“Irene, I feared you had lost your capacity to shock me, but I see that I was grievously wrong.”
“Good.” Irene smiled as we neared our carriage. “Mr. Wilde is indubitably right about one thing: the capacity to shock is pure sweetness in a sour world.”
At that we entered the landau and returned to St. John’s Wood. I held my tongue during that long ride, having learned from my association with Irene Adler that the only antidote to her desire to shock was my ability to keep still.
Chapter Thirty-one
TWILIGHT ZONE
Dusk came to Chelsea as the sun sank into the grey, wavy mirror of the river Thames and wraiths of fog twined through the wrought-iron fences of Tite Street and Swan Walk and Cheyne Row. Figured curtains cast ghostly glows against the streetside windows from the lamplight streaming through their diaphanous folds. The river’s stale perfume mingled with the homely odors of coal fires piping from a dozen surrounding chimneys, invisible in the lowering dark.
I clasped my jacket collar closer against the cold and fog, wondering how I came to be roaming picturesque Chelsea by twilight.
From the adjacent Royal Hospital grounds came hoarse whispers of mischief, while the Physic Garden across the way echoed with sounds of attempted illegal entry.
I myself was skulking about Oscar Wilde’s garden in the dusk, trying desperately not to sneeze.
“Irene,” I croaked, “we shall catch our deaths—or at least bring the police down upon us.”
“Nonsense. We are invited guests, hardly trespassers.”
“Under false pretenses!”
“Only we know that.”
“Why did you send Godfrey off to Carlyle’s former house?”
“Because that is how he is most useful: leading the bulk of the party as far as possible afield.”
“Surely this racket shall attract undesirable interest—won’t Mrs. Wilde notice us poking about her garden?”
“Certainly we shall attract attention if you continue questioning me in such ringing tones. Your whisper reeks more of the stage than of the confessional.”
“I cannot help it! I am contracting the influenza already, I am sure. Oh! We shall be apprehended, and such a scandal will result.”
“Nonsense,” Irene repeated. “After all, the festivities are in my honor, are they not? One does not arrest the guest of honor.”
“You call this noxious stumble through the damp and dark of a Chelsea evening a festivity?”
“We may have much to celebrate if things go as I planned. Here, I have stubbed my boot-toe on something. Is it that Celtic cross?”
“Perhaps. It is rough and wet and in our way—why can we not carry a torch, as the other parties do? Now that the sun is gone it is nearly pitch dark.”
“Because we wish to attract no unnecessary attention—and we need our hands free to dig.”
“Dig? Not again? The rules were that only the chief prize should require digging for; surely it is not concealed at the host’s very house? You set the rules yourself.”
“The rules are for the rest of the hunters and the ordinary objects of the hunt. We are after special game, Nell. Ah, it is loose! Help me lay it back upon the ground.”
“Overturning crosses, even Celtic ones, is not something my father would have endorsed.”
“This is a garden ornament only, nothing sacred. Lean into it, Penelope. It will take both of our full weights to dislodge.”
I did as commanded, resting my back against the cross and pushing my booted feet deep into the dead leaves and wet turf surrounding it.
Suddenly and silently, it toppled, I collapsing atop it.
“Quickly! We must dig.” Irene thrust a wooden stake into my hand.
My hand followed the handle down to a spade-shaped end, garnering several splinters in my woolen gloves. “This spade is tiny!”
“What else would fit into my petticoat pockets? These are toy spades, for children.”
“Really, Irene. This is your greatest madness yet, an expedition out of Gilbert and Sullivan. I know not whether to laugh or to cry.”
“Do neither,” she advised tersely from the dark. “Dig.”
At least I was already upon the ground. I rose to my knees in the soggy leaves and joined Irene in clawing at the lumpy earth with my petite implement.
The sky was overcast, though a pallid moon shone through the lime trees as the winds swept its face free of clouds. That milky glow was our only illumination. Irene’s face looked dead white; the fallen cross had attained the color of long-dead bone. Fortunately, I could not see myself.
