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

by Douglas, Carole Nelson

  It was left for me to tread the thin line between truth and self-interest.

  “Perhaps,” I said airily. “Theatrical people can be so eccentric.”

  Dr. Sauveur frowned, as if unsure how to take my meaning. Indeed, I was uncertain of that myself. Then he picked up his top hat and bowed sketchily before leaving the room. Sophie waited in the hall to let him out.

  “Well!” Irene’s ambiguous eyes sparkled with the pure honey of speculation. “I am minded to reconsider and journey with you. Perhaps this Mr. Sherlock Holmes we ‘perhaps’ have heard of should be consulted in the case! Quite a pretty puzzle.”

  Godfrey frowned and lit one of his cigarettes, dropping the lucifer into a crystal dish. “What do you think, Irene? Victim and weapon in the same room, but not related.”

  She tented her long fingers and rested her chin upon them, a pose that would have been piquant had she not been thinking so hard.

  “Could there,” I suggested tentatively, “have been another snake?”

  “Another snake!” Godfrey nodded approvingly at me.

  “That is the heart of the problem,” Irene said. “Where did the snake come from, and were there two? We have assumed that the snake was an occupant of the chamber, because its cage was there. But was the Indian also an unacknowledged lodger? We cannot know for sure until we find Mr. Stanhope and ask him.”

  “Until we find Mr. Stanhope,” I corrected. “Godfrey and I. You are remaining here in Paris.”

  “Ah! So I am. And a pretty puzzle remains here in Paris with me: the two snakes, the mysterious dead Indian who may or may not be acquainted with Mr. Stanhope, and the sinister Captain Morgan.” Irene rubbed her hands together in anticipation.

  “Godfrey!” I demanded. “Do you think we should leave her?”

  “We have no choice,” he retorted cheerfully. “I hazard that the London end of the matter will be fully as nettlesome. But the questions Irene raises are fascinating. Did the Indian bring the lethal snake—or snakes—to Stanhope’s garret intending to kill him? Did one bite his trainer and escape—you said there were several open casements? Did Irene shoot an innocent bystander?” Godfrey laughed and rubbed his hands in imitation of his wife.

  “Or...” Irene sat up with a demonic expression. “Was the Indian a manservant, even a friend of Mr. Stanhope’s? Was the snake his, and did someone, not knowing of either the Indian’s or the snake’s existence, import his own snake to kill Mr. Stanhope? Only the lethal snake escaped, after ridding itself of its venom. But no matter how many snakes we import to the scene, we are missing something. The man was killed by snake venom... administered somehow. Not necessarily by a reptile.

  “Did the same venom coat the needle that pierced Mr. Stanhope, I wonder, only in that instance, in an insufficient amount? Inspector Le Villard was right. This case requires some sophistication in chemistry. I will have to persuade the inspector to let me see whether the English detective’s works include any methods of transmitting venoms. Perhaps the good inspector could use a proofreader for his translations?”

  “Irene, even you would not dare!”

  “Why not, Nell? One can always learn from a rival.”

  “You and Sherlock Holmes are not rivals.”

  “We are certainly not allies.”

  “I hope not,” Godfrey put in significantly.

  Irene eyed him. “Surely, Godfrey, you have not resided near Paris long enough to contract the French national disease?”

  “And what is that?” he asked.

  “A rivalry of your own.”

  He was quiet for a moment. One of Irene’s eyebrows arched in surprise. He said slowly, “I agree with Nell. You are like a moth playing with the fire. I understand that for you it is an amusing game, but it makes me uneasy at times. There is the matter of the King of Bohemia as well—”

  “That, too?” She, also, had become unnaturally quiet.

  “Only in that he is not likely to have forgotten you so quickly. He is an autocratic, unpredictable man, and a spoiled ruler. It is best not to tempt him into something rash. The more you plunge yourself into sensational matters, my dear Irene, the more likely you are to attract unwelcome attention, even exposure.”

  “Oh, pooh, Godfrey! You are sounding like Nell. Shortly Casanova will be carping at me, urging caution. The King is in Prague and Sherlock Holmes is in London. I will be in Paris, will I not?” she added almost coquettishly.

