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

by Douglas, Carole Nelson

  “We need Mr. Sherlock Holmes.”

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  HOLMESWARD BOUND

  “Nell!” Irene sounded utterly exasperated, like a nanny at odds with an obstreperous child. “You are being completely unreasonable!”

  We were in my hotel bedchamber the following morning, each tugging at opposite ends of the same paisley silk shawl.

  “I am not being unreasonable! Even you must admit that I am impeccably reasonable. You cannot go. I will go.”

  “It is too dangerous.”

  “Dangerous! Irene, if Sherlock Holmes recognizes you, the entire scheme will be ruined and who knows what measures against you he may take? Besides, Dr. Watson may be present, and he has already seen me.”

  Irene drew breath but let go of the shawl not one whit. “When I have finished dressing in character, you and I will look like twins. Besides, I am sure that Dr. Watson did not engrave your features upon his memory during the brief visit you and Godfrey paid to Paddington.”

  “You always tell me not to underestimate Mr. Holmes, but you underestimate Dr. Watson. Merely because he associates with the man does not mean that he is equally as indifferent to women.”

  She tugged on the shawl, but I held fast. “Quentin’s riveting story will mesmerize them both, Holmes and Watson,” Irene insisted. “Do you think two such Englishmen, already addicted to domestic malfeasance to an alarming degree, will be able to resist an international stew reeking of blood and thunder and battle and infamy—not to mention venomous serpents? The woman’s role in this scheme merely reveals the unity of the two incidents. Now stop being such a ninny and do give me that shawl!”

  “No! It is mine. If you wish to impersonate me impersonating someone else, you will have to find your own costume!”

  “Nell—!” Irene sighed gustily and released the remarkably tenacious material so abruptly that I tumbled back onto the bed. “This is ludicrous.”

  “I only wish to protect you from yourself. You are far too tempted to flit near this awful man on Baker Street. Godfrey does not like it, either.”

  That gave even Irene a moment’s pause. “Godfrey does not—? What are you saying, Nell?”

  I was sorry I had brought it up. “He thinks you overly fascinated by this fellow.”

  “Godfrey is jealous?”

  “Perhaps. A little.”

  She collapsed beside me, as only Irene could, in her most gracefully unladylike manner. “Well then, it is decided. I must go!” she said in Sarah Bernhardt tones. “As the French say, nothing is bettair for the average ’usband than a little jealousy, no?”

  I could not help smiling. “Godfrey is not the average husband. Truly, Irene, you should not risk going near that man. He warned you in Monte Carlo to stay out of his affairs.”

  “I should not breathe then, in this London smog,” she erupted, ready to explode temperament as Mount Etna spews hot lava.

  Then she eyed me narrowly. “Nell, are you certain that your true objection is not to the fact that I wish to go to Baker Street, but to the role I will be playing?”

  “What do you mean?” I edged myself and the shawl out of her easy reach.

  “You know what I mean! I will be posing as Quentin’s fiancée. You are jealous!”

  “I am not! I am not,” I repeated in a lower, more restrained tone. “I merely point out what is logical: I have already approached the doctor in the guise of someone’s fiancée, that of Jasper Blodgett, late of Godfrey’s imagination. Dreadful name.”

  “Blodgett, you mean,” Irene said, nodding.

  “No, Jasper.”

  “Blodgett will be harder to make credible,” she muttered, “but I expect Quentin to carry it off. A successful spy is an actor first and foremost. What poetic justice to leave both you and Godfrey behind on this venture—Godfrey especially, for creating Jasper Blodgett. Besides, you are both jealous and there is something of the Feydeau farce in all this.”

  “I am not jealous! But if you persist in this madness, you may not have a stitch of my wardrobe for it.” I clasped the shawl to my bosom.

  Irene lunged forward and shook the fringe. “Oh, keep it, Nell. Wear it in good health, Miss Buxleigh. At least we were fortunate that Mrs. Watson misheard your surname. You shall go with Quentin, and mind you that you do not miss a detail of the conversation. I expect you to report every word and every nuance.”

  “Oh, thank you, Irene!” I leaped up, still embracing my shawl.

  Irene stood as well.

