The Adventuress (29 page)

“Brava, Nell.”

“—and later, when I was governess for a family, I did experience a fleeting... discomfiture with my charges’ young uncle, who, of course, was far above my station, and I may have been imagining that he even paused to notice me in any sense whatsoever. Still, naturally—”

“Yes, Nell? Naturally and of course. The point?”

“Do you think it possible that I could overcome my extreme ignorance of the sex and . . . make friends with one? A man, I mean.”

“Aren’t you friends with Godfrey?”

“Of course, but he’s different.”

“Why?”

“He’s... yours.”

“But you met him before I did. You worked as a typist for him. You had every opportunity to snap him up.”

“But I didn’t! Godfrey is—was—above my station.” I thought for a moment. As embarrassing as this conversation had been, some glimmer of enlightenment was sizzling through my brain. “But you say all talk of station is nonsense.”

“Is and should be. Still, it rules most of England.”

“I suppose I need not regard myself as beneath anybody. Any man, even.”

“No, Nell, you need not regard yourself as beneath any man, unless... ah, but I am getting too risqué for a parson’s daughter.” Irene suddenly seized my elbows, nearly causing me to spill the last bit of wine in my glass. “You have had a wonderful insight tonight. You have seen in a glance what is wrong with the world and put it into one simple phrase, one motto, one undeniable truth and inalienable right: you need not regard yourself as beneath any man! There, go forth now, my child, and act upon it. Then who may say what you will do, and with whom, and when?”

“Really, Irene? You think that there’s hope, that I shall not have always to pine after the uninteresting Jasper? Really and truly?”

A noise from the next chamber ended my moment of dazzling lucidity regarding my purpose in life.

“Godfrey!” Irene whispered, hastily rising. The expression of mingled relief, joy and anticipation on her face told me more than had all of the words we’d exchanged.

I, too, felt eager to ascertain his safety, and even more eager to learn about his outing. We rushed into the adjoining room to find one French window banging open. Godfrey was climbing over the stone balustrade outside it.

“Godfrey!” Irene pulled him into the room, and then through the door into the parlor. “How did it go?”

“Excellently, if you consider breaking a wine bottle over the head of an Algerian navigator and fleeing a mob of Monégasque police through the streets of the Condamine worthwhile.”

“Poor dear. Have some pȃté de foie gras. Some crackers. Breaking a wine bottle? How wasteful.” She poured him a full measure of Burgundy, which he downed like milk. He also gulped the disgusting crackers without complaint.

The lamplight revealed smudges of dirt upon his threadbare sailor’s jersey. Irene brushed at the revolting hair matted to his ear.

“Your sailor’s sunburn, applied by myself, has faded at the edges. Lucky that you visited dark bistros, not the open docks in daylight.”

“Lucky that I had the dark of night to shadow my retreat.”

“But you were accepted as what you appeared to be?”

“All too well,” Godfrey complained. “They are a brawl-minded lot in the bistros. When I inquired after our quarry, I got more questions than answers.”

“But—?” Irene seemed certain that more words would follow.

“But.... The two tars who accosted Nell and myself in the train are indeed known, and have been seen in town. ‘Gravesend Gerry and his Heathen,’ they are called. Many strange sailors sail into port these days, and so does one whom we know as no sailor whatsoever.”

“Who?” Irene demanded.

“Who, indeed, should I find in the old salts’ lair, asking questions like myself, but Louise’s wretched uncle? He didn’t recognize me.”

“Louise’s uncle,” I repeated. “He must have hounded the child to Monte Carlo.”

Godfrey shook his disreputable head. “It wasn’t Louise he was asking after. He was hunting the same quarry we sought—one seaman, Gerald by name. He didn’t get far, though, since he had no description, unlike me.”

“How lucky—” Irene stared into the distance as she mulled Godfrey’s tale. “—that Gerry and the Heathen decided to accost you two on the train. Otherwise, we’d be as lost as the uncle.”

“Aren’t we anyway?” I asked.

“No, we are not. I begin to see a common thread to this affair. Godfrey! You must go tomorrow to the registry of ships. And we must recruit Mr. Winter as a researcher as well; we have no time to waste!”

“In what guise do I go?” he asked sardonically. “Why, as yourself,” she replied. “Your handsome, brave, clever and kind self, of course.” He looked a bit taken aback at this surfeit of praise, but Irene galloped on. “I have it on impeccable authority that you are all these things. Surely even a registrar of ships will succumb to such virtue and tell you all we wish to know. If not, I myself will have to persuade
him
.”

Of the next few days’ activities I was mercifully kept ignorant. Irene recruited me as a sort of governess again, for into my hands was given the shepherding of Louise. Now that her formidable uncle had been seen about the harbor, she must be kept out of sight.

With her customary appropriation of all decisions, Irene ordered Louise and myself to holiday at one of the picturesque villages halfway up the mountainside. So much for “three heads are better than one.” How she decided to trust us two to ourselves, I cannot say, but Louise’s young man was required in Monaco, so it was a sisterly jaunt we made to the simple village of Eze.

Louise brought a sketch pad, and I my diaries. We spent placid days sitting atop the bluffs, gazing on the Mediterranean’s frowzy surface, munching picnic lunches of sausage and cheese. It was, if I may say so, quite a bohemian existence, and the most pleasurable part of my sojourn in France.

