FEMME FATALE

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  I cannot say I have an ear for music. Casanova tilted his head from side to side, yet remained silent. Perhaps if Irene had sung . . . but there were no words to “Für Elise” and the violin was voice enough, the croakings of some abandoned Caliban as it was.

  I have always preferred more sprightly instruments like piccolos and flutes to lugubrious bagpipes and the violin.

  Yet there is a power in the strings’ unspoken longings, in their hoarse straining for expression, and I felt it now, despite myself. I was unhappily reminded of the Gypsy violinists of our last grueling adventure, and of one not-Gypsy violinist.

  The piece ended at last, on a piano chord held until the final vibration faded, on a dying rasp of the violin strings that drifted into distance.

  I was struck, watching this impromptu recital, by how much physical and mental effort each instrument required, by the emotional vibrato the long-gone composer’s score exuded like incense into the room. I thought of dead gardens, and the inexorable march of autumn in the touch of brittle leaves and the reluctant withdrawal of warm sunlight into the cool shadow.

  The chamber was silent. The music gone.

  It was just Irene gazing sightlessly over the top of the piano, Mr. Holmes lowering the violin and bow together, as if shaking off a spell.

  They had collaborated, but separately from one another.

  Irene spoke first. “I have no use for it but memory. It is yours if you want it.”

  “I have a violin.”

  “Not a Guarneri?”

  “No, but what I have is more than sufficient for an amateur. Thank you for the duet, but I am not good enough for you there either.”

  “You play very well, and that is well enough for even a professional. Surely you can use an extra violin.”

  “I cannot accept so valuable a gift. On closer examination I have found the initials ‘I.H.S.’ and the signature of the great Guiseppe del Gesú of the Guarneri family, an exceptionally devout man who was perhaps second only to Stradivari himself in the construction of exquisite violins.”

  Irene smiled, played a rivulet of notes. “Small price to pay for Nell’s life, which I am most grateful to you for saving. In fact, I am most grateful that you chose to meddle in my affairs in that instance.”

  “Playing an instrument such as this is reward enough. Who is this maestro you speak of?”

  “A person very dear to me, but only informally a ‘maestro.’ He is probably dead by now.”

  “What sort of ‘informal maestro’ would own, and give away, such a masterwork?”

  But Irene would say no more of that. “An unplayed instrument of this quality is a sad waste, as its former owner would be the first to tell me.”

  “No.” He laid the instrument and bow back in its shabby box as if interring an old friend only recently rediscovered. “Yet I thank you for the duet and pray you take better care of your Guarneri from now on.”

  “I owe you my life as well, surely I can spare a violin for it.”

  “I don’t like debts, whichever way they flow. In fact—”

  He moved into the hall with giant steps as Irene looked at me and shrugged. She had meant him to have the violin. She had meant to clear the debtor column in her personal ledger. He would have nothing of it.

  He returned from rummaging in the deep pockets of his country cloak.

  In his hand was a rolled scroll of documents.

  “I have, madam, an exchange of documents for you. For the courtesy of your difficult and no doubt costly unabridged translation, I have a small composition.”

  The word “unabridged” made a mockery of sincerity, but it was not the one that captured her attention.

  “Composition?” Irene straightened at the piano bench like a marionette whose strings have been abruptly pulled into a simulacrum of life.

  He had surprised her as much as she had surprised him. Irene did not like such parity.

  “Why, Mr. Holmes, what have you done?”

  “Actually, Bram Stoker and Sir Arthur Sullivan accomplished this.” He held out a beribboned bundle.

  Irene stepped back and plastered her spread fingers to her throat. “For me? I can’t imagine—”

  The sad part was, she couldn’t. Nor could I imagine what the scrolls contained, only that Irene prided herself on anticipating events, and here she had not a clue.

  She delicately eased the ribbon down the scroll’s length, then unrolled one sheet to read it, like a page boy in a Shakespearian play.

  “Why, this is a libretto, and these other sheaves, the music. I don’t recognize the piece.”

