“Irene! You let him believe that he had had his way with you? Why?”
“Because he cannot resist using his princely power to seduce any woman who catches his eye. I let him think I was already conquered territory; hence he can leave me alone for so long as we both shall live. That is the way of princes.”
“But your reputation. The Baron must certainly think—”
“If the Baron thinks that, he thinks no more of it than that the Prince has consorted with Sarah Bernhardt, or regularly visits the Princess de Sagan.”
“Or pairs of nameless women in a maison de rendezvous,” I added with a shudder, and not at the recent deaths, but at the more recent revelations of debauchery.
“In many maisons de rendezvous, Nell. Albert Edward is not choosy. Chambermaid or countess. Or opera singer. It is all the same to him.”
“How can you abide being misjudged?”
“This method saves me the future effort of repulsing a man who will be King. It is nudge, nudge, wink, wink, and over with. I do not doubt that many a woman favored with a nocturnal call from the Prince would wish she had my method.”
“And what do their husbands say, if they have them?”
“Many do. But the husband’s hands are tied. It is a privilege to have one’s wife coveted by a future king.”
“Nonsense! And what of Godfrey? If he should hear of this?”
“He will not, and if he did, he will understand my strategy.”
“He would not stand still for it.”
“No, but the damage is done, the seed is planted, the Prince is deceived. I was younger then, and it seemed a practical solution, particularly if I was ever to encounter the Prince again. And you see, Nell? It was only the Baron and yourself who heard the Prince’s implications. Neither of you will think the less of me for it, for both of you will recognize my deception for what it is.”
“Even the Baron?”
“Do you not think that he has politely and quietly conceded much for the friendship of the Prince? Perhaps even his beautiful and spirited English wife, Leonora?”
“His wife the Baroness? He is one of complaisant husbands that strew Bertie’s trail?”
“Rumor is not always credible, so I seldom bother believing it. You must understand, Nell, that wealthy men mark their achievement in life by what things belonging to other men they have taken: businesses, wagers, horses, women. And these aristocratic wives have been traded on the marriage market like thoroughbred horses on the race circuit. They have little to do but bear heirs and dress well. I think they relish these Society skirmishes in infidelity, gossip, and subterfuge. It relieves the boredom. Remember Alice Heine, the American banking heiress who has a French duke and a Monacan prince to her credit so far, as well as less well known gentlemen not suitable for matrimony. So no, I don’t doubt that the Baron has conceded much for the freedom the Prince’s friendship gives to him and those he cares about, which includes the far-flung members of both his large and international immediate family, and the many million members of his race. So have I, too, conceded a little to the Great Game of Western Europe. The future King of England is a mighty man indeed.”
“ ‘The future King of England is a mighty man indeed.’ That sounds like a patter line from a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta.”
“It does,” Irene said, laughing with delight, repeating the phrase in a perfect English accent. “Amazing how my time in the chorus has made its mark upon my diction.”
“It is pleasant to hear you speak with proper diction, even if I do not like the tune you sing: that the Prince’s power is absolute, and that we must, like all good subjects of Empire, bow to even a debaucher.”
She said nothing in reply. I was silent, too, listening to the Baron de Rothschild’s silken springs barely rustle as we hurtled over deeply rutted roads.
If they could keep so many serious secrets, so could I.
Our maid Sophie was much discommoded that we arrived home just as she was arising to tend to us. She is a tall, rawboned woman whose approval of us has somehow become more paramount than our approval of her work. Given Sophie’s irritation, and the fact that it is very hard to keep satisfactory servants in the country, especially in a small establishment such as ours, Irene and I allowed her to serve us breakfast and pretended to go about our day as usual.
I then tended to the menagerie of beasts I had accidentally acquired through the years, mainly from the fact that no one else would have them.
There was the parrot, Casanova, who had been trained to talk by a foul-mouthed master, and had survived yet another master—this one murdered—to require a new owner. I was elected. There was the huge black Persian cat, Lucifer, also never named by me. Irene had presented him to me on my arriving in Paris to join her and Godfrey safely across the Channel from the man, whom only I had reason to know she had more dire reason than anyone suspected to stay well away from. There was Messalina, named after the barbaric empress, a lithe mongoose we had inherited during our pursuit of the cobra-bearing would-be assassins of Dr. Watson, and dear to me for having a connection to Quentin Stanhope, of whom I shall not speak of more, here. And there were the snakes acquired as well in an outré manner.
Luckily, the bird and the snakes were restricted in movement, at least some of the time.
So I made my morning rounds and saw that all were fed and had clean quarters and were not engaged in eating each other, or seeking to avoid being eaten by each other.
Although I do believe that they were all evenly matched and hence unlikely to harm any but the unwary human.
I intended to see that the unwary human was not I.
While Sophie bustled about the rooms, scrubbing and dusting and sighing, I pretended to do needlework, and Irene pretended to read and play scales.
Finally, Sophie left us a cold supper and departed for her room to mend linens.
Irene and I took one look at the repast: chicken, and retired upstairs before the sun set to our respective featherbeds.
