Irene Adler 08 - Spider Dance

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “Conklin, sir. Father. Bishop, that is. I guess yer kissin’ cousins to the high clergy of me own Catholic faith.”

  Here the bishop’s genial expression curdled somewhat. What could he do? More than half the population of New York was Irish Roman Catholic these days. They were tenement shop workers, domestics, laborers, bartenders, and policemen. Even private policemen.

  “I need information on the good fathers,” said Holmes, taking out a tiny stub of pencil, licking the lead and applying the blunted point to a smudged and crinkled notebook. “Where were they last seen?”

  “Why, here, I suppose. Both had official positions at the club, and therefore roomed here. We also have a library and club rooms and direct our charities to the poor from here as well.”

  “You don’t room here?”

  “No. No, of course not. I have the official residence.”

  “Then why do ye spend so much time here?”

  “To dine, of course, in a more communal atmosphere. The cook is quite fine. And to escape the pomp of my office.”

  “I don’t suppose you invite any Catholic priests here.”

  “Prelates, from time to time, but not priests. The large Irish population of New York requires us to set aside denominational differences on occasion. Our congregation, of course, is more . . . stable.”

  “No Irish need apply, eh, Bishop?” Holmes had strolled insolently to the bay window overlooking the street. “No Jesuits either, I s’pose?”

  “Jesuits? No. Hardly. They are the aggressive arm of that ancient religion. Brilliant but doctrinaire. Bishops, on the other hand, well, we all have to be diplomats.”

  Holmes turned from the window that looked out on absolute blackness now.

  “I don’t s’pose you allow cigar smokin’ inside here?”

  “Not in the library. In the club rooms, but—”

  “Nothing to it. I’ll take meself outside for a think and a smoke. The two often go togither. Maybe Miss Ruxleigh has a question or two to ask you about Father Edmonds. She was much taken with him.”

  “Huxleigh! And I was no more taken with Father Edmonds than I am with you, Mr., uh, Cronklin.”

  Holmes had oiled out of the door, the disgusting snuffed cigar already in his hand, ready for a relighting.

  Really! I’d never been seen in such debased company before, even if it was a pose, and blushed for the crudity of my companion.

  The bishop, being a man of sensibility, immediately sensed my humiliation. “These police types are but a step up from the petty criminals they pursue, my dear,” he consoled me with a fineness of feeling I much appreciated.

  I glanced out the window to see a bright ember flare against the dark. The revolting cigar. I do wish Irene would stop smoking such things! Irene . . . My eyes teared over.

  “Please, Miss Huxleigh, do sit down again. Believe me, I’ll do all in my power to assist in your search for Mrs. Norton. Such a handsome woman. One hopes that . . . well, much evil happens on the streets of New York. I understand your need to employ an inquiry agent, but perhaps Mr. Conklin is not the best person. He seems eager to be off.”

  I leaped up from my chair like a fox startled by hounds and whirled to look out the window. No ember glowed in the dark. I had been . . . seduced and abandoned.

  Holmes was off on the real business of the night and I was sitting here exchanging inanities with the bishop.

  “I must go.”

  And I did, ignoring the bishop’s sputtered objections behind me, prating of dark streets, of Irene’s recent fate, promising he would find me an escort. . . .

  I had had an escort, and he’d quite neatly deluded . . . and eluded me.

  I burst out into the street. Night black now, and no one visible there. Not a soul.

  Rushing down the stairs, I squinted at the far gaslights, searching for anything moving.

  Something tinkled in the sparse summer breeze that crept down this misbegotten street.

  Then someone swooped from the dark and captured my arm.

  I didn’t waste time screaming, but fumbled among the objects on my chatelaine for the sharp, small scissors.

  “Nell!”

  I paused at hearing Godfrey’s voice. “Where’s Holmes? Oh, Godfrey, he has slipped us both, as he always intended.”

  “Perhaps.” Godfrey whistled. A clatter of hooves came charging out from the mews behind the Episcopal Club. We were up and into a hansom cab before—as Americans say—I could whistle “Dixie,” although why I would do such a vulgar thing, I can’t imagine.

