Coronets and Steel

by Sherwood Smith

“German was the language of government, and French the language of diplomacy, until the Second World War. Leftovers from the Hapsburg era. The Dobreni have caught up with nineteenth-century nationalism enough to want to be governed in their own tongue, but all our parents thought it necessary for us to learn German as well as French.”

  “I don’t know any Dobreni.”

  “Anyone who would want to speak Dobreni to you is going to be intercepted by one of us. Shouldn’t be a problem.”

  “And what about her short hair? I won’t cut mine.”

  “If you put it up the way you did for the ballet in Vienna, it’ll be fine. She still wore her hair up for formal occasions, which is why I was fooled.”

  “But we won’t be doing anything formal, will we?”

  “No. Remember, no one will be looking for anything strange. It will seem a new whim.”

  When we went upstairs a surprise was waiting for me: not only were my jeans freshly laundered, but a pair of expensive new suitcases (empty) plus a makeup case (not empty) and an overnight bag waited in my room. Lying next to them was a department store bag containing a pretty cotton nightgown and a matching robe of soft rose. In the makeup case I found a load of goodies: toothbrush, soaps and shampoo, hairpins of every imaginable kind, and a handsome cedar-backed brush and comb, plus a formidable battery of hairspray and cosmetics.

  Alec leaned in my open doorway, grinning. “How’s Emilio’s taste?” he asked.

  “Well, fine, I guess! Except .. . .” I brandished a bottle of crimson nail polish in one hand and hair spray in the other. “My look is pretty much beach casual, so I’ve never been into any of this stuff.”

  “But Ruli is.”

  I snapped my fingers. “Of course! So this is my disguise kit.”

  “D’you like the frock?”

  “Where?” I turned to the wooden wardrobe in the corner, opened it. There hung a dress, a belted cotton print in shades of blue. “Oh, that’s pretty.”

  “He said the dress store owner picked that out when he described your coloring and approximate size. You can shop wearing it. My aunt never permitted Ruli to wear jeans, though she might now. But we’ll stick with what I remember. Be on the safe side.”

  “Gee, this is fun,” I enthused.

  He smiled. “I’ll tell Emilio you’re pleased.”

  “So that was Emilio’s mysterious errand?”

  “One of ’em. Emilio’s married, with a daughter and daughter-in-law. I thought he’d make sensible choices.”

  “Well, give him my thanks,” I ended a trifle awkwardly.

  Alec gave me that airy salute. “Good night.”

  “Okey-dokey.” I shut the door. “Good night.”

  TWELVE

  THE NEXT MORNING, bright and early, we were off. Emilio carried down my new badges of respectability and I wore my new dress, and unfortunately my ruined sandals. My ankle was less swollen, and I kept my pace sedate.

  Alec was behind me on the stairs. He said, after a few seconds, “You never mentioned any duels with desperados—other than myself—the other day.”

  “What?” I stopped, surprised to hear the guardedness back in his voice. “Desperados?”

  “On your hike.” He brushed his fingers over my shoulder. His touch was fleeting and impersonal, but it sent sparkle-fire down my nerves.

  “Oh,” I said as offhandedly as possible. “That mighty bruise. I forgot. Looks awful, huh? Maybe I’d best get some blouses with sleeves.”

  “How did that happen?”

  “When I jumped out of the train. Got another biggie, too, on my butt.” I laughed; he smiled, but his brows contracted in quick concern.

  The big Daimler smoothly ate up the miles under Alec’s hands, and the time passed agreeably; the three of us talked about favorite books, movies, local history, and the like.

  Alec was right about Emilio. I apologized to him for my rudeness on the Glorietta monument at Schönbrunn, he apologized in turn for disturbing me, and after that we got along fine. He never called me by anything except Mam’zelle; he seemed earnest, and a trifle shy, and it was impossible for me keep seeing as a sinister and evil villain a guy in his seventies whose face lit with joy when he talked about Gilbert and Sullivan operettas.

