Snow White Red-Handed (A Fairy Tale Fatal Mystery) (3 page)

For a few seconds, Gabriel feared Winkler’s girth would not fit. But after a moment of straining, he popped through. Gabriel followed.

I
t was a one-room cottage, perhaps twenty by thirty feet. The roof had probably once been thatched, but now nothing was left but ceiling beams woven with brambles, which created a roof of green leaves. Splotches of sunlight fell through the leaves onto the dirt-covered floor. Gabriel made an exploratory probe in the floor with his penknife, revealing rotted floorboards.

Puzzling. Everything was coated with rot and loam. Everything, that is, except the skeleton. That had been laid out recently.

“Precisely like the Grimm tale,” Winkler said, holding up the lantern. “Little chairs and a table, and seven
kleine
beds along the wall there. Observe those small pots and kettles by the fireplace, and spoons and plates”—he lifted a dirt-covered plate from the table—“of pewter. Our charlatans were certainly faithful to the Grimms’ text ‘
Schneewittchen’
.”

“The style of the spoons”—Gabriel picked up a begrimed spoon from the table—“is sixteenth century, is it not? I don’t know a great deal about German antiquities, yet I recall seeing a similar design at a castle in Scotland.”

Winkler brought his lantern close and squinted at the spoon. “The peasants tend to reproduce the same styles for century upon century, making their objects difficult to date. They have not the capacity for originality, you see.” He crawled away. “What have we here?”

Gabriel looked up. Winkler held the lantern high. The middle ceiling beam glinted behind leafy brambles.

“Gold,” Gabriel said, and then recited a line from the Grimms’ “Snow White”:
“The seven dwarves spent their days mining ore and digging for minerals
.
”

“
Ach
, you are falling under the spell, Penrose.” Winkler moved the lamp along the length of the ceiling beam. Much of it was coated with dirt. But here and there they saw that its surface was carved wooden relief, and flecks of gold leaf and colorful chipped paint still remained.

“We shall have this beam and the skeleton removed and carried to the castle,” Winkler said, “and clean and inspect them after luncheon. It must be twelve o’clock already.”

“If the images on this beam are still intact,” Gabriel said, “they could provide clues to the mystery of this cottage.”

It was an effort to sound disinterested. His secret life’s obsession was to compile a collection of relics that would at last prove, indisputably, that fairy tales were based upon historical events. Until he did so, however, he needed to keep quiet or become the laughingstock of academe.

“That is all very well and good.” Winkler had crawled past the skeleton and was pushing back out through the doorway. “But I am certain,” he said over his shoulder, “that what every party is most interested in is whether or not that is real gold leaf.”

*   *   *

When Gabriel joined
Winkler back out in the forest glade, he saw three ladies and two gentlemen clustered about Coop and Smith. Not wishing to enter the fray, he paced off a distance, leaned against the trunk of a tree, and took the opportunity to write a few lines in the memorandum book that he always carried in his breast pocket.

Not a hoax
, he wrote with a stub of pencil and underlined it twice.

Feminine titters caused him to lift his eyes. The newcomers were, he assumed, members of the Coop family, their visitors, and their servants. Smith had apprised Gabriel and Winkler of their names during the hike to the cottage.

There was an elegant lady of middle years, petite, brunette, possessing a rose-petal complexion and a refined mien. That was the Russian Princess Verushka, doubtless. The foppish, dark-curled young Adonis who loitered off to the side, smoking a cigarette and looking bored, was probably Mr. Hunt. Smith had said he was British. There was also a bony young lady—Miss Amaryllis, perhaps—with a large nose. She cast her eyes towards Mr. Hunt. He did not seem to notice. The other gentleman was a footman in green livery, holding a parasol over the ladies. He didn’t, to be honest, appear as dashing as footmen usually did. He was over fifty years of age, with a small paunch and disheveled gray hair that called to mind the expression
gone to seed
.

A somewhat blowsy-looking woman, yellow-haired and richly attired in a walking costume, was the source of the commotion. Gabriel pegged her as Mrs. Coop. She was pointing to the ground at the entrance of the cottage.

“The soil is sparkling!” Gabriel heard her cry. “It’s got gold in it, Homer. Look!”

