I heard no footsteps behind us, but felt such an imperative sense of haste that I crimped my fingers into Godfrey’s arm.
“Why, Nell,” said he with a reassuring smile. “You are actually worried.”
“Indeed. Please, you must whisk Irene away before—”
A presence loomed at our backs. I glimpsed the red-gold pelt of a sable and inhaled a heady foreign perfume—only the fashionable lady but unaccompanied, how odd... and then another figure hove to behind me—the mysterious foreigner about to bump into us!
We three turned at once, for different reasons: Irene sensing the unknown and rushing to meet it; Godfrey determined to inspect and confront the object of my alarm; I knowing that Fate in bizarre guise was about to enmesh Irene—and Godfrey and me—in another dangerous puzzle.
There he stood, the man who had so unnerved me. And an unnerving figure he was, his skin chestnut-brown, his face and form gaunt beneath garments that were a patchwork of European and Oriental castoffs.
You see! I almost shouted triumphantly in front of all the Sunday strollers. You see! Here it begins again; Irene drawing mystery and skullduggery as a magnet attracts metal.
The fellow, having reached us, fixed us with disbelieving eyes that were—oddly—a shade lighter than his swarthy foreign face. He swayed upon his feet, his pale hazel eyes narrowing, as he stared stupidly at me and intoned in perfect Sloane Square English, “Why, it is Miss Huxleigh, indeed.”
Then he collapsed to the cobblestones like a sack of potatoes. Irene regarded me inquiringly, even accusingly.
“I do not know the man!” Staring down at the unconscious fellow, I could only repeat the obvious. “I cannot speculate how he knew my name, but I most certainly do not know—have never known, never seen—”
“He saw you,” she interrupted. “He saw you and could not believe that he knew you.”
“The f-feeling is mutual,” I stuttered, aware of onlookers gathering around us. “I tell you I have never seen this man before, nor do I hope to again.”
Godfrey had bent to examine the creature at the same moment that a waiter from the café rushed over with a glass of red wine. The French belief in the curative value of wine rivals only their conviction in their own cultural superiority. More of that gruesome liquid fell upon the man’s barbarously embroidered shirt than on his lips, but he stirred at this bloody baptism, his eyelids fluttering.
“Miss Huxleigh,” he murmured as if dreaming.
I stepped back, appalled, my hands clasped at my throat, which was dry. “I have never met the fellow, I swear.”
Irene regarded the fallen man from the lofty pinnacle of consideration for a moment; though she was the softest-hearted of women when moved, she was not one to be deceived by false weakness. Then she addressed me dryly.
“Although you pride yourself on strictly abiding by the Holy Writ, Nell, it is not necessary to follow the New Testament example and deny any association yet a third time. Whatever your memory of a connection, this, er, gentleman clearly knows you and your name. Since he has been taken ill—”
“A ruse!” I interrupted, my cheeks hot with anger at the attention the bounder had drawn in my innocent direction.
“A ruse by another name may be a true illness.” Irene waited for Godfrey to report on the fellow’s condition.
“I am no medical man,” he said, glancing up with a sober face, “but it looks like a legitimate illness to me.”
Irene nodded briskly, her ostrich plumes bowing faintly to the gesture. “We will take him back with us to Neuilly, then. Our carriage will accommodate him if you ride up with André,” she told Godfrey.
She gave me a wicked smile. “Or perhaps Nell would prefer to ride with the coachman rather than with our mysterious charge.”
My throat felt stuffed with cotton, but I managed to speak. “If you wish to play Good Samaritan to this stranger, far be it from me to interfere. However, I would never agree to anything so improper as riding with the coachman.”
“Good,” Irene returned. “I knew I could rely upon you, Nell, to do the proper thing. Godfrey, you must tend the poor man while Nell and I fetch the carriage. Guard him well.”
With that cryptic instruction, Irene took my elbow and steered me into the crowd milling before the great stone cathedral.