  Zagreb was old and modern in a fascinating jumble. As soon as we got to the city center Alec turned over the car to Emilio and he took a taxi to some unnamed destination while Emilio and I embarked on a massive shopping campaign, all paid for by Emilio from a fat wallet. Shoes imported from Italy—clothes from all over Europe—it was a shopaholic’s heaven . . . but cool as the idea was to be spending someone else’s money, it felt weird picking out clothes according to a stranger’s taste. A stranger who looked like me.

  That second night I rolled my papers and cash in my jeans and LA top and tucked those into a corner of one of the suitcases. That small roll was my reality check.

  We all met back at a grand hotel called the Regent Esplanade, the name of which reminded me ridiculously of San Fernando Valley shopping malls. The resemblance stopped at the name, of course. This place was solid with early-twentieth-century charm, the colors variations on warm gold, with high ceilings, arches, elegant chandeliers, the works. I practiced my Aurelia act, steadied by the knowledge that she’d only stayed there once or twice; her infrequent visits to Zagreb were to see some second or third cousins.

  Alec said nothing until we were alone at dinner (Emilio having thanked me for a pleasant afternoon and disappeared, destination unspecified), then he gave me some mild coaching.

  At the end of dinner he said we would begin the charade the next day, and he excused himself politely—after requesting me to confine myself to my room. I was prepared for that. On my shopping foray I had found a bookstore with a small section containing French novels. So I’d made a few random selections.

  After we parted I sat in the expensive room, propped my foot on a hassock, and opened the first of my books. It was late when I became aware of my tired eyes and stiff neck. I stood up and stretched. My foot hurt much less than it had.

  Someone tapped briefly at my door.

  Surprised, I called in French, “Who’s there?”

  “Alec.”

  I opened the door. He made no movement to come in. “I saw your light on and stopped to ask how your evening was, if there is anything you need?”

  “I’ve got a question for you.” His brows lifted interrogatively and I went on, “If Princess Lily was the heir, and she gave it up, why didn’t her sister take over the throne, and her descendents after her?”

  He said, still standing in the hallway, “Princess Rose’s daughter was disinherited right after she was born. Shortly after that the king abdicated and turned the throne over to my father.”

  “Ah, I see! So that’s why you and Brother Tony are at odds! He wants his mother’s rights, huh? Why not give ’em back?” As soon as it was out Alec’s expression shifted to that ice-smooth facade and I knew my flippant surmise was a mistake. Worsened by the late hour.

  Alec said lightly, “The proverbial American knack for solving everyone’s problems after thirty seconds’ perusal. Tell me, does the solution come with foreign aid?”

  I slammed the door in his face.

  No, I don’t want to hear your nasty political ramifications, I’d said to him. I knew I’d set myself up for that zinger—but that didn’t make it any easier to take.

  After a restless night I marched down to breakfast the next morning, ready to apologize—or take the next train out, depending on his attitude.

  I found Alec sitting at a table in the dining room. When he saw me he laid down his newspaper and stood up.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be a jerk—” I began at the moment he said, “I beg your pardon for my rudeness.”

  We eyed one other—the tension was gone.

  With one of those sudden, rare, real smiles, he opened his hand toward a chair in invitation. “May I pour you some tea?”

  No hint
of droit de seigneur.

  I sat down. As we got our tea and coffee, he said, “Shall we discuss today’s agenda? Emilio and the car are at your disposal. He says there are a number of streets whose shops you haven’t seen yet.”

  “O-kay,” I said slowly.

  “Daunting prospect?” He seemed on the verge of a laugh.

  “We-ell,” I drew out the word. “I like pretty new things as much as anyone. But most of this stuff is so . . . so high end. And it costs a fortune. What will we do with it when the switch is over? I can’t see myself in a two hundred dollar blouse grading student papers, or grubbing under the hood of my junkmobile wearing shoes that cost half a grand.”

  He laughed. “Night and day . . . night and day.”

  “I guess I’d feel better if you donate them to some good cause,” I finished awkwardly.

  “We’ll do whatever you want.”

  I felt uneasy again, that sense of proximity, and yet there was the possibility of trespass. I am not Ruli, I only look and sound and dress like her. “What’s on the menu? Anything besides scrambled eggs and calves’ brains?”

