I followed him into the business wing of the palace, where the parquet floors were covered with rugs to protect the old wood, and where ceilings were smooth plaster above rococo molding instead of fabulous wood-carvings and paintings. As we walked, I considered and reconsidered what to say to Alec.
Then the cadet opened a set of double doors that had to date back to the seventeenth century.
By that time, I felt as if my nerves had poked through my skin, and though warmth emanated from the enormous china stove in the corner, I shivered. In the middle of the room was a splendid baroque era rosewood desk. A woman was seated there, and standing behind her, his arms reaching around her to rest on the tops of her hands, was Alec.
My brain shut down, and I stumbled to a stop.
They looked up as one. For about a hundred years I took in those shocked honey-brown eyes the same shade as my own, and Alec’s enigmatic blue-gray gaze above.
Then Alec straightened up. I was peripherally aware of the woman putting something in her purse as he said, “Kim. Welcome back.” It was almost a question.
The woman’s expression smoothed to blandness.
“Uh.” My voice came out sounding like someone else’s. “I’m intruding. I can . . .” I waved my hand in a circle.
The woman got to her feet—not that she had far to go. She was short, built in the petite version of the pear shape, with a pointed face, a broad forehead, and a cloud of curly dark hair twisted up simply but in a way that framed her face with wispy tendrils. She wore a plain pearl-gray shirtwaist dress, but it was so stylish it had to have come from Paris.
Alec pinched his fingers to his forehead as though his head hurt. “Kim, this is Rebekah Ridotski. Beka, Kim Murray.”
Beka smiled at me. “Hello.” She flicked a glance at Alec. Her English was French-accented. “I’ll see you tonight, then?”
He assented with a gesture. She stepped around the desk and whisked herself out, leaving a whiff of expensive scent as the door shut behind her with a decisive click.
I approached the desk but stayed on my side of it.
Alec looked exactly the same—wearing slacks, a good shirt, a hint of a tie at the V neck of a dark woolen sweater-vest. His eyes, the color of clouds on a rainy day, were steady. But he wasn’t exactly the same; there were healing bruises on one side of his forehead and along his jaw. The cobalt Ysvorod signet ring was on the little finger of his left hand, and on the ring finger of his right he wore a plain gold band.
And he stayed there, on the other side of that huge desk.
I stood poised to close the distance between us, though I knew it would be wrong, that whatever his relationship had been with Ruli, he’d just lost her in a horrible way. “Alec, I’m sorry about what happened. I really, truly did not know. Until I got here. And Nat told me just now.”
“You just got here?” Alec repeated, sounding distracted the way you do when way too much is going on at once.
“Well, yesterday. On the train. You knew I was here? I told the Waleskas not to blab about—”
He was catching up; he gave me a look, with a hint of the old humor.
“Okay, old news before I even got to them. But how? I’d swear no one could have recognized me after I got off the . . . oh. Right. The train conductors. I’m sorry, Alec. Nat did warn me. But the whole concept of my being ‘a person of interest’ seems totally alien to me. Anyway, I came because . . .” It was difficult to get the words out, because modern life makes it too easy to scorn what we don’t understand. But it was too important not to try. “The other night. On our way to London. I saw a vision of Ruli.”
He stilled, almost a recoil. It was like I’d hit him. The words Help me froze right there in my mouth. What if he took them as accusation, and hard on that was the betraying thought: What if he was the cause?
No. Every cell in my body revolted against that notion. No matter how disastrous a marriage it might have been, Alec would not do something so evil as to cause an accident.
Or so stupid.
“A vision?” he repeated.
The instinct to avoid that was as overwhelming as the instinct to talk to him, to regain the understanding between us. But where to start?
I looked around wildly for any subject to break the nightmarish silence stretching out into infinity. “Vision. Hallucination, maybe, caused by jetlag. Do you know now long I have been traveling?” I babbled. “This country is beautiful even in winter. On the ride up I kept wondering if Wordsworth had ever been here—‘Black drizzling crags that spake by the wayside—’“
His smile flickered, and the quote came automatically. “‘As if a voice were in them. . . . ‘ ”
He stopped himself before the sick sight.
