Good Night, Mr. Holmes (19 page)

B
URIED
T
REASURE

Mr. Beaverholt,
our driver, munched the better part of our picnic on the box above us while our carriage rattled along the tree-shaded roadway.

Inside the coach, Irene and I lurched like loose sardines in a tin, our mud-stained hands clinging to the straps. In place of the picnic hamper that Irene had offered Mr. Beaverholt on condition he “drive like the wind” to the railway station was a small, leather-buckled chest as dirt-laden as our hands.

“Your best walking suit is ruined!” I wailed.

“It needed retrimming anyway,” she answered.

“My Chinese shawl is in shreds!”

“We had to cover the chest with something.”

“Your fingernails are worn to—to saw teeth!”

“Cutting them will make playing the piano easier.” Irene lifted the ivory handle of her parasol and tapped the coach ceiling. The horse quickened its already frantic trot as a discarded sardine tin flew past the open window.

“What a glorious day this is, Nell!” Irene shouted over the rush of the wind, the rattle of the conveyance and the screech of Surrey’s prolific birdlife. “Just think! We have beaten Sherlock Holmes himself to the prize.”

I regarded the battered box at our feet in silence... in silence until a particularly rough jolt lurched its metal-bound edge into my shin.

“What can be in this devil’s chest that’s worth all this deception and going behind poor young Mr. Norton’s back and the ruination of our attire?” I cried, beside myself.

I confess to having been so unnerved at the notion of disturbing the late Mr. Norton’s bones that our struggle to disinter something less than human at the foot of the sycamore tree had completely exhausted me.

“Treasure!” Irene replied, dimpling wickedly.

“I still can’t fathom how you knew where to dig.”

“I didn’t until I thought like a madman. As Mr. Edgewaithe pointed out, his... cell, shall we call it?... and its sole window overlooked the sunrise. The tree was the only landmark for a mind as feeble as old Norton’s to fix upon. During his outings, I’m sure the attendant’s attention would wander while the old man drooled at the pondside—”

“Irene!”

“Then there was that peculiar pattern of roots fanning out into a sort of sunburst. That, too, would catch an unfocused eye. Old Norton was senile, not ordinarily mad. He must have had moments of clarity. In such a moment he secreted the things most important to him in this chest, then buried it.”

“The Zone?” I eyed the bucking box between us with more respect. “You really think the Zone of Diamonds lies in this very receptacle?”

“And Mr. Sherlock Holmes does not have it!” Irene crowed. “Mr. Charles Tiffany does not have it. Mr. Godfrey Norton does not have it. But I do.”

“Greed,” said I, my heart pounding nevertheless at the notion of opening the box. So Pandora must have felt.

“Not greed.” Irene teased me with a smile. “Glory.”

How I survived that headlong return trip to London I shall never quite know. The chest was heavy, which very fact encouraged our dreams of booty. Irene and I were forced to cart it like some ungainly valise between us through the length of Victoria Station. The cabman we hailed outside offered to lift our “luggage” to the box. Irene refused so adamantly that I expected him, suspicions aroused, to whistle for the nearest bobby.

Our hansom rattled ‘round the curve of Buckingham Palace along The Mall and across Trafalgar Square onto Charing Cross Road. I was so guilt-ridden by now that I anticipated the Royal Guard riding out and commanding us to “stand and deliver” our ill-gotten goods on the spot. Every nearing hansom seemed to conceal a Scotland Yard man. Every pause for traffic congestion to untangle seemed a plot to detain us.

“Amusing how convenient our rooms are to Baker Street,” Irene commented as we turned onto New Oxford Road and away from the northwest section of the town.

I said nothing, wondering if our efforts to smooth over The Sycamores’ disturbed earth would escape the notice of Mr. Sherlock Holmes.

“He is sure to be suspicious,” she said, as if anticipating my thoughts. “He may even find our ‘dig.’ But then what? The Misses Saunders and Rushwimple have naught to do with us.”

“Our descriptions—”

“—could match a thousand women’s in London—more, perhaps a half-million of these busy four-and-a-half million souls around us! Besides, even if he catches us eventually, we have the prize now.”

My shoe-toe touched it gingerly.

“Yes, it’s plain and ugly,” Irene admitted. “Yet great beauty can dwell in a lowly exterior, do not Scriptures tell us, Penelope? As the earth accepted the remains of old Norton, so it gives up the better part of him, that prize which was bought, people say, and so does Godfrey Norton testify by inference, with the sacrifice of wife and sons.”

“What will you do with it?”

Irene stared at me, her face uncharacteristically blank. “I have not considered. I thought only of obtaining it. I can hardly pawn it and I don’t know... yet... how to sell it. Perhaps I’ll wear it on the stage. I can do so more honorably than my sister singers who collect their stage jewels from rich admirers.”

“You are still in the chorus.”

“I will not always be.”

“Oh, Irene.” I found myself laughing wearily, fatigued by the day’s surprises. “You are such an optimist. Why can you not aim lower—a supporting role instead of a starring one? A respectable marriage instead of such fevered independence? A modest suite of garnets instead of Marie Antoinette’s diamonds? Such things are more naturally within your grasp.”

“Such things are within any woman’s grasp—which is why so few women make anything of themselves. I shall try at least.”

She settled back in her seat, saying no more as the familiar streets rolled past, but I felt that I had offended her—even worse, had cast a shadow over her moment of triumph. I simply did not wish to see her fail, and she always reached so far beyond herself that ultimate failure seemed inevitable to me.

