Still. I was a country parson’s daughter, and had seen much in my tending of the ill young and old in the parish that would surprise a dweller in large cities, where much ugliness is swept away into institutions.
On the first story we were led again to the wide passage. A rich flocked wallpaper of oriental design glinted gold back from the walls as our guiding lamp passed. Dragons writhed in the flickering twilight, and roofs like piled hats seem to shimmer with worms instead of tiles.
By the time we came to the painted and gilded door where two gendarmes stood at attention, my hands were cold and clasped before me. Just like . . . Pink’s, I realized, and I had seen nothing yet.
“The first to see has the least to fear,” Irene whispered in my ear.
I noticed that her face was pale, her features drawn into the same falsely serene control I had seen on Pink’s young face.
The man who had never identified himself nodded to the guards. One swept open a door with military precision, never glancing inside.
The stench that rushed out to greet us was unfortunately familiar, though stronger than any I had encountered before. A charnel-house reek of unfettered blood and bowel.
All six of us recoiled involuntarily from that awful odor.
Grim-faced, Inspector le Villard held up the lamp. “It is not too late to retreat.”
Irene’s answer was to take the heavy light from him and step inside the door.
I followed, fumbling with both hands in my pocket for my silver talisman and one of the many objects that ornamented it.
“We are on the banks of the river Seine again, Nell,” Irene muttered.
I knew instantly what she meant, seeing again the sopping dead body of the sailor, reeking of death and damp. We were to breathe through our mouths.
Yet the notion of taking that fetid overwhelming scent into our lungs . . . I thrust my find to Irene. A slender glass vial capped in silver on both ends.
“Rub the perforated end on your nostrils.”
She recoiled from the strong scent that assailed her. I answered her confused look.
“Smelling salts. You should not be able to detect any other odor for some minutes.”
By then she had inhaled as deeply as a Regency dandy ingesting snuff, and I did the same. I noticed the Frenchmen behind us exchanging rueful glances, and turned to offer them a medicinal whiff. But men are foolishly fearful of being thought womanly, and they refused my remedy with terse headshakes.
The salts had not only driven all other odors from my nostrils, they had cleared my senses and stiffened my spine. I was now free to join Irene in gazing on the scene Pink had stumbled into.
I remembered most clearly the strange barber’s chair she had mentioned. The lamp abetted us by picking out the swirls of gilt wood that defined its outré shape.
Gold winked from elsewhere in the chamber. It was as richly overdecorated as the room upstairs.
Irene had lowered her gaze to the floor and was studying the wood parquet visible between the Savonnerie carpets scattered before the furniture. An unusual black background to the florid French designs gave the chamber a properly sober note, and made a dramatic canvas for the even more elaborate furniture.
And what strange furniture it was, even for Paris! A dressing table with a towering rococo mirror. A chaise longue. Some upholstered chairs and small tables. The room was accoutered like a bedchamber in every respect . . . except that there was no bed.
I may not know much of worldly matters, being a spinster, yet even I knew that it was most unlikely that a brothel, however elevated its clients, was not likely to have a bedroom without a bed.
“Have you taken photographs?” Irene asked the men lurking in the doorway still open behind us.
“This is not a scene to commemorate, Madame.”
“You will rely on memory, then, and notes?”
“We will photograph the bodies at the morgue, when the full extent of the wounds can be shown.”
I was abstracting my notebook and pencil from my other pocket as they spoke. The activity kept me from observing the gruesome centerpiece of the room.
“If you will leave us,” Irene was saying, as I drew the items from the folds of my skirt.
“Impossible!” Inspector le Villard said.
“It is quite possible,” she rejoined, “and necessary if we wish to examine the scene without supernumeraries present.”
He jerked as if avoiding a dash of cold water at being called a spear-carrier on a stage where he was accustomed to being in utter charge.
“The First Gentleman of Europe who insisted on our assistance would want us to have all the facts,” Irene continued. “We can best assemble them if left to ourselves.”
