The Adventuress (v5)

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “None,” the gentleman in question himself answered, coming from the other room while fastening his collar. He paused to let Irene supervise the artistic arrangement of his tie. “Irene, I refuse to be used as a piece of rather large bait off the coast of Crete, even in theory. You never asked, but I do not swim. Being expected to perform the unauthorized transport of unknown snakes is danger enough.”

  “You do not swim?” Irene beamed at Godfrey, as if elated at discovering a new facet to his personal accomplishments. “Then we must bathe on the beach as soon as this vexing matter is done with. I will teach you to dog paddle.”

  “A human being,” I put in, “was not made to so much as duck paddle.”

  “On that I concur with Nell.” Godfrey took my intervention as an opportunity to snatch up his hat. “I must be on the trail of a map of Crete. Please leave something of the puzzle unsolved for my return.”

  “I did not know that you swam,” I told Irene when he had gone.

  She smiled nostalgically. “I did not so much swim as to appear to. My dear Nell, I was once a mermaid.”

  “A mermaid?”

  “Yes. For Merlin the Miraculous, a magician in Philadelphia. I wore a sea-green bathing costume that had a single lower extremity and I submerged myself into a large tank of water with my hair loose, blowing bubbles for exactly two hundred and eight seconds. That was how long it took for the Miraculous Merlin to replace me in the tank with a trained seal—or rather, for myself and the intelligent seal to accomplish the transference. The Miraculous Merlin actually had very little to do with the feat.”

  “You blew bubbles, underwater, for two hundred and eight seconds? Without breathing?”

  “Of course. Singers have excellent lung capacity, you know.”

  A soft knock on the door interrupted this fascinating reminiscence that offered more than I had learned of Irene’s past in the seven years of our association.

  “Godfrey?” I wondered.

  It was only the maid with a letter.

  I heard the envelope flap tear free and glimpsed the heavy parchment in Irene’s hand as she read; then came a sudden stiffening of her shoulders. I edged around her to view the missive, but she turned and went to the window.

  “What is it, Irene?”

  “Nothing of consequence, save the seal.” She lifted the envelope so I could see the fat blob of palace wax she had broken to open it. She read the contents again, quickly, then folded the message and replaced it in the envelope. “We must see Alice. Let us hope she is in when we call.”

  “Now? But it is teatime.”

  “My dear Nell, the Americans and the French do not take tea with such fervor as the British. We shall have to risk it.”

  I naturally assumed that Alice’s message contained some new development and that I should shortly know every detail of it. And I was all too correct.

  “My dear Irene, you are positively prescient!”

  So the duchess greeted us, rustling into her yellow morning room in an ecru-lace tea gown that must have cost a thousand francs. “Please sit down, Nell, Irene. I have been told the date.”

  One would have thought from Alice’s flushed cheeks and excited manner that the prince had chosen a wedding day.

  “How were you told?” Irene wanted to know, shaking her head to refuse the tea Alice offered.

  I accepted my cup with a genteel nod. Alice Heine might have been born American and have married French, but she knew how to select and serve a most satisfactory tea.

  “By letter, of course,” she said, delivering my cup gracefully. “With that same seal that fascinates you, the same overpressed signet device. And the palace wax.”

  “I believe we know how that is come by,” I put in.

  Alice’s blue eyes widened, if that was possible.

  “Or how it was come by almost twenty years ago, in quantity,” Irene modified. “Would that have been possible?”

  Alice nodded. “Like all accoutrements of royal houses, the wax is a fusty old formula from forever ago. ‘A fusty old formula from forever ago’... that line would sing well in an operetta. Irene, your suggestion for installing an opera hall within the casino may well be possible. Then I will write an operetta to accompany my line and you shall sing it.”

  “First we must settle the present business,” Irene rejoined. Enthusiasm ever tended to distract the duchess from present necessities; but then, there must be some reward in being a duchess. “So you would say that it is feasible for someone to have removed a sizable bit of sealing wax from the palace years ago?” Irene prompted.

