“I did not investigate, Madame. I heard no sound above stairs.” Sophie set down her tray on the wooden table with an emphatic dank. There are no people like the French for resenting unrewarded effort.
“The gentleman is absent. See for yourselves.” Sophie’s elaborate intonation of “gentleman” made plain her own judgment of our houseguest.
“Impossible.” I, too, rose from my seat. “Quentin would never depart without the proprieties.”
Godfrey stood last. “Quentin?”
Irene intervened as smoothly as an actress delivering a line. “Apparently the only thing of interest that Nell learned from our guest last night was his preference to be addressed by his middle name. ‘A rose by any other name,’ et cetera. Now we may not have a guest to address by any appellation whatsoever. We had best see for ourselves.”
And so I found myself following my companions upstairs in pursuit of a meeting that I would have given anything to avoid but an hour before.
Sophie had been regrettably correct. The Stanhope bedchamber was empty; so was the bathing room tucked so cozily under the eaves. We returned to his chamber in bewilderment.
“Perhaps he is in the garden—” I went to the window.
The casement was ajar; birds peeped contentedly under the eaves. The garden radiated no mysterious, misty aura in broad daylight. It seemed cold and aloof, the usual Gallic grid of walks and flower beds. How I longed for the friendly tangle of an English garden—for a vista that was not foreign!
“No.” Irene sounded quite definite, and utterly serious. “He understood the danger of exposing himself.”
“Then why would he leave?” I demanded, whirling on her.
“You must tell me.”
“I?”
“You were the last to see him.”
I stared at her, then at Godfrey’s innocently puzzled face, his silver-gray eyes darkened to charcoal in the chamber’s dimness. I spun again to face the garden. Spears of hyacinth bowed in the breeze. Purple, orange and blue shades of heliotrope, lily, and what we English call bachelor’s button ran together like flooded watercolors before my eyes. I could not see clearly, and could not say why.
“My dear Nell—” I heard the firm forward step of Godfrey’s shoe.
“Godfrey, please! Stay back.”
“Let us examine the chamber,” Irene put in hastily, and I blessed her for that.
Behind me came the squeak of wardrobe hinges, the rustle of bedclothes. I almost laughed to think of Irene hunting under the bed for her quarry. Yet laughter seemed an alien response when all 1 could see were the blurred flowers melting into a potpourri of waxen blots.
“Here are my clothes,” Godfrey announced from the direction of the wardrobe. “He has taken nothing.”
“Only the odd garb he wore when we found him,” Irene added. “And here—look!”
I almost turned but did not dare.
“In this dish upon the bureau. His medal.”
Godfrey went over to examine it. “He must have forgotten it.”
“Forgotten it?” Irene demanded skeptically. “With even the bedclothes straightened? No, our visitor has left this room too tidy to have overlooked anything. His military training has not forsaken him. Perhaps he left the medal as a token.”
I could sense her face and voice turning to me.
Their talk, the matter at hand, drifted toward me through layers of muffling curtains. At this window less than twelve hours before I had stood with our departed guest. At this window not twelve hours before—
“Nell.” Irene’s clear stage voice penetrated my mental miasma. “What do you think? What possible reason would Stan have to vanish like this, without a word?”
“I would not presume to say, as I would not presume to still call him ‘Stan.’ “
“Mr. Stanhope, then,” Irene said impatiently. “Something has caused him to bolt. What?”
I whirled on her, goaded beyond the wisdom to resist facing them, and facing the empty room. “Not I!”
Godfrey stepped forward, looking grave and concerned as well as puzzled. I could never resist Godfrey when he insisted on being sincere. I backed away, into the window.
“My dear Nell,” Godfrey said, “what is the matter?”
“Mr. Stanhope,” Irene interjected before I could answer, “expressed a small tenderness toward her last night.”
Godfrey stopped moving. “What kind of small tenderness?”
“Er, in the nature of a kiss.”
“Nature of a kiss?”
I could stand this speculation no more. “Godfrey, must you repeat everything Irene says? If I had wanted two parrots I would have acquired another.”
