Coronets and Steel

by Sherwood Smith

  So I returned the scarf by messenger, with only a note expressing my thanks.

  My plan was now to wait for a nice day, walk to the inn (making sure I wasn’t followed), and hire someone to drive me to the Cistercians, paying with the money still hidden with my passport inside my jeans and T-shirt wherever Tania had stashed them.

  My chaperone was a gentle, quiet woman named Madam Aradyinov. She was a maternal relation of Alec’s who’d been widowed during the Russian mess, losing her livelihood as well. Madam A. spoke rusty French and English, and I sensed after sitting through two uncomfortable meals with her that the situation with Tony (what little she knew about it) disturbed her. She was religious, shy, went to Mass every day at an hour unlikely to discommode my “social schedule,” and she loved Alec. When she saw him she brightened up considerably, and he called her aunt.

  There’s even less to say about the parties, which were pretty much limited to the von Mecklundburgs. I didn’t meet any of Alec’s friends or allies; a few council members were invited, all of them old. I was constrained against real conversation by having to pretend I was Ruli.

  One evening I did forget to be Ruli; I’d just been introduced to a baroness connected to the number two man in the country, Baron Ridotski (who I’d read about in the journal, and longed to meet if he was still alive). The old woman turned out to be another ballet aficionado. In my delight at the prospect of an actual conversation, I began talking about the performance I’d seen in Vienna before I was interrupted in the smoothest way by Aunt Sisi.

  I’d forgotten. No one could forget Ruli, Aunt Sisi made it clear.

  And she was totally right. No one should forget Ruli—she was still a prisoner in this horrible stalemate.

  The rain moved on. On the first nice day, I dressed for a walk. My plan was to tell Madam A. that I needed some exercise—I’d lunch somewhere, then do some window shopping and return by evening. I figured that would be enough time to get to the Waleska inn, hire someone to drive me to Mt. Corbesc, and get back again.

  Madam A. clasped her hands anxiously. “Can you wait a moment, Mam’zelle, while I consult the watch captain?”

  “Watch captain?” I repeated witlessly.

  She lifted her hand in a circle, indicating the house—the street. “We are guarded at all times.”

  “Guarded? That is, the whole house?” I ran to the front window, but didn’t see anything beside the quiet street beyond the orderly garden full of blooms.

  “Yes, Mam’zelle.”

  “Then . . . the threat is more serious than I thought.”

  “Yes, Mam’zelle,” the old lady said, in a low voice.

  “Right. As my dad says, eighty-six the walk, then.”

  I contained my impatience until that evening, when Alec arrived to escort me to a party. When I asked, he said, “Tony’s friends have already made two tries to seal off my street.”

  “Twice? But I didn’t hear anything.”

  “No.”

  “Somehow that’s creepier than sirens and yelling and noise.”

  “Tony doesn’t want a body count any more than I do. I don’t trust Reithermann. Anyway, if you wouldn’t mind staying inside the perimeter? It’s only a few more days.”

  “Right. I did say I’d cooperate. I take it they haven’t given up.”

  Alec’s smile was grim. “Not at all. I wish they’d make their move.”

  “Yeah. Me too. I think.”

  “I apologize for the lack of things to do, other than being seen with your relations.”

  “I’m good with your dad’s journal. And you’ve plenty of other books here—though it doesn’t look like your library has much written after 1810.”

  Alec smiled. “This is mostly my grandfather’s library, which was hidden with the furniture right before the house began its long occupation. We finished restoring the place within the last decade. Most of the modern stuff is still in London. I’ve brought a few things over. Please help yourself to the CD player in the cabinet in the library. Didn’t Emilio tell you? I have a reasonable selection of music that doesn’t have ‘composed by’ as part of the title.”

  Madam A. appeared then, and we left for the de Vauban dinner party.

