“I am sure that it was quite not all right. You must understand, Miss Allegra, that your arrival at Neuilly was not properly announced and rather awkward. Your presence here is against everybody’s better sense, but we did not wish to send you home in disgrace. So you will refrain from being seen and heard in Prague, and keep yourself out of dangerous intrigues.”
“Of course. Miss Huxleigh,” she said quietly. “But you must remember that we are no longer in the schoolroom, and I am not your charge and you are not my governess. Therefore, you will call me ‘Miss Turnpenny.’ ”
I drew back, feeling insulted. “What have I been calling you, pray?”
“ ‘Miss Allegra,’ as if I were thirteen years old and still wore my hair down.”
“Oh. I was not aware. It is just that I am so used—”
“Well, Miss Huxleigh, I am used to being addressed as ‘Miss Turnpenny,’ unless I allow you to call me ‘Allegra,’ in which case I should call you ‘Nell.’ ”
Confused, I threw up my hands. Had I journeyed all the way to Bohemia to debate the fine points of address with a former charge? I think not.
“Since we are both unmarried,” I said pointedly, “we will be ‘Misses’ to each other.”
She glanced at my friends. “I should like to be married, if I could be sure of such a handsome and attentive husband as Mrs. Norton has.”
“You will be married,” I assured her, “in good time and to a man who will appear as handsome to you as Mr. Norton does now.”
“You think so?” she asked with a touching trace of uncertainty. What a child she was, under her excessive airs and impatience!
“I know so! But you will never be ‘Mrs.’ Anybody if you poke that inquisitive Stanhope nose into the wrong business.”
“Oh!” She covered the offending feature. “Do I really have my mother’s Stanhope nose?”
“Yes. It is a splendid nose, only highly curious. Quentin has it too.”
“You mean Mr. Stanhope.”
“I mean your Uncle Quentin,” I said severely. “Since we are adults, and old acquaintances, we have decided to use our first names.”
“And don’t you mean ‘had’?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I mean—” Allegra’s honest brown gaze (so like another Stanhope’s of my acquaintance) fell. “You speak in the present tense. My Uncle, my dear Uncle Quentin, is... dead. Pleasant as it is to speak of him to another who knew him, we mustn’t forget that.”
I could have strangled myself. No one but I, Irene, and Godfrey knew evidence existed that might indicate Quentin had survived the deadly trap Colonel Sebastian Moran had set for him. I had nursed that hope in my secret soul, and seeing this engaging child again, forgot what a slender hope it was, and that I must not encourage it in Quentin’s relations without greater proof.
“No,” I agreed in a throttled voice, “we must not forget that he is dead.”
Silence fell upon us both: mine because of my possible deception of this dear child who deserved to share the hope I cherished; hers because she feared, with a youngster’s wisdom, that her elder had failed to reckon with reality.
Into this awkward pause came Irene and Godfrey, among the conscious again, bearing champagne glasses.
I eyed the flute my friend presented to Allegra.
“Miss Turnpenny is too young,” I objected, still seeing in her the schoolroom miss.
“Then is Miss Huxleigh too old?” Irene demanded so mockingly that I accepted the glass Godfrey offered me in patient silence.
Indeed, I needed a distraction. Meeting Allegra again had been unsettling. She set me vibrating between two separate poles: my long-ago role as governess to her and as no one of significance to her uncle, and my new role as friend to her long-lost uncle and herself. A gulf of years and social position separated us, yet was rapidly shrinking in both cases. If only I could give Allegra a hopeful word of her uncle’s survival!
Irene, as usual, apparently read my intemperate thoughts. I found her admonishing eye upon me. A particularly dark eye. She had again been using the preparation that enlarged her pupils for a disguise.
“We traveled long today,” Irene noted, myopically watching Allegra sip her champagne with flushed cheeks. “One glass, my dear girl, and then to bed.”
“Shall you retire also?” Allegra asked ingenuously.
“I am retired,” Irene said into the awkward silence. “From the stage, from the opera house. One glass, then Godfrey will see you to your room.”
“He will?” Allegra brightened immediately and downed her champagne with the same desperate speed as if it had been as repulsive as cod liver oil.
