Good Night, Mr. Holmes (24 page)

His roguish smile was wasted on me. “How do you propose to unravel this Mutterworth will?” I asked.

“I am relying on my infallible instincts about character,”

I stared at him, having many times made clear my belief that he had utterly misjudged Irene. Mr. Norton smiled as if reading my thoughts.

“Here, Miss Huxleigh, I have
male
character to study; allow me some superiority on that score. The late Cavendish Mutterworth was a bitter man, a bachelor tied to an unmarried sister all his life until they became a kind of estranged couple sharing only the same house. I suggest that the parrot—the aptly named Casanova, for there was also a harem of lady parrots that Miss Mutterworth dispersed during her brother’s fatal illness, say the solicitors—was bought purely to ruffle Miss Mutterworth’s feathers, so to speak.”

“What other reason could there be for acquiring such a beast?” said I grimly.

“Ah, you found him as ingratiating as Miss Mutterworth did, then?”

“Mr. Norton, I have spent half the night past cajoling the roster of verbal ‘poltroonery’ you have perused from that bird’s lips—er, beak. No properly reared gentlewoman would tolerate an hour in his company.”

“Nor pay any heed to his ravings?”

“Certainly not. Had I not been forced to endure them in the performance of my duty—”

“And most kind of you to accept this unpleasant task. Yet once you had begun listening to the creature, did not certain words and phrases recur?”

“Yes, and all of them foul.”

“I perceive that you have marked the most common ones. When we see the Mutterworth house and grounds, we may gain a better sense of direction, I think.”

At this juncture a strangled squawk of agreement issued from the shrouded cage at my feet, causing me to wonder whether stewed parrot would have any culinary appeal.

I recognized in my employer the same curious symptoms I’d observed in Irene: impatience, the alert posture of a hound about to slip its leash to follow the fox, and a certain air of intellectual intoxication that has nothing to do with strong spirits.

With a mild stirring of these same emotions, I leaned toward the carriage window to watch Mr. Mutter-worth’s residence loom into view.

“An isolated, foreboding sort of place,” Mr. Norton commented in the dramatic tones he employed to such fine effect before the bar.

“Quite a Wuthering Heights,” I noted.

“Withering,
Miss Huxleigh,” he said sharply, glancing my way, “for Cavendish Mutterworth withered away here. Even the eminent Casanova had to watch his harem shrink to nothing under Miss Mutterworth’s instructions.”

“You seem bent on making the woman the villain of the piece,” said I.

“Not I. Old Mutterworth. He put it into his will: To my sister, Jezebel—’”

“Jezebel?!”

“Not as aptly named as the parrot, I fear. At any rate, ‘To my sister, Jezebel, I leave my prize possession, the parrot Casanova, that she may not have to hear herself talk.’”

The coach drew through the wrought-iron gate that stood ajar and along a driveway to the house. Chimneys bunched against the somber sky like huddled street Arabs. A rook cawed disconsolately from a leafless beech tree down the lane. I shivered.

“The house disturbs you?”

“A draft,” I said smartly, and descended the carriage with the driver’s aid.

Miss Mutterworth awaited us in the receiving room, to which a housekeeper showed us.

“The house looks Jacobean,” Mr. Norton said.

“Looks are not everything,” the elderly lady sniffed. “My brother had it built forty years ago to fool just such upstarts as you.”

He glanced about in apparent innocent pleasure. “What a fine job he did, too. Is everything newly made, even the fence and gardens?”

“Forty years ago, all of it.” Miss Mutterworth leaned toward the round table upon which Mr. Norton had set the parrot’s cage. “They say these birds can live as long as that—even longer,” she added with deep melancholy.

“How long did your brother have the bird?”

“Only the past few years, perhaps five.”

“Yet he taught it a great many phrases.”

“Dozens, though the tongue-waggling beast came with a whole litany of catchwords. Some say he’d been a sailor’s pet. Certainly my brother made a bosom companion of him, feeding him seeds and whispering new abominations to his imitative ear as if they were partners in crime.”

