“Mr. Dvořák gives you his blessing. ‘Go, go,’ he says. ‘I cannot stand in her way.’” The King demonstrated Mr. Dvořák’s farewell with repeated flicks of his hand, as though shooing chicks from a hen-yard.
“Willie! Mr. Dvořák did not dismiss me?”
The King shrugged, looking for a moment like a guilty little boy. I glanced from Irene’s white face to his robust, complacent one and was tempted to box his ears. Seated as he was on the ottoman, I could reach them nicely.
“Mr. Dvořák has no need of you, Irene. This... operatic delusion is simply a convenience, is it not? An excuse for your removal from Warsaw to Prague on my account. I appreciate your discretion, but—”
She clasped her hands until the knuckles went white. “Your presence here was not a deterrent, certainly, but always—always!—my primary purpose has been my career. Now you tell me that I am brushed away like a piece of lint—”
“No, no, nothing like that. Dvořák accommodates us, that is all.”
“Us? Are you employing the royal ‘we,’ Willie?” Irene’s voice was ominously level.
The King cleared his throat. “I speak for the future, and in the future it will not be necessary for you to sing. You will not need the money, for I will provide that. As for audiences, you will have no more loyal and exclusive admirer than myself.”
Here he pressed his hand to the medals winking over the vicinity of his heart. I held my breath. Like most noblemen, he had learned to disregard persons of an inferior class like myself. Thus it was that I was witnessing the King of Bohemia proposing to my friend, Irene Adler. And she did not like it.
“An exclusive audience smacks of an empty opera house, Willie,” she said.
“It smacks of a full palace, Irene, a beautiful palace in the verdant hills to the south. All yours, Irene. You may have your little English friend with you there... pets, if you so desire, all that you wish.”
She listened to him, her head half turned away as if she tried to heed another voice, as if she could not quite believe what she was hearing.
“South? We will live farther into the... country?”
“Beautiful country, Irene. You will be mistress of your own palace, of all you survey.”
“Mistress?”
“And Vienna, we will have trips to Vienna—Paris, even, on occasion. Yes, Paris is more discreet.”
“Discreet? Has not Prague been discreet enough?”
He bit his full lower lip, making himself seem to pout instead of showing indecision. My governess instincts for brewing mischief were raising my hackles. Large Willie was up to something very naughty, something I itched to slap him for, did I dare, but I could no more see it than Irene.
“It is your father’s murder,” she said suddenly. “Your family wishes to hide the fact; you fear that I would not respect your desires in this matter. That is why you have had me dismissed from the National Theatre and talk of banishing me to the country—Willie, for God’s sake, it is not necessary to silence me this way! It is, after all, your family’s affair and I do not need the credit. I must respect your wishes even if I do not approve of the treatment of the criminal. And now, I must find Mr. Dvořák and reclaim my position—”
She glanced around the chamber, as if searching for her maid, her clothes. She no more saw me than he did, for a very different reason. Irene was utterly off balance; I saw it. She hardly knew where she was. Her astute mind, so used to building minute facts into inescapable conclusions, could not reduce the gross changes in the King’s attitude into anything but... absurdity.
The King stood, his boot-heels thumping the floor as his weight returned to them. “You will not contact Dvořák. I forbid it”
“Forbid it!”
“I am King.”
“Indeed, but I am not Bohemian.”
“Irene, you must do as I say; I ask you, then, as a friend!”
‘Why? Tell me why, Willie.”
He looked away and down; perhaps he saw his reflection small and precise in the toes of his mirror-polish boots. “It is impossible that you stay in the castle.”
“Very well, I will take rooms in the city. I always could have, it was you who insisted—”
“It is impossible that our association remain public.”
“Public? You call a few drives along the avenue to Wenceslas Square public?”
“It cannot even be suspected,”
“A bit late for that now, isn’t it, Willie?”
