The Adventuress (10 page)

“Doesn’t it strike you, Godfrey,” said I in her absence, “that Irene weaves conspiracy on a very broad loom? The likelihood of your happening to rescue a suicidal girl whose distress is related to a pair of tattooed sailors drowned in two great rivers many years apart—”

“—is not the mad coincidence you hope, Nell.” He smiled, then winced as the expression stretched his scratches. “I was strolling by the Seine, puzzling over the tattoos, and was very near the spot where you and Irene saw the dead man drawn from the water. It was then that I noticed Louise thrashing about in the river.”

“But that low, dead sailor could have had nothing to do with a genteel girl such as Louise!”

Godfrey shrugged. “Irene is right. The sinews that bind together any sequence of events seldom resemble one another. Clues are no more than connective tissue, vital for their function, not for their substance.”

Footfalls in the passage announced the girl’s approach under Irene’s gentle shepherding.

Louise entered, and we both stared. Dried, brushed and soothed by an actress’s expert hands, she cut quite a different figure in our cozy, lamplit parlor, with its English chintz, rush-seated chairs and gathered draperies, than the one she had presented in the house of ill repute.

Louise was a more weighty young woman than she had appeared at first; no wonder Godfrey had been hard put to rescue her. The lamplight revealed large, expressive, almost black eyes and shining, nutmeg-colored hair, a piquant but decidedly stubborn profile, and hands that seemed far too dainty to have inflicted the scratches that even now seared Godfrey’s cheeks.

Eyes cast down, she settled into the chair Irene indicated and crossed her ankles. I noticed that Irene’s generosity had extended to the loan of my best black-kid house slippers and hoped that Louise’s equally generous feet would not stretch them.

Godfrey and I knew, of course, that Irene already had plied our guest with soft, glancing queries; it was time for a concerted interrogation.

“You are feeling better?” Godfrey began courteously.

“I am dry, Monsieur, and warm. Yet I feel no better.” Even, white teeth pressed a pale lower lip. “Madame Norton has told you of the... attack?”

“You must not blame yourself. It was through no fault of yours. Perhaps you would care to share the circumstances with us.” Louise remained silent. “As a barrister, I may find some way of discovering and punishing the culprits.”

“What is there to discover?” the girl cried suddenly. “Except to know that these men are, were, mad!” The outburst propelled Louise forward, her white-knuckled hands clutching the arms of the chair.

She sank back, exhausted and troubled, looking twice her likely age. “Oh, Monsieur Norton, your wife has assured me that you are a wise and sympathetic man, that your own sister was the victim of a similar senseless attack—”

Here Godfrey and I looked to Irene, who shrugged as if to say: well, you gave me the notion, Godfrey....

“I understand your interest,” Louise went on, “and I truly apologize for resisting your noble efforts to save me. I was quite mad in my own way by then, having awakened in a strange place in an even stranger condition. It was unclear in my mind what had happened; I assumed the worst upon finding my basque disarranged. Then I felt a dull ache and discovered the... disfigurement. Not only had the villains abducted me, but they had marked me forever with their cruelty and my shame!”

“Barbaric,” Godfrey murmured in a low, angry voice, so sincerely that Louise looked directly at him for the first time. She was barely twenty, I estimated, and certainly not immune to so dashing a champion as Godfrey.

“My dear young woman,” he said, sensing his advantage, “you must tell me the exact circumstances if I am to help. Who were ‘these villains’? When and where did they abduct you?”

Louise forced her hands to her lap, where they folded and remained as still as if cast in plaster.

“First, Monsieur, you must understand my position. I am of good family”—smug looks were exchanged at this confirmation of previous speculation—“though of impoverished circumstances. My mother died in childbirth and my father, distraught, began to lead the careless, dissolute existence that was to end his days prematurely.

“I became the care of my Aunt Honoria, no relative save by marriage, but devoted to me and very kind. Her husband became my guardian. Uncle Édouard was Father’s older brother; to him had gone all the family’s lands and assets.

