A Soul of Steel (A Novel of Suspense featuring Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes)

by Douglas, Carole Nelson

  So the pair of them helped Mr. Stanhope into bed, where he reclined fully dressed upon the feather quilt with a relieved sigh. Godfrey and Irene took a somewhat hasty leave, it struck me.

  The paraffin lamp had been turned very low while the chamber was unoccupied—Sophie was a tyrant about saving oil. I was expected to read and sew in a level of lamplight barely sufficient for seeing one’s hands at arm’s length. I went to turn up the light.

  “Leave it be,” he said.

  At my inquiring look, he gestured to the window. “We don’t wish to be too visible to the world outside.”

  “Oh.” My hand darted back from the little brass turnkey as if it had been a viper’s fangs. “Perhaps it is not safe to remain in this chamber.”

  “The odds are long that he will try again here, but it’s best not to tempt chance.”

  In the dimness of the tapestry bed curtains, his face was unreadable; only the extraordinary pearly glimmer of his teeth and eye whites caught the scant light. I sat on the straight-backed chair that would insure no nodding off and fell into an uneasy silence.

  In my father’s parsonage, visiting the sick was an obligation of the highest regard. Since a child I had sat for long hours beside many a sickbed; there I had learned patience and a respect for mortality.

  Despite the nobility of the role, I found myself uneasy in Mr. Stanhope’s presence. Perhaps it was the fact that he was fully dressed, oddly enough, although that should allay any notion of impropriety in my sitting up with a man in his bedchamber. Long custom makes clear that only when a man is laid utterly flat by illness can he be regarded as safe enough not to make improper advances to any nearby female.

  Mr. Stanhope did not seem sick enough to erase any suggestion of scandal, at least from my mind.

  “He, you say.” My voice emerged froggy from the long silence.

  “He?”

  “Your marksman. You know, or suspect, his identity.”

  “She did not pursue that.”

  “She?”

  “Your friend. She cared only about the name of my battlefield rescuer.”

  “That is true,” I admitted, “and also odd. Yet Irene has her instincts, and they will not be denied. Nor can I deny that such apparently wild guesses have served her well. Perhaps it is the artistic temperament.”

  He laughed. “Perhaps. I have not a jot of it.”

  “Yet you have led quite a... Bohemian life.”

  “Not at all, Miss Huxleigh. I have led an irregular life. There is a difference. That is even worse than being a Bohemian,” he added mockingly. “And you... you surprise me. You have led an adventurous life.”

  “I? Not at all! I am a complete homebody. Although,” I was compelled to add in all honesty, “I did once travel from London to Bohemia by train unescorted. It was highly improper of me, but the situation was desperate.”

  “By train? A woman alone? You see my meaning! That is the civilized equivalent of daring to dwell solitary among the brigands of Afghanistan, my dear Miss Huxleigh.”

  “Ah, but I have never been called ‘Cobra.’ “

  He sobered at that; at least I no longer glimpsed the pale scimitar of his teeth.

  “Although,” I was again compelled to add in all frankness, “I once signed a cablegram by the code name ‘Casanova.’ “

  “You! Casanova?” He leaned forward until the light limned his features.

  At the time I’d thought the ruse rather clever myself. “The parrot,” I explained modestly.

  “Ah, of course. A sagacious old bird. But you see? Coded cablegrams, unescorted train journeys. You have been quite an adventuress.”

  “Never! And only because Irene had summoned me to Prague. Even Godfrey—who barely knew her then—advised me against going, but I knew Irene would never call on me for a frivolity.

  “And it was a good thing I went, for she trembled upon the verge of a fearsome scandal. I am happy to say that my mere presence insured that no one could speak against her dealings with the King of Bohemia. Quite a nasty little man, that, though he stood several inches over six feet tall.” I shuddered in remembrance of the arrogant monarch.

  “A cat may look at a queen,” Mr. Stanhope said in amused tones, “but only a Miss Huxleigh may despise a king. You are so British, my dear Nell, and so innocently charming. I had quite forgotten.”

  I froze. “We had not agreed upon using Christian names, Mr. Stanhope.”

