I had never heard Irene speak with such fire before, the anger in her voice barely bridled.
“What mercy would Mr. Holmes have offered?”
“Respect, at least, even in victory. And I think he is sufficiently self-assured to offer it in defeat, which is remarkable in a modem man.”
“Surely men are not such a sorry lot!”
“They have not been reared to be anything better, at least toward women. The long-cherished notion of ‘chivalry’ disguises an arrogant disregard of a woman’s deepest concerns. We women are much to blame, for asking no more of them.”
“For all your disdain of the Lords of Creation, you are a married woman, and I am not.”
Irene smiled. “Isn’t it amazing? What did Alice call Godfrey—an extraordinary ordinary man? She meant, I think, that he has no noble blood but great nobility of character. That’s true also of Sherlock Holmes, I suspect. Willie, king or not, is a pauper in the aristocracy of mind and soul. He shall never win any man or woman’s esteem, only their fear or obedience.”
“Why did you describe Godfrey as conventional, then, a moment ago?”
“Because he is, bless him. You have no idea of the persuasions it took to transform him into Black Otto and send him forth to spy. Deception is anathema to his character, as it is to yours, for different reasons. You have ingested the churchly tenets of truth-telling no matter what. He saw hypocrisy crucify his mother upon a cross of social disapproval. He is a crusader, our Godfrey; he wishes to make what is wrong right. He may even be heroic for having such an aim. And that makes him supremely conventional.”
“Do you not wish to right wrongs? Else why rush to the aid of Louise Montpensier and her aunt?”
Irene sat back like a demure schoolgirl. “I wish only to amuse myself, to occupy my idle hours, to stretch my slack brain. To have fun.”
I rose to my knees in outrage at her self-deprecation and was surprised to find the room spinning a bit.
“Irene, you will never convince me that only selfish motivations rule your actions. I know your game! Your role is to torment the conventional, to prick bubbles and shatter complacency. You impel us—Godfrey, myself— beyond the bounds forced upon us. You are freer than we; I don’t know if you were born that way, or became it, or if it’s just that American brashness you hear in the clock chimes. But you are an alarum, and you peal us both out of our sleepy beds, blinking our eyes at the world and the danger hidden all around us, danger that we would never see without your caroling.”
I expected an amused dismissal. I expected Irene’s habitual sleight of speech to glide over my sudden passion and slide into other topics. Instead, she regarded me soberly—which was quite remarkable, considering that she had consumed the preponderance of the wine.
“Am I right, though,” she asked, “to counter society’s assumption of common sense and tradition? Is it wise to encourage Godfrey to don a false face, to send him amongst lascars, thugs and tarry old salts? You are correct, Nell; danger does lurk beyond the safe social strictures of ordinary life. Real, physical danger. I have brought you to its brink on occasion, and now, Godfrey.” She glanced at the open door to the bedchamber. “If he should not return through that window, if he—”
“He will! Godfrey is most capable of handling difficult situations, even those you create for him. I am surprised. I thought you quite unconscionable when lashing one of us to outré endeavors.”
She shrugged. “Some responsibilities I take seriously.”
I smiled cautiously. “Irene, we have never spoken of your past. I have grown not to mind, only—”
“It is good that you do not mind, for I am not minded to discuss it.”
“—I question the present. Why did you, with all your scoffing at convention, with your almost frantic disdain for its impediments, why on earth did you marry Godfrey?”
“Perhaps you have noticed, Nell. He is a most prepossessing and persuasive man,” she said.
“Certainly I have noticed,” I snapped. “He is handsome and clever and kind. You are deliriously lucky to have him. Perhaps my spinsterhood makes me thick about such things—”
“Perhaps?” One eyebrow raised.
“It is true that my experience of the intercourse between a man and a woman is somewhat limited—”
“Somewhat?”
