“How can we keep these gifts”—bribes, I almost said— “if we do not go to Bohemia?”
Irene’s hands cupped her delicate mug of black coffee and she inhaled the steaming aroma as if indulging in a drug. She smiled.
“Because we are going to Bohemia, Nell. There is nothing to return—except our own selves to that lovely land.”
“Going? To Bohemia?” I set down my sturdy cup so hard that a dirty tan wave slopped onto the bare tabletop. “How can we? Godfrey will not permit it.”
“Well, you may heed such impediments, but I do not. I am not a former employee used to taking orders.”
“I will be no part of any scheme that violates your husband’s wishes and authority.”
“Wishes only, Nell. Authority does not come into it except with dispensers of moral rectitude, of whom there are none on earth that I recognize, or with civil rulers, none of whom I call sovereign.”
“Apparently your own husband has little to say on the matter.”
“Oh, he had a great deal to say. So did I.”
“And?”
Irene smirked—there is no other way to put it—over the brim of her cup. “We are going to Bohemia.”
“We? All three?”
She glanced carelessly away. “There are a few... conditions.”
“Aha!”
“Minor, trifling conditions.”
“So it always seems at first, with a lawyer.”
“We shall see how it seems at last,” she answered, with a satisfied smile. “Godfrey is in Paris now making preparations.”
“So quickly you have converted him.”
“Conversion does not quite describe my influence over Godfrey, Nell; but you are not in a position to understand the fine points of such negotiations. Let us say that I... persuaded him that the benefits of this mission outweigh the drawbacks.”
“I don’t think you argued openly and honestly.”
“But I did! Godfrey himself admitted the boons of an association with the Rothschilds in your presence."
“Still, I think that you pressed some unfair advantage. I imagine that you did not tell him of Queen Clotilde’s unhappiness and plea to you.”
“And you claim you lack imagination, Nell,” she mock-chided me. “We were both sworn to keep the matter of the Queen’s discomfort private, Nell. Would you violate the poor woman’s confidence?”
“A husband—”
“Need not know everything. Wait until you have one and then judge.”
I felt myself reddening. “I have not the time,” I snapped. “And if you recognize no sovereign, why do you honor a queen’s rights over your own husband’s?”
“Nell! I swear that awful muddle of milk and tea you drink clouds your brains as much as it clouds your cup. You’ll understand these things better when you know more of the world, and that conflicting loyalties must each keep their proper place. The persons and events you and I knew in Bohemia are our own business. I had only briefly encountered Godfrey when I knew the King-to-be, and I never expected to see him again, much less marry him. Yes, I am determined to fully decipher the mysteries of Bohemia, be they royal dereliction of marital duty or seven-foot-high clay men stalking the streets. If Godfrey knew my full reasons, he would understand.”
“Then tell him!”
“I said he would understand. I didn’t say that he would like them.”
“You have put me in the middle,” I charged.
She regarded me calmly. “No, you have put yourself there. It cannot be comfortable, but no doubt moral confusion builds character. I am sure I have read some religious adage on the matter.”
“And I have promised not to tell Godfrey of the Queen’s request,” I complained, “so my hands are tied.”
“Yes, you have promised,” Irene mused, sighing. “There will be nothing to regret, dear Nell, except missing this opportunity to better our finances and return to Bohemia to solve greater mysteries than we left behind.”
“Much to regret,” I predicted, sipping my now lukewarm tea. “What conditions has poor, deluded innocent Godfrey set?”
“‘Poor deluded innocent Godfrey’ has decided,” Irene said dryly, “that I must pass in Bohemia under a pseudonym and in disguise.”
I sat up. “Most wise. You are notorious there, after all.”
“Apparently I am notorious everywhere. In fact, Godfrey has declared that he will be the excuse for the mission, and its prime implementer. He is visiting the Baron’s Paris office today to set the machinery in motion. He will go openly as legal representative of unspecified Rothschild interests in the neighborhood. I will come along later in my... new persona.”
