Chapel Noir (18 page)

“In February of that year a thirty-eight-year-old widow of Spitalfields was stabbed in the nether region by an unknown man wielding a clasp knife.

“In March a thirty-nine-year-old woman was stabbed twice in the throat by an unknown man with a clasp knife. In April a forty-fiveyear-old widow of Spitalfields was . . . unspeakably attacked by an unknown man. In August, a thirty-nine-year-old hawker of Spitalfields who hawked herself as well as her wares was stabbed thirty-nine times in Whitechapel. And on August 31, Mary Ann Nichols’s mutilated body was found in Bucks Row, Whitechapel.”

He had reached his thumb and flared his left hand to continue the count. “Then: Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catharine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly, the roll call of the so-called Ripper.”

His little finger remained upright after he had ticked off the victims. “Mary Jane Kelly is buried on the twelfth November. And in December, Rose Mylett, described as ‘a drunkard,’ is found dead, though unmutilated. A murder verdict is brought in.”

Irene bestirred herself. “You are saying that many murders as vile as the Ripper’s have occurred in Whitechapel before and after his reign, and still will.”

“What is remarkable about the Ripper case is the public furor, not the victims of the crime, nor even the acts of violence. I assure you that did I wish to solve sensational crimes rather than interesting ones, I could be in the papers every fortnight with a new atrocity.”

“You would not be involved in solving these crimes at all, were it not for Queen and country,” Irene observed with some surprise.

The man sighed, then glanced to us both. “Would you object if I smoked?”

“Not at all,” said Irene, “if you do not object if I smoke.”

I added “nicotine fiend” to my list of
the
man’s vices.

We had removed ourselves to the antechamber, where the smoke of my companions could lose itself among the plaster-and-gilt ceiling cherubs, who no doubt wondered why they had won a place in Heaven only to inhale the fumes of Hell.

“Dr. Watson is not in France,” Irene noted as she and her host directed companionable streams of smoke toward the ceiling.

I was not deceived. The duel was continuing on different ground, but the feints were as fierce. I would rather see her jousting with the dreadful detective than conjoining with him.

“No, as he was not in Whitechapel. I could not allow him to enter an arena where one with his skills was so suspect. All this twaddle about Jack the Ripper having medical skills—”

“He does not?”

“The work was mere butchery, Madam. Even butchery may show a certain order. But you would find it incomprehensible how many respectable persons were suspected of being the Ripper during the height of the fever.”

“Perhaps,” I said, “but the public suspects were usually of the lower orders.”

“Sacrificial lambs,” Irene said. “So the mighty were not immune from suspicion, despite the Whitechapel setting?”

“The mighty have been known to lower themselves.” He shook his head impatiently as he drew on his pipe. “This is a most sordid affair, ladies. I cannot discuss it freely with you. Count yourself fortunate that you have matters other than the revolting excesses of madmen to occupy you.”

“And your ultimate message is . . . besides luncheon, of course, and the pleasure of your company?” Irene asked in a silken tone I knew enough to avoid like a honed razor edge.

“That your loyalty has been welcome to His Royal Highness. That I am here now, and you are not needed. That this subject matter is not suitable for ladies. That I have the case in hand, and your services are no longer useful. That your Prince appreciates your subjecting yourselves to much unpleasantness. And that you are free to resume your pursuits innocent of the tawdry details of brutality and murder.”

“Thank you.” Irene stood, crushing her small cigar in a crystal dish. “I do appreciate knowing my place in the scheme of things. I wish you luck in hunting this new, not-Ripper, and am happy to have given a sou, however humble, to the cause.”

Oh, my.
The
man may have been a nine days’ wonder in solving murderous conundrums, but he knew nothing of the fury of a woman scorned. When Irene Adler applied the word “humble” to herself . . . well, the shoe was about to slip on the other’s foot before he could say . . .

“Thank you, and farewell.”
The
man stood, bowed to us both, dismissed us.

I found myself sharing Irene’s outrage. We had not asked to be drawn into these atrocities, but we had suffered and seen more than gently reared women should, and no thanks, however princely or glib, could restore what had been lost in us.

Irene glided to the door, remembering at the last moment to pause to let our host open it for us, to release us.

He hesitated, almost urbane for a moment. I thought he would take her hand and kiss it.

But he didn’t, and we sallied out together, as we usually did, moving down the hall until we were out of sight, then taking a deep, mutual breath.

“What an astounding meeting, Nell. At least we learned more from him than he did from us.”

“We did?”

“Indeed. Well.”

“We certainly have been sent on our way. It would have been more gracious if the Prince had tended his gratitude and farewell in person.”

“Oh, it is not the Prince who has brushed us off.”

I was pleased to note a rising note of fury in her tone. “Not the Prince?”

“And not the Rothschilds.”

“The Baron was decidedly absent.”

“As we will be. Apparently.”

“Apparently? We are going home to Neuilly?”