“Why could you not have enlisted Godfrey for this mission?” I grumbled as the scent of overturned earth and wet wool gloves assailed my nostrils. I quailed to think what creatures of the clay our frantic and half-blind digging was disinterring...
“He is not aware of it,” she replied, digging as madly as I.
My child’s shovel struck something rock-hard, conveying a shudder all the way to my shoulders. Irene, hearing the dull chime of metal on sterner stuff than clay, applied her own implement to the spot until our shovel blades clashed like tangled knitting needles.
“I’ll dig and you draw the dirt aside,” Irene suggested hoarsely.
‘The damp is bad for your voice, I knew it!”
“Hush. I will happily stay mute for a week if we find what I suspect we will. There—a nice squarish sort of rock we have found. Buried treasure.”
“Likely it conceals only some deceased bird or kitten a child buried near the cross.”
“We have neither the light nor privacy to investigate now. I will slip our prize into the commodious pocket I have sewn into my petticoat, then we will lay our little shovels to rest in Mother Earth and give them a decent burial. Poor things, they have served in their time and now ‘tis done.”
Irene stood and began kicking clods of dirt into the hole we had made. Raising the cross was four times more difficult than overturning it, but eventually it stood in place—properly askew. We began tamping down the surrounding earth, Irene pounding her feet upon the site like a frenzied Spanish dancer, her skirts caught in her hand so her precious box should not be rattled.
“Now may we leave?” I said.
“Of course. We must repair to the Physic Garden to collect our legitimate quarry.”
I sneezed my displeasure, but Irene was already tripping toward the house, which was fortunately still empty except for the maid, and out to the street.
We returned an hour later to the Wilde residence to find the mellow sitting and dining rooms afire with lamps and a merry company of red-nosed denizens of Chelsea gathered there, surrounded by an arcane collection of trivia.
In removing my wraps before the mirror I saw my nose was as cherry-bright as the others’—though Irene maintained a dignified pallor despite her exertions. When she spoke, however, her voice rumbled like a foghorn.
“Punch?” Godfrey joined us, bearing cups of a steaming libation.
We downed it ravenously, like twin Oliver Twists in hopes of more.
“How went your hunt?” Godfrey asked, but before Irene could answer, our towering host approached, a feather duster rakishly sprouting from his breast pocket.
“My dear Miss Adler and the classical Miss Huxleigh! You are the last to return. What an inspired idea it was to suggest a scavenger hunt instead of the usual Sunday tea. It has all been too, too utterly delicious fun. Shall we compare lists and see who has carried off the prize?”
“By all means.” Irene joined the ladies by sitting demurely on the sofa arm, the only vacant perch. The gentlemen lounged against the dado with their punch cups tilted.
Godfrey drew a straight-backed chair from the dining room into the circle for me, and the evening’s ceremony began. Each participant flaunted the fruits of the night’s hunting: several had dead grape clusters from the late Mr. Carlyle’s garden. Irene produced a peacock feather she claimed had been dropped by one of the late Dante Gabriel Rossetti�
�s feral flock, which still wandered the vicinity.
Perfectly respectable actors, writers and painters (if any of those can be deemed perfectly respectable or even imperfectly so) flourished common objects and sprigs of pirated vegetation as though they were pearls of great price. Mr. Wilde had obtained the required feather duster from the cook three doors down, for instance, and you would have thought he had talked an angel out of its wings, such was the pride he took in its acquisition.
There were herbal trophies from the Physic Garden, that relic of the seventeenth-century botanical garden which had provided America with the cotton seed that resulted in Civil War. I could not approve of this venerable site’s plundering. The room fairly reeked of desiccated eucalyptus, scents overcome only by the punch, which Godfrey later told me was rum. Had I known, I never would have touched it, no matter how warming. As it was, I had three cups before I learned its composition.
Perhaps that is why we women were able to laugh at the sorry state of our skirts; Irene and I were not the only ones to have dampened ourselves—several gentleman wore wet and baggy knees.
