The Blue Diamond Read Free

eyes, followed hers in the mirror, then they looked at each other, and were soon locked in a hot embrace.
    “Diamonds! We must have diamond ear buckles for these little rosebuds,” he murmured softly, nibbling at a petal.
     “Don’t you think, love, sapphires?” she asked, with a thought to her eyes.
    “Blue diamonds,” he disagreed. “Sapphires are common. Unworthy of you.”
    “Are there blue diamonds?” she asked, wrinkling her nose in a way that suited the babyish air of her new coiffure.
    “You’re so adorable,” he said huskily, and found himself again falling deeply in love with Googie, as he so often did when she got a new hairdo. Sometimes even a new gown accomplished it.
    “Googie never heard of blue diamonds,” she said, lisping in his ear. She looked so droll—about twelve months old, she thought, as she smiled at her reflection in the mirrors. “Me so ignorant. Are they rare?”
    “Very rare,” he said, reaching to remove her peignoir. “I daresay we’ll find some in Vienna.”
    “Does Harvey love Googie?” she asked, in a teasing way, and was shown very clearly that he did. Enough even to have positively promised her blue diamonds before they arose from the bed.
    The great hairdo, which was eventually christened the Portia, as a sort of conjugal counterpart to Harvey’s stylish Brutus do, occurred in late October. It had to be trimmed twice before they had prepared the retinue for the trip. Their private yacht, the Hargoo , took them across the Channel, while advance runners arranged accommodation across Europe and in the city of Vienna. A mansion was hired at an undisclosed sum in the Innere Stadt, the inner city, where “everyone” lived or stayed in Vienna. Palgrave’s solicitors thought his lordship had purchased the mansion when they heard the sum paid for a year’s hire, and erroneously entered it in his books as a credit. But houses were nearly impossible to obtain at such a time, and naturally forty servants could not be put up in a couple of rented rooms somewhere.
    The lavish couple were not long in town before their presence was causing ripples.
     

Chapter Three
     
    Lord Moncrief’s establishment in Vienna was considerably less opulent than his cousin’s. He was assigned one room of the twenty-two-room floor at Minoritenplatz No. 30, where Lord Castlereagh, first plenipotentiary for England at the Congress of Vienna, was billeted. His valet and groom occupied some cubbyhole of the edifice, far enough removed from him that they were virtually inaccessible, though there was a pull cord in his room which, in theory, put him in contact with his servants. In fact, he had not seen his valet, Wragge, in the last twenty-four hours. He dressed himself; clean clothes were miraculously awaiting him, as were polished boots, but he had waited half an hour for hot water for bathing and shaving that morning, finally sending a junior clerk for it. Moving out was impossible. There was not a room in the city to be had, and if there has been, Castlereagh would resent the desertion.
    Moncrief was attached to British headquarters as a liaison officer, whose job it was to conciliate the Russian and Prussian delegations to the Congress, or failing this Herculean task, to keep an ear to semiofficial pipelines laid in every hostess’s saloon and discover what nefarious schemes were hatching.
    The major political issue to be resolved was what had been termed, for ease of reference, the Saxony-Poland question. There existed a tacit alliance between Russia and Prussia. Tsar Alexander would support King William’s claim to Saxony if Prussia would support the Tsar’s annexing of Poland, under the guise of granting it independence. Austria and England were in an uneasy alliance against them, as was France. They none of them wanted too strong a Prussia at their doorsteps.
    There existed a host of minor questions as well. Every country had an axe to grind and a cause to push forward. Loyalties