I smothered a smile. “So Godfrey takes the lead and you must follow. Most wise. He has not lost all his senses. I commend his strategy.”
Irene yawned again. “How fortunate that you do, for you will accompany this vanguard expedition as his loyal secretary.” Her eyes glittered with lazy wickedness. “Ah, how I envy you, Nell, in your humble but underestimated role! You will see the new Bohemia first. You will pry—with Godfrey, of course—into the manipulations of court and city. You will gaze again upon His Royal Highness, King Wilhelm von Ormstein, first. You will no doubt have an opportunity to consult with the Queen on her delicate problem. I am sure that she will recognize you at once and accept you as a delegate of mine, and consider you her discreet confidante. Ah, how I envy you!”
Her voice grew more stern than gently mocking. “And you will seal your lips on the subject of our previous meeting with Her Majesty, even if Godfrey should become suspicious and ask.”
“Yes,” I said dully, realizing that Godfrey’s and my jaunt to Bohemia would not relieve my moral dilemma, but in fact intensify it. “I will do my best.”
Irene smiled and shook out the Paris paper. She eyed me not unsympathetically over its serrated rim. "That has always sufficed in the past, and I am sure it will do quite nicely now.”
Where Irene would have dashed off to Bohemia at the drop of a royal enigma, Godfrey proceeded to prepare for the mission with all deliberate slowness and groundwork.
I do not think he could have better infected Irene with a seething impatience she dared not express.
He was in Paris all the day now, every day, consulting with the Baron or his representatives—which was not clear. A new energy drove his step, even as a new reticence dogged his evening conversations. Had I not known better, I would have said Godfrey was being deliberately mysterious about his whereabouts and actions. He claimed that he was being discreet, that it was necessary to familiarize himself with the political and legal ground he would encounter in Prague.
Irene took her revenge by flitting off almost daily to the House of Worth for more fittings with the “maestro.”
Even here I was carefully excluded. I was sent to the library to read crabbed texts concerning the Golem of Prague, and asked to report nightly on this preposterous fairy tale. Perhaps fairy tale is not the proper description, unless it was one told literally by some set of Brothers Grimm that children were not allowed to read.
I admit that I am not fond of the French, nor sympathetic to the Irish, nor at ease with the Oriental, either in individual or cultural form.
As for the Jews, I had been reared to think of them as a race of benighted people too foolish to recognize their own vaunted Savior when He came. So I learned at my father’s knee, and so I had not thought further until I combed the heavy, gilt-edged volumes of the Paris Bibliothèque.
I had taken the liberty of also investigating the history of the Rothschild family in its many national branches. If any form of aristocracy is by nature untrustworthy, that acquired solely by the criteria of great wealth must be the most suspect.
I left my sessions at the library with my eyes bleary and the bridge of my nose tweaked scarlet from my pince-nez. I also left them so disturbed that I rode home in the carriage in numb disbelief, recalling Irene’s and my one expedition into Prague’s Josef Quarter (
to find a fortune teller, much against my inclinations) with a shudder of hindsight.
What my readings told me—that I dared not tell anyone else lest I be considered half-mad—was that good precedent existed for such a being as a Golem, and that if there was a God and He was Just—this I firmly believed—then the Golem might walk the byways of Prague as a sign that injustice had prevailed too long in Bohemia and, indeed, upon the earth. For the first time, I began to regard the demon in Prague as other than King Wilhelm von Ormstein, one-time admirer of Irene Adler, and something very different and not at all human.
“Nell, do you think that Godfrey is not telling me something?” Irene asked me one evening when we sat in the parlor, she at her piano, I at my stitchery.
Her rare plaintive tone caught my instant attention. Even the odious parrot sidled along his perch to press his tilted head against the bars as if to listen better. His hearing, in my observation, was only too excellent.
Godfrey was absent, as he had been on occasion, dining in Paris with our new “employers.” So he had said.
“Why should Godfrey not tell you something?” I inquired reasonably.
