Free Killer Queens by Rebecca Chance Page A

tiara and parure you will wear,’ the Dowager said, producing a small key from the pocket of her jacket and unlocking the boxes.
    With a superbly theatrical gesture, she flung one after the other open, and stepped back, revealing the contents, a small smile playing on her face as Lori and the seamstresses gasped in unison. It was immediately obvious why the boxes were so big: inside each, on moulded beds of dark burgundy velvet, sat a lavish tiara, surrounded by matching sets of jewellery. Both tiaras were so heavily crusted with pearls and diamonds that they looked, Lori thought in a rare, disloyal moment, more like something a drag queen or a gypsy bride would wear than an actual royal queen.
    But then the Dowager lifted one up, easing it gently out of its case, and carried it over to Lori, who bent to allow her future mother-in-law to set it on her head. It felt as if it weighed ten pounds, the metal sides spiking down through her hair, pressing tight as a clamp. She thought suddenly of that medieval torture device she’d seen in a film, an iron ring that fitted round the skull and could be tightened, slowly and agonizingly, by screws on each side. Gingerly, she straightened up again, to even louder gasps: one of the seamstresses burst into loud, gulping tears, and the Dowager produced a tiny, lace-trimmed handkerchief from somewhere and dabbed at the corners of her eyes with it.
    Lori felt like crying herself, to be honest. The tiara was perfect, breathtakingly so: the Dowager’s good taste was unerring. Lori didn’t even want to imagine the value of what she was wearing on her head: it was more like a crown, imposing and regal. Diamonds the size of quails’ eggs were fixed into the elaborate golden curlicues, pearls almost as large weaving around them in swirls that echoed the gold setting, rising to a central curve in which the largest diamond of all towered high above Lori’s temples.
    ‘Only you could wear this, Lori,’ the Dowager said with great fondness. ‘Your height, the lovely wide forehead . . . magnificent! It would dwarf a smaller woman. I could never – how do you say,
carry this off
? This tiara has not been worn for over a hundred years. Oh yes.’ She nodded in great satisfaction as she folded up the handkerchief and replaced it in her pocket. ‘It waited for you a long time.’
    Lori was speechless. She stood, staring at herself, as the Dowager bustled back to the jewellery box, and returned with a pearl and diamond collar, the jewels set in a gold framework that matched the design of the tiara.
    ‘I instructed Dagmar to cut the neckline
so
,’ she said, nodding vigorously as she looked at the lace that followed the line of Lori’s collarbones. ‘It is excellent, Dagmar.’
    The seamstress went bright red and swallowed hard.
    ‘Help me,’ the Dowager commanded, as they lifted and eased the collar to lie around Lori’s neck without damaging the delicate lace. It weighed almost as much as the tiara; Lori thought again, oddly, of torture devices. ‘See!’ the Dowager said happily. ‘The diamonds
en tremblant
! Perfect!’
    She touched the diamonds that were suspended all around the base of the collar on minutely fine gold wires.
    ‘They move, a little, as you do,’ she explained to Lori. ‘They catch the light, like a fire around your neck. Beautiful! Dagmar, the earrings . . .’
    The little seamstress was already holding out the matching earrings to the Dowager, who clipped them onto Lori’s lobes.
I’m like their doll
, Lori thought with amusement,
their giant, larger-than-life doll that they get to dress up .
. .
    ‘Such an Aryan beauty!’ the Dowager observed happily. ‘So blonde! And such lovely blue eyes, just like Joachim’s! You will have very beautiful fair babies.’
    The seamstresses nodded vigorously as Lori braced herself not to flinch at the ice-cold metal tightly fastened to her scalp, bare neck and earlobes:
wow, these boxes must have come from deep in the