by Irene Adler
“Leave her alone!” Sherlock shouted.
Lupin helped me get back up. With the use of our elbows, we fought our way toward the corridor. We were about to take off at a run when three hooded figures blocked our way, pulling out their pistols.
“I wouldn’t take another step if I were you!”
Chapter 19
AN EMPEROR
It was one of the most awful moments in my life. My heart filled with anger and shame for how I had gotten my friends into trouble by tripping and falling on the ground like a fool. I still remember the shouts from the hooded crowd behind us.
“Scoundrels!”
“They’re plants sent by the rebels!”
“Yes! Teach them a good lesson!”
The Grand Master’s guards ordered us to raise our hands. They escorted us toward a tiny door in the middle of the corridor, guns pointed at our spines. Then they forced us to walk through a short, damp corridor. At its end was a filthy cell, which they abruptly shoved us into. I had just gotten back up when one of the guards grabbed me to search me.
“Don’t you dare, worm!” Lupin attacked the guard, flinging himself on top of him.
One of the Grand Master’s other cronies hit him in the face with the butt of his gun and drove him into the corner.
“No!” I screamed.
“We’re not here for a romantic comedy, sonny, so see that you cut out this nonsense!”
Then they searched the three of us. In Sherlock’s pockets, the Grand Master’s men found the two fragments of the map. Everything is blurry from the moment I saw one of the hooded men grip the two pieces of parchment between his hands, as my eyes filled with tears.
Nonetheless, I heard one of our jailers say to another, “Call the boss! Right away!”
The remaining two guards tied our wrists together with pieces of rope. After they locked the door with a heavy chain and a bolt, they disappeared into the dark corridor.
“I’m … I’m so … I’m so sorry,” was all I could whisper between my sobs.
“You needn’t apologize for anything, Irene,” Lupin said. He began to rub the rope tying his hands together against a rock that stuck out from the wall.
“Right. It’s not over yet,” Sherlock added.
Looking back, the most amazing thing is that my friends’ faces showed they were not just saying this to comfort me. For Sherlock, this affair was truly like a chess game still being played. For Lupin, it was like a boxing match in which our opponent had scored a good hit but was far from having knocked us to the canvas. If, on the one hand, that relieved me a bit, on the other hand, the thought of having gotten my two extraordinary friends into trouble was like a thorn jabbing into my pride. Even today, many years later, it hurts.
Luckily, I did not have to remain at the mercy of these thoughts for very long. After a few minutes, we saw the Grand Master’s red robe appear beyond the bars of our cell. In his hands, he was carrying the two map fragments that his guards had just taken from us, and he had his hood lowered to his shoulders. I could see his face and was amazed. He was only a young man, with reddish hair, thin whiskers, and intense, brilliant blue eyes. A smile that was both vicious and mocking seemed to animate every muscle in his face.
“I don’t know who you are, my dear children,” he said, waving the pieces of parchment. “But I’m delighted you decided to pay me a visit!”
Then he burst into laughter and walked away, escorted by his men.
I watched them disappear into the darkness until I no longer could see them. Then I turned to my friends. I saw right away that Sherlock had been struck by his appearance, too.
“He’s really not what I expected!” I said, almost without thinking.
Sherlock began pacing back and forth in the cell nervously. “You’re right.” He nodded. “There’s something strange about that man!”
“If you mean to say you expected he would be a stern old man with a white beard, well, I admit you’re right,” Lupin said as he continued to work on the rope tied around his hands.
“His tone of voice, his cadence …” Sherlock continued. “When he spoke in front of all of his followers it was different, as if …”
“ … as if he was putting on an act!” I anticipated.
“Exactly. And then …”
“And then?”
“In his speech he made a basic astronomy error,” Sherlock said.
“Oh. Really?”
“Sure. He said Sirius was part of the constellation Virgo, but it belongs to the Big Dog.”
“Goodness,” I said. “So not only was he merely performing, but he didn’t even learn his script very well!”
Lupin snorted, and with one last effort, he finally managed to loosen the rope enough to free his hands.
“Maybe that man is not a walking encyclopedia — agreed,” he said, rubbing his reddened wrists. “But the thing that worries me is that his thugs are armed to the teeth. So I would say it’s a case of —“
At that exact moment, Sherlock abruptly stopped in the middle of the cell and put his index finger to his lips, motioning Lupin to be silent.
“Quiet! I hear something!” Sherlock said. Looking around, he pointed to a dark little corner of the cell. “Up there! Quick!” Sherlock stretched his hands toward Lupin, who helped him get the rope off, and then said, “Help me get up to that corner.”
Lupin asked no questions. Ducking down, he grabbed Sherlock by the knees and lifted him up to the place he had been pointing to.
Holmes put his ear next to a little hole in the rock, closing his eyes so that he could concentrate on listening.
I stared at his thin, pointy face. It was tense from the effort of grasping as much of what he was hearing through that crack as he could. With every little tremor and every little contraction in his face, my heart beat faster. He spent some time up there, which seemed very long, but in reality it was only a few minutes. Then suddenly Sherlock gestured to Lupin to put him down.
