Irene Adler: Chapel Noir Part 43

A Message from Abroad

I think had there been any alternative I should have taken,

it instead of prosecuting that unknown night journey.

-JONATHAN HARKER'S JOURNAL, DRACULA

We returned to our rooms at the Hotel du Louvre by the same back stairs from which we had left them.

I believe we pa.s.sed even the same footman and maid we encountered when we had departed.

We were as taken for granted as before, which was rather disappointing. Looking like a sinner was less exciting than I had thought.

Once the door to our suite had shut on us, we all threw ourselves down on the nearest couch, chair, or-in Elizabeth's case-empty area of carpeting.

"So then he is captured!" Elizabeth leaned back on her elbows, the very image of a hoyden, were one ever made up like a harlot. "There is something about him, something about his name that tickles my memory. But it is gone."

"I felt the same way when we were at the cabinetmaker's," I said. "It is indeed suspicious that he left England just after Mary Jane Kelly's murder. Wait! What about this notorious Madam Kelly? Isn't Mary Jane Kelly the one who had claimed a gentleman had taken her to Paris once? Perhaps she is a relative of Madam Kelly."

"Kelly, as we can see, is as common a name as Smith nowadays," Irene said.

"Especially," Elizabeth added dourly, "since the famine in Ireland forced Kellys and O'Connors and everybody Irish from their homeland."

"Really, Pink," Irene said, amused. "I cannot decide if you are more indignant about the stamping out of the Irish, the buffalo, or the fallen woman."

"I am equally outraged by all such acts of extermination," she said.

Their exchange, which made little sense to me, especially the part about the buffalo, had at least allowed me to think.

"Now I have it. James Kelly was married, and his first overt crime was against his wife. Perhaps he was no stranger to escaping to Paris, and perhaps he had taken one of the Whitechapel prost.i.tutes he despised to Paris, because she shared his last name, and it was as if they were a man and wife on a honeymoon. After all, Irene, G.o.dfrey took you to Paris for a honeymoon."

"G.o.dfrey has nothing in common with James Kelly," she said sternly, "but that is a very good point, Nell. It might explain a good deal about the progress of the Ripper's crimes, and why they ended abruptly after the savage death of Mary Jane Kelly."

Elizabeth gazed at me with something resembling awe. "Good work, Nell! Of course. He may have killed the other women as he wandered the Whitechapel streets attempting to meet up with Mary Jane Kelly again. In some strange way she was the mirror of his first crime: attacking his actual wife, Sarah. Only with Mary Jane Kelly, he could do all he had only begun to do to Sarah years before."

"We have gone to all this trouble to find and confront that miserable little man," I complained, "and Sherlock Holmes will get all the credit."

Irene had stripped off her gloves and was untying her heavy taffeta bonnet ribbons. "Mais certainement. Sherlock Holmes will get all the credit."

"Where would he have been," I inquired indignantly, "if we had not been there to cow the suspect?"

"Yes," Irene agreed pensively, leaning her chin on her hands, which were braced on her knees, "we were herded like sheep to the perimeter to keep the wolf at bay. Isn't that the reverse of common practice? Usually the shepherdesses don't repel the wolf, but the other way around."

"We are rather lurid shepherdesses," I put in. "Most repellent, really."

"To such a man, yes," Irene said. "Elizabeth, would you fetch our Krafft-Ebing from my room?"

"Oh, that awful book," I complained, as Elizabeth jumped up and darted off with the energy of a twelve-year-old.

"You have not read it, Nell."

"You have not let me read it, Irene, which is how I know it is an awful book."

She looked beyond me to the desk. "What is that?"

I turned slowly to look over my shoulder, past the heavy fall of my undressed hair. Masquerading as a fallen woman was a wearying occupation.

A small white sort of pillow lay upon the desktop's green-leather inset.

"A letter?" I suggested, squinting at it.

"Could you fetch it? It must have been delivered while we were gone."

That is the problem with living in a hotel. People come in and do things while you are out. Of course, our own Sophie was no better.

I pushed myself upright and tottered to the desk. Irene's thinsoled slippers had turned the bottoms of my feet into skates of fire.

"G.o.dfrey's hand!" I cried, thankful to see something familiar and welcome after our immersion into gruesome crime. "And many, many sheets." I seized the bra.s.s letter opener and slashed open the flap. Three folded pages of thick foreign vellum practically sprung out. "You will want to read it right away, Irene."

