“Holmes, I think you’re being”—I caught back the word paranoid—“overly suspicious. But I know better than to try and talk you out of it, so I’ll merely ask, what do you propose to do? Skulk around and see who she’s meeting with? Because I can tell you, among her acquaintances are the most harmless Americans one can imagine.”
I paused, waiting for him to reveal that he knew all the details of my two days on French soil, but miraculously enough, it appeared that he had not been watching from the nearby trees or an anchored fishing boat. So I described for him the American colony of artists, writers, and hangers-on I had found in Antibes—and, the unexpected appearance of our Mrs Hudson.
“She is providing entertainment for a group of children?” One eyebrow went up at this dubious picture.
“So? How much of her life did she spend organising the Irregulars? To say nothing of an endless series of ill-trained scullery maids. If there were such a degree as Children’s Psychology, Mrs Hudson would be given a DPhil without having to sit an exam. Who better to figure out a means of enticing rich young parents to spend their time and money here in the Principality?”
“Rather like your friend Miss Maxwell is doing in Venice.”
“Exactly. But that does not answer my question of what you intend to do. You’ve been here for three days. Have you caught any faint scent of wrongdoing in her vicinity?”
His hand shifted the silver cigarette case an inch or two along the table. “I have not.”
“During which time I imagine you’ve used all the tricks in your basket, from disguising yourself as a street-corner layabout to drinking in pubs with any person you’ve seen her come into contact with.”
“Not all of my ‘tricks.’ ”
“Just most of them. Holmes, I know this will be a radical proposal, but maybe you and I should just go and talk with her? In any event, she’s seen me now. She’s sure to assume you’re here, too.”
He nodded, less in agreement than an agreement to think about it. He held his table napkin to his moustache and laid it down definitively beside his plate. When his eyes met mine, I realised—vaguely, in an unoccupied corner of my mind—what it was that drove people to gamble.
“Are you finished?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Oh, most certainly yes.”
In the morning, faced by an empty wardrobe, I phoned down to the front desk. As Holmes had suggested, the Hermitage was an establishment well accustomed to the varied needs of wealthy guests. The neat French lady’s maid who appeared at our door five minutes later noted down my measurements and my requests—not too short, not too extreme, and conservative about the chest and shoulders—with neither shake of the head nor moue of distaste. Twenty minutes later, I was picking through an assortment of remarkably fashionable garments that more or less fit me. Ten minutes after that, Holmes and I set off for a pre-breakfast stroll along the yacht-sprinkled Port Hercule.
There seemed to be more masts than the previous afternoon. Was this week-end traffic, or did yacht owners prefer beds to bunks, and spend only their daylight hours out at sea? Perhaps they had all spent Friday night in the Casino? In any event, the occasional waft of coffee and bacon showed that the residents were rising. The sea-plane was still there, its wind screen shaded against the Mediterranean sun. Closer in, two grease-stained men discussed an engine whose parts were spread across an impressively large area. Out nearer the breakwater, two sailors walked up the ladders at the top of the Bella Ragazza and vanished into the deck house.
“Do you suppose that big yacht belongs to the Prince?” I wondered.
He shook his head. “The last Prince was an ardent marine explorer, but not the present one. That ship does resemble the Hirondelle, but it is far too new.”
We had reached the far end of the harbour, where the breakwater stretched out to protect all these rich-men’s playthings. A bench there invited contemplation, so we sat.
“One can hope the Bella Ragazza isn’t owned by some competing member of the royalty. It would be rather hard to avoid seeing, from half the windows in the Palace.”
In fact, Monaco’s royal family was probably relatively secure, being among Europe’s oldest. Its coat of arms commemorated the 1297 seizure of power, when a nobleman of the Grimaldi house led a group of disguised soldiers, swords hidden beneath Franciscan robes, through the gates of the mountain-top castle. That particular Grimaldi was tossed out a few years later, and a cousin-turned-stepson (the royalty of Europe is ever complex) became the head of the Grimaldi line—although actual ownership of Monaco was not established for some 120 years, when one of the three princes who took turns with the crown (cf.: complex) simply purchased the country outright. Even then, tussles continued.
