Irene winked at me.
“I see... death. Violent death. And great fortune, but it is hidden.”
Irene yawned.
“I see many diamonds at your feet, lady, as well as a kingdom ... and a small, dark case that is very precious.”
Irene shifted on the stool to ease her back.
“I see much difficulty and heartache, but always I see a tall handsome man. His initial is ... G.”
Irene’s free hand lifted the veil from her face. “Look again, fortune teller. Are you sure the initial is not W?”
“G,” the old woman snapped. “I read what I see, not what you wish me to see.”
“And you tell me what you think I wish to hear,” Irene returned.
“No.” The old woman was firm. “I read what I see.”
I had been thinking and leaned over to pluck Irene’s sleeve again.
“Gottsreich,” I whispered, “Willie’s middle name.”
Irene’s eyebrows raised. “The reading was so direct otherwise. Why should she suddenly turn coy and use middle names?” She leaned across the table to eye the old woman. “I have come here for greater matters than my future.”
“The future is all I sell. It is forbidden that we trade in things that unmake the baby or inflame the lover—”
“No, no,” Irene said, laughing. “I need neither potion.”
“Not you, but another...?” The hag’s berry-dark eyes feasted on mine.
“Certainly not!” I insisted.
“Then what do you ladies want?” She shrugged, ready to dismiss us. “I give you more in one meeting than many hear in ten years of readings.”
Irene lifted her open hand and closed her fingers over the palm. “Perhaps you read the roles I have played on the stage. It doesn’t matter, for I don’t believe a word of it. I want facts, not fancy, for my gold coin.”
“My fancies are my facts.”
“What are these?” Irene drew a handkerchief from her reticule and laid it on the table.
The old woman’s fragile claw peeled the linen back from the contents. “Apple pips, lady! Go make yourself a kolache.”
“What if I were to brew them into a tea and serve it to a friend?”
“No! The pips of the apple are as deadly as the flesh is sweet. But you know that.”
Irene nodded and tucked the handkerchief away. “I didn’t know if you did.”
“The lore that you laugh at when I read it in a hand governs the things that spring from earth as well.”
“I have a puzzle,” Irene said. “Someone has died of poison, yet it is not by the pips of the apple or the squeezings of the Jaborandi root.”
“Very bad.” The woman turned her head as if to escape hearing the last words. “You know much for English lady already; what can reader like myself offer?”
“News of another herb—one that sifts into the skin, clogs the pores, smothers the lungs in its powder, its scent, its very essence... yet cannot be eaten or drunk. It must be almost invisible and quite deadly.”
The woman lurched up and retreated. I thought she would leave Irene’s question unanswered. She reached the wall of carpets strung from a rope, then, by some exertion far beyond the power of her slight frame, flung a rug aside.
A dusty library of bottles and potions, elixirs and hanging roots lay before us. “Not eaten,” the gypsy repeated. “Not drunk.” She turned and gave Irene a narrow, bitter smile. “Not easy to find. But at least a... unique... herb.” She lifted one of several dust-frosted glass jars, waiting for Irene to inspect it.
“Golden Chain tree,” the old woman breathed. “Touch not the stopper or the vial’s deadly golden fingers will touch you!”
Irene had gone to the tiny vial as if drawn by a magnet. “How much?” The skull’s chimes chattered like frightened teeth.
“Not much, but often.”
“It is undetectable?”
“Is the lady’s face powder visible?”
Irene nodded thoughtfully, “I could have a sample? The merest vial, I assure you, not to be used, of course, only to be... compared.”
The woman clutched the bottle to her flat bosom. Irene held thumb and forefinger two inches apart. “One vial.”
“That would not kill a sparrow.”
“But it might catch a killer.”
The gypsy looked as dubious as Irene had when her fortune was being read. “More gold.”
Irene frowned. The first coin had been princely. “One more coin, then.”
The gypsy nodded and drew the carpet down behind her as she vanished into the dusky clutter. Moments later a hand thrust through a seam clutching a vial of bronze-gold powder. Irene exchanged the vial for a brighter brand of gold.
