Chapel Noir (3 page)

1.
Somewhere in Paris

I often have this strange and moving dream of an
unknown woman
. . . .
—
PAUL VERLAINE,
MON RÊVE FAMILIER
, 1866

FROM A JOURNAL

Saturday, May 18, 1889
.

I must be strong and record my impressions before they fade.

Yet . . . no wonder my penmanship resembles the thin, palsied scrawl of a very old lady, though I am not yet twenty-five. My hand shakes despite myself, as my body shivers despite the snapping flames I sit so near.

I had hoped that my unconventional life thus far had prepared me to face disagreeable things, things that those who lead more circumscribed lives might call distasteful, even bizarre. Brutal. Shocking.

But this . . . where to begin?

With the beginning, I tell myself now. I take pride in not being the green girl I am taken for by the blind old eyes all around me. Buck up, my dear childish self! You are a mistress of deceit, and besides, the world will need to know the truth. Someday.

How odd it is that when one is assaulted by the unendurable that the mind fastens on the irrelevant.

So I stood alone and undiscovered on that horrible threshold and elected to notice that the center of the chamber was occupied by the most bizarre piece of furniture I had ever seen. A sort of barber’s chair by way of Versailles.

Barber’s chair. The phrase puts me in mind of Sweeney Todd, the murderous “demon” barber of Fleet Street in London, the city which I last visited before this one.

And, of course, thoughts of the barbarous Sweeney Todd made the rivulets of drying blood encrusting the chair’s brocade into something more than . . . distant and gruesome embroidery.

Having forced my mind to admit what my eyes had already seen and repudiated by looking elsewhere, I forced my gaze to the figures that occupied the bloody appliance.

My first thoughts are unforgettable, and so unlike me, who has seen much unpleasantness from an early age:

I will not swoon
.

I will not vomit
.

I will not go mad
.

I WILL NOT
!

2.
Somewhere in France

Never go to France unless you know the lingo,
If you do like me, you will repent, by jingo
—
THOMAS HOOD, 1839

A secret is a stone. You pick one up and think,
Oh, this is not so heavy. And it’s rather interesting, isn’t it?

So you walk along carrying it for a little while. And you find it heavier. Yet you dare not just drop it anywhere, for simply anyone to find, so you walk with it for a long distance, for a long time. Then you find that you cannot let it go no matter how much you wish to. And you realize at length that it weighs the world.

We all carry secrets we have picked up almost unwittingly. Almost, but not quite unwittingly. Some are mere pebbles. Others true loadstones.

All weigh more than they are worth.

I recently have found myself weighing one of my secret stones, the heaviest I have ever carried. I turn it over, examine it, consider passing it on to another. A secret shared has wings and becomes a confidence. And sometimes unwanted confidences can become insupportable stones for another.

And so I walk on alone.

Nothing is more soothing to the female soul than a quiet evening of needlework, if I do say so myself.

This thought came to me as I crocheted a charming cover for the tabletop bell by which we summon our maid-of-all-work, Sophie. I do not know why a bell should require a crocheted cover, save that it would keep the dust off of it. Somewhat.

Irene was reading a book, a French novel, I am afraid, on the chaise longue across the room. She would have been pleased that I thought she looked almost as decadent as Sarah Bernhardt in one of her swooning portraits.

On his perch near the antique grand piano by the window Casanova was currently torn between gnawing a half-devoured grape and his own scaly foot. (I cannot choose which is the more loathsome occupation myself.) Occasionally, the parrot would croak out a word, but we two humans managed to remain silent and engrossed in our peaceful occupations.

This evening in Neuilly-sur-Seine, not far beyond the gaslit mists of Paris, felt so unlike the hectic London days when Irene and I had shared quarters in the Saffron Hill district.

Ever since I met Irene Adler eight years ago my peace of mind has been sorely tested. I don’t know if we so much “met” as that she selected me as suitable for salvage. As I recently looked through my diaries for those days I could sniff an attitude of despair lifting off the yellowing pages like the smoky miasma that perfumes crowded London streets. Paris is airier, and therefore far less comforting than dear olde London towne. That portion of my diary sits on the table beside me.

By night, when gaslights glitter through the fog and the cobblestones gleam like bootblack, London seems a landscape glimpsed in some
Arabian Nights
tale. By day the effect is more commonplace, as the city streets throng with omnibuses, hansom cabs, and pedestrians.

Yet that daily, daylit London can intimidate even more than its dark nocturnal side; at least a respectable young woman like myself found it so in the spring of 1881. I trudged the streets of London town, wondering how I came to be adrift on this tide of strangers, my few belongings tumbled into the carpetbag at my side. I was alone and friendless and—for the first time in my four-and-twenty years—homeless and hungry.

So there I was, much younger and quite lost, carrying not secret stones, but a laden satchel containing all my unworldly worldly belongings. A street urchin made to run off with it, for my numb fingers were no obstacle. Suddenly Irene was descending on us, not like the goddess of peace the name meant to the ancients, but like Diana on the hunt, an angry goddess. She drove off the small thief (after filling his grimy paws with coppers) and took me in hand and to tea (which, it turned out, she could as ill afford as I).

From the first it became evident to me that Irene Adler was a fraud. Perhaps I should put it more gently. She was an aspiring opera singer who survived on her wits and some private inquiry commissions stemming from her work with the Pinkerton detective agency before she had forsaken America for England.

The fine copper-colored silk gown and bonnet that so impressed me that day proved to be resurrected street market scavengings. From such remnants she configured an eclectic wardrobe to suit whatever persona she needed for this audition or that inquiry.

