The Adventuress (35 page)

“Oh, he is very leveling,” Irene said impudently, taking Black Otto’s disreputable arm, thus causing strangers to eye our party. She merely laughed at their obvious disdain.

We returned to the hotel arm in arm, parting only on the promenade. Irene and I entered by the grand front lobby, while Godfrey skulked to the usual rear entrance.

We arrived at their parlor just after him. “A treat for Oscar,” he said, emptying something from his pocket into the basket.

I forbore asking what it was; certainly I would have to consult a herpetologist quickly, although I understood that snakes do not dine daily. If the creature was in my charge, I could not let it starve, however disgusting its appetite.

“Well.” Irene unpinned her rose-colored bonnet and lay it on the table next to our assembled sketches. “Crete, then. Jerseyman and his partners obviously washed ashore there, ironically making their destination in an unanticipated way. And the ‘horned beast’ can only be a representation of the Minotaur of classical legend and labyrinth. We shall require a detailed map of the Cretan coast, particularly the northern one. The compass rose we have assembled from the individual tattoos must provide some still-arcane clue to the exact location. Somehow we must make compass and map tell us their secrets.”

“I presume that when details are called for, you will turn to me?” Godfrey surmised.

“Indeed. And please dispense with Black Otto from now on. I find the blackened teeth wearing.”

Godfrey produced one last revealing grin and vanished into the bedchamber.

Irene tapped the drawings. “We know what and we know how, Nell, but we still do not know who.”

“Irene, you astound me. Certainly we know that resurrection of the lost treasure is the aim of the conspiracy, but how on earth are they to attempt it?”

“Not on earth at all, but by sea: the prince’s forthcoming oceanographic expedition. That is why the voyage must be diverted from Corsica, and why someone has resorted to blackmailing Alice to accomplish the diversion. Her royal lover’s research has provided the means of redeeming this sunken booty. His expedition will unwittingly become a reclamation project.”

“I see now why Alice is being blackmailed in this manner, but it’s impossible!”

“How so?”

“This will be an official scientific expedition. No one could conceal the act of raising a bulky treasure from ancient times. Such a deception would be impossible under the eyes of the prince, the crew, the captain—”

“Difficult is not a synonym for ‘impossible.’ You forget, Nell, being forthright like the prince himself, that others are not so direct. But one man in the diving party could move the treasure to shallow water so that cohorts might collect it easily by dark of night. Even an outsider like myself could arrange for Black Otto to become a crew member—”

“Irene! You would not allow Godfrey to attempt something so dangerous as deep-sea diving? This begins to resemble an episode from Mr. Verne’s
Twenty Thousand Leagues Beneath the Sea.
Have you no regard for Godfrey’s safety?”

“None,” the gentleman in question himself answered, coming from the other room while fastening his collar. He paused to let Irene supervise the artistic arrangement of his tie. “Irene, I refuse to be used as a piece of rather large bait off the coast of Crete, even in theory. You never asked, but I do not swim. Being expected to perform the unauthorized transport of unknown snakes is danger enough.”

“You do not swim?” Irene beamed at Godfrey, as if elated at discovering a new facet to his personal accomplishments. “Then we must bathe on the beach as soon as this vexing matter is done with. I will teach you to dog paddle.”

“A human being,” I put in, “was not made to so much as duck paddle.”

“On that I concur with Nell.” Godfrey took my intervention as an opportunity to snatch up his hat. “I must be on the trail of a map of Crete. Please leave something of the puzzle unsolved for my return.”

“I did not know that you swam,” I told Irene when he had gone.

She smiled nostalgically. “I did not so much swim as to appear to. My dear Nell, I was once a mermaid.”

“A mermaid?”