Urgh. Only I could commit a poetical faux pas! I said quickly, “It figures you’d know ‘Simplon Pass.’ Did you think of it when riding the train up here, when you were a kid?”
But it was too late. The smile was gone, and I knew without any mysterious visions that we were right back where we’d started, no matter how much either of us would rather have avoided it: Ruli. “Yes,” he said, neutral and polite.
I said, “I saw Tony in London.”
I may as well have hit him. He didn’t quite recoil this time, but his chin lifted, and if possible he tensed up even more.
I blundered determinedly on. “He came over to meet my grandmother, but she was—your dad was—Tony and I were touristing around when he got a phone call, and—something was very wrong, but he wouldn’t tell me what it was.”
I couldn’t bear to see that painful question in Alec’s tense face, the beautiful, dear face that I had tried not to think about even though I was reading the poetry he loved and practicing his language. And dreaming about him at night.
“Kim,” Alec began. “We should probably—”
There was a polite knock at an inner door, followed by muffled words in Dobreni: “Statthalter, they are all here but the Prime Minister.”
“A moment,” Alec called.
Noooo! Not with us like this, on opposite sides of the room, and the tension, the questions between us.
I said quickly, “Alec, before anything else, I wanted to apologize for leaving last summer without talking to you.”
Our gazes finally met, and personal space made that seven-points-on-the-Richter-scale shift to intimate space. The urge to run to him was almost overpowering. I watched his eyes, his hands, for the green light . . . and he looked down at the papers waiting on the desk, his long eyelashes effective shutters.
The last time we’d seen each other, I spent the night within the circle of his arms. The chemistry between us was as powerful as ever (and I discovered that I was gripping the edge of the desk) but something was definitely wrong, horribly and painfully out of balance.
Because his wife just died, and you have her face. Doh!
I finished numbly, “I really thought I was doing the right thing.”
“I know.” He made an effort I could feel in my own bones and muscles. “You thought you were sparing me from . . .” He pinched his fingers between his brows again. The signet ring glimmered, a cobalt blue teardrop. “You thought you were doing the honorable thing,” he said. “I know you well enough to have been fairly certain about that.”
“Could I have possibly called it more wrong?”
As if the words were wrung out of him, he said, “Kim, I do not want you to take this the wrong way, but I wish you had not come.”
Sick and miserable, I gazed at him, completely unable to speak.
“No.” He flung up his hand in a sharp gesture. “No, I take that back. Please don’t walk out of here thinking. . . . A week ago, I would have welcomed you more than—” I’d never heard him speak so wildly, so disjointedly. I felt the effort he made to stop, to take a deep breath. “Kim. I am afraid there’s going to be trouble. I don’t yet know how much, but one thing I want to prevent if I possibly can, is your being dragged into it.”
“Alec, I wo
uld do anything to help you. I hope you know that.”
“I do.” He dropped his hand and moved to a rosewood Louis XV cabinet in the far corner. “And I want you to know how glad I am to see you. In spite of. . . everything going on. But I—”
Another knock, more insistent than the first.
Alec’s head lifted sharply, the fine skin over his cheekbones tense. “I can’t make them wait any longer. We’ll have to talk later. It’s the best I can do at the moment.”
“Alec.”
He opened the glass door in the cabinet and removed a crystal decanter. At the sound of his name—perhaps at the sound of me saying his name—he jerked around, as though I’d reached inside him and yanked.
“If you want me to leave Dobrenica,” I offered, “say the word. You’re the one in crisis mode right now. What’s best for you?”
“The Prime Minister has arrived,” came that muffled voice from behind the inner door.
“It’s too—”
Late?
He didn’t say the word. I felt it and so, heard the sidestep in his tone. “It’s too confusing right now. That is, there is too much going on. Let’s talk later, shall we?” As he spoke he poured something from the decanter into his coffee mug.
