When Masks Fall Off Chapter 4.36: So He Took a Bow
The next time Nadja heard news of either of the Harcourt twins was in Salzburg, a month and a half after leaving Mykonos Island. The mayor was opening a charity concert, and Troupe Dandelion had been hired to perform; yet for some reason, rumors were running around that the mayor had received a card of the Black Rose—a sure sign that the Black Rose would arrive to rob him in the near future.
That night, once the Leader's snores were echoing through the car and Rita had begun to mutter nonsense in her sleep, Nadja sat up and looked around. Once she had satisfied herself that everyone was indeed fast asleep, she dressed quickly and silently, and crept out of the car. She wasn't too sure what she was expecting to find as she raced down the street, but at the very least, she wanted to get a straight answer out of Keith as to why he was going to steal from the mayor.
Surprisingly, she hadn't been walking long before the shout of, "It's the Black Rose!" caught her ears. Oddly enough, she froze. She should have ducked into an alley—there was one right beside her, in fact—but why should she act like a criminal? She was just an innocent young girl taking a walk...right? Footsteps were growing closer, and just as she was beginning to think that she was going to have to explain herself to the suspicious police, an arm shot out of the alleyway and tugged her in.
She would have screamed, except a hand was tightly over her mouth. She would have struggled, except by the time the shock wore off, she had identified her captor and was too busy glaring at the individual whom she knew to be Keith over her shoulder to bother. Really, there had to be something wrong with the fact that she could identify him by nothing more than his touch. That was the way she had identified him as the real Black Rose at the masquerade in Paris, she recalled vaguely. Strange.
The police reported to one another—all had yet to find the Black Rose, obviously—and dispersed. Keith released Nadja.
"Did you have to do that?"
"What, the gagging part? Because you were on the verge of screaming."
"You knew I wouldn't scream after the police came."
"Did I?" countered Keith, raising an eyebrow. "For all I know, you could have turned me in. I'm not your favorite person, as you've made abundantly clear!"
Nadja wondered why that statement made her feel guilty. It was the truth...wasn't it? No, replied some part of Nadja's brain. If he were caught, you'd do everything in your power to save him, and you know it. Which brought her to the question, why did she care
"Well, I've got to be getting back to bed now," Nadja stated, if slightly snappily. "Goodbye!" And she rushed out of the alley and onto the street. Keith probably would have let her run off if he hadn't heard the sound of some policemen returning then. He raced after Nadja, who had once again frozen. Keith nearly rolled his eyes. She was acting like she was guilty of thievery! Or was it that she felt guilty for knowing him and not turning him in? Either way, he couldn't leave her. She was a poor girl in a tattered, though clean, dress. The police didn't take well to such individuals, Keith knew. Moneyless could mean criminal in their eyes.
"Shh!" whispered Keith, putting an arm around her shoulders and beginning to walk as casually as if the police weren't after him. "Just keep your face down and follow my lead."
"Wh-"
"Shh!"
The police rounded the corner. "Halt! Who are you and what are you doing here?"
"The police of Salzburg certainly are quite rough," Keith noted mildly.
"What? Who are you?"
"Francis Harcourt," replied Keith. He was prepared for Nadja's accusing look at him and shot her a warning glare as the police recalled Francis Harcourt as the rich, important individual from the tree-planting event the previous year. It almost made Keith sick how a mere name got them off the hook. "We apologize, sir!" said the policemen in unison.
"It's no matter, now that we understand each other," Keith replied mildly. Then, just to lighten his own mood, "Shall we go then, my dear?" he inquired of Nadja, kissing her on the cheek. He didn't miss her look of annoyance, and his spirits were back up. Maybe that was why he so enjoyed picking on Nadja. She had this way of unconsciously lifting his spirits when he wasn't feeling so good, or even remotely good at all.
"What was that supposed to be?" whispered a very annoyed Nadja, shrugging off his hand from her shoulder as the police ran off and rounded the corner behind them
"'My dear'?"
"Would you have preferred 'my little rose bud'?" Keith asked. How he managed to remember every little thing that annoyed Nadja was beyond him—he had only heard that one once, and it had been over half a year ago. True to his predictions, Nadja glared and stomped off. After chuckling to himself a moment and shaking his head, Keith took off after her.
"Wait, Nadja, I'm sorry for treating you like we were lovers! You know it would have looked strange otherwise." Nadja didn't reply.
"Nadja, come on. I really-"
"Why did you do that?" demanded Nadja, spinning around to face him.
Keith stared. "What, treat you like I did? Because otherwise we'd have been Francis Harcourt and a random young girl, and that could have been cause for a scandal—it would have made the papers if either policeman was in need of money, and next thing you know, they'd be on their way to uncovering me."
"No!" snapped Nadja, throwing her hands into the air. "I mean why did you have to use Francis's name?"
Keith's eyes darkened. So that was what this was about? His smirk didn't leave his face, but his stomach sank back to the pit it had been in before he had cheered himself up by teasing Nadja.
"What if they start suspecting Francis? Then what?" Keith snorted, still smirking. What did he care? Unfortunately, his sentiments were apparently clear to Nadja, who stormed off again in a huff.
"Why did you freeze every time the police came after you?" Keith asked.
Nadja turned and glared. "Some of us actually get a guilty conscience from sneaking into peoples' houses uninvited for the sole purpose of doing something that the individual won't like!"
"You snuck into someone's house? When?" asked a mildly mildly thrown, mildly amused Keith.