  “I asked you all below to call me ‘Stan.’ “

  “That is a variation of a surname, not a Christian name. And even”—I took a great mental breath before I uttered it —“Emerson... is not a truly ‘Christian’ name.”

  “Perhaps I should not confess that my middle name is... Quentin, then.”

  “Quentin?” Alas. That, too, struck me as a highly euphonious, if unconventional, pair of syllables. “Quentin is quite—”

  “A variation on the Roman Quintus. Quite pagan,” he added, a teasing glint in his cairngorm eyes. “Yet I prefer it to Emerson, and was so called among my family and closest friends before I left for Afghanistan. I prefer it.”

  “Quentin is not uncomely,” I admitted, “but it is decidedly un-Christian.”

  “So is ‘Penelope,’ “ he shot back with alarming accuracy.

  “Well—!” I didn’t know quite how to defend my poor parents’ nonconformist choice of a baptismal name. “True, the name is of classical origin, but my father was highly learned, though a humble Shropshire parson. Penelope was an admirable and virtuous woman, who remained faithful to her roving husband Ulysses despite the clamor of suitors and his twenty-year absence.”

  “Yes, that does resemble Christian denial,” he murmured, sounding alarmingly as Irene does at times.

  “At least she was not consorting with some sorceress who enjoyed turning men into pigs!”

  “Ulysses was a bounder to leave the lady languishing for so long,” he admitted soothingly. “But if I have no true Christian name, and neither do you, is there any impropriety in using them between us?”

  “I am certain that there is, but you have talked me out of it in that silver-tongued way that Irene puts to such good use. You are both too much for me.”

  “I doubt that, Nell. And would it be too much for you to assist me to rise? I wish to see the fabled garden that I am now forbidden to visit because of my usefulness as an apparent target. Sophie said the window overlooks it.”

  “Is it safe?” I looked uneasily to the window.

  “Perhaps not, but it would be a shame to live in total safety. Besides, how can I sleep certain that nobody lurks unless I look?”

  “You and Irene are two of a kind,” I muttered as he shifted on the bed.

  I really had serious qualms about serving as his support. What if I could not bear up to the weight? I did not relish another humiliating tangle on the floor, this time without the excuse of an assassin’s shot. But the ill often take odd notions, and I was not one to refuse them small comforts.

  As he stood and lay an arm along my back and shoulder, my heart sank at the impress of alien weight. I should buckle like an overburdened banister, I feared. But then no more pressure came, and we made an awkward progress to the window, where he leaned a hand on the broad elbowboard and pushed the shutters carefully open.

  It was as if a clumsy wooden curtain had been dragged away from the fairyland scene in a play. I confess I had never observed our formal French garden by moonlight, had never thought to enjoy it then. By daylight it displayed a rainbow row of hollyhock and heliotrope, larkspur and snapdragons.

  Now night’s cool silver hand soothed the garden’s fevered daytime brow, creating a pale landscape of subtle shape and shimmer and shadow. Utterly beautiful. Its perfume drifted up in a delicate, sheer curtain that was almost tangible.

  We stood in silence.

  He finally spoke. “When I thought of England in the ice house of an Afghanistan winter, in the sweltering swamp of India, I pictured such serene, uncrow
ded beauty. I thought of Berkeley Square, teacups and crumpets, my rosy-cheeked nieces in organdy pinafores. I also thought of you, Nell, and the certainty that however the Empire sizzled abroad under brutally blue skies amid dirt and dust and a dozen vicious not-quite-wars, somewhere London fog danced a saraband on the paving stones and among hidden rosebushes in the back garden, and somewhere Miss Huxleigh was putting her charges through their gentle paces.”

  “And so I should have been,” I burst out in frenzied self-incrimination, “save for the war which drove you from that vision! When your sister’s husband, Colonel Turnpenny, was posted to India again, the family went, too, as did many such. I found myself unemployable, with governesses a glut on the market. I was forced to become a drapery clerk, and not very successfully. Had it not been for Irene, no doubt I would have starved on the streets. I am sorry to have disappointed you, but it was quite impossible for me to remain a governess. I was fortunate to become a lowly typewriter-girl, and actually became rather proficient at it, though it is a common enough skill now—”

  He had grasped me by the shoulders partway through this speech, still leaning upon me somewhat and also, in an odd way, supporting me. A flutter like a caged bird beat within my breast as he spoke with rapid, even joyous conviction.

