Dazzle - The Complete Unabridged Trilogy

by Judith Gould

  During the past five weeks, Senda had become increasingly and frustratingly familiar with the château. Now, once again facing the imposing ornate gates topped with the gilded crest of the Danilovs, she was reminded of that first time she had stood here and rung the buzzer.

  It had taken her two full weeks to track the Danilovs down after she had arrived. The Prince and his entourage kept an extremely low profile, and had she not had a sudden burst of inspiration, it might have taken much longer. Only when she spied the golden domes of the Russian Orthodox Church gleaming above the rooftops near the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire, did she know her search was over. Expatriate Russians flocked together like lost pigeons, and no matter how high or low their social station, their lives invariably revolved around the church.

  Who knew his flock better than the local priest?

  The unsteady pounding of her heart throbbed loudly in her ears as she pulled wide the heavy door and stepped into the church. Outside was Geneva, sunlight sprinkling silver dapples on windswept Lac Léman, but inside the church it was as if a giant, invisible hand had somehow transported her back in time, into the past, to Russia.

  Tears welled in her eyes. This church looked like the churches in Russia and even smelled the same—heavy and oppressive, thickly fragrant with incense and the hot wax emanating from the banks of flickering candles. Multitudes of dark unmoving eyes stared down at her from icon-hung walls, as though watching her every move and penetrating her very being. There was a hauntingly beautiful quality about it, but the overwhelming, even threatening, sense of déjà vu compelled her to forget her reason for coming, compelled her to back out into the world of sunshine. For it was in a church much like this that she had renounced her Judaism, had turned her back on all she had ever been and known, had vowed to embrace and uphold the tenets of Russian Orthodoxy.

  Painful memories swept over her, all the more painful because her conversion had been the catalyst that had pried apart the first menacing crack in what she had once been so certain was the stubborn, organic bedrock of the relationship she and Schmarya had shared.

  She wanted to flee in desperation.

  'Can I help you?' a voice asked softly out of the gloom in heavily accented French.

  Startled, she whirled about and was confronted with an old white-bearded priest who had stepped from behind a marble column. His slippers whispered on the stone floor and his heavy dark vestments rustled mysteriously about him. There was a gentleness in the sound of his baritone, and somehow his voice soothed her.

  'You are crying, my child.'

  Abruptly she made to leave. 'Perhaps I should not have come here,' she replied in Russian. She turned to go.

  'Nonsense.' He caught her arm, and led her to a pew. He sat beside her, folding his hands in his lap. He tilted his head and regarded her curiously. 'I have not introduced myself. I am Father Peter Moskvin.'

  'Senda Bora.'

  'A refugee.' It was a statement, not a question.

  She nodded in silence.

  'Can I be of assistance to you, Senda Bora?'

  'Do you know my friends, Father?' Senda asked eagerly, her pulse quickening. One part of her was desperate for the reply; the other was afraid of what she might hear. 'The Danilovs? Prince Vaslav and Princess Irina?'

  The old man's eyes lit up. 'Yes, I do, and they are here,' he said, smiling. 'But they never come into town to worship. They have a private chapel on their estate, which I myself blessed at their request.'

  She looked at him directly. 'I must try and reach them. Can you tell me where they live?'

  He smiled. 'Of course,' he said, patting her hand reassuringly. 'It is the Château Gemini, on the far side of the lake. Anyone can give you directions.'

  Armed with the address of the Danilov lakefront estate, she hurried back to the boarding house where she, Inge and Tamara rented rooms, stopping at a stationery shop along the way. She splurged on a creamy vellum envelope and several sheets of thick rag paper.

  As soon as she reached the boarding house, she hurried from the foyer up the steep stairs, pausing at both landings to catch her breath. Coughs racked her, and she hacked into her handkerchief before balling it up and continuing her climb to the three tiny rooms they shared under the sloping eaves.

