The Adventuress (15 page)

“What did the mailed letters say?” I asked quite sensibly. “Oh. A lot.” Irene seemed too distracted by her puzzle pieces to go further, so Godfrey continued.

“I read them over Irene’s shoulder as she took notes. They were decidedly odd, even ominous. The earliest- dated ones referred to the ‘lamentable and curious’ death of Claude Montpensier and told Édouard of a matter in which Claude’s nearest relative, Louise, would figure. The letters said that although Louise was not of legal age, it made no difference, that the uncle should arrange for her to be contacted by the writer, in secret.”

Irene nodded as I stared in confusion. “Now the uncle’s actions become understandable,” she said. “The proposal to meet with an undefended young girl without her guardian’s knowledge of the specifics is most bizarre.”

“At this point, cruel Uncle Édouard sounds a hero,” said I.

Godfrey shrugged. “Later letters grew more urgent, saying that it would be to Louise’s ‘advantage’ to respond to the request, that many people were involved in the matter, which was highly secret, and that the uncle’s demands for information were inappropriate, since he was merely a conduit and not the nearest relation of the dead man and thus not entitled to know more.”

“And all of these letters were written in French?”

“Grammatical French for some, others not,” Irene said. “Most were written in
different
hands and posted from various points on the globe. Some took months to arrive. The tone increases in urgency; the last letter came but a month before Louise was kidnapped and tattooed.”

“It seems some vast old plot, like
Treasure Island!”

 
“Exactly, Nell.” Godfrey lit a cigarette and leaned against the window. “This is a sinister affair, I think, involving a number of desperate men. Louise’s uncle has violated some long-standing agreement by keeping his niece from these men. I doubt they mean to harm her.”

“But the assault! The tattoo!” I burst out.

“These are likely men of a seafaring nature, Nell, remember,” Irene said, “considering the far-flung correspondence. They are not apt to weigh the effect of a forced tattoo upon a well-bred young woman. In fact, they seem to have been striving to meet some obligation owed her father. With Louise presumed dead, I wonder what they will do.”

“Perhaps,” Godfrey said, “they will do what a solicitor would do in the case of a deceased heir. They will approach the next nearest relation.”

“Uncle Édouard!” Irene abruptly straightened. “Yes, he has not underestimated the import of the letters, else why hide them? And he has kept Louise from them.

Perhaps he wished to force the writers’ frankness,” Godfrey said. “Perhaps he too saw some gain in it... for himself.”

“And now that he thinks the poor girl dead—” I put in.

“He may deal with this... company... himself! To his own profit!” Irene’s glance sought our concurrence. “He may force himself upon them.”

“What is this scheme?” I wondered aloud. “And why would tattoos be the method of its initiation?”

Irene swept the papers into a pile and rose to lift a candle. “Excellent questions to sleep upon. I shall be most interested to hear your suppositions in the morning, Nell. In the meantime, Godfrey and I shall consult the sandman.”

I picked up my lamp and followed her to the stair. “For myself,” she continued, “I see but one sensible course. I must visit Sarah Bernhardt first thing tomorrow... or rather, tomorrow afternoon, as she never rises before noon.”

I glanced with amazement and dismay at Godfrey. He knew what I thought of that hussy, Divine Voice or not.

“And you must accompany me, Nell.” Irene’s voice floated down from the dark at the top landing, her lone candle winking like a bright star. “Sarah has been most eager to meet you.”

Godfrey was just swift enough to take the lamp from my nerveless fingers before I dropped it to the floor.

Chapter Twelve

R
APT IN
B
ABYLON

Madame Sarah
reclined upon a divan that was draped with oriental cloths.

Madam Irene lounged upon a pile of cushions.

Miss Huxleigh sat upright upon a chair.

A diaphanous scarf draped the Thin One’s no doubt scrawny neck, but her famous strawberry-blond mane spilled around her pallid face like a fiery fountain. Irene’s hair had been styled for the occasion in a similar free-flowing mode: she looked very French and more than somewhat wicked. I was sure that Godfrey would not approve but that Edward Burne-Jones would want to paint her. Then I reconsidered my conclusion about Godfrey.

