The Adventuress (v5)

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “How refreshing.” Godfrey rose from the table. “Have you any idea of what I should look for beyond the obvious?”

  “None,” Irene admitted blithely. “Of course I would be most interested in knowing the direction that Mr. Holmes’s inquiries took.”

  “Of course.” Godfrey was off with a last significant glance to me.

  “What shall we do today, Irene?” I queried.

  “I have not decided.” Irene began stirring her coffee, although her customary cream and sugar were well blended already.

  Then she looked up, and her features sharpened with interest and alarm, changing from idleness to utter attention within the instant. She grasped my wrist as if she would break it.

  “Nell, you have seen Sherlock Holmes in person.”

  “I have seen him. We were both of us ‘in person’ at that first occasion at Godfrey’s chambers. Irene—!”

  “You would recognize the gentleman again?”

  “I should assume so; a year and a half does not ordinarily work great changes on most people.”

  “Would he recognize you?”

  “Possibly not. I was of no great significance to him, although he—”

  “Nell, do stop chattering and listen. Look slowly, but quickly; that is, don’t be too tardy about it or we shall lose our chance. Behind you. Tell me that is not he!”

  I turned. That is the only way to look behind one, although Irene’s hiss indicated that my turn was not sufficiently discreet to satisfy her. There on the terrace many people were lounging at tables, talking, laughing, and strolling toward the promenade.

  One tall, top-hatted figure drew my eye. It was weaving between the tables, drawing nearer—but then, so were other gentlemen. The terrace of the Hotel de Paris attracted almost as many pedestrians as did the promenade.

  “I cannot be certain, Irene. He had removed his hat when I saw him before, for one thing. For another, I have not on my pince-nez, and for yet a third thing, it was his voice that I most remember, so crisp and remote in its way.”

  “Oh, do be still!” Irene’s hand throttled my abused wrist. “And look back at me! Of course it’s he, and he’s coming this very way. He shall pass right by us. Try to steal a glimpse of him then.”

  Despite matching wits in the Bohemian affair, they had never met in their own guises. Mr. Holmes had gone from saintly old churchman to stable oaf. And Irene had worn heavy men’s outerwear when she’d skimmed past the elderly “churchman” entering the door of 221 Baker Street and said in her best basso, “Good Night, Mr. Sherlock Holmes.”

  I did as instructed, my heart beginning to beat as rapidly as a rabbit’s, thanks to Irene’s air of urgency. She had languorously obscured her face by putting a hand to her temple, but her eyes glowed brighter than tiger’s-eye gemstones. I could almost see her figurative tail twitch.

  I prepared to snatch a look as the presence passed, save that it paused instead.

  “Good day, ladies,” said a voice I shall never forget. “I understand from the porter that I have the honor to address Madame Norton and Miss Huxleigh.”

  “You also have the advantage of us,” Irene said, looking up. Only I would have detected that she was slightly breathless.

  A small smile stretched those thin lips. “I am already known to you: Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street, London. I believe that you are more than sufficiently familiar with the exact address, Madam.”

  In the ensuing pause, I attempted to glance casually at the gentleman looming behind me. It could not be done without cricking my neck, so I continued watching his reflection as mirrored in Irene’s expression.

  Sheer shock had given way to a wary kind of amusement. “Pray be seated, sir,” she said. “We have just finished breakfast.”

  He took Godfrey’s vacated chair and removed his hat, revealing a head of black hair that matched his strong eyebrows. I was able to observe him as minutely as he no doubt dissected others in the course of his cases. His eyes were gray, but not the open, amiable, silver-gray of Godfrey’s. They viewed the world closely, as if looking through a microscope.

  His long, thin fingers moved idly over the brim of his beaver hat and his walking-stick handle. All of his senses seemed restless, as if eager to be put to use. Certainly his eyes were gathering in every detail of our tabletop, of Irene, of myself, in glances that struck like summer lightning. Then he spoke again in that light, slightly high voice that barely veiled an almost chronic impatience.