Once again I awoke in the utter dark of a French countryside, as far from Shropshire as I could ever have imagined myself to be, to the sound of strife.
I heard not thunderous rapping on our broad safe door, but cries and whimpers, almost of an abused child. The governess in me started up, hurling myself out of bed. The shock of cold boards on my bare feet woke me fully, and I fumbled for the candleholder. Not to light it, but to seize it as a weapon.
A louder cry made me launch myself at the dark, hunting for remembered objects and distances, smashing into the doorjamb, then lumbering down the hall, rubbing painful elbows with the rough stucco surfaces.
The sounds were coming from Irene and Godfrey’s bedroom.
I ran facefirst into the closed door, then flailed to find the handle. I must have sounded like a small herd of elephants to the room’s occupants, but the gasps and cries continued despite my clumsy arrival.
At last the cold iron of the doorknob turned with one desperate wrench, and I felt the door swing wide.
The muted sounds paused. Then Irene screamed, a spine-chilling, heart-stopping aria of a scream not ten feet from where I stood.
I threw myself in the direction of the bed to arrive and find the linens in an uprising. Had the robbers I feared the previous night come in fact now?
A form from the dark met me as if demon-possessed.
I was determined not to be overpowered. We lurched back and forth in the bed linens. I had no time to speculate on who—or what—I fought. I heard its labored breath, and my own. Something sharp cracked on my forearm, and I could not repress a cry of distress.
The bedclothes grew still of a sudden.
“Nell?” Irene’s voice asked, husky.
“Irene!”
“You are the attacker?” she demanded.
“You are the housebreaker?”
“We need some light,” she decreed firmly, as God must have on the First Day.
I felt the mattress shift as she knocked over
what sounded like a great many things on the nightstand.
At last a match scraped into a spark and then a candlewick tremored into flame with a pungent scent of sulphur.
We sat staring at each other over a tangled welter of bedclothes.
“Only you?” I was amazed.
“Only you!” she replied, with a relieved laugh. I noticed that her face was the same pale shade of ecru as the sheeting. And her laugh contained what even she would define as far too much tremolo.
“Why did you cry out?” I asked.
Irene’s face took on an expression I had never seen on it before. Sheepish, we would say in Shropshire.
“I, ah . . . it was a nightmare, Nell.”
“A nightmare! You never had nightmares in all the years we shared rooms in Saffron Hill.”
Irene pushed the feather pillows into a mound against the old wooden headboard, drew up her knees until her bed shirt’s ruffles covered her bare toes, and nodded.
“That’s true. But I had never seen Jack the Ripper’s work during all those years in Saffron Hill.”
I mounded the remaining pillows (she and Godfrey favored a great many for some reason) into my arms and collapsed upon them, feeling like a girl again, or at least a young governess who’d come in to quiet a charge’s nighttime frights.
“It was a dreadful scene, that is true,” I agreed, “but we were spared the worst by the confusing tangle of the clothing.”
“It did not spawn nightmares for you?”
“No. Not yet. I do not understand, Irene. You are ever so much more adventuresome than I am, yet I have never seen you so upset. We have seen corpses before.”
My blunt term made her shudder, then shiver. She drew the coverlet that was half on the floor close around her shoulders and almost up to her nose.
“It is my cursed theatrical imagination, Nell. Usually it works for me. No matter how . . . terrible and distasteful the scene, I pretend it is Otello, or Lucia di Lammermoor or La Traviata, so I am but a poor performer who frets my hour in the presence of whatever horror we have encountered. And the two drowned men we saw were victims of natural elements, even if one was deliberately held underwater. This was a scene of carnage incarnate. Yes, the dress was disarranged, but in such a way that I could guess at the unthinkable excess of the wounds.”
“So it is always a play to you: murder and crime?”
“No. I did not say that. Only that my part in it, my role as observer, feels as it would on a stage. I must play it to the hilt. Oh, dreadful metaphor! I can stave off full realization of what has happened because I see myself as playacting, do you understand, Nell? Tonight, when I slept, in my dreams, I was no longer playacting.” She bit her lip. “And I deeply regret leaving Pink in that place.”
“So do I! And not because of the poor dead women! I do not believe in ghosts, Irene, although I enjoy reading about them, but I do believe in sin, and that house of death is also a house of iniquity.”
Irene did not seem to be listening to me, but rather watching me with cautious wonder. “You are not . . . disturbed by what we saw last night?”
“Of course I am. Deeply. Imagine! Bram Stoker in that place of infamy. And the Prince of Wales, not only there, but possessed of the odious notion that you . . . that he . . . that the unthinkable—Yes, I was most distressed and had great trouble falling asleep. I must have spent half an hour twisting and turning until my linens make this tumult look like nothing.”
Irene said nothing for a moment, then smiled. “I wish our fender from Saffron Hill were here, and we could cook some tea and toast some scones.”
“Tea and scones are in the pantry far below,” I pointed out. “And neither of us is wearing bed slippers.”
“There is a decanter of brandy by the window seat.”
I stared in that dim direction. “I am not going to ice my feet again in search of spiritous liquors.”
