Chapel Noir

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “Do you mind, Miss Huxleigh?”

  “I most decidedly do, although I am given to understand by those I know that fumes of foul-smelling smoke can aid the cognitive functions.”

  He pushed some messy shocks of tobacco into the pipe bowl, packed it down, then scratched a lucifer on a striking box and lit the assemblage, drawing on the pipe with the huff and puff of a train leaving the station.

  “That’s right,” he said between puffs, chuffing out steam as regularly as an engine of the Great Western line. “Madam Irene is devoted to small cigars.”

  “Only when she is deeply puzzled.”

  “Is she deeply puzzled often?”

  “Only when she has inserted herself into the muddled affairs of others.”

  “Ha!” He gave that strange bark of a laugh I had heard from him before and moved to the window, whether to give me his back or to look down upon the street I could not tell. Either intent was insulting. “How does she survive your disapproval of her habits?”

  “Do you mean of smoking or of inserting herself into the muddled affairs of others?”

  “Both.”

  “Very well,” I said coolly. “Everybody does.”

  He barked in laughter again and turned to face me. “I must say I admire one of your own habits.”

  “My habits? I have none.”

  “On the contrary, I have never seen a more habit-prone woman. I am referring to that feminine gewgaw you wear. Apparently it has it uses.”

  It took me a moment to realize he meant my trusty chatelaine. I took its presence so for granted that I had forgotten about it, as a man might a pocket watch and chain.

  I suppose this sterling silver assemblage of accessories that dangle from a central piece that clasps onto my belt was actually an elegant female appurtenance. Yet I, who avoid ornament for its own sake, did not regard it so. Perhaps it was from the habit of doing needlework, but I was so used to having my daily tools by my side that they seemed pure practicality, like a man’s pocketknife. And indeed, I did carry a small but sharp blade among the many implements upon my chatelaine.

  I disconnected one small item from its leash of slim silver chain now: the etched and enameled etui, or Oriental needle case.

  “Irene wished me to bring you this,” I said, holding it up, knowing that what I held would for him be irresistible.

  He strode toward me, his face bright with curiosity. This alien object was from his former adversary, Irene Adler. It was small and hidden. It was being offered by a rival, or an enemy, or perhaps by a colleague. It came to him, a gift, by the command of a beautiful woman he admired above all others of her sex.

  He came to me as a fish to a hook, and I knew an intermediary’s triumph.

  Yes, we all have our all-too-predictable habits. Even, or especially, Mr. Sherlock Holmes.

  34.

  Buffalo Gals

  Buffalo Gals, won’t you come out tonight,

  And dance by the light of the moon.

  —AMERICAN MINSTREL SONG

  FROM A JOURNAL

  “Too bad that Nell must immerse herself in the affairs of the maison de rendezvous,” I told Irene as we jolted toward the red-painted iron-lace minaret of the Eiffel Tower on the open second level of a horse omnibus. For a few centimes we could suffer along with the mobs of men of affairs and visitors to Paris. “She might actually enjoy an outing to the World Exposition.”

  “I doubt it. She has at least confronted the exotic individuals available at the maison. Cowboys and Indians and buffalo herds are utterly alien, and might be even more distressing.”

  Irene gave me an exceptionally level glance, as if she now was talking to a person she perceived behind my current guise. “It is best that we Americans investigate the Wild West Show. Luckily, today is a command performance for the Baroness Rothschild, and we are to be guests in their pavilion.”

  I nearly choked at this casual information. I had never dreamed to be in spitting distance of a Rothschild.

  “After the performance,” Irene went on, “I have taken the liberty of arranging for a British ‘scout’ for our behind-the-scenes tour.”

  “Really?”

  “Bram Stoker.”

  I blinked quickly. “I’ve always wondered. Is Bram short for Abraham?”

  “Probably. I’ve never thought about it. He has always been ‘Bram.’ Wondering otherwise would be like questioning why ‘Pink’ replaces Elizabeth, or why Elizabeth does not admit to a last name.”

