Femme Fatale (7 page)

“Oh. Yes. Now that I know it is valuable, I will have to take it into Paris to be restored. I had no idea it was in such a sad state. It’s just that I haven’t thought of my old life in America for years, for some reason . . . or of the maestro.” She stroked the violin’s crackled surface. “Poor old maestro. I wonder if he’s still alive. It
would be wonderful to see him again, and he had traveled in Europe in his youth, before I was born. No! He must be dead by now, and if he isn’t, too frail to ever return to Europe. How he used to play up storms of pathos on this very instrument. He said I must sing with as much passion as a violin could under the right hands.”

“
He
is not an accomplished musician, Mr. Holmes, I mean, it seemed to me.”

“Quite passable, actually, yet music is not his profession. Apparently he
is
accomplished at unpredictability and that is more valuable in his line of work than even a Guarneri.”

“He may have diagnosed this wrongly. I have never heard of such an instrument,” I sniffed.

“Nor have I.” Irene hummed a long, lyrical phrase. “How I shall enjoy portraying all of Henry’s wives! Henry really didn’t know what to do with them when he was alive, but I certainly know what to do with them now that he is dead.”

“And what is that?”

“Why, give them the last word, after all.”

2.

News from Abroad

Nelly Bly, Nelly Bly,
bring de broom along
We’ll sweep de kitchen clean, my dear,
and hab a little song
.

—STEPHEN FOSTER, 1850
NELLIE BLY, BYLINE FOR A MUCKRAKING REPORTER, 1885

It was not enough that one unexpected visitor had disturbed our bucolic retreat.

When Godfrey returned from the city late that afternoon, he bore an unexpected message from another person I regarded with as little admiration as I extended to Sherlock Holmes.

As soon as I heard the welcome clatter of his cane and hat being assigned to their domestic resting places in the entryway, I rushed to confirm his arrival.

Seeing him where Sherlock Holmes had stood only hours before, I was struck again by the fact that two men could be much of an age and a height, and even of a coloring, and yet be entirely different. Dr. Watson had reported Sherlock Holmes describing
Godfrey as “a remarkably handsome man, dark, aquiline and mustached” in the mercifully unpublished narrative of our first encounter with the London detective two years earlier. Sherlock Holmes himself was dark, hawk-nosed, and clean-shaven, in some ways similar and in most ways a world apart from Godfrey, for no one would call him “remarkably handsome.” The odd thing was that, from his dispassionate yet generous summation of Godfrey’s personal attractions, he didn’t seem to care a particle about whether anyone did or not. In that small way he resembled myself, who was quite content to be plain despite being publicly paired all my adult life with a great beauty like Irene. Handsome people could no more help their looks than ugly ones, and looks were no sensible reason to judge upon, either way.

I welcomed Godfrey’s return not because of his pleasant visage, but for how he always soothed my easily ruffled spirits.

“Godfrey! I was deathly afraid that awful man from London had forgotten his silly cap and was bedeviling our doorstep again.”

“Ah, a pity I missed Sherlock Holmes’s visit. Apparently you had no such misfortune, Nell,” he teased, his light gray eyes glittering with camaraderie, for he was well aware that I regarded the detective as both nosy and annoying.

He went into the parlor to salute Irene with a kiss on the cheek, but had to bend over the piano bench to do it, for she had been picking out the notes of her new chamber opera on the keys ever since
The
Man had left.

“What is this?” Godfrey asked. “Some new lieder from Dvorák? He does favor you with the first glimpse of all his Bohemian folk songs.”

“It is new, yes, but from quite a different composer. Sullivan has made a foray from operetta into chamber opera. This is a one-woman solo piece. I will sing the roles of six dead queens.”

“That will be a change from consorting with live ones,” he observed.

She turned away from the piano. “Oh, it is quite a toothsome sweet of a piece, with words by Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde. This is the sort of thing I can work up and present anywhere, with any sort of accompaniment.”

“What of the wardrobe of six queens, in addition to your own?” Godfrey asked, exchanging a conspiring glance with me. “That does not sound like a very portable endeavor.”

“I can make do with a change of headdress for each queen, at the minimum. I assure you, Godfrey, I could tour the wilds of America with this piece and still require only two trunks.”

“Only two trunks. Impressive. As for touring the wilds of America, you may be interested in doing so sooner than you think.”

This announcement caused Irene to utterly abandon the piano and spin around to face him, and it caused me to drop a stitch.

“Godfrey,” Irene said, “the New World is the last place I wish to be at the moment. Nell and I are growing quite accustomed to a quiet life in the country after our recent gruesome hunt across Europe. And you have established an office in Paris that requires running. I thought you would be pleased that I am following your suggestion, and planning to revive my performing career in some manner, however small.”

“I am pleased as Punchinello about your plans, Irene, to rephrase a truism, but I received a communication at my new office today that smells of dire news and sudden journeys.”

“Oh, Godfrey dearest, do stop sounding like a Prague fortune-teller!—it is most un-English—and let me have this mysterious missive! Surely it has nothing to do with your assignment to untangle the affairs of Bavaria and the late mad King Ludwig? Who is it from? Who has obtained your new office address so swiftly? What is wanted?”

