City of Secrets (34 page)

It was still hard to believe. Maddie supposed it only proved what she ought to have learned from Peter Kropotkin—that anarchists came in all sorts of unexpected forms, and taking the “popular press” view of them only prevented one from seeing them as they really were.

But why had Florence done it? Maddie tried to imagine what could have moved her to an act so seemingly out of character, to a deception so complete that she had taken in—Maddie hoped—her own husband. She tried to put herself in Florence’s shoes but could only imagine that she must have acted on behalf of someone she loved strongly enough to change her life for him. But if it was not Geoffrey, Maddie could not guess who that someone might be.

She should not have been surprised when Louise came back to report that not only was Florence’s maid gone, but—she had taken it on herself to investigate—the Wingates had checked out several hours ago.

“Oh ...
curses!”
Maddie said, resorting to her father’s favorite euphemism more to chastise herself than her bad luck. Had she really expected Florence to wait for them to catch her in the act?

She threw her linen napkin down on the breakfast tray. “Louise, where is that pistol Ollie keeps urging me to carry? I gave it back to him after ... in Paris.”

“Are you going out?” Louise asked, disregarding this question and planting herself firmly in Maddie’s path to the door.

“That’s why I have my hat on,” Maddie said, jabbing another pin in to secure it.

“I don’t think Mr. Drummond would wish you to leave the hotel,” Louise said, unsure why her husband would wish this but absolutely convinced that he did.

“Louise, I’m bigger and stronger than you are, or Oliver is, for that matter. Step aside.” Maddie moved forward to tower over her faithful maid, who recognized her determination, if not her only half-sincere threat. “And find me that gun.”

“I shall tell Mr. Drummond!” Louise called after Maddie as she disappeared down the hall a moment later, pistol tucked securely in her coat pocket.

“Do,” Maddie said, knowing Oliver was probably long gone. Then she stopped, turned, and came back to give Louise a little hug. “Please try not to worry, Louise,” she said fondly. “Everything will be all right.”

She was not as sure as she sounded, however, especially when she went around to the stables to see if the Wingates had left by the carriage Florence said they had hired for their stay in Baden. Devin wouldn’t have time to see about that, unless his appointment with Oliver was in the hotel stables, which seemed unlikely. He would not be able to be everywhere at once, even with the help of Oliver and the redoubtable Sergeant Brenner, so he would be grateful in the end for her help. She breathed a little prayer that that would turn out to be true.

The pistol in her pocket thumped against Maddie’s leg as she walked, so she slowed to a more respectable pace as she approached the stables and looked in.

“May I assist you, madam?”

A young groom, the only staff member in evidence, got up from the bench where he was polishing a harness and gave her an admiring glance before remembering to bow to her.

“Good morning!” Maddie said with a cheerful smile. “I wonder if you could tell me something? You see, I didn’t want to wake my friend Mrs. Wingate—in room 308—before I went out for my morning walk, so I thought I’d just make sure she hasn’t gone out herself before I go up to her suite. Do you know her carriage?”

“Yes, madam. It was taken out early this morning, but by a young man, not by Mrs. Wingate.”

That startled her. “A
young
man?”

“Yes, madam. About thirty years of age, I would say. He was slender and blond and wore a small mustache. An American, I believe.”

“Oh, yes, of course,” Maddie said, pretending she knew who this mysterious young American was. He did sound somehow familiar, but she could not think why. She smiled charmingly at the groom. “In that case, I will leave a message for Mrs. Wingate at the desk and hope to see her later. Thank you so much. Good-bye!”

Trying not to hurry, Maddie went back into the hotel through the lobby. The guests were beginning to wake up now, and people were standing about waiting for cabs or breakfast; Maddie nodded to those she recognized and stopped to say good morning to the hall porter, who asked if she were going to the baths this morning and spent ten minutes, which Maddie endured as patiently as she could, extolling the distinctive virtues of the various bathhouses in town. Then Maddie remembered that there were more than twenty of them, so she made her excuses when he reached the fourth and went out the entrance that faced the street to ask the doorman to fetch her a cab.

