The Cathedral of Fear

by Irene Adler

  “Don’t worry, Papa! I’ll be careful.”

  Indeed, the attic was spacious, but the ceiling was low. With any other bed, I would have wound up feeling suffocated. My father looked around with his shoulders slightly stooping forward. He examined the open trunk in a corner of the large room, and the dresses I had hung all around it, attaching the hangers directly into tiny gaps in the wood, like you might find in an eccentric fashion boutique.

  He scratched his head. “I believe you urgently need a tutor,” he muttered, bending over to climb down the narrow stairs.

  “There’s room in the house for one!” I replied cheerfully. I said this not because I wanted a tutor, but because my father had not opposed my idea of sleeping in the attic.

  “Did you notice?” I asked Mr. Nelson when we were alone. “He said, ‘Yes!’”

  He was fussing with the windows overlooking the garden and then nodded, satisfied. “Did you check that they open quietly?” he asked me.

  I joined him at the windows, surprised. “What did you say?”

  “The windows,” Mr. Nelson said. “They are quite old, and the hinges are rusty. You will want to make sure I can’t hear you when you leave the estate secretly, Miss Irene, or when your good friends want to meet with you for some reason.”

  I jumped. How could he have known I intended to write Sherlock and Arsène?

  Mr. Nelson peered through a windowpane, onto the sloping roof. “From here, it’s not to be considered.” He moved on to another window. “Not even from here …”

  He stopped in front of the third window. “Maybe from here,” he said. “The branch of the elm tree doesn’t seem too far from the top of the gutter. Of course, you’ll have to be very careful not to slip.” He stared at me mockingly.

  “What exactly are you saying to me, Mr. Nelson?” I asked.

  “What am I saying to you in your opinion, Miss Irene?” he answered.

  “I’m asking you,” I replied.

  “Ah. Very good …” Mr. Nelson pretended to scratch his chin thoughtfully. Then he crossed his arms over his chest and raised an eyebrow to underscore the irony of how much he trusted me. “I’m saying that once your first days of exploring the new house are over, you may want to leave on your own, as you usually did in London on Wednesdays and Fridays. Perhaps it would be better if your mother and your father didn’t know about it. So as not to worry them, you understand. I must point out, in strict confidence, that it certainly won’t be from me that they hear about it.”

  Mr. Nelson gestured to the attic around us. “But one would be able to guess from the creaking of the wood above one’s head, from the windows that cannot be closed from the outside and, therefore, slam in the wind or, heaven forbid, from a branch or a gutter that suddenly collapsed under the weight of a personality as lively, so to speak, as yours, Miss Irene.”

  He ended all this with a wide grin that completely floored me. Never had he spoken to me like this.

  I giggled nervously, because it seemed to me that he was somehow right. I found the attic magnificent because it was the most isolated and protected place in the house, but it was also the least accessible from outside. Mr. Nelson was giving me the opportunity to decide how much I would want to bury myself in my things, my books, and my thoughts in that attic and how much, instead, I would want to choose a room below, which I could easily come and go from.

  I hesitated, and he took advantage of it. “Did you notice the odd bay window in the small lilac bedroom, Miss Irene, the one in the corner of the house?”

  “The one with the window covered by vines?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he replied. “The room with the tiny trapdoor.”

  My hands moved involuntarily, reaching to push my hair off my forehead. “Tiny trapdoor?”

  “It’s a bit rusty, yes. And I think it leads to an equally tiny spiral staircase, right in the middle of the vines …”

  “Mr. Nelson?”

  “What, Miss Irene?”

  “Why are you telling me all this?”

  “Because, as I told you, the tiny trapdoor creaks persistently, and even if you are careful, it will always squeak a little. And my room is the first one alongside the bay window. Supposing I should become aware of one of your excursions, I would prefer to know you’re hidden among the leaves of the vines rather than dangling from a third-story gutter.”

  I looked at the attic around me — a quiet, open space. It felt like being enclosed in an ancient, wooden shell, creaky and resin-scented. I found it very difficult to think of giving it up.

  “Who knows? Perhaps the time for excursions is over,” I muttered. “After all, Evreux is a sleepy country village.”

  “The village may well be sleepy, Miss Irene, but you are not. We both know this.”

  Mr. Nelson climbed down the little wooden steps, making them creak. “Or better still … all four of us know!” he corrected himself after he had already disappeared from my sight.

  I let go of my hair, which fell back on my face wildly.

  “Have you already written your friends, miss?” Mr. Nelson asked me from the floor below, before moving away down the hallway.

  As a result of this conversation, I decided to move into the lilac-colored bedroom, to the delight of Papa and Mama, who thought I was simply being less difficult.

  And every once in a while, in the days to come, I heard them ask each other from the room where Mama was resting, “Did you hear that strange creaking?”

  * * *

  I sent the letters almost immediately. The one to my friend Sherlock Holmes left for London with the post the day after I moved into the lilac-colored room. The letter contained a brief recap of what had happened in the last few weeks, and also a request for several issues of the Globe — the London daily newspaper in which Holmes had a regular puzzle column. I sent my letter for Lupin to Brussels, where I knew the traveling circus in which he and his father, Theophraste, performed was currently stationed. Just to be certain, I made a copy. This I sent to Paris, to the address where, according to my friend, there was someone who acted as their agent and who, within a few weeks, I discovered to be the former Mrs. Lupin.

