by Irene Adler
Lupin looked like a wax statue, and I no less so. “Sleep here?” I said.
“Of course, Irene,” Papa responded. “There should be a room in the attic for chance guests, if I am not mistaken.”
“You’re not mistaken, sir,” Mr. Nelson broke in, clearing the plates off the table. “I will see to it myself, as soon as dinner is over.”
“Splendid!” my father said, raising his wine glass up high. “Let’s drink to youth! And to friendship!”
And so I did, confused and happy, because once again I was with all the members of my family.
* * *
“Let me see this piece of paper,” Sherlock said right away, once we had finished our dinner and settled in the sitting room. No sooner had I handed him the old, yellowed parchment than he seemed entranced by it.
He carefully studied it, slowly and hungrily, while Lupin and I exchanged questioning looks. Our worry, along with our hope, was that in a few seconds he would be able to figure out more than we had — we who’d had it in our hands for almost a week.
“Right, of course. But only a part,” Sherlock muttered, when the darkness in the sitting room forced him to look away.
“What?”
“Follow this outline and this line … do you see it here? They make a right angle, and then they go off the parchment in this direction. There’s no doubt. It’s part of a map.”
“And what are we to do with a part of map?” Lupin asked.
“This we need to ask the hoodlums who assaulted you,” Sherlock responded.
“They stole my pendant,” I said.
“But they didn’t say that was what they were looking for …” Sherlock replied.
“You’re saying?”
“I’m not saying anything. But there are some things that do not add up. The woman at the cathedral who got lost in the crowd, running away as soon as she saw a certain carriage arriving, and then those two who suddenly appeared.”
“How do you know these things?” Arsène burst out, amused.
“I write good letters,” I replied.
“And I read those letters, unlike some other people,” Sherlock said.
Arsène spread his arms out wide. “I would, too, but I move too quickly, my friends.”
We stopped, because Mr. Nelson had opened the door to the sitting room. “The attic is ready, Master Holmes,” he announced.
“Thank you very much, Mr. Nelson,” Sherlock responded.
Then he turned to look at me and Lupin. “Tomorrow,” he said.
“Tomorrow, what?” I asked.
“Tomorrow, the three of us start our counterattack.”
Chapter 8
SNAPS AND SECRETS
I could not sleep. No matter how hard I tried to stuff my head under my pillow, I still could hear the ceiling creak. I realized it was the steps of Sherlock Holmes, who must’ve been as restless as I was. The night was a solid blanket above the park, and my bed shone a vibrant pearly gray, like a raft at the mercy of the waves.
I grumbled a bit, but eventually I gave up. I slipped out from under the covers and put a long woolen robe over my nightgown. I slid on a pair of thick socks and carefully padded out the door of my lilac room. Passing by Papa’s room, I could hear his heavy breathing and the crumpling of his sheets every now and again. All that filtered out from Mama’s room was a delicate silence. I leaned my foot on the first step to the attic and cautiously put my weight onto it.
Mr. Nelson had been right to dissuade me from choosing the attic for my bedroom. It was impossible to move around in it secretly, and it would have been difficult to sneak out of the house from there. I slowly climbed up the stairs, one step at a time, thinking back to why Mr. Nelson had convinced me to choose a room with a trapdoor and secret steps that led to the vines, since I knew he really hadn’t wanted me to have a way to get into trouble.
I crouched in the shadows, dropping onto all fours to make the least amount of noise. But the wood seemed alive under my hands, and it creaked unpredictably.
Somehow I reached the door to the attic. Once there, I was about to knock when I was forced to stop, surprised. I heard Sherlock Holmes’s voice faintly coming from the other side.
He was speaking to someone.
“These few hairs left on the pillowcase are enough for me to figure out who’s been sleeping here,” my friend was saying. “Are you sure that the others know nothing about it?”
“It was Mr. Nelson who suggested it to me.”
“He knew that you’d run away from home then?” Sherlock asked.
“Just by looking at me.”
“While Irene and her father think you’re staying at the village inn.”
“That’s why I kicked you at dinner.”
Only then did I recognize that the voice answering Holmes belonged to Lupin. So Mr. Nelson had been letting him sleep in the attic all along?
I squeezed even closer to the door.
“Is it a bad business, what your father’s up to?” Sherlock asked.
“He says it’s an opportunity to start fresh,” Lupin said, “but I don’t agree. I don’t like the friends who got in touch with him in Paris and even less what they proposed he do. The city’s in chaos, and my father … has a clouded past, as you know.”
“But that’s not what’s really bothering you.”
“No,” Lupin admitted. “The problem is that he kept getting angrier and angrier at me. We were fighting about everything, and the moments of peace between one fight and the next were getting shorter. Was it like that with your father, too?”