“Of course. And then we are moving to a Paris hotel.”

“Moving to Paris?” I was dismayed. “Why?”

“If Jack the Ripper is in Paris, so must we be.”

“But Sherlock Holmes said there was no Jack the Ripper.”

“Sherlock Holmes is about to learn a lesson. From Jack the Ripper. And from me.”

19.
A Movable Feast

Paris is the most volatile of cities. It is also—in ways that
reveal themselves slowly—one of the most reclusive
.
—
ROSAMOND BERNIER

Like Sarah Bernhardt, Irene was a woman who was used to seeing stage productions involving huge casts and massive amounts of wardrobe and scenery mounted and transported within days. In fact, I believe that an operatic prima donna, as Irene had been for a few, brief, glittering years, was even more accustomed than an actress to making Herculean efforts. After all, she not only had to enact a role while dragging around, like a Volga boatman in thrall to a barge, forty to sixty pounds of costume, she also had to trill like a nightingale while doing it.

In other words, actress or opera singer, these were women who were used to moving mountains, and whatever puny humans happened to inhabit them.

A simple project such as relocating two women from a rural village to the nearby heart of Paris in one day was but a trifle to Irene. She was in one of those moods that would brook no opposition. I could have more easily turned a twenty-two-stone Brunhilde away from an imminent stage entrance as persuade Irene to another course of action.

Godfrey, perhaps, would have had some influence, but there was no time to wire him, and he likely had not even reached Prague as yet.

On first observing Irene’s wholesale thirst for swift action, one might think it was directed by a certain autocratic self-absorption.

But I had come to see, through my years with Irene and my accompanying observance of the demands of stage productions, that the case was quite the opposite. The leading actor, or the prima donna, is the engine upon which the entire great enterprise of imagination and art made concrete depends. The weight of the entire cast’s employment, as well as the responsibility for doing due honor to the maestros whose words and music are presented, falls on the performer. Only a confident, courageous, and deeply committed person would dare set foot on the boards with so much at stake. Uncertainty and hesitation are death onstage. Once the curtain has opened, there is nowhere to hide.

And so it was with Irene in life as well. Her enforced retirement from the opera, in which Mr. Sherlock Holmes had played an incidental role by making the false rumor of her death necessary for some years, had made the world at large her stage and had given her a panoply of roles to play on a daily basis: playwright, conductor, leading lady, costumer, prompter, stagehand, and, on occasion, cleaning lady. Only now she applied these arts and this effort to stage-managing the solution of dramas written in the newspapers and the courts. She had become a leading lady of crime and punishment.

Like all leading ladies, she had her eccentricities. Thank God she did not sleep in her own traveling coffin, as La Bernhardt did. But Irene did travel like a one-woman Shakespearean company, with an enormous quantity of costumes. Andre was to make many return trips with our baggage once we were settled in our hotel. (Sophie was indulging in a grand pout at being left behind, but was secretly glad to sleep at her own cottage for a few days.)

I must admit that the sense of embarking on a great and possibly dangerous journey entranced even as settled a soul as I. It was like taking a carriage to the opening of a new and mysterious play, without quite knowing whether it would be tragedy or comedy of manners. Or perhaps a bit of both.

As much as my upbringing and inclinations might encourage dragging my feet to resist being swept away by the grand illusions before us, my wayward heart would beat a bit faster as I went stumbling after Irene en route to one of her great enterprises.

The village of Neuilly was only a few miles from the Champs-Elysées, that avenue along which all Paris—the
tout Paris
of legend—drives to see and be seen. In the carriage en route Irene was forced to sit still long enough to explain herself.

“I much appreciate your readiness to do what must be repugnant to you, Nell,” she said. “There is no time to be lost. Sherlock Holmes may be clever, but he is most unsuited to find the killer he has been charged with stopping. No wonder the Ripper escaped London unscathed and uncaught.”

“You were sufficiently astute to outwit this so-called consulting detective in London, and elsewhere later. I am sure the man’s reputation is exaggerated. And I have never found him suited for much.”

She regarded me quizzically. “I know you are loyal to me to a fault, Nell, but I have never held his assignment for the King of Bohemia against Mr. Holmes. It was always clear that he saw through Willie from the first. In that regard, he was a good deal cleverer than I.”

“You were a woman misled by your heart.”

“By my hubris, I fear, but you are kind to call it heart.” She shook her bonneted head, for she had dressed in the height of convention, no doubt to soothe my misgivings about our unconventional decamping to Paris. “I admit I was dazzled by Willie’s obvious enamourment. I did learn that one’s heart may most yearn after what is worst for it, and that a most unlikely man may be far more worthy of regard than the more obvious candidates.”

“Godfrey was never unlikely, Irene. You just did not like him at first.”

