The chair shook in a light, admonishing way. “My dear Nell, it is past midnight,” Godfrey said. “We had no idea that you would work so long.”
“Midnight!” I pushed the ebbing pince-nez back on my nose.
Then I frowned at my companions’ flushed faces and celebratory air. Godfrey, with his raven hair and pale gray eyes, looked as devastating in the crisp black-and-white of men’s evening dress as any man I had seen. Marie Antoinette’s diamond flashed at Irene’s throat, barely competing with the Worth evening gown of jade-green brocaded tulle that bared her shoulders and swirled around her figure in a sea foam of swags, draperies, and folds. The Tiffany pin that Godfrey had given her in Paris, of an intertwined musical note and a key, reposed on the tulle at the cleft of her bosom.
“You are up very late,” I commented.
“So are you.” Godfrey pulled back the chair with me on it, then firmly took my elbow. “You must give it a rest, Nell, and return to your rooms. The maps will be here tomorrow.”
“Of course, but I am very near—”
“Wonderful!” Irene spoke with hearty insincerity, brushing my cheek with a good-night kiss. “We must see it all... in the morning.”
In the passage, feeling quite like a bird flushed from its favorite cage, I paused to pat my skirt pocket for the key to my room. From behind the parlor door there issued the sound of soft laughter—not at my cartographic obsession, in fact having nothing to do with tattoos or maps. And then it abruptly stopped.
By morning my eyes were refreshed and I saw new possibilities in my tracings. Alas, Godfrey and Irene did not.
“These look like hieroglyphs.” Godfrey squinted at several sheets, then set them down again.
“More like decorative braid,” Irene agreed to disagree. “Perhaps I’ve set you on an impossible task,” she told me with regret.
For one whose talents were creatively expressive and came naturally, the notion of repetitive, boring work was appalling. Now the size of the assignment she had given me was weighing on Irene’s ordinarily cast-iron conscience.
“Perhaps we—you—should drop the notion,” she said. “Alice has invited us to the palace.”
“What will Godfrey do?”
He smiled at my question. “What else would Godfrey do in a landscape of sun and sea and waving palm trees? I will seclude myself in the Office of Maritime Records and hunt for a shipwreck near Crete around eighteen sixty-eight.”
“Irene never gives you any amusing assignments,” I said.
“Not ‘never’,” he replied, giving her a glance I could not read. “And I prefer the Office of Maritime Records to the palace. It harbors some amazing old gents with even more amazing old stories.” With that and the addition of his hat, he was off for the day upon as dry a mission as my own.
Irene left me to my tracery, retiring to her bedchamber and warning me that I must stop for lunch and then be ready to stroll to the palace for a most interesting demonstration. She had an odd look upon her face; it made me wonder if she was on the verge of a discovery that would render Godfrey’s and my own work moot.
My hand was cramped and my neck stiff by the late forenoon. I was only too pleased to lay aside pencil and pen and refresh myself in my room. When I collected Irene, I learned the reason for her withdrawal all morning.
She stood before me a fashion plate, magnificent in a black silk gown brocaded with clusters of pink barley spikes. Pink ruffles ran up and down the skirt and bodice and festooned a black lace parasol. Neither the broad girdle of pink that encircled and emphasized her slender waist nor the black velvet bonnet with its explosion of pink bows at one ear did anything to detract from the utter, feminine splendor of her toilette.
“We... we are only going to see Alice?” I ascertained.
“I did not say we were going to see Alice—” Irene drew on pink kid gloves “—only that Alice had invited us to a demonstration at the palace. So we are expected, but I don’t expect Alice to be there.”
By now my blue-and-white striped skirt train was cascading alongside Irene’s wake of pink ruffles down the grand marble stairway of the hotel, while every head in the place turned toward us—or rather, toward my companion. Irene rustled through the lobby, oblivious. The faint flush on her cheeks disturbed me. I had seen that glow before, and it was always the same: the bright, feverish expression of a huntress upon the track.
