Snow White Red-Handed (A Fairy Tale Fatal Mystery) (26 page)

“Penrose,” Winkler called.

Hang it.

“Good evening.” Gabriel poked only his head round the doorframe, so Winkler wouldn’t see his bloodstained jacket.

Winkler lowered his newspaper. “I inspected those mushrooms.”

“And?”

“Innocuous. Completely. Used by the
volk
in a broth for treating headaches and such. Utter quackery, needless to say.”

“Well, thank you.”

Once in his chamber, Gabriel removed his jacket and shirt. Luckily, all that rainwater had prevented the bloody fabric from crusting to the wound.

It was, thank God, but a flesh wound. A deep one, yes, but nothing serious. No embedded bullet. He’d suffered worse.

He cleaned it with a wet cloth, doused it with brandy, and bandaged it as best he could with a few shreds of linen nightshirt.

He stretched out on his bed, shirtless, with the brandy bottle in one hand and his second Webley revolver in the other.

There. Comfort and safety. The two guiding ideals of the British Empire. Although he rather doubted those guards would have the audacity to try to murder him in his bed. Surely Ghent, whoever he was, wished to cover his tracks.

He took a deep swallow from the bottle.

*   *   *

A wet evening
sank over Heidelberg. Prue and Hansel followed Franz through twisting, turning streets, dodging around puddles and dripping roofs. Franz quizzed them about Karl’s letter. Prue buttoned her lips, and Hansel was vague.

The student’s beer hall that Franz took them to was the frolicsome kind. The wooden sign above the door had red lettering and a picture of a jumping pig. Someone was playing an accordion inside, badly enough to make your ears curl up and die. Prue could barely hear the accordion anyway, through all the clattering beer glasses and boyish hooting. The rowdiness rolled, along with light, cigarette smoke, and puffs of stale beer, out into the dark, narrow street.

Prue wriggled her fingers into Hansel’s. He gave them a squeeze. Good. He wasn’t too mad about how she’d spilled the beans to Franz about the letter, then.

“Come meet my friends,” Franz said over the uproar inside. “The fine student gentlemen of number seventeen, the castle stairs.”

Number seventeen, the castle stairs? Was that really an address?

“I’m awful hungry,” Prue whispered to Hansel. That was the truth. But she also couldn’t bear to meet new folks dressed in the ugly brown dress, with her hair under a milkmaid’s straw bonnet, and in a rain-drenched knitted shawl the color of mold.

“Miss Bright desires something to eat,” Hansel said. “We shall have a meal, and then we shall go.”

“I suppose it must be trying for you, Hansel,” Franz said, “seeing your old classmates in your . . . reduced circumstances.”

Hansel met Franz’s eyes coolly. Then he led Prue to a table in the corner.

A
fter they sat down, the barmaid came to ask what they wished to eat and drink.

The barmaid wore a sapphire blue cotton dress with a tight bodice, puffy white sleeves, and a white swath of apron. She had shining raven-colored hair piled on her head. Her skin was a rare porcelain, without any sun coloring or pink. Her lips were red, her eyes onyx and darting.

In fact—Prue felt an unfamiliar pang—she was prettier than Prue.

Prue was accustomed to fellows of all ages walking into walls and tripping on their own bootlaces when they saw her. But these days, for the first time in her life, Prue wouldn’t describe herself as pretty. Ma had taught her that her beauty was her greatest prize and her meal ticket. Without it, Prue felt near invisible.

Even Hansel, who in the first few weeks after Prue’s arrival at the castle had seemed enchanted, no longer looked at her the same way. The problem was, Prue realized, she’d fallen in love with him, right when the only thing she had to offer—her beauty—had vanished.

She wiped the tears from the corners of her eyes so Hansel wouldn’t see them.
He
was the one who ought to be crying, anyway. His pa was dead.

Prue and Hansel studied Franz and his friends, who were crowded at a table on the other side of the beer hall.

Franz was the runt of the litter. His friends were all strapping. When they whacked Franz’s back in jest, Prue reckoned it was with a mite more vigor than necessary. But Franz played along, even as the other young men seemed to be jeering at him.

When the barmaid came around with more beer, the men all fell silent and stared after her like they were plants and she was the sun. Then, as soon as the barmaid was out of earshot, they stood to raise a toast. Almost like they were toasting . . . the barmaid. Prue saw flashes of red, white, and black ribbons wrapped around belts, hidden beneath jackets.

“Look,” Prue whispered to Hansel. “Them secret society ribbons.”

Hansel stole a look. “So they are.”

After a while, the barmaid brought Hansel and Prue plates of oily noodles with cheese and bits of sausage. Prue dug in like a coal miner.

Hansel forked noodles into his mouth, chewed. “I am not certain where to search for Snow White next. Perhaps we might visit my former history professor. Although. . . .”

“You’re afraid he might laugh at you?”

