A Collector of Hearts

by Sally Quilford

  “No, darling. You deserve far better than that,” said Blake, reading her mind. The Count smiled kindly, suggesting he too understood what Caroline had been about to offer. “Very well, Count, I will do as you ask. Especially as I know Caroline will be severely disappointed in me if I don’t, and that I could not bear. If I can’t be anything else in life, I try to be the man she thinks I am.”

  “The man I know you are,” said Caroline.

  “But before we do anything, Count,” said Blake, “we have to find out who’s stolen the Cariastan Heart. I am not leaving here until I know Caroline’s name has been cleared.”

  “Darling, you’ve got more important things to worry about …”

  “It’s not open to discussion,” Blake said.

  Chapter Nine

  “I think we can assume,” said the Count, “that our impostor is involved in some way.” It was the early hours of the morning, and Caroline, Blake and the Count had met up again in the empty ballroom, to try to retrace everyone’s steps.

  “Mrs Oakengate was sure he was standing near her when the Heart was stolen,” said Caroline.

  “How could she tell?” said Blake. “It was hard to know who anyone was.”

  “Today … or was it yesterday?” said Caroline. She rubbed her tired eyes. “I’ve lost track of where we are. Anyway, I found a room off the passageway.”

  “The one with the mirrors,” said Blake.

  “Yes, that’s right. I was sure I saw Lady Cassandra in there. At the time I assumed it was a ghost. No, don’t laugh. I’ve been seeing strange things at night.”

  “But it could have been someone trying on the costume,” said the Count.

  “Exactly. Mrs Oakengate insists that she had the idea of me dressing up as Lady Cassandra. I’ve said all along – forgive me, Count as I know you’re fond of her – that Mrs Oakengate could not have come up with that on her own.”

  “I am inclined to agree, Miss Conrad. She is magnificent, but she is also remarkably self-absorbed.”

  Caroline smiled. “Yes, I’m afraid she is rather. But she insists she did. That suggests to me that either she doesn’t want to admit it wasn’t her idea or …”

  “She’s been made to think it was her idea,” Blake said, finishing Caroline’s sentence for her.

  She nodded. “It’s easily done. Aunt Millie does it to Uncle Jim all the time. If she wants something and he says no, she has a way of making him think it was his idea. It’s very clever.”

  “I can’t wait to meet this Aunt and Uncle of yours,” said Blake. “Though whether good old Uncle Jim is going to bash me on the nose after what you’ve told him about me, I don’t know.”

  “I shan’t let him,” said Caroline, reaching out and taking his hand. It only served to remind her that she would soon lose him forever. “So if the impostor prince – Ronald Stephens – remained standing near Mrs Oakengate, that must mean he has an accomplice. Someone had to switch the lights off.”

  “Yes, but then someone, dressed as Lady Cassandra, had to steal the Heart before the lights came back up,” said Blake. “There just wasn’t time for someone to get from the cellar to the ballroom. I timed it. That must mean two accomplices. Has the impostor shown a preference for anyone else this weekend? Apart from Mrs Oakengate.”

  “Only that dizzy blonde actress,” said Caroline. “The one Anna Anderson works for. I forget her name. She was dressed as Marie Antoinette. The costume was quite elaborate too. I don’t think she’d have had time to change into the Lady Cassandra dress. I don’t remember seeing her when the lights went off, but that doesn’t mean anything. I wasn’t really looking. That’s the trouble really. There were so many people, and none of them in their normal clothes, and everyone wore a mask. I hadn’t yet worked out who everyone was, apart from Jack Henderson and you, Blake, being the Harlequin, and the Count being the Laughing Cavalier. I only knew the actress was Marie Antoinette because of her stupid laugh.”

  “I would gladly lock her up for that laugh alone,” said the Count, rolling his eyes heavenward. “Did the servants see anyone go past them to the cellar?”

  “No,” said Blake. “I asked them when I went down there.”

