Another Scandal in Bohemia (8 page)

“Broken men mend, especially when they are pampered royal personages with a high opinion of themselves,” she said. “And I did not elope with Godfrey. We married in haste and left England in even greater haste. Speaking of Godfrey, you must mention nothing of this to him.”

“I cannot lie!”

“He isn’t likely to ask anything that requires a lie. Simply don’t blurt out any mention of this.”

“I never ‘blurt.’ That sounds quite vulgar.”

“What I will do to you should you tell Godfrey anything of our interview with the Queen will be more vulgar still,” Irene promised.

“That sounds like a threat.”

“Only a warning, dear Nell. Men are too high-strung to deal with certain matters.”

“Such as their wives’ former suitors?”

“Such as their wives’ former suitors, especially if they are kings, and certainly if they are showing an inexplicable reluctance to consort with their own wives.”

“She is not beautiful,” I said then.

“Nor is she that unattractive. She merely lacks finishing. Besides, the Willie I knew did not show such nicety in these matters that any reasonably presentable woman would fail to interest him.”

“He had not been spoiled by knowing you then.”

“You are too partisan, Nell. I possess certain assets, but none that can surmount blue blood and a fat dowry, as I learned to my sorrow in Bohemia. The women in the salon are right, no matter how I berate them. I do not play fair with the world on its own unfair terms, and I have been— and will continue to be—punished for that. But Clotilde Lothman did play fair, so far as she was given leave to know, and I do not like to hear that Willie has treated her so badly. I do not like it at all.”

“Does that mean that you will assist the Queen? Irene, how can you?”

“I don’t know what I will do, but whatever it is, it will be interesting.”

I repressed a chill of presentiment. What Irene and I considered “interesting” differed dramatically.

Chapter Five

SPLENDOR IN THE GLASS

I awoke
that night in Neuilly to the faint sounds of Antonin Dvořák’s lively Bohemian folk songs.

In fact, I did not awake at all, having lain for some time in an abstracted yet restless state. Like any keeper of someone else’s secret, I found that hidden knowledge narrowed and darkened my view of the world around me.

Irene’s normal dinnertime gaiety—she always rose to an audience, no matter how small or how familiar—took on a forced air in my eyes.

Godfrey’s ordinary yet courtly attentions to us both made me feel the worst sort of hypocrite. In the parlor after dinner, while Irene demonstrated to vivid comic affect our introduction to the great Worth, Godfrey frequently turned to ask my opinion.

“What do you think this man-milliner of Paris will put on Irene, if peacock feathers are not grand enough?” he inquired in his way of teasing her by consulting me.

“Something daring beyond belief, no doubt,” I answered in the same spirit. Godfrey always bestirred me to mild rebellion. “Perhaps sackcloth,” I went on despite her gasp— “trimmed with diamante.”

“A Cinderella in diamonds.” He laughed at my word picture. “How I wish I had seen and heard Irene sing that role while wearing Tiffany’s diamond corsage.”

Irene threw herself into an easy chair, her theatrics over for the moment. “You have seen the newspaper sketch of me in that role and wearing those jewels.”

“A sketch is not sufficient,” Godfrey said. “You are always far more affecting in person. In the flesh,” he added rather wickedly.

“So are diamonds. In the flash,” she retorted. “Ah, me. I wonder where that magnificent Tiffany corsage is now?” she speculated wistfully. “You never saw it either, did you, Nell?”

“Of course not. You sang at La Scala alone. It must have been heavy, that showy swag of diamonds cascading from shoulder to hip.”

“Not in the least. Like wearing meringue or angel hair. How cleverly it was designed, like a lacy sash of rank, to enhance any gown. They told me it shimmered like a comet on stage.”

“Nonsense!” Godfrey lit a long cigar and stretched his slipper-clad feet to the fire, for the nights had grown chill. “You shimmered like a comet; the diamonds merely reflected your glory.”

“There, you see,” Irene urged me, laughing. “My most devoted audience. He is won over by the very thought of my performance.”

Godfrey did not answer, nor did I. We were suddenly both too aware that Irene’s future musical performances would be haphazard and private. She had retired from the stage only because the King of Bohemia had high-handedly cut her career short in Prague and then her risky encounter with Sherlock Holmes had forced her into premature anonymity.

I thought about Irene’s great talent so suddenly and circumstantially silenced as I lay awake that night. She never spoke of it, and I dared not mention the subject. Yet it must secretly chafe her spirit, though she would never let that show. So I was not surprised to hear the piano’s faint tinkle in the sleepless wee hours, knowing as I did that the day’s events must bring Irene’s thoughts back to Bohemia, back to a past in which she had envisioned a glorious future that included neither Godfrey—then unmet—nor myself, save in a now-and-then way.

But Irene did not reign as queen of stage and palace in Prague; she was an English barrister’s wife in Paris. Another woman no doubt treasured the Tiffany corsage that Irene had introduced to the fashionable world in Milan. Another woman wore the crown jewels of Bohemia that King Willie had himself arranged upon her for the incriminating photograph. Godfrey had never seen that, either. Irene told him that the sight of the King and herself together was history that would only pain him. Now I began to wonder if she feared that the sight of the jewels she had forsaken would pain him more.

Still the distant Dvořák melody unwound like a music box. I sat up, thrust my feet into slippers before they touched the cold wooden floor, then rose and donned a shawl.

