The Adventuress (14 page)

Madame Montpensier shrugged ever so slightly. “Why else would strangers like yourselves desire to help Louise other than for the reasons you give, Madame Norton? The matter of the tattoo is troubling, especially the fact that Louise concealed it from me. I helped her to disrobe when she arrived home; how could I have missed seeing it?”

Irene’s lifted hand spread thumb and forefinger. “A small jar of almost-magical cream, Madame. I gave it to Louise so that she could conceal the mark.”

“You have more than magical creams up your sleeve, Madame Norton!” The woman’s fleeting amusement showed her relief at passing her burden to another.

“I will perform one last magician’s trick, Madame Montpensier, before I leave,” Irene said. “But first, three answers for me—three wisps of information that I may weave into a solution: what is the name of Louise’s fiancé; where did they go; and where would your husband keep the letters?”

The woman straightened, took a deep breath, and told us. “Caleb Winter of Boston; I believe they spoke of the Blue Coast; and the old library below holds many secrets. If the letters are anywhere, they are there. No one enters but Édouard. As a child, Louise liked to curl up there on gray days with a book, but Édouard was so angry to have his chamber disturbed that she learned to find books and reading facilities elsewhere.”

Irene nodded at each morsel of information. Caleb Winter’s name produced a moue of amusement, as if it reminded her of the inimitable character of her native land.

Mention of the fabled Blue Coast of France, overlooking the Mediterranean, elicited a pleased smile, as if this location figured in her speculations already.

And the existence of the sacrosanct study, from which even young girls were banned, positively inflamed her golden-brown eyes with the fever of pending challenge.

But first there was the promised magic trick.

Irene leaned against the mantel and glanced at Godfrey. In some ways, she looked as fatigued as she had when we returned to England after a sleepless five-day flight from the King of Bohemia’s henchman. I would never forget her in the coach from Victoria Station, producing a cigarette from her man’s suit coat. Smoke threaded through the carriage as Godfrey joined in that filthy ritual that yet manages to cloak one’s memories in a hazy blue miasma, as fog blunts the sharp edges of London. We may cough at and revile them both, but fog and smoke are, alas, undeniably romantic.

Now Godfrey produced a cigarette case and offered it to Irene before making his own selection. He lit their cigarettes with the remains of a long match from the fireplace. Irene tipped her head back, gazing dreamily through a mist of smoke as though consulting a crystal ball.

“Now I will tell you the location of Louise’s bracelet.”

Madame Montpensier gasped and clutched the dog upon her lap closer even as Irene leaned forward to pat the spaniel’s shining head. Then her fingers burrowed into the thick blond fur at the dog’s neck, and wrenched a bit of bright metal into the light.

“How did you know?” Madame Montpensier’s morning-glory eyes shone in a face as guileless as a child’s. “You are truly a miracle worker. Louise will be safe. I believe it now!”

“This room offers a thousand hiding places,” Irene said, smiling, “but none so close to Louise as that dog, and none so likely to be ignored by your husband. That is the sad predictability of this house, that those in it will be ignored, as Louise was, until she became innocently involved in something too... exciting... to be ignored. That ‘something’ is what we will discover, Madame.” Irene cast the last of her cigarette into the logs. “Until then, Chou-chou may keep his collar, and you may rest easier. Louise is so far safe with her American suitor. At least we know now that there is indeed a mystery to solve.”

Chapter Eleven

B
URGLARS BY THE
B
OOK

The following
night no rain fell, but a full moon rode the darkness like a pearl set into an onyx mourning ring.

“Bah, humbug!” Irene drew back a chintz curtain and frowned at the moonlight bathing our front garden. “I loathe full moons.”

She was clad again in utter black, on this occasion a well-cut gentleman’s suit. Her dark hair’s red-gold luster was snuffed by a black beret. Godfrey, also black-garbed from toe to collar, joined her at the window.

“You are no true romantic, Irene.” He peered up at the moon’s smug, waxen face. “Be grateful for its presence. We shall at least be in no danger of falling into the mere.”

“Yes, but we are more likely to be taken for what we are—housebreakers!”

This was my signal for a small lecture. “The two of you look like Lucifer after a dip in the carp pond—black and sleek and too furtive for words.”

The animal itself lay at my feet, toying kittenishly with a ball of cotton thread I was crocheting into a household object of use and beauty.

“We must see these fabled letters.” Irene hefted a small black leather bag much like a physician’s. It rattled as if concealing the family silver, although I suppose that what clattered was an array of housebreaking tools.

“We shall not even
take
the letters,” Godfrey said.

“Of course not,” I retorted. “That would give away your crime.”

“We shall not need to take them,” Irene said. “We have paper and pens—and lucifers, Godfrey?” she added in alarm.

He patted a bulging side pocket whose contents I did not care to speculate upon, although I had not recently seen Irene’s ferocious little revolver. It, too, was black, in keeping with the mournful tone of the outing.

“Lucifers!” he announced.

“Surely you do not intend to
smoke
whilst flouting the laws of France, not to mention those of hospitality?” I inquired.

“We must light our own interior moon, Nell.” Irene lofted a shuttered lantern from the bag. It alone accounted for half of the clamor. My wince caused her to return it more softly. “We must be utterly quiet, Godfrey.”

“We shall certainly endeavor to be so.” He lifted a boot whose sole had been smeared with coal tar to smother his footfalls.

“I hope you do not leave a trail, as Lucifer does when he has been in the coal cellar,” I said, crocheting so briskly that the animal under discussion began bobbing about in an attempt to pinion my ball of thread.

“No need to wait up, Nell,” Irene advised, donning black gloves.

“I do not intend to.” I rose and retreated to the parlor, where Casanova held forth from his perch.

