A Soul of Steel (A Novel of Suspense featuring Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes)

by Douglas, Carole Nelson

  “According to where it entered the bedpost,” Godfrey added, “the bullet would have passed through your head had you remained decently abed instead of chasing cats with Nell.”

  “Nell?” Our guest stared at me with some confusion.

  “A nickname,” I explained a trifle smugly. “It, too, is short, far more efficient than ‘Penelope,’ and Mr. Wilde cannot make endless coy classical allusions on it.”

  He nodded slowly and savored his brandy. “I forget that you have traveled far, as well. This is better than salty tea,” he declared suddenly.

  “Whyever should you drink salty tea?” I wondered.

  “Sugar is a rare and expensive item in Afghanistan, so precious that they drink their tea with salt. Even salt is so treasured that it is saved for only the tea.”

  “A most uncivil place for an Englishman!”

  “You are right, Miss Huxleigh, which is why, after this second Afghanistan war, we English retreated to the civilities of India. Even the ferociously ambitious Russians appear to have tempered their hopes in regard to the area.”

  “Then why did you stay on?” Irene demanded.

  “I could not return.”

  “Why not? You were unwounded, and you had a medal. That is more than most men take from wars.”

  “How did you—?” He attempted to rise but his weakness— or the brandy, or both—forced him to fall back.

  “I searched your most intriguing apparel and found it in your shoe.”

  “That is no way to treat a guest, Madame.”

  Irene’s golden-brown eyes glittered like murky gaslights through the blue fog of her cigarette. “You are not a guest, my dear Stan; you are a puzzle.”

  He frowned. “I begin to fear I have fallen into the lair of one more lethal even than Tiger.”

  “Your suspected marksman,” Godfrey prompted.

  Mr. Stanhope looked at me. “Your friends are formidably quick, Miss Huxleigh.”

  “They are curious as cats, I admit, but I do nothing to encourage their tendencies. Despite this indefensible interest in the most private affairs of others, they have been of actual assistance to some. Pray do not judge them harshly.”

  My comment brought a bitter laugh. “The opposite case is more likely,” he said. “Very well. I will tell you what you wish to know, though it’s an ugly story.”

  Irene held his gaze. “First, does that medal I found in your shoe belong to you?”

  He started up again, fire burning in his pale eyes. “Before God, Madame Norton, you tread where the Tiger himself would hesitate. I would not dishonor myself by bearing another man’s medal.”

  Irene shrugged. “A good part of mankind is more casual in such matters than you, and I imagine a great many of them populate Her Majesty’s troops, especially in these degraded days.”

  He subsided, noticing that each of his aggressive gestures had caused Godfrey to sit forward in his chair with a decidedly tigerish expression.

  Once again he looked to me for enlightenment. “I trust that Miss Huxleigh does not suspect me of purloining medals.”

  “Never!” I replied. “I fear that my friends are more influenced by your present appearance than your honorable past, Mr. Stanhope.”

  He laughed then, softly, at himself, his hand stroking his beard. “I look a bloody wild man, I suppose. I had forgotten... Even when I first came to Kabul, and found myself adept at the local languages, my fellow officers looked at me aslant. It is not the done thing, you know, speaking the lingo like a native. Better to shout at them in English; they will not do what we wish in either case.

  “Yet a talent I had, and few could speak Afghan or the various dialects. So they made me a spy.”

  “Ah!” Irene exclaimed rapturously, lighting another cigarette with a lucifer snatched from a dainty Limoges box painted with hyacinths.

  The scent of sulfur starched the air. Irene imbued even the most masculine occupation with an instinctive femininity—unless she wished to pass for a man, and then she doffed her ladylike habits in one fell swoop, as if they were an opera cloak.

  Godfrey nodded. By the engaged arch of his raven eyebrows I could see that the milieu of the mystery—a foreign clime, military matters, past treachery—were capturing Godfrey’s interest as Irene’s earlier, more domestic investigations had failed to do.

  I, of course, could not have been more indifferent, save for the subject of our inquiry.

  “A spy,” Irene repeated in a dreamy, thrilling voice. “Sarah would love it.”

