Femme Fatale (6 page)

“I am both a musician and my own instrument. Those strings are my vocal cords. That wooden frame is my sounding board of bone and blood. I maintain myself. I had forgotten the maestro’s long-ago gift. Can you play it?”

“I can, but I doubt that I should.”

“Just a few passages, perhaps. I should like to hear it again. It had such a sweetness of tone, I remember.”

“Madam, really—”

But Irene had dashed around the front of the piano, drawing out the stool and lifting the key cover.

“It is yours, Mr. Holmes, if it is worth having. I will never play the violin, nor anyone else here. I am so glad I remembered it. The maestro would be happy.”

“I am an amateur, madam.”

“You play. Nell particularly remarked upon it.”

He sent me a look sharp enough to debone a trout. I thanked Irene’s tact that she did not mention my opinion of the violin-sawing that I had heard emerging from his hotel room on one occasion.

A glissando of notes rippled off of Irene’s supple fingers. “Beethoven’s ‘Für Elise’? Everyone knows that.”

“I must tune it.” He turned the violin into the crook of a suddenly elegant wrist and then stroked the accompanying bow over the strings.

Lucifer flattened his ears, fluffed his tail, and scampered out of the parlor at the first violently off-tune screech. I had heard that violin strings were fashioned from cat gut, which might account for the wily Lucifer’s sudden exit. Then again, the unholy wailing sound the strings emitted under Mr. Holmes’s attentions might have accomplished it.

Strangely, the dreadful sound seemed to encourage rather than discourage him. He pressed the instrument to his ear and cheek, his eyes only upon it, turned the tuning pegs, then struck a chord again. And again. Turning and striking and listening with
an intensity I have seen in no other living creature than a cat, or a mongoose, waiting to strike prey.

The parlor was forgotten. The piano was forgotten. Irene was, perhaps for the first time in her life . . . forgotten.

She grinned at me in admission of her insignificance compared to a dusty old violin. I realized of a sudden that she had meant to distract him from the issue of how complete the translation of the Yellow Book was, that she had never answered him on that account.

I also recalled Dr. Watson’s describing his former living partner’s retreat to the seven percent solution of cocaine, and suspected that Mr. Holmes’s face and attention must be just so lost and concentrated when he was needling the drug into his hollow veins as when he was drawing sound from the hollow body of a violin.

The process, the intense . . . pitch of it unnerved me. It reminded me of something far closer to home, but I could not quite name it.

Irene ran another introductory glissando up the keys of her piano. Gradually, the tones of the two instruments were growing together, and the teeth-jarring dissonance was muting into melody.

Finally, Mr. Holmes nodded without taking his eyes from the violin, and her hands moved into the familiar lilting notes of “Für Elise.”

The violin entered after the first few bars, a sudden low moan of almost-unwanted harmony. And then the two very different instruments rang through their melodic pattern, both in tune and in conflict still, so different and yet so paired. The piano’s smooth, bell-like trickling sound ran like clear water. The violin sounded raw, as if each note were wrung from a dry throat. Yet it throbbed with muted feeling, as the veriest beast will whimper for some unknown boon.

I cannot say I have an ear for music. Casanova tilted his head
from side to side, yet remained silent. Perhaps if Irene had sung . . . but there were no words to “Für Elise” and the violin was voice enough, the croakings of some abandoned Caliban as it was.

I have always preferred more sprightly instruments like piccolos and flutes to lugubrious bagpipes and the violin.

Yet there is a power in the strings’ unspoken longings, in their hoarse straining for expression, and I felt it now, despite myself. I was unhappily reminded of the Gypsy violinists of our last grueling adventure, and of one not-Gypsy violinist.

The piece ended at last, on a piano chord held until the final vibration faded, on a dying rasp of the violin strings that drifted into distance.

I was struck, watching this impromptu recital, by how much physical and mental effort each instrument required, by the emotional vibrato the long-gone composer’s score exuded like incense into the room. I thought of dead gardens, and the inexorable march of autumn in the touch of brittle leaves and the reluctant withdrawal of warm sunlight into the cool shadow.

The chamber was silent. The music gone.

It was just Irene gazing sightlessly over the top of the piano, Mr. Holmes lowering the violin and bow together, as if shaking off a spell.

