I wasn’t going to see him at all. I couldn’t say that, but I really did not want to tell her about her daughter’s ghost asking me for help. “No,” I said. “I, um, eh, thought I should come.”
Even in my own ears that sounded painfully unconvincing, though it was the truth. From the direction of the couch came the faint ring of crystal, and a titter from Cerisette.
I forced myself to meet Aunt Sisi’s brown eyes so much like my own—to discover she wasn’t looking at me at all. Before I could figure out who she was checking out, her gaze shifted back to me, and she smiled. “How very generous, my dear. Is your family with you?”
“No. I came alone.”
“It was probably a wise decision on Alexander’s part to leave them to a peaceful holiday in London,” the countess drawled, her soft voice giving me those prickles of implied extra meaning. Then she flashed her invisible dueling sword and went for the kill. “If you will forgive the curiosity of an old woman, if you didn’t know about . . . the event of my daughter’s death, why did you come?”
The silence was profound. They were all waiting, and it was then that Nat’s hints, Tony’s I don’t believe in coincidence, Beka’s wary politeness, and Alec’s tense There is going to be trouble punched past the days of jetlag and travel, the cascade of surprising changes, and most of all, my own conviction of my good intentions, which I had never thought to question or to think anyone else would.
The duchess, and no doubt many of these others, not only thought that Alec had caused that accident, they thought I was in on it.
For an endless second all I could do was stare at her in horror.
Then I thought: the duchess will never believe me no matter what I say. But I had to kill that rumor dead, if I could, with all these others.
I raised my voice and glanced around. “When I left last September, it was because I believed it to be the right thing to do. Ruli and Alec were engaged, which was supposed to bring peace between the families. I saw myself in the way. So I returned to the States and found a job.”
No one was speaking.
I took a deep breath and went on. “Last Friday, I finished my semester of teaching and drove home to see my parents. When I discovered they were going to London for the holiday, and my father had bought an extra ticket in case I came home, I decided to go with them rather than spend Christmas alone.”
I paused, looked around—and discovered that at least half of them weren’t looking at me at all, but at someone behind me. Were they bored? Except they weren’t talking.
So I gritted my teeth and slogged on. “Shortly after our arrival, Tony appeared, and invited me to take a trip on the Eye. Then he got the bad news, but he didn’t tell me what it was. So I decided to come here, alone, and see what I could find out.” There. Let them deal with that, every bit of which was true.
Again, at least half of them were watching someone behind me. It wasn’t Tony. He was standing three feet away from me, drink in hand.
He raised the drink in salute to me, and said, “My part is true.” He grinned, and I knew he was thinking of that sword fight. Maybe even daring me to mention it.
I turned away from him to find the duchess smiling thinly. She said to Baron Ridotski, “May I request one of those glasses of mulled wine, cher Shimon? The air is so chilly.”
She walked away, and everyone was in motion again, leaving me once more alone in the middle of a floor. I used the opportunity to take a look behind me to see who everyone had been checking out, to discover the only person there was Honoré de Vauban leaning against the bar, a glass held loosely in one hand.
Why would they be staring at him? No clue. Perhaps someone else had been there? Oh, well. I turned my mind back to Alec, behind me on the other side of the room. Now I understood his reaction when I showed up at the palace—that exclamation, seemingly wrenched out of him, that he wished I had not come. How many people in this room were watching us both, gleefully waiting for the least sign of friendship and affection between us, to verify that we’d conspired against Ruli? I shut my eyes, furious, sickened. You’re right, Alec. I should not have come.
Except Ruli had appeared in a window and begged, Help me.
“I don’t think we’ve met.” I opened my eyes to discover a handsome man in a Vigilzhi dress uniform, complete with epaulettes and a ribbon across his chest. Instead of the small gold captain’s stars on either side of his collar, the pins were stylized falcons, like those the Vigilzhi wore on the fronts of their hats. He was a well-built man with sandy brown hair and light eyes. “I am Dmitros Trasyemova, at your service.” Here was the duke I hadn’t yet met, the leader of the fifth Important Family.
