The Adventuress (46 page)

“We will be leaving soon,” she said, surprising me.

“I trust your cabinet photograph of a certain royal Bohemian personage and yourself rests safely.”

“I have destroyed it.”

Mr. Holmes frowned. “Can you trust the king to forget you?”

“It is not necessary. I have forgotten him.”

He smiled to himself. “He has not forgotten you. Only recently he sent me a gold snuffbox in token of his undying gratitude. For nothing.”

“In place of the ring you would not accept?”

“How did you know that?” Mr. Holmes regarded me for an instant, then turned back to Irene. “Your accomplices need tutoring. I perceived that I was followed to the chemist’s.”

“I was not able to do it myself. But then, you wished to attract our attention.”

“True. I wanted to be led somewhere, and I found you at the bottom of it. I hoped to learn more of your real purpose in being here.”

“And have you?”

“Time will tell, although I do not have much of it to waste on a tangle of the sort I suspect you are following. More urgent matters call. However, if you persist in crossing my path, it will not be to your ultimate advantage, I assure you. Prior acquaintance will not sway me from my duty.”

“Nor will it me.” Irene rose on that avowal.

Mr. Holmes studied her face as he might a Gainsborough portrait in a gallery. There was much of the character reader in his scrutiny, but something also of the connoisseur admiring an elusive treasure.

Irene smiled slowly, her beauty and her certainty radiating like sunlight. It was the power of the performer that she unleashed on the famous detective. If he was not totally immune, neither was he susceptible.

He bowed to take his leave, first nodding at me. “I bid you good morning, Madam Irene.”

“I have already found it so,” she said.

Then he was gone, his footsteps fading into the general hubbub around us.

“Irene! You heard him. We must meddle no more!”

“Nonsense, Nell. Even Sherlock Holmes could not make swift sense of the many threads we investigate. When Louise sends a cablegram from America to her aunt, his interest in the affair will be satisfied.”

“He will not take crumbs when he can have the whole cake; you heard him yourself. He strikes me as a man of his word.”

“Of course he is, but I am too far ahead of him. He works from the narrow tip of the iceberg downward; I have plumbed the depths and need only to crown my achievement with the final peak of revelation.”

Irene paused to let her features reflect her triumphal apex of emotion. “And now I am at last ready to orchestrate a climax to our diffuse drama that will amaze and baffle one and all, thanks to Mr. Sherlock Holmes.”

Chapter Thirty-eight

T
HROUGH
A
LICE’S
W
INDOW
G
LASS

Madame Sarah
Bernhardt held a most atypical soirée two nights later in the salon of her friend Alice, Duchesse de Richelieu, at the instigation of another friend, Madam Irene Norton.

Only a carefully chosen few were invited: the hostess, Godfrey and Irene, myself, the odious Viscount D’Enrique, Dr. Hoffman, the captain of the prince’s yacht (one Jules Rousseau), Jerseyman—and Oscar, the ingratiating serpent.

Not every guest’s appearance was voluntary. Viscount D’Enrique, I understood, had been loath to have anything to do with the woman whose “son” had bested
him
in a duel until Alice made clear that his future good graces with the ruling family of Monte Carlo depended upon his attendance.

Jerseyman also was reluctant, having been dredged by Godfrey from some musty bistro, where he still mourned his dead companion with a wine bottle. He looked rather the worse for it, despite the clean suit jacket that had been forced upon his spare form. A wrinkled red kerchief substituted for a tie and collar at his stringy throat, making him more than ever resemble an organ-grinder’s over-attired monkey.

Outside the villa, the heavy sapphire-velvet curtain of the Monte Carlo night was ruffled by the winds that can buffet the Blue Coast. The shutters rattled, while heavy foliage scratched at the walls for entrance.

Whether by accident or by Irene’s native sense of drama, the ladies’ attire was a study in somber tones. The three other than myself wore shades of mourning, although gentlemen would hardly note that. Alice was in a becoming lavender, Sarah in a changeable purple silk, and Irene in a rich black-and-heliotrope watered taffeta. They resembled a youthful convening of the Three Fates, if those mythical hags could be imagined in the prime of life.