  Mr. Stanhope shook his head. “Grubby, thankless work, but Army life did not suit me. I liked being off on my own in the crowded native bazaars, eavesdropping among them, dressed like them, bandying a few words, as I realized that I could indeed pass as one of them.”

  “You must have been invaluable to the command,” Godfrey commented.

  “Not I. I was too lowly to report directly. I needed Tiger for that.”

  “Who is this Tiger?” Irene asked. “He sounds intriguing.”

  “I don’t know. That was the point of the names, was it not? He was just Tiger, and I was Cobra.”

  “Cobra,” I breathed. “It sounds so, so—”

  “So much more dramatic than it was,” he finished. “Serpents are supposed to be silent and swift, and that is what the occupation of spy demanded. My task was almost too easy,” he mused. “My mastery of language is instinctive. I can hardly explain it—”

  “An ear,” Irene put in. “Singers call it perfect pitch. What others need to study, one can reproduce in an instant. I myself am able at languages, but you must be a born master. Do you sing?”

  He looked confused, for good reason. “I’ve joined a chorus or two at camp. I’m reasonably true, but no soloist.”

  “Irene,” I put in, “is an opera singer.”

  “Retired,” she added swiftly.

  He nodded. “Due to death.”

  “Due to reported death, which is much the same as the real thing.”

  “Naturally,” I explained, “Irene has this perfect pitch she mentions. So she understands your gift.”

  “More of a curse,” he said wearily. “It has kept me from England for a decade. But you ask about the medal. It was awarded to me for spying. That was before the court-martials came, and the charges in the aftermath of Maiwand. I might have lost it if I had stayed around, but I didn’t.”

  “You didn’t go home to England,” Godfrey said, frowning. “Where then did you go?”

  “Where no Englishman and no Russian would find me. I went the length and width of Afghanistan. To the brutal mountains of the Hindu Kush that thrust against the ceaselessly blue skies, to the farther mountains north of Kabul, through the eye of the Khyber Pass’s twenty-seven miles of legend and death where brigands play gatekeeper, into the far eastern Afghan hills toward China, to the ice-bound lake along the Russian frontier. Into no-white-man’s-land.”

  “You lived among the natives for ten years?” Irene’s question was not so much incredulous as admiring. “You passed as they? You vanished, Mr. Stanhope, from the world of Berkeley Square, even deserted the comfortable hill stations of India’s English settlements? What a... role... you must have played, have lived. And in all that time no one disturbed you?”

  “No. Even when I visited India again, I buried myself in obscure native villages. Few civilized men ventured into that terrain. I wanted to lose myself, and it was easier than one might think.”

  “Why?” I asked, appalled at the waste of this fine man in that ungodly wilderness.

  “I was sickened of war, of my kind, of myself. We lost at Maiwand, and there was treachery in it. Our troops took their stand in a deep ravine outside the village, but Tiger had failed to report a subsidiary ravine meeting it at a right angle. Through that sheltered slash in the terrain the Ayub Khan poured his formidable artillery. I was able to warn only one man the night before the battle, a friend, Lieutenant Maclaine. He pushed his own battery of artillery forward to cut o
ff the Ayub’s secret secondary attack, though Brigadier Burrows ordered him back to the agreed-upon battle lines.”

  “Where did you spend the battle?” Godfrey asked with interest.

  “Unconscious near the village,” Mr. Stanhope said bitterly. “I was attacked leaving camp. When I awakened, our forces were in retreat. Some British medical man came to tend my battered head. Even as he bent over me, a bullet knocked him aside. I now wonder if that ball was meant for me, even then. But I was swept up in the panic of retreat, and still half out of my head. The Afghanistan fighters harried our flanks through the mountains to Kandahar, which was the nearest Afghan city where we had troops garrisoned.”

  “And Maclaine?” Irene asked. “The young lieutenant who defied orders to forestall the treacherous attack. What happened to him?”

  Mr. Stanhope regarded her with empty eyes, over his empty brandy snifter. “Captured while foraging for water near the village of Sinjini during the retreat. Held hostage along with five sepoys in the camp of the Ayub Khan.”

