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

by Douglas, Carole Nelson

  Mr. Sherlock Holmes rode such a track as well. I could tell by studying his quick, nervous and yet admirably controlled features that he would never forsake it, and never could forsake it.

  “Thank you,” I found myself saying quite sincerely, not as Miss Buxleigh or even as Miss Huxleigh but as my Real Self. He was Irene’s last resort. He had served to complete the rescue of Quentin Stanhope from his past, and—unfortunately, I feared—from my future.

  Quentin helped his mother down the stairs and to the street while I slowly followed, wrapped in uncustomary emotions. I was once again the odd one out, but had anything other been destined for me?

  Baker Street was dim. A fleecy black sheep of cloud had rolled over the town like an endless, billowing coverlet of smoke. The air had grown still, just as time seemed to have stopped.

  Quentin drew out a whistle and blew twice. A four-wheeler veered across the thoroughfare at a reckless pace to fetch us. Even the horse sensed the storm sulfur in the air; its hooves churned the pavement and its eyes rolled nervously despite the driver’s hard hands on the lines.

  After Quentin seated his mother, he took my arm to assist me within, where it was even darker than the drab day. None of the gaslights had been lit yet, but they ought to have been.

  We clicked away from the curb, Mrs. Stanhope covering her face with a fall of lace handkerchief. Her entire fragile frame quivered at the mercy of a coughing spell.

  “Your mother must have overdone,” I said, trying to sound properly sympathetic.

  “I fear so,” he answered, bending nearer the old woman to inspect her. “It should pass in a moment.”

  I stared politely, for Mrs. Stanhope was shaking now as with an ague and was burying her face in the folds of handkerchief in paroxysms of breathlessness.

  “Quentin, perhaps we should stop—”

  “We will,” the old lady croaked, “just as soon as I remove my nose.”

  Chapter Thirty-one

  THE DREADFUL TIFFANY SQUID

  “Irene, this is your most appalling mischief yet! It was unspeakable—and most unwise.”

  “You are quite right as usual, Nell,” she admitted cheerily, peeling away theatrical putty wrinkles like some giddy reanimated corpse on Judgment Day. In fact, this was the first thing I could picture Irene doing on Judgment Day.

  “I will be out of your way in a twinkle, once I have restored some semblance of myself.”

  She reached under her crackling taffeta petticoats to draw out the carpetbag, into which went the literal pieces of her face as well as a snow-white flock of various “rats” and hairpieces. Only a bit of white remained at her hairline, and that she was vigorously shaking out, until the powder clogged the carriage like smoke.

  “How did you manage to turn your eyes yellow?”

  Irene flourished a small vial. “The opposite of belladonna, which enlarges the pupil and makes the eyes appear darker. This handy potion reduces the pupil for the opposite effect. Of course, it makes it a bit troubling to see. Mrs. Stanhope’s bumbles through the chamber were not fakery.”

  Still, she glanced at me sharply enough. “You need not fear, Nell. I will not intrude on your pilgrimage to Grosvenor Square. Two Mrs. Stanhopes might cause confusion, and Quentin’s triumphant return is excitement enough.”

  “Quentin.” I turned to him, shaken from the strange reverie that leaving Baker Street had caused. “You must have known about this ruse even before we left the Strand.”

  “Guilty,” said he with no more contriteness than a boy who had eaten all the teatime scones. He smiled at my rising indignation.

  “My dear Nell, after all Irene has done to insure my safety, even my sanity, during this troubled time, I could hardly deny her an opportunity to play my mother.”

  “And I was mad to get inside Baker Street!” Irene pled her case even as she resumed her own face with quick, skilled movements. “What a glorious hodgepodge in which to find such a supremely logical man living! It is quite endearing.”

  “ ‘Endearing’ is not a word I would apply to Sherlock Holmes or his environment,” I retorted.

  “No, I am sure that you would not,” Irene said, leaning over to jerk at my hem.

  I recoiled, both from startlement and from a sense that she had wronged me. I would not accept additional liberties from her at the moment.

