I remembered visiting a gypsy fortune teller in this quarter with Irene, and light glowing through a skull-shaped lamp. I recalled palms glittering with gold and cryptic lines, and a fortune frighteningly apt given subsequent events: Irene would wed a man with the initial “G.”
She, her eloquent eyes still starred with visions of queenship and the King of Bohemia, thought of his middle name, Gottsreich. I knew Godfrey then, but could I have ever imagined that he would be the “G” of Irene’s fortune? So although I was not superstitious, still I knew that this quarter contained an uncanny portion of occult knowledge. Might not the remnants of a Greater Age of Faith, a medieval manikin formed from clay and the Cabbala still stalk these mean byways?
“Cheer up, Nell,” Godfrey said from behind me. “It is too much to expect that on our first night in Prague we shall be granted a glimpse of its resident demon.”
Of course he was right. Dear Godfrey, so sensible. No wonder he made the perfect partner for Irene, who was oft so insensible, or do I mean the ungrammatical “unsensible?” I will leave it to future readers of these diaries to decipher my meaning. As for me, Godfrey’s comment greatly reassured me. I was able to gaze around sagely when our guide stopped to point out the intersecting street where the Golem had first been spied in recent times.
“A cramped and narrow way,” Godfrey noted. “Even a man of ordinary height would seem taller there,”
He stepped into the byway as if to demonstrate. I caught my breath and stifled my warning cry. Perhaps it was blasphemy to mimic the Golem’s path.
But Godfrey was correct. He stood a solid six feet high, perhaps a shade more. In the confines of that cramped street, in the dark, he looked larger, taller, more threatening.
I sighed when he stepped from the shadow into the faint light of a distant lantern. Prague had no gaslights yet to dazzle the night shadows into daylight safety, and the narrow byways formed a stingy birth canal for the vastness of the night sky. Only a few stars at a time dared twinkle sparsely down on the old city’s inhabitants, like sparks glimpsed in a mud puddle.
Our guide marched on, deeper and darker into the poor quarter. Meager light seeped out of closed doors and shaded windows. Even the robust smells of the tavern district were gone. Who lived here, what they ate here, was a mystery.
I thought I heard the distant chime of crystals cascading from a skull-lamp’s lantern jaw, and coins clinking in a gypsy purse. I thought I heard footsteps hard behind me. Oh—Godfrey’s. I thought I heard mumbled words in a foreign dialect, and saw a clay tongue accept a small roll of mystical paper as a Papist takes the Communion wafer....
Oh, my imagination was wrought up! Why was I here, with Godfrey? Irene should be treading these dreadful cobblestones, with her hard head and her steel pistol to protect her, and Godfrey. And me!
She would laugh at my fancies. Godfrey would laugh. Our guide would laugh. I would laugh when I was safe at home with Lucifer curled at my feet and Messalina guarding the garden stoop and Casanova prowling his perch in the parlor and muttering Baudelaire....
Yet now I heard footsteps. They seemed to thunder in rhyme.
Fee, fie, foe, fum!
I smell the blood of an English mum.
Be she brave or be she yellow,
I’ll eat her marrow, for I’m a raw fellow.
Imagination. Fancy. Fright dreams. Nightmares.
Yet the footsteps came on, and our guide stopped, hushing us with a hand gesture.
We three halted against a house front. Godfrey’s hand tightened on my arm, as if he would never let go. His cane lifted. I saw its faint, faint shadow on the dimly lit cobblestones.
And then the steps. Slow. Heavy. Black as Bohemian lager in their advance. One. Two. Three. Four. Five... on and on, louder and louder. A shadow fell dark as pitch on the charcoal-gray canvas of the street.
It thrust to the third story, that shadow, preceding the one that cast it. I heard the rattle of chains, though I knew I would see no ghost, no Marley come to take us on a Christmas odyssey. There was no Christmas for this phantom so physically advancing toward us. Six. Seven. Eight steps. Louder, and now moans. Horrible, anguished, frustrated moans of one pent up for too long, for weeks and months and ages and eons. Nine. Ten. The steps were the slowing beats of my heart, which could only throb in time to the oncoming strides. Much slower, and it would stop, my heart, my hearing, and I would know nothing of what came toward us, and would welcome that surcease.