  “When I said that I had the honor to address Madam Norton, I might have been more explicit. I have the honor to address Madam Godfrey Norton, nee Irene Adler.”

  Irene’s hands fanned eloquently. “Is that so remarkable a thing, my dear Mr. Holmes?”

  A smile tightened the comers of his mouth. “It is, when the newspapers would have you and your husband dead, Madam.”

  “The newspapers report many fictions as fact.” Irene’s honey-brown eyes grew ingenuous. “Is there some matter in which you wish to consult me?”

  His laughter startled the pigeons into abandoning their posts on the nearby vacant-chair rails. “Indeed there is, Madam. There are many matters involving yourself that I would inquire into, but circumstances and civilized behavior allow me to pursue only one.”

  “How unfortunate.”

  “For myself, or for you?”

  She shrugged, a slight, French shrug, and allowed her eyelids to drop for a moment. “For both of us perhaps, Mr. Holmes.”

  He looked away, then spoke, the brisk detective. “I wish to know all concerning the disappearance of Louise Montpensier of Paris.”

  “A rather sweeping request, Mr. Holmes.”

  “I never ask for crumbs when I can have the whole cake. Come, come, Madam, you are too clever to deny the obvious. You and your husband returned Mademoiselle Louise to the family home after a day’s absence. Her disappearance came on the heels of that incident. You must tell me what you know.”

  “Why?”

  He considered. “Most people, when confronted, would prefer to make a clean breast of a rather messy matter. I suspect that Louise Montpensier is not dead; at the least, you could speak to spare her aunt further suspicion. The woman is utterly innocent, though I cannot say the same for the uncle.”

  “Madame Montpensier will be cleared very shortly, I promise you.”

  “Perhaps, but in the meantime, where is Louise? I believe that you know, Madam, and that you have always known.”

  “Not always, Mr. Holmes. But I know that she is safe and happy now, as she was not before.”

  “And her adventurous absence?”

  Irene’s face dropped its mask of taut amusement. “The girl attempted to drown herself in the Seine, sir. Godfrey, my husband”—Mr. Holmes made a swift, dismissive gesture to indicate he knew that—“saved her. Then we returned her to her home, hoping that her family would not need to know of a young woman’s temporarily overwrought feelings.”

  “Why did she attempt to take her life?”

  “A young man whose attentions were not welcome to her uncle. At Louise’s age, such impasses can seem insurmountable.”

  Irene had carefully adhered to the truth, as far as it went.

  “And now she is—?”

  “Where she wishes to be. She will notify her family as soon as possible. Or I can have her notify you, so you will not be defrauded of your solution.”

  The thin lips pursed, then an arctic twinkle lit those icy-gray eyes. “I detect another romantic elopement here, Madam. You grow overfond of the device.”

  Irene smiled. “It is a bit melodramatic, Mr. Holmes, yet I do have that weakness.”

  The walking stick lightly tapped the terrace flagstones. “There’s more to it than the resolution of Louise Montpensier’s romantic escapades. I’ve seen the so-called mysterious letters, which are as plain as child’s play. Laughable as the scheme is, there is great gain in it— for someone. I do not imply yourself. I would imagine you to be quite nicely fixed now.”
<
br />   “Retirement has been kind to me.”

  “You must chafe,” he said suddenly, leaning forward intently, “at the pseudonymous life. I myself find extended idleness an... agony. You cannot perform on the concert stage as long as you allow that fiction about the train wreck to persist unchallenged. What else remains for you, but to meddle in other people’s affairs?”

  “You do not call your own efforts meddling.”

  “I am a professional.”

  “As am I.”

  “No, Madam. You were a professional, a professional opera singer. Now you are barred from your vocation. It is no wonder that you have taken up an avocation.”

  “And that is?”

  “You heard me: meddling.”

  “I think, Mr. Holmes, that it is you who meddles in my affairs, rather than the other way around.”

  “Then you admit that you are embroiled in something!”

  “I admit that I have pursuits I follow, that is all.”

