The Adventuress (33 page)

I shook my head. “Perhaps Irene will have some insight when she returns from the palace.”

She did not do so until late afternoon. The young people had left long before that to return to their—separate, I am happy to say—hotels and recover from the arduous and wakeful night.

I attempted to nap in my bedchamber but found myself staring at the ceiling, an elaborate expanse plastered with overweight cherubs. Nothing, not even a heavenly vista however ill-executed, could persuade me to close my eyes. I felt exceedingly nervous, forcing myself to remain supine, listening to the birds’ aggravating chatter outside my window and waiting for our party to assemble again for another unpredictable night.

A light knock on my door roused me from a sort of waking stupor. I answered it to find Irene bonneted in rose faille, bowed with chiffon under the chin, and clad in a black-lace fichu from shoulder to peplum, through which her faille visiting gown in the shade known as Rose Du Barry peeped most charmingly. A pity her urgent manner did not match her amiable ensemble.

“A message from Godfrey awaited my return to the hotel,” said she breathlessly. “We must meet him at a café near the bay.”

“A café?”

“Quickly! Fetch your bonnet. I am fearfully late in returning from the palace. Godfrey’s message has been waiting for more than an hour.”

I pinned my bonnet on askew and tied its chin ribbons tightly. The wind would blow hard nearer the water. In minutes Irene and I were rushing down the steep streets to a destination known as Le Café de Mouettes. Monaco has now become renowned for its cafes, but then such places were barely respectable for women, although I was happy to see Irene going out, for once, as herself.

The day was very fine. Clouds scudded through the sea-blue sky as gracefully as the full-sailed yachts puffing about the harbor below. Monte Carlo was hardly the commercial seaport that Marseilles was. No, this blue bay at the base of great white cliffs of stone studded with stucco residences was a Croesus’ port. Still, sailors were required to make all those pretty boats go; nearer the water, a whiff of the briny deep wafted among the cafes, bistros and fishmongers.

We found Godfrey in his Black Otto guise. How soon Irene had subverted him to her nefarious devices! He was sitting with the elusive Gerry, the villain I had christened Jerseyman, at a large, round table covered in a green-and-white checked cloth.

Jerseyman seemed shriveled and morose now. I marveled that he had ever had the power to terrify. He nodded meekly when we ladies sat down, his only courtesy. A tankard before him was filled with some murky liquid. We were too far from England for it to be ale.

“No sign?” Irene asked.

Godfrey shook his head.

“He’s over the rail and into the arms of Mother Ocean, ma’am,” Jerseyman intoned. “Dragged out to sea and down the coast, feedin’ the fishes, poor old Singh, that never ate a living thing in his life. Some heathen quirk of his kind, I guess.”

“Who would kill him?” Irene asked.

Jerseyman shot her a glance but remained silent. “One of his Quarter?” she persisted.

The sailor’s face grew as jaundiced as his eye whites. He stiffened suspiciously. “
You
was on the train at the last! Likely overheard that. No, it weren’t none of our Quarter. We’re not ones to do in our own mates.”

“How were the Quarters selected? By station? Chance? Choice?”

The man hoisted his tankard. A waiter approached our table, looking disapproving. No doubt the sight of rough seafaring men in the company of gentlewomen was uncommon. Godfrey ordered Vichy water for Irene and myself. It soon arrived—in tankards!

“Lots,” said the Jerseyman suddenly, after a deep swallow of his dark, unknown libation. “We drew lots. But most of our Quarter were the lowly and unlucky folk. Montpensier was the only gent, and he done himself in early.”

“You and Singh were most thoughtful to inform the authorities of his identity, so he shouldn’t die unknown.”

“Singh didn’t think of it,” the man said sourly. “Them from his country don’t look on the ceremonies of death the same as the white man. He was just a messenger. I figured they’d forget about it if someone like Singh, who didn’t speak any Christian lingo, brought the message. Young Montpensier was a decent sort, never looked down on the rest o’ us. As for the others, one or two stopped showin’ up in port years ago. They weren’t shipmates like me and Singh always were. Maybe the last of ’em’ll blow in now.”

“Your compass must have had a center,” Irene speculated. “Someone who kept track of all the Quarters through the years.”

“Poor old Singh,” the man said, ignoring her remark. “As solid a mate as a salt can have. We hacked round the Horn together, by God. Now some coward sticks him for a few sous he didn’t even have. I always carry the coin. I was off talkin’ to your man here,” he added with a glance at me, “or I’d been there to give them that did in Singh the what-for.”

