Echoes of Sherlock Holmes: Stories Inspired by the Holmes Canon(30)
“No need to apologize to me, darling. Run along and drink some hot lemon when you get home. Your voice sounds as if it were in shreds.”
Tears filled the younger woman’s bright eyes, but she managed to hold them in check as she turned and looked up at the crown prince. “Wilhelm, I am most—”
“No, no, that won’t do at all,” Miss Adler said, the rich musicality of her voice giving every phrase she spoke the sound of an aria. “Go, Magda, before you make a spectacle of yourself. Crown princes do not permanently ally themselves with girls from the opera chorus, and whatever the two of you shared is clearly over.”
The prince shifted his weight awkwardly from one foot to the other. “Magda, my dear, I am most sincerely sorry if I—” The young woman did not stay to hear the rest of his apology—the only fortunate choice she had made since meeting him, as Wilhelm had not the slightest idea what he planned to say next. Even if he had, the sight of Irene Adler, whose performance as Rosina in The Barber of Seville had dazzled him earlier in the evening, would have robbed him of his words. Her superb figure, shown off to great effect by a violently fashionable gown cut from emerald green silk, would mesmerize any man, but it was her eyes, identical in color to her dress, that he found irresistible.
“I shan’t apologize now she is gone,” she said. “I may have been rude, but the situation called for it. Subtlety is lost on Magda.”
“I am most heartily grateful,” the prince said. “I ought to have handled the situation more deftly.”
“Quite right,” she said. “Are you generally so hopeless with the ladies?”
“I did not realize while watching you onstage that you are American.”
“You did not answer my question.”
“I never expected to be rescued by Rosina,” he said. “I should have thought she would be the one to require rescuing.”
“No. I shall never require rescuing.”
“A fact that, if true, makes you all the more astonishing.”
“I should like very much to be able to return the compliment, but so far you have revealed yourself to be nothing more than a typical prince, easily seduced by a pretty face—eyes, to be specific—and helpless to take care of himself.”
“I am not used to being insulted to my face.” He was not smiling, but amusement danced in his eyes.
“Surely you would prefer it to knowing it’s done behind your back?”
“Eyes are my weakness, yes,” he said. “How did you know?”
“Even when you were trying to rid yourself of Magda you could not stop gazing into hers, and now you are doing the same to me.”
“We have not been properly introduced,” he said. “I know you, of course, the divine prima donna whose talent is in demand at every opera house in Europe. I am Wilhelm Gottsreich Sigismond von Ormstein, hereditary Crown Prince of Bohemia.”
“I have never cared for the name Wilhelm and shall call you Sigi instead. Siegmund is one of my favorite characters in Wagner’s Ring, and the name derives from Sigismond, does it not?”
“I would not dare contradict you.”
“Wagner’s greatest hero, Siegfried, is the son of Siegmund, conceived after a single night of grand passion.”
“Are you suggesting my own greatness will come through a son, not myself?”
She shrugged. “One can never predict what might come from a grand passion. Although I do sing Erda in The Ring, a goddess of infinite wisdom who has the ability to see the future . . .”
The prince stepped closer to her. “Then I ought to take any predictions you make rather seriously, as you perfectly embody every role you play.”
“Flattery does not impress me.”
“What about grand passion?”
“You believe it can strike so quickly?” she asked.
It could, and it had.
If she were Erda, wise and imperious, he was Hercules, strong and strapping. They made a handsome couple, her beauty and his height both seeming to have come from heaven rather than earth. They twirled through waltzes in ballrooms and stayed in cafés well past midnight arguing about politics. He missed none of her performances at the opera and hired the best photographer in Warsaw to make a cabinet picture of them. He called her Rosina until she reminded him of the sour turn taken in Rosina’s marriage to the count in The Marriage of Figaro, but she never refused his requests that she sing for him, back in his suite at the hotel. He soon found it impossible to imagine life without Irene. She adored him as no one else ever had, loving the man, not the prince. Nothing mattered more to him than possessing this woman who was a vision of strength and loveliness.
Only a sternly worded telegram from his father reminded him of his true purpose in Warsaw: to persuade a Prussian princess to turn over to him a series of embarrassing love letters written by the Bohemian king during, as his father explained, a lapse in moral judgment. The queen, Wilhelm’s mother, generally took this sort of thing in stride. What royal marriage did not benefit from the occasional lover? Unfortunately, however, this particular princess happened to be the queen’s bête noir, the daughter of the greatest rival of her youth, and the king, upon learning this, had no desire to further risk his tranquil domesticity. Wilhelm, who was close in age to the princess and had always got along well with her, could readily convince her to see reason—or so the king hoped. However, Princess Anna Elisabeth Victoria proved less pliable than the king had imagined, and on the very night the crown prince had met Irene, Wilhelm had all but given up the task. Ladies, it seemed, were loath to relinquish souvenirs of royal affairs.