“Oh, do stop mimicking me like Casanova! I know that I am lamentably naive on such matters. But why, with so little regard for convention on your part, did you marry Godfrey? Why do you not do as your friend Sarah Bernhardt does, as the Duchesse de Richelieu and her prince do?”
Irene tucked her knees up and rested her chin upon them. “I never thought that I would hear you urging so improper a course as taking a lover.”
“I do not urge it! I merely question why you resisted it, when your philosophy does not object.”
“You mention Sarah and Alice’s irregular romantic lives. Both of them are independent women, by temperament and by virtue of economic freedom. Both set the course of their romances. Alice even ventured to love far beneath her station, not once, but twice. Yet she remains prisoner of her sex. Her millions are inherited from father and husband. The husband may be dead and unable to say anything about her behavior, but the father is ever ready to rush into his grown daughter’s life and govern her actions.”
“She is too dutiful,” I concluded slowly, amazed at myself. “Had she been truly unconventional, she’d have never given up the doctor... er, doctors.”
“Yes. Above all, the Great God Hypocrisy rules her life. Despite her Jewish family roots, her own father objects to her association with a Jew, and enforces it. Alice is free only by appearances. Sarah is free to her soul, yet pays for it. As much as men applaud and pursue her—and often achieve her for a moment—they resent her, for she does not docilely meet their ideals of womanhood. She is cruelly caricatured by the cartoonists, who depict her as a garden rake. Why do you think she wears her signature scarves about her neck? To disguise its thinness. Why affect such flowing robes? Again, to hide the fact that she does not fit the model of female voluptuousness currently in vogue. She is an urchin at heart, Sarah, and ever at war with her world even when she rules it.”
“So their freedom is an illusion.”
“Yet they have more than Lillie Langtry, who has truly surrendered to the man’s game and is little more than what the French so aptly call ‘La Grande Horizontale,’ a woman who rises in the world via a reclining position. She moves from man to man, title to title, millionaire to millionaire. One day she will be old and no longer negotiable, like paper money that has passed through too many hands.”
I shuddered. “Still, you have not said why you married Godfrey.”
“He wished me to do so.”
“Irene! You never do anything merely because someone wishes it.”
“And he is one of those ‘uncommon common men’ Alice so envies me.”
“You never did anything merely to make others envy you.”
“And there are his personal attractions.”
“The King of Bohemia had as many personal attractions, in his way, and you did not marry him.”
“Ah, Penelope, but I would have. Once. When I was young.”
“You would not now?”
“Never!”
“Then... Godfrey?”
Irene swept her hands wide. “You are a merciless inquisitor, Nell; I shall have to set you on a suspect. Who can interpret the human heart? He is peculiarly suited to my odd brand of honor. Godfrey grew up counter to his beast of a father. When his mother could stand no more of her husband and dared to take her three sons and support them by her novel-writing, Godfrey saw her shunned by the same society that had tolerated her husband’s abuse. Then he watched that that society’s regulatory system, the courts and the law, support his father’s claim to all money that his wife had earned, even while living apart from him.
“Marriage does not protect a woman, as is commonly put forth; it confines h
er. Caroline Norton found that out, and so did her son. So perhaps Godfrey is the only man I would dare marry, that I would ever care to marry, the one man who will not make a prison of his love.”
“Love. You finally mention that.”
“Love is not to be discussed as casually as the weather, unless it is only casual love. I will say this: that while in the relationships between men and women there is much stuff of comedy and tragedy, there can be found in the marital bed an intimacy that mingles the best of the human and the divine.”
Her words brought me far over a threshold I had merely meant to peep past. I don’t know if I colored, but I could not keep myself from asking one last thing.
“Irene, I’ve never inquired about your past experience of... men. You seem to grasp this mystery by some... some mysterious process.”
“It is not a mystery, Nell. It is merely kept so to most women, for their own ‘protection’.”
“Well, do you think, possibly, that I, I might someday—”
She regarded me with tilted head and a frank expression. “I cannot say, Nell. You have been reared to be a perfect ass on the subject, you know.”