They had collaborated, but separately from one another.

Irene spoke first. “I have no use for it but memory. It is yours if you want it.”

“I have a violin.”

“Not a Guarneri?”

“No, but what I have is more than sufficient for an amateur. Thank you for the duet, but I am not good enough for you there either.”

“You play very well, and that is well enough for even a professional. Surely you can use an extra violin.”

“I cannot accept so valuable a gift. On closer examination I have found the initials ‘I.H.S.’ and the signature of the great
Guiseppe del Gesú of the Guarneri family, an exceptionally devout man who was perhaps second only to Stradivari himself in the construction of exquisite violins.”

Irene smiled, played a rivulet of notes. “Small price to pay for Nell’s life, which I am most grateful to you for saving. In fact, I am most grateful that you chose to meddle in my affairs in that instance.”

“Playing an instrument such as this is reward enough. Who is this maestro you speak of?”

“A person very dear to me, but only informally a ‘maestro.’ He is probably dead by now.”

“What sort of ‘informal maestro’ would own, and give away, such a masterwork?”

But Irene would say no more of that. “An unplayed instrument of this quality is a sad waste, as its former owner would be the first to tell me.”

“No.” He laid the instrument and bow back in its shabby box as if interring an old friend only recently rediscovered. “Yet I thank you for the duet and pray you take better care of your Guarneri from now on.”

“I owe you my life as well, surely I can spare a violin for it.”

“I don’t like debts, whichever way they flow. In fact—”

He moved into the hall with giant steps as Irene looked at me and shrugged. She had meant him to have the violin. She had meant to clear the debtor column in her personal ledger. He would have nothing of it.

He returned from rummaging in the deep pockets of his country cloak.

In his hand was a rolled scroll of documents.

“I have, madam, an exchange of documents for you. For the courtesy of your difficult and no doubt costly unabridged translation, I have a small composition.”

The word “unabridged” made a mockery of sincerity, but it was not the one that captured her attention.

“Composition?” Irene straightened at the piano bench like a marionette whose strings have been abruptly pulled into a simulacrum of life.

He had surprised her as much as she had surprised him. Irene did not like such parity.

“Why, Mr. Holmes, what have you done?”

“Actually, Bram Stoker and Sir Arthur Sullivan accomplished this.” He held out a beribboned bundle.

Irene stepped back and plastered her spread fingers to her throat. “For me? I can’t imagine—”

The sad part was, she couldn’t. Nor could I imagine what the scrolls contained, only that Irene prided herself on anticipating events, and here she had not a clue.

She delicately eased the ribbon down the scroll’s length, then unrolled one sheet to read it, like a page boy in a Shakespearian play.

“Why, this is a libretto, and these other sheaves, the music. I don’t recognize the piece.”

“Nor should you,” Mr. Holmes said. “It is freshly commissioned. After returning to London, I was occupied with reinvestigating and settling the last fragments of the Jack the Ripper matter and putting the proper highly placed persons at peace. I then had a word with your associate in Transylvania, Bram Stoker. Mr. Stoker easily convinced Sir Arthur to compose a chamber opera on the six wives of Henry the Eighth, especially for your vocal range.”

“And,” I wondered aloud, “who wrote the words?”

“Ah, Miss Huxleigh, an excellent question. I doubt we shall ever know for sure. Stoker himself wrote some of it, but Oscar Wilde had heard of the project and insisted on having a hand in the matter.”

“What!” I was appalled. “The vile Wilde?”

“More wily than vile, I would think. This is, by the way, the closet piece on the wives of Henry the Eighth.”

“The very work you suggested to me in Paris. I remember, Mr. Holmes,” Irene said in obvious surprise, and with perhaps a bit too much pleasure to please me.

“It is one thing to suggest a work of art, another to watch it being born,” he admitted, the faintest twinkle of amusement in his gray eyes. “The two librettists did nearly come to blows in my presence concerning the title of the work. Stoker wanted to call the piece ‘Brides of the Axe.’ Wilde wanted ‘Henry the Eighth’s Secret Wives.’ Sir Arthur settled on a ‘A Suite of Queens.’ ”

“And you, Mr. Holmes,” Irene interjected at last, “was there no title you favored? After all, you commissioned the work.”