“Kim Murray. Glad to meet you,” I said, as a boy of about ten tugged insistently at Dmitros’ uniform tunic. The boy’s heart-shaped face and general resemblance to Beka and her siblings made it clear that this was the youngest of the many Shimons.
“Uncle Dmitros, you promised . . .”
With an apologetic smile, Trasyemova excused himself and was pulled away to where a bunch of kids waited in the door to a far room. I was alone, and so not feeling the love. I chugged down the limonade, just to have something to do, then came a deep voice.
“Permit me to say it is a surprise to find you here.” There was Tony’s Uncle Robert, he of the Russian emperor costume and the octopus hands last summer. “Did old Milo send you, is that it?”
“No one sent me,” I said. I couldn’t prevent my face from heating up.
“He doesn’t know you are here?” Robert’s bushy brows rose.
“I don’t know what he knows. All I can tell you is that I left London without telling him. He was busy.”
Robert’s disbelief was so obvious I might as well have saved my breath. He then cleared his throat, giving me that false smile I remembered so unfondly from summer. It was more a leer than a smile, a brandishing of teeth below angry eyes. “I believe you are an opera connoisseur?” he began.
What? Had I fallen down a rabbit hole? “That would be my mother,” I said, shooting my forefinger toward the west as I edged away from him.
“Kim. I was wondering if you’d like to—” Tony came up and, mad as I was at him, he was still a thousand times preferable to his Uncle Robert. Before he could finish his sentence, however, a thin, elegant blonde stepped between us.
“Take this. You need it,” drawled Tony’s cousin Phaedra Danilov in her high voice, while pressing a tinkling glass into Tony’s hand.
Beka came up on my other side with her short, salt-and-pepperhaired older brother—another Shimon—who gave me a rueful smile before he deftly intercepted the countess, Robert’s wife.
Beka was equally deft in cutting off Tony’s uncle and passing him to her older sister Malca, saying smoothly, “May we tempt you with something at the buffet, Count Robert? We’ve also freshly mulled wine . . .”
Malca then escorted Robert firmly away.
Phaedra gestured impatiently to her brother, and as he and Honoré joined us, Tony shifted slightly to let them in. Honoré said something under his breath that caused the cousins to laugh as Tony stepped closer to Beka. While everyone else’s attention was on Honoré, he gave her a private smile, then ran his hand up the back of her neck to cup the back of her head.
Here’s the weirdness of human nature. That gesture of tenderness, from someone I had extremely ambivalent emotions about, gave me a real jolt. Beka whispered something, and his hand dropped.
I looked away quickly, suspecting I was not supposed to have seen that. Since I did not want to be caught staring at Tony, I found myself face to face with the Danilovs, like a pair of golden bookends and about as friendly-looking. Morvil Danilov’s blond hair was perfectly barbered in the same style as Alec’s and Honoré de Vauban’s, and Morvil, like Tony, wore a dress shirt with a mandarin collar (though his was white, with a hint of pleat showing in the V of his beautiful suit coat). Like Tony’s coat, his was beautifully cut, exquisitely evoking the Edwardian era. The wink and glitter
of diamonds drew my eye to his cufflinks.
Then Phaedra gave me a forced smile and cooed in her high, kittenish voice, “Tony and I were just talking. I hear you are adept with the rapier. Why don’t you come to a practice at our salle?”
“Say yes, Kim,” Tony coaxed. Then he grinned. “You know you need it.”
Was this friendly invitation a gesture of apology?
“As soon as the sun rises,” Morvil Danilov said. “Day after Christmas.”
“It will be warm.” Phaedra added with another of those glances, “Quite warm.”
Wary, curious, gratified, wary again. “I don’t have any fencing gear,” I said.
“We have plenty.” Phaedra’s brows lifted.
“Dienstbeflissenheit,” Honoré muttered softly, from just behind Phaedra. I mentally translated that as German for “fuss,” but just as I was wondering if it was aimed at me, Phaedra flushed.
I could refuse and learn nothing. In that case, I may as well go directly back to London. But would that look like I was running away out of guilt? It was that flush of Phaedra’s, the first human expression I’d ever seen from her, that decided me.