  “What harm can come of that? Better you should worry about the safety of Quentin Stanhope and his long-ago friend, Dr. Watson. Better you both should fret about the explanation our former houseguest owes to us all, and especially to Nell.”

  Once more all eyes fastened on me, as Irene skillfully turned an inquiry into her own situation into an unwanted and intimate examination of mine.

  England lay ahead, visible on the heaving silver breast of the sea. How was it that the land that I approached with so much fond eagerness should strike me as ominous when I saw the chalk cliffs of Dover rising like a ghostly barrier from the crashing sea?

  Godfrey stood beside me at the rail, his feelings perhaps as mixed as mine. Neither of us was used to traveling without Irene, and we were both forlorn, yet relieved that we need not worry about her.

  “I haven’t forgotten,” Godfrey remarked.

  “Forgotten what?”

  “My promise to you.”

  “Oh, please, Godfrey, it is not necessary to speak of it.”

  “Yes, it is. You must not think that either Irene or I take you for granted. You are our friend, and we cannot allow this man to take advantage of you—”

  “No such thing happened!”

  “Or allow him to renew a friendship and then leave so callously, without explanation. Gentlemen do not do such things.”

  “I don’t think he had any choice. If the man who died in his rooms was a friend or acquaintance, perhaps he feared that same fate for myself—for you and Irene, who had only tried to help him. An honorable man would have no choice but to flee.”

  Godfrey nodded slowly. “I hope for your sake that he is honorable still, Nell. If he is not—”

  “Then we shall know, shall we not? And I suppose that knowing is better than... not knowing.”

  He suddenly smiled down at me. “So serious, Nell, for a lady under a Paris bonnet. You have changed, you know. Stanhope was right about that. And now you espouse the motto that drives Irene, and sometimes myself and most of the human race.”

  “What is that?” I asked, unaware of any recent profundity that had dropped from my lips.

  “ ‘Knowing is better than not knowing.’ I trust we shall soon know more about this tangle than we did.”

  “What if ‘Dr. Watson’ is the Dr. Watson?”

  Godfrey’s gray gaze suddenly twinkled like the water around us. “Then we will have a most interesting puzzle piece to deliver to Irene. Perhaps we will even surprise her and solve the puzzle altogether on this end.”

  “Oh, do you think so, Godfrey?! That would be... amusing, would it not? That would be adventuresome.”

  “Yes, my dear Nell, it would. Even my incomparable Irene can benefit from an outwitting now and again.”

  I would have never believed that London could strike me as terra incognita, yet it looked like an utterly unfamiliar charcoal sketch through which we rode by some magical means of progress—though a four-wheeler has seldom been mistaken for an altered pumpkin.

  The soot-blackened buildings seemed limned by some absent artistic hand rather than by reality. Viewed in the high noon of summer rather than through the romantic misty lens of gaslights and fog and memory, the streets appeared cramped, commercial and tawdry compared to the broad, tree-strewn boulevards of Paris. The constant clatter of omnibuses and carriages, the calls of street mongers through the narrow lanes, quickly gave me the headache.

  Godfrey directed the driver to Brown’s Hotel.

  “That sounds a rather common establishment,” I commented.

&nbs
p; Godfrey merely smiled. I had long ago learned to interpret that response: he knew something which I did not.

  As our vehicle drove past Green Park to Dover Street, I realized that we had crossed into Mayfair, which made me lilt my eyebrows as Irene often did. “Is this not an excessively extravagant address?”

  “We have an extravagant amount of money from the sale of the Zone of Diamonds,” he replied.

  I could not argue with fact, however much I might wish to. Brown’s Hotel appeared as respectable as the Duke of Kent’s country house, not that I have ever been a guest at such an establishment, but a governess does hear things, and I had forgotten nothing that I had heard during those days. And, of course, even then I kept my diaries, though they were not so interesting as they had become since my involvement with Irene, and now Godfrey.

  For me the greatest obstacle to Irene’s scheme of sending Godfrey and myself a-hunting medical Watsons in London was not the formidable consulting detective sure to be lurking there. No, the most dreaded barrier now rose up before me in a wall of coffered mahogany: the embarrassment of registering at a hotel.

