Good Night, Mr. Holmes (42 page)

“No, I congratulate you upon it. Apparently your new fame has reached all the way to Bohemia. Do you still think he might wish to abduct you?”

Irene shook her head until the melted snowflakes on her veiling shone like diamonds and trembled free like dew. “No. He is concerned only for himself now, for his... security. How it must frighten him to know that I am free, with the photograph, and have no reason to protect him because I feel obliged to guard my own reputation. Such hypocrisy he practices!”

“Frightened men are dangerous,” Godfrey warned.

“So are free women,” Irene replied.

“Must we move now?” I wondered.

“No.” Irene stood. “We are safer where they think there is nothing to be found. Besides, the compartment remains secret. No one will find it.”

Shortly after Christmas we were burgled again. The signs were slight but telling.

“Professionals this time,” Irene said, her voice hard.

“Godfrey will not like it.”

“Godfrey need not know.”

“But he has been so kind—” I protested.

“Precisely why I do not wish to worry him, dear Nell. He is occupied quite enough. Now drink your tea and fret no more about the King of Bohemia’s little games. He who has lost his Queen always pushes the pawns about.”

“I don’t play chess.”

“Perhaps I exaggerated my figure of speech. This King is about to gain a Queen, after all. Have you seen the afternoon edition of the
Telegraph?”

“Is your portrait in it?”

“No, but hers is.”

“Hers?”

“Clotilde Loatheman von Saxon-mine-again, or whatever she is called. Would you like to see her?”

“Certainly not. She cannot be half so handsome as you!”

“Handsome is as handsome does, and Clotilde does very well in the blue-blood department. Have a look!”

There was nothing to do but take the rustling pages Irene forced upon me. My eye fell on the offending likeness instantly—a portrait of one of those broad-browed, thin-skinned, pale-haired Nordic women whose noses could well serve as a ski slope. So I told Irene, at any rate.

She beamed. “Sometimes, Nell, your descriptive powers verge on the poetic! No wonder Mr. Wilde was so enamored. But have you read her pedigree?”

“It is almost as long as that of Mrs. Chandeley-Monningham’s Pekinese in Shropshire,” I commented. “But of course,
his
ancestors’ nobility traces back to ancient China. I suspect the King of Scandinavia’s daughter has a pedigree that only extends back to the Dark Ages; before that, enter the Huns.”

“Really, Nell, had you not been so tenderly reared in the parsonage, I believe we could have made a first-class society cat of you! I had no idea you ever knew anyone named Mrs. Chandeley-Monningham!”

“Even Shropshire has its country bumpkins,” I retorted.

Irene began giggling in a way that I could only describe as girlish, and so Godfrey found us when he arrived.

We had by then descended to speculation on the size of the unfortunate Clotilde’s feet, which Irene likened to a form of American savage transport she called “snow-shoes.” She was in the process of describing this fanciful footwear when Mrs. Seaton showed Godfrey into the sitting room.

“Is it charades?” he asked eagerly, “because if it is, I have a mime to offer as well.”

“Indeed.” Irene sat back to give Godfrey the floor.

This he took full advantage of, pacing the carpet, harried and hat in hand, knocking at many doors to make a pantomimed request.

“A beggar!” Irene guessed.

He quelled her with a look. “Only an agent of the merciless Irene Adler.”

Next Godfrey trudged down some mythical steps, lower and lower. He seemed to dodge hanging spider webs. He knelt before something he regarded with awe.

“A minister!” I offered.

“Sir Galahad and the Holy Grail,” said Irene.

“Only a worshiper at the feet of Mammon, I fear,” Godfrey admitted.

His hands drew something toward him. He turned on one knee and presented the vacancy on his palms to Irene.

“I give up,” she sputtered through her laughter. “You are too outrageously obscure.”