  The evening was typical. The von M. gang spent the entire evening talking about amusing parties hosted by a bunch of people I’d never heard of. At the time, I thought if this is sophisticated conversation, then I’ve got no hope of ever becoming sophisticated because I am so bored. Later I began to wonder if they were being deliberately boring—which is kind of cool, in a twisty way. Paybacks for my big lies, which officially hadn’t been proved one way or the other.

  I didn’t have a chance to speak aside from “please pass the . . .” and “thank you.” When we got back, Alec hesitated at the front door. No more than a quick, questioning glance—meeting my own questioning glance.

  There was no drama in how comfortable we’d become with one another. I could sense his effort to scrupulously stick to business, but I couldn’t help tipping my head toward the library any more than he could help dropping his coat over the banister pole with a murmured “For a minute.”

  “I wanted to ask about some of this other stuff. What’s here that I can occupy myself with,” I said.

  He led the way to a dressoir cabinet with fenestrage carving around the top, reflecting the stylized pictures you see in stained glass windows. There were three of them; those cabinets had to date back to the Mannerist period. “Here are the CDs I was telling you about. My ancestors, who appreciated music enough to keep musicians on the household payroll, would probably love what’s in here now. Once they got over their surprise. Those two cabinets over there are full of LPs that my father collected. These I brought when I first became Stadthalter.”

  As he opened the cabinet doors, which had been carved in a relief scene of a man in Renaissance garb surrounded by books, I said, “Your ancestors would probably think CDs were magic. One of my dad’s favorite quotes is by Arthur C. Clarke, who said, ‘Any sufficiently advantaged technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ If your people here get the modern stuff you’re bringing, maybe the belief in magic will vanish.”

  Alec lifted his hand toward the stacks of CDs, and the player, inside the cabinet. “You’d think so.” He leaned against the wing chair, watching me as I scanned the contents.

  “But you don’t know so? Is that what you’re saying?” I said.

  The top row of CDs was everything the Beatles ever did. From there the collection ranged from classical to classic rock, with representation from European bands, like Schandmaul, who combined metal with ancient folk music.

  “Ask Tony about his vampire treaty,” Alec said, his expression wry, as I propped my elbows on the other side of the wing chair.

  “That’s the third time I’ve heard about vampires. Tony laughed at the idea of magic when we were at Sedania. But he believes in vampires?”

  The easy atmosphere had changed; I was aware of his arm lying along the back of the chair; his gaze dropped from my eyes to my hands. Changed and charged. Neither of us had said anything, or moved, but the quiet room had become intimate space.

  He straightened up. “Claims to know at least one. If you ask him, he’ll tell you that vampires and magic are two separate issues. I’d better go.”

  So on the surface, social frivolities. Underneath? The tension of so many pretenses. For me the tension was underlined—intensified—by Milo’s journal during the years of World War II.

  That whole week reminds me of Ravel’s Boléro, steadily, inexorably, building toward a crescendo. I could feel the crescendo coming—in 1945, and in the present.

  Alec kept to the path of virtue, though gradually staying longer and longer in the evenings after dropping me off. By tacit agreement we no longer went into the library. Instead we’d stand on the stairway, me two or three steps up, leaning on the banister, he at the foot with his head tipped back, his jacket slung over his shoulder.

  O
ne or the other of us would ask a question, and then another after that, shooting ideas back and forth, mixed with the same sort of ironic jokes. It was only chat, but these chats got longer each evening, and they were the best part of my day.

  Rain caused Honoré de Vauban to cancel the picnic at the river down below the city, so I curled up to read more Milo. I closed the last page of November 1944 as the clock struck two AM.

  I was curious to see what Milo would have to say in his own words about the search for my grandmother. So I got out of bed, where I had been reading since cold had driven me out of the library, picked up Ruli’s dressing gown, and pulled it on. The pure silk felt wonderful against my skin.

  The library was dark. The fire had burned down to a few redly glowing embers. I turned on a lamp and went to the cabinet. I replaced the old book and picked up the next. Then, feeling as if I was carrying a live grenade, I carried it to the lamp, flipped it open to find the date at the top: June, 1948.