He bent to lift a basket from the floor to the tabletop. I recognized it with a thrill of horror. “This’ll be all old Singh had, this damned little green vine snake. Treated it like a child, you know. Petted it and called it names in that long-syllabled lingo of his and fed it warm milk in a saucer.” He lifted the latch and peered in. “Don’t know how long it’s been since it had a bite—”

“Please!” I beseeched.

His bleary eye noted me. He shrugged and shut the basket again. “Harmless, it is, just like Singh. I always looked out for him. Lots of folk don’t like to traffic with foreign ways, but Singh was no more harm than a fruit fly. Pity him going off like that so soon before—”

His eyes darted around, suddenly sharp. He drank from his tankard, the fingers of his left hand idly petting the serpent’s basket. I gasped when I noticed that the man was missing the middle finger on that hand, a phenomenon I had been too distressed to observe while on the train.

“I don’t think that Mr. Singh died randomly,” Irene said. “I believe he was murdered for his portion of the Quarter, like the other two sailors.”

“Other two? Which?” Jerseyman frowned with anxious suspicion.

Godfrey answered. “One was an old man found in the early eighties in London. Lean, but strong. Missing a middle finger on his left hand and tattooed with the letter ‘O.’ Despite a powerful effort to rescue him, he drowned himself in the Thames, as if the Hounds of Hell were after
him
.”

“Grimes!” The sailor huddled into his jersey until they both seemed shrunken. “ ’Tis not true! ’Tis some game you’re playin’ with me. Grimes was lost overboard somewhere in the Adriatic.”

Irene nodded grimly. “Lost overboard, all right, from the Thames passenger steamer
Twilight.
We saw him dead, I and my friend here.” She nodded at me.

The man grasped the wicker basket as if clinging to a piece of flotsam and gazed at me. “Truly, Missus, truly? You said you’d not lie, even to defend your own husband.”

“Godfrey’s not... I’m not...” The misconception was too ingrained to deny it now. “No, I wouldn’t lie. As my friend says, I saw the man—the awful absence of his finger, the presence of the tattoo, still wet from the river.”

“How murdered?” he demanded.

Irene shook her head. “He acted as if he wanted to drown, an odd impulse for a seaman, don’t you think? Perhaps his food or drink had been doctored with some potion that unseats reason. Perhaps he saw someone pursuing him whom he had no desire to confront.”

“Grimes was old,” the sailor said doubtfully.

“The man these two ladies saw recently pulled from the Seine was not,” Godfrey added.

Jerseyman looked at him, waiting.

“Missing a middle finger and bearing a tattoo of the letter ‘S’,” Godfrey confirmed.

The man plunged his seamed face into his hands. “That’s it, then. I’m the last of our Quarter. And Paddy must have been on the way here if he was as far inland as Paris. Recently, you say? By God—” The face that lifted to regard us had hardened until the eyes were as bright and as black as the snake’s. “—if there’s foul doings afoot, I won’t have it! Our Quarter’s the one that’s been cast to the four winds and the seven seas all these years, trustin’ to the others to do right, trustin’ to our betters,” he said bitterly. “There’s no common interest between common folk and highborn sorts, save for young Montpensier; he’d have played fair.”

“Perhaps that’s why he is dead,” Irene said quietly. “His death may not have been a suicide, either. I think it unlikely, although assassination would be impossible to prove at this late date.”

“By God! Then it’s a miracle I sit here a living man, ma’am. But why Singh, poor devil? He never even had a proper share. I was going to hook him in on my part. He couldn’t say so much as ‘good day’ in English or French or any other white man’s lingo. He followed his ways and hurt no one. And if his goddesses sometimes had as many arms as an octopus, whose business was it but his? Who’d he hurt? Why Singh?”

The man’s grief for his fellow sailor was as sincere as it was roughly expressed. I was minded to say something comforting along the lines of “generations of grass mown down,” or “resting in the bosom of the Almighty,” but I wasn’t sure that the bosom of the late Mr. Singh’s almighty was the sort one rested in.

“Perhaps,” said Godfrey in a kindly way that warred with Black Otto’s grim features, “you will tell us the entire tale.”