  “Now, Nell, I am only hitching up the side on your overskirt. We both have transformations to accomplish in this miserable little carriage and not long to do them. You do not wish to look... dowdy at Quentin’s homecoming, do you?”

  The word “dowdy” instantly drove all other considerations from my mind. Irene began unbuttoning the diagonal closing of my bodice as if I were a recalcitrant child who had to be guided through even the most elementary process.

  “Irene!” was all I could say in objection to the notion of being undressed with a gentleman present.

  “Hush!” she ordered. “I am merely folding back the reveres. Old rose,” she told Quentin. “Quite the thing on Grosvenor Square, I assure you.”

  He laughed, a carefree sound I had not heard from him in a very long time, not since Berkeley Square days. “Don’t apply to me for approval. I am ten years behind the times.”

  “Then you will have to take my word on it.” Irene fluffed the folds of rose chiffon at my bodice. “As will Nell. There. And see what I brought!”

  She plucked something from her carpetbag and then her fingers lunged at my throat. “Oh, do be still, Nell! I’m not trying to garrote you, merely affix this brooch.”

  “Oh!” My fingers went to my collar. “It’s not the dreadful Tiffany squid, is it?” My fingertips traced a cool, irregular shape.

  “Nell, you wound me.” She shook her hair into a lavishly ungoverned mane, then twisted it up with a few flicks of her wrists and transfixed it with long pins she had grasped in her teeth. No doubt she would argue that her cigarette smoking was the ideal preparation for dressing her hair in a moving carriage.

  “Lish-en,” she articulated fairly well through her diminishing mouthful of tortoiseshell quills as her fingers swiftly drove them one by one into place. “You must not tell Godfrey about this. He will be cross.”

  “I cannot abet a woman who intends to deceive her husband!”

  “Goodness, Nell, most of the wives in Mayfair and Belgravia make a religion of it. I am merely following Fashion. Besides, you know how obsessed he can be on the subject of Sherlock Holmes.”

  “Godfrey? Godfrey is obsessed?”

  “It was my plan,” she said. “I had a right to see it accomplished, though Mr. Holmes was annoyingly coy about the exact means. Never mind, I can guess it, and if we are lucky there may be some cryptic reference in the newspapers.

  “Now—” she opened the carpetbag, drew out a bonnet and donned it “—I am ready to leave you to your next interview. For some reason I do not have the same curiosity about the goings-on in Grosvenor Square as I do about the doings in Baker Street.”

  Irene leaned to the window. “Quentin, signal the coachman to stop at the next corner. I will take an omnibus back to the hotel.”

  I could only shake my head, my nerveless fingers still massaging the brooch at my throat.

  The carriage jerked to a slower pace as soon as Quentin rapped on the ceiling. He leaned across to release the door when the vehicle stopped, and Irene darted out with the zest of a street urchin. I leaned after her.

  “Wait! Irene...”

  She was grinning back at me, and then she blew me a kiss.

  “Irene—this brooch. Tell me that it isn’t the ruby star the King of Bohemia gave you—?”

  “It should look very well in Grosvenor Square,” she caroled back, even as she hurried away.

  “But rubies... and old rose don’t go together—”

  “Rubies go with everything, like blood,” came her fading answer as the carriage jerked us past all sight of her.

  I shuddered as my fingers fell away from the gemstones.
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  “Are you cold?” Quentin inquired with a certain solicitude that would have been warming had I really been chilled.

  “No. Merely outmaneuvered.”

  He laughed again. “Pray do not be angry with her. She must have her masquerades or she does not feel quite alive.”

  “Is that what spying was like?”

  “I suppose so. The times of greatest danger are also those of the greatest exhilaration.”

  “You will miss it,” I said.

  He shrugged, but his eyes had a faraway look. “I will have to find something other to do, that is all. I am not sure what.”

  “What did you do when you were abroad after the war for so long?”

  “I traveled among strange peoples, learned odd languages and odder customs.” His eyes fell to the jewel at my throat. “Rumors abounded of a lost ruby mine in far northeast Afghanistan among a blue-eyed, yellow-haired people. I convinced myself that I was looking for it, that this intriguing treasure was why I stayed.”

