Irene Adler: Chapel Noir Part 40

Her gloved hand hesitated above the doork.n.o.b, then seized it and wrenched it open.

The door opened on silent hinges, and we walked into the second most enchanting smell in Christendom. The first is freshly baked bread, and I must admit that Paris produces the finest, most fragrant form of this simple staple of life. The second scent is not the perfume any city is renowned for, but, to me at least, the divine odor of freshly cut wood.

Perhaps their attraction is that both odors are common to the kitchens and outbuildings of the humblest cottage and the most magnificent castle or chateau alike.

We smell them and all think of home.

Odd as it may seem, this was the first time that I considered myself a resident of Paris rather than a refugee and visitor.

A doleful little man in a (gasp) leather ap.r.o.n scuttled to greet us.

His torrent of words became a ripple Irene translated for Elizabeth and me: this was a workshop, not a place of commerce.

Irene loosed her own torrent, all the while the little man blinked to regard each of us in turn. He began to blush and bow, then vanished into the larger room beyond.

Faint light fell through the still-open door, which made chair frames naked of upholstery cast tortured shadows on the floor. I felt as if I was in the lumber room of a favorite house where I had been a governess: the Turnpennys of Berkeley Square, for instance, where I had played blindman's buff with Allegra and her friends, and, unbeknownst to me until much too late, with her very das.h.i.+ng uncle Quentin. . . .

Disturbed dust swirled in the single shaft of daylight, dancing like tiny fairies in a moonbeam. I heard the distant rhythm of a hammer. The entire effect was so soporific that I felt like Alice dozing off before she slipped down the rabbit hole into Wonderland.

At last the gnome reappeared, behind him a figure so like Charles Frederick Worth, the Englishman who gowned women the world over, that I almost clapped my hands and laughed in delight.

He wore a velvet beret, a poet's s.h.i.+rt, a brocade ap.r.o.n.

"I am maestro," he said proudly in French-accented English that for once sounded charming instead of silly. "You wish to compliment me upon a creation?"

"Indeed," Irene said, beaming. The obvious paint melted away under the radiant force of her unabetted personality. "You are an artiste, monsieur. I have seen the magnificent siege d'amour you made for . . . well, for a man of great prominence in the English-speaking world."

Here the artiste laughed and pantomimed a ma.s.sive stomach. "Prominence indeed, Mademoiselle, that is why the siege was needed."

"As you say." She dimpled, she fluttered her eyelashes. She did all but wink. She played the perfect coquette, and I reflected what an actress the world had lost when the King of Bohemia and Sherlock Holmes had conspired to force her fictional death.

"Monsieur." She took his arm; they were old acquaintances from this moment on. I saw Elizabeth staring after them as if watching a scene oddly familiar. They walked a bit away, but Elizabeth and I could still overhear them.

"Monsieur. I am . . . ah, an American in Paris. I have a little house, yes?"

"Une maison. Mais oui, Mademoiselle. Like Madame Kelly's."

"Not so famous as Madame Kelly's, but perhaps you can help me make mine so." Without uttering one falsehood, Irene was building the impression she wished on the foundation of his own expectations.

"I need . . . such a chair. Siege. D'amour. Pour ma maison."

She could have been requesting a last tumbler of water for her dying mother. The artiste's sensitive features quivered. To deny such a charming mademoiselle was against the Parisian code of honor.

"I have heard," she said, most affected. "Of the . . . foul desecration of your magnificent creation at, urn . . ." She whispered the name of the house into his ear. "Is it possible you could create another?"

"Possible! C'est possible. C'est vrai." He was so beside himself with triumph that he pushed open a door into the vast workroom behind the sun-dusted foyer, and we all entered.

"Lillian Russell's diamond spider garters!" Elizabeth gasped beside me. "Who would think the world would need so many sieges of love! Or what pa.s.ses for it."

"The word is siege," I corrected her, ever the alert governess. I was, after all, the elder. But I was also astounded by the array of these odd creations.

And still the filtered rays from the skylight high above us played with dust motes, and the rich scent of sawdust filled our nostrils like sandalwood. Again I was struck by the impossibility of describing them, these sort-of brocaded sledges or sleighs with spidery leaf-twined gilt limbs.

