The Adventuress (19 page)

Daylight fell upon our befuddled party. Placid countryside clicked past our window in a rapid series of stereopticon images. Godfrey had pinioned Jerseyman to the seat comer opposite with one knee and both hands. Crawling about on the floorboards, his basket open and empty, the Indian looked even smaller from my elevated height.

I saw that the ticket-collector by the window, for all his official cap—and there is no nation like the French for officious uniforms on the most insignificant persons— had somehow fused his lower limbs and resembled a chessman with a pedestal base.

Nowhere did I see the snake.

Nothing meant anything to me so long as the horrid serpent was loose in the compartment.

The ticket-collector pointed to me like a figure from a Christmas pantomime. I did not see myself as the main character in the confusion, despite my elevated position and the almost insuperable difficulty of maintaining it in a moving train. I certainly would not forsake it. To have the vile snake so much as slither over my foot... oh! it would be an act too hideous to contemplate.

The ticket-collector was still pointing, as if struck dumb. Slowly Jerseyman, Godfrey, and the Indian gave up their separate struggles to gaze up at me. I stared down into faces frozen in horror, then realized that they were looking not at me, but at the gasolier swaying rather hypnotically just beyond my face.

Despite the absence of my trusty pince-nez, I too regarded it—a tangle of tarnished brass, with the usual array of arms and lamps—and noted a dull, coiling design about the central pole that was quite serpentine in shape, shade and movement.

Movement!

I shrieked, appalled to see the elusive serpent writhe upon its perch
_v
dangle horribly like a living pendant, and then vanish.

Yet no one in the compartment looked down. Their upturned faces grew even more horror-struck, if possible. I still quivered from the snake’s odious proximity. Nothing on heaven or earth could have persuaded me to leave my lofty pedestal or to touch a boot toe to that infested floor, not even the Angel Gabriel and the trumps of Last Judgment.

The ticket-collector spoke, jabbing his finger idiotically at me. “Nell! Your bonnet! Your bonnet!”

Caught within the net of a nightmare, I found elements mixing madly. The French ticket-collector spoke with Irene’s voice and wanted my bonnet?

Godfrey abruptly released the Jerseyman. Before I could open my mouth to protest his carelessness, he had bounded onto the seat beside me, tom the bonnet from my head—and I always pin my bonnets quite firmly in case of an unpredictable wind—and cast it to the floor.

I shrieked again, this time in pain. “Are you all mad? Look, he’s getting away! Godfrey, how could you? My best bonnet, the only purchase I deigned to make in Paris!”

He ignored me, leaping down to stamp upon my pitiful bit of festooned straw as if demented, while the Indian crawled about the compartment wailing disconsolately.

Fate and the train picked this moment to enter a tunnel.

The swaying gaslight was a beacon of sanity in that disordered cell out of Wonderland. Our train lurched around a curve and unbalanced me. I caught the gasolier as I fell; my fingers recoiled from the notion of touching anything associated with the snake, but my presence of mind overruled my distaste.

I swung for a dreadful moment while the fixture groaned its disapproval of myself as a pendant. Then the train burst from the tunnel, and illumination again flooded our compartment. My fingers slipped, but Irene and Godfrey reached up to cushion my fall. We tumbled together to the seat, dazed by the light.

I sat up immediately, lifting my feet from the floor. The compartment was deserted, save for ourselves.

We looked around. My bonnet, sadly crushed, lay upon the floorboards. Of the basket, the snake, the lithe Indian and the menacing Jerseyman there was no trace.

And of the ticket-collector there remained only a fallen cap.

“Well.” Irene sat up and brushed locks of loose hair from her face.

“How have you managed to mimic me in losing your bonnet?” I asked.

She pointed mutely to the floor and the ticket-collector’s cap.

“You were . . . he?”

She began undoing her jacket’s gleaming brass buttons; I hadn’t noticed her attire until now. Underneath was her charcoal-gray traveling gown. No wonder the ticket-collector had looked as if he sat upon a pedestal— he had been Irene in skirts!

She laughed as I stared at her transformation. “I only had time to bribe the ticket-collector for his cap and jacket. My object was to startle the miscreants, but I underestimated your ability, Nell, to single-handedly distract them with gymnastic exhibitions.” She turned swiftly. “Godfrey, my dear, are you quite all right?”

“Quite,” he replied, laughing, his collar sadly askew. “A queer pair of villains, almost out of Gilbert and Sullivan’s light operas, far adrift from their normal environment. Though they did keep their sea legs better on this rolling train than we.”

“Legs,” I said bitterly. “If you must be so indelicate as to mention ‘legs,’ Godfrey, what of the one
without
legs? Where is... it?”

“I believe that Singh entrapped it in the basket during the confusion; certainly he would not have left without it.”

“I do devoutly hope so. But
what
was it?”

Godfrey struggled to reinstate his collar without benefit of
mir
ror. “Difficult to tell. It was somewhat smaller than a cobra—”

I gasped.

“—and too mildly colored for a water snake.”

I moaned.

“I might suspect a
fer-de-lance
—”

“A
French
snake?” I demanded.

“Only the name. Indian by origin. Its bite is—”

“Yes?”

Godfrey paused, obviously determined to spare me.

“Deadly,” Irene intoned, pushing Godfrey’s hands from his throat, where they had seemed more likely to strangle him than straighten his collar. “Now, your collar is tidy and I am in proper guise again. And, Nell, here is your bonnet.”

“Leave it!” I shuddered.

“Paris millinery?” She tsk-tsked and bent to retrieve the cap, its braid winking in the conjoined brightness of daylight and the swaying gasolier. “I must return this to our generous—and generously paid—ticket-collector.”