Mr. Norton raised an expressive dark eyebrow at me, a gesture he had mastered in the cradle, I warrant. “Might we explore the house and grounds?”

“All you wish, though it will not be mine to admit you to before long.”

“We shall see,” Mr. Norton said, lifting the parrot’s cage from the table. He led me toward the entry hall where the stair forked into two flights before meeting on the landing and forking again.

“His own building,” he whispered at me, and winked.

I followed him upstairs, resting my hand on the walnut railing until I discovered at each turn of the stairs that a grotesque carved face grimaced from every newel post. When I mentioned the gargoyles to Mr. Norton, he merely nodded and pointed to the plaster frieze beneath the hall ceiling.

The design was that odd pictograph of “Cave-in-dish Mutter-worth,” traced in the plaster over and over.

On the second floor a maid led us to the late master’s quarters, where even the chamber pot wore a twisted ceramic face, and its handles were two uplifted hands. I hesitated to direct Mr. Norton’s attention to it.

He was busy unveiling the parrot and installing its cage on the empty stand that stood ready for it.

“Awk!”
Casanova cleared his throat, sidling down the perch until his seamed foot brushed the bars. “Awkward,” he said, cocking a hidden ear my way.

“Most awkward,” I agreed.

“Quick study,” Mr. Norton approved, rubbing his palms together. “You used the word in the coach and it suits the bird’s natural voice.”

“It is awkward being here.” I glanced around the bedchamber, struck by the recent presence of death, however naturally delivered.

The air held that sickroom tang of age and decay. I noted a cane leaning into a dark corner, the old man’s nightshirt and cap folded at the foot of the testered bed.

“Let me have a look at your list again,” Mr. Norton said.

The paper crackled as he unfolded it and Casanova edged nearer to absorb every snap.

“Tippecanoe and treasure, too,” Mr. Norton mused.

“Go soak your head in it,” the bird croaked. “Go soak your head in it.”

“Tippecanoe,” I mused in turn, feeling obliged to contribute something to this expedition. “Isn’t that American?”

“Pertaining to an American political contest, I believe. A campaign slogan that became a popular song years ago, ‘Tippecanoe and Tyler Too’. But the canoe is also an Indian boat of sorts, long and thin and made of birch-bark.”

“Tippecanoe and treasure, too. Nonsense then, just like Mr. Mutterworth.”

“Mutterworth. I wonder if he was so enamored of making puns upon his own name—”

“Well, he had enough muttering around him, with all those parrots—”

“And one master mutterer.” Mr. Norton extended an imprudent finger into Casanova’s cage. The bird shuffled over to the bars, then clamped its iron-grey beak shut on it.

This time Mr. Norton flapped and squawked. “Quite a grip.”

“I got la grippe,” the parrot shrieked back.

I went to the window and cast the casement wide, needing some fresh air, fresh thought and something other to regard than the odious and flesh-eating Casanova.

A row of grotesque green faces grinned up at me—topiary bushes cut into inhuman expressions, all marching away in a double row toward the formal gardens that clustered around a manmade pond and an airy wooden gazebo in the shape of a parrot’s cage.

“What a bizarre garden!” I noted. “Those faces— ‘neither beast nor human,’” I quoted from Poe, a favorite of mine. “Ghouls.”

Mr. Norton was at my side in seconds, which I found most gratifying. Chivalry toward the weaker sex is so lost to most modern men. However, it was not my possible peril that drew him, but my ungodly discovery.

“Faces... yes. And neither beast nor human, but—
bird,
Penelope!” he cried in his wonder, forgetting more formal means of address. “Not a... catwalk, but a
birdwalk.
You’ve found it!” At that he clapped me on the shoulder in a most familiar—if unthinking—manner. “I was convinced the clue would be in the house. How did you come to think of the grounds, the garden?” he demanded.

How did I? Then I remembered Irene wondering where a half-demented old man might have hidden his greatest treasure and realized that I had duplicated her methods without knowing it. I had looked beyond the chamber that imprisoned him to the greater world and the fresh air. But I could hardly tell Godfrey Norton that, since his own late father’s case had inspired my actions in this one.