  Inge, apparently alerted by the coughing seizures, was holding the door open. Breathlessly waving away her greetings, Senda headed for the little desk pushed against the dormer window. She sat down and with trembling hands took pen, inkwell, and blotting paper out of a drawer. She slipped the precious sheets of vellum from the plain brown wrapper and then stared, deep in thought, out past the lace curtains at the thin slice of lake visible between the two buildings.

  After several moments of deliberation, she dipped the pen into the jar of ink, and then the nib swooped unhesitatingly down on the paper, scratching its confident message in graceful letters.

  Your Highness

  Brows furrowing, she frowned at the salutation. How she despised this form of address when she wanted so badly to scrawl 'Dear Vaslav' instead. After sharing his bed and affections for so long, it seemed ludicrous to have to be so stiffly formal, yet propriety required she keep the message distant and polite. There was always the possibility, however remote, that her message could be intercepted by carefully drilled servants, misconstrued, and subsequently tossed out with the day's garbage, thereby never reaching Vaslav's hands. Best it be veiled and courteous, and that he received it.

  It has been a long time since we last saw each other, but I have finally reached Geneva. It would be marvellous—and to our mutual advantage—if we could meet and renew our past acquaintance. I can be reached at 21 rue de Moillebeau, number 6, and am waiting to hear from you.

  Senda paused, as if too weary to compose the required closing. The pen moved slowly now, each letter of each word harder to form. Strange, now that the message was written she should feel so empty, so depleted, the pen so heavy, as if it had been fashioned of gunmetal.

  I am, of course, available at your convenience. Meanwhile, I remain, respectfully,

  Your humble servant, Senda Bora

  She sealed the envelope, and for a long moment held it in front of her, staring at the name and address. It was done. The rest was up to him.

  Then a sudden thought occurred to her. No, it was not quite done.

  She picked up the pen again and scrawled the word 'Personal' in both Russian and French on the front of the envelope and underlined them with a single fluid slash.

  Now it was done.

  Inge didn't need to be told what was up. Wordlessly she took the envelope, glanced expressionlessly at it, and pulling on her coat, she trotted out to hand-deliver it to the Château Gemini immediately.

  Like a caged tiger, Senda prowled the rooms, anxiously awaiting Inge's return. Her eyes flitted constantly to the clock. The minute hand moved so slowly that at first she was certain the clock had stopped. But it ticked on noisily, proof of her own fraught nerves.

  Darkness had fallen by the time Inge returned. Senda rushed to her eagerly, eyes questioning, but Inge only shrugged and sighed and went to hang up her coat. Senda followed at her heels. 'Well?' she prompted, her eyes gleaming with a mixture of fear and anticipation. 'What happened?'

  'At the Château I knocked, and when he answered the door, I handed the envelope to the majordomo. He took it.'

  'And?' she demanded passionately.

  'I was told not to wait for a reply.' Inge shrugged negligibly. 'If there will be one—'

  'There will!' Senda interrupted with an indignant hiss. 'There has to be!'

  But no message arrived from Vaslav that day, or the next. As day after day crept by and there was still no word from him, Senda became increasingly moody and cantankerous. She was irritable toward Tamara and Inge, and actually had to restrain herself from lashing out at them.

  It was like living in a pressure cooker.

  By the eighth day, Senda knew there was only one avenue left open to her. She woul
d have to go and see Vaslav unannounced. She had followed the rules of etiquette to the letter by sending the note first. Since that had failed, she now had no other choice.

  Chapter 24

  Baroque in design, the gates were so intimidatingly lavish that they were a startling reminder of the mean circumstances she, Inge, and Tamara had been reduced to. But how well she knew that proud polished brass crest embellishing them! It seemed a lifetime had passed since she had last seen it. By reflex, she patted her hair, adjusted her felt hat, and smoothed her plain, forest-green cloth coat. Two years earlier, she would have been dressed in sumptuous furs and beautifully tailored dresses, and would have arrived by car, or a carriage with both a driver and a footman in attendance instead of having to take public transportation and endure a long, seemingly endless walk. But times had changed, and she'd had to change along with them, a rudimentary rule of survival. Were it not for her adaptability, would she have survived this long or gotten here at all? Wouldn't she have succumbed to her disease instead of fighting for life? Still, the plain, ankle-length dove grey dress was a painful reminder of how her fortunes had changed.

