Another Scandal in Bohemia (A Novel of Suspense featuring Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes)

by Douglas, Carole Nelson

  “Bloomers! That is an American invention, and long since failed.”

  “Perhaps, but the melody lingers on.” She held the foul articles up to my person. “They should fit perfectly. Do you wish to allow Godfrey and myself untrammeled access to an ancient tomb, or do you wish to dress for the part and accompany us?”

  “It strikes me,” I answered, “that you have been most forward today in advising other people on what they should wear.”

  “That is because I know better,” she retorted with irritating certitude.

  I glanced to the ever-sensible Godfrey, “What do you say?”

  He shrugged, then gave a short laugh. “I believe that Irene is right; we’ll require spiritual guidance tonight if her suspicions regarding the Golem are correct.”

  “And she has told you what she suspects?” I demanded.

  “No,” he admitted, “but I recognize the symptoms.”

  “Very well, Godfrey. If you will assure me that you will not lose respect for me if I don this extraordinarily idiotic outfit, I will do so.”

  “My dear Nell, I could never lose respect for you, no matter what you wore,” he promised me, with a commendable sincerity that his wife would do well to imitate now and then.

  I gathered up the repellent garb. “Were I not concerned for your spiritual well-being—”

  “I know, I know, Nell!” Irene interrupted, leading me to her empty bedchamber where we could change our clothes. “Think how poor Quentin had to don long, alien garb—the equivalent of women’s robes in our quarter of the world!—in Afghanistan and India, where he did spy work for Mother England. You do the same, after all.”

  “Not for Mother England,” I reminded her, “and Quentin did not have to wear bloomers!”

  “How, dear Nell,” she asked in the same sly tones a speaking serpent might have employed in Eden, “do you know?”

  Whilst I considered the interesting question of what Quentin had worn under his Arab robes, trying not to blush, Irene was swiftly drawing off her gown. In minutes she was garbed in the disconcerting men’s clothes in which I had seen her before. I had donned the outfit provided and Godfrey’s chatelaine, then faced myself in the long mirror on a wardrobe door. In my nautical black, selected for midnight camouflage, I looked like an American female cyclist contemplating entering a Catholic nunnery, both concepts utter anathema to my British and Anglican upbringing.

  “Charming,” Irene declared, drawing an oversized black beret over my hair, ears, forehead and all. At least I was permitted to see. “Quentin would be impressed.”

  A city like Prague never sleeps, simply because the large number of taverns and beer gardens that populate its streets do not permit even the decently abed populace to slumber undisturbed.

  We three—Godfrey now wearing the same dark seaman’s garb he had employed on other such surreptitious expeditions in Monaco and Paris—made our sober and silent way through the convoluted streets. We were warmed by the flare of tavern lights, an ever-present distant whine of fiddle and harmonica, and a faint chorus of merriment borne on a sour breath of beer.

  Other anonymous knots of pedestrians, loud and lurching with laughter or worse, passed and even occasionally jostled us. Usually when we walked out together in our proper clothes, Godfrey took the middle so Irene and I could take one of his arms should we require steadying while navigating the streets in our sometimes enmeshing garb. Now, Godfrey and Irene bracketed me, a courtesy I much appreciated, for Godfrey carried the cane that contained a sword. I did not doubt that Irene’s pistol weighted the pocket of her man’s coat.

  “I understand now,” Irene commented as our route took us into the twisted byways of the Old Town, “why the Golem’s three rampages had witnesses. No street of this city, however narrow or deserted, is quiet all the night.”

  “Do you suggest that the Golem was deliberately paraded?” Godfrey asked.

  “It is possible,” she answered in that vague tone of intentional denseness that she uses to deflect too close questioning. “It’s also possible that the Jewish quarter has set guards in the cemetery. The recent sightings might encourage crowds or even vandalism at the tomb of him who first raised the Golem, Rabbi Loew. We must be cautious and quiet.”

  Fortunately, even midnight revelers seldom decamp to graveyards. When we came upon the black blot that was the ancient cemetery, the sounds and lights circled at bay in the distance. We saw no patrolling figures—not even a supernaturally large one, for which I was most grateful.

