A Soul of Steel (5 page)

Perhaps the most shuddersome of Irene’s souvenirs, however, was the plain gold wedding band, which dated from the day she and I met in 1881. She had received it from the hand of a man I shall never forget, Jefferson Hope, an American who drove our first shared cab ride together. When he became gravely ill en route to Irene’s humble Saffron Hill lodgings, he confessed a strange tale of perfidy in the American Great Salt Desert involving a woman betrayed and revenge unto the second decade.

He was a murderer, that man, though his victims were villains, and he gave Irene the ring of his tragically lost love Lucy.

Only days after that dramatic encounter we read of his capture in the rooms of Mr. Sherlock Holmes, the amateur detective. We were to see Mr. Jefferson Hope no more. He died in police custody shortly after.

Mr. Sherlock Holmes proved to be quite another matter indeed.

How Irene had foiled the supposedly peerless detective and the King of Bohemia in the matter of the photograph—and the unsuspected Zone of Diamonds! She had wed, then fled with, a worthier man, Godfrey, with the Zone and the photograph, and most important, with her integrity intact.

Now the French village of Neuilly near Paris became the newlyweds’ home. And now I, Penelope Huxleigh—once Irene’s chambermate and Godfrey’s typewriter-girl—had joined them. Godfrey required a secretary to manage his correspondence in international law. Since arriving in France the previous summer, I had mastered the language in its written form, though I still stumbled over its spoken cadences.

As an orphaned, unmarried parson’s daughter past thirty, it seemed fitting that I should amuse myself by polishing Godfrey’s punctuation and Irene’s jewelry. One in my social position cannot expect much glamour from life, although my association with Irene first, and now both the Nortons, unfortunately involved me from time to time in a mysterious doing or other.

Indeed, had it not been for my sensible counsel on many occasions, my good friends might not be here to enjoy the proceeds of the queen’s diamonds. They remained an impetuous pair abroad, even the usually stable Godfrey, when it came to some puzzle in the neighborhood.

Fortunately, all had been quiet after the Montpensier affair, which had begun with a drowned man on Bram Stoker’s Chelsea dining-room table in London years before and ended recently in perfidy and lost treasure in Monaco. Happily no sign of some new, outré investigation loomed on the horizon.

So like any idle sailor polishing brass, I brightened the souvenirs of previous escapades and secretly hoped that they would be the last of their kind. A respectable married couple has far better things to do than to meddle in the affairs of others, especially when those affairs involve theft, murder, unsanctioned relationships and other even more unsavory matters.

Casanova, gargling his consonants and vowels
sotto voce
behind me, bobbed his red-and-green head in agreement and hungrily eyed the Tiffany squid, his large yellow beak gnashing.

I had not thought of
that,
and stopped polishing while I savored—theoretically, of course—the delightful appropriateness of killing two birds with one stone by feeding the repellent brooch to the equally odious parrot.

Chapter Five

A STRANGER IN PARADISE

A wren
alit on the back rail of Irene’s wrought-iron chair and cocked its meek brown head hopefully at her French pastry.

She immediately paused, tweaked off a morsel and offered it on the platter of her palm. The bird snatched the prize and flitted to the paving stones to consume its treat.

“Truly, Irene,” Godfrey said, laughing, “I know that you have been idle too long when you resort to charming the birds out of the chestnut trees. You require more demanding game.”

Irene, unlike the bird, refused to be baited, but merely smiled and dusted pastry flakes from her skirt.

Although Paris pouted under unseasonably shrouded gray skies, Irene bloomed like a Holland tulip in her costume of the new Buffalo red, a dramatically dark shade lavished along the high collar, basque, waist and skirt front with rococo scrolls of black cord passementerie. A Buffalo-red felt hat with ostrich feathers and black velvet ribbon perched on her brunette hair, and lent her the wren’s look of pert inquiry combined with an appealing touch of hopefulness, if not outright hunger.