“Is what Irene says true? He took a liberty?”
“Yes—and no! It does not matter. It was nothing. Obviously such a trifle would have naught to do with his disappearance. Perhaps he has been—kidnapped.”
“Without a struggle?” Irene’s skepticism was gentle but unavoidable. “Leaving his borrowed clothing neatly hung and his bedclothes drawn up? A commendably cooperative kidnapping victim. No, I am sorry, Nell. Stan has left of his own free will, and you are the only person who can possibly tell us why.”
“Must you call him that?”
“He asked us to,” she reminded me. “Why do you object to the nickname so much?”
“It... denies his past, his place. It is something rude soldiers would use.”
“He was a soldier,” Godfrey put in.
“An officer,” I corrected, “and a gentleman. I am the only one here who knows that for a certainty.”
“You hold him to more than he claims for himself,” Irene pointed out. “Is that why he left?”
“It has nothing to do with me!”
“Yet you two spoke last night, and there passed between you more than ordinary chitchat, however vague you are about the particulars. Something you said, that happened, must have persuaded him to leave—quickly, without farewell. I agree with you, Nell, your Mr. Stanhope is a gentleman still. He would never have departed without expressing his gratitude unless he felt compelled. Perhaps to save us—you— from himself,” she speculated. “You must tell us what you said.”
“I said very little! He prattled on, about the garden, about my representing England to him. And then he said that he had always expected me to be minding some charge, to be a governess. And when I explained how I had become a typewriter-girl, he behaved as if this were a kind of achievement and said that I had shown him that his memories of home had been mistaken. That we all had changed, though, of course, I had not.... He must have been feverish, though the moonlight from the window was as cool as ice water. He did ask if I judged him, which I never do. ‘Judge not lest ye be judged.’ And the last thing he said, the very last thing was so odd. I told him that he did not have my ill opinion. He said that then there was no one he could not face—but surely I am of no consequence to him! Why would he say such a thing? Why would he do such a thing?”
“What thing, Nell?” Godfrey asked.
I paused, tangled in conflicting thoughts and emotions. And then I did the unforgivable. I lied. Baldly. “Why... leave without a word. It is most impolite.”
“A soldier cannot always be expected to be polite,” Irene said with a smile. “And it is obvious that matters deeper than mere death threats trouble Mr. Stanhope.”
A sudden wave of guilt engulfed me. “I—I must have behaved badly. I drove him to flee. What I said... I do not even remember what I said.”
The strain of the long, wakeful night, of sitting up in a linen closet, of explaining what to me was still inexplicable, caught up with me in a gallop. I put a hand to my surprised mouth too late to smother a hiccough, or a sob. I was horrified to find my demeanor melting like wax, and hid my face in my hands before anyone should see it cracking.
A silence held, during which I heard the snap of Godfrey’s long stride toward me. Then a hand was patting my shoulder and another stroking my hair and I was
held close against his maroon satin shoulder as he murmured, “There, there.”
I felt as I had at some long-forgotten childhood crisis, when I’d sought refuge in my father’s gentle embrace, and heard those heartbroken sobs echoing and felt the saltwater leaking through the tight barrier of my fingers.
“We will find him, Nell,” Godfrey promised in tones that thundered with resolve. “We will find him and demand an explanation, and if it does not satisfy me, I will thrash the bounder within an inch of his life.”
“Should he still possess a life,” Irene broke in coolly, “after facing assassin’s bullets and lethal hatpins. Yes, we will find him. He must at the least explain his shocking lack of manners in the face of hospitality. And he has managed to intrigue me.
“There!” Godfrey bent toward me with a smile. “Woe to the man who intrigues Irene and runs away. She is a merciless hound on the trail and will not stop until she has her answers.”
I blinked through my sopping eyelashes at my two friends. How could I tell them that learning anything more of Quentin Stanhope and his astonishing affairs was the last thing on earth that I wished?!
Chapter Twelve
SAVING SARAH’S ASP
We began our search where the man had fallen at our very feet but two days before, in the ponderous shadow of Notre Dame.
