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“The palace is newer than you might think,” he added as he raised the poker-face drawbridge again. “It was built in 1867 by the king’s great-grandfather. A palace, if you haven’t gathered from context, is the home of royalty.”
“I have gathered, thank you.” She paused. Once again, that had come out too snippily. She tried again on the making-friendly-conversation front. “It looks like a more realistic version of Cinderella’s palace at Disney World.”
“Indeed. I spend more time than you might imagine denying requests from film crews.”
“Why would you deny them?”
“Whywouldn’tI?”
Because you need money.She didn’t say it like that, and of course Mr. Benz personally did not need money—although his suit was a little old-fashioned in terms of its cut, at least to her American eyes, it clearly wasn’t actually old. Dark blue and paired with a lavender raw-silk tie, it was elegant and fit him to a degree of perfection that could only be attained by a tailor. And she assumed that not only did the equerry gig pay well, it was the kind of job you got by being a fancy person to begin with.Eldovianeeded money, though. That was the whole reason she was here, even if these posh Europeans would never put it so plainly. The luxury watch industry was in decline, and this was a one-industry country. Unemployment was up, and GDP was contracting. Mr. Benz didn’t need money, but his country sure as hell did.
As they wound their way up the hill, the palace disappeared from sight due to the steepness of the incline and the forested landscape surrounding it. When they emerged onto a gravel-lined approach, it appeared again, monumental yet delicate. It was imposing but somehow, at the same time, welcoming. A castle of contradictions.
She smiled to herself as she issued a mental correction. Apalaceof contradictions, though that was not as pleasingly alliterative a phrase. A palace of paradox?
Mr. Benz said something to their driver in German before turning to her. “Is something amusing?”
That was the second time he’d asked her that. She needed to rein in the smiling along with the sniping. “I’m merely happy to have finished my journey. I don’t think I’ve recovered from the jet lag from my last trip.” On cue, she yawned.
“The best thing to do is to force yourself to stay up until a reasonable hour locally, as difficult as it may be, and retire for the evening at a normal time.”
For some reason, an anti–jet lag lecture from this dude annoyed her. “I’m aware.” She was back to being snippy, but she couldn’t help it. “I travel a lot for work.”
“Do you now.”
She was noticing this tendency of his to say something that should be a question—Do you now?—but to make it a declarative statement, and one that conveyed subtle, snobbish disapproval. “After this trip, I’ll have logged more than two hundred days on the road this year.”
“Mm,” he said as they came to a stop in front of the palace. He opened his door, and she did likewise. The driver was extracting her suitcase from the trunk. “Your bag will be delivered to your suite if that suits?” Mr. Benz asked, making an “after you” gesture in the direction of a stone staircase that led to an oversize wooden double door.
“Yes, thank you.” She made her way up the stairs, and the door opened to reveal a man and a woman. The man wore a plain black suit and the woman a black dress. Servants. They were servants. They probably didn’t call them that anymore, and hopefully they made a decent living and had dental benefits and all that, but they looked like they could have come from the set ofDownton Abbey.
“Ms. Delaney, welcome,” the man said. “I am Ernst, and this is Frau Lehman.”
Cara had no idea how she was supposed to greet them, but she stuck out her hand. Maybe that wasn’t done, but she came from humble origins herself and she always made a point to be niceto service staff. Hell, her mother had cleaned houses—normal houses—for a living until her rheumatoid arthritis got bad enough that she’d had to stop.
Each of them shook Cara’s hand in turn, with no indication that to do so was unusual. “The princess and the king are so sorry they could not be here to greet you in person,” Ernst said as they made their way into an enormous foyer with marble-tiled floors and gleaming wood-paneled walls. There was a fireplace at one end with a massive, elaborately carved mantel over which hung a portrait of a very pretty woman. “Though I’m sure Mr. Benz has welcomed you in their stead,” said Ernst.
“Yes,” she said, though she wasn’t surewelcomewas the word she would use.
“I trust you will see Ms. Delaney settled to her satisfaction and to the high standards for which we are known,” Mr. Benz said to Frau Lehman.
Ernst answered, apparently speaking on behalf of Frau Lehman. “Yes, of course.” Cara wondered if Ernst was his first name or last name. Did Eldovians do the British-style one-name butler thing? She had read up on royal protocol on the flight but hadn’t learned anything about servants. Servants! It still boggled the mind.
“You’ve had a delivery, Mr. Benz,” Frau Lehman said. “Several boxes. I had them sent to your office.”
“Thank you, Frau Lehman,” Mr. Benz said warmly, and with a curt nod in Cara’s direction, he set off down a corridor.
What a curious man. On the surface of things, he had been the picture of decorum, but there had been a disconnect between the actions he performed and the emotions that seemed to lurk beneath them. And he definitely had a tone problem.
But to be fair, so did she, apparently. He brought it out in her.
Cara gave up her attempts to make sense of Mr. Benz when they reached her room. Rooms, plural. It wasn’t unusual for a client to put up a consultant on-site when the project was in a remote locale, but as far as she knew, never in the history of CZT had anyone been accommodated in a palace. As Ernst showed her around, she reasoned that theoretically, the space wasn’t that different from a hotel suite. There was a bedroom, a sitting room, and a bathroom—a glorious bathroom featuring a large, freestanding soaker tub. Cara loved nothing more than to luxuriate in a hotel bathtub at the end of a long day. Her house in New York had only a small shower stall, so she considered hotel bathtubs a major perk of all her work travel.
Outside, the sitting room was broken up into four zones—a sofa and chairs arranged around a fireplace, another seating area in a corner centered on a television, an office alcove with a desk and a charging station, and a nook housing a coffee machine, microwave, and minifridge.
But everything was so muchfancierhere than a hotel room would be. Not the princess-fancy of her girlhood imagination, or that she might have expected when she first got a load of the Sugar Plum Palace, but understatedly elegant. Instead of being painted or wallpapered, the walls were paneled in a dark wood. The gray marble floors were veined with a subtle pattern, and antique-looking lamps and chandeliers cast the space in a warm glow. The minifridge was full of drinks of all sorts including half bottles of champagne. And there was a display of chocolate truffles she’d been told were a local specialty.
If all that weren’t enough, before he left, Ernst showed her a longtasseled cord hanging in a corner—like, literally the kind people pulled in movies set in ye olden days to summon servants—and told her to pull it if she wanted anything. He presented her with a menu and told her that the kitchen could produce anything on it at a moment’s notice and that if she wanted anythingnoton it, she merely needed to inquire and they would do their best.
