The Adventuress (36 page)

Chapter Twenty-seven

S
EALED WITH
W
AX

FROM THE CASE NOTES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES

I miss
the fogs of London.

Watson, I suspect, would be pleased to know that my ventures abroad always bring home to me the rare affinity between my own rather melancholy nature and that of my nation’s great capital city.

One cannot think properly under a blazing Mediterranean sun, which is no doubt why pleasure-seekers flock to balmier climates. Curses, I say, upon sunny seas and starry skies, upon idle holiday mobs and fresh warm breezes as clean as a French laundress’s linen sheets.

Such relentlessly open and bright atmospheres are no proper milieu for the spawning of intelligent crime. Oh, the crimes of passion, certainly, can flourish here as floridly as do the native blossoms, but they are lurid events that run interminably in the papers and are as simple to solve as what comes after A,B,C. Even Lestrade could do it.

No, such sojourns as my current visit to Monte Carlo remind me forcibly of what delicious kinks, crooked as a black cat’s broken tail, crime can take on a lonely moor or in a crowded back alley of Saffron Hill. Give me smoky, stygian air, creeping damp, and a dank, rancid river fog running through it all; nights on which both murderer’s and victim’s breath leave a visible if ephemeral trail in the chill murk. Give me the devious schemes that arise when some four millions of people are crowded into a great spinning, creaking clockwork of a city.

Give me, in short, England, and let le Villard and his ilk bask in this filthy sunshine.

At least I have had an opportunity to acquaint le Villard with the full range of exact knowledge in which he is so lamentably lacking. Otherwise, I find him a quick study, with that Celtic intuition so useful to the policeman. As a translator, he is merely competent, but it is my hope that his work with my monographs will inspire him to emulate my methods, if he cannot equal my success. In truth, I am eager to have done with Monte Carlo and to proceed to the infinitely more important and intriguing affair that awaits me in a more northerly quarter of the globe.

However, I have committed to the Montpensier matter. The case took on some small interest when Édouard Montpensier disappeared from Paris with the circumstances of his niece’s banishment still pending.

Madame Montpensier’s distress, if possible, went up another note on the scale of hysteria.

“You are concealing something, Madame,” I challenged the lady brusquely.

She wrung her hands and looked left, right and down, at last, to the useless yellow spaniel in her lap. Then it came out: the flight of her niece with a young American admirer, the odd intervention of an English couple named Norton, her husband’s disappearance... despite the suspicious odor it lent
him
in the matter of his missing niece. And she told me of the letters that had arrived over the years, and of the English couple’s interest in these same missives.

It was child’s play to find the letters. My suspicions fastened, as had the Nortons’ previously, on the house’s large old library. Once there—Watson knows my methods and takes far more pleasure in detailing them than I—it was a simple matter to find the false shelf-back and the very documents behind them. The dust fields atop the books on that shelf had been recently disturbed by two sets of hands, one set remarkably dainty to be found at such a height.

Unlike the ubiquitous Nortons, I removed the papers. My examination produced several interesting facts as to the types of persons—yes, there was more than one— who had written them, from where they had been posted, et cetera. I need not go into detail here; Watson can ferret all that out should I decide to tell him anything about the affair, which depends on how secret it needs to be kept.

The papers were of no interest except for their variety of origin: a cheap oatmeal-pulp stock attainable only in Calais; a limp parchment with a meaningless watermark that is manufactured in Barcelona; and a flimsy, pale- blue notepaper of wretched texture that I have seen emanate only from the South American nation of Argentina. What intrigued me most was the sealing wax, a particularly creamy variety that blended the colors of black and crimson into a marbleized, swirling pattern. The quality of the wax far surpassed the quality of the envelopes, the paper, and the literary level within.

So sealing wax, rather than missing heiresses who stand to inherit no money, vanishing uncles and falsely murderous aunts, is the one sure strand in this tangle. A physical clue is always the most solid. I have traced the wax to a small stationer’s establishment in the Condamine at Monte Carlo on the Cote d’Azur, and to that shop I will go tomorrow.

Chapter Twenty-eight

B
ARED WITH
I
MPUNITY

Godfrey had
returned from his errand with not one but four maps of the Cretan coastline, each drawn on heavy parchment and folded until the creases had obliterated some of the ink. The maps covered the parlor table like ungainly dressmaker’s patterns. I was dismayed by the profusion of these large guides to the island’s silhouette.

“So many fussy ins and outs per inch! I may as well attempt to decipher Battenberg lace,” I said, firmly applying the pince-nez to the bridge of my nose.

An arm embraced my shoulders. “You will do it, Nell! You have an impeccable eye for detail.”

Despite Irene’s confidence, I surveyed the intimidating tablecloth of overlapping maps with little appetite. “And if no length of coastline matches the configuration of any of the tattooed letters’ scrolls?”

“Then we shall have eliminated
that
idea and can concoct a new one,” she said cheerfully. “You will have performed a most valuable service.”