“You do not mean to say, Godfrey,” she asked ravenously, “that you have found some puzzle for me to unravel amongst your exceedingly dull legal documents?”

“I fear my cupboard is bare,” he said, hastily sipping the black coffee he had learned to prefer since meeting Irene.

Godfrey, too, looked most debonair, as the French say, attired in a shiny top hat and walking suit and carrying a malacca cane. One sometimes forgot that Godfrey was such a fine-looking gentleman, so royally did Irene’s beauty and style command public attention. She always radiated the air of the opera diva she had been—a confidence and intelligence of manner that was most striking in a woman.

No wonder all eyes in the little sidewalk café under the ponderous shadow of Notre Dame fixed on Irene’s charming pantomime of feeding the little brown wren, which had flitted back to her shoulder to beg for more.

Speaking of little brown wrens, I suppose that I should mention my disposition and attire that late September day of 1888. My habit of making complete notes in my diary had not failed me that day, and by evening it would prove to be a most astounding date, to say the least. That morning, however, I was innocent of pending revelations, and wore a brown plaid walking suit trimmed in suede velvet cuffs, reveres and collar.

My bonnet was suede felt topped by a panache of ostrich tips and wings shaded, like foul coffee soothed by variations of cream, from soft suede to darkest brown. The bonnet had been purchased in Paris at Irene’s order, despite my fear that it was frivolous. I need not have worried. I could have worn scarlet satin bloomers and she sackcloth, and I would have gone unnoticed in Irene’s company.

Fortunately, I have never been afflicted with the female fault of welcoming personal attention, and Irene’s beauty was all the more effective for being unaffected, so we made an ideal pair. I had long since grown resigned, even relieved, to escape public notice when with such a stunning companion.

Some must not only serve by standing and waiting, but by sitting and taking copious notes, and such had been my reluctant role in our previous adventures, such as the Escape from the King of Bohemia, the Distasteful Matter of the Drowned Sailor, the Incident of the Tattooed Heiress, and other intrusive puzzles that flocked to Irene’s vicinity like... the wrens of Paris.

“You are pensive, my dear Nell.” Godfrey leaned toward me with twinkling eyes as gray as the Paris skies. “No doubt you contemplate the likelihood of Irene finding another mysterious matter to investigate. Surely you are safe from such scandals in the saintly shadow of Notre Dame.”

“Saintly, indeed,” I admitted, “but too tricked-out for my Protestant tastes.” I looked up at the gargoyles grinning from the bristling parapets crowning the great cathedral’s mass across the street. I had no doubt that these ancient stone guardians were more successful in warding off fiends than I would be at shielding Irene from the temptation of a puzzle.

As my eyes dropped back to earth and half the population of Paris out for a stroll in its Sunday best, they lit upon a disreputable figure—a robed and turbaned man of bearded, dark mien who might have materialized like Beelzebub in Faust’s study. I do not like to stare at the less fortunate, or the possibly more predatory, but it was clear that this... apparition was gazing toward our threesome.

“Godfrey—”

“Yes?” His eyes left Irene and the greedy little bird.

“There is a man—”

“There usually is on the streets of Paris, and usually several.”

“He is watching us.”

Godfrey smiled ruefully. “Your use of the plural is kind, but not accurate. He is watching Irene. Most men do.”

“You take this sort of thing extremely well, Godfrey. No doubt it is the cool temper required by the courtroom. This man—and I did not look long, I did not wish him to receive any illusions as to my interest—is most savage looking! He does not look a Parisian gentleman at all!”

Godfrey looked around with that admirable discretion that Irene is always urging upon myself, to no avail. “Ah. I see. The bearded Oriental man who looks half beggar and half brigand, and no doubt all infidel to you. But Paris is the crossroads of Europe; men of all races convene here freely.”

“But not to look at us! Even at one of us. I find it most disturbing.”