“I’m not as indifferent as I might seem. In fact, before my father died and I was cast adrift on the world far from Shropshire, I had conceived an... affection for a curate in the neighborhood. Jasper Higgenbottom. He was, of course, unaware of my interest—”
“Of course.”
“—and I naturally was unwilling and unable to make plain my regard—”
“Not naturally, but go on.”
“—and I frankly have virtually forgotten him, for a wider experience of the world has shown me that he was narrow in more senses than his features—”
“Brava, Nell.”
“—and later, when I was governess for a family, I did experience a fleeting... discomfiture with my charges’ young uncle, who, of course, was far above my station, and I may have been imagining that he even paused to notice me in any sense whatsoever. Still, naturally—”
“Yes, Nell? Naturally and of course. The point?”
“Do you think it possible that I could overcome my extreme ignorance of the sex and . . . make friends with one? A man, I mean.”
“Aren’t you friends with Godfrey?”
“Of course, but he’s different.”
“Why?”
“He’s... yours.”
“But you met him before I did. You worked as a typist for him. You had every opportunity to snap him up.”
“But I didn’t! Godfrey is—was—above my station.” I thought for a moment. As embarrassing as this conversation had been, some glimmer of enlightenment was sizzling through my brain. “But you say all talk of station is nonsense.”
“Is and should be. Still, it rules most of England.”
“I suppose I need not regard myself as beneath anybody. Any man, even.”
“No, Nell, you need not regard yourself as beneath any man, unless... ah, but I am getting too risqué for a parson’s daughter.” Irene suddenly seized my elbows, nearly causing me to spill the last bit of wine in my glass. “You have had a wonderful insight tonight. You have seen in a glance what is wrong with the world and put it into one simple phrase, one motto, one undeniable truth and inalienable right: you need not regard yourself as beneath any man! There, go forth now, my child, and act upon it. Then who may say what you will do, and with whom, and when?”
“Really, Irene? You think that there’s hope, that I shall not have always to pine after the uninteresting Jasper? Really and truly?”
A noise from the next chamber ended my moment of dazzling lucidity regarding my purpose in life.
“Godfrey!” Irene whispered, hastily rising. The expression of mingled relief, joy and anticipation on her face told me more than had all of the words we’d exchanged.
I, too, felt eager to ascertain his safety, and even more eager to learn about his outing. We rushed into the adjoining room to find one French window banging open. Godfrey was climbing over the stone balustrade outside it.
“Godfrey!” Irene pulled him into the room, and then through the door into the parlor. “How did it go?”
“Excellently, if you consider breaking a wine bottle over the head of an Algerian navigator and fleeing a mob of Monégasque police through the streets of the Condamine worthwhile.”
“Poor dear. Have some pȃté de foie gras. Some crackers. Breaking a wine bottle? How wasteful.” She poured him a full measure of Burgundy, which he downed like milk. He also gulped the disgusting crackers without complaint.
The lamplight revealed smudges of dirt upon his threadbare sailor’s jersey. Irene brushed at the revolting hair matted to his ear.
“Your sailor’s sunburn, applied by myself, has faded at the edges. Lucky that you visited dark bistros, not the open docks in daylight.”
“Lucky that I had the dark of night to shadow my retreat.”
“But you were accepted as what you appeared to be?”
“All too well,” Godfrey complained. “They are a brawl-minded lot in the bistros. When I inquired after our quarry, I got more questions than answers.”
“But—?” Irene seemed certain that more words would follow.
“But.... The two tars who accosted Nell and myself in the train are indeed known, and have been seen in town. ‘Gravesend Gerry and his Heathen,’ they are called. Many strange sailors sail into port these days, and so does one whom we know as no sailor whatsoever.”
“Who?” Irene demanded.
“Who, indeed, should I find in the old salts’ lair, asking questions like myself, but Louise’s wretched uncle? He didn’t recognize me.”