“Irene,” said I. We had paused on the hotel terrace while she unfurled her extravagant parasol, dousing her flaming expression in filtered pink shade. “Why will you not tell me what you have in mind?”
“Because you possibly will betray my intentions.”
“I would not! Indeed, I have rarely known them.”
“Exactly why you would give them away if you did.” She marched, not strolled, smartly down the promenade toward the palace.
I sighed, then clattered after her like a tardy child. We were indeed expected at the palace. The liveried footman admitted us at once and led us toward the building’s rear, and deep within it. I felt vaguely like a trespasser when he flourished open a set of double doors and bowed: “Madame. Mademoiselle.”
The room beyond was vast but so overlit by gaslight that the same architectural details that were charming and whimsical above seemed glaringly gaudy below. Parlor palms thrived somehow in that bright dungeon, while standing coats of armor glittered like gunmetal specters along the walls. These walls were plainer than those above and on them hung strange artifacts: crossed rapiers and leather sacks, bizarre masks of metal mesh, clubs, shields and pistols.
“Madame Norton!” came a jubilant, welcoming voice. “You answer my note with your presence.”
We turned to see a gentleman walking toward us. In that enormous, unfurnished chamber, our entering footfalls had sounded like repeated claps of doom. Yet this man’s steps were soundless. He approached us as if treading water, his silent reflection driving deep into the polished marble floor.
I recognized the Viscount D’Enrique despite his bizarre dress: a striped jersey like a sailor’s, baggy trousers of some cotton stuff, and—now I saw the reason for the stealthy soft-footedness—lace-up shoes as flimsy as spats, with no visible soles.
“I am delighted that you and Miss Huxleigh could come today.” He nodded to me, then bowed over Irene’s hand to kiss the shell-pink kid. “Alice said that you were intrigued by the pugilistic art.”
“I am intrigued by any art, Viscount,” she responded in tones as silken and dark as her gown, “when it is well done.”
Our host was, of course, the same odious viscount who had steered Irene so far down the palace halls on the night of her concert. I liked him no better by day.
“Pugilistic?” I hissed nervously to Irene as he turned away. She shook her head imperceptibly and I subsided.
“Ladies, let me show you the ring,” the viscount offered. “An impromptu space, but it serves.”
His great, silent strides took him to a farther comer of the ballroom-sized space. Upon the floor a painted rectangle defaced the shining stone.
“But it is square,” I noted in confusion.
Irene smiled. “The term is traditional, Nell, from the time when fisticuffs were street affairs, bound only by the ring of men surrounding the contestants.”
“Fisticuffs?” I was horrified. “You call that an art form?”
“No, my dear,” Irene said, “but when gentlemen do it and it is called ‘pugilism,’ it is considered an art form. Fisticuffs is mere survival.”
The viscount’s greasy smile grew slicker. “Madame is obviously an aficionado of the sport, a rarity in a woman. But then she is a rare woman, is she not, Miss Huxleigh?”
“Rare, indeed,” I choked out.
Irene lifted her furled parasol, which she had braced on the floor like a decorative cane, to point to the wall. “Those, I suppose, are the protective gloves.”
“Those?” Was Irene blind as well as mad? I wondered, observing the fat leather bags she in
dicated.
“Indeed.” The viscount, smiling still, looked her up and down as if she were a painting. “I have taken the liberty of asking an equerry to play the role of sparring partner so that you ladies may observe the science of an actual encounter in the ring.”
I stared again at the square on the floor, but I held my tongue. Obviously, these were deep waters, and Irene had seen to it that I should have neither chart nor sextant. I looked up, startled to note the presence of another man in the room. He, too, had arrived soundlessly and was attired as eccentrically as the viscount.
The two men stepped to the wall to take down the clumsy bags, then plunged their hands into them, the viscount lacing the equerry’s closed. He turned to Irene, expecting her to perform the same service for him. She went about it as surely as if she were lacing a corset, not some bizarre appliance for a cruel and even more bizarre sport.
