Femme Fatale (5 page)

Mr. Holmes did not appear to direct any licentious glances in their direction, which was a point in his favor.

He clasped his long bony hands behind his back and gazed into the garden, which was entering its autumn stage.

In the parrot cage behind the piano, Casanova edged his gaudy red, green, and yellow plumage down the perch to comment “Good day, Matey,” in that odd distant voice of parrots that always sounds like an echo.

The consulting detective ignored the bird’s greeting. Indeed, I had the notion that his mind was far removed from this quiet (except for Casanova) parlor in Neuilly outside Paris.

In fact, his entire mien struck me as pensive. (Not the bird’s, the man’s.) I immediately found my indignation rising on Irene’s behalf. Supposedly, the man was secretly besotted with her. Surely he could produce some better reaction to being in her home and her presence than a moody pout!

“The mongoose has slain a snake, I see,” he said out of the blue.

“Mongoose!” I dropped my already abused embroidery hoop to the floor as I stood. “Snake! Not a small green one.”

“No, a medium black-and-green striped one.” He turned, his features tautened with amusement. “Nothing so large and lethal as, say, a cobra, Miss Huxleigh. But then I imagine you have not had an opportunity to see such a fearsome snake in your experience.”

I certainly had! More than once. In fact, the mongoose in my care, Messalina, had dispatched more than one when we had occasion to revisit London to save this very man’s Boswell, Dr. Watson, from persons with evil intentions toward him.

“A garden snake,” I diagnosed with relief. “Messy is fed very well and does not need to eat anything, but at least the victim is not one of Sarah Bernhardt’s green snakes that I inherited.”

“I imagine the mongoose acts for the sport of the chase, not from hunger. Other creatures than ourselves enjoy the constant game of hunter and hunted.”

“I do not, Mr. Holmes. We can all rise above our beastly natures.”

“Some of us do not want to,” he commented, “which is when I find myself being consulted.” He glanced over his shoulder as if eager for Irene’s reappearance.

I could only suppose that listening to Casanova, watching the garden, and trying to make awkward conversation with me were not pursuits that suited the man’s temperament. He struck me as a strider and a pacer, an indefatigable walker in town and country.

Rapid steps on the hall stair saved us from further attempts at conversation. Irene, as usual, was clattering down the staircase like a schoolgirl.

“Here it is,” she announced, a bit breathlessly.

Instead of the producing the small, yellow moiré-bound diary kept by one of the principal villains during our Continental pursuit of Jack the Ripper after Whitechapel, she cradled a sheaf of papers in the crook of one arm, a raw manuscript, written by hand.

Mr. Holmes met her halfway across the room, accepting the untidy sheaf of paper with avidity.

“Excellent! May I ask whom you employed to translate it?”

“An east European actress. I told her it was from a novel.”

This was news to me, but while I stared agape, Mr. Holmes nodded. “The tale this tells reads better as fiction, I suspect. A discreet
and clever solution to a vexing problem. If the material is unabridged.”

He hefted the manuscript, matching his gesture with a lilt of one dark eyebrow. “I should put it in my coat.” With that he vanished into the hall, allowing Irene and I to exchange several significant glances, none of which was quite clear to either of us. Consultation after his departure was clearly needed.

He returned so swiftly he was caught in the crossfire of our latest voiceless consultation. His hand still held the manuscript, which was odd.

Then he hefted it up for our inspection and I saw it was a small red-bound book rather. “I offer an exchange of prisoners,” he said. “Please accept this small token: my friend Dr. Watson’s first foray into authorship.”

Irene took it before I could intercept her.

Oh, no!
Had that dreadful manuscript called “A Scandal in Bohemia” actually been printed by some penny-dreadful press? And would Sherlock Holmes have the colossal nerve to pass on a fiction that publicly described his fascination with the very woman, the very married woman, who now held the dangerous volume in her hand? Would Godfrey be forced to challenge him to a duel because of it? Godfrey and Sherlock Holmes . . . would it be pistol or sword? Would I risk seeing both of my dear friends distraught and perhaps even destroyed because of this miserable bit of fictioneering?!

I rushed to snatch the small volume from Irene’s hands. “Dr. Watson? An author? Oh, I must see! Right now!”