“Irene, you are a sophisticated woman. We have had our little courtship dance and you know what comes after. I will not stint; you will enjoy every comfort and luxury. I will travel to the south as often as I can—”
“And here, in Prague? What will you do here in Prague? Will you attend the National Theatre and watch someone else sing ‘Spectre Bride’? Will you drive out with some other woman?” Irene’s voice took on sudden, if reluctant, certainty. “Will you live here at the castle... with some other woman?”
The King stiffened, as indeed would any man had tones so laced with contempt been aimed his way.
“Clotilde Lothman von Saxe-Meningen is not ‘some other woman,’” he answered. “She is second daughter to the king of Scandinavia and my future bride.”
“Ah...” Comprehension flooded Irene’s face.
“With my father’s death—however it occurred—my family and civil obligations have changed. I must consider the succession, the royal—”
“—pedigree? Is it your family who is so eager to see you wed just now?”
“Yes, but it was inevitable someday. I knew it since I was a child. It does not mean I love her, Irene—”
“No. Apparently not. So you have known, since—”
“I know this thing always, but I do not like to think about it. In my heart you will always be my queen, but I am King, and a man of almost thirty now. I cannot be expected to restrain myself in regard to you, to play the suitor forever. You must have known.”
“I should have, yes. Will... your marriage... be soon?”
“Not for a year—a mourning period, you see—which will give you and me delightful times together, but we must be discreet, for Clotilde of Saxe-Meningen is of a delicate nature and would refuse the marriage should any hint of scandal taint me.”
“Scandal,” Irene repeated, in that same bewildered tone that so wrung my heart.
I watched them as the silence lengthened. Both their heads were lowered—the King’s in shame, I hoped. Irene’s head drooped like a flower’s—in thought or sorrow or a blend of both. Her splayed fingertips touched the table linen, as if supporting her by this light contact with reality. She seemed very far away—from the King, from myself.
The King at least had the grace to sense her shock. He bowed slightly, in that stiff way favored by European gentlemen.
“I will withdraw and allow you to make plans to remove to the southern palace. It is a great change and must be accomplished swiftly. I expect that you will manage it with your usual flair.”
Irene looked up again. Her lips lifted in a smile so small it required a magnifying glass. “Yes. My usual flair.”
He nodded, pleased, and left without a last glance at myself.
Once his clicking boots had withdrawn across the marble hall floors, I could hear only the mantel clock ticking and the grind of the gears each time the minute hand was driven a centimeter forward.
Irene’s fingers on the tablecloth twitched, then tapped, then began pantomiming the playing of a melody only she could hear. I poured some more hot chocolate and pushed the cup and saucer toward her. She ignored it. She stood there, head bent, as lost in contemplation as Tennyson’s Lady of Shallot. I feared for her, feared that she, too, “had seen the mirror crack from side to side.” That way lay madness and despair.
“Irene,” I began, just as she looked up and said, “Nell..”
“What will you do?” I continued.
Her lips tightened. “Pack.”
“Then you a
re leaving Prague?”
“Certainly.”
“As the King wishes?”
“As he demands.”
I stood, my throat very dry. “Irene, I will do all I can to assist you in your packing, but as for accompanying you to this distant palace, and remaining there with you in a compromised position, I am very sorry, but I cannot... cannot— “ Here I almost choked on a rising tide of emotion.
Irene was staring at me as if I were mad. “Nell, you idiotic goose, you don’t actually believe that I would agree to this revolting proposal?”
“Well,...”
Irene began pacing so furiously that the train of her morning gown twisted into a thick tail.
“Though why you should think I had any sense left after the—lunacy!—I have displayed in regard to his Majesty, Wilhelm Gottsreich von Ormstein... ‘G’ says the fortune teller. ‘Gottsreich,’ say you. Do you know what that translates to—God’s rule! Willie may be King of all bloody Bohemia, but he does not rule a centimeter of my soul, and I will go to the ends of the earth before I will submit my spirit or my body or my career to his royal convenience!”
The train lashed behind her as she continued raging. “Oh, I have been mistaken in him. He is a small boy to be wound around the finger of the family interest.”