Perhaps it was my imagination—my presentiment that at this artificial social occasion, old puzzles would be solved and a new culprit revealed as by a magician’s agile hand—but the scene seemed painted in the jaded hues of the decadent bistro artists. The ample candlelight hardened Alice’s pastel features and sharpened Sarah Bernhardt’s white-powdered, feral face to a skull-like mask. Irene, among them the darkest of hair and dress, seemed as solemn as a heavily robed judge.

I, of course, wore my old mouse-gray India silk figured with yellow blossoms; since the comedy of Irene’s assumptions concerning Dr. Hoffman’s purported romantic interest in me, I had renounced female fripperies... and was not much noticed.

By the time we assembled in Alice’s parlor, evening candlelight had dimmed its sunny color to a sad jaundice. I no longer wondered that yellow was sometimes considered a decadent color.

Alice served saffron champagne in crystal flutes, which was sipped with a kind of nervous temperance.

No servant entered the room, adding to the sense of conspiracy. Dr. Hoffman took the champagne tray from the butler at the double doors and brought it around to the guests himself.

Jerseyman squinted his disgust at this effete liquor, but wrapped a grimy hand around a glass stem anyway. The viscount clutched his flute as if wishing for a weapon to replace it. Captain Rousseau, the only newcomer to this cast of characters, about whose inclusion Irene had been extremely sphinx-like, sat stiffly on a fragile Directoire sofa, the foot of his glass balanced upon his knee.

Oscar contented himself with decorating Sarah’s shoulders and disconcerting the guests by raising his head every so often to hiss mournfully.

“I confess, gentlemen,” the Divine Sarah began in a throbbing tone, “to having lured you here under false pretenses. This evening’s amusement will not be the usual mélange of frivolous chatter and gaiety, but rather a demonstration conducted by my esteemed friend and sister of the stage, Madame Irene Norton.”

Irene bowed her head modestly. “Captain Rousseau, I present this portion of a map. Does it mean anything to you?”

She handed him my sketch of that portion of the Cretan shoreline I had matched to the compass rose.

The captain, a stout man in his fifties with old-fashioned grizzled mutton chops, extracted a pair of spectacles and frowned at the paper Irene offered.

“ ’Tis a map, all right. This coastline could be anywhere on the seven seas, Madame.”

“It belongs to this one.”

The captain’s head shook somberly. “A mere patch of a map tells me nothing. Have you any notion of how many jagged coastal miles of North Africa, not to mention the boot of Italy and the nose of Greece, skirt the Mediterranean?”

“No,” Irene admitted sweetly. She took back my sketch of the pertinent coastline and offered it to Jerseyman.

The sailor precariously set down his champagne flute and smoothed the paper over his sailcloth-trousered knee. He reversed the map, then tilted it left and right, after which he looked up with a grin.

“Aye, that’s the spot, Madam. Fox-Eye Bay. I’ve spent half me lifetime staring at the image of that curlicue of coast on me shut eyelids. That’s where I was swept ashore when we floundered in sixty-nine.”

“I don’t doubt it.” Irene turned to the captain. “I wished to demonstrate, sir, that while general seamanship does not qualify one to recognize every bit of coast roundabout, even a simple sailor can commit a particular spot to memory if he has reason to.”

“There’s no mystery in it, Madame,” the captain said gruffly, pulling a pipe from his frock-coat pocket. “Seamanship’s a matter of memory at bottom, as well as a nose for the weather.”

“Oh, but there is a mystery in it, an old and rather dangerous one. My husband, Godfrey, shall continue.”

Handsome in his evening dress, Godfrey stood like a robed barrister at the bar, a paper of notations in his hand. “We have,” said he, “heard a tale of treasure from this, er, thirsty seafaring gentleman before us.” He indicated Jerseyman, who was in the process of draining his glass.