“The Worthington Bank of Islington went bankrupt eighteen years ago,” he told her. “Its unclaimed resources are stored in a warehouse in the Brixton Road. Among them is—”

“A safe-deposit box in the name of John Norton!” Irene stood, her eyes blazing with unexpected triumph. “I am brilliant! And you, dear Godfrey, are”—she gazed into his eyes as he knelt before her “—ridiculously diligent. Now get up and let us go to the Brixton Road!”

“First I require the keys to your heart.”

“What keys?” she demanded, growing restless at their mock-courtship pose, at Godfrey’s wicked smile.

“What heart?” I murmured under my breath.

“The keys are in the music room—” Irene began, moving to get them.

Godfrey captured her hand with melodramatic finesse. “Fetch them, Nell,” he ordered.

“I’ll get them; stay!” Irene said.

Torn between two masters, I naturally obeyed the one least likely to take offense and fled the room. I found the keys and returned them to Irene, hoping to assuage both my household gods at once.

“The keys, fair queen!” Godfrey importuned.

She slapped the ring ungraciously in his upheld hand. “Oh, very well. You must have your applause, I suppose. Fairly done. Rise, I dub you Sir Persistence.”

He rose just enough to seat himself on the sofa and turn the keyring in his hands. Irene stood for a moment, then sank reluctantly beside him.

A strange, awkward silence settled over us, broken only by the jingle of keys in Godfrey’s restless hands.

“There are many keys in my father’s ringdom,” he quipped at last. Suddenly we all laughed in shared delight. “Which one shall open it?”

“We shall try all if we have to,” Irene said.

Her eye fell on the newspaper pages, which had dropped to the carpet in the excitement. The likeness of Clotilde Lothman von Saxe-Meningen stared up at us.

Godfrey took Irene’s clasped hands in one of his and, as they unfolded, filled them with the ring of tarnished keys.

“Mystery and music, Irene,” he reminded her. “They are your proper kingdom.”

She regarded the many-shaped keys spilling like brazen jewels from her palms.

“Both pursuits require keys,” she said, “but I did not expect such a choice. These... possibilities”—she shook her hands until the keys and rings chimed like little bells—”result from my wit and Godfrey’s work, not any pedigree. I will follow them wherever they lead. I think that this is the lesson I learned in Bohemia.”
Chapter Thirty

T
HE
G
OOD
B
OOK

A new
object lay on the music room table along with the oddments from Black Jack Norton’s treasure chest— a book in an elderly tobacco-brown binding.

This small rectangular object, plain save for the title and author’s name gold-stamped on the spine and front cover, was the sole fruit of plundering the safe-deposit box.

“Why would he hide away this, of all things?” Godfrey demanded in utter mystification.

“He had no attachment to your mother’s novels as the source of his brief good fortune?” Irene wondered.

“Good heavens, no! He abominated her fiction works. I can’t believe that he ever had one in his possession, much less that he read one.”

“Did you?” Irene said.

Godfrey looked startled. “I? Well... no. I—I was not of the age to read these genteel romances and then, she had stopped publishing and it... never occurred to me.”

“But you possess some?”

“I suppose so, somewhere among my bookshelves.”

Irene cast her eyes heavenward, although the only illumination they found was the glow of the ceiling-hung gasolier. “So passes all artistic glory. Her own son.”

“Her books were considered suitable for a female audience,” Godfrey said stiffly. “For all that I resented my father commandeering the income from them, it never occurred to me to actually read one. And once she was dead, the exercise would have been sad as well as pointless.”

Irene weighed the little book on her palm. “Where best to hide the key to a treasure but in an out-of-print book by a deceased author, one that the author’s own sons—and one’s own sole heirs—can be counted upon to overlook?”

“I don’t follow you, Irene,” I put in. Godfrey, properly chastened for filial delinquency as well as literary snobbery, remained silent.