  Irene winced, while Godfrey rose to refill Mr. Stanhope’s glass. My old acquaintance stared into that bubble of crystal as if he saw the battle of Maiwand in it.

  “You cannot imagine the heat and the dust,” he said. “Our troops had recorded temperatures at one hundred and fifteen degrees Fahrenheit in June, when the bad-i-sad-o-bist-roz, the hot west winds-of-a-hundred-twenty-days, whip up dust devils all month, and this was almost July.

  “We danced with dust until all was swirling, murky confusion punctuated by the screams of men and horses and camels. We had to abandon some of the field guns, abandon some of our wounded. Luckily, I had been attacked before I had managed to change from uniform back into my spy garb. I would have been a dead man for certain in my native robes amidst that mob of rampaging men.

  “We stumbled back to Kandahar, an organized retreat in name only. The public soon knew the outcome: how we settled in to defend the city against siege; General Roberts’s famous forced march to Kabul of ten thousand fighting men, eight thousand ponies, mules and donkeys and eight thousand followers, in three weeks, over three hundred miles of desolation at the very apex of the heat. This turning tide washed over the Ayub Khan’s forces and resulted in his retreat, although he promised that the five prisoners would not be harmed. In the changing fortunes of war, soon the British were sweeping into Ayub’s abandoned camp.”

  “And your friend, the lieutenant, and those sepoys? Were they there when our troops arrived?” I asked breathlessly.

  “They were there,” he answered.

  “Alive?” Irene inquired sharply.

  “Five sepoys were.”

  “And your friend Maclaine?” Godfrey asked.

  “There, as promised.” Mr. Stanhope sipped the brandy, then held its forbidding fire in his mouth for long moments before swallowing it in one great gulp. “Except his throat was cut. One long cut that nearly severed the head from the body. The body was still warm when our men got in.”

  I gasped, but no one looked at me. Mr. Stanhope stared into the yawning amber eye of his brandy snifter. Godfrey regarded his interlaced fingers; sometime during the tale he had sat forward, supporting his arms upon his legs. Irene drew on her cigarette until the ember at the tip glowed hellishly red, then snuffed it in a small crystal tray as if she found it suddenly distasteful.

  “Afghan treachery,” she said, but she was watching Mr. Stanhope carefully.

  “No.” He did not even look up. “According to the sepoys, Ayub had left instructions before he retreated that the prisoners were not to be killed. Yet a guard cut Maclaine’s throat and wounded one sepoy who tried to stop it. Why would the Khan secretly countermand his orders in regard to only one man?”

  “The only Englishman,” Godfrey reminded him.

  “No. Afghanistan breeds fierce fighters, and fiercer palace intrigues, but they are forthright folk in actual battle. Maclaine was of no danger to the Afghans.”

  “These five sepoys,” Irene finally said. “Explain to me their part in the battle.”

  I was most relieved that she had asked that, as I had no idea what a sepoy was. As far as I was concerned, it could be some rare breed of lapdog.

  “Native Indian troops. Noncommissioned,” he said. “Good soldiers.”

  “They would have no reason to lie,” Irene said.

  “No.”

  “Unless—”

  “Yes?”

  “Unless they killed Lieutenant Maclaine. The guards had fled. There is only their word on it.”

  “But why?” Godfrey wanted to know.

  “Perhaps they were bribed to absolve this Khan, this Ayub, of blame. Perhaps, as Stan’s story implies, someone British wished to prevent Lieutenant Maclaine’s testimony about his actions on the battlefield, about the unreported subsidiary ravine leading straight to the British line.”

  “What happened about that?” Godfrey asked, sitting straighter. “Surely there was a military inquiry?”

  Mr. Stanhope answered at once. “There were inquiries, and a court-martial. The generals produced their reports, which varied depending on how long after the battle they were written. Much blame was laid on Mac. Of course he was the only one not there to defend himself.”

  “And where were you?”

  He avoided our eyes. “In the Afghan hills. I didn’t learn of the charges, which came out a full year after the battle, until years later. By then it did not seem to matter.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Why did you... retreat so far beyond Kandahar? Into the wilderness? For all those years?”

