“Do you identify with her?” he asked, gesturing to the Magdalen’s face when he reached the princess.
“Douglas?” The princess stepped off her stool and turned, smiling. Her smile melted slowly as she looked at him, even though he thought his impassivity remained. Had he always looked at her with calf eyes before now?
“Do you? Mourn for your cousin every time we close in on him? Do you weep?”
Her eyes widened and she shook her head. Hands reached out to him. “No, of course not. He’s a killer. He’s mad.”
He closed the distance between them and took her arm, ignoring the outstretched hands. “You need to come with me.”
“Yes, of course, Douglas. I’m just finishing here.”
Ignoring her glance back at the painting, he pulled her out of the room. “Where is he, in the hotel?”
“Who? No, what?” She glanced around.
“Your cousin. Is he here?”
“I don’t think so. What is this about?” Her skin creased between her eyebrows.
He pulled her down the hall, into the service lift. As they descended, she asked, “Where are we going?”
“To Konstantin. Where is he?”
“I don’t know, Douglas. What is happening?”
She pulled her arm, but he didn’t release it. He shook her arm as the lift stopped on the ground floor. “You were seen with him outside this hotel. Where is he, Olga?”
Her lips parted and her shoulders shook. When she said nothing, he dragged her out of the lift and past the Reading Room and the shop where he’d made love to her such a short time ago. He forced those thoughts to the back of his mind.
Pushing through the front door of the hotel, he saw that the clouds had moved again. Sharp slashes of rain descended, catching his cheeks with bursts of cold.
Johnnie dashed up to them, holding an umbrella. “I have your taxicab, sir.”
Glass pulled Olga underneath the umbrella and marched her toward the cab. The driver had remained in his seat. Johnnie opened the door, and Glass pressed Olga’s head down so that she’d enter.
“Excuse me sir, but the princess doesn’t have her coat on.”
“Unfortunate,” Glass said, flipping the doorman a coin. “Thank you.”
When Johnnie had shut the door, he leaned forward to speak to the driver, ignoring the princess’s frightened eyes. “Holloway Prison, my good man.”
As the taxicab pulled away from the curb, tears formed in the princess’s eyes and dripped down her perfect cheeks. He ignored the subtle histrionics. If she wanted to wait until they reached the women’s prison to tell him the truth, it didn’t matter to him.
They would be going to the prison either way.
“Why?” she asked in a low voice.
“The prison is only about four miles from here,” he said in a calm tone. “You have that long to tell me where he is.”
“I don’t know.” Her voice shook a little. “He threatened your father when he found me.
“Where was he living when last you knew?”
Her head drooped on her elegant, regal neck. “I don’t know.”
“You saw him in the hotel. Where else?”
“I took him to the boardinghouse to make calls. I thought that was the last I’d see of him.”
He leaned forward and tapped the driver’s shoulder. “Change of plans. Montagu Square.”
“Right you are, sir.” The taxicab came to a stop at a street’s end and turned.
Glass sat back and returned his attention to the princess. “What else?”
“Nothing else,” she whispered. “After you gave me the knife. It didn’t do any good. He was in the hotel again, in the Salter’s room. I didn’t know what to do.”
“So you risked poor Bert Dadey’s life to save your own skin? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I was frightened.”
“You were covering for him.”
“He threatened my sister. And your father. But I only saw him once. I have no idea where he is.”
“Your sister?” Glass asked. “What does he know about your sister?”
“He said she’s in Shanghai, and he knows people.”
“You don’t even know if your sister is alive, and you are risking half of London or worse, not to mention betraying me.” Glass stared out the window at the rain. No wonder he hadn’t married before now. He couldn’t trust anyone, not even a woman he’d cherished, caressed, perhaps even impregnated.
They reached the boardinghouse. “It wasn’t like that, Douglas,” she protested, but he pulled her from the taxicab and told the driver to wait. He rapped sharply on the door when he arrived at the top of the steps, the shivering princess next to him.
Bert Dadey opened the door after his usual fumbling with the lock. His wrinkled face was wreathed in a smile when he saw the princess. “Another week, another visit! So happy to see you, Yer Highness.”
She forced a smile. “Good afternoon, Mr. Dadey. I wondered if you had seen my cousin since I brought him here to use your phone?”
“Haven’t seen him at all today,” Dadey said. “Would you like a cuppa?”
“Today? You mean you saw him yesterday?”
“Why yes, miss. He took a room here.”
“We’ll need to see the room. We’re in a rush,” Glass said, securing Olga’s arm with his hand.
“Must be. You need a coat, Princess,” Dadey told her. “Did you leave one here?”
“In a rush,” Glass repeated. “When did you see Mr. Novikov last?”
Bert’s eyes lifted skyward. “Not since yesterday evening. But he’s not my only tenant. Someone else might have let him in, and my sciatica was acting up this morning, so I didn’t come down early.”
“So you think he might have been and gone?”
“Really couldn’t say, my lord.”
Glass nodded briskly, reached into his coat, and pulled out a card. He handed it to the man. “Please contact Detective Inspector Dent at Special Branch immediately if you see Mr. Novikov again. It’s a matter of national security. Don’t let the man know you are making the call.”
