He grunted his agreement and pushed his chair back, slapping his thighs for Nut to jump onto his lap before giving me a searching look. “You do not really believe J. J. would do such a thing?”
“I do not know what to believe,” I said evenly.
“Veronica, I know she is a difficult person to like at times, but I find it hard to believe she would stoop to such depths.”
“Do you? I wonder. She is ambitious and intelligent and her career has been thwarted by the mediocrity of lesser men. What if she felt pressed to produce a story so gripping that her editors were forced to take her back? It mightn’t feel like much of a crime to introduce a small card with a few words into a box of chocolates. She must know any number of miscreants willing to hurl a small explosive, particularly if she stressed that the thing was to be harmless. And she is on hand.”
He sighed, rubbing Nut’s ears gently until the dog gave a little sigh of contentment. “You are correct in that it is a good theory, but I cannot believe it.”
I rose and dropped a kiss to his head. “Your trouble, Revelstoke Templeton-Vane, is that you are too sweetly naïve where women are concerned.”
His laughter was still ringing in my ears when I left him.
•••
As soon as I had finished my toast and dealt with the most pressing of our correspondence, I turned my attention to Alice Baker-Greene’s notebook. I might have had to fight Stoker for the privilege, but he had been the delighted recipient of a gift. His brother Tiberius, taking his leisure in Paris, had paid a visit to Deyrolle, the temple of natural history on the Left Bank, where he encountered a rare trophy of a roseate spoonbill—“Platalea ajaja,”Stoker happily informed me. “I have not seen one of these beauties since I was in South America.” He fell at once to studying the quality of the mount and would likely not have noticed had I divested myself of all my garments and done a dance to shame Salome. So I quietly collected the notebook andretired to my desk with a good reading lamp and a quantity of paper for taking notes.
The notebook was far denser than I had realized, the leaves being the thinnest vellum imaginable, and each page written in a tiny hand quite unlike Alice’s usual bold style. She had devised a sort of shorthand for herself that took many pages to decipher, and even then much of it was unintelligible to anyone not familiar with the intricacies of alpinism. There were coordinates and materials lists, sketches of routes and notes on traverses and conditions. It was as thorough a record as I had ever seen, both scientific and personal, and I vowed to see it returned to the Curiosity Club in perfect condition so that others might benefit from its contents. (I also roundly cursed the hide of Douglas Norton for very nearly making off with it, no doubt ensuring it would be lost to mountaineering history if he had been successful.)
Most of this material I skimmed past, recognizing my own limitations in interpreting the data she had recorded. But I paused to read more closely her paragraphs on the people she encountered on her travels. She was unflinching in her assessments, detailing flaws and foibles as fluently as she did favors and virtues. From the dates inside the cover I deduced this was not the notebook she had carried during the expedition in which she made such an enemy of Douglas Norton—much to my irritation. I should have thoroughly enjoyed reading her acerbic comments abouthim. But it began some year and a half before, just about the time she had decided to settle in the Alpenwald. There were frequent mentions of trips from Hochstadt to various mountain towns in the vicinity in Switzerland and Italy, short climbing expeditions in small, out-of-the-way villages, often accompanied by the notationClimbing with D.orLazy day with D.These mentions were always finished with a tiny sketch of a flower. I peered through my magnifying glass at the distinctive little petals and realized they were meant to be St. Otthild’s wort.
“D. is an Alpenwalder,” I murmured to Vespertine. My hound had taken up his post next to my chair, laying the broad weight of his head upon my feet as I worked. Whenever I spoke to him, he raised his shaggy brows before subsiding again into a deep slumber.
“But who?” I wondered. “Durand? Possible, but he is meant to marry Yelena. Unless he found his attentions wandering. And surely she does not mean Douglas Norton,” I said with a snort. Vespertine snuffled in his sleep as if to agree. I reached for the Rosemorran copy ofTwistleton’s Continental, a compendium of European nobility that ran to some forty volumes. The Alpenwald was in the first, and it took only a moment to find the entry for Duke Maximilian.
