Irene beamed at my incredulity. “Alice, Duchess of Richelieu, is a discerning woman. Her Paris salon in the Rue de Faubourg St-Honoré attracts the leading wits, politicians, writers and artists of Paris, although she somehow overlooked inviting myself; living incognito can be an inconvenience.”
“What does the woman have to do with me, pray? Would she invite your entire family if she knew any more of them than Godfrey and I do?”
“I merely point out that Her Grace is not unintelligent and that she has included you in the invitation; apparently she recognizes you as a key member of our... association.”
“But this is not a social invitation!” I said, exasperated.
Irene smiled with extreme self-satisfaction. “No, is it not. It is a business invitation. My first... case... as Madame Irene Norton. And I owe it all to Sarah Bernhardt.”
“The world owes much that is unfortunate to Sarah Bernhardt,” said I darkly, “including the notion that women may go about doing as they wish with no consequences.”
“Oh, there are consequences,” Godfrey said, draining the last of his coffee with a thoughtful expression. The imbibing of that disgusting brew was a habit he had acquired from Irene. “And it is consequences that cause crime, which in turn provokes more consequences. I had best begin inquiring after poor Montpensier; I must return by three for this command appearance before the duchess. Perhaps I shall know more of the suicide of Louise’s father’s then.”
“That would be nice.” Irene smiled as if Godfrey were promising her some tasty bon-bon, her hand pausing on his.
“Someone must tell this woman that I am not your sister,” I said when he had left. “First I am taken for
Godfrey’s wife, and now for your sister, which is equally ludicrous.”
“Godfrey’s wife? But, Nell, who would—? Not the ruffians on the train! Poor darling, you seem to be forever miscast by both the highest and the lowest elements of society. Being my sister is not so awful a role, is it?”
“I would that I were; I could probably sing on key and I might even be pretty.”
“You’re pretty as you are; you simply don’t dress for it.”
“Oh, Irene, you always think clothes make the woman.”
A wicked gleam enhanced her already bright eyes. “Let me prove it. I will attire you this afternoon as my mythical sister. We will see what the duchess thinks of you then.”
“I am more concerned with what I think of the duchess.”
“You are always thinking of others, and never of yourself, Nell. We will take one small step toward correcting that today. You will see; you will not know yourself. Besides, it will divert my mind from the excitement of my appointment with the duchess, will it not? And you do wish to be useful, don’t you?”
I was, as always with Irene, trapped by my own credo.
We walked to the duchess’s home that afternoon. Irene said she knew the way. In Monte Carlo, walking was not a sign of poverty but, rather, a display of ease and idleness and the means to afford it. Here it was called “taking the air,” or “strolling,” never a “necessity.”
Yet walking any distance from the public promenades was hazardous, for the streets were steep and winding. Godfrey offered each of us an arm, delighted, he claimed, to squire two such beauties about the town.
Irene had indulged in two happy hours devoted to my reconstruction, trilling snippets of arias as she snipped off frills of my hair. She became so enraptured by her vocalizing that she waved the hot curling iron as if it were a conductor’s baton. Such play, she said, reminded her of her performing days.
If at any point I objected to a particularly frivolous placement of a curl, or to such enhancements as rouge delivered on a rabbit’s foot or soot pooled around my eyes, I was instructed not to be silly; she was using only the lightest of subterfuges.
I was curious to see how she would transform me into her “sister.” I had not forgotten the aged housekeeper she had created on my features before she and Godfrey fled England, the King of Bohemia and Mr. Sherlock Holmes in London. .
“A pity you would not permit the henna rinse,” Irene said as her fingers poked my frizzled locks into a final semblance of disorder. “Your hair is unremittingly brown otherwise. Now the bonnet.”
She lowered a beribboned concoction atop my plain brown head. A pale-blue ostrich plume trembled above the felt bonnet in time with the matching flutter of the curls fringing my face.
The gown was of brown grosgrain silk, with broad, blue satin skirt reveres and sleeves on which a brown cut-velvet pattern provided rich shadings. Pleated blue canton crepe circled my neck and cascaded down my bodice, emphasized here and there with blue satin bows.
