Good Night, Mr. Holmes (46 page)

At the front door she paused. “Penelope, your bonnet!”

“I am not going, though I would wish to. I can better serve by packing your things here. You shall not leave all behind you again if I can help it. Now—go!”

She embraced me, then ran through the door, pulling on her gloves, her husky voice calling to the coachman, who had brought the landau around. “The Church of St. Monica, John, and half a sovereign if you make it in twenty minutes!”

I smiled to myself and then ran to consult the mantel clock. Twenty-five minutes to twelve. The horse would require wings, too. I breathed a quick prayer and retreated upstairs to begin sorting Irene’s things into packable piles.

An hour had passed before I had separated the shirtwaists from the corsets. I heard the faint clop of returning horse’s hooves and flew down to the door, arriving with our maid. Irene was coming up the walk alone.

“Godfrey?” I said.

“The Temple.” Irene paused by the hall mirror to remove her hat and gloves.

“Let me see it!” My eye had caught a new glitter on her left hand.

We slipped into the sitting room, where she fanned her fingers for my inspection. The ring was a lengthways lozenge of pierced gold that covered one knuckle, containing a center-set emerald flanked by two opals.

“It is... most striking,” said I.

“Most modern, you mean. Godfrey did well in five minutes’ choosing. He said we will save diamonds for Paris.”

“Speaking of which, does he know the nature of your girdle?”

“Penelope,” she rebuked, “a woman must have some secrets from her husband.”

“If he is that, why is he not here?”

“He will return, at his usual hour. For now we are discreet—and we were almost not married.”

“Not! What happened?”

Irene loosened the Zone and let it slither down her petticoats to the floor. She retrieved and coiled it into the secret compartment like a diamond serpent. Then she perched on the chaise and patted the cushion beside her.

“It was the most amazing comedy of errors, Nell. Poor Godfrey was white with worry. I need never wonder if he truly wished to wed me; the man moved heaven and earth to accomplish it. The ‘heaven’ was our clergyman, who demanded a witness since our license was so fresh and no banns had been announced. Not a witness was to be found. People usually devote their noon hour to food for the flesh instead of the soul.”

“Indeed, so my father often lamented.”

“It was five minutes to twelve before Godfrey spotted some threadbare lounger in a side aisle, who represents the ‘earth’ in our equation. He pounced upon this unlettered unfortunate like Little Jack Homer on a plum pudding.

“‘Come, man!’ he whispered loudly enough to wake the dead. ‘Only three minutes. You’ll do.’

“ ‘Do what? asked the honored worshiper, looking as if he has been invited to witness a hanging instead of a holy matrimony.

“Godfrey dragged the fellow before the clergyman, hands him the ring and tells him to do as he’s told. Such blinking and stuttering, but the man performed adequately, with the result that Godfrey and I were maritally linked just as the church bell began to bellow twelve o’clock.”

“I cannot believe it, Irene. Can you not even marry in a conventional fashion? And now you come home husband-less.”

“Godfrey had matters to attend to at the Temple, and no Nell there to help him decamp.”

I put my hands to my cheeks. “Goodness, he will make an utter mess of the papers if he tries to deal with them himself.”

“He is assigning the lot to a fellow barrister. Let the new man deal with it.”

“And what do you do now?”

“Rest. Pack. Drive out at five and dine at seven as is my custom. If I am being hunted it is best to cleave to my usual routine so as not to alert the hounds that the fox is digging an escape tunnel.”

“You are a marvel, Irene. Your life is turning upside down, yet you remain cucumber-cool.”

“What am I to do?” She spread her hands helplessly, the new ring winking. “The next move is up to our opponents.”

So the excitement of the forenoon became the routine of a quiet afternoon at home. John brought the landau around at five p.m. when Irene, more finely dressed by then than she had been for her impromptu wedding, went out for her drive in Regent’s Park. I suspected that Godfrey would take a cab to meet her there, as he no doubt had been doing for some time. It was my affair even less now than before.

At seven I was established in the middle of Irene’s bedchamber floor, arranging gloves, trimmings and handkerchiefs into piles by color. I was nothing if not thorough.

I heard our front door bang and a bustle below and rounded the stair to see our door agape. John and a stranger were carting an unconscious man into the front hall. A murmur of voices from the street beyond gave a sense of confusion and hubbub.

“Here,” Irene was directing the men with their burden, “the sitting room.” She spied me on the stair. “Oh, Nell, this poor kind-hearted clergyman has been grievously struck down, and in my defense.”

I clattered downstairs in time to see the man laid upon the chaise longue. He looked so much like my own late father that I quite froze in the threshold ... a dear frail old fellow with snowy hair, baggy black coat—and a horrid red gash upon his venerable forehead.

“Irene, what has happened?”

She was busy laying the clergyman’s broad-brimmed hat upon the table and loosening the white tie at his throat.

“Serpentine Avenue has attracted a convention tonight. Not only guardsman courting nursemaids and young idlers but a pair of rude characters who thought to earn a copper by opening my carriage door; instead they fought each other for the privilege and little else.

“They had trapped me between the landau and their own windmilling arms, despite John’s best efforts to reach me. Had this passing clergyman not undertaken to defend me, I should have been pinned like a butterfly to velvet. One of the ruffians struck the old fellow senseless—hence he is here. Ah, thank you,” she said as Mrs. Seaton imported a wet cloth from below-stairs.

I watched Irene daub the wound. The fallen man groaned as his eyes fluttered open behind the thick spectacles that perched askew on his aquiline nose. He struggled half upright, then fanned one hand weakly before his face.

“The window!” Irene directed the maid. “He requires air.”