Logic insisted I should get out of the country—go to the air field, since the train only ran once a week or so. But instinct clamored for me to stay, to fight against whatever it was that threatened him, to take a stand at his side.
“I’ll be at the inn,” I said and opened the door to the hall.
I slipped out—
And found Rebekah Ridotski waiting for me.
SEVEN
“WHY ARE YOU HERE?”Beka’s English flared with a strong
French accent.
“I . . .” Though I had no right to complain if Beka and Alec were an item, I also didn’t owe her any answers. “Why do you need to know?”
“Because it is I who must pick up the pieces after you—” She made a little shrug, then finished with the French verb déguerpir.
It means “take off ” or, closer, “ditch.” Ditch Dobrenica? Ditch Alec? “Pick up the pieces” was what I’d said to Nat.
I answered, “What makes you think I’ll do anything of the kind?”
I expected her to dismiss me or, worst case, shoot back something hostile. Instead, her chin lifted slightly. “Permit me another question. Have you seen Natalie?”
“I was there yesterday.”
“Perhaps we should visit her together.”
I hesitated, then thought, I came here to help. I made a “lead on” shoot with my forefinger, then followed Beka down the icy hallway and through the servants’ door to the side of the palace, where there was a half-cleared parking lot. From the haphazard look of the clearance, it was evident they did not have any snow plows. The work was done by grunt force.
Last in a modest row of examples from over five decades of auto manufacture was a sporty French model. It felt unreal to climb into a car with the woman who had had Alec’s arms around her.
It felt more unreal that Ruli was dead.
Beka negotiated slowly past the mounds of slush onto a slippery cobblestoned street that had been cleared, then asked polite questions about my journey. My replies were equally polite efforts, barren of content but crammed with phatic cooperation as the car slid on the icy street then caught, slid and caught.
She nosed down the boulevard leading to the huge traffic circle built around the statue of St. Xanpia, where the streetcar looped around. From there, we continued under the triumphal arch and on past nineteenth-century buildings with the ubiquitous tall windows, iron grating, and Palladian embellishments. Our struggle at conversation was drowned by the clatter of tires on cobblestones, and we abandoned talk—no doubt as big a relief to her as it was to me.
We reached the Khonzhinya District, where Nat lived. Most of the houses dated back to the eighteenth century, with a few newer. There were fewer cleared streets.
Beka parked around the corner from Nat’s with the ease of habit, and we crunched into the crusty slush alongside the road, chins down into our coats. From the low sky, flakes of snow dropped. I wondered if it was still ninety degrees in LA.
An older woman was leaving. Nat looked past her at me and said, “Did you chicken out?” Then she saw Beka, and her brows shot up. “Dude!”
Beka said with a hint of irony, “You can offer us some of your vile coffee.”
“Get in here before all my warm air escapes,” Nat replied.
She shut the door, and we stood in the tiny vestibule, again in one another’s personal space as we shed gloves and scarves and hats and coats, hanging them on the row of hooks Nat had bolted to the bare plaster wall. Beka’s face was turned away, so all I saw was her profile, her expression closed.
Nat called, “I’m finishing a patient. Grab a sitz.”
Beka gestured for me to take the armchair. I did, then noticed that the other two would be sitting side by side on the couch, staring at me like a two woman jury.
I made a business of looking around so I wouldn’t have to sit there staring, or not-staring, at the person Alec was going to meet later tonight.
From the back Nat yelled, “Kim! Tell her who attacked you in London.”
“Tony,” I said, and when Beka’s lips parted, I added, “With a sword.”
Her eyes widened. “La la!”
Two sets of footsteps went down the outer hall. The second pair was Nat, who reappeared holding a tray, trailing the mixed aromas of astringent soap and fine black tea. “Water was already boiling for washing up my instruments.”
Beka put her chin on her hands and studied me, eyes narrowed.