“Oh,” Irene said, huddling under the coverlet and looking no more ready than I to leave the warmth our bodies had won from the bedclothes. “Perhaps I had the nightmare because Godfrey is gone.”
“Indeed. We are undefended in this drafty cottage. I almost wish we lived in Paris proper, and you can see how strongly I must feel to make such a despicable weakness known.”
“Indeed, Paris seems custom-made for the despicably weak,” Irene said with the old sly tone I recognized and took for her returning equanimity. She sobered instantly. “This is a bad business, Nell. Far worse than anything we have ever been drawn into before.”
“Why do you think I got no rest for half an hour upon retiring? I know that.”
“I should not have allowed you into this affair.” Her face and body twisted in uncharacteristic expression of an emotion I had never detected in her before: guilt.
“And who are you to ‘allow’ me or not allow me anything?”
“Now you would have me be condescending as well as overprotective. But I know far more of the ways of the world than you do, and would like to keep it that way.”
“So I am sure that I would prefer it, save that I deplore being ignorant, even if it is better for me, and I do see that it might be. How I wish I had never known that the Prince of Wales has been allowed to assume, to presume, to dare to think that you have succumbed to His Royal Lowness like apparently scores of women before you!”
“I was young when that choice was thrust upon me. I would not do it now. But you understand that it was the lesser of two evils at the time.”
“Your reputation—”
“Reputation can be falsely tarnished. At least in this case I did it myself. And I know it to be a falsehood. Before a Rothschild ever became a baron, the family reputation was impugned again and again. It still is.”
“Not by anything so distorting as your imagined alliance with the Prince of Wales!”
“No? What of the rumor that Baron Alphonse had a child out of wedlock by a mistress?”
“I suppose it could be true.”
“And that he sent mother and child packing, until they were forced into a brothel, then he came and knowingly patronized his own virginal daughter?”
“Baron Alphonse! I have some judge of character, Christian or not, and that certainly would be impossible. What a vile and twisted lie—”
“So you see what a minor deception my trick on Bertie was? He is a benign sort of tyrant, your Prince of Wales. If you allow him his self-deceptions, he will underwrite your own.”
“But it is corrupt! All society is corrupt.”
“Yes!” Irene trumpeted the single word like a professor well pleased with a student’s hard-won correct answer. “That is what I had hoped to spare you, but you will not let me.”
A silence fell between us.
“I am not having nightmares,” I said finally.
She was silent in turn, then sighed as if from the bottom of her soul.
“Not . . . yet.”
14.
Gypsy Fortune
He makes love in the same wild way that he drinks, all is
a sensual quest for some elusive transcendence. All his
appetites demand excess, even his love for the eerie gupsy
music that makes violins wail like wolves mating with banshees. . .
—NOTE TO MYSELF
FROM A YELLOW BOOK
I went among the Gypsies tonight.
The campsite reeked of dog dung and old piss, spilled wine, smoke and sausages, but the music and laughter were a symphony for my soul.
Paris, London, Rome, Vienna, Warsaw, Prague, St. Petersburg . . . they have their palaces and dynasties, theaters and opera houses and museums, their universities and government ministries, but those grand and glorious buildings and the pretenses of the people who haunt them are all so many houses of cards.
The old Gypsy, Tasarla, lays out her dirty pack of tarot, telling me my latest fortune. The tarot cards are worn to faint images. She seems to recognize each card by touch as much as sight. I cross her seamed p
alm (with the lifeline that curls around the mount of her thumb into the bracelet lines of the wrist and across the back of her hand) with foreign silver until she deals the cards again and again, giving me the amusement of an array of various fortunes.
Some are dire, some triumphant, all are ambiguous and oddly apropos.
To the people in the great cities and palaces, the Gypsies are a distant, stinking mist at the vast, unknown rim of the civilized world, where peasants toil to supply the wood and wheat that make the glittering cities go.
Most of the world is raw land ruled by rawer emotions, but the great in their cities seldom see that. Although I have walked on their marble floors and Aubusson carpets, I am never more alive than here, my feet on a carpet of dead leaves, my chair not gilded but a pile of tattered Turkey rugs.
The Gypsies drift at the edges of the great cities and settle like fog on the wastes between the towns, selling their inferior crafts and moving on before the mendacity is discovered, telling their mysterious fortunes, dancing and drinking around their campfires, to the music of fiddles and wolves.
They are an unholy lot of beggars too proud to beg and thieves too accomplished to bother stealing real riches.
The young girls wear their gold and grime like ornaments of equal value, and are given in marriage among themselves in childhood, reaching a man’s hands and first blood at the same time. The Gypsies give their women to men from the cities or towns at the drop of a copper, but as usual the exchange is always in their favor, and the favors given are short and unfulfilling.
He is here, of course, prodigiously drunk.
Although, with time, I have come to move among the Gypsies as I please (and as long as I pay sufficiently), a rare honor for a non-Romany, he pays nothing.
Like a young wolf he strides into their campground, pissing where he pleases.
His strange, savage vitality fascinates the Romany as much as it does me.
He brings his own brew, the potent liquor of a land even wilder than the imagination, and his intoxication never brings him to his knees, only to more fascinating excesses.
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