"Mykonos Island," Nadja snapped. "And it's not funny. It's not right, and you know it as well as I do." With that, she stormed off again.
Keith hesitated a moment this time before going after the girl again. "Nadja..."
Nadja stopped. "Why?" There was a pause, and Keith was about to ask her to elaborate when she did so of her own accord. "Why are you and Francis so different? You're so alike in so many ways, and you even dedicate your life to the same goals! And yet..."
Keith sighed, shaking his head. "Where there is light, there's always a shadow. Francis grew up only seeing our mother's light; I saw her shadow. That's the difference."
Nadja looked at him sadly as he told the tale of his mother: a bright, cheerful woman who loved helping the needy, particularly orphans, but found herself restricted by her husband, who saw her effort in keeping up appearances at parties as more important than her charity work. And then of the death of the saddened, lonely woman who was oppressed by the world of nobility.
"I'm sorry," Nadja said quietly, "I didn't know."
"Nobles wear a lot more masks than I do. And that," Keith told Nadja firmly, looking at her brooch, "Is why I want you to-" He stopped. Her brooch was gone. Why was it gone? He grabbed her by the shoulder.
"Nadja, where's your brooch?" Nadja looked up at him in wide-eyed surprise for a moment, then closed her eyes. "It was stolen from me in Egypt." Keith couldn't believe it. "After I told you that firmly never to let it out of your sight?" Nadja sighed. "I'm sorry. It was the same pair that you saved me from at Applefield. They've been trying to get it for quite some time..."
"Them?" Keith furrowed his brow, thinking. "That probably means that they were hired by someone in the House of Preminger." "Keith, how do you know about the House of Preminger?" She sounded shocked—she had probably only figured it out herself recently.
"That night at Applefield, when I picked up the ring to put it back into the brooch, I just happened to notice its little trick. The swan design looked familiar, so I did a little bit of research and learned that it was a part of the coat of arms of the House of Preminger."
Nadja seemed almost tired as she looked at him and replied, "So you knew."
Keith looked penetratingly at Nadja, taking her by the shoulders. "Nadja, stay away from the House of Preminger."
"What, why?"
"There's been quite a bit of unrest in the House of Preminger as of late, about who's to take over after the Duke. Situations like that can be dangerous: don't go to Vienna."
"No!"
Keith was surprised, to say the least. She was at least listening to him intently, hearing him out, and he had not expected such a vehement reply. "Nadja?" "I just want to meet my mother."
"And then what? Do you want to become a noble?" demanded Keith, exhasperated.
"I don't care!" Nadja replied, practically in tears. "My mother could be the richest noble around or dirt poor, and it wouldn't matter to me either way! I just want to see my mother!" And then she actually began to cry.
Keith was an international thief, feared throughout Europe, and he had stood by expressionlessly as he had watched people scream and cry in horror at the loss of things he took. He fought attackers as casually as though he did so everyday. Yet, when Nadja began to cry, all those walls, all that emotionlessness that he had built up over the years as the Black Rose, crumbled to nothing and he sighed. "All right, Nadja," he said gently, and caught her by the chin. To his surprise, she didn't resist in the least when he pressed his lips to her forehead.
Then he turned to walk away...until, "Keith!"
He stopped and looked around. "Nadja?"
"Thank you."
"For what?" asked Keith in surprise.
"For understanding. For being there."
Keith smiled wryly. "Anytime."
And then he walked away, and all the way back to the car, Nadja fought the odd feeling that something wasn't right. She had no reason to worry...right? I didn't even remember to ask about the mayor, Nadja noted wryly.
It was that very same night that the Black Rose appeared in Vienna—at the House of Corlade.
He found a brooch in the drawer of the bedchamber of Herman Preminger, and felled the two detectives as well as Herman when they attempted to stop him. He was almost about the window when he saw a girl beneath the window being referred to as "Nadja"...only she wasn't Nadja. Her hair was darker, her eyes were far more calculating, her hair was far more wavy...she wasn't Nadja. When Herman put a gun to Keith's head, it would have been a simple maneuver to tear the gun from Herman's inexperienced hands before he had the chance to even think of pulling the trigger.
But he was doing this for Nadja, and if there was a girl who wasn't Nadja in the same house as the stolen brooch being called Nadja, something was definitely going on that had to do with Nadja. He had to figure it out, and so he allowed himself to be bound and gagged, dragged into an underground room, and chaind to the wall. He endured the whipping at Herman's hands; a thought of Nadja was all he needed to get through it without spilling a thing, he found, and he almost smirked wryly at the realization of the depth of his love for the girl who was in love with his brother, but the whip struck again then, and the smirk turned into a grunt of pain.
When the whipping was over, Herman left the two detectives to look after him so that he wouldn't escape—and that was the moment he had been waiting for. It was a simple trick to hide coins on his person, and he had never been so grateful that he had studied the art of trickery, for it took two gold coins (apparently conjured out of nowhere, to the eyes of the detectives) to bribe the truth out of the detectives: that Herman was going to set up the girl as the next heir of the House of Preminger. Which meant that Nadja was to be the heir, Keith realized, and that would explain why so many people were after Nadja and her brooch.
Across Austria, Nadja danced, attempting to save the charity concert that was falling apart with the abrupt departure of the mayor. She was entirely unaware of a beaten, wounded Keith murmuring her name exhaustedly in an underground cell...except, perhaps, for a strange tug in her chest as she danced.