“They’re coming back!” he whispered.
Both of them hid their hands behind their backs and leaned against the wall, pretending to be tied up still.
We heard the sound of steps, and shortly thereafter, the Grand Master and his friends reappeared beyond the bars.
“So what should we do with them?” said one of the thugs.
The Master threw us another cursory look.
“Our young friends? Leave them there inside a while to cool their heels,” he said. “We have more important things to deal with.”
And without saying anything else, he disappeared again, with the nervous pace of someone who has important matters waiting for him.
As soon as the echo of his footsteps vanished from the corridor, Lupin and I went over to Sherlock.
“What did you hear?” I asked him, while Lupin undid the rope around my wrists.
Sherlock looked very thoughtful and waited a little before responding.
“They had just put the map back together. The Grand Master was thrilled, to say the least,” he said. “And yet I’m sure he ordered the guards to say nothing about it to his followers. They were not to know anything.”
“What do you mean by that?” Lupin jumped on him. “Isn’t that exactly what those masked lordlings were waiting for?”
“It is,” Sherlock confirmed. “But our Master doesn’t want this discovery shared with his followers and …”
At this point, Sherlock broke off and shook his head, perplexed.
“I think I know French pretty well, and yet I didn’t understand the word he used to refer to them.”
“Maybe you didn’t hear correctly,” I suggested.
“On the contrary. He said the sentence in a loud voice, and I heard it perfectly well. He said, ‘Those bardouchis shouldn’t know anything about it!’”
Lupin st
ifled a guffaw.
Sherlock and I turned to look at him, surprised. Not even I, who had grown up in France, had ever heard that word.
“You must have heard wrong, my friend,” Arsène said.
“Out of the question,” Sherlock said. “I have very acute hearing, and I don’t have the slightest doubt about what I heard. Why do you think I’m wrong, though?”
“Simple. Because that word bardouchi is used by Belgians — and not even by all of them. Only in a certain part of Belgium would you happen to hear someone who uses that term to talk about someone who has a screw loose.”
“And how do you know something like that?” Sherlock asked.
“Simple. It so happens that that I’m unlucky enough to have my Uncle Constant, who lives in that small corner of Belgium, which would be a small southern city named Namur —”
Upon hearing the name of that city, Sherlock’s forehead wrinkled. He muttered, “Namur … Namur … Namur …” He then stayed quiet for several moments until he took again to repeating, “Namur … Namur …”
“So do you mean to torture us as you recently did with that Latin?” I teased him, intrigued.
But he did not even reply and continued his recitation, “Namur … Namur …”
All of a sudden his muscles tensed up. A flash of light went across his eyes, which stayed still, like dark glass beads. Once again Sherlock repeated as if possessed, “NAMUR!”
“Right,” Lupin joked. “And I don’t get how hearing the name of the most boring city in this world could have this effect on you!”
Sherlock smiled a fleeting smile, as if he had been bewitched. “It’s funny … It’s the only thing I know about this Belgian city. And yet, this one tiny thing just allowed me to figure out … everything. Everything, do you understand?”
“No, I don’t have even any idea of what you’re raving about!” I burst out.
Sherlock looked at me, with that strange, triumphant smile still on his face. “Look … the only thing I know about Namur — and it took me a while to bring it into focus — is that it’s the city that gave birth to Albert Vaneighem. Or, if you prefer the nickname that the newspapers coined for him … the Emperor of Con!”
Chapter 20
THE DARKEST TRUTH
“A … a con man?” I stammered, suspecting I had heard Sherlock’s last words incorrectly.
“The best of all of them,” he confirmed. “One who managed to sell an American tycoon an island that didn’t exist and equipment for telepathic communication to the Swedish king. It actually was just a metal chest, to be perfectly clear.”
Lupin was even more astonished than I was. “So you think this Vaneighem could be the Grand Master?!” he said, dumbfounded. “And you figured all that out just from bardouchi? A word my Uncle Constant uses to make fun of my father?”
Sherlock shrugged. “We never know whose hand will open the door to the truth,” he said, citing some poet. “Plus, think about it! This way everything makes sense. His appearance, which is so out of place, the voice that changes when he addresses his followers, the basic error in astronomy … It explains everything if he’s not what he says he is, but rather just a swindler who’s juggling a huge act.”
On the one hand, Holmes’s theory seemed like total nonsense. On the other hand, the more I thought about that man, the more likely the story seemed. The face I had seen a little earlier was that of a shrewd con man and certainly not that of a dark sorcerer!
Many things, however, were still shrouded in mystery.
“But even if the Grand Master is Vaneighem, what would a man like him want with a saint’s relic?” I asked.
“We can’t know that yet,” Sherlock admitted. “But I’m willing to bet he has his reasons for getting hold of it.”
Lupin snickered sharply. “Underneath, it’s not so hard to believe you. This business of hooded people underground always seemed like a big masquerade to me! And now, what do you say about going out there to find out if you’re right?” he asked, going up to the padlock on our cell.
