Irene Adler 08 - Spider Dance

  The young hotel messenger boy blinked at our united front.

  “Urgent telephone message for Mr. Stanhope,” he said, holding up a folded sheet of paper.

  Quentin snatched it, Godfrey tipped the boy, and I began to read its telegraphic phrases aloud over Quentin’s shoulder as Godfrey closed the door.

  “‘Disastrous turn of events at Six-sixty Fifth. Come at once. Present Stanhope as agent of Her Majesty’s foreign service, Norton as Rothschild agent. I don’t know what they’ll make of Miss Huxleigh, but bring her anyway. This supercedes any current concerns. Stop for nothing. Holmes.’”

  “Surely,” Godfrey objected, “Irene’s disappearance supercedes any new mischief at the Vanderbilt mansion.”

  Quentin frowned. “One would think so. As least we would. Holmes is employed by the Vanderbilts, not us, and his first obligation is to them, of course.”

  “A pity he must go haring off after his own business just now,” Godfrey said. “I for one am going down to the area where Irene was last seen, by God.”

  “Agreed.” Quentin sounded like a second Musketeer chiming in.

  It was all very blood-stirring and gallant, but . . .

  “No,” said I.

  They both stared at me as if I were mad.

  “I wish Irene safely recovered as fervently as you,” I told Godfrey. “But I have known Mr. Holmes—if anyone indeed may know such a man—longer than you. He revels in working alone and needing no one. He wouldn’t summon us unless the disaster at the Vanderbilt house involves Irene’s disappearance. We must go.”

  “And waste more precious minutes,” Godfrey said, “in which Irene may be subjected to unthinkable torments? No!”

  “Then I’ll go alone, though I am the least wanted or useful person on his list.”

  “Nell! Make sense,” Godfrey pled. “We can’t worry about you dashing off on your own when Irene is already missing from just such an intemperate action.”

  “I’ll accompany Nell,” Quentin offered. “Once she’s safe with Holmes, I’ll join you at the Episcopal Club.”

  Much as I hated to discourage Quentin from any course that involved our mutual participation, I quickly pointed out an objection. “Quentin has been in New York City longer and knows it better,” I told Godfrey. “You would be lost on your own.”

  “Then I’ll go to the damned Vanderbilts with you, Nell. Quentin, you can explore the area Holmes was discussing.”

  “I don’t care for us separating like this,” Quentin said. “That’s how Irene disappeared in the first place.”

  “All for one and one for all,” I said. “Has it been lost upon you that Mr. Holmes requested that you represent yourselves in the most impressive professional terms, as agents of the two most potent powers in European affairs today?”

  “We are hardly such elevated figures,” Godfrey said with his usual modesty.

  I could hardly keep myself from stamping my foot. “But you will be useful in that guise, Holmes says. He even thinks I may be useful, which will give you some idea of how truly desperate the situation is. And it involves Irene’s . . . disappearance”—I would not say kidnapping—“or he wouldn’t presume upon us. I know the man. I may detest him, but I don’t underestimate him, and neither should you.”

  Godfrey shook his head as if to dislodge the awful fears that must be buzzing around his brain like gnats, invisible but inescapable.

  “If we find the situation unproductive for our first concern,” Quentin said, “we can leave directly. Another hour—”

  “Another hour.” Godfrey’s voice was grim, and his hands had curled into fists.

  “Irene,” I told him, reminded him, “was not beaten by the Ripper. We have to believe that she can survive another brush with the unthinkable.”

  Godfrey nodded.

  I snatched my hat and steel pin from the table as they, now utterly converted, rushed me out the door.

  I installed the hat once we were ensconced in the Gurney Quentin had run into the middle of the street to engage. I thought for a moment he would have to vault upon the lead horse’s back to dragoon it, but flashing a two-dollar half eagle gold piece worked wonders.

  Certainly it encouraged the current passengers to get out then and there, and he tossed a second such coin up to the driver.

  I rather would have liked to see him vault upon a Gurney horse in the middle of Fifth Avenue, but had to admit that gold was just as quick and effective in this instance.

  “What can have happened?” Godfrey speculated as we rattled along at that smart equine pace that is faster than a trot and just below a canter.