“Yes.” Hansel prodded noodles with his fork. “But my father was adamant that Snow White was a real lady. So, perhaps there is something in a dusty book somewhere. I do not know.”

“A book?” Prue’s eyes fell on Franz, pretending to carouse with his fellows. He must’ve felt her looking, because his gaze slanted in her direction. His eyes were beady. “Franz said something about books to Miss Gertie at the ball the other night. Said there are some kind of old fairy tale books at the library.”

Hansel hunched forward. “Which library? In Schloss Grunewald?”

“No. He said they were in the one here, in Heidelberg.”

Hansel slumped back in his chair. “The university library closed at five o’clock. We shall go there first thing in the morning.”

They finished eating and paid. Without saying good-bye to Franz—he was in the middle of singing, beer glass aloft, with his student friends—they wandered out into the soggy night.

Prue hugged her ratty shawl around her arms. “Where will we go?” Despite the ups and downs of her childhood, she’d never actually slept in a gutter. Yet.

Hansel took her hand. “I know a safe place.”

He led her to a row of houses facing the river. They stopped at a door painted dark blue. There was a white oval sign hanging above the door that Prue couldn’t read. It had a painted sprig of violets, though. That was reassuring. Prue was pretty sure dens of sin didn’t have painted violets on their signs.

“Frau Bohm was my nursemaid at the castle when I was small.” Hansel knocked on the door. “After I was grown, she cared for some children at an estate outside of Mannheim. Now she runs this little boarding house. She will not turn us away.”

The door swung open. A lofty lady with jutting bones like a scarecrow stood there. She wore a dove gray cotton gown, an immaculate white apron, and a white mobcap on her dark, gray-streaked hair. “Hansel!” She clasped her long fingers and said more things that Prue couldn’t understand. Then she looked at Prue, wearing an expression that was kind but inquisitive.

Prue wanted to turn tail and jump into the river. She felt so grimy and crumpled. And she was fair certain there was a bit of dinner stuck between her two front teeth.

Hansel drew her forward and introduced her. Frau Bohm smiled and led them inside, through to the back of the house and into a kitchen.

Ma had never done a scrap of cooking, unless you counted cracking oysters and pouring champagne as cooking. Prue had somehow grown to young womanhood nourished by gingersnaps, pretzels, roasted peanuts, and fried dough purchased for pennies from New York street vendors. So Frau Bohm’s pristine little kitchen seemed like a wonderland of cross-stitched dish towels and shining copper pots.

Hansel and Frau Bohm spoke softly in German for a bit, and they all drank chamomile tea. Frau Bohm cast a few maternal looks in Prue’s direction. Prue tried to dissolve into her periwinkle-painted chair.

It seemed to work, because Hansel didn’t look her way. Not once.

Then Frau Bohm led them upstairs, carrying two milky-globed hurricane lamps. Prue’s chamber was on one side of the corridor, and Hansel’s was on the other. Prue whispered good night, took one of the lamps, and shut herself in her chamber. She untied her bonnet strings, listening to Frau Bohm’s footsteps going back downstairs, and to the creak of Hansel’s door swinging closed.

Impulsively, she tossed aside her bonnet and pushed open her door. “Hansel!” she whispered.

He regarded her through the door crack. “What is it?”

She paused. What
was
it? She wasn’t sure. Only that she felt like crying, and she wanted one last glimpse of him before she went to sleep, and—

He crossed the corridor in a stride and took her face in his hands. His chest rose and fell, and his eyebrows were drawn together in fierce concentration as he gazed down at her.

Prue couldn’t breathe, and she wasn’t sure if her kneecaps were jiggling from fright or something else altogether. “Do you . . . do you see me?” she whispered.

Surprise flickered over his features. “See you? Of course I see you, Prue. How could I see anything else?”

A lump gathered in her throat. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to make it last, him holding her head, his palms rough and warm against her cheeks. “But I’m so ugly now. How can you bear it?”

He paused. He stroked a thumb over her cheekbone. “There are many ways to be beautiful,” he finally said.

Then he turned and went back into his chamber.

Prue held her eyes shut. Her body whirred with his touch. But she didn’t understand what he had meant.

*   *   *

Schloss Grunewald was
quiet that night.

The servants kept to themselves. Miss Amaryllis refused all admittance to her chamber and lay sobbing in the dark.

Mrs. Coop was abed, thrashing and muttering, under the effects of the hysteria drops.

Ophelia stashed the revolver Penrose had given her under a sofa cushion in Mrs. Coop’s chamber. Then she went to the window, pulled the drapes aside, and stared out at Prue’s desolate tower. No jug in the window. Which likely meant Prue had not yet returned from Heidelberg.

Ophelia hoped to hickory that Prue was all right, wherever she was.

She curled up on the sofa and watched over Mrs. Coop until she nodded off, too.

