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An hour later, dancing with her again, he saw Klaus talking earnestly with an elderly man Evelyn told him was a Prussian aristocrat.
“He looks like a soldier,” Monk agreed.
“He is,” she replied, shrugging her lovely shoulders. “Almost all Prussian aristocrats are. For them it is practically the same thing. I dislike them. They are terribly stiff and formal, and have not an atom of humor between them.”
“Do you know many of them?”
“Far too many!” She made a gesture of disgust. “Klaus often has them in the house, even to stay with us in our lodge in the mountains.”
“And you don’t care for them?”
“I can’t bear them. But Klaus believes we will ally with Prussia one day quite soon, and it is the best thing to make them your friends now, before everyone else does and you have lost your advantage.”
It was a peculiarly cynical remark, and for a moment the laughter faded a little, the lights seemed sharper, glittering with a harder edge, the noise around him shriller.
Then he looked at her face, and the laughter in it, and the moment passed.
But he did not forget her story of Klaus’s deliberate courting of the Prussians. Klaus was for unification, perhaps not for his country’s sake but for his own. Did he hope to emerge from such forced union with greater power than he now held? Friedrich’s return would have compromised that. Had he feared it, and killed Friedrich to prevent it? It was not impossible. The more Monk considered the idea, the more feasible did it seem.
But it hardly helped Rathbone. Then again, nothing that seemed even possible, let alone likely, would help Rathbone. The only person who seemed to care about Zorah was Ulrike. That curious remark of hers came back to his mind.
At midnight he was drinking champagne. The music was lilting again, strictly rhythmic, almost willing him to dance. Until he could find Evelyn, he asked the nearest woman to him, and drifted out onto the floor, swirled and lost in the pleasure of it.
It was nearly one when he saw Evelyn and contrived to end the dance close enough to her, and she had equally contrived to be away from Klaus and had laughingly passed by her previous partner before he could invite her again.
They came together moving to the music as if it were an element of nature and they simply were carried upon it, as foam upon a current of the sea. He could smell the perfume of her hair, feel the warmth of her skin, and as they spun and parted and came together again, see the glow in her cheeks and the laughter in her eyes.
When at last they stopped for breath, he lost count of how many dances later, it was at the edge of a group of others, some fresh from the floor, some sipping champagne, light winking in the glasses, flashing fire on diamonds in hair and on ears and throats.
Monk felt a sudden surge of affection for this tiny, independent state with its individual ways, its quaint capital, and its fierce desire to remain as it was. Maybe the only common sense, the only provident way forward, was to unite with all the other states into one giant nation. But if they did so then something irreparable would be lost, and he mourned its passing. How much more must these for whom it was their heritage and their home mourn?
“You must hate the thought of Prussia marching in here and taking over,” he said impulsively to Evelyn. “Felzburg will be simply a provincial city, like any other, ruled from Berlin, or Munich, or some other state capital. I can understand why you want to fight, even if it doesn’t seem to make sense.”
“I can’t!” she replied with a flicker of irritation. “It’s a lot of effort and sacrifice for nothing. We can always go to Berlin. It will be just as good there … maybe better.”
A footman passed by with a tray of champagne, and she took a glass and put it to her lips,
Monk was stunned. He looked beyond Evelyn to Brigitte, who was smiling with her mouth, but her eyes were aching with sadness, and even as Monk watched she blinked and he saw her breast rise as she breathed in deeply, and the moment after turned to the woman next to her and spoke.
Surely Evelyn must see that. She could not be as shallow as she had sounded.
“When are you going back to London?” Evelyn asked, her head a little on one side.
“I think tomorrow, perhaps the next day,” Monk answered with regret.
Evelyn looked at him, her brown eyes wide. “I suppose you have to go?”
“Yes,” he replied. “I have a moral obligation to a friend. He is in considerable difficulty. I must be there when his time of crisis comes.”
“Can you help him?” It was almost a challenge in her voice.
Beyond her a woman laughed, and a man proposed a toast to something or other.
“I doubt it, b
ut I can try,” Monk replied. “At the very least I can be beside him.”
“What purpose is there, if you can’t help?” Evelyn was looking very directly at him, and there was an edge of ridicule in her voice.
