Chapel Noir

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  12.

  Family Resemblance

  Many times subsequently I had the pleasure of meeting him,

  and I found less of the airs of office about him than I have

  many times seen displayed by third-rate officials, even in our

  own dearly beloved ana highly-spoken of democratic republic.

  —WILLIAM F. CODY, A.K.A. BUFFALO BILL

  A bemused chuckle issued from beyond the right wing chair facing the fire, sounding uncannily like an apologetic throat-clearing as well.

  Then a figure rose from the shelter of the chair like a ghost in a Sheridan Le Fanu story.

  No ghost he, but a man to whom the word “portly” would be a compliment. I had seldom seen such a fat man, except in the newspapers.

  While I stared, the familiar features took undeniable shape: the heavy-lidded, sleepy eyes, both amiable and arrogant; the neatly trimmed mustache and the beard whitening at the corners of his obscured mouth.

  One feature was decidedly not familiar. The Prince of Wales was balding quite markedly. I realized with shock that I was seeing him in intimate circumstances common only to family and friends, not to the public. It also occurred to me that all the photos published of him had been made out of doors, when His Royal Highness wore a dignified top hat or a jaunty yachting cap or sportsman’s cloth cap. Hence I deduced that the Prince was vain as well as in line for the throne, although perhaps the latter fact accounted for the first.

  He was staring dumbly at Irene and squinting those already half-shut eyes. “You look like what the photographers call a negative of Sarah Bernhardt in her pale-trousered sculpting ensemble. So you are the formidable Madam Norton. I have met you before, have I not? I never forget a pretty face, even when it is later presented to me above a gentleman’s frock coat.”

  She approached him, hand extended.

  The Prince of Wales was one man she did not force an American-style handshake upon. Instead, he took her limp offered hand while she executed as pretty a curtsy as I have ever seen done, though performed by a woman in trousers.

  “It was many years ago,” Irene said. “How kind of Your Royal Highness to remember.”

  “Ah. I do not remember where or when, though.”

  “Luckily, Your Highness, I could never forget.”

  His sleepy eyes fluttered at this flattery. “I trust so.” He leaned as close as his great bulk would permit, and she honored him with the details.

  “It was dinner at William Gilbert’s house, Sir, when I was singing in Iolanthe: The Peer and the Peri. Mr. Gilbert enjoyed inviting the ladies of the chorus for a brush with greatness.”

  I hoped only I had noticed that Irene had not specified if the greatness to be so brushed with was that of William Gilbert, the renowned librettist, or of the Prince of Wales. “Bertie,” of course, would leap to the conclusion Irene wished him to swallow like the Queen’s pet Pomeranian diving through a hoop for a bit of the dinner roast. Perhaps royalty did not eat roast, on second thought, but I was certain that the Queen’s Pomeranian, and her eldest son and heir, both leaped on her command.

  For a moment I envied Americans their wild, ungoverned state.

  Irene was showing no sign of being a republican rather than a royalist now though, as she smiled at the Prince.

  “I do remember you.” His pudgy forefinger tapped possessively on the soft silk ascot at Irene’s throat. Only I saw her stiffen. “Quite a forward miss, as I recall. Insisted on a private audience.”

  “Which your Royal Highness so kindly granted.”

  His walrus eyes began to twinkle. “I remember every moment of it. And now you are married?”

  “Indeed,” Irene said. “And now I am permitted to meet your Royal Highness again, and to hope to do you some small service in repayment for the favor of a royal audience so long ago.”

  “Tut, my dear. It is I who owe you a royal favor for sharing your beauty with the world. Do you still perform? I mean, er, sing, was it?”

  “Alas no, Sir. I am now kept busy with private inquiries. As you may imagine, the great have need of protection.”

  “Imagine nothing! I am plagued by the Paris police, who follow me everywhere, or everywhere they can. But you were a clever girl, I recall. Was there not some unpleasantness involving a peer of the realm and a chorus girl?”

  “An unpleasant murder, Your Royal Highness, as there is here.”