Monaco had no resources other than its setting—once strategic, now merely scenic. Most of its princes chose to live in Paris. Two external bits of agricultural land had been lost in the mid-nineteenth century, leaving behind a Prince, a church, a mouldering palace, and a few hundred Monégasque fishermen and olive farmers.
The House of Grimaldi clung to its Rock through determination, trickery, open battle, financial shrewdness, and—most intriguing—its willingness to let a woman take over whenever the line lacked sons, or had a ruler behind bars or distracted by the lights of Paris.
Strong and imaginative women had been the saving of the Principality. In the last century, the ineffectual and impoverished Prince Florestan, a man much taken with the theatre, married an actress named Maria Caroline Gibert de Lametz—then promptly hurried back to Paris. Princess Caroline, on the other hand, took one look at the bald, rocky Principality at the foot of the Palace, and decided it would make a fine personal stage.
She sent a man to the German spas for a report on what made for a successful watering place. Next, she had Florestan legalise gambling in Monaco—a country surrounded by lands where cards, dice, and the wheel were forbidden. She found a willing partner in François Blanc—scam artist, double-dealer, and showman extraordinaire. They set up the wholesome-sounding Société des Bains de Mer—or more grandly, Société Anonyme des Bains de Mer et du Cercle des Étrangers du Monaco: SBM for short—and tucked the Casino in behind it. The years that followed saw a sequence of elaborate and thinly-propped swindles that nearly collapsed any number of times, and yet, against all rational expectations, the SBM and its Casino—along with the baths that gave it all a face of healthy respectability—not only survived, but thrived.
Ten years after Caroline’s death, another woman took up the challenge, this time an American named Alice. The prince she married was interested, not in theatre, but in oceanography, so while he was off at sea, she brought in culture, from opera companies to Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Caroline and Alice between them dragged their adopted country out of penury and into the modern era, providing an object lesson in how big an edifice could be built atop the shakiest of foundations. Walking back along the harbour towards our somewhat delayed morning eggs, I told Holmes what I had read about Monaco, particularly the striking role of women in this unlikely place.
He nodded. “One does wonder what the world would look like if all its countries were given over to the women to run for a time.”
“Good heavens, Holmes—we’ll make a feminist of you yet.”
“A person need not wear a label to see the sense in a thing.”
Sherlock Holmes was often accused of misogyny, but I’d found his scorn equally divided between the sexes. If anything, my Victorian-era husband tended to regard women as having the greater (if more often thwarted) potential.
“Have you come across the current Princess?” I asked.
“Charlotte? I have not met her, although one tends to see her here and there.”
“Do you know anything about her? Some people at the Murphys’ party made her sound like another Princess Caroline. It got me to wondering what she was like.”
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“She is the heir presumptive—the Prince’s actual daughter, though born out of wedlock and later officially adopted during the War. France insisted on it,” he explained, “since the next in line was a German.” (As I said: complicated.) “The Prince mostly leaves Monaco to her—and her husband, although he seems a bit of a ne’er do well. The two of them are particularly interested in the arts, and wish to establish Monaco as a cultural centre. A sort of Paris on the Riviera, as it were.”
“Caroline brought the Casino, and Alice the Ballets Russes—and if Princess Charlotte has a vision for Monaco that reaches beyond the gambling rooms, that could be good news for Mrs Hudson. I don’t imagine her savings will take her far without some kind of a second career.”
“Mrs Hudson has many hidden talents,” he said, which I decided to take as an agreement.
All in all, I was feeling more sanguine about our landlady’s future in this unlikely place. Perhaps on our way through the Hermitage’s Eiffel-glass lobby, I would pause to chat with the desk man, about how to locate an old friend. He might be of more willing help to a young woman than he had been to a grey-haired foreign gentleman. In any event, given the size of Monaco, how many elderly Englishwomen named Hudson could there be?