“I did not trust him at first, solely because of his late father’s connection to that bit of skullduggery involving Marie Antoinette. In this I was unfairly judgmental. Would that Mr. Holmes had learned such a lesson of the heart as I have. Unfortunately, he is supremely untutored in that regard, and it makes him a most unreliable investigator of these particular crimes. If I do not take a hand in it, more women will die in this unthinkable manner.”

“I agree that Mr. Holmes is not likely to solve these fiendish crimes, but why do you think so?”

She eyed me cautiously. “I am bothered, Nell, at having to involve you, though it is at your own insistence. These are the ugliest, most inhuman murders one could imagine occurring on our planet. Unless one recognizes, and admits, that this inhumanity is a part of human nature, one will never see the murderer were he to cross the square ahead of one. This is not Mr. Poe’s ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ alas. No great ape can take the blame or absolve the hand of man in these slaughters, both here in Paris and in London earlier. These murders bear the mark of the beast, and he is all too human.”

“I do admit that I would do a great deal that is against my nature to see you show up that Baker Street detective once more, but why is he so handicapped, in your opinion?”

“He is not a woman.”

“And a woman—?”

“Would understand immediately that these crimes strike to the heart of womanhood.”

“Oh.” Since I
was
a woman, I was not about to admit that I didn’t understand her point. “Of course.”

“And you saw today . . . he makes the same arrogant error he made when first we encountered one another. He dismisses my observations, and yours, as insignificant. He has no wish to know what we may have seen and what we think.”

“He also dismisses the observations of the Paris police.”

“He dismisses. No doubt his experience of the police, and his inexperience with women, have given him some cause for finding them both unreliable. Yet his experiences with me should have prevented him from making the same mistake of underestimating me twice.”

“Now who is sounding like a prima donna?”

She shrugged, then laughed. She has the most musical, unfettered laugh of anyone I have ever heard. It is like a Pied Piper’s fluting, and so effective with men, women, and children that I imagine even rats would follow Irene’s laughter into the mouth of the King of Cats. Which is probably Lucifer in disguise.

For a moment I fretted about our menagerie left to Sophie’s untender mercies. The worst thing about having servants is that they invariably end up feeling superior to those they serve. Perhaps that is because they see far too much of them.

“There is at least one purpose for our removal to Paris that you are bound to approve, Nell,” Irene said at last, breaking a companionable silence.

“And what is that?”

“To get Pink out of that bordello.”

“Wonderful! I shall endeavor with all my heart to help her see the error of her ways.”

“That is not exactly what I had in mind for her, but your approach will be equally interesting, I am sure, Nell.”

Irene insisted on going alone to retrieve Pink, or Elizabeth, I should say. My first step toward reform would be the elimination of that infantile nickname.

I objected strenuously to Irene’s going there unescorted, but she argued that she would be accompanied home by Pink. Two women alone was also improper, unless in the most public and expected of places, but propriety was always the last thing Irene troubled herself about.

I remained puzzled and deeply hurt that she would care to burden us with a stranger during a time when we were confronting crime on a level unprecedented in touching the both highest and lowest levels of society.

Pink, I concluded, fell somewhere in the middle of that social ladder. Perhaps I should have been worried about having a fallen woman in our midst, but the governess in me actually relished the idea of enlightening the girl. She had a bright mind, was very well mannered for an American, and seemed far more likely to respond to my advice than Irene ever was. A rather odd fallen woman actually, but I suppose the establishments that catered to aristocrats preferred to offer girls of the middling classes to their clients, odious as the thought was.

Poor Pink. That terrible family life! What chance had the poor girl had? And then I recalled Irene’s comments that Pink was sharing only the tip of the truth about herself with us . . .
Pink!

I had been blind! Of course. Pink. From America. As Irene had been, years before. And, as Irene had been, also a Pinkerton private inquiry agent! Could a young woman be both a trollop and a detective? I suppose it would be a useful combination of . . . pursuits. Think of the state secrets such an agent could learn, the commercial dealings!

Then how should I treat her? I must not betray her secret. All must seem as before. I remained hurt that Irene did not share this information about Pink with me. Perhaps she felt that I would give away Pink’s true assignment. I would show that such a concern was needless! I would treat Pink as purely the foreign
fide de joie
she appeared to be.

Irene had chosen a hotel on the rue de Rivoli central to the various sections of Paris, which are called
arrondissements
. The Hotel du Louvre was nothing to sniff at, and we had a large suite with a receiving room and dining room separating two bedchambers as well as a sleeping alcove off the dining room. I was not sure where Pink would sleep.

We had no maid, but Irene and I were used to playing maidservant to each other. She had always been far too American to accept the waiting-on that the profession of prima donna offered her. She rarely used dressers during performances, unless absolutely necessary. Since her marriage to Godfrey she had more played the maid to me than vice versa, as he apparently took over such tasks as corset-string tightening and loosening, which is so difficult to do on one’s own. I imagine that masculine strength was better suited to this troublesome task, and then ceased to imagine more lest I imagine too much.