“‘Maximilian Detlef Reinhardt Luitpold von Hochstadt, Duke of Lokendorf,’” I read aloud to Vespertine. Detlef. Or duke. Either began with a “d.” On a whim, I turned a few pages to the entry for the chancellor, running my finger down the page until I came to his paragraph. “Dagobert,” I said, snapping the book closed decisively. “It appears every man who knew Alice is a candidate.” I replaced the volume and returned to the notebook with a sigh of irritation. As I reached for it, the book slipped a little and my fingernail caught on the endpaper, tearing the corner. It was marbled stuff, Florentine and heavy, and I swore under my breath for damaging it. But when I inspected it more closely, I could see that I had not torn it at all. Rather, my nail had slid beneath the edge of the endpaper where it had been pasted down, cracking it free of the spine of the book.
I took it nearer the lamp to assess how easily I might glue the endpaper back again, but as I held it to the light, I noticed the endpaper stood very slightly proud of the cover in the center. Something had been pasted inside it, I realized. I took up my paper knife, a dagger I had liberated from the Rosemorran Collection. It had once stabbed a Venetian nobleman, but I employed it for a far more quotidian purpose. I slipped the blade beneath the edge of the endpaper, levering itgently, ever so gently. The paper resisted, then came away, bit by bit, until I laid it back, revealing a single page, folded carefully. I extracted it and opened it cautiously.
I had expected a letter, perhaps. Something romantic, maybe a bit of poetry or a few sentences of passionate declaration. Instead it was a sketch, detailed and done with skill and exquisite care. Noted at the bottom was the word “Dolcezza,” and I laughed aloud. The word meant “sweetness” in Italian, and suddenly I understood the reason for all the climbs in Italy and Switzerland.D.
I studied the sketch for several minutes, realizing I was doubtless the first person to have seen this since Alice had pasted it into her notebook—the notebook she had carried with her everywhere, the notebook that had been with her when she died. “I am glad,” I said quietly. “I am glad you had a little happiness.”
I was still looking at the sketch when Stoker left off playing with his spoonbill and came to look over my shoulder. He glanced, then peered closely with astonished eyes. “Veronica, why is there a nude sketch of you in Alice Baker-Greene’s notebook?”
“Because that is not me,” I told him. “It is Princess Gisela.”
CHAPTER
17
Stoker brewed us a strong pot of tea whilst we considered the implications of the sketch. I retrieved a stack of newspapers from the Germanic section of the Belvedere and pointed him to the relevant dates whilst I took over the chore of making the tea. His German was rough but much better than mine, and with the assistance of a German-English dictionary—not quite as good as an Alpenwalder-English dictionary but such a volume has yet to be written—he managed to decipher the broad strokes of the Hochstadt Court Circular for the dates in question.
By the time the last of the tea had been drunk and the better part of an entire tin of Cook’s candied ginger shortbread consumed, he was finished. “I have compared the dates of Gisela’s absences from the Alpenwald to Alice’s expeditions when she climbed with ‘D.’ You are correct. They tally in every particular.”
“That is why she was making her home in the Alpenwald,” I said, still not entirely believing how blind we had been to the possibility of Alice’s affections being fixed upon Gisela.
“How devastated she must have been!” I added.
“What do you mean?” Stoker’s brow furrowed.
“They clearly spent much time together, cared deeply for one another—Gisela must have been distraught when Alice died. And yet, as princess, she could never publicly reveal her grief. Imagine her, forced to conceal her emotions all this time.” I fell silent as a growing horror dawned swiftly upon me.
Stoker was quick to intuit my thoughts. “And then we told her that the woman she loved was murdered. Worst of all, she overheard it! It was not put to her gently or kindly. It was a passing piece of gossip and we discussed it as if it were an academic matter rather than a tragedy of the most intimate variety.”
And then a new horror introduced itself, a crawling, wriggling, nasty little doubt. “Unless...” I let my voice trail off uncertainly.
“Unless?” he prompted.