Then the men faced each other. The viscount glanced to me. “Miss Huxleigh,” he said in rebuke, looking at my feet.
I discovered that I was standing on the ridiculous line that indicated the square ring and stepped back, as Irene had. The men began bouncing on their toes and dancing in and out, swooping at each other with their swollen gloves.
Irene prowled the drawn perimeter like a visitor to a zoological garden inspecting a prime exhibit. I stood speechless, watching the viscount strike snake-fast at the equerry, whose head snapped away from the blow. The sound, like a muffled slap, disquieted me.
Many more such sounds ensued. The gleam in the viscount’s eye showed a feral concentration; he took this “sport” very seriously indeed. The equerry was no match for him—how could he be, given the vast difference in their station?—and the viscount soon finished pummeling the man’s resigned features and nodded brusquely to end the match.
He crossed to us like a lion proud of a kill, his face damp with effort, his jersey darkening in places from the same source.
“Well? Was it what you expected, Madame? Mademoiselle?”
“I expected nothing,” I said pointedly, more to Irene than to the viscount.
She smiled and unlaced the hideous gloves. I performed the same chore for the poor equerry, who looked quite faint. Irene regarded the viscount’s overheated state.
“It is warm work,” he said, not in a properly apologetic tone, but in one of boast.
Irene merely smiled again and remained silent.
“You are disappointed, Madame?” he asked. “I could have knocked him down easily.”
“No, no,” she said at last. “I do not require knockdowns, and your skill was most impressive. I should certainly not wish to drive you to violence, Viscount. It’s that I’m American by birth, and in the United States, pugilistic pursuits are not so... formal.”
I had no idea of what she was talking about, but the viscount laughed like a man who has just been dealt a fine hand of cards.
“America! No doubt, Madame, you are used to bloody knuckles and bare chests.”
Irene shrugged ever so slightly and smiled like the Mona Lisa. Despite her elegant pink-and-black gown, I was reminded of a cat who had just released its jaws from a mouse.
“It can be done that way here, Madame,” the viscount said, his voice going low and husky, “but not in the palace. The prince would find it in poor taste. He has found much that he and I used to enjoy together in poor taste since he has become enamored of your American friend, the duchess. I hear now that she wishes to put an opera house in the casino! Opera houses are all very well, and you sing quite ably”—Irene bristled at the comment, I was glad to see—“but the casino! I see, however, that you are a woman of another stripe.”
The conversation’s undercurrent was horrendous. I felt like a swimmer sinking in a rank, dark tide of innuendo and intrigue. Of course I had not the slightest notion of Irene’s purpose, but I wished myself gone. I wished Irene gone. I wished the Viscount D’Enrique gone also, but first I wished Godfrey to arrive and punch the man in his sneering, smiling face. It never occurred to me that I was asking rather more of my imaginary Godfrey than he might accomplish against so seasoned an opponent of the “ring.”
Irene said nothing. In the silence, the viscount barked “Jacques!” at the departing equerry. The man froze like a fox at the first call to hounds. Beside me, Irene’s kid gloves made fists for the merest moment.
With a particularly slimy smile, the viscount crossed his arms and grasped the hem of his striped jersey. “We will have another go at it. No one need know. Madame will be well satisfied.” He made to pull the jersey up— up and off.
“No!” said I.
“You may wait outside,” Irene said without looking toward me. Instead, she was staring at the viscount like a snake at a bird. I could hear my heart beating and the soft shuffle of the reluctant Jacques as he approached the “ring” again. I glimpsed a wedge of cheese-white flesh, a sprinkle of black hair, as the viscount’s jersey peeled upward.
“Really, this is most improper and quite unnecessary,” I stammered. Irene caught my arm in a tight, cautionary grip.
In that awkward, frozen instant, I heard a door open and hard-soled shoes cross the stones. The viscount dropped his jersey. Irene dropped my hand. The equerry’s face lost its look of dread.
