“Most unpleasant for ladies,” said Sherlock Holmes, “but then I see you are attired as lads. A wise precaution.”
“You!” said Elizabeth, as indignant as only the young can be. “You were the one who waited outside our hotel and then followed us here.”
“If I were watching you, you would not see me. And I would not station myself so obviously near your windows as to be visible. No. I was your coachman. That is a far more practical method. Why follow when one can lead?”
Irene unleashed an impressive arpeggio of laughter. “You were taking quite a chance. Why on earth gamble that we would go out?”
“Because you have been out at hours and in places where ladies of good reputation would never go. And because I saw that the arrest of James Kelly would not satisfy Pinkerton extraordinary Irene Adler.”
“Former Pinkerton,” she corrected him. “The only ‘Pink’ we have here is—” She glanced at Elizabeth, who even in the lamplight could be seen to blush a fiery red.
Was Irene hinting to Sherlock Holmes that Elizabeth was the Pinkerton agent now, or did Irene truly not know that she was? Or was Elizabeth not a Pinkerton as I had suspected? While I began to question who I really was the conversation continued without me.
“I must tell you,” said Sherlock Holmes, “that the fragment of cork you found in the cellar on the rue des Moulins is exactly the same as smaller fragments embedded in the soles of Kelly’s shoes. He obviously never left the establishment after installing the, er, settee, but lurked in the cellar until the dinner hour, when he could prowl the upper stories undetected.”
“And there he stumbled across the two women, er, sitting on the settee, and promptly slit their throats and committed other gruesome but compelling atrocities?” Irene sounded dubious.
“You’ve seen the man. Quite significantly mad. He is also a very likely suspect in the Whitechapel atrocities, even more especially after this outrage.”
“And the death near the Eiffel Tower?”
“Likely his work as well. There will be quite a tussle between the French and English authorities and governments for the possession of Mr. James Kelly. Both will vie for the claim to the most pernicious crimes committed on the motherland’s soil. Fortunately, that is not part of my responsibilities.” He paused, as if about to broach an unpleasant subject. “Despite the evidence, you believe that the Ripper is still at large?” Mr. Holmes asked Irene then.
I believed that asking the question, rather than telling her the answer, took some measure of humility on Sherlock Holmes’s part that he was not used to extending to anyone, least of all a woman.
“Because of the evidence, I believe that someone, or something is. I am not convinced that a man as easily unhinged by a trio of fallen women as James Kelly is capable of eluding the police as neatly as Jack the Ripper did.”
“Eluding the police in Whitechapel was child’s play, Madam. It is a tortured labyrinth of interconnecting streets and yards and byways made for swift escapes. Saucy Jack was interrupted once, for certain, and possibly seen many times.
“Besides,” he continued with a stern glance at all of us, “once removed from the infuriating feminine presence this Kelly proved a clever fellow under interrogation. He was certainly wriggling valiantly to save himself. Only my judicious mention of his dead wife provoked an outburst that proved his insanity to the French police. My analysis of the cork from his boot sole provided conclusive evidence that he concealed himself in the maison’s cellar.”
Irene stood aside. “James Kelly may not have been the only one to lurk in cellars, or even that particular cellar. Look.”
“I will,” he said, “but someone must hold the lantern.”
“I will!” Elizabeth, still scarlet, stepped forward to take custody of it.
“Someone must hold my pipe.”
“I will not!” I said.
He smiled, bending to lay it on the ground. “Then perhaps you will extract the usual paper and pencil from your far more practical pockets, Miss Huxleigh, and take notes. But stay behind me please. You must not walk in the evidence any more than you have.”
Behind him? Well!
“And I, Mr. Holmes?” came Irene’s most silken tone.
“You will stand guard by the passage with the pistol at the ready. You are quite right that someone watched you from the hotel. I did my best to lose any pursuit on the cab drive here, but cannot guarantee that the pursuer was turned completely away.”