  “But they wouldn’t have had to go past the servants,” said Caroline. “The mirror room leads into the secret passageway, as does mine and Mrs Oakengate’s. Someone need only go upstairs, perhaps saying they’re going to the bathroom, and they can get down there that way. Or any other room that we haven’t yet discovered which has a door to the secret passage.”

  “I wonder If they knew about the mirror room leading to the secret passage before you went in there and caught them, Caroline,” said Blake.

  “What do you mean?”

  “They were visiting your bedroom at night, you said, and we assumed that’s because they wouldn’t have got past the servants in the day time.”

  “I’d forgotten about that. Yes, perhaps the thieves only realised when they saw me. But they’d already hooked up the Lady Cassandra plan by then. They must have, because Mrs Oakengate needed time to order the outfit to arrive for today … yesterday, I mean. Before the ball.”

  “Plan B,” said the Count. “You say that Lady Cassandra has visited you at night. So it is possible they tried to sneak into your room at night, to find the Heart, and used the Lady Cassandra outfit so that should you wake up, you would think you were being haunted. When that did not work, because the Heart was not here yet, they probably realised how much you looked like Lady Cassandra and managed to relate that to Victoria Oakengate in the way you said. By making it appear that she had thought of it. If only we could find out what was said to her and by who.”

  “Yes, Plan B,” said Blake. “That makes sense.”

  “It occurs to me that Stephens would know,” said Caroline. “After all, the impostor is his son. It seems that Stephens was told it was meant to be a bit of fun. A joke.”

  “Some joke if he knocked out his own father,” said Blake.

  “Perhaps he didn’t. Perhaps one of his accomplices did. I wonder how much Jack Henderson was in on the joke. What did he say when you told him the prince was an impostor?” Caroline turned to Blake.

  “I didn’t. I only told him I was the owner’s grandson and that I would like to stay here rather than the pub. I showed him the picture in the drawer to prove it. The one with my grandfather. Jack couldn’t really refuse. I agreed to pretend I was a late visitor, so that the guests wouldn’t be confused as to who their host was. That suited my purposes because I didn’t know how much the impostor knew about Prince Henri. To be honest with him coming here, I thought he must know everything. It was rather a big coincidence when you think about it.”

  “Doesn’t Stephens know about you?” asked Caroline. “Surely he would have told his son.”

  “No one knows. My mother’s heart was broken in two when my father threw her over. So when the Cariastan government turned her into a myth, she decided she would rather be one. All the staff here know is that my mother fell in love and married abroad, and that her husband discarded her. She gave me her maiden name – my grandfather’s name.”

  “What do we know about Jack Henderson and his wife?” asked Caroline. “It seems we’ve missed them out of our deliberations completely. Count? You were invited this weekend, so I assume you know them.”

  “I invited myself, Miss Conrad. When I heard his Royal Highness was going to be here, I came to sound him out, to see if he was suitable to take over Cariastan. I contacted Mr Henderson to ask if that might be possible, playing on my friendship with Mrs Oakengate, and hinting that I may be willing to finance one of Mr Henderson’s future productions.”

  “Jack Henderson said the embassy contacted him to ask if the prince could attend,” said Caroline. “But that can’t be true, can it? And I was just thinking how odd it was that Jack also dressed as a Harlequin tonight, though I’m not sure how that fits in. Did he know what you would be wearing, Blake?”

  “No, not at a
ll. I just grabbed a costume from an old dressing up box we have in the attic. So that’s a dead end.”

  “If only it had not been a costume party,” said the Count. “It is confusing that no one wore their own clothes.”

  “Oh!” Caroline jumped up off her chair and stood in the middle of the ballroom. The mirrors were still set around it. “I remember seeing my reflection in one of the mirrors as I danced with Blake, and thinking it didn’t look quite right. I couldn’t work out what was wrong with it. I suppose I just assumed it was the natural distortion caused by the mirrors. But now I think I’ve got it. Blake wasn’t in the reflection, and I was standing in a different position.”

  “That’s because you saw the other Lady Cassandra,” said Blake, standing up and joining her. “The impostor. There are far too many around here for my liking.”