  “But I am not disappointed! That is the point, Nell. I am astounded. The England I painted, that I painted myself into a far corner of the world to avoid, no longer exists except in the musty trunk of my memories. People have changed, even as I have. Times have, manners have. I have felt an outcast incapable of returning. And you, Nell, have shown me just how foolish I have been.”

  “Well.” I could hardly take exception to serving as a model for seeing the error of one’s ways. “That is quite... reassuring—” I decided to plunge into the deep waters I had so clearly been invited to enter “—Quentin.” I would never call him “Stan” and that was that.

  “You see,” he said with a quite irresistible smile, “the old barriers crumble. You are not the governess Huxleigh anymore and I am not—”

  I interrupted before he could finish. “—the dashing young uncle.”

  “Is that what you thought?” he asked.

  I blushed in the dark and hoped the molten moonlight did not betray me. “That’s what we all thought in the schoolroom. The girls adored you, as girls that age will.”

  He sighed, and his hands loosened on my shoulders. I swayed a little, surprised to discover that I had been relying upon his grip to stay upright, to find that I had willingly surrendered some of the usual effort of standing on my own two feet.

  “You were hardly much older than they. That is why I will not hear talk of your disappointing me,” he said, “when I have disappointed so many.”

  “You have not even given them an opportunity to be disappointed; you have deprived them of yourself. You must let them see you anew and judge for themselves. You have condemned yourself unheard, unseen.”

  “And you, Nell? How do you judge me?”

  “I—I have no right.”

  “Forget our once-separate classes! You have opinions, that was always clear.”

  “I cannot say! You are so... different, and I have never known you, besides. You’ve lived a life I cannot even imagine; perhaps some of it would shock me. I would say, judge yourself. Go home. See your sisters, your old friends, your nieces.”

  “It would raise a hornet’s nest—about the war, about wounds long healed. I fear the bad opinion of those I love more than bullets.”

  “Bad opinion can hurt more,” I admitted, “but one thing I can tell you: whatever you have done, you do not have mine.”

  His hands tightened again on my shoulders, so swiftly it quite took my breath away. “Bless you,” he said in a low, intense tone that induced further threats of self-asphyxiation. “If you can say that, is there anyone I cannot face?”

  He released one of my shoulders but I remained frozen, gazing up at his bronze face bathed in a sickle of icy moonlight. He seemed utterly familiar and utterly foreign at one and the same instant, and I felt that way myself.

  In a daze, I felt his fingers pause at the point of my chin, and he tilted my face up as if to study a sculpture in better light. And then his face filled my vision. I felt a teasing tickle that reminded me of a boar’s-bristle brush, his beard... and then his lips touched mine as lightly as moonshine. The faint flowery scent burst into full bloom around me as my closed eyes suspended me in a place with no bottom or top and no time.

  How that moment—moments? minutes? eternity?—ended I cannot say. I felt myself drowning in a fragrant sea of alien yet not unpleasant sensations, so that my fingers curled into the soft folds of his nightshirt to keep myself from sinking. I was one adrift in a maelstrom, embracing the strange, tender wave that sucked the very air from my soul, lost again in a suddenly adult game of blindman’s buff. I recall that odd internal flutter in my chest bubbling over into breathless if belated retreat, and then a babble of parting inanities.

  I next came to myself outside the bedchamber door, in the passage softly lit by the moonlike globe of the paraffin lamp. Its painted roses glowed as if alive and for a moment I held my trembling fingertips, suddenly cold, over its warmth. By its illumination I stumbled to my bedchamber, but though it was pleasant and familiar, it seemed confining. I wanted to burst outdoors, to run into the garden, but that was impractical and would cause comment, and I most of all wished to be alone, as alone as I had ever been. I rushed back into the passage. No, I must speak to someone—to Irene! I must hurry to Irene and tell her, ask her... but I could not rouse Irene and Godfrey at such a time, for such a matter.

