Irene Adler: Chapel Noir Part 17

Before I could digest this unappetizing idea, Inspector le Villard caught up with us, looking harried.

"Now that you have seen this, your presence is requested at the Hotel Bristol," he said without so much as a bow. "Can your coachman take you there? It is in rue Faubourg-Saint-Honore."

"Both I and my coachman are familiar with the rue Faubourg-Saint-Honore," Irene said. "We are expected no matter the hour?"

"No matter the hour," the inspector repeated grimly. "This is an affair well beyond the bounds of the usual channels. I am sorry, Madame, Mademoiselle, that you should be subjected to such sights, but we are all p.a.w.ns in the hands of higher powers."

With a brisk bow of farewell, he returned to the lantern-bearing gendarmes cl.u.s.tered at the entrance to the death chamber.

A wagon-lit waited nearby, its heavily harnessed pair of horses standing with their weight on three legs, heads bowed as if in sorrow.

"She will soon join her more elegant sisters lying on cold stone beds at the Paris Morgue," Irene said in a somber tone.

"And whom will we join at the Hotel Bristol?"

"It is the favorite hostelry of the Prince of Wales when he is in Paris."

I raised my eyebrows, though no one took note of the gesture. I was about as eager to take another meeting with Bertie as I was actually to encounter Jack the Ripper.

The Hotel Bristol was, of course, fit to house a prince, even an English prince.

A discreetly elegant facade of gray stone opened into a lobby carpeted like a Monet water lily painting: those costly carpets known as Savonneries, these woven in misty hues of blue and green that seemed too delicately tinted to dishonor by stepping upon.

Marble pillars and floors should have made the vast place echo, but the thick, exquisite carpets, the even more exquisite rustle of silks and velvets and finest wool broadcloth, the hushed tones of the people who pa.s.sed at a stately pace made everything seem m.u.f.fled in great clouds of the fine silk net that is called Illusion.

I am not sure if a footman or an equerry met us in the hotel lobby. Whatever his position, he was awaiting us, recognized us as we entered the vast s.p.a.ce, and intercepted us before we took four steps into the marble-paved interior.

Or rather, he recognized Irene.

He bowed so profoundly that I could almost hear his heels click. "Madame Norton, I am to take you and your companion immediately upstairs for lunch."

His great height and lance-straight spine reminded me of Prince Willie, now King of Bohemia, and I suspected the man was German. Despite his military bearing and manner, he was dressed in a good-quality frock coat that did not look out of place in the imposing lobby.

I wish I could have said the same for my ensemble, though I seldom allow myself to be troubled by notions of not dressing well enough for my surroundings. Simple, useful clothing will pa.s.s muster anywhere. And if I am taken for a nanny, or a duenna, or, in this case, as a lady's companion, that is not so very different from my past and present role in life.

I saw with some dread that we were to be conducted to our place of a.s.signation in an elevated car. Although this was a fine and decent apparatus that went directly up and down, and not on an angle like the two terrifying, steam-driven, inclined American Otis elevators on the Eiffel Tower, rather like mechanical dragons to my mind, I found myself hesitating over the dark s.p.a.ce between the solid if polished ground of the lobby and the varnished wooden floor of this mobile box.

"Ladies," our escort urged from behind us. This was one instance where male courtesy forced women to take the first risk.

Irene, of course, had scampered over the gap like a cat leaping a puddle. I followed, feeling more uneasy than I had at either of our body-viewing expeditions. Imagine my emotions when a collapsible metal-mesh grating closed us off from the mult.i.tude in the lobby. In instants we lofted upward, causing such an uncustomary flutter in my innards that I crushed my doctored handkerchief to my mouth and feigned a polite cough, all the while inhaling heady fumes that made my eyes water and my senses clear.

Upon our arrival in an upper hall cus.h.i.+oned with a thick runner of Turkey carpet, our escort led us to a pair of double doors, painted and gilded on every cursive surface.

I was not surprised by the richness of our surroundings, not even when we were ushered into a reception area that would have done a London town house proud.

