My recent life having been measured out in daily doses of Styrofoam-encased teabag caffeine reluctantly sloshed out in the faculty nook, I appreciated the marriage of culture with art. Mom set about providing tea and coffee as if she’d been handling this kind of porcelain all her life, instead of our old stoneware at home.
Gran accepted a cup of tea, her back straight, her shoulders tense. She had dressed formally for the plane, in her customary widow’s black, her long silver hair pulled up into its bun. Her pulse beat softly, visibly, in her neck as she held her cup and saucer.
A pair of double doors opened. In came a thin elderly gentleman in an expensive suit, leaning on a gold-topped cane. Marius Alexander Ysvorod’s face was craggy and lined. If gravitas had not been supplied by his DNA, it had become so habitual that Lord Chesterfield might have used him as an example of it in those letters to his son.
Gran set aside the tea things.
Dad, Mom, and I stood up politely, but we could have been yodeling and swinging from the chandeliers for all the notice the not-yet-crowned King Marius took of us.
“Lily,” he said softly, advancing on Gran, who stood up.
Gran and I (and Ruli) shared the same first name—Aurelia—which none of us actually used. Gran’s nickname had been Lily. Her twin sister Elisabeth, Ruli’s grandmother, had been known as Rose.
Milo stretched out both hands.
Gran laid her trembling fingers in his, and as he bent down to kiss them, she clasped his hands and offered her cheek. He acknowledged it with a peck then said, “Welcome. How was the journey?”
“Please sit, Milo,” said she. Her English was heavily accented.
Only then did he take his place in an armchair, and that was the mode for the entire dinner: old-fashioned manners ruled them both. Each move, almost each word, had been inculcated by careful tutors and governesses almost a century ago, in lessons meant to get one through any eventuality in a civilized manner. They spoke in carefully enunciated English, a language not native to either of them. It, like this house, was neutral territory.
But they couldn’t quite hide the effect of seeing one another after seventy years, a major war and several minor ones, relocations, births, and deaths. She had dumped him in front of the entire kingdom to run off with Armandros (who later returned and married Rose), leaving Milo duty-bound to take up Lily’s rejected crown as the Germans rolled over the border.
The conversation was correct, and killingly boring, though Dad did his best to lighten things up by introducing easy subjects: the clock he’d made for Milo, the history of timekeeping, cultural views of time. Literature. Dad, who is a Roman History buff, ranged back and forth from Vergil to Voltaire, writers chosen to include my grandmother, though she scarcely spoke. Mom threw in a comment here and there, though she’d never been much of a reader. She’s more into movies, opera, and folk tunes. She prefers image to text.
For me, the occasion exuded a false neutrality because from the moment I walked in, it was inescapable that Alec had been there. He had breathed this air, he had walked upon the polished hardwood floor where I now stepped. He’s married to Ruli.
As I sat in a cabriole-legged Chippendale chair on which he might have rested, the present unraveled around me, blending with the evidence of his past. There was the Edwardian era portrait of a dark-haired woman with Slavic features; in it, the painter had reproduced, with inexorable detail, the Ysvorod diamond necklace that Alec had put around my neck the night of the masquerade ball. Opposite her hung a painting of a young woman in Regency era lace, ringlets, and puffed sleeves, who bore a strong resemblance to the Swedish princess, Sophia Vasa, whose genes were visible in several of us.
Superficially, everything was pleasant, and the Linguine aux asperges et saumon fumé delicious, making me wonder if my mom had a hand in menu planning, or even supervising. But it was a relief when we rose at last, and Emilio said that coffee would be served in the parlor.
As we followed Milo through a comfortable sitting room with great leather-backed chairs and floor to ceiling bookcases, my mother whispered into my ear, “We’ve got to get them to mellow out. I’ve never seen him that stiff, even at the duke’s funeral.”
She stopped talking when Gran touched her arm, murmuring in French, “I think I had better lie down. Will you make my excuses?”
“Of course, Maman. I’ll show you your room.”