  I quivered in the hall like a hare frozen in the bright, silent blare of a full moon with no place to run. Then a long-ago refuge crossed my mind. I opened the door to what served as our linen closet. The space was cramped under an angled ceiling; it resembled my notion of a priest’s hole from a distant century. I darted in and drew the door shut behind me. In pristine dark and quiet, I embraced a bolster smelling vaguely of camphor, and thought.

  Time was irrelevant to my state of suspended confusion. The utter dark suited my mood, and so it remained for a long time, until light suddenly sliced into my surroundings—not the mellow bar of daylight dawning under the door that one would expect, but a vertical slash of lurid lamplight.

  I had not thought so far ahead as to dread discovery. Its actuality stirred a mortification more profound than when I had been found raiding the parsonage tea tray at the age of four. I quailed before the questing shadow that bore the lamp, whoever it was.

  “Nell!”

  Irene’s voice. I suppose it could have been worse, but not much.

  “Nell, you were not in your bedchamber. You were not in our guest’s bedchamber. You were not—”

  “Why should I be in Mr. Stanhope’s bedchamber?!”

  “That is where I left you last,” she answered reasonably. “What on earth are you doing here? And why—?”

  “Must you shine that miserable light in my face?”

  “No.” Irene lowered it, then stepped fully into the crowded space. She closed the door behind her, taking care to sweep the lace-flounced train of her nightgown into the closet with her first. My hidey-hole glowed in all its homely clutter, lamplight reflecting from the white linens stacked around us.

  Irene herself seemed a shining though girlish ghost, her burnt-honey hair backlit into an auburn aura that curled loosely over her shoulders, her snowy nightdress afoam with a phosphorescence of lace and satin ribbons.

  She crouched beside me in a spindrift of silk and shook my wrist cautiously. “Are you quite all right?”

  I still blinked in the sudden dazzle. “Did you need me for something?”

  “No—”

  “Then why bother looking?”

  “I merely wanted to ensure that you had gotten safely to bed.”

  “Then you thought I was in some danger!”

  “Well... a shot was fired into t
his house not a day ago.”

  “Yet you encouraged me to remain in Mr. Stanhope’s chamber.”

  “Another attempt did not seem imminent. Was there trouble?”

  “Nothing... of that kind.”

  “Ah.” Irene placed the lamp on a vacant shelf and settled against a stack of coverlets, tucking her lacy hem over her bare feet.

  “And you have gone roaming without your slippers!” I admonished.

  “You have gone roving without your night clothes,” she observed, eyeing my fully dressed state.

  I suppose I did appear ridiculous, but then the look matched how I felt.

  “I wanted to think,” I explained in a rush, “but the garden is not safe, and I would not leave the house at night in any case. My room was too... familiar, and I did not want to rouse the household by going downstairs and being mistaken for a housebreaker. Besides, Casanova would no doubt squawk, and Godfrey might shoot me.”

  Irene received my confused recital with commendable sobriety. “Now that you explain your reasoning, I can see that the linen closet is a most ideal place to think. I am only amazed that I have not thought of it before. I have sorely wished a retreat myself from time to time.”

  “Oh, do not be so understanding! You know that I am in a perfectly inane position. You would never back yourself into such a ridiculous comer!” I clutched my bolster closer.

  “My dear Nell, we are three unrelated adults sharing one household, along with the servants. What is so ridiculous about seeking solitude? Even Lucifer wanders off and cannot be found at times.”

  “That’s true. And Casanova has his cage cover to hide under, I suppose. At least he is quiet then. Usually.”

  “Indeed. Isolation is a rarity in modern life, yet we all need it. If nothing you wish to share is troubling you, I will leave you to your solitude.” She began to struggle upright in her voluminous gown.

  “That piece of frivolity is utterly impractical,” I noted. She paused to gaze at me with naked bemusement. “I did not don it in hopes of being practical.”