The Adventuress (v5)

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “Not Montmartre.”

  “Of course not. Much too... Bohemian.”

  “Indeed. Nor the Boulevard, not even in broad daylight.”

  “Naturally not. Much too... Baudelaire-ian.”

  “And I have seen Notre Dame—”

  “Much too... Romanish.”

  “You know what I would really like to see, Irene?”

  “What is left?” she murmured to the odious bird, blowing a kiss at its huge yellow beak.

  “Pretty bird, pretty bird,” the creature squawked.

  “Bel oiseau, bel oiseau, ” Irene crooned until the parrot cocked its head and repeated the French phrase with irritating success.

  “I should like to stroll the Left Bank,” I said, exposing a secret wish.

  “The Left Bank! But, Nell, that is more Bohemian than Montmartre and the Boulevard put together.”

  “I’ve heard that booksellers set up shop on the riverbank near Notre Dame. I should very much like to look for antique volumes there.”

  “Bibles, no doubt.”

  “I do know that bibliotheque is the French word for ‘library’. I wish to peruse this street-side library.”

  “Bibelot is the French for ‘bauble’; perhaps we can finish with a stroll down the Rue de la Paix.”

  “Done!” said I, who had not expected to spend a dry two hours amongst musty volumes without trading Irene a jaunt into the glittering storefronts of the milliners and jewelers.

  So we set out.

  Autumn was a distant thought on the horizon that August day. Paris lay tranquil under robin’s-egg blue skies, most of its denizens having gone to the country on holiday. The Seine reflected Notre Dame’s famous towers in a wriggling fashion that resembled the work of those demented Impressionist paint hurlers.

  We ambled along the Left Bank, visiting dried-up antiquarians who sold pieces of the past volume by volume. Their customers seemed universally attired in long coats, misshapen hats and too-short pants. Despite the unsavory company, I plunged into the bookstalls. My eager fingers (far cleaner than those of my fellow bibliophiles) soon were dusted with gilt from rich old pages. I quite felt a child again, exploring treasure boxes in the Shropshire parsonage lumber room.

  Irene trailed me, playing the indulgent nanny and stopping now and again to skim some elderly theatrical memoir. I was quite aware that this outing was intended to humor me. After deep immersion in a Douay Bible—much too Romanish indeed; “blessed are the meek” had been rendered as “blessed are the debonair”—I turned to tell Irene that she was free to scamper directly over to the Avenue Filthy Lucre.

  But Irene no longer followed me.

  I turned again, feeling a mild thrill of panic. How would I ask these shriveled book vendors, whose French was no doubt whistled through toothless gums, where my companion had gone?

  “Oh, dear,” I said, comforted by the sound of an English voice, even my own.

  I looked up and down the avenue. Below the wall, on the walkway edging the river itself, the odd stroller was visible, but none wore a red felt bonnet with an upstanding crimson ostrich plume.

  Oh! how would I describe Irene’s garb in my crippled French? I was lost beyond chapeau. La plume de ma tante did not seem to suffice for an ostrich feather.

  I had removed my gloves before examining the dusty volumes, for I hadn’t wished to dirty the white kid. Now my bare hands flew to my face, where icy fingers chilled my fevered cheeks. I turned again, ready to screech Irene’s name publicly, like a fishmonger, if need be.

  At last!—the very bonnet, bobbing along down by the river. I hastened to find stairs leading below.

  Irene stood on a stone embankment by the gentle, lapping Seine.

  “Irene!” I called from above.

  She turned with an expression of intense distraction, even satisfaction. I had not seen her so vibrant recently, save in Godfrey’s company.

  “Come down, Nell!” she commanded joyfully. “Watch your step! They’ve found something in the water.”

  I paused in my instant obedience. “A dead fish, likely.”

  Irene was craning her neck like a cockney gawker. “Oh, it looks a great deal bigger than that. Do hurry, Nell! I think it’s a body. I don’t want to miss it.”

  “Irene, come back! Irene... Well, you shall certainly not approach those rude men unchaperoned.”

  Once I had committed to the stairs, my feet stuttered down the risers, rushing me as if eager toward a knot of rough-looking men crowding the embankment.

