The Blue Diamond (2 page)

“How absolutely right you are, my dear, and to make it even better, hundreds of women will try to ape me, as they always do, and will appear ridiculous.” She sat before her mirror, joyfully flicking her fingers through her vestigial curls, and admiring her pretty face. “It does look
ravissant
, does it not, my pet?” she asked her husband.

"
Merveilleux
,” he agreed. They had run out of English words of praise for her six months ago, and were beginning to run thin in French as well. "
Wunderbar
,” he added, as he was doing a bit of reading in German preparatory to the trip. “It makes your neck look longer. That is—
reveals
the full beauty of that glorious column. And the ears—do you know, Googums, I had not appreciated those little ears till this minute.” He reached down over her shoulder and kissed first one, then the other, sending a delicious thrill of sensuous pleasure through her. He could still achieve that, after twelve months.

“Googie’s so lucky!” she chirped, smiling into the mirrors, so arranged as to allow her to see the front or either side of herself. She smiled at the reflection of connubial bliss, and released a long sigh. Really the new hairdo was a master stroke. She must exert her wits to create a name worthy of it. Perhaps she would call it the Viennese do. But no, why should those foreigners get the credit for it?

“I am the luckiest man in the world,” Harvey responded, also admiring himself in the mirror. They were remarkably similar. Both blond, blue-eyed, small, with of course those differences that their sex decreed. He bent down and placed a sliding kiss on the back of the glorious column, which sent a shiver of pure bliss through his wife.

She turned to him, her lips half-open, her eyelids drooping softly, as his arms tightened around her waist. He drew her up from the padded velvet bench, nuzzling her neck, which left her eyes free to see that she still had her girlish figure, thank God. Her husband’s eyes, followed hers in the mirror, then they looked at each other, and were soon locked in a hot embrace.

“Diamonds! We must have diamond ear buckles for these little rosebuds,” he murmured softly, nibbling at a petal.

 “Don’t you think, love, sapphires?” she asked, with a thought to her eyes.

“Blue diamonds,” he disagreed. “Sapphires are common. Unworthy of you.”

“Are there
blue
diamonds?” she asked, wrinkling her nose in a way that suited the babyish air of her new coiffure.

“You’re so adorable,” he said huskily, and found himself again falling deeply in love with Googie, as he so often did when she got a new hairdo. Sometimes even a new gown accomplished it.

“Googie never heard of blue diamonds,” she said, lisping in his ear. She looked so droll—about twelve months old, she thought, as she smiled at her reflection in the mirrors. “Me so ignorant. Are they rare?”

“Very rare,” he said, reaching to remove her peignoir. “I daresay we’ll find some in Vienna.”

“Does Harvey love Googie?” she asked, in a teasing way, and was shown very clearly that he did. Enough even to have positively promised her blue diamonds before they arose from the bed.

The great hairdo, which was eventually christened the Portia, as a sort of conjugal counterpart to Harvey’s stylish Brutus do, occurred in late October. It had to be trimmed twice before they had prepared the retinue for the trip. Their private yacht, the
Hargoo
, took them across the Channel, while advance runners arranged accommodation across Europe and in the city of Vienna. A mansion was hired at an undisclosed sum in the Innere Stadt, the inner city, where “everyone” lived or stayed in Vienna. Palgrave’s solicitors thought his lordship had purchased the mansion when they heard the sum paid for a year’s hire, and erroneously entered it in his books as a credit. But houses were nearly impossible to obtain at such a time, and naturally forty servants could not be put up in a couple of rented rooms somewhere.

The lavish couple were not long in town before their presence was causing ripples.

Chapter Three

Lord Moncrief’s establishment in Vienna was considerably less opulent than his cousin’s. He was assigned one room of the twenty-two-room floor at Minoritenplatz No. 30, where Lord Castlereagh, first plenipotentiary for England at the Congress of Vienna, was billeted. His valet and groom occupied some cubbyhole of the edifice, far enough removed from him that they were virtually inaccessible, though there was a pull cord in his room which, in theory, put him in contact with his servants. In fact, he had not seen his valet, Wragge, in the last twenty-four hours. He dressed himself; clean clothes were miraculously awaiting him, as were polished boots, but he had waited half an hour for hot water for bathing and shaving that morning, finally sending a junior clerk for it. Moving out was impossible. There was not a room in the city to be had, and if there has been, Castlereagh would resent the desertion.