"No, Nell, you read it to me. I am too exhausted."

I returned to my chair, withdrew my pince-nez from its silver case on the chatelaine in my pocket-betraying accessory that it was, but then someone's clay pipe had been a clear clue in Whitechapel, too-and unfolded the heavy foreign paper with a sigh.

After all I had been through, holding G.o.dfrey's neat lawyerly script in my hands was a return to sanity.

"Dearest Irene-oh, it may be too personal."

She waved a weary hand. After a performance Irene often sank into an almost-drugged state of fatigue, when even holding her head up seemed too great a task.

"I don't care, Nell."

" 'Dearest Irene'-oh, 'and Nell.' There I am, in the parentheses. It is a joint letter after all."

I read on. " 'My departure from Prague was so sudden that I had no time to inform you beforehand.' "

Irene stirred on the couch. "Departure?"

" 'Some trifling business that the Rothschilds found too pressing to ignore has been plunged into my hands. Hence I am on the train once more heading eastward into Hungary. I will be traveling as far east again as I have come thus far from the North Sea inland to Prague. I am writing a serial letter, as I do not know when I will be stopped long enough to post it, and as I am not even sure of my destination.

" 'Apparently these millions of acres between Prague and the Black Sea do not reckon locations and distances as precisely as in the more salubrious and civilized parts of Europe.' "

I paused to take breath.

"Poor G.o.dfrey!" Irene exclaimed, hus.h.i.+ng Elizabeth as she came rus.h.i.+ng into the room with the dreadful book in her hand. Her nod indicated that Elizabeth should sit on the foot of her couch while I continued to read.

I, of course, was familiar with G.o.dfrey's hand from our work in the Temple together and declaimed smoothly with enough skill that Irene should not be ashamed of my performance.

" 'The first leg of the journey retraced our trip to Vienna, Irene.' " I squinted at the page and was forced to interrupt G.o.dfrey's text. "I believe there is a string of Austrian words. Or are they German? What do people speak in Vienna, anyway?"

"Love, music, and pastry," Irene said, smiling nostalgically. "Don't worry about translating that part. It probably describes . . . tortes. Not legal ones, edible ones."

I resumed reading: " 'Our train track weaves near and then away from the broad blue thread of the Danube as if knitting into its curving course. Buda-Pesth is not as imperial a city as Vienna, though quite as picturesque. I am thankful that I have learned a smattering of German from you and from my visits to Bohemia. English is seldom heard as one ventures into the ancient land of the Turk and the Magyars.

" 'I will not follow the Danube into Bukovina and am not bound so near the Black Sea as Bessarabia. Instead, from Buda-Pesth, where I have time for lunch before the train leaves, my route will strike southeast through the Carpathian Mountains into Transylvania. One expects a quant.i.ty of wooded terrain from that name. It appears that I now venture farther east than even you, Irene, for Warsaw far to the north is still west of my destination. Were it not for the barrier of Bessarabia, I would soon be adjoining the Ukraine of Russia, imagine that.

" 'I am to call upon a provincial satrap or other. My train chugs into wooded hills between the Tisza and Mures rivers, with a town called Klausenburgh my goal, and from there, who knows what village? An agent of the Countess will meet me there to conduct me to the family seat. The train compartments are mostly empty. No one shares the s.p.a.ce to disturb my writing, though the rocking of the train along the tracks gives my hand a slight palsy.

" 'It is rea.s.suring as I forge deeper into forests and foreign territory to know that you and Nell are safe and amusing yourselves at Neuilly. You must not languish in the country, though, but take yourself into Paris to see the World Exposition, perhaps, and marvel at all the foreign displays. I do not doubt that you will be able to tour more interesting parts of the world in Paris these days than I will see on my entire long journey into the backwaters of Europe.' "

We ended up giggling like girls at G.o.dfrey's well-meant but wildly inappropriate visions for our current occupations.

"Is that all, Nell?" Irene asked after we had stopped laughing. The faint frown had returned.

"Only a postscript that he does not know when he will be able to post a letter after this Klausenburgh stop."

"Why are the Rothschilds sending him into this primitive country?"

"Apparently it is such a trifling errand that he forgot to mention the point."

"Trifling errands do not take people hundreds of miles from civilization." Her fingertips rapped the tabletop beside the sofa, mimicking the sound of galloping horses. Perhaps she was playing an imaginary tarantella on her imaginary piano. "I will wire the Rothschild agent in Prague and ask why. And where. And when he will be back. For a barrister G.o.dfrey was annoyingly vague on these crucial points."