  “Nor should you,” Mr. Holmes said. “It is freshly commissioned. After returning to London, I was occupied with reinvestigating and settling the last fragments of the Jack the Ripper matter and putting the proper highly placed persons at peace. I then had a word with your associate in Transylvania, Bram Stoker. Mr. Stoker easily convinced Sir Arthur to compose a chamber opera on the six wives of Henry the Eighth, especially for your vocal range.”

  “And,” I wondered aloud, “who wrote the words?”

  “Ah, Miss Huxleigh, an excellent question. I doubt we shall ever know for sure. Stoker himself wrote some of it, but Oscar Wilde had heard of the project and insisted on having a hand in the matter.”

  “What!” I was appalled. “The vile Wilde?”

  “More wily than vile, I would think. This is, by the way, the closet piece on the wives of Henry the Eighth.”

  “The very work you suggested to me in Paris. I remember, Mr. Holmes,” Irene said in obvious surprise, and with perhaps a bit too much pleasure to please me.

  “It is one thing to suggest a work of art, another to watch it being born,” he admitted, the faintest twinkle of amusement in his gray eyes. “The two librettists did nearly come to blows in my presence concerning the title of the work. Stoker wanted to call the piece ‘Brides of the Axe.’ Wilde wanted ‘Henry the Eighth’s Secret Wives.’ Sir Arthur settled on a ‘A Suite of Queens.’ ”

  “And you, Mr. Holmes,” Irene interjected at last, “was there no title you favored? After all, you commissioned the work.”

  He shook his head and fanned his long fingers in denial. “I suggested the idea. It did not cost me a penny or a pound. That is hardly commissioning a work of art. You were your own benefactress in this case. You have staunch friends in London, madam.”

  Irene’s face glowed at this assurance. I realized that she missed the city and its circle of acquaintances, though she had always made the best of being exiled to Paris by circumstances beyond her control.

  “You must have had some hand in this result, Mr. Holmes.” She lifted the thick scroll in her right hand as if it were a scepter. Already I could see the mantles of those long-dead queens settling on her artistic soul.

  Mr. Holmes shrugged modestly. I could not believe it. “Stoker and Wilde wrote the words,” he repeated. “Sullivan the music. I made one minor contribution in suggesting that the violin serve as the model of and counterpoint to the soloist’s voice.”

  Irene hastened to the piano, quickly absorbing the music indicated in the arcane patterns on the parchments.

  “ ‘Six Wives, Six Lives,’ ” she declaimed her version of the title. “And I shall sing of every one of them, and of their deaths.”

  “Two did not have the grace to die until their own good time,” he pointed out.

  “I said it was a brilliant concept, but I did not expect—”

  Mr. Holmes bowed slightly. “Nor did I expect the Guarneri, madam.”

  “Apparently,” Irene said, “we have managed to exceed each other’s expectations equally. Surely now you will take the violin.”

  He shook his head. “I will take my leave. Urgent matters call in London. This chamber concert was reward enough.”

  “For Nell’s life?” Irene sounded incredulous.

  “For the translation, and the introduction to the fascinating Krafft-Ebing and his studies. Adieu, madam. Miss Huxleigh.”


  He nodded and moved into the hall to redon cape and cap and leave our home.

  Moments later the latch fell shut on the front door, followed by the departing hooves of the hired horse-and-trap.

  Sophie appeared in the doorway. “So tea will not be served, madam?” she asked in dour tones.

  “Of course, it will! Nell and I—and Casanova—will partake royally.”

  Sophie was no sooner gone than Irene was unrolling the libretto, thumbing papers to grasp both words and music, and humming snatches of melody.

  “Written for both English and French. I recognize Oscar’s fine Irish hand in the libretto, too. Most intriguing, Nell! Most fascinating.”

  I was happy to see Irene toying with resuming her singing career, despite the source of the inspiration. The King of Bohemia and Sherlock Holmes both knew now that she was alive, and neither wished her ill. She no longer needed to hide behind the false report of her and Godfrey’s deaths in an Alpine train wreck after escaping London more than eighteen months before.