  But some things never changed. One look at the Château Gemini and it was obvious that the Danilovs still had a great deal of their massive fortune intact—reason enough for her to thank her lucky stars.

  As she pressed the buzzer set into the nearest of the two massive stone piers surmounted with carved pineapples, Senda could hear a bell jangling somewhere behind the wall. An elderly green-uniformed gatekeeper immediately shuffled out to answer the summons.

  He eyed her dubiously from behind the thick curlicued iron bars and made no move to unlock the gates. 'Yes, madame?' he asked, eyeing her with dry disapproval.

  So her apparel, which had seen far better days, was not lost on his wily old eyes.

  'I have come to see his Highness,' she stated succinctly.

  'Is his Highness expecting you?'

  Senda hesitated for only the briefest fraction of a second.

  'My good man, would I have wasted my time and come had I not been expected?'

  He put his face close to the gate and peered out sideways in both directions. 'Madame does not have a vehicle?' he asked in surprise.

  'It is a glorious day and I chose to walk. I had the car sent back to town.' She raised her chin, knowing that affecting airs was necessary. 'I shall be picked up later. If a car arrives for Madame Bora, please allow my driver admittance.'

  He hesitated, then unlocked a pedestrian gate so ingeniously crafted that it was impossible to tell it was set into one of the two larger ones.

  She smiled her thanks and slipped inside before he could question her further. She could hear him locking the gate behind her. 'The château is at the end of the drive,' he called after her, pointing. 'Just keep on the drive and eventually you'll reach it!'

  She turned and waved. 'Thank you,' she called back over her shoulder.

  The sweeping drive was longer than she had anticipated. On either side of it, the parkland was beautifully maintained, studded with enormous old trees, artfully pruned shrubs that gave the impression of having been not so much clipped as shaved, and marble copies of Greek and Roman statuary. She heard loud shrieks and turned her head, gasping at their source: An army of snow-white peacocks, pulling their heavy tails behind them like proud brides, strutted, impossibly beautiful, between the trees.

  Even as she neared the château, she could see little of it. As though they wanted to hug it protectively within their leafy bosom, the trees suddenly thickened, and she could only glimpse a sea of verdigris-aged copper rooftops rising above them. Then the trees abruptly cleared and the château reared its magnificent symmetry before her.

  Squaring her shoulders as if preparing to go into battle, she climbed the low stone steps to the intimidatingly scaled double doors, tossed back her head, and reached forward to lift the enormous brass knocker. Almost magically, the door opened from within before she could touch it. Startled, she withdrew her hand and instinctively moved a step backward.

  'Can I help Madame?' a man croaked, disapprovingly.

  Senda stared. Standing before her, his bald head glossy from polish or wax, was a thin, ugly man in the formal attire of the majordomo. The black tailcoat and detachable wing collar of his shirt did little to soften his angular features. In the shadows behind him stood two immobile men with inconceivably wide shoulders. Guards of some sort, she surmised.

  Senda said softly, 'I have come in the hope of speaking with Prince Vaslav.'

  'Madame does not have an appointment.' The majordomo's voice was a froglike croak.

  Senda shook her head ruefully. 'No,' she admitted, 'but he . . . and the Princess . . . and I were close friends in Russia. Tell his Highness Madame Bora requests to see him.'

  Did the name spark a flicker of recognition within those bulbous eyes? Or had she imagined it?

  'Perhaps an appointment would be possible,' he said smoothly. 'Could you leave your calling card, please?'

  She glanced closely at his face, but an inscrutable veil seemed to have slithered down over his eyes. If he had shown any recognition at her name, it was impossible to tell now.

  'Then they are not in?' she asked.

  He shook his head regretfully. 'I am sorry, but they have left for several days.'