“How did you find us?” Godfrey stood and stretched to his entire height to dim the gaslight.

“A process of elimination. I spent the better part of half an hour jostling from car to car. How fortunate that these new European trains offer interconnected carriages, rather than isolated cars that may be entered only one by one from the outside. Progress has its benefits.”

“What of our assailants?” I asked. “Surely we are not going to simply let them escape?”

Godfrey bent to the window to peer at the rapidly passing countryside. “I fear we are. They could jump off safely at any point along here—we are slowing for our entry to Cannes—although Singh’s pet may escape again and lose itself in the long grasses of Grasse rather than among your bonnet plumes, Nell.”

“I do hope so! That is the proper place for a snake... in the grass. How did you explain your bizarre request for his uniform to the ticket-collector, Irene?”

“I told him that I had an eccentric friend at whose expense I wished to have some merriment.”

“You implied that
I
was eccentric? How could you say such falsehoods about me, even in the service of our rescue?”

“My dear,” said Irene, smoothing my untidy hair with nanny-like amusement as she propelled me into the passage, “when he sees your present state, he shall be completely convinced.”

Chapter Fifteen

S
TRANGERS IN
P
ARADISE

After Marseilles
and the sordid struggle in the railway compartment, I was thoroughly convinced that France had nothing to offer but hubris and a few slightly superior varieties of mushroom.

So when our train wound around the low cliffs overlooking the Mediterranean and a vista shimmered in the hazy blue distance that resembled the Heavenly Gates—all white and gleaming—it was some consolation to reflect that Monaco was a principality in its own right and thus not part of France.

“How glorious!” Irene cried.

She and Godfrey had crowded to the compartment window like eager children, his trousered knees and her skirt folds pressing the tufted-velvet upholstery of the lower carriage walls.

I studied our nearing destination. Monaco and its city, Monte Carlo, lived up to their lofty implications. A promontory ringed with sheer cliff faces commanded a view of the shimmering cobalt water lapping at its rocky roots. Like a mountain, its summit was snowcapped. Strong sunlight danced off cupolas and towers of white marble, its brilliance making my eyes water.

“It resembles a wedding cake,” Irene observed, “a great, frosted wedding cake.”

As we neared, we saw ragged green palm fans brushing the white buildings, indicating a soft, warm breeze at play.

“Surely nothing too unpleasant could occur in such a place,” I ventured.

“On the contrary,” Godfrey put in sharply. “Claude Montpensier hung himself in view of these balmy palms and that glittering sea.”

“Yes, we forget why we came.” Irene leaned back to extract a slim selection of postcards from her reticule. She thrust one at me.

It showed a baroque building rising from a manicured landscape. In the upper right-hand comer, a top-hatted gentleman with a flower in his lapel hung by the neck. At the lower left, a breeches-clad lackey came bearing a giant scissors with which to cut down the unfortunate suicide.

“How grotesque, Irene! And callous toward the loser’s fate.”

“Realistic, perhaps, Nell. And so are the casinos, and the governors of these fair gambling centers. Guns are not allowed in Monte Carlo, nor poisons, although these strictures do not stop suicides—or prevent those lethal means from entering the principality. It is said that during the seventies, one suicide victim a day was found... and quickly spirited away. Still, it does not stop pleasure-seekers from coming.”

Godfrey eyed the fanned postcards, then drew one as if an ace from a deck of cards. “And here on this one
we
are pictured en route to this paradise of sun, sea and temperate weather. Irene and I are the handsome foreground couple, but I believe that if the lady mounting the carriage steps would turn, she’d wear Nell’s features.”

I viewed the scene askance. The postcard showed a “Train des Moutons” bound for Monaco; its “passengers,” about to board, were well-hatted sheep dressed in the latest fashions.

“We are not here to be shorn,” Irene said with spirit. “We are wolves, not sheep. We hunt a vanished girl and the source of the mysterious tattoos. And perhaps a missing snake. Poor Mr. Singh was so patient. I wonder what a ‘Quarter’ is. While I waited my opportunity to enter the compartment, I heard Nell’s ‘Jerseyman’ mention that word.”

“Three months,” I answered promptly.

“Not to those two sailors who accosted us on the train.”

“Sailors?”

Godfrey nodded. “Seamen of the old-tar school. They are not here only to follow us, flattering as that assumption may be. This is their home ground, this great inland sea of the Mediterranean.”

Irene smiled. “That is why the letters to Louise’s uncle came from so many corners of the world—all of them seaports, you noticed.”

“No, Irene, I did not. I am not interested in seaports... or sailors.” I directed my second remark to Godfrey, who shook his head in mock sorrow.

“Perhaps you are interested in American princesses-to-be,” Irene suggested.

“Hardly. I was not even impressed by an American queen-to-be in Bohemia,” I responded tartly.

“You will have little to occupy you in Monte Carlo, I fear,” Irene said, “for our business involves princesses, old tars and, I suspect, sealing wax, if not cabbages and kings.”

“I had enough of kings in Bohemia.”

“Indeed.” Irene eyed Godfrey, who was busy checking his pocket watch. “I have had my fill of that species also. But the real aristocracy of Monte Carlo is not old King Charles the Third, who is blind, or Lady Luck, who is even blinder. It is not even Prince Albert, who will soon inherit this Mecca on the Mediterranean. No, Monaco’s reigning monarch is the gambler, who nightly risks thousands of francs, dollars, pounds and marks in the temple of gaming called a casino.”

“It is a Whited Sepulchre,” said I, pinning the bonnet Irene had lent me firmly to my hair.