Torn between two masters, I naturally obeyed the one least likely to take offense and fled the room. I found the keys and returned them to Irene, hoping to assuage both my household gods at once.
“The keys, fair queen!” Godfrey importuned.
She slapped the ring ungraciously in his upheld hand. “Oh, very well. You must have your applause, I suppose. Fairly done. Rise, I dub you Sir Persistence.”
He rose just enough to seat himself on the sofa and turn the keyring in his hands. Irene stood for a moment, then sank reluctantly beside him.
A strange, awkward silence settled over us, broken only by the jingle of keys in Godfrey’s restless hands.
“There are many keys in my father’s ringdom,” he quipped at last. Suddenly we all laughed in shared delight. “Which one shall open it?”
“We shall try all if we have to,” Irene said.
Her eye fell on the newspaper pages, which had dropped to the carpet in the excitement. The likeness of Clotilde Lothman von Saxe-Meningen stared up at us.
Godfrey took Irene’s clasped hands in one of his and, as they unfolded, filled them with the ring of tarnished keys.
“Mystery and music, Irene,” he reminded her. “They are your proper kingdom.”
She regarded the many-shaped keys spilling like brazen jewels from her palms.
“Both pursuits require keys,” she said, “but I did not expect such a choice. These... possibilities”—she shook her hands until the keys and rings chimed like little bells—”result from my wit and Godfrey’s work, not any pedigree. I will follow them wherever they lead. I think that this is the lesson I learned in Bohemia.”
Chapter Thirty
THE GOOD BOOK
A new object lay on the music room table along with the oddments from Black Jack Norton’s treasure chest— a book in an elderly tobacco-brown binding.
This small rectangular object, plain save for the title and author’s name gold-stamped on the spine and front cover, was the sole fruit of plundering the safe-deposit box.
“Why would he hide away this, of all things?” Godfrey demanded in utter mystification.
“He had no attachment to your mother’s novels as the source of his brief good fortune?” Irene wondered.
“Good heavens, no! He abominated her fiction works. I can’t believe that he ever had one in his possession, much less that he read one.”
“Did you?” Irene said.
Godfrey looked startled. “I? Well... no. I—I was not of the age to read these genteel romances and then, she had stopped publishing and it... never occurred to me.”
“But you possess some?”
“I suppose so, somewhere among my bookshelves.”
Irene cast her eyes heavenward, although the only illumination they found was the glow of the ceiling-hung gasolier. “So passes all artistic glory. Her own son.”
“Her books were considered suitable for a female audience,” Godfrey said stiffly. “For all that I resented my father commandeering the income from them, it never occurred to me to actually read one. And once she was dead, the exercise would have been sad as well as pointless.”
Irene weighed the little book on her palm. “Where best to hide the key to a treasure but in an out-of-print book by a deceased author, one that the author’s own sons—and one’s own sole heirs—can be counted upon to overlook?”
“I don’t follow you, Irene,” I put in. Godfrey, properly chastened for filial delinquency as well as literary snobbery, remained silent.
“If Black Jack Norton loathed his wife’s novels,” she said, “why hide even one, with the key to it buried in a mass of keys? I tried twenty keys before finding one that turned that rusted old lock. This is the true clue to the Zone’s whereabouts. It must have pleased your father’s perverse sense of humor to know that if he died with the secret to the Zone forgotten, it would be because his wife’s work was forgotten by all, even his sons. Especially his sons.”
“You are not being fair to Godfrey, Irene. He has been an exemplary son to both his parents. Certainly he supported his mother when no one else would.”
“Hear, hear,” she said in good humor. “But his time would have been better spent reading his mother’s tomes, for then we might know why”—Irene peered at the spine’s glinting gold— “Cloris of the Crossroads was so particularly important to the late Black Jack Norton.”
“A message might be pricked out beneath certain letters,” Godfrey suggested.
“Wonderful! I shall set Nell and her pince-nez to reading this devilishly small type looking for pricks that are not merely the tracks of bookworms!”
Irene set the volume down, slightly open, on its spine, then did it again. And again.