“Yes. For Merlin the Miraculous, a magician in Philadelphia. I wore a sea-green bathing costume that had a single lower extremity and I submerged myself into a large tank of water with my hair loose, blowing bubbles for exactly two hundred and eight seconds. That was how long it took for the Miraculous Merlin to replace me in the tank with a trained seal—or rather, for myself and the intelligent seal to accomplish the transference. The Miraculous Merlin actually had very little to do with the feat.”

“You blew bubbles, underwater, for two hundred and eight seconds? Without breathing?”

“Of course. Singers have excellent lung capacity, you know.”

A soft knock on the door interrupted this fascinating reminiscence that offered more than I had learned of Irene’s past in the seven years of our association.

“Godfrey?” I wondered.

It was only the maid with a letter.

I heard the envelope flap tear free and glimpsed the heavy parchment in Irene’s hand as she read; then came a sudden stiffening of her shoulders. I edged around her to view the missive, but she turned and went to the window.

“What is it, Irene?”

“Nothing of consequence, save the seal.” She lifted the envelope so I could see the fat blob of palace wax she had broken to open it. She read the contents again, quickly, then folded the message and replaced it in the envelope. “We must see Alice. Let us hope she is in when we call.”

“Now? But it is teatime.”

“My dear Nell, the Americans and the French do not take tea with such fervor as the British. We shall have to risk it.”

I naturally assumed that Alice’s message contained some new development and that I should shortly know every detail of it. And I was all too correct.

“My dear Irene, you are positively prescient!”

So the duchess greeted us, rustling into her yellow morning room in an ecru-lace tea gown that must have cost a thousand francs. “Please sit down, Nell, Irene. I have been told the date.”

One would have thought from Alice’s flushed cheeks and excited manner that the prince had chosen a wedding day.

“How were you told?” Irene wanted to know, shaking her head to refuse the tea Alice offered.

I accepted my cup with a genteel nod. Alice Heine might have been born American and have married French, but she knew how to select and serve a most satisfactory tea.

“By letter, of course,” she said, delivering my cup gracefully. “With that same seal that fascinates you, the same overpressed signet device. And the palace wax.”

“I believe we know how that is come by,” I put in.

Alice’s blue eyes widened, if that was possible.

“Or how it was come by almost twenty years ago, in quantity,” Irene modified. “Would that have been possible?”

Alice nodded. “Like all accoutrements of royal houses, the wax is a fusty old formula from forever ago. ‘A fusty old formula from forever ago’... that line would sing well in an operetta. Irene, your suggestion for installing an opera hall within the casino may well be possible. Then I will write an operetta to accompany my line and you shall sing it.”

“First we must settle the present business,” Irene rejoined. Enthusiasm ever tended to distract the duchess from present necessities; but then, there must be some reward in being a duchess. “So you would say that it is feasible for someone to have removed a sizable bit of sealing wax from the palace years ago?” Irene prompted.

“I presume so, were that someone familiar with palace routine. The wax is of secret manufacture, but it is hardly a state secret, though it was more significant during the French Revolution, when a forebear of Albert’s was imprisoned and the principality was temporary swallowed by the squat Corsican. It was used for clandestine communications.”

“Corsica.” Irene considered. “Luckily, on a global scale, the prince’s first destination is not far from Crete.”

“No. Nor is the date far off by which I am to have Albert leave for Crete. The twenty-second of September.”

“Not much time,” Irene murmured.

“For what?” Alice asked.

“To... make arrangements. So the wax is at least a hundred years old. That is the charm of a principality, I imagine; traditions do not change.”

“I wish that they would,” Alice answered with feeling. “Then Albert and I could marry.”

“Quite remarkable,” Irene noted, “the way the Grimaldi line extends back six centuries and has endured despite the frequent perambulations of national borders all around it. After my concert, Viscount D’Enrique explained the Grimaldi continuity and showed me several imposing paintings of princely ancestors.”

Alice rolled her eyes. “Oh, he is most charming, that one, but more interested in arts other than painting, my dear Irene.”

“So I gathered. His family, however, has been loyal to the prince for some time.”