  During the succeeding days, I tried to spend as much time as possible with my mother and got into the habit of reading to her every day from a novel. It was nice sharing a story with her, as I believed she had done for me when I was little. To tell the truth, it was a very distant memory, and a vague one, so much so that I did not recall a single one of those stories, nor even her voice. But there was something nonetheless familiar about reading aloud from a book at her bedside. I felt somewhat irritated when I found out my mama had chosen Paul and Virginia, an old novel by Bernadin de Saint-Pierre, which fit poorly with my taste for “scandalous” books by those American writers that Mr. Nelson secretly shared with me. I think that he and I, particularly, were the big readers in the Adler house.

  I found Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s writing pompous and outdated, but my mother seemed to adore it. She stopped me from time to time to comment on this passage or that, frequently when there were touching scenes or preaching dialogues that she hoped in her heart would be useful to me.

  If she only could have guessed that I loved the dark stories of Mr. Edgar Allan Poe, in which Detective Dupin hunted for a monkey killer!

  These afternoons passed calmly, and I saw my mother’s face slowly turn pink. After a week at Evreux, two hundred pages of a novel, and just as many small cups of beaten eggs, she found the strength to get out of bed and walk to her window that overlooked the river.

  I followed a step behind her, afraid she might fall, watching her thin body, stiff under her bathrobe and fragile as a spider’s web.

  “What a splendid church, don’t you think?” she asked after leaning against the windowpane to look outside for a long time.

  Hers was perhaps the only window in
the house from which you could see the bell towers of the cathedral through the trees.

  “Well, it is …” I hesitated.

  “You don’t like it?”

  “I find it …” I started, but the words wouldn’t come. “Threatening.”

  “How strange,” she murmured. “It makes me think how God must be.”

  “Pointy?” I joked.

  But she didn’t reply.

  * * *

  Luckily, Papa did not look for a tutor for me right away. Or perhaps he tried, but had no luck. My mother’s illness had made my education less of a priority, and I had no intention of protesting.

  I spent a good part of my days reading on the swing, on the wooden jetty, or hidden in the attic. I daydreamed and grew sad, feeling myself left to my own devices a little too often after the months spent in London and the intense events I’d experienced. I had risked my life in a den of thieves, crept into a theater in the company of a killer, spent time on the seediest streets and in the most disreputable places in the city, found myself face to face with agents from Scotland Yard, and been threatened with a pistol on the docks of the Thames. And, especially, I had been swept away by a kiss from one of my friends and had been hugged enthusiastically by the other of them.

  The pain I felt from missing them both grew more pronounced across the distance.

  So as not to lose touch with what my world had been over the previous months, I worked on my English by reading Mr. Nelson’s books, having sworn I would not admit I had gotten them from him under any circumstances.

  “You could say that you stole them from me, rather, or that they came from the public library in Evreux …” Mr. Nelson said.

  At that idea, we both burst out laughing. To see if there was at least a library, we went together for a short walk in the country. We crossed the bridge and found ourselves in a small square with lovely little wooden houses facing it.

  Wherever we walked, I felt the shadow of the cathedral above me, and when Mr. Nelson asked me if I would like to visit it, I refused. But there was a library in Evreux. It was tiny and only contained books in French, among which, I realized, there weren’t many new ones. I borrowed a couple of small volumes by Mérimée, however, and explained to the lady at the counter that we had recently moved to the village.

  “Ah, you’re guests at poor Mr. d’Aurevilly’s estate!” she said.

  I hesitated and saw that Mr. Nelson was hesitating, too. The young lady wavered as well, as if she had said something awkward. She avoided meeting our eyes, as she had done from the moment we had entered. But I knew that she had really been scrutinizing the dark-skinned Mr. Nelson with curiosity every instant she thought she was not being observed.

  “Why ‘poor?’” I asked.

  “Because he hasn’t been back to Evreux for years. He and the foreign young lady who lived there,” she murmured. “These days, the capital is dangerous for foreigners … and for all gentry, if they are born of old families like him, you understand.”

  Actually, I did not. I thought Papa had bought that country home and that we were not merely guests. But since I had noticed how the young lady spoke of the new Parisian government with venom in her voice, I tried to let her have her way.

  “What scoundrels!” I exclaimed, expressing an opinion that wasn’t mine.

  “You said it, miss!”

  “Or perhaps it would be better not to say just that,” Mr. Nelson whispered, taking the books from the counter and accompanying me to the exit.

  * * *

  I thought that everyone had forgotten about me or that I even existed, and that my mother’s illness had pushed us to the fringes of the world, to this place where not far from me — although out of reach — things did happen. I thought that the sleepy country spring would turn into a muggy marsh of boredom.

