Another Scandal in Bohemia (30 page)

“Fresh from Maison Worth!” Irene’s Lady Sherlock grew of a sudden rapturous. “Oh, but we must see, Your Majesty, if we may?”

“If you wish.” Queen Clotilde seemed taken aback, then her cheeks turned faintly pink. “Perhaps, if you don’t mind, you could help me choose. You seem to have a sure fashion sense,” she added wistfully. “The King wishes me to be handsomely gowned, although he seldom notices what I wear. Perhaps he feels that a queen should advertise her husband’s rank.” She laughed nervously. “We were careless about such matters in Scandinavia; the dogs were always leaping up on our skirts anyway.”

“Dogs,” said Irene brightly. “Charming. Did you hear, Nell? What kind of dogs? Miss Huxleigh tells us that she is most partial to cats and parrots, and even keeps a mongoose, but she has never had a dog.”

“A mongoose, Miss Huxleigh?” Queen Clotilde regarded me as if I had climbed Mount Everest in her estimation. “I knew the English were eccentric!” She frowned, then stuttered, “F-forgive me for being forward, but... have we not met somewhere before?”

Clotilde was rising in my estimation by kilometers. She was proving more perceptive after a half-hour’s previous meeting than her esteemed spouse was after hours spent in my company.

“No doubt!” Irene rose and took the Queen’s arm to usher her from the room. “Miss Huxleigh has one of those ever-familiar faces. I tell her that is the legacy of being a parson’s daughter and trying to fade into the woodwork seven days a week. It never works. The Worth creations are in here?”

“My bedchamber suite.” The Queen gestured to the grandly testered bed in an adjoining room before indicating a row of exquisitely attired dolls propped along the back of a Biedermeier sofa in the antechamber.

How bizarre to see an entire row of Worth fashion dolls, every one in the pallid likeness of the Queen, yet all differently dressed! With their tiny arms lifted and their blank faces, they reminded me of an army of miniature Golems. At any moment, I feared, they might come to life and march in insipid formation down to the carpet and up to our feet. So odious was this notion that I envisioned myself kicking them away like so many oncoming, exquisitely dressed rats.

“Lovely.” Irene waltzed over to one doll, plucked it up, then sat in its place. “Look at the lacework! Exquisite. One cannot blame the King for wishing his wife to have such treasures.”

As she ran an appreciative finger over the skirt’s intricate pearl bead work, I had another disconcerting vision: that of Berthe bent over her table at the Maison Worth workrooms, the shears impaled in her back like a pin into a cushion and an abandoned mannequin toppled on the table before her.

Allegra, fascinated, ventured to the sofa too. “May I touch one, Your Majesty? I have never seen a doll so beautifully made, or so well-dressed!”

Queen Clotilde’s pale face waxed feverish at her guests’ pleasure. “Of course, my dear child. The dolls are Juneau
Bébés,
but you cannot hurt them. They are rather dolls for grown-ups, aren’t they? You must tell me which you like the best, and I shall order those gowns.”

“Every one is so... lovely.” Allegra turned the tiny figure over to examine the intricate back fastenings on the gown. “Why not order them all?”

“All? Oh, I could not!”

“Why not?” Irene asked.

“That would be... greedy.”

“But the King wishes you to dress well,” Irene pointed out.

‘True,” Clotilde murmured. “The only thing he requires of me, it seems—”

“Majesty,” Irene said, her voice suddenly her own. “Do you not recognize Miss Huxleigh and myself?”

The Queen looked up, stunned, with the same frozen porcelain expression as her mannequin. “Recognize you—? How could I? We have never met.”

“Not in this place, and not under these pretenses, but not that long ago.”

The Queen stared into Irene’s smiling face, then blinked in amazement “Madame... Norton?” She turned wildly to me. “You were the... maid.” Her attention fixed on Irene again. “I don’t understand. You wrote me in Paris that circumstances prevented your investigating my dilemma.” She stared at Irene, trying to paste her likeness in Paris over the role she played here. Then she nervously eyed Allegra. “The child knows nothing of—”

“She knows that you need assistance,” Irene said quietly. “And that is more the case than ever. Forgive the theatrics. I was indeed called away but have managed to come to Prague, and found an assumed identity convenient.”