  “Nothing would please Godfrey more than your returning to the stage to use your magnificent gift,” I noted. “As Mr. Holmes said, it is a crime to conceal such a remarkable instrument. I must admit that I could wish for fewer questionable people to be involved in this project.”

  “Questionable? You can’t mean Bram Stoker! You like him. And Oscar is a remarkable talent in his own right, he has only to find his métier and he will make sparks fly.”

  “He is a dandy,” I said. “And Sir Arthur Sullivan’s partner Gilbert is a well-known ladies’ man—”

  “And Mr. Holmes is quite the opposite, so surely that cancels out Sir Arthur’s unsavory professional association.”

  “Scandal does not work like that, Irene. It is not a matter of mathematics. And who knows what scandalous tendencies a man who answers only to himself, like Sherlock Holmes, might harbor?” I said as darkly as I could without making charges I would have to verify. “He has, after all, given you two gifts today: that ridiculous little book and the libretto.”

  “It is tit for tat. He knows I could have refused to share the Yellow Book with him, and then, no doubt, he would have been forced to housebreak on his way back from Germany to England, to get it. And he knows I’m rather good at hiding things. Nell! You saw today that he only has eyes for the violin, if you have suspicions otherwise. That man is as close to a monk as any nonbeliever could be, I tell you! Any passions he might have are reserved for his investigations, and, perhaps, the occasional musical interlude.”

  “Which you now are.”

  She laughed, shaking her head. “You are such a romantic, Nell! Really! Besides, nothing could come between Godfrey and myself.”

  That last I believed.

  “What of the violin?” I asked, regarding where it lay on the piano like a dead thing.

  “Oh. Yes. Now that I know it is valuable, I will have to take it into Paris to be restored. I had no idea it was in such a sad state. It’s just that I haven’t thought of my old life in America for years, for some reason . . . or of the maestro.” She stroked the violin’s crackled surface. “Poor old maestro. I wonder if he’s still alive. It would be wonderful to see him again, and he had traveled in Europe in his youth, before I was born. No! He must be dead by now, and if he isn’t, too frail to ever return to Europe. How he used to play up storms of pathos on this very instrument. He said I must sing with as much passion as a violin could under the right hands.”

  “He is not an accomplished musician, Mr. Holmes, I mean, it seemed to me.”

  “Quite passable, actually, yet music is not his profession. Apparently he is accomplished at unpredictability and that is more valuable in his line of work than even a Guarneri.”

  “He may have diagnosed this wrongly. I have never heard of such an instrument,” I sniffed.

  “Nor have I.” Irene hummed a long, lyrical phrase. “How I shall enjoy portraying all of Henry’s wives! Henry really didn’t know what to do with them when he was alive, but I certainly know what to do with them now that he is dead.”

  “And what is that?”

  “Why, give them the last word, after all.”

  2.

  News from Abroad

  Nelly Bly, Nelly Bly,

  bring de broom along

  We’ll sweep de kitchen clean, my dear,

  and hab a little song.

  —STEPHEN FOSTER, 1850

  NELLIE BLY, BYLINE FOR A MUCKRAKING REPORTER, 1885

  It was not enough that one unexpected visitor had disturbed our bucolic retreat.

  When Godfrey returned from the city late that afternoon, he bore an unexpected message from another person I regarded with as little admiration as I extended to Sherlock Holmes.

  As soon as I heard the welcome clatter of his cane and hat being assigned to their domestic resting places in the entryway, I rushed to confirm his arrival.

  Seeing him where Sherlock Holmes had stood only hours before, I was struck again by the fact that two men could be much of an age and a height, and even of a coloring, and yet be entirely different. Dr. Watson had reported Sherlock Holmes describing Godfrey as “a remarkably handsome man, dark, aquiline and mustached” in the mercifully unpublished narrative of our first encounter with the London detective two years earlier. Sherlock Holmes himself was dark, hawk-nosed, and clean-shaven, in some ways similar and in most ways a world apart from Godfrey, for no one would call him “remarkably handsome.” The odd thing was that, from his dispassionate yet generous summation of Godfrey’s personal attractions, he didn’t seem to care a particle about whether anyone did or not. In that small way he resembled myself, who was quite content to be plain despite being publicly paired all my adult life with a great beauty like Irene. Handsome people could no more help their looks than ugly ones, and looks were no sensible reason to judge upon, either way.