  “A carriage came past just now,” Godfrey said after ordering the driver to make for Broadway as fast as he could. “It paused between the peddler’s cart Holmes ordered me to man and the Episcopal Club. When it moved on, Holmes was gone: kidnapped or willingly away. I don’t know which. Perhaps we can still catch it.”

  “What’s he up to, Godfrey?”

  “Finding Irene and Consuelo Vanderbilt. Without our participation. He’s accomplished his goal. He’s been taken by the ones who took them, and he left us behind.”

  “What about Quentin? Where is he?”

  “Either duped, as we were, or already on the trail. It could be that Holmes regards you and me as amateurs, as emotionally wrought-up amateurs better left out of the picture. He told me to arrange for the hansom to wait so I could escort you safely back to the Astor House.”

  “What arrogance!” I sounded like an Amazon. “What shall we do?” I wailed the next moment.

  “I for one intend to follow him if I can. This cab will go where I tell it. Unless you object.”

  “Object? I applaud.”

  Godfrey was leaning half out of the hansom to see ahead as it turned onto the brightly lit thoroughfare of Broadway.

  “There! That Gurney with the two black horses ahead of the horsecar.” Godfrey pounded his walking stick on the trapdoor above us. “Follow that Gurney, but at a decent distance.”

  I heard a grunt in answer.

  “Will the driver heed you?”

  “A half-eagle gold piece says yes. What did you learn inside the Episcopal Club?”

  “Nothing! Holmes engineered this outing merely to attract the wrong attention.”

  “At which he succeeded brilliantly,” Godfrey said with a rueful chortle.

  “Godfrey! This entire plan was based on duping us.”

  “But he hasn’t quite, has he?”

  I saw Godfrey’s keen features illuminated in the flash of a passing electric streetlight. They were as sharp and intent as Holmes on the hunt for scintillas of evidence on a carpet. We were all hurtling toward a way to find and free Irene.

  If she needed freeing.

  That sober thought I didn’t share with Godfrey. Irene was as willful as any wayward child. If she had secret purposes of her own she would think nothing of following them to any extreme required.

  50

  SACRIFICIAL GOATEE

  The stage lost a fine actor, even as science lost an acute reasoner,

  when he became a specialist in crime.

  —DR. WATSON IN “A SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA”

  FROM THE CASE NOTES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES

  My abductors, of course, had to be quite rude about it.

  The moment I had been snatched inside their rattling Gurney, I was thrust on the floor at their feet and my hands secured behind me.

  I made no resistance. The idea was to remain conscious and hear, see . . . and smell . . . what they were up to. Where they were up to it was no more a mystery after a deep inhale or two of their noxious footwear.

  We were headed toward the harbor, naturally, where a rat maze of warehouses permits any manner of concealment.

  The one barefoot member of the party, whose tracks I had spied at the boardinghouse the night Madam Irene disappeared, provided the most provocative and chilling aroma. Blood. Fresh blood.

  I admit the revelation chilled my own blood. I’d never doubted these were desperate villains willing to commit mayhem i
n order to gain their ends. I hadn’t expected the smell of fresh blood and the fears it gave birth to, for both Irene Adler and for the child she had taken, apparently these . . .

  Well, what were they? My bones and head received the endless jolt of the cobblestones, bereft of any softening springs, but I can think in a thunderstorm.

  From the shifting bars of gaslight that entered the Gurney windows, I detected thick bull-hide soles and lanolin-soaked uppers. Hardly Regent Street.

  Crude men, I decided, from crude climates. As for the unshod one . . . I’d already formed some idea of his origins. In fact, I’d researched the notion a bit. What I found was more disquieting than anything I’d yet seen, including Father Hawks’s ravaged body.

  Imagination, however, is the great enemy of logical deduction.

  Anything I learned now would help me save the Vanderbilt child, and her ambiguous abductress, and myself for that matter, later.

  And it was a good deal later, almost half an hour, I should estimate, before the Gurney came to a stop in an area reeking of sea salt, manure, and blood.

  Distant ships sounded, mournful as distant whales, while they left and attained the great harbor.

