Good Night, Mr. Holmes (17 page)

“Would you really, Irene? Somehow I think the cart has come to pull the horse. You’ve shown no loss of interest in the Zone of Diamonds despite all this time and a cold trail.”

“The Zone.” Irene lifted an eyebrow. “No, I shall always want to solve that conundrum—but that is a major work of detective art, involving revolution and royalty and missing crown jewels. As for the rest, let it go. I shall be as indifferent to mysterious matters as a dog to milk once I am fully established as an opera singer.”

Though this was said grandiosely, with Irene’s offhand tone of conviction, I sniffed audibly before she swept out the door, which unspoken comment she pretended not to have heard.

“You seem distracted today, Miss Huxleigh.”

I tore my eyes from the window, where they had been staring at the treetops. “So sorry, Mr. Norton. I don’t think I have fallen much behind.” I began to admonish the keys sharply.

“I did not mean for you to attack the poor machine,” he said, laughing. “Let me rephrase my comment. ‘You seem pensive today, Miss Huxleigh.’ Is there a difficulty?”

“No, of course not... I was merely thinking.”

“Is thinking such a sad occupation?”

“No, only... I was thinking of my late father.”

“Ah.” His tone became abruptly noncommittal.

“And... guilt. I was meditating on the strange state of guilt”

“Perhaps natural in a parson’s daughter,” he said with a slight smile.

“Have you ever felt... guilty, Mr. Norton?”

His laugh was sharp and brief, like a bark. “What person who has passed through childhood has not? Have you not instilled guilt in your day, Miss Huxleigh, as a governess?”

“Yes. Guilt is quite a useful emotion. Now that I have experienced it more closely, I feel... wretched... for ever having induced it in another, even in the name of discipline.”

“What have you to feel guilty about, for heaven’s sake?”

I took my hands from the keys and folded them in my lap, staring steadily at Q-W-E-R-T. “I have not been fully frank about my situation with you, Mr. Norton.”

“I sense a confession coming on. I should warn you that a barrister is not a man of the cloth.”

“Perhaps you will have to do. I should tell you that, that I... share lodgings with another.”

“You... share lodgings with another.” A long silence, in which Mr. Norton cleared his throat. “Surely, you are not implying an unsanctioned alliance...?”

I looked up, mortified. “Oh, no! I reside with another woman, of course.”

“Of course.” He sounded much relieved. “But that is becoming common as more countrywomen descend on London for work. There is nothing irregular in it—”

“My chamber-mate is... an actress.”

“I see. No doubt an... unusual companion for a parson’s daughter, but there are a good many actresses in London, and some of them even respectable, I am sure.”

“She also... takes on clients—”

“Clients! I see.”

“No! Clients of a quite respectable kind, although unusual.”

“Respectable but unusual.” His voice remained carefully neutral as his confusion grew.

By now he had no inkling of where I was headed and half-feared the direction. Yet he remained calm and not at all judgmental. I did not quite know how to conclude my awkwardly begun admission.

“What kind of clients?” Mr. Norton prodded gently. “For what services?”

“For... finding things.”

“Finding things? Like those that are lost?”

“Or stolen.”

“What you describe, Miss Huxleigh, is an inquiry agent. Many barristers employ such from time to time. Such men are of some use...” He paused to dissect his erroneous assumption. “But that is the point, is it not? Your chamber-mate is a woman, a female inquiry agent... and an actress as well—”

When the truth struck him, Mr. Norton drew himself up as if in court. “She is this Adler woman who has meddled into the history of my family, who is trying to locate my father!”

“I fear so.”

“And you have been sent to spy upon me!”

I dared not even glance up to read his expression. Now the blind impression of “old Norton” I had received through the draperies and the man I knew merged as his indignation thundered above me.

“This is pernicious, Miss Huxleigh! I would not expect it of you.”

“Nor would I. Truly, I have not ‘spied’; there was naught to spy, and so I have told Irene. She was most annoyed with me.”

“This is infernal!” He began pacing. “Intolerable. To corrupt a parson’s daughter, to harry a man in the privacy of his own office—”

I wrung my hands. “Yes, it is dreadful. Irene has absolutely no compunction in the pursuit of a mystery. She is relentless.”

“Mystery! What mystery is there about the Nortons but the usual measure of human misery in double dose?”

“Why, the Zone.”

“Zone?”

“Of Diamonds.” I swallowed. Godfrey Norton stared at me as if I were mad. “Queen Marie Antoinette’s diamond belt, that your father reputedly bought in the fifties and that Mr. Tiffany wants to buy.”

“Diamonds? Marie Antoinette? Tiffany?” Mr. Norton flipped up his frockcoat skirt and sat on the documents that cushioned the only other chair in the office. “You had better tell me more, Miss Huxleigh. Half-confessions are liable to lead to half-baked conclusions.”

“That is what Mr. Tiffany had heard, that a fellow named Norton had purchased the Zone cheaply after it escaped Paris in the Revolution of 1848.”

“I wasn’t even born then.”

“Nor was I. Or Irene. But that’s why she was investigating the Norton family. It was her only line of inquiry. She was looking for your father; instead she apparently unearthed you.”

“Diamonds”—he shook his head—”what... fairy tales! Oh, I don’t doubt that some story is circulating. At least this tale is more glamorous than the sordid truth of my family’s past. Perhaps I should be grateful to this fabulous ‘Zone’ for obscuring what is merely tawdry with its dazzle.” He regarded me sharply. “You know, of course, then, of my call upon your chamber-mate.”

