The Tin Princess Page 3

  "No doubt about it," said Mrs Goldberg. "And she's married to the Prince of Razkavia... Where is Razkavia? Dan would know. He's probably been arrested there more than once. My husband," she added to Becky. "Not a criminal, a politician."

  "I know where Razkavia is," Becky said. "As a matter of fact, I was born there. I suppose I'm still a citizen."

  She was pleased with the modest sensation she caused. Mrs Goldberg and Mr Taylor looked at each other, speechless, and then a broad grin broke out on his face and a warm smile on hers.

  "That settles it," Mrs Goldberg said. "You'll have to stay to lunch now, and tell us all about it. This is too good to miss, isn't it, Jim?"

  Lunch was a casual affair, to Becky's relief. Within half an hour she found herself feeling that she'd known these odd, sharp, teasing, friendly people all her life, and she told them everything she knew about the little kingdom that was her birthplace.

  "It's hardly bigger than Berkshire. Between Prussia and Bohemia, so it's sort of squashed between Germany and Austria-Hungary. There were dozens of those little kingdoms once, but most of them have been gobbled up now. Except Razkavia. It goes all the way back to 1253...

  She told them what she remembered of the story of the Red Eagle. Razkavia had been invaded by Ottokar II, the King of Bohemia, but a nobleman called Walter von Eschten and one hundred knights took a stand on a great rock in a bend of the River Eschten, fighting under a banner bearing a red eagle, and all Ottokar's forces couldn't dislodge them. At night, knowing the mountains so well, Walter and his men slipped out silently, without their armour so as not to make a noise, and destroyed all the Bohemians' supplies. Ottokar's knights clanked about helplessly, hot and hungry and totally baffled, until Walter drew them into battle at his castle at Wendelstein, where most of the invaders were killed.

  Ottokar kept his distance after that, and so did everyone else; and the Red Eagle banner, the Adlerfahne, had flown over the Rock of Eschtenburg ever since. While the eagle flies, Razkavia will be free, said Walter von Eschten, and so it was. The banner was only taken down for two reasons: one was to keep it repaired (there wasn't an original thread left, but it was still the same banner) and the other was at a coronation, when it was taken to the Cathedral to be blessed, and then carried by the new king back across the ancient bridge to the Rock of Eschtenburg, to fly again. That was why the King of Razkavia was sometimes called the Adlertrager, the Eagle-bearer. For Razkavians the Red Eagle wasn't just a flag; it was their very identity. If it were ever to fall, ever to touch the ground... No one even dared to think of it.

  The country wasn't especially prosperous. There had once been rich mines in the Karlstein mountains, producing copper and a little silver, but as long as two centuries before, they had begun to run out, or to run out of copper, at least. There was plenty of some ore that looked like copper but wasn't, and which poisoned the miners who worked it. It was so useless and unpleasant that they called it Kupfer-Nickel, or Devil's Copper, and left it well alone.

  Much later someone discovered that Kupfer-Nickel was a compound of arsenic and a new metal, which they called nickel, and by the beginning of the nineteenth century they'd found some uses for it, so the mines of Karlstein began to work again.

  But for centuries there was nothing to be gained from Razkavia, so the nations around left it alone. The people milked the cows that grazed on the upland pastures, made wine from the grapes that grew on the slopes of the Elpenbach valley, and hunted the game in the forests. In the capital, Eschtenburg, there was an opera house, where the composer Weber had once conducted; there was a theatre and a cathedral and a pretty baroque palace, all fantastic columns and fountains and icing-sugar plasterwork; and there was a park with a grotto-pavilion built by Razkavia's one mad king, who had been fairly harmless, as mad kings went. In the 1840s, the younger set of the aristocracy, tired of the stuffy life around the King and his conservative court, tried to establish a little spa called Andersbad, down the Elpenbach valley, as the centre of fashion. There was a casino; Johann Strauss had played there with his orchestra, and they'd even paid him to write an Andersbad Waltz, although it wasn't one of his best. There were a few tourists; even occasionally a visiting king or grand duke; but not enough to spoil it.