“Ages,” Alice said with a very American groan. “That is the politics of this little principality. Such a lot of families with precedence. Victor—Viscount D’Enrique, that is—comes from a family of palace right-hand men; he has practically grown up with the prince. In fact—” Alice glanced cautiously in my direction “—when Albert was a royal carouser, Victor was his most constant companion. Albert, I am happy to say, has reformed completely. Victor, alas, is incorrigible.”

Irene produced a polite, distracted smile. I could tell that her agile mind had fastened on some crumb of information that had fallen from the duchess’s voluble lips and that she was busy milling it to the fineness of face powder. What it was, I could not imagine, but that is the constant state of the lesser intelligence.

At that moment the maid stepped in. “Dr. Hoffman, Your Grace.”

The doctor bustled in with his usual efficient manner. Even on social occasions, the good physician regarded people with the sharp eye of a diagnostician with symptoms on his mind.

“Alice, you look ravishing but a bit overexcited. My dear Mrs. Norton—” He took Irene’s hand warmly, then narrowed his dark eyes, studying her. “—you have not been sleeping enough lately. Your beauty is not faded, but it is a bit... crinkled.”

Irene laughed in great good temper. “You are quite right, Doctor, I have missed a bit of sleep recently.” She turned to wink at me. Only Irene could accomplish that vulgar gesture with supreme style.

The doctor next bent his attention on my humble self. “But Miss Huxleigh has lost no beauty sleep; she practically blooms! The Blue Coast is salubrious for you, Miss Huxleigh; it has given you fine color.”

Certainly I blushed as scarlet as a rose at his compliments, knowing my appearance to have been abetted by Irene’s beauty potions.

“This appears to be a council of war,” he jested, turning to survey the three of us. “Has anything happened?”

“Another letter has arrived,” Alice admitted, “saying that I must have Albert and his ship on the north coast of Crete by the twenty-second of September.”

“And what does the formidable Madame Norton think of this directive?”

Irene smiled again, that dreamy, removed smile that looks so innocent and is in fact so dangerous. “She thinks that Her Grace must follow the instructions precisely. My inquiry has hit heavy waters, Dr. Hoffman. I fear I can offer no advice but compliance.”

“From you and your charming companion, a course of compliance is all that is to be desired,” he said with a bow that had me blushing again.

“I think,” Irene said as we left the house moments later, “that the good doctor is harboring an admiration for you, Nell.”

“Impossible,” I murmured. “The duchess is a famous beauty, and you are even more deserving of that sobriquet. I am a wren in the company of birds of paradise. Besides, it is your theatrical tricks with my appearance.”

“Whatever,” she said airily. “I am married and Alice is sworn to be. You, though, are a single woman.”

“Irene! You cannot be serious! Dr. Hoffman is no doubt a dedicated man of medicine and most polite, but we will leave Monte Carlo and I will likely never see him again.”

“Oh, I am sure we will return. Someone must teach Godfrey to dog paddle; we appear to have no time for it this trip.”

“Irene!”

She stopped walking up the steep cobblestoned byway and turned to confront me. “Odd, isn’t it, that Alice persists in her attraction to men of science: first Dr. Hoffman on Madeira, then the doctor in Biarritz; now the prince, who is an oceanographer.”

“She is at least consistent in her preferences.” I was somewhat bewildered by the change of topic.

Irene’s face grew extremely pleased, as if I had just uttered some perfect pearl of philosophy. “Yes, people do not change, do they, in their preferences?”

“Not usually,” I said. “I, for one, shall never regard the odious Casanova with affection, nor could I ever have any strong attachment to a snake.”

Irene laughed. “You are a rare and discerning woman, Nell. You have no idea of the number of women who become intimately attached... to a snake!”

And off she went ahead of me, striding up the hill, humming an aria I didn’t recognize. I could only conclude that Irene had learned something that day—some fact, some clue—that she, and only she, could put to the proper, or improper, use.