A Soul of Steel (9 page)

“Of what battle do you speak so harshly, Mr. Stanhope?” I asked. I confess that I have never paid much attention to these innumerable skirmishes with outlandish appellations so often fought under foreign skies by my countrymen.

“Maiwand,” he answered in loathing tones, as if mouthing the devil’s pet name. “A black day for England, and for Maclaine, and for a fool with the youthful hubris to call himself ‘Cobra.’ “

I barely recalled this engagement, but Irene raised an imperious hand, leaning forward in her chair, her eyes gleaming with dawning intelligence. “Maiwand was nearly a decade ago, Mr. Stanhope. Its name is forgotten except in the military histories, though it was far from England’s finest hour. What is the present danger? What is the name of the man you seek, whose life you fear for?”

“A man who saved my own life.”

“And who is he?”

Young Mr. Stanhope—and so I still thought of him, despite the lapse of years and his present, much-fallen circumstance—was strangely silent. His sun-darkened face held that inscrutability said to accompany an Oriental turn of mind. This was not the blithe youth who had left Berkeley Square in high spirits but a decade before.

“I know naught of him but those few hectic minutes we shared amid a battlefield dust storm,” he finally said, picking at the crochet work—my own—on the bed linens.

Irene leaned back, looking even more inscrutable than he. “Now you truly intrigue me, Mr. Stanhope. You seek a nameless man, whose face must have been obscured when you encountered one another during the heat of battle and whose semblance is certainly time-blurred by this late date. Please tell me at least that he is English! That would narrow the field of search somewhat.”

“Why should he not be English?” Mr. Stanhope shot back.

“He might have been an enemy, or an Irishman.”

Mr. Stanhope laughed at her quick retort and sardonic wit. Irishmen were frequently soldiers of fortune and ever the enemy to England even as they served under British rule.

“He is English,” Emerson Stanhope conceded in a raw voice of weariness, though the cautious fire in his eyes that Irene’s questions had lit remained unbanked.

“I am relieved.” Irene stood, catching Godfrey’s eye. “Then you are in the right place. Perhaps we can help you find your quarry.”

“I do not require help, save in your kindness to an ill man.”

“An ill man and a hunted one, I think.”

He made a denying hand gesture but Irene ignored it. “It seems that the life this mysterious gentleman saved is not much regarded by its owner, for that life also appears in fresh and more sinister danger than ever on a battlefield.”

“I merely suffer a relapse of fever. It is you who are delirious, Madame, with your hints of poison and conspiracy.”

“I am often taken that way,” Irene said lightly. “It comes of an apprenticeship in grand opera. Forgive me for harrying you at a time of such weakness. I will leave you to the tender nursing of Miss Huxleigh. No doubt you both have much to discuss.”

Her skirts rustled imperiously as she swept out of the bedchamber.

Godfrey paused by the bed. “If you feel strong enough tomorrow, we can move you to the garden for a time; fresh air should do more for fever than anything else.”

Mr. Stanhope’s hazel eyes crinkled at the comers. “And a smoke, Mr. Norton? I admit that I could use a decent smoke. Outdoors it would not disturb the ladies.”

Godfrey laughed at that, no doubt well aware that the activity would never discomfit one lady in particular. “If you hope to hide from my wife’s curiosity behind a haze of cigar smoke,” he said, “I warn you that it will not do. But the smoke itself can be arranged.”

I followed him out to find Irene waiting in the narrow upstairs passage like a governess ambushing a miscreant.

“Nell!” Her voice was low and urgent. “You must find out more about Mr. Stanhope’s mysterious mission—and his even more mysterious past.”

“I must do no such thing! Irene, the man is ill. Have you no shame?”

“He is not so ill that he cannot obscure his motives and plans. Nell, this is for his own good. Mr. Stanhope has obviously been long abroad and is not well suited to conduct the sort of inquiries he intends.”

“He is wise enough to dodge your impertinent questions!”