  After breakfast, I found Emilio waiting for me in the lobby. He was dressed in a quiet brown suit, his expression earnest as he stood up at my approach. “Good morning, Mam’zelle,” he said with a funny nod like a short bow.

  Alec had obviously talked to him about the shopping, for Emilio offered me a drive through the countryside instead, which I accepted with relief. The weather was balmy as we drove along narrow country lanes, some juddering the car with ancient cobblestones laid down before tires were ever invented, others hastily covered with tarmac to ease the movement of some army crossing from here to there, and patched afterward. We passed picturesque old villages apparently little changed in three or four hundred years, and two ancient, crumbling churches that were at least a thousand years old. Probably older.

  We stopped at one of these. Inside, kerchiefed and black-dressed widows knelt and prayed, as their foremothers had done for a thousand years. The rough, aged artwork in these churches showed the influence of Eastern Orthodoxy as well as Roman Catholicism. The sense of mystery, of the numinous, made my tourist-gawking seem inappropriate. Perhaps it was the otherwhere-absorbed motionlessness of the figures at the wooden rails, partly perhaps the utter silence in which my scraping steps and rustling clothes sounded preternaturally loud . . . or maybe it was Emilio’s unthinking crossing of himself as he entered and bowed his head reverently.

  When I walked out the sunlight coruscated in a familiar way, making me giddy, as if a slight quake rolled the ground, and I stopped short, staring at a dust-covered box coach, all black. Even the horses were black, and the liveried servants at their heads wore black armbands.

  The sunlight flared with glaring coronas around Edwardian-era silhouettes that walked slowly toward me. Another blink and they vanished, leaving me staring at the dusty road, grass on one side, an ancient churchyard on the other, while my head reverberated like a sonic boom.

  “Mam’zelle? Are you ill?” Emilio’s voice broke the grip of excitement—fear—sorrow, yanking me from the aftermath of Sarajevo in June of 1914, and thrusting me back in the now.

  I hadn’t had that giddiness since I’d sat with Alec looking up at the castle ruins. I’d ascribed it to exhaustion plus beer, worsened by the residue of Kilber’s sleeping pill.

  This weird sense of stumbling briefly in and out of time was nonsense, of course. “Fanciful.” More serious was the concern in Emilio’s kindly face. In my experience, people who express real concern worry more if you say, Oh it’s nothing. If you don’t want to cause them to worry at it further, then you have to give them a plausible reason.

  “I stumbled. And, well, the truth is, I happen to have an overactive imagination. What are we seeing next?”

  Emilio accepted this clumsy answer and drove me to an open air market, where we cruised the dealers offering spectacularly complex and colorful Persian rugs. He knew a lot about textile art.

  In midafternoon as a drizzling rain seeped over the landscape we found an old, jumbled used bookstore. I prowled among the dusty stacks and shelves in the dimly lit airless cubbyholes. Wishing I had the cash to buy bags of books, I picked up a pair of slim volumes of Russian and Serbo-Croatian poetry, and then I made my big discovery: a small, green-bound German-Dobreni dictionary. It was almost a century old, printed (as it stated in red and black fraktur, complete with crest) in 1890 by order of Alexander IV, King of Dobrenica. Would he be my something-great-grandfather? I wondered, feeling strange.

  I didn’t tell Emilio. I wanted to study it in private, maybe even figure out a sentence or two to surprise him with—if we were around one another that long. But mainly I intended to take it back to LA and give it to my mother when I told her Alec’s strange story.

  When we got back to the hotel I curled up with the dictionary. Alec knocked on my door at about six and asked if I’d like to go down to dinner with him. He looked tired as he asked politely if I’d had a nice day, etc. etc. and I responded with equally ironclad politeness.

  Before we entered the dining room, we stepped out onto a terrace, where crowds of smokers talked, laughed, and drank. In the reflected light from the enormous bank of windows, he pulled from his jacket a slim, richly gleaming gold case with two diamonds glittering in light scrollwork along the edges, and with a wry quirk to his brows, handed it to me.

  “What’s this? Oh!” I flicked it open and saw two rows of aromatic white cylinders lying inside. “I forgot. She smokes.”

  “You know how to handle a cigarette?”