Eleven. Twelve. Like the Apostles. Thirteen. As is unlucky.
The maker of the shadow burst into the byway we occupied. I saw—no face. A blank face, worse than a doll’s, lacking all features save a general outline I longed to call a face. No expression, but the sound. The low, strangled, angry, hopeless moan. The huge feet, striding like an automaton’s. Fourteen. Fifteen. Sixteen. Toward us, over us. Washing us like cold waves of imagination made incarnate. The Golem. I had seen It. Heard It. Feared It. Believed in It. At that moment, faith quavered before fear. I heard a metallic rasp. Godfrey’s sword. I saw a thin pin of darker shadow fall across that great, moving, mechanical Shadow.
And the sword hesitated. And the Shadow shuddered on. Past. Into memory. Into disbelief. Into rationalization. Into shivers and sobs.
“It’s all right, Nell,” Godfrey was saying, over and over, as if to convince himself. “It’s all right.”
Chapter Fifteen
HIS FRENCH CONNECTION
London, September 1888
“Bah!” said my friend Sherlock Holmes as he pitched the Daily Telegraph Agony Column into a sagging tent on the footstool. “Crime has taken a holiday. No evil-doers of any imagination whatsoever remain in London. I edge more perilously close to boredom every hour.”
“What of the continuing atrocities in Whitechapel?” I asked in a mild tone.
Now that I was married and residing in my own establishment, I took Holmes’s dramatic outbursts of despair in stride. I could afford to, since I could easily leave them behind for the more tranquil company of my dear wife Mary in peaceful Paddington.
Holmes cast himself across the chamber in one great lunge to stare gloomily out of the bow window, reminding me of a house-bound boy in need of suitable occupation.
“You know my opinion of that sad string of events, Watson. The Whitechapel Ripper is likely no more than a disenchanted ticket-taker seeking a bit of attention.”
“He has certainly achieved it.” I eyed the latest sensational sketches in the Illustrated Police News with a physician’s scorn for the crude anatomical renderings. “Surely the contradictory information about the method of slaughter intrigues even you. Call it mere ‘butchery’ if you will— God knows I saw enough of battlefield butchery in Afghanistan. Yet this Ripper fellow apparently possesses basic surgical skills. I find myself speculating on his likely history. A surgical apprentice perhaps, or a barber—”
“Soon you will be resurrecting Sweeney Todd, Watson!” Holmes twitted me from the window.
Yet I saw that my fumbling theories had lit embers of analytical fire behind the banked ash-gray of his eyes. He sighed and let the curtain fall back into place, a sign that he had seen no promising, agitated figure bustling along Baker Street to beg for his help.
“I do have one paltry request to consider a puzzle at present,” he added, still lost in the fog-bound view that acted as a mirror of his mood. “A communication of such insignificance arrived that I would use it to light my pipe were I not eager for any distraction.”
“Excellent,” I said, lighting mine and puffing away as regularly as the daily mail train, which habit I knew drove Holmes's more quicksilver temperament to abrupt and involuntary revelations. He could never tolerate life at a rhythmically steady pace, but thrived on the unannounced disruption. His thoughts must ever be drops of water sizzling on a hot griddle, always exploding into new and daring notions.
“This case would require a trip abroad,” Holmes said a bit too casually.
“Oh?
” I had never ventured abroad with him, though crises took him there now and again, and he had never asked me to do so. Now that I was married, and newly married at that, the likelihood was even smaller.
A measuring glance darted from those lowered, lazily speculative eyes. “The matter is minor, but halfway puzzling. You’ve been reading the newspapers, Watson; anything strike your fancy that hints of oddities abroad?”
“Well—” I shook the papers in question and puffed a few more times to teach Holmes’s more mercurial temperament patience. “I find the revelation of this ring of Cuban counterfeiters rather intriguing.”