  “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “To my chamber, to cross-examine Godfrey on certain behavior unbecoming a barrister, such as jealousy.”

  “You cannot,” I wailed.

  “Whyever not?”

  “You have to help me choose what to wear.”

  “But you are going as yourself.”

  “But I am pretending to be someone else.”

  “Nell, that is still the same thing.”

  I regarded her with silent rebuke until she clapped her hands to her sides.

  “Very well. What to wear: your ‘surprise dress’—the housedress that closes into a plain, side-buttoning coat for street wear. A fiancée of Jasper Blodgett would be practical to a fault, I think. Boots, of course, no dainty slippers for her. Pale kid gloves and a most subdued bonnet, perhaps the ecru straw with the ghastly spotted ribbon.”

  I was shocked. “I never knew you thought the spotted ribbon ghastly.”

  “I am usually diplomatic, despite those who think me brazen,” she said pointedly.

  I had begun assembling the items in question as she spoke and draped them over the bed, except for the boots. “You don’t think that this ensemble will be too... dowdy?”

  “For the fiancée of Jasper Blodgett? Any woman engaged to a man whose Christian name is Jasper cannot be too dowdy.”

  I dared not mention that the first man to engage my romantic interest was a Jasper, but I determined to remove and destroy the spotted ribbon as soon as my mission to Baker Street ended.

  “Besides...” Irene bent over the severe, black silk surprise dress that was trimmed only by a five-inch hem of ruching. When she flipped open the front, the pale old-rose lining embroidered in black bloomed like a flash of color on a blackbird’s wing. She leaned conspiratorially near to whisper, “When your task is done, you can return to the hotel, swiftly fold back the gown’s reveres to reveal its sumptuous under gown, and ‘surprise’ Mr. Jasper Blodgett at dinner.”

  She left the room before I could answer that I had no such ambition, a typical example of how aggravating Irene could be on occasion.

  Early that morning, we had sent a note to Baker Street requesting an interview with Mr. Holmes. Irene had composed it with an eye to making it impossibly irresistible.

  “Mr. Holmes would detect any discrepancy between the penmanship and the purported fiancée,” she insisted, so I copied it in my own hand:

  Dear Mr. Holmes,

  Your help is desperately required in a most mystifying matter upon which may hang the fortunes of several nations, as well as our own lives.

  The problem involves my poor fiancé, Jasper Blodgett, missing in India these nine years and now miraculously returned to me with his life in grave danger. We have no notion what to make of these awful events.

  We have made what inquiries we can on the matter ourselves, and now find our lives in danger in a most repellent manner, which I cannot even commit to paper without a shudder.

  Please do us the honor of hearing our tale. We should be forever grateful for any assistance you may be able to render us.

  Yours very truly,

  Irene paused in dictating this breathless missive. “What name shall we give you, Nell?”

  “Mrs. Watson has already renamed me ‘Buxleigh.’ Surely that is disguise enough?”

  “I mean for a first name. It is best not to offer such a quick man as Mr. Holmes too many genuine clues. Have you never longed for another Christian name?”

/>   I shook my head.

  “Never yearned to be called ‘Chloe,’ say, or ‘Aurelia’?”

  “Never.”

  “Not even ‘Melisande’ or ‘Cressida’ or—”

  “Irene, please! Penelope is classical enough for my tastes. If I must choose a pseudonym, I have always been partial to ‘May.’ “

  “ ‘May’! That is all? ‘May’?” My plain choice appeared to plunge Irene into a minor melancholy. “The entire world unrolls before you and you are content with ‘May’?”

  “Yes,” I answered. “I am, after all, from Shropshire.” And I had already signed the missive “May Buxleigh,” so that was that.

  Within three hours, a note penned in a brash but legible hand was returned to us by our messenger. This was a street youth who had been instructed to wait for Holmes’s reply, but to indicate another hotel as his destination, if pressed.

  “You intrigue me,” it read. “Three o’clock today. S.H.”

  “A man of few words,” Irene observed, smiling tightly, then tying the paisley shawl over my plain-Jane coat-dress.

  Quentin and I set out by hansom cab taken from a neighboring hotel at two-thirty.