  Such lofty matters were remote from the doings here.

  I was pulled out of the carriage onto the damp cobblestones, inhaling another dose of salty mist and blood, dragged to my feet between two fellows clad in dark, damp, and cheap wool, and marched into a building as huge and inky as the night around us.

  “Hurry!” ordered a voice in English. A voice that had never spoken my language from birth.

  The fools had thought binding a man’s hands was sufficient That left his feet, eyes, nose, and brain perfectly free to operate.

  I hadn’t anticipated brilliant opponents, but madness makes up in power for a great deal of stupidity.

  I was half dragged over perhaps forty yards of hard stone floor, glimpsing a roof as high as a cathedral, or more aptly, the wings of a theater, for I saw distant metal mechanisms above, reflecting the light from the bull’s-eyes lanterns they bore.

  Lanterns indoors indicated a deserted warehouse of sorts.

  “Here,” cried the one voice that used English.

  I was rushed from the dark into a chamber haphazardly lit by paraffin lamps. Their smell mercifully dampened the inescapable odor of new and old blood throughout this echoing building.

  I was half sat on a wooden chair placed before a crude wooden table.

  “This man came to the club seeking information.”

  Another man jerked my head back by the hair—my atrociously shaped bowler hat had been left to be windblown about the street in front of the Episcopal Club.

  My eyes blinked from the unaccustomed light, but not before they had registered the sight of Madam Irene Adler Norton, smoking a small cigar and standing before me with a pistol akimbo on her hip.

  I must admit to being momentarily speechless, but luckily the occasion didn’t require comment.

  Behind her I noticed the child in her pale lace stockings and frock, half sitting, half reclining on a table, like a nymph in an absinthe advertisement, her thin legs tucked under her. Then I realized the reason for her sitting on a table. Rats.

  Even as I thought it, I heard the snakelike rasp of their tails over the stone floor.

  “He was going about the club, asking questions about everything,” the first man said

  “And who are you?” Madam Irene demanded, giving immediate notice that she was playing some role to mislead this gang.

  “Artemis Conklin, but I go by Artie.”

  She lifted the pistol and aimed it at my forehead. “What are you?”

  “A Pinkerton by profession, but not for long,” I added.

  “Pinkerton?” The man behind me sounded confused, and extremely annoyed that he was. I felt his grip on my hair tighten.

  Given his barefoot companion, this was not a happy observation.

  Madam Irene shrugged. Her hair was down and disarranged, and her trousers stained, but her manner was as calm as if she stood in a chapel instead of a slaughterhouse, for that was what this great empty building had been.

  “Pinkertons are a sort of domestic detective,” she told the man behind me. I would describe her tone as a dismissive sneer. “They are hired to look into errant spouses and do some antiunion work for the kingpins of commerce, but are otherwise no threat.”

  “This one was with the woman who earlier was with you.”

  “No threat also. I had to mount my own inquiries before I, er . . . encountered you and your compatriots. Unimportant tools, my dear Reisling. You can understand my need for them.”

  “Then you think this man knows nothing?”

  She regarded me for a long, torturous moment. It appeared that during her short time with these thugs she had become their leader, or at least their guide.

  She blew out a considering stream of smoke that teased my nose like a fresh slipper of shag on Baker Street. Alas, both shag and Baker Street were far from this sink-hole of iniquity.

  “I doubt he knows anything worthwhile. You can see by his suit that he’s a humbug sort of detective.”

  “Still, we should let our savage pet have at him. A little manicure job and he will say whatever we want to hear.”

  At this I was hauled up from behind and slammed facedown of the rough wooden table. My bonds were loosened, but no sooner had my elbows unflexed than two men turned me over and threw their full weight on both my arms.

  I saw nothing now but the crude wooden struts of the small chamber’s ceiling above my head. I heard, however, the poor child whimper.

  My arms were pulled outward and my wrists pinned.

  A face from a nightmare . . . dark, painted with the image of bones, raised a knife over me.

  I heard a pistol cocked. Another stream of smoke diffused through the lantern light that revealed every fiendish feature of my torturer’s face.