Louise, I found, despite her impetuous flight with the young American, a most delightful and docile girl. She felt keenly her aunt’s predicament and asked me many questions of that lady’s state of health and mind.

“She is a woman determined to endure,” I said at last. “May the Lord have mercy on your uncle.”

“Is he a bad man, do you think? I have never liked him, but he
is
my uncle.” A wisp of wind blew a hat ribbon over her shoulder like a strand of cherry-colored hair.

It was quite pleasant to be consulted so earnestly. Certainly there was little of that when Irene was about. “It is difficult to say. He is a hard man, I would judge, in his disowning of your father.”

“Perhaps he is in the neighborhood because he feels it his duty to find me.”

I found myself smiling the smile Irene offered me on occasion. “It is good to think as well as one can of one’s uncle. But it is more likely that his motives serve himself, not duty.”

She bent her head to her sketch pad for some moments. “Mademoiselle Huxleigh—”

“Nell, please.”

“Nell. I have been very happy here. I do not like Paris, I have discovered.”

“My sentiments exactly.”

“Really? Then when Caleb and I marry, it would not be so dreadful if I went to the United States with him? Aunt would—”

“Aunt would understand. But first we must settle your uncle’s role in this affair. We cannot abandon your aunt with your ‘death’ still hanging over her head, or in danger of your uncle’s anger.”

“What exactly is ‘this affair’?”

“We are not certain, which is why it is an ‘affair.’ Perhaps it is an assassination attempt—”

“No!”

“—or some scheme to defraud you of money due you.”

“I am an heiress? I can do as I please?”

“You most certainly cannot. Not even the duchess can do as she pleases, and she is an heiress to make all others pale.”

“She has been very good to Caleb and myself, as have you and Madame and Monsieur Norton.” Louise suddenly giggled. “Oh, it is not funny, for I felt most terribly desperate that day, but poor Monsieur Norton. I fear I was most ungrateful to him for saving me from the Seine.”

“Godfrey has a gift for surviving ingrates.”

Louise drew herself up. “If I am an heiress, I will give him a reward for saving my life.”

“That is most responsible of you,” I said with a smile.

“There is no danger to what they are doing, do you think?”

“A little perhaps, but your American seems braced for it. And I can assure you that Irene thrives upon it, and Godfrey survives it quite adequately.”

“And you, Nell?”

“I abhor it. Danger is unpredictable. It tends to make a fool of one.” I envisioned myself swinging from the snake-draped gasolier in the railway carriage. “It is unnecessary to a well-regulated life.”

“This is more fun than danger,” Louise said with a sudden dimpling smile. What an adorable child she was, after all. She handed me her sketch pad. “What do you think?”

I studied a pencil portrait of myself. “It’s quite good, but I don’t think my nose is so long.”

“I had to change it to make the pince-nez fit. Spectacles are dreadfully difficult to draw.”

“So I see. As are collar pins, apparently.”

“Do you think they will tell us when we get back?”

“Tell us what?”

“Tell us everything that they did, they saw, they learned. It is exciting to think of so many people acting on my behalf.”

“No, Louise. They will tell us only what pleases them. That is why they have sent us here to the country. But we shall have our revenge.”

“How so?” she asked with twenty-year-old innocence. I smiled conspiratorially. “We shall enjoy ourselves.”

Chapter Twenty-two

A
B
IT OF
B
LACKMAIL

My bucolic
idyll ended when Caleb Winter arrived at our rustic pension that night to assume the duty of safeguarding Louise. The search at the registry of ships was not done; apparently my clerical prowess was called for, or so I was told.

I reluctantly took Caleb’s hired coach back down the precipitous corniche road to the Hotel de Paris, leaving the lovebirds to share the attractions of the mountainside unchaperoned, and arriving so late that I merely greeted Irene and Godfrey in their rooms before retiring to my own chambers.

We three breakfasted early the next morning. I was eager to catch up on Irene and Godfrey’s investigations and looked forward to attacking the musty documents at the registry of ships. There is something about old papers that I find irresistible. Imagine my disappointment when I learned I was not to see that fountainhead of official foolscap after all: a summons to the duchess’s villa came during breakfast, in the person of a harried Dr. Hoffman.

“It is urgent, Madame!” the personable physician told Irene, refusing the seat she urged upon him. His lively eyes paused on Godfrey and myself. “Monsieur. Mademoiselle.”

So polite, these French; they must observe the social amenities even while bearing dire news.

“What has happened?” Godfrey wanted to know.

Dr. Hoffman’s worried eyes belied his shrug. “I must let the duchess tell you the particulars. But the blackmailer has made clear the price of his silence.”

“And?” Irene asked.

The doctor’s well-kept hands slapped his sides helplessly. “It is a most extraordinary—nigh impossible—demand. And Alice—” he glanced as if overconscious of my presence “—the duchess is frantic with worry.”

“We will come at once,” Irene promised. “Only wait in the hotel foyer until we have dressed.”

He nodded and bowed politely to me on his way out.

“I was minded to pursue the past today,” Irene murmured, “but it seems that the present has reared its ugly head.”

And so we ventured forth to witness the next act in the melodrama of the duchess’s life. When we arrived, we were shown directly to the sunny parlor. She herself had moved beyond puzzlement and indignation to numb bewilderment. She handed Irene a letter.

“This came—?” Irene was already reading the missive as she spoke.

“Sometime in the night.”