  “It is only ten-thirty in the morning,” I noted, consulting my lapel watch. “What so dire can have happened?”

  Quentin, sitting on my side of the facing seats, touched his finger to my small timepiece. “It was clever of you to have loosened this pin to leave a trail of your own kidnapping last spring,” he said. “I’m glad we recovered your bauble, but you deserve a finer one for your travails.”

  “This has served me well for many years.”

  “Perhaps an outing to Tiffany’s with Irene when we reunite with her—?”

  I caught my breath. Not at the promise of Tiffany’s but at the assumption of a reunion with Irene.

  “You really think so, Stanhope?” Godfrey asked.

  “You remember that Holmes suggested Irene was not a captive but a hunter. I would bet upon it.”

  I bit my lip and nodded to encourage Godfrey, but still couldn’t explain why she would not at least find a way to send us a message, were that the case.

  Quentin squeezed my elbow in acknowledgment that he knew my anxiety. There are a great many liberties the truly ingenious gentleman may take in even the most public circumstance.

  Godfrey, his dear forehead a roadmap of worry lines, didn’t notice this byplay. He sat slapping his undonned leather gloves on his palm, as if they were reins exhorting the horses’s back to further speed.

  The springs jerked back and forth as we stopped, and we three stormed the white stone steps to 660 Fifth Avenue in a solid line, myself whisked up the stairs with boot barely touching stone, my elbows in close custody between my two escorts.

  It occurred to me that neither man was eager to lose a woman under his protection.

  Quentin thumped the huge knocker like a blacksmith.

  The white-faced butler who answered merely had to raise his eyebrows.

  “Mssrs. Stanhope and Norton,” Godfrey said, “calling at Mr. Holmes’s request, with Miss Huxleigh.”

  “Gentlemen, yes. And Miss. I’ll take your things, then this way, please. Right here. The master and Mr. Holmes are in here.”

  He opened a door that was but twenty steps past the huge entry hall.

  I was dazzled by the sight of huge expanses of pale stone carved with medieval intricacy. Had I not been so worried, I might have been impressed by the surrounding magnificence. Yet all I longed to see was Irene’s familiar and dear face.

  It was not within the rich library into which we were ushered. Smoke wafted upward like incense. My first sight was Mr. Holmes pacing, pipe cradled in his palm, thinking furiously and smoking to match the physical and mental motions he made.

  “Ah!” He turned on our entrance. “Mr. William Kissam Vanderbilt, may I present Mr. Quentin Stanhope of Her Majesty’s foreign service, on assignment in New York City. Mr. Godfrey Norton, international barrister and key agent for the Rothschild interests in Europe. Miss Nell Huxleigh, their associate. Gentleman and lady, Mr. William K. Vanderbilt, the wealthiest man in America.”

  “And now the poorest,” Mr. Vanderbilt said sadly. He eyed Godfrey hopefully. “You are acquainted with August Belmont, the Rothschild emissary in America?”

  “Not yet, sir. I just arrived from Bavaria, but I carry letters of introduction to Mr. Belmont, and others.”

  Mr. Vanderbilt nodded, obviously impressed (although anyone who saw or heard Godfrey would have been impressed no matter what
letters he bore).

  “I’m most grateful that gentlemen of your position and experience are here in the city to advise in this most . . . tragic circumstance.”

  We directed expressions of polite, if urgent, inquiry to Holmes, who immediately complied with one of his thorough, if unemotional, précis.

  “Mr. Vanderbilt has been receiving extortion notes from unnamed parties regarding the personages we’ve already discussed,” Mr. Holmes restated to us for our host’s benefit. “These allies are aware,” he added, turning back to the millionaire, “of the atrocious death your blackmailers have engineered in your own home.

  “Therefore,” Mr. Holmes went on quickly, as if racing to apprise us of the situation before we should unwittingly make some awkward comment, “it will not surprise you, my colleagues, to learn that Mr. Vanderbilt’s only daughter, a child of twelve named Consuelo, has been kidnapped by these dastardly schemers.”

  We stood stunned.

  Each of us imagined a child of tender years in the hands of this band of proven monsters.