  Although some benighted young women nowadays, who consider themselves thoroughly modern, think nothing of remaining unchaperoned with a man for whole hours at a time, the true gentlewoman cannot permit the slightest miscomprehension of her position vis-à-vis any male person at any time. Dear as Godfrey was to me as both employer and friend, I could not bear to have a hotel clerk reach any wrongful conclusions about our relationship.

  Godfrey broached the main desk. “I have made reservations for a pair of suites,” said he, very commandingly, I thought.

  “And the name, sir?” inquired the man on duty. The wall behind him resembled a gigantic pigeonholed desk bristling with messages, mail and unclaimed keys.

  “Feverall Marshwine,” said Godfrey without batting an eyelash. “Of Paris.”

  “Feverall Marshwine of Paris,” repeated the clerk without a pause. “Here it is, sir. And a two-room suite for Miss Lucy Maison-Nouveau. ’ ’

  “My cousin,” Godfrey said with a courteous nod at me. The desk clerk inclined his head politely. He eyed the trunks a man had deposited in the lobby and rang for a manservant.

  Shortly after we and our baggage were escorted by a modern lift to our rooms high above Old Bond Street. They were adjacent, but no one could accuse us of cohabiting without a lewd imagination.

  It was not until Godfrey had paid our baggage toter an unholy amount of coinage for the Herculean task of conveying our baggage up six flights in a lift that I was able to doff my bonnet and gloves and speak my mind.

  We stood in the sitting room of my suite, where my trunk had been deposited until a maid could unpack it.

  “This is splendid accommodation, Godfrey,” I admitted, “but it is shockingly extravagant for us to occupy two rooms each. I could do quite nicely with one.”

  “Surely, Nell, you do not wish to be perceived as entertaining gentlemen in your bedchamber? And I will find it necessary to visit you, or vice versa, so we can compare notes on the day’s investigations.”

  “Yes,” I agreed, “but you are my ‘cousin.’ And what do you mean by ‘gentlemen’ plural? Surely my rooms are not to become an interrogation center for cabmen and snake charmers?”

  He smiled. “How quick you are. I was thinking, of course, of Stanhope. Well, Nell, if—when—we locate him, it is possible that we will need to offer him the discretion of a private talk. So you see, our parlors are needed as interview rooms, so to speak, as well as for our own consultations.”

  “A long way around to justify extra expense,” I said. “And where did you come by those ridiculous pseudonyms? Irene, no doubt?”

  He bowed. “Irene had nothing to do with it. I am in charge of this expedition.”

  “Feverall Marshwine?!”

  “It leaped into my mind at the cable office. Have you never wanted to pretend to be someone else?”

  “No, I have not. I know what I myself have been up to, but some other identity may be another case entirely. And how did you come by ‘Lucy Maison-Nouveau’? Do not tell me it was another inspiration of the cable office.”

  “But it was! Based upon your sterling example, as always. I recalled the cable from Belgium you signed with the code name Casanova.”

  “Oh. I see. Maison-Nouveau is French for the same thing. In English it would be Newhouse. Perhaps the better choice, Godfrey. No one will ever mistake me for a Frenchwoman. And the ‘Lucy’?”

  Like many a delinquent charge from my governess days, Godfrey guiltily eyed his boot tips, polished to as glossy a black as Lucifer’s fur after an hour’s licking.

  “Lucifer! Godfrey, how could you?” I managed to avoid laughing.

  “A hasty and desperate invention, Nell,” he said contritely, “and ‘Lucille’ is a French name. Forgive me, but I thought it better for us to travel incognito.”

  His apology was approximately as sincere as Irene’s respect for the literal truth. At least no one in London who had known me would suspect that I was masquerading as a French female who had no objections to engaging a suite adjacent to that of an unrelated man, which, I admit, was decidedly “French” behavior.

  “Now that we are here, what is our plan?” I asked.

  “First, to eliminate the obvious.”

  “You mean this ‘Dr. Watson’ who, Irene is convinced shares rooms with Sherlock Holmes?”

  “Irene saw two men entering 221B Baker Street late at night after the rather underhanded charade in St. John’s Wood.”