  “It’s him or the Vanderbilt spawn,” the English speaker said. “One or the other will make a nice donation to the decor on Fifth Avenue. Vanderbilt needs another warning.”

  “A waste of time,” Irene Adler Norton said with studied ennui, “but you’ll do what you will do.”

  I bunched every muscle in my body for resistance . . . or endurance.

  51

  ABBOT NOIR REDUX

  But the inspector and Irene had not been speaking of my

  mythical head monk at all. Not Abbot Noir, but abattoir,

  a word I did know even if I did not expect to hear it

  spoken in polite society.

  Slaughterhouse.

  —NELL HUXLEIGH IN CHAPEL NOIR BY CAROLE NELSON DOUGLAS

  Soon our horse’s clopping hooves were no longer part of the constant equine drumbeat along Broadway but became a singular effect. Godfrey’s and my hansom turned down darker and even darker streets.

  We’d borne west, not east. I’d assumed the slums of the East Side, teeming with tenements, would be the destination of so dangerous a criminal element desiring to hide.

  But our hansom was slowing to navigate the damp, salty air of the docks. There was no way to muffle the horses’s hooves. Both Godfrey and I felt as if our presence were announced with every step as definitely as by a footman pounding a staff at a royal reception to shout out the name of each arriving guest.

  The rank odor of wet wood and dead fish was mild compared to another reek that hit us in the open hansom like a slap across the face.

  “Godfrey—?”

  He thumped on the trapdoor until the driver’s top hat was visible, if not his face beneath the ragged brim.

  “Where are we, man?”

  “Holding pens,” was the muffled answer. And another word.

  “The Gurney?” Godfrey asked.

  “Turned down this alleyway. I don’t see or hear it, sir.”

  “Then stop at once. We’ll get out here.”

  “But, sir, ‘sno place to take a lady.”

  G
odfrey released us both from the hansom. We stood on damp cobblestones shining faintly from some unseen light.

  I glimpsed another gold coin handed up to the driver.

  “Wait for us.”

  The top hat nodded, even as the gold piece disappeared. I wasn’t sure he’d wait, but then, I didn’t care. If we weren’t successful in finding Irene tonight, no ride back to Broadway would bring the light back into my life, or Godfrey’s, again.

  “That odor!” I said as we walked away. “It’s like a barn, but a thousand times worse.”

  “That’s because these barns house thousands of farm animals.”

  “Thousands? This is a—”

  “An area of slaughterhouses, I think.”

  I stopped dead in my tracks. “An abattoir.” Of course I was familiar with the French word for slaughterhouse. I had, in fact, once visited the great Paris open market of Les Halles, where butchered meat hung on hooks and passersby had to be wary of slipping on the odd misplaced entrail. . . . One visit had been more than enough.

  I also recalled once mistaking the word abattoir for a personage: Abbot Noir. This had been on the scene of the worst human slaughter Irene and I had ever encountered, only last spring.

  “You can return to the hansom and wait.” Godfrey seemed to sense my internal recoil. “In fact, I’d like some extra assurance that the driver will wait.”

  “No. If Irene and Consuelo are in this terrible place they’ll need us both.”

  We resumed walking without more debate, each of us listening, but hearing only the muffled bawls of penned animals awaiting brutal death.

  “Perhaps,” I told Godfrey as we pushed as quietly as we could farther into the silent dark, “we are in the way.”

  “Perhaps. But I can’t let Irene’s fate rest in another’s hands, no matter how expert, any more than you can. We must be discreet, Nell. If it appears that our presence will interfere with Holmes’s scheme, we must defer.”

  For a moment, I said nothing. I recognized that the man had put himself in danger to resolve this mystery. That he had intended to risk himself and only himself. And perhaps Quentin.

  I also recognized that Godfrey’s and my claim upon Irene superceded any intent Sherlock Holmes might harbor. Besides, Holmes’s first professional obligation was to poor little Consuelo Vanderbilt. Not Irene. No matter how personally he might wish to save her, he was committed to Consuelo. No one else. And certainly not to Godfrey and myself, whom he’d left flailing about in front of the Episcopal Club like a prize pair of turkeys!