A Soul of Steel (33 page)

As I passed a pair of towering ostriches (such glamorous plumes upon a bonnet; such gawky and unpleasing creatures in person), I heard a rustle like a great bird’s quills. I turned to see a familiar figure bearing down on me—an old woman in mourning dress!

She brushed past impatiently to approach a stuffed ostrich. Even her stooped posture could not disguise her once-great height. She lifted a lorgnette on its black silk cord and bobbed her head upon its scrawny neck to scrutinize the exhibit. Her gestures were so like a chicken’s in a hen yard that I could not repress a smile, despite my lively suspicions.

Could this be Quentin Stanhope? Certainly that humpshouldered carriage could disguise a man’s height. I had seen enough of Irene’s wonder-working with crape hair and veiled bonnets to know that the unruly gray eyebrows could be false and that a black veil could soften a man’s harsher features into those of an elderly woman. As women age their feminine features harshen into those of old men, as if all our differences are designed to melt away by life’s end.

The dowager turned from the ostrich, keeping her lorgnette raised while she favored me with the same openly bobbing inspection. Then she nodded, once and briskly, and rustled on.

I didn’t know what to think. Had she recognized me from the street? Or was this inspection a signal to accost her? What if I were wrong and mere coincidence had brought her here?

“Mere coincidence, Nell?” I could almost hear Irene’s amused tones. “I do not know if there is such a thing as the God defined by the self-declared men of God, but I do know that there is no such thing as ‘mere coincidence’.”

I looked around. Figures passed, vaguely seen among the stuffed animal life—or death—surrounding me. An overwhelming sense of observation oppressed me. Perhaps it was engendered by the myriad of glass eyes, shining as if every creature came equipped with spectacles.

I drew out my pince-nez, presumably to better inspect the exhibits, but in fact because my naked face felt so vulnerable. I wished for one of Irene’s lavish veils. No wonder she affected them; they allowed her to see without being fully seen—not only an advantage for an actress, but a necessity for the inquiry agent.

And here was I, armed with nothing but my determination and a note that—oh! For the first time the dreadful thought struck: a note that might not even be from Quentin Stanhope, that might be a ruse to lure me here for purposes... purposes... purposes unguessed at but not good!

I looked about with the intent of making my exit—and spied the old soldier who had collared the thieving boy of yesterday. He was leaning down, whisker to whisker with a gigantic, sprawling male seal!

I hastened around the rear of a most impressive giraffe, and tried to hide behind one of its tall but extremely slender spotted legs. Another unwelcome discovery greeted me. Yes, my eyes were not deceiving me; there, not twenty feet away, was the boy who had stolen my purse, strolling among the monkeys with his hands in his pockets and an innocent expression on his still-filthy face!

I fixedly contemplated the giraffe’s tail high above my head: a most ridiculous appendage considering the owner’s great height, terminating in a broomlike brush of whisker-stiff hairs. The spots before my eyes were as nothing compared to the mad pattern of notions colliding in my brain.

The boy could not be Quentin, but he might be bearing another message for me. Or... I looked about. A number of children gamboled through the rooms, as the animals were a drawing card for the younger set. I would have taken my charges here myself, had I been a governess longer. Most instructive and suitable entertainment, given the number of families in attendance.

But lone, purse-snatching street urchins...

I had half convinced myself that certainly all of the previous day’s population of Covent Garden had now convened to the Museum of Natural History and Modern Curiosities. The retired soldier was looking in my direction. As our eyes intersected, he nodded and bowed slightly, and why should he not? He had assisted in the recovery of my reticule but a day before.

Coincidences bred like monkeys around me, and so did my own speculations. It seemed as if I were center stage at the Grand Guignol, the leading actress in a gruesome play. Was it Irene’s fine Machiavellian hand airily pulling a set of invisible strings high in the building’s vaulted ceilings? An air of intense expectation hung above the macabre blending of man and beast executing a clandestine pavane in the scene below.

