Another Scandal in Bohemia (9 page)

Even Irene was taken aback by this sober apparition, and turned toward our vendeuse in silent surprise. This young lady, a slender child in light lilac surrah, rustled toward the diabolic-looking gown.

"This will take some care in donning, Madame. If I may assist—?”

Irene’s theatrical background had made her the mistress of her own image. She scorned personal maids and hairdressers, preferring her own expert attentions. No matter how rich she became, I suspected, she would never sit easily while another arranged her. But now the intimidatingly mysterious gown that hung like condemned goods on the wall forced her to acquiesce.

I aided her undressing, relieved to see that today Irene wore the full complement of necessary underthings: pale yellow chemise, silk combinations, frilled drawers, rose-colored shot-silk petticoats and crimson brocade corset, silk vest and white bodice, all covered by a lace-edged camisole.

Soon all this sensible attire vanished under a rustling ebony cataract of fabric. I felt that a murder of crows had descended en masse upon my unfortunate friend and was quite relieved to see her auburn head finally rise above the smothering gown.

The vendeuse pulled and prodded while I watched from the sidelines, then fell back when Irene was at last installed within her new carapace.

Carapace, is the proper word for it; the gown was a dark, iridescent, glittering shell reminiscent of some mystic scarab.

“Well!” Irene eyed herself in the mirror. And well she might. The gown’s low-cut bodice was entirely fashioned of cock feathers—a glossy black tracery that shone with highlights in a borrowed share of the peacock's emerald, turquoise, and burgundy hues.

Airy masses of black tulle, tufted here and there with tiny jet feathers and dotted with exotic embers of black opal, formed the huge, puffed sleeves and swaggered across the iridescent black taffeta skirt.

The vendeuse produced a pair of long, emerald velvet gloves scattered with jet beading. I was reminded of the Divine Sarah’s twin green bracelets: living serpents.

“Sublime,” Irene pronounced, turning in a crackle of brunette glitter when she had donned the gloves.

“Monsieur Worth will wish to see.” The vendeuse bustled to the door, "but first he has ordered that you view the gown in its proper setting—gaslight.”

This time we veered left through the main salon, into a series of chambers draped, as in Mr. Poe’s Masque of the Red Death, in sumptuous fabrics of various colors. Cunning light bathed costly folds. My few days at Whiteley’s could only help me guess at the rareness of these tempting lengths.

The fifth and final chamber held the same drama as Mr. Poe’s penultimate room: an environment of eternal night lit by gas-lit sconces and an overhead gasolier. Under this artificial illumination, Irene’s gown glimmered like the discarded skin of a jeweled serpent, perhaps even of the one that had cost mankind paradise.

“Marvelous!” she exclaimed, turning before the wall of mirrors to watch the gown ring through its black rainbow changes. “Superior to common peacock feathers, more subtle.”

“Monsieur Worth has outdone himself,” the vendeuse said. “Now he must see the results.”

Once again we paraded to the upstairs salon, Irene’s train dragging like a funereal peacock’s half-folded tail.

Only the man-milliner himself was present on this occasion, wearing a puce dressing gown over his shirt and loose necktie. The spaniel deserted its well-dented sofa cushion to waddle over and sniff Irene’s hem.

“En promenade,”
Monsieur Worth ordered in dictatorial French. The language lends itself to dispensing orders. No wonder the nation spawned a Napoleon.

Irene complied with the uncustomary meekness to which I was becoming used. Perhaps she felt as if she had inherited the earth. Certainly she looked it in the extravagant gown.

She paused to let her green-gloved hands fan expressively. “What accessories should I carry, Monsieur? And jewels? Perhaps a simple diamond necklace?”

“Nothing that is not by Worth,” he responded haughtily, nodding to the vendeuse. “Not so much as a stickpin.”

The young woman bent to a large flat box spouting tissue and soon came bearing an encrusted undulating fringe like a living thing across her hands. This she put around Irene’s neck. The upstanding collar of iridescent jet exploded into a dusky firework of design over Irene’s décolletage, ending in a swaying rainfall fringe of supple beads. Diamonds did indeed seem redundant in the face of such extravagant artifice.

Irene fingered the necklace through the cushioning gloves, a moment later reaching for an item the vendeuse also presented reverently on open hands, a similarly beaded reticule.