“I’d say not, from what I remember,” Sherlock said. “The word fight wasn’t part of his vocabulary. That would suppose he even realized that other people existed, to mistreat them at all. No, my father never fought with anyone, but that’s not why there was peace in the family, as far as I know. My mother is silent when Mycroft and I try to talk about it. It is my brother and I who are responsible for our family. Mycroft has almost finished his studies and wants to be a lawyer or a politician, with a chance of earning a decent living. I think it’s a good idea and that he has a flair for it. Whereas I —”
Lupin snickered. “You want nothing to do with it.”
“That career doesn’t attract me at all. I’d rather become a mathematician, a concert pianist … or a violinist! But I feel like it won’t entirely be my choice.”
“At least you’ve got a brother,” Lupin said.
“You’re forgetting my little sister.”
“Exactly — you’ll never be alone. But I’m an only son.”
“And your mother?” Sherlock asked.
“Oh, it’s been five years since I went to see her.”
“Why?”
“You can’t imagine how cruel she can be. As if she had never forgiven herself for having had a son, and for having had one with my father. I think it was even out of spite toward her that my father let his new friends convince him to —”
Without any warning, the door I was leaning on suddenly opened wide. I fell into the room with a stifled little scream.
“Hello, Irene,” Sherlock Holmes greeted me, kneeling in front of me. “Do you want to come in and make yourself more comfortable?”
“It’s not what you think!” I hurried to explain myself. “I wasn’t eavesdropping.”
“It’s never what you think it is,” Lupin said, perched on the edge of his bed like a crow. He was dressed in his grubby nightclothes. Right then I realized why his clothes seemed familiar to me — they were ones my father had discarded.
All three of us sat down on the ground, with a candle lit between us. Wax cascaded down it.
“Truth is like a moth,” Sherlock said. “When light comes, it disappears.”
Lupin slipped his bare feet under a blanket. He looked thinner and younger than usual.
“I think the three of us should do something,” he murmured.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Trust,” said Lupin. “We desperately need some trust.”
“And we don’t have it?”
Lupin grimaced. “We know we want to have it, but we’re surrounded by people who are lying. And that’s why we keep searching.”
“Speak for yourself,” I interrupted.
“Because you don’t feel surrounded by lies, big and small? Or perhaps was it your idea to put me up in your attic secretly?” Lupin asked.
“I didn’t suspect a thing,” I said.
“Which means Mr. Nelson lied to you. And your father? And your mother? Are you really sure everything they tell you is true?”
“Yes,” I lied.
“Or perhaps,” said Lupin, “the truth is that we keep solving mysteries because we actually enjoy lies. Just a moment ago, I was hiding in this attic, Irene was behind the door, and you, Sherlock, where were you hiding?”
“In my head,” he replied, his expression pensive and bleak.
We were silent for a while, as if we’d discovered something important. I was captivated by the mysterious power of the night, which made it all seem grander.
“I think we should take an oath,” I said at that point, worried by hundreds of questions. “And swear that we will be different.”
They looked at me.
“We should swear to tell each other the truth from now on,” I said. “Always and no matter what.”
They stared at me.
“Just us three,” I added softly.
Then I brought the palm of my hand toward the lit candle. Arsène put his on top of mine, and Sherlock did so, too. We interlaced our fingers and held them above the flame until our skin burned from it. And that was how Sherlock, Lupin, and I sealed our oath of eternal trust in the attic of the d’Aurevilly house, in March of 1871.
It was our last oath as children — a naïve but powerful promise. It was a promise we could never turn back from. If even one of us broke it, all three of us would be forced to grow distant from each other forever.
And to grow up.
* * *
The next day, a pale, uncertain sun rose over Evreux. Sherlock and I met Lupin at the bridge. Lupin pretended to come toward us from the village, not knowing which mysterious observer this might benefit, given that my father and mother were nicely shut up in the warmth of the house.
“Plans?” he asked.
“The usual — the scene of the crime,” Sherlock replied. He handed Arsène one of the hot rolls he had nabbed from the breakfast table, and Lupin munched on it as we went into the village.
“How do you come and go from the attic discreetly?” I asked him.
“Discreet isn’t the best word to describe it,” Arsène joked. “Because sometimes I have a bad time of it with the gutter. Let’s just say that I take advantage of that tree closest to the rooftop. Once there, it’s easy enough.”
We reached the spot along the walk where we had been attacked a few days before and stopped there.
“The chances of finding something interesting here are practically nil,” Lupin said.
“Indeed. You should have come back right afterward to check,” Sherlock said.
I felt my neck ache. “It’s not particularly easy when someone has attacked you and tried to rob you!”
“I didn’t say it was easy.”
We set to searching with our eyes fixed on the ground, dividing the area into zones. Luckily, no one passed by.
“What exactly are we looking for?” Lupin asked after about ten minutes of unsuccessful searching.
“If we knew, we wouldn’t be looking,” Sherlock replied, kneeling on the ground and examining the grass with his utmost concentration.
“Maybe … a button?” I asked, recovering a small object from behind a brick that had broken off from those that made up the embankment. I held it out between my fingers and showed it to my two friends.
“That’s not a button,” Lupin said. “It’s too small.”
“From a shirt?” I guessed, holding it to the light.