I wore a gray-felt bonnet with a few pheasant feathers.

A cat that made Lucifer look saintly prowled among the heaped pillows, its sharp withers knifing the smoky air, its spotted amber hide shifting with each muscular step. I have never favored leopards as domestic pets.

Plant leaves as extravagantly broad as the ostrich- feather fan our hostess waved tickled the ceiling. Green tendrils snaked over the furnishings. An arrangement of peacock feathers brushed my nose if I did not sit absolutely still.

Somewhere in that crowded salon, I was given to understand, a serpent lurked. Certainly Adam and Eve had already long left this garden of excess, and Lilith herself was my hostess for tea.

Little in the ornate façade of the actress’s modem house on the Boulevard Pereire had prepared me for this ungoverned interior. Perhaps the “S.B.” carved above the door should have alerted me that I was entering a temple of vanity.

Irene and I were shown into the main salon, where crimson-damask walls reminded me of Mr. Poe’s Chamber of the Red Death. These bloody walls bristled with antlers, exotic masks, and weapons of sinuous oriental design. I nearly tripped on the massive open jaws of a brown bear when I entered. Many such still-carnivorous skins littered the carpets, as did pots of scent-heavy tropical blooms profuse enough to induce a swoon.

No wonder the Divine Sarah reclined upon her divan in the semi-stuporous pose she had made famous.

“So this is the admirable Nell you mention, Irene,” said the only animal exhibit in the chamber capable of speaking. The Divine Sarah coiled forward to peer at me.

I remained tongue-tied. My French certainly would not survive exposure to a wicked woman who declaimed in that language as if divinely inspired.

“I have had many lovers,” the actress told Irene, “but seldom a devoted woman friend. Now this Miss Uxleigh”—(That is how she pronounced my surname; I was delighted that even the Divine Sarah could be flummoxed by foreign words.)—“is indeed a rarity of world stature.”

“Merci,”
I murmured modestly. Perhaps she was not so very wicked as I had thought.

“A jewel beyond price,” Irene said airily. “Have you visited the cafés of late?”

“Ah, our amusing masquerade. We were quite dashing, were we not? I really think you ought to have fought that duel, dear Irene. My son, Maurice, has fought duels twice in my honor since he has turned sixteen. Swords are so dramatic... and so harmless these days. I wonder how they ever won wars with them.”

“They didn’t.” Irene twisted in her pillows to pluck an apple from a basket. I gasped to see a fat, serpentine form slithering away as her hand reached out. “They used ships, cannon and cavalry, then guns. Swords were always mainly ornamental. Men can be so vain.”

“Almost as vain as women,” Sarah agreed with a laugh. “I imagine that Miss Uxleigh is not vain.”

“Oh, no. She is most refreshing, and almost always honest.”

“Almost always!” I objected.

“What an
original
pronunciation,” the actress said enthusiastically. I cringed in irritation as she spoke on. “A pity that I can master no English. I believe I would have as charming an accent in that language as Miss Uxleigh has in mine. There is no single advantage a woman of truly enduring fascination can possess that is so splendid as speaking with a foreign accent, whatever her origin.”

“Really?” I said in English, sitting more upright.

The actress’s painted red lips parted over white teeth that struck me as rather too large and pointed.
“Vraiment
,” she said to me simply, with a smile. Truly.

Then she turned to Irene. “I do so long to speak Monsieur Shakespeare as written, but to attempt to do so would draw attention to me rather than to the part. Please speak a bit for me, my dear. It is such a pleasure to hear Shakespeare in his own words.”

Irene complied by rising nearly as sinuously as I had seen our hostess do and launching into Katharina’s curtain speech from
The Taming of the Shrew.

