Chapel Noir (17 page)

“A sommelier?” I challenged her when we had reached the open air and were now being roundly ignored. “That is a wine-waiter. I grant you that the French are very serious about their wines, but how could you suggest such a ridiculous thing?”

“Because it is not ridiculous. I should very much like to know if the wine that was spilled here at the foot of
La Tour Eiffel
is of the same vintage as that stored and smashed in the cellar of the
maison de rendezvous.”

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-Honoré.”

“Both I and my coachman are familiar with the rue Faubourg-Saint-Honoré,” 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 pawns in the hands of higher powers.”

With a brisk bow of farewell, he returned to the lantern-bearing gendarmes clustered 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 passed at a stately pace made everything seem muffled 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 space, 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 pass 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 assignation 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 space 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 multitude 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 cushioned 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 petit-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 entrée 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.”

18.
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 pâté, 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 Godfrey’s chambers at the Temple, quizzing me about this and that while Godfrey 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 circumstance 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 Godfrey Norton would be similar, but the fine points made all the difference. Godfrey was both far better-looking and much more genial-natured than the consulting detective, although all three—Mr. Holmes, Godfrey, 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 gusto but without any loss of manners.

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

“The hunt sharpens appetite in some people,” Mr. Holmes said at once. “Perhaps because it gives so little time for satisfying it. When I am truly on the trail, I cannot eat at all.” He turned his lofty attention to Irene. “How did you know that I was the laborer?”

“Because I knew that you were in Paris.”

“And how did you know that?”

“If the Prince of Wales was worried enough to summon me from Neuilly to Paris at midnight, he certainly would have wired London for the aid of the famous Sherlock Holmes.”

“Why? I had nothing to do with the Ripper investigations in London.”

Irene ignored this statement and began demurely deshelling an egg, skepticism screaming from every gesture as well as her long silence.

“It is true,” I put in meekly. “The newspapers never mentioned his participation. Not once.”

Irene’s skeptical glance met mine. “Now that is a telling omission, and the key to the real story.”

“Which is?” Mr. Holmes asked before I could. A rude man from start to finish.

“Whatever is least reported is most true,” Irene declared. “At least that is my experience of the police and the newspapers when matters are most extreme. If you somehow managed to avoid involvement in the most sensational murders in the world, I cannot believe that you would avoid involvement in a similar case when your country’s heir apparent had the ill luck to be at the scene of the slaughter.”

“As Watson has said time and again, Madam Norton, when you explain yourself conclusions prove a very simple matter indeed. Mere common sense.”

“I don’t think so. I have never found sense to be very common. I hope, by the way, that you will find room on your watch chain for the sou I gave you yesterday, though it is not so grand as the sovereign I offered you on my wedding day.”

“Ha!” His bark of delight, or laughter, was so abrupt that I nearly swallowed a bite of food the wrong way and was forced to drink a great deal of the luncheon wine I had determined to avoid.

He slapped his napkin to the tablecloth, though he had eaten very little. “You see through me, Madam, like no other.”

“Oh, it was masterfully done, my dear Mr. Holmes, but I was expecting you. Though not so near my own cottage stoop. Why did you come all the way to Neuilly?”

“You came to my doorstep in disguise to wish me ‘Good night’ once, Madam. I sought to return the favor by coming to wish you ‘Good morning.’ ”

“Hmmm.”
Irene did not seem very convinced.

Mr. Holmes lifted his watch to display the chain. A gold sovereign twinkled there like a morning sun. Beside it dangled the cold bronze moon of a well-used French sou.

“Had I been able to fly like a gull across the Channel, instead of taking the boat train to Calais and rail again to Paris, you would never have been exposed to what you saw in the
maison de rendezvous.”

His words were both an apology, and a dismissal.

“But we saw what we saw. Have you?”

His head was quick to shake. “No. The Sûreté had cleared the house with its famous dispatch. It hardly matters. They had trampled the site so thoroughly by then that no mote of evidence could remain, although I spent hours on my hands and knees examining the carpeting and was able to find some small shreds, signifying not very much, I daresay.”