He glanced around at us with an amusement completely out of place on such a sinister scene. “Poor old Watson! What will he say when I tell him that it took three women in men’s clothing to make up for his ever-reliable presence.”
“He will say,” Irene answered, “that you have much underestimated him, and women.”
“Yes, Watson has always been too gallant for his own good.” His amusement faded. “You will not find that a flaw of mine.”
“Why, Mr. Holmes,” Irene said, “should we be looking that closely at you? We’d rather seek the flaws in those who violate the bounds of civil conduct.”
That he did not answer, but began circling the edges of the cavern, Elizabeth holding the lantern over his stooped form as he produced a magnifying glass from another pocket and began examining the scratches on the walls and the—one would think—utterly unimpressionable ground. While he worked and the light was good, I hastily sketched the odd marks on the wall into my notebook.
Beneath the crude symbols and letters, he bent to find bits of singed wood and produced an envelope into which he swept the disintegrating char. “All that is left of a burnt stick, chestnut I should think, that was used to make the wall markings. There was a fire in the center.”
Elizabeth swept the lanternlight in that direction, illuminating a coalish glitter, a gouache of charred wood, now that he had mentioned it. She had volunteered for a most arduous task: holding the heavy metal lantern high enough to create a pool of light for the detective to work in, and yet always moving it high and low to accommodate his quick and unpredictable motions.
Meanwhile, I had relit my candle with one of Irene’s lucifers and stood near the passageway, trying to jot down notes by its wavering faint light. Chestnut tree stick. Bonfire in center.
“Blood,” said Sherlock Holmes as he lay nearly prone on the ground beyond the charcoal markings. “Drops. From the pattern . . . This is not good.”
He moved on, at times reminding me of nursery charges playing games on hands and knees. The man seemed to have no regard for his own dignity. I remembered Irene’s comment that he looked close in order to see the larger picture, then thought of him as a sort of microscope on human legs, and his actions made perfect sense.
“Wine,” he pronounced. “Red, of course, and it accounts for some of these other drops, but they are thin, and the blood has come in gobbets.”
I nearly gagged as my pen dutifully recorded: Wine. Blood. Drops. Gobbets.
“Ah!” He rose slowly to his feet, his change in position illuminated by Elizabeth’s mirroring of his motion, lantern still in hand, although held up by both hands now.
He had come upon the long string of French words.
“You realize what this means?” Irene commented from the passage mouth. Although she had not much raised her voice, her contralto carried perfectly across the cavern, like a challenge.
“One would almost think,” Sherlock Holmes murmured, “that you had put this here yourself to force a tie to the London . . . unpleasantness, except that I do not know where you would get blood.”
“It is blood?” I couldn’t help asking, much as I hated to ask that man anything.
“Blood indeed, but perhaps not human.” He glanced to the floor, then knelt a distance back from the wall. “Or perhaps very human indeed.”
Then he began moving back and forth on his knees the length of the writing, leaning to gaze through his magnifying glass close enough to follow the movements of a single ant, then lurching away to survey t
he larger wall.
Elizabeth tried to keep behind him, her lantern illuminating the ground and wall he studied. She scurried like a servant girl to accommodate his moves, and like a member of a privileged class, he gave no notice to her exceptional efforts to anticipate his every need.
At last he sat back on his heels, dirty worn heels they were, and sighed.
“Madam Norton, you have indeed unearthed a conundrum. I would be most interested in your reasons for coming here and finding this. I confess myself puzzled. But I warn you, this smacks of an attempt at deceit, and it had better not be that of you and your cohorts.”
Stern as his voice had become on the last sentence, I felt an unreasonable glow of pride. I had never been called anything so formidable as a “cohort” before. Not even Sarah Bernhardt, bold, shameless woman, could quite qualify as Irene’s “cohort.”