“There you are, D’Enrique,” came the prince’s bland voice. “I thought we’d have a go at some of the official correspondence, but here you are, dressed for boxing. A demonstration for the ladies, I see.”
We all bowed.
“I will attend Your Highness within a quarter of an hour,” the viscount promised formally.
The prince’s smile and limpid wave of hand indicated that the two were on far easier terms than the viscount’s public manner hinted.
“No hurry, my dear fellow. I’ve no wish to shorten the ladies’ pleasure. I’ve quite a good gymnasium here; used it myself in my youth, but now leave that to D’Enrique. I do my exercising at the Ritz table d’hote.” He laughed at his own jest and left us.
“Well, my dear ladies... The viscount bowed. “Perhaps another day?”
“Indeed,” Irene said, pivoting on the point of her parasol and rustling out beside me.
Our echoing steps prevented further conversation. My last glimpse of the wretched human punching bag, Jacques, was to see him vanish down a lower hall.
We left the palace in silence. I found the frank splash of the Monte Carlo sunshine a relief, like light that is cast upon some dank, damp place.
Irene inhaled deeply of the fragrant air and sighed. “So close.”
“Close to public offense! That wretched viscount was about to remove his shirt.”
“I had so hoped, Penelope.” She sighed again.
“Irene! That is hardly the sort of answer I would expect of you.”
“Surely you did not think I had any interest in viewing that pasty, puffy expanse? If he had more than helpless equerries to practice on, the viscount would spend his time in pugilistics staring at the ceiling.”
“Then why did you go to observe him?”
‘To observe him? I wished to see if he bore a tattoo.”
“The viscount?”
“Not the equerry, surely!”
“Irene, you didn’t tell me.”
“I never dreamed that you would interfere.”
“Even if you had truly had a legitimate aim, I would have been obliged to object. Really, there must be some other way to find out than by tricking a man into removing his shirt in the presence of ladies!”
“There is another way—” Irene’s face had a speculative look “—and the advantage to it is that you would not be required to cooperate, since it would be a private ruse as opposed to a public one.”
“What is that?”
“I could accede to the viscount’s obvious intentions to seduce me and... be seduced long enough to learn what I need.”
“Worse! Truly depraved! You would compromise yourself beyond redemption. You might not be able to escape him. There would b
e a terrible scandal. Godfrey would—”
“Yes,” she agreed glumly, “Godfrey would. There are some severe drawbacks to marriage for the investigator.” She glowered at me. “Also for the investigator who has well-intentioned friends. She schemes best who schemes alone. Well. No harm done. I shall simply have to find another method of inspecting the viscount’s chest.”
“I can suggest one,” I said grimly.
“What?” I had caught Irene off guard.
“Drown him,” I proposed with some pleasure. “Then pretend to find the body. As we both have seen, a dead man may be bared with impunity and cause no scandal whatsoever.”
“Murder before impropriety!” Irene unfurled her parasol along with her sunniest laughter. “It never fails to shock me—what a properly brought-up Englishwoman will condone to ensure her blessed propriety.”
Chapter Twenty-nine
LADIES EN GARDE
On the way back to the hotel, we stopped at the telegram office. Irene sent a message to Milan.
When I asked her to whom the telegram was directed, she tightened her lips and said, “Desperate questions require desperate measures. I have sent for aid.”
“Outside aid? That is not like you, Irene.”
“You would not let me ply my feminine wiles on the viscount; now wait and see to what lengths you have driven me.”
“Surely the viscount cannot be that important!”
“If I am right, he is the key to the whole affair. It is vital to determine... what I was on the verge of determining this morning when you so prudishly interfered.”
“And if the prince had found us with the viscount in a state of undress? I mean the viscount, of course.”
“He would have tsked and wandered off. A great many more scandalous things than that occur in Monte Carlo every quarter hour.”
Somehow Irene had twisted my upright position askew. I changed tactics. “Why are you so certain that the viscount is involved in your investigations? You seem to have picked him out of thin air.”
The Adventuress: A Novel of Suspense featuring Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes Page 26