Dadey’s eyes rounded. “Yes, my lord.” His head swiveled on its thin, sagging neck. “Are you well, Yer Highness?”
She didn’t even fake a smile this time. “No. We need my cousin.”
“You can trust me,” Dadey said, thumping his sunken chest. “I’ll call this man as soon as I see your cousin.”
“I’d like to check his room.”
“Of course, my lord.” He pointed up. “Yer princess knows where it is. Her old room.”
Glass went up the steps, followed by Olga. Konstantin’s door, when she indicated it, wasn’t even locked. The room bore few signs of habitation. He quickly went through the small chest of drawers, lifted the mattress, poked here and there, but there were no signs of bomb-making equipment, no letters or telegrams.
Glass nodded his thanks when they returned to Dadey, pulled Olga back down the short flight of stairs to the pavement, and thrust her back into the taxicab. “Thank you for waiting. Holloway Prison again, please.”
“Sir,” the driver said, and pulled back into the center of the road on the quiet street.
“Why are we going to a prison?” Her lips tightened.
“To keep you safe, Princess.”
* * *
On Wednesday morning, the telephone in Glass’s suite rang for him for the first time. He took off the headphones, set them on the ledge behind the Firebird, and picked up the receiver. “Yes?”
“Quex needs to see you immediately,” Miss Drover said. “He is at the Piccadilly safe house.”
“The Russians are having a meeting,” Glass said. “I shouldn’t leave. They are discussing brandy, which might mean another smuggling campaign is underway.”
“You don’t have a choice, sir,” Miss Drover said crisply. “It’s Quex.”
Glass placed the receiver back on its hook. He’d just changed the disk. Hopefully the Russians’
meeting wouldn’t last longer than his recording. Pain speared his palms. He glanced down and saw he’d been digging his fingernails into them. Half moons marked his skin.
He’d felt less stress in the trenches. But he hadn’t slept a wink with his princess locked away in the hospital wing at Holloway. What choice did he have? She was in danger and was dangerous. He had thought they were past all subterfuge. She was Russian. He’d forgotten that. No end to subterfuge. And yet, he’d offered her everything she might have wanted: a home, money, a British title, a husband, an escape. Why throw it away on a mad cousin?
He pushed the thought of the threat against her sister away, her mutterings about a threat to his father. Surely she’d given up her sister for dead years ago, like he’d mourned his lost brothers. She could not have kept the hope alive that she’d see her sister alive in this life. It was only through the efforts of someone like him, a spymaster, that a lost Russian princess could be found in the Orient and shipped to London. If indeed she ever arrived, much less arrived intact and sane, whoever Princess Fyodora Novikova had been, she was surely a different person now.
Half an hour later, he rapped on the rear door of a milliner. The man who opened it was not the type to be involved in the making of hats. He grunted when he recognized Glass and let him through. A door at the back of the storeroom led to a set of narrow stairs. On the second floor was Quex’s favorite meeting room, a floor below what passed as the safe house.
Quex sat in shadow, his chair against a wall. But next to him stood a man Glass recognized, an equerry to the king.
“Lord Walling,” the man said.
“Captain Drew.” Glass stepped forward and shook his hand. “Are the Bolshies targeting royal property? I’ve heard nothing of the sort.”
“What are you hearing?” Quex asked.
“I think another smuggling operation is underway. The last time we heard this kind of coded conversation, we found the Russian prostitutes coming in at the docks.”
“Did you get a firm date and time?”
“No, I was called away to this meeting. But I’m recording. Hopefully I’ll get the information we need.”
“Good,” Quex said acerbically. “Now listen to this.”
“His Majesty is very fond of Grand Duchess Xenia,” Captain Drew said. “And the grand duchess is very fond of Princess Olga Novikova.”
Glass winced. He knew what was coming. “Yes.”
“You are engaged?”
“Yes, not formally announced yet, not with this business going on, but my father knows.”
“So do we,” Captain Drew said. “You have no right to arrest Russian princesses, no right to put them into Holloway.”
Glass clenched his jaw. “She’s not in the main population but the hospital wing. It’s been done before with high-born women.”
“What possible justification can you have?”
“How can you ask me that? She’s been aiding her cousin, who is a bomb expert and who killed my operative a few days ago.”
“Aiding?” Quex asked.
“I’m not saying it isn’t under duress. He’s made threats that she seems to believe, however intelligent she usually appears to be, but aiding him she is. I had her take me to his last known location.”
“Gone, I suppose.”
“Of course. He moves around like a rat. You never find him in the same place twice.”
“You will release her today,” Captain Drew said. “And take her personally to the grand duchess. I would suggest a special license and a fast marriage to erase the stain of what you have done with her.”
“She’s making a bad situation worse,” Glass said, pounding his fist against the wall. “He always finds her and takes her money, then uses it to keep out of our way.”
“She is a princess,” Captain Drew with an inexorable air. “I don’t care about that quasi-Egyptian princess who was in Holloway a couple of years ago. She was essentially a whore. This Novikova woman is anything but, and she has protectors.”
“Then why has she been working as a chambermaid the last year?” Glass demanded. “Where were her protectors then?”