The woman flung the long French window open to the night. The clergyman gave one last, sharp hand gesture, then fell back. We stared at him, awaiting some further sign of revival.

“Smelling salts!” Irene ordered, turning away to direct Mrs. Seaton to fetch this essential item.

At that moment the knot of spectators in the road beyond raised their dull murmur to sudden alarm.

“Fire!” someone shouted, then several took up the call. “Fire!”

We turned as one to the window, shocked to see airy gray plumes coughing into the sitting room. Smoke curled along the floor like fog and spumed up toward the ceiling. In only instants the room was choked with grey clouds.

Beside me I heard Irene gasp, then she was gone. Fire? The photograph! The Zone! I turned to see a dim figure stumbling against the bell pull, and heard the snick of the secret compartment as it slid open.

I looked back at the window, thinking to escape that way. The cleric was sitting upright like an animated corpse, his wavering voice raised.

“Not fire, ladies. False alarm. Surely not fire. Be calm and the smoke will disperse.”

The quick dispersal he predicted revealed a strange cylindrical object on the floor. John had joined us and retrieved it with a grunt.

“Plumber’s rocket,” he said, frowning at the clergyman. “Somebody’s played a nasty trick.”

“Amazing, most amazing evening,” that worthy stammered. “Well, I feel quite recovered now.” He peered about to thank his hostess, but Irene had vanished, with the smoke.

I felt some embarrassment at this rude dereliction of her charge and escorted his slow steps to the door. “Are you sure you are fit to leave?”

“Indeed, yes. I must trouble your household no longer. So pleased to have been of service to such a fine, kind lady.”

The old fellow tipped his broad hat brim and toddled down the walk. The previous crowd had thinned like smoke. I was surprised to note that John had slipped out to drive the carriage around to the mews. When I retreated inside again, Irene was not downstairs—nor was she below-stairs or upstairs.

In her bedchamber, filled with neat stacks of her clothes, the wardrobe doors gaped, her evening’s attire piled before them. I suppressed a superstitious shiver, remembering the magician’s curtain of smoke in our sitting room and Irene’s shadow by the fireplace and then seeing her no more.

I wandered the ground floor, puzzled. Mrs. Seaton and the maid were setting things to rights and had no idea that she had gone, much less any notion of where. I paused by Casanova’s cage and offered him a biscuit from the sideboard.

“I shall be glad when Godfrey is solely responsible for her comings and goings,” I confided to the bird, who sidled close to the bars to hear me.

“Godfrey, Godfrey!” he crowed with a cocked head. “Ex-why-zed, jay-kay-el, ay-bee-cee.”

What could one do with a bird that got even the alphabet backwards? I retired to the sitting room and read
Cloris of the Crossroads
until half past ten, when hooves clattered up our quiet street once again.

There in the house Irene found me, for I refused to give her the satisfaction of leaping up to greet her.

“Still up?” she inquired. She sounded breathlessly pleased about something and oddly alert. “We shall be up longer, I fear. I have sent John and the landau for Godfrey.”

I dropped the book and turned.

Irene, a bowler hat pulled low over her brow and a muffler pulled high up to her chin, stood behind me in a gentleman’s coat.

“Irene... what on earth?”

She moved briskly to the compartment to withdraw all its hidden booty. “We are discovered. Our self-sacrificing clergyman keeps his rectory in Baker Street.”

“He was a spy?”

“He was a spy and a pseudo-arsonist and something of a theatrical director. If I am not mistaken, he hired and arrayed that entire cast of supernumeraries outside the house tonight, and arranged for the special effects of the smoke.”

“But why? Why would a man of the cloth...?”

“He changes his cloth like an actor. I followed his cab to 221-B Baker Street, where he paused on the threshold with his companion—the rocket hurler, I suspect—to extract the key. I could not help myself—ah, vanity, thy name is indeed woman. I passed behind the pair and taunted him with my knowledge.”

“What did you say!?”

“Why, nothing but ‘Good night, Mr. Sherlock Holmes.’ I moved quickly on, and John picked me up around the corner. But Godfrey and I must leave immediately. You and I must finish packing so I may flee as soon as Godfrey arrives.”

“Irene ...” There was no time for sad farewells. Irene was already bolting up the stairs, bowler and muffler in one hand and the compartment’s treasures in the other.

“I must travel in my proper sex, I fear,” she said in her bedchamber. “The whole point of marrying Godfrey was to stifle comment.”

She was stripping off her male attire while I tumbled her most essential clothing into a single trunk, my color-sorted piles all come to naught.

She paused in her shirt sleeves and came to take my shoulders in her hands. I looked into her face, too desolate to truly feel our imminent separation. She smiled at me, smiled her old wicked, speculative smile that used to fill me with dread and a certain, quite uncalled-for anticipation.

“I would give anything, my darling Nell, to see Mr. Sherlock Holmes arrive at this house to find the den empty and the fox fled. Anything!”

Her smile deepened as her voice became a thick, cajoling honey.

“Who else can I rely upon for an accurate and thorough account of that delicious moment? Could I prevail upon you, dear friend, to don a slight alteration of feature, to play the left-behind maid and admit the hunting party to the empty house,
hmm?

“Just a dusting of white powder over your hair, a dozen minor wrinkles...” She had propelled me before the pier glass and was sprinkling face powder over my nutmeg brown hair. A pale cloud of smoke seemed to have obscured my youth, my familiar features.

“Not any deep deception, simply something superficial that would disguise you from future harassment. After all, you stay to face the music we flee. If you would deign to play a role for the briefest of times. Just this once, this one first and last time, I swear...”

Chapter Thirty-four