Would that its tones could reach the rich,
She sang the 'Song of the Shirt!’
Yet the object of my labors was not coarse linen; far from it. And calloused hands could not have managed the silks, satins, and velvets that slid through my fingers without snagging the stuff more precious than a mere seamstress’s flesh.
No, my sewing song was far more cheerful than that of the piece-work drudge celebrated in Mr. Hood’s poem. No matter how my neck and back ached, the workrooms were clean and decently aired. More than a straight seam was required of me.
Madame Gallatin, the supervisor I had mentioned, brought the tiny clothes the other women had cut and half finished, rustling toward me with tissue-paper designs that I was to translate into beadwork on the miniature skirts and bodices.
I pushed my pince-nez more firmly onto my nose to study these intricate patterns.
“You must first baste the tissues over the proper part of the gowns, Mademoiselle Uxleigh,” she instructed, sounding unfortunately like the Divine Sarah in dropping the initial “H” in my surname. She mistook my cringe at the memory for fear of the work.
“It is not so difficult,” she went on more sternly. “Surely a relation of Monsieur Worth will have a modicum of skill in her fingers, not to mention the head.” Here she tapped hers, her sharp features screwed tighter by hair drawn back mercilessly into a coal-black topknot that sat the crown of her head like an angry question mark.
She set a series of glass jars down before me. “You will use these beads as indicated in the sketch. Do not deviate from the pattern or the sketch and you will do nicely.”
I nodded to spare her my atrocious French and set to work.
The partially attired doll who would wear my stitchery stood before me, her pale, placid face cocked, her plump, painted cheeks and tiny features wearing an expression that blended pert expectancy with a waxen deathlike calm.
Her tiny, curled hands, so like a sophisticated baby’s, could grasp anything—fan, mirror, opera glasses, gloves, parasol, reticule. I could not picture that fragile bisque extremity grasping anything so heavy or dangerous as Irene’s wicked little pistol.
This doll was to wear a spotted grosgrain silk gown in palest ivory with fan-shaped designs on skirt and corsage worked in a heavenly array of beads ranging from faintest aqua to deepest midnight blue.
I basted on the first tissue, threaded with medium-blue silk a needle almost as fine as an eyebrow hair and plunged it up through the skirt’s heavy ivory silk and tissue overlay. An instant later my first bead was fixed in place. An unpleasant flutter of half-fear, half-pleasure trilled in my chest.
“That fashion doll is destined for the Empress of all the Russias,” Madame Gallatin’s guttural voice admonished from above my bent head. “Be careful,” she added in an almost sinister undertone.
Startled, I looked into the only face gazing my way—the doll’s frozen features. The deep brown eyes held a weary, vacuous stare, but now I recognized the brunette coiffure, the petite figure: the very likeness of Maria Feodorovna herself, whom I had seen in Paris not months before!
Had she come to Sarah Bernhardt’s salon fresh from a call on Maison Worth that resulted in the commissioning of the doll before me? Could I ever have dreamed then that many weeks later I would be sewing beads onto a miniature gown destined for her eyes and hands thousands of miles away in St Petersburg? Could I have guessed that a murdered girl would link us, when before only the person we knew (if one could call it that) in common was the murderous Colonel Moran, then masquerading as Captain Morgan?
Life was indeed exceeding strange.
Work! work! work!
While the cock is crowing aloof!
And work—work—work,
’Till the stars shine through the roof!
It’s oh! to be a slave
Along with the barbarous Turk,
Where a woman has never a soul to save,
If this is Christian work!”
When Irene asked me after a late dinner that evening how my day had gone, I responded with that stirring verse of Hood. She was not much impressed.
“I doubt that you would prefer employment with the barbarous Turk, Nell. Melodramatics and fancywork aside, what did you learn?” she demanded.
“How to sew on decorative beading.”
“Well.” She thought “That may ultimately prove useful for my wardrobe, but what did you learn of the dead girl? Her friends, foes, passions, problems?”
“There was no time for talk.”