Then from behind an aardvark hobbled the strangest creature yet: a hunchbacked old scholar buttoned into a rusty black coat despite the warm day, a yellowed beard trailing down his concave chest, his eyes vigilant and owlish behind a pair of yellow-tinted spectacles. He might have been the twisted twin of the stooped dowager...

I could not resist glancing at her; she had interrupted her close inspection of a mole peering out from a mossy log to glare at the newest arrival.

Suddenly inspired, I realized that both figures could have been men in disguise; men, moreover, who were gifted, or cursed, with telltale eyes—men like Quentin Stanhope, with his clear hazel gaze that a veneer of foreign sun only emphasized, or Captain Sylvester Morgan, whose compelling cold azure stare was that of the professional hunter!

Could hunter and prey have both found their way here? Which could I trust, if both approached me? And what part did the retired soldier play?

I watched them circle in the exhibition room: the young urchin, the old soldier, the elderly scholar, the stooped dowager. It was not lost on me that three of my four suspicious fellow citizens were apparently old.

“Age is the best disguise,” Irene had remarked long ago. “It is so commonplace, yet so unspokenly dreaded, that we seldom look it in the eye, much less examine its traces in ourselves.”

So. Which of these enfeebled browsers was Irene, then? And why was that idle boy present, if he was not Irene? No matter how I summed up my suspicions, I had one candidate for disguise too many. Quentin; Irene; Captain Morgan.

To give myself time to think, I extracted the pince-nez from my reticule and exchanged soulful gazes with a two-toed sloth that depended most artistically from an artificial tree within a glassed-in case. In its faint reflection I could follow the actions of the principal parties.

The scholar had pressed himself to an opposite case as if to obtain the same once-removed view of us all that I had of them. The dowager was rummaging in her reticule. The boy was surreptitiously removing the prettiest of the small rocks arrayed around the corpulent seal. The soldier was honoring the giraffe with a long inspection, and seemed, viewed through the gaudy bars of the beast’s legs, confined in a cage. One must be Quentin, one Irene and one Captain Sylvester Morgan.

But who was the fourth? Who?

When the logical answer occurred to me, I plucked a linen handkerchief from my reticule—no easy task, as I had taken to wrapping the cords twice around my wrist since the attempted theft—and buried my face in it.

The fourth in our game of hide and seek must be: Sherlock Holmes! Now I must conceal my identity. No doubt Dr. Watson had alerted him to the cobra in swift enough time for the detective to discover where our cab had taken us and follow me from the hotel this morning.

My face muffled in white linen embroidered with love knots, I sneezed delicately from time to time and shuffled along to the next cabinet, which featured an array of goggle-eyed lizards.

Someone bumped into me from behind.

I whirled, one hand clutching my reticule, one clasped to my mouth and nose.

The retired soldier stood there, ramrod straight, his features florid against the snowy frame of his muttonchops and mustache, his eyes in the shadow of a jaunty straw boater a very familiar hazel.

I felt the hand with the handkerchief sinking into a sea of surprise and confusion. My mouth opened to say the only possible thing, which was “Quentin...”

“Kweh... kweh... kweh,”
I began, only catching myself in time at a sudden warning cramp in the very pith of my being. I must not betray his true identity!

“Kweh-choooo!”
I declared, muffling my face again.

A long, dark tube like the barrel of a rifle thrust through the fraudulent foliage of the thick, junglelike display in which a half-dozen jeering monkey faces perched.

Another figure crashed into us. I reeled as the retired soldier moved to catch me. Something sped past my bonnet ribbons. At the same instant, the glass case behind me exploded and a shower of pebbles pelted my back.

I recognized the phenomena as issuing from a firearm, but the other museum visitors screeched and milled madly, unsure of what transpired. Amid all this mayhem, someone was again pulling on my poor reticule cords.

“No!” I shouted. “Stop, thief!”

