Aunt Dimity and the Lost Prince (17 page)

I
didn’t have to wave the silver sleigh under Lady Barbara’s nose to prompt her to recall
Mikhail. Her memories of him, once triggered, flowed as freely as a stream dancing
downhill.

“His full name was Mikhail Alekseiovich Markov,” she said, “and for a brief time,
he was my best friend.”

Her panting lessened as she spoke, as if she were no longer tethered to an oxygen
tank, but breathing the fresher air of childhood.

“One summer, one golden summer, nearly eighty years ago,” she began, “a new family
bought the property adjoining ours. Wideacres, it was called, but the new family rechristened
it Mirfield. The reactionary morons among us—the Boghwells and their set—ostracized
the newcomers, but my father was an open-minded man. He took me with him the first
time he called upon the Markovs.”

I pictured a freckle-faced girl with copper curls, bouncing in her father’s wake as
he sallied forth from Tappan Hall to introduce himself to his new neighbors.

“The day I first set foot in Mirfield is as clear in my mind as if it were yesterday,”
Lady Barbara continued. “I felt as though I’d stepped into a fairy tale. Mr. Markov
was a big bear of a man with a mustache and bushy black beard. Mrs. Markov’s corsets
could scarcely contain her magnificent bosom. They spoke a kind of English I’d never
heard before—broken, heavily accented—but I didn’t need to understand their words
to understand how welcome I was at Mirfield.”

Lady Barbara took another small sip of brandy, then looked down at the snifter and
chuckled.

“Mama Markov—as I came to know her—made sure Father and I were properly fed and watered,”
she told us. “We drank tea poured from a golden samovar into tall glasses cradled
in filigreed glass holders. We ate exotic pastries—rugelach, piroshki, vatrushkas,
and little round hazelnut biscuits covered in icing sugar. Father kept a close eye
on me to make sure the icing sugar didn’t end up on the carpet instead of in my mouth,
but I was too absorbed in my surroundings to make too much of a mess.”

The freckled-faced girl seemed to peer out at us from behind Lady Barbara’s faded
blue eyes as she recalled her first impressions of Mirfield’s splendors.

“The house was a swirl of color—figured fabrics, lush carpets, inlaid tables, enameled
clocks,” she murmured. “Strange and beautiful pictures hung on the wall, portraits
of mournful saints painted like jewels against a gold field. And everywhere there
were the most magical silver creations. Not your everyday punch bowls and salvers,
but true works of art—birds, horses, flowers, bears, delicate ladies in ball gowns,
gentlemen in powdered wigs, none of them more than six inches tall and each one a
masterpiece.”

She paused for a moment, then smiled.

“Best of all, there was the boy. He was my age—a little younger than Daisy—and his
dark, straight hair framed his face like a helmet. He was wearing a sailor suit and
old-fashioned buckled shoes and his eyes were a velvety brown. We stared at each other
like a couple of mutes until Mama Markov sent us up to the nursery to play. The rocking
horses! The train sets! The hoops and the teddy bears and the clockwork toys! I thought
Mikhail must be one of a dozen children, but he made it clear that he was an only
child.”

“Did he speak English?” Bree asked.

“He was bilingual,” said Lady Barbara. “I had to teach him how to curse in English,
naturally, but otherwise he spoke the language as fluently as I did, though he never
quite lost his Russian accent.

“We spent almost every day of that golden summer together,” she went on, “flying kites,
climbing trees, playing pirates and knights, though I refused point blank to be a
damsel in any sort of distress. I’m afraid I bullied Mikhail terribly, but I believe
our friendship was the only thing that kept him from turning into a self-satisfied
prat. His parents adored him, treated him like a little prince, but I kept his feet
on the ground.”

She paused and her face crumpled slightly. She gestured for Bree to throw another
log onto the fire, as though she’d felt a sudden chill, and she didn’t speak again
until the log was blazing.

“Our golden summer ended quite cruelly,” she said.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Polio,” she said softly. “No one knows how the virus came to Mirfield, but it found
Mikhail. I was banned from the premises, and when I tried to return Misha—”

“Misha?” said Bree.

Lady Barbara looked toward the far end of the mantel. I followed her gaze and saw
a small, cream-colored teddy bear dressed in a red Cossack shirt. The bear had lost
most of the mohair on the top of his head, but he had a winning expression that warmed
my heart.