Godfrey withdrew a long narrow sheet of yellow paper from the inner breast pocket of his suit coat. “It arrived at my office because it came first to the Rothschilds’ bank and was forwarded to me.”

“Unopened, I hope,” I put in. I would never trust a banker to leave any piece of paper unturned.

“Unopened, and addressed not to me, but to thee, dear wife.”

He held it out, knowing that Irene would leap like a gazelle to any communication not yet read, and therefore mysterious.

Even as she rose to pounce upon the paper, Godfrey pulled it back out of reach. “You have not asked who it is from.”

“Who is it from?!” she demanded, reaching for the missive.

“Miss Elizabeth Jane Cochrane.”

“Oh!” I cried, dismayed. “Has that forward girl not enough to do on her own uncivil shores that she should bother us again?”

“Bother Irene,” Godfrey corrected, ever the barrister and, as such, a bear for accurate details. “We are not among the addressees, you and I, Nell.”

“How improper to leave you out, Godfrey. I predict that Miss Elizabeth will never marry with that attitude!”

“Certainly she will never find her name embroidered on a piece of your fancy work.”

His comment, however artless, immediately reminded me of a certain gentleman who appeared only last summer to be getting along quite well with the forward American female we discussed, one better known by her quickly-becoming-notorious nom de plume of Nellie Bly, the brash American girl reporter.

While I fell into uneasy silence, Irene was only the more intrigued. “What can Pink have to tell me that is urgent enough to require a transatlantic wire? Give me the thing, Godfrey! You have teased me quite enough to make it interesting.”

She snatched at the envelope in his hand, winning a prize she immediately took to the lamp on the piano, the better to read it as twilight stole across our garden and shadowed the interior of the house.

That same shadow fell over my heart.

Pink Cochrane had burst into our lives and enterprises uninvited, and I confess that her energy and astounding cheek, either
an American characteristic or a journalistic one, seemed to sap me of will and hope, especially when I discovered that in my absence she had made quite an impression on a special friend of mine, indeed, one of the very few good friends of mine, Quentin Stanhope.

While I stewed with my eyes glued to my embroidery so no one should notice my distraction, Irene was being strangely quiet by the piano.

“Well?” Godfrey asked at last. He was loosening his collar and obviously ached to go upstairs to change into less formal and thus more comfortable clothing for the evening.

Irene said nothing.

She simply sat there, haloed by the lamp that grew brighter behind her as the daylight faded, staring at the folded yellow paper the envelope had contained.

She certainly was well able to read the message, yet her eyes remained fixed on the page. She was deaf to Godfrey’s voice, and blind to our presence, though we were growing more mystified by the moment.

“Irene?” I said.

I could have been asking the Guarneri for an answer.

Godfrey leaned forward, peering at her. “Irene? Irene! Good God, what is it?”

I stood, forgetting to set aside my embroidery work. Lucifer dashed from under the piano and immediately snagged it for a plaything. So bizarre had the atmosphere in the room become that Casanova the parrot shifted feet on his perch and began whistling a dirge!

“Irene!” Godfrey repeated, standing as well.

She finally looked up, as if surprised to find that we were still there and then further startled to see us on our feet. Clearly she had heard nothing for the past few minutes.

“Something has happened,” Godfrey said.

She looked around, as if seeking an explanation. Her eye fell
on the piano top. “That old violin that was left with me. It is a Guarneri. I had no idea.”

“Guarneri? What is a Guarneri?” Godfrey glanced at the instrument in its shabby case with true incomprehension. “I didn’t know you had a violin. Did it arrive today? With that Holmes fellow? Is that it?”

His tone had definitely become as suspicious as mine would have been when discussing Sherlock Holmes.

While I was pleased to see Godfrey extending the man some of the same animosity I felt toward him, I could not see even he falsely accused.

“The violin is Irene’s,” I explained. “She’d kept it at the bottom of that old trunk all these years. She merely showed it to Mr. Holmes, who being the expert he is on all minutiae, immediately declared it an apparently rare and valuable Guarneri.”

“So it is worth something?” Godfrey asked.

“I suspect a great deal, when it is restored.”

His regard fixed on Irene again. “That is not cause for this. Irene adores finding lost treasures. She is as bad as a nine-year-old in her fever to find things. She should be pounding celebratory mazurkas into those old keys, not mooning over a telegram from Nellie Bly.” He moved toward his wife. “I must read this for myself.”

She snatched it away, not playfully as he had earlier, but with a gesture of unconsidered protectiveness.

“Irene!” I admonished.

I could not help it. The governess instinct becomes ingrained, even though I only held such positions for a year or two. At the moment, my friend and mentor was acting like a sullen child. Although as a former operatic diva she had her share of temperament, this was not a display of that. This was a worrisome state of shock.

Godfrey glanced at me, then lowered his tone into a soothing
one. “Irene, we can’t . . . help you if you won’t share the contents of the message that has so upset you. Please.”

At that, the voice of reason, and I must say that Godfrey before the bar was always the most attractive representative of the Voice of Reason in all the Inns of Court, Irene literally shook off her strange state.

“Oh,” she said, massaging one temple with her free hand. “I think it must be a bit of mischief engineered by that imp of international interference, Pink.” She held the paper out to Godfrey with a rueful smile. “Forgive me, but you will see that the contents are nonsensical enough to strike Casanova mute.”