“It opens to variant pages, Irene,” Godfrey said. “I already attempted that trick; it is not the clue.”
“Invisible ink!” said I with sudden inspiration.
“And how do we make it visible?” Irene said.
“Hold it over a fire, like in the melodramas!”
“These brittle old pages would flash into flames. Besides, Black Jack could have written in invisible ink on anything. He did not need one of his wife’s books.”
“Except that he thought no one would look into it,” Godfrey reminded Irene, reviving her own argument.
“There is only one thing to do,” Irene declared.
“What?” we begged, glad of any action.
“I will have to read the book myself.”
Irene marched to the sitting room, sat and began reading. So she remained that entire afternoon, hardly stirring even when I rustled into the room at twilight to light the lamp at her elbow.
Godfrey and I toyed with the chess pieces in the music room.
“Do you play?” he asked me once, glancing at the piano.
“I was taught to execute a few pieces—and execute them I did. I dare not touch the keys with Irene nearby; I would not benefit by comparison. Were you—are you— musical?”
He laughed. “As musical as a hedgehog! I am of a more literal bent, I fear, as are you. The mathematics of music—and the puzzling aspects of mystery, go hand in hand.”
“Yet we unmusical creatures attend Irene’s performances.”
“They also serve who only sit and clap,” Godfrey observed, paraphrasing Milton.
I drew the keys across the table cloth, watching them spin randomly on the ring. It was the chance aspect of mystery that annoyed me, the unpredictable combination of the tedious and the inspired.
The chiming keys recalled the tinkling chimes in the Prague orchestra pit. “The King of Bohemia must have been most musical,” I mused. “He wept to see Irene sing.”
Godfrey was quiet for a moment. “Then we differ, he and I. If I would weep, it would be to see her not sing.”
“Perhaps that is not a matter of music at all, Godfrey. For all his easy feeling, the King had little faith in Irene. And you can take credit for rousing her from her malaise.”
“I have done nothing. Work has, in both arenas.”
We heard a single clap from the sitting room. Irene found us moments later, the finished novel held prayerfully between her hands.
“Well?” Godfrey rose.
“I have learned much. Cloris of the Crossroads was the only daughter of a harsh Scottish laird, an innocent driven onto the moors for daring to love a crofter’s son. After much travail she had a hand in rescuing Bonnie Prince Charlie, fomenting an uprising of the Scots peasantry and engaging in a secret mission to the Court of France.”
Godfrey sat beside me again. “And you would have had me read this folderol? Then the book is a cul-de-sac”
“Not necessarily, but I shall have to think it over. It would make a grand opera—tragedy both political and personal with room for tender arias among the heather... Do you remember, Godfrey, where your mother was living when she wrote it?”
“How can I forget? In Chelsea, down the street from that impecunious Leigh Hunt and half the other poo
r but artistic denizens of Chelsea in that period. It’s hard to credit that the same neighborhood is so fashionable three decades later. Tite Street, I believe.”
“The number?”
“Sixteen. But the neighborhood has changed utterly since.”
“Hmm,” Irene said, and would say no more.
I put my hand out for the book. “May I read it now that you have finished?”
Irene playfully withdrew it. “I do not know, Nell, it is full of toil and trouble of a most sordid nature, not to mention certain ardent although unsanctified unions.”
“Oh, Irene, don’t be such a prig! It’s Godfrey’s mother’s book and he is the one to say whether I shall read it or not.”
“Then you shall,” Godfrey obliged, “for two heads may bring more light to bear on the puzzle. And after you are finished, I will read it.”
“This literary unanimity is admirable,” Irene said, “but I think it will get us nowhere.”
My opportunity to consume Claris of the Crossroads was short-lived, however. Irene commandeered me at eleven the next morning.
“Hurry, Nell. The landau is coming around shortly and you must dress better than that when calling upon your dear former admirer, Mr. Oscar Wilde.”
“We have not seen that popinjay in years; he is not my admirer. And you claim that we are going to call upon the creature?”
“Indeed.”
