Lady Be Good

by Heather Hiestand

  “You are a hard man.” Her voice sounded dull and defeated.

  “These are hard times.” His lips worked, as if he wanted to say more, and the skin around his eyes drooped. But he said nothing, merely opened the office door and slipped out, leaving her there.

  She sat in the hard-backed visitor’s chair, happy to be away from the cries of desperate inmates for a moment longer, but the silence only made her wonder what she would have done in Douglas’s place. Could she really be trusted where Konstantin was concerned? She’d betrayed Peter and the hotel because of him. She’d lied so many times, trying to protect the only family she had left. No wonder she was in prison. She deserved it for her crimes.

  * * *

  That evening, Glass paced through his suite and debated if he could return to Knightsbridge for a time and refresh his wardrobe since the Russians appeared to be out for the evening. However, he didn’t want to go anywhere his father could find him since he had no idea what to say about his relationship with Olga. He’d announced their engagement, then this mess had happened. He’d been harsh, but with people’s lives and national security at stake, what else could he do?

  At least Olga was safe, whether she wanted to believe that or not. He hadn’t stopped caring for her. He knew Konstantin would really hurt her. That didn’t make her innocent, though.

  The trouble was she’d been helping him for years. Where did her loyalties lie?

  The telephone rang. He pushed his thoughts aside, went to the table where it rested, and picked it up. “Yes?”

  “Peter Eyre,” said the voice on the line. “Did you know your pet Russians are whooping it up at Maystone’s this evening?”

  “No. Is that out of the ordinary?”

  “They have some ladies with them we do not recognize. Not our usual class, based on the accents. The clothing is deceptive.”

  “Maybe the Russians bought them clothing first.”

  “My thought exactly.” Eyre’s tone was wry. “Why don’t you stop by?”

  “I’ll need to change, but I’ll be there in twenty minutes or so.” He hung up the receiver and went to put on evening dress, thinking of the irony that he would be dressing for a nightclub while his fiancée languished in the hospital ward of a prison.

  Twenty minutes later as promised, he found Peter Eyre’s table just beyond the dance floor, directly in front of the band. A waiter was replacing an empty bottle of champagne with a newly uncorked one. Eyre filled both of their glasses and saluted him with one of them.

  Glass took the other, noting the high color in Eyre’s cheeks and the sheen in his eyes. “Drink the first one yourself, did you?”

  “No, the manager here had a glass,” Eyre said.

  “That makes all the difference,” Glass said as Eyre drained his glass and poured another. “What makes you so eager to down the bubbly this evening?”

  As Eyre lifted his glass to his lips, Glass surveyed the room. The man they suspected to be Lashevich was on the floor. Two women were laughing loudly, teaching the alleged assassin the Charleston. Two other Russians of the thuggish variety were also on the floor with girls. They didn’t look too out of place. Both knew how to dance.

  “I don’t understand why Olga was helping the bomber,” Eyre said, pouring the last of the bottle’s contents into his glass.

  Glass stared at the empty bottle in shock. When had the man emptied it? Had he stared at the Russians for more than a few minutes?

  “How could she risk the Grand Russe?” Eyre asked, his hair flopping over his brow as he set his glass down. “It was a chance at a better life for herself. Not only that; she loves my family.

  “In fact,” he continued, “there was a time, as a boy, you understand, that I had quite the calf love for her. But my parents discouraged it. Too far above me, they said. But a valuable friend.” He laughed drunkenly.

  “She’s not a valuable friend?”

  “I’ve been a valu-valuable friend to her,” Eyre said, starting to slur and stumble on his words. “Helped her. And she betrays me and the entire family. We’ve invested a great deal in the hotel, my entire family. And she’d let her bloody cousin destroy it.”

  “She’s naïve despite everything,” Glass said, pulling the glass away from the man when he reached for it. “I think she believed Konstantin when he promised he’d stop. She thought he was trying to earn a living and if she gave him money, he’d stop.”

  “That’s foolish. To make bombs you have to be s-s-suicidally mad.”