“My thought exactly,” I slipped in. “A most immature attitude.”
“But dangerous, Nell.” She stopped and fixed me with an intense look. “Spoiled little boys do not like their toys taken from them. Especially royal little boys. We must leave, that much is clear, and ‘discreetly.’ So discreetly that Willie will not suspect that we are leaving for England instead of his hidey-hole palace in the country.”
“Leave... when?”
“Now! As soon as possible. Our only advantage is that Willie is so smug, so... arrogant that he would never
believe a woman would flee him as the plague. Oh, he will be furious when he realizes—Bohemia will tremble. Nell! You need not go with me. You could proceed home on your own, alone—that might be safest. Or wait until he finds I am gone—no, he might use you then to draw me back.”
“Are you certain he is so set upon this course?”
“Nell, a man who would immure a free woman in a castle in the wilds of Bohemia because he is so convinced that his intermittent attentions would be that welcome... well, such a man is not liable to heed anything but his own colossal vanity. Mistake me not; Willie will be very dangerous foiled. He will stop at nothing to secure me if he can—I am caught like that poor little fool who poisoned his father because she believed political fairy tales. When do you think she will ever see the light of day again?”
“Oh, Irene, how have we snared ourselves in such a tangle?”
A rueful smile touched her lips. “Is that the royal ‘we,’ dear Nell? You are far more generous than the ruler of Bohemia. This mess is my doing and I will get both of us out of it, I swear.”
“I trust you implicitly,” said I, quelling a thousand uncertainties and a rather unpleasant flutter in my stomach.
She gathered my hands into her tight grasp. “How foolish I’ve been, and how wise I was to send for you. I thought you would arrive to witness my triumph, though I feared the machinations of his family. Now you can only testify to my utter ruin—”
“Ruin of what? Mr. Dvořák’s regard? He wished you safely away from just such a snarl, I know he did. Your career? You still sing wonderfully and have served as diva at two opera houses of Europe. Your reputation? You have done nothing wrong; indeed, you flee the wrong.”
“And my pride?” she asked.
I smiled. “Pride can always benefit from having a tuck or two taken in it, or so my father often said to me when he felt that my petticoat of self-regard was showing.”
“Bless Parson Huxleigh! A tuck in time saves nine! Come, we must plan our campaign, for Willie—like the great grey wolves who prowl these ancient forests—will hunt us wherever we go.”
Chapter Twenty-three
A SUDDEN FLIGHT
Within hours every hat in Irene’s possession, every stocking and petticoat, every lace-festooned “combination” of corset cover and pantaloon was strewn about her rooms.
Open trunks lay in wait for unwary shinbones. An unlikely perfume of violet sachets and mothballs pervaded the suite. To this disordered atmosphere the von Ormsteins made pilgrimage in solemn turn to observe Irene’s vanquishment. First came Hortense, smirking.
“I am so sorry to disturb you, Irene dear. When do you think you will be ready to leave?”
Irene combed a distracted hand through auburn curls, turning her impeccable coiffure into wild disarray. “Perhaps the day after tomorrow. I simply cannot manage to pack so many things any sooner.”
“Surely your maid will do all that?”
“But first I must tell the maid what to do! It has all been so sudden.” Here Irene sighed, carefully avoiding Hortense’s gaze. Only I saw the Duchess’s expression of cruel triumph, which further disfigured her unattractive features.
“I have some lovely mountain laurel sachets,” the Duchess said with a sneer. “I will have my Angelica bring them to you as a parting gift.”
“So generous,” Irene murmured, adding as the King’s sister-in-law left, “in her good-byes.”
“Is that a quotation from something, Irene?”
“Yes. My future memoirs. Hurry! The more insurmountable we make the packing look, the more time we buy.”
So we delved into wardrobe drawers and hatboxes like maddened monkeys, flinging goods hither and mostly yon. I actually enjoyed the disinterring of Irene’s vast wardrobe. I had never seen such a quantity and quality of wearing apparel and nearly swooned from the profuse luxury of it, despite my modest tastes.