“Where?”
“At his home, of course. Number sixteen, Tite Street.”
This effectively silenced me. After adding a grander jacket and hat, gloves and reticule to my attire, I was ready to join Irene in her mysterious journey.
Mr. Wilde had married in the years since we had seen him, Irene informed me in the carriage.
“You must be careful to remain discreet before his wife, Constance,” she twitted me, as if I were the Siren of Warsaw.
“I shall have no difficulty in regarding Mr. Wilde with the same propriety as before,” said I.
Tite Street was a short avenue off the Royal Hospital Road a bit east of the Stokers’ residence on Cheyne Walk, if they indeed still resided there. Irene thought not. The row of eighteenth-century, four-story red brick dwellings peered through a lacework of bare tree limbs. Number sixteen was indistinguishable from its fellows, though I had expected a design of lilies, or at least sunflowers, to decorate the door, which was painted a bilious yellow.
The interior was not as outré as I had anticipated—strange floral borders of gold leaf painted on dark walls, perhaps, Oriental fabrics and a profusion of Japanese blue ceramic ware that were so popular among the set, with peacock feathers as profuse as parlor palms.
Instead, I was favorably impressed by the cool sitting room shades of dull gold and cream played against the chaste white carved mantelpiece and a frieze of framed etchings along two walls.
I was relieved to hear from Mrs. Wilde’s lips that her husband was at the “office,” having accepted the editorship of The Woman’s World magazine the previous summer.
“And you yourself contribute, do you not?” Irene asked as we seated ourselves at Mrs. Wilde’s invitation. “Are you not the author of those charming articles on muffs? I must confess a partiality to muffs myself.”
“Why thank you, Miss Adler. My husband has noted your return to the London concert scene. He mentioned that he had been an admirer of your vocal talent years ago.”
Mrs. Wilde was a slim, grave little woman with lovely eyes. The folds of loose aesthetic dress she favored—or her famous husband imposed—overwhelmed her delicate figure, but I was not offended by this unconventional attire, for if any one attribute shone from the visage of Constance Wilde, it was a sober sweetness.
“We have heard so much of your home, it is quite the marvel of Chelsea,” Irene went on. “May we see it?”
I readied myself to blush at my friend’s forward request, but Constance Wilde leaped up as if delighted to have been given a mission. She led us into the dining room with its white enameled dado and chairs. Charming accent pieces of blue and yellow heralded the forthcoming spring year-round. We exclaimed quite sincere praises of the decor.
“No wonder Mr. Wilde now edits a magazine of fashion and society,” Irene noted, “his sense of style and simplicity bounds ahead of the most radical among us.”
“If only I could persuade him to exercise that simplicity in his own lair,” Mrs. Wilde said, leading us upstairs to the poet’s study.
A burst of buttercup yellow walls erased the grey day outside. Curios and books littered the chamber, reminding me of the male clutter in Godfrey’s chambers. Mrs. Wilde paused at a chair set before what was obviously the owner’s writing table. Her fingers stroked the wood.
“It was Carlyle’s. So many of his things were sold after his death.”
I stared at the surface upon which Carlyle scribbled his masterworks of history, wondering if any more immortal writings would be scribed across that sere wooden expanse.
“Mr. Wilde is not the first writer to dwell here,” Irene said suddenly, “in this very house.”
“Indeed?” Constance Wilde was not surprised. “Writers and artists have called Tite Street home for decades. Jimmie Whistler lived down the road until recently. A foolish suit on his part has reduced his means. Oscar tried to warn him...”
“I am thinking of an earlier resident, the mother of an acquaintance of mine,” Irene went on. “Caroline Norton, the versifier and novelist.”
Mrs. Wilde offered a puzzled smile; clearly she had heard nothing of the woman.
“You did not find souvenirs of another writer in the house?”
“Anything we found is gone now. The rooms were completely redecorated on our marriage, under the guidance of Mr. Whistler—when Oscar would deign to take it,” she added. “They are rather cross with each other now, I fear.”
