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

by Douglas, Carole Nelson

  I sighed. “Certainly my foresight is. I seem to be walking in a fog. Perhaps I have been away from London too long.”

  “Perhaps your distraction began in Paris,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Only that you have confronted your past. That is always a shock to the equilibrium.”

  “That is the whole trouble, Godfrey! I have no past, only a history, like a public edifice. Sarah Bernhardt once said that a woman without a past is like a poodle without a pedigree: alive, but who is interested enough to notice?”

  “And for how long have you heeded what Sarah Bernhardt says?”

  “Never! But I remember. Even Irene seems to have a past.”

  “Irene ‘seems’ a great deal of things.”

  “Have you never wondered, Godfrey, about her life before you two met?”

  He shrugged. “She lived with you for several years.”

  “But before that? She did not burst upon London fully formed at the age of three and twenty. And she will say nothing of her American days.”

  “Assuredly that makes them more interesting. Irene is never one to neglect sowing subtle seeds of interest.”

  “As long as no one around her reaps the result! Perhaps that is what Sarah means by ‘a past’: the assurance that at some time one has been interesting. I have never been ‘interesting’; I have been in Shropshire.”

  “Shropshire is, I am sure, most interesting.”

  “But you have no desire to go there.”

  “Not in the immediate future, no.”

  “Never.”

  “It’s not likely,” he admitted at last.

  “I even come from a dull place. Irene would never allow herself to come from a dull place.”

  “Nell, I am certain that New Jersey is a dull place, or else Irene would not be so close-mouthed about it. Has it ever occurred to you that an unmentioned ‘past’ may simply be unmentionably dull?”

  “No, Godfrey, it has not.”

  “Well, it may. Besides, the present is all that matters, and here is the next sporting club on our agenda, The Frontier Fusiliers.”

  Another black-painted door with a brass knocker inset discreetly into a row of redbrick Georgian facades confronted us. Godfrey rang the bell, then introduced us and our business. This time the porter suffered me to enter the hall, where I waited on cold marble, not wishing to sit upon the red-velvet upholstered chair formed from animal horns, and glimpsing a warm red-damask room beyond where deer antlers bristled on the walls.

  Godfrey soon returned, his face transparently disappointed.

  “This club had a directory of the memberships of all the others; no Sylvester Morgan, Captain or not, honors their rolls. The senior member present suggested that Morgan may have been expelled from one of the other clubs years ago.” “Expelled?”

  “Hunters’ clubs on occasion resemble their game for behavior. The odd member of the pack ‘goes rogue’ from time to time. He said this Morgan sounded like ‘a bad ’un’ who may have had less than honorable dealings with both the hunters’ fraternity and the public, if he dealt in rare pelts.”

  “A perceptive gentleman. So what is our next course?”

  “Retreat, I suppose.” Godfrey escorted me down the few stairs to the street.

  “You are remarkably calm in the face of defeat,” I commented.

  “I am remarkably calm at all times,” he retorted with a smile that I found winning. I also found the absence of his mustache disconcerting. Much as I deplore facial hair on men, I confess that I had grown used to it in mild amounts. Or at least I had made an exception to my prejudice with Godfrey.

  We walked in silence. Irene made her investigative efforts look like larks, but without her we were a plodding pair.

  “Something bracing is called for,” Godfrey announced suddenly, steering me with a featherweight pressure on my elbow toward an ABC tea shop. He was also guiding me away from a convention of beggars sprawled upon the walkway.

  I hesitated. Under normal conditions, I am not swayed by public beggary, no matter how pathetic. Much of it is polished into a vehicle for the greed of the beseecher rather than the generosity of the giver.

  Yet only weeks before in Paris one such unappetizing person had proved to be not only truly needful but an acquaintance. Impulsively, I cannot say why, I dug in my reticule for a few pence.

  As I was about to drop them into the grimy hand extended, something flashed past with the utmost speed. My reticule was snatched from my hands, the proffered coins clinking to the pavement. The beggar was too stunned to even scramble for the coppers, although his younger fellows hurled themselves atop the bounty.