“Louise’s uncle,” I repeated. “He must have hounded the child to Monte Carlo.”
Godfrey shook his disreputable head. “It wasn’t Louise he was asking after. He was hunting the same quarry we sought—one seaman, Gerald by name. He didn’t get far, though, since he had no description, unlike me.”
“How lucky—” Irene stared into the distance as she mulled Godfrey’s tale. “—that Gerry and the Heathen decided to accost you two on the train. Otherwise, we’d be as lost as the uncle.”
“Aren’t we anyway?” I asked.
“No, we are not. I begin to see a common thread to this affair. Godfrey! You must go tomorrow to the registry of ships. And we must recruit Mr. Winter as a researcher as well; we have no time to waste!”
“In what guise do I go?” he asked sardonically. “Why, as yourself,” she replied. “Your handsome, brave, clever and kind self, of course.” He looked a bit taken aback at this surfeit of praise, but Irene galloped on. “I have it on impeccable authority that you are all these things. Surely even a registrar of ships will succumb to such virtue and tell you all we wish to know. If not, I myself will have to persuade him.”
Of the next few days’ activities I was mercifully kept ignorant. Irene recruited me as a sort of governess again, for into my hands was given the shepherding of Louise. Now that her formidable uncle had been seen about the harbor, she must be kept out of sight.
With her customary appropriation of all decisions, Irene ordered Louise and myself to holiday at one of the picturesque villages halfway up the mountainside. So much for “three heads are better than one.” How she decided to trust us two to ourselves, I cannot say, but Louise’s young man was required in Monaco, so it was a sisterly jaunt we made to the simple village of Eze.
Louise brought a sketch pad, and I my diaries. We spent placid days sitting atop the bluffs, gazing on the Mediterranean’s frowzy surface, munching picnic lunches of sausage and cheese. It was, if I may say so, quite a bohemian existence, and the most pleasurable part of my sojourn in France.
Louise, I found, despite her impetuous flight with the young American, a most delightful and docile girl. She felt keenly her aunt’s predicament and asked me many questions of that lady’s state of health and mind.
“She is a woman determined to endure,” I said at last. “
May the Lord have mercy on your uncle.”
“Is he a bad man, do you think? I have never liked him, but he is my uncle.” A wisp of wind blew a hat ribbon over her shoulder like a strand of cherry-colored hair.
It was quite pleasant to be consulted so earnestly. Certainly there was little of that when Irene was about. “It is difficult to say. He is a hard man, I would judge, in his disowning of your father.”
“Perhaps he is in the neighborhood because he feels it his duty to find me.”
I found myself smiling the smile Irene offered me on occasion. “It is good to think as well as one can of one’s uncle. But it is more likely that his motives serve himself, not duty.”
She bent her head to her sketch pad for some moments. “Mademoiselle Huxleigh—”
“Nell, please.”
“Nell. I have been very happy here. I do not like Paris, I have discovered.”
“My sentiments exactly.”
“Really? Then when Caleb and I marry, it would not be so dreadful if I went to the United States with him? Aunt would—”
“Aunt would understand. But first we must settle your uncle’s role in this affair. We cannot abandon your aunt with your ‘death’ still hanging over her head, or in danger of your uncle’s anger.”
“What exactly is ‘this affair’?”
“We are not certain, which is why it is an ‘affair.’ Perhaps it is an assassination attempt—”
“No!”
“—or some scheme to defraud you of money due you.”
“I am an heiress? I can do as I please?”
“You most certainly cannot. Not even the duchess can do as she pleases, and she is an heiress to make all others pale.”
“She has been very good to Caleb and myself, as have you and Madame and Monsieur Norton.” Louise suddenly giggled. “Oh, it is not funny, for I felt most terribly desperate that day, but poor Monsieur Norton. I fear I was most ungrateful to him for saving me from the Seine.”
The Adventuress (v5) Page 20
