Good Night, Mr. Holmes (4 page)

“You haven’t told me your name.” Irene Adler swept a cucumber sandwich off the tray with such panache that I found myself reaching as naturally for my own tidbit.

“Penelope Huxleigh. I... was a governess.” Neither hunger nor curiosity could be contained any longer. I consumed the tidbit in one unseemly bite, then asked, “How did you do it, Miss Adler? No one else around us noticed even after you snared the child. I never saw him.”

“Call me Irene, please, dear Miss Huxleigh. We are, after all, partners in crime-solving. But I am hardly surprised you didn’t spy the little wretch. I didn’t see him either,” my new-found friend admitted. “I saw you.”

“I? You were
watching
me?”

Irene Adler laughed. “Not ‘watching’ you, but I did notice you, for the same reasons that our young thief did. You were walking slowly, lost in... thought, an ideal target for a purse snatcher.”

I found myself reaching for yet another pastry and blushed.

“Eat everything,” my hostess urged with the same energy that vibrated through all her speech. “What’s left over will only be gobbled by the kitchen staff. From the girth of our server, I doubt they require so much sustenance.”

I blushed further, darting my eyes about for the unfortunate woman in question.

“She can’t hear. She’s across the room, at the tea trolley,” Irene said softly.

“You
do
watch people.”

“Of course I do. It’s my profession. I’m an actress.”

“An actress?” My hand paused guiltily over a particularly plump
petit four.
Father would never have allowed me to break bread with a person of the theatrical sort, and especially not cake!

“Now
you
embarrass
me,”
Irene said blithely. “Such a tone. You might as well have said ‘street sweeper,’ Yes, an actress, but first and foremost an opera singer.”

I sighed and seized my prey. “Oh, an opera singer. That’s quite different.”

“Is it?” Irene’s smile tightened into catlike inscrutability.

“Opera is quite a respectable art.”

“Kind of you to think so.”

“Music ennobles,” I groped, for the sudden influx of food had unaccountably given me a headache, “what would otherwise be purely posturing on the stage. Although, were operas sung in English, more people would realize they’re lurid dramas about rather immoral people.”

“How fortunate, then, that I must sing in French, Italian and German. No one in London need know what I’m really saying.”

“You sound as if you mock me.”

‘To the contrary, I mock myself. It is my fate to be misunderstood, I sometimes think.” Irene’s vivid eyes warmed suddenly, like strong tea when honey sweetens it. “But you’ve had a tiring day traipsing the streets. Eat some more.”

“I can’t.” It was true. My abused stomach, presented with a surfeit, had rebelled. “And how did you know that I have been walking all day?”

“Early morning rain.” Her eyes flicked to where the furls of my stiff horsehair flounce brushed the floor. “Your hem dampened, swept up a border of street grit, then dried. One can see the meandering waterline all along the material.”

“Oh.” I belabored the dirt with my gloves. “I hadn’t noticed.”

“You had other things to think of, no doubt,” Irene answered so dryly that I glanced into her eyes. They penetrated me with such keen intelligence that I felt she knew my whole sordid story.

I began to gather my belongings despite her urgings that I eat more. I wondered whether she knew how hungry I was, whether she had always known it. The tray was still half-full; I realized that although Irene had struck me as eating, she actually had consumed little of the bounty, leaving the majority to me.

She laid out some coins, then lifted her beaver muff atop the table and began fussing with her gloves even as she rose.

Embarrassed to accept a stranger’s charity, I simply could not face watching her lay money on the table. I occupied myself by taking futile strikes at my dirtied hem with my gloves until I had mastered my distress and quelled a sudden lump in my throat caused by an odd sense of imminent abandonment.

“Ready?” Irene asked brightly, rising and keeping a gloved hand outside her muff to guide me to the door, as if I were Parson Huxleigh’s feeble widowed mother instead of his able-bodied orphaned daughter.

The street’s crisp air, pungently scented with charcoal and smoke, reminded me of my circumstances. A familiar bleak numbness descended, as if my teatime with Irene Adler had been a dream and this hazy, glazed world outside were my true reality.