The prize of the entire hunt was to be one of Oscar Wilde’s yellow silk neckcloths with a mother-of-pearl cravat pin, which had been buried earlier that day and which no one had found.
The company deliberated at some length before declaring Bram Stoker the winner for having collected the most items from his list. He smiled with touching pleasure, this red-bearded giant, and gazed upon his tawdry array as if they were jewels.
“You see, Irene.” I leaned close to whisper into her ear. “You likely have unearthed the major prize, but foolishly refuse to examine it.”
“Yes... and no,” she said.
“Poor Irene!” Mrs. Wilde said suddenly. “The hunt was in your honor and you have won nothing! That hardly seems fair.”
“I have seen my friends enjoy themselves; that is reward enough,” Irene answered, with a salute of her punch cup to the company.
Everyone toasted her sentiments. Our carriage arrived soon after, for St. John’s Wood was a long drive. At Briony Lodge Irene showed a strange disinclination to examine her buried treasure. I was too weary and influenced by the rum to care. We parted to our separate chambers, but I could not resist making a prediction.
“You have unearthed no more than a tumbled array of bird bones and I am glad I shall not be present to see you discover it. Or, if you were lucky, you have recovered Mr. Wilde’s saffron silk square and pearl cravat pin,” I added thickly, longing far the sheets where Mrs. Seaton had installed flannel-wrapped warming pans for our feet. “You have carried off the prize of the scavenger hunt without even claiming it.”
“Perhaps,” Irene conceded hoarsely from the doorway of her bedchamber, “we could consider that poetic justice.”
Chapter Thirty-two
DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER
The morrow was chill. Irene’s voice had faded to a croak and I fought the sniffles. Rain rapped its fingers on our windows all day long, while Irene played bits and pieces of a half-dozen composers and I refused to inquire after the boxy rock she had unearthed in Oscar Wilde’s garden.
Godfrey arrived unannounced that afternoon, unimpaired by the previous night’s labors but oddly strained. He joined us in the music room.
“We are most mawkish today,” Irene warned him in a contralto rumble.
His eyebrows raised at her unlovely speaking voice, then he studied my reddened features. “I fear you will feel more mawkish when you hear my news.”
We cocked our heads in tandem, neither wishing to waste our energies in speaking.
Godfrey spread his hands helplessly. “I discreetly induced a man in the foreign office to apprise me of any unusual movements by London-bound Bohemians.”
Irene pressed a dramatic, trembling chord on the piano keys, as if underlining the dialogue at a melodrama. Godfrey ignored her irreverent response.
“I have learned only this morning that a... personage from Prague has reached London.”
Irene’s fingers left the keys. The little color remaining left her face. “A personage? What does that mean?”
“It means that the traveler is identified as ‘Count von Kramm, a Bohemian nobleman.’”
“That is ridiculous.” She paused to gather some timbre for her shattered voice. “No such nobleman resided in Prague when I was there. You think this man is an agent of the King?”
Godfrey frowned. “My dear Irene, I think he is the King.”
“Even more ridiculous! The King is to marry this spring. Why rush to London when his agents have been unable to procure the photograph after two attempts?”
“Two? You have not been frank with me.”
Godfrey looked quite angry. I really wished myself out of the room, but Godfrey had paused near the doorway and left no gracious exit for me. I cleared my throat but neither one heeded me.
Irene stood slowly, her fingers fanned at her throat as though to press the voice from her abused larynx. “You truly believe the King is in London?”
“What is worse, this Count von Kramm’s secretary has made inquiries at the foreign office after the services of a specialist.”
“Specialist?”
“He was directed to Mr. Sherlock Holmes of Two-twenty-one-B Baker Street.”
Irene sat even more slowly, as if uncertain that the bench—or indeed the floor—remained beneath her. “Sherlock Holmes. Oh, I would give a great deal to meet, to match wits with that gentleman, but not now! And not both of them together, the King and the detective. How unfair life is sometimes, Godfrey!” Her fist hit the keys.