I nodded, afraid that an unconsidered word would force me to confess to the miserably petty crime of eavesdropping as well.

Mr. Norton sighed, smoothing his dark mustache with a forefinger. He laughed suddenly. “Your Miss Adler must think me a greedy rival for the Zone, angered to have other hounds on the trail. Or does she think I have it?”

“She thinks no one has it, for no one shows signs of that kind of wealth, though, of course, we—she has not located your father.”

“My father.” An odd expression came over Mr. Norton’s face. He tore a piece of paper from the corner of a deed and scrawled across it. “Here is my father’s, address. Perhaps she should speak directly to the supposed owner of this fabulous treasure. Take it! That is where he resides, at that address. You have my blessings, Miss Huxleigh. Let your indefatigable friend go directly to the source, and good luck to her!”

“Surely you are not serious!”

“You mean that I am not sincere. But I am!” He smiled again, bitterly. “I wish to forget my family, and particularly my father. I wish all others to forget him. Let Miss Adler find the cursed Zone and convey it to Mr. Tiffany and let them all forget the memory of Black Jack Norton. My mother is dead, at least. She can be hurt no longer.”

“Please, Mr. Norton. It was quite unforgivable of Irene to go hunting over the ground of your family’s history. She gets quite carried away in the pursuit of the unattainable—”

“So do we all. Do you want to know what is really unattainable about my sorry family, Miss Huxleigh? A happy memory. My mother had left my father when I was quite young. As I grew older, I began to see what a scandal it was that she and my brothers and I lived apart from him. I even began to see the price she had paid, despite the success of her novels. When my father sued her for the proceeds of her writing—and won—I certainly saw our lodgings, our food, our clothing decline in the face of his legal success. It quite broke my mother’s heart to have the very law of England uphold such a scoundrel.”

“I cannot say how sorry I am; really, you need not tell me more.”

“I
must tell someone the truth, since lies about my family are all that I have heard since my youth. Now your friend perpetuates more lies with this glittering tale of lost diamonds. Speak of lost honor, lost love, lost hope, lost livelihoods, rather than of diamonds. But such losses are too dull, too sordid in their everyday way to enchant the curious.”

“Yet they are losses I can sympathize with more readily, Mr. Norton,” I said quietly.

His thin-lipped smile grew rueful. “You find yourself quite in the middle, don’t you, Miss Huxleigh? A parson’s daughter must be used to firmer moral ground. Perhaps you think ill of my late mother, as so many did—”

“It sounds as if she were sorely wronged.”

“Indeed she was, by the law of England that declares all of a wife’s property is her husband’s, even when she earns it and lives apart from him because he is the worst sort of brute. That’s why I became a barrister, though my father before me had tainted the profession in my eyes, I wanted to right that law, and defend other women who are defenseless against the rapacity of their own husbands.”

“Most admirable,” I muttered, ashamed. “I quite understand why you cannot bear to have strangers probing into your family background. I shall tell Irene at once and insist that she abandon her inquiry.”

“No!” He caught my wrist as I rose, releasing me as soon as he realized the strength of his gesture. “That, too, invades my privacy. This talk of ours is between us alone. As you sought discretion, so do I.”

I unfolded my hand, in which lay the crumpled address of his demonic father. “What of this?”

He smiled with a mysterious relish. “Give it to her. Let her follow the trail to its natural conclusion. From what you say of Irene Adler, she will not rest until she is convinced every stone has been turned. Let her overturn her own stones, and deal with what... vermin ... she finds under them.”

I shivered a little at his tone, at the bitter blackness in his eyes. I knew and liked Godfrey Norton, but I realized that I had merely skimmed the unhappy surface of his family’s past. I wondered now—with new guilt—whether I should let Irene pursue the path that Mr. Norton had so unexpectedly cleared for her.

Chapter Eleven

B
LACK
J
ACK
N
ORTON
U
NEARTHED

“You are
certain that this address in Croydon is where Godfrey Norton has sent so many of his funds?”

“Yes,” I admitted, though I felt something of a betrayer for leading Irene blindly to it. I had not told her of Mr. Norton’s revelations to me. It had taken me a full month to pass on the address.

“Why ask now, Irene, when we are already embarked by rail and by hired coach, at great expense? If you have doubts about prying into this affair—”

“No.” Irene lifted her chin as she did just before delivering the first note of a song. It was a gesture that both commanded attention and expressed Irene’s deep commitment to her course. “This jaunt of ours may forever lay to rest an old mystery.”

“Mr. Norton has been a most considerate and generous employer,” I mumbled. “Perhaps old mysteries should not be settled at his expense.”

“Don’t go sentimental on me, Nell, at this late date. ‘Mr. Norton’ was not most considerate and generous to me when we met. You say he is now aware that you and I share lodgings. No doubt he still thinks me a hired meddler with not the brains to solve who killed Cock Robin. I fancy I will change his opinion shortly.”

“Then you know what to expect at The Sycamores in Croydon.”

“Not what, Penelope.
Who.”

With the rare invocation of my full formal name and that clipped monosyllable, Irene lapsed into morose silence.

Late summer sunshine dappled through the roadside leaves and cast a lacy veil of light and shadow over her features. She would not heed any feeble objections I might care to make; for some reason, this journey tapped both her personal and professional wellsprings. No one knew better than I when Irene Adler would not be gain-said.