In the morning, Ophelia realized she wouldn’t be able to sneak away to Baden-Baden again. Mrs. Coop was up and about, and making demands. It was all Ophelia could do to transport the revolver from under the sofa cushion up into her own chamber unseen.

When she spied the greengrocer’s delivery lorry outside the kitchen door, she dashed off a note to Professor Penrose and entrusted it to the deliveryman.

*   *   *

Gabriel was relieved
that Miss Flax couldn’t accompany him. She’d be safer at the castle.

After breakfast, he took a hired carriage into Baden-Baden and went directly to the
Conversationshaus
.

It was probably madness to go there after what had happened yesterday in the wood. But even if Ghent’s guards were bent on killing Gabriel, they surely wouldn’t do it here. It’d be bad for business, for one thing.

He checked the tearoom and the gaming rooms. They were nearly empty since it was before luncheon. Many of the town’s denizens were surely still abed, sleeping off the effects of last night’s revelries.

No sign of Princess Verushka.

He crossed the marble foyer. He’d nearly made it to the doors that led outside when two looming forms appeared from behind one of the great pillars.

The guards.

“Good morning,” Gabriel said, lifting his hat. He didn’t stop walking.

One of the guards, the one with the black caterpillar of an eyebrow, stepped in his path. “Have a pleasant ride yesterday?” he growled.

“Yes, thanks awfully. Despite the weather and”—Gabriel’s shoulder, bandaged beneath his shirt and jacket, throbbed—“a bit more excitement than we’d planned for.”

“We know what you are searching for—”

“Do you? Because I’m not certain that
I
know—”

“—and if you enter the wood again, you and that strange woman who wears gentlemen’s clothes will die.”

“Thank you for the suggestion.” Gabriel lifted his hat again and dodged by the guards.

They didn’t follow.

*   *   *

Across the gravel
drive from the
Conversationshaus
was a long, tree-shaded avenue. Fashionable ladies and gentlemen sauntered up and down the white gravel. Birds chirped and the sun sparkled. The only traces of yesterday’s rainstorm were the puddles shimmering on the gravel.

Gabriel took a seat at one of the many green-painted benches along the avenue and pretended to read a newspaper.

Now and then he glanced up to see society matrons thrusting their daughters at gentlemen, blushing debutantes casting shy looks at Russian officers, matrons flirting with gentlemen who were not, perhaps, their husbands. It was rather like an aviary during mating season. Some of the birds were gorgeously plumed, but—he watched a corpulent old fossil strolling with a damsel one-third his age—others resembled overfed vultures.

It was difficult to picture Mr. Smith here. What business could he have in Baden-Baden’s most fashionable spot? And why, for that matter, was he mapping the forest about Schloss Grunewald?

Gabriel had finished one newspaper and was halfway through a second by the time he finally sighted Princess Verushka.

She was as lovely as he remembered, with her leaf green, flounced walking gown, parasol, and a smart little hat. She was tripping along beside a dignified-looking gentleman in a dark suit, silk hat, and a waxed white moustache.

Gabriel buried his nose in his newspaper as they came closer.

The princess emitted a tinkling laugh. “How you flatter me, baron,” she said in French, with her rich Russian accent. “Calling me a debutante! Why, you know I am, sadly, a widow.”

“The loss of the prince was indeed a tragedy,” the gentleman said, “but now at last the rest of the world may enjoy the exquisite charms of the bride he kept so jealously locked away.”

Gabriel peered over the top of the newspaper as the princess and her squire passed. She looked smug. As well she might; Gabriel recognized the gentleman as a high-ranking French politician and wealthy aristocrat.

If Princess Verushka were Ghent’s mistress, perhaps it was her task to socialize with Baden-Baden’s elite. Although Ghent, if he had red blood in his veins, wouldn’t be too pleased about the way she was flirting.

Gabriel followed their retreating forms with his eyes. Another gentleman strode up to them. They were out of earshot, but the second gentleman—also in the prime of life—appeared to be having words with the baron. The princess watched fretfully. Then the second man thrust something—a letter—into the princess’s hands and marched away.

The baron appeared to quiz the princess; she was tearful. The baron made a cold bow before he, too, stalked away.

Gabriel folded his newspapers.

Smith had been mistaken. The princess was not Ghent’s mistress. She was on the hunt for a wealthy husband. And, evidently, she’d been overfilling her dance card.

She hurried away, in the opposite direction the baron had gone.

Gabriel followed.

*   *   *

Princess Verushka, as
soon as she’d turned onto a side street, no longer took mincing steps. Her stride was purposeful.

She walked for fifteen minutes, Gabriel trailing a block behind. She left the central district, with its magnificent hotels and shops, and entered a cramped quarter where everyday people lived. The streets were tighter, packed up against a hillside, and the windows fluttered with washing hung out to dry. Grubby children romped in the streets, bony cats slunk along gutters.