Sarah Bernhardt listened almost visibly, a palm pressed to one temple, her spread fingers as white as an ivory comb against her flowing hair, her eyes closed and her pale profile tilted to the ceiling. The actress’s every pose seemed designed for a photograph or a portrait. Even as I recognized the art—and artifice—behind the façade, I felt mute admiration for such adept self-presentation.

Despite the magnetism Bernhardt exerted even when frozen into a complicated pose, Irene managed to divert my attention. She gave a quietly ironic reading of the famous “advice to wives” speech that pretends to submission but in truth urges subtle rebellion. I had seen Irene act before, of course, usually in musical surroundings—in Gilbert and Sullivan, for example, or before the intervention of an aria. This informal performance moved me more, perhaps because there was only Irene to create the illusion. Her character’s sly sincerity shone through the bizarre environment.

“Brava, brava!”
Sarah cried at the end, clapping her hands over her head and lowering her small, feral face so that the wild waves of blondish hair made a frizzled mane behind her. “I could never play the shrew: there is no murder or suicide in the plot.”

Irene sat down again, searching for her half-finished apple.

“Utterly gone, my dear. Eaten. Panache tidies up so diligently. He is an anaconda. So much more useful than the boa constrictor that ate my sofa cushions. I had to shoot Otto.”

“S-shoot him?” I said faintly.

The Divine Sarah leveled her ostrich fan at an ottoman of particularly mottled design. “Otto. I did not even have to change his name.”

I need not report every odd detail of that bizarre meeting, or, perhaps I should say, every bizarre detail of that odd meeting. In the salon of Sarah Bernhardt, eccentricity came and went an honored guest.

What was most bizarre was that the great actress— and I could see that S.B. would indeed be formidable upon the stage—welcomed me, the soul of convention, as an intriguing new eccentricity in her chaotic domestic mise-en-scene. Perhaps excess always ultimately admires its opposite.

Yet I sensed that Irene’s visit to Sarah Bernhardt was another sudden, inexplicable turn of my friend’s own particular genius. Even as I kept alert for encroaching snakes or vines, I knew to my bones that Irene had a serious reason for consulting her acquaintance.

Someone, or something, tapped my shoulder. I turned to find a blue-and-yellow parrot perched upon my best wool-serge basque with the rather smart new epaulets. The bird’s loathsome scaly feet curled around the extravagant satin braid of my left epaulet as if it were a luxurious perch.

“Away!” I ordered in my best imitation-Casanova grumble. The bird jumped to a pillow embroidered with La Bernhardt’s ever-present personal motto,
Quand meme,
“in spite of everything,” upon which it deposited a final exclamation point. Even the odious Casanova would not have so presumed.

Yet amidst so much clutter, what was one parrot dropping?

“Ah,” the actress was intoning, “I have played Shakespeare only once. Ophelia in
Hamlet,
here in Paris, but the run was brief and costly. I was forced to tour South America to rebuild my gold reserves. I took one hundred curtain calls in Rio, and the millionaires of Buenos Aires made a carpet of their pocket handkerchiefs for me to walk on from my carriage to the stage door—so gallant, these Hispanics. And in Peru, the Indians gave me a necklace made of human eyes. I wear it now—”

She lifted a strand from among the strings of beads swagging her breast, but I hastily averted my... ah, eyes.

“That was the tour on which I lost both my poor maid and my wonderful impresario, the Terrible Mr. Jarrett—a pet name, you understand. I also fell and injured my knee while trying to avoid a pot of heather on shipboard coming home. Such vile luck, heather. Never let it come near you, my dears.”

“Fear not,” Irene said, getting a word in at last. “I have had quite an aversion to herbs since I was in Bohemia.” She cast me a sidelong glance and an ironic smile that were quite lost on Madame Sarah.

“At least I was able to net a delicious Andean wildcat from the tour... and Otto, of course, and two hundred fifty thousand francs in profit, which made possible this new house and my first production of Shakespeare.”

“You would make a splendid Ophelia,” Irene said politely.