“Make time,” she ordered as imperiously as Madame Gallatin. “A spy must never sacrifice her secret purpose to the mere outward demands of her guise.”
“If I am let go, I will be of no aid whatsoever.” Godfrey lowered the London Times, which he read assiduously after dinner every evening. “If Nell is let go, it will not much matter. We leave for Bohemia in two days.”
“What of my inquiry into the Maison Worth murder?” Irene asked indignantly, although I could not much see that it was “her” inquiry when my fingertips were pierced purple.
“Irene, you adorable ingrate,” he answered calmly, “you who have caused me to move heaven and earth to accommodate your desire to meddle once more with the affairs of Bohemia. Now that I have accomplished the necessary groundwork, you can at least let the murder of a fashion house bead-girl simmer for awhile, and allow Neil to trade her trying needle for her more customary pen and pencil.”
‘Then it is true!” Irene tossed aside the novel she had been reading—Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet, imagine Irene eating up a tale about a miser!—and stormed to the side of Godfrey’s chair. “We are to go to Bohemia at last!”
“Nell and I depart Thursday noon. Arrangements have been made for you to follow—under your assumed name—later.” He glanced at me. “Can you bear to leave your sewing, Nell, that soon?”
I eyed the crocheted doily in my lap. “I will take along my own fancywork, but will leave the routine of a bead- girl behind as gladly as I left the life of a typewriter-girl. This will be quite official? We shall work together as before?”
He nodded. “To all appearances, but with greater causes at stake than most court cases. Or so my wife and Baron Rothschild tell me.”
“Oh, good,” I replied, cheered by the notion of accompanying Godfrey on legal business, no matter how distant or dangerous. Perhaps I had missed my role as secretary and clerk.
While we conferred, Irene had sunk onto a stool beside Godfrey’s chair, from which she teased Lucifer with the last strands of my unraveled ball of crochet twine. Between them, they had snarled the string beyond any damage either one could have accomplished singly.
“When do I leave?” she asked.
Godfrey smiled and removed a cigarette from the malachite box on the side table. “As soon as your chaperone arrives.”
Irene popped as upright as a jack in a box. “Chaperone! I require no chaperon!”
“The Baron and I beg to differ. Your role as a woman traveling alone will be more believable if you are properly accompanied.” He lit his cigarette with a flourish.
Irene’s hands pounded the upholstered arms of his chair as if they were flesh. “Godfrey Norton, you have taken to very secretive and high-handed ways of late, and I do not like it one bit! I said nothing about your silence and your endless absences in Paris—one would think you had a secret mistress!—because I understood, and was foolish enough to respect, your deep personal reservations about an enterprise in Bohemia. But now you simply... schedule me like a departing train, and book unwanted passengers for me as well! I have been meek, I have been mild, and I have been silent, but enough is enough. I require no chaperon.”
By now she had risen to her knees on the stool, and her face was on a level with his.
He turned away to blow a polite stream of smoke in the direction of Casanova’s cage.
“It is ludicrous!” Irene stormed on. “I am perfectly able to take care of myself, and as for scan
dal, when has the threat of that ever stopped me?”
“Not often enough,” he said, turning back to her.
“I will go armed. What chaperon could you produce that would be worth as much to me as myself? Alone!”
“I had considered Sarah Bernhardt.”
“You had?” Irene’s flexible voice moderated, took on an intrigued quality. She sat back on her heels and held out her hand for a cigarette, which he provided, as well as a lit lucifer.
She tilted her face toward the lucifer, looking much like a cat that expects a petting, until her cigarette was lit, then conceded. “Sarah might not do too badly. I could say that she was my maid.” Her voice had deepened into a pleased purr.
I rolled my eyes at the notion of anyone taking Sarah Bernhardt for a lady’s maid, anyone’s lady’s maid. I rolled my eyes in the other direction at anyone having the temerity to consider her in such a secondary role.
“But Sarah is an actress, and must honor a playing schedule,” Godfrey purred right back.
Irene bristled, then huffed out a furious stream of smoke, without politely turning away her head. “Then who?” she puffed like an angry locomotive imitating an outraged owl. Godfrey smiled. “I happened on just the solution.”
