Another Scandal in Bohemia (16 page)

His forefinger tilted up my chin until I was looking directly into his amused gray eyes. “Because she represents a challenge he knows that he can find nowhere else on earth.”

Before I could ask another question, and I had several after this bewildering response, an upstairs door creaked.

We both turned, startled.

Irene’s figure gleamed ghostlike in one dark doorway. She was clad in creamy satin and lace, and her dark hair snaked over her shoulders.

“There you are,” she said as if nothing had happened. “I need help brushing my hair.”.

Despite her nonchalant air, hesitation touched her voice and its characteristic clarity was slightly clogged.

Godfrey and I exchanged a look that said:
shall it be you or I?

Still he hesitated, and she waited. I didn’t move, but crouched on the stair like a scullery maid.

“It’s cold on the stair,” Irene noted, the silver-backed brush flashing through the long tendrils curling over her shoulder. “Come to bed.”

Suddenly he was striding upstairs. I expected that to be
that
, but just before the door closed I heard Irene’s voice again: “Come up, too, Nell, or you shall catch your death.”

I rose stiffly, sighed, then fetched the lamp from the newel post and made my way to my own chamber, where a heated brick set there by Sophie hours before awaited my chronically cold feet.

Chapter Ten

TRIFLING CONDITIONS

The late
and trying night so upset my equilibrium that I woke unforgivably late the next morning, my feet as icy cold as the brick within my bed.

I dressed and hurried downstairs, impeded only by Sophie dusting the passage. Irene was in the breakfast room, slathering goose-liver pȃté on thick slabs of crusty French bread with such gusto that she seemed to be conducting an invisible orchestra.

I admired the flourish of her lace-flounced sleeves, then eyed her face. Other than an infinitesimal puffing around the eyes, I could detect no sign of the previous evening’s histrionics.

I decided to beard the lioness in her den directly.

“Where is Godfrey?” I enquired, sitting and snapping the folds from my linen napkin.

“Where he always is this late in the morning,” Irene said, yawning. “Out.”

“Out?”

“In town, of course.”

“Of course.”

“He has business to attend to.”

“Naturally,” said I. “What sort of business?”

“Business... business.”

A platter of French breads and rolls shared the center of the homely wooden table with a crock of butter and an array of jams. I helped myself.

Irene yawned again. As an opera singer, she could accomplish quite awesome yawns.

“Baron Rothschild,” I said, “is inconsiderate of guests who dwell near town.”

“Had Ferrières been open for the Season, we would have stayed the night,” Irene said. “Still, we were rather generously rewarded for keeping such late hours.” Thoughts of the Tiffany corsage glittered in her topaz eyes, like diamonds viewed through a bronze mirror.

“How unfortunate that we shall have to return the lot.” I poured intertwining streams of milk and tea into my country-size cup.

“We shall do nothing of the sort!”

“How can we keep these gifts”—bribes, I almost said— “if we do not go to Bohemia?”

Irene’s hands cupped her delicate mug of black coffee and she inhaled the steaming aroma as if indulging in a drug. She smiled.

“Because we
are
going to Bohemia, Nell. There is nothing to return—except our own selves to that lovely land.”

“Going? To Bohemia?” I set down my sturdy cup so hard that a dirty tan wave slopped onto the bare tabletop. “How can we? Godfrey will not permit it.”

“Well, you may heed such impediments, but I do not. I am not a former employee used to taking orders.”

“I will be no part of any scheme that violates your husband’s wishes and authority.”

“Wishes only, Nell. Authority does not come into it except with dispensers of moral rectitude, of whom there are none on earth that I recognize, or with civil rulers, none of whom I call sovereign.”

“Apparently your own husband has little to say on the matter.”

“Oh, he had a great deal to say. So did I.”

“And?”

Irene smirked—there is no other way to put it—over the brim of her cup. “We are going to Bohemia.”

“We? All three?”

She glanced carelessly away. “There are a few... conditions.”

“Aha!”

“Minor, trifling conditions.”

“So it always seems at first, with a lawyer.”

“We shall see how it seems at last,” she answered, with a satisfied smile. “Godfrey is in Paris now making preparations.”

“So quickly you have converted him.”

“Conversion does not quite describe my influence over Godfrey, Nell; but you are not in a position to understand the fine points of such negotiations. Let us say that I... persuaded him that the benefits of this mission outweigh the drawbacks.”

“I don’t think you argued openly and honestly.”

“But I did! Godfrey himself admitted the boons of an association with the Rothschilds in your presence."

“Still, I think that you pressed some unfair advantage. I imagine that you did not tell him of Queen Clotilde’s unhappiness and plea to you.”

“And you claim you lack imagination, Nell,” she mock-chided me. “We were both sworn to keep the matter of the Queen’s discomfort private, Nell. Would you violate the poor wo
man
’s confidence?”

“A husband—”

“Need not know everything. Wait until you have one and then judge.”

I felt myself reddening. “I have not the time,” I snapped. “And if you recognize no sovereign, why do you honor a queen’s rights over your own husband’s?”