“Nell—!” Irene remonstrated mildly.

One oddity I noticed at once. “It says ‘by Conan Doyle.’ ”

“Watson is modest,” Mr. Holmes said, “and doesn’t want his medical profession confused with his literary hobby. That is the name of his literary agent.”

“
Hmmm
.” The publisher was Ward, Lock and Company, a London house, at least, I observed. I paged through, encountering
some illustrations. In one a lounging gentlemen had ranks of scruffy street Arabs lined up and saluting like some grubby regiment. The caption read: “ ’T
ENTION,” CRIED
H
OLMES IN A SHARP TONE
.

Although the figure purporting to be Holmes more resembled Oscar Wilde, I could just see him ordering around an array of street Arabs.

“The illustrations are by Mr. Doyle’s father, Charles Altamont Doyle, a rather well-known sketcher in his day.”

“
Hmmmm
.” I was not about to admit that I found the entire package mystifying as well as disturbing.

I closed the volume. My fingers traced the large elaborate letters of the title, which seemed composed of Oriental slashes.
A Study in Scarlet
.

There was nothing scarlet about Irene’s Bohemian adventure, unless you cast her in the role of Scarlet Woman. . . . The villain! That is exactly the sort of lurid character assassination I should expect from a physician who has nothing better to do than scribble stories instead of prescriptions. If Irene was utterly upright in any one area, it was in resisting any temptation to become what the French so coyly term a Grand Horizontal: in other words, a woman who will sleep for her supper.

“I cannot believe you would give us this book!” I said sharply.

“You are right,” Mr. Holmes answered. “It speaks of shameless self-advertisement, but, believe me, I offer you this volume, not because it catalogues one of my more interesting cases, but because I believe both of you ladies met one of the principals.”

Of course we had “met one of the principals”! The King of Bohemia had been Mr. Holmes’s client, Irene’s suitor, and my, my mortal . . . enemy, because he was at bottom no friend to Irene’s integrity.

Irene was by now eyeing me reprovingly. “One of the principals?” She had no reason to jump to the unhappy conclusion I just had.

“A Mr. Jefferson Hope of the United States,” Mr. Holmes went on with relish, surprising me. “The poison-pill killer of the Mormon hypocrites who had forced his innocent beloved into a loveless marriage and spurred her early death in the far-off salt flats of the West. It was among my most satisfying and sensational cases, I might add. The American West produced an avenging angel with a sense of justice as well as of mission. Jefferson Hope was captured in my rooms, answering a trap I had laid in the agony column claiming to have found lost Lucy’s ring. He was by then already deadly ill of a heart condition that would claim his noble, if savage, soul soon after. Before that he raved of meeting ‘two angels of mercy’ who had forgiven him the sins he had committed in order to avenge his dead . . . ah, fiancée. His description of the ‘angels’ was so physically exact, and indeed memorable, that I realized later that they must have been you and Miss Huxleigh.”

By now Irene was freeing the blasted book from my numb fingers, one by one. Jefferson Hope. Yes, we had met that doomed man. That was how we had first learned of the existence of Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson, and Baker Street. So had, I imagine, many readers of
Beeton’s Christmas Annual
by now. That perfectly respectable publication had first serialized the story that led to this single-volume novel, according to its cover.

I stood confused. This book was certainly not the manuscript relating the Bohemian affair I had seen in the doctor’s office. Still, it showed that he not only intended to publish, but had achieved it, which boded ill for that damning manuscript remaining secret. My current relief could not ease my fears for the future.

Even now Irene’s palm was caressing the cursed cover. “Jefferson Hope. A most remarkable man. I’m pleased to have this remembrance of him, for he gave me his Lucy’s ring and I still treasure it.”

“You have the ring! He didn’t say that before he died.”

Irene regarded him for a moment. “So now that I have solved an old mystery for you, Mr. Holmes, perhaps you can solve one for me.”

She moved toward a trunk that served as a side table, its homely origin hidden under another flagrantly figured silk scarf. Belatedly, I recognized it as one of the second-hand trunks she had used to store costume pieces from our early lodgings in London’s Saffron Hill district.