“What!?”
“You will see how perfect it is when Allegra arrives.”
“Allegra? What is this? I am to travel with a musical direction?” Her hands were pounding the chair arm as if it were ebony and ivory and not mute stuffing.
I, however, sat up with a pleased chirp. “Allegra, Godfrey? Not really?”
Irene snapped her head in my direction. “This word means something to you, Nell? Am I to be utterly excluded from the schemings of my so-called friends?”
I gave her the look that she gave me when I was being uncommonly dense. “Allegra, Irene. Dear, charming Allegra. Quentin’s niece. She has been longing to visit me in France. An ideal solution, Godfrey.”
“Thank you.” He turned to Irene with a smile, which was akin to facing the Medusa with a pocket mirror. “She is a delightful girl.”
“Girl? You saddle me with a green girl when I am on a woman’s business? I have never met this Allegra person.”
“That is true,” said I. “You never did. Allegra Turnpenny is most astute, Irene, and quite charming.”
“She will fit perfectly into your plans,” Godfrey added. “You can say she is your maid, or your niece.”
“I am not old enough to have a niece,” Irene noted dangerously.
I came to Godfrey’s rescue, as I wholeheartedly approved of his scheme. “Of course you are, Irene, had you an older sister. Do you have an older sister?”
“No, nor do I have any friends,” she added pointedly, glaring at me. “Apparently, neither does this poor Allegra Turnpenny, or they would not allow her to venture into darkest Bohemia.”
“But,” said Godfrey with a lawyer’s pounce, as Lucifer leaped to take full control of the abandoned twine, “she will be chaperoned by the most dangerous woman in Europe. Poor, dear Allegra could not be safer, save in her own bed in Berkley Square.”
Irene considered. “That is true.” After a last draw on her cigarette, she handed it to Godfrey to extinguish. “I could say that she is my sister, my protégée. It will be inconvenient”—she glared most effectively at Godfrey—“but I will manage.”
He laughed. “I am sure that you will. Frankly, Allegra has turned up on her own, impetuous impulse. I received her letter yesterday, and she herself arrives Wednesday. Nell will write to her family and assure them of her safety. I saw little else to do than take her with us.”
Irene, mollified, nodded. “I do not relish traveling across Europe for five days with a stranger. At least I will have someone to talk to while I wonder what you and Nell are up to in Bohemia.”
“And,” I added, rewinding my thread until I hit the snag of fourteen pounds of fierce black fur, “while you contemplate what else is up in Bohemia, besides the arisen Golem.”
“Yes,” Irene and Godfrey agreed in concert, she now sitting on the arm of his chair, while his own arm encircled her waist.
They were the very picture of utter domestic harmony. I thought of another picture—a photograph much desired by the King of Bohemia, which Irene kept in a bank safe in Paris.
A pity such scenes could never last.
Chapter Twelve
DEATH BEFORE DISMISSAL
I fear my heart was not in my work at Maison Worth the following day.
Although Irene had promised, rather wolfishly, to attend to my packing while I was pursuing duty to the penultimate moment, my thoughts were not at ease.
Small stabs of memory darted in and out of my mind as my needle pricked in and out of the rare fabrics it adorned: Allegra. My long-ago charge, albeit briefly. Berkley Square. Her uncle Quentin. My distant vision of the blithe young uncle. My very recent reacquaintance with the jaded man of adventure returned from darkest Afghanistan.
Allegra, a delightful child, met again as a young woman as intemperate and charming as Irene herself. Dear Godfrey. A Solomon in modern dress. A Daniel come to judgment. Harnessing Irene’s wildest unconfessed impulses with a new responsibility, Allegra. Protecting Irene from herself and her past, protecting Allegra and her future even as he endangered them both. For if Bohemia was all that Baron Rothschild implied it was, there was no safety there for anyone, especially a vagrant lamb like Allegra Turnpennny.