“ ‘A man’s reach must exceed his grasp, ‘else what’s a heaven for?’ “ Irene declaimed suddenly from her quiet corner. “Why not a woman’s reach?”

I need not describe the bruising progress of two women and one inexcusably heavy piece of baggage up four two-hundred year-old flights of stairs. Once our rooms had been reserved for hard-working eighteenth-century servants. We two were equally as prostrate as they after a day’s labor when we finally dragged the accursed little trunk over the threshold. I panted in the doorway, loosening hairs trailing like witchweed around my face, as Irene rushed to light the gasolier and the lamps.

“Now, Nell, do you think we can swing it atop this table?”

“We can try,” said I, preparing to heave up my end as she joined me.

We finally had the trunk posed like a homely centerpiece on the dining table, the gasolier’s light directly above, glittering on the dull nail heads.

“It looks rather like a stage chest from ‘The Merchant of Venice,’” Irene said.

“The one made of lead,” I couldn’t help adding pointedly.

Irene laughed as she seized a carving knife and ran it under the strapping. The buckles were rusted shut and the leather as stiff as whalebone. More fingernails snapped before we had pried the three leather tongues through their steel bits.

“Now.” Irene paused to brush fallen hair from her brow with her forearm. The elegant lady of the morning was gone; she looked like a washerwoman after a long day’s labor over the steaming tubs—save for the mud.

“Now,” she repeated, pushing at the lid. It resisted. She snatched the knife again and ran it under the rim, ramming the handle with the heel of her hand.

There came a snap and a visible exhalation of earthy dust, then the lid sprang back.

“You show alarming signs of prophecy,” Irene said, surveying the interior without a change of expression. She lifted out a score of small grey metal bars.

“Lead,” said I.

An inventory revealed the remaining items to be lighter but no less puzzling than the lead bars: among them a box of starch, a huge ring of keys, and a piece of lambskin.

Irene scraped the knife over the lead bars as if peeling potatoes; no gold glimmered through.

“Perhaps this is the Zone of Diamonds in disguise.” I lifted a long string of dusty amber beads.

Irene held them up to the light. “Hand-knotted Russian amber, not my favorite. Worth a few pounds, but—”

“But hardly the find of the century.”

“You grow sarcastic, Penelope. It does not become you.”

“Nor does chagrin become you.”

“Still, old Norton went to considerable trouble to secrete these items. Think of a feeble old man toting and burying this monstrosity. He must have had a purpose.”

“Yes, Irene! Purposelessness! He was muddled, don’t you see? If ever he had the Zone, he’d forgotten where it is now. These few pathetic ‘treasures’ of his old age are only that.”

“Mementos merely, you think, Nell? Lambskin and starch could signify the barrister’s wig and stiffened collar bands.”

“No doubt this necklace is some petty trinket that he extorted from his long-suffering wife!”

“And the lead bars—the keys?”

“Keys to the Kingdom of Afterlife, where he’d meet his Maker and receive justice when he died. He must have mused upon salvation in some disconnected way. And the lead bars signify... the weight of his sins against his family and fellow man—like the chains binding Marley’s ghost!”

“Excellent, Nell! You find the makings for a sermon in this paltry array, but there is more order in your interpretation than Norton’s disordered mind could muster. Though he did have the foresight to weight his casket with lead so it would stay hidden if the pond rose to engulf the tree roots someday....

“
Hmm
,” Irene murmured, shutting the lid. “We’ll think upon it Certainly I’d rather have a trophy of our successful forestalling of Mr. Sherlock Holmes than nothing. Some happy find may help us interpret this jumble of objects.”

“I’m going to bed,” I announced, exasperated by her everlasting optimism. “Perhaps Rumplestiltskin will have made the amber into diamonds by morning.”

The last I saw before I drew my curtains shut that evening was Irene standing bowed over the ugly chest, contemplating it as soulfully as Hamlet regarding-the skull of Yorick. I fancied the box would yield as little to her, despite her hopes, as the skull had tended the melancholy Dane.

In the morning the chest had vanished, arduously buried, I suspected, under the effluvia in Irene’s bedchamber. She never mentioned it again, but I knew that she had not forgotten it for a moment.

Chapter Thirteen

A
STOUNDING
P
ROPOSITIONS

One of
life’s peculiarities is that necessity oft becomes preference and preference, necessity. This rule has governed some of the more famous love affairs of history as well as the daily habits of the least romantic among us.

My four-year association with Irene Adler had been fraught with surprise, even shock, and the most unpredicted turnings in my own life. We had lived the poor but unfettered life of Bohemians, which is what the French call gypsies and the label modern social pundits pin on followers of the convention-scoffing artistic life. Even as Irene inexorably climbed the ladder of the London theatrical scene, singing often and seldom resorting to acting, monetary security never dulled the edge of her fierce independence.

Our Saffron Hill quarters suited us long after we could afford lodgings elsewhere, and though the quality and quantity of Irene’s clothing increased as her theatrical presence grew, we remained content with our unlikely neighborhood. Even I had grown to like waking to the street peddlers’ Italian serenades and was as close to developing a sense of pitch as ever in my unmusical life.

Irene still accepted—even sought—any puzzles that came her way. I had steady work as a “typist,” the word freshly minted that year to describe my skill. I confess to taking a pinch of pride in bearing a title reminiscent of the violin
ist
and the art
ist
(although similar words of far less noble connotation, such as atheist, swiftly humble one).