My savior was not only in need herself, but was a human chameleon who recognized none of polite society’s boundaries. None! And that included outings in gentleman’s dress on occasion! Although she admirably spurned the aspiring actress’s easiest ladder to fame and fortune—the sponsorship of wealthy noblemen willing to trade pounds and jewels for a woman’s favors—in less personal matters of morality she practiced an alarming flexibility. I can best sum up her outlook in that ancient legal catchphrase and popular children’s chant: “finders keepers.”

It was clear from the outset that she needed me as moral compass. Certainly her hardheaded survival skills were useful to a gently reared spinster who found governess work vanishing and employment as a shopgirl too brutal for words.

We shared rooms in the Saffron Hill Italian district while I went to school to master the mechanical beast that was invading offices throughout London. I became one of the newly named typewriter-girls, and the first female such person employed in the Inns of Court when one Godfrey Norton, barrister, dared to hire one of the new breed. . . .

Godfrey. My jaunt through the past had completely predated his arrival on our domestic front of two, and felt so pleasant for that reason, that a stab of guilt for my present contentment caused me to jab the crochet hook into my forefinger.

“Oh, botheration!”

“What is it, Nell?” Irene inquired.

I was hardly about to confess that I had just realized that I did not miss Godfrey, her husband and my former employer, a man who was the closest thing to a brother I had ever had or was ever likely to have in this vale of woes.

“My crochet hook has taken it upon itself to admonish me for inattention. It’s nothing, really. Not even a drop of blood.”

“Then we shall hope that you do not fall into a hundred-year slumber until Prince Charming comes.”

“Why Prince Charming would be interested in such an immobile girl as Sleeping Beauty, I cannot imagine.” When one catches oneself being selfish, it is always best to make rapid public amends. “I was just thinking about missing Godfrey,” I said piously. (I had indeed been thinking about missing him, only that I did
not
, which is a fine point that Irene need hardly be told.)

She sighed and let her finger mark the place in her novel while she dropped it to her lap. “His journey has just begun. He will be gone a good deal longer.”

“It is most inconvenient that the Rothschilds feel they can call upon Godfrey so often with so little notice.”

“Inconvenient,” Irene agreed with a rueful smile, “but highly lucrative. And Godfrey enjoys the challenges of foreign missions.”

As the lamplight flickered beside her, illuminating her face with some of the flattering glow thrown by theatrical footlights, I reflected that she looked not a day older than when we had met eight years earlier. I have no idea how time has treated my features. I have never been a beauty, and no one notices such things about me, including me.

But Irene, now just past thirty, had been blessed with more virtues than one woman should claim. The fairy godmothers had flocked around her cradle, wherever in the wilds of America it had rocked, and left her infant self endowed with intelligence, a peerless singing voice, an indomitable will, and, of course and most obviously, beauty. Luckily, Irene also had inherited some few flaws that it was most useful for me to point out, and one was about to show itself.

“This country life is so dull, Nell!” she burst out, hurling the inoffensive novel to the floor. (Actually, I suspect it was a rather offensive novel, having been written by that shocking George Sand woman, and the floor was probably too good a place for it.) “I do not know what I will do with myself while Godfrey is in Prague all these weeks.”

“Surely you would not wish to encounter the King of Bohemia again?”

“Godfrey may wish to forestall such an encounter. I am more adventurous.”

“Exactly why he is selected for these diplomatic missions over yourself. I am sure Baron Alphonse is well informed as to your past Bohemian escapades.”

“Escapades!” she mocked, even as her tone celebrated the word. “I believe that our mild entanglements in Prague are remembered only by ourselves. I do agree, Nell, that Godfrey deserves the Rothschilds’ recognition of his abilities, which far exceed the usual skills of being a barrister. There are times, you know, when I am quite content to play the proud helpmeet.”

“Play! Exactly. All life to you is a series of roles to be played. If you are the bored and abandoned wife at the moment, I suggest a retreat to your former occupation.”

“I am not as I was formerly, an unmarried woman. I do not know even what I would call myself if I sang in public again. Irene Adler has died in more than a few newspapers and some people’s imaginations. Can she be resurrected?”

“Why not sing as Irene Norton?”

“She is a stranger. She has no reputation. No history.”

I thought. For all Irene’s force of will, when it came to her own interest she could be as indecisive as any ordinary mortal. Much of the confidence of the artistic soul is purely armor.

“What of that lady violinist?”

“Which ‘lady violinist’?”

“She has two last names, hyphenated. The first is something feudal, and the second is Indian, East Indian.”

Irene frowned with blank alarm, as if she thought me demented. Finally, her expression cleared.

“Norman-Nèruda. Feudal-Indian, really, Nell! You are so quintessentially British! I believe her maiden name was Wilhelmine Nèruda, but she married a Swede named Norman. If I followed in her footsteps, I would be Irene Norton-Adler.”

This time I frowned. “You follow in no one’s footsteps, Irene. You would be Irene Adler-Norton.”

There came a long pause while her mind played with this new incarnation. Irene could never resist recasting herself in new roles. Or other people.

I nodded toward the parrot. “There is the piano and your vocal exercises.”

“Yes—” Her face, suddenly pensive, rested on her bent elbow and clasped fist, a hoydenish posture I should never tolerate in one of my charges, though it had been years since I had seen employment as a governess. Still, the corrective instinct, once encouraged, is ingrained. I managed to hold my tongue.

“But what is the use, Nell, no matter what I call myself?” Irene demanded, agitated again. “My scales only show how far my range and tone have degraded. One cannot dabble at operatic singing, Nell. One must be always in rehearsal, always performing. The voice must be kept in constant condition, or it soon sours.”