  Nearer the water, the picturesque river’s native stench reared its noxious head. I took one great breath and determined to inhale through my mouth thereafter. This resolve lent my voice the accents of an adenoidal child.

  “I-reend. I-reend. Please wade, wade!”

  She did not wait for me, and fortunately did not take my last instruction literally, but paused just before her black kid boots met the murky waves that licked the stone.

  The men huddled over some object—seemingly a tangle of netting. I breathed easier, but not through my nose; apparently we were merely witnessing a submerged log being dragged ashore.

  Then the men, wet to their knees, struggled back, and I saw a fish-white human form rolled up onto the sopping pavement.

  In a country parsonage it is not uncommon to view death at close quarters; certainly I have seen my share of village corpses arranged for burial. Funerals were as frequent among my father’s flock as christenings, life and death maintaining a particularly noticeable balance in a small parish.

  Yet something about death by water blends the most awful aspects of mortality with remembrances of the church’s joyful, liquid welcome of each soul to the world. It seems a sacrilege, this fatal, final, unnatural baptism; at least so it has always struck me.

  The men were grunting in particularly guttural French (for all French is guttural; so much for the language of “love”). A fellow in a navy blue jacket and fisherman’s sweater straightened from studying the corpse to regard Irene and myself.

  His gesture was as short and sharp as his words. He ordered us away. I gladly turned to comply, but Irene swept a fist to her hip, brushing aside a layer of gentility as another woman might lift her veil. Her voice dropped into throaty French. I had before me a soubrette from the Comedie Français, long familiar as a shockingly bold Paris type.

  “Ah, Monsieur,” she trilled. Rapid French followed—coaxing, bullying, flirting. The Fisherman of Rome, the Pope himself, could hardly have brought himself to deny this charming, cajoling gamine who had materialized beside me. Irene’s hands spoke as quickly as her voice— pointing to the corpse and the opposite shore, lifting to the watered-silk heavens as she shrugged or laughed, clapping once when an answer pleased her.

  The men might as well have tried to stand mute on Judgment Day. There was no mercy. Irene skinned them of their testimony as she might peel a grape at table.

  In the end, two of them escorted us back up the path, their rough hands, redolent of cod-liver oil, at our elbows.

  “Merthi, Monthieurs,” I murmured as our escorts left us on the upper path.

  Irene inhaled happily and stroked her kid gloves smooth over her knuckles, wriggling long fingers as if anticipating a piano exercise. No such wholesome occupation was planned.

  “I must go to the Paris morgue, Nell.”

  “The morgue! Is nod one corpsth a day suffithient, Irend?”

  “You know, your French accent is much improved when you breathe through the mouth. I noticed that when you thanked the fishermen. You must exercise so, as a singer does. But first, how to storm the morgue? Parisian authorities are likely to be most uncooperative to English ladies wishing to view the remains of dead strangers.”

  “You are Americand,” I said indignantly, forgetting to breathe normally. “I amb English, and I cerdainly do nod intend to visid the Parith morgue.”

  “Oh, but you must! You are crucial to the identification. I fear you stood too far back here to make a
reliable witness.”

  “Idendification of what!? Widness to what? He was... is... a dead French fitherman.”

  “Oh, no. Not French. Decidedly not French. Dead, yes, but not French. And not a fisherman, I think, though his dress was crude.”

  “Irend. I wished a simble stroll along the book boodths. I did nod antidipade hurling to the riverbank to view a corpsth and then being dragged from Seine-thide to morgue!”

  “But you did not view the corpse, Nell, or you would never question my need to examine it more fully. We have seen one like it before.”

  “We? Before? Whend? Irend, whend have we viewed a corpsth before?”

  She gazed at the chestnut trees shading our path. Below us, the men grappled with the body; behind us, pages of old books rustled like leaves of dry grass.

  “London. Chelsea. September of eighteen eighty-two, I believe, although I shall have to consult your very useful diaries for the precise date. We saw the dead man, still dripping from immersion in the Thames, lying most docilely upon Bram Stoker’s dining-room table.”