Oddly enough, Jerseyman seemed to take some comfort in Godfrey’s bearded, scarred face. He nodded solemnly. “I’ll tell. I’ve wanted to spill it on a hundred nights in a thousand seaports, for it’s a story to make Sinbad drool... and we seventeen forced to keep separate and silent about it so long. Now I’m the last o’ my Quarter; likely I’ll draw my lungs full of water or blood with no one to avenge me.

“I’ll tell, by God, though we all lose by it. It’s not worth the lives of my Quarter, nor so much as the soul that stirs Singh’s little snake here. Strange, but the thinkin’ of it, the waitin’ and the dreamin’... the knowin’ that Singh and me, someday, would come back here and pick it up like a plum out of a Christmas pudding—well, that was the taste of it, ladies. That was the sweet and the bitter part. It was the idea of the adventure rather than the rewards that made it worth the fingers all we sailors sacrificed so’s we’d be recognized if we turned toes up some day, for our closest relation could claim the prize, if we had any relations who’d care to acknowledge us.”

“That’s why Louise was only tattooed,” Irene said softly.

“I’m not about to nick the finger of a little lady like that! Not needed, anyways. We left the father out of that, too. ’Twas a sailors’ pact. A tattoo is a wee tingle and sting and a bottle of brandy. Fingers, now that’s a sweating man’s chore. Oh, I drank right royal the night Grimes took mine. Held me hand out and he cut nice as you please between the fingers—no easy job. Nerve needed on both sides, yes indeed. Never missed it, though, and most folks never noticed it was gone.”

“I confess that I did not, in the train.”

The man smiled at me rather condescendingly, considering his position. “You was more concerned over this little rope of muscle and scales, Missus. Ah, I’ll miss old Singh, and the odd part is, we never talked the same lingo. We just knew, I guess, what the other was about.”

“I said before,” Irene said, “there must be some central party to whom you all reported, who notified you when to assemble again.”

“I heard you. And you’re right. But it’s a good tale and I’ll tell it as I’ve always wanted to, with a full tankard before me and open eyes and ears all around and the sea within sight.”

Godfrey took the hint and signaled the waiter for a fresh round of Vichy water and... whatever. Jerseyman hunched over his basket and his fresh tankard and looked to each of us in turn.

“It was a pleasure jaunt, for the passengers at least. For us sailors, it was pull and haul and trim and sweat. A pretty swell on the sea, this very one that blinks so blue and innocent just beyond the piers. Almost twenty years ago. Little Louise was newborn, and this small snake right here was likely thousands of generations from its getting.

“We lifted anchor out of Monte Carlo, bound for Crete. Oh, the ladies was twirling their parasols on deck, and we barefoot boys was playing monkeys in the rigging, and the captain was struttin’ afore the fancy folk on deck. We tacked merrily down the boot of Italy and eastward to the Aegean for two days. The third dawned unlucky.

“A wind came up, fast as a clap of hands. Ahead of the sirocco season, but black and bitter for all that. Well, it was pipe-my-boys-jolly for some time, an’ all the slackin’ of sail and tackin’ of ship didn’t keep us from being hit amidships like that—boom! Knocked bloody over by a wave as high as Big Ben. Off it sped for the shore and we sat swamped and sinkin’. We swam for it, those as could. Those as couldn’t, or those as couldn’t find some flotsam to cling to—well, there was a lot of parasols afloat, and a wide-brimmed straw hat or two.

“We dragged ourselves ashore by ones and twos, those of us left. Singh came aground but thirty yards from meself. Montpensier was washing back and forth in the surf, so Singh and me pulled him out. At first we didn’t know where we was, and it could have been the Greek isles, or Crete, for all we knew, the wind had blown us about that much. The skies was still scrubbed dirty gray and the sand kicked up like to rub your skin off your body.

“Lucky we was, though, Singh and me and the young Frenchman. Found a cave. Started a fire and settled in to rest up and dry off. By daylight we found the others bit by bit—some passengers, no women; none of the ladies lived. No captain, no first mate, a few sailors. We had to stick together until a ship would come by and pluck us off whatever we was on, and it didn’t much matter, island or coastline, for it was deserted through and through, and little in the way of fresh water.

“But the rest joined us in the cave we three had hunkered in the first night. Must have been almost twenty of ’em, and we never learned each other’s names. It was while we was settlin’ in the cave, pushing deep with our makeshift torches, for fire was easier to come by than water there, that we stumbled upon a shallow pool. Well, there was drinking on bellies and faces dipped in to the eyebrows—and brackish sour water it was, but still less salty than Mother Mediterranean.