Irene visited the surrounding cafés, the greengrocers’ stands, the fruit dispensers at their carts, her fluid French cascading with descriptions of the “Monsieur Exotique” and the Turkish trousers and loose jacket he wore. “Très basane et très brunet,” she would say, passing her hands over her face to indicate his bronzed aspect and his beard. Godfrey, presumably, was performing the same mimes in his designated territory, the Left Bank.
I was a mute witness, fascinated by Irene’s endless energy. Each waiter and street sweeper was pounced upon as if he commanded the source of the Lost Chord. At every repetition, the description expanded, requiring more gestures, more discussion. “Costume Egyptien,” she would say. “Nationalité, Anglais.”
At this last attribution, I endeavored to look totally indifferent to the inquiry. The French already displayed ample hauteur toward the English; I had no wish to encourage their unfounded prejudices by claiming this outré person Irene described as one of my own kind.
At last an individual responded to Irene’s badgering with as many nods as a street puppet. “Oui, oui,” he squealed like a transported pig, and released a spume of French so rapid that I understood almost none of it.
“Excellent.” Irene pulled me away from the vendor’s river of information. “He has seen Mr. Stanhope in the vicinity—and more. He often goes to Les Halles, the great Paris market near Montmartre, and has seen our quarry about very early in that quarter. It sounds as if Quentin had rooms there.”
“Montmartre? But the district is a refuge of lowlife.” “And high life, remember, Nell—if you count the fashionable Bohemian cafés.”
“I count them for naught,” I returned. “And Quentin did not strike me as one to frequent cafés.”
“No, not in his current guise, though certainly no one in Montmartre would look twice at him. Visitors expect such examples of Bohemian dress to lounge about there. A wise address for a man who wishes to disappear.”
Her eyes fastened on the distance. “And there is a man whom I wished to appear, just when I want him. Godfrey has impeccable instincts for an Englishman.”
I turned to see her husband striding across the bridge over the Seine toward us, his polished ebony cane swinging jauntily, its gleam vying with the sheen of his plush beaver top hat.
“Nothing to be learned at the bookstalls,” Godfrey said as he drew near. “Evidently our friend Quentin had little time for dallying among the encyclopedias.”
“Ah, but he had a definite taste for the Bohemian. Nell and I are directed to Montmartre.”
“Speak for yourself,” I told Irene. “I want nothing to do with such a depraved place.”
“Then Godfrey will accompany me tomorrow, and you need not trouble yourself about how our search for Mr. Stanhope progresses.”
Irene took her husband’s arm and they strolled on.
Moments later, and breathless, I caught them up as Godfrey was whistling for a hansom. “I will go to Montmartre,” I said. “I fear that were I not present, one or the other of you might do some violence to poor Quentin.”
“Very wise,” Godfrey confided as he helped me into the conveyance. “One never knows what Irene will do with that discreet little revolver of hers.”
Of course the day’s entire agenda—from the hunt for traces of Quentin to a full schedule of social outings—was designed to distract me from my “loss.” A pity we were in Paris. We were taken first to the Louvre, where I wore myself out crossing large expanses of marble floors and endless staircases to view paintings almost as large as the exhibition halls—I think of David’s series on the coronation of Napoleon and Josephine—all bordered in miles of rococo gilt frame.
In a short time I felt I had surfeited myself on Swiss chocolates and was glad when our party withdrew to take another cab to a fine restaurant in the Latin Quarter. There, once I had eliminated such items on the menu as tripe, octopus, squid and liver in various innovative forms, I was able to consume a crème soup and a small salade. Much of the so-called “beauty” of the French language is adding a mere fillip to ordinary English words, which last the French would no doubt spell “fillipe.”
To end what had been a perfect day in Paris—that is, fatiguing and over-self-indulgent—we adjourned to the Porte Saint-Martin Theatre to view Irene’s friend Sarah Bernhardt in Lena. A note that morning from Sarah herself had urged our attendance. I had hopes for this production, for it was based on an English novel, As in a Looking Glass. Alas, I would have found a looking glass far more entertaining than what transpired on the stage for several hours.