The old soldier collared the lad again. I had an overwhelming sense of what the French (they have their few uses) call
deja vu.
Over the soldier’s shoulder the wizened scholar stared at us and then darted away. The dowager rustled after him at a startlingly efficient pace. A stranger was striding toward us, a black-suited figure with a vertical line of small suns blazing down his coat front and a helmet upon his head. He swelled until he blocked out all the rest.

“ ’Ere now,” said he in a great authoritarian grumble, putting a firm hand on the soldier’s narrow elbow. “We will all come along quietly. This ’ere’s a public institution, you know. No disturbances in a public institution.”

“Let him go!” I screeched, thinking of Quentin, if he
was
Quentin.

Unfortunately, two “hims” were in custody. The supposed Quentin, startled, immediately liberated the boy, who thanked him by tightening his grip on my reticule, which he had never released, and turning to run.

Unfortunately, I had bound it to my wrist all too well. I lurched forward, my feet slipping on shards of shattered glass. I found myself falling toward the sparkling, diamond-strewn floor.

I was arrested in my plummet by a strong arm around my waist, even as the bobby leaped to snag the wretched urchin with the law’s long arm.

“Thank you.” I adjusted my bonnet as the old soldier righted me. “And there is your thief,” I told the bobby while I unwound my snarled reticule and glared at the captive boy.

“You’ll all ’ave to come along to the magistrate,” the bobby returned in the bored tones of a policeman used to all sorts. “We’ll need testimony. And someone’s got to pay for that spoiled glass. Was it a slingshot done it, lad?”

His captive squirmed and hunched and muttered unintelligibly.

The soldier was eyeing the blasted cabinet with a sober expression, then caught my glance.

Quentin he was! I knew it now.

He must not, of course, be forced to name himself to any official. His current identity would no doubt melt like a vanilla ice under the hot regard of the law.

“Come then,” the bobby urged, his thick black mustache, most ill trimmed, vibrating with emphasis. “ ’Onest citizens must do their dooty, or wot kind o’ an example is set for lads like this?”

I would have resisted strongly, save that the sullen lad looked up suddenly from under the brim of his tweed cap and said, “Oh, give it up, Nell; you’ll ruin everything if you cause a fuss now.”

I would have recognized the unadulterated, bell-like tones of Irene Adler anywhere, even in the Museum of Natural History and Modern Curiosities, and even when she was sounding utterly annoyed with me.

Chapter Twenty-three

FORAGING AT FORTNUM'S

The bobby
rushed all three of us into a four-wheeler outside the museum. I was unsure by whom to be the more amazed—Quentin Stanhope in the guise of a retired soldier, or Irene Adler as the boy in the disreputable cap.

“Irene, is that you?” I demanded the moment I was seated within the dim interior.

“Of course.” She flung herself into the vehicle after Quentin and me, then immediately strained halfway out the open window again. “If I had not been so efficiently restrained, I could have followed Tiger—but it is too late now. We must lose no time in being off! Oh, where is Godfrey?”

“I have no idea, Irene, but I do believe that this bewhiskered old gentleman is Quentin.”

Irene flung herself into the seat opposite to regard him. The inspection was intensely mutual.

“It had better be Quentin Stanhope,” Irene noted at last, “else we have the honor to share a four-wheeler with Sherlock Holmes, which would suit none of us at the moment, I think.”

“Who is this impertinent boy?” the perhaps-Quentin demanded, turning to me. “And why do you keep calling him ‘Irene’?”

The streetside coach door opened at that awkward instant, and in bounded the bobby. “Chelsea, and be quick about it,” he shouted over his uniformed shoulder to the driver as he sat.

“Chelsea?” I demanded in shock.

“We must mislead pursuers,” Irene answered as, ahead, the reins snapped over the horse’s hindquarters.

The carriage gave a fearful lurch, and we began to rattle over the cobblestones at a smart pace. The motion jolted the Disreputable Cap askew on the Disreputable Boy’s head... and down fell the rich lengths of gilt-tinged brown curls I had envisioned revealing the previous day.