  Returning to Baker Street filled me with anxiety, despite my having seen it previously. Irene had draped my bonnet with the spotted veiling, but other than making me dizzy, it likely had little effect on muting my appearance, should Mr. Holmes choose to remember that he had met me twice before: in my servile role at Briony Lodge and as myself in Godfrey’s Temple chambers.

  Quentin looked most proper but ordinary in a suit he and Godfrey had bought earlier in the day at a department store, quite nice broadcloth but not personally tailored. It perfectly fit his role of returned prodigal son.

  We said little in the hansom, both aware of the roles we must soon assume before a man reputed to see through criminal subterfuge.

  “That is the key,” Irene had prompted us before we left. “You are there to speak the truth, after all. You must only omit certain inconvenient facts.”

  “Such as you and me,” Godfrey added wryly.

  So Quentin and I rehearsed the truth in our minds as we left the cab poised before 221 B Baker Street.

  This time Quentin, not Godfrey, pulled the bell. My tongue suddenly cleaved to the roof of my mouth. Why had I fought Irene for this dreadful privilege? I remembered the man’s piercing iron-gray gaze, fixed on me for a few, unnerving minutes when I had undertaken the role of housekeeper at Briony Lodge. This interview could last an entire hour. Or more.

  “Yes?” The cheery white-haired woman opened the door with a welcoming smile. “Mr. Holmes said he was expecting visitors. Go right up.”

  So I climbed another momentous flight of stairs, this one with only a figurative cobra awaiting us at the top.

  “Come in, come in!” A cordial, though slightly high voice greeted us as we entered the room above. “Miss Buxleigh, Mr., er... Blodgett.”

  I recognized the Holmesian manner. He was tall, thin and quick in motion and speech. We were shown to a sofa while our host cast himself with a kind of caged energy into a basket chair that should be cool seating indeed at midsummer.

  “Now,” said he, “you must tell the tale that your—that Miss Buxleigh’s—uncommonly intriguing letter began. I have requested a colleague of mine who is peculiarly suited to throw some light upon the matter to join us later. For now, however, I must hear the facts.”

  He laid an elbow upon the chair arm and leaned his head upon his hand, a position of rapt attention belied by the sleepy droop of his eyelids.

  I immediately recalled Dr. Watson’s reference to cocaine use. Had Mr. Holmes been indulging this outré habit before our arrival?

  “Begin,” he suggested with the brisk command of a maestro to an orchestra, “at the beginning, if you please, Mr. Blodgett.”

  Quentin and I exchanged an uneasy glance.

  “We cannot, Mr. Holmes,” I said, “however much we may wish to oblige you. The fact is that a mere three days ago I was in search of—” I glanced at Quentin in a melting manner that Irene would have applauded “—dear Jasper. That we have found each other after so long is a wonder; that our reunion has been shadowed by the most bizarre incidents and danger is a cruel twist of fate.”

  “Tell me, then, of this most amazing recent reunion. How did it occur?”

  I glanced again at Quentin, not having thought to invent this supposed occurrence. He plunged into the dangerous waters of this topic like a trout into a pool.

  “On Angel Street,” he said promptly. “Quite the most amazing coincidence. I had returned to England only after a long and not totally willing sojourn in India and Afghanistan, sir.”

  “You are, of course, a veteran of the battle of Maiwand,” Mr. Holmes interjected with a rather weary smile.

  “Why—yes! Indeed. That is extraordinary, Mr. Holmes. I can see why your reputation shines so brightly.”

  Mr. Holmes leaned forward with the speed of a hawk diving on a dove. “How did you learn of me, then?”

  “Why—” Quentin glanced at me to gain time for his fabricating faculties to grind into gear.

  I was inspired. “From my solicitor, Mr. Marshwine.”

  “I have not heard of him,” Holmes said in a way that struck me as deliberately challenging.

  “That was not necessary,” I replied tartly, “since he had heard of you. He has connections in France—a Monsieur Le Villon of the Paris police, I believe, speaks highly of your amazing deductive abilities.” In a bit of inspired deception, I slightly changed the surname, so my story should not be too neat.

  “Monsieur Le Villard,” Mr. Holmes corrected me.