Moncrief was attached to British headquarters as a liaison officer, whose job it was to conciliate the Russian and Prussian delegations to the Congress, or failing this Herculean task, to keep an ear to semiofficial pipelines laid in every hostess’s saloon and discover what nefarious schemes were hatching.

The major political issue to be resolved was what had been termed, for ease of reference, the Saxony-Poland question. There existed a tacit alliance between Russia and Prussia. Tsar Alexander would support King William’s claim to Saxony if Prussia would support the Tsar’s annexing of Poland, under the guise of granting it independence. Austria and England were in an uneasy alliance against them, as was France. They none of them wanted too strong a Prussia at their doorsteps.

There existed a host of minor questions as well. Every country had an axe to grind and a cause to push forward. Loyalties shifted from day to day, depending on the current rumors. Prince Talleyrand was there for France, trying to insinuate himself in where he was not wanted, and having very good success too. Spain, Italy and Portugal were in a pucker at being left out of important meetings. The independent German states, ignored by the major powers, united in a federal league. It was enough to make the most sober head reel.

Baron Hager had been put in charge of policing the international meeting, to look into the daily threats of kidnapping, assassination, intrigue, espionage, counterespionage, treason and revolt. And despite all this converging of the powers, there was really no Congress going on at all, but a series of secret meetings. It was said amongst the wits that the only time the national representatives were likely to get together was when Isabey, the Congress artist, had got them all individually painted, and assembled on canvas.

Moncrief glanced at the slip of paper in his hand, wondering what “urgent matter” Castlereagh could wish to discuss with him. He was soon tapping at a carved oaken door nine feet high and being shown into the Foreign Minister’s office. Castlereagh sat behind a mammoth desk littered with reports. He was paring his nails. He was a handsome gentleman in his early forties, his face already lined from the weight of his responsibilities, his hair turning gray.

“Come in, Moncrief. Come in,” he said. “You have heard the latest?”

Moncrief shrugged his shoulders and advanced to the desk. He was tall and slender, dark-haired and dark-eyed, but with no flavor of the Latin in his appearance. He had prominent cheek bones and a prominent nose and was seldom seen wearing any but a haughty expression. “My most recent news is eight hours old. I expect I am seven hours and fifty-nine minutes behind the times.”

He sat down and crossed one long leg over the other, carefully arranging his trousers to avoid wrinkling. “I was at the Prussian do last night, at the Schweizerhof Wing,” he mentioned. All the visiting monarchs were put up at the Hofburg, each allotted its own wing.

“I refer to domestic affairs,” Castlereagh informed him. “It is Crowell.”

“Yes?” Moncrief asked, searching his mind to put a face to this name.

“An informer!” Castlereagh went on. “One of my own household, imagine! A trusted footman—I have used him dozens of times for carrying highly secret documents. My wife caught him red-handed opening a billet she was sending to a friend. Fortunately it was no more than a request for the name of a modiste, but it could as easily have been a matter of more importance. You see how it is. He was in Baron Hager’s pay—the chief of Austrian police. Every delegation is rife with informers. God only knows what they do with all the scraps of paper they snitch out of the waste baskets, and all the private correspondence they have copies. As though anyone would be fool enough to entrust anything of real importance to the mails! We require another servant we can trust. I hope you don’t mind that I have borrowed Wragge from you. It wouldn’t do to hire a foreigner, and Wragge will still see to your toilette, as a matter of course. Or perhaps you can borrow a valet from your cousin. I hear Palgrave brought his own private domestic army with him.”

“Ah, they have arrived, have they? I did not hear it at the Hofburg last night.”

“Did you not? That’s odd. They have been here a couple of days. They were at the other party last night at the Hofburg—the Amalia Wing, with the Grand Duchess Catherine of Oldenberg. There is some bit of spite simmering between Catherine and the Prussian King. I believe he neglected to flirt with her in passing, or some such detail. Never mind, any cooling between those two is to the good. The Duchess might even talk her brother into welcoming Louis back on the throne of France, if King William comes out strongly enough against it. Anyway, that is really why I asked you here.”