Irene led me to the pier glass and while I confronted myself, gave me one last examination.
“Well?”
I studied myself, who indeed did not resemble myself, and next I studied Irene. Then I laughed.
“You do not like it? Nell, you ingrate!”
“I do not look like your sister—I look like you! And you look like a laundry girl! Irene, the price of making me into a silk purse has transformed you into a... I do not wish to be explicit.”
“I know the adage, Nell.”
Irene frowned at herself in the looking glass. Her long labors over my coiffure had caused her own hair to fall from grace. Her face was pale, her brows knitted, her expression distracted.
“We have less than half an hour before we must meet Godfrey in the lobby,” I reminded her gently. I stepped to the room’s center and turned slowly. “Of course, I am ready.”
“And I will be in a moment.” Irene seated herself at the dressing table. In mere minutes she had worked the same transformation upon herself that it had taken her an hour to achieve with me.
Irene spurned personal maids; her long experience with theatrical paint and hairdressing made her more skilled at her own toilette than any servant would be. And indeed, she moved with a magician’s swift surety, her fingers darting to the precise powder puff or rouge pot she required. Her hair bowed to the admonishment of a boar-bristle brush and was quickly piled and gleaming auburn again, without benefit of henna. She soon rose to doff her combing gown. I helped her don a handsome visiting costume of pink lace and corded satin.
We shortly stood before the mirror again. Now there was nothing laughable about her appearance, save that mine suffered by comparison.
“You look divine,” Irene said, bracing me. “How unfortunate that your nature takes so little delight in feminine frivolities.”
“It’s a pity that feminine frivolities take so much time! Your beauty is inborn, Irene. That’s why you can enhance it in a moment. Mine must be erected brick by brick from a dull foundation.”
“Nonsense. It is a matter of motivation. We must find you a charming gentleman to dazzle.”
“You were beautiful before you met Godfrey.”
“And you have your own virtues, both inner and outer, Nell. Neither need be skimped upon.”
Irene thrust toward me a blue silk parasol decorated with an exceedingly silly array of bows. I backed away. “Not another parasol, I beg you!”
“A parasol will not kill you, and it is ever so elegant in Monte. We must not let the sun darken our porcelain complexions.”
“And how could it, with all this powder we have pressed upon them?”
But Irene would not be denied. I took the idiotic thing. Thus we rustled downstairs to greet Godfrey, whose surprised attention and complimentary opinion greatly embarrassed me and brought many unwanted glances to our party and myself.
Now I was bemoaning my fragile apparel as my thin-soled kidskin slippers skidded on the rough cobblestones while the soft, constant sea zephyrs blew curls and furbelows into my eyes.
“The very house, as I thought!” Irene said, stopping before a villa that crouched in the shadow of the palace. The wind had tousled the curls around her face into a rich russet furl; on her, disarray seemed neither an impediment nor a d
etraction.
“This is where the bearded man escorted the woman from the palace?” Godfrey sounded doubtful.
“Exactly. I stood there—” Irene pointed to a narrow side alley “—and smoked a cigarette while waiting for him to come out.”
We were expected—and urgently—for a houseman opened the duchess’s door before Godfrey could ring. He bowed us down a short hall to a side parlor.
Although the house’s pale stucco exterior was in need of paint and some of the shutters had broken struts, within all was elegant in that French manner that makes wicker stools and flowers in pitchers seem the careless height of fashion. Oscar Wilde would have adored it... and probably did.
Sunny yellow silk covered the parlor walls; gray velvet pussy willows studded bare stalks arching from vases set around the chamber. Bowls of blue Japanese porcelain bloomed against this temperate background like Holland tulips.
The duchess rustled in unannounced, clad in a striped house gown of hyacinth and mint-green taffeta bearing multitudes of heliotrope ribbons.
My long association with Irene had given me an opportunity to study the day’s most acclaimed beauties: in London, Lillie Langtry and Florence Stoker; in Paris, Sarah Bernhardt. I was always struck upon first meeting them by how their reputations had not only preceded them, but exceeded them.
