Malice at the Palace (The Royal Spyness Series Book 9)
By: Rhys Bowen
I looked at the man with interest. Hugo was not a very common name and one of the letters in Bobo’s safe had been signed by him. A love letter to another man called Gerald. So Hugo was presumably another of those being blackmailed. I looked around the room. Was Gerald also here?
More and more people arrived, some that I recognized from their photographs in the picture papers. Cocktails were poured. Canapés were served. Noel sat at the piano and entertained. He was awfully witty, terribly risqué, and I was glad that Irmtraut had decided not to come. Either she wouldn’t have understood his wicked innuendoes or she would have been mortally offended by them. Marina, however, laughed with the rest of us.
“I think she’ll do nicely for George, don’t you?” I heard one of the men saying in a low voice.
“Ah, but will she take him out of circulation? That’s the question.”
Noel was singing another song, one he had just made up, according to him. “It’s a bit risqué, what do you think?” he asked. “Dare I try it on audiences? Is the London theater ready for it?”
“You should try it out first at the Black Cat,” someone called out and there was laughter.
“Is the Black Cat a nightclub?” I asked the man standing next to me.
“In a way,” he replied, looking at me cautiously. “It’s a place where young men of a certain persuasion go to meet other young men of similar persuasion. Very discreet or the police would shut it down.”
“Oh, I see.” I glanced across at Hugo, who was now chatting with a rather too gorgeous young man with blond curls. He had complained that Gerald no longer came to the Black Cat. I turned back to the man I had been chatting with.
“Is—uh—Gerald here tonight then?” I asked.
His eyebrows raised. “I shouldn’t think so,” he replied hastily. “Not his sort of thing. He wouldn’t want to be associated with Noel, would he? Very cautious is our Gerry boy.”
So Gerald might have had more to lose. I should report that to Darcy tomorrow. I wondered how many more people there were, willing to keep paying Bobo for her silence about behavior that society would not accept. And whether one of them had decided she had to be silenced forever.
The party showed no signs of ending but at nine o’clock Princess Marina indicated that she was ready to leave and sent someone for our motor.
“I’m sorry, but I was getting a headache,” she said as the car drove away. “All that smoke and noise and people one doesn’t know talking to each other and only including one occasionally to be polite.”
“I know, I felt rather the same,” I said, realizing how very overwhelming it must be for her, having to be nice to everyone in a strange country when she would be nervous about her wedding. “They certainly like to hold forth, don’t they? Each trying to outdo the other in wit.”
She chuckled then. “That would be tiring in everyday friends.”
We arrived back at Kensington Palace to find that Irmtraut was nowhere to be seen. But she had left a note on the front table. “I retired to bed early with headache.”
“Poor Traudi, she’s sulking,” Marina said. “I’ve tried to include her as much as possible but she’s not easy to please.”
“Has she always been that way?”
“We hardly ever saw her branch of the family but I do remember her as a morose child who didn’t want to play pranks with my sisters and me—” She put her hand up to her mouth. “Oh God,” she said. “I forgot all about it.”
“What?”
“My sisters and the other bridesmaids will be arriving on the overnight train from Hook of Holland. Mama suggested I should be at the station to meet them. I completely forgot to tell the chauffeur. Too many cocktails.”
“What time does the boat train arrive?” I asked.
“Seven thirty at Liverpool Street Station. Can you imagine?” She looked around. “And there is no telephone and I wouldn’t know who to call either.”
“I suppose you could always order a taxicab or two.”
“I don’t think it would go down well to meet royal young ladies in a taxicab,” she said. “I’d better go and find the major. He will know.”
She looked completely washed out. “I’ll go for you,” I said. “If you have to be up that early you should go to bed now.”