  Godfrey was bounding after the cutpurse, coattails flying, and I hurried after. I had my suspicions. I had nursed them all along, and now I was certain. No one would make off with my reticule twice in the same week, and only one person would remember a similar incident of many years ago....

  I shortly came even with Godfrey, who had paused to search the crowd from his not unrespectable height.

  “I fear the scamp has escaped, Nell,” he told me.

  “No,” I told him, “I fear that you have let ‘the scamp’ escape.”

  “Why, what do you mean?”

  “Only that I am tired of this charade! I am not the oblivious fool you take me for! Cablegrams from Paris indeed! Such ‘foreign’ communications may be arranged from London. It has all been a farce: our search for the mythical Captain Morgan; Irene remaining in France.

  She is here in London, do not bother to deny it, and hot on a more rewarding trail. Do you think that I have failed to notice the suspicious persons along our route? I have seen that miserable boy three times, and I warrant that you were unable to catch him only because you did not want to!”

  “Nell, come into the tearoom and sit down until you collect yourself—”

  “No!” I shook off his gentlemanly hand. “I will not be made a public fool, and if Irene does not produce herself soon, I cannot say what I will do!”

  “Excuse me,” came a deep voice.

  Godfrey’s eyebrows lifted at the new arrival behind me.

  I turned. An old soldier stood there, snowy muttonchops frothing at his jaws, thick spectacles with a dark tint shading his weak old eyes. Apparently there was nothing wrong with his weak old legs, or his weak old arms, for he had the very lad in question by the scruff of his tatterdemalion jacket.

  “I caught this one running as if the Queen’s Guard were behind him. Since street lads seldom dress with such nicety, he plainly was the reason for the furor down the street. Might this be yours, miss?”

  The old man extended my reticule, which I took with relief.

  “Anything gone?” Godfrey inquired.

  “Not a thing,” I replied triumphantly, eyeing the writhing youth. He was a strapping lad. Such street urchins looked depressingly similar, but no matter how he hunched and wriggled, it was obvious he had attained the size of a grown woman.

  “Really,” I said, regarding the lad unpityingly. “You could not resist the grand gesture, could you? Was it not enough that you cast yourself in my path at every opportunity? Did you expect me to remain completely duped?”

  “Nell—” Godfrey said urgently at my rear. I turned on him with great pleasure.

  “And you, you... henchman! Oh, I have been very thick, but that is past now.”

  “Nell, in all good conscience—”

  “Godfrey, do not try to dissuade me. I am certain that it will be most mortifying, but she needs to be taught a lesson. Sir, will you keep a good hold on that lad? Thank you.”

  I took a handkerchief from my retrieved reticule and reached out to scrub at the filth smudging the boy’s features. Immediately a lighter cast of skin shone through.

  “You see?” I spared Godfrey a triumphant glance.

  He had a most odd expression. I turned back to my victim, who was cursing in a Cockney screech so unintelligible it fortunately spared my sensi
bilities.

  “Irene, it’s no use,” I advised the captive. “You cannot fool me, though of course you had to rub my nose in your deception. Now I am rubbing your nose and it looks far better so. And as for this ridiculous cap—” I reached for the item of apparel in question “—anyone could see it was a clumsy disguise, too large only because it hid a great, feminine quantity of hair—”

  At this I lofted the offending headgear. By now my demonstration had drawn a crowd of onlookers: the beggar family, more used to entertaining than being entertained; several nicely dressed children; even the old lady in mourning, with whom we had apparently caught up again.

  “You see,” I said to my mesmerized audience. “The game is up. This is not a lad,” I announced. “This is a grown woman who likes to play silly games!” I looked back at the miscreant.

  The sunlight shone down on a dull tangle of cropped black hair, not the shimmering lengths of cinnamon-brown I had expected to unveil. The captive’s squirmings and epithets increased.

  Well, I had heard of theatrical wigs before. I grasped the unappealing head of hair and jerked.

  “Owwwwwww!” The creature howled as if to wake any dead within earshot and every living soul all the way to Gretna Green.