“As I grew older, I learned of my father’s weaknesses, particularly for games of chance. I also learned that my uncle might provide me with some small dowry should I prove myself a steady, well-behaved person prone to none of my father’s follies.

“I cannot complain of my childhood, though Uncle Édouard was remote and stern, as if expecting me to follow in my father’s footsteps. Aunt Honoria was my salvation, particularly when my father died in so shocking a manner.”

Louise paused. We kept silent, each wondering how to broach the indelicate subject.

Casanova’s voice floated from the other room: “What? What?” he croaked.

“What manner, you ask?” Poor Louise was so distracted that she had not noticed the nonhuman nature of her interlocutor. “By the rope. Oh, not by legal decree, but by his own hand. In Monte Carlo. The casino, you see. He had lost everything, save the little that remained. I was only five. From that moment on, Uncle Édouard began to watch me as if I, too, would succumb at any instant to gambling fever, or to scandal, or to some misstep.

“It was only long after my father’s death, which was highly publicized of course, that letters began coming to Uncle from Central America, London, the south of France, even from Africa. They began three years ago and upset him enormously. After one was received, he would glare at me as if I were a criminal. The entire household came to dread the appearance of one of these ominous missives upon the silver salver in the front hall. All of our breaths hushed, mistress and maid alike, until Uncle came home at six o’clock and read the post. The letters were sealed with a clot of marbled black-and-crimson wax impressed with some strange device. The sealing wax smelled of sandalwood.”

‘The wax was foreign, then?” Godfrey inquired.

“So it struck me.”

“But the letters came from many nations,” Irene put in.

“From a number of correspondents, then,” Godfrey said.

“Or a single one who traveled widely,” she amended.

“When did your father die?” Godfrey asked Louise.

“Fifteen years ago. It was a horrid scandal. That is why I must... erase myself somehow. I cannot face Uncle’s disappointment and rage. Once I reached a certain age, he had his man accompany me upon the most innocent of errands, as if he suspected me of wrongdoing. Now that I am quite literally marked, I am worth no dowry. No man will wed me. I am as utterly ruined as if I had in truth followed in my father’s profligate footsteps!”

Louise broke into soft sobs.

“Nonsense, my girl.” I was surprised to hear myself speak. “You must not despair. I myself was orphaned before I was twenty, and my father, although a righteous country parson, had not a relative to whom to commend me, nor a pence in his pocket—save what he had collected from the parish poor box. You must convince your aunt and uncle of your innocence; if they spurn you, you can find work. Independence does wonders for a woman.”

Louise gazed at me in horror through a shining glaze of tears. “Employment?”

I was about to sing the praises of self-support when Irene interrupted. “Miss Huxleigh is certainly right; you must convince your guardians of your innocence.”

“But how?” the silly child wailed.

Godfrey was ready with a concrete suggestion. “Continue your narrative. Who were these men who abducted you? How many? Where did the kidnapping occur? How was your uncle’s man eluded?”

“Pierre? True, Pierre did not intervene.” Louise frowned, then rubbed her temples. “My head aches so. I remember little from the time I was walking in the Bois de Boulogne until I awakened in that horrible room, discovered my injury, and staggered to the street to find the river awaiting me. It shone like a broad gold-and- silver braid in the late-afternoon sunlight. I—I could not live in this condition. I ran into the water. Its cold numbed me, like the sheets of a December bed. I was sinking into icy, sweet oblivion when Monsieur Norton appeared beside me and kept tugging me back to shore, back to shame, kept pulling me away from the cool, silent river!”

Irene rose and perched on the arm of Louise’s chair, pressing a hand on the girl’s quaking shoulders.
“Shhh,
my dear.” She eyed us, saying softly, “I questioned her delicately while I arranged her toilette. I am convinced that the tattoo was the extent of the men’s mischief, and further that they used chloroform to drug her, then dragged her into a waiting carriage.”