  We plunged into this section of Prague as into a coal mine, for the city had not yet converted to gaslight. Only the occasional street light beamed feebly through dusty glass.

  I was terrified of stubbing a boot-toe on one of the many aslant tombstones and tumbling into a picket fence of unknown markers.

  Luckily, Irene carried the same black bag that had served so well in Paris. When she extracted and lit the hooded lantern she carried, a line of light waved before us like the pale wand of blind beggar’s cane.

  Most of the headstones were the modest, two-foot-high variety. What made the site so irregular, so remarkable and memorable, was how they sat one upon the other, up to twelve deep.

  Like the cabin on a ship, the rabbi’s tomb loomed ahead of us, a monument of significant size in this landscape of upthrust but lowly slabs.

  Irene ran the lantern’s beam over the tomb’s smoke- stained stone, illuminating a surface scabbed with notes.

  Some had shriveled from the admonition of the elements; others were as fresh-looking as the Hotel Europa stationery.

  This time Irene endeavored to read some of these missives, handing Godfrey the black bag and myself the lantern.

  “All written in Bohemian, German, or Yiddish,” she commented after perusing several.

  “What did you expect?” I wondered.

  “The lone anomaly. I can grasp most of these languages well enough, yet we do not have time to read the entire offering.”

  While she studied the messages, Godfrey had begun circling the edifice, patting it with his gloved hands. He made a full circuit back to us, then lofted the light from my hand to crouch down and cast it along the tomb’s stone base.

  “You’re right,” he told Irene, “a most curious structure. To all appearances it is simply a massive stone monument atop an ordinary grave. Yet its size suggests the entrance to something grander, a church crypt, perhaps.”

  “That was Nell’s observation, not mine,” Irene pointed out with commendable accuracy. “No one has been buried here since the mid seventeen hundreds. The rabbi’s grave—not the monument surmounting it—dates back more than two hundred more years. We stand on exceedingly ancient—and sacred—ground.”

  “My point exactly!” I said in relief. “We should leave.”

  “Yes, but how?” Irene said, a smile in her voice even though the lamp lit only the impassive stone before us. “Godfrey, light my way around the monument.”

  “Wait!” I cried, as two shadows followed the light’s beam around a stone comer. “Don’t leave me.”

  “This will take but a moment, Nell,” Irene’s voice drifted back from the dark.

  Even a moment in an unpleasant place is an eternity. In fact, the moment they—and their lantern—vanished, I was plunged into Stygian darkness. Perhaps my eyes had not immediately adjusted to the removal of light. Perhaps I sensed the history of this venerable graveyard, collapsing under the weight of the outcast souls confined to its borders for so many centuries.

  I groped after my friends, needing a glimpse of light, a sense of what was left and right, up and down, in the instant gloom. And I confess to a superstitious dread: of us three, only I implicitly believed in heavenly retribution, in the certainty of life after death for the saved; only I could conceive of such a thing as the Golem coming to life at the call of the ancient Hebrew text, the power of a rabbi who at the least was a remarkable and influential holy man for his time, if... not... more.

  Why else
had he commanded the imposing monument, the written supplications three hundred-some years after his death, supposing that he was indeed dead?! If the Golem still walked—and Godfrey and I had seen something inhuman, outsize, and impressive, there was no denying it—then why not its creator?

  I felt an instant need to draw away from the monument, to gain some distance. I backed up into the empty arms of the dark, and the very thing I had been dreading happened.

  I tripped—tripped on some not-to-be-imagined upthrust of stone—tombstone, curbstone, protruding bone turned stone—I know not what, nor do I ever want to know!

  Shuddering, I retreated forward without thought.

  Into the very monument that I feared!

  My gloved hands came down hard on night-dewed stone, cold and dank as... well, I need not say more.

  Worse, my mad scramble for escape upset my balance. My hands scraped down the monument’s slick sides, over groove and decorative scroll. I knew a moment of absolute conviction that I was about to fall forward on my face, directly into the adamant stone.