  “I presume so, were that someone familiar with palace routine. The wax is of secret manufacture, but it is hardly a state secret, though it was more significant during the French Revolution, when a forebear of Albert’s was imprisoned and the principality was temporary swallowed by the squat Corsican. It was used for clandestine communications.”

  “Corsica.” Irene considered. “Luckily, on a global scale, the prince’s first destination is not far from Crete.”

  “No. Nor is the date far off by which I am to have Albert leave for Crete. The twenty-second of September.”

  “Not much time,” Irene murmured.

  “For what?” Alice asked.

  “To... make arrangements. So the wax is at least a hundred years old. That is the charm of a principality, I imagine; traditions do not change.”

  “I wish that they would,” Alice answered with feeling. “Then Albert and I could marry.”

  “Quite remarkable,” Irene noted, “the way the Grimaldi line extends back six centuries and has endured despite the frequent perambulations of national borders all around it. After my concert, Viscount D’Enrique explained the Grimaldi continuity and showed me several imposing paintings of princely ancestors.”

  Alice rolled her eyes. “Oh, he is most charming, that one, but more interested in arts other than painting, my dear Irene.”

  “So I gathered. His family, however, has been loyal to the prince for some time.”

  “Ages,” Alice said with a very American groan. “That is the politics of this little principality. Such a lot of families with precedence. Victor—Viscount D’Enrique, that is—comes from a family of palace right-hand men; he has practically grown up with the prince. In fact—” Alice glanced cautiously in my direction “—when Albert was a royal carouser, Victor was his most constant companion. Albert, I am happy to say, has reformed completely. Victor, alas, is incorrigible.”

  Irene produced a polite, distracted smile. I could tell that her agile mind had fastened on some crumb of information that had fallen from the duchess’s voluble lips and that she was busy milling it to the fineness of face powder. What it was, I could not imagine, but that is the constant state of the lesser intelligence.

  At that moment the maid stepped in. “Dr. Hoffman, Your Grace.”

  The doctor bustled in with his usual efficient manner. Even on social occasions, the good physician regarded people with the sharp eye of a diagnostician with symptoms on his mind.

  “Alice, you look ravishing but a bit overexcited. My dear Mrs. Norton—” He took Irene’s hand warmly, then narrowed his dark eyes, studying her. “—you have not been sleeping enough lately. Your beauty is not faded, but it is a bit... crinkled.”

  Irene laughed in great good temper. “You are quite right, Doctor, I have missed a bit of sleep recently.” She turned to wink at me. Only Irene could accomplish that vulgar gesture with supreme style.

  The doctor next bent his attention on my humble self. “But Miss Huxleigh has lost no beauty sleep; she practically blooms! The Blue Coast is salubrious for you, Miss Huxleigh; it has given you fine color.”

  Certainly I blushed as scarlet as a rose at his compliments, knowing my appearance to have been abetted by Irene’s beauty potions.

  “This appears to be a council of war,” he jested, turning to survey the three of us. “Has anything happened?”

  “Another letter has arrived,” Al
ice admitted, “saying that I must have Albert and his ship on the north coast of Crete by the twenty-second of September.”

  “And what does the formidable Madame Norton think of this directive?”

  Irene smiled again, that dreamy, removed smile that looks so innocent and is in fact so dangerous. “She thinks that Her Grace must follow the instructions precisely. My inquiry has hit heavy waters, Dr. Hoffman. I fear I can offer no advice but compliance.”

  “From you and your charming companion, a course of compliance is all that is to be desired,” he said with a bow that had me blushing again.

  “I think,” Irene said as we left the house moments later, “that the good doctor is harboring an admiration for you, Nell.”

  “Impossible,” I murmured. “The duchess is a famous beauty, and you are even more deserving of that sobriquet. I am a wren in the company of birds of paradise. Besides, it is your theatrical tricks with my appearance.”