“And not only the Ballets Russes,” I remembered, “but racing events as well. Terry and Gerald Murphy were talking about a Rally that takes place in the winter season. Also something about sea-planes. Or was it flying boats? Is there a difference?”
“Flying boats are winged boats, landing on their bellies. Sea-planes are aeroplanes with pontoons—such as that one.”
The object in question had shifted slightly and was now catching the sun, its white paint polished to brilliance.
“Handsome thing,” I commented. So long as one was not required to ride on it.
After a moment, I let my shoulder lean slightly, to press into his. “I’ve missed you, Holmes.”
He glanced down at me, surprised. I smiled. “Though you’d have murdered someone if you’d come sailing with us. Where have you been, these past weeks?”
“I told you, I went to Roumania.”
“Ah, I thought that might be some kind of whimsy. What’s in Roumania?”
“Yet another interesting woman,” he said. “One with an intriguing problem.”
“Should I be jealous?”
“You should be interested. It isn’t every day one encounters a problem to do with vampires.”
I drew back, and had opened my mouth to demand an explanation, when we were interrupted by a familiar voice.
“Why, if it isn’t Sailor Mary—and heavens me, her husband! Well met, the both of you.”
The Hon Terry leapt up from the bench he’d been sitting on and came to shake Holmes’ hand, with enthusiasm and the name Russell that Holmes used in Venice. He then more or less dragged us over to the seat for introductions. “You both know Luca, I think—and this is Johnny Perez, a friend of Patrice’s, lives here in Monaco, if you can believe it. Johnny, this is Mary Russell and her husband. Mary came with me on the Stella Maris. Mr Russell is a musician. Johnny lives here, at the Sun Palace—and did you see that ’plane down on the water, the white one? That’s his! He gives people rides and sprinkles adverts over the beaches on Nice and Cannes. Isn’t that a marvellous way to make a living? Here, sit down, do.”
“No, Terry, we’re headed back to our breakfast. But what are you doing over here? I thought you were staying on the Cap?”
“Johnny showed up last night, invited us to go up with him—one at a time, naturally, the thing’s a two-seater. So we popped up on the first train.”
“You were certainly up early!”
“We never actually made it to bed. Patrice is coming along in a bit, to see a man about a boat. Might have a chance at skiing, later in the week.”
I laughed. “Terry, I’ve had enough of skis for one summer, thanks. You have a fun day, gentlemen.”
“Oh, Mary, I say—did you hear about that jolly nanny person of Sara and Gerald’s?”
“The girl? Mademoiselle Geron, I think Sara called—”
“No, the older one. Miss Hudson.”
Silent fingers closed over the sea-front. I made a sort of creaking noise, since I couldn’t seem to shape actual words, but fortunately he took that as a request to continue.
“Seems she’s been arrested.” I felt Holmes go rigid.
“Arrested?”
“I know, butter wouldn’t melt, wouldn’t you have said? But seems the old cat has some life in her, ’cause they found a fancy man at her feet and a gun in her hand.”
“Mur…” I could not pronounce the word.
“Murder, right. I say, Mary, are you feeling quite well? You’ve gone a decidedly odd shade. Maybe you—”
I sat down, hard.
“Do you want to remain ‘Mr Sheldon Russell,’ ” I asked Holmes, “or is it time to throw your true name about?”
The horse taxi—Monaco did have a few, so as to save visitors from arriving at a hilltop destination winded and sopping—had clopped its way up The Rock to the Medieval buildings that were the oldest section of the Principality. We very nearly got out and pushed the creature up some of the steeper bits.
“Let us see how far we get without it,” he replied.
I nodded in agreement, and launched up the ornate staircase of the Palais de Justice.