“What, to foster a feud between the Grand Duchess and King William? Sounds like lady’s work to me.”

“No, no—it is your cousin I speak of. Palgrave.”

“He will doubtlessly carry his own particular brand of mischief into the toils of the Congress. And prices are already so high too! But then you know, with a hundred thousand visitors to outspend, and two hundred and fifteen princely families, he will hardly cause much rise in the rate of inflation.”

“I don’t know about that,” Castlereagh replied, in perfect seriousness. He was clever, but not much given to levity. “He is certainly spending like a drunken sailor in any case."

“Palgrave’s man of business called on me a week ago. I expect there was some ill feeling when the semiofficial group from Württemberg had their headquarters rented out from under them, but really that is nothing to do with me. It is a
fait accompli
. The Württemberg group were put up elsewhere, were they not?”

“It is not the house I’m worried about. Palgrave is spouting some nonsense about blue diamonds.”

“Blue diamonds?” Moncrief asked, frowning. "The lady has every other color known to science. Now you must own, Castlereagh, blue diamonds would match her eyes very well.”

“It is all fine and dandy for you to joke, but you know well enough what blue diamond he refers to.”

“I’m afraid I don’t.”

“What, you don’t know of the Blue Tavernier, and you call yourself an expert on gems?”

“I don’t, actually, though I don’t trouble to refute it when others bestow the title on me. Certainly I am familiar with the Blue Tavernier.”

“I am glad to hear it. I want you to tell me all about it. Someone was saying last night that it belongs to the King of France, and that it is stolen property. One of the French delegates it was—Chabon. Ready to raise a great stink about it.”

“How much do you want to know?”

“Everything.”

“A comprehensive answer,” Moncrief said, and adjusted his posture to achieve total comfort. He crossed his arms, tilted his chair back, rested his chin on his chest and closed his eyes, to aid memory. “Well then, some several thousand years ago, there was a forest growing in India . . ."

“Let us just skip over the next few millenia till a diamond had formed and been discovered by man, shall we?” Castlereagh asked, in a damping tone.

“If you like, but the formation of a diamond is really very interesting. The stone commonly known as the Blue Tavernier comes from Golconda, in India. It first became known in Europe when it was brought back to France by Tavernier, a French traveler and gem merchant, who had stolen it from the forehead of a statue of Rama Sita in India. This was around 1668. It was over a hundred carats at the time, but was subsequently recut to two-thirds the size. Badly cut, in the opinion of most experts. I have not personally seen the stone, you understand,” Moncrief said, opening his eyes to regard his listener.

“I don’t see what all this has to do . . ."

“You did say everything. But I shall shorten the history if you like. It was sold to King Louis XIV, to be set in the crown jewels. It is set in a fabulous jeweled insignia of the Order of the Golden Fleece. It picked up rather a nasty reputation as a stone of evil about that time. Tavernier, you see, was eaten alive by wild dogs in Russia. King Louis caught a disease which delicacy forbids mentioning and died, Louis XVI, er—lost his head . . . and the stone is now bringing ill luck to an unknown party.”

“But where is it? Who has it? Chabon spoke as though it were someone here in Vienna."

“Chabon seems to know a good deal more about it than anyone else. It has not been heard of since the French Revolution. It was part of the jewel exhibition put on at that time, when the French crown jewels were claimed in the name of the bourgeoisie and set out for them to see. This was at the Garde Meuble of the Tuileries. The blue diamond, along with the Sancy and the Regent—also ten thousand lesser stones—were all stolen. The robbery was believed to have been executed by twenty men, who were ultimately betrayed by one woman. Five of them were executed, but none of them talked. The Tavernier is still missing, as are many of the others. A few have turned up—the Regent was found in a Parisian attic, hidden in the woodwork. It was the largest of the lot. But it was found shortly afterwards. I have heard nothing of the rest of them for years. What makes you think it is the Blue Tavernier Palgrave is after?”

“He said as much last night.”