The Adventuress (7 page)

I again studied the sculpture—no, the actual, dead face, preserved uncannily all these years. Those empty, unpupiled eyes, that sad, slightly slack mouth. She could have been a seraph about to sing... or a ruined shop girl about to sink. Certainly she had been alive once; alive and obscure, not a curiosity for anyone to gawk upon.

I clasped my hands, suddenly aware that shadow chilled the dour old building, that stone and plaster and the endlessly lapping river water were cold comfort even to a corpse. The official crackled a stiff page of the ledger as his fingers tripped down another roll of the dead.

“Aha!”
he announced. His finger stabbed a number with no name after it. A moment later he swung a huge hoop of keys from his belt and led us onward.

Now we went below to even colder climes. Shallow stairs coiled deeper and deeper into the building’s dark belly, lit by oil-fed sconces that exhaled a thick smoke. Various chambers housed the dead in low-ceilinged, cellarlike rooms. We entered one and were ushered to a bier far less polished than Bram Stoker’s dining table.

“How fortunate they have not yet removed the clothing,” Irene said. I agreed with mute intensity. “What did you say, Godfrey, was our purported relationship to the corpse?”

“A former servant who had turned to the water trades.”

“Ah.” She nodded to the left hand that lay upon the rude wood. Its pallor emphasized the coarse black hairs clustered upon the first joints, the grime-caked fingernails, and especially the missing middle finger.

“An old wound,” Godfrey said. “He might have been born so, save for the scars.”

“And neatly done,” Irene added, “as if by a cleaver, or a guillotine,
hmm?
No other finger has been nicked. There is a deliberate look to the injury, as on the man in Chelsea. Is that not so, Nell?”

“If you mean you expected raw tissue, I concede that there is a certain surgical neatness to the remaining joint. Wouldn’t a physician have attended it afterwards?”

“Even a surgeon can’t repair a ragged injury. I say this man
sacrificed
his finger, as did the drowning victim in Chelsea.”

“Allowed it to be... taken?” Godfrey sounded dubious.

I also was skeptical. “But that was years ago, Irene. How can that be?”

“Perhaps both men lost their fingers at the same time, if not their lives.” Irene smiled angelically at the attendant, a morose little man whose mustache ends drooped to his chest. “Mon-see-oor,” she said in studied mispronunciation, “may we—that is—” Her dainty gloved fingers stuttered on a gesture that hovered on the brink of being French before she turned to Godfrey.

Godfrey intervened manfully with a string of French.

I stood absorbed in the exchange occurring before me. It was all writ plain on the attendant’s sallow face: polite puzzlement, disbelief, a shocked glance to Irene and myself, stern resistance, uncertainty, reluctance, distaste....

Through it all, Godfrey’s French flowed like the Seine, placid and unceasing.

At last the attendant stepped to the corpse and began undoing the man’s clothing with a last glance at us ladies.

“Anglais,”
he murmured in disgust.

I deeply resented
my
countrymen bearing the blame for Irene’s brash American curiosity, but I was helpless to protest. And indeed, as the dead man’s chest and shoulders were bared, I could not help feeling a pulse of anticipation: what if he, too, bore a strange ornamental tattoo? Would it mean only that both men—both drowning victims—had been sailors? Or that some other, less apparent, yet possibly sinister, link joined them in death, if not in life?

Irene sighed unhappily. I leaned past her shoulder to view the pitiful corpse. On a chest upon which black hairs coiled there lay another dark scrolling: the letter “S” in sinuous detail, at least three inches high.

Irene sighed again.

“Are you not pleased by this ghoulish discovery, Irene?”

I drew out my notebook so that she could record the mark. I wished my diaries complete to the last detail, no matter how odious, since they had proven valuable before now.

 “Not only a tattoo, but another letter of the alphabet... and in the same rather rococo style. Proof that ties this poor creature to the man we saw on Bram Stoker’s dining-room table so long ago, though what that can mean, I can hardly conceive... Irene?”

Irene asked me to sketch the mark, which Godfrey and I immediately compared to the original. To my surprise, the depiction was perfect.

Irene had ceased regarding the tattoo at all, a rather ungrateful reaction after all that Godfrey and I had undergone in order that she should see it. No, her gaze clung instead to the dead man’s face, an unremarkable, full-featured expanse the color of overbleached table linen.

“What is it?” Godfrey leaned forward intently. The attendant rolled his eyes and muttered
“Anglais”
again.

“I have seen more than I expected,” Irene said at last, straightening from her inspection and handing me the note pad. “The features are not French, but Celtic, as I expected. But I did not anticipate the bruises upon the throat. If only we had examined the Chelsea corpse more thoroughly! This man was throttled first and drowned as an afterthought. Perhaps the man in Chelsea was marked by attempted strangulation as well.”

“Perhaps his rescuers caught him by the neck,” Godfrey said. “Surely a more logical explanation.”

“Forcefully enough to leave marks?” Irene sounded dubious. She noticed the attendant, plucked a lacy handkerchief from her reticule and dabbed her eyes, shaking her head.

“No, no... no! It is not poor Antoine after all.” Her eyes, miraculously and suddenly red, turned on me. “Is that not true, Philippa? Not whom we seek at all. Thank you, Monsieur.”

Godfrey translated this false speech to the attendant, but Irene’s acting spoke more strongly than words: the fellow was already ushering us out.