A hubbub ensued, during which Winkler stooped to open his bag, scrape a sample of soil into a small glass vial, and cork it.

Gabriel suppressed a sigh. The greed and melodramas of the rich and bored were a larger part of his life—at least his life in England—than he’d wish. He longed to roll up his sleeves and begin conducting, inch by inch, an examination and catalogue of the cottage. But it was evident that he’d have to suffer through luncheon with this lot first.

He jotted more notes as Winkler, speaking in his booming voice, led the group into the thicket. Gabriel tried not to think about the damage they could inflict on the house, blundering about in there.

The footman had stayed behind. When he thought he was alone—he did not seem to be aware of Gabriel’s presence—he pulled a silver flask from his jacket, unscrewed the cap, and took a long swallow.

Then a small movement across the glade caught Gabriel’s eye. There was another young lady, one he hadn’t noticed at first, standing in the shade. Evidently there hadn’t been room enough for her to go into the thicket with the others, and she was waiting.

She was attired in a charcoal-gray gown with a white collar, and a dark bonnet. A poor relation or a paid companion. Or perhaps a lady’s maid. Although there was something graceful about her tall, slim figure, and she held her head so high that it was difficult to imagine she was a servant. Her face was, well, plain. It was a pure oval, very symmetrical, yet somehow, in its very purity, it just missed the pretty mark. Her darting dark eyes reminded him of the centers of poppies.

He hadn’t realized he was staring until her eyes riveted on him. A tingle ran down his spine.

She lifted her eyebrows. Gabriel yanked the brim of his hat down over his eyes and scribbled something absurd in his memorandum book.

*   *   *

“I simply must
have you at my side this afternoon, Flax,” Mrs. Coop said. “I’ve come down with a sick headache, but I wouldn’t miss Professor Winkler’s gold test for the world. Tighter!”

“I’m doing my utmost, ma’am,” Ophelia said, straining to cinch Mrs. Coop’s corset laces.

After luncheon, Mrs. Coop had returned to her cream-and-gold jewel box of a boudoir, high in a turret of the castle, to change into her afternoon gown. She’d been breathless and disheveled, and determined to shrink her waist to a smaller compass.

Mrs. Coop’s disarray, and her sudden wish to appear pixielike, resulted, Ophelia suspected, from the presence in the castle of either Princess Verushka or Mr. Royall Hunt. Mrs. Coop and Miss Amaryllis had made the acquaintance of these two fashionable personages at some point in the last two weeks’ frenzy of excursions into Baden-Baden.

“You must,” Mrs. Coop said, “stay by my side with my smelling salts, should I need them, and fetch me glasses of water and whatever else I may need. I am not well, Flax—even Mr. Hunt noted that I’m white as a lily—yet this is perhaps the most thrilling day of my life.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Ophelia said.

“Just think! Snow White’s cottage on my own estate. And a dwarf’s bones!”

“Mm.”

“Do I hear doubt in your tone, Flax?”

“Truth be told, ma’am, it is difficult for me to believe that that house belonged to creatures from a storybook.”

“Difficult to believe?”

“Well, ma’am, near impossible.”

Ophelia had performed with P. Q. Putnam’s Traveling Circus for two years, and she’d known a so-called dwarf. He’d been a shrimp, true, but there hadn’t been a thing magical about him. Unless you counted swearing like a sailor and smoking like a house on fire as magic.

“Of course.” Mrs. Coop sniffed. “I nearly forgot you’re a Yankee.”

Ophelia held her tongue; she was stepping out of character. It had to be the result of exhaustion. Mrs. Coop and her stepsister, Amaryllis, kept Ophelia on her feet from dawn to dusk, arranging their hair, pressing their clothing, mixing beauty concoctions, and running up and down the spiraling castle stairs fetching things.

How could anyone past the age of pigtails think Snow White and the seven dwarves had really existed? And it wasn’t only Mrs. Coop, who could be counted upon to be frivolous, who was entertaining the notion. Those two university professors were as well. The younger of the two professors, the tall, handsome, bespectacled one with the upper-crust British accent, looked far too intelligent to be taken in by such hogwash.