Chapter Eighteen
THE MAKING OF MONSTERS
Irene sighed, then unfastened her cloak and let it collapse over a vacant chair. The Tiffany corsage burned upon her bosom like incendiary ice.
“Can you come help me loosen this diamond anchor, dear Nell? I am quite weary from traveling all day.”
I rose promptly to accompany her to the bedchamber, suspecting that more than a need for a maid was behind Irene’s request She turned to shut the door behind us as soon as I entered and then smiled wryly.
“And I’m weary from spending five days and nights with Allegra’s chatter, dear child that she is, is also enormously taxing. I pray that with Godfrey seeing her to her rest, later she will sink into blissful peace, quiet, and long, long sleep when we share our suite tonight.”
“She is somewhat taken with him,” I said carefully. “She is utterly mad about him! Can I blame her? Girls of tender age often fix upon an older male acquaintance, even a cousin or an uncle, as a romantic target.” She eyed me inquiringly.
“I’m glad that I am not young any longer, and prone to embarrassing misattachments.”
She smiled. “I am glad that I am not young any longer, and prone to embarrassing misattachments. Did you see the King? What did you think of him?”
"Yes. He looked... splendid.”
“Oh! All starch and pomposity. How I ever—No matter. Clotilde seems even more distraught than when she approached us in Paris. I must arrange a rendezvous with her.”
“You are here on Rothschild business!” I said sternly, at last unfastening the heavy yet fragile diamonds.
“Rothschild business will benefit from my worming my way close to the throne. Would you rather I closet myself with the King?”
“No!”
“Then Queen Clotilde it is. Did you and Godfrey learn anything interesting?”
I sat on the adjoining chair, the Tiffany diamonds a glamorous doily across my lap, watching Irene fan herself until the fringe of black curls lifted from her face. Inactivity was death to her; physical fidgeting only indicated the constant working of her mind.
“We’ve made the acquaintance of two Rothschild agents.”
“Two whole days in Prague, and that’s all you have accomplished?”
I bridled. “And... we have made an expedition to a beer cellar.”
“Indeed! Most daring.” Irene wafted the corsage from my lap into its harbor in the lid of her traveling case. “I am impressed. For what purpose?”
She drew me up from the chair as she passed and herded me back to the sitting room, where Allegra and Godfrey waited. I immediately saw that Allegra’s glass was brim full again; even superior men may overindulge pretty young girls. The minx herself sat demure and silent, content with her hero’s recent sign of favor and not eager to attract Irene’s attention to her forbidden second glass of champagne.
“What purpose?” Irene repeated as she sat and lifted her empty glass in both toast and request to her husband.
“To meet with the first Rothschild agent,” I said. “What transpired afterward was more... unexpected.”
“Nell, when one is spying, one must expect the unexpected. What was this untoward event?”
“We saw the Golem,” Godfrey put in. ruining my careful introduction to the subject.
“At th
e beer cellar?” Irene demanded incredulously.
He approached Irene’s chair to collect her glass. “Outside the beer cellar.”
“Even a Golem must crave to have its thirst slaked,” she observed, while Godfrey poured her another full flute.
He delivered it with a flourish, glancing at my nearly untouched glass. “Perhaps that was why the fellow squawked so, Nell. He craved champagne instead of beer.”
“He squawked?” Irene asked.
I endeavored to give a more rational report of the encounter, “He tried to speak, Irene, but was somehow prevented. The Golem is supposedly a mute creature, but this... figure struggled to speak, and failed. It was quite heart-wrenching, really, as if an animal should attempt speech.”
Irene’s eyes grew sober. “What would a pseudo-man who had been created only to serve say? The Golem was not made to speak, but to serve. Yet our servants will always insist on speaking, eventually. It is most inconvenient of them.”
“This was not the Golem!” I said impatiently. “Some fraud, some figment—”
Irene looked to her husband, who became the compleat barrister.
“Tall,” he said as if testifying in a court of law. “Perhaps seven feet. I felt... diminished. Insufficient. A massive figure blindly reaching out—with his legs and arms, with his smothered, inarticulate voice. Such raw energy, contained power, pain I have never before seen. Had it been a beast, I would have shot it to put it—and myself—out of its misery.”