"He wrote in haste," I pointed out in his defense.

"Why such haste to hie to nowhere on a trifling errand? I do not like it." Her fingers drummed the scarf-swathed table again. "Any more than I like the fact that we were followed from the upholsterer's lodgings."

"Followed?" Elizabeth demanded, looking quite alarmed as she held the Krafft-Ebing book open on her knees like a schoolroom miss.

"Why do you think I proposed a detour through the street market?"

"You wanted new fabrics, as you said?" I asked, recalling Irene leading us on a lightning raid upon on the crowded stands. She had moved through the jumbled labyrinth with the random force of a whirlwind, tossing up lengths of cloth and leaving without settling on anything. We had emerged from the area like refugees from a foreign bazaar, empty-handed and breathless, and spun in such a totally different direction that we had to circle back the long way around to our hotel.

Oh.

"I wanted to glimpse our pursuer," Irene was explaining to Elizabeth, "and to lose him."

"Him?" Elizabeth asked, even more alarmed. "Perhaps Sherlock Holmes-"

"Why would he bother to follow us at this point? After all, he has James the Ripper in his grasp, doesn't he? He forgot about us the moment he joined le Villard in his carriage to convey James Kelly to the Surete."

"I don't believe he had forgotten about you," Elizabeth added slyly.

This charge startled Irene from her reverie. "Nonsense. You cannot view with silly girlish wishfulness a man who is made of mathematics and test tubes. He relishes a mind that will not kowtow easily to his cleverness, that is all."

"But if that dreadful Kelly was maddened by our presence," Elizabeth persisted politely, "Mr. Sherlock Holmes was made nervous. You must allow, Irene, that by the nature of my trade I have special knowledge of men of many temperaments."

"Miss Pink!" I said, forgetting my resolve to eradicate that unsuitable name. "Boasting of the wisdom learned from severe moral failings is not accepted here."

She turned wide hazel eyes upon me. "You make him nervous as well, Nell."

"I do not do that!" I gritted between my teeth, feeling the headache coming to wrap itself around my temples like one of Sarah Bernhardt's lithe little parlor snakes.

"Oh. I didn't mean to . . . tell. Nell."

I shut my eyes. The headache was a boa constrictor and it wore the Divine Sarah's face.

"I am the only one," she went on, "he took virtually no serious notice of. I choose to consider that a mark of distinction, rather than a snub. And also a mistake. So, Irene, I have been skimming Krafft-Ebing, if one can skim such strong stuff. You are right. If one relaxes and lets a foreign language sink in, you understand more than you thought you could. Case number ten is interesting, given the reaction of James Kelly."

Irene took the book from Elizabeth's hands and laid it open on the table, under the bright halo cast by the oil lamp. Daylight did not far penetrate the heavy draperies and dark furnis.h.i.+ng of our rooms.

"An unnamed journeyman painter, age thirty," she noted aloud. "Also a lower craftsman, and almost exactly the same age as Kelly," she noted. "No family history." She looked up to nod at Elizabeth. "A hatred of women."

"I do not understand," I put in. "Why should any man hate women? We are the gentle s.e.x. We are their sisters, wives, mothers, daughters."

Instead of answering me, Irene bent her gaze back on the page, and quoted: "A hatred of women, especially pregnant women, who are responsible for the misery of the world."

"That is ridiculous! I was unfortunate in that my mother died before I was old enough to know her, but surely every son venerates his own mother."

Someone laughed. Elizabeth. "Surely you are an only child, Nell, due to your mother's untimely death. I am far from that, and I can a.s.sure you from my brothers' actions that there is a time when young boys resent their mothers very much, especially when her maternal bonds would keep them from getting into mischief."

"It is true some of my boy charges could be most stubborn at times."

Irene's forefinger tapping the open page of Psychopathia s.e.xualis interrupted our discussion. "As a boy this man cut into his own private parts. He was arrested at age thirty for trying to castrate a boy he had caught in the woods. He hated G.o.d and mothers for bringing children into a world of misery and poverty. He himself could have nothing to do with women for that reason, in fact he felt no natural satisfaction in any act."

This recital silenced me, even silenced my thoughts. One was not encouraged to think of such matters. Although I realized that country life had given me some knowledge of the raw facts of congress between male and female of lesser species, I had never, never attached such parts and conditions to humans.