“I am not quite certain what you may mean by that, or whether it should entirely please me. But I have sufficient vanity to be flattered by your recollection of my gowns in view of how little attention you seemed to give them. Will you have one?”
She proffered her exquisite box and on his “Thank you, no,” crossed to the hearth where she lifted a crimson-slippered foot to the side bar of the fender, and for graceful balance (pose, Belknap thought it) laid a hand against the tapestried wall. It yielded enough to mar her picture.
“I had forgotten these tapestries are but the semblance of walls,” she murmured. “What a cosy place for rats. Although I suppose it was for the very purpose of perpetrating the Hamlet act against rats that the space was originally reserved.”
Belknap was pouring himself a thimbleful of Scotch at the tray standing in readiness on the divan table. He tossed it off, and turned over the after flavor on his tongue, as his mind turned over the possible subtleties of Nadia’s remark. She had made it piquant by a twist of inflection. A Polonius as well as a rat—or so the tone implied.
“We were speaking of Bertrand,” she continued abruptly. “Do you not consider him a little secretive about the week-end, conveying that there is a _reason_ why we are here? Why should there need be a reason?”
“There _should_ be none, Nadia, except our enjoyment of his unbounded hospitality. But I feel myself, now that you mention it,” Belknap pursued, willing to test where her guards were raised, “that Bertrand has something up his sleeve. Possibly an announcement; he likes to make any news impressive. He may have lost his shirt in the Market, or been left a fortune by his great-aunt Emma in Vermont. You know Bertrand well enough to know he’d celebrate either with equal pomp.”
He heard the little whispering sigh that Nadia suddenly drew.
“I hope it’s nothing serious,” she said, more to herself than Belknap. Then, quickly: “Is it the Diary?” she asked.
Belknap hesitated by the fraction of a second. By all accounts Nadia Mdevani was dangerous. Her intelligence, fearlessness and beauty were things that might throw dust in any man’s eyes. Her ability to ‘clinch,’ as she was doing now, with a power greater than her own, and cut her way free from within, had won her many a hand-to-hand encounter that if taken blow for blow would have seen her downed long ago. However, Belknap could see no better way at the moment than to close with her.