  It didn’t matter that young Consuelo was a millionaire’s daughter. We’d have felt the same to learn that the most anonymous Street Arab had fallen into such brutal hands.

  “When?” Godfrey asked in the sharp inquiring fashion of a barrister.

  Mr. Vanderbilt answered in the dead tones of one who had pushed the incredible facts through his mind again and again.

  “Her absence was discovered first thing this morning, by her deportment tutor.”

  “If you wouldn’t mind,” Holmes suggested, “it would help if those involved reported to my associates, who have various areas of expertise and knowledge on such matters.”

  “Even Miss Huxleigh?” the millionaire asked doubtingly.

  “She is associated with the Pinkertons in America, Mr. Vanderbilt, yet last spring was instrumental in bringing down a cadre of international spies that threatened the crowned heads of several smaller but vital European kingdoms, which remain on the map today almost solely due to her efforts.”

  Well! Irene Adler was not the only one to twist facts into fancy to support a position.

  As Mr. Vanderbilt left the room to summon his witnesses among the family and staff, he left me with the memory of his awed departing regard.

  “I glimpsed the child,” Holmes said the moment Mr. Vanderbilt exited the library. “A waif as thin-faced as any London Street Arab, though a million times more privileged. She was peering pensively down through the balustrade of the grand stone staircase as her mother left the house. Now. Listen to the testimony of the household, including the child’s mother.”

  Godfrey seemed about to speak, but Mr. Holmes forestalled him.

  “This incident has the most appalling reference to your closest personal concerns, Mr. Norton, rest assured. I would that it did not.”

  So we waited, we three, in considerable anxiety and confusion. Dreadful as the abduction of a child was, given what we knew of these men, it shed little light on the issue dearest to our hearts, our own abducted, or at least vanished, Irene.

  47

  THE GOVERNESS’S TALE

  How do you think I learned the gentle art of Mesmerism, Nell? He hypnotized me, to free my voice of my conscious control, and he taught me to do the same to myself, and, incidentally, others. It has proved a most useful skill, as you may remember from an adventure or two we have shared.

  —IRENE ADLER NORTON IN FEMME FATALE

  BY CAROLE NELSON DOUGLAS

  The person ushered next into the Vanderbilt library was the ghost of my Christmas future.

  That is to say that she was British, she was perhaps fifty years of age, and she was obviously an instructress of well-to-do young ladies. Such I would have been someday had I not encountered Irene on the streets of London in 1881.

  “Miss Bristol was present,” the millionaire said, sitting after ushering her into the room, “when my daughter was abducted.”

  He did not invite Miss Bristol to sit, and indeed I was familiar with such treatment. One always reports on one’s feet, as one’s charges always recite on theirs, while the pater familias listens and nods from the depths of a luxurious easy chair.

  I must admit that Mr. Vanderbilt, though seated, was not at ease in his luxurious leather chair at all.

  Mr. Holmes had already heard the governess’s tale; I could tell that by the way he lingered on the room’s fringes to watch us all as if we were performers for his private entertainment.

  “We’d had our morning ablutions and breakfast,” Miss Bristol said, “during which we’d conversed in French, as required.”

  Quentin interrupted. “Miss Vanderbilt has a speaking command of French?”

  “Indeed yes, sir. She has spoken three languages since the age of eight. Her mother has seen to her education here at home. She expects Miss Consuelo to be as perfectly at ease on the Continent as in England and the United States. I was, in fact, expecting Miss Consuelo’s dancing teacher when the most extraordinary woman appeared in the third-floor gymnasium. My little miss was as entranced as if the Sugar Plum Fairy had paid her a visit.”

  Godfrey and Quentin and I exchanged glances, for this was not the preface for a violent abduction by the sort of men responsible for the death of Father Hawks and the abuse of Father Edmonds.

  Holmes remained content and silent in the background, watching us observing the child’s governess.

  “How extraordinary was this women?” I asked, speaking for the first time. My English accent put the governess at instant ease.

  “Oh, miss, I have never seen the like! She was dressed like a young master, yet her long hair tumbled all around her face and shoulders. And such a face! Quite the most comely face I have ever seen.”