  “I’ve seen enough old Joan Crawford movies that I think I can manage to fake it with the proper old world air.”

  His eyes smiled as he handed me a solid gold lighter. The metal was warm from being in his pocket. I maneuvered it awkwardly in my hand as I said, “This I’d better practice with. I never could figure them out.”

  His smile deepened to a grin. “No need. Her mother trained Ruli to never light her own cigarettes if there is a man present. It’s a proprietary act, don’t you see? She produces a lighter only as a hint to a slow escort. Flash it around. Ruli used to play with hers, I think as a way to break her childhood habit of chewing her nails.”

  “Okay,” I said, feeling silly as I pulled a cigarette from the pretty case. “Try lighting it.”

  I put the cigarette in my lips and leaned forward. His hand moved toward my face with the lighter, up sprang a flame which came closer—closer—my eyes crossed trying to stay focused on it, and belatedly I remembered to puff. Rather than draw the smoke into my lungs, I held my breath for a second or two, then blew it out slowly. It burned the inside of my mouth, hot and acrid.

  “Good job. But—” He was on the verge of laughter. “—you needn’t watch. I won’t burn your nose, or miss the cigarette.” Then he added in mild enquiry, “What are you doing?”

  I had put out the cigarette and was in the midst of laying it back in the case.

  “Saving it for later,” I answered, surprised my intentions were not clear. “I don’t need Ruli props right now, and I’m sure not going to finish it. Yeccch, my mouth tastes like the bottom of a birdcage.”

  “Ruli would never reuse them.” He shook his head and stretched out his fingers to twitch the cigarette from mine.

  The touch of his fingers on mine gave me a small inward shock. I slapped the case shut and made a business of slipping it into the handbag until I recovered. Then I grinned. “You’d best keep an eye on me in case I leave it somewhere behind. Remember, I’m not in the habit of lugging smoking kafuffle around.”

  “Kafuffle,” he repeated, smiling as he flicked the cigarette into an ashtray.

  “Dad’s word,” I said. “Gran hated—hates—cussing. My dad picks up words that get around vulgarity, like fewmets and minions. He was a newspaper minion before he got laid off.”

  “Kafuffle,” he repeated under his breath and chuckled as we went inside to dine.

&n
bsp; After dinner we took a taxi to stone-facaded nightclub. Outside the doors Alec shot me an inquisitive look. “Ready?”

  “Lead on.” I followed him in.

  Noise and smoke blasted at us. The place was nearly as dark as the cloud-smothered sky overhead, and super crowded. Loud music thumped inside my chest, played through mega-amps by a combo on a small stage. The small dance floor was crammed with people. In the hazy darkness they seemed to be struggling at Sisyphean labors. We threaded our way through, and somehow Alec found a table. Drinks appeared. Alec sat back to watch the band as I self-consciously pulled out a cigarette. He took the lighter and lit it with smooth expertise. The flame brightened his face briefly, and he gave me a salute, a private gesture between the two of us. Then the lighter snapped the flame out and Alec sat back.

  Talk was impossible. I watched the band, and Alec watched the people. I was too nervous to risk meeting any eyes, so I tried puffing the cigarette, but my breath was so nasty I waved it around instead. At one point his chin came up and he lifted his drink in salute to someone behind me. I resisted the impulse to turn my head, but I thought, They’re here already! Then I remembered that Ruli, if not Alec, had distant relatives in this city.

  With his other hand he touched my arm and, my heart banging counterpoint to the band, I nodded over my shoulder in the general direction he’d sent his salute. It was impossible to identify one among the mass of light-limned silhouettes, though it did appear the crowd was flowing around a thickset man who stood against a far wall. The owner? He was swiftly hidden from view by approaching dancers, and I straightened around again.

  Another drink, another cigarette, which burned down nicely all by itself, more noise—then Alec touched my arm again. I understood from the jerk of his head that we were free.

  Outside I gulped in pure, cool, sweet air. “Made it out alive!”

  He laughed. “Not accustomed to the club scene, I take it. What do you do for fun in Santa Monica?”

  “I curl up with hot cocoa and Jennifer Crusie. Jane Austen on a big night. Why are you laughing?”