“Paris is unlucky for us,” I commented morosely when Godfrey came down the narrow stairs of our cottage at Neuilly after helping the coachman install our mysterious invalid in an upstairs bedchamber.
Godfrey frowned at the chamomile tea our maid, Sophie, had prepared for me, and went to the sherry decanter instead. He returned with a half-full glass and presented it with a bow. “For thy stomach’s sake. It has had a turn.”
I seldom partake of alcoholic beverages, but my throat was still dry so I sipped the potion, which struck me as no more unappealing than drinking from the perfume flagon Irene kept on her dressing table. “He may have contracted some virulent Oriental disease,” I muttered.
“He may have,” Godfrey admitted. “We are taking him on faith, given his acquaintance with you.”
“You must not! As I told Irene, I do not know—” Footsteps descended the stairs. I paused, loath to subject myself to another reminder from Irene that the wretched man knew me even if I did not know him. Our buxom maid appeared in the hallway.
“You need help?” Godfrey asked in rapid French that I had only lately begun to follow well. “André has gone for Dr. Mersenné in the village.”
“Non, Monsieur,” Sophie replied, adding—if I understood her correctly—that Madame Norton was having no difficulty disrobing the man!
I turned on Godfrey like an angry goose, so furious I could only hiss my disbelief.
“No, no, Nell. André and I disrobed him for bed. Irene is merely searching his clothing for clues.”
“Worse! They might be disease-ridden, vermin-infested—”
“Decently clean, if a bit worn,” came Irene’s cheery overriding tones from the foot of the stairs. She entered the parlor, her eyes belladonna-bright, though curiosity was her only cosmetic.
“Such a puzzle,” she added happily, perching on the arm of Godfrey’s chintz-upholstered easy chair. “His Eastern outer clothing hides European underwear and his body is sun-browned to the waist, yet his legs are as white as a fish belly.”
“Irene!” I remonstrated faintly.
“I am sorry, Nell.” Irene sounded genuinely contrite for once. “I should not have said anything so forward as ‘fish belly.’ “
“You are having fun with me. At least until now your interest in the condition of strange gentlemen’s bodies had confined itself to corpses.”
“We may have one on our hands yet,” Godfrey put in a trifle grimly.
“This man may... die?”
“But you must not worry, Nell,” Irene said. “You do not know him.”
“That does not mean I wish him to die, disreputable as he is. He may have had a tragic life... have been cast out while a child. He may have contracted a dreadful malady in far-off China while ministering to the heathens.”
“Nell is right in one thing,” Godfrey told Irene. “It has the look of a foreign fever. Dr. Mersenné may know what, I hope.”
Irene nodded, equally grave. “I also hope Dr. Mersenné can diagnose the large puncture wound in his upper right arm.”
“The bite of some huge, exotic foreign spider,” I suggested.
“More like the injection of some huge, exotic needle,” she returned.
“A needle? You mean a syringe? Then he has already seen a doctor.”
Irene leaned over and lifted my barely touched glass of sherry from the marquetry table upon which it sat. “I do not think so.” She sipped consideringly. “I believe we may have a mortally ill man upon our hands, and one so recently stricken that he did not yet know it himself.”
“How recently?” I asked, puzzled.
“Even as he paused to observe us outside the café. In fact, I believ
e that he has ‘fallen ill’ because he recognized someone.”
“Some... one?”
Irene toasted me with my own glass. “You, my dear Nell. I must congratulate you: you have led a most delicious and likely dangerous mystery straight to my doorstep.”
She eyed Godfrey with rather ferocious jubilation. “To our doorstep, my dears. Now we must keep our guest alive so we can learn who is trying to kill him, and why.
“And we must discover why our formidable documenter Nell does not recall a man who remembers her so vividly that the passage of years and a major dislocation in place does not deceive him even on the brink of physical collapse.”
“He is not in the least respectable,” I protested in explanation of why I should not be expected to recognize such a man.
“That,” said Irene severely, “is no excuse.”
Chapter Six
A POISONOUS PAST
The cottage at Neuilly was becoming a routine rest-stop for wayfaring strangers.
