I breathed a sigh of relief, put a slice of cheese onto a roll and fled. I arrived at the library to find that the others were already assembled, sitting around a big oval mahogany table in the center of an impressive if gloomy library. Shelves of leather-bound volumes rose into darkness, and a gallery circled the library at about twelve feet above our heads. High, narrow windows threw shafts of sunlight onto the floor, illuminating the dust motes. There was a pervading smell of must, dust and old books. I took the empty chair next to Lady Middlesex and opposite Nicholas and Dragomir.

“Sorry I’m late,” I said. “I got held up by—” I broke off as I noticed that there was one person at the table I hadn’t expected. Prince Siegfried was sitting beside Dragomir.

“Lady Georgiana.” He nodded his head.

I looked at Nicholas. He raised his eyebrows. “Siegfried sensed that something was wrong and insisted on seeing Field Marshal Pirin, so naturally I had to tell him the truth and apologize for our secrecy in keeping this matter hushed up.”

Siegfried pursed those cod lips. “This most serious matter was brought to my attention, and I now have to decide whether it should be brought out into the open, or kept from my parents.”

I glanced at Dragomir. Had he been the one who had spilled the beans to Siegfried? And if he was the murderer, would that have been a wise thing to do?

“I have explained to His Highness the delicacy of the situation regarding the stability of my nation and the Balkans as a whole,” Nicholas said in a clipped voice. It was clear there had been an argument about this already.

“And I have explained to His Highness that this is my country and I have to make sure that we behave as we would expect any citizen to behave—and that includes reporting a murder to the proper authorities.”

“Obviously we may have to do that eventually,” Anton said in a soothing manner, “but if we can solve it among ourselves here, then nobody else needs to know and the wedding can take place as planned. Surely that is what you wish, Siegfried?”

“Of course.”

Dragomir cleared his throat. “But surely the simplest thing to do would be to claim that a communist or anarchist managed to climb into the castle, administer the poison and then make his getaway undetected.”

“The simplest thing,” Nicholas said, “would be to treat the death as a heart attack, which is what everyone else believes anyway. If they decide on an autopsy, it will be hard to trace the cyanide after that amount of time.”