“If Black Jack Norton loathed his wife’s novels,” she said, “why hide even one, with the key to it buried in a mass of keys? I tried twenty keys before finding one that turned that rusted old lock. This is the true clue to the Zone’s whereabouts. It must have pleased your father’s perverse sense of humor to know that if he died with the secret to the Zone forgotten, it would be because his wife’s work was forgotten by all, even his sons. Especially his sons.”

“You are not being fair to Godfrey, Irene. He has been an exemplary son to both his parents. Certainly he supported his mother when no one else would.”

“Hear, hear,” she said in good humor. “But his time would have been better spent reading his mother’s tomes, for then we might know why”—Irene peered at the spine’s glinting gold—
“Cloris of the Crossroads
was so particularly important to the late Black Jack Norton.”

“A message might be pricked out beneath certain letters,” Godfrey suggested.

“Wonderful! I shall set Nell and her pince-nez to reading this devilishly small type looking for pricks that are not merely the tracks of bookworms!”

Irene set the volume down, slightly open, on its spine, then did it again. And again.

“It opens to variant pages, Irene,” Godfrey said. “I already attempted that trick; it is not the clue.”

“Invisible ink!” said I with sudden inspiration.

“And how do we make it visible?” Irene said.

“Hold it over a fire, like in the melodramas!”

“These brittle old pages would flash into flames. Besides, Black Jack could have written in invisible ink on anything. He did not need one of his wife’s books.”

“Except that he thought no one would look into it,” Godfrey reminded Irene, reviving her own argument.

“There is only one thing to do,” Irene declared.

“What?” we begged, glad of any action.

“I will have to read the book myself.”

Irene marched to the sitting room, sat and began reading. So she remained that entire afternoon, hardly stirring even when I rustled into the room at twilight to light the lamp at her elbow.

Godfrey and I toyed with the chess pieces in the music room.

“Do you play?” he asked me once, glancing at the piano.

“I was taught to execute a few pieces—and execute them I did. I dare not touch the keys with Irene nearby; I would not benefit by comparison. Were you—are you— musical?”

He laughed. “As musical as a hedgehog! I am of a more literal bent, I fear, as are you. The mathematics of music—and the puzzling aspects of mystery, go hand in hand.”

“Yet we unmusical creatures attend Irene’s performances.”

“They also serve who only sit and clap,” Godfrey observed, paraphrasing Milton.

I drew the keys across the table cloth, watching them spin randomly on the ring. It was the chance aspect of mystery that annoyed me, the unpredictable combination of the tedious and the inspired.

The chiming keys recalled the tinkling chimes in the Prague orchestra pit. “The King of Bohemia must have been most musical,” I mused. “He wept to see Irene sing.”

Godfrey was quiet for a moment. “Then we differ, he and I. If I would weep, it would be to see her
not
sing.”

“Perhaps that is not a matter of music at all, Godfrey. For all his easy feeling, the King had little faith in Irene. And you can take credit for rousing her from her malaise.”

“I have done nothing. Work has, in both arenas.”

We heard a single clap from the sitting room. Irene found us moments later, the finished novel held prayerfully between her hands.

“Well?” Godfrey rose.

“I have learned much. Cloris of the Crossroads was the only daughter of a harsh Scottish laird, an innocent driven onto the moors for daring to love a crofter’s son. After much travail she had a hand in rescuing Bonnie Prince Charlie, fomenting an uprising of the Scots peasantry and engaging in a secret mission to the Court of France.”

Godfrey sat beside me again. “And you would have had me read this folderol? Then the book is a
cul-de-sac”

“Not necessarily, but I shall have to think it over. It would make a grand opera—tragedy both political and personal with room for tender arias among the heather... Do you remember, Godfrey, where your mother was living when she wrote it?”

“How can I forget? In Chelsea, down the street from that impecunious Leigh Hunt and half the other poor but artistic denizens of Chelsea in that period. It’s hard to credit that the same neighborhood is so fashionable three decades later. Tite Street, I believe.”

“The number?”

“Sixteen. But the neighborhood has changed utterly since.”