  The reminder pushed him away from her as from a bad omen. “Yes. Again. That was a trifling affair, that operetta instance. We were able to hush it up. This—”

  “This is too gruesome to hush up,” Irene agreed.

  “And how did you know that I was here?”

  “At the Baron’s residence? In the chair? In Paris?”

  “Any or all of it?”

  “I knew you were in Paris to inaugurate the Eiffel Tower at the opening ceremony; the papers were full of it. From there it was but a skip and jump to guessing the extreme concern you would feel over the terrible murders that occurred so near to Your Royal Highness’s . . . neighborhood. How may I be of service, other than interviewing the American girl who discovered the atrocity?”

  “You have heard what the Baron fears,” the Prince said, sounding like a prince concerned with issues larger than his own interests for the first time.

  “Yes, but I was not in London during last autumn’s Whitechapel events. Does Your Royal Highness also fear that fresh murders will raise fresh fury against the Jews?”

  “I do.” He spun away from us to pace to the fireplace, then turned and addressed us as a group. I was amazed to see those lazy eyes pass over me as well as the Baron and Irene. It was as if he addressed an audience.

  “I am sure you know that I am not held in the public’s highest regard—oh, they are fond of me,” he hastened to say, as if any one of us had argued with him, “but I am merely tolerated. They love my mother and admire my wife. I am tolerated. ‘Good old Bertie.’ ” His massive shoulders shrugged. “I enjoy good food, good company, good gaming, good sailing, good hunting, good friends, good cigars, good women.”

  Irene waited politely, as must all who wait upon a prince, but I was possessed of an unexpressed restlessness I could only quench by pushing a hand into my pocket and squeezing my fingers shut on the many sharp angles of my chatelaine.

  No wonder the Prince of Wales was merely “tolerated” by his subjects, as he put it! He was a careless pleasure-seeker, and that was all.

  “I am criticized for my love of foreign climes,” he went on, “Paris, Vienna, Baden-Baden, Marienbad. I am as liable to associate with jockeys as with Jews, commoners as with nobility. These are modern times, Madam, and I move with them.”

  You move with the money, I heard a wicked voice I did not know I possessed answering him. And who had more money than the Rothschilds? Of course, Irene and Godfrey and I had benefited from their patronage ourselves, but we worked for it.

  And, of course, the Jews whom the public turned on from time to time included both the wealthy and the powerless. I had to admire Baron Alphonse for responding to attacks on the most humble and helpless of his kind.

  Apparently, he had also won the sympathy of the Prince of Wales, not an insignificant achievement.

  “Sir,” the Baron said now, “do not doubt that my family is most grateful for your support.”

  “And I for yours,” the Prince said, chuckling again. “You rascally bankers know you have rescued the crowned heads of Europe from fiscal and political ruin time and again. Not to mention that you offer such splendid hunting and cigars at Ferriéres.”

  The Baron shrugged modestly. I realized that I was hearing of affairs the public and even the journalists never dream of eavesdropping upon.

  Irene, however, grew visibly impatient with this mutual self-congratulation, though it involved a baron and a prince. I recalled that she never had been very intimidated by princes, not even when they resided in Bohemia.

  “Sirs,” she said, “if you wis
h to avoid an eruption of anti-Jewish sentiment, this killer must be stopped before the public suspects Jack the Ripper is at work again. He must be caught and identified.”

  “Well said, and not easily done,” the Baron noted.

  Irene fixed Bertie with a stern eye equal to any maternal glare. Having been an opera diva did have its uses. “Your Royal Highness.” In just such a tone would I as governess have addressed a naughty baronet of eight. “Is it not true that you were present in the maison de rendezvous at the time of the murders, that you were the caller the two now-dead ladies were expecting, instead of Jack the Ripper?”

  “Oh dear God, yes.” Bertie whispered the words, then stumbled toward the fire, sitting heavily in the wing chair.

  Irene followed him like a Queen’s prosecutor at the bench.

  “But you were entertained elsewhere in the house at the time.”