I did not often have an evening to myself. I intended to make full use of it by plying the parrot with my French and studying the creature’s pronunciation. This was an activity I did not care to pursue in public. So it was that I did not see them out, these charming housebreakers, although I peeped through the window with the lamp low. I saw the moon burnish their black shoulders to silver as they melted into the carriage that Godfrey would drive to the gloomy Montpensier residence.

When I turned back to the room, my insides were as knotted as my thread. Lucifer crouched by the bird cage, his fat tail twitching with unlawful appetite. “No, wicked cat!
Avaunt!
Leave my French tutor alone.”

I offered Casanova a grape from the dining-room sideboard. The sly old reprobate sidled to the bars and cocked his head, presenting me with a suspicious eye as round and bright as a billiard ball.

“Pretty bird,” I said stiffly,
“pairlay-vhoo franzay?”

The ruffled neck darted forward. A flaking yellowed beak seized my bribe and would have snatched my fingertips had I not quickly pulled back. Casanova edged down the perch, which, despite daily attention from Sophie, still flaunted memoirs of chronic dropsy, so to speak. The bird transferred the grape from one talon to another, then eyed me, its head twisted at a conniving angle, looking like Long John Silver mentally measuring the captain of Stevenson’s
Hispaniola
for a coffin.

“No, you foul bird,” I admonished. “No escape. I’ve given you treasure, and you shall speak French. Now,
pairlay!”

Thereafter Casanova trilled his French phrases, much to the irritation of Lucifer. I noted down phonetically the saucy but accurate pronunciations.

I did retire early, if only to demonstrate my absolute unconcern, but I did not sleep. The clock had struck two before I heard the sound of hooves in the lane; it struck three before my industrious criminal friends had installed the horses in the stable and crept into the house like the footpads they were.

“Well?” I met them on the stairs in my combing gown with lamp held high, feeling like an unlikely (not to mention anachronistic) offspring of Marley’s ghost and Lady Macbeth. “I hope your entry to the Montpensier home was more discreet than this. You woke me from a sound sleep.”

(A tiny untruth in the service of instilling guilt is permissible—even necessary—when dealing with wayward children and erring adults, as I had long since learned.)

“A pity.” Godfrey grinned knowingly up at me. “Then I suppose you are too drowsy to hear our tale.”

I sighed. “I doubt I shall sleep again, between your lumbering about the premises and that vicious bird gargling its gutturals all night.”

Irene shook her hair loose from the beret. “We were in desperate need of your skills tonight, Nell. While you lay dreaming, I struggled to copy the penmanship of a drunken sailor.”

‘Then you found the mysterious letters!” I clattered downstairs to follow the miscreants into the parlor.

Godfrey was unshuttering the lantern to reveal the ragged pile of papers that Irene strewed over the shawl-covered table. I eagerly picked up one; because of my former profession of typist, paperwork has become my greatest weakness.

“Why, this is virtually illegible, Irene.”

“You should have seen the original if you seek illegibility,” she replied rather sharply. “I am not accustomed to writing by the light of a shuddering lantern while bent over a bookcase with my ears perked for a footfall at any moment.”

“And this... what is this mess?” I demanded, staring at a veritable melee of crisscrossed lines.

“That is a sketch of the seal.”

“Lucifer might have done better with his claws.”

“Lucifer might have done better at the entire expedition,” Godfrey said. “The window catches were so old they were rusted shut. The formidable Pierre makes the rounds of the house every forty-five minutes—and the library’s high shelves are reached only by a movable ladder so possessed of creaks that it mimics a pump handle.”

“How dreadful.” I sat down at the table, pulled out the pince-nez I happened to have ready in my gown pocket and propped it on the bridge of my nose. “Perhaps I can decipher this scrawl, Irene, in daylight. With time. But the seal is an impossible jumble.”

“Exactly what I thought,” she said, “until I realized that the blurred appearance was intentional because it
is
a jumble, a jigsaw puzzle. The wax was not imprinted with one massive seal, but overprinted with several. And I think—oh, where are the previous sketches?”

Godfrey fetched them from the desk where she had left them rolled into pigeonholes.

“Where were these missives found?” I asked Godfrey, watching Irene’s hands shuffle pages around on the tabletop as if consulting an Ouija board.

“On the top shelf of the farthest bookcase,” he said. “A false back hid them. We had to remove two shelves with all of their books. Quietly. Within minutes.”

“Oh, dear. How did you ever know to look behind that particular shelf?”

“I did not. Irene did.” He nodded at her tumbled auburn curls, all we could see of her face as she pored over the copies. “You must ask her to explain the logic; I cannot. It has something to do with a Provençal cookbook being on the top shelf.”

“Well, of course!” said I. “Who would put a cookbook on a
top
shelf? Only someone who expected that shelf never to be disturbed. No woman worth her house sense would do it, but a man would, if he wanted to conceal a hiding place with books and wasn’t particular of the volumes he selected.”

“I see.” Godfrey sounded unconvinced. Male logic often trips over such small but telling details.

Irene suddenly lifted a sketch to the lantern light, then another and another. Her face was rapt with dawning excitement.

“Yes! If I turn this one... so... and this that way, and do this with the third—Yes! Now, where is the sketch of the seal?”

Godfrey fetched it. She held it so close to the unshuttered lantern that I feared it might catch fire.

“Yes! The seal blends all three letters we have seen tattooed on three vastly dissimilar people.”

“How extraordinary,” I admitted.

“And not the half of it. Look! There is yet another letter impressed into the seal. I believe—I am convinced!—that it is an ‘N’.”

“What does it all mean?” Godfrey asked, as a barrister will.

Irene sat back with a great sigh. “I don’t know. Certainly these two dead men and a young French girl are connected in a matter that involves at least one other person, perhaps several.”