“Because he is so satisfied with himself of late!”
Her hands, deceptively strong despite their grace, drove a crashing chord into the hapless keys.
Casanova squawked and uttered meaningless parrot for once, lofting above his perch with beating wings.
“That is exactly how you behave when you are involved with an unpleasantness,” I pointed out.
“Precisely why I am worried,” she retorted, striking a less truculent chord. Her fingers relaxed into a liquid arpeggio that trickled up and down the keyboard. “It is not like Godfrey to be mysterious,” she added wistfully.
“The shoe,” I said.
She eyed me quizzically.
“It pinches.”
Another exasperated chord. Casanova cackled fluent parrot.
“On the other foot,” I finished, tying off a knot.
“If you are going to prate clichés,” she said, “you could at least rattle them off in one go.”
Irene spun around on the velvet-covered stool, hopelessly twisting her skirts. Candlelight invariably flattered her, but now it illuminated a faint pleat of worry lines in her forehead.
“They also serve who stand and wait,” I complied dutifully.
She gritted her teeth, and being an actress and opera singer, managed to speak with perfect diction despite it, or perhaps because of it. “Sit, Nell. We sit. We sit here night after night and know nothing. Surely the Rothschilds did not mean us to... dawdle our days and nights away in Paris while all Bohemia burns!”
“I am certain that Godfrey is putting matters into fine order in good time. He was always most efficient in court. A paragon of organization.”
“International politics do not wait for the finesse of impeccable paperwork,” she spat. “Nor do monsters like the Golem.”
Lucifer, sleeping by the ember-bright hearth, stirred and yawned to show his rose-red maw equipped with formidable white thorns of teeth. He growled slightly.
Irene’s hands fisted on her lap, then crashed again on the piano keys. “I am not patient, it is true. Yet I am bound to abide by Godfrey’s timetable. He is in communication with the Rothschilds, and I am not.”
“Spying is men’s work,” I noted placidly.
“You have not read your Bible,” she returned, pointing to the plump volume that occupied the whole top of my side table. “The example of Judith in the camp of Holofernes contradicts you.”
I found my nose wrinkling. “That was butchery in the name of spying. Not all Biblical tales are suitable for emulation. One sometimes forget how brutal the old ways were.”
“They are still brutal.” Irene turned back to the piano, uncoiling her skirts. “And I am brutally bored. We shall have to do something about it until Godfrey’s brilliant and dilatory organization—whatever it is—is completed.”
“We?”
“You, as usual, will bear the brunt of the task.”
I looked up over my pince-nez, hoping I embodied my most forbidding governess resolution.
“What will I be required to do this time?”
“Only what you do exquisitely every day.” Irene’s fingers were wandering the keys amiably again, and her voice had lightened to a careless, cajoling mezzo-soprano trill.
“What is that?”
“Sew,” she said, glancing coyly over her shoulder as I plunged my needle firmly into my forefinger.
Chapter Eleven
SEW WHAT!
So it was that, past my thirtieth year, I was rechristened “Agatha”—I do not think that Irene could have concocted a more abominable pseudonym—and introduced to the crowded workrooms of Maison Worth as the replacement for the late and apparently unlamented Berthe.
To excuse my less than fluent French, I was made out to be a remote English “cousin” of the Worth family. Playing a “poor relation” was nothing new to me, although pretending to be an accomplished “beader” was.
“I doubt there is any danger in this assignment, Nell,” Irene had speculated the evening before my first day with a certain sang froid that I found unbecoming in a dear friend. “But certainly we will learn nothing of the true circumstances of that poor girl’s death without some notion of her life and work.”
“I thought that you were a regular at Maison Worth these days.”
“The workrooms form their own world. Neither of the Worths, nor I, will see what truly goes on there. This masquerade will only last for a few days.”
“No doubt Godfrey will have completed his arduous preparations for Bohemia by then,” I said fervently.