“Okay. Thanks.”
As Phaedra leaned toward Honoré to murmur something, and her brother reached past her to pick up a fresh drink from the end of the bar, Tony said low-voiced to Beka, “Want to come watch?”
“You don’t need an audience,” she whispered.
Tony laughed softly, his smile intimate. The chemistry between the two was totally guns and roses.
During the brief lull in conversation, I heard an old councilor on the other side of the room: “Statthalter? You will forgive a moment of business, but I must ask . . .”
How was Alec dealing with this horrible party? I did not dare look, though I fancied I could feel his tension. As Phaedra and the rest of the von Mecklundburg gang chattered, I ducked around them and wandered in the direction of the buffet, concentrating on the voices at the other end of the room.
The foremost voice was the duchess—Aunt Sisi—probably at the center of a circle, as was appropriate for the bereaved mother. But when I focused, I realized she wasn’t reminiscing about her dear departed daughter; she was in the middle of an amusing anecdote about the disastrous dinner she’d served before she left for Paris. Then she went on about the troubles she was having finding a decent cook who was willing to relocate to the middle of nowhere.
I busied myself at the buffet as Beka’s niece and nephew led a pack of middle-grade kids in a raid on the edibles, bouncing between fast, idiomatic Dobreni and French, with a smattering of Russian. I tried one each of the marinated mushrooms, the caponata parve, and baba ghanouj . Delicious. When the kids moved off toward some inner sanctuary with their loaded plates, I found myself alone.
Okay, I’d done what I’d come to do, I’d even made a date with the von Mecklundburg cousins at which I could (at least theoretically) do some sleuthing. Though I longed to talk to Alec, just to see him, eyes meeting eyes—I was not going to give the gossips any more fodder. Time to leave.
I took a step here, ducked there, and a minute later reached the foyer.
I changed back into my boots and was just picking up the bag with my shoes when Beka appeared. “Thank you for coming,” she said politely.
“Thank you for inviting me,” I said politely.
“How long are you staying here in Dobrenica?”
Whoa, what to say? “I don’t know.”
Okay, this non-conversation could stagger on until the polar cap melted. She seemed to want to know where I was coming from, and I wanted to know where she was coming from. To test her out a little, I said, “There are a whole lot of things I’m not getting. But. One thing will get me on the next train, and that’s a conviction that my being here is bad for Alec,” I said, and waited for her to smile, to tell me how my departure would be for the best.
She looked back toward the gathering then gave an impatient sigh. “I don’t think—no. I dare not say anything.” She tipped her head as though considering, but an older woman appeared with one of the white-haired council guys behind her—and behind him, Robert von Mecklundburg, drink in hand, his eyes on me.
“Bye!” I said, and hustled through the door into the cold night air, with the lung-expanding enthusiasm of a dungeon-escapee.
TEN
SEVERAL INKRI DRIVERS had lined up along the street below the driveway, like cabs do at home, hoping for business. I jumped in the first one, and we set off. The cold was a shock. The runners of the sleigh hissed and cracked over the thickening ice as we zigzagged from street to street. From a distance I could see the cathedral lit up, and I sighed. I was exhausted. The thought of sitting through an incomprehensible Latin church service with the Waleskas was as welcome as air so cold it hurt to breathe.
But when I reached the inn, there were two anxious faces side by side in one of the frosty front windows: Wednesday Addams, aka Tania, and her little sister Theresa. When they saw my inkri pull up, Theresa’s somber face lifted in a relieved smile.
I paid, bolted up the steps, and promptly skidded on the ice. As I caught myself on the iron handrail and picked my way unsteadily to the doorstep, Theresa flung open the door.
I began, “I’m late ? I’m sorry—”
Theresa shook her head. “We have a quarter of an hour, Mademoiselle. We must take the streetcar, as everyone else has gone ahead.”
“I thought the streetcar stopped at sunset.”
“Not tonight. It will run before and after Christmas Mass.”