“There,” Ophelia said, tying a seaworthy knot at the end of the corset laces. “That’s as tight as I can get it. Will you be wearing the blue silk, ma’am?”

“No, no, the tea gown with the lavender stripes.” Mrs. Coop surveyed herself—still in only crinoline, petticoats, and corset—in a tall, gilt-framed mirror. She tipped her head sideways. “Whatever is wrong with this mirror? It’s gone all squat.”

Mirrors weren’t known for lying. But Mrs. Coop wouldn’t take kindly to that observation.

“I don’t think this corset is strong enough,” Mrs. Coop went on. “But it’s made of real whalebone, you know. It’s not one of those cheap starched things.”

Then it had been strong enough for the whale.

“Hurry up, Flax. Professor Winkler shall be starting soon.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

*   *   *

“The first item
I require,” Professor Winkler said, once everyone had reassembled in the library, “is a small quantity of washing soda from the castle laundry.”

Ophelia watched from the shadows beside the fireplace. Winkler looked like an elderly walrus and had something of the snake oil salesman about him. But everyone else in the lofty, book-lined chamber—Mrs. Coop, Miss Amaryllis, Princess Verushka, Mr. Hunt, Mr. Coop, and Mr. Smith, even Karl the first footman, standing against the wall—was rapt with attention. The lone exception was the younger professor. Ophelia had overheard that he was called Professor Penrose.

While the others stared at Winkler, Penrose was studying their faces. His eyes, behind his spectacles, were hazel, and his eyebrows were straight and dark. His brown hair was as tidy as a professor’s ought to be, but how had his complexion come to be so suntanned, and his shoulders so broad, if he spent his days lecturing and reading indoors?

“Washing soda?” Mrs. Coop said. “Whatever for?”

“You do not intend to bore us with housework?” Princess Verushka added in her heavy Russian accent. She was hovering somewhere in her middle years, but she was a marvel of religious preservation, as Ophelia had heard it said of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Her mahogany hair gleamed, her figure was spry, her fair skin was lustrous, and Ophelia’s trained eye could not detect a particle of powder or paint.

“All, my dear ladies,” Winkler said, “shall become clear.”

Mrs. Coop rose and hurried across the library to yank the velvet bellpull in the corner.

“Luncheon, by the by, was superb,” Winkler said to Mr. Coop. “The sautéed liver! Your cook is a sorceress. Did you bring her from America?”

“Came with the castle.” It appeared that Mr. Coop had drunk heavily at luncheon. His neck was mottled and his eyes bleary. “Trained in gay Paree, I’m told. Durn well better be, I said to Pearl, for the greengrocer’s bills this place runs up.”

“It
is
a castle,” Mrs. Coop said in a pouting tone, returning to her seat. “You can hardly expect it to run itself.”

“Ah, but enchanted castles do,” Winkler said. He was taking small objects from a black leather bag and lining them up on a table in the center of the library. “Madam, I am given to understand you are taken with our European fairy stories.”

“I’ve adored them since I was a girl. I always dreamed of being a queen in a castle.”

“And now you are,” Miss Amaryllis said. She pursed her lips. “Fancy that.”

“Enough,” Mr. Coop boomed. “Your sister, Amaryllis, has been good enough to give you a roof over your head—begged me to do it, even though I preferred to let you make your own way in the world like everyone else. I gave in, but now you do gad-all but blight our honeymoon with your waspish sniveling.”

Ophelia scanned the library. Mrs. Coop’s lower lip was tremulous, and her hand was on her husband’s arm. Mr. Smith studied the Persian carpet. Princess Verushka fanned herself, nervous as a finch. Mr. Hunt, wearing a bland expression, reached to a side table and took a handful of sugared almonds from a bowl. The footman Karl gazed into space. Professor Penrose watched Mr. Coop.

And Amaryllis glared at Mr. Coop with murderous hatred in her eyes.

“You,” Mr. Coop said, wagging a thick finger at Amaryllis, “are a nasty witch—they got those in fairy stories, professor?”

“Homer,
please
,” Mrs. Coop hissed.

Amaryllis’s hands were trembling in her yellow silk lap. She swiveled her eyes from her brother-in-law to Mr. Hunt.