Monsieur mistook our bemus.e.m.e.nt for admiration.

"These are, of course, a very hidden part of my craft. The price is-"

"Princely," Irene said.

He bowed. "Perhaps something in the way of stools?"

"No, we require a chair." She walked around one. "May we . . . inspect, in private?"

"Of course."

He vanished into the dust motes and beyond the door, which hushed shut behind him.

"I had not seen the like, until I got to Paris," Elizabeth said, walking around the nearest siege.

I attempted to make sense of its sinuous shape. Although the upper "seat" curved softly back like a chaise longue, below the supporting tendrils of carved wood, at floor level, was a sort of built-in sofa bed, with a small neck roll at one end, a middle section that was double-tufted, where the scored metal footrests protruded with their decorative end cups, and then a curved frontal lip.

Irene saw me studying that ap.r.o.n of upholstery so near the floor. "A kneeler, I suppose."

"This is a Romanish religious artifact?"

"Hardly. Pink, perhaps you could attempt to arrange yourself on the contraption. The draping skirts of the murdered woman above obscured the position of the one below."

It quite cramped my stomach to watch Elizabeth slither onto the bottom tier, pulling her skirts through the cage of struts, lying back, placing her boot soles into the flat metal sheaths. "Stirrups," Irene had called them, and they were oddly similar. Elizabeth's skirted knees jutted into the air in a position that struck a faint memory. As a child I had blundered into a cottage bedroom where a woman was giving birth.

"Such a very odd feeling," Elizabeth exclaimed. "There is a painting on the underside of the upper tier, so the bottom lady has something to look at, I suppose."

"What is the subject of the painting?" Irene inquired.

I shut my eyes.

"I think . . . Zeus raping Europa. You know, the white bull-"

I kept my eyes closed.

Irene walked around the abomination. The lovely smell of sawdust had turned to something wretched. "Women arranged on this 'seat of love' would not be able to move quickly if someone came at them unexpectedly."

"From behind," Elizabeth pointed out, straining to lift her head a trifle from the embroidered upholstery to demonstrate her confinement. She was as helpless as a tortoise on its back.

Irene leaned against the graceful but bizarre upper arms. "This time the Ripper wouldn't have to wait for his victims to fall to the ground, both were down and ready."

"Do you think," I asked, "that he had just happened upon them?"

She nodded, briskly. "I do. They had come early to the a.s.signation with the Prince. Such women like to set the stage, do they not, Pink?"

"Give me a hand up, Nell," she ordered, thras.h.i.+ng to work free of the metal stirrups and the wooden struts that hemmed her in.

I reached down gingerly, not sure those metal appliances wouldn't snap at me like lethal jaws.

She grunted as she finally came upright again. "They would have done as I did. Tried out the new toy. Once they were flat on their backs . . ."

"Their necks were offered to the slaughter." Irene gazed at the empty upholstery. "He could cut their throats in a simple sweep from behind, like a barber turned surgeon. And this is just the weapon to do it."

She held up a flat-edged, wooden-handled chisel, a homely object that suddenly looked sinister.

"He!" I demanded. "Who?"

"I'll ask," she said mysteriously, gliding to the open door.

I heard her talking with the cabinetmaker in the other room. "A ripping chisel, you say. Such a . . . descriptive name for a simple tool."

I shuddered at her underlying emphasis. A reciprocal murmur that indicated negotiation came next, softening into purrs, then chirps of utter agreement.

"And I shall expect," she finished, leading the artiste like a lamb back to the unlikely sacrificial altar of his creation, "impeccably smooth upholstery. Can you not send someone along to a.s.sist with the installation?"

He frowned, bereft of good news and too shattered to transmit the bad. "Alas, Mademoiselle! We have just lost our finis.h.i.+ng upholsterer and have not hired another."

"Lost? Has he rolled under a sofa, like a thumbtack?"

Monsieur shrugged unhappily. "Such a splendid workman. Such almost surgical precision with the knife and the nail, devoted to his art. That is why I hired a foreigner and allowed him to work on a piece destined for-well, I may tell you, Mademoiselle-royalty. Alas, he has disappeared since installing the siege d'amour. I cannot explain it. Perhaps the scandalous purpose of the siege and the maison de rendezvous unnerved him. He was English."