Mom walked away with Gran as the rest of us moved to a pale green salon with high ceilings, pastoral cornices, and Queen Anne furnishings. Emilio began serving out coffee and tea. I offered to carry around the cups and saucers, finishing as Mom returned.
Dad and Milo were talking about London plays. Under cover of that, while she fiddled with cream and sugar, Mom muttered, “All she’ll say is that she’s tired, but I think she’s bummed.”
“I think it took major guts to come here and face the guy she dumped,” I muttered back.
“It took major guts for him to face her,” Mom’s smile turned wry, “being the dumpee.”
There was a pause in the chat as Dad and Milo sipped coffee, so Mom said to Milo, “My mother asked me to beg your pardon. Jet lag. She’ll be fine after a night’s sleep.”
Polite chatter resumed, but the atmosphere was easier. Weird, when you consider that Gran hadn’t said much. The conversation had switched to different versions of Hamlet (original versus movies) when the phone began to ring somewhere beyond the tall doors carved in a sylvan scene.
I said I don’t get premonitions, and I still believe that’s true, but one does sense patterns, even in a new situation. The back of my neck tightened as the housekeeper came to the door. She whispered to Milo. We all heard the word “Statthalter,” that being Alec’s official title.
At that very moment, someone rapped the knocker at the front door. Only three times, but loud enough for the sound to carry all the way down the hall to us. The housekeeper went to answer it as Emilio helped Milo out of his chair. Milo excused himself with his customary grave courtesy and left through another door.
The tea wasn’t doing me any good. I tried to calculate how many hours I’d been awake and gave up when I realized I was too tired to figure in the time zone jumps. If we were expected to stay awake and be polite, I needed to splash cold water on my face.
So I got up and headed for the bathroom right across the hall. I almost ran into the housekeeper. She had someone right on her heels. A tall someone, with long, curly blond hair.
“Uh,” I said intelligently.
The tall man drawled, “Cousin Kim.” And laughed at the expression on my face.
It was Ruli’s brother, Tony.
THREE
THE LAST TIME I’D SEEN Lord Karl-Anton von Mecklundburg, a.k.a. the Possibly-Wicked Count, he had put himself under the gun of a pack of real villains, in order to get me out of his castle alive. That was definitely not wicked. These villains, by the way, were his one-time allies and operated under the dubious leadership of a total obnox who called himself Captain Reithermann.
The time before that, Tony tried to abduct me from the middle of a masquerade ball. That qualifies as just over the edge into wicked territory, though I had to admit it had been swashbuckling in a typically brazen way. The time before that, however, he’d tried to sweep me off, with a characteristic combination of charm and force majeure , to his ancient castle on the Devil’s Mountain. That one definitely landed in the wicked category—though I’d escaped by diving off a bridge.
Oh yeah. And at the masquerade, he’d kissed me.
I was still debating the wickedness quotient of that.
He looked the same only taller, somehow, his black eyes tilted like a Byzantine icon, his long, curly blond hair wilder than I’d remembered. He was dressed much the same: an exquisitely made white shirt over old jeans, single-seamed riding boots, and—worn carelessly open over all—a handsome long black duster.
The crooked grin he gave me I’d seen in countless dreams. “Which is it, love, a tip o
r a kiss?”
“What?” I said, rattled.
“Which one will get me in the door? Or is this a delicate hint that old Milo’s got the wind up and barred me at last.”
“Oh!” I realized I was blocking his way to the parlor. As I stepped back, the housekeeper excused herself with a word and walked on down the hall. Tony and I were alone outside the parlor, but with my parents sitting side by side in view, watching.
Tony bent to kiss me.
I turned my cheek so his lips pressed beside my ear, cold and warm at the same moment. His coat smelled of wood smoke, wool, and leather, and his arms were as strong as I’d remembered.
“Now, is that a welcome kiss?” he asked, chuckling as he passed inside to my mother. “Hullo again, Marie.”
“Tony,” Mom said, sending another shock wave through me. Mom knew Tony? “This is my spouse, George Murray.”
