Wildest Dreams (The Contemporary Collection) (56 page)

Joletta stood still while her heart ceased its beat inside her. Then as Rone detached himself from the long form on the grass and pushed up to his knees, she stumbled toward him. He caught her, dragging her against him, holding tight.

They stood like that for long, shivering seconds. Joletta, feeling the warm seep of his blood against her back, stirred first.

“Your arm,” she began.

“It’ll do, but we have to see about your cousin.”

She drew back, a question in her eyes she didn’t want to put into words.

He shook his head in answer. “If you’ll call an ambulance, I’ll look at him, but I think he’ll be okay.”

The crew of the ambulance that appeared in due time were more guarded in their opinions than Rone, but none of them went into the kind of action reserved for extreme cases. Nor did any suggest that the police should not, eventually, ask Timothy their questions.

It was morning before the official business of explanations and statements was over, before the last of Aunt Estelle’s screams was heard, or her claims that the violence was the fault of everyone except her son and herself. She would get Timothy the best lawyer in the state, she said. She could not believe he had actually tried to harm Joletta; certainly he could not have hurt Mimi. It was all a terrible mistake. They would fight this thing, claim insanity, but they would need money. Joletta had better think about what she was doing by denying the wealth from the perfume to them all.

The sun was rising as Joletta and Rone walked along the Moon Walk, the raised viewing platform that overlooked the Mississippi River in front of Jackson Square. The haze over the expanse of yellow-brown water was shafted by spears of light. The Algiers ferry made a sturdy track across the current while the foam of its spreading wake drifted slowly downstream.

The smell of coffee and beignets hung in the still, warm air, coming from the Café du Monde, which was located only a few blocks from the perfume shop. They had already made their early morning breakfast there. It was Joletta who had suggested that they walk along the river afterward.

Rone moved beside her with his hands clenched into fists in his pockets and the fine line of a frown between his brows. He had not touched her since he had taken her in his arms in the garden. That restraint was deliberate, Joletta thought. He had been helpful and efficient in dealing with the police; he had been considerate and endlessly understanding. But he had said nothing personal. As for the perfume, it had not been mentioned.

Joletta had a great deal to say about it. She waited until the moment seemed right, until they were quite alone on the walkway, leaning on the railing looking out over the water, before she began.

She told him first about the code to the old perfume, then she went on, “There’s something else. Violet was playing games with the formula, I think, though I’m not sure what was in her mind. Maybe she was afraid she might be killed and was determined to leave a record of who Allain had been, however concealed; maybe she had a Victorian preference for hidden messages and meanings — as in the language of the flowers. Or maybe the whole thing gave her some kind of comfort and satisfaction, I don’t know. All I know is that she changed things as she was rewriting everything that had happened.”

“Rewriting?” The expression in his eyes was keen as he gazed down at her.

“Exactly.”

It was easy enough to continue from there, going back in the story of Violet and Allain to the point where he had stopped reading and catching him up on what had taken place up to the day the last entry was made in Violet’s journal. She told him, too, the details she had not had time to tell her aunt and her cousins the night before, about her visit to Signora Perrino, and the many ways that Violet, and everyone else, had changed the formula.

“Violet sketched a lot of flowers and I did wonder about them, but there were too many for them to have any meaning; the blossoms and other sketches, you remember, were almost like idle work, doodling done while she paused to think. It was only after Signora Perrino showed me the necklace that they began to make sense. There was a design etched into the amethyst. It was the double-headed eagle with spread wings of the royal family of Russia.”

“Not a phoenix?”

She shook her head. “That was a false trail, almost. No, this was the symbol of the Romanovs. As soon as I saw it, I remembered a series of small drawings all about the same size that had been placed in the heading above a scattering of journal dates. One thing that had thrown me off about them was that they were not all of flowers. The drawings were of a rose, an orange blossom, a musk deer—”

“A fly trapped in amber,” he suggested with a shake of his head.

“You see it, don’t you?” she said in quick agreement. “Roses, R. Orange blossom, O. Musk, M. Amber, A. Also a botanical narcissus on the bulb, the orchid flower of the vanilla bean vine, and, finally, a wood violet.”

“Romanov.” He repeated the name quietly as he acknowledged the sense of the combined letters.

Joletta agreed. “I think Allain was the son of Alexander the First of Russia. The one bit of concrete information he gave about his father certainly fits, the meeting with Napoléon Bonaparte at Tilsit in 1807 — only a few years after the Egyptian campaign — when Napoléon is supposed to have given the perfume to Allain’s father.”

“But wouldn’t everyone have known if Allain had this connection?” Rone objected.

“Apparently, they did know, a lot of them; it seems to have been an open secret around the courts of Europe. That knowledge explains Allain’s unofficial standing with Louis Napoléon and Parisian society, as well as his supposed recognition elsewhere. And remember Napoléon the Third telling Violet that Allain and the Duc de Morny had something in common? I thought when I first read it that he was suggesting Allain was an illegitimate son, like Morny. But you may recall that Morny’s wife was the illegitimate daughter of Czar Alexander the First? That would have made her Allain’s half-sister. Allain would have been brother-in-law to Morny, therefore a connection, by marriage, to Napoléon the Third.”

“You think Allain was legitimate then?”

“He must have been, otherwise he would have been no danger to anyone.”

“But if he was Alexander’s legitimate son, why wasn’t he in Russia on the throne, instead of that idiot who started the Crimean War?”

“I don’t think he would have been recognized as the heir apparent. You see, Alexander the First is supposed to have died in 1825, something like two years before Allain was born. Since he had no legitimate children at the time, his brother Nicholas became Czar.”