I managed to trail the trio—I am always being overlooked; it must be due to my inbred Shropshire reticence—and had only moments in which to jot my last impressions onto the note pad before the others reached the archway and I was compelled to join them.

We left en masse, as we had come, leaving the dead to their meditations. I could not resist a parting glance at the unearthly dead girl’s face pinned like an albino butterfly to her dank stone wall.

Chapter Six

A
S
ORDID
S
UMMONS

“An Irish-linen
handkerchief soaked in ammonia!” Irene announced, producing this repellent item and waving it. “An old melodrama trick.”

“That explains how you can induce teary, crimson eyes on cue, if not how you are to rid yourself of them,” said I. “What accounts for these two similar and serpentine initials?”

We three had gathered around the parlor table after dinner to consider the sketches of these curious tattoos by lamplight. Even Casanova had pressed against his cage bars, scrawny head craned over the table and neck feathers ruffled.

“These letters are elaborate enough to decorate a medieval manuscript,” Godfrey complained, frowning handsomely.

“If only we had been able to record the tattoos with a camera!” Irene said. “Nell’s eye or hand may have missed some telling detail in the translation from skin to sketch pad. Perhaps the resemblance to letters is meant to mislead us.”

“You suggest that the meaning lies in the embellishment, not in the central figure?” Godfrey liked the notion. “That would be fiendishly clever.”

“What of a mirror?” I inquired.

“Mirror?” they chimed in unison like a pair of well- timed clocks.

“Perhaps the designs make more sense backwards.” Irene and Godfrey rushed to the pier glass in the hall, each clutching a sketch. A moment’s study showed that the reflected images made no more sense than before.

“Why do you expect these letters to bear more than face value?” I queried. “Could they not simply be initials for ‘Oliver’ and ‘Sidney,’ or some such?”

“Why not ‘Olivier’ and ‘St. Denys,’ their French counterparts?” Godfrey asked. “Why need both be English?”

“Then why not ‘Ophelia’ and ‘Serafina’?” I suggested. “Excellent point, Nell!” Godfrey explored this new line of speculation by staring fixedly at the ceiling. “Men who acquire tattoos often choose to honor a lady of their acquaintance.”

Our quickly widening circle of theories annoyed Irene. “We must begin somewhere,” she said, pressing the sketches against the glass and manipulating them like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. “Initials seem logical. In any case, this is the only incident that shows any promise of developing into a curiosity at all.”

A long pause, and then she snatched the papers away. “Oh, I am so
bored
with France!”

With that she dropped the sketches and stormed into the music room, leaving Godfrey and myself to regard each other in the mottled old mirror. An excessively ferocious burst of Wagner soon thundered from the piano’s elderly strings.

While I picked up the literal pieces, Godfrey retreated to the dining-room sideboard, where he poured a glass of sherry. Together we tiptoed to the music room, ignoring Casanova’s raucous rendition of “The Pilgrim’s Chorus.”

Lucifer stood blinking on the rustic carpet, shaking his complacent black head. Obviously, he had been summarily evicted from slumber on the tufted-velvet piano bench. There Irene sat while she pounded out octave chords.

Godfrey diplomatically deposited the sherry glass atop the piano case, then brought a lit candelabra from the mantel to illuminate the music on the stand, a melodious and apparently irrelevant Schumann suite. Tonight Irene played from memory and emotion.

Godfrey arranged himself at the instrument’s inward curve and assumed a stance of rapt attention. I settled upon an ottoman. Godfrey would have to deal with Irene’s fit of pique, but I was far too curious about how he would manage it to withdraw discreetly, as I ought to have.

During my long association with Irene, I had occasionally been treated to the excesses of her artistic temperament; Godfrey was perhaps only beginning to comprehend that where brilliance and art blaze bright, there also flare impatience and frustration.

Irene’s playing smoothed so gradually that I could not say when the moderation had begun. Perhaps a modicum of Godfrey’s courtroom calm had reached her. The keys tinkled with the good-natured Schumann piece; then even that music faded as she paused to sip the sherry.

“It is true,” Godfrey said in the sudden silence, “that we are strangers in a strange land, and further true that we are saddled with our own ghosts. But we are healthy, wealthy and wise, and we do have some resources at our disposal. You, my darling Irene, have your music and your mystery still; how many Paris ladies can arrange to be present at such a sordid activity as the removal of a corpse from the Seine? You, my dear Penelope—” Godfrey quite startled me by directing his thoughts my way; I preferred my “mouse-in-the-comer” view of things.

“You, my dear Penelope,” he repeated, “are sustained by your habit of recording the world around you and observing life through others.

“Even I have found some slight place here, through my legal work. One never knows what will turn up. Only this week I found myself making a London referral on the testy matter of a French will that bridges the two nations. I realized, with some chagrin, that I could recommend no finer English inquiry agent to Monsieur le Villard than Mr. Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street—”

Irene stood so abruptly that she nudged the piano. The keyboard cover clapped shut. “Godfrey, you didn’t! You actually referred someone to Sherlock Holmes?”

“Not a mere ‘someone,’ my dear girl; Francois le Villard is a prominent member of the French detective service. I felt that he would benefit from observing Mr. Holmes’s methods. And now that
you
no longer operate in London, you would hardly begrudge a fellow sleuth the custom.”

“Oh, Godfrey, you are incorrigible, outrageous! Why did you not tell me?”