“Nell! I swear that awful muddle of milk and tea you drink clouds your brains as much as it clouds your cup. You’ll understand these things better when you know more of the world, and that conflicting loyalties must each keep their proper place. The persons and events you and I knew in Bohemia are our own business. I had only briefly encountered Godfrey when I knew the King-to-be, and I never expected to see him again, much less marry him. Yes, I am determined to fully decipher the mysteries of Bohemia, be they royal dereliction of marital duty or seven-foot-high clay men stalking the streets. If Godfrey knew my full reasons, he would understand.”

“Then tell him!”

“I said he would understand. I didn’t say that he would like them.”

“You have put me in the middle,” I charged.

She regarded me calmly. “No, you have put yourself there. It cannot be comfortable, but no doubt moral confusion builds character. I am sure I have read some religious adage on the matter.”

“And I have promised not to tell Godfrey of the Queen’s request,” I complained, “so my hands are tied.”

“Yes, you have promised,” Irene mused, sighing. “There will be nothing to regret, dear Nell, except missing this opportunity to better our finances and return to Bohemia to solve greater mysteries than we left behind.”

“Much to regret,” I predicted, sipping my now lukewarm tea. “What conditions has poor, deluded innocent Godfrey set?”

“‘Poor deluded innocent Godfrey’ has decided,” Irene said dryly, “that I must pass in Bohemia under a pseudonym and in disguise.”

I sat up. “Most wise. You are notorious there, after all.”

“Apparently I am notorious everywhere. In fact, Godfrey has declared that he will be the excuse for the mission, and its prime implementer. He is visiting the Baron’s Paris office today to set the machinery in motion. He will go openly as legal representative of unspecified Rothschild interests in the neighborhood. I will come along later in my... new persona.”

I smothered a smile. “So Godfrey takes the lead and you must follow. Most wise. He has not lost all his senses. I commend his strategy.”

Irene yawned again. “How fortunate that you do, for you will accompany this vanguard expedition as his loyal secretary.” Her eyes glittered with lazy wickedness. “Ah, how I envy you, Nell, in your humble but underestimated role! You will see the new Bohemia first. You will pry—with Godfrey, of course—into the manipulations of court and city. You will gaze again upon His Royal Highness, King Wilhelm von Ormstein, first. You will no doubt have an opportunity to consult with the Queen on her delicate problem. I am sure that she will recognize you at once and accept you as a delegate of mine, and consider you her discreet confidante. Ah, how I envy you!”

Her voice grew more stern than gently mocking. “And you will seal your lips on the subject of our previous meeting with Her Majesty, even if Godfrey should become suspicious and ask.”

“Yes,” I said dully, realizing that Godfrey’s and my jaunt to Bohemia would not relieve my moral dilemma, but in fact intensify it. “I will do my best.”

Irene smiled and shook out the Paris paper. She eyed me not unsympathetically over its serrated rim. "That has always sufficed in the past, and I am sure it will do quite nicely now.”

Where Irene would have dashed off to Bohemia at the drop of a royal enigma, Godfrey proceeded to prepare for the mission with all deliberate slowness and groundwork.

I do not think he could have better infected Irene with a seething impatience she dared not express.

He was in Paris all the day now, every day, consulting with the Baron or his representatives—which was not clear. A new energy drove his step, even as a new reticence dogged his evening conversations. Had I not known better, I would have said Godfrey was being deliberately mysterious about his whereabouts and actions. He claimed that he was being discreet, that it was necessary to familiarize himself with the political and legal ground he would encounter in Prague.

Irene took her revenge by flitting off almost daily to the House of Worth for more fittings with the “maestro.”

Even here I was carefully excluded. I was sent to the library to read crabbed texts concerning the Golem of Prague, and asked to report nightly on this preposterous fairy tale. Perhaps fairy tale is not the proper description, unless it was one told literally by some set of Brothers Grimm that children were not allowed to read.

I admit that I am not fond of the French, nor sympathetic to the Irish, nor at ease with the Oriental, either in individual or cultural form.

As for the Jews, I had been reared to t
hink
of them as a race of benighted people too foolish to recognize their own vaunted Savior when He came. So I learned at my father’s knee, and so I had not thought further until I combed the heavy, gilt-edged volumes of the Paris Bibliothèque.

I had taken the liberty of also investigating the history of the Rothschild family in its many national branches. If any form of aristocracy is by nature untrustworthy, that acquired solely by the criteria of great wealth must be the most suspect.

I left my sessions at the library with my eyes bleary and the bridge of my nose tweaked scarlet from my pince-nez. I also left them so disturbed that I rode home in the carriage in numb disbelief, recalling Irene’s and my one expedition into Prague’s Josef Quarter (to find a fortune teller, much against my inclinations) with a shudder of hindsight.

What my readings told me—that I dared not tell anyone else lest I be considered half-mad—was that good precedent existed for such a being as a Golem, and that if there was a God and He was Just—this I firmly believed—then the Golem might walk the byways of Prague as a sign that injustice had prevailed too long in Bohemia and, indeed, upon the earth. For the first time, I began to regard the demon in Prague as other than King Wilhelm von Ormstein, one-time admirer of Irene Adler, and something very different and not at all human.

“Nell, do you think that Godfrey is not telling me something?” Irene asked me one evening when we sat in the parlor, she at her piano, I at my stitchery.

Her rare plaintive tone caught my instant attention. Even the odious parrot sidled along his perch to press his tilted head against the bars as if to listen better. His hearing, in my observation, was only too excellent.