  Qualms of serious physical injury as well as spiritual danger for violating a sacrosanct and arcane place (for this was not merely a Christian cemetery, and the late rabbi had practiced the Cabbala) surged into utter horror. Choked by the prospect of facing my worst fear, I was even gagged from expressing my terror.

  Mute like the Golem, my arms stretched out to cushion the blow both physical and spiritual. I stumbled forward, falling... falling... into solid stone, my hands clutching what small holds they could find.

  My anticipations were only too accurate. I felt my body fall forward until it seemed level. Yet... no impact with the monument met me.

  For a moment I hung in vacant dark air, madly convinced that my scrabbling hands had pushed the monument away from me to avoid the inevitable collision. But that was impossible!

  Then gravity and time reasserted themselves. I did indeed fall to earth—to loam scented with the rich aroma of growth and decay. My body jolted with the contact, my hands absorbing the worst stress and paying for that role. Now I made noise—an involuntary ooof of impact as I felt my bones shudder.

  Dazed, I used my poor hands (thank God for the offices of the gloves, or they should have bled), to push myself to a sitting position.

  Still the dark surrounded me without any boon of lantern light. How odd that my eyes were taking so long to adjust. I struggled to my feet, on the theory that a woman on her feet is a match for almost anything, and reached out for orientation.

  Ahead of me was only empty air, but as I made a tight circle, afraid to step from the solid ground beneath me for fear of stumbling again, I found the monument’s wall again. Directly behind me.

  This could not be! I had always faced the monument and I had never changed my position until this rotation. Could the rabbi’s tomb move, as a mountain?

  Something panted in the dark. I froze for long seconds before I realized that it was... I.

  I crouched down, felt before me in my original direction. Oh! The naked, packed earth upon which I stood was not level. As I feared, it dropped away before me.

  So might a holy hermit of old on his high pillar feel, unable to move left or right, forward or back, yet even these holy men had not immersed themselves in utter, unremitting dark.

  Something whimpered in the blackness. I thrust a fist into my mouth, and thought.

  Where were Irene and Godfrey?! I heard nothing of them, saw nothing of them. They could still be pacing mere feet away, circling the monument, looking for something only they knew.

  That was not I. They expected me to have remained where I was.

  With sight blindfolded, I was aware of being blanketed in heady smells—earth, age, insects, decay—and of a certain motionless chill that wrapped my body like a shawl.

  Shivering, I strained for any sight, sound, or smell that might call me, guide me. Nothing. I was surrounded by the macabre silence of the tomb.

  Prayers began mumbling through my mind as I moved in a slow circle. Though my lips moved with the familiar words, no sound came. I would not make any impression on this blind captivity. I would not admit my presence to the waiting dark. I would not hear my own despair.

  Then, as if in answer—a fine wire of light, the merest hair—hung taut and upright in the featureless dark before me.

  I tore off a glove and clapped my bare palm to the phenomenon, feeling a barrier of cold, damp stone! Again, behind me.

  The light... moved. Up and down. Like a lantern in a hand.

  “Irene! Godfrey!”

  My own voice berated me as if I and it were confined in a closet and could only gibber at each other.

  “Godfrey! Irene!” I heard nothing in reply.

  The light winked out, leaving a cruel ghostly line on the blank slate of my vision.

  I swayed on my feet, disoriented again, like a drowning person whose one lifeline has been yanked away.

  Light seeped through again, horizontal this time, at a height I could just reach. My hands, both bare now, reached to capture this slender thread, strained to warm my chill fingers at its pale warmth. Ah, a red reflection on my flesh! The light was real, the light was... moving again.

  Down it went, vertical once more, sinking toward the earth, and then winking out.

  I pounded stone with fists. I shrieked and wailed. I heard—and hurt—only myself.

  After a few more moments of mania, I forced a fist into my mouth to stop myself, to warm my icy fingers with my own breath. My breathing huffed and puffed around my invisible cell, but nothing blew down.

  Yet even as my panting roughened into the first swell of a sob, I heard something. A scrape. A chinking sound.

