A Soul of Steel (8 page)

“How disappointing. Is there any honey? Ah, thank you. And, Irene... did she mention anything significant occurring when she returned from her time on duty?”

Godfrey paused in dosing a croissant with a dollop of pale, sweet country butter. “Ah... it was rather late. We had other matters than your mysterious gentleman to, er, discuss.”

“Truly? I cannot imagine Irene being distracted from a mystery so near at hand for anything.”

Godfrey shrugged with masculine modesty. “She was fatigued, no doubt, from her late hours sitting up with the sick man.”

“And she did not report any delirious revelations?”

“She reported delirium, but no revelations,” Godfrey said at last with the hesitant air of a man conveying the exact truth in an utterly different context from the one under discussion.

“Then it has been a most unproductive night,” I summed up, biting as daintily as possible into my condiment-laden roll. I dislike the taste of French baking, which is much overrated by the easily led, and have been forced to resort to disguising the dough with sweets.

“I would not say that the night was unproductive.” Irene swept into the small breakfast chamber in a blonde lace combing mantle, her russet hair rippling over her shoulders.

It occurs to me that during the years I have recorded Irene’s adventures, or rather, recorded my adventures while living with Irene, that my descriptions of her coloring have varied. For some annoying reason, the exact shade of Irene’s hair, even her eye color, shifts with the hour of the day, the hues of her clothing and the range of her moods.

Beyond being a gifted actress, she is a human chameleon upon whom the light plays tricks, sometimes painting her hair auburn, at other times brunette. Her eyes have that fascinating tiger’s-eye quality of mellowing to orbs of honeyed amber and darkening to coffee-dark brown when her pupils swell with agitation.

That gay, green June morning in Neuilly Irene was nevertheless a walking palette of autumnal hues, as warming as well-steeped tea.

She accepted the coffee cup that Sophie instantly brought her and poured several dollops of clotted cream into it, carelessly stirring the mess with the nearest utensil, a fork. Could the Beauties of Europe watch Irene eat whatever pleased her, there would be more than ground glass in her rouge pot, as happened once in the dressing rooms of La Scala.

“Well, my dears.” Irene looked brightly from Godfrey to me, unaware of the current day’s aura. “And have you been comparing notes on our patient’s progress? What do you think?”

“That you hardly look as if you had sat up half the night,” I answered tartly.

I had slept barely at all after the strain of fleeing the sickroom and then toying with the dinner that had followed under Irene’s formidable scrutiny.

Irene smiled. “Oh, I was up more than half the night at that, Nell, but I haven’t worried about confessions I must make in the morning, as you have.”

“What confessions?”

“You might start,” she suggested, sipping the scalding coffee with true American bravado, “by telling us the identity of the sunburnt hero upstairs.”

“What makes you think that Nell knows?” Godfrey asked.

“Why do you call him a hero?” I demanded simultaneously.

She blinked and stared from one of us to the other.

“My, but we are testy this lovely morning. To answer your questions: Nell has always known the man, Godfrey; she simply did not recognize him until last evening.” Irene addressed me next. “As for his being a hero, I found a medal concealed in his shoe. What do you say to that?”

I sipped my tea, which had cooled to tepid peppermint consommé. “That I am relieved to learn that the fellow actually wore shoes.”

Irene laughed delightedly. “You are doing a splendid job of pretending ignorance, but I could tell from your manner last evening that something troubled you. Surely only knowing the identity of the sick man could deaden your palette to Veal Malmaison.”

“I suppose he revealed that while you were sequestered with him later?”

“Alas, no. He was as irritatingly mum on the subject then as you are now.”

“Perhaps it’s a conspiracy,” Godfrey suggested, “between our Nell and the mysterious stranger from the East.”

“You are a cold-blooded pair,” I put in, “to show such curiosity about a man who may be dying from some subtly administered poison.”

“A hatpin is hardly subtle, Nell,” Irene corrected me. “And I think that the poison it bore is not fatal to this particular victim. Besides,” she added blithely, shaking her napkin free of pastry flakes, “his fever broke in the night. I expect him to be perfectly intelligible this morning.”

I could not keep from jumping in my chair. “Why did you not say so the first thing? We must let the poor man know where he is, so he does not panic.”

Irene’s warm hand covered my icy fist like a tea cozy. “He will not panic. He knows he is among friends.”