Irene had sat to attention during Godfrey’s compelling—and unexpectedly vivid—description of our encounter with the Golem of Prague.
“This... figure was truly that large, that... awesome?” she asked.
He nodded, sipping champagne from the narrow apse of the glass. “I hope never to see such a wounded creature again. I—we—could only watch, stricken to silence more than fear. This was not a thing one tries to capture, or describe. One only experiences it and lives to speak of it if one can bear it.”
She turned to me. “Nell?”
Godfrey’s description had shaken me. Hitherto, I had forced my mind to dismiss what I had seen as a delusion or a mistake. Now I felt it, felt the blind flailing center of that manifestation, felt the inhuman, yet human, hurting heart of it. I knew that voiceless fear and rage, knew it for the thin, small voice of humanity arguing hopelessly in the face of universal dissolution and death. I had been such a sightless, soundless, raging creature myself during moments I dared not remember on a bridge outside London not very long ago.
“Nell?” Irene was repeating, and I could tell that she wanted, that she required my opinion. I was not a mere witness, but someone whose views she depended upon for a certain consistency, even a certain clarity. That Irene, with all her wit, many talents, greater worldliness, and superior intuition, relied upon me for balance was a realization I knew seldom.
When I did experience this revelation, I felt less foolish, less useless, less idle. Now I must set aside my deepest prejudices and speak to what I had seen, as truly as possible, so that Irene could see through me to the greater mystery that was hers to solve. I spoke softly, slowly, aware of Allegra’s enormous and impressionable eyes and ears upon me.
“You know me, Irene. I believe in the spiritual too deeply to fall easy victim to the merely supernatural. Yet this Golem is the product of a spiritual process, however base its common clay, as we all are. What did I see?” I sighed, trying to be utterly accurate. “I saw a being. Male. Large. Huge, in fact. Something chained about it, something confined. Something vacant, masked, unfinished in the face. I saw a powerful... blundering, witnessed a Hercules unchained. It did not see us, not in any common sense. It could have just broken free of a long-ago past, for the street itself was older than many cities. It was not a normal thing that we saw, that I knew. Larger than life. Perhaps larger than death. Was it the Golem? I cannot say. But it was not... ordinary. It was not... right.”
Irene stroked the bridge of her nose, as I do when my pince-nez pinches, but she wore no spectacles. Her eyes closed as if consulting an inner vision. Then she nodded.
“There is no doubt. You and Godfrey have seen something extraordinary. I had not reckoned on that, upon there being substance to these rumors of the Golem walking again. Most troubling.”
“What is this ‘Golem’?” Allegra asked eagerly, no longer able to contain herself or the champagne she had imbibed. “Is it something like a Guy Fawkes effigy?”
And a little child shall lead them. I smiled at Allegra, that most innocent of us innocents abroad. “The Golem, my dear, is like a giant from a fairy tale, only more profound. It is both living and dead; wise and stupid; victim and avenger. It is protector, and sacrificial lamb.”
Only I had studied the old tales years ago. Only I knew the Golem’s proper place in ancient Prague. Only I might predict its reality in the present-day city. Of all my duties as a governess, I loved best telling tales, especially if they were morally instructive. Or if I could make them so. “Have you heard of the Rothschilds, child?”
Allegra nodded, eyes wide. “The wealthiest and most powerful bankers in Europe.”
“The fiscal frog princes of Europe, my dear girl, who sprang from a small, dismal pond no one else wanted: the Jewish quarter of Frankfurt, but twelve feet wide, and that twelve feet extending forever into poverty and despair. You know that most humans failed Our Lord when he finally came to Earth. Only a few knew the promised Savior, and pledged allegiance even at the foot of the Cross. You know how Christianity, persecuted and reviled, came to convert half the world—the most civilized half, of course. You know how Greeks became Christians, and Romans, and half-wild Huns. But not Jews. And, in time, Christians reviled the Jews for their ignorance of the Lord’s arrival. The Jews were forced to wander the earth, and to them Christians assigned the distasteful task of handling money, as Judas had handled the thirty pieces of silver. Only they could lend and borrow, could thrive on the interest of such transactions.”