“Zum Bahnhof, bitte!”
he told the driver on her instructions, then shrugged as the cabbie looked around for her nonexistent maid and baggage. When he looked Maddie up and down, she realized her error and smiled shyly at him, even managing to summon up a blush as she stepped closer to the carriage.

“You see,” she said, standing on her tiptoes to whisper to the driver high on his perch, “I am meeting someone
very
important on the train ... at least, I
hope
he is on the next train.”

As she intended, the cabbie immediately assumed she was on her way to meet her lover, and smiling and doffing his hat to her, he scarcely waited until she had got in and the door had closed before cracking his whip over his horse’s ear. The cab shot forward smartly.

Maddie had no clear idea of what she intended to do, but Devin had said that he was going up the railway line to see that everything was in order, presumably to examine any likely hiding places for the assassin. Since the prince was not yet in Baden itself, the railway line seemed the logical place to be concerned with now, and Maddie hoped that an extra pair of eyes would prove useful. She would simply get on the next train north and use those eyes.

At the station, however, a barrier across the carriageway prevented her cab from entering, and Maddie’s heart sank. A large, curious crowd was already gathering in the surrounding streets, drawn by what seemed to be dozens of town officials in cocked hats and a band of honor adjusting their instruments in readiness. Maddie put her head out the window of the cab, and a train guard gave her a suspicious look.

“Do you have a ticket, madam?” he asked, approaching the cab.

“No, I’m not traveling,” Maddie said with her most devastating smile, trying to think of a way to avoid this crowd. She could scarcely tell them they were all too early and might as well go home and wait. But then she another fabrication occurred to her.

“I only stopped for a timetable,” she told the guard, “not realizing, of course, that I would encounter such a long queue! May one acquire such a thing without waiting for all this to disperse?”

“Where to, madam?” the guard asked, relaxing his stiff backbone a fraction.

“To Strassburg,” Maddie said, remembering the last large city they had passed on the way to Baden.

“One moment, please, madam.”

The guard went away to fetch the timetable, giving Maddie another chance to look around. Suddenly she saw Oliver Drummond on the other side of the barrier; she pulled her head back into the cab and drew the veil of her hat down over her face—not that such a subterfuge would deceive Oliver, should he see her, but it seemed to have an unexpected effect on the guard, who held a conference with her driver to discover where his passenger was going. Beaming broadly now, he knocked on her window and handed in the timetable.

“Thank you,” Maddie said, keeping her face hidden.

“My pleasure, madam,” said the guard, looking up at the cabbie and apparently joining his league. “Where would madam wish to go now, please?” he asked, in a conspiratorial whisper.

“What is the next station north of here?”

“Oos, madam.”

“Would you ask the driver to take me to Oos, please,” Maddie said, reaching a coin out the window to him. “And thank you.”

The guard bowed, gave the driver her instructions, and stepped back. In a few minutes, the driver had cleared the crowd, and his horse was trotting briskly past the scattered houses at the edge of the town.

Maddie tried to think what Oliver may have been doing at the station but could only conclude that he and Devin had decided to give out Maddie’s fortuitous fabrication about the prince’s earlier arrival, so that the station would be thronged with people by the time the prince actually did arrive. It was taking a terrible chance, Maddie thought, if no threat was made on the prince before that; an assassin could easily get lost in a crowd of frightened people at a railway station. On the other hand, if he were counting on a clear shot from a distance, he—or she—might be discouraged from attempting it in such a crowd.

Before very long, her cab was passing through pure country, and for the first time Maddie was able to hear the sound of the bells on the horse’s harness. It was such a cheerful sound; she could not think why it seemed so sinister today.

Devin had sent a telegram up the line to Heidelberg and left Oliver to do his part at the Baden railway station. Then he took the next train north, got the reply to his telegram at Karlsruhe, and continued on to Kirchheim, where he just caught the prince’s train as it pulled into the tiny station.  Fritz Ponsonby leaned out the window as the train slowed, and as soon as he saw Devin jump on, he signaled the engineer not to stop, so that within five minutes they were up to speed again.