And to think that this was only in Paris.

Fine oil paintings stacked two and three high on the lofty walls allowed portraits of aristocrats to gaze across to country-estate scenes. The gilt frames jousted with the array of costly trinkets on the marble-topped tables dotting the room, beside enough upholstered sofas and chairs to accommodate a regiment.

On one of those seats sat a common laborer who did not know enough to rise when we entered the room. Instead, he showed a mostly toothless grin and nodded with revolting familiarity.

Irene's head was tilted to examine a particularly large and fine portrait of a family in eighteenth-century garb.

"Irene, there is a strange man in the room," I whispered under the velvet brim above her right ear.

"I know. He was the first thing I noticed."

"And should have been the last! What is such a low fellow doing here?"

"Could he be a witness, do you think? Why else are we here, if not to testify to what we have seen in the past two days?"

"Testify? Surely we have seen nothing worth testifying to. And surely they could have had this fellow come by the servants' stairs."

"I did not wish to stare when we entered, Nell. Perhaps you could describe him to me and I could determine what he is doing here from his appearance."

"So I am to stare, then?"

"You know you stare so subtly. And your powers of description have much benefited from the exercise of keeping a diary."

That was true, so I fussed with the handkerchief, played with my chatelaine, consulted my lapel watch and otherwise made many useless movements that conveyed I was doing everything but observing our fellow loiterer.

He seemed ill at ease, as well should anyone sitting in those worn, homespun clothes upon the exquisite pet.i.t-point upholstery.

"A typical French street peddler or laborer," I told Irene in a swift aside, as we made our way around the chamber, she studying the oil portraits, I creating a word portrait of our unlikely companion.

"Workman's boots, scuffed and cut. A stiff-crowned cap. Rough trousers. One of those silly short jackets that should be on sailors."

"And his features and peculiarities?" she asked, sotto voce. An opera singer can execute a sotto voce that is as soft as falling snow.

I was forced actually to regard the man's face.

"A French nose."

"Which is?"

"Large."

"Ah. Like an English nose."

I was too busy doing my duty to object. "Bony, raw hands. His are kneading his knees."

"Perhaps they trouble him."

"Or he is nervous to be in such fine surroundings."

"Anything more to his face than a nose?"

"Clean-shaven save for an untidy, unduly thick mustache, but then a workman cannot afford the meticulous upkeep of facial adornments. Of course one cannot see his mouth. The ears are . . . ears."

"Age?"

"Perhaps fifty. His eyebrows are liberally sprinkled with white, and the mustache is milk-pale in the middle, though what hair I can see is dark. That is so odd, Irene. Why is men's facial hair so often at odds with the hair on their heads?"

She shrugged, but before she could answer, the sound of a door cracking open made us turn to face the room. The far door stood ajar, our guide in it. He nodded to the workman, who sprang up and vanished through the door without a word.

"Irene!"

"Yes, Nell?"

"That, that . . . ill-kempt individual was allowed in before we were."

"Yes, Nell."

"And we are to wait?"

"Yes, Nell, but not for long."

"I cannot see why even so debased a person as a royal rake would invite a common French workmen into his presence before two respectable English ladies."

"You forget that I am neither English nor respectable."

"You would be, if you had been born in England and had never gone on the stage. This is outrageous. Is this how Bertie treats a . . . an imagined paramour? He has no manners, not to mention morals."

"True, but we are not waiting for Bertie. What time does your clever little watch say?"

Irene was not about to insert a pin into her silken Worth bodice, no matter how useful it was to know the time.

"It is eleven minutes after 1:00 P.M."

"Hmmm. And our humble workman has been absent for about three minutes. I believe we will be received in another six minutes' time, give or take thirty seconds. Shall we sit down?"

"No. I shall pace the chamber until we are allowed the same easy entree as a . . . ditchdigger."

With that I took several furious turns around the room while Irene watched me from the very same chair in which the miserable fellow had lounged but minutes before.

Hence it was that my back was to the door when I heard it crack open again.