  “Hmm.” Sherlock Holmes gazed morosely at his amber-headed stick. “You have been indiscreet in Monte Carlo. You have drawn attention to yourself by consorting with palace hangers-on. You have even sung in semi-public circumstances.”

  “What business is it of yours what I do, and where?”

  His smile came quickly. “None, save that I would have attended your concert. I am a music lover, did you know?”

  This time Irene blinked. “No, I did not. I must notify you of my next performance.”

  “Your next musical performance. I believe you have others, less meant for public consumption,” he said obliquely. “So you will keep your knowledge to yourself. All the better! I do not like too easy a trail to follow.” Sherlock Holmes rose to his full, imposing height. “I would remind you that if I have discovered your former identity, it is on the tongue-tips of all Monte Carlo.”

  “We will be leaving soon,” she said, surprising me.

  “I trust your cabinet photograph of a certain royal Bohemian personage and yourself rests safely.”

  “I have destroyed it.”

  Mr. Holmes frowned. “Can you trust the king to forget you?”

  “It is not necessary. I have forgotten him.”

  He smiled to himself. “He has not forgotten you. Only recently he sent me a gold snuffbox in token of his undying gratitude. For nothing.”

  “In place of the ring you would not accept?”

  “How did you know that?” Mr. Holmes regarded me for an instant, then turned back to Irene. “Your accomplices need tutoring. I perceived that I was followed to the chemist’s.”

  “I was not able to do it myself. But then, you wished to attract our attention.”

  “True. I wanted to be led somewhere, and I found you at the bottom of it. I hoped to learn more of your real purpose in being here.”

  “And have you?”

  “Time will tell, although I do not have much of it to waste on a tangle of the sort I suspect you are following. More urgent matters call. However, if you persist in crossing my path, it will not be to your ultimate advantage, I assure you. Prior acquaintance will not sway me from my duty.”

  “Nor will it me.” Irene rose on that avowal.

  Mr. Holmes studied her face as he might a Gainsborough portrait in a gallery. There was much of the character reader in his scrutiny, but something also of the connoisseur admiring an elusive treasure.

  Irene smiled slowly, her beauty and her certainty radiating like sunlight. It was the power of the performer that she unleashed on the famous detective. If he was not totally immune, neither was he susceptible.

  He bowed to take his leave, first nodding at me. “I bid you good morning, Madam Irene.”

  “I have already found it so,” she said.

  Then he was gone, his footsteps fading into the general hubbub around us.

  “Irene! You heard him. We must meddle no more!”

  “Nonsense, Nell. Even Sherlock Holmes could not make swift sense of the many threads we investigate. When Louise sends a cablegram from America to her aunt, his interest in the affair will be satisfied.”

  “He will not take crumbs when he can have the whole cake; you heard him yourself. He strikes me as a man of his word.”

  “Of course he is, but I am too far ahead of him. He works from the narrow tip of the iceberg downward; I have plumbed the depths and need only to crown my achievement with the final peak of revelation.”

  Irene paused to let her features reflect her triumphal apex of emotion. “And now I am at last ready to orchestrate a climax to our diffuse drama that will amaze and baffle one and all, thanks to Mr. Sherlock Holmes.”

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  THROUGH ALICE’S WINDOW GLASS

  Madame Sarah Bernhardt held a most atypical soirée two nights later in the salon of her friend Alice, Duchesse de Richelieu, at the instigation of another friend, Madam Irene Norton.

  Only a carefully chosen few were invited: the hostess, Godfrey and Irene, myself, the odious Viscount D’Enrique, Dr. Hoffman, the captain of the prince’s yacht (one Jules Rousseau), Jerseyman—and Oscar, the ingratiating serpent.

  Not every guest’s appearance was voluntary. Viscount D’Enrique, I understood, had been loath to have anything to do with the woman whose “son” had bested him in a duel until Alice made clear that his future good graces with the ruling family of Monte Carlo depended upon his attendance.

  Jerseyman also was reluctant, having been dredged by Godfrey from some musty bistro, where he still mourned his dead companion with a wine bottle. He looked rather the worse for it, despite the clean suit jacket that had been forced upon his spare form. A wrinkled red kerchief substituted for a tie and collar at his stringy throat, making him more than ever resemble an organ-grinder’s over-attired monkey.