I watched from the front parlor that afternoon as Dr. Mersenné arrived in an officious hush and was rapidly ushered upstairs. I was reminded of Louise Montpensier’s arrival on the premises just last autumn: disheveled, wet, hysterical and freshly tattooed.
In Louise’s case, there was the evidence of good jewelry upon her person to recommend her. All the turbaned stranger bore in the way of mitigating accoutrements was European underwear, according to Irene, hardly a recommendation in conventional circles!
Still, I shared the anxiety that attends a crisis. My worry was increased by the troubling fact that the man had indeed seemed to know me—or to recognize me, rather. Irene’s assertion that the fellow had been attacked in some invisible way right before our eyes—or behind our backs, to put it more accurately—was even more disturbing.
It promised that this inconvenient person would not simply vanish from our lives as swiftly as he had appeared, at least not until Irene had satisfied herself as to his identity and discovered a reason for the apparent attack.
I should inject here an architectural note. Although our residence at Neuilly was commonly referred to as a “cottage,” this was not the humble, squat dwelling to be found dotting the English countryside. This cottage was two-storied and rambling, like all buildings that date to an assortment of centuries past. It offered narrow stairs, low doorways, and floors paved in slate, stone or broad wooden planks. The place thronged with dormers and unexpected window seats, and the kitchens were a flagstone-floored horror reminiscent of Torquemada’s torture chambers, replete with wrought- iron hooks and a massive, man-high hearth perfect for spitting a pig. Numerous bedchambers nestled under the lead-tiled eaves above.
The entire arrangement demonstrated that French facility for combining the grand and the cozy. I must admit that I found it amenable.
So we had room aplenty for any unclaimed wretch lucky enough to fall into the path of Irene’s curiosity. I kept my own curiosity, which Irene has often accused of being more sluggish than Lucifer after a culinary expedition to the surrounding fields, well reined, despite the hustle and bustle overhead.
At last patience was rewarded. A parade of footfalls on the ancient stairs brought the doctor down first, then my friends. I was reading the London Illustrated News with great concentration.
“A most bizarre case,” Dr. Mersenné was declaring. “You are correct about the puncture wound, Madame Norton, but no ordinary medical needle made it. A hypodermic needle, no matter how fine, is hollow. Whatever pierced our friend’s arm was not. Furthermore, it has taken a rather crude bite of his flesh. Most clumsy. Mademoiselle.”
Dr. Mersenné nodded at me as Godfrey gestured him to the chintz armchair and offered him a glass of brandy. I have never known a physician to refuse spirits, and the French especially are no exception.
“Furthermore,” he continued as Irene and Godfrey seated themselves before him like attentive pupils, “what is the point of skewering a fellow with a narrow point if one is not injecting some foreign substance? To get his attention?”
“His attention had already been deeply engaged by one of our party,” Irene answered. “You are certain that our guest has not received a recent dose of poison, then?”
“How can I be certain, unless the miserable fellow dies?” The doctor laughed long and easily. “Your own English doctors,” he said, like everyone else wrongly assuming that because Irene was married to an Englishman and was friend to an Englishwoman she must be English and not American, “would perhaps nail down the diagnosis with a harder hammer, hut my guess is that the man suffers from a chronic fever contracted on the Indian subcontinent.”
“India.” Godfrey narrowed his eyes and tented his fingers in his best barrister manner. “His dress, of course, comes from that part of the globe.”
“I did not see him dressed.” The doctor drained his glass and rose, his scuffed black bag again in hand. “But his complexion bespeaks many years in a foreign clime, if he is indeed an Englishman, as you surmise.”
“He addressed us in English,” Irene put in, “or, at least, he addressed Mademoiselle Huxleigh in that language. His accent was perfect.”
“So is your French accent, Madame,” Dr. Mersenné said with a bow that was a little too low and a little too long.
“That is true.” Godfrey led the doctor to the passage. “Appearances can be deceiving and so can aural impressions.” The two men ambled toward the front door.