I groaned, a sound that escalated as I saw Godfrey peep into the snake’s basket by the window. “Godfrey, are you feeding the creature something dreadful?”

He smiled as he latched the lid. “Something delectable, to snakes at any rate.”

I could not rebuke him further, being grateful that he at least tended the creature’s needs so that I should not have to. I began work immediately, and tedious it was. The thick pad of tracing paper that the young people purchased had struck me as wasteful when first I saw it. Now I was tearing through it, tracing intricacies of coastline, then reducing my traceries enough to compare them with the intertwined scrolls of the N, E, O and S.

Yet it captured me, the enormity of the task and the remote possibility that I could actually demonstrate some synchronicity between Crete’s coastline and these fanciful scrolls of the late Singh’s manufacture.

I declined to join Irene and Godfrey for dinner but supped on onion soup, roast beef, cheese and a vanilla pudding sent up on a tray. What had begun as the search for a needle in a haystack or a jig in a whirligig soon proved to be a matter of straining grains of sand through cheesecloth. Too many inlets mocked the curves of the scrollwork to make the one answer apparent.

My taskmasters returned in an expansive mood, perfumed with the dubious scents of postprandial brandy and Turkish cigarettes.

“Nell! Still working?” Irene said. “You shall get the headache.”

“I
have
the headache.”

“Then you must rest,” Godfrey prescribed, coming over to grasp the back of my chair.

“Only another minute! I must copy this last curlicue of coastline; this may be the very spot we seek... oh, but not quite. Perhaps one more tracing—”

The chair shook in a light, admonishing way. “My dear Nell, it is past midnight,” Godfrey said. “We had no idea that you would work so long.”

“Midnight!” I pushed the ebbing pince-nez back on my nose.

Then I frowned at my companions’ flushed faces and celebratory air. Godfrey, with his raven hair and pale gray eyes, looked as devastating in the crisp black-and-white of men’s evening dress as any man I had seen. Marie Antoinette’s diamond flashed at Irene’s throat, barely competing with the Worth evening gown of jade-green brocaded tulle that bared her shoulders and swirled around her figure in a sea foam of swags, draperies, and folds. The Tiffany pin that Godfrey had given her in Paris, of an intertwined musical note and a key, reposed on the tulle at the cleft of her bosom.

“You are up very late,” I commented.

“So are you.” Godfrey pulled back the chair with me on it, then firmly took my elbow. “You must give it a rest, Nell, and return to your rooms. The maps will be here tomorrow.”

“Of course, but I am very near—”

“Wonderful!” Irene spoke with hearty insincerity, brushing my cheek with a good-night kiss. “We must see it all... in the morning.”

In the passage, feeling quite like a bird flushed from its favorite cage, I paused to pat my skirt pocket for the key to my room. From behind the parlor door there issued the sound of soft laughter—not at my cartographic obsession, in fact having nothing to do with tattoos or maps. And then it abruptly stopped.

By morning my eyes were refreshed and I saw new possibilities in my tracings. Alas, Godfrey and Irene did not.

“These look like hieroglyphs.” Godfrey squinted at several sheets, then set them down again.

“More like decorative braid,” Irene agreed to disagree. “Perhaps I’ve set you on an impossible task,” she told me with regret.

For one whose talents were creatively expressive and came naturally, the notion of repetitive, boring work was appalling. Now the size of the assignment she had given me was weighing on Irene’s ordinarily cast-iron conscience.

“Perhaps we—you—should drop the notion,” she said. “Alice has invited us to the palace.”

“What will Godfrey do?”

He smiled at my question. “What else would Godfrey do in a landscape of sun and sea and waving palm trees? I will seclude myself in the Office of Maritime Records and hunt for a shipwreck near Crete around eighteen sixty-eight.”

“Irene never gives you any amusing assignments,” I said.

“Not ‘never’,” he replied, giving her a glance I could not read. “And I prefer the Office of Maritime Records to the palace. It harbors some amazing old gents with even more amazing old stories.” With that and the addition of his hat, he was off for the day upon as dry a mission as my own.

Irene left me to my tracery, retiring to her bedchamber and warning me that I must stop for lunch and then be ready to stroll to the palace for a most interesting demonstration. She had an odd look upon her face; it made me wonder if she was on the verge of a discovery that would render Godfrey’s and my own work moot.

My hand was cramped and my neck stiff by the late forenoon. I was only too pleased to lay aside pencil and pen and refresh myself in my room. When I collected Irene, I learned the reason for her withdrawal all morning.

She stood before me a fashion plate, magnificent in a black silk gown brocaded with clusters of pink barley spikes. Pink ruffles ran up and down the skirt and bodice and festooned a black lace parasol. Neither the broad girdle of pink that encircled and emphasized her slender waist nor the black velvet bonnet with its explosion of pink bows at one ear did anything to detract from the utter, feminine splendor of her toilette.