  I bridled a bit, then feigned confusion. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Is the French connection you speak of Monsieur Le Villard, not Le Villon?”

  “Yes, you are right! These French names are so similar.”

  Mr. Holmes nodded and leaned back in the basket chair, his eyes on the gasolier. “Continue.”

  Quentin accepted his invitation. “As I said, I was strolling down Angel Street when I spied Miss Buxleigh in the window of a... I suppose it was a draper’s shop. I was so startled that I paid little attention to the surroundings. You see, my fiancée and I have been separated for nine years. Imagine meeting one another purely by chance!”

  “Yes, it is unlikely to the point of incredulity,” Mr. Holmes noted dryly. “Why had you not returned from that rough quarter of the world for so long, Mr. Blodgett?”

  Quentin and I kept our innocent visages bland.

  “Severe fever following the battle of Maiwand,” Quentin answered. “I lost my senses and ultimately my memory. It was only in March when I was set upon by thieves in the bazaar at Peshawar and hit upon the head that I woke up whole again.”

  “I have heard of such miraculous returns to the senses,” Mr. Holmes said. “It appears your path of late has been salted with happy mishaps.”

  “Indeed.” Then Quentin drew a long face and took my hand. I was wearing kid gloves, naturally, but still could not quell a thrill of excitement utterly unrelated to the terrors of our impersonation. “Poor May has had restored to her a fiancé who is dogged by some malign god. An attempt was made on my life when I embarked from Bombay. Another occurred in Belgium; the latest and most exotic transpired in my hotel room on Oxford Street.”

  “What was this latest assault?” Mr. Holmes inquired.

  I gave a mock shudder, quite without guile.

  “An... object was left in my room while I was out.” Quentin said. “A venomous serpent.”

  “An Asian cobra, in fact,” Mr. Holmes interjected.

  “Exactly!” Quentin regarded me with innocent joy. “Utterly amazing. You see, my dear, this is just the man to aid us.”

  “How did you,” the detective inquired next, “live to tell the tale?”

  Here Quentin looked modestly down. “I have lived in India for nearly a third of my life, sir, and have picked up some exotic
habits, perhaps. One of my acquisitions is a devoted pet. I go nowhere without it.”

  Holmes leaped out of the chair. “Of course! A mongoose.”

  Quentin regarded me with another wondrous look. “Is not this amazing, my dear! Mr. Holmes is quick to the point of prescience. Surely he can help us. As you evidently know, Mr. Holmes, there is nothing a mongoose likes better than a dance-to-the-death with a cobra. My Messalina was out of her cage in a wink—clever with her feet, she is. All I found when I returned was a dead cobra... sorry, my dear... and a bit of damage to the draperies. Messalina can be quite a climber on occasion.”

  Mr. Holmes drew a pocket watch and studied it in silence while its gold chain swung hypnotically. From the links swung a small yellow sun—a gold sovereign set into a bezel; an odd souvenir. I was pleased to have spotted a detail about Sherlock Holmes that I could legitimately report to Irene, as ordered. (Certainly I could never tell Irene the dreadful words Dr. Watson had penned about the man’s obsession with her!)

  Mr. Holmes lifted his head intently like an animal. “Ah, I hear my associate’s step upon the stair. How convenient that your tale has reached a point where it should prove most interesting to him.”

  He rose and opened the door to a man who was no surprise to me; the same Dr. Watson among whose writings I had shamelessly read and from under whose desk I had quite unintentionally kicked a dead snake.

  I experienced some nervousness during the introductions, while Miss Buxleigh professed great amazement that Mr. Holmes knew Dr. Watson, but the doctor merely nodded politely at me and Quentin. All of Dr. Watson’s attention was on his friend.

  “I am happy to see, Miss Buxleigh,” he said bluffly, “that you have managed to retrieve your missing fiancé, uh, Blodgett, is it?” He turned to the much taller, thinner man beside him. “Holmes, what has this to do with the Paddington mystery? Your note promised revelations.”

  “And we shall have them, Watson,” Mr. Holmes said with great good humor, gesturing his friend to a velvet-lined armchair that must have been hot for the day. “Pray continue, Mr. Blodgett.”