“He will likely move on. As we can do ourselves.” Godfrey took up his cane and leaned toward Irene, who had been lost in feeding the inordinately tame wren. “We should take our leave,” he suggested quietly.

She started, then began to don her dashing, though unconventional black gloves, suitable only for mourning.

“Was I ignoring you? Dreadfully sorry. I was wondering if Casanova might not like this precious little one for a companion— although Lucifer would like it too well, I fear!”

Lucifer was the black Persian cat Irene had “given” me on my arrival in Paris in August. He was large and lazy and, despite my distaste for cats, often lay across my diary as I wrote or lounged in my lap when I attempted some domestic duty, such as the crochet work that his wicked claws would snarl.

“I agree,” said I, gathering up my reticule. “That is the trouble with these so-called ‘romantic’ sidewalk cafés of Paris; they provide a fishbowl for the sharks that prowl the streets to prey upon innocents. Godfrey, that scoundrel is not moving on. If anything, he is coming closer. Hurry!”

“Oh?” Irene came out of her trance and began to look around in the manner she recommends to me: missing nothing but appearing to overlook everything.

“Do hurry, Irene! Once again you have attracted the attention of some unsavory individual. I will not have our Sunday ruined by an unseemly incident. I knew coming into Paris would be a mistake.”

Irene instantly singled out the very man whose demeanor so agitated me. “He’s only a poor foreign beggar, Nell.”

“Some foreign
rogue
who would see
us
poorer, no doubt. Please, Irene! For once could you refrain from involving us in a public scene? We need only step along to the Left Bank and our coachman will collect us, and we will have had a thoroughly enjoyable outing with not one thing to mar the day.”

“Oh, very well.” Irene took Godfrey’s arm with an indulgent smile at me, but she moved so languidly I feared the rude watcher would have time to bolt toward us and do whatever he so clearly had in mind: beg, beseech, or berate us with some insanity.

Godfrey extended his other arm, which I took, and we threaded through the tables to the street. Most of the passersby were respectable to the point of being fashionable. Top hats bobbled past the blue turban that never left my view, and a tall, blonde woman with golden sable fur burnishing her hem and shoulders brushed past the watching man, oblivious to his unsavory nature. Paris accepts anything. We swung right to escape his view and began crossing the street, forced to pause as a fruit vendor pulled his fragrant cart past us.

I heard no footsteps behind us, but felt such an imperative sense of haste that I crimped my fingers into Godfrey’s arm.

“Why, Nell,” said he with a reassuring smile. “You are actually worried.”

“Indeed. Please, you must whisk Irene away before—”

A presence loomed at our backs. I glimpsed the red-gold pelt of a sable and inhaled a heady foreign perfume—only the fashionable lady but unaccompanied, how odd... and then another figure hove to behind me—the mysterious foreigner about to bump into us!

We three turned at once, for different reasons: Irene sensing the unknown and rushing to meet it; Godfrey determined to inspect and confront the object of my alarm; I knowing that Fate in bizarre guise was about to enmesh Irene—and Godfrey and me—in another dangerous puzzle.

There he stood, the man who had so unnerved me. And an unnerving figure he was, his skin chestnut-brown, his face and form gaunt beneath garments that were a patchwork of European and Oriental castoffs.

You see!
I almost shouted triumphantly in front of all the Sunday strollers. You
see!
Here it begins again; Irene drawing mystery and skullduggery as a magnet attracts metal.

The fellow, having reached us, fixed us with disbelieving eyes that were—oddly—a shade lighter than his swarthy foreign face. He swayed upon his feet, his pale hazel eyes narrowing, as he stared stupidly at me and intoned in perfect Sloane Square English, “Why, it
is
Miss Huxleigh, indeed.”

Then he collapsed to the cobblestones like a sack of potatoes. Irene regarded me inquiringly, even accusingly.

“I do not know the man!” Staring down at the unconscious fellow, I could only repeat the obvious. “I cannot speculate how he knew my name, but I most certainly do not know—have never known, never seen—”