  “I agree with you on the underhandedness of Mr. Sherlock Holmes, Godfrey. I cannot comprehend how Irene can profess such admiration for a man who would stoop to impersonating a clergyman while attempting to trick a helpless woman out of the sole artifact that defends her from another man’s unwanted attentions, and a king’s at that!”

  “I agree with you,” he said, “except for the ‘helpless.’ In fact, I consider it highly charitable of you, Nell, to campaign for the life of a man who very likely pitched the plumber’s rocket into your drawing-room windows at Briony Lodge. It was a shabby if all too effective ploy to trick Irene into revealing the hidden chamber in which lay the photograph of her and the King of Bohemia.”

  “You think that Dr. Watson did such a despicable thing? He is a medical man.”

  “You are a former governess, but I believe that you have essayed a deceptive mission or two for Irene’s sake.”

  “That is quite different! Nothing I have ever done could possibly be construed as malicious mischief.”

  “Oh? What of your masquerade as Irene’s housekeeper, gloating over Mr. Holmes and King Willie when they found their trap sprung and their quarry gone?”

  “Perhaps that was the tiniest bit mischievous, but it was hardly malicious, Godfrey. No, you will have to find a better apologist for Dr. Watson’s failing than myself. Irene’s freedom and happiness were at stake then. Sherlock Holmes had nothing to gain but a mere fee. His only interest was financial.”

  “Odd that he has not pursued the Zone of Diamonds now that he knows Irene is alive....”

  “Nothing odd, only ignorance. He knows nothing of the Zone!”

  “He knows it existed, for Tiffany himself said he hired Sherlock Holmes as well as Irene to look into its whereabouts. And from your own account of the trio’s visit to Briony Lodge, it is obvious to me that Mr. Holmes had hoped to find a far more glamorous prize than a photograph, or even Irene herself.”

  “Obvious? To you? I wrote the account to which you refer, and it was more than obvious to me that no such undercurrent existed.”

  “Ah!” Godfrey spread his hands in surrender. “Useless to argue with the author of the document in question. Perhaps I am seeing undercurrents on dry land. So you are convinced now that Sherlock Holmes’s Dr. Watson—should he prove also to be Quentin Stanhope’s Dr. Watson—is a heartless trickster and a lying lackey not worth the effort of saving?”

  “If we dol
ed out our acts of charity according to who is worthy, we might have no objects left for our concern,” I said stoutly. “And if Quentin thinks it worth risking his life for this man who saved him in Afghanistan, I can only do my best to aid in this enterprise. Besides, I am convinced that the Dr. Watson from Afghanistan in eighteen-eighty has never set foot in Baker Street except for innocent, unrelated errands! He may not even be in London, or England.”

  “Then the only thing to do is to test your—I hesitate to call such a rousing opinion a mere theory—assertion, shall we say?”

  “ ‘Assertion’ is a fine, forthright word that does not shilly-shally. So shall we sally forth?”

  “First we have two separate duties to perform.”

  I grew instantly serious, as the word “duty” invariably encourages me to do.

  Godfrey smiled in a way that was eerily reminiscent of Irene. “I must repair to my suite and make some alterations of a personal nature. Irene, I believe, equipped you for slight disguise?”

  I produced a length of heavy black veiling, diligently spotted with velour, from the upper shelf of my trunk. “Not efficient for seeing, but most appropriate for mourning—or for not being seen.”

  “Excellent. And I believe now would be a good time for you to take the hotel stationery in hand and pen a note to the family of your former employer. Mrs. Turnpenny, was it not?”

  “The Turnpennys left Berkeley Square for India. I have no notion where they might reside today.”

  “I refer to Mrs. Turnpenny’s family—the Stanhopes.”

  “The Stanhopes of Grosvenor Square—Quentin’s parents? You expect me to address them at this late date? I have never met them!”

  “But you have encountered their son recently, which may be of some interest to them if he has not already returned to England and made himself known. Merely send them a note identifying your earlier connection with the family and expressing your desire to visit them on a matter concerning their son, et cetera. You composed such communications for me innumerable times at the Temple, dear Nell. What makes you pale at the idea now?”