“Misha was Mikhail’s nickname as well as his bear’s name,” said Lady Barbara, “and
you rarely saw one Misha without the other. Mikhail left his bear here by accident
the day before he fell ill and when I tried to bring it to him, my father went spare.
Polio was highly contagious, there was no vaccine, and the consequences of my innocent
visit could have been catastrophic. After Father gave me a well-earned hiding, he
promised solemnly to keep me informed of Mikhail’s progress, but he made me promise
in turn to stay away from Mirfield.

“We both kept our promises,” she said. “I learned from my father that Mikhail had
the best doctors, the best treatments, the best care, and that he was making a good
recovery. But I never saw him again.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Boarding school, finishing school, and a life lived abroad,” Lady Barbara replied.

“Finishing school?” Bree said doubtfully.

“It didn’t take,” Lady Barbara said with a wry smile. “But the time I spent at Madame
LeFleurier’s academy in Switzerland whetted my appetite for travel. I decided to see
as much of the world as I could before I checked out of it. Snippets of news about
Mikhail reached me from time to time. He married a nice Russian émigré girl, they
had a son, the son married, the son died, the wife died, and so on, but I was always
too far away—in China or Fiji or Ecuador—to hear about weddings or funerals until
long after they’d taken place.”

“You must have looked in on Mikhail when you returned to Tappan Hall,” I said.

“There comes a point when it’s too late to renew an old acquaintance,” said Lady Barbara.
“Besides, I was told that Mikhail was too ill to receive visitors.”

“He’s very old,” I reminded her.

“So am I,” snapped Lady Barbara. “I’m not in perfect health, either, as you may have
noticed, but I’m never too ill to receive visitors. Polio, though . . .” Her gaze
turned inward and her voice lost its sharp edge. “Polio is an insidious enemy. In
some cases, the virus lies dormant for years, then strikes again, more virulently
than it did before. It’s called post-polio syndrome and it’s a bugger.”

“I’ve heard of post-polio syndrome,” said Bree. “It’s not usually fatal, but it zaps
the joints as well as the muscles and it causes extreme, sometimes debilitating, fatigue.”

“As I said, it’s a bugger,” said Lady Barbara. “I was told that Mikhail had been laid
low by post-polio syndrome a few years ago, that he’d become too weak to raise his
head, let alone speak. I was told that no one apart from his quack was allowed to
enter his room. But . . .” She nailed me with a piercing look. “If Mikhail’s been
living in strict isolation for the past few years, Daisy Pickering couldn’t have met
him, because her mother didn’t begin to work at Mirfield until a year ago.”

I nodded, but said nothing. I didn’t have to. Lady Barbara was clearly up to the task
of unraveling the puzzle on her own.

“And if Daisy never met Mikhail,” she said, still gazing intently at me, “she wouldn’t
have invented a story about him, because her characters are based on tangible, recognizable
people.”

I nodded again and Lady Barbara straightened in her chair.

“I think, perhaps,” she said, “you should tell me what Daisy told you about the character
she called Mikhail.”

I repeated the story Coral Bell had related to me and to Bree over the cinder block
wall in Addington Terrace. Where I faltered, Bree filled in, and between us we gave
Lady Barbara the most complete version of Daisy’s tale we could give her. We spoke
of a prince, a lost kingdom, and a dangerous journey to the safety of a foreign shore.
We spoke of an evil man’s treachery and of stolen treasures, and as we spoke, Daisy’s
absurd fantasy became real to me in ways it never had before.

I lapsed into a momentary silence after Bree and I finished the tale, but Bree carried
on without pausing.

“Daisy’s story tallies with yours,” she said to Lady Barbara. “The Markovs were Russian,
they were well-to-do, and they came to England nearly eighty years ago—within a decade
of the Russian Revolution. It’s possible that they were, to paraphrase Daisy, driven
from their kingdom by a band of wicked men.”

“Their journey must have been a difficult one,” I pointed out. “They may have been
forced to cross frozen rivers and to creep through frozen woods. They certainly had
to sail over an ocean to reach England. It could have taken them almost a decade to
make their way to a safer shore, then to Mirfield.”

“Many years later,” said Bree, “someone betrayed Mikhail. Whether it was an evil man
or an evil woman, we don’t know, and we’re not at all sure about the dungeon, but
we believe someone took something precious from him. When Daisy found out what was
happening, she tried to rescue Mikhail, but he was too weak to go with her—because
of post-polio syndrome, perhaps?”

