Another Scandal in Bohemia (17 page)

Godfrey was absent, as he had been on occasion, dining in Paris with our new “employers.” So he had said.

“Why should Godfrey not tell you something?” I inquired reasonably.

“Because he is so satisfied with himself of late!”

Her hands, deceptively strong despite their grace, drove a crashing chord into the hapless keys.

Casanova squawked and uttered meaningless parrot for once, lofting above his perch with beating wings.

“That is exactly how you behave when you are involved with an unpleasantness,” I pointed out.

“Precisely why I am worried,” she retorted, striking a less truculent chord. Her fingers relaxed into a liquid arpeggio that trickled up and down the keyboard. “It is not like Godfrey to be mysterious,” she added wistfully.

“The shoe,” I said.

She eyed me quizzically.

“It pinches.”

Another exasperated chord. Casanova cackled fluent parrot.

“On the other foot,” I finished, tying off a knot.

“If you are going to prate clichés,” she said, “you could at least rattle them off in one go.”

Irene spun around on the velvet-covered stool, hopelessly twisting her skirts. Candlelight invariably flattered her, but now it illuminated a faint pleat of worry lines in her forehead.

“They also serve who stand and wait,” I complied dutifully.

She gritted her teeth, and being an actress and opera singer, managed to speak with perfect diction despite it, or perhaps because of it. “Sit, Nell. We sit. We sit here night after night and know nothing. Surely the Rothschilds did not mean us to... dawdle our days and nights away in Paris while all Bohemia burns!”

“I am certain that Godfrey is putting matters into fine order in good time. He was always most efficient in court. A paragon of organization.”

“International politics do not wait for the finesse of impeccable paperwork,” she spat. “Nor do monsters like the Golem.”

Lucifer, sleeping by the ember-bright hearth, stirred and yawned to show his rose-red maw equipped with formidable white thorns of teeth. He growled slightly.

Irene’s hands fisted on her lap, then crashed again on the piano keys. “I am not patient, it is true. Yet I am bound to abide by Godfrey’s timetable. He is in communication with the Rothschilds, and I am not.”

“Spying is men’s work,” I noted placidly.

“You have not read your Bible,” she returned, pointing to the plump volume that occupied the whole top of my side table. “The example of Judith in the camp of Holofernes contradicts you.”

I found my nose wrinkling. “That was butchery in the name of spying. Not all Biblical tales are suitable for emulation. One sometimes forget how brutal the old ways were.”

“They are still brutal.” Irene turned back to the piano, uncoiling her skirts. “And I am brutally bored. We s
hall
have to do something about it until Godfrey’s brilliant and dilatory organization—whatever it is—is completed.”

“
We?”

“You, as usual, will bear the brunt of the task.”

I looked up over my pince-nez, hoping I embodied my most forbidding governess resolution.

“What will I be required to do this time?”

“Only what you do exquisitely every day.” Irene’s fingers were wandering the keys amiably again, and her voice had lightened to a careless, cajoling mezzo-soprano trill.

“What is that?”

“Sew,” she said, glancing coyly over her shoulder as I plunged my needle firmly into my forefinger.

Chapter Eleven

SEW WHAT!

So it
was that, past my thirtieth year, I was rechristened “Agatha”—I do not think that Irene could have concocted a more abominable pseudonym—and introduced to the crowded workrooms of Maison Worth as the replacement for the late and apparently unlamented Berthe.

To excuse my less than fluent French, I was made out to be a remote English “cousin” of the Worth family. Playing a “poor relation” was nothing new to me, although pretending to be an accomplished “beader” was.

“I doubt there is any danger in this assignment, Nell,” Irene had speculated the evening before my first day with a certain sang froid that I found unbecoming in a dear friend. “But certainly we will learn nothing of the true circumstances of that poor girl’s death without some notion of her life and work.”

“I thought that you were a regular at Maison Worth these days.”

“The workrooms form their own world. Neither of the Worths, nor I, will see what truly goes on there. This masquerade will only last for a few days.”

“No doubt Godfrey will have completed his arduous preparations for Bohemia by then,” I said fervently.

“Let us hope so.” Irene echoed me with even greater fervor. “He has been tiresomely... distracted of late. All work and no play make Jack a dull boy and Jill most irritable.”

I could not argue with Irene’s current irritability, but I could never find Godfrey dull; no matter how distracted he might be, I always found him rather charmingly distracting. But I was used to working with him, and Irene had an entirely different relationship, so perhaps I did not understand her complaint.

What can I say of the fashion house workrooms? Imagine a convention of female Casanovas chattering away in high-pitched rapid-fire French in a dozen different provincial accents. The Tower of Babel would have been a relief.

While carriages idled at the establishment’s entrance on the rue de la Paix and great ladies lounged in the front salons, we sewing girls in back lined long, plain tables, separated from the stitcher opposite only by our lengths of fabric and a clutter of trims. Our days began at dawn and ended at twilight, with too few necessities breaks and an unsatisfactory lunch “hour” that lasted less than half its supposed time.

Luckily, this was no shock given my early clerking work at Whiteley’s Emporium in London. It was indeed a shock, however, to find how poorly I tolerated such hours and such labor in these latter, lax days.

Strong cheeses perfumed the faces and garments around me. Garlic and onions scented their conjoined breaths. Given the forcefulness required to speak a language as awkward as French, this vegetable stew of odor hung foglike over the workers.

Several sang or hummed as they stitched, an effect that would have anguished Irene’s sensitive ear. Indeed, my first day was spent contemplating how ill-suited Irene would be to survive such an ordeal, although perhaps I do her an injustice. The only song in my ear was the rhythmic syllables of Mr. Hood’s poignant “Song of the Shirt.”