I was about to ask how this could be, but feared I would not like the answer. So we finished breakfast—or my friends did. I had suddenly lost my appetite, as I had last night at dinner.

“I do believe I know him,” I admitted at last, “but he has changed so much...”

“Perhaps you have as well,” Irene said almost consolingly.

“I? Not in the least, I’m sure. After all,
he
recognized me, not vice versa.”

“Do you wish to tell us of him?” Godfrey inquired.

“I would rather let him speak for himself,” I said firmly. “He has changed so greatly that I dare not speculate on why or how.”

“What a shame!” Irene smiled tigerishly. “Speculation is one of the few truly creative entertainments left to our modern times. I have been concocting plots on an operatic scale. I would hate to have our guest destroy them with the simple, dull truth.”

We finished breakfast, each in our way, and repaired upstairs to confront the invalid. There he lay, brown upon the bed linens but pale in an inner, spiritual sense. Perhaps the breaking fever had also washed away his resolve.

Sophie made a self-important to-do about fluffing pillows and propping him up against them so he could speak with us. Despite the snowy nightshirt he wore, or because of it, his skin seemed strikingly dark, though his eyes no longer held the unnatural luster of illness.

He spoke in that disconcertingly perfect English while the rest of us studied his remarkable appearance in silence.

“I apologize for inflicting myself upon your household. The maid tells me that you plucked me from collapse upon the cobblestones of Notre Dame.”

Irene pounced. “Then you speak French, for our servant speaks no English.”

He looked taken aback at this challenging response to his apologetic beginning, but added in the language of this land, “Yes, Madame, I speak French. Yet in any language I must apologize for casting myself upon the mercy of strangers. I cannot imagine what weakness came over me.”

“Can you not?” Irene did not sound even slightly merciful at the moment. “Come, come, sir. You dissemble.”

“D-dissemble?”

“Or, as the plain folk put it, you lie. At the least you mean to mislead us. You have suffered from fever for some time.”

“But not in this climate, not so far north. Is this what you mean by deception, Madame?” He was more bewildered than defensive.

“Not at all. There is also your insistence that we are strangers to you.”

“But—” He eyed Godfrey and Irene with rather pitiful confusion. “You are.”

“And Miss Huxleigh—whose name you have called out not once but several times in your delirium?” Irene pointed to me at a moment when I most would have liked to sift through the floorboards into safe invisibility downstairs. “What is she to think of you now calling her a mere ‘stranger’?”

“Really, Irene,” I murmured. “The gentleman is quite correct.”

The man’s gaunt face had stiffened like a soldier’s on parade. “I may have said a great deal of nonsense in my delirium. They do not call it ‘senselessness’ for nothing.”

“On the contrary.” Irene drew a side chair to the bed the better to interrogate her victim. “You have not forgotten an iota of what you said while raving. It is merely that with a cool head again, you are prepared to deny it.”

“I cannot blame you for thinking me a liar and rogue, considering the circumstances in which you found me. Give me my robes and I’ll be gone.”

“Oh, I cannot in good conscience do that,” Irene murmured. “You are too ill.”

“And this is how you treat an ill man, Madame?”

“This is how I treat a prevaricator, sir, well or ill. If you will not answer my questions frankly, I will be forced to bully the answers out of Miss Huxleigh.”

The patient’s eyes gleamed with fresh spirit. “I do not know what position this unfortunate lady occupies in your establishment, but she does not have to suffer such mistreatment.”

“As I thought. You seek to protect her—now, and by your continuing silence about yourself.”

A silence ruled the room. Godfrey had watched the exchange with the same sharp attention he would give to a rival barrister’s cross-examination, as if more were going on than was evident. I myself was embarrassed by Irene’s rough accusations. Yet she had hit a nerve. For the first time I saw color flush that dusky visage.

The man sighed. “You overestimate the chivalry that I am capable of at this point in my life,” he said wearily. “It is far more likely that I seek to protect myself.”

“And your identity,” Irene prodded. She smiled and leaned back in the chair. “My dear sir, you have in the past few hours escaped a horrible and intentional death. Can the truth of your identity be worse than that fate?”

His expression became more bitter than the black coffee Irene and Godfrey consumed so copiously in the morning. “Truth is almost always worse than death, especially to one who has lived on the other side of the veil between East and West.”