He shook his head and fanned his long fingers in denial. “I suggested the idea. It did not cost me a penny or a pound. That is hardly commissioning a work of art. You were your own benefactress in this case. You have staunch friends in London, madam.”

Irene’s face glowed at this assurance. I realized that she missed the city and its circle of acquaintances, though she had always made the best of being exiled to Paris by circumstances beyond her control.

“You must have had some hand in this result, Mr. Holmes.” She lifted the thick scroll in her right hand as if it were a scepter. Already I could see the mantles of those long-dead queens settling on her artistic soul.

Mr. Holmes shrugged modestly. I could not believe it. “Stoker and Wilde wrote the words,” he repeated. “Sullivan the music. I made one minor contribution in suggesting that the violin serve as the model of and counterpoint to the soloist’s voice.”

Irene hastened to the piano, quickly absorbing the music indicated in the arcane patterns on the parchments.

“ ‘Six Wives, Six Lives,’ ” she declaimed her version of the title. “And I shall sing of every one of them, and of their deaths.”

“Two did not have the grace to die until their own good time,” he pointed out.

“I said it was a brilliant concept, but I did not expect—”

Mr. Holmes bowed slightly. “Nor did I expect the Guarneri, madam.”

“Apparently,” Irene said, “we have managed to exceed each other’s expectations equally. Surely now you will take the violin.”

He shook his head. “I will take my leave. Urgent matters call in London. This chamber concert was reward enough.”

“For Nell’s life?” Irene sounded incredulous.

“For the translation, and the introduction to the fascinating Krafft-Ebing and his studies. Adieu, madam. Miss Huxleigh.”

He nodded and moved into the hall to redon cape and cap and leave our home.

Moments later the latch fell shut on the front door, followed by the departing hooves of the hired horse-and-trap.

Sophie appeared in the doorway. “So tea will not be served, madam?” she asked in dour tones.

“Of course, it will! Nell and I—and Casanova—will partake royally.”

Sophie was no sooner gone than Irene was unrolling the libretto, thumbing papers to grasp both words and music, and humming snatches of melody.

“Written for both English and French. I recognize Oscar’s fine Irish hand in the libretto, too. Most intriguing, Nell! Most fascinating.”

I was happy to see Irene toying with resuming her singing career, despite the source of the inspiration. The King of Bohemia and Sherlock Holmes both knew now that she was alive, and neither wished her ill. She no longer needed to hide behind the false report of her and Godfrey’s deaths in an Alpine train wreck after escaping London more than eighteen months before.

“Nothing would please Godfrey more than your returning to the stage to use your magnificent gift,” I noted. “As Mr. Holmes said, it is a crime to conceal such a remarkable instrument. I must admit that I could wish for fewer questionable people to be involved in this project.”

“Questionable? You can’t mean Bram Stoker! You like him. And Oscar is a remarkable talent in his own right, he has only to find his métier and he will make sparks fly.”

“He is a dandy,” I said. “And Sir Arthur Sullivan’s partner Gilbert is a well-known ladies’ man—”

“And Mr. Holmes is quite the opposite, so surely that cancels out Sir Arthur’s unsavory professional association.”

“Scandal does not work like that, Irene. It is not a matter of mathematics. And who knows what scandalous tendencies a man who answers only to himself, like Sherlock Holmes, might harbor?” I said as darkly as I could without making charges I would have to verify. “He has, after all, given you two gifts today: that ridiculous little book and the libretto.”

“It is tit for tat. He knows I could have refused to share the Yellow Book with him, and then, no doubt, he would have been forced to housebreak on his way back from Germany to England, to get it. And he knows I’m rather good at hiding things. Nell! You saw today that he only has eyes for the violin, if you have suspicions otherwise. That man is as close to a monk as any nonbeliever could be, I tell you! Any passions he might have are reserved for his investigations, and,
perhaps
, the occasional musical interlude.”

“Which
you
now are.”

She laughed, shaking her head. “You are such a romantic, Nell! Really! Besides, nothing could come between Godfrey and myself.”

That last I believed.

“What of the violin?” I asked, regarding where it lay on the piano like a dead thing.