Chapter 17
I am having a weekend. Olga told herself this as she sat in the straight-backed chair next to a woman in labor, despite the fact that she was very sure it was Wednesday, and this bland hospital wing, with its prison officer always on duty and six narrow beds in her dormitory, was anything but a country estate where one might have gone for the grouse shooting late in the summer months. No, it was March, and her fiancé didn’t trust her, and her cousin had ruined her life.
She had never in her life expected to be forced to succumb to a mental and physical exam by a prison doctor. She had never expected to sleep in a prison ward with drunks, baby killers, and the deranged. She had never thought Douglas, once having proposed marriage, would betray her so completely.
She rested her hands across her aching stomach and tried to focus on the panting woman. The food she’d eaten these past few meals had been atrocious and what little she’d forced down had not settled well. Thinking about her own physical discomfort had no value. She had to help this woman through childbirth. Leaning over, she blotted the woman’s damp forehead with a rag, smelling her sweat.
The wardesses were busy with a woman at the end of the row of beds who was having a fit and needed restraining to avoid eating her own tongue.
Hours passed. She helped the woman through her labor pains, though she could do little more than wipe her sweaty face, comb her tangled hair. Her prayers came out in Russian instead of English, but the prisoner didn’t seem to mind. Today she was more locked inside her own body than in Holloway Prison.
“Who will take the baby?” Olga had whispered to a wardess.
“The baby will go to an orphanage, poor mite,” the woman told her. “There’s no family.”
“Why is she here?”
“Killed her husband, the great brute.” The attendant rubbed her nose. “Poison.”
Olga’s eyes widened as they stared at the exhausted, emaciated figure on the bed. She was skin, bones and a huge lump of belly. The attendant shrugged. “No poison here, and from the scarring on her arms, cigarette burns, I’d say he deserved everything she gave him.”
“I wish she could have pinned it on someone else. She must have hoped to give her child a better life.”
“Considering the hell she went through, maybe the child will have one. More than one kind of prison.”
Olga heard a commotion at the other end of the hallway as the woman moaned. The prison officer held her hand out in a stop gesture to the shadowed man in the doorway. Douglas. Had he come to remove her from this place? Had her cousin been found? They’d taken her ring away, along with her clothing. She felt set adrift from that young lady she’d been only yesterday.
The female official’s shoes rat-a-tapped on the floor as she walked across the ward. “Novikova? You’re wanted.”
Olga took one last glance at the laboring woman as a wardess took her place in the chair. She walked slowly to the end of the ward.
At the end, Douglas waited for her. She felt hot and bedraggled in comparison to him, an immaculate nobleman dressed in the latest fashion. How quickly she’d been brought low, a princess in prison garb. What did he think of her now? Did he feel any guilt? Douglas stared at her, almost as if he didn’t recognize her in the prison uniform.
“You can use my office, my lord,” the official said, taking them down the hall and into a narrow room that smelled of cheese and cold coffee.
“Thank you,” Douglas said.
After Olga had stepped in, he shut the door behind her. “I’m sure you’ve had time to think about your cousin’s present whereabouts. What conclusion have you reached?”
She stared at him, this cold face of a stranger. He’d been inside her, loving her, and now this—completely shut down, in a way he hadn’t been even when Konstantin had killed his friend. It was as if he saw her as the betrayer i
nstead of the other way around. His marble face invoked pity, despite her circumstances. But she was also frightened and couldn’t hide it.
“He threatened Fyodora and your father,” she said, wringing her icy hands. “What else could I have done?”
“Konstantin is a national threat. What could he possibly have done to your sister in Shanghai? And I’ve put my father under guard. Meanwhile, people are dying here. Konstantin tried to destroy the Grand Russe two months ago. He’s bombed an art gallery, a theater. How can you aid him? Your sister is merely an excuse.”
“I think you decided you don’t want to marry his cousin and therefore will destroy me instead,” she told him, her hand against the wall holding her upright despite her trembling knees.
“Why? You could be carrying my child, my father’s heir. Why would I want that?”
She shrugged. “Tainted blood? I’m Russian?”
“The royal family is angry at how you’ve been treated.” His eyes burned into her. His face seemed to have lost weight overnight. The skin stretched tightly over strong bones. “I am in trouble for my treatment of you, but I tell you this: You are the key to finding Konstantin, and I will find him. I will get Konstantin out of this country.”
“You’ll have your revenge,” she said dully, “on me, if not on my cousin.”
“I don’t want you here,” Douglas said. “But I can’t have you aiding and abetting your cousin.”
“I was afraid!” she shouted. “It is a good thing you didn’t marry me as clearly you are incapable of putting your wife first.”
His jaw set. “The royal family may want you released, but I’m telling you that you can choose to either stay here or be deported. As long as Konstantin is loose, I want you locked up, for both of your sakes.”
“You can’t possibly see this as the right place for me. Don’t you have safe houses? I’m not a criminal.” She smelled something sour and fought not to gag. Her stomach was already in such an uproar.
“I can’t risk him finding you. Tell the ward mistress if you have information for me. Otherwise, I will see you when your cousin has been captured.”
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