He turned over his shoulder to regard Elizabeth. “Oh, do set down that lantern, Miss Pink. There, toward the middle of the cavern so it will light your excavation party’s find. It is possible that you three have unearthed what corresponds to lost Troy when it comes to the Jack the Ripper saga. Now be quiet and let me think.”
As Elizabeth followed his instructions, the swath of the lantern widened to illuminate the entire French phrase scrawled across five feet of cavern wall and the silhouetted figure of Sherlock Holmes on his knees before it like a follower of Islam facing the east for his morning prayers.
The lantern, its shutters opened fully, cast a faint glow upon the entire site so we could see each other at last. We exchanged glances both puzzled and awestruck.
After a few moments, Sherlock Holmes spoke again, and I wrote down every word, as was my role.
“A man knelt here, where I do, not twenty-four hours ago. More likely . . . six. He was lashed savagely. And he dipped his right forefinger in the blood from his shoulders and sides and back to write these words. French is not his native language, but he knows it well. He moved along this length of cavern, roughly that of a human body, his blood spattering the rock in a fine spray like salt water in a cove, lashed all the while, until he had written these words.”
He paused as if exhausted, as if he himself had made that hellishly painful journey of firelight, blood, and crude penmanship.
Irene spoke, violating his injunction to be silent.
“The Jews,” she said, “are the men that will not be blamed for nothing.”
Of course I recognized the phrase, though I had not when first-seeing it in French.
I held my breath. Something astounding was about to be thought, realized, understood, yet I could not quite grasp it myself. I wrote the phrase again in my notebook, in English: “The Juwes (who could forget that bizarre, unlettered spelling, or was it?) are the men That Will not be Blamed for nothing.” I remembered the odd capitalization, the confusion of negatives so that one was not sure if the Jews were being exonerated by the writer, or indeed blamed. And this was the evidence found not far from Catharine Eddowes’s body, that had been forever erased by the English authorities within hours.
“The Rothschilds were right,” she said. Then, “Do you see it, Mr. Holmes?”
“Of course I see it,” he said icily. “I see almost everything that transpired in this miserable, brutal cavern. There is an evil beyond the insane obsessions of Jack the Ripper, one far older and far more sinister, and it has been at work here. And I am not sure that anyone on earth can stop it!”
I realized then that all his fine and icy anger was really and truly fear.
“It is bad enough to hunt men who rejoice in hurting others,” he added. “It is impossible to hunt men who will so injure themselves.”
After a long pause, he spoke again. “There was murder done here as well. I have read that in the quantity and pattern of the blood that sprinkles this chamber of horrors like holy water from a Roman priest’s aspergillum, just as you, Madam Norton, read your French and realized that the French word for Jews—juives—in a handwritten form and missing the dot of the T—would look like luwes’ to the English eyes that saw it for brief instants before it was erased for eternity.”
For eternity. What had been done here would last for eternity. We were indeed staring at an undeniable link between London Then and Paris Now and the unholy work of Jack the Ripper. There were two links: the Jewish element that Baron de Rothschild had feared and the French connection that indicated the atrocities in Whitechapel had been just the beginning.
In the long, anguished silence that followed, we all paid tribute to the severity of the crimes that had drawn us together. In those moments, the cavern became a dark chapel filled with the incense of sacrifice in its most primitive, fatal forms. In those moments, we became a congregation determined to resist the darkness.
Irene finally spoke.
“I believe I know where the body that bled here has gone. Now, will you follow us, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, and keep quiet and let me think?”
42.
Tableaux Mordants
It had the reality of a newspaper, which most people enjoyed as reality, despite the fact that it was packaged and sensationalized for everyday consumption.
—VANESSA R. SCHWARTZ, SPECTACULAR REALITIES
FROM A JOURNAL
My arms ached from holding up the blasted lantern for the Englishman, as if I’d been rowing a boat across Lake Erie for hours, but of course I could say nothing, or risk being left behind.
Still, how thrilling to be on the hunt with Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler Norton! I could not have dreamed of a better turn of events.