As they said polite things I tried to deal with this astonishing turn of events. How weird this was—Tony and my mother in the same room, knowing each other, apparently on friendly terms.
“. . . Milo?” he was saying.
“On the phone with Alec,” Mom replied.
“They’ll be at it all night, no doubt. Nothing gets in the way of their riveting discussions over whether they should build street lamps or wind machines. Your mum? Came to pay my respects, all right and proper, before I head back to Paris for Christmas.”
Mom chuckled. “Very proper. But she’s gone off to bed.”
Tony refused coffee with a casual wave of one long hand, then he said to Mom, “Tell you what. How about I take Kim out for a quick tour of London. Maybe stop somewhere for a bit of night life.”
I did not trust him for a heartbeat and was thinking up a polite way to refuse when my mother shrugged, as if this happened all the time. “It seems Milo might be on the phone for a while. Go ahead, Kim. We hadn’t planned anything else for this evening. Come on, George, I’ll show you our room.”
“Mom?” I asked, and when Tony laughed—and I knew he knew why I was aghast—I added clumsily, “Are you sure?”
My father yawned as he followed Mom out the parlor door. “Time for the old folks to go horizontal.” He shot his forefinger at us. “You kids have fun.”
Leaving Tony and me standing alone in that pretty parlor.
I put out a hand. “Reality check time,” I said. “Last time I saw you . . .” No. The last time we’d seen one another he’d saved my life. So I skipped back a bit farther. “What about that night you tried to grab Alec and the government? May I take it you and Alec aren’t enemies anymore?”
He flashed the grin that I had not forgotten. It, too, had figured in my dreams. “You want the long version or the short?”
“I want the truth. Or maybe I should go in and ask Mom, since she seems to know you.”
“We’ve met several times, but she doesn’t know what happened in Dobrenica after you left.”
“Okay, so tell me.” I stood with my back to the door, arms crossed.
He lifted a shoulder. “After they took you off the mountain I hid out in the hills until things cooled down a bit. My plan was to wait until after the wedding, and then move back into the Eyrie—figuring Alec’s wedding present to Ruli could be a royal pardon for the conniving brother.”
“Is that what happened?”
Tony snorted a laugh. “No. We were sitting out under the stars one night, half of my people drunk and the other half working on getting there, when Kilber walked into our camp.”
I got a vivid image of the big, burly old man who served as Alec’s lieutenant, as he had served Milo during WW II and after. As tough as he was silent, he was also extremely loyal. “I’m surprised your guys didn’t shoot him.”
“Shoot Kilber?” Tony said, his eyes widening. “I was terrified of him when I was growing up. Somehow never believed that mere bullets or steel could stop him. I sat there with a jug in one hand and a rifle on my knee—we’d heard wolves down in the valley—and hoped he wouldn’t grab me by the scruff of my neck and shake me like he used to when Alec and I were fighting schoolboys.”
“So then what happened?”
“Stopped right in front of me, squinted down, said, ‘Statthalter wants to talk to you.’”
“So you went?”
Tony grinned. “Well, of course I did. That’s hardly the sort of invitation one refuses. I figured Alec had cooled down by then. If he was still after my blood, he wouldn’t have sent Kilber, he would have come himself. We agreed to regard the past as error and continue on with our praiseworthy attempt at family unity.”
It sounded reasonable. If one knew them both. Meantime, Tony was here—he’d met Mom. Alarms were stilled. So he wasn’t The Enemy any more.
There was no way I could sleep now. Intensely curious, I said, “In that case, let’s go.” I pulled open the door, felt a blast of cold air, and stopped. “I better go unpack my parka,” I said.
“No need.” With unhurried grace he removed his long coat and dropped it over my shoulders.
“Then you’ll be cold,” I said, acutely aware of his warmth captured in the silk-lined coat, and his scent.
“We won’t be outdoors long.”
He opened the door to an Aston Martin roadster. Soon we were bowling along on the wrong side of the road at a pulse-pounding speed, and I couldn’t help but remember—vividly—what had happened the last time I went driving with Tony, in the mountains of Dobrenica.