“Like Shylock!” the dear girl prompted.
Irene started from her reverie. “Oh. I thought you had mentioned my current pseudonym.” '
“Like Shylock,” I reiterated pointedly. “At first we despised them because they did not believe as we did. Then we despised them because they did what we considered ourselves too noble to do. Despite their money-handling, most Jews remained poor, and even the rich among them dwelled in the same crowded, filthy alleyways, the Jewish quarter, in the great cities of Europe.
“Then we began to suspect them of occult wrong-doing, of ritual murder of our children. Did not Herod order the Slaughter of the Innocents? So on great Church Holy Days, particularly at Easter, when Our Lord was crucified and resurrected, Christian anger boiled over. Then they would storm the gates of the ghetto, then riots ensued, and then Jews would pay the blood price for the Blood of the Lamb they had shed, and may still be shedding.”
“But did they do it?” Allegra demanded. “Murder children? Like the evil butcher who pickled them in the St. Nicholas legend? That was so long ago, Miss Huxleigh! And the ancient Jews didn’t know, did they, who the Christ was? If they had known, would it not have made the prophesies of their disavowal wrong? Weren’t the people of Israel needed to reject the Savior, so that he could save us all? And is it fair to blame the descendents for their forebears’ stupidity?”
I smiled at her impassioned, naive wisdom. “Perhaps. That is not for the likes of you and me to decide. Even Christians all suffer for the foolishness of Adam and Eve, our own forebears.”
“Ah,” Irene interrupted, “is that why life is sometimes so vexatious? I shall have to have a sharp word with Adam and Eve in the Afterlife.”
Allegra opened her mouth as if to say something more, then shut it. I resumed my tale, which had all the drama of grand opera, not appreciating the interruption. Irene had been right; the Golem legend provided the perfect text for such a work, could only a baritone big enough be found to sing the part of the Golem.<
br />
“To know the legend of the Golem, one must know the meaning of the Hebrew word. It means ‘germ,’ also ‘formless’ and ‘mindless.’ ”
“A blank slate,” Godfrey put in, sitting back and folding his hands. “A perfect tool.”
“There are many variations of the Golem story, and who may say where the truth most lies?’ I went on, quelling Godfrey with a governess’s glare.
“Certain elements persist: the High Rabbi, one Loew, used the Cabbala, the mystic Jewish occult powers, to bring to life a huge man-figure of clay. He put a paper, on which was written the vivifying words, including the shem, the secret Name of God, into the Golem’s mouth to raise it. But the Golem must not defile the Sabbath with its unnatural life, so each Friday evening the Rabbi must remove the paper bearing the sacred shem. On one such midnight the Rabbi forgot”
“Just like Cinderella forgot!" Allegra burst out, much annoying me.
“The Golem is no Cinderella,” I said sternly. “For one thing, it would require a large rather than a tiny shoe.”
“Clementine,” Irene added absently, and mysteriously. “Number nine.”
“There was no number written on the paper, simply the occult formula for the Golem’s creation. What do you suppose happened when the Golem was not set to rest for the Sabbath?”
Allegra blinked, looking weary, and I suppose that the hour was late for old folk tales that seemed to have no point. “He turned into a pumpkin?”
“No. He turned into a madman. He went berserk, uprooting trees and running wild through the streets of Prague.”
“Like the figure you saw!” Allegra exclaimed.
“Exactly. Like the figure Godfrey and I saw. Legend has it that the appalled Rabbi realized that the Sabbath had not yet been consecrated at the Old-New Synagogue. He pursued the Golem and drew the sacred scroll from its mouth. The clay form fell to the ground and shattered. Even today the pieces are said to lie in the attic of the Old-New Synagogue.”
“A stirring tale,” Godfrey put in over the smoke of a cigarette that he now passed back and forth to Irene, a most unsanitary habit, but then I imagine that married persons indulge in more unsanitary pursuits.
Another Scandal in Bohemia (A Novel of Suspense featuring Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes) Page 20