“What of this Pierre?” Godfrey wondered.

“Duped. Or...”

“An accomplice,” I breathed.

“It grows late, little one,” Irene whispered into the girl’s ear. “You must compose yourself and return home.”

“Home? Never!”

“Soon,” Irene insisted, “else our excuses for your unheralded absence will not ring true. We will say that you took ill upon the street. My husband and I drove you away in our carriage—for did we not do just that this very evening?—to our quite respectable residence in Neuilly, where you did not recover until now, when we promptly brought you home. The maid has dried and freshened your clothing. You can return home as if nothing has happened.”

“But, but—” As more than one had done before her, Louise fell speechless in the face of Irene’s relentless will. “I am utterly altered, Madame!”

“Tut, tut!” Irene brushed a tendril from her charge’s cheek. “I have a marvelous tinted cream that will obscure your . . . um, interesting adornment. Some women willingly submit to the tattoo artist’s needle, did you know that? Perhaps not very respectable women, but some who are quite famous.”

“You, Madame?”

Irene’s forefinger closed Louise’s gaping mouth. “Not... as yet.”

“Irene!” I managed to choke out.

“But I have heard—” At this, Irene leaned close to Louise’s ear and whispered something. The girl’s eyes grew as round as her mouth had been.

“You are certain, Madame? She?”

“Indeed. So there may come a day when you will flaunt your most interesting souvenir of an adventure. But for now, you can easily hide it from even your maid, if you take care.”

“Why should I perform such a charade when a letter may come any day to my uncle announcing my alteration?”

“Why? Because we are going to get to the bottom of this puzzle. Ah, that is an English turn of phrase, don’t look so bewildered; we are going to—”

“Find the villains,” Godfrey said acerbically, with the look of a Sidney Carton who has just seen his guillotine looming.

Irene adapted his phraseology without hesitation. “Find the villains and—”

“—decipher the arcane meaning of the tattoo,” I put in.

“Yes, of course, as Miss Huxleigh says. We must find out
why
a proper young Frenchwoman was seized from the Bois de Boulogne and forcibly tattooed. And then we will—” Irene paused, out of inspiration, as were we.

“Cut the cackle,” a low voice suggested from the front parlor.

Irene took the cue and stood. “And now we must cease talking and act! Sophie will attend you.”

She nodded to the maid hovering in the passage. Our lost lamb moved to the doorway like a sleepwalker ordered to do so by the sandman himself, so persuasive were Irene’s voice and manner when she cared to make them so.

“One last thing,” Irene instructed the girl. “You must tell us your uncle’s family name, else we cannot take you home.”

Louise paused, cobalt shadows etched beneath those dark, doelike eyes. “Montpensier, Madame.” Then she turned at Sophie’s curtsy and followed the maid upstairs.

Godfrey stretched his legs as if uncramping them from a long and uncomfortable journey. “We must take her home tomorrow. Montpensier. Good God, Irene! Montpensier was one of Napoleon’s marshals of France. The uncle must be a grandson.”

“Excellent.” Irene collapsed into the vacated armchair, fatigued but aglow with satisfaction. “A first family of France. This puzzle is beginning to intrigue me.”

Chapter Nine

T
HE
F
RENCH
C
ONNECTIONS

Casanova, released
from his cage for a few moments of freedom, gnawed the purple grape clutched in one leprous foot.

(Although I am no longer of the opinion that piano “legs” require sheathing from the view of the innocent, I am utterly convinced that all parrots should wear spats. My motivation is not the public morality, but aesthetics.)

The large bird was perched, like Mr. Poe’s raven, upon a bust—one of Madame de Maintenon, the royal governess who became a royal mistress and then a queen, two commendable occupations out of three—atop the bookshelves. From his aerie he observed that plaster lady’s imposing bosom, w
hi
le far below, Irene perused “many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,” most of them obtained on expensive expeditions to Left Bank bookstalls.