“Good catch,” Ponsonby said, clapping Devin on the shoulder. “You should have been a yachtsman. You’d keep your footing nicely.”

“I’d have to,” Devin said. “I can’t swim.”

Ponsonby laughed and said he’d go on ahead to the royal carriage to see if the prince would see him. Devin was grateful once again for Ponsonby’s tact in not asking the reason for his precipitous entrance. In fact, Devin was going to try to persuade the prince to leave the train and enter Baden by some other means of transportation, an effort he knew to be hopeless but which he felt duty-bound to attempt.

“My dear fellow,” his highness said, as expected, when Devin was shown into his smoking room five minutes later. The prince was dressed with his usual exacting care, as if he were going to receive important visitors instead of only a member of his staff. Devin became conscious again of his own no-doubt disreputable appearance. But if he did not meet his employer’s sartorial standards, the prince seemed to understand that it was a result of circumstance, not disrespect, and he made no comment on it. .

“I quite understand that you feel obliged to warn me of my peril, Grant,” he said, “but I have no intention of making any change in my itinerary, or of having my cure interrupted by these absurd threats, of which nothing ever comes.”

But he narrowed his eyes at Devin just the same and added, “Does it?”

“There is always a first time, sir.”

The prince leaned his portly frame toward Devin, who maintained a passive expression, and said kindly, “Next you will tell me that it only takes one time. Well, possibly, possibly. But never mind. You have done your duty, my boy. Yes, I know you think that I am underestimating the threat this time, but I assure you, these things must be faced up to. I cannot run away every time some fool shouts an antimonarchist slogan at me. That is why I hired you. I have every confidence that you will keep me safe.”

“I hope I may live up to your good opinion, sir.”

“As do I,” the prince said with a wink to take the sting out of the observation. “Do have a glass of wine, Grant. Ponsonby tells me you have come all the way from Baden this morning to leap aboard like one of those Wild West desperadoes one reads about. Have something to take the starch out of your backbone.”

Devin could scarcely refuse, particularly since the prince’s servant had poured out a whiskey-and-soda even before his master finished speaking and was now holding it out to Devin. He took it and raised the glass to the prince’s health before taking a swallow. It felt good, despite his best intentions; but he would have to nurse the one drink, or he’d be offered another, and that would take more than starch out of him.

The prince quizzed him for a few minutes about how he found Baden, before Ponsonby came in with a question. Devin rose to leave, but the prince, seeing that his glass was not yet empty, motioned him to stay. In order to maintain a discreet distance from the conversation, therefore, Devin got up and walked around the carriage.

This was a new one, but Devin was familiar with the prince’s style of travel—well-upholstered chairs and thick carpets, a fully equipped bathroom and luxuriously appointed bedroom off the smoking room they now occupied. Because the prince was traveling incognito—maintaining the fiction of being an ordinary tourist as a way of signaling to anyone who might misinterpret his intentions that this was not a state visit—he had only his valet, two footmen, and another equerry with him, besides Ponsonby. The only unusual aspect of this particular supposed pleasure jaunt was the presence of a larger than usual number of policemen who came aboard at each border crossing and large city, a presence that Devin kept as unobtrusive as possible, knowing how much the prince disliked being under continual observation.

There were some new family photographs on the desk, Devin noticed, and went to look at them. The portrait of Victoria, seated at a table signing a document, always traveled with her son, but the newcomers to the collection included one of the prince and his son on the royal yacht. Devin remembered that one, because Princess Alexandra had taken it with her Kodak. He would have to tell Daisy Jervis about it when he saw her again. In fact, there was even Laurie’s snapshot from the Bois de Boulogne; he would be glad to hear it had a place of honor, at least temporarily. The latest trophy picture, of the prince standing over the stag he had shot at last year’s hunt, dominated a series of informal snaps of royal daughters and nieces in straw hats, probably also taken by Alexandra, who was getting better at them.

Then a sporty image of Prince George caught Devin’s eye. Standing next to him was his cousin, Nicholas of Russia, and the resemblance was remarkable. They weren’t all that closely related, yet they might have been twin brothers. He picked up the photograph and studied it thoughtfully. Odd how these resemblances worked.