  “Was it?”

  “It was a convenient reason to stay. Going home has become frightening. There is too much to explain.”

  “Then do not do it all at once,” I advised.

  He nodded and fell silent until the carriage stopped again.

  By now dusk had crept like smoky ground fog over the square, between the great houses, and curled like a sleeping black panther around the statuary in the square’s central gardens.

  Quentin helped me down from the carriage. The wheels rattled away behind us, drowning out the patter of my heart as we approached the ranks of windows glowing with the evening’s first-lit lamps.

  “Perhaps we should have warned them,” I suggested.

  “No.” He took my arm, and I had the oddest sense that this gesture was for his support, not mine.

  The black-painted double door bowed away from us at Quentin’s knock, revealing the austere butler. I paused, wondering if he would recognize Quentin, but apparently he had not been in service until after Quentin’s departure.

  “Whom shall I announce?” this personage asked in disapproving tones, his eyes pausing respectfully on my borrowed brooch.

  “Quentin Stanhope of Afghanistan and Miss Penelope Huxleigh of Paris,” Quentin said, a twinge of humor in his voice.

  I found my fingers curling into his coat sleeve. His hand briefly covered mine. Even through kid leather I could feel its warmth. We followed the butler across the marble-floored hall as vast as a ballroom, past a dining room where linen lay like melting snow and candles gleamed like stars. Our footsteps reverberated with the same soft patter the rain makes in autumn on fallen leaves.

  We were announced at the open double doors of a drawing room, in which the family had gathered before dinner. After passing through the spreading dusk outside and the inner shadows of the hall, we crossed that threshold into a room that exploded with blinding light.

  The family sat as frozen as in the Sargent portrait I had imagined, dressed for dinner, the men in regulation black and white, the women a blurred watercolor swirl of gowns and skin tones and startled blue-gray eyes.

  “Uncle Quentin!” cried one vague pastel pool. Then Allegra Turnpenny was tripping across the Aubusson carpet and over the marble floors like a child on Christmas Eve. She flew at him, throwing her arms around his neck while he repeated, “Allegra? Allegra—is it you, really?”

  And those calm, composed Stanhope women deserted their places in the portrait and came flowing over in clouds of silk and satin, followed at a more sedate pace by the puzzled men in evening dress.

  Introductions were made, of myself, of course, of the two married sisters’ husbands. Even Quentin required a formal greeting from each member of his family, as if to place them once again in his current landscape.

  I watched Quentin sink into his family as one might ease onto a down-upholstered sofa, talking with first one, then another, pausing to embrace a sister who only now had overcome the strangeness of this reunion. The men, the brothers-in-law, kept circling back to him with hand pumpings and astounded looks.

  Then came a pilgrimage to the upstairs domain of his elderly mother. If I had any tendency to smile after the travesty of Irene’s impersonation, old Mrs. Stanhope’s condition crushed it in an instant. She was a frail, silent lady in a wheeled chair attended by a capped nurse.

  Her memory was a gray hummock of ashes from which no phoenix would arise. While she smiled her tremulous pathetically polite pleasure at the hubbub, she clearly had no recall of her son whatsoever, and virtually none of the older siblings who cooed around him.

  Sobered, we went downstairs again, the family keeping up a gay repartee as if to drown out the old woman’s utter silence of voice and mind.

  Dinner, needless to say, was delayed. By the time we all migrated into the long dining chamber, the butler’s expression had hardened into an icily polite, harried fury.

  At table Allegra quite literally took me in hand and plied me with questions, all the while admiring her favorite uncle from afar.

  “He doesn’t look a bit different. Not really,” she added. “Not even older.”

  “That is because as a child you considered every adult as ancient as Egypt.”

  Her giggle implied guilt, but she denied my charge with newly adult dignity. “That is not true; I have never considered you at all Egyptian, Miss Huxleigh. Or may I call you ‘Nell,’ as Quentin does?” she added mischievously.