  I welcomed Godfrey’s return not because of his pleasant visage, but for how he always soothed my easily ruffled spirits.

  “Godfrey! I was deathly afraid that awful man from London had forgotten his silly cap and was bedeviling our doorstep again.”

  “Ah, a pity I missed Sherlock Holmes’s visit. Apparently you had no such misfortune, Nell,” he teased, his light gray eyes glittering with camaraderie, for he was well aware that I regarded the detective as both nosy and annoying.

  He went into the parlor to salute Irene with a kiss on the cheek, but had to bend over the piano bench to do it, for she had been picking out the notes of her new chamber opera on the keys ever since The Man had left.

  “What is this?” Godfrey asked. “Some new lieder from Dvorák? He does favor you with the first glimpse of all his Bohemian folk songs.”

  “It is new, yes, but from quite a different composer. Sullivan has made a foray from operetta into chamber opera. This is a one-woman solo piece. I will sing the roles of six dead queens.”

  “That will be a change from consorting with live ones,” he observed.

  She turned away from the piano. “Oh, it is quite a toothsome sweet of a piece, with words by Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde. This is the sort of thing I can work up and present anywhere, with any sort of accompaniment.”

  “What of the wardrobe of six queens, in addition to your own?” Godfrey asked, exchanging a conspiring glance with me. “That does not sound like a very portable endeavor.”

  “I can make do with a change of headdress for each queen, at the minimum. I assure you, Godfrey, I could tour the wilds of America with this piece and still require only two trunks.”

  “Only two trunks. Impressive. As for touring the wilds of America, you may be interested in doing so sooner than you think.”

  This announcement caused Irene to utterly abandon the piano and spin around to face him, and it caused me to drop a stitch.

  “Godfrey,” Irene said, “the New World is the last place I wish to be at the moment. Nell and I are growing quite accustomed to a quiet life in the country after our recent gruesom
e hunt across Europe. And you have established an office in Paris that requires running. I thought you would be pleased that I am following your suggestion, and planning to revive my performing career in some manner, however small.”

  “I am pleased as Punchinello about your plans, Irene, to rephrase a truism, but I received a communication at my new office today that smells of dire news and sudden journeys.”

  “Oh, Godfrey dearest, do stop sounding like a Prague fortune-teller!—it is most un-English—and let me have this mysterious missive! Surely it has nothing to do with your assignment to untangle the affairs of Bavaria and the late mad King Ludwig? Who is it from? Who has obtained your new office address so swiftly? What is wanted?”

  Godfrey withdrew a long narrow sheet of yellow paper from the inner breast pocket of his suit coat. “It arrived at my office because it came first to the Rothschilds’ bank and was forwarded to me.”

  “Unopened, I hope,” I put in. I would never trust a banker to leave any piece of paper unturned.

  “Unopened, and addressed not to me, but to thee, dear wife.”

  He held it out, knowing that Irene would leap like a gazelle to any communication not yet read, and therefore mysterious.

  Even as she rose to pounce upon the paper, Godfrey pulled it back out of reach. “You have not asked who it is from.”

  “Who is it from?!” she demanded, reaching for the missive.

  “Miss Elizabeth Jane Cochrane.”

  “Oh!” I cried, dismayed. “Has that forward girl not enough to do on her own uncivil shores that she should bother us again?”

  “Bother Irene,” Godfrey corrected, ever the barrister and, as such, a bear for accurate details. “We are not among the addressees, you and I, Nell.”

  “How improper to leave you out, Godfrey. I predict that Miss Elizabeth will never marry with that attitude!”

  “Certainly she will never find her name embroidered on a piece of your fancy work.”

  His comment, however artless, immediately reminded me of a certain gentleman who appeared only last summer to be getting along quite well with the forward American female we discussed, one better known by her quickly-becoming-notorious nom de plume of Nellie Bly, the brash American girl reporter.