"He was there, then?"

"Supposedly, but he was a strange man, mad about the violin and little else, though a superb upholsterer. He had walked to Paris, he said, from the north. He had been apprenticed in upholstery at the age of fifteen, and I found his work excellent, so entrusted him with the finis.h.i.+ng work on the Prince of Wales's siege. I hired two men with a cart to deliver it, and sent James along to ensure that the fabric was smooth after transport."

"Smooth," I repeated, repelled by the extraordinary care given to an object of debauchery.

"James?" Irene inquired.

"Kellee," he said, "like the infamous madam, you know." His tone implied that all we fallen women would know one another. "He had worked with the East London Upholsterer's Trade Society, and we all know how precise the English are about their dress and upholstery."

"Oh, yes," Irene agreed, rolling her eyes toward me. "To the English, good dress is upholstery, and they are always agonizingly meticulous. In fact, you could say that fas.h.i.+on makes upholstery of all women.

"I have American and English girls," she added with a glance at me. "It would be useful to have an English-speaking upholsterer. I may provide my own fabric from Worth, if that is satisfactory."

The man's eyes bulged. "You . . . know the great couturier Worth?"

"Indeed. I have been of some service to him in the past."

"But . . . he is devoted to his wife."

"Purely business, Monsieur, if anything is purely business in Paris. Now, surely, you must have some idea of where this gifted but nomadic upholsterer dwells. A description would be useful as well."

"East London," Irene said tightly as the three of us left Durand Freres.

"We must go there?" I asked, startled.

"No, but James Kelly obviously was there. Medium-dark mustache, neat, clerkish appearance, five-foot-five or -seven indeed. How inconsiderate of Saucy Jack to be so annoyingly middling in all his particulars. Half the male population of the known world could be the Ripper!"

We hurried along the cobblestones. The elusive upholsterer's lodgings were only a few streets distant. I was tired of gazing through the veil of lucifer haze on my lashes, so I brushed a forefinger against them. The cream-colored glove came away smeared with soot.

"Oh!"

"Face paints demand constant consideration," Irene agreed, "but they are necessary on the stage."

"They do not look so garish there."

"That's because the limelights wash out the color."

I observed various people we pa.s.sed. The women gathered their skirts to pull them aside from contact with ours. The men eyed us appreciatively.

"I can't help feeling that someone could recognize me, and then what will I do?"

"We will encounter no one we know in this part of Paris, Nell."

Elizabeth had been uncharacteristically quiet, and suddenly I knew why.

"There," she said, putting a hand on my arm to stop me, for I felt that if I walked fast enough, no one would be able to focus on my disreputable appearance.

"There is the patisserie we were told about, and there . . . number forty-four, that door painted blue-green. The Durand Frere said Kelly kept rooms on the first floor."

Such a plain whitewashed building for frilly Paris, mean almost! Its long French windows were fenced with wrought-iron railings behind a tiny balcony barely wide enough to hold a cat, although one did.

"Not prosperous," Irene noted. "Unfortunately, even for this neighborhood we are not properly dressed to impress the concierge."

While we paused to consider what we could do about this, I heard a sharp whistle behind me. I turned to face the street.

Elizabeth caught my forearm and spun me back toward the building. "Ignore rude whistles, or we shall get ruder attentions."

"How do you know it was a rude whistle meant for us?"

"Have you never had a rude whistle directed at you before?"

I shook my head, trying to brush off another layer of char since my glove was already tainted.

Before we could do more, a snapping crack above us made us stare. One of the first-floor windows was flung open and a man came cras.h.i.+ng through, balancing for a moment with one thick work shoe atop the balcony railing, then springing off and down into the street.

The impact almost took our breaths away.

Then his feet were pounding past us. Irene lunged toward him and thrust her booted foot into his path.

He sprawled forward, facedown on the cobblestones so hard I winced.

"Sit on him!" Irene ordered. "Hold him at all costs." I glanced where she was looking, which was back at the window.