The desk man at the Hermitage had given us little more information about this purported murder than Terry had, in the form of a French newspaper with a brief paragraph to say that an elderly English woman, who had recently come to the Principality, had been arrested for shooting a young Frenchman in her Monte Carlo apartment.
Some rapid questioning and telephone calls had modified the report: she was not a tourist, but a resident; her dwelling was not an apartment but a house—and not in Monte Carlo, but in the upper reaches of La Condamine. And the dead man may not have been French.
Mere quibbles, all of those, against the hard fact that he had been found, dead, on her floor.
A bare ten minutes after climbing the ornate Palais de Justice stairway, we came down again, armed with a note and a feeling of anti-climax. Not only had we not been required to conjure up authority with the mighty name of Sherlock Holmes, no one even objected to our questions. Indeed, the Monégasque equivalent of a desk sergeant had gone so far as to sketch a crude map to the gaol on the back of our visitor’s permission note.
I’d been surprised to find that Monaco had a gaol, rather than just a locked room at the back of the police station. The sergeant did admit that it was used mostly for prisoners on remand. Once found guilty, they were shipped off to France to serve out their terms.
Despite the map, it took some time to locate the prison entrance. We’d been told it lay between a pleasure garden and the grand Oceanographic Museum, but we were quartering the park in search of something resembling a gate when a flustered young man in a bizarre costume burst out from a hole in the wall. His lower half wore every-day tweed, but his torso sported a confection of scarlet, white, and gold, tailored for a larger man, that looked like a costume from a regimental museum. His arms were wrapped around a combination of file-folders and a hat with an elderly ostrich-feather plume.
We watched this vision scurry by. I said to Holmes, “It’s a little early in the day for a fancy-dress party. Was that Alice’s white rabbit, or an official in court uniform?”
“If so, there should have been a sword as well. Where the devil did he come from?”
We tracked the door down. The man who answered our ring gave the clear impression that he had hastily put on his coat and snugged up his necktie.
“Oui?” he snapped impatiently.
Holmes addressed him in flawless Parisian French, telling him that we wished to see a prisoner, and holding out the note the desk sergeant h
ad given us.
The guard didn’t bother looking at it, although he did draw himself up a bit and replied with a trace more deference. However, what he said was that the lady would not see us.
Holmes told him to ask her.
The guard replied that she hadn’t been willing to see the English Monsieur from the vice-consulate just now, so why should she want to see us?
She may care to see her friends the “Russells” instead, Holmes told him firmly.
The man threw up his hands and slammed the door. I glanced at Holmes. “Was that a gesture of ‘Oh for pity’s sake, go away I’m eating my lunch,’ or was it ‘Oh if you insist, I’ll go ask her then come back and tell you no’?”
“Let us assume the latter,” he replied. While we waited to find out, we located a shaded seat. He lit a cigarette. I watched the boats heading towards the harbour. Just as my patience was about to run out, the door opened.
The guard looked considerably tidier and much chastened. When he ushered us into the interview room, I could see the cause: he would not meet Mrs Hudson’s eyes. Her expression was one I had seen her turn on a careless house-maid.
The guard silently closed the door.
Mrs Hudson—that bobbed hair!—was standing behind the chair on the prisoner’s side of an ancient wooden table. “Hello, Mr Holmes. I hadn’t expected to see you quite this soon. And Mary, I should have said the other day how well you’re looking. You’ve gone very brown.”
“You too,” I said. “But—oh, hello, Mrs Hudson! I was so happy to see you!” Impulsively, I circled the table and threw my arms around her. She gingerly returned the embrace, giving my shoulder a reassuring pat as she pulled away.
“You shouldn’t have come here—a dreary place on a lovely day. I hope you’ve been enjoying the Murphy family? Such delightful people. Do sit down.”
I could only stand and gape. She was talking as if this bald and unsavoury cell was her sitting room and we were visitors collecting jumble for the church sale. This was taking English phlegm to an extreme.
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