“Well,” I asked Irene, “is it poison or fever, and will he live or die? Like most physicians, Dr. Mersenné was indefinite.”
She regarded me closely. Lucifer chose that moment to stalk into the parlor and brush against my skirts. Irene rummaged in a Sèvres box on the marquetry table until she had found a cigarette and one of Lucifer’s namesake matches. I found her habit of prefacing the answers to momentous questions with such stage business most annoying.
Irene smiled at me through her veils of smoke, looking like a snake charmer working with a ghostly subject. “He may suffer from both: fever and poison. Doctors are so unimaginative. From my observation, the puncture wound would accommodate any one of a dozen hatpins I have on hand. Or that you have.”
“A hatpin?”
“Don’t sound so skeptical, dear Nell. I have put a hatpin to good use in my own defense on numerous occasions. Seven to ten inches of sharpened steel is nothing to underestimate, particularly if it is dipped in a toxic substance. Hatpins are miniature rapiers, and often a woman’s best defense. Why could they not be a man’s downfall?”
“I have never regarded a hatpin as lethal,” I admitted, “but then I see the world with the innocent eyes of a parson’s daughter.”
At this announcement, Lucifer narrowed his emerald eyes and leaped onto my lap, there to switch his tail most commandingly. “Why must this creature cast himself upon my skirts?”
“Apparently innocent parson’s daughters are as attractive to cats as they are to mysterious strangers.”
“Oh, I see I will never live it down,” I retorted. “And you still have not said whether the man would live or die.”
“I don’t know, Nell, any more than Dr. Mersenné does.” Irene snuffed her cigarette, then rose and smiled down at me. “All I know is that the swarthy gentleman upstairs requires constant tending. We shall have to take turns nursing him, you, Sophie and I.”
“I can stand guard as well,” said Godfrey as he returned from seeing the doctor out. “Who will take first watch?”
They stood there, shoulder to shoulder, my handsome friends, and eyed me blandly.
“Perhaps Nell should,” Irene suggested at last. “After all, the man is asking for her.”
I stood so abruptly—and unthinkingly—that Lucifer thudded to the floor with a furious hiss. The sound was echoed by the parrot Casanova in his cage, but no noise was louder than the oceanic roar of my inner disbelief.
A sickroom always reminds me of a wake to which no one has yet come. My melancholy in the presence of illne
ss is no doubt due to my lot as a parson’s daughter. From an early age I made myself useful to my father and his flock, and running sickroom errands was one thing a child could do.
Simply closing the shutters in daylight and putting a dormant form in the bed linens had transformed our cheery upstairs bedroom into a slightly sinister place. A paraffin lamp glowed softly on the bureau, casting enough light to reveal the figure in the bed.
“He looks quite different,” I exclaimed, keeping my distance nevertheless.
“A fascinating man,” Irene said, her voice vibrant with its most dramatic timbre.
“How can you say that? You know nothing about him.” Her amber-brown eyes fairly scintillated. “Ah, that is what makes him fascinating. Speculation, darling Nell, is always much more exciting than information. What do you think of him now?”
“He will not—”
“Awaken? I cannot say. At the moment he is quiet. You may study him safely.”
“I wish Godfrey were—”
“We are better off without Godfrey now.”
“Why?”
Irene flashed me a probing look. “You might prefer privacy when you discover who he is.”
“You are here, are you not? And I do not require privacy, I require belief. You really think that I know this man?”
“Not... yet.”
I sighed pointedly and examined this most inconvenient person. Against the pallid bed linens, his profile was etched as sharply as charcoal on canvas. Not even illness could bring pallor to that tea-stained face. Yet his gaunt features were well modeled, and the absence of the turban revealed hair of a lighter brown than his beard, grizzled at the temples.
Drawing nearer, I found myself unable to guess his age. Perhaps the extreme thinness made him seem older. Certainly the sun had tanned his skin until it cracked at the outer eyes into a fan of fine lines.
A Soul of Steel (A Novel of Suspense featuring Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes) Page 4