  “That’s where the naivety is evident,” Glass pointed out. “She did wise up, but then he simply stole from her. Threatened her with bodily harm.”

  “And now she’s with him,” Eyre said glumly into his empty glass.

  Glass didn’t correct him. He drained his to keep it away from the inebriated hotel manager. “Excellent stuff,” he had to admit.

  “We should order another,” Eyre mumbled.

  “I suspect you started even before that first bottle. Come, let’s get you back to the hotel before what you just drank hits you.”

  “Legless,” Eyre said. “I never get legless.”

  “Not true,” Glass said, with a last look at the Russians. He’d have to give their party a miss for tonight. At least it appeared they were merely having fun. Maybe the violent streak had died with Ovolensky. Pushing his chair back, he reached for Eyre’s arm, just as a waiter rushed up with another bottle.

  “So sorry, sir,” the waiter apologized. “I didn’t realize you’d emptied it.”

  “We’re done,” Glass said. “Help me get him to his feet, will you?”

  “I’m fine,” Eyre said precisely. “It wouldn’t do, you know, to show weakness. Never does.” He put his hands on the table and levered himself up. After a chuckle, he said, “The last funny drunk I saw was Sadie Loudon. She sat on the floor. Her husband hit me when I took her home.”

  Eyre laughed again. Glass moved behind him to persuade him to walk out of the nightclub. “I do miss that Sadie Loudon Rake, or whatever her name is these days. Loads more fun than you’ve been, in the Artists Suite. Lost my best friend, you know.”

  “Who, Sadie?” Glass knew Sadie well enough since she’d joined his payroll but had never heard she and Eyre were close.

  “No, you fool. Olga. Princess Olga Novikova. You going to marry her after all this?” Eyre turned suddenly, swayed, then poked his finger into Glass’s collar. “She still good enough for you?”

  “Her virtues are so much greater than her faults,” Glass said. “But I don’t wish to discuss my fiancée with a man who is half cut.”

  “So you love her, do you?” Eyre asked. “Well, good for you. I’d have said she was worth it, if not for this bombing mess. She’s Russian, you know. A v-v-very complicated people, those Russians.”

  Glass offered up a prayer when they reached the bar. He navigated Eyre through the back. “Let’s have your keys, my good fellow.”

  Eyre fumbled into his pocket until he found them. Glass unlocked the rear door into the hotel. They walked down the surprisingly opulent rear corridor after he relocked the door.

  He recognized Olga’s signature style in one of the pastoral paintings on the walls. “Did she put any of her own art into that exhibit?”

  “No,” Eyre said, after slowly processing the question. “Very modest for a princess.”

  * * *

  Olga was awakened in the dark by the wardess. She pushed aside her thin prison blanket, in the bed next to where the woman who’d finally given birth in the wee hours was recovering, and sat up. “What is it?” she asked drowsily. When she focused on the watch pinned to the wardess’s coat pocket, she discovered it was just after 6 a.m.

  “Had a cable,” the woman said. “You’re free to go.”

  Olga wiped sleep from her eyes and blinked. “I am?”

  “Yes. One of the king’s equerries is here to escort you to a relative of yours.”

  For a moment, Olga panicked. Surely this wasn’t s
ome rouse of Konstantin’s. He seemed to prefer brute force to anything so intelligent. “Which relative?”

  “A Russian duchess?” the woman asked uncertainly.

  “You mean the grand duchess Xenia?” Olga asked, anxiety spearing her empty stomach.

  “Shhh,” the wardess said. “I do not know.”

  “The equerry, did you get a look at his eyes? Are they amber and blue?” Olga asked, worried that it was Konstantin.

  “Brown as mud,” the woman said. “Never seen him before, but he gave his name as Captain something, and he had the proper credentials.”

  “I guess I had better go with him then,” Olga said, her stomach calming.

  The wardess snorted. “As if you have a choice, princess or not. Time to stop making enemies and get along, I say.”

  Olga stood and stared at the woman. “How dare you.”