“Monsieur Worth, what can I say?” Irene asked in bemusement, going on nevertheless. “The gown, the entire ensemble, is magnificent beyond words.”

“Wear it and say nothing,” he advised. “A woman in such a gown should be seen and not heard.”

“In that I fear you ask too much of me,” Irene replied. “I must at the least sing your praises when I appear in public in such a toilette.”

He tilted his head, a moue of false modesty upon his world-weary face. Before he could answer, a door slammed in a distant area of the building.

The man-
millin
er frowned, obviously unused to domestic disharmony, and clapped a hand to his forehead.

“Please,” he murmured to no one in particular. “My migraine—”

A person rushed into the room, the only one on whom his wrath could not fall. His wife, Madame Marie.

“Charles!” she cried, giving the word its soft
shhh
French twist, instead of the forthright English
chuh.

“What is it, my dear?” he responded in concerned French.

Luckily, I could follow short and sweet exchanges in this sour language, no matter how rapid, and there are no people like the French for chattering faster than a telegraph operator.

“A terrible thing.” Madame Worth groped for the sofa and sat heavily, only then spying Irene, and perhaps myself.
“Magnifique,
Madame Norton,” she paused to murmur. Then she addressed her husband again. “I am devastated to intrude but... one of the bead-girls has died.” She eyed Irene distractedly. “The very girl, in fact, who made Madame Norton’s rainfall neckpiece only yesterday. Such an agile hand.”

“Sad news, my dear,” he answered, “but hardly a matter of such import that it could not wait.”

“Perhaps not. Yet—” Madame Worth’s plump, capable hands sketched a helpless gesture. “Not merely dead, my dear husband, but... killed.”

“Killed?” he repeated dumbly.

“Murdered?” Irene intoned in a rising tone of interest. The Worths regarded her,
père
and
mère,
their eyes dawning with the same notion at the same moment.

Madame Marie clasped her hands in overwrought beseechment. “Oh, Madame Norton. You know about such matters. Could you not see to this one?”

Monsieur Worth nodded until his mustache ends fluttered. “We will have to call upon the gendarmes, of course, if this proves to be a case of deliberate death. If not, perhaps Madame Norton could put our minds at rest.”

“I should be delighted to assist you.” Irene managed to subdue the relish in her voice to a hushed tone of concern.

Yet even I, God help me, felt a welcoming thrill at this possibly macabre diversion. There would be no more talk of Bohemia and King Willie’s lack of marital effort if a murder victim were in the vicinity.

Monsieur Worth collapsed to the sofa, groping for either the spaniel or an abandoned compress. Madame Marie absently thrust a vial of smelling salts into his hand and stood.

“Follow me, Madame.” She nodded briskly at me as well. “Mademoiselle.”

Thus we found ourselves hastily winding down the rear, far less grand stairs of Maison Worth on the heels of the establishment’s dignified mistress.

Despite the fashion house’s grand but discreet exposure along the rue de la Paix, it contained much unsuspected space. We found ourselves weaving through workrooms crowded with French sparrows—those thin, doe-eyed, working-girl waifs one often sees rushing home in the Paris twilight from twelve hours of labor in the shops and factories.

Ordinarily these industrious creatures chatter with that peculiar French effervescence, but now their large eyes were serious as they watched us pass. Irene’s unearthly gown went uncommented upon, if not unnoted.

At last the endless rooms and worktables and rows of white-fingered girls opened into an empty room, one vacant only because of the ghost-faced mademoiselles clustered outside it.

One girl remained in the room, lying apparently asleep upon the empty table glittering with a comet’s tail residue of jet, beads, and diamante stones. A small, richly dressed figure stood on the table before her, like an idol worshiped by a mute supplicant.

“The supervisor did not at first suspect.” Madame Worth’s deep voice hushed in the presence of sudden death. “So many of them fall asleep at their work.”

Irene approached the motionless figure while our guide held back. I followed her, patting my skirt pocket for the small mother-of-pearl-covered notebook and pencil Irene had bought me since our arrival in Paris. I had remarked that such grandeur was inappropriate for the minor or macabre matters I might jot down on an outing.

“Au contraire
,” she had enunciated in her perfect French. “Macabre matters require more formality than most. Consider the funeral.”

