Passenger to Frankfurt - Agatha Christie [24]
‘Yes, quite handsome, too.’
‘It’s much better to be interesting than handsome. But you haven’t been in Hungary or Austria, have you? You wouldn’t meet anyone like her out in Malaya? She wouldn’t be sitting around a table there making little notes or correcting speeches or things like that. She was a wild creature, by all accounts. Lovely manners and all the rest of it. But wild. Wild as a wild bird. She didn’t know what danger was.’
‘How do you know so much about her?’
‘Oh, I agree I wasn’t a contemporary of hers, I wasn’t born until several years after she was dead. All the same, I’ve always been interested in her. She was adventurous, you know. Very adventurous. Very queer stories were told about her, about things she was mixed up in.’
‘And how did my great-great-great-grandfather react to that?’
‘I expect it worried him to death,’ said Lady Matilda. ‘They say he was devoted to her, though. By the way, Staffy, did you ever read The Prisoner of Zenda?’
‘Prisoner of Zenda? Sounds very familiar.’
‘Well, of course it’s familiar, it’s a book.’
‘Yes, yes, I realize it’s a book.’
‘You wouldn’t know about it, I expect. After your time. But when I was a girl–that’s about the first taste of romance we got. Not pop singers or Beatles. Just a romantic novel. We weren’t allowed to read novels when I was young. Not in the morning anyway. You could read them in the afternoon.’
‘What extraordinary rules,’ said Sir Stafford. ‘Why is it wrong to read novels in the morning and not in the afternoon?’
‘Well, in the mornings, you see, girls were supposed to be doing something useful. You know, doing the flowers or cleaning the silver photograph frames. All the things we girls did. Doing a bit of studying with the governess–all that sort of thing. In the afternoon we were allowed to sit down and read a story book and The Prisoner of Zenda was usually one of the first ones that came our way.’
‘A very nice, respectable story, was it? I seem to remember something about it. Perhaps I did read it. All very pure, I suppose. Not too sexy?’
‘Certainly not. We didn’t have sexy books. We had romance. The Prisoner of Zenda was very romantic. One fell in love, usually, with the hero, Rudolf Rassendyll.’
‘I seem to remember that name too. Bit florid, isn’t it?’
‘Well, I still think it was rather a romantic name. Twelve years old, I must have been. It made me think of it, you know, your going up and looking at that portrait. Princess Flavia,’ she added.
Stafford Nye was smiling at her.
‘You look young and pink and very sentimental,’ he said.
‘Well, that’s just what I’m feeling. Girls can’t feel like that nowadays. They’re swooning with love, or they’re fainting when somebody plays the guitar or sings in a very loud voice, but they’re not sentimental. But I wasn’t in love with Rudolf Rassendyll. I was in love with the other one–his double.’
‘Did he have a double?’
‘Oh yes, a king. The King of Ruritania.’
‘Ah, of course, now I know. That’s where the word Ruritania comes from: one is always throwing it about. Yes, I think I did read it, you know. The King of Ruritania, and Rudolf Rassendyll was stand-in for the King and fell in love with Princess Flavia to whom the King was officially betrothed.’
Lady Matilda gave some more deep sighs.
‘Yes. Rudolf Rassendyll had inherited his red hair from an ancestress, and somewhere in the book he bows to the portrait and says something about the–I can’t remember the name now–the Countess Amelia or something like that from whom he inherited his looks and all the rest of it. So I looked at you and thought of you as Rudolf Rassendyll and you went out and looked at a picture of someone who might have been an ancestress of yours and saw whether she reminded you of someone. So you’re mixed up in a romance of some kind, are you?’
‘What on earth makes you say that?’
‘Well, there aren’t so many patterns in life, you know. One recognizes patterns as they come up. It’s like a book on knitting. About sixty-five different fancy stitches. Well, you know a particular stitch when you see it. Your stitch, at the