He put down his empty glass firmly on the table. The participants rose to their feet. Except for me. I was staring hard as if I were seeing a vision. I had just realized something that threw a whole new light onto this situation.

Chapter 23

Chapter 23

I stood staring at the table until the others had left. In my mind’s eye I could visualize Field Marshal Pirin giving his drunken, rambling toast. He had reached for a glass, and he was holding it in his left hand. Hannelore had mentioned that his table manners were abysmal and he never used the correct fork. Apparently he didn’t use the correct glass either. It was not his glass at all he had grabbed for, but Prince Nicholas’s.

It took me a moment to grasp the implication of this. The intended murder victim was not Pirin at all, but Nicholas. And the reason Nicholas hadn’t drunk his own wine and died was that he had switched to champagne when the toasts started and had not touched his red wine after that. This would indicate that the glass had originally been free of cyanide during the main course when Nicky was drinking red wine with the wild boar. Somehow, someone had introduced the cyanide after that, unfortunately not realizing that Nicholas was going to call for champagne for his toasts. And if someone had introduced the cyanide, it had to be one of the servers or Dragomir.

Wait a minute, I thought. I was discounting the other diners at the table. Pirin obviously wouldn’t have put cyanide into a glass he was going to drink himself. On Nicholas’s other side was his bride and she was hardly likely to want to kill off her bridegroom. Opposite him was his brother, Anton, and as Dragomir had said, it was frightfully bad form to reach across the table. It would have been noticed instantly. And besides, the brothers seemed to be on good terms. Anton wouldn’t have wanted his brother dead. I paused, considering this. Anton had made jokes about not being the heir and having no purpose in life. Did he secretly wish that he’d be king someday and not his brother? And of all the people around, he would have had a knowledge of poisons. After all, he had told me that he was studying chemistry in Heidelberg. And he was the one who had persuaded Patrascue to do nothing for now. Which would give him ample time to dispose of any traces of cyanide if he needed to.

“Lady Georgiana!” Lady Middlesex’s strident voice cut through my thoughts. “Aren’t you coming?”

“What? Oh—yes,” I stammered. Now there was the question of whom to tell. I wished that Darcy hadn’t gone away.

Lady Middlesex grabbed my arm with her bony fingers. “We must go somewhere to plan strategy.”

“Strategy?”