It is perhaps testimony to my partiality, or to the cruel obscurity in which the most deserving almost always languish, that none of them could hold so much as a beeswax taper to Irene’s incandescent loveliness.
Alice, Duchess of Richelieu, was another disappointment, although some would find her enormous blue eyes piquant. Certainly her blond hair was striking, but her nose and chin were excessively long and would coarsen with age. Now, of course, like Irene, Alice Heine was but thirty. Unlike Irene, she was already a mother—of a boy, Marie Odeon, and a girl, Odile—and a widow for longer than she had been wed.
Such facts had Godfrey produced from his inquiries with those who record us all for posterity: journalists and lawyers.
“My dear Mr. and Mrs. Norton,” the duchess said in English. “And Miss—?” Bright blue eyes as unblinking as buttons were fixed upon me.
“Miss Penelope Huxleigh,” Irene said quickly.
“Then you are English by ancestry, if not by birth,” the youthful duchess said quickly, still taking me for Irene’s sister and thus assuming that Huxleigh had been Irene’s maiden name.
Apparently it suited Irene to have her think so. “Not—quite,” said she.
“But you were born in America. Sarah says so.”
“The North.” Irene said no more.
“I lived in the South, the penultimate south of New Orleans. If you have seen it, you understand why I love the French, and love particularly Monte Carlo. Perhaps you know New Orleans?”
“No. My travels have been predominantly abroad.”
“You must have been young when you left the States. I detect no accent.”
“As a singer, I am at home in many languages.”
“I see.” Again the lively blue eyes pecked at Godfrey and myself, darting from buttonholes to gloves to faces to empty chairs about the chamber. “You must be seated and we will have tea. Are you enjoying Monte Carlo? Mr. Norton? Miss Huxleigh?”
“Splendidly,” Godfrey said, “although I am now engaged in poring over obscure documents rather than strolling in the sunshine.”
“Indeed, I have heard that your grasp of both English and French law has been useful to many in Paris. It is becoming a fluid world, is it not? We are all mixes of this and of that and live in this land and that.”
A maid appeared among us and began quietly laying out a tea fit for an emperor.
“Certainly, Your Grace,” Irene said, “but our roots remain. I detect a New Orleans glide over your vowels in both English and French.”
Alice smiled so sunnily that I revised my opinion of her beauty. “I am an utter mélange, it is true: half French, half Jewish and of the Catholic faith!” She laughed at her self-contradictions. “I am a young woman still, but a mother and a widow. I am wealthy, yet unable to buy my heart’s desire. I am a friend to starving writers and artists, yet would be a princess. Can you help me, Mrs. Norton? Sarah said you are a mistress of the awkward situation.”
Irene sipped the exotically colored tea in a Sevres porcelain cup. “How awkward?”
“Very,” replied the duchess. “I am, you see, an impetuous woman.”
I stared, recalling that Irene had discerned that very characteristic in her handwriting.
The duchess went on as one accustomed to talking and being heeded, not from vanity but from the effervescent force of her personality.
“I wed just two weeks past my seventeenth birthday and bore my first child within the year.”
“That is indeed impetuous,” Irene murmured into her teacup.
“Armand died in Athens scarcely more than four years after our marriage. In the meanwhile, my father had left New Orleans to join his family’s banking firm in Paris, Heine Frères, second only to the Rothschilds in prominence. Father would say the Rothschilds are second.” Irene nodded sagely. “Sarah Bernhardt credits your father for the fact that any of her wealth accrues at all, given her spending habits.”
“Sarah is an artist. She holds nothing back, especially money. When she comes to Monte, my father bombards me with letters pleading that I keep her from the gaming tables.”
“Do you?” Godfrey asked.
She regarded him for a long moment, during which she both measured his attractions and read his imperviousness. “No, Mr. Norton. Only one thing would distract Sarah from gaming, and then not for long enough. Besides, my father asks the wrong persuader. He has had scant luck at dissuading me from my, ah, intense interests.”
“How intense?” Irene asked softly.