  In fact, Razkavia was one of the most pleasant places in Europe. The forests were deep and romantic, the Elpenbach valley was picturesque. Eschtenburg, with the Rock and the Banner, was medieval and baroque and artistic, Andersbad was raffish and amusing, the beer was good and the game was abundant and the people were hospitable.

  "Sounds delightful," said Mrs Goldberg. "But you're not living there now..."

  "We're in exile, Mama and I and my grandmother. You see, when I was young my father and some of his friends - he was a lawyer - tried to set up a political party. A liberal party. They wanted to bring about a more democratic system, because there was no parliament or senate or anything. But they put him in prison, and he caught typhoid and died. So Mama took me and Granny away and we've lived here ever since. She won't go back. It's more democratic now, apparently, but there's the danger from the two Great Powers."

  "What do they want?" said Mr Taylor.

  "The nickel from the mines. I think you make an alloy with it, for gun-barrels or armour-plating or something. Both powers are sort of hovering, ready to pounce. Germany could conquer the place in about an hour and a half, and so could Austria-Hungary, but if either of them did they'd have trouble with the other one, so they're holding off, so far. Mama thinks we're safer here."

  "She's probably right," said Mrs Goldberg. "And Adelaide - little Adelaide! Married to the Prince..." She shook her head in wonderment.

  "It'll have to be a morganatic marriage," said Becky.

  "What's that?" said Mr Taylor.

  "Legal," said Mrs Goldberg, "but limited. If she has any children, they don't inherit. That's right, isn't it?"

  Becky nodded. "There was a King of Razkavia called Michael the Second, who was mad. He wanted to marry a swan. So they let him, but it had to be morganatic."

  "Quite right," said Mr Taylor. "Wouldn't do to have an egg on the throne. But it's a bit of a coincidence, isn't it? Prince Rudolf picking one of his own subjects as a language tutor for his wife, I mean."

  "Not so much really. There's quite a lot of us in Maida Vale - people who've left Razkavia for one reason or another. I know at least a dozen. Writers, painters, people like that. One of the ways we can earn money is teaching German, and Maida Vale's only a short walk away from Church Road. The Prince could have picked any of us without knowing where we came from."

  "And you," said Mrs Goldberg. "What do you want to do with your life?"

  That was a question that wasn't often asked of girls, in Becky's experience, and she wasn't sure what sort of answer to give. She liked the idea of sweeping into a lecture, austere, gowned, majestic, and being addressed as Doctor Winter. But then she also liked the idea of presiding over a bar in a shanty town, with a cigar in her mouth, a diamond in her ear and a gun in her belt. It was difficult to decide.

  "I've got to earn some money," she said. "I want to go to university, but I've got to help Mama too. She illustrates stories for magazines. But now I'm involved with this... I promised I'd go back to Miss Bevan. Adelaide. The Princess. She needs to learn, and I want to help her. And besides, I'm curious. Prince Rudolf is a descendant of Walter von Eschten, you see. And that means a lot to me. Because I am Razkavian, after all, in spite of what they did to my father; and if people are trying to blow up my Royal Family..."

  "Yes?" said Mr Taylor.

  "Well, I want to try and stop them."

  "Good for you," he said. "But you want to keep away from dynamite."

  "You know, I'd love to see how this turns out," said Mrs Goldberg, with real longing in her voice. "But I'm off to America with my husband the day after tomorrow. He's going to study labour relations in Chicago, and I want to look at the stock-market in New York; we're going to be away some time... Listen, Reb
ecca - may I call you Rebecca?"

  "Becky."

  "Becky, then: give my love to Adelaide. And trust Jim - Mr Taylor - and take his advice. He's saved my life three times already. I hope he never has to save yours, but if he has to, you can be sure he'll do it. And the best of luck!"

  Chapter Three

  THE IRISH GUARDS

  Jim Taylor was twenty-three. As he'd told Becky, he and Sally Goldberg had shared a number of adventures and a considerable amount of danger; and he did work as a detective, though that was only one among many ways he had of earning money. He also wrote stories for the shockers and the bloods - cheap magazines of the sort Becky's mother illustrated - though he had higher literary ambitions than that. He also gambled; he'd been a European courier; he'd been a bodyguard; in short, he had a variety of livings, and he knew a great deal about the more colourful, which is to say the less law-abiding, side of London.