“Here.” Irene’s cheeks bloomed pink with the fresh chill, or perhaps with excitement. She drew me toward a doorway niche. “For later.”

To my amazement, she began drawing pastries from the recesses of her capacious muff.

“You carry only that carpetbag, Penelope? Wait.” She left the booty heaped in my bare hands and darted to the curb. After a word with a wizened chestnut vendor, she returned flourishing an empty paper bag. “Put them in here. You can have them for supper later.”

“I
cannot!
Irene, this is stealing. This is as wrong as what that urchin attempted to do to me. How did you...
when
did you...? Oh, I must object, in the strongest moral terms.”

“Yes, I’m sure you must,” Irene agreed, heaping delicacies into the bag as if deaf to indignation. “But think! Were you and I as glossy and plump as that tearoom staff, we could have easily gobbled the entire contents of the tray and would have been charged no more for it. Are we to be penalized because we are dainty of appetite? We will simply remove our consumption to another place and time.”

“Not ‘we’—I!  I will be guilty of this ... robbery.”

“Nonsense. I took these things, not you. Be it on my head,” she insisted, tossing it until her bonnet plumes nodded frivolous agreement. Her eyes fixed on me, luminous and yet strangely piercing. I felt as if under the truth-demanding scrutiny of my father once again. “And will you not in fact be hungry again soon? Would you not have eaten all your share of the tray, and mine, too, were you not too hungry to break your fast so suddenly?”

“I... I...” Words failed me. To have my sorry circumstances so intimately known to another—and to a stranger—was more than even my tattered pride could stand.

Irene rolled the parcel shut and thrust it at me. “You can eat these at home later.” Something in my face must have collapsed further, for her remarkably expressive eyes narrowed. “Or,” she said abruptly, an actress improvising a scene and sweeping her audience with her, “why not come home with
me?
Since I am the true culprit? If goodness hampers your appetite, you can at least watch me devour the lot, for I will if you won’t, and the sin will be on someone’s head anyway.”

“Home? With you?”

“And let us hire a cab before another street Arab snatches our ill-gotten gains. They are even hungrier than you are, you know.”

I cannot defend myself except to say that I was worn and worried beyond any state I had ever reached in my life. I was faint from hunger and my pride had ebbed to the very edge of my endurance.

Without quite knowing how it happened, God forgive me, I found myself in a hansom cab rattling over the London paving stones to wherever Irene Adler, actress, opera singer and petty thief, called home.

Chapter Two

A
T
ALE OF
H
ORROR AND
H
OPE

I was
unused to the luxury of cab rides, but Irene Adler tripped up into the hansom’s shadowed interior like one born to such convenience.

“Eversholt Street,” she instructed the driver. He was a sun-burnt, gaunt individual with a hollow-eyed stare I didn’t much fancy.

The reins snapped and then the cab jolted forward. Street scenes that had seemed all too heartlessly actual only moments before jerked past, offering an unreal stereopticon review of lowly pedestrians to privileged passengers like ourselves.

The clattering horse hooves masked my stomach’s happy growls of satisfaction and rude rumblings for more. I sat silent, trying to place the address Irene had given.

The hansom turned one corner, then several in succession. The way grew narrow, darkened by the artificial twilight of looming buildings and oncoming dusk. The feeble glow of the cab side lights brightened on either side of us as I smelled the mingled aromas of unwholesome stews cooked in crowded urban tenements. I recalled the driver’s fierce face with another twinge of regret, even as Irene drew a reticule from her all-purpose muff and began probing for coins.

Suddenly, the conveyance jerked to a stop that all but threw me from my seat. Irene unfastened the half-door that enclosed our nether extremities and vaulted down onto the gloomy street. I followed, loath to remain alone and ignorant in a strange place.

At the vehicle’s rear the driver slumped over on the cab roof. Reins loose as hair ribbons draped the horse’s undernourished hindquarters—poor beast, city coursers are always harder used than their country cousins.

