catalogues with folded-down pages were all over the place. Along one wall, twenty or thirty postal service boxes overflowed with unopened fan mail, and I felt a sting of humiliation for those whose gushing missives had been treated so contemptuously. There were sterling silver champagne buckets on almost every table, maybe eight or ten of them, each with a bottle of Dom Pérignon floating in melted ice. Most of the bottles had been opened and used flutes sat here and there. But the real corker, the pièce de résistance, was above the fireplace: an enormous (and very famous) Gainesborough portrait of a young woman in a pink dress smiled placidly over the mess. Incredibly, someone, maybe it was Lady Melody herself after a few belts of champagne, had painted a huge black mustache on the girl. I almost gasped out loud. It was one of the most insolent things I’d ever seen. Someone had been having one hell of a party.
E L E V E N
I moved quickly into her dressing room. It was dirty and smelled of stale perfume. I wasn’t a bit surprised to find the real-life Lady Melody bore little resemblance to the public one. She’d done a bad thing, disavowing her daughter all those years ago, and the guilt had rotted her from the inside out. If my long-abandoned son or daughter walked into my life today, a herd of wild horses couldn’t trample my joy at meeting and showing off him or her. But then, who am I to throw stones or cast aspersions? Me, the Queen of the Double Life.
Dozens of scarves—everything from large silk Hermès squares to cotton pocket handkerchiefs to fringed shawls—lay piled and draped about. Atomizers, powder puffs, hair ornaments, tons of makeup, piles of jewelry, coins, and stacks of pound notes in every denomination covered the surface of the dressing table. I would have liked to have had that table in my dressing room—it had a pink tulle skirt covered with sparkles and faced an antique gilt-framed mirror bolted to the wall by little flower-shaped mirrors. Yellow sticky notes were pasted everywhere. I went over and looked more closely.
Although I’m a jewelry expert, it wouldn’t take one to see that some of Lady Carstairs’s pieces were much better than others. I glanced at my watch: four minutes gone. I sifted rapidly through the assortment, then spotted a diamond bracelet, approximately one and a half inches wide, set with maybe sixty stones. I dug my jeweler’s glass out of my pocket. On cursory study, the diamonds looked to be of stunning color and quality, possibly D but most probably E or F, there were so many of them, approximately two carats each.
I recognized the piece instantly as the one the beautiful spy, Lucinda, had worn to the ball to identify herself in Kiss the Stranger , five or six novels ago. It was modeled on the bracelet Queen Victoria had made by Garrard Crown Jewelers in 1850 to wear with the King George III Fringe Tiara. More recently, both the bracelet and tiara had been owned by the Queen Mother, who had loaned them out to family princesses to wear at their weddings. The pieces are well-known and easily recognizable to people who pay attention to such things. Such as I. This bracelet seemed to be a fairly good copy.
The tiara and the bracelet were first seen together in 1851 in Winterhalter’s painting, The First of May , in which a dewy Queen Victoria has her arm around her seventh child (out of a total of nine), baby Prince Arthur, later the duke of Connaught, while his godfather, the duke of Wellington, who has his white hair brushed forward to cover his balding head, presents him with a gold box studded with dime-sized emeralds and rubies. Victoria, who was thirty-two at the time of the painting, has on a pink-and-silver skirt I’d kill for. Baby Prince Arthur is balanced on the green velvet arm of a sofa, a spray of lilies of the valley clutched in his little fist, while his father, the long-suffering Prince Albert, stands behind them. He seems
E L E V E N
I moved quickly into her dressing room. It was dirty and smelled of stale perfume. I wasn’t a bit surprised to find the real-life Lady Melody bore little resemblance to the public one. She’d done a bad thing, disavowing her daughter all those years ago, and the guilt had rotted her from the inside out. If my long-abandoned son or daughter walked into my life today, a herd of wild horses couldn’t trample my joy at meeting and showing off him or her. But then, who am I to throw stones or cast aspersions? Me, the Queen of the Double Life.
Dozens of scarves—everything from large silk Hermès squares to cotton pocket handkerchiefs to fringed shawls—lay piled and draped about. Atomizers, powder puffs, hair ornaments, tons of makeup, piles of jewelry, coins, and stacks of pound notes in every denomination covered the surface of the dressing table. I would have liked to have had that table in my dressing room—it had a pink tulle skirt covered with sparkles and faced an antique gilt-framed mirror bolted to the wall by little flower-shaped mirrors. Yellow sticky notes were pasted everywhere. I went over and looked more closely.
Although I’m a jewelry expert, it wouldn’t take one to see that some of Lady Carstairs’s pieces were much better than others. I glanced at my watch: four minutes gone. I sifted rapidly through the assortment, then spotted a diamond bracelet, approximately one and a half inches wide, set with maybe sixty stones. I dug my jeweler’s glass out of my pocket. On cursory study, the diamonds looked to be of stunning color and quality, possibly D but most probably E or F, there were so many of them, approximately two carats each.
I recognized the piece instantly as the one the beautiful spy, Lucinda, had worn to the ball to identify herself in Kiss the Stranger , five or six novels ago. It was modeled on the bracelet Queen Victoria had made by Garrard Crown Jewelers in 1850 to wear with the King George III Fringe Tiara. More recently, both the bracelet and tiara had been owned by the Queen Mother, who had loaned them out to family princesses to wear at their weddings. The pieces are well-known and easily recognizable to people who pay attention to such things. Such as I. This bracelet seemed to be a fairly good copy.
The tiara and the bracelet were first seen together in 1851 in Winterhalter’s painting, The First of May , in which a dewy Queen Victoria has her arm around her seventh child (out of a total of nine), baby Prince Arthur, later the duke of Connaught, while his godfather, the duke of Wellington, who has his white hair brushed forward to cover his balding head, presents him with a gold box studded with dime-sized emeralds and rubies. Victoria, who was thirty-two at the time of the painting, has on a pink-and-silver skirt I’d kill for. Baby Prince Arthur is balanced on the green velvet arm of a sofa, a spray of lilies of the valley clutched in his little fist, while his father, the long-suffering Prince Albert, stands behind them. He seems
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