Rone stared at her a moment. He took his hands from his pockets, not quite touching her arm as he indicated a bench just down from where they stood. As she moved to sit down, he lowered himself beside her with his arm along the back behind her. He lifted his hand, as if he would clasp her shoulder, then curled the fingers into a closed fist. Joletta waited, barely breathing, but he only looked away out over the river with set features while he slowly opened his fingers again.

“All right, let’s back up a minute,” he said in quiet tones. “You’re telling me Alexander the First was supposed to have died, but didn’t?”

It was an instant before Joletta could marshal her thoughts once more. Finally she went on. “That’s it. The death of Alexander the First is one of history’s unsolved puzzles. From all accounts he had been disenchanted with his position for some time and had made numerous threats to abdicate. He was unhappy in his marriage to a sickly wife who could not give him a legitimate heir and depressed over the death of an illegitimate daughter. He was heard to say several times that he would give anything to be relieved of the burden of the life he was leading. Then he died, so the official record shows, in a small town on the Sea of Azov. Because of bad weather, his body did not arrive in St Petersburg for proper burial until over two months later. By then, identification was difficult.”

“I can see how that might have been a problem,” Rone said dryly.

“Yes, and to make matters worse, his wife, the illness-prone czarina, died from shock and the rigors of the long funeral journey from Azov, leaving no one of high position who had seen him die. Rumors began to circulate immediately that the czar’s death was faked, that some poor courier of the same general size and appearance who died in an accident was passed off as his corpse. Alexander was supposedly taken away in the yacht of the Earl of Cathcart, an Englishman and former ambassador to Russia. The Cathcart family has never refuted the story and has, in addition, refused to make their family papers public. And the Russian government has always declined to permit the body to be exhumed for tests which might settle the question.”

Rone nodded his understanding. “After Alexander gets away, then, he lands in Italy and marries a diva of the opera who becomes Allain’s mother?”

“One whom he may or may not have known before his escape,” Joletta added in agreement.

“So Alexander, like the mythical phoenix, rose from the ashes of his own death.”

“That’s the way it looks. The insignia Allain wore may have been a new Romanov symbol, a phoenix within the laurel leaves of victory.”

“So what became of Alexander later? The way I remember it, a year or so after Allain was born, his old man is supposed to have tired of domestic bliss and skipped.”

“Or else he developed a great need to see Mother Russia again. There was a famous hermit at that time who was said to be the image of Alexander. People from the court at St Petersburg were supposed to have visited him regularly for advice, and to have gone into mourning when he finally died in 1864.”

“Which means this hermit, Alexander, would have been alive in 1855, when his brother Nicholas the First died,” Rone suggested.

“Therefore able to confer some kind of legitimacy on Allain if there had been a movement to bring him to power. Alexander had been a popular ruler; Nicholas was not. Nicholas spent his entire reign putting down revolutions of the kind that shook Europe in those years and brought Napoléon the Third to the throne. He learned to watch for the least sign of rebellion and crush it before it spread. He would not have looked kindly on a usurper — and neither would the faction which wanted to continue in power after his death with Nicholas’s son, Alexander the Second.”

Rone stared out over the water. “Nicholas might not have officially recognized Allain as his brother’s son, but he would have been aware of his existence and could possibly have paid men to keep tabs on him. The men who came to see Allain in Venice, then, might have been members of some group who wanted him to try for the throne. He refused them because he wasn’t interested, but also because he knew he was being watched.”

“Things were heating up because of the Crimean War,” Joletta added. “It looks as if assassins were sent after Allain earlier in Venice to remove him before he could make trouble. He became worried about them trying again, especially after the visit from the two men who may have proposed that he lead a revolt to gain the Russian throne. That’s when he hid Violet away in the country. Later, when Signora da Allori died, he became so fearful for Violet, and for the child she was carrying, that he left her while he tried — what? To make contact with Nicholas and renounce any claim he might have to the throne? To give himself up and accept imprisonment of some kind in exchange for safety for Violet and her baby? He never told Violet, so we don’t know.”

“The baby would not have been legitimate,” Rone objected.

“No, and I’ll admit that puzzles me. But the child was unborn at the time of the death of Nicholas the First, and Gilbert would not have been the first husband to die in the nick of time when a crown was at stake. That possibility was removed when Allain fell to the assassins in the garden — which is why the last man left standing that night made no great effort to kill Violet afterward. If there could never be a marriage, then she and her child ceased to be a threat.”

“So Allain came back to be with her and protect her and the baby,” Rone said, his voice reflective, “and, by dying, made certain that they would live.”

“No.”

Joletta let the word stand alone for long seconds. She couldn’t be sure of what she was about to say, and yet nothing else made sense, nothing else fit all the facts.

Rone gave her a deliberate look. “No,” he repeated quietly. “It was Giovanni who died, wasn’t it?”

She tried to smile, though it was a poor effort. “It must have seemed so perfect, a repeat of what had happened with Allain’s father, like some strange, macabre joke played by time. Giovanni and Allain were close in age and size and description. They died for the same cause, the same woman. Maria was there to lay out her son and wrap him in his winding sheet. Why else would Violet have left the necklace with the housekeeper and been so generous with the family, unless it was because Maria allowed them to bury Giovanni under Allain’s marker, Allain’s name?”

“While Allain became Giovanni.”

“And traveled to New Orleans to become a pharmacist and live beside Violet all his days. They never married because Gilbert had the last laugh after all. Violet might have forced him to agree to a divorce if he had been hale and hearty, but she could not publicly abandon an invalid husband who had tried to kill himself.”

“Could be they decided it was best that way, one less thing to fear in case Allain’s identity was ever discovered.”