  Chapter Four

  FROM A PARSON’S DAUGHTER’S DIARY

  Florence Stoker was accounted a beauty, but next to my friend Irene Adler, she was merely pretty.

  Both women’s faces radiated the assurance that beauty gives its possessors, but introspection, not intelligence, animated Florence Stoker’s eyes. The delicate eyebrows sketched by such diverse artists as Edward Burne-Jones and Oscar Wilde seldom lifted or fell with vital emotion, not even when her young son hung bawling from her skirts, as he did at that moment—until a servant pried him loose and took him upstairs.

  An odor of seawater and sewage mingled with the dim chamber’s scents of beeswax and gaslight. I stood in the Stoker front parlor at 27 Cheyne Walk feeling as needful of clinging as young Noel, yet too irrevocably adult to admit the impulse. Instead, I studied the two lovely women so seldom in proximity—anything to avoid regarding the thing on the dining-room table.

  Irene leaned over it, rapt, one hand pressing her scarlet bonnet ribbons to her breast so they would not impinge upon the corpse, ribbons that swayed in the evening gaslight like strands of dripping gore.

  Yet only water beaded the waxed tabletop. And only water blotted the figured carpet with goutlets as black as blood.

  “How interesting!” Irene mused, embarrassingly intent. “This man was so suicide-bent that he struggled with you in the water until you overpowered him? But he is old, spare... and you, my dear Bram—”

  Happily, her words directed my attention to someone among the living. I regarded Abraham Stoker with the same strange remoteness from which I viewed that scene so like a newspaper’s lurid illustration.

  Bram Stoker was at the prime of life: a mammoth man, nearly six foot six and as broad as a bear. He stood dripping on his wife’s cherished carpet, looking so forlorn that each droplet might be a tear shed for the life he had been unable to preserve. Water had washed his features of all color and rusted his bright copper hair and beard to a dull, wet luster. He and the corpse that lay upon the table shared a pallor his wife’s rice-powdered face could merely imply.

  “Drowning panics many victims.” He shook his soggy head. “The poor soul took me for some demonic pursuer. He fought me as if death were a salvation. His strength was phenomenal.”

  “Perhaps you should begin at the beginning.” Irene bowed even deeper over the body to inspect its left hand as Bram Stoker, manager of the day’s greatest actor, Henry Irving, told his dramatic tale.

  “I was traveling this evening by steamboat to the Lyceum, as I do on theater nights. The hour was shortly after six o’clock, that fleeting time when twilight paints the clouds pastel and chars the trees and rooftops to silhouettes. I stood by the rail savoring the dusk. Then, to my amazement, a figure vaulted the barrier and plunged into the dark water. I threw off my coat and dived after him.

  “I could see his white-haired head bobbing on the waves. By now the sunset had tipped the wave crests with points of pink St. Elmo’s fire. How oddly beautiful it was, though the water was icy and the current vicious. I reached him quickly, but the fellow kept his face fastened to the water despite my attempts to propel him otherwise. He seemed some... mad dog, drinking down his own death.”

  We gazed at the still and sopping recumbent form. How difficult to imagine the frantic strength that had allowed this scrawny man to resist a Goliath such as Bram Stoker, bent on rescuing him.

  “They tell me,” Mr. Stoker went on, “that we struggled for five minutes before onlookers could haul us both back aboard the Twilight.”

  “Ah,” Irene murmured, acknowledging the dramatic irony of the steamer’s name.

  “Indeed.” Stoker’s theatrical instincts were as quick as hers. “A French doctor nearby examined him and pronounced him dead, but to me he seemed merely insensible, so I brought him here and sent for my physician brother in hopes—”

  His wife muffled a cry. “Oh, Bram, anyone of sense would have known the wretch was already dead! Can you never accept the inevitable?”

  A silence deeper than death lingered between the pair. Irene, undisturbed, elevated the dead man’s left hand on the point of her right forefinger. “The middle finger is missing. How odd.”

  “He is—was—a sailor, by the reefer jacket we removed,” Stoker said. “Many lose fingers—and more— in a long life at sea.”

  “But the middle finger. Is that not... interesting?”