Moments later I was feeling my way downstairs in the dark, too timid to light a candle and risk awakening Godfrey. Halfway down the steps my own shadow began to softly accompany me: Irene’s parlor light seeped into the passage to bathe me in a vague glow.

A few steps more, and my darker self hunched in huge and twisted relief on the whitewashed passage wall. I pattered over the hall’s slate tiles onto the softness of faded French rugs.

The leashed moon of a paraffin lamp glowed above the grand piano and reflected in its burnished rosewood, so two soft eyes beamed at me in the semidark.

Matching green embers burned near the fireplace. Apparently Lucifer had an ear for music as well as an ever-open eye for mischief.

At the piano, I saw only the rich gleam of Irene’s hair meandering down her back before vanishing into the satin folds of her peignoir. Her hands, white in the artificial moonlight, glided over the ivory keys, as if invoking a spell or weaving on a loom.

Notes came forth, sometimes a separate trickle that gathered into watery falls, sometimes hunched together in throat-tightening chords. She played quietly: some notes were imagined moments strained for. She had meant not to wake us, but the effect was to haunt our dreams with an undercurrent of melody. Dvořák’s music could be melancholy, and so this playing struck me.

I sat on a leather hassock, unsurprised when something black arched into my lap. Lucifer balanced on his claw-points, neatly puncturing my knees, before settling down to pummel my abused flesh.

“I’m sorry I woke you.” Irene spoke without turning or stopping, her words overlaying the music like a recitative.

I refused to be unnerved by her recognition of my presence. “You didn’t wake me. I never slept.”

She played a while longer, then her fingers pressed a pair of chords into the keys, holding them down until the last almost inaudible vibration stilled.

There was a calm fatality in the way she throttled the instrument silent. I caught my breath as she turned to me at last, her face cameo-creamy in the lamplight.

“You mustn’t worry, Nell. The queen’s confession is a mystery in a minor chord. I am puzzled, I admit, but hardly intrigued enough to act on it.”

“You would like to,” I accused.

“True. I am perishing of curiosity, but I am hardly in any position to lift so much as my little finger on the Queen’s behalf. My hands are tied. I cannot go to Prague—”

“Of course you cannot! If you think Godfrey was perturbed when you ventured back to London and the vicinity of Sherlock Holmes last summer, can you imagine what he would say to your dallying near the King and Prague?”

“I was speaking for myself,” she said. “And Godfrey did endorse my London trip once I’d convinced him that I’d be unrecognizable. I could visit Prague incognito as well.”

“What you
can
do is not the question, only what you should do.”

“Agreed, and what is it that I should do, Nell?”

“Nothing! Nothing that rekindles the old wounds you received—and inflicted—in Prague.”

“You mix metaphors with great dash, my dear girl. One usually rekindles memories or passion, not hatred and wounds.”

“You know what I mean to say! You yourself admitted that the King is not one to forget a slight. By fleeing his offer—his assumption—that you would be his mistress, by evading his agents across half of Europe, by outwitting his chosen delegate in London, Sherlock Holmes, you have earned his eternal enmity. This distressed young Queen may merely be a tool he uses to lure you back to Bohemia and into his clutches—”

“A pathetic tool! And how could Willie believe that I would go running off to Bohemia at the first whisper that he has not consummated his marriage?”

“Curiosity,” I answered. “Your fatal flaw.”

“I am curious, but I am not mad. I will not be going to Bohemia. I will not be delving into the intriguing intimate confessions of the Queen of Bohemia, poor creature. But I can remain safe at home and speculate to my heart’s content, and that right I claim.”

“You are married.”

“What has that to do with it?”

“You should not think of other men under any circumstances.”

“Ah!” Her hands lifted as if to strike thundering chords on the piano, then dropped with a sharp slap to her lap. “I am not to think, then, because I am married. I fear not even Godfrey would agree with you on this.”

“Yet you don’t want him to know of the Queen’s proposal.”

“Nor do I want him to know of the women’s gossip. Both are... rumors, idle speculation. They can only do harm.”

“So can your dwelling upon any conundrums that involve the King of Bohemia.”

Irene smiled slightly. “I do not dwell. I muse. And I amuse myself.” She turned away to lower the key cover without a sound. “But fear not. Wild West horses could not drag me back to Bohemia. And now, back to bed.”

Irene rose, collected the lamp, and laced a companionable arm through mine as she led me to the stairs. She even shook my elbow admonishingly as we parted in the upper hall.

“Don’t worry, Nell! Today’s events were tiny, unimportant incidents in the vast, daily flow of present into future. What I really dwell upon is what Monsieur Worth has in mind for my new gown.”

“Now there,” I agreed, “is a matter worth worrying about!”

Wednesday came all too soon for my taste. Also for André’s. Our coachman glowered from the moment he drew up before our country cottage until he deposited us before Maison Worth in the heart of the city.

Already idle drivers and their carriages lined the streets, their equipages far smarter than ours. Perhaps that is why André stewed; the French do not like to appear less fashionable than anyone, not even a fellow servant.

The page boy and mistress of the salon greeted us like old friends. Irene swept boldly into the antechamber, only to find it empty. Her chastened critics of Monday were disappointingly absent, from her point of view.

I began to breathe again, but found that pleasant condition interrupted when we were once again shown into an ornate dressing room. Against the far wall’s pale paneling gleamed a sinister dark cloud of taffeta and tulle.