“Then you must put to him some less impertinent queries that he will not avoid. I count upon your impeccable tact, your undying sympathy and your eternal concern for another’s own good. You must find out more about your old acquaintance—and soon. For I fear he will not live long to tell anyone more if he is not taken in hand.”

Godfrey met my skeptical look with a sober nod. “Irene is right. There’s something odd about the fellow. He has obviously lived outside the pale in India and environs. Englishmen seldom turn renegade in such climes without reason.”

I turned reluctantly back to the bedchamber, my mind churning with doubt and fear. And curiosity.

“And while you are at it,” Irene added in her best operatic
sotto voce
, which carried to me even as I opened the door, “you had best find out why he was called by that intriguing sobriquet, ‘Cobra.’ “

I shuddered, for I have never liked snakes.

Chapter Eight

PILLOW TALK

“Your... friend
is a determined woman.”

I paused in opening the shutters. If I meant to throw light on my long-ago acquaintance’s situation, the actual light of day might draw forth a corresponding candor. Besides, the hushed, dim intimacy of the sickroom made me uneasy, as did the familiar but utterly altered figure upon the bed. I opened the shutters, and the clear morning light poured in.

“Irene has had to be determined,” I said, taking the hard chair by the bedside with a false calm. I was not used to playing interrogator.

“Tell me about her,” he suggested after a pause. “At first I thought you were employed in some manner in the Nortons’ household. Are you actually mere friends?”

“Yes, I am,” I said, laughing at his confusion. “And more. I assist Godfrey with certain legal matters, and—although no one can be said to assist Irene; she is far too independent—I make myself useful to her as well. I am not quite employee nor family member. I suppose you could accuse me of idleness and waste.”

“You ‘make yourself useful,’ “ he repeated soberly. “That is more than I have done in the years since I last saw you in Berkeley Square.”

“Surely the wish to save a man’s life is of a high order of usefulness?”

“You have not aged,” he said, abruptly changing the subject.

“Of course I have. I am past thirty.”

He smiled. “So am I, but a woman should not confess such things so easily.”

“I am not the kind of woman who would find any advantage in coyness, Mr. Stanhope. Why would I wish to conceal my age except to deceive someone, most likely myself?”

He eyed me with some perplexity, as if, he actually found me—perish the thought—fascinating in some respect. I am not used to being regarded in such a light, although I have often seen its beams showered upon Irene.

“I am quite astounded to find you here in Paris, in such circumstances,” he went on.

“Indeed, Mr. Stanhope! You take the words from my mouth.”

He frowned again, in the way of a baffled boy. “I do not remember you as being so quick-spoken.”

“Ah.” The memory of our youthful selves had induced in me a strange tongue-tied tartness that even now I could not explain. “I was far younger then, and had seen a bit less of the world.”

“What of the world have you seen now?” His tone was so jocular that it unaccountably offended me. Certainly he expected this country mouse to have ventured not much farther than the parson’s pantry. Yet I knew myself to be no match for the exotic adventures that had occupied his life.

I folded my hands upon my lap, as they become restless when idle. Naturally Lucifer, who had been sitting docilely enough upon the elbowboard at the window, proceeded to loft into my lap. Mr. Stanhope awaited my answer.

“I have worked as a drapery clerk at Whiteley’s and as a typewriter-girl in the Temple. I have been privileged, if you can call it that, to see several freshly murdered corpses and to have solved a cryptic cartograph that led to buried archeological treasure. I have been to Bohemia and have met a king, although I did not much like him. I have also met a princess-to-be, and came to like her despite myself. I have never liked Sarah Bernhardt or Oscar Wilde, however much they may claim to cherish me; nor do I have anything but the most profound distaste for snakes, satin slippers, French cuisine and the dreadful Casanova. Lucifer is not among my favorites, either, though I would never neglect him.”

Poor Mr. Stanhope struggled more upright among his feather pillows, which were as overblown and airy as French pastries. “The King of Bohemia? A princess? Bernhardt and Wilde? Casanova and Lucifer? I fear my fever has not waned, after all.”