  “Really, Miss Adler.” Florence Stoker’s voice drenched us like ice water. “You show as much appetite for the macabre as my husband. Perhaps that is why he insisted you view the remains.”

  Irene lowered the lifeless hand to the polished mahogany, a surface so glossy that a ghostly reflection seemed to reach up to take it.

  “Perhaps we share an interest in the mysterious,” she said mildly. “The mysterious is often macabre and always theatrical. Dr. Stoker”—she turned to the tall quiet man who waited by the sideboard—“was the victim dead by the time he was brought here?”

  The physician advanced with a soldier’s firm step. “I assumed not and did my utmost to revive him. Downing’s an ambiguous death, Miss Adler. It submerges life subtly, unlike the cut-and-dried devastation of the battlefield. I did my best and failed.”

  “Poor man!” I couldn’t help murmuring, although my sympathies lay more with the valiant brothers who had tried to save a life than the victim so sacrilegiously set upon destroying himself.

  “Yes.” Irene glanced at me. “He was poor, but he had great expectations.”

  “Indeed?” The doctor, polite but nonplussed by Irene’s frank appraisal of the corpse, leaned closer.

  “The watch fob is of far finer quality than the watch,” she noted. “Either he had pawned a watch of equal value or he aspired to owning one in the future.”

  “Could he not have stolen the fob?”

  “Of course, but hardly without the watch. And if he was vain enough to keep the fob, he would certainly have kept the timepiece. I do not wish to be indelicate, Doctor, but I see that you have loosened his shirt and singlet.”

  “A necessary step in my revival attempts. I apologize for subjecting ladies to the sight.”

  “Do not apologize! I would ask you to bare more.”

  “Irene!” I remonstrated.

  Mrs. Stoker clapped a hand over her mouth and left the room in a disapproving rustle of silk petticoats.

  Irene continued, “It is only that I glimpse a rather intriguing insignia on the chest—a dark blot of some kind.”

  “Possibly a leech,” Bram Stoker put in.

  My hand flew to my mouth, but I remained. It would have been odiously improper to leave Irene alone with three men, even though one of them was dead.

  “Doctor?” she inquired.

  His bushy red brows lifted at her commanding tone, but he bent to push aside the wet clothing even farther. Then he drew back, as if startled. “I say, it’s a—”

  I sti
ffened, expecting him to pluck a slick black leech from the dead man’s sunken white chest.

  “—a tattoo.”

  “So it is.” Bram Stoker had joined in peering at the dead man’s secrets.

  Irene straightened and looked at me. “Nell, I believe you always keep a note pad and stenographic pencil upon your person. May I borrow them?”

  “What... whatever for?”

  “I must sketch this most unusual marking. It will take but a moment. Mr. Stoker, you are dripping on the subject matter of my sketch, I fear; pray step back. I shall be done in a thrice and long before the coroner’s men come.”

  ~

  “And this is that very sketch?” Godfrey asked in our sunny, present-day parlor in Neuilly-sur-Seine.

  He lifted a piece of yellowed loose-leaf from my diary, from which Irene had read to us with great effect, and looked at it.

  “You are both as morbid as the brothers Stoker,” said I.

  “Of course, my dear Penelope!” Godfrey grinned at me, like an older brother who has just unearthed something disgusting from the herb garden. “Missing digits, arcane tattoos and a dedicated double suicide six years and several hundred miles apart would stir an archangel to morbidity.”

  “Today I saw only the missing middle finger on the man’s left hand,” Irene said. “A tattoo, however tantalizing, is pure speculation, Godfrey. But it will not remain so, if you can introduce us into the Paris morgue to examine the body in full.”

  “Us?” I protested faintly.

  “Come now, Nell,” Irene said. “Your valuable observation skills will help determine whether these two dead men have more than their manner of death in common.”

  “What does it matter?” I returned. “Bram Stoker received a medal for his attempted rescue, but Irene Adler earned no reward from overseeing the sad scene at Cheyne Walk. Mrs. Stoker could never abide the house afterward, and I don’t blame her.”

  Irene smiled. “My reward was seeing that preternaturally composed lady unravel a bit. And now, Nell, fate has thrown another mystery of the great rivers to my very feet.”