“You have not abandoned me!” The Queen sank onto the sofa in bewildered relief, seizing a fashion doll to take its place, then sitting the small, macabre figure on her lap. “Astounding. You have such... verve, Madame, to come here in disguise. Will you help me, then, if you can?”

“Certainly,” Irene promised. “I will even help you choose your Worth gowns, for no recompense. I like nothing better than spending someone else’s money, as Miss Huxleigh can well attest.”

What an extraordinary afternoon it turned out to be! The queen’s relief at the proof of our assistance was so palpable that we all became quite giddy from it.

First a lively discussion ensued as to which of the many gowns the Queen should commission. Allegra, of course, had numerous opinions and displayed as much art as Irene in putting her finger on the most flattering styles and in convincing the Queen to accept them.

Clotilde herself became another person: animated, laughing more, and blushing for imagined awkwardness less. I felt like a governess among a high-spirited set of charges playing with dolls, and Allegra’s unaffected laughter echoed the Queen’s more often than not.

“Then it is settled,” Irene said in sober summation after some minutes of merriment “You will take at least six of the gowns suggested.”

“Heavens! That will bankrupt the kingdom’s coffers.”

“A few paltry French gowns will hardly undo the nation, or the von Ormstein credit line.” When the Queen’s troubled silence continued, Irene took another tack. “You said yourself that the King wished you to dress in the first fashion. You can do no better than Worth.”

“I know, Madame.” Clotilde toyed with a tiny frilled hem. “Monsieur Worth’s selections are designed to flatter me as I have never been flattered before.”

“He is a genius, you know,” Irene said.

So was she, in her own insidious way. It struck me that Irene was already performing most admirably as a
mannequin de ville
by encouraging the Queen of Bohemia to patronize Maison Worth so lavishly, all the while making gleeful inroads on the King’s purse to boot.

Yet I must admit that the Clotilde who bid us goodbye was a vast improvement on the melancholy creature who had welcomed us. So eager was she to perpetuate our company that she escorted us back to the common areas like any Paddington house mistress. Since Allegra’s light brown hair was the closest to the Queen’s blond, the two chattered about the advantages of faded “rosebud” shades, like mauve, coral, lavender, and yellow.

This girlish dialogue was interrupted when Irene paused at the mouth of a long hall we were passing.

“Does the Castle have a portrait hall?” she enquired mystifyingly, for she knew very well that it did.

“How odd that you should ask,” the Queen said. “This very passage leads to it Would you like to see it?”

“Oh, yes,” said Irene, veering in the direction she had always intended to go.

Allegra and I brought up the rear while the Queen pointed out notable paintings along our path.

“How horrid it must be to have such a long line of forebears cluttering up the walls and looking down painted noses at one,” Allegra confided to me.

“I imagine that depends on the forebears.”

“The Queen is quite charming and unaffected, when one knows her, is she not?’

“Perhaps; but I doubt that you ‘know her.’ ”

I was feeling a bit distracted by the scenery, recalling Irene’s and my similar stroll among the portraits. Too many canvas faces displayed the von Ormstein hauteur for my taste.

Whatever Irene’s purpose in suggesting this detour, and I do not doubt that she had one that went by a better name than mere whimsy, we emerged into the common area of the castle’s royal apartments.

By then Allegra was gawking about like a schoolgirl on an outing. She had glimpsed but a particle of the castle at the reception. Now she was free to star-gaze at a firmament of plastered ceilings and a veritable Milky Way of gilt-frosted architectural details.

My every step further into the castle’s more familiar areas sank me into a quicksand of the past The long walls became a tunnel lined by disapproving faces that had witnessed our first downfall in Bohemia. I recalled not only our shocked flight when Irene learned that King intended to marry the very woman who was now our conductress (and therefore make Irene his mistress), but the grave events that preceded that revelation, including the murder of the King’s father and Irene’s solution of that crime.

None but the immediate family and we knew by what means Wilhelm von Ormstein had assumed his crown.

If Bohemia, and Prague, and Prague Castle could have hosted such deadly intrigues eighteen months ago, what more noxious stew might now be simmering here potently enough to attract the attention of the Rothschilds’ international interests?