  “How beautiful?” Godfrey asked, steeling himself visibly even as he spoke.

  “Why, such beauty is hard to describe, sir. And it’s odd, I remember her well, but not very precisely, after all. As if some veil were put between her and the world. Her face was . . . sweet and dainty of feature. Her hair was chestnut, yet with gleaming strands of red and gold, her eyes a deep, warm bronze, like a statue made flesh. Her expression, benign in the extreme.

  “Consuelo is a slim, delicate child, quite . . . sensitive. At the age of six, she was terrified to leave the lights below and climb that immense white stone staircase to the upper chambers. She’s twelve now, but still quite timorous. Yet when this woman extended a gloved hand, my miss put her pale palm in hers.

  “‘We will tread a quadrille, Miss Vanderbilt,’ the woman said, almost like someone from another century, ‘that will make you the envy of Paris and Paraballa Land. We will dance away on a moonbeam to Cinderella’s palace in Pichu Machu.’”

  “‘Are you a new dancing teacher?’” I asked.

  “‘Indeed I am,’ she said in that same paralyzing, Mesmerizing tone. ‘And now, my dear woman, if you will leave us to do our steps, we’ll astound you with our progress in an hour hence.’”

  The governess shook her head as she reported this exchange. “I can’t say why, but I did as this extraordinary woman said. I suppose I expected a dancing instructor to be a bit strange. M’sieur Reynard was.”

  Miss Bristol hung her head. “I deserve to be dismissed. When I came back in an hour, they were gone, pupil and instructor.”

  A silence held in the room, while Quentin and Godfrey and I eyed each other in turn.

  At last Godfrey turned to Mr. Vanderbilt. “No one saw either one, your daughter or the unannounced dancing teacher, after that?”

  “No. I suppose if a man is to mislay a daughter, he’d rather it be to this charming apparition than to thugs from the docks, but . . . gone is gone. My wife is inconsolable. And I—am more so. Consuelo is a gentle, docile child, obedient to an extreme. That someone would take advantage of such virtues to wrest her away from us—! If you can’t find her and find an answer to my troubles soon, I will tear this city apart.”

  “That won’t be necessa
ry, Mr. Vanderbilt.” Holmes sounded quite definite. “First, let’s hear from your wife, then I’ll examine the gymnasium where the abduction occurred and proceed from there.”

  Mr. Vanderbilt’s pleasant face went from worried to haunted on hearing Holmes’s plan, but went to the door and asked the waiting butler to fetch his wife.

  “Alva is distraught,” he said on returning to his desk, “to say the least. Consuelo is our only daughter, named for her mother’s closest friend. Alva has . . . great hopes for her.”

  As a former governess, I was delighted to hear of a mother who was as ambitious for her daughter’s development as well as her sons. So often the girls were slighted in favor of the boys. Even I had to admit that Eliza Gilbert’s good education made it possible for Lola Montez to hobnob on equal terms with the leading men of her day.

  So I awaited Alva Vanderbilt with some sympathy. The men had all risen even before she entered the room.

  When she did, I saw a woman with a soft, square face flushed with emotion. I barely more than noted her elaborate Worth gown, although Irene’s acquaintance with the famed “man milliner” of Paris had forever made me aware of over-expensive clothing on other women, even in the most trying circumstances. I suppose I was as expert on that subject as Mr. Holmes was on more homely matters of calluses and cork fragments.

  Alva Vanderbilt stood panting softly as the introductions were made: Mr. Holmes, Godfrey, Quentin. I rose when my own forged qualifications rolled off Mr. Vanderbilt’s tongue, but his wife’s gaze barely flicked over me.

  “I’ve heard of Mr. Holmes from Mrs. Astor,” she said. “If you can do as well by us as you did by the Astors, we shall be all right. But you must understand: Consuelo is not any ordinary millionaire’s daughter.”

  “I would not presume to think any millionaire’s daughter ordinary, madam,” Holmes said with an ironic bow.

  Irony was lost on this lady. “Consuelo has been tutored in all the gracious arts. She is destined to be a great lady in your own native land, sir.” Her glance raked us all, for we were all British. “She will marry a duke.”