We emerged from the drapery-hung chamber and the passage blinking in the spring sunlight, finding time had run on without us. Pigeons were already flocking to the rooftops to capture the sun’s warmest rays. We walked the tangled streets, guided by the Powder Tower’s Gothic peak. Had my life depended on retracing my steps to the doorway of the numbered hand, I could never have done it—nor I imagine could have Irene. Nevertheless, she seemed content.
Our carriage awaited in the Tower’s shadow. We rode back up the winding road to Prague Castle with our souvenirs. I had the Dvořák signature cradled in my arm like a baby, and Irene had the vial of Golden Seal secreted in her reticule like a weapon.
Irene held a command performance in the late King’s bedchamber that evening. In attendance, besides myself, were the current King, the Queen Mother, his brother and sister-in-law—the absent brother apparently was not a factor in Irene’s calculations—the pair of eager-to-please doctors and the late ruler’s body servant and chambermaid.
Though it was the apartment of a king, the room seemed as eerie as the gypsy woman’s skull-lit tent earlier that day. The candelabra’s relentless flicker etched bizarre shadows into the furniture’s gilded carvings and changed the ceiling cherubs’ smiles into leers. Everyone present, even servants, wore black.
“Penelope, you will record events as they occur,” Irene directed in stern tones.
I nodded, making a dutiful note by the palsied dance of a nearby candle. A fireplace log broke with the sound of a spine being snapped. I was not the only one who jumped.
“The question,” Irene began, “is the precise cause of his late Majesty’s death. The general cause is already known—some variety of poison, probably herbal, certainly lethal.”
She bent to lift a candelabrum. The nervous flames cast unflattering shadows upon her features, drawing them down, making her seem illuminated by a hellish light. Irene stalked, bearing her branch of tapers, to the royal siblings.
“Herbal poison. It could have been something as simple as the crushed seeds—or pips—of several apples administered as food...” She paused while Hortense’s haughty face blanched. “It could have been an exotic herbal hair restorer poured into a beverage, an innocuous tea, perhaps.” Bertrand winced.
“It could have been other, more imaginative substances administered by other, less likely candidates.” Irene passed before the King and his mother, her candelabrum briefly illuminating their stiff disbelief.
I feared she had ventured too boldly on this course: von Ormsteins were not likely to put up with playing possible suspects for long.
Irene paused before the doctors, silent, her gaze compelling. An awful suspicion dawned in my mind. No one had considered the royal physicians! Were they the “patriots” Irene suspected of poisoning the King?
“The doctors,” she declaimed, pausing, “the doctors tell me that the poison was neither drunk nor eaten. If... they are to be believed.”
Here, both began stuttering at once. “Y-y-es! Cer-certainly so!”
“If they are to be believed,” she emphasized, “the poison was... inhaled... through the skin. Something that was present daily, like a baby’s powder. Something that could gradually weaken the King’s resistance and then— at the right moment—could be ad
ministered in a massive dose that would kill. Silently. Invisibly. Or... almost invisibly.”
The Queen Mother began to sob quietly.
“Enough!” The present King put a giant arm around his mother’s doll-like shoulders.
Irene ignored him, stepping instead to the bedcurtains. She swept them back as if revealing a stage setting.
“Nothing here has been changed since the late King died. Nothing. Not even the one thing that would change every day, for the victim was a king and was given every luxury. The bedlinens!”
With a long fluid gesture, Irene threw back the coverlet and bedsheets, creating a wave of lace-frothed linen. Everyone gasped at the bald presentation of the bed bereft of its occupant. Irene lowered the candelabrum to the revealed white linen. A fine golden dust glimmered amidst the weave.
The Queen Mother tottered forward to look. “Gold... gold dust.”
“Lethal gold, your Highness,” Irene said. “The tree is called Golden Chain and every part of it is lethal. It stifles its victims’ breath and is nigh undetectable.”
“The sheets,” Dr. Sturm said with a start. “Yes... the victim was wrapped in his poison, his every move grinding it deeper into his pores, inhaling it.”