  “I was honorably discharged and free to go where I would. Native tales of treasure buried in the remote mountains intrigued me. Also, I was sickened by the method of Mac’s death. If he had not acted on my information, he might be living today.”

  “So you have refused to return to England and live the life you were born to because Lieutenant Maclaine could not, and you felt responsible for that.” Irene spoke as dispassionately as a doctor.

  Mr. Stanhope cupped the snifter in both of his bronzed hands and let the silky liquid roil like a brazen sea from side to side. “It is not so simple as that. I had reason to think that my life was wanted, too. So I saved it. By remaining lost in Afghanistan.”

  “Where you have been totally untroubled by anything, until—”

  “Until I returned to Europe,” he admitted.

  Irene leaned forward, her hands taut upon her chair arms. “Why, Mr. Stanhope? Why have you returned? And why now?”

  He sighed heavily. “I’ve learned a thing or two. I now believe that the physician who tended me in the field at the retreat from Maiwand survived also. I believe that he may be in danger. I will not have yet another man die on my account!”

  “But how will you find him?” Exasperation tinged Irene’s facile voice. She used it as a goad or a lure, that voice, and even when speaking she could imbue her words with all the emotional command of a coloratura soprano. “Ah. You are not quite as lost as you would have us think. You have a clue. You have—his name!”

  He recoiled from her words as from a whip. “What is one name in a world full of so many?”

  “A thread, Mr. Stanhope. And from a single thread whole cloth can be woven. Tell me his name.”

  “It will mean nothing to you! It is common beyond counting. You have no reason to know.”

  “We can search him out if something should befall you.”

  “How would you recognize him?”

  “How will you, with all that battlefield dust and many years between you two?”

  “This is pointless, Madame. I regret I have told you so much as my own name.”

  “Do you not see? It was your knowing something and confiding it to so few that may have caused Maclaine’s tragedy! Secrets aid conspirators, not truth-tellers.”

  “But this bloody name would mean nothing to you! None of this means anything to you. You are implacable, Madame. You are damn near Afghan.”

  “
I reserve,” Godfrey put in quietly, “the right to shout at my wife to myself.”

  Mr. Stanhope grew immediately silent, then ebbed back into his chair, exhausted. “Do you ever do it?”

  Godfrey smiled. “No.”

  “I can see why not. She is... not to be denied.”

  “No,” Godfrey said.

  Mr. Stanhope set his brandy snifter on a side table and threw up his brown hands. “Watson,” he said. “The name was Watson.” He regarded us with weary triumph. “You see! The information is utterly useless. All you have learned is that curiosity can not only kill the cat, but also can be a cul-de-sac, Madame.”

  “Good Lord, man,” Godfrey commented in awed tones. “Do you know how many thousands of Watsons there are in England? How many hundreds may be physicians?”

  Nevertheless, Irene shut her eyes and clapped her hands together as if just offered a rare gem before inclining her head toward poor unknowing Mr. Stanhope.

  “Ah, but you need not despair, my dear sir.”

  Irene glanced significantly at me. “I may already know a most excellent place to start our search for the mysterious Dr. Watson.

  “And Godfrey,” she almost literally purred in closing the subject, “I believe that I will have some of that excellent brandy now.”

  Chapter Ten

  KISSMET

  Mr. Stanhope had to be assisted upstairs. The strain of sitting up to tell his tale had weakened a constitution already tested by years of privation and most recently—if Irene was right—an attempted poisoning. And although brandy is reputed to buttress the backbone, in this case it further sapped the system, in my opinion.

  At his bedchamber door he thanked Godfrey for his support, wished Irene good night now that her questions had been answered, and requested that I remain a few moments, as he wished to speak with me.

  I opened my mouth to decline—morning would do, but Irene rushed to answer for me.

  “An excellent idea! You seem pale, sir, after recounting your Afghanistan ordeal. A watchful nurse for a short time would set all our minds at rest.”

  Her suggestion was sensible, at least, but to call Mr. Stanhope “pale,” no matter how worn his condition, was a great stretch of the imagination, if not the sympathy.