A Soul of Steel (A Novel of Suspense featuring Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes) (47 page)

Mr. Holmes’s expression hinted that he, too, had been goaded beyond his endurance. He went to the mantel and lifted the frame from the elderly woman’s rapt gaze. “A lady of my acquaintance,” he said coldly, “a rather private person.” He paused. “Of my ‘late’ acquaintance,” he added finally.

Mr. Holmes had also discovered how admirably mention of death deters impertinent inquiries. Mrs. Stanhope recoiled at this implied rebuke, but a moment later lifted a hand from her cane to jab a crooked finger at Mr. Holmes’s midsection.

“Now that is a lovely charm, sir. No doubt a memento from a grateful client, eh? Jasper, son, you must find Mr. Holmes something suitable, too. A sovereign would hardly do, as he has one already.

“Why, sir,” she jibed him slyly, “if you are as successful in the detection business as they claim and receive a small token from every satisfied client, you will hardly be able to walk, your watch chain will be so laden with booty.”

He drew his jacket over the chain with great dignity, like a man closing a curtain, or perhaps veiling a wound unsuitable for public viewing.

“Please be seated, Mrs. Blodgett. I fear you will trip upon a wrinkle in the rug; though your eyes seem remarkably sharp, you are somewhat unsteady on your feet.”

With that he took her elbow and guided her back to the central table and into a chair beside it, bending his remarkably penetrating, almost fierce, gaze upon her.

“Now,” said he, “our business is concluded. Ah, thank you, Mr. Blodgett, an entirely satisfactory commission.”

“I hope,” Quentin said, “that pound notes will not inconvenience you, Mr. Holmes. Being newly arrived in the country, I have not yet had time to establish credit.”

“Not at all, not at all. I have accepted gold coin as happily,” he added, with a sharp look to the elderly lady.

Mrs. Stanhope looked a bit taken aback and began her pained rising once again, the cane wobbling between her clasped hands until every eye was fixed upon her in the same breathless way one watches rope dancers at a circus.

Her trembling hand paused on Mr. Holmes’s forearm.

“Sir,” she said, “I hope you will accept a mother’s full measure of joy at witnessing the restoration of her son’s safety and freedom.”

“Indeed I will, Madam,” he said swiftly, guiding her once again with such courteous skill toward the door that for a moment he almost seemed a courtier escorting a great lady to a moment of mutually lamented farewell.

Quentin and I followed, mortified; at least I was.

And then it was over—the charade. We stood on the threshold. I could glimpse beyond Mr. Holmes a room that had become, after two visits, familiar in an odd way. What bizarre experiments unfolded under the bright glow of those gaslights high on the walls! What high- and low-born clients passed over this very threshold, bearing problems of every description like gifts to the strange man who lived there!

I saw the chamber for an instant as an exotic private railroad car hurtling through time with its cargo of crime and punishment. I felt I would never be able to return to Baker Street with quite the innocence with which I had first viewed it, just as I would never be able to return to Saffron Hill or Shropshire.

And then I realized that I was the train, and that my life was the tracks that were hurtling me away from my past into an uncertain, an ever-mysterious future. I began to understand Irene’s fascination with the curious and the criminal; these things were the velocity that made the journey fast and frightening and... interesting.

Mr. Sherlock Holmes rode such a track as well. I could tell by studying his quick, nervous and yet admirably controlled features that he would never forsake it, and never could forsake it.

“Thank you,” I found myself saying quite sincerely, not as Miss Buxleigh or even as Miss Huxleigh but as my Real Self. He was Irene’s last resort. He had served to complete the rescue of Quentin Stanhope from his past, and—unfortunately, I feared—from my future.

Quentin helped his mother down the stairs and to the street while I slowly followed, wrapped in uncustomary emotions. I was once again the odd one out, but had anything other been destined for me?

Baker Street was dim. A fleecy black sheep of cloud had rolled over the town like an endless, billowing coverlet of smoke. The air had grown still, just as time seemed to have stopped.