Although I was not sure who the First Gentleman of Europe might be, Inspector le Villard was sufficiently impressed to pale. “This is outrageous, Madame! This scene is not fit for females to see, and to leave you alone with such carnage—!”
“Apparently it is fit for females to be the object of such carnage. I assure you that Miss Huxleigh and I will neither swoon nor disturb the scene.”
A brave speech, but I noticed that Irene’s complexion looked a trifle green and felt in my pocket for the smelling salts.
The other man murmured to the inspector, and they withdrew, not without muttered French imprecations on Inspector le Villard’s part.
As soon as the door closed silently behind them, Irene turned to me.
She met the uplifted vial in my hand with surprise, then a quick sigh of relief. We both inhaled mightily at the tiny perforated ending.
“No photographs!” she objected to our absent guides. “Of course not. They do not wish to implicate the aristocrat who was expecting to dally with these ladies.”
“Ladies? Bodies? Plural? How can you tell?” I glanced sidelong at the contorted piece of furniture piled with contorted limbs, clothing, and bloody bits of things it was best not to identify.
Young Pink had done well to compare the scene to Les Halles. I had walked past hung carcasses of plucked fowl and disassembled pigs. In Shropshire, sheep country, the young parson’s daughter had also tended the old parishioners besieged by gangrene and bedsores. I could survive facing this. If I did not look too closely.
Irene pointed to the odd piece of furniture, which reminded me of a patten, those tall platform shoes worn by medieval women to keep their skirts from the offal on the streets.
It truly beggars my descriptive powers. Pink’s “barber chair from Versailles” it was, a strangely sinuous affair, perhaps purchased at some goblin market. Every surface snaked into the other in white-wood tendrils edged with gilt. Two arms lifted from its upholstered top, but curved backwards, like no chair arms I had ever seen.
At the front of both bottom and top surface bronze metal brackets protruded at each curved corner.
Around and through and within this tangle of wood and upholstered brocade and metal prongs draped a quantity of silken fabric revealing the hint of a vastly distorted body, actually bodies, behind and beneath it all.
Irene’s face was grimmer than I had ever seen it as I lifted my eyes from my jotted-down description of the scene.
“You see the lower bronze stirrups, on the floor-level upholstery?”
“Yes, but stirrups? This is a kind of rocking horse? As in a child’s schoolroom?”
“Not child’s play, this.” Irene eyed me worriedly, then without a word dropped to her knees on the costly Savonnerie carpet.
“Irene!”
“I must examine the trail of disturbances before the whole French prefecture arrives and tramples the carpeting like a herd of Indian elephants.”
“You expected to be making such a close inspection,” I noted in surprise, surveying the indignity of her hands-and-knees position concealed by the trousers and coat-skirt of men’s dress. “Why?”
“You remember the poisoned cigarette case in Prague?”
“Of course. A ‘gift’ from that Russian
woman.”
“You remember how Mr. Holmes examined it, as if it were the veriest mote in God’s eye?”
“That man does believe he is God’s eye,” I agreed. “Most impious.”
“But I saw even as he saw. I am used to looking at the stage enscène. En masse. As an overpopulated picture framed by the proscenium arch that separates it from the audience. Full of power and glory, yes. But crowded. He looks at the scene as a scientist, through the microscope of his eye. He looks for the telling minutiae. So must we here. Look. Come down on your knees. You can see the footprints in the black background of the carpeting, as you can see fingerprints on black-velvet skirts, if only you get on a level where the light casts the past into a trail.”
I complied. “It is no difficulty getting on my knees at such a scene, Irene. Prayers are needed here, if anywhere.”
“While you are praying, Nell, could you see if that chatelaine of yours bears a quizzing glass.”
“Quizzing?”
“A magnifying lens!”
“I do not think so . . .” There we were, prostrate in the presence of vicious death, hardly daring to breathe and yet splitting hairs and carpet fibers. “My pince-nez, however, has magnifying properties.”