Although the Divine Sarah is famed for her death scenes, this one was most repugnant. After caressing a dagger, she snatched a nearby bottle of poison, emptied it into a rather showy goblet and consumed it. Then she sat and faced the audience. Such were her powers of concentration that I detected a green tint to her skin.
I seized the opera glasses from Irene to confirm it, just in time to see Sarah mime a most unnecessarily convincing convulsion and fall face forward onto the floor. The curtain fell in great wallowing swaths of crimson velvet. I found myself heartily pleased that I had supped so lightly, especially when I noticed whey-faced gentlemen and ladies rushing from the theater for the retiring rooms after the play.
“She should have tried Hamlet,” Irene observed, replacing her opera glasses in their velvet-lined case.
A mistress of backstage maneuvering, Irene forged a path against the current of the departing masses, while Godfrey escorted me. The press was not as great as I expected, yet the dressing room was crowded, not only with people but with the miasma of powder and perfume that accompanied the actress as invariably as her diaphanous scarves and marabou boas. Sarah herself was the center of a frenzy of admirers, her extraordinary strawberry-blonde hair exploding from their midst like a firework.
She sizzled through them the moment she spotted our party.
“Irene! My darling child! And my dear Godfrey, how splendid you look. And Miss Uxleigh—”
Irene and Godfrey suffered her kisses upon their cheeks. The actress merely clasped my hands instead, which would have been acceptable, or at least endurable, save that I glanced down to find living green bangles circling each wrist.
I pulled my poor hands free with a genteel shriek.
Sarah regarded her embellished wrists. “Ah, Miss Uxleigh recognizes my darling little Oscar, the so-sweet snake she gave me in Monte Carlo! Do you see, Miss Uxleigh, I have found such a charming companion for the poor dear. A mate. I plan to introduce them as the asp in Cleopatra soon. Only one serpent will play the part at once, but the footlights are hot, the death scene much extended, and I writhe about quite inte
ntly. Each snake will alternate appearances, lest the rigors of performance overcome it. Are they not a handsome pair?”
Here she thrust her ghastly bracelets under my nose. One raised a narrow scaled head to hiss.
“Most engaging,” said I, backing away. “I must not keep you from your public.”
“Ah, but my dressing-room guests are always my private public,” she answered. She flitted to her dressing table, opened a damask jewelry box and cavalierly stripped the serpents from her wrists into its padded velvet interior.
“They thirst for peace and quiet after their hour in the limelight. I wish I could say the same for myself. Ah, thank you, darling Maurice.”
I was intrigued to inspect the person from whom Sarah accepted a flute of champagne. Maurice was her son from her illicit union with a supposed nobleman. I observed an even- featured, polite youth of twenty-some, waiting on his energetic mother like a devoted pageboy.
This paragon of young manhood appeared at my side with a companion flute to his mother’s.
“You are the so amusing Miss Uxleigh that Mama speaks of most fondly,” he said in French. “She has many an endearing anecdote about your adventures in Monte, and is most enamored of your gift of Oscar. Few women appreciate Mama’s taste in accessories.”
I would have been compelled to correct this young man’s lamentable miscomprehension about my opinions of his Mama and her menagerie, save that Irene, waving about one of the champagne flutes that Godfrey had procured for them both, burst forth with an announcement.
“You will never believe it, my dear Sarah. Our Nell has unearthed a most intriguing gentleman.”
“Miss Uxleigh? A gentleman? French?”
“Only English, I fear,” Irene returned, “but he has lived in Eastern climes.”
“Ah. An adventurer. Is he rich? Has he found King Solomon’s mines? Or simply a small diamond mine would do.”
“We don’t know. He has vanished.”
“Ah.” Sarah smiled knowingly at me. “Gentlemen often do. And ladies are often more grateful for the fact than they admit.”
A Soul of Steel (A Novel of Suspense featuring Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes) Page 11