Beads flew through my throbbing fingers. I imagined myself to be a Sleeping Beauty who had been pricked by a multiplicity of evil fairy godmothers. Irene traveling with Allegra, who reminded me of... Quentin. I abroad with Godfrey, tracking the ghosts of Irene’s disastrous almost- romance with the King of Bohemia. Clotilde. Queen Clotilde, where did that unfortunate woman come into our dramatis personae? And where—heaven forbid!—did the Golem?
“Mademoiselle Uxleigh!”
The voice thundered from above, like the Lord’s, although I doubt that He would deign to speak French.
“Yes?”
“You have altered the pattern. Have you no brain above the wrists? Look at this!”
I looked at the miniature skirt I was embellishing. “It seemed more pleasing to continue the loop to the left.”
A crumpled sketch was shaken under my shaking nose.
“This! This you follow. The pattern. Do not deviate from the pattern. This is no place for daydreaming. Here! Perhaps you can follow a new pattern better.”
The mannequin of Maria Feodorovna was whisked from before my quaking gaze. Another small, stiff, elegant figure was pounded into her place like a nail.
I took in a corona of dark hair with red-gold highlights, gold-brown glass eyes as melting as licorice-butterscotch candy, an impeccable, imperious posture....
I stood, breathing hard.
I looked at Irene. A doll of Irene.
“Monsieur Worth’s latest model,” Madame Gallatin announced. “Perhaps she will inspire you to do your best.”
No.
“No!” I said. "I cannot!”
I cannot sew for an Irene in miniature while sitting on the hard wooden seat last warmed by a dead girl. I cannot—
“You cannot? Or you will not? Relation or no, I cannot tolerate an arbitrary worker. Miss Uxleigh, where do you go? You cannot leave—!”
But I did leave, for good, and breathed better for it.
Irene expressed surprise to see me home at midday. Perhaps she was merely surprised to see me.
“My dear Nell! Why are you at home—? You are so pale. And perspiring. Here, sit down. Have you an ague? A fever?”
“No, not at all. I am not perspiring,” I added indignantly. “I am... dismissed. Again.” As from Whiteley’s, when Irene first found me on the streets of London years before.
“Oh. Oh! Do not fret. That spy business at Maison Worth is not worth fretting about.”
“It is not? You insisted that I must go there and learn things.”
“Yes, bu
t that was before Godfrey’s preparations for Bohemia had matured. Now we have bigger fillets to grill. You seem most upset There is nothing to worry about, I promise you. I will even tolerate this Allegra Turnpenny who has been foisted upon me. What has happened at Worth’s to upset you? I will have words with them if they have behaved badly.”
I sat in Godfrey’s chair while she fussed over me, and must admit a moment of satisfaction. “You do not wish to endanger your standing with Monsieur Worth.”
“Defending my friend will endanger no standing I value. What has gone wrong?”
“It’s that awful Madame Gallatin who supervises the seamstresses. She allows for no invention in her workers. I merely changed the design a scintilla, not even thinking about it but I have some aesthetic sense, you know, and do fancywork of my own, and she was most overwrought by my innovation.”
“ ‘Overwrought by your innovation!’ ” Irene puffed up like an angry peacock. “What enterprise does this woman imagine she directs? A bakery? Every loaf, every slice, must be of regulation size? Are you not to embroider a more pleasing design? Am I not to sing a more inventive aria? My dear Nell, I can’t think what I was doing, sending you into that den of... conformity. Monsieur Worth will know of this.”
“No!” I caught her hand before she could rush off to write a letter, or dash into town, or seize a horsewhip like her idol Sarah Bernhardt. “I am not suited for such workrooms. And... I was distracted.”
“By what?”
My hesitation quieted her of a sudden, made her sink beside my chair, as she had at Godfrey’s the previous evening.
“I was thinking of”—my voice quavered despite myself—“dear Allegra.”
Irene nodded sagely, looking regretful. “Of dear Allegra, and of her absent uncle. And also of my headstrong trek to Bohemia, and of the King, the Queen, and Godfrey. Oh, Nell, you worry too much about us, who are not worthy of your devotion—”
Another Scandal in Bohemia (A Novel of Suspense featuring Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes) Page 13