  I felt myself flushing. It didn’t matter the emotion: anger, anxiety, indignation, I always flushed in response. The one thing I never flushed from was shame, because I never felt any. Which fact would astound Miss Penelope Huxleigh.

  “Cochrane,” I said, bitingly.

  “Irish,” Irene mused, “the blessed race.”

  “Blessed into starving by the millions not four decades ago.”

  She eyed me sharply, as if I had just confessed to something I had meant to keep secret.

  “You have a thirst for justice, Elizabeth Cochrane, that is most unusual in the inhabitant of a bordello.”

  I flushed more, furious but unable to answer her.

  “I have a thirst for justice, too,” she admitted. “It surprises me, but there it is. I am appalled that the London police have so easily given Jack the Ripper up for dead. If he is not, many more women will die both horribly and uselessly.”

  “You can understand that the police would hope that the crimes were merely a madman’s last gasp.”

  “And you think—?”

  “I have seen the rough side of life’s hand. There is much needless suffering and too many who inflict it in every land. Such infamy is not an accident, and it usually doesn’t end so conveniently.”

  Irene nodded. She had dressed for our outing in an ensemble fashioned like a riding habit, but more useful than that lovely but confining English fashion.

  There was no trailing train to drape gracefully down from a sidesaddle, for instance, but a street-length skirt that brushed her boot tops and gave the impression of being divided. A veiled derby dipped over her forehead, the veil caught up with a feathered cockade. I also realized that Irene had assembled this ensemble from a skirt, jacket, boots, and hat never meant to commune together.

  I was startled, on regarding her dress, to realize that in some inimitably elegant Parisian way it recalled the sharp-shooting rig of Miss Annie Oakley, Sitting Bull’s “Little Sure Shot,” who performed under her two middle names, in actuality being Miss Phoebe Moses. I smiled at that fact. Women who performed were not always as barefaced in using their private names as Irene Adler.

  The sharpshooting ladies of the Wild West Show were much admired, both within the company and beyond it. My companion was subtly appropriating that revered position by mimicking their attire.

  I considered my all-purpose checked overcoat, neat and practical. I would pass muster with Nell, surely, and on the necessarily trampled grounds of the Wild West Show, but Irene Adler Norton would seem strangely at home, however much a stranger. She had prepared for this expedition as an actress for a play.

  I wondered whether this would be a melodrama or a tragedy. Or merely an exhibition.

  The domes and spires and mansards and peaked rooftops and pagodas and tent tops gathered around the foundation of the Eiffel tower like gaudy circus wagons surrounding the fiery red central pole of a tent fashioned from the smooth, gray-clouded Parisian sky.

  The audacity of Gustave Eiffel’s Tower was astounding and the talk of the world. Its broad, arched base stood astride the cream of French architecture, dwarfing everything with its three hundred meters of height topped by a fifty-meter-high all-metal electric light at the very pinnacle.

  It was, in short (if such an expression has any business being applied to a temple of modern hubris like the Eiffel Tower), the world’s tallest building and an immense lightning rod for all Paris. And this role became literal when they lit the entire structure at night. The to
wer glowed ember red, with gold lights gleaming around each of the three tiers and the four foundation arches. The great beam at the top flashed up into the clouds and down upon the glittering domes and glass ceilings of the exposition buildings. I had seen it from our hotel room windows when I could not sleep.

  The theme of the exposition was Jules Verne and the industrial transformation his stories predicted, mechanical whales in the sea and such.

  Irene stood still on the river embankment, gazing at the hurly-burly of the crowds. She was used to the bucolic quiet of the country, I think, and to entering Paris only to visit its grand institutions.

  Then the History of Human Habitation display clustered around the tower’s base caught her eye.

  “That is the great architect Garnier’s work,” she said brightly, almost wistfully. “He designed the Opéra of Paris, a quite extraordinary building. One feels impelled to sing just to look at it. And that is from the outside! We must see this exhibition.”

  “What of Mr. Stoker?”

  “Oh, he is tall enough to be seen, or to see us. We have time to explore.”