I smiled at his agitation, a sign of recovering strength, and stroked the black cat, who at least felt amiable if he did not behave so. “This is Lucifer. He is Persian and Parisian. A gift from Irene upon my arrival here last year. Most unwanted, I might add.”

“Afghan,” Mr. Stanhope said in a clear, bitter voice. “The breed is Afghan. Persian is a misnomer.”

“He is misbegotten, I’ll give you that,” said I. “But you mean to say that such cats originated in the unhappy land where you fought in that battle, My... My—?”

“Luckily for you, it is not ‘your’ anything. The battle was called Maiwand, after an insignificant village on the site.”

Lucifer, like all cats knowing himself to be under discussion and reveling in it, bounded soundlessly to the bed and stalked over to inspect its resident.

“He’s a handsome fellow,” Mr. Stanhope said. “This sumptuous breed of cat is the only exportable product of that unhappy landscape, though I’ve spent enough years scraping over it like a scorpion. You must have been referring to domestic pets with all that King of Bohemia and Bernhardt and Wilde business.”

“Certainly not! I am not personally fond of those persons but I would never compare them to animals. That would be quite... disrespectful. To the animals, no doubt. That would be something—”

“Something that your friend Madame Norton would do.”

“Exactly,” said I righteously. “Irene can, at times, be shockingly irreverent. But she means nothing by it.”

“Of course not.” He did not sound at all convinced, but I am used to the people around me contradicting my convictions, having resided for so long with Irene.

“Why did you take such a dislike to Mr. Wilde?” he asked. “I have overheard much of him in the cafés since I came to Paris.”

“You habituate the cafés?”

“Only the fringes. But tell me how Wilde offended you.”

“For one thing, he is such a man with the ladies, always throwing himself into tortured metaphors in our praise and flinging flowers and quips at our feet. I may know little of the world, but I know that nothing good can come of it. He was quite taken with Irene, I’m mortified to say that she insists he also harbored a fondness for myself.”

“And Madame Sarah Bernhardt?”

“Quite an immoral woman, and utterly willful. She let Irene fight a duel disguised as her son, can you imagine it? I tried to stop it, but Sarah, of course, can be quite forceful for such a small woman. And I am not at all certain that her hair is its natural color.”

He shook his head. “I fear I still suffer from delirium, Miss Huxleigh. The picture you paint is exceedingly different from what I would expect of our placid governess of Berkeley Square.”

“There are times that I find my life since then a delirium, too, Mr. Stanhope. Really and truly, it is for the most part excessively dull, unless Irene becomes involved in one of her tangles.”

“She has ambitions of making me into one of these ‘tangles,’ does she?”

“Possibly, but the tangles come to her, rather than vice versa. I would not underestimate her, Mr. Stanhope. She found a missing girdle of diamonds that belonged to Marie Antoinette. Later, she saved a young Parisian girl from disgrace and freed the demoiselle’s poor aunt from a charge of murder. Ignore her flamboyant ways; Irene has done much good, despite herself.”

“No doubt due to your good example.”

“Well...” I smiled modestly. “Certainly I have offered advice on occasion. She, being an opera singer by training, suffers from an impetuous nature and requires the moderation of a cooler head. That is where Godfrey comes in so usefully, although he is so besotted at times with his bride that his normal sensible nature can be corrupted—only in the most minor ways, of course. If it were not for me, who is to say upon what questionable ventures Irene might lure him?”

“Not I.” Lucifer had settled at the invalid’s side and had begun grooming his glossy black flank. Mr. Stanhope stroked the cat’s flowing ruff. “You are a virtual Scheherazade, Miss Huxleigh, spinning exotic tales. I cannot believe that you are the same diffident, lonely young person I knew.”

“You did not know me, Mr. Stanhope. A governess is but one step up from a servant. And I was not lonely! I had my two charges, Charlotte and Allegra—how grown they must be by now. Young ladies...” My sigh was echoed by Mr. Stanhope’s.