“It’s a fastener from a shoe,” Sherlock Holmes replied.
“Splendid,” Lupin grumbled. “Now we have a trail.”
Sherlock gave him a surprised look. “Well,” he commented. “I’d say we do.”
“And exactly how, for heaven’s sake?”
Chapter 9
A GOOD REPAIR
“Is anyone here?” I asked, pushing open the door.
Inside, the shoemaker’s shop was shrouded in shadows. Leather in different colors was nailed to the once-white walls, along with dark iron tools. On the counter sat long-handled wooden forms in the shape of feet, along with scissors and hammers, punches for making holes in leather, and colored string. A weak fire burned at the rear of the shop in the soot-covered fireplace.
A little man bent in two by his waistcoat approached me. His arms were long and his hands gnarled. “What can I do for you, mademoiselle?” he asked with a perfect Parisian accent.
“I don’t exactly know,” I replied, following the instructions Sherlock had given me. “But I found this and … I thought it could possibly be useful to you.”
Saying this, I handed him the little snap we’d found at the river. The cobbler held it in his palm, staring at it carefully. And just as Sherlock had thought, he recognized it. It was the snap to an unusual fastener for a shoe.
“This is so lucky!” the shoemaker exclaimed.
“Really?” I said.
“Oh, yes. I thought it would drive me insane!”
“Seriously?”
“Yes, indeed,” he said. “A customer came in a few days ago, asking me to repair a pair of boots with this snap. I asked to have several days to fix them, but until now I hadn’t been able to find a fastener that matched the others. I was going to have to deal with it this morning no matter what, because the gentleman is coming to pick them up today.”
“Do you still have them here?” I asked.
“Yes, it’s these. Do you see?” he said, pointing to a pair of boots. “Without the fastener you just brought back to me, I was going to have to replace all of them. Do you see this hammered metal along the edge here? It’s a fastener that’s the latest fashion — comes straight from Paris. One of those inventions we go crazy for, here in the provinces.”
“And who is this man who is so alert to fashion, here in Evreux?” I asked.
The cobbler seemed captivated by the snap. “Would you believe? I don’t know,” he replied. “It was the first time he’d come into the shop.”
* * *
We stationed ourselves nearby, careful to remain out of sight. Sherlock and Lupin had a deck of cards that they used to while away the time. I went home for lunch and reported back to the shoemaker’s alley a little before two o’clock. At three, the shoemaker finally stopped hammering. Shortly after, as if he had heard, a curly-haired man in a very elegant overcoat appeared at the shop.
Lupin hid the cards in his pocket. Sherlock pulled his checkered hat down on his head. A few minutes after he went in, the man left, quickly walking in the opposite direction from the one he’d originally come from.
He was wearing the boots.
We followed him at a safe distance and left the village with him, passing into the countryside. The man was moving at a brisk but calm pace. He never turned back, as if he felt completely secure. He turned down a couple of increasingly narrow streets. After less than a half hour of walking, he arrived at a wooden barn, from which the roofs of Evreux could barely be seen.
“I’d say we’re there,” whispered Sherlock, who was walking ahead of us.
We crouched between the bushes and stayed there for a little while to watch. As soon as we were sure there was no one else nea
rby, we raced up to the side of the barn and began skirting it, looking for a way to get inside.
Arsène pointed out a small window on the upper floor and a wooden ladder carelessly propped up nearby. Moving it very carefully, we leaned it against the wall without making any noise. Sherlock crept up first, then I climbed up second, and Lupin followed us.
We crawled into a dusty, rickety loft. There were cracks between one board and the next, which let us see into the barn below. Sherlock led the way until we heard several men’s voices chatting a few meters below us.
“Our orders were clear, Marcel!” one of them shouted. “We were supposed to tear up that cursed piece of paper!”
“And that’s what I tried to do!” Marcel replied. “But she reacted like a panther!”
I couldn’t hold back a smug grin.
“Why do I always have to work with a bungler like you? Why?” the first one said. I saw him wave my heart-shaped pendant and then throw it into the center of the room. “Why’d you think she’d wear it around her neck?”
“The thing glittered,” Marcel said. “And besides, what do I know about what girls put around their necks? She could’ve put the folded-up paper in it, as far as I knew.”
“If it wouldn’t be a waste of the rope, I’d strangle you! Couldn’t we make better use of a knife and finish the job, once and for all?”
“Enough already!” a third voice roared. Through the boards, I saw it belonged to the man who had picked up the boots. “What’s done is done. Which is nothing at all.”
“Look, I tried to get into that house at least twice, Bernache.”
“And both times, you were forced to stop because of that mysterious knight.”
“I swear to you, Bernache, it’s a monkey! If you’d seen how it climbed up the tree and then onto the roof! It was impossible to get in there.”
This time it was Lupin’s turn for a smug grin.
“They smelled a rat, I’m telling you. The house is monitored.”
“How scary.”
“The guy who climbed onto the roof stabbed Marcel.”
“And there’s also the butler,” Marcel added, coughing.