“Ah.” Irene settled happily upon her hard chair. “A story. Begin with who you are.”

“Should you not tell me your identity first?”

“A good point. I am a dead woman, sir, but you may call me Madame Norton. And this dashing gentleman is my husband, Godfrey, also presumed dead. Miss Huxleigh you know, and her mortality has never been in question, nor has anything else about her. Miss Huxleigh is of impeccable intentions. Her position in this household is as strict guardian of propriety, and a terrible tyrant she is, too.”

“You jest with me,” the poor man said.

Godfrey forsook his position lounging against the bureau to approach the bed. “My wife always speaks the serious truth, but often spouts ambiguities, like the Oracle. She means that she and I are wrongfully presumed dead and that we have not sought to correct that mistake. In my case, at least, it does not matter, as I was virtually anonymous before the misunderstanding occurred.”

“And”— the man looked into my eyes for the first time— “is... Miss Huxleigh in truth the household terror your wife implies?”

“Miss Huxleigh is a stalwart member of the company, but at times her stringent standards do terrify my wife... a little, as I believe Irene meant to intimidate you into saying what you may wish to keep to yourself.”

“What of this deliberate death she spoke of?”

Irene wasted no words. “Poison,” she said. “Borne on the prick of a hatpin. You were infected in the crowd before Notre Dame, but I believe your chronic fever foiled the toxin by forcing your body to perspire it away before it could do its damage.”

The man laughed. “Yes, it’s hard for civilized toxins to harm a system that has been suckled at the breast of hellish Afghan and Indian plains for over a decade. I have quinine rather than blood in my veins by now.”

Godfrey frowned and drew another side chair to the foot of the bed. “News of this attempted murder does not surprise you?”

Hazel eyes burned in the bezel of that lean, dark face. “Living in India—not as the White Man does, in separate settlements and cool hill-stations, but as the native does—is a form of attempted murder far more serious than poisoned hatpins, sir.”

“Oh, you must tell us your story,” Irene ordered rapturously, “but first you must explain yourself to poor, dear Penelope. She has suffered enough confusion.”

I wanted to die of mortification as those hazel eyes searched mine. He seemed to look only at me, and deeply into me. “Do you not know me, Miss Huxleigh?”

“I—I believe that I do.”

“Do you wish to know more?”

“I believe that Irene is right. I believe that I must know.”

He sighed, spread his brown hands on the coverlet and examined them with a kind of weary wonder. “You have before you a dead man, too, Mr. and Mrs. Norton, in everything but the fact of my breathing despite all attempts to end it—my own and others’. In my youth, I was the flower of English gentility, one of hundreds of sturdy blossoms stripped from the bush of England at their peak and exported to a foreign clime. I was sent off to war in a smart uniform with scarlet trousers, with white-gloved hands. With no blood on anything but my morning razor.”

“Who were you, in this world of long ago?” Irene wondered.

He studied the figured coverlet, as if its loose-woven hummocks and valleys were an unfamiliar landscape from which he could not tear his eyes.

I found myself answering for him, saying the words he had lost the will to affirm. It has often been my role in life to act for others in this fashion, but at no time has it been more difficult.

“Young Mr. Stanhope,” I said, my voice remarkably clear, remarkably formal, as if I were announcing him to the Queen. “Mr. Emerson Stanhope of Grosvenor Square.”

“Stanhope.” Godfrey raised a raven eyebrow. “It’s an honored name in the Temple.”

“And so it shall remain as long as I stay lost and forgotten. But now... I must venture from the foreign bolt-holes in which I have hidden for so long.” He glanced at me. “And I fear I will bring pain and disgrace upon those who have known me.” A flush of color surfaced again in the hollows of those sunken cheeks.

“How do you mean ‘disgrace’?” Irene probed.

“That bitter battle is long forgotten. If I survived, others as deserving died that day. Others even more deserving had their reputations tarnished far beyond what the mere metal of medals and history books can honor. I was content to let the dead lie unavenged, coward that I am. Now I fear that a living man will pay the price of my stupidity and my silence, so I must return to England to set things right, if I can. Though nothing can right the perfidy of that day when men and horses died by the dozens in the dust of those brutal plains under the damned, underestimated, relentless thunder of the Ayub’s artillery.”