Murder At The Masque by Amy Myers Read Free Book Online Page B

Cannes didn’t even have a decent casino; be damned if he was going to pay through the nose to join the Cercle Nautique just for the sake of one game. Thirty francs? Outrageous. Besides, they played baccarat there, still unacceptable in England, and the less, as Her Majesty’s Envoy, he knew about that the better, if His Royal Highness was going to play. His relations with the Prince were sufficiently strained already, thanks to Her Gracious Majesty’s trust in him, and he didn’t fancy being cast in the Prince’s eyes as his mother’s spy in Cannes. Ten to one, the Prince would oppose his membership anyway.
    ‘Darling.’ Lady Westbourne swept into the room, dressed by Worth and half a dozen maidservants, ready for the drive to the port for the foundation-stone ceremony. Dora Westbourne, fair-haired, and steely-eyed, looked superbly beautiful, and utterly uninterested in her ‘darling’. The fair hair was helped by dye to the Lillie Langtry
de rigueur
shade, and marcel-waved. The dress was rock-pigeon grey silk, the latest Paris fashion for Lent. She was no Kallinkova.
    Her husband regarded her dispassionately. He wonderedif that small, almost feline, face lit up when she met her lover, whoever he was – although he had a shrewd idea whom she had her eye on now. Now that he was away half the time on this damned conference, he’d noticed she hardly seemed as eager to see him on his return as two months’ chastity might suggest. Fortunately there had been La Belle Mimosa in Paris – until their last meeting, that is. He cringed at the memory of her screams and threats to kill him if he didn’t provide more money . . . But he’d put a stop to that, and, thank heavens, he was sure he’d seen the last of her.
    Dora’s lover was another matter. He suspected the devil must be in Cannes now, hence her sudden enthusiasm for renting a villa down here – so that ‘I’ll be here when you can take time off from your boring conference, darling’. And
that
had meant they’d had to pay £1,000 for a whole season although they needed only two months. Dora had even agreed to attend the match – highly suspicious. A sudden alarming thought struck him. Her lover couldn’t be H.R.H. himself, could it? His passion for Lady Warwick was fading at long last. No, Dora wasn’t his type – though she had a fancy for princes, of course.
    He’d have to face her with it, though, after the revealing conversation he’d had with the Russian ambassador in London about Fabergé eggs. The ambassador was a friend of the Grand Duke Igor’s, and the fellow had told him about the Grand Duke’s extra-marital enthusiasms (carefully edited, had Lord Westbourne then appreciated it) and his method of their termination with a Fabergé egg. Lord Westbourne, guffawing with all the satisfaction of a husband with nothing to worry about, had noticed a remarkable similarity between the ladies named by the ambassador and the victims of the jewel thefts that were the talk of London society. Thereupon two nail-heads had been more squarely hit than he intended. Firstly, with a startling dexterity that would have amazed the Niger Conference, hejuxtaposed information gathered from two quite different social circles and reached a conclusion about the identity of the cat-burglar, a conclusion he felt impelled to pass on to Scotland Yard if only to clear the matter from his mind.
    The second nail-head had led him to think further about that odd ruby theft of their own. Now he knew all these Fabergé eggs had rubies in too, it had made him not only wonder, but pretty certain. If Dora, who had behaved very oddly about the theft, had had one of those eggs, that meant she’d not only known the Grand Duke, but known him rather well. Not that Igor was her lover now. He sighed, as the depressing truth of her current amour swept over him again. He was going to have a word with her about that.
    The landau progressed down the Rue du Fréjus and onto the Quai de St