  I sprinted back to the cabinet, checked again, checked succeeding volumes to see if it had been placed out of order, but the rest of the books went on in steady jumps of years until the last page, which was addressed directly to Alec, apparently written right after his birth.

  I was standing there holding June 1948 in my hand and curling my bare toes against the cold floor, when the door opened behind me. I jerked around to see Alec enter, dressed in black; the only color about him in the dim lamplight was cobalt flickers from his ring.

  “You look like a ghost,” he said with a soft laugh.

  “No, you look like a ghost.” Turning away to switch on another lamp I went on hastily, “I haven’t slept yet, I was reading. Oh! A problem, and I promise it wasn’t me, but there’s a book missing. Maybe more than one.”

  “Nothing’s missing.” Alec closed the door behind him and advanced into the room. The stronger light touched his features as he leaned over to stir up the dying fire. He smiled in a way I’d rarely seen before.

  “What is it? You’re laughing at me. No, you’re pleased about something!” And, quickly, “Tony?”

  He shook his head. “I was having some fun tonight poking around where I had no business being. So you’ve still been reading the journals?” He took a hunk of wood from the holder and threw it into the fireplace, sending a firestorm of sparks whirling up the chimney.

  “Yes. Steadily,” I said, watching him kick the wood into place with the toe of his boot. He was dressed in a black thick-knit sweater, jeans, and boots. Completely uncharacteristic, but I liked him in that gear at least as much as I liked him in a tux or his Stadthalter clothes. “But what about 1945?”

  “Isn’t one.”

  “Did something happen to it?” I leaned on the back of a chair, balancing the journal for ’48 between my hands as Alec moved to the desk and started looking through the drawers.

  “Want to know what happened?”

  “I can guess at some,” I said. “The Russians came. And there was that business with Armandros. And his search for Gran,” I added. “I guess I should have expected he wouldn’t talk about it, seeing how he never mentioned Gran in the journal at all.”

  He used the poker to position the wood, then stared into the fire. “Bad years—everything he tried failed. Armandros shot down, your grandmother reported dead in Paris. Then the Russians came. Move up the years. He married my mother on September second, in Xanpia’s sanctuary on Mt. Adeliad, like I told you before. And for whatever reason, the Blessing did not work.”

  “Were all Tony’s family here for that as well?”

  “All of them.” Alec said. “Your Aunt Sisi’s first introduction to Dobrenica was heralded by crowds lining the roads and throwing white roses at her.”

  The image was so intense, I got this fast, unsettling roar in my ears—the roar of a crowd, engines—a whiff of crushed roses and diesel smoke. I shut my eyes and held my breath, willing the giddiness away.

  I reopened my eyes as Alec gestured toward the book in my lap. “Don’t feel you have to read the rest, since it takes up after the events that directly concern you.”

  “I’m interested. In fact, some of it may be enjoyable, now that the war part is past.”

  “There’s some heavy going in ’49, ’50, ’51, when that first Soviet commander allowed his thugs open season on the decadent superstition-mongers of the Roman Catholic church, and of course the Jews. And I should probably warn you there’s a fairly rough part in February of ’52 with several nun-teachers, though my father and Kilber did successfully lead a rescue party.”

  “Thanks. I might do some skipping; I don’t think I need to read any more evidence of inhumanity to other humans. It’s the courage, the humor, the risk and skill I admire.”

  He laughed. “There’s enough of both, because after all, people are people. But it gradually gets somewhat better, as the oppression lifts. The Jews began living openly again in the late sixties, and were largely ignored by the increasingly nominal government representatives. The last one, before the Soviet government collapsed, used to attend the concerts at the music school, which is connected to the temple shul.”

  “That’s cool.”

  “I have to be at a city council meeting in, ah.” A quick glance at his watch. “Six hours, in order to listen to them squabble about the street-lamp issue. What’s on the social schedule tomorrow? Today? I never can remember, and my calendar is back at the residence.” He got slowly to his feet.

