Cinderella Six Feet Under(106)

“Are you well?” Griffe whispered.

Ophelia nodded. She looked back to the dais and saw Colifichet standing up close, narrow arms folded, smug.

The crowd babbled. Ophelia stood on tiptoe to see a footman pushing something up a ramp and onto the dais. Shrouded in a white sheet, it glided as though on wheels.

“She arrives,” Prince Rupprecht said, watching the thing approach with a look of boyish anticipation.

It couldn’t be.

The footman parked the thing beside the prince. Then he bowed to his master and whipped off the sheet.

The crowd gasped.

Standing beside the prince was a beautiful automaton in a sumptuous gown of ivory tulle, embroidered all over with gold and silver threads. The Cinderella gown, except it didn’t have a stomacher. The waist was plain ivory silk. The automaton’s hair was heaped upon its head in a profusion of shining, diamond-studded cornsilk that looked too heavy to be supported by such a slender neck. Its demure lips and alabaster arms curved in permanent perfection.

“He means to marry a doll?” Ophelia whispered. “An enormous doll?”

Prince Rupprecht caressed the side of the automaton’s neck. He must’ve touched some kind of spring, because it jolted into motion. It gracefully moved its head on its filigree neck. One hand lifted to touch its throat in a maidenly gesture of surprise, and back again.

The crowd was having forty fits, but Prince Rupprecht seemed to be deaf and blind to his guests. He knelt before the automaton. He gazed up at it, still holding the glass slipper.

“He truly seems . . . jumpy,” Ophelia said. “As though it were a real lady who might turn him down.”

“I always suspected it would come to something like this with him,” Griffe said. “He is not right in the head.”

There was a delicate chime, and then another and another. The crowd fell silent.

The clock was striking midnight.

Where was Prue?

Just as the clock chimed twelve, the automaton kicked out a bare foot from under its tulle hem. Prince Rupprecht attempted to place the slipper onto the foot. He wiggled and shoved, but he could not get it on. All the while, the automaton went on swiveling its head and touching its throat. The prince leapt to his feet, cursing and ranting in French.

“What’s he saying?” Ophelia asked Griffe.

“He asks if this is a joke. He demands to know who has tampered with his Cendrillon and replaced her foot with a larger one. He says someone will be punished.”

Someone had replaced the automaton’s foot? Yes. The feet in Malbert’s workshop cupboard must have been the automaton’s original feet. But how had they come to be in that brining vat?

Prince Rupprecht yelled and pointed at someone standing to the side of the dais.

“He says, ‘You! You destroyed her, you ditch rat!’” Griffe said.

“Who?” Ophelia struggled to see. Her breath caught.

Prince Rupprecht was pointing at Pierre, Colifichet’s apprentice.





32




Gabriel stood in a doorway to the side of the dais only a few yards away from Pierre. Where were Inspector Foucher and his men? Gabriel had received word that they were on their way from Paris, but he had not seen them yet.

Pierre had appeared downtrodden and flimsy the few times Gabriel had seen him before. Now he exuded a vicious power.

“Yes,” Pierre said in loud, clear French, addressing the shushing crowd as well as Prince Rupprecht. “It was I who altered your automaton.”

“You replaced her foot with another!” Prince Rupprecht yelled. “A large, ugly foot, like any ordinary woman’s. You destroyed her—her perfection!”

“No lady is perfect,” Pierre said. “Not even a clockwork lady, it seems. You thought you would destroy my sister for her imperfections, did you?”

Sister?

Understanding hit Gabriel. It hadn’t been Lord and Lady Cruthlach on the lake. It had been Pierre—slightly built, vengeful Pierre. But who was his sister? Surely not Sybille.

“You thought,” Pierre said, stalking forward, “you would not pay the price for sullying my sister, for discarding her like a soiled rag? No, altering this automaton was only a little joke, Prince. Only the beginning of what we have in store for you.”

The two men locked eyes, Prince Rupprecht large, opulent, and looking like he was about to erupt, Pierre cool and crackling with hatred.

Where was Miss Bright? Had she forgotten her role? Because an entrance on her part at this moment would be theatrical indeed.