  “Whatever,” she said airily. “I am married and Alice is sworn to be. You, though, are a single woman.”

  “Irene! You cannot be serious! Dr. Hoffman is no doubt a dedicated man of medicine and most polite, but we will leave Monte Carlo and I will likely never see him again.”

  “Oh, I am sure we will return. Someone must teach Godfrey to dog paddle; we appear to have no time for it this trip.”

  “Irene!”

  She stopped walking up the steep cobblestoned byway and turned to confront me. “Odd, isn’t it, that Alice persists in her attraction to men of science: first Dr. Hoffman on Madeira, then the doctor in Biarritz; now the prince, who is an oceanographer.”

  “She is at least consistent in her preferences.” I was somewhat bewildered by the change of topic.

  Irene’s face grew extremely pleased, as if I had just uttered some perfect pearl of philosophy. “Yes, people do not change, do they, in their preferences?”

  “Not usually,” I said. “I, for one, shall never regard the odious Casanova with affection, nor could I ever have any strong attachment to a snake.”

  Irene laughed. “You are a rare and discerning woman, Nell. You have no idea of the number of women who become intimately attached... to a snake!”

  And off she went ahead of me, striding up the hill, humming an aria I didn’t recognize. I could only conclude that Irene had learned something that day—some fact, some clue—that she, and only she, could put to the proper, or improper, use.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  SEALED WITH WAX

  FROM THE CASE NOTES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES

  I miss the fogs of London.

  Watson, I suspect, would be pleased to know that my ventures abroad always bring home to me the rare affinity between my own rather melancholy nature and that of my nation’s great capital city.

  One cannot think properly under a blazing Mediterranean sun, which is no doubt why pleasure-seekers flock to balmier climates. Curses, I say, upon sunny seas and starry skies, upon idle holiday mobs and fresh warm breezes as clean as a French laundress’s linen sheets.

  Such relentlessly open and bright atmospheres are no proper milieu for the spawning of intelligent crime. Oh, the crimes of passion, certainly, can flourish here as floridly as do the native blossoms, but they are lurid events that run interminably in the papers and are as simple to solve as what comes after A,B,C. Even Lestrade could do it.

  No, such sojourns as my current visit to Monte Carlo remind me forcibly of what delicious kinks, crooked as a black cat’s broken tail, crime can take on a lonely moor or in a crowded back alley of Saffron Hill. Give me smoky, stygian air, creeping damp, and a dank, rancid river fog running through it all; nights on which both murderer’s and victim’s breath leave a visible if ephemeral trail in the chill murk. Give me the devious schemes that arise when some four millions of people are crowded into a great spinning, creaking clockwork of a city.

  Give me, in short, England, and let le Villard and his ilk bask in this filthy sunshine.

  At least I have had an opportunity to acquaint le Villard with the full range of exact knowledge in which he is so lamentably lacking. Otherwise, I find him a quick study, with that Celtic intuition so useful to the policeman. As a translator, he is merely competent, but it is my hope that his work with my monographs will inspire him to emulate my methods, if he cannot equal my success. In truth, I am eager to have done with Monte Carlo and to proceed to the infinitely more important and intriguing affair that awaits me in a more northerly quarter of the globe.

  However, I have committed to the Montpensier matter. The case took on some small interest when Édouard Montpensier disappeared from Paris with the circumstances of his niece’s banishment still pending.

  Madame Montpensier’s distress, if possible, went up another note on the scale of hysteria.

  “You are concealing something, Madame,” I challenged the lady brusquely.

  She wrung her hands and looked left, right and down, at last, to the useless yellow spaniel in her lap. Then it came out: the flight of her niece with a young American admirer, the odd intervention of an English couple named Norton, her husband’s disappearance... despite the suspicious odor it lent him in the matter of his missing niece. And she told me of the letters that had arrived over the years, and of the English couple’s interest in these same missives.

