“Do you know anything about her disappearance? Where she might be?”
She hesitated, darting a glance to the door. “Perhaps. I might know something about the night she left.”
“I know you made her a loan of your cloak,” I said, and she gave a start before dropping her lids in a look of grudging respect.
“Perhaps you do not require what I know,” she said in a demure murmur. Guimauve moved from the bed, putting out a paw in supplication. Yelena busied herself pulling a little chicken from a sandwich and feeding it to the cat.
“Do not be tiresome, Yelena,” I said with governessy firmness. “Tell me!”
Yelena gave me a sly look, her expression identical to Guimauve’s as he considered the spread of dishes upon the tray. “Such things are not free,Fraulein,” she told me.
“You want me to pay you for information?”
“I am not a rich girl,” she said, her lips twisting bitterly. “But I want to marry. If I have money, it will be easier.” She flicked another look at the closed door, and I recalled what the baroness had told me about Yelena’s romantic inclinations.
“You wish to marry Captain Durand,” I said.
“His family are very proud. They think I am a peasant because I am Russian, but I am no peasant,” she told me, her eyes bright with pride or hostility, I could not tell. “My father was put into prison after the attack upon the tsar.”
I blinked at her. “The attack upon the tsar? You mean the bomb that killed Tsar Alexander?”
She pressed her lips together and nodded. “My father had nothing to do with this, you understand. He knew those involved, he went to a meeting or two, but nothing more. He did not know of the plot. He did not act,” she insisted. It sounded to me as if he had had rather more than nothing to do with the conspiracy to assassinate the tsar, and my blood ran a little cold at the idea of an anarchist’s daughter in the employ of the princess.
“How did you come to work for the princess?” I asked.
“My mother had a sister who married an Alpenwalder and I was sent to my aunt so that I would be safe. My aunt married beneath her, an innkeeper,” she said, fairly spitting the word. “He expected me to make beds and empty chamber pots, and one day I said, ‘If I am to do such things, I might as well do them in a palace!’ And I went into the princess’s household as a chambermaid. She noticed me and the way I dressed my hair,” she said, touching a hand to her neatly plaited locks. “When her maid was ill, she sent for me to dress her hair. She liked my way of talking, and from then on, she sent for me often. When her maid left her post to marry, the princess offered me the post. I do good work for her,” she added with pride.
“But why hide the fact that you speak English?”
She reddened. “They talk about me when they think I cannot understand. The nobles and the high servants, they all speak English. If I keep my mouth closed, they say things in front of me they think I cannot understand.”
“And you blackmail them for it?” I hazarded.
“It did not begin that way,” she said, her mouth thinning unpleasantly. “But often they let slip little things they do not want other people to know. I ask only for small sums and that they keep my secret. I have put aside ten pounds,” she said, bringing out a small bundle from her pocket. I recognized one of the princess’s handkerchiefs knotted into a pouch. She opened it to show me the assortment of coins and notes, some German, some French, even a Swedish krona or two.
“Very resourceful,” I told her. The knowledge that Yelena was little better than a common blackmailer was distasteful; however, I had no wish to stem the tide of revelations.
But Yelena had said all she came to say. She knotted the handkerchief closed again and tucked it back into her pocket. “If you want meto keep your secret, you will pay me a little. And if you want to know where the princess was going, you will pay more, I think.”
“I suppose I would,” I said politely. “How much will you require?”
“Ten pounds,” she told me in a tone that would brook no negotiating.
I suppressed a sigh. I never carried so much money upon me; it was a month’s wages. Stoker, who was reckless with banknotes, his own or anyone else’s, might well have tucked four times as much idly into a boot, but he was not at hand.
“My associate will pay you,” I assured her.
She gave a laugh, a merry little trill that might have been pleasant under other circumstances. “I do not give credit. You will pay me,” she repeated. “And then I will talk.”
Yelena wrapped up four more of the cheese tarts in a handkerchief and slipped them into her pocket. She left me then, and I was glad of it. She was a distinctly unlikeable young woman, although I was not entirely unsympathetic to her plight. Still, a gift for extortion was unattractive in a lady, I thought, deciding it best not to dwell upon my own particular talents in that regard.
Whilst I waited for the baroness, I made a hasty search of the room in hopes of discovering some clue to Gisela’s whereabouts or her state of mind when she left. Guimauve was underfoot, nudging my hand and making a silken nuisance of himself until I settled him on the bed with one of the chicken sandwiches.
“Do behave,” I ordered. “I am trying to find your mistress.” He gave me a long, cool look and then attended to the base of his tail, as if to indicate his complete indifference to the princess’s whereabouts. I pulled a face and made a quick survey of the room’s contents. There were no enticingly locked doors or diaries written in undecipherable code. The chancellor and baroness managed her state papers andschedule, and any private correspondence she might have kept was nowhere in evidence.
The only truly personal effects in the room were the stack of books upon the night table. There was a selection of political volumes—one on constitutional monarchies of the world, another on English history viewed through the lens of Continental perspective—and the memoirs of Benjamin Disraeli. A few books on alpinism and a selection of travel guides to mountainous regions (Baedeker’s, of course) were stacked with a slender collection of poetry andLe Livre de la Cité des Damesby Christine de Pizan. There was also a weighty biography of Queen Christina, the sixteenth-century monarch who had traveled the Continent dressed as a man and abandoned her Swedish throne after embracing Catholicism. I thumbed through it at random, noting the passages highlighted in pencil. There were notes in the margin, little drawings and the odd exclamation mark or notation about a point of law. The princess had been particularly effusive in the chapter regarding Christina’s incognita adventures, and I was not surprised. There was a stifling element to court etiquette, to the endless round of formal engagements and appearances, the restrictive clothing, the requirements of behavior and expression of opinions. I had spent only one evening in harness and found it exhausting; I could not imagine how weighty the burden of state must be when it must be endured for a lifetime. I flipped through the rest of the book, my attention drifting during a heavily annotated section on Christina’s abdication.
I replaced it in the stack of books, surveying the various volumes of policy and history and political biography. Together they suggested a woman deeply conscious of her place in history and who must have felt the pressures of her position to be at times insupportable. I had theorized to Stoker that Gisela might have removed Alice as a threatto her future as a monarch, but my eyes fell again upon the assorted Baedeker’s and the biography of a queen who gave up her throne. It was possible that Gisela had had a hand in Alice’s murder, but it was just as possible that she had considered abdicating to begin a new life with the woman she loved.