  She took my arm, and soon we were strolling under imported palm trees gazing into Sudanese huts or, mere moments later, passing stunted Oriental trees beside Chinese and Japanese structures as intricately constructed as paper lanterns.

  At one moment we were viewing the crude cubbyhole of a Stone Age arrow-maker, at the next three-dimensional representation we were peering into an elegant Etruscan villa or a Persian mansion.

  Beside these architectural adornments squatted the crude skin and hide huts of Lapps, Eskimos, the reed huts of African tribes, and . . .

  We stopped to admire the simple towering triangle of a teepee.

  “Quite different from a maison de rendezvous,” Irene murmured as we observed an architecture of sticks and skins that yet radiated a simplicity and strength which rivaled the Eiffel Tower itself.

  “This is supposed savagery,” she said. “The tower is civilization. Which society would more easily spawn a Ripper, do you think, Pink?”

  “You are doing it,” I said.

  “Doing what.”

  “What Nell complains of.”

  “Which is?”

  “Rhyming our names. ‘Well, Nell.’ ‘. . . think, Pink.’ ”

  “Really, I am doing that?”

  I nodded.

  “Perhaps I am used to singing in rhyme, or assonance at least. Anyway, what do you think? Does the Ripper’s mania spring from too much savagery or too much civility?”

  “The answer would seem obvious.”

  “Yes, but obvious answers are always dangerous. Ah.” She lifted her chin like a dainty hound smelling prey. “There is Bram’s glorious red head. We will soon have a chance to meet savagery face-to-face.“

  I trotted obediently after her as she hastened to the side of the very tall, very red-bearded man in a hat and suit who stood gazing over the heads of the crowd looking for someone.

  I was free to study him as I had not been in the confines of our hotel room. He was a man of substantial and robust middle age, not portly like the Prince of Wales, yet massive in both height and breadth. Quite handsome in a quiet way, his beard neatly trimmed and his gray eyes lightening with pleasure as he recognized Irene.

  Yet there was nothing untoward in his expression or manner, only the easy congeniality so often found in large, secure men who manage to avoid becoming self-satisfied.

  He took her hand and brushed his lips against it. “My dear Irene,” he murmured happily, then turned politely to me.

  And froze in horror.

  Instantly I realized that he, too, had taken new stock of me, and that he must have glimpsed me at the maison de rendezvous, for there is nothing about me that should strike horror into any man, unless he suspected what I am capable of, and none ever do. I am often called “little,” although I stand five-foot-five, but I am slender and pretty enough. Men have always been gallant with me, and I do not mind it, for it is useful.

  “You remember meeting this young lady at my hotel, although I neglected to introduce her,” Irene said quickly. “Miss Elizabeth Cochrane of Pennsylvania.”

  “Indeed.” Bram Stoker stared hard at me. “I have visited that state during Irving’s tours, a fine place.”

  “And Henry Irving is a very fine actor,” I said, “so they are well matched.” I extended a hand, which he shook gently. “Are you not his manager?”

  He nodded, conveying an air of both pride and modesty that I found charming, as I sensed that all his pride was in Irving and all the modesty was for himself. I could see that the proper introduction that Irene had engineered had dispelled his fear of familiarity. He turned to her, affable again.

  “You wish to meet Buffalo Bill, I understand.”

  “Heavens no, dear Bram! I wish to meet”—Irene visibly consulted her memory, one of her few performances that I found forced—“Red Shirt, is it? Or Mr. Flat Iron?”

  Bram Stoker roared with a redhead’s unfettered laughter. The blessed race, Irene had called the Irish, and perhaps laughter is our one and only blessing.

  I found my lips turned up in company with his, and hers.

  “Buffalo Bill is a down-to-earth sort,” he went on, “but I imagine that he will be disappointed that two such lovely ladies are more eager to meet a pair of Red Indians than the famous Western scout himself.”

  Irene put her arm through Bram Stoker’s. “If you can find this American marvel, I have no doubt that he will be happy to show us all the exotic elements of his world-famous spectacle.”

