Ripper and if any harm comes to you, he will slit her throat and take out her heart. I think that gave her pause. She’s terrified of Sebastien and she thinks it’s all part of the de Lacey curse.”

  “Which, of course, it is,” said Sebastien.

  “If you do get the sense that you’re being duped, leave her. Find a safe place and lay very low. Do whatever you need to do to get back home. They’ll want someone to hang for the Prince’s death and they won’t care whom. Do you understand?”

  “Do you want my blanket?” asked Sebastien.

  Suddenly, the cab door swung open on a tall man in a military uniform. He had sleek dark hair, a sporty moustache and bright eyes.

  “You are von Steam, yes? I will speak English. Come out, come out.”

  Reluctantly, they obeyed as Valerie appeared beside him in the gaslight, hair newly piled, the sable wrapped around her shoulders. Ivy sighed. Easy to be unremarkable around such a woman.

  “This is my cousin Archduke Franz Salvator Maria Joseph Ferdinand Karl Leopold Anton von Padua Johann Baptist Januarius Aloys Gonzaga Rainer Benedikt Bernhard of Austria, Hungary, Croatia and Bohemia.”

  Ivy blinked.

&n
bsp; “Call me Franz,” said the man, offering his hand. “You must be Remy.

  “Christien de Lacey,” said Remy.

  Interesting, thought Ivy, how he suddenly preferred his Christian name.

  “And you the miracle man,” he said, turning to Sebastien and offering his hand. “I am fascinated to meet you sir.”

  Sebastien took it.

  “Is there a church nearby? I would dearly love to pray. Last time I tried, it went very badly.”

  “Ah yes, the relics! Valerie has told me. Are you a practicing Catholic, sir?”

  “Practicing,” said Sebastien. “Haven’t quite got it right yet.”

  And he began turning Franz’s hand over and over in his, running his fingers up to the wrist and holding it there for a moment. For his part, the man called Franz just stared until the Mad Lord released the unusual grip and smiled.

  “Italian, yes? Do you prefer Austria or Tuscany?”

  “I—” He looked at Valerie. She arched a brow. “Austria, sir, but I must admit Tuscany is considerably warmer!”

  “Do you have tea?”

  The Archduchess stepped forward.

  “Remy, you and your brother will stay as guests of my cousin. He understands you were not responsible for Rudolf’s death and will afford you as much protection as any minor prince can give. Do not leave his company. We cannot guarantee your safety otherwise.”

  “You cannot guarantee our safety at all,” said Christien.

  “Do not leave his company,” she growled.

  And she climbed back into the coach and threw a glance at Ivy, ordering her with that simple gesture.

  Ivy turned to the men.

  “Remember what I said,” said Christien. “Be careful.”

  “I will.” She swallowed, looked up at the Mad Lord. The blanket was draped across his shoulders like a cloak. “Sebastien?”

  He stepped toward her and she marveled at the rush of her heart. His cheek brushed hers and she held her breath, waiting for the feel of his lips on her skin.

  “Beware of horses, Miss Savage,” he breathed into her ear. “They are duplicitous creatures and will turn the world upside down with their hoofs.”