  Outside the villa, the heavy sapphire-velvet curtain of the Monte Carlo night was ruffled by the winds that can buffet the Blue Coast. The shutters rattled, while heavy foliage scratched at the walls for entrance.

  Whether by accident or by Irene’s native sense of drama, the ladies’ attire was a study in somber tones. The three other than myself wore shades of mourning, although gentlemen would hardly note that. Alice was in a becoming lavender, Sarah in a changeable purple silk, and Irene in a rich black-and-heliotrope watered taffeta. They resembled a youthful convening of the Three Fates, if those mythical hags could be imagined in the prime of life.

  Perhaps it was my imagination—my presentiment that at this artificial social occasion, old puzzles would be solved and a new culprit revealed as by a magician’s agile hand—but the scene seemed painted in the jaded hues of the decadent bistro artists. The ample candlelight hardened Alice’s pastel features and sharpened Sarah Bernhardt’s white-powdered, feral face to a skull-like mask. Irene, among them the darkest of hair and dress, seemed as solemn as a heavily robed judge.

  I, of course, wore my old mouse-gray India silk figured with yellow blossoms; since the comedy of Irene’s assumptions concerning Dr. Hoffman’s purported romantic interest in me, I had renounced female fripperies... and was not much noticed.

  By the time we assembled in Alice’s parlor, evening candlelight had dimmed its sunny color to a sad jaundice. I no longer wondered that yellow was sometimes considered a decadent color.

  Alice served saffron champagne in crystal flutes, which was sipped with a kind of nervous temperance.

  No servant entered the room, adding to the sense of conspiracy. Dr. Hoffman took the champagne tray from the butler at the double doors and brought it around to the guests himself.

  Jerseyman squinted his disgust at this effete liquor, but wrapped a grimy hand around a glass stem anyway. The viscount clutched his flute as if wishing for a weapon to replace it. Captain Rousseau, the only newcomer to this cast of characters, about whose inclusion Irene had been extremely sphinx-like, sat stiffly on a fragile Directoire sofa, the foot of his glass balanced upon his knee.

  Oscar contented himself with decorating Sarah’s sh
oulders and disconcerting the guests by raising his head every so often to hiss mournfully.

  “I confess, gentlemen,” the Divine Sarah began in a throbbing tone, “to having lured you here under false pretenses. This evening’s amusement will not be the usual mélange of frivolous chatter and gaiety, but rather a demonstration conducted by my esteemed friend and sister of the stage, Madame Irene Norton.”

  Irene bowed her head modestly. “Captain Rousseau, I present this portion of a map. Does it mean anything to you?”

  She handed him my sketch of that portion of the Cretan shoreline I had matched to the compass rose.

  The captain, a stout man in his fifties with old-fashioned grizzled mutton chops, extracted a pair of spectacles and frowned at the paper Irene offered.

  “ ’Tis a map, all right. This coastline could be anywhere on the seven seas, Madame.”

  “It belongs to this one.”

  The captain’s head shook somberly. “A mere patch of a map tells me nothing. Have you any notion of how many jagged coastal miles of North Africa, not to mention the boot of Italy and the nose of Greece, skirt the Mediterranean?”

  “No,” Irene admitted sweetly. She took back my sketch of the pertinent coastline and offered it to Jerseyman.

  The sailor precariously set down his champagne flute and smoothed the paper over his sailcloth-trousered knee. He reversed the map, then tilted it left and right, after which he looked up with a grin.

  “Aye, that’s the spot, Madam. Fox-Eye Bay. I’ve spent half me lifetime staring at the image of that curlicue of coast on me shut eyelids. That’s where I was swept ashore when we floundered in sixty-nine.”

  “I don’t doubt it.” Irene turned to the captain. “I wished to demonstrate, sir, that while general seamanship does not qualify one to recognize every bit of coast roundabout, even a simple sailor can commit a particular spot to memory if he has reason to.”