  “Yes, there are. It’s odd, but the term smoke and mirrors kept coming into my mind, and I think that’s exactly what this was.” Caroline moved around the dance floor, trying to recreate her dance with Blake, in an attempt to find the mirror she had seen. “It’s this one!” She went to a mirror on the left hand side of the room, and stood in front of it, before turning and looking at the room, then back at the mirror again. “What parts of the room does this mirror pick up? The band. I could see them through it, and a little of the wall to the side of them. And those tables. Those in that corner…where …” Caroline ran across the room to the cupboard from which Stephens had taken a sweeping brush. She opened it and lifted out a bag. “I know who it was now. The one person who wasn’t wearing a costume tonight. All she had to do was slip into the closet whilst no one was looking and put on this!” With a flourish she pulled out a green velvet dress, a black cloak and a red wig.

  “Well done, Sherlock,” said Blake, smiling. “Erm …now you’ve got the answer could you tell us?”

  “The prince, our impostor, doesn’t really have to do anything, apart from be waiting, in his highwayman costume with his swag bag. He’s supposed to be a prince, so no one is going to ask to search him, are they? My guess is that his father, Stephens, told him about the secret passageway years ago, or maybe he found it himself when he stayed here, but didn’t know every room it led to. The dizzy blonde, dressed as Marie Antoinette, says she is going to powder her nose. It’s the most natural thing to do at a party. She would probably have used the cloakrooms near the cellar if I hadn’t revealed the entrance to the mirror room. That’s better for her, in terms of not being noticed. I remember the day after we got here, Stephens found her in the kitchens. She said she’d got lost, but perhaps she hadn’t. I was sure I saw someone behind me in the mirror that day.”

  “So she was heading for the cellar, or coming back from it,” said Blake.

  “Exactly. So at last night’s party, if she can’t get through the kitchens, she goes upstairs, then down the secret passageway into the cellar and waits. Anna Anderson, the actress’s supposed secretary who told me she’s a bit-part actress and, I suspect, the real brains behind it all. So she slips into this cupboard, changes into the Lady Cassandra costume, and moves into the ballroom. I saw her in the mirror and thought it was me. Only no one else notices she’s there because everyone is in fancy dress, and several people are wearing the same costume anyway, including Blake and Jack Henderson as Harlequin, a few highwaymen, half a dozen Marie Antoinettes and goodness knows how many vampires, ghosts and skeletons. She goes across to Mrs Oakengate, at which point the lights go down – if you remember Blake, the song had just come to an end – which was no doubt the cue for the dizzy blonde to turn the lights down. Anna snatches the Cariastan Heart from Mrs Oakengate’s neck, and secretly hands it to our highwayman who stuffs it into his bag. Then the lights go back up, and Lady Cassandra dashes back across the room to the closet, helped by the confusion of the distorted mirrors, leaving me to carry the can.”

  “Genius!” said Blake. “Utter genius.”

  “Yes, they were very clever,” said Caroline.

  “Not them, darling, you.”

  “Well, of course,” said Mrs Oakengate the next morning as Caroline, Blake, Mrs Oakengate, Aunt Millie, Uncle Jim and the Count sat in the breakfast room, drinking coffee. “I knew the truth all along. I only went along with pretending I thought it was Caroline in order to let the perpetrators think they had gotten away with it.”

  “Of course,” said Aunt Millie, dryly. It had been wonderful for Caroline when Millie and Jim arrived, both taking her into their arms. Despite having cleared up the mystery of the Cariastan Heart, she had still not come to terms with the fact that her own heart was breaking.

  “And I knew when that Anna Anderson person suggested you looked like Lady Cassandra that she was up to something.”

  “Naturally,” said Blake. “And now the police have locked them all up. It’s really all thanks to you, Mrs Oakengate.” The police had searched the impostor’s room, and found the Cariastan Heart in the Highwayman’s swag bag, just where Caroline said it would be. Anna Anderson had broken down and confessed that she had heard about the party whilst working on Henderson’s film, and that the Cariastan Heart was going to be there. Remembering that her friend, Ronald Stephens, had a father who worked at the Abbey, she had hatched the plot, with Stephens and another struggling actress friend, to steal the diamond. Ronald Stephens had told his father that his appearance as the prince was a joke set up by Jack Henderson and that the truth would be revealed on Halloween.