“Luckily, I didn’t spend it all on my wardrobe,” Irene said, lifting a heavy chamois bag from the back of a drawer.
The coins within shifted with that satisfying rasp so dear to the ear and heart of a miser.
“Irene! You keep all this money here with you?”
“Is not the castle as safe as houses? For money, at least. Besides, I like my resources at hand. You see, I have saved various foreign coins collected in my journey—and plenty of good English pounds. This will be useful in our flight.”
“I do wish you wouldn’t call it that, Irene. He may ... forget you.”
“Hmm. I prefer to prepare for the worst.”
“How deep should I pack these shawls? I am not sure which of them you are really taking.”
“None of them.”
“None? But they are exquisite!”
“So are all these things.” She eyed the littered chamber. “Exquisite burdens we cannot afford. Here is our real baggage.
Irene bent to wrestle something from under her bed-skirt flounces.
“Carpetbags!” I exclaimed.
“And shabby, modest, well-traveled carpetbags they are,” she said with perverse pride.
“Wherever did you get them?”
“I bought them from the maids. ‘Poor Miss Irene, you know, so distracted at being rushed out of the castle that she doesn’t have the slightest wit left to pack efficiently.’ There are two each; with that we shall have to make do. I’ve bribed the coachman to take some trunks away secretly, but he will have them sent to a friend in Paris—to put off our pursuit, if we have one.”
I paused in folding a cotton petticoat of such fineness that it shone like silk. “When do we actually leave, then?”
“Tonight.”
“Why such haste, Irene? Surely you can forestall the King for many days with your pretended disorganization!”
“I can, but I do not wish to. I will not spend one more night under this ancient roof than I must.”
She spoke with such feeling that I was silent. Irene idly straightened the hair she had deliberately disarranged and regarded the carpetbags again. “I will carry the money in one. We will take a single change of clothing: escape before nicety. And...” Irene lifted th
e closed cabinet photograph from her bed table.
It blossomed open in her hands, lay upon them like a prayer book as she studied the photograph within.
“A sop, Nell, a sop to what Willie took for my greed, for all women’s greed. It was not the crown jewels I cared about. They really are rather inferior; small ill-matched stones for an ill-matched couple. May the... delicate... Clotilde enjoy her reign in them. The late King was quite fat, Nell. Willie will get fat, too, like the Prince of Wales,” she said with some satisfaction, “and I will not be here to see it.”
Clapping her hands, she closed the case in a dramatic gesture, then weighed it in one hand. “I will take this photographic fable with me.”
“As a reminder of your betrayal?”
“As a reminder of the King’s folly in leaving such a trace of his indiscretion. And as a precaution.” She slipped it into the gaudiest carpetbag just as the Queen Mother entered.
“I do not wish to interrupt you, my dear, but I did want to say that I am most grateful for your efforts to locate the person who poisoned the King. You must also know that I shall never think less of you for your... position with Willie.
“It’s such a pity that this alliance could not be official. I shall miss your singing here in the castle, when you used to practice in the music room. I have urged Willie to have one of the pianos sent south as a surprise, so do not let him know that you are aware that I suggested it.”
“No, I would not want to ruin his surprise.” Irene spoke in a two-edged tone I recognized very well.
Yet she seemed pensive after the Queen Mother had left and sat sorting through the clothing in an abstracted way, her right hand pausing once to play those phantom notes on the coverlet.
“What piece do you practice?” I finally asked.
Irene glanced at me ironically. “ ‘Viennese Melody,’ my pet. I can’t seem to forget the tune.”
We worked through dinner, asking that a meal be served us in Irene’s sitting room. The truth was that neither of us could stomach taking food with the von Ormsteins any longer; I began to appreciate Irene’s demand for instant action. Everything and everyone in the castle had become a reminder of a time now irrevocably past.
Good Night, Mr. Holmes (A Novel of Suspense featuring Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes) Page 24