Alice sighed, folded her hands in her lap, then tilted her head to eye us each in turn. The maid had long since departed. In the silence, a cheerful trill came from a cage of canaries almost lost from view against the yellow silk-covered walls.
“Sarah knows, of course, the entire story. Did she tell you?”
“No,” Irene said. “Sarah is discreet about her friends.”
Alice smiled. “A pity she cannot be discreet about herself. Neither can I. You are an odd triumvirate in whom to entrust my deepest secrets. I feel that by rights, Mrs. Norton, we should be rivals; and that we, Mr. Norton, should be romantic intriguers; and that we, Miss Huxleigh—” she leaned forward to fix me with a long stare “—should be sisters. Yet there is something steady and reassuring about you all. I sense perhaps that you also have seen more of the world than most.”
I did not know whether to resent more being taken yet again for a harmless sister or the assumption that I was hardened to the world’s uglier side.
“Certainly we see more than most,” Irene said. “Your Grace—”
“No, no! Alice. Simple Alice from New Orleans—though my title enraptures my father to the buttons on his spats. That’s what has always worried him, you see, that after the coup of capturing Armand, Duc de Richelieu, one of the oldest, most esteemed titles in tout France, I should waste myself on someone unworthy.”
Irene contemplated the chirping canaries. “Would ‘someone unworthy’ have precise hands and wear a beard?”
Alice drew back, surprised into silence for once. She regarded her entwined fingers and spoke on. “I was but twenty-two when Armand died. I did not show the proper spirit of wishing to vanish utterly from the sight of the world. My father exported me to the isle of Madeira, off the coast of Africa. There I was to bask in the sunshine, stroll lost in melancholy along the beach and in general wither for a decent period of time.
“Instead, I met Emile. He was a doctor and Jewish. Neither characteristic pleased my father. He descended on the capital city of Funchal like a well-dressed torrent, humiliating Emile and whisking me away to Biarritz to ‘recuperate’ in peace.”
Alice shru
gged. “Biarritz also had doctors. I met Jacob, also Jewish, also a physician and also poor, relatively speaking. This time I was not to be swayed by my father’s wrath. My money was my own, as was my will.” Irene frowned. “Where does His Highness, Prince Albert, come into this?”
Alice dimpled, clearly delighting in recounting her shocking story. “I had met him briefly in Funchal. He was leading an expedition to conduct deep-sea diving experiments near Madeira. He was titled and rich, all that Father would want for me, but of course Father must rush me from Madeira to separate me from Emile.”
“Was the prince not also married?” Godfrey asked coolly. When she stared at him, he smiled. “Such facts are always recorded in cramped handwriting in dusty offices. I have spent my morning in such unpleasant places.”
“Albert’s wife left him years ago, while still carrying his son. The marriage had been arranged, and she was Scotch,” Alice added disdainfully, as if the last fact certainly explained all previous ones.
“But you have jumped to the conclusion of my tale,” she continued. “Albert was also a neighbor of mine in Paris. Our brief meeting in Funchal was not our last. His first marriage had been annulled in the church and dissolved by the divorce courts. We were free to marry, save that his father, Prince Charles, forbid it. He found me flighty. So it sits, with Albert and myself living our lives in Paris and Monte Carlo, waiting for... the inevitable, when we will do the inevitable, and marry as we wish.”
“What is your difficulty?” Irene inquired. “You are willing to wait, and worldly enough—both of you, from what I hear of the prince’s younger days—to make the wait pleasant.”
“The problem is Emile,” Alice said.
“The bearded man,” Irene prompted.
Alice appeared dazed. “You do know him then?”
“I have seen him, which is enough. You set him to follow us.”
“I wished to know more about those to whom I would confide such delicate matters. Then, too, Emile himself was suspicious. He thought you might even be the source of our problem.”
“Which is—?” Godfrey put in.
“Blackmail,” Irene answered promptly for the duchess. “Someone wishes to acquaint Prince Albert with your indiscretions. Though the prince himself had a scandalous youth—”
The Adventuress: A Novel of Suspense featuring Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes Page 15