I must have moved, or stiffened, or shown some kind of expression, because Tony said, “Cheer up, coz. You won’t be diving off any bridges. I promise.”
I reminded myself that he was welcome at Milo’s, that Mom seemed to like him. And the chances were pretty good that Tony wasn’t conspiring to take over any governments. “Awesome,” I said, trying for lightness. “This is not the weather for floating down the Thames.”
The Hampstead streets widened. As the car nosed onto a main road, I had to close my eyes against the traffic coming at me from the wrong side.
Tony’s cell vibrated with that brrrt-brrrt noise, quiet but insistent in the small space of a car. He ignored it as he pointed out various sights with famous names: Finchley Road, St. John’s Wood, Regent’s Park, Hyde Park. There were neo-classical Nash-like terraces dominated by the enormous British Telecom tower. We sped past monuments, bridges, old and new buildings, dramatic against the skyline. His phone kept burring, but he ignored it as he answered my “What’s that building?” questions.
When last we saw each other he’d said, Au revoir, before he ran off, a knife wound in his shoulder. And that’s a promise.
“Didn’t you manage to see anything?” he asked. “I thought you stopped here before flying off to Los Angeles.”
“I did, but I barely had enough for bus money. So I walked around a lot, and once or twice treated myself to the tube. You don’t see much from the tube.” I didn’t say that I’d spent most of the time holed up in my B&B, feeling sorry for myself.
“I know what you might like, then. See it all at once. If you don’t mind heights, we can take the champagne flight on the Eye. I’ve never been up on the damn thing. Should do it once.”
“Sure,” I said. “Sounds like fun.”
We were stopped at a red light. He pulled out his cell, which had begun to vibrate again. He sighed. “Hell. What’s my mother want, calling fifty times? I’ll see her tomorrow.” He thumbed the ignore and brought up a search engine. By the time the light changed to green, he’d found the Eye and the time. “Good. Last flight in half an hour. If we stop at the flat, we can borrow one of my sister’s coats. She must have a hundred of them upstairs.”
Now that I felt safe, I was wildly curious to see the von Mecklundburg London house. Tony drove up a quiet street lined with handsome street lamps. The Georgian façades looked unchanged from the days of Horry Walpole. Tony parked in front, and as we walked to the door I pulled his coat close against the icy air. His cell phone vibrated three times.
>
Tony unlocked it and led the way down a hall into a cavernous room, where he moved around quickly, flicking on lights. The air was still— stuffy in the way rooms are when they’ve been closed up for months. There was no heat, and I was cold.
“Sorry about the lack of welcome.” He indicated the covers on all the furniture. “We’ve someone who comes in, sweeps out the spider webs, and plunks down the mail. Otherwise no one is here anymore.”
“You usually spend Christmas in Paris?”
He shot me a fast look, then flashed his grin. “Not usually. This year, yes.”
There went his cell again.
“Go ahead and answer that if you have to,” I said. “I’ll wait in here while you get the coat.”
“I should chuck this thing out the window.” He pulled out the phone. “Make yourself at home.” He vanished into the hall, saying, “Ja?”
A few seconds later a door shut somewhere upstairs.
I didn’t want to risk sitting on some chair that would turn out to be three hundred years old and fragile, unused since it received the royal backside of Prince Somebody in 1734. So I walked around the room, idly looking at things.
In spite of the Enlightenment era architecture, what I could see of the shrouded furnishings turned out to be vintage 1920s, right down to the light fixtures. Here and there were jarring touches: a sixties stereo console, and in a corner, a big screen television that reminded me of Ruli.
Ruli.
I’d tried for three months not to think about her. I knew I should wish her well in her huge, cold palace in Riev. But keeping your rational mind civilized doesn’t fix the hurt.
I was examining the art deco-framed nineteenth-century racing prints on the walls when I heard Tony’s footsteps clattering down some stairs, much louder than he’d gone away.
Then came the ringing, shivery sound of drawn steel, and Tony advanced, still in his shirt sleeves, carrying a dueling sword in each hand, his eyes narrowed.