  Mr. Stoker offered me his other arm. He was completely at ease now. I had to wonder how he had seen me during my short time at the maison de rendezvous. I certainly had not spied him, which either meant that his presence there was utterly innocent, or appallingly guilty, depending on if he had been behind closed doors the whole time, or not. Few men wander into such a place innocently, but I am always willing to consider an exception to the rule.

  “You will indeed meet this ‘American marvel,’ ” Mr. Stoker went on jovially. I could tell he enjoyed having two handsome women on his arm. I am not in Irene’s league, but am not to be sniffed at in that line, either. “First I will escort you to the Rothschild box. The show is ending, and you may wish to greet the Baroness and her guests.”

  I could hear the rapid explosions of firearms and the thunder of hooves followed by applause and hoarse cheers, but by the time Mr. Stoker had escorted us around the grandstands surrounding the vast outdoor performance arena, only a shimmering curtain of dust and a huge expanse of ground churned up by the wheels and hooves of two daily frantic reenactments of war parties and raids was evident.

  The baronial box was draped with the flags of America and France as well as velvet swags in both countries’ colors: red, white, and blue.

  Imagine my surprise when I was introduced to the Baron and Baroness de Rothschild, who then turned to a rather portly gentleman with sleepy spaniel eyes the Baroness introduced as “Edward Albert, Prince of Wales.”

  Irene apparently knew everyone except the Baroness, whom she had given a deep bow of the head, the gesture of unacquainted equals, which I found interesting. Like me, there was not a servile bone in her body. I could not say as much for Nell.

  Yet, for the first time in my life, I simply did not know what to do! At mention of the Prince’s name, I found my hand thrusting out, then retracting, then advancing again, not sure if I expected the Prince to kiss it (if a prince could even kiss the hand of a “commoner”) or shake it.

  “You must be American.” His laugh brought a brief spark of life to those heavy-lidded eyes. “All the American sharpshooting ladies when Buffalo Bill’s show came to London last year shook hands with Mama, a frightful breach of court etiquette that the Queen and my wife Alex took in gracious spirits. I never thought I should see that, Mama dispensing with ceremony, for which I much thank the refreshing American ladies!”

  He took and shook my
gloved hand rather limply, but his touch was lingering while he consulted Irene behind me. “This is—?”

  “Not my usual companion, Miss Huxleigh. This is Miss Elizabeth Cochrane of Pennsylvania.”

  “Another charming American place name, with as lovely an ambassadoress as New Jersey boasts,” he replied with a nod at Irene.

  By now my hand was anxious to emigrate from the rule of Britannia, but there was no graceful retreat. So I produced a good old American schoolgirlish curtsy and incidentally retrieved my hand on the pretext of needing it to lift my skirt hem during my exercise.

  “It is always a pleasure to see you again, Your Highness,” Irene noted during my maneuver.

  The Prince nodded complacently. He seemed a man of amiable nature. “Especially with my current visit to Paris proceeding so . . . quietly, thank you, which I can’t say about the entertainment we have all enjoyed here today, though there will never be a Wild West Show as thrilling for me as June before last in London. That is when I joined the Kings of Denmark, Belgium, Greece, and Saxony for a thundering ride in the Deadwood Coach during the howling, shooting attack by Red Indians. Quite enthralling.

  “Afterward I told Buffalo Bill, ‘Colonel, you never held four kings like these, did you?”

  “ ‘I’ve held four kings,’ he replied, ‘but four Kings and the Prince of Wales make a royal flush, and that is unprecedented.”

  The Prince chuckled at the showman’s swift and flattering response. I confess myself impressed by our American legend’s quick wit as well as his ease among the foreign aristocracy.

  Irene also exercised that wit and savoir faire. I looked around and saw she had ebbed away for a quick conferral with the Baron, a slight man wearing the white side whiskers of his generation.

  By now the Baroness had come to rescue me from the Prince, or perhaps the Prince from me. I exchanged a polite glance with her only to encounter the cool, assessing eyes of a woman who regards other women as rivals, at least on first acquaintance.

  It occurred to me that Edward Albert might be a special friend of hers, so I gave him a darling, dimpled smile of farewell just to irritate her before flouncing off to join Irene.