Quentin drew out a whistle and blew twice. A four-wheeler veered across the thoroughfare at a reckless pace to fetch us. Even the horse sensed the storm sulfur in the air; its hooves churned the pavement and its eyes rolled nervously despite the driver’s hard hands on the lines.

After Quentin seated his mother, he took my arm to assist me within, where it was even darker than the drab day. None of the gaslights had been lit yet, but they ought to have been.

We clicked away from the curb, Mrs. Stanhope covering her face with a fall of lace handkerchief. Her entire fragile frame quivered at the mercy of a coughing spell.

“Your mother must have overdone,” I said, trying to sound properly sympathetic.

“I fear so,” he answered, bending nearer the old woman to inspect her. “It should pass in a moment.”

I stared politely, for Mrs. Stanhope was shaking now as with an ague and was burying her face in the folds of handkerchief in paroxysms of breathlessness.

“Quentin, perhaps we should stop—”

“We will,” the old lady croaked, “just as soon as I remove my nose.”

Chapter Thirty-one

THE DREADFUL TIFFANY SQUID

“Irene, this
is your most appalling mischief yet! It was unspeakable—and most unwise.”

“You are quite right as usual, Nell,” she admitted cheerily, peeling away theatrical putty wrinkles like some giddy reanimated corpse on Judgment Day. In fact, this was the first thing I could picture Irene doing on Judgment Day.

“I will be out of your way in a twinkle, once I have restored some semblance of myself.”

She reached under her crackling taffeta petticoats to draw out the carpetbag, into which went the literal pieces of her face as well as a snow-white flock of various “rats” and hairpieces. Only a bit of white remained at her hairline, and that she was vigorously shaking out, until the powder clogged the carriage like smoke.

“How did you manage to turn your eyes yellow?”

Irene flourished a small vial. “The opposite of belladonna, which enlarges the pupil and makes the eyes appear darker. This handy potion reduces the pupil for the opposite effect. Of course, it makes it a bit troubling to see. Mrs. Stanhope’s bumbles through the chamber were not fakery.”

Still, she glanced at me sharply enough. “You need not fear, Nell. I will not intrude on your pilgrimage to Grosvenor Square.
Two
Mrs. Stanhopes might cause confusion, and Quentin’s triumphant return is excitement enough.”

“Quentin.” I turned to him, shaken from the strange reverie that leaving Baker Street had caused. “You must have known about this ruse even before we left the Strand.”

“Guilty,” said he with no more contriteness than a boy who had eaten all the teatime scones. He smiled at my rising indignation.

“My dear Nell, after all Irene has done to insure my safety, even my sanity, during this troubled time, I could hardly deny her an opportunity to play my mother.”

“And I was mad to get inside Baker Street!” Irene pled her case even as she resumed her own face with quick, skilled movements. “What a glorious hodgepodge in which to find such a supremely logical man living! It is quite endearing.”

“ ‘Endearing’ is not a word I would apply to Sherlock Holmes or his environment,” I retorted.

“No, I am sure that you would not,” Irene said, leaning over to jerk at my hem.

I recoiled, both from startlement and from a sense that she had wronged me. I would not accept additional liberties from her at the moment.

“Now, Nell, I am only hitching up the side on your overskirt. We both have transformations to accomplish in this miserable little carriage and not long to do them. You do not wish to look... dowdy at Quentin’s homecoming, do you?”

The word “dowdy” instantly drove all other considerations from my mind. Irene began unbuttoning the diagonal closing of my bodice as if I were a recalcitrant child who had to be guided through even the most elementary process.

“Irene!” was all I could say in objection to the notion of being undressed with a gentleman present.

“Hush!” she ordered. “I am merely folding back the reveres. Old rose,” she told Quentin. “Quite the thing on Grosvenor Square, I assure you.”

He laughed, a carefree sound I had not heard from him in a very long time, not since Berkeley Square days. “Don’t apply to me for approval. I am ten years behind the times.”