“Bless your nearsighted eyes! And hand me the spectacles.”
Irene barely glanced at my face as I removed my spectacles from the bodice locket that held them at the ready. She took them blindly.
“Ah!” she said a moment later, holding my pince-nez to her eyes like a mask.
“What is it?
“I don’t know. But it is something. Do you have in that bottomless pocket of yours some . . . container? And a pincer of some kind? I see a few crumbs worth preserving. They do not seem native to this room and its purpose.”
“Container? Other than my pocket itself—”
“That will not do. These tiny crumbs would crush to powder.”
I thought furiously. It is my role in life to be useful if not decorative, and a dereliction in utility is most humiliating. “I know! My, ah, my ah . . . etui!”
“You are sneezing from the carpet dust?”
Startled, it suddenly struck me that a word familiar to me would sound not like a word at all to Irene. Despite our grim situation, I found a nervous giggle bubbling in my throat. “An etui is not a sneeze, Irene,” I objected. “It is just the thing you asked for.”
“Forgive me, but an etwee is not from any vocabulary I have heard of,” she complained. “Pray tell me what it is, if it is indeed a ‘what’ and not an inarticulate wheeze.”
Despite her tart impatience, so unlike Irene, by now the laughter was threatening to choke me, so unlike me. I was ashamed, but helpless. “I’m sorry. I can’t. I can’t—” Now I did indeed sound as if I were about to sneeze.
Irene’s fingers clenched on my upper arm. “Hold tight,” she rather harshly advised me.
By now tears were blurring my eyes and streaming down my cheeks.
“Hush,” she whispered. “We promised no hysterics.”
“But I’m not,” I was able to choke out. “Having hysterics. I’m laughing, though I don’t know why.”
Her voice was low and urgent. “That is a form of hysteria, if you don’t contain it.”
I gazed at her, seeing only through a wavy pane of glassy tears. “I don’t know why I would laugh in such a grim circumstance,” I managed to get out on a wavery sigh of words and whisper.
“Because our circumstances are ludicrous, Nell.” She allowed herself to sink onto her hip, after glancing carefully around at the carpet. “We are searching for needles we don’t know are there in a haystack of rococo furnishings, on our hands and knees, in the presence of crude death.”
“I cannot tell whether I am laughing or crying now,” I complained, wiping my cheeks with the heels of my hands, which were impressed with the costly whorls of the Aubusson carpet.
Irene regarded me carefully, and somewhat wearily. “Why do you suppose the Greek masks of comedy and tragedy are always shown paired, tilted together like a pair of gossiping neighbors? When I was performing at La Scala in Milan, I encountered a composer, Ruggiero Leoncavallo, who was working on an aria by Pagliacci, the tragic clown. It is a virtuoso exercise in despairing laughter.”
I shook my head. What did opera have to do with my unforgivable behavior?
Irene took my wrists in her hands and pulled my fingers from my face, as one might demand the attention of a petulant child, save I was not petulant, but mortified.
“Nell, laughter and tears sit side by side in the chamber of the heart, as any actor can tell you. And any tenor who will someday sing Pagliacci can tell you that the same contraction of air and muscle that produces sobs produces laughter. The brilliance of Pagliacci’s aria is its interplay of forced hilarity and unsurvivable despair.”
Having settled to a discreet hiccough during her lecture on the finer points of stage performance, I finally nodded, relieved that the irresistible urge to giggle had sunk beneath an exhausted melancholy much more appropriate to the situation.
“Now. What is this object by any other name? Besides a rose?” Irene smiled slightly.
I recognized the Shakespearean allusion. Strangely, all this stagecraft talk had given me a sense of distance from the terrible scene in which we played such ludicrous parts.
“My needle case,” I said with sobriety. “Here.” I drew the long, narrow, enameled case from the chatelaine. I removed the needles, lancing them into temporary lodging in my skirt’s sturdy twill fabric until the case was empty. “It’s meant to hold needles and bodkins and toothpicks, but may serve for other things. Will this do?”
