An Unexpected Peril (Veronica Speedwell #6)(35)
“Is there anything else you can tell us that might help bring her murderer to justice?” I asked.
J. J. thought a moment, then shook her head. “I am afraid I cannot help you.” She rose, smoothing her apron as she gave us a brittle smile. “I must take my leave of you now. The bathtubs will not scrub themselves, you know.”
She left then without a backwards glance. Julien sighed softly. “Such a waste of those hypnotic eyes,” he said.
“How so?” Stoker reached for another choux bun.
“I have never met a woman so inflexible, so incapable of succumbing to pleasure,” Julien lamented.
“You mean you were unsuccessful in luring her to your bed?” I asked.
“One of my few failures,” he said with a mournful expression. “She thinks I am too fancy, too French. She likes plain words and plain deeds and I am not a plain man. She would be just the woman for you, my friend,” he added with a laugh at Stoker.
I did not join in his amusement. Instead, I thought of her parting words.
Stoker looked at me. “She did not say she did not know. She said she cannot help.”
“She knows something,” I agreed. “But never mind J. J. Butterworth. We have no need of her,” I added, collecting another bun to slip into my pocket for the next time Stoker felt peckish. “The devil helps those who help themselves.”
CHAPTER
10
We spent the early afternoon at the Natural History Museum, bickering happily over the quality and position of the specimens, before presenting ourselves back at the Sudbury, where the baroness whisked me immediately into the princess’s private rooms. The next few hours were deeply instructive. As the semi-legitimate daughter of the Prince of Wales, I might have had my own claim to a throne—at least in Ireland, where my father’s marriage to my mother according to Catholic rites might have been recognized. But if this was what it meant to wear the purple, I had no inclination for the life. The baroness set to work as if she were planning a military operation and I was her objective. She hurried me into the bedchamber, where a young woman dressed in a simple blue gown with an enormous lawn apron waited at attention.
“This is Yelena, the princess’s personal maid,” the baroness told me. “She is Russian. Her Alpenwalder German is passable but the accent grates upon the ear and her English is nonexistent. You might try a little French if you must speak with her but I do not encourage it.”
I said a polite hello but the girl merely looked at me with enormous, slightly blank eyes. Her face had the broad, high-boned look of the Slav, and her blond hair was neatly plaited and coiled at the nape of her neck. I recalled what J. J. had said about Captain Durand’s interest in the girl and I was not surprised. She was quietly pretty with the watchful look of all good servants. The baroness rattled off a series of instructions at her in the peculiar Alpenwalder dialect, and the girl bobbed a curtsy to show she understood.
I glanced about the room, taking in my surroundings. Furnished in the same quiet luxury as the rest of the suite, the bedchamber was a study in tastefulness. Yelena might not have been the most articulate of servants, but she kept the room neat as a pin. No stray articles of clothing, no traces of face powder or trimmed threads, were to be seen. The books on the bedside table had been stacked in order of size, squared off at a precise angle. The pillows on the bed were plumped to an exact sameness, and the chairs tucked in the embrasure of the French windows were as rigidly correct as the sentry outside. Even the recamier of dark raspberry velvet had been positioned exactly in the center of a faux bois screen stretched across one corner of the room. The only unexpected note came from the plump Persian cat sitting majestically upon the dressing table. It regarded me with a long, unblinking stare.
“How do you do,” I said politely, for I have always believed that while one may be familiar immediately upon making a dog’s acquaintance, a cat will stand for no such informality.
The cat gave me a slow blink of its jeweled eyes.
“That is Guimauve,” the baroness told me. “He is spoilt beyond redemption.”
“Guimauve,” I repeated. “What an apt name!” It was the French word for the marshmallow flower, Althaea officinalis, a most useful herb with a broad white bloom that bore a striking resemblance to the creature before me.
The baroness issued another order to Yelena, who immediately collected the animal from the top of the dressing table and placed it on an azure silken cushion. It meowed by way of complaint, but it seemed to be a token protest only, for it instantly fell to grooming its snowy fur and ignoring us entirely.
As the cat attended to his ablutions, I was stripped of my own clothing down to the bare skin, my nakedness swiftly covered with a silk chemise of such delicacy it felt like a fall of rose petals whispering over my flesh. I would rather enjoy playing at being a princess if all the garments were going to be so lavish, I decided.
But no sooner had the chemise settled on my skin than I was trussed within an inch of my life into a strangulating corset of merciless dimensions. Unlike my own lightweight athletic corset, which permitted great ease of movement with only modest support, this monstrosity was clearly fashioned of steel with stays that might uphold a battleship if necessity demanded.
“I . . . cannot . . . breathe,” I protested through gasps.