While Lupin got working with his tools, Sherlock and I crouched down on the ground, our eyes set on our friend. The big padlock holding us prisoner, however, was not scrap metal like the lock at Saint-Sulpice. It resisted all of Lupin’s attempts.
* * *
Time passed, marked by poor Arsène’s curses. In the corridor beyond the bars, the torch that had been providing us with a little light was slowly dying out.
During those rough-and-tumble days in Paris, we had eaten very little. I felt faint, and my throat felt parched from thirst. As the darkness around us grew thicker, I slipped into sleep more than once, falling prey every time to short but scary nightmares.
Finally, Lupin’s voice came from my right. “I’ve got it! I did it!” he whispered in the darkness.
I found it hard to believe, but it was true. The padlock had finally yielded, and we were free to leave that horrible cell. We slipped past the bars and lined up single file, Lupin at the front and Sherlock at my back. It seemed as if this part of the underground had been abandoned, and we’d been forgotten in the cell. Being considered simple, defenseless children had for once been a benefit to us. And so it would have been crazy not to take advantage of the opportunity to escape.
We moved silently, as carefully as we could, holding our breath at every corner we turned. Lupin retraced the steps we had taken in the afternoon when we came from the church of Saint-Sulpice, but when we found ourselves in the large circular chamber, we got an unpleasant surprise. The little door we had passed through on the way in was now locked with two sturdy bolts.
“No!” Lupin swore between his teeth.
We had no choice. Nothing else remained for us other than to go on through the dark tunnels that were unfamiliar to us.
Sherlock snatched a small surviving stub of candle from a candelabra and fixed it to his little pocket notebook so we would have a little bit of light for our walk. We wandered for long minutes through those dank stone passages, one so much like the next that more than once I thought we were passing through a section where we had already been.
We found ourselves at the opening to a corridor that was larger than the others when we heard the sound of steps thundering, leading us to believe they belonged to a group of well-fed people.
“This way! Quick!” Sherlock said. He blew out the candle.
We stopped after a few steps and hid ourselves in a dark nook that had moisture seeping into it.
The steps grew closer. From the little alcove, I saw dark shapes silhouetted in the orange halo of several torches.
The group stopped abruptly.
“Are you sure this is the right way?” someone asked.
“I swear it to you, sir,” replied a woman’s voice that made me shudder for some reason. I covered my mouth with my hand, wondering what in that voice had disturbed me so much.
And it was right then that I asked myself yet again during this adventure if I was dreaming, despite the fact that I had my eyes wide open. For in the flickering light of the torches, I actually thought I saw Mr. Nelson’s features. When the small company turned to move forward, my impression became a certainty.
“Mr. Nelson!”
My voice gushed from my mouth without my being able to control it. Instinctively, I took a few steps forward.
“Good gracious! Miss Irene!” our butler exclaimed, running to meet me. I found myself in his arms, stunned.
“Mr. Nelson … It’s such a delight to see you again!” I said.
“Oh, Irene … Thank heavens,” murmured a woman’s voice, one different from the voice I had heard a few moments before. And after those words, the woman who had spoken them burst into tears. I was extremely surprised and quickly turned to face her. She was a slender woman with delicate features … Had I seen her before, perhaps? Or was it a trick of the dim li
ght? But there was no time to think about it.
Sherlock and Lupin were now a step behind me. I saw Mr. Nelson rest his icy gaze on them.
“You!” he exclaimed harshly. “You …”
“Mr. Nelson, I beg you,” I interrupted. “It’s not what you think. Everything that happened was my fault alone!”
There were many more things I would have liked to say and should have said to Mr. Nelson, but there was no way I could then.
A tall, slightly bent-over man came a few steps nearer, affectionately patting the hand of the woman in tears. “My name is Jean-Jacques d’Aurevilly, and to have found you and your friends, is for me a cause for great relief and joy. There will be time to talk about it later. First, however, I believe we should leave this place now.”
The voice of that no-longer-young man seemed filled with wisdom, and no one had any objection.
As we walked through the dark tunnels lit by the two torches, I lingered to study the little group we’d been united with. Besides Mr. Nelson, d’Aurevilly, and the lady who had burst into tears, I counted at least four armed men walking ahead of us.
Turning briefly, I saw that there were another two armed guards behind me. Between them was another woman wearing a bonnet and a large scarf that hid her face. I was deeply curious to find out who she was, but my desire to breathe a little fresh air — outside the underground — was even greater. For this reason, I kept walking quickly next to Mr. Nelson and my friends, trying not to think of all the questions I wanted to get answered right then.
One step after the other, I felt that horrible adventure under the earth ending. As my relief grew bit by bit, I started to think about the explanations I would have to give, first and foremost, to my father and my mother.
So I was silent and deep in thought when I heard a voice echoing from a side passage.
“Confound it! We need at least two sticks of dynamite and …”
All I know is that a few moments later I found myself in Sherlock’s arms, while all around me it seemed as if bedlam had erupted.
Our little company suddenly found itself faced by the Grand Master and two of his henchmen. The wretches immediately grabbed their weapons. The Duke d’Aurevilly’s guards did the same, meeting them with rifles.