“There seemed little of interest in the house,” I said shortly but firmly.

Mr. Norton nodded and shook his head at the garden below us. Even as we watched, a pair of gardeners in baggy trousers with clay-stained knees advanced on the topiary bushes with hedge-clippers.

“Not a moment too soon,” Mr. Norton said. “As the fair female parrots went, so shall the bushes. This is Casanova’s late lamented harem, don’t you see, Miss Huxleigh? And there, at the end, sits the cagey old bird himself.”

I reexamined the faces with their curved proboscises and leaves upraised like feathers. Mr. Norton was right. At the end of the avenue, in perfect proportion to the distant cagelike gazebo, perched the hoariest, shaggiest shape of all—Casanova in green glory, one wing extended as he groomed his bedraggled chest feathers.

We hurried below and out to the gardens, Mr. Norton muttering from the list. “‘Cut the cackle; kill the grackle’... an aviary outdoors perhaps? ‘Greenback’? The topiary bird backs? Bird bath?”

“The pond!” I exclaimed, stopping under a shower of clipped leaves. The gardeners on their ladders snipped away above me.

“Greenbacks! American money!” Mr. Norton responded.

We stared at each other in ecstatic agreement.

That is why, approximately half an hour later, the two gardeners drew from the pond waters, at Mr. Norton’s direction, a birdcage wrapped in oilcloth.

From the bedchamber casement I had neglected to close, a raucous voice hailed our discovery: “Tippecanoe and treasure, too.”

When the cage’s contents were examined on Miss Mutterworth’s parlor table, they proved to be a large amount of American dollars, or
greenbacks,
a rare stamp and coin collection, several packets of stock in our nation’s most solid companies and various other documents of value. Miss Mutterworth fluttered and cooed as the treasure spread across the figured shawl that covered the table. Finally the cage was emptied. It was much rusted, although the oilcloth had preserved the papers, stamps and coins.

When it was empty, Mr. Norton on an impulse turned the cage upside down. “Another clue,” he pronounced, “though I can’t quite read it.”

I lifted my trusty pince-nez to my nose and squinted through the rust at the word engraved in the metal, the maker’s name. “Tyler.”

“Tippecanoe and
Tyler’s
treasure, too!” Mr. Norton and I recited together.

From upstairs came a dim and awful echo.

Chapter Sixteen

W
ORD FROM
A
BROAD

Our past
words often come to haunt us, but rarely do so in such naked ringing tones as those emitted by a parrot.

Miss Mutterworth, naturally, had no desire to add Casanova to the tally of wealth left by her late brother.

“You’ve always fancied a canary, my dear Miss Huxleigh,” Mr. Norton cajoled.

We were back in chambers with work to do and the parrot’s cage hanging from a makeshift hook too near my shoulder for comfort. “Casanova may possess unsuspected musical gifts.”

“I doubt it,” said I with a shudder, but the upshot was that the creature fell to me by default.

If I did not wish to hear its siren squawks while performing upon the typewriter at Mr. Norton’s chambers, the lesser of two evils was to bring the bird home. At least the parrot had feathers and a voice, albeit rough, and—as it was prone to remind me from the amphitheater of the bay window, where I installed its cage, I had always “fan-cied a ca-nar-y, fan-cied a ca-nar-y—
awk!”

I confess I found it company of a sort; I would not wish the beast to fall into uncharitable hands. What Irene would think of my acquisition, I often wondered; likely she would teach it to smoke those little cigars of hers. Casanova was soon the least of my concerns, however.

In examining my diaries for the year 1886,1 find that no document can more tersely summarize the swift turns in Irene Adler’s career abroad than her own remarkable letters informing me of the major events.

Thus I present her words unsullied, save that I have taken the liberty of repairing some lapses in spelling and punctuation. Irene Adler wrote as she spoke and lived: with flair and intelligence but not the tidiest of approaches. I have also interspersed annotations of my own, as needed.