I did consider such macabre ceremonies as I stood gazing over Irene’s fountain-of-tulle shoulder at the slumped figure of the bead-girl. I noticed little: the cheap woolen bodice and skirt; fingertips still reddened from the pressure and punctures of the thin beading needle; a knot of tobacco-brown hair; a pallid slice of face.

All the shopgirls were wan, even the youngest, and the French naturally tend to sallow complexions, but no doubt I am jaundiced, so to speak, against them.

“Perhaps she has merely fainted,” I suggested.

For answer, Irene stepped aside, the movement acting as the drawing of a bejeweled black curtain on a living tableau.
Tableau vivant,
the French put it in that Frenchy way of theirs, only this scene was a depiction of death.

Now I saw it—the means! Sewing shears embedded to their large, looped handles in the maroon wool of a bodice back; a darker ring of red soaking into the surrounding fabric.

“An eternal faint,” Irene commented, leaning over to eye the pearls and crystal beads that scattered from the dead girl’s extended hand like semi-precious birdseed. The figure before which the tiny treasures were flung stared open-eyed at the human sacrifice before it.

Irene nodded to the figure’s lavishly beaded skirt. “The bead-girl was working on this fashion doll when she was murdered.”

“Fashion doll?” I stared at the small form, which had previously struck me as some wicked, well-dressed fairy presiding over the death scene.

“Fashion doll,” Irene repeated a bit impatiently. “The finest French dressmakers send samples of their latest styles to the great ladies of many lands, to the Courts of St. Petersburg and St. James, to Vienna, Madrid, Rome.”

I studied a pale bisque face with rounded cheeks and chin both tinted dawn-pink, with round blue-glass eyes and painted lashes and brows. This fat, waxy doll seemed cruelly complacent keeping guard over the spare form of the dead girl. Her yellowish lean hand stretched toward a feeble trail of tawdry glitter, toward the heavy blue satin hem of the gown that clothed the doll, the raw, needle-pierced fingertips still ruddy despite the clutch of pale death’s chill hand.

The doll’s toy fingers were the color of ivory, each tiny nail sculpted into place. One finger wore a miniature ring of gold and topaz.

“No rings,” Irene said, taking inventory of the corpse as if it were a different kind of doll. “She was not engaged, but that doesn’t rule out a rival among her sister sewers. Stab wounds usually indicate a crime of passion—and opportunity. The fatal weapon was near at hand.”

She looked up at Mad
am
e Marie. “Surely there were witnesses.”

The Frenchwoman shrugged. “Their work is taxing and leaves little time to take their eyes from it. According to what the other girls said when I was called, they heard only a deep intake of breath, a gasp, and looked up to find Berthe slumped among them. They, also, suspected sleep at first. One even shook Berthe’s shoulder before she saw the shears.”

“I would speak to that one,” Irene said.

Madame Marie looked to the open door crowded with worried faces. “We have twelve hundred such girls working here. I do not know their names—”

“Twelve hundred?” Irene recovered from her surprise. “Ask the one who first noticed to step forward.”

Initially Madame Worth’s request was met by dropped eyes and shuffling feet. Then a harsh wave of whispering agitated the girls who stood askance with the haunted eyes of a Greek chorus.

Finally one of them limped forward, her body twisted into a hunchback. I could see why she sat at a table all day and strung beads; what other work could such a one seek? She approached reluctantly, and gave her name even more reluctantly to Madame Worth.

“Genevieve Pascal,” Madame Worth repeated, turning to Irene, who had already heard the name forced from those bloodless lips.

“Mademoiselle Pascal,” Irene began with great politeness. “First tell me, please, who she is.”

Genevieve’s lusterless hazel eyes lifted to Irene, first traveling over the intricacies of her gown. Such humble seamstresses seldom saw the full results of their labor, I realized, or the women who wore them.

“Berthe Brascasat,” Genevieve whispered.

“What of her family? Who must be notified?”

The girl shrugged one already high shoulder. “Who knows? She came each dawn to sew, and left each sunset with the rest of us.”

Irene ran a hand over the glittering Braille of her necklace. “I understand that she made this wonderful piece.”

“Part of it, the center. Others did the fringe.”

“And this doll, she was working on the skirt?”