  “Concert at the cathedral—my first public appearance. I believe the canaille will be at it, from the way Cerisette was sighing the other day. Though it could be she aimed that at me.”

  He paused in the act of picking up the papers he’d dropped on his desk and gave me a brief smile. “Cerisette only wishes you canaille.” Before I could figure out how to answer that, “Meanwhile you’ve been cooped up without getting to see anything. Shall I take you over to the palace and show you Queen Maria Sofia tomorrow afternoon?”

  “So there’s no sinister Tony minions lurking about?”

  “Oh, they’re out there, but not around the palace.”

  “I’d love to go. I’ve already seen Maria Sofia’s portrait once,” I said. “But I’d like to see her again. Take note of her hairdo, since I’ve got to figure out how to copy it myself, as my maids seem to have taken the year off.”

  He was still smiling, more than the dumb joke warranted, then said, “See you tomorrow.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  I DON’T KNOW what I expected to find in Milo’s journal after Gran’s departure. Like Alec said, there was no more emotional drama than there was magic. I still kept at it. The journal changed considerably over the decades after the war. The human side of Milo—the shy, reserved, extremely well-read man devoted to duty, always thinking about the country even when running from the Russians (and Alec was right, Kilber did save his life several times)—vanished, replaced by a series of mission statements.

  It was so detached it was nearly inhuman. By the time I reached the end, I wondered if hints of love or laughter, much less magic, were present by their absence. Milo didn’t even mention anything as innocuous as music, though there was that enormous collection of LPs in the library, and Mina had said he was as good a piano player as Gran, and they’d played long duets together.

  The last entry I read was a thoughtful, closely reasoned essay based on experience, addressed to “Marius.” An adult Marius, though I knew he wrote it after Alec’s birth. It began with the duties of a king then moved on to a list of Dobrenica’s prioritized needs—with reflections on the state of the Soviet government and what he thought would be its future.

  I was impressed with the farsightedness, but as I closed it, I wondered what it was like to grow up with such a person as a father. I had this vivid image of a smart, lonely boy with books as his constant companions. His dedicated, austere, universally admired father would be too busy with crucial governmental duties to ever take him to a soccer game or to a movie.

 
; I was replacing that last journal when I heard the noise of an arrival, which was the delivery of the masquerade ball gown Aunt Sisi was loaning me, along with its accoutrements: silver high-heeled, jewel-buckled shoes à la Cinderella; a fantastically lovely petticoat with yards of stiff tulle and lace that could have been worn alone and been admired; a headdress of pearls and feathers; a brocade fan; the mask was a scrap of lace with seed pearls sewn on.

  She included a note saying that if the gown needed alteration, she could send a seamstress over. The shoes would be too difficult to replace on such short notice, but if they did not fit I could wear Ruli’s silver sandals.

  The dress was a Robe à l’Anglaise a la polonaise. It was a struggle to deal with the zillion hook-and-eyes at the back of the tight, stiff bodice. I could understand how a maid had been indispensable.

  When I got a look at myself in the mirror, I almost fainted.

  The gown was ice-blue brocaded silk satin, with a cream-colored taffeta skirt beneath the huge polonaise swoops. Both were embroidered in silver. The elbow-length sleeves and the low square neckline were edged with pearls and heavy lace. The result was that I looked like Cinderella.

  The shoes were tight, but with silk stockings they would be bearable for a night. They were too perfect with the gown.

  I danced around the room, loving the whoosh of the wide skirt, until Madam A. tapped at my door to announce Alec’s arrival.

  “Tell him I’ll be down in five!” I yelled.

  I wrestled my way out of the dress, sat down and scribbled a note to Aunt Sisi, saying that the dress fit fine. Then I raced down the stairs, resetting my hair clip as I ran.

  Alec was waiting in the hallway. “You know, you can sit down in your own house,” I greeted him.