At the window, Holmes’s long, lean hand waved disparagingly. He did not trouble to turn. “Closer to home, Watson.”
I shook the papers until they rustled like Mary’s best taffeta petticoat, meanwhile raking the news columns in search of some outré event likely to have piqued Holmes’s always fickle interest. Matters of great political, or even criminal, moment seldom fascinated him; no, only the odd, telling fact or detail drew his formidable intelligence into its keenest state. As the most minuscule physical clue could solve a case for him, so the most trivial newspaper item might set him off as swiftly as blaring hunt horns trigger a pack of baying dogs.
I grasped at another peculiar item. “Here is a curious report! A medieval monster prowls old Prague, a Jewish demon called a Golem. Several eyewitnesses swear to seeing the creature on more than one occasion in the past few months—most recently an English barrister, only last week. The report offers no name, but if an Englishman claims to have seen the thing—”
Holmes made an impolite sound. “You know my opinion of what passes for the occult, Watson: fodder for the foolish. There is more seen on heaven and earth than has ever inhabited it. I would no more track this phantasm of a Golem than I would try to calculate the number of archangels doing a mazurka on the head of a hatpin. Does nothing in the multitudinous news from the globe over reach out and catch you by the lapels, dear fellow? Has all the earth been infected with the London malaise, so that decent people may now walk in a stultifying paradise free of crime and punishment? Perhaps I shall be forced to pursuing archangels and phantasms, after all.”
“See here. Holmes, I can’t imagine what blasted event might pertain to your request for aid!”
He turned to display the sliver of his smile. “When in search of the bizarre, one can never go wrong by looking to France.”
I ran my eyes down the columns, hunting a French dateline—and found one, Paris. “Hmm. Murder. And then later a second murder. That might intrigue you more than the commonplace one-and-only murder, even if the Ripper’s multiple slaughters repel you. Two young seamstresses at the House of Worth were skewered by sewing shears amid a great number of their sister sewers. Is this it?”
For answer Holmes hied gleefully to the desk, lifted some pages of notepaper, and tossed them into my lap on his return to his brooding post at the window.
I lifted the pale blue paper, surprised to find the writing in English. Holmes detested it when I skipped ahead of any logical progression—and no doubt lost vital clues, but I turned first to the last page to read the signature.
“Charles Frederick Worth! Holmes, this fellow is something of a sensation himself. Is he not the man-milliner whose clothes all the women are mad about? Even Mary, modest woman that she is in her manner of dress and conduct, has remarked on him.”
Holmes clapped his hands together in sudden relief. “At last. A connoisseur.”
“Hardly, Holmes. It’s merely that a fellow can’t be married these days without hearing a bit about this or that fashion.”
“You are a veritable expert compared to my abysmal—and happy—state of ignorance on the subject of women’s dress.” He wheeled from the window. “The trail is appallingly ice-cold, Watson. The first woman was murdered two weeks ago; the second an entire five days before this. Quite an impossible commission, and yet... well, read the letter, Watson. Perhaps you’ll see between the same lines that I did.”
“I doubt it, Holmes. I am always the last to know anything.”
He smiled again, that quick, stabbing, yet charming smile that he reached for as rarely as another man might for a dagger. “But you are the first to tell it. How go your little stories?”
“Well enough.” I disliked discussing my attempts to write up Holmes’s cases as much as he loathed delving into areas that held no interest for him, such as women’s fashions. I let my eyes concentrate on deciphering Mr. Worth’s fussy yet sweeping hand, and looked up shortly.
“He mentions a relationship—”
“Yes, yes. The French branch of my family is related to his wife, Marie, who was born Vernet. A peculiar fix, Watson, for a man with as few relations as I have, to be called to the aid of a French shirt-tail. Odder still that she has a famous English husband on top of it—! Read on.”
I did so, absorbing the distress that Mr. Worth and his wife obviously felt at the murders of two young seamstresses among the several hundred they employed. One could not help but wish to aid a pair who took responsibility for their workers so much to heart. And then there was the gruesome nature of the deaths: both young women stabbed in the back by a pair of shears during the work day, yet no one had witnessed the bloody deeds.