“And such lethal wrappings could be changed daily!” Dr. Drang added. “Clever, oh, so very clever.”
“Who,” Irene asked, “would suspect a chambermaid?”
She turned her fistful of candlelight upon the silent young woman standing in the shadow of the huge wardrobe. The maid was of peasant stock, solid and plain. Under the melodramatic light of the candles, her stolid features crumbled into disbelief.
“It cannot be!” the accused maid cried. “I changed the sheets myself afterward, though the doctors ordered me not to! No trace should be left, nothing!”
Irene lowered the candelabrum and her voice at once. “Why?”
The maid’s head had lolled onto her chest. When it lifted her voice was leaden, indifferent. “They felt, the others, that the eastern kingdoms could separate from the Empire, that we should take every opportunity to topple a king. I was already here in the castle.”
“You did the deed because you were convenient?” The King’s question clapped like thunder.
“We have always been here, waiting,” the woman answered. “We are your subjects,” she added bitterly, “your servants.”
The Queen Mother spoke at last. “If the perpetrator had not been apprehended, she would have waited longer—until Willie was vulnerable... or myself, or any of us.”
“Mein Gott!” Bertrand mumbled, realizing for the first time that he had risked losing more than his hair.
“I’ve taken the liberty, your Highness,” Irene addressed the Queen Mother, “of having the captain of the castle guards standing by to take the wrongdoer into custody.”
“Excellent,” boomed the King. “Take her from this place she has dishonored. We wish to see her no more.”
The old King’s body servant left as the girl was removed.
“And he?” the King asked Irene.
She shook her head and set down the heavy candelabrum, shaking her strained wrist. “Only one was needed.”
Hortense turned from her inspection of the sheets, her fingertips bronzed. “How could this powder remain in laundered sheets?”
Irene lifted the slender vial of Golden Seal, only half full. “No powder remained, but I needed to stimulate a confession. I suppose this subterfuge will be awkward to defend at the trial—”
“Trial?” The King was incredulous. “My dear”—he glanced to his family and plunged into the formal manner of address—”my dear Miss Adler, there will be no trial.”
“No... trial? What will you do with her?”
“Question her for her confederates’ names and whereabouts. Keep her where she can never do more harm.”
“But—” Irene hoisted her candelabrum again to inspect the four royal faces regarding her stiffly.
“We are most grateful.” The Queen Mother swept forward to usher us from the room. “You have solved a great misdeed and taken the weight of suspicion from our own shoulders. Now all must be forgotten.”
“All,” repeated Hortense, reaching to snatch the notes from my fingers.
“I will speak to you in the morning.” The King bowed over Irene’s hand to kiss it. “Until then.”
“Yes,” unprepossessing little Bertrand put in as if repulsing peddlers, “the family has much to discuss now that this business is behind us. The affairs of the kingdom have suffered of late. Good night, ladies.”
Irene and I found ourselves in the corridor—unfeted and unsung. I joined Irene in her chambers, loath to retire until the evening’s surprises had faded.
“Poor little fool!” Irene said bitterly as soon as we had crossed her threshold and found ourselves alone. For a moment I thought she referred to herself.
“Your performance was brilliant, Irene,” I said to console her for the anticlimax of ingratitude that had ended the evening.
“A bit overdone, but the peasant mentality is still fresh enough to respond to melodrama.” Irene laughed suddenly. “I thought Willie should have me carted away to a sanitarium when I began making my rounds with the candelabrum.”
“No one could anticipate where you were leading us. I thought for certain you were about to accuse Hortense.”
“If I had been forced to accuse a member of the Royal Family, I would have chosen a far more public arena. As it is, that would-be patriot will pay an ugly price for her crime, heinous as it is.”
Irene cast herself onto the chaise lounge and lit a cigarette with a lucifer from the table. “Don’t look so disapproving, Nell; I’ve had a frightful evening.” She threw back her head as she inhaled the strong smoke, then let it drift out in lazy tendrils. “I never dreamed that the little fool would not face public justice.”