Irene’s attention, however, was all for the slack-limbed driver.

“Why, this man is ill! Can you climb down, fellow?”

Her rousing tone lifted his head. I looked about anxiously for help. It was that hour when respectable persons draw indoors before dinner. We were utterly alone with our driver, ill... or simply feigning it for some sinister purpose.

I caught Irene’s faille sleeve, murmuring discreetly, “It may be a ruse to disarm and rob us.”

She shook me off. “We’ve little to be robbed of. Help me support him—he’s a brawny fellow.”

A leaden arm swagged my shoulders as the driver swung down to the street. Irene guided him into the passenger seat we had vacated, where he slumped like one dead.

“Quickly, Penelope, have you a handkerchief?”

“I? A handkerchief? Certainly!”

“Give it over. I need it.”

I fumbled through my carpetbag and extracted an Irish linen square embroidered by my cousin Hyacinth with violets, an appropriate choice of color but an odd dislocation of botany. “Will this do?”

Irene didn’t answer, instead clamping my pristine square to the driver’s hangdog face.

“Nosebleed,” she diagnosed authoritatively.

“Gracious,” I protested as my prized possession stemmed a spreading tide of dark blood.

Irene leaned over the unfortunate man. “Are you all right?”

He laughed then, too loud, too ... bitterly for one supposedly so weak. I clutched my carpetbag closer.

“Not by half,” he answered in a rough yet breathless voice. “But thanks, lady, for asking. I’ve got this condition—”

Irene leaned away as if to memorize his strained face. “You are seriously ill—high color does not normally accompany extreme weakness. Heart, is it not? An extremity of the condition we all face ultimately, I see.”

The man pulled my ruined linen from his nose and stared at her. “By God, I believe you do, Miss. Are you a—a—physician?”

Irene laughed ruefully. “That is one profession I’ve not yet been accused of practicing. I am American, however; aren’t you as well, sir? From the West by your twang. Your callused hands say you have led a hard life.”

The fellow seemed more disabled by her intuitions than his apparent ill-health. Again he stared at her—such a strange, concentrated stare, as if he were weighing thoughts on a balance far beyond the here and now. He began speaking with a desperate compulsion.

“A hard life I’ve had, and I’ll have a harder death, but a satisfied one, thanks to my work of days ago on the Brixton Road. Ah.” He massaged his left side, then continued with the same impulsive resolution. “I’m bound to leave London soon, one way or another. It might as well be dead as not. My work is done.”

“No one should seek death,” I felt obligated to put in, “desirable as the thought of reclining in the Deity’s bosom may be.”

The man’s fierce black eyes fixed on me until I thought I should swallow my tongue.

“The Deity won’t much like the notion of drawing Jefferson Hope to His bosom, Miss,” he said roughly. “But you’re a delicate female, like my late Lucy, and entitled to your illusions, I guess.”

Agony clenched his features; his fingers made white-knuckled fists. “I’d give anything to see her again, anything but give up my eternal damnation.”

“Your wife?” Irene inquired softly.

“Lucy?” Jefferson Hope’s eyes remained shut. “Nope, but she should have been, would have been, had I returned but a day sooner, before Stangerson and Drebber, the damned hypocrites, had done in old John Ferrier and forced my Lucy into Drebber’s Mormon harem.”

Irene sank onto the cab foot-hold as if it were a stool, not appalled as any woman of delicate sensibilities ought to have been, but fascinated. I subsided against the hansom’s side, too numbed to protest.

Jefferson Hope continued in a husky, exhausted voice.

“Found my Lucy lost as a child in the Great Salt Desert out West years ago, old Ferrier did. Ferrier was a done-for scout, but little Lucy had survived a wagon-train attack. Then the Mormons found ’em both and sheltered ’em on the terms that they join their damnable church. John raised Lucy like she was his own. He followed their strange ways—though he never took a wife, much less several; he’d never subject Lucy to that polygamy notion.”