“Then you will have to take my word on it.” Irene fluffed the folds of rose chiffon at my bodice. “As will Nell. There. And see what I brought!”

She plucked something from her carpetbag and then her fingers lunged at my throat. “Oh, do be still, Nell! I’m not trying to garrote you, merely affix this brooch.”

“Oh!” My fingers went to my collar. “It’s not the dreadful Tiffany squid, is it?” My fingertips traced a cool, irregular shape.

“Nell, you wound me.” She shook her hair into a lavishly ungoverned mane, then twisted it up with a few flicks of her wrists and transfixed it with long pins she had grasped in her teeth. No doubt she would argue that her cigarette smoking was the ideal preparation for dressing her hair in a moving carriage.

“Lish-en,” she articulated fairly well through her diminishing mouthful of tortoiseshell quills as her fingers swiftly drove them one by one into place. “You must not tell Godfrey about this. He will be cross.”

“I cannot abet a woman who intends to deceive her husband!”

“Goodness, Nell, most of the wives in Mayfair and Belgravia make a religion of it. I am merely following Fashion. Besides, you know how obsessed he can be on the subject of Sherlock Holmes.”

“Godfrey?
Godfrey
is obsessed?”

“It was my plan,” she said. “I had a right to see it accomplished, though Mr. Holmes was annoyingly coy about the exact means. Never mind, I can guess it, and if we are lucky there may be some cryptic reference in the newspapers.

“Now—” she opened the carpetbag, drew out a bonnet and donned it “—I am ready to leave you to your next interview. For some reason I do not have the same curiosity about the goings-on in Grosvenor Square as I do about the doings in Baker Street.”

Irene leaned to the window. “Quentin, signal the coachman to stop at the next corner. I will take an omnibus back to the hotel.”

I could only shake my head, my nerveless fingers still massaging the brooch at my throat.

The carriage jerked to a slower pace as soon as Quentin rapped on the ceiling. He leaned across to release the door when the vehicle stopped, and Irene darted out with the zest of a street urchin. I leaned after her.

“Wait! Irene...”

She was grinning back at me, and then she blew me a kiss.

“Irene—this brooch. Tell me that it isn’t the ruby star the King of Bohemia gave you—?”

“It should look very well in Grosvenor Square,” she caroled back, even as she hurried away.

“But rubies... and old rose don’t go together—”

“Rubies go with everything, like blood,” came her fading answer as the carriage jerked us past all sight of her.

I shuddered as my fingers fell away from the gemstones.

“Are you cold?” Quentin inquired with a certain solicitude that would have been warming had I really been chilled.

“No. Merely outmaneuvered.”

He laughed again. “Pray do not be angry with her. She must have her masquerades or she does not feel quite alive.”

“Is that what spying was like?”

“I suppose so. The times of greatest danger are also those of the greatest exhilaration.”

“You will miss it,” I said.

He shrugged, but his eyes had a faraway look. “I will have to find something other to do, that is all. I am not sure what.”

“What did you do when you were abroad after the war for so long?”

“I traveled among strange peoples, learned odd languages and odder customs.” His eyes fell to the jewel at my throat. “Rumors abounded of a lost ruby mine in far northeast Afghanistan among a blue-eyed, yellow-haired people. I convinced myself that I was looking for it, that this intriguing treasure was why I stayed.”

“Was it?”

 “It was a convenient reason to stay. Going home has become frightening. There is too much to explain.”

“Then do not do it all at once,” I advised.

He nodded and fell silent until the carriage stopped again.

By now dusk had crept like smoky ground fog over the square, between the great houses, and curled like a sleeping black panther around the statuary in the square’s central gardens.

Quentin helped me down from the carriage. The wheels rattled away behind us, drowning out the patter of my heart as we approached the ranks of windows glowing with the evening’s first-lit lamps.

“Perhaps we should have warned them,” I suggested.

“No.” He took my arm, and I had the oddest sense that this gesture was for his support, not mine.