  “I cannot hold him much longer,” the old soldier gritted between a set of wooden teeth. “Do you want to call a bobby or continue on your own?”

  “Nell,” said Godfrey in soft rebuke that only I could hear, “this is not Irene.”

  My hand tugged again, to no avail. My gloved fingers uncurled, suddenly aware of the thick, oily texture of the hair they grasped. Even a theatrical wig did not have to be so disgustingly... dirty.

  Every onlooking eye was nailed to me with lively interest.

  “I—I thought...”

  As my own grip collapsed, so the old gentleman’s loosened. The lad wrenched free with a blazingly indignant face, now striped from the cleansing offices of my handkerchief. The young thief whirled to leave, then spun back to glare at me before snatching his... truly filthy... cap from my nerveless fingers.

  “Mad as a moonbeam,” he spat at me with perfect clarity before dashing away through a crowd that did nothing to prevent him.

  I looked around. “He did steal my reticule.”

  “Quite so.” The old gentleman dusted off his palms as if that would remove his contact with so much uncleanliness.

  Gradually, but not soon enough, the onlookers ebbed, going about their business. I stood in the street drawing my reticule strings tight and loose in turn.

  “Nell—” Godfrey began, more gently than I should have had the circumstances been reversed.

  “Do not say it! I was wrong, but I was right as well. Irene is in London,” I said, raising my eyes defiantly to his at last.

  He did not deny it. “Would you care for some tea now?”

  Godfrey and I did not discuss the matter further, not even at dinner that night. I recognized that by avoiding the topic he avoided having to deliver any falsehoods. Of course Irene was lurking about London.

  At least my reticule had been returned.

  Alone in my room, I examined it to see if it required mending or cleaning. As I had told Godfrey, my coin purse was still there, along with the handkerchief, which would require laundering, and a vial of smelling salts, an item that no woman should ever be without. I sniffed it delicately in case any lingering miasma remained from my strenuous afternoon.

  The reticule’s lining appeared unbesmirched, I noted with relief, for the lad’s filthy fingers had not escaped my notice. What had escaped my notice until that moment was a cylinder of pale paper that lay upright against the cream silk lining.

  I withdrew it gingerly.

  Scratched in faint pencil were the words: “You must come to the Natural History Museum vertebrate rooms at 11 A.M. tomorrow (the 8th). Urgent!” One letter signed the note: “Q.”

  My heart began pounding. How had this message gotten into my reticule? When? By whom had it been delivered? I rose, intending to fetch Godfrey. Then I paused.

  I would not make an idiot of myself again in anyone’s presence, least of all his. No proof existed that the message was from Quentin Stanhope, but who else should it be from? And as for the method of delivery, that I must puzzle out for myself.

  I took the note to my dainty Louis XIV desk. Brown’s Hotel was liberally equipped with gaslight, but the desk bore as well an oil lamp, which I lit. I held the tiny piece of rolled paper down by the edges of a crystal stamp box and an ink bottle.

  The words had been hastily written, but I was no judge of Quentin’s handwriting in any case. I desperately wished I was, having seen Irene dissect the character of correspondents with a glance and a blithe pronouncement.

  The penmanship was legible; a pencil—none too sharp—had been used, which bespoke a hasty scrawl made on the street without premeditation; and the words were impossible for me to ignore.

  When and how had this missive come into my possession? Certainly not at the hotel; I had filled the reticule myself before leaving. The most obvious choice of messenger was the unfortunate thief. Had he actually been adding to the contents of my reticule rather than subtracting from them?

  Perhaps that was why he had “let” himself be caught. I had glimpsed this unwholesome figure several times. Obviously he had been commissioned to watch us. Of course, he could simply be a thief who had decided that my reticule was tasty prey and who had followed us for that reason only. But if the young thief had not thrust this note into my bag, who else could have?

  I rose to fetch the reticule, a common kind of faille sack with a wide mouth pulled shut by pursing the strings interwoven into the folds. I drew the cords, noticing that while the reticule was throttled shut, so to speak, the moment that I released the cords they loosened slightly. Sufficient room remained among the puckered pleats to thrust a slender pipe of paper into the depths of the bag.