Another (and unwanted) thing I was given: poor Berthe’s very seat. (I would never forget first seeing her slumped maroon figure pierced by the shining steel shears and the small, dark red rose of blood blossoming around that silver thorn.) I was even given her work: dressing the fashion mannequins.

Never had I seen dolls so beautiful. At first I was afraid to touch these elegant female figures only two feet tall. When I expressed my awe, I was told by the haughty dame in charge of the sewing room that these were “Juneau
bébés
” because of their finely done bisque heads.

Oh, those pale, exquisitely round little faces, with their startling lifelike blue- and gray-glass eyes, their tiny pierced porcelain ears dangling semiprecious stones, their strongly drawn brows and delicately traced painted eyelashes. Those unearthly eyes were made of “paperweight glass,” I was told. Even their hands were finely molded, and because their bodies were made of kid leather gusseted for movement, they could assume postures eerily similar to those Irene struck when modeling her Worth gowns.

Yet, despite their blonde and brunette mohair wigs (some had real hair, though it was duller and certainly more macabre than the mohair) and elegant wardrobes, I found them slightly sinister. Perhaps I was put off by those hard, babyish faces with limpid glass eyes and timid rosebud lips, some hoarding two tiny rows of sharp teeth gleaming in the darkness within.... Or the uncanny way their articulated necks and wrists moved ever so daintily.

I was shocked on my first day—while embroidering a lacy set of white muslin underthings (I felt it best to start with items that would not show and work outward as I became more confident)—to discover a naked wooden form beneath the modest pantaloons and corset cover, jointed everywhere as in life. Such blatant mimicry struck me as nearly blasphemous, as did the bare, lifelike puppet beneath the elaborate garb.

Perhaps my recent readings in the medieval legendry of the Golem had reminded me of sorcerers’ simulacra and homunculi, of forbidden experiments and fallen idols; even of primitive magic. Perhaps Berthe had been slain because of the idolatrous nature of her work, was stuck with a pin like the object of a savage curse.

The workrooms were not the place or time for fancies, not even macabre ones, laboring twelve hours a day with neck bent and fingers flying until needle pierced flesh as often as fabric.

Stitch! stitch! stitch!

In poverty, hunger and dirt,

And still with a voice of dolorous pitch,

Would that its tones could reach the rich,

She sang the 'Song of the Shirt!’

Yet the object of my labors was not coarse linen; far from it. And calloused hands could not have managed the silks, satins, and velvets that slid through my fingers without snagging the stuff more precious than a mere seamstress’s flesh.

No, my sewing song was far more cheerful than that of the piece-work drudge celebrated in Mr. Hood’s poem. No matter how my neck and back ached, the workrooms were clean and decently aired. More than a straight seam was required of me.

Madame Gallatin, the supervisor I had mentioned, brought the tiny clothes the other women had cut and half finished, rustling toward me with tissue-paper designs that I was to translate into beadwork on the miniature skirts and bodices.

I pushed my pince-nez more firmly onto my nose to study these intricate patterns.

“You must first baste the tissues over the proper part of the gowns, Mademoiselle Uxleigh,” she instructed, sounding unfortunately like the Divine Sarah in dropping the initial “H” in my surname. She mistook my cringe at the memory for fear of the work.

“It is not so difficult,” she went on more sternly. “Surely a relation of Monsieur Worth will have a modicum of skill in her fingers, not to mention the head.” Here she tapped hers, her sharp features screwed tighter by hair drawn back mercilessly into a coal-black topknot that sat the crown of her head like an angry question mark.

She set a series of glass jars down before me. “You will use these beads as indicated in the sketch. Do not deviate from the pattern or the sketch and you will do nicely.”

I nodded to spare her my atrocious French and set to work.

The partially attired doll who would wear my stitchery stood before me, her pale, placid face cocked, her plump, painted cheeks and tiny features wearing an expression that blended pert expectancy with a waxen deathlike calm.

Her tiny, curled hands, so like a sophisticated baby’s, could grasp anything—fan, mirror, opera glasses, gloves, parasol, reticule. I could not picture that fragile bisque extremity grasping anything so heavy or dangerous as Irene’s wicked little pistol.

This doll was to wear a spotted grosgrain silk gown in palest ivory with fan-shaped designs on skirt and corsage worked in a heavenly array of beads ranging from faintest aqua to deepest midnight blue.

I basted on the first tissue, threaded with medium-blue silk a needle almost as fine as an eyebrow hair and plunged it up through the skirt’s heavy ivory silk and tissue overlay. An instant later my first bead was fixed in place. An unpleasant flutter of half-fear, half-pleasure trilled in my chest.

“That fashion doll is destined for the Empress of all the Russias,” Madame Gallatin’s guttural voice admonished from above my bent head. “Be careful,” she added in an almost sinister undertone.

Startled, I looked into the only face gazing my way—the doll’s frozen features. The deep brown eyes held a weary, vacuous stare, but now I recognized the brunette coiffure, the petite figure: the very likeness of Maria Feodorovna herself, whom I had seen in Paris not months before!

Had she come to Sarah Bernhardt’s salon fresh from a call on Maison Worth that resulted in the commissioning of the doll before me? Could I ever have dreamed then that many weeks later I would be sewing beads onto a miniature gown destined for her eyes and hands thousands of miles away in St Petersburg? Could I have guessed that a murdered girl would link us, when before only the person we knew (if one could call it that) in common was the murderous Colonel Moran, then masquerading as Captain Morgan?