“Always, Irene. What do you wish to do?”
She stared for some time at her hands. I found it hard to believe that these pale, delicate fingers with the nails clipped short for the piano had joined mine in clawing at Mr. Wilde’s garden turf only the night before.
Irene seemed so diminished at the moment—her voice, both her glory and her weapon in meeting the world, blunted; all the promise of her past having become a threat in the present. She lifted her head then as if having heard my worry made audible.
“What do I wish to do? I wish to go into the sitting room.”
Godfrey and I exchanged a worried glance. Yet Irene still possessed that commanding calm of hers. We followed her across the hall and watched as she paused before the bookshelves.
“You promised to read your mother’s novel,” she said to Godfrey. ‘Take it”
Some unspoken strain was thickening her voice, though Godfrey was deaf to it, as most men are to the nuances of women’s emotion.
‘Irene, we have no time for novels now; it is possible that you have been written into the climax of a rather sorry story yourself.”
“Please, forget this... rumor. I want you to take your mother’s book.”
Both Godfrey and I stared at the humble brown spine on the shelf.
Godfrey was beginning to sense her fevered emotional pitch. “Irene, this is ridiculous. We must make plans for your defense, perhaps for your swift removal from London.”
Irene closed her eyes. “Godfrey, please!” she pleaded, her magnificent voice in shreds. “It is vital to me. I wish you to take your mother’s novel. Do it!”
He stepped forward like a duelist, in one long stride, and sharply pulled the book from the shelf. There came a rapid patter, like raindrops or running mice feet. Splashes of random light spilled from the space the book had occupied. A papist rosary seemed to dangle there, crystal beads strung in neat decades—perhaps my clerical background was deceiving my short-sighted eyes...
Godfrey lifted a slow hand to the object as though dislodging a cobweb in a dream. He pulled the strand of light. There came more clicking, more tumbling of bright white beads to bookshelf, length after length until the droplets were pooling like hailstones on the shelf below...
I came over, a dream walker myself. They were not beads of crystal, but diamonds, an entire Zone of Diamonds.
Tears were glittering
on the sickle of Irene’s lower lashes, tears of suppressed triumph.
‘1 wished to surprise you, Godfrey, but you would not cooperate! Your mother’s book was the one true clue, if you had only read it. Cloris of the Crossroads, don’t you see? It was at the crossroads on the moor that poor benighted Cloris first lost her true love, there that she rallied the prince and the peasants, there that her heartless father died at novel’s end—clutching the Celtic cross that marked the roads even as he expired and there that the family jewels were found buried beneath the stone cross.
“Your mother penned that novel in the very house we visited last night. Nell and I found this Zone buried beneath the same Celtic cross that inspired your mother and your father in two very different ways, possibly the only thing besides their children that they truly shared.”
She paused, exhausted, while Godfrey numbly drew the lengths of white fire through his hands.
“It is glorious, Irene, beautiful. Nell?” He held the glittering skein out to me and I drew closer, as one mesmerized.
The piece was antique, the stones cut in the old French style, but the fiery length of it was stupendous. We truly regarded the last vestige of the Ancien Regime, something that belonged more to the past than to any present claimant.
Godfrey finally looked from the Zone to Irene, bemused.
“I thought you had failed to find it when you were so subdued last night.”
Now she was surprised. “You... expected me to find the Zone? Surely you did not suspect when I proposed a scavenger hunt to the Wildes?”
“But I did. I knew precisely why you manipulated that particular entertainment for the evening in that particular neighborhood.”
“Godfrey! You are not prescient. You are not Sherlock Holmes. How did you know?”
“Irene,” I put in, “you mustn’t strain your voice.”
“Oh, be quiet, Nell!” she snapped, turning once again on Godfrey like an angry lioness. “How could you know, Godfrey Norton?”
Good Night, Mr. Holmes (A Novel of Suspense featuring Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes) Page 32