“Admirably!” Irene pronounced, inspecting it through her—my—spectacles. “And the pincers?”
I extended the small sterling silver tweezers. “I use these for picking up threads and beads.”
“Excellent.” In a moment she had bent to pluck some vague brownish yellow crumbs from the carpet. She dropped them into the enameled needle case.
She paused to eye me. “How are you doing now?”
“Doing? That is such an American expression. I am not doing at all. I am pretending to be in another place at another task, breathing other air. Will that do?”
“It will,” she said. “That is also a clue as to how our Mr. Holmes performs his miracles of detection in the face of human iniquity. He looks close, not far, dear Nell, and spares himself much anguish.”
“We are looking through a microscope then?”
“Yes. As a physician or a botanist. We look small, so that the large does not overwhelm us. Yes?”
“Yes.” I crawled forward behind her on my elbows and knees. “It is most undignified.”
“So should we be in the presence of such indignities to the human body and soul. Does this not remind you of something other than the fictions of Edgar Allan Poe about the rue Morgue?”
“Oh yes, Irene.” I found my voice quivering and cast a quick glance at the heavens, which in this room was a painted ceiling of naked cherubs and naked ladies, a pairing I shall never understand. “Despite the distance in location and in time, I find this scene most distressingly reminiscent of the depredations performed in London just last autumn.”
Irene rose to her knees, reminding me of some rearing centaur in her unnatural man’s garb. Her hastily piled locks seemed to writhe in the wavering lamplight like the Medusa’s snaky tendrils.
“Jacques the Ripper appears to have turned his ghastly attentions on Paris.”
“It does not make sense,” I objected.
“But it does make for murder,” she said. “And politics. And a most brutal puzzle.”
6.
Frere Jacques, Dormez-Vous?
Well I say, December’s here already and January,
February and March are waiting for us and I’m one of
those plants which can’t stand the cold of winter. Would you
like to see my legs? Then they say, Come along in.
And
indoors it’s so snug and warm that one immediately wants to
strip to one’s chemise and stay like that. A fortnight later
one’s so completely forgotten the draughty street-corners up our
way that the mere sight of a wet overcoat is enough
to astonish us.
—LA BELLE OTERO, MY DAYS AND NIGHTS
After our inspection of the death chamber, we were taken to another grand chamber and there sat down to wait. Inspector le Villard seemed much surprised by our composure.
Again ensconced in a grand but empty room, I occupied myself making sketches of the footprints on the scene in my tiny silver-encased notepad.
“Four sets,” I noted. “Some dainty slipper impressions. A large man-size imprint, but narrowed with dandified daintiness at toe and heel. A massive imprint as undefined as a bottle side. And many man-size boot prints, uniform in shape if not in size.”
Irene nodded as she studied my sketches over my shoulder. “The ladies, the police in their uniform boots, and two men, one well shod and one ill shod.”
“What would an ill-shod man be doing in such a room in such a place?”
“An excellent question, Nell. We shall have to see if a doctor was called previously, but I doubt it. Officialdom will only fully invade the scene now that our Eminent Personage is well away from the carnage.”
Her last word suddenly took my mind and eye from microscopic distance to the enlarged view of everyday reality. I felt my stomach and my senses spinning.
The only remedy was to resume my close-work. I began to wonder if this was why fancywork attracted me.
I attempted a far more challenging artistic task: to draw an approximation of the barber’s chair.
Irene inspected my efforts. “Very good.”
“What is this thing?”
Her lips pursed as she eyed me. “You have held up very well, Nell.”
“You always manage to say ‘well, Nell,’ as if you were declaiming ‘how now, brown cow.’ ”
Her laugh was weary. “Guilty. I have underestimated you, I admit. But then, you were not reared in America, and are unused to uncivil atrocities.”
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