  But he knew little about European politics. After he'd escorted Becky back to Maida Vale, he took the omnibus to Soho and climbed to the third floor of a dingy boardinghouse-cum-socialist club in Dean Street, where he found Sally's husband, Daniel Goldberg, with a pungent cigar clamped between his teeth, packing books for his trip to America.

  "Ever been to Razkavia, Dan?"

  "I passed through it once. Don't drink the water in the spa there - it'll give you a gripe in the guts that'll lay you out for a week. Why?"

  Jim told him. Goldberg stopped packing to listen.

  "Well, I'm damned," he said. "How do you do it? How do you keep finding trouble like that?"

  "Just luck. But what I want to know is, who'd want to blow him up? Anarchists, d'you reckon?"

  "Pah! Who can say? Half of them are crazy, and the other half are ineffectual. You've spoken to the Prince himself, you tell me. What does he think?"

  "He thinks it might be his cousin Otto. Count Otto von Schwartzberg. He gave me a photograph..."

  Jim fished in his waistcoat pocket and brought out a picture of a group of men, including the Prince himself, wearing short Austrian-style jackets and hats decked with feathers and brushes of badger-hair, posing outside a hunting lodge with a heap of dead stags at their feet. Some of them were carrying rifles.

  "That's Otto, with the crossbow," he said, pointing to a tall man, dark-eyebrowed and heavy-moustached, with a ferocious glitter in his eye and a scar down his cheek. "Apparently he killed a bear once with his ... bare hands. He'd shot the cub, and the mother attacked him before he could reload. He tore her lower jaw from her head and then beat out her brains with a rock. He was covered in terrible wounds, and he stood and laughed. He's next in line to the throne, after Rudolf. The Prince is frightened of him, that's plain enough; but I don't know, there's something that doesn't make sense about it."

  "I agree," said Goldberg. "Always look for the politics first. The country will fall to one of the Great Powers eventually, and take it from me, that's what this is all about. As for the wild man who tears the heads off bears - no, he doesn't sound like a bomber. Pass me that book - the one you've got your feet on. That expensive one with the beautiful binding."

  Jim took his feet off the table and handed Goldberg the scruffy directory he was referring to. Goldberg flicked through the pages and ran a finger down a column.

  "Here we are," he said. "This is a couple of years out of date, but the place isn't a democracy, the same men will still be in charge."

  He handed back the book. Straining his German, Jim read a brief description of the kingdom of Razkavia, with the names and residences of the King, the Crown Prince and Prince Rudolf, and the names of various officials such as the Chancellor, the Mayor of Eschtenburg, the Inspector of Mines, the Chief of Police and so on.

  "And your Prince is not the first in line to the throne?" Goldberg said.

  "No. That's his elder brother Wilhelm, who's married, but without children; so Prince Rudolfwould be next. But just to get it straight, Dan: who would you suspect of leaving a bomb in his carriage? Who should I watch out for?"

  "Well, you can forget the werewolf of Schwartzberg. He's interesting, but anthropologically, not politically. It won't be him. There'll be someone obscure working quietly to provoke a crisis, so as to give Prince Bismarck in Berlin or Emperor Franz-Josef in Vienna the excuse to send in a regiment and annex the place. And once they do, nothing much will change. The King will become a duke of some kind, keeping his palace and his hunting lodge; Otto von Schwartzberg will go on biting animals in half, but all the nickel from the mines will be trundling busily along a railway line to one place or the other. My bet is Germany. It'll end up in Krupps, in Essen."

  "You're an optimistic so-and-so, aren't you?"

  "Realistic, dear boy. It's being right all the time that keeps me cheerful. You want that book? I won't need it in Chicago. Incidentally, I know a little story about Eschtenburg, the capital of Razkavia. The streets there are so crooked and ancient and narrow that they have no names, and the houses are numbered not according to where they are but according to when they were built, so you have Number Three next to Number Forty-six, and so on. Anyway, it seems that the Devil went there once, and couldn't find his way out. Which means, of course, that he's still there. I think I'd rather be in Chicago."

  A year or two before, Jim had made the acquaintance of a gang of Irish street-urchins from Lambeth. They were a brawling, foul-mouthed, filthy crew, but he'd never seen better in a fight for cunning and tenacity; if rats bred with terriers, they'd produce offspring like this. Jim had used them on a number of different jobs, and he always paid them well, so they naturally respected him as a sound judge of value, as well as a masher and a swell.