Tania stood behind her sister, gaze on the floor. Theresa took charge, gesturing toward the corner table, as if that little distance from the entrance and the front desk afforded extra privacy in an empty house.
We sat down, and Theresa leaned forward. “Tania says you asked about . . . the protections.”
“Protections?”
“The prisms. The charms, we say to visitors.” Theresa went on in that calm, helpful tone of the carefully prepared speech, “It is a very old custom here, in winter, to wear the faceted stones as protections. The wealthy wear diamonds, but faceted crystal is said to be as good to ward off the magical beings who mean us harm.”
I sat back so I could see them both. “I really went there to ask about ghosts.”
Tania looked away. Theresa shot her a fast glance. “Perhaps we should start for the streetcar.”
In silence they turtled up into their winter gear (I was still in mine) and bent into a chill that was doing its best to enter the next Ice Age. In the distance, the cathedral bells tumbled melodic peals into the starry night. The last note sang brassy shivers through the air as we followed the last arrivals into the cathedral, where we were handed a candle by an apple-cheeked, earnest choirboy.
The cathedral, like most medieval buildings, was luminous with architectural beauty meant to draw the eye upward. The hundreds of candles painted the gilding on the vaulted ceilings with rich light, though the long stained glass windows were dark, sending down glints of gentian blue, cadmium, and malachite green—hints of sunlight’s full glory.
There was a Byzantine feel to the murals representing the Stations of the Cross. The huge decorated fir was not loaded with tinsel, fake snow, and a zillion ornaments as I was used to. It was hung with tiny crystal stars. There was also an Advent wreath with three purple candles representing the first three weeks of Advent, and the single bright red candle for the fourth.
When the service began, the white candle at the center was lit, and someone passed down the aisle with it to touch flame to the first candle in each pew, after which people held their wicks together, passing the light until the entire space glowed.
While that happened the singing began: children’s voices first, then women’s clear, beautiful tones, and then the men joined in, some voices so deep, they resonated through the wood of the pew.
I was prepared to be bored. I was not prepared for the power of song, color, scent, the feel of the candle
in my fingers, the charged air as the antiphonal responses echoed back and forth like a carillon, the sight of smiling faces, young and old, all made beautiful by the candles’ warm glow: the cumulative effect was to break apart the habitual enclosure of the “I” and join it with the community—and with spirit on a different plane.
I don’t remember when my gaze was caught by the reflection of my candle flame in the diamond pin securing the hat of the woman in the pew in front of me. I recall gazing at that tiny flicker, likening it to the star in the song currently being sung . . . and then I saw the reflections of hundreds of pinpoints of light, held by up by arms covered in velvets and brocade. . . in woolens . . . in slashed sleeves . . . in uniforms not seen for a century or more.
I’d fallen into vision. I recognized it, and though the periphery of this vision glittered, and my body seemed unmoored, instinct caused me to narrow my focus to 1938 as I stared at that first pew.
And there was a row of three kneeling teens beside several old folks. There were the twin girls, their corn-silk hair gleaming in the ruddy light.
My Gran and her twin had looked exactly alike, but their personalities had been completely different, and I saw the evidence before me as one glanced around, her lips parted with barely suppressed mirth. The other knelt soberly, head bent, eyes closed. The sober one had to be Lily, my grandmother, and the one looking idly around was Rose.
With them was a tall, thin, dark-haired boy in a blue cadet’s uniform, only with epaulettes . . . Milo. He, equally sober, had never interested Rose. It was Armandros who had flirted with both sisters, which had deepened their rivalry to a serious breach.
The pangs in my head thundered to my heartbeat, and the vision smeared into flickering colors. I blinked, gasped, and clutched with one hand at the pew as Tania sent me a frightened look, and on my other side, her grandfather blinked at me in sudden concern.
I forced a smile that was probably as convincing as Prometheus on the rock saying, “No, I’m fine. Really.”
I kept my eyes closed, rising when the hiss and rustle of people around me indicated I should, and sitting again when they did. I opened my eyes when they began to snuff the candles, filling the air with the heady scent of honeybee wax smoke.