Another Scandal in Bohemia (51 page)

With every step, the Horror That Was Its Face came clearer. Only for Godfrey, I told myself. Only for Irene.

Instead of flesh, I saw the stiff brown-orange of cheap pottery—what else should a clay man be made of? Only slits indicated eyes, mouth, nose. What else should a man-made man have but rudimentary senses? No wonder it had stumbled blindly, mutely through Prague—sheer power with only the crudest of features.

Further, I could see, the closer I came, the
seams
that criss-crossed that awful man-made face like scars. I could see even—heaven help me!—the
stitches
.

Stitches? Seams?

The Golem held itself still, as if recognizing the necessity to control its impulses. Crouched as it was against the wall like Caliban, I could look down on its huge head.

I could see... the gleam of metal studs down the back of its bald head. Not studs... but rivets, in straps.

Not the face of a monster, but a monstrous... leather... mask literally bolted to a...
human
... head.

A wave of utter indignation emboldened me beyond my mettle. I slipped Godfrey’s sharp and powerful knife under one rear strap, sawing desperately.

The tough material resisted the blade, but by now I was determined to unmask the phantom that had haunted my dreams. The Golem was someone’s creature indeed; a prisoner used to terrify the ignorant; a prisoner subjected to a fearsome use.

The first strap broke on a raw tear. I attacked the next. The Golem was oddly quiet, hanging its head docilely while I performed my crude and arduous surgery.

Another strap sawed free! I applied myself to the next with a sense of fevered mission. I would not see even the maddest dog treated so, chained and masked.

At last the final strap gave before the sharp, shining point of my knife. I stepped back, panting.

The Golem’s huge hands came up to the loosened leather. Slowly, as if expecting pain, the creature pulled the false face from its head.

I stepped back, prepared for greater horrors.

The skin beneath the ebbing skin looked patched, mottled red and white from the mask’s pressure. The dirty brown hair and mustache were matted, the features so stiff they seemed unable to move, to see or speak.

I was unable to move, to see or speak, though an incredible realization dawned at a distance of perhaps—three feet.

Irene had no such inhibitions. Her vibrant voice declared into the utter silence, “Well, Willie, it’s an unconventional crown you wear.”

In answer, the Golem buried his face in his manacled hands, rubbing his roughened skin, digging into his matted scalp.

“Irene,” he muttered in a voice as hoarse as a saw. “Irene! Irene?” with every intonation under the sun possible—amazement, shame, disbelief, regret, relief.

This litany to a single saint seemed to please her. She glanced at me. “The key to his bonds must be on the person of the guard. I will handle that task, if you will hold the pistol again. His Majesty is overcome, and may be unpredictable.”

I took the dreadful object with experienced hands. His Majesty, Wilhelm von Ormstein, did not seem in a state to attempt anything but incoherence. However, I elected not to watch Irene perform the distasteful task of searching the guard.

In moments she was back with a large iron key in her possession. Moments after that, the King’s manacles fell away.

She had brought the half-empty wine bottle, and wordlessly offered it to him.

He drank from it like a peasant, head thrown back, eyes shut.

His mien was more ordinary when his face came level again. He dropped the empty bottle to the stony ground. “How did you know?” he asked in English.

She shook her head. "That’s not important now. I’ve come to give you your Queen and kingdom back, but you must accommodate me for a while.”

“Anything,” he said flatly. “Anything. But I am... not myself.”

A smile quirked the corners of her mouth. “Indeed, you would be surprised to what extent you are not yourself.”

“I mean that I don’t know if I can even stand. I have been chained here for so long.”

“Save for your three escapes,” she said.

“How did you know of that?”

“The people of the town took you for the Golem.”

Anguish played across those features on which I had seen only arrogance before. “Is
that
why no one aided me? Why I was allowed to blunder blindly until my captors came and led me back to my prison? The people... feared me?”

“Once upon a time, not too distant, you relished your subjects’ fear, Willie, when you would have made a woman the prisoner of your desire, your wishes, your royal blood and obligations.”

He raised his hands to his face, shook his head. “Such time is ancient history. Tell me what has happened while I have... slept here, like a prince in a fairy tale. Tell me what I must do. What you would have me do.”

“That is simple. A double has ruled in your stead.” She watched his giant frame shudder with shock. “A double has entered into a secret pact with Russia to cede Bohemia to its dreams of empire. A double has flaunted a foreign mistress in front of your Queen—in this he is not so different, eh, Willie, although your wrong was in intent rather than in execution.”

The King’s unbound hands lifted as if to shelter his now-naked face from such facts, from such truths.

“A double,” she went on, “would duel with my husband within three hours, and slay him.”

“Your—husband. I recall            ....”

“You recall the truth. I will give you your life back. I will restore your Queen and your throne, but you must be absolutely ruled by me for the next several hours. You must do as I say. You must be my subject.”

He was silent for several moments, then looked up from red-rimmed eyes. “I have always been your subject, Irene; why do you think I tried to make you mine? And I do not want my Queen back,” he added with the old fierceness. “She is as nothing compared to you?”

“She is a Queen,” Irene said softly, unflattered, “and she has been treated abominably, both by you and your substitute. If you want your throne, you will have to win her back; it is that simple.”

“And, in the meantime, I must march to your tune.”

“Yes,” Irene said. “I do appreciate your putting that in musical terms, Willie.”

“I’ve always been fond of music.”

“You will become even fonder of it when you dance to my tone,” she promised.

Irene glanced at me. “The time, Nell!”

“Four o’clock.”

“We have no time to waste. Back to the Hotel Europa.”

“The Europa? Why?” I wondered.

“We must install the King in a safe place.”