  As soon as he'd suspected that the girl might be Adelaide, he'd set them to guarding the villa in St John's Wood - without anyone's knowing they were there, of course. They were to hide in the shrubbery of an empty villa overlooking Adelaide's house and, in case of trouble, raise a hullabaloo. That very morning, Jim had checked with them first after the explosion; they hadn't seen anyone throwing a bomb, which was how he knew it had been an infernal machine.

  Later that evening, when the Prince was attending a soiree at the Brazilian Embassy, Jim paid the Irish Guards a visit of inspection. They were in fine fettle. Too fine, in fact; they'd found the local ruffians no match for them, and when Jim arrived at their hideout, they were crowing about a victory over a butcher's boy, and roasting some juicy-looking sausages over a smoky fire.

  "But we're living off the land!" protested Liam, when Jim told them off. "Sure and isn't that what your guerrilla fighters are supposed to do?"

  "You're supposed to keep out of sight. Save your fighting till this job's over. Is the lady at home?"

  "She's been out for a drive," said a little boy called Charlie. "She came back about an hour ago. Say, mister, d'ye know about the skivvy?"

  "What about her?"

  "She's got a mash."

  "He's an Alphonse!"

  "He's a mackerel, if ever I saw one."

  "All right, keep your voices down," said Jim. "What's he do, this fellow?"

  "He calls each night after dark," said Liam. "She slips out and they have a yarn in the bushes. I thought maybe we could tap him on the coconut, what d'ye say? Go through his pockets."

  "What I say is, don't. Why don't you follow him, see where he comes from?"

  "Psst!" came from the lookout, and Jim clambered over the tangle of legs to see where he was pointing. "There he is now..."

  The road was lit by gas, but the laurels overhanging Adelaide's garden shadowed it heavily. Jim could just make out a dark figure slipping along the side of the house and vanishing into the darkness. A second or two later came a gleam of light as the kitchen door opened and shut again.

  "All right," said Jim. "Let's go and listen. Me, Liam, Charlie and Sean. If I shout, then we grab him. If not, keep out of sight and don't let him hear you."

  The Irish Guards were good. They slipped across the road like cats, and within a few second
s they and Jim were under the trees in Adelaide's garden. Jim felt a hand on his arm, and Liam whispered, "Listen."

  Two voices were murmuring close by. The girl was saying, "... and she told that perky dell she was married to him!"

  "Married?" said the other voice. Jim felt a strange prickle along his hairline, because something was wrong with that voice; was it foreign? Or was it something else?

  "And I got this."

  There was a rustle of paper, and a little flash of light as the man struck a match. Jim could see Liam's eyes glitter.

  "A marriage certificate..." the man said. "What is this mark?"

  "X. It's her signature. She's too bleedin' ignorant to read and write, so she's got to make an X. But that's her name, look, it's all legal."

  The man said, "Ahh..."

  There was the chink of coins. While they were distracted, Jim whispered, "As soon as she goes back in, we'll have him. I want that paper - it's vital. And I don't want him yelling."

  He didn't have to tell them any more. Like most boys of his age, Liam wore a silk muffler, which had all kinds of uses. He slipped it off, stooped and felt for a stone, and tied it into one end so that he could swing the muffler round the man's neck as a garrotte. The other boys crept away to hide by the gate.

  They didn't have to wait for long. The man said quietly, "Same time tomorrow?"

  "All right. I'll see what else I can find. But I want more money'n this next time."

  "You shall have it," he said.

  The maid turned away and flitted back along the side of the house. The man stayed where he was for a minute, lighting a cigarette, while Liam fretted and twitched beside Jim; and then the man moved away towards the garden gate.

  Two paces, and then Liam was behind him, the muffler swinging through the air with a silken hiss. It lashed around the man's throat, and Liam tugged backwards and Jim threw himself at the man's knees, and there was a lashing, gasping, kicking, choking confusion for a few seconds until he was pinioned face down on the dark little patch of grass under the laurels, with Liam kneeling on his back and the other two boys holding his legs and arms.