  She tightened her lips, and cleared her throat, struggling valiantly to retain her poise. 'In that case, I see that I will have to leave my card.' She could feel him waiting stoically as she opened her purse and reached inside. Her fingers groped among its meagre contents, keeping up the charade. She would never admit that she had no calling cards. Finally she sighed and smiled disarmingly, a wry expression in her eyes as she snapped the purse shut. 'I seem to have left them at home,' she said. 'How silly of me.'

  He appeared unperturbed. 'If Madame will be so good as to wait a moment, I shall get something to write with.' He left the door open, with her standing on the other side of the threshold. A mere doorway, she thought, has become a visible line of demarcation I dare not cross uninvited. Then she looked up. He was back with a polished sterling silver salver on which lay a tiny gold pencil and miniscule pad. She wrote her name and address, smiled her thanks, and turned, leaving with as dignified a carriage as she could muster. Tears of frustration stung in her eyes.

  Suddenly she stopped dead in her tracks. Ice, not blood, coursed through her veins as realization dawned.

  The gates.

  The gatekeeper had let her in, after she had told him that she wanted to see the Prince. The gatekeeper, better than anyone, would know his employer's comings and goings. He would have told her Vaslav was gone. Wouldn't he?

  Her face felt as if it were on fire, an unbearable coughing fit racked her chest, burned her lungs. So Vaslav was in. Only she couldn't get to him.

  Why. Why?

  In his second floor study in the Château Gemini, Count Kokovtsov stared at the tiny slip of paper in his hand. The veins and arteries stood out on his high domed forehead as his glossy, lacquered fingernails drummed a steady tattoo on the finely inlaid Louis XV desk. His brow was furrowed, his teeth clenched.

  Common sense told him that he should not feel consternation or surprise at the woman's unannounced visit. He knew better than to believe she could be as easily evaded as the intercepted letter to Vaslav could be burned. Senda Bora was, after all, a determined, resourceful bitch. Hadn't he anticipated her coming in person after receiving no reply to her letter? And wouldn't the bitch return time and again? Yes, and he was certain that eventually, despite any obstacles he might erect in her path, she would connive some devious way to contact Vaslav.

  Which was precisely the one thing he could not afford to let happen.

  Thoughtfully, he pushed back his chair and moved over to the tall French doors overlooking Lac Léman. He parted the heavy curtains swagged over the windows. Through the glass, he could make out two small figures down by the lakeside. Then he saw a third figure climbing the steps of
the stone jetty to join the other two waiting on top.

  Mordka scowled contemptuously before letting the curtain sway back into place. So Vaslav had just finished his daily swim in the chilly waters of the lake, the usual two attendants waiting subserviently to drape his shivering body in heavy, heated robes. Despite his state of mental and physical depletion, Vaslav Danilov still insisted on taking his daily dip, just as he had in Russia, no matter how frigid the weather, or how freezing the water.

  Mordka's lips curled into an ugly smile as he turned away from the window and paced the study. Unconsciously, he crumpled the slip of paper into a tiny wad.

  Well, his cousin wouldn't be taking these refreshing little dips much longer, he thought with satisfaction. Soon now, Vaslav would be out of the picture, and the mighty Danilov fortune would be his, and his alone. From the desk he took a sheaf of documents, representing another parcel of the Danilov fortune which would be his, then, pausing to stare at the tiny ball of paper still in his hand, he strode swiftly toward the fireplace and tossed it in. The flames licked greedily at it, turning the paper black before consuming it altogether. With the physical evidence of her visit destroyed, he already felt much better. Then he went downstairs to take tea in the salon overlooking the lake. The papers were tucked under his arm and he hummed softly to himself, his mood buoyant and self-congratulatory. He felt utterly confident.

  After all, weren't the Danilovs always so bovinely content, so idiotically manageable and agreeable at tea?

  Come to think of it, they were becoming more and more agreeable all the time!

  Chapter 25

  Her second visit.

  This time she was received quite differently at the château. The same majordomo opened the door, but his manner was decidedly less superior. 'If Madame will be so good as to follow me?' An unctuous, sweeping hand invited her to enter.