No doubt Irene and Godfrey would chide my over lively
imaginati
on, but I realized that a legendary monster loose in the city’s oldest byways could do far less harm than the occupants of a royal palace who exercised supreme rule over an entire nation.

Even as I thought this, we passed a particularly dark and sober painting of an antique-garbed man with a sallow, sunken countenance and a raven moustache.

“Surely not an ancestor of the King?’ I exclaimed, as startled as if I’d been accosted by a cutpurse in a dark byway.

The Queen stopped and retraced her steps to regard it. “Quite a dour fellow indeed, but no direct relation to my husband. A painting of a Transylvanian cousin, I believe. The King has cousins in every neighboring nation—Germany, Austria, Poland, Moravia, as far as Russia.”

“There is virtually no family resemblance,” Allegra noted, bending closer to study the odious visage.

The Queen blushed. “Not all of Wilhelm’s cousins are... how can I say it delicately—?”

Irene, always in the forefront of delicacy except when it suited her not to be, stepped in quite literally. She strode to the painting, as if to confront its subject eye to eye.

“An utterly different physical type,” she pronounced, even for a ‘cousin.’ Ladies, the Queen is trying to spare us the ugly facts: not all royal relatives are legitimate.” Irene studied the dissolute visage with satisfaction. “King Wilhelm’s family tree includes some seeds that fell far from the trunk, hence the lack of resemblance, although most such unrecognized offshoots often bear the hallmarks of their royal lineage.”

I am not a complete innocent We were regarding no mere shirt-tail relation, Irene implied, but a nightshirt-tail relation from the wrong side of the blanket! I took Allegro’s arm firmly in custody and impelled her down the hall and away from such degenerate subject matter.

So determined was I to protect Allegra from the ruder realities of royal life that I did not slow my pace even for the Queen and Irene, but swept Allegra around the corner and away from the disreputable portraits.

A woman’s rich, low laughter floated toward me, as if ridiculing my concern. I stopped, turning, amazed that Irene would mock my deepest sensibilities in public... and found her coming up behind me, quite unlaughing.

The laugh continued against a counterpoint of clinking crystal. Before our party could recover from our surprise, someone rounded an opposite corner of the foyer. Two someones, linked arm in arm, both tall, both bearing wine glasses, both looking away from each other to see us four at the same time.

No more alien species could have met at opposite shores of the same wilderness pond. We acknowledged each others’ presence, then froze and said nothing.

The King, who had been leaning down to address his companion, straightened to his usual height to adopt his usual haughty look. His companion’s head lifted as if delicately scenting prey. Her red-gold hair caught and held the light from the windows high above.

I looked back. Queen Clotilde’s face was locked into a grimace of happiness curdled into distaste. Irene’s eyes had narrowed at the sudden sight of her former suitor. How I wished I could have put a blindfold on Allegra! Even an innocent girl could guess that the King’s recent
tête-à-tête
with the red-haired woman had been anything but innocent.

“You entertain guests, I see,” the King said to his queen, almost accusingly.

Clotilde answered in an barely audible voice, as if
she
had been caught entertaining inappropriate company, not he. “English ladies. I hoped to practice my language skills.”

“Why?” he demanded jovially. “You have none.” His pale blue eyes rolled passed us like vagrant marbles. Then his gaze fixed—on myself! A frown creased the lofty royal brow. “Ah. This is the English secretary of Mr. Norton, the Rothschild emissary, is it not?”

“Miss Huxleigh, yes,” the Queen answered uneasily.

The King’s demeanor softened. “I will have dinner with him tonight.”

Irene and I exchanged a glance. Apparently Godfrey had been filling his social calendar as well.

The King was eyeing Irene now, with close appreciation. Now it would come: the recognition, the recriminations, the open scandal. A royal forefinger lifted as the King wagged it at Irene in belated understanding.

“Now I know you!” We held our conjoined breaths. “The English lady who wore such a magnificent gown at the reception. I am sorry,” he said, although he hardly sounded it, “but I have forgotten your name.”

“I am Lady Sherlock,” Irene answered with matching imperiousness, “but I was born Sarah Wilde.”

“Such strange names, these English syllables,” the King commented.

Clotilde spoke abruptly, for she had not been listening “And who is your guest?”

The woman answered for herself, with a dramatic toss of her head. “Tatyana.”