As Irene whisked the shawl aside, a wave of nostalgia swept me back to a time seven years ago, before Irene and I had ever met Sherlock Holmes, or Godfrey Norton, for that matter.

Irene knelt to open the ancient trunk and began attacking its contents, shunting crackling pieces of taffeta and limp lengths of lace aside almost as roughly as Lucifer exercising his claws among my embroideries.

Mr. Holmes watched her with an air of puzzled disbelief. It was not the ordinary hostess who fell to her knees to ravage the contents of a trunk on some unknown whim.

I knew Irene and her unknown whims, and I knew that they always had a purpose.

“Here!” She turned and flourished a shabby black case like a magician producing a top hat accoutered with a rabbit. “I knew I still had it. Poor old fellow! He asked me to keep it instead of a pawn shop. The legend of the starving artist is based on all-too-true facts, and Erich was a maestro.”

Mr. Holmes actually extended a hand to help her up, but Irene filled it with the handle of the mysterious black case and leaped up as if she were the magical rabbit, with no sense of effort or strain, and certainly no consciousness that a gentleman should assist a woman in all things.

Her face was radiantly pink after the effort of unearthing the black case from her treasure trove of forgotten fabrics. I winced to see her looking so happy and pretty in front of Mr. Holmes.

Yet he had eyes only for the case.

I saw, now that it was unveiled, that it was a pear-shaped violin case.

“Irene!” I couldn’t help exclaiming. “I’ve never seen such a thing in your possession before. Has it always resided in your trunk?”

“I almost forgot about it myself, Nell. The poor old maestro left it in my care as a parting gift, and it soon was lost beneath the flea-market fabrics. I suspect that this old violin is a rather good one. Is it, Mr. Holmes?”

He had laid the object atop the piano and opened the case, almost as slowly as he had explored the poison-bearing cigarette case on an earlier occasion when we had been forced to accept his presence.

Then, he had saved Irene’s life.

Now, he attempted to preserve the integrity of an obviously old object.

I glimpsed dusty and flattened rose velvet and flabby leather hinges.

Irene gazed into the case like a child at Christmas, all the actress’s artful composure fled, her hand at her mouth as if to hold in excitement, her coiffure trailing loosened tendrils.

“Is it good?” she asked again, clearly unable to wait for a verdict.

Sherlock Holmes was occupying some other place or time. His face lost its habitual hawkish cast. Suddenly I glimpsed the boy in him, the boy at Christmas who did not have many heartfelt presents, and none that spoke to his secret soul. I knew this in my governess’s heart, and, as much as I feared the man, even more, for this moment, I pitied the boy. My throat grew suddenly thick.

He neither saw nor noted my reaction, or even Irene’s. He lifted the instrument from the case . . . up, up to the light of the window. So a dipsomaniac might hoist of glass of claret, holding it poised on the fingertips of both hands, as if a touch might turn it to powder.

He sighted down its length both front and back like a hunter weighing a field piece. He peered into its recesses, bent to study the faded velvet. Said nothing.

“Perhaps Amati?” Irene prompted.

“No.”

“Surely not Stradivarius.”

“No.”

“Then it is worthless. How sad. I had hoped for the maestro’s sake it was not.”

“A Guarneri.”

I couldn’t resist breaking the strange spell that enwrapped them and disquieted me. “Is that a dread disease, pray tell? Like tuberculosis?”

“The Guarneris were a family of violin makers active from the sixteenth into the eighteenth centuries,” Mr. Holmes answered me with equanimity. “They were instrumental geniuses of the first water, though their violins are no longer as well known as the Stradivarius or Amati to the general public.”

Well, I had never been labeled “the general public” before!

He finally glanced at Irene. I had the oddest feeling that he hadn’t dared to do so before.

She awaited his verdict with an annoying air of suspense. Surely there were better appraisers of violins in France than this visiting Englishman! I think what annoyed me most was that she welcomed his verdict, that she was most sincerely interested in it.

“Guarneri,” she repeated. “You are right. I am not familiar with that name. Is it . . . playable?”

“It has been abominably neglected.”

“I am not a violinist.”

“The strings are brittle and the wood weeps for oiling.”

“That shall be repaired as soon as possible. I had forgotten it, you see.”

“You are a musician. How could you have forgotten an instrument of this rank?”