An Unexpected Peril (Veronica Speedwell #6) -Deanna Raybourn Page 0,121
she did. I hid around the side of a boulder, and when she reached the first step of the middle of the Teufelstreppe, I emerged and sliced cleanly through the rope. Only I left it almost too late. It took longer to make the cut, even with a sharp blade, and she almost got a foothold on the step before she fell. She stretched out her hand to me as she went.”
The baroness turned to me, and I saw there were tears in her eyes, whether from the brisk wind whipping off the river or any excess of emotion, I could not say.
“She grasped my coat as she fell. I did not realize at the time that she had taken hold of my summit badge. Only later did I notice it was missing, and there was no way to know where it had fallen. I thought someone might eventually find it and I would simply say I had lost it on a previous climb.”
“But no one did find it,” I said, working it out as we spoke. “Because it was still clutched in Alice Baker-Greene’s hand when she died. And because it was found in her hand, it was mistaken for her own badge and buried with her. She took the proof of your guilt with her to the grave.”
She shook her head. “You cannot imagine my horror when I realized what must have happened.”
“And no one was the wiser until the princess arrived at the club and noticed the photograph of Alice in her coffin—wearing a badge for her burial. But the badge at the exhibition was Alice’s, marked with a nick that the princess knew about and recognized immediately. And this immediately raised the question, ‘Whose badge had Alice been buried with?’ Coming hard upon Stoker finding the cut rope, Gisela must have realized instantly that if Alice had not worn her own badge that day, she could only have been buried with her murderer’s badge.”
She clutched her hands together, the knuckles whitening.
“Is that why you harmed your princess?” I asked.
She rounded on me, her expression fierce. “How many times do I have to say it? I would never harm my princess!”
“Then where is she, Baroness?”
“I do not know,” she told me, her voice small and defeated. “She has run away before, but never for so long.”
“When she left before, it was to be with Alice, wasn’t it?” I ventured. She did not respond, but the stubborn set of her chin told me I was right. “We compared the dates of her absences from the Alpenwald with the times Alice was climbing in remote areas with a companion she referred to in her journal by the letter ‘D.’ Dolcezza.”
“The sweet one,” the baroness said, the words bursting forth in a torrent of rage. “It was wrong, her association with that woman. It brought out all of her worst instincts, her inclination to liberality, to modernization. It taught her to neglect her duties and to scorn our traditions.”
“Alice Baker-Greene was a suffragist,” I recalled. “She demonstrated for all sorts of causes, education for all, Irish Home Rule, the rights of workers, and open immigration. All the things in which Princess Gisela was interested. I have seen her books, remember?”
“Books given her by that woman,” she spat. “They sat up for hours, far into the night, talking of such things, making plans to change our country, to strip away all that we hold dear. And Gisela neglected her duties to be with this foreigner who had befriended her. It was a kind of madness. I tried to speak with her so many times about her responsibilities, about her duty to marry and secure the succession, but she would argue with me, trying to explain about education and votes for women and the rights of animals,” she said, her mouth twisting bitterly. “Animals! She was no longer the Gisela I knew, but I believed she would return to us. She was too proud, too much of an Alpenwalder, to neglect her people.”
“Then why eliminate Alice?” I asked. “If you were so certain that Gisela would overcome her feelings and do her duty, why act at all?”
“Because she was blinded by her idealism—idealism instilled in her by that creature! Every day our Gisela became more radical in her opinions, wanting to change things, to make it all different and modern,” she said, her mouth twisting bitterly. “Every day she moved further away from us.”
“And you realized Gisela was thinking of renouncing her