He savored the wine with the ease of a Frenchman. I added the charge of “dipsomaniac” to my lengthening list of Holmesian vices. It went very well with “opium addict.”

“Then you are not interested in our observations of the death scenes?” Irene persisted.

“I am sure that you noticed some of what I did: that precise timing or luck was needed in the house of ill repute; that the killer had some influence over the victims; that they must have been killed quickly and damaged afterward, also quickly. Quite like the Whitechapel Ripper, I grant you, but also quite unlike him. The second killing by the Eiffel Tower smacks more of Saucy Jack, but already these matters have diverged too much from the Whitechapel murders to be considered part of that sequence, if it is indeed a sequence.”

“You doubt the Whitechapel horrors are the work of Jack the Ripper?” I was startled into asking.

That quick, piercing gaze, as searing as a hot iron, focused on me and me alone. Oh, dear.

“Apparently you do not, Miss . . . ?”

“Huxleigh.”

“The typewriter-girl in the Temple,” he said with narrowed, amused eyes, remembering our first, unpleasant encounter. “Quite the watchdog for the absent barrister.”

“I am always proud to serve as watchdog for my friends.”

“No doubt why the bulldog is the British mascot,” he murmured, my unspoken challenge not lost on him. “But you are convinced of the existence of the Ripper?”

“It is a given, sir. Any informed person—”

“Has read too many newspapers too uncritically. I assure you, Miss Huxleigh, I could make a convincing case that any of two dozen persons were the Whitechapel Ripper, from street sweeper to tree surgeon to prime minister.”

“Why do you doubt the Ripper’s existence?” Irene asked.

Those gimlet eyes returned to her, and I was momentarily relieved to escape their gaze, though I had resolved to sacrifice myself for Irene’s sake.

She, however, had that hazy acceding look she wore when winning a game of chess with Godfrey or dealing with an operatic director who wanted her to sing a role a certain way. She looked quite amenable in an intelligent way, but was growing as stubborn as Satan beneath the affability.

“I do not believe in frightening horses in the street or ladies at luncheon,” Mr. Holmes noted, “but, since you insist, I will only note other events of the year of 1888 in the working-class sections of London. You realize, of course, that the Ripper’s supposed victims were all middle-aged women of the lowest orders? Is there anyone who does not recognize that quintet of names: Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catharine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly? They are as famous as wives of the Henry VIII.”

“They also are as dead,” Irene muttered in a stage aside.

“Ha! Why is there not an opera on that subject? You could play all the wives admirably.”

For a moment her composure shattered. “That is a rather brilliant idea, Mr. Holmes.”

“Then I hope you will act upon it and leave investigating these poor women’s deaths to those who must delve into the lowest impulses of man. I have investigated many criminous matters, but that a voice such as yours should be silenced from the stage is the greatest crime I have ever encountered.”

I have seldom—nay, never—seen Irene at a loss for words, but she was tongue-tied then. In fact, her eyes brightened suspiciously, and I leaped into the chasm of silence.

“It takes constant practice to maintain a fine voice, Mr. Holmes, and such a discipline allows for very little life of any normal sort.”

“A life of ‘any normal sort’ is very little indeed, Miss Huxleigh,” he replied abruptly. He, too, seemed suddenly stricken in some strange way. “You and Dr. Watson!” He sounded rueful and also a trifle envious.

I hastened to change a subject that was becoming unsettling to us all.

“I do not understand your earlier point, Mr. Holmes. Each of the women you named was murdered within proximity of the others, in similar and too-loathsome-to-mention ways, within a period of time ranging over two and a half months. And then there were the letters signed ‘Jack the Ripper’ taking credit for the crimes. He even predicted two of the murders before they happened.”

“Indeed.” The eagle eyes were back on me and the topic of murder most foul rather than Irene and her wounded singing career. “You are suspiciously well-read on this subject, Miss Huxleigh.”

“It was a sensation worldwide, after all. And . . . it was news of home,” I added lamely.

“There was other news of home that did not draw worldwide attention, also in the year 1888.”

He glanced once at the tabletop as if to assure himself that we had eaten and drunk our fill. Then the long fingers on his right hand flared, and his left hand began ticking them off, starting with the small finger.