“Let us hope so.” Irene echoed me with even greater fervor. “He has been tiresomely... distracted of late. All work and no play make Jack a dull boy and Jill most irritable.”
I could not argue with Irene’s current irritability, but I could never find Godfrey dull; no matter how distracted he might be, I always found him rather charmingly distracting. But I was used to working with him, and Irene had an entirely different relationship, so perhaps I did not understand her complaint.
What can I say of the fashion house workrooms? Imagine a convention of female Casanovas chattering away in high-pitched rapid-fire French in a dozen different provincial accents. The Tower of Babel would have been a relief.
While carriages idled at the establishment’s entrance on the rue de la Paix and great ladies lounged in the front salons, we sewing girls in back lined long, plain tables, separated from the stitcher opposite only by our lengths of fabric and a clutter of trims. Our days began at dawn and ended at twilight, with too few necessities breaks and an unsatisfactory lunch “hour” that lasted less than half its supposed time.
Luckily, this was no shock given my early clerking work at Whiteley’s Emporium in London. It was indeed a shock, however, to find how poorly I tolerated such hours and such labor in these latter, lax days.
Strong cheeses perfumed the faces and garments around me. Garlic and onions scented their conjoined breaths. Given the forcefulness required to speak a language as awkward as French, this vegetable stew of odor hung foglike over the workers.
Several sang or hummed as they stitched, an effect that would have anguished Irene’s sensitive ear. Indeed, my first day was spent contemplating how ill-suited Irene would be to survive such an ordeal, although perhaps I do her an injustice. The only song in my ear was the rhythmic syllables of Mr. Hood’s poignant “Song of the Shirt.”
Another (and unwanted) thing I was given: poor Berthe’s very seat. (I would never forget first seeing her slumped maroon figure pierced by the shining steel shears and the small, dark red rose of blood blossoming around that silver thorn.) I was even given her work: dressing the fashion mannequins.
Never had I seen dolls so beautiful. At first I was afraid to touch these elegant female figures only two feet tall. When I expressed my awe, I was told by the haughty dam
e in charge of the sewing room that these were “Juneau bébés” because of their finely done bisque heads.
Oh, those pale, exquisitely round little faces, with their startling lifelike blue- and gray-glass eyes, their tiny pierced porcelain ears dangling semiprecious stones, their strongly drawn brows and delicately traced painted eyelashes. Those unearthly eyes were made of “paperweight glass,” I was told. Even their hands were finely molded, and because their bodies were made of kid leather gusseted for movement, they could assume postures eerily similar to those Irene struck when modeling her Worth gowns.
Yet, despite their blonde and brunette mohair wigs (some had real hair, though it was duller and certainly more macabre than the mohair) and elegant wardrobes, I found them slightly sinister. Perhaps I was put off by those hard, babyish faces with limpid glass eyes and timid rosebud lips, some hoarding two tiny rows of sharp teeth gleaming in the darkness within.... Or the uncanny way their articulated necks and wrists moved ever so daintily.
I was shocked on my first day—while embroidering a lacy set of white muslin underthings (I felt it best to start with items that would not show and work outward as I became more confident)—to discover a naked wooden form beneath the modest pantaloons and corset cover, jointed everywhere as in life. Such blatant mimicry struck me as nearly blasphemous, as did the bare, lifelike puppet beneath the elaborate garb.
Perhaps my recent readings in the medieval legendry of the Golem had reminded me of sorcerers’ simulacra and homunculi, of forbidden experiments and fallen idols; even of primitive magic. Perhaps Berthe had been slain because of the idolatrous nature of her work, was stuck with a pin like the object of a savage curse.
The workrooms were not the place or time for fancies, not even macabre ones, laboring twelve hours a day with neck bent and fingers flying until needle pierced flesh as often as fabric.
Stitch! stitch! stitch!
In poverty, hunger and dirt,
And still with a voice of dolorous pitch,
Another Scandal in Bohemia (A Novel of Suspense featuring Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes) Page 12