This unspoken (and sometimes almost-spoken) rivalry between them is fascinating. It must long precede my arrival on the scene. I would love to know just how and when it began.
Nell knows, I imagine, but she would not tell the likes of Pink!
I do think that we three women comported ourselves quite well in that stinking cellar. And although I prefer to dress as a lady, roving about in men’s garb is such a lark! Will I dare tell anyone later . . . when this is over? It is all very well to be independent but if one goes too far in offending public sensibilities one can go from being considered a darling of the eccentric to a despised pariah.
Anyway, there we were, four men on the town: three semirespectable gentlemen and one loutish laborer.
As we walked the damp, dark streets following Irene’s lead and looking around and behind for signs of stalkers, I couldn’t help thinking that we three women were a pretty representative sampling of the various heights attributed to Jack the Ripper. None of us was only five feet tall, but rather a few inches over. Just like the Ripper suspects.
And Sherlock Holmes? Well, he topped six feet by at least an inch or two or I’m a mulberry bush! I could see why he assumed a stooped form when in disguise. An exceptionally tall man would not want to stand out any more than he had to.
Imagine if he would wear cowboy boots like a Wild West Show rider!
Well, that is quite a vision.
I tried not to think such wicked thoughts as we proceeded, but I was very tired, and close quarters with rude death tends to make one resort to bravado.
In truth, I was much disturbed by that cellar and the savage events Mr. Holmes divined as happening there. Surely the scrawling man who used his own blood as an inkwell was a prisoner of some kind. Perhaps the writing assignment was a sort of punishment. I am much against corporal punishment for anyone.
And, speaking of corporal punishment, oh, how my arms ached on that walk. Why had I offered to “lift my lamp beside the golden door”? The Statue of Liberty, at least, was made of copper and not frail flesh.
And Miss Liberty rested on a strong base designed by Monsieur Eiffel. It was only a third as tall as his mighty Tower, and an American Revolution centenary gift installed a decade late, only three years ago in 1886. I was glad the French had not elected to observe the hundredth anniversary of our revolution as they had considered marking the centenary of their own revolution: with a giant guill
otine. Imagine all those immigrants “yearning to breathe free” steaming into the face of that in New York Harbor!
I was beginning to recognize the streets. We were not far from the Paris Opéra, moving along the Boulevard Montmartre. The Théâtre des Varietes was on our right, its narrow two stories of classical pillars and top pediment gleaming as if phosphorescent in the gaslit mist. The Théâtre du Vaudeville and the Opéra Comique were also in this area where the Boulevard Montmartre begins and the rue de Richelieu crosses it and famous cafés crowd the sidewalk like pigeons—the Café Riche, the Café Anglais, the Maison Dorée, the Café de Paris. Just ahead was the Passage des Panoramas, those marvelous attractions whose circular scenic paintings twisted perspective into the oddest impression of reality.
Despite the early hour of the morning, this was a celebrated section of Paris, and the occasional cab horse trotted past, though pedestrians were thankfully few, making the possibility of following us harder.
We had all adopted a loping, drunken gait, even Sherlock Holmes, who was, in fact, the most convincingly tipsy of us all.
“How far, Madam?” he asked in slurred tones.
“We are there.”
We managed to stop and pile into one bewildered clot. “Where?” I asked.
She nodded at a building across the boulevard. “The Musée Grévin.”
This announcement brought silence to us all, except to Nell, of course.
“I have never heard of it. What kind of collection does this museum feature?”
“Bodies,” said Sherlock Holmes with a certain relish. “Waxen bodies, many of them impersonating the famous and many of them impersonating the famous dead. The place is locked and barred. Why are we here?”
“To get around locks and bars,” Irene replied. “I believe that someone has preceded us in that enterprise.”
“This is mad!” Nell said.
“It would seem to lack reason,” the English detective seconded in milder tones.
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