"Please come in," said a voice in perfect English, though a bit high-pitched and more than somewhat complacent. "I am delighted that two such noted ladies have consented to lunch with me."

It was as if a rasp had been drawn over my teeth. I recognized the voice instantly. We were being entertained by the man.

Irene rose slowly, as if finally hearing a long-awaited cue that called her onstage. So had I seen her advance to a duel with swords against a man in Monaco. I suspected the weapons in this forthcoming duel would be much more subtle, if not less capable of wounding.

"Thank you, Mr. Holmes," she said. "I thought you would never ask."

An Unappetizing Menu

You know my opinion of that sad string of events, Watson.

The whitechapel Ripper is likely no more than a

disenchanted ticket-taker seeking a bit of attention.

-CAROLE NELSON DOUGLAS, ANOTHER SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA

While my imagination had peopled the chamber behind our host with ogres and opium addicts, we found instead a small receiving room that had been furnished with a square table set for three.

On the spotless napery lay a deceptively simple and wholesome repast, mostly cold, it is true, but filling nevertheless. There was not a slab of goose-liver pate, or tripe, or any other foreign "delicacies" in sight.

It did indeed seem odd to sit down to lunch with Sherlock Holmes, although I imagine even the pope in Rome ate lunch. Not even Irene knew of the unwanted yet intimate glimpse I had gained of the man and his habits-and of his particular and peculiar and dangerous romantic notions-during a less forthright encounter with the papers of his physician friend, Dr. John H. Watson, who apparently fancied himself a Boswell to a Johnson.

Since those written revelations so accidentally read, I took on a new and secret role: human hedge between Irene and this strange man who was all too fascinated by her. Although that was a common state among men who had but to meet her once, I was wise enough to realize that Mr. Sherlock Holmes was not a common man. And his purported dismissal of women in general did not ease my fears one iota. Irene had never been a woman in general.

Were it not for his formidable reputation as a solver of puzzles, I should not give the fellow a second thought. I had mostly seen him out of doors, either in some foolish disguise or else accompanied by hat and cane and appearing confident and insufferably certain. Our encounters were too many for my taste: his abrupt appearance years ago in G.o.dfrey's chambers at the Temple, quizzing me about this and that while G.o.dfrey was out. He learned nothing. The second, the sweet occasion during my first foray into disguise at Irene's hands, when I had opened the door to Briony Lodge to him, his doctor friend, and the King of Bohemia, only to announce the nest empty and Irene fled. A later occasion: him broaching Irene and me at breakfast on the terrace of the Hotel de Paris in Monaco, arrogantly warning her off a case she had all but solved. Perhaps the most dramatic circ.u.mstance had been in Irene's dressing room at the National Theater of Prague, when he had saved her from that devil dancer Tatyana's venomous parting gift. And then there had been our memorable foray in disguise into the heart of Baker Street itself. That masquerade had strung gray hairs through my coiffure that could not be rinsed out!

Indoors and hatless, he seemed am unprepossessing sort: rather scholarly though taut-strung, like catgut on a violin, perhaps five-andthirty years old I should say, in the prime of life but past first youth: tall, thin, his clean-shaven face free of any distraction from the sharp hawklike nose and the sharper gray eyes. In the broadest sense, a description of Sherlock Holmes and one of G.o.dfrey Norton would be similar, but the fine points made all the difference. G.o.dfrey was both far better-looking and much more genial-natured than the consulting detective, although all three-Mr. Holmes, G.o.dfrey, and Irene-possessed the apparent supreme self-confidence of those used to expressing themselves or their opinions in public. I say "apparent" because those who express themselves in public are often surprisingly shy when it comes to other matters. Irene was correct about the "armor" many people affect to hide their true worries and fears.

But I was used to no such thing as supreme self-confidence, I reflected sadly as, despite the sights of the morning, we all fell to our meal of artichoke soup and potted crab with gus...o...b..t without any loss of manners.

I could not help remarking aloud on our shameless conversion from horror to gluttony.