  “Don’t you take that tone in my prison,” the woman warned.

  “I’ve done nothing wrong,” Olga said with dignity. “I was a political prisoner, nothing more.”

  “If you say so. I might even believe it, with all this royal business. But it don’t take much to lay a woman low in this world, and you had better mind your p’s and q’s. I don’t want to see you again.”

  “I feel quite the same way, madam,” Olga said.

  They stared each other down; then, the woman pointed, and Olga walked down the ward and out of the door, to the woman’s office, where she was allowed to dress before leaving.

  Half an hour later, as she was driven to Windsor in a square black car to be rejoined with the grand duchess’s household, she realized that Douglas had been lying to her about how dire her circumstances were. The slow burn of anger overtook her senses. She fought to maintain an aloof, regal appearance.

  It took immense effort to keep her feet from tapping against the floor of the car. Her expression was carefully neutral, ignoring her emotions, the way her hair itched, her empty stomach. Spymaster or not, how dare he? She wasn’t the bomber. She was the bomber’s victim. Oh, he’d have a taste of her sharp tongue when she saw him again.

  She twisted at her engagement ring, which the wardess had retrieved for her from the safe, though only after she’d made a point of asking for it. How she’d like to throw it in Glass’s face, though that was something a lady wouldn’t do.

  But why, why must she be a lady after her fiancé had clapped her in prison? She remembered her mother’s softness. How ill equipped she would have been for the 1920s. How grateful Olga was that she and her sister had inherited their father’s more sporting blood. Her mother would have spent the last seven years in the grand duchess’s Russian Orthodox shrine praying instead of doing anything. She’d never have had an art career, though she was quite as good an artist as Olga. She’d never have been a chambermaid. And she certainly would never have attracted a man like Douglas.

  Why had Douglas chosen her when he could have had any woman? Even this angry, she found the idea of him still intrigued her. She still wanted what he represented: that painting of parents and four boys, a family unit. The thing they had both lost, a family. She and Douglas could start over together. Anyone other than him was unimaginable. He understood her twisted, stunted life. The war had changed him too. She didn’t need the money or even his title. She’d proved she could earn a living; she had a title of her own. But a family? That she’d long since lost. She’d been right to attempt to protect the earl.

  By then, they had driven into Windsor Park and were arriving at the gleaming white Frogmore House. The long line of windows on the ground floor made the palatial house seemed curiously blank. Olga wondered if the grand duchess would find a measure of happiness here or if it would be just one more stop on this long journey of exile she had suffered since the Romanovs had lost power.

  * * *

  Glass woke suddenly, uncertain of his whereabouts. Dimly, he remembered champagne with Peter Eyre, drunk in his suite in the hopes of lessening the hotel manager’s consumption. He fumbled for a lamp and discovered he was stretched across his sofa in the suite, alone. Had Eyre drunk him under the proverbial table? He heard banging on the suite door and realized that was what had woken him. Standing, he rubbed his eyes, buttoned his coat, and reached for the knife he kept in the side table next to the door. He hid his knife hand behind the door as he opened it.

  Princess Olga stood in the doorway, her expression quietly furious. She wore a fur jacket with matching cloche, and he could see a black wool dress underneath, nothing he’d seen her in before. Even the shoes were unfamiliar to him.

  “Hello, Princess.” His voice came out gravelly. Surely from sleepiness and not emotion. He’d treated her terribly yet she still came to him. “Here to slap me?”

  “No,” she said. “May I come in?”

  He nodded and stood aside. She stopped still after he closed the door, and he realized he still held the knife. “My apologies,” he muttered.

  “Do you think my cousin is coming for you?”

  “More like the neighbors,” he said, “though I am certain to be on your cousin’s list.”

  “I take it that imprisoning me did not help you find him.” Her jaw worked.

  “No, but you are still alive,” he said.

  “Do you think he will kill me?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Not if he still hopes to take money from you, but he’s carrying weapons, and he’s unafraid to threaten you. I want you safe, but obviously your family intervened.”

  She shuddered slightly. “How could you leave me there?”