  It seemed to me as if the seclusion of the d’Aurevilly house was like what Mrs. Brontë described when she said, “In all England, I do not believe that I could have fixed on a situation so completely removed from the stir of society.” Except in that novel, the heroine shared her solitude with the man she loved, while I was spending my time in the company of books — mine and Mama’s old novel. Surrounded by so much tranquility, I grew convinced that nothing exciting would happen to me until we left there.

  However, nine days after we arrived in Evreux, I discovered I was wrong. Beneath the seat of my swing, I found a strange note written in a delicate feminine handwriting that I did not recognize.

  Chapter 4

  GRACEFUL HANDWRITING

  “Mr. Nelson?” I called, going back into the house. “Did someone arrive? Do we happen to have guests?”

  It would not have been the first time that — shut up with my books and my thoughts — I was unaware someone had come, perhaps the village doctor or a colleague of Papa’s.

  Mr. Nelson was supervising the cleaning of the sitting room. He replied without ceasing to give orders to the household staff in grand style, scarcely moving a white-gloved hand. “Guests, Miss Irene? None today. Why do you ask?”

  I stopped in the middle of the carpet, which I sank into almost up to my ankles. “Have you seen a gardener, perhaps? Or the mailman? Someone passing along the river?”

  “Has something happened I should know about?” Mr. Nelson asked.

  “Yes, maybe …”

  I hid the note in my hand so he could not see it.

  “Should I suspect something, Miss Irene?” he said without looking at me. “Or perhaps prepare the guest room? For one person? Or maybe two?”

  I laughed. Certainly my two distant friends hadn’t come this time.

  “It’s not what you think!” I replied, seeking refuge in my room.

  “It’s never what I think, Miss Irene,” I heard him respond from his command post.

  * * *

  It was obvious that Lupin and Holmes had nothing to do with the note. To me it seemed certain that it had been written by a woman. The writing on the envelope was in a bluish color, sketched with a slanted hand:

  To be delivered to Miss Irene Adler.

  Inside the envelope was an ivory-colored card with a brief message:

  I beg you to come to the cathedral garden this afternoon at four o’clock. I would like to tell you about Mr. d’Aurevilly and your mother.

  That was all. I read it a second time, wondering what Mr. d’Aurevilly could have to do with my mother. Then I went to check the time on the pendulum clock. It was less than a half hour before four, a sign that whoever had delivered the note had expected me to find it much earlier.

  Had it already been under my swing that morning? I wondered.

  If Sherlock had been with me, he would certainly have been able to give me an answer, possibly figuring it out from the dampness of the envelope and the card. But Sherlock was on the other side of the sea, and the clock showed that it was past 3:30, so I did not think about it for long. I decided to leave the house right away, careful to pass by my mother’s room to say goodbye first.

  I found her standing, walking slowly from one side of her room to the other, as the doctor had recommended she do in order to regain the strength in her legs.

  “I’m going to go for a walk into the village,” I told her.

  “What a splendid idea!” she replied. “I can’t wait until I am able to go with you.”

  I bit my tongue, hesitating in the doorway to her room. “Mama?”

  She looked at me. “What is it?”

  “Nothing,” I responded, rejecting the idea of asking her if she personally knew Mr. d’Aurevilly.

  Without another word, I headed for the park.

  * * *

  The Evreux Cathedral seemed to capture every ray of light. It was made of light gray marble. The brightness of the marble contrasted with the shadows from the arches, pointy spires, and tall bell tower. The cathedral
was supported by bold buttresses that made it look more like a rocky mountaintop than a place of prayer, at least to my eyes. And the large rose window in the front looked like a big eye staring at me instead of the flower its builders probably intended.

  The village was as sleepy as ever. The few passersby loafed at the intersection of the two main streets, acting as if they had nowhere to go.

  It was not hard for me to find the garden specified in the note. It was a green space beside the cathedral, divided into sections by spoke-like paths and the gravestones of local people. I spotted a bench and sat down, looking around.

  I saw a family of crows perched on the spires of the cathedral like sentinels, and I followed their flight. They glided across the grass and pecked at the gravestones. They seemed to display a wicked familiarity, as if they knew better about the past, present, and future events in Evreux than anyone else.

  “Forgive me for having asked you to come here,” a woman’s voice interrupted my thoughts at that point. The voice was both soft and deep. “I am truly sorry, Miss Irene.”

  I had been so focused on studying the crows that I had not realized a bejeweled woman had drawn near. She was a few steps away, staring at me.

  I started with surprise. I stood up, embarrassed, but tried to act nonchalant. I could not figure out how that woman had been able to sneak into our garden all the way to my swing, leave the card for me, and then depart undisturbed.

  “Don’t worry about it. It’s only a short distance,” I replied. “If anything, I found your method of communication … intriguing.”

  “I know, I know. I can imagine it!” the woman said, sitting down next to me.

  I could not see her eyes, which were hidden behind the veil of an elaborate little hat. I was amazed to note that her style of dressing, which would have been bizarre on any London street, seemed perfectly appropriate in an Evreux garden.

  “May I at least ask who you are?” I began, but she was quicker than me.

  “Poor little girl, poor treasure that you are … Your mother has told me so much about you!”