I turned to the third page, and sat up to attention. I glanced again at Holmes, seeing the same slight, thin stiletto of a smile.
“Well, Watson. Have you reached the same conclusion that I have?”
“You refer to this ‘American client, a woman known for having a way with delicate matters?’ Apparently, the Worths called upon an amateur inquiry agent to investigate the first murder.”
“At the suggestion of ‘Alice Heine, Duchess of Richelieu,’ a most prominently placed lady and a great patron of the opera. Does that not set any bells ringing in your cranium, Watson?”
“Naturally, I can think of only one woman bold enough to pass herself off as a problem solver of that sort—the woman you encountered in the matter of the King of Bohemia’s photograph. But Irene Adler is dead, Holmes.”
“Presumed dead. There is a vital difference between that and the evidence of one’s own eyes. You know my position on that issue as well.”
“Holmes, you cannot persist in seeing this woman behind every forward hussy who takes matters into her own hands!”
“No? What if I were to tell you that Irene Adler is not only alive, but that she meddles in mysterious matters with irritating frequency; that I have seen her face to face since the purported death of herself and her husband.”
“You would say such things?”
“What if I were to say that she has stood in these very rooms in other guise, before your very eyes?”
“Holmes.” I was momentarily speechless before I noticed the challenging glitter in his eyes. “Then I should have many things to say, as a friend and a physician, among them that you were indulging overmuch in the seven percent solution of cocaine you so rely upon. I should have to say that your use treads perilously close to addiction and delusion.”
“Should you, Watson?” The glitter was gone, in its place a weary smile. “Fear not. I will not say such foolishness. You and I are far too rational for outright nonsense. As well say that the Golem performs the Emperor waltz through the streets of Prague, or that Chinamen drink apple cider instead of tea. No, we will keep the planets in their courses and the stars fixed in their accustomed constellations. We will each see Irene Adler in our own way, I fear, and mine is to imagine that she is not dead. Is that delusion, Watson?”
“Only if you pursue her.”
“The lady is married, whether dead or alive, and I pursue truth, not anything less. We will agree to disagree as to her state, just as we agree to disagree on the placement and nature of the wounds you received at Maiwand. Such differences salt an association, and ours is certainly well cured by now. And, finally, has Mr. Worth’s letter sufficiently piqued your interest to bestir you for the first time from E
ngland’s fresh-scrubbed stoop into murkier waters? Will you hop the puddle of the Channel and come with me to Paris?”
“Is that what this is about, Holmes? All this chatter of Irene Adler was a mere ruse to prod my curiosity and enlist my aid? You needn’t go to such lengths. My practice can spare me for a week or so, and Mary will approve so long as I bring her back a trinket from this House of Worth, if anything to be found there is affordable.”
“Oh, if we find who has killed these two young seamstresses, I imagine much will become affordable there. I thank you, Watson. There are few arenas in which I feel at a loss, but this French factory where women’s clothing is concocted is one of them. I predict that I will sorely need the advice of an experienced voice in matters of women and fashion before we are done.”
“Then I am your man,” I said, “to the best of the ability that any mere male can have on that demanding subject... and providing that Mary will give me leave to go.”
Holmes fluttered his eyelids in mute complaint, but forbore comment. He then headed for the drawer with the seven percent solution. I, of course, could not object now.
Chapter Sixteen
AN ENGAGEMENT AT THE PALACE
Why is it that expeditions to sterling civic institutions are never as fascinating as jaunts into the seamier side of whatever city one is visiting?
Whatever the reason for this phenomenon, it accounts for the fact that my diary entry on Godfrey’s and my mission to the Bank of Bohemia is much shorter than my description of the previous evening’s outing to the appalling and notorious drinking establishment, U Fleků. Even to write the name the next day is to evoke a thrill of exotic distaste. Perhaps I am simply overtired from describing at length the degradations of that cavernous place and its denizens, not to mention Godfrey’s and my later encounter with the supposed Golem of Prague.
Another Scandal in Bohemia (A Novel of Suspense featuring Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes) Page 17