  It was child’s play to find the letters. My suspicions fastened, as had the Nortons’ previously, on the house’s large old library. Once there—Watson knows my methods and takes far more pleasure in detailing them than I—it was a simple matter to find the false shelf-back and the very documents behind them. The dust fields atop the books on that shelf had been recently disturbed by two sets of hands, one set remarkably dainty to be found at such a height.

  Unlike the ubiquitous Nortons, I removed the papers. My examination produced several interesting facts as to the types of persons—yes, there was more than one— who had written them, from where they had been posted, et cetera. I need not go into detail here; Watson can ferret all that out should I decide to tell him anything about the affair, which depends on how secret it needs to be kept.

  The papers were of no interest except for their variety of origin: a cheap oatmeal-pulp stock attainable only in Calais; a limp parchment with a meaningless watermark that is manufactured in Barcelona; and a flimsy, pale- blue notepaper of wretched texture that I have seen emanate only from the South American nation of Argentina. What intrigued me most was the sealing wax, a particularly creamy variety that blended the colors of black and crimson into a marbleized, swirling pattern. The quality of the wax far surpassed the quality of the envelopes, the paper, and the literary level within.

  So sealing wax, rather than missing heiresses who stand to inherit no money, vanishing uncles and falsely murderous aunts, is the one sure strand in this tangle. A physical clue is always the most solid. I have traced the wax to a small stationer’s establishment in the Condamine at Monte Carlo on the Cote d’Azur, and to that shop I will go tomorrow.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  BARED WITH IMPUNITY

  Godfrey had returned from his errand with not one but four maps of the Cretan coastline, each drawn on heavy parchment and folded until the creases had obliterated some of the ink. The maps covered the parlor table like ungainly dressmaker’s patterns. I was dismayed by the profusion of these large guides to the island’s silhouette.

  “So many fussy ins and outs per inch! I may as well attempt to decipher Battenberg lace,” I said, firmly applying the pince-nez to the bridge of my nose.

  An arm embraced my shoulders. “You will do it, Nell! You have an impeccable eye for detail.”

  Despite Irene’s confidence, I surveyed the intimidating tablecloth of overlapping maps with little appetite. “And if no length of coastline matches the configuration of any of the tattooed letters’ scrolls?”

  “Then we shall have eliminated that idea and can concoct a new one,” she said cheerfully. “You will have performed a most valuable ser
vice.”

  I groaned, a sound that escalated as I saw Godfrey peep into the snake’s basket by the window. “Godfrey, are you feeding the creature something dreadful?”

  He smiled as he latched the lid. “Something delectable, to snakes at any rate.”

  I could not rebuke him further, being grateful that he at least tended the creature’s needs so that I should not have to. I began work immediately, and tedious it was. The thick pad of tracing paper that the young people purchased had struck me as wasteful when first I saw it. Now I was tearing through it, tracing intricacies of coastline, then reducing my traceries enough to compare them with the intertwined scrolls of the N, E, O and S.

  Yet it captured me, the enormity of the task and the remote possibility that I could actually demonstrate some synchronicity between Crete’s coastline and these fanciful scrolls of the late Singh’s manufacture.

  I declined to join Irene and Godfrey for dinner but supped on onion soup, roast beef, cheese and a vanilla pudding sent up on a tray. What had begun as the search for a needle in a haystack or a jig in a whirligig soon proved to be a matter of straining grains of sand through cheesecloth. Too many inlets mocked the curves of the scrollwork to make the one answer apparent.

  My taskmasters returned in an expansive mood, perfumed with the dubious scents of postprandial brandy and Turkish cigarettes.

  “Nell! Still working?” Irene said. “You shall get the headache.”

  “I have the headache.”

  “Then you must rest,” Godfrey prescribed, coming over to grasp the back of my chair.

  “Only another minute! I must copy this last curlicue of coastline; this may be the very spot we seek... oh, but not quite. Perhaps one more tracing—”

  The chair shook in a light, admonishing way. “My dear Nell, it is past midnight,” Godfrey said. “We had no idea that you would work so long.”