  “I was angry, but I also wanted you safe,” he repeated.

  “Was that your way of canceling our engagement?”

  He shook his head. “No, but I understand if you feel that way.”

  She slowly unbuttoned her coat. “How absurd that it took a trip to Holloway to put me in the latest Paris fashions? The grand duchess dipped into her latest acquisitions to dress me.”

  “I am sure they are very righteously angry on your behalf.” He stepped behind her to receive the expensive coat and placed it on the bench in the entryway.

  Underneath her dress was shapeless, but fashionable, sportswear in the color of mourning.

  “I had a bath and washed my hair at Frogmore House,” she said in an almost musing tone. “I even put on perfume, Chanel, I think.”

  “It smells wonderful.”

  “It keeps changing,” she said. “Very complicated notes. Right now I’m smelling the floral notes, but I think it gets woody at the end before it wears away.”

  He appreciated her feminine dithering, but it wasn’t like her. “Whatever it does, I like it now.” He waited for her to take a shot at him.

  “I should hate you, Douglas.”

  “I know.” He shrugged because what else could he say?

  “No argument?”

  “I am suspicious and have too much power for my own good.”

  “Did you really send me there to keep me safe?”

  “It was about half that and half anger.”

  “I see.” She walked past him into the sitting room.

  He changed his mind about the dress. It only seemed shapeless, but he could see her hips moving beneath it, her torso slim and straight above. He hardened instantly, his body notifying him of where it wanted to be led.

  “Why didn’t you stay at Frogmore for the night?”

  “The grand duchess told me my place was here,” she said, picking up the bottle of champagne. “Good year.”

  Amusing that the grand duchess had told Olga to return to her fiancé when the imperial been separated from her husband for many years. “It’s probably gone flat.”

  She poured the last couple of ounces into his empty glass and drained it.

  “I see.” He crossed his arms over his chest, observing her. His princess was faking her bravado. He saw it in the faint trembling of her fingers on the glass. She held her head like a dancer would, well trained, a royal to the last.

&nbs
p; What would she do if he responded to the woman beneath the exterior, the one who must be desperately in need of comfort after such an ordeal? “I am so sorry, my dear girl.”

  Her head tilted. “Are you?”

  “Of course.” He removed the empty glass from her fingers and set it down. “I wish we could just run up to my father’s country seat and have a rest. But you know it isn’t possible with your cousin on the loose and the Hand of Death sleeping comfortably next door.”

  “You cannot still want to marry me.” She twisted her engagement ring but, tellingly, did not remove it.

  “On the contrary. I know you are loyal. As my wife, you will be completely loyal. An excellent quality. Also, I know a little hardship will not break you.”

  “Do you expect your enemies to imprison me as well?” She sounded sarcastic.

  “I hope not, but these are uncertain times.”

  She muttered something in Russian and sat gracefully on the sofa. He took the champagne glass to the bathroom, rinsed it out, filled it with water, and brought it back to her.

  “Drink,” he said. “Your skin looks tired.”

  “Really, Douglas. What a thing to say to a lady.” But she set the cup to her lips and drank it down.

  “You need fresh air, something to put the roses back in your cheeks. But it isn’t safe for you right now.”

  “Am I safe anywhere?” She toyed with the glass stem.

  “A valid question.”

  “I do not feel safe with you.” She said it casually, as if toying with the notion.

  “I am a dangerous man. I won’t deny it.” He sat next to her, pressing his advantage with his larger body. His thigh brushed her skirt. He could smell dust, as if her clothing had been stored some place unused, but underneath was still the faint citrus scent of her.

  “It is ironic, is it not, that my biggest enemy is my closest relative.”

  “And your biggest tormentor is your future husband?”

  “No, you aren’t my greatest torment.” Her lips curved. “A momentary aberration. I expect you do not think you have a temper, but you do.”

  “I’m very clearheaded,” he protested. “You should have seen the risks I took in the war, delivering messages behind enemy lines to saboteurs. A temper will get you nowhere but dead.”