  “I don’t seek any praise for doing the right thing,” said Mrs Oakengate, her head held high. “I am, of course, sorry that I had to upset you, Caroline.” For the first time her voice held a note of sincerity. “I have to say you’ve been my favourite companion ever. Much less trouble than your Aunt Millie.”

  Aunt Millie gave a benign smile.

  “But now, I suppose,” Mrs Oakengate continued, “you’ll be going away with young Mr Laurenson. Or should I say Prince Henri?”

  “No,” said Caroline, her voice barely above a whisper. “That isn’t possible. Blake … the prince … has more important things to consider.”

  “I promise you,” said Blake, reaching across the table and taking her hand, “nothing in my life will ever be as important to me as you are. Count Chlomsky?” He turned to the Count.

  “Yes, Your Highness.”

  “Am I right in thinking that no one but the people in this room knows the truth about me?”

  “That is true,” said the Count.

  “So really, if your Prince Henri were already to have taken a wife before he is told the truth of his parentage – because of course, it is highly likely he did not know until you found him – then the people of Cariastan would think very little of him if he discarded her along the way. Especially as they have more pressing problems to consider at the moment. I would need a fortnight at least, after which time, you could make the announcement of my discovery.”

  “It seems,” said the Count, looking at his fingernails, “that my search for Prince Henri will have to continue for a little while longer. I think it could perhaps take another month. But no longer than a month, mind you.”

  “But I thought we’d found him,” said Mrs Oakengate, who had not quite followed the conversation as well as the others. “Isn’t he Mr Laurenson?”

  “Really?” Caroline said to Blake. “You would be willing do that?”

  “I would do anything so as not to lose you, darling. You’re the one thing in my life I never want to have to give up. The people of Cariastan will love you as much as I do. And if they don’t, damn it, I’ll be the king, I’ll have them all thrown in jail.” He turned to the Count and said, “That was a joke by the way.”

  “I am glad to hear it Your Highness.”

  Chapter Ten

  Blake stood up and took Caroline by the hand. “Come with me, I’ve got something to give you.” He led her from the breakfast room and across the hallway, into the study. Once there, he pulled a portrait open to reveal a safe hidden behind it.
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br />   “Here,” he said, once he had opened the safe. “The one place our thieves never thought to look! I bought this after my mother died. I don’t know why. On a whim I suppose. To own a little bit of Cariastan.” He held a small box out to Caroline. She opened it to reveal the real Cariastan Heart, glittering in a gold setting. She could see then how different it was to the fake. Anyone viewing them together would know the difference. It sparkled more, and the diamond was of a much richer quality, not just in monetary terms, but also in hue and perfection. “I always said I’d give it to a woman who really deserved it,” he said. “The woman I eventually gave my heart to. So now, my love, it’s yours.”

  “Oh, Blake, it’s beautiful, but you don’t have to give this to me.”

  “Yes, I do. Consider it an engagement present. I can’t think of anyone who would look more beautiful wearing it. Will you marry me? Even though it means we’ll have to go and run a country that nobody has ever heard of?”

  “I would marry, even if it meant we had to run a pig farm in Yorkshire.”

  “I wish that was an option,” he said, with a hint of sadness. “Because then we would only belong to each other.” He took her into his arms and kissed her, holding her for the longest time. “Are you a witch?” he whispered afterwards. “Are you going to cut out my heart and keep it in a box?”

  “Only to keep it safe next to mine,” she whispered back. “And it will be more precious to me than any jewels. We do belong to each other, Blake. No matter what happens in the future. Remember that when things get difficult. I love you, and I’ll always love you.”

  “I love you, and believe it or not, if Chlomsky hadn’t agreed to my terms I’d have told him to go to hell.”