  The line of light flared again at my left and paused at waist height. Came the faintest of scrapes, like mice feet on soapstone—delicate creatures mice were, not truly vermin, but rather endearing, after all. Even Messalina and Lucifer had clever delicate claws that could insinuate themselves into almost-invisible chinks... even Casanova’s gross claws—if I had Casanova’s claws now, strong and curved, perhaps I could widen that narrow line of light, perhaps I could push stone from stone, crack grout, break the back of the granite, burst through the darkness and silence and... and musty smell... into wholesome clean night!

  But I did carry Casanova’s claws. I reached to the chatelaine at my waist and, amid a reassuring jingle, found and applied the small penknife on it to the stone.

  Even as I echoed it, the tiny exterior scrape roared toward my long-denied ears, suddenly become a grating, a freight-train howl. A coffin lid of darkness swung away from me, narrowing into an oblong of dazzling light peopled by a pair of vague silhouettes. And were not angels supposed to be light, not shadow? Why would Dark Angels come for me? I wondered; I had always been as good as I could.

  Grasping arms, hands, protruded from the dark. Then I was plucked from my prison and dragged into the light amid a roar that resolved itself into confusing and commonplace chatter, like Casanova’s, after the enforced silence of the tomb.

  “Nell!”

  “Penelope!”

  “How on earth—? Come.”

  “Oh, my dear—”

  More than one voice picked at my muddled mind. Still light-blinded, I staggered forward, supportive hands upholding me.

  Something crushed me to bone and blood. “Oh, darling Nell! You have done it! I knew that there was some mystery to this monument! How dare you vanish like that and frighten us—”

  Irene’s voice; was she dead, too, then? And what did they mean, frighten them?”

  “Hush, Irene; she’s terrified.”

  Someone large clasped me in an encompassing embrace, as I did not recall but suspect my father had done when I was quite young and frightened of something. A sense of security dropped over me like Casanova’s cage cover. Oddly, I began trembling at that moment when I felt myself finally rescued.

  Godfrey kept an arm around me, but I saw his hand thrust the warm glow of t
he lantern toward the other dark figure. He lifted his cane top into the light and then twisted it.

  The amber knob fell apart in his hands, but, undismayed, he tilted the cane toward it. A moment afterwards something clinked on my teeth and a bolt of wet stinging fire washed into my mouth and down my throat

  Sputtering and swallowing, I struggled to express my outrage.

  “This is an abomination! Must I be drowned as well as incarcerated?”

  A stinging warmth burned my chest like a poultice. Then I found that I could breathe without gasping, and speak without pausing.

  “Irene! Godfrey! Where have you been? What are you doing?” I cannot say whether it was freedom or Godfrey’s liquorish application, but I was myself again, and fully indignant.

  Godfrey laughed as he screwed on the cane-top again. “Brandy is for heroes, said Ben Jonson, and you have certainly merited your ration.”

  Irene’s hands grabbed my shoulders as she crowed, “You are inspired, Nell! How on earth did you discover the mechanism to the secret entrance when Godfrey and I have been crawling around this cursed monument to no avail?”

  “I would not call it ‘cursed,’ ” I said first, coughing as genteelly as I could. Ben Jonson’s heroes must have come equipped with iron esophagi.

  “A mere expression,” Irene interjected with customary impatience. “Godfrey was able to use his sword-tip—what a most accommodating cane he carries!—to find a break in the seam, but how does the door open without forcing? I am afraid that in the excitement Godfrey neglected to keep the portal from closing again.”

  I turned to look behind me, the lantern’s dazzle lighting every stone cemented into monument. I studied an apparently impervious wall, all of a piece. How annoying to have to admit that I had literally stumbled upon this wonder! Drawing my gloves on again in order to gain thinking time—and the night air was chill—I looked this particular surface up and down and still saw nothing.

  Then I remembered my flailing hands, and ran my fingers over the decorative sills and down toward the monument’s bottom, pressing hard. On the swell of an acanthus leaf, the stones separated with hardly a sound and swung inward upon a darkness so palpable that I recoiled. The cool, close air of a crypt hushed into my face. Thank God I stood outside of it now, and had other air to breathe!