“I gotta say, I thought nothing I ever heard about that guy would surprise me.” Nat flopped down next to Beka, then handed her a cup. “But that wins the coconut. Try this, Bek. It’s concentrate from Hawaiian coffee.” She waved at me. “He attacked you. Like that. Out of the blue. Does he have swords all over the house? Of course he’s got a stash of swords. Probably guns and grenades, too.”
“Maybe he’s just nuts,” I said. “Like his insisting there’s no magic, but vampires totally exist.”
“They do.” Beka sipped. “Ah. Much better.”
“Vampires?” I repeated, turning to Nat.
She shrugged, hands out. “News to me. I thought they were part of the hill myths.”
“I hope they remain unknown. I would love it if they faded to myth,” Beka said, and turned to me. “Did he say why he attacked you?”
“He said it was to make me tell the truth. I guess I earned that, lying like a rug to his family last summer. Though he knows why I did it.”
Beka and Nat each looked the other’s way, just for a second. I couldn’t read anything from that brief meeting of eyes, except that whatever I’d said carried some significance that they were not going to share, because then Nat chuckled, a pleasantly rusty sound. “They were being buttheads. Especially his mother. Geez, she tried to have you offed!”
“I have not forgotten,” I said, and was going to say that I hoped she was still in Paris, but of course she wouldn’t be. Not after her daughter’s accident. “Is the duchess in the country?” I asked.
Beka said, “Sisi von Mecklundburg? Alec told me this morning that they are . . . expected.” She glanced at her watch. “Within an hour.”
Nat hoisted her mug. “Usually this time of year there are parties, balls, concerts, right up until the twelfth day of Christmas, or what the Eastern Orthodox gang call Theophany. When there’s a really snazzy ball, we minions gather along St. Mihal Bridge to watch the sleighs cruise by. People decorate ’em up.”
Beka uttered a soft laugh at the word “minions.” “We have canceled the parties, at least through the date of the funeral. We are waiting to see what the von Mecklundburgs will say about the New Year’s Eve gala they were organizing in honor of the new opera house. Ruli was to host it. Her first formal gesture as Madam Statthalter.” Beka
got up and said to Nat, “I did not have time to visit the ladies’ at the palace. May I?”
Nat jerked her thumb over her shoulder. “You know where it is.”
When she was gone, I discovered Nat staring at me with a puzzled, wary expression. Nat said, “You tracked her like you’re a bomb sniffer and she’s about to plant a nuke.”
“I can’t figure her out,” I said.
Natalie thumped her elbows on her knees. “Geez, you’re not going to go all high school catfight on me, are ya?”
“Like I have any grounds,” I said. “And if you knew how I grew up . . . but you don’t. I’m trying to understand where everyone is coming from.”
“Okay, that’s cool. So how did it go with Alec?”
“It was horrible.” I told her what he’d said, then finished, “It was like it actually hurt him to see me. That’s even worse than ‘I’m over you.’ Something is really wrong.”
“Ya think?”
“I mean, besides the accident. Because I know that was an accident. I don’t believe for a second it could have been anything else.” I shivered again, glanced at that empty spot on the couch and said, “So in the nature of figuring out what’s going on in his life, are Alec and Beka close?”
“Close, yes. How close, no idea.” Nat started piling the dishes together. “Yeah, she’s over here often, and yeah, we talk about him, but like I said, I haven’t seen him but once, and she doesn’t tell me everything.”
“Got it.”
“What was that about your growing up?” she asked.
“Mom was a hippie. Free love, drugs, rock and roll. Except she liked Wagner and Puccini.”
“Wow. Just your Mom?”
“Dad was too much of a geek,” I said. “Mom didn’t settle down until she was forty. That is, she got married. Let’s just say she was in love with being in love. But she always came home after her romances.”
Nat’s brows rose. “Your mom was a player? Well, if she hit her twenties during the sixties, yeah, I guess that would make sense. I somehow didn’t picture that, you know, with your grandmother added in. The princess thing and all.”