“Two artists, like dueling peacocks both fanning their glorious tails, no doubt,” Irene said.
“Exactly. Two outraged peacocks, more likely. Have you ever heard a peacock scream, Miss Adler? The sound is unearthly. Mr. Carlyle, disturbed in his work by such while he lived, called them ‘demon fowls.’ I know how they shriek because Mr. Rossetti kept peacocks; since his death some have wandered wild into the neighborhood.”
“What a charming neighborhood it is.” We began wending our way downstairs again, Irene pausing to glance out of the landing window. “Gracious, what a delightful garden you have as well.”
“The winter still holds sway. It will charm more when the vines green.”
“And that most picturesque stone cross—is it something precious from your husband’s Irish youth?”
“The cross...?”
Mrs. Wilde leaned into the light to remind herself of the object of Irene’s inquiry, a small stone monument of the kind that dots graveyards and landmarks in Ireland, a cross with a circle uniting its four diverging arms. In the dull daylight her pallor emphasized the lines that two swiftly successive childbirths had etched in her countenance. No doubt I shall soon look as worn as a token of my custody of Casanova.
“Nothing to do with Oscar, save that it is Irish,” she said of the cross. “A garden ruin we inherited that has leaned forever at that disreputable angle. I wanted to straighten it, but Oscar insisted that aesthetics favor any veer from the upright. ‘A ruinous lean has its own allure,’ he said, ‘greater than the perfectly upright pillars of rectitude.’ Oftentimes I can hardly keep up with his charming perversity.”
“I should not wonder,” Irene murmured sympathetically. “No doubt your children shall be rising from their naps soon; we must say good-day.”
“I will tell Oscar of your call, Miss Adler—and you, Miss—” She glanced at Irene’s card to no avail, since my name was not on it.
“Huxleigh.”
With polite smiles we went down the several steps and paced our way back to the carriage, which Irene had left by the Royal Hospital gates.
“A pointless visit, with Mr. Wilde out,” I me
ntioned as we strolled under the skeletal branches. “A pity he no longer works at home.”
“On the contrary, a most fruitful exploration. Now I must determine what to do about it. Perhaps the most courteous thing would be to consult Godfrey, since his mother is concerned, if not his Zone of Diamonds.”
“Irene! You know where the Zone of Diamonds is?”
“Of course. Oscar Wilde has it.”
“Oh, but—” I stopped walking, but Irene caught my wrist and urged me on.
“He doesn’t know he has it, silly. Now the problem remains how to repossess it without him knowing that we do so.”
“Is that not... larcenous? He is not a rich man, despite his fame.”
Irene, stiffening, looked at me as if I had suddenly turned into a Medusa of moral turpitude.
“Nonsense. He never paid me for the return of his cross of gold. Now he will, in kind, and he will not even be troubled by knowing about it. What could be more simple? Next you will be telling me that the bauble is rightfully Godfrey’s.”
“You do not mean to abscond with it, leave Godfrey without any fruits of his labor after all he has done for us, and for you?”
“He has made himself useful, as a good barrister should. Besides, I have paid for his professional services.”
“Irene! All men are not the King of Bohemia. You must not be callous. Surely Godfrey is of more consequence to you than, than ... a luggage porter!”
“You confuse matters of the heart with those of head. Good business is never a pity, as Mr. Tiffany quite rightfully corrected me not a year ago. I would I had heard his advice before engaging on my charade in Bohemia. If I had thought more of myself and my career then, I should never have been lulled into such a weak position. It will not happen again.”
“Love and admiration are not weaknesses!”
“But to wish to be loved and admired is, my dear Nell—an addictive emotion that we of the artistic bent often undergo, as Mr. Wilde could tell you in iambic pentameter. I’ve no doubt that poor woman behind us ‘loves and admires’ her aesthetic husband, for all the good it will do her, for all the good it did Caroline Norton when she was a bride. She must have married Black Jack for some reason, though why an intelligent woman who prizes her independence would ever marry is quite beyond me.”
Good Night, Mr. Holmes (A Novel of Suspense featuring Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes) Page 31