“Daisy told just about every adult in her life about Mikhail,” I said, “but none of
them believed her.”

“I would have believed her,” Lady Barbara said grimly. “But I don’t understand why
you did.”

“I didn’t, at first,” I admitted. “Then I made an extraordinary discovery. . . .”

I described my brief encounter with Daisy at Skeaping Manor and the unsettling effect
her haunting monologue had had on me. I told Lady Barbara about the charity shop and
the bedraggled pink parka I’d found at the bottom of the bag filled with girl’s clothing.

“Daisy’s parka,” she murmured, nodding. “I remember it well.”

“I’ll never forget it,” I said, “because in one of its pockets, I found . . .”

I removed the silver sleigh from my shoulder bag, placed it in the palm of my hand,
and held it out to Lady Barbara. It seemed to catch fire in the firelight, but the
sparks it threw off were nothing compared to the sparks flying from Lady Barbara’s
eyes.

“I knew it!” she exclaimed. “I knew the shifty-eyed little scrounger was up to no
good!”

Her cheeks reddened and she began to breathe in short, sharp gasps.

“Please don’t get overexcited,” I begged, shoving the saltcellar back into my bag,
“or you’ll make me wish I’d never shown you the silver sleigh.”

Lady Barbara tossed back a slug of brandy and made a visible effort to compose herself.
Though she was still simmering with anger when she regained her voice, she’d pulled
herself back from a rolling boil.

“It’s a troika,” she said.

“We know the silver sleigh is a troika,” Bree said with more patience than I could
have mustered, “but we don’t know who the shifty-eyed scrounger is.”

“He’s the grandson, of course,” snarled Lady Barbara. “Al Markham. He’s the scheming
rat who’s taken over at Mirfield.”

“Al Markham?” I said alertly. “Did he change his name?”

“Sharp as a tack, you are,” Lady Barbara said sardonically. “Al was christened Alexei
Mikhailovich Markov, but he didn’t think the name would go down well with the punters,
so he changed it to Alec Michael Markham.”

“What punters?” asked Bree.

“Al calls himself an independent financial adviser,” Lady Barbara explained with an
air of thinly veiled contempt, “which is another way of saying he gambles with other
people’s money while working from home. He tried to rope Ronald into one of his bogus
investment deals a few months ago, but I tore up the contract before my gormless great-nephew
could sign it.”

“Why did you think the deal was bogus?” I asked.

“Insider knowledge,” Lady Barbara replied. “Al Markham has all the trappings of a
high-flyer—the bespoke suits, the sports cars, the posh flat in London—but his ex-cook
told Shanice Clarke, who told my cook, who told me that Al came a cropper two years
ago and racked up some ruinous debts.”

“Barbara,” I marveled, “you’d fit right in, in our village.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” she said, “but if we might focus on Al . . . ?”

“Sorry,” I mumbled, blushing. “Carry on.”

“Just over a year ago,” she said, “Al replaced his entire live-in staff with dailies
he found through a temp agency.”

“Hence, the ex-cook,” I said, nodding. “And later, Amanda Pickering.”

“Suddenly, Al was in clover again,” said Lady Barbara. “I assumed his cost-cutting
measures were taking effect, but I now see his abrupt change in fortune in a more
sinister light.”

“Here’s how I see it,” Bree piped up. She hunched forward in her chair, her brow furrowed
in concentration. “Al needs an infusion of cash to pay off his debts, so he decides
to sell some family heirlooms. Only, they’re not his to sell. They’re Mikhail’s.”

“Mikhail refuses to go along with the scheme,” I chimed in, “so Al makes him disappear.
He uses post-polio syndrome as an excuse to isolate Mikhail from the outside world.”

“Mikhail’s an old man,” said Bree, “and he might actually be ill. If he does have
post-polio syndrome, he’d be virtually helpless. It wouldn’t be difficult to shove
him in a room and leave him there.”

“But Al can’t shove Mikhail anywhere until he gets rid of the family’s longtime servants,”
I said. “He fires the old retainers who’d speak up on Mikhail’s behalf, maybe even
report Al to the authorities, and he brings in a cadre of temps who don’t know anything
about Mirfield or the Markovs.”