I huddled forward on the ottoman. “Where do you suppose they will keep her?”
“Below,” Irene intoned grimly. “There must be a dark, dank ‘below’ we never saw beneath all this candlelit gilt and frou-frou. Oh, it quite takes the frosting off my cake,” she burst out, “this ... high-handed royal trait of handling traitors in secret. I am responsible for that girl’s admitting her crime; I will not live in ignorance of the price she pays for it!” Irene’s foot began tapping the chaise frame, rapping like Mr. Poe’s raven as smoke spiraled around her head.
“It is not the triumph you imagined, then?” I said.
“I expected more direct dealing. And more gratitude. The family von Ormstein seem more obsessed with hiding the crime than wringing justice from it.”
“ ‘Court intrigue and peasant revolt,’” I murmured.
“What?” Irene demanded.
“What Godfrey warned me you meddled in.”
“Godfrey?”
“Norton. My employer.”
“Oh.” Irene was too agitated by the disturbing turn of recent events to consider past acquaintances from London, to even think of England.
“Perhaps we should go home, Irene. Mr. Dvořák is most concerned for you.”
“I am singing ‘Spectre Bride’ next; I cannot go home. Besides, matters have not been settled with Willie.”
“You mean... your relationship?”
“I mean this blatant disregard for the courts of justice.” She took another puff upon the tiny cigar that had been feminized by the French suffix of ette, then crushed it out in a crystal tray. “I must talk to Willie first thing in the morning. Perhaps when his family is no longer present...”
“First thing,” I agreed, rising. “And now let me play maid since yours has long since vanished—”
Irene cast me an alarmed look. “It would behoove us, Penelope, to wonder where our servitors go when their chores are done—a garret with bars upon the window?”
“I’m sure not. A servant’s garret, certainly, but not so dreadful as that. And you say that my imagination has become baroque in Bohemia!”
/> “Perhaps mine has been blind, dear Nell; perhaps I have only seen what I cared to see, which is the first price of pretensions to royalty.”
Chapter Twenty-two
A SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA
The King called upon Irene the next morning as she and I were indulging in hot chocolate and a surfeit of pastry in her sitting room.
“Good morning, dear ladies,” he greeted us, in enormous good temper.
He looked like a man who had seen a massive burden lifted from his shoulders, in great part thanks to Irene’s investigation. The smart uniform he so often affected was brushed to its scarlet and black best, and his boots were as shiny as coal tar.
Irene brightened at the King’s obvious good spirits. She had begun to think that her good deed in unmasking the late king’s murderer had taken a very bad turn indeed.
He began on an intimate, teasing note: “Irene, you are a sight to make the angels sigh in envy. I must whisk you to Vienna to acquire more of those winsome frivolities you ladies call combing gowns.”
“Vienna! Oh, Willie, I feared I should have to kidnap you to get there again. As soon as ‘Spectre Bride’ is over.”
“Tsk,” said the King, sitting on the ottoman and putting his hands on his knees, fingers inward, elbows turned out. “We will go next week. We must wash the memories of past troubles from our minds. A jaunt to the capital will be like tonic water rinsing away impurities. Perhaps you could go now with Miss Huxleigh, and I could join you later.”
“Willie, you are impossible! So set on one course and then, changing it, you rush in the opposite direction. I cannot quit Prague now; you know I am rehearsing ‘Spectre Bride.’ My investigative adventures must not distract you from my operatic efforts. I have never let them do that, I assure you.”
“Your adventures, yes.” The King sighed, a great bellows of a gesture from so heroic a chest. “It is best to forget these things. As for the opera, it is already attended to. You are free! You need never attend another rehearsal. The company will find another soprano to serve as prima donna.”
“What are you saying?” Irene stood, nearly overturning her cup of chocolate had I not rushed to steady it. “That can’t be! Mr. Dvořák is depending upon me.”
Good Night, Mr. Holmes (A Novel of Suspense featuring Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes) Page 23
