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“I thought she was devoted to Friedrich?” Monk looked at him anxiously. “Why should she care if Zorah rode with Florent?”
Now Stephan was thoroughly amused.
“Don’t be naive!” he exclaimed. “Certainly, she was devoted to Friedrich, but she adored other admirers. It was part of her role as the great lover that all men should admire her. She is the woman for whom a throne was lost: always gorgeous, always desirable, always utterly happy. She had to be the center of the party, the most alluring, the one who could make everyone laugh at whatever she chose. She was terribly witty at dinner that evening, but Zorah was just as quick. It was a battle royal over the dinner table.”
“Unpleasant?” Monk asked, trying to visualize it and gauge the underlying emotion. Was her hatred really enough to prompt Zorah to fabricate this charge, or even to blind her to the truth and make her believe a lie because she wanted to? Was it all really stung vanity, a battle for fame and love?
Stephan stopped and stood still on the path, looking at Monk carefully for some time before answering.
“Yes,” he said at last. “I think there is a sense in which it has always been unpleasant. I’m not really sure. Perhaps I don’t understand people as well as I thought I did. I couldn’t speak as she did to anyone whom I liked, but I don’t think I really know what they felt.” The wind blew in his face, lifting his hair a little. The sky was clouding over to the west. “Zorah always believed Gisela to be selfish,” he went on. “A woman who married for position and then was cheated out of the ultimate glory. Most people believed she married for love and didn’t care about anything else. They would have thought Zorah merely jealous, had she expressed her views, but she had enough sense not to. They could never have liked each other; they were too utterly different.”
“But you believe Zorah?”
“I believe her honesty.” He hesitated. “I am not absolutely certain I believe her to be correct.”
“And yet you will stake so much to help me defend her?”
Stephan shrugged and flashed a sudden, brilliant smile. “I like her … I like her enormously. And I do think poor Friedrich might have been murdered, and if he was, we ought to know. You can’t murder princes and simply walk away. I have that much loyalty to my country.”
Monk received a very different picture when he spent a delicious afternoon in the rose garden with Evelyn. The flowers were in their second blossoming. The garden was sheltered from the light breeze, and in the still air the perfume was heavy and sweet. The climbing roses had been trained up columns and over arches, and the shrub roses were four or five feet high, making dense mounds of blossom on either side of the grass paths. Evelyn’s huge crinoline skirts touched the lavender at the edges of the beds, disturbing their scent. The two strollers were surrounded by color and perfume.
“It’s an unspeakable thing for Zorah to do,” Evelyn said, her eyes wide as if she were still amazed at it, her voice rising in indignation. “She’s always been very odd, but this is incredible, even for her.”
Monk offered his arm as they walked up a flight of stone steps to another level, and Evelyn took it quite naturally. Her hand was small and very beautiful. He was surprised how much pleasure it gave him to feel its feather touch on his sleeve.
“Has she?” he asked casually. “Why on earth do you think she said anything as strange as this? She cannot possibly believe it is true, can she? I mean, is the evidence not entirely against it?”
“Of course it is,” she said with a laugh. “For a start, why would she? If you want to be quite brutal about it … married to Friedrich, Gisela had wealth, rank and extraordinary allure. As a widow she has no rank anymore, Felzburg will make her no allowance, and even the wealth will be used up pretty rapidly if she continues the life to which she has been accustomed—and believe me, enjoyed very much indeed. He spent a fortune on jewels and gowns for her, carriages, their palace in Venice, parties, travel to anywhere she wanted. Admittedly that was only within Europe, not like Zorah, who went to the oddest places.” She stopped in front of a huge wine-red Bourbon rose and looked up at him. “I mean, why would any woman want to go to South America? Or to Turkey, or up the Nile, or to China, of all things? No wonder she never married. Who’d have her? She’s never here.” She laughed happily. “Any respectable man wants a wife who has some sense of how to behave, not one who rides astride a horse and sleeps in a tent and can and does converse with men from every walk of life.”
Monk knew that what she said was true, and he would not want such a woman as a wife himself. Zorah sounded far too like Hester Latterly, who was also outspoken and opinionated. Nevertheless, she sounded brave, and extraordinarily interesting as a friend, if nothing else.
“And Gisela is quite different?” he prompted.
“Of course.” Evelyn seemed to find that funny also. Her voice was rich with underlying amusement. “She loves the luxuries of civilized life, and she can entertain anyone with her wit. She has a gift of making everything seem sophisticated and immense fun. She is one of those people who, when she listens to you, makes you feel as if you are the most interesting person she has met and are the center of her entire attention. It is quite a talent.”
And very flattering, Monk thought with a ripple of appreciation—and a sudden warning. It was a powerful art, and perhaps a dangerous one.
They came to an arch of late-flowering white roses, and she moved a little closer to him so they could pass through side by side.
“Did Friedrich never mind Gisela’s being the center of so much attention?” Monk asked as they moved beyond the rose arch onto a path between iris beds, only green sword blades now, the flowers long over.
Evelyn smiled. “Oh, yes, sometimes. He could sulk. But she always won him around. She had only to be sweet to him and he would forget about it. He was terribly in love with her, you know, even after twelve years. He adored her. He always knew exactly where she was in a room, no matter how many other people were there.” She looked across the green iris leaves back towards the rose arch, the expression in her eyes bright and far away. He had no idea what lay in it.
“She used to dress marvelously,” she went on. “I loved just seeing what she would wear next. It must have cost a fortune, but he was so proud of her. Whatever she wore one week would be the vogue the week after. It always looked right on her. That’s a wonderful thing, you know. So feminine.”
He looked at Evelyn’s own golden brown dress with its enormous skirts and delicately cut bodi
ce with a froth of creamy lace at the bosom, fine pointed waist and full sleeves. It was a gift she had no cause to envy. He found himself smiling back at her.
Perhaps she read his appreciation in his eyes, because she blinked and looked down, then smiled a little and began to walk away. There was a grace in her step which showed her satisfaction.
He followed her and asked more about the weeks before Friedrich’s accident, even the years in exile in Venice and a little of the life at court before Gisela first came. The picture she painted was full of color and variety, but also rigid formality, and for royalty itself, intense discipline to duty. There was extravagance beyond anything he had imagined, let alone seen. No one he knew in London had spent money as Evelyn described quite casually, as if it were a feature of the way everyone lived.
Monk’s head swam. Half of him was dazzled and fascinated, half was bitterly conscious of the hunger and humiliation, the dependency, and the constant fear and physical discomfort of those who worked all their waking hours and were still always on the brink of debt. He was even uncomfortably aware of the servants who existed to fill any whim of the guests in this exquisite house who day and night did nothing but pass from one amusement to another.
And yet without such places as Wellborough Hall, so much beauty would be lost. He wondered who was happier, the gorgeous baroness who strolled through the gardens, flirting with him, telling stories of the parties and masques and balls she remembered in the capitals of Europe, or the gardener fifty yards away snipping the dead heads off the roses and threading the tendrils of the new growth through the bars of the trellis. Which of them saw the blooms more clearly and took more joy in them?
He did not enjoy dinner that evening either, and his discomfort was made worse when Lord Wellborough asked him quietly at the table if Monk would excuse them all that evening. They were all there to discuss the sensitive matter with which Monk was now acquainted, and as Monk was not involved, surely he wouldn’t be offended by being excluded from their talk that evening. There was some decent Armagnac in the library, and some rather fine Dutch cigars …