“He told of a pleasure boat that sank nearly twenty years ago, drowning many of the passengers and crew. The survivors, cast ashore, discovered, purely by the accident of their marooning, a massive golden hoard.”

Sarah Bernhardt came suddenly upright on the sofa onto which she had subsided.

The duchess was also shocked. “Irene said nothing of this!”

“That is why it is a mystery,” my friend herself answered them, “and why we meet here to solve it.”

“But you said you would settle the matter of my... private affairs possibly becoming public.”

“And I will, dear Alice, but first things first.” Irene leaned back in her chair with a lighted cigarette and composed herself to listen once more to Godfrey.

He strode to the fireplace to rest a hand upon the carved white-marble mantel. “Whether these artifacts were a Mogul hoard sunk in the fifteenth century, or plunder from ancient Carthage, it was obvious to all the survivors that they were beyond price.

“They also shortly went beyond reach, for an after-gale from the same tremendous storm that had capsized the survivors’ vessel inundated the cavern in which they’d uncovered the treasure. A wave as high as a mast washed the cave and its secrets down the coast’s hidden underwater slopes to a burial as sudden and capricious as its exhumation after all these centuries.”

“What a tale, my dear Godfrey! I must have a play written from it.”

“Alas, my dear Sarah,” he rejoined with a bow, “there were no women survivors.”

“It does not matter! I will play the heroic part, whatever the gender.”

“There are no heroes, only survivors and schemers.”

“Then I shall play the blackest villain among them!”

“Is there such a one?” Alice wondered.

“Certainly,” Irene said. “You are being blackmailed; that alone is a villainous act. It is but the latest of such committed by the one who has directed this scheme since its inception twenty years ago.”

At this announcement we regarded each other in suspicion, for clearly this person must be among us, or there would be no point to the evening.

Then Irene nodded to me. “Nell, if you would be so kind as to pass the example of your handiwork among the party...”

I produced my drawing of the compass rose pieced together from the tattooed letters.

Then she took up the tale: “So there were almost twenty men, of high and low birth, cast shoeless together on an unknown coast with a treasure they had glimpsed but seen vanish from their grasp.

“It was not many years later that the first clue to the group’s existence surfaced—or sank, rather. For that twilight evening in the early eighties, when Bram Stoker attempted to save an apparent suicide from the Thames, was the beginning of my acquaintance with the... ah, case, shall we call it?”

Irene smiled as she stood and began to walk around the circle of listeners, always the actress and, as such, careful to address each one in turn. She paused before Jerseyman.

“There were some irregularities in the death, for Bram was unable to revive the man. First was the matter of his missing finger—the middle one on the left hand, commonly called the second finger, since the thumb is disregarded. The finger was completely severed to the first knuckle, which struck me even at the time as deliberate, for no accident is so neat.

“Then there was the tattoo I discovered upon the dead man’s chest. Nell, will you pass around the first illustration? Even then my reliable companion recorded the anomalies we encountered.

“Strangest of all was the man’s behavior. Mr. Stoker saw him hurtle over the railing and into the water. He resisted all efforts to save him—and Bram is well over six feet in height and brawny besides. The man acted as if fleeing what Bram described as some ‘devilish pursuer.’ No one came forward to claim the victim or to edify the authorities as to his identity.

“It was not until Miss Huxleigh and I discovered a second body in the same condition being removed from the Seine several years later that I suspected that the two deaths were linked. We have little testimony as to the second man’s state of mind at the time of death, although the body bore bruises, but his left-hand middle finger had been similarly cut off and his chest was tattooed—with a different letter. Nell.”

I passed around the second initial, ‘
N’
, pleased by the polite mystification on their faces. One was feigning. Could it be the ever-on-stage actress, Sarah? The oily Viscount? The well-schooled but socially ambitious duchess? The loyal doctor and lover? The captain? The humble sailor we knew as Jerseyman? This was becoming more instructive than a melodrama. I redoubled my efforts to take exhaustive notes.