  “It remains to be seen whether we two will associate enough in future that such issues will require settling.”

  “You are not leaving London?”

  “My home is in France now, near Paris.”

  “Near Paris, how divine!” Allegra’s eyes sparkled like star sapphires, soft and fugitive with youthful illusion. “Oh, the couturiers, the courtiers, the utterly romantic French gentlemen—!”

  “I see that you have not seen much of Paris.”

  “Oh, but I may come and visit you! Do say I may! I have never known anyone who lived in Paris.”

  “Near Paris,” I corrected, “and you must ask Mr. and Mrs. Norton, at whose cottage I reside.”

  “A cottage. How picturesque. What else have you there?”

  “A rather fiendish black cat named Lucifer. He is of the breed called Persian, but Quentin informs me that the animals are actually Afghan in origin. We also are endowed with a parrot I inherited from one of Godfrey’s—Mr. Norton’s— clients, a nasty gaudy prattlewit named, er, Casanova.”

  “It all sounds such fun,” Allegra said wistfully with the optimism of the very young. “Not dull and stuffy and dark like London. And I think your friend Godfrey must be as charming and handsome as real Frenchmen.”

  I omitted pointing out that her experience of Frenchmen vied only with her experience of Paris. “Godfrey is also married.”

  “Oh, yes, you said so.” She was young enough to sound disappointed.

  “His wife is my friend Irene, who used to be my chambermate in Saffron Hill years ago.”

  “Saffron Hill? You really lived there? How Bohemian.”

  “Yes, Irene and I are devout Bohemians,” I said. “We always seem to be poking around the more colorful quarters of great cities.”

  “You know, Miss Huxleigh,” Allegra said as she leaned back in her chair to accept a bowl of exceedingly thin soup in which floated several unidentifiable objects sliced unbearably fine, “I am sure that Uncle Quentin’s war stories will be quite interesting, as well as his life in the East, but I am also convinced that your adventures since we last saw you in Berkeley Square are much more enthralling.”

  “Such delusions apparently run in the family,” I muttered as the serving man presented me with my own pallid pool of soup. The lusty bouillabaisse of Provence began to look edible in comparison. “I doubt that your uncle will speak of his war days. His work was secret and he has suffered much since then.”

  “Secret?” She looked down the glittering tabletop to Quentin, who was speaking with h
er mother. “He is always so amusing and I adored him, but I can’t imagine Uncle Quentin doing anything actually important, can you?”

  So much for the adoration of nieces. It required biting my tongue, which fortunately rendered sampling the soup impossible, but I refrained from telling her in detail just how exciting and vital a life her uncle had led of late.

  The tall-case hall clock had rung half-past ten before we took our leave of Grosvenor Square. After dinner the gentlemen had slipped away to the study for cognac and cigars. I did not much miss the miasma of smoke such masculine pursuits engendered, but found my time in the drawing room with the ladies almost as stifling.

  Save for Allegra, they had little to say to a governess turned acquaintance of the family Lost Sheep. I had even less to say to them. The London scandals and sensations that struck them as cataclysmic seemed trivial matters indeed compared to the international plots and attempted assassinations of the past few days. As I listened, I realized that Quentin had been right. However low-born and obscure, I led a more adventuresome life than most women.

  Once again Allegra escorted me and a gentleman out, but on this occasion she hung upon her uncle and myself a trifle desperately.

  “Please do come again to call, Miss Huxleigh,” she begged, “or at least invite me to Paris. And Uncle Quentin, say that I shall be seeing more of you. I have missed you dreadfully!”

  He sighed and gently untangled her arm from his. “It seems like yesterday, dear Allegra. I was the youngest of my family. Miss Huxleigh can tell you how deeply I was impressed by you and your schoolroom friends when I was... mislaid in Afghanistan. It was for you I fought, the new and vibrant generation. I am delighted to see what a charming and lively young lady you have become. Whatever you do, never surrender your spirit.”

  She clung to his arm as if afraid of losing him to another decade-long exile. He patted her hand and kissed her cheek and finally extricated himself.