most surprising young woman.”
“I shall take that as a compliment.”
He smiled thinly and I fell to thinking that this sophisticated nobleman with his weathercock moods might well have had an excellent motive for murdering Alice himself. He was a royal of the old, Continental variety; it was not difficult to imagine that he would find nothing untoward in settling a woman who might well have been his mistress in proximity to the castle he hoped to share with his future wife. But what if Princess Gisela had taken a different view of the matter? There was gossip about Duke Maximilian and Alice Baker-Greene, that much I knew, and it was likely that some of it reached the ears of the princess. In previous generations, a nobleman could expect to establish a cozy situation for himself—his wife comfortably settled in his official residence whilst his paramour feathered their love nest. But these were modern days. Not every royal marriage included genteel adultery on the part of the husband. Our own Prince Albert had been a paragon of marital virtue, I reflected. And Gisela, as the reigning hereditary princess, held all of the cards. She could easily refuse to accept his proposal except on her own terms, and the most logical demand would be for him to remove his ladylove from Hochstadt. All of this was quite reasonable enough and no motive for murdering the woman.
Unless she refused to go quietly. I thought of Alice Baker-Greene, standing flushed with delight in the Curiosity Club as she related her future plans to me. I remembered the photographs of her posed on a mountaintop with her suffragist banners and the stories of her whipping Douglas Norton down a Bolivian street to assuage her honor. Oh no. Alice Baker-Greene was most definitely not the sort of woman to meekly accept being cast off by a lover who found her presence burdensome, I decided. She would have staked her claim to him as stalwartly as she did a mountain summit.
These thoughts chased and tangled in far less time than it takes to describe them, and as I considered them, the duke continued to smile his oblique smile at me until the baroness rapped him sharply with her fan. She said something in the Alpenwalder dialect too rapid for me to understand and he moved his chair back again and fell into conversation with the chancellor.
“I hope he does not trouble you too much,” she began in a low voice.
I shrugged. “I have encountered many such men in my travels, Baroness,” I assured her. “If he chooses to make trouble with me, he will find me a worthy adversary.”
Her expressions were carefully schooled, but I could tell she was distressed. “I beg you, do not make an enemy of him. He might take it in his head to create mischief, and when he does, no one can be naughtier than our Maximilian.”
There was something modestly revolting at the notion of a grown man being described as mischievous, but the baroness was obviously troubled and I had no wish to add to her burdens. I put a fingertip to her arm, startling her a little.
“You are clearly distressed,” I said. “Be of good heart, Baroness. I am certain your princess will return unharmed and soon.”
She said nothing, biting her lip before she darted me a grateful glance. She cleared her throat and opened her program. “Ah, act two is the love duet. That should be a most excellent scene,” she began. She carried on talking about the opera whilst a steady stream of visitors appeared at the door of the box, offering flowers, confections, and other little tributes from admirers whilst being carefully discouraged from entering by the lowering Teutonic presence of Captain Durand. The gifts were heaped on a small table in the corner—armfuls of carefully arranged blooms, boxes full of sugared almonds and tiny jeweled fruits, and an assortment of envelopes.
“Correspondence?” I asked the baroness.
“Petitions,” she explained. “Whenever the princess appears in public, there are those who present her with their needs. If it is in her power to assist them, she will do so.”
I watched the chancellor carefully bundle the envelopes before tucking them into his pocket. “It is my responsibility to assess the worthiness of each claim before passing it along to Her Serene Highness,” he told me smoothly. I realized then how very isolated the princess must be. She seldom traveled outside her own country, and even when she went in public, there