  “Yes.” He looked up at her with the meekness of the found-out. “Who told you—?”

  “No one told me. It was obvious from the moment I entered the house that the first business had been to remove and conceal the presence of a person of high rank. I merely imagined the highest rank I could and arrived at you.”

  He blinked. “P-p-poor girls. So y-y-young and pretty. Vivacious, both of them. Charming.”

  I thought I saw him shiver, despite the roaring fire.

  Irene glanced at Baron Alphonse, who, along with me, had followed her pursuit of the Prince’s testimony.

  “Baron, you were the first informed.”

  “His Royal Highness had dined with me before departing for the house. My driver was still at the back stables when the Prince fled.”

  “I did not flee, my dear Alphonse,” Bertie said, his gaze still fixed on the flames. “I retreated in good order.”

  “You did the right thing.”

  “And you,” Irene asked the Baron, “then sent for me to question of the young woman, Pink, who discovered the dead women instead of the Prince?” She eyed the distraught heir apparent. “Or after the Prince?”

  “I saw nothing, thank God. From what I have heard, I salute you, Madam, if you have witnessed what I have heard described. I could not have . . . tolerated it. So charming, so fresh. Ah!”

  “There is something else,” Irene said, her expression sharpening. As usual when she wanted incisive answers, she looked to the Baron de Rothschild.

  He nodded slowly. “In London. Lately. There have been rumors.”

  “Rumors that make the Prince’s nearness to the scene even more dangerous?”

  “Yes. These are false and devious untruths, that my race has had aimed at it for centuries. Only now, it fixes on the Prince of Wales, perhaps for his friendliness to our family and our welfare.” The Baron’s thin lips thinned further. “Nothing must be said of these matters outside this room, and I hold your companion to that charge also.” The Baron glanced at the Prince, then lowered his eyes and his voice and told us two women the dreadful truth.

  “The latest rumor is that the royal family is tangled in the Ripper horror. They whisper of Prince Eddy in that regard.”

  Before I could murmur “Prince Eddy,” Irene had seized upon the news and made it hers.

  “Prince Eddy. The heir of the heir to the throne.”

  I glanced at the Prince of Wales, confused. He was muttering brokenly to himself, “Just a ‘dear, good, simple boy,’ as Mother said.”

  I confess that I did not much follow the doings of royalty, however stoutly I upheld Queen Victoria and the Succession, no matter how weak its links.

  That had been before I had personally met the Prince of Wales, however. If he was the example, what could have that “dear, good, simple boy” his son been up to?

  Both men gazed at Irene, their faces corroded with worry as she spoke what they could barely face.

  Apparently it was “like father, like son,” and Prince Eddy was now reputed to be as much of a lady-killer as his sire. Perhaps even more so.

  13.

  Rogue Royale

  The very air of Paris seemed to encourage license. Foreign

  celebrities passing through the capital hastened to pay their

  respects to the most notorious filles en renom.

  —JOANNA RICHARDSON, THE COURTESANS

  The birds were trilling in the hedges as we were driven back to Neuilly.

  Irene had taken the combs out of her piled hair one by one as the dawn brightened the glittering leaves of the tall poplar trees. The locks rippling to her shoulders, she looked no older than dear Allegra Turnpenny when I had tucked her into bed on Berkeley Square more than a decade ago.

  I wished that I could tuck myself into bed this morning, into such fresh, innocent sheets as young Allegra had slept in, but my mind churned with the sights, sounds, and smells of our dreadful evening in Paris.

  Irene bent forward, leaning her elbows on her trousered knees and her face in her hands. Her fingers massaged her temples and forehead.

  “I shouldn’t doubt you had the headache,” I observed, “after all we have seen tonight.”

  “It’s what we didn’t see that haunts me, Nell.”

  “Jack the Ripper?”

  “No one has seen him, at least knowingly, except his victims.”

  I agreed. “We are like those poor people of Whitechapel, or the constables, who stumbled upon the bloody deeds just after they had been committed. Would you really care to catch the killer in the act?”