  So. Anyone could have done it. The dowager in mourning who had bumped into me... the old soldier who had captured the young thief... the flower girl who had handed me the posy, for that matter... the ragamuffin... even Godfrey.

  One of these figures—or even another, unnoticed person— could have been Quentin in disguise. Or Irene in disguise. Or even—never underestimate the man—Sherlock Holmes in disguise.

  Or none of them could be anybody at all.

  I leaned my head on my hands and shut my eyes. On the blackness before me floated the figures of the day, as if inviting me to choose one. But my choice that afternoon had been horribly wrong. I would not make that mistake again! And I would attend that rendezvous on the morrow.

  Of course I dared not tell Godfrey. Besides suspecting that he and Irene had left me out of their game, I couldn’t risk letting him see Quentin again. Godfrey’s last promise had been to thrash an explanation for his disappearance from Quentin. I had no intention of allowing such an occurrence.

  No, I must somehow elude Godfrey without his suspecting anything. But how? And then I sat up straight, divinely inspired.

  I would tell Godfrey that I wished to go to church!

  Chapter Twenty-two

  ’ONEST CITIZENS

  ''Church?” Godfrey said in startled tones, as if I had proposed visiting a Whitechapel opium den.

  “Yes. Church,” I reiterated at breakfast. “I have had no opportunity to attend Anglican services since joining you and Irene in France nearly a year ago.”

  “I have not been in a church since Irene and I were married,” he mused.

  “Neither has she.”

  “I suppose,” he began with little enthusiasm, mangling his kipper, “I can accompany you.”

  “You can indeed, and that would be commendable, save that this expedition of mine is a private pilgrimage. I make it once a year upon the anniversary of my dear father’s death.”

  “Oh.” Godfrey looked as taken aback as I had ever seen him. Referring to a death in the family is a proven method of ensuring other people�
��s rapid loss of interest in one’s personal affairs.

  He frowned. “I never noticed such an annual outing during the years that I employed you at the Temple.”

  I rather oversalted my kidney pie while composing my next venture into falsehood. “Ah... such visitations are more spiritually salubrious if not boasted about, Godfrey.”

  “No doubt, no doubt,” he agreed. “You are the parson’s daughter and should know.”

  “Indeed.”

  “What church do you honor with your pilgrimage?”

  Now I trod upon very delicate ground. My difficulty was the fact that Brown’s Hotel was located close to the theatrical district called by the silly name of Piccadilly. Unfortunately, but not unexpectedly, no reputable church was within suitable distance. I would have to name one near my true destination.

  “Holy Trinity,” I said firmly, hoping Godfrey would inquire no further.

  He was not a barrister for nothing. “Holy Trinity?” He spoke with some astonishment. “Why on earth would you wish to go there?”

  “Why on earth not?”

  “I read about it in yesterday’s Telegraph. It will be a splendid homage to the Arts and Crafts Movement when completed, with its Burne-Jones and Morris stained glass windows, but it cannot be the goal of your pilgrimage. It is still unfinished, Nell.”

  “Where is this so-called ‘Holy Trinity’?”

  “Sloane Square,” he replied, watching me carefully.

  “Heavens, no! That Holy Trinity is quite the wrong one, Godfrey. Goodness. My Holy Trinity is in Knightsbridge, near the Victoria and Albert Museum, an excellent, restrained example of the Gothic style.”

  He buttered his muffin. “You are certain that I cannot persuade you to allow me to escort you?”

  “I prefer going alone, so that I may think about things.”

  “Things,” he echoed in his newly annoying way, so like Casanova.

  “Things,” I repeated firmly. At least that part was utterly true.

  I insisted on taking an omnibus to Kensington, as I had not done for many months. Godfrey argued in favor of a hansom cab, but I resisted. As my association with Irene and her early “cases” had shown me, a cab journey is easier to track than the crowded comings and goings aboard a public omnibus.