She eyed me steadily, her glance dropping to my hands, each of which still clutched a knife. “Then, Robber Girl, we must hasten to a very unsafe place and perform a miracle of politics, intimidation, blackmail, and eleventh-hour salvation.”

Chapter Thirty-four

BLACK RUSSIAN SABLE

During the
long return trip to the hotel, I mused upon Irene’s eerie reference to the same Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale that I had been contemplating, “The Snow Queen.” I, the Robber Girl?

Certainly I carried the knives for the role. Irene had insisted that the guard’s confederates would find him soon, and that we dare not leave even a bread knife with which he might sever his bonds.

The King, weakened by his weeks of confinement, was barely capable of carrying himself, much less pointed objects.

Such a sight we three must have made through the dim Prague streets: the King lurching between us, an arm thrown over our shoulders; we staggering forward despite the burden, Irene lustily singing a slurred tavern song in the deepest basso she could produce.

She instructed the King to “hum” along, and he complied meekly, adding a wandering but surprising tenor to the tune.

I remained silent, for my quavering soprano would have done nothing but attract suspicion—or thrown footwear.

Our disguise was perfect. No one questions a tipsy trio about Prague at four in the morning. To do so would be unpatriotic, and would harm the business of the ubiquitous U Fleků and its ilk, and such establishments are national monuments to the renowned Bohemian fondness for fermented hops.

Once we reached the hotel, Irene and I battled the King up the back stairs. Our efforts were similar to shoving a sack of feed up a ladder into a loft. The walk had exhausted the King, and he was nearly drunk from confusion, elation, and mystification.

Imagine the picture we presented when Irene scratched discreetly on Allegra’s door, and the poor child finally heard and came to admit us.

Her eyes were already round as buttons when she edged the door open a crack: who would call at four in the morning but madmen and villains? When she saw us three, she immediately took us for the latter, and would have slammed the door shut, save that Irene thrust her booted foot in the way.

“Piano,
Allegra,
piano!”
she begged, wincing from Allegra’s sturdy attempt at door closing. “We have brought someone in need of tending.”

Allegra eyed the figure slumped over our shoulders. “Oh, is it Godfrey? The duel was not to be fought until six!”

Irene led us in and to the sofa, on which we let His Majesty collapse like the animated lead weight he resembled. His head fell against the sofa back, so it basked in the light of the gasolier that Irene had turned on.

Allegra examined the King, not much impressed. “Not Godfrey, thank God! Where did you find this scoundrel?”

Irene looked both amused and satisfied as she sat down to extract her cigarette case from her apparently bottomless side pocket. “Within desecrating distance of a graveyard, but he was not up to much mischief, being chained like the ghost he should be. Meet Wilhelm Gottsreich Sigismond von Ormstein, King of Bohemia.”

“King?” Allegra came closer to peer into the King’s exhausted face. “Another?”

“The first and only,” Irene said on a breath of smug blue smoke. “You must tend him, Allegra, while Nell and I attend to other business. Godfrey mustn’t know, for now, of his presence, so we three must hide the King in the bedroom.”

“The bedroom?” Allegra paused. “My bedroom or your bedroom?”

“I doubt you will get much more sleep tonight, and I find it impolitic to store the King in my bedroom, for reasons that you might not fully appreciate, nor should you be expected to.” Irene’s turn of the room ended in her smashing her cigarette to ashes in a tray. “So your bedroom, dear girl, will do nicely.”

Allegra shrugged, a rude gesture that I feared that she had acquired from Irene. “As you wish.”

“I protest, Irene,” said I. “Allegra is an unmarried young woman; such an arrangement is scandalous.”

“No one will ever know, Nell. Scandal does not exist without knowledge. Besides, the King is hardly in any condition to initiate any new scandals in his bucolic kingdom of Bohemia.”

“And,” said Allegra, “my friends in London will be thrilled to hear that I concealed a king in my bedchamber.”

So much for averted scandal when the victim is eager to announce its existence to assorted friends and acquaintances.

Yet glad I was to have Allegra’s young back help us hoist the King and propel him into the room in question, where he collapsed upon the bed in a semiconscious state like the commonest drunkard.

“What shall I do with him?” Allegra asked herself as much as us.

“Watch him,” Irene instructed. “See that Godfrey does not see him, and that the King does not see anyone—not even a hotel maid. If he rouses, you could encourage him to clean up as much as possible—”

“—as far as is fit and proper for you to do so,” I added swiftly.

Irene eyed me, then shook her head. “The times do not call for ‘fit and proper,’ Allegra. You must do what you can, as best you can. We will return to take custody of the King before dawn—”

This was news to me, and most unsettling.

“—for he must play the role of his life tomorrow. He must rise from the dead, and no one must notice.”

“Yes, Madame Norton,” Allegra answered meekly. “I will care for him as if he were my Uncle Quentin.”

“Oh, you need not be
that
nice,” Irene added. “Kings respond better to high-handed treatment. They recognize it from their own history. Whatever you do, you must not be intimidated by him. He is your charge, and his fealty is pledged to me. Remind him of that if he should become troublesome and insist on returning to Prague Castle prematurely.”

“Indeed, Mrs. Norton, I will be as fierce a guardian to His Majesty as Miss Huxleigh was to me.”

Irene glanced at the King. He lay, in his dull, crude clothes, like a gigantic dead moth on Allegra’s delicate white linens, his limbs splayed and his mouth ajar, snoring softly.

“That should do nicely,” she said, jerking her head to the door as a signal that I should accompany her away.

“Do I still need the knives?” I asked breathlessly as I trotted after her into the hotel passage.

“Of course. In fact, if you have a nail file that is sufficiently sharp, I suggest that we take it. We go now to beard the most dangerous beast of all.”