  “If that were the only way to catch him, and in such cases as these, I fear that is so.” She sat up, energetic again. “Nell, you have read about the exploits of this monster. How does this Paris case differ from the London murders?”

  “Several instances,” I said promptly. I am much better dealing with the dimensions of a thing than its deeper meaning. “The violence was committed indoors, unlike every London murder but the last, the slaughter of Mary Jane Kelly. And that poor creature was set upon in her tiny room; this outrage took place in a large room within a vast, occupied building, with people all around.”

  “Who heard or saw nothing but the result.”

  “So it was in the case of Mary Jane Kelly. A neighbor thought she heard her call ‘Murder!’ once, but did nothing about it.”

  “At least those neighbors were willing to testify. It is in the interest of every resident of the maison to conceal the details of these killings. Certainly no one would breathe a syllable of the Prince’s presence.”

  “That is one thing I don’t understand, Irene.”

  “Only one?”

  I refused to be drawn into a defense of my assertion. “It is the Prince. He was to . . . call upon two of the women at once.”

  “Yes, Nell.”

  “Two? At once?”

  “Yes, Nell.”

  “I had heard a rumor that he was most gallant with the ladies—”

  “He is a rake, Nell. You know what a rake is?”

  “Yes. Of course.” I could feel my cheeks warming. “Hellfire Club. The kind of person that Queen Victoria has dedicated her life to eradicating from the realm.”

  “To no great effect. Her uncles, son, and grandson are notorious examples of the species.”

  “A rake . . . goes with a lot of women.”

  Irene flared a wrist toward the open window of the carriage and the chitter of bird life. “As many as birds in the bushes.”

  “Is that not rather . . . greedy?”

  “The Prince of Wales is a greedy boy.”

  “And I didn’t understand your conversation with him. It seemed to have an unwholesome undertone. I cannot comprehend you, Irene! You were absolutely fanatic about preserving your reputation in connection with the King of Bohemia, but you seem to be on far too intimate terms with the Prince of Wales. What, pray, is the difference?”

  Irene smiled, her face looking drawn for a moment. “The difference is that the King of Bohemia is in Prague and Bertie is in London, and often in Paris.”

  “I don’t understan
d—”

  “The King of Bohemia, like all princelings, felt himself entitled to a mistress. He erred in assuming that I would settle for such a compromised position. A mistress, Nell. He was not a rake, merely a privileged man exercising his royal prerogative.

  “Bertie, for all his boyishness, his vanity, and his actually admirable tolerance of classes of people his royal forebears would have nothing to do with, including Jews and opera singers, is a rake. He never rests in his quest for female conquests. They are not even conquests. Every female whom his eye falls upon is his for a night, be she street doxy, dairyman’s or duke’s wife. It is simply so.”

  “Not you! But he spoke in that odious way, as if—”

  “He believes that he, we, have . . . hmmmm.”

  “No! Not . . . hmmmm?”

  “He believes it so because I want him to believe it so.”

  “Why?! That is madness, Irene. You would not compromise yourself for a very real alliance with the King of Bohemia, however unsanctioned. Yet for this Prince of Wales—”

  “For this Prince of Wales I needed to devise a stratagem that feeds his vanity and his appetite without costing my virtue. You remember how years ago the Prince overheard a murder on Sir William Gilbert’s newly installed telephone device that connected sound from the very stage wings to his home?”

  “Yes. You had been invited to sup there with some of the other operetta singers. I was not able to accompany you, and now much regret that. You realized that the Prince had heard a conversation important to the murder of a chorus singer by her titled lover and used Mesmerism, which you had learned in the States, where they apparently teach anything to anyone, to pry the pertinent information from the future King. I can’t say I approve of Mesmerizing an heir apparent, but—”

  “I instructed Bertie to forget what I had learned through him, and added one notion that would be with him forever after the spell was over.”

  “One notion? Global accord?”

  “No. I led him to believe that he had consummated his wishes in connection with me, but that we had agreed to nevermore meet in that fashion.”