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

by Douglas, Carole Nelson

  Quentin pointed to a small table surmounted by a basin and a mirror near the little window. She retrieved a damp square of linen from the tabletop, drew a wooden chair into a shaft of sunlight, and stood behind it, a barber welcoming a customer.

  “Come, sit, Quentin. I must be utterly certain of the identity of those with whom I dine. A most creditable job of disguise,” she noted as he took the seat. “Had your posture not betrayed you, I should never have recognized you.”

  “But I took great care to mimic a lifetime of military bearing!”

  “Exactly. I knew you had been a military man. Your imitation was too excellent. A retired soldier no longer has to take such pains, and that shows the merest bit—a fine point only an actor would notice. Hmm. The false facial hair and florid greasepaint well served to hide your sunburned skin.... You know, I often have used this red paint for lip and cheek rouge, but mixed with white it makes a splendid base for a splenetic gentleman—it also covered your difficulty.”

  Irene had whisked the crape hair and paint away. Godfrey and I stared at the denuded face of Quentin Stanhope, which looked as if he wore a tawny half-mask over the eyes and nose.

  He grimaced at our expressions. “I shaved off the beard thinking to disguise myself, but forgot that the pale skin beneath it had seen no sunlight in many a year. And there was no time to grow another beard.”

  Irene fetched two small jars from the table, the contents of which she blended in her palm. Then her fingers passed quickly over Quentin’s upper face. When they came away, the top half had lightened to match the lower portion.

  “Goodness, Irene!” I could not help exclaiming, though I’d seen her perform such tricks with her own appearance. “He looks as if he had never left Grosvenor Square.”

  She smiled. “Not fine enough to fool a mortal enemy, but sufficient among friends. Next I shall ‘shave’ Godfrey and then wash myself. Nell we can leave alone; as usual she has done nothing to alter her natural appearance, not even so much as apply a bit of color on the tip of a rabbit’s foot.”

  “I should hope not.” I colored quite naturally at this attention drawn to my appearance—or lack of one.

  Godfrey had happily removed his overbearing bobby’s helmet the instant we were secure in Quentin’s lodgings. Calling him to the chair, Irene quickly softened the adhesive holding on his dreadful, bristly false mustache, which was the color of a bleached muskrat.

  “You too have a wan upper lip, my love,” she said when the mustache fell away like a dead rat-tail, rubbing a forefinger over her palm and then passing it under Godfrey’s nose. As if by magic his skin color was of a piece all of a sudden.

  Irene finished her transformations by rinsing the artistic arrangement of “dirt” from her delicate features. She turned, still clad like an urchin, but angel-faced.

  “There. We are a better-looking crew, except for Nell, who was always lovely.” Irene collapsed on the coverlet like the street arab she had impersonated. “We can discuss our situation while we eat.”

  Quentin turned to me, gallantly extending his arm. “May I assist you to the floor?”

  “You already did that most effectively in Neuilly,” Irene pointed out archly.

  I blushed like a schoolgirl while Quentin took my hand in his to steady me until I was safely seated on the floor.

  “What is ‘our situation’?” I asked Irene, bending my knees into a “side-saddle” position to sit more comfortably. “And why on earth did you suggest that Quentin might be Sherlock Holmes in disguise?”

  “Because Mr. Holmes was there, or else I have seriously misjudged his interests and his intelligence!”

  “Who is this Holmes?” Quentin asked as Godfrey opened the food containers while Irene and I passed out utensils, plates and goblets.

  “Ah!” Irene clasped her now-clean hands in mock rapture. “Do you hear that, Nell? An innocent who is mine to educate. Sherlock Holmes, dear Quentin, is the foremost consulting detective in Europe—”

  “England,” Godfrey interrupted sternly.

  Irene flashed him a melting look. “Thank you, my dear. What is not debatable is that Mr. Holmes is the greatest master of disguise in—”

  “England,” Godfrey put in again, opening the champagne with a pop that made me jump.

  “In England,” Irene repeated docilely. “And by the most delicious of coincidences, he is the dear friend, nay, the former chambermate of the same Dr. Watson who aided you in Afghanistan.”

  Quentin frowned even as he accepted a large slice of cold game pie from Irene. “You mean that you have found my Watson and that he has a protector?”

  “I mean that we have found your Watson and that now he has a barrier against both the assassin and ourselves. So far as I could determine during my own investigations, Mr. Holmes has been engaged on a matter of extreme delicacy. It involves an unfortunate young man who was well placed in the Foreign Office until a violent illness overtook him more than two months ago. I followed Mr. Holmes and Dr. Watson to Woking the day before yesterday and the matter appears to be settled, although after Dr. Watson returned home to Paddington yesterday, Mr. Holmes paid a visit to an extremely discreet and odd establishment called the Diogenes Club. My instincts tell me that the case is not as settled as Sherlock Holmes wishes his old friend to think.”

  “And this Holmes fellow was at the museum today?”

  “Mmm.” With great relish Irene was doing something disgusting involving the pâté de foie gras and soda crackers. “That means that he was following one of the principals in the case. He was either Queen Victoria’s grandmother or the Quasimodo-like scholar.”

  “And you cannot be sure which one you libel with your suspicion?” Quentin asked.

  “I libel neither of them. The other was decidedly the man who has been pursuing you so lethally, and who tried to murder Dr. Watson through the intervention of an Asian cobra.”

  “Good God!” Quentin would have started up, except that Godfrey had filled his hand with a brimming flute of champagne, which he quickly downed as if it were pale ale. “He was there? You cannot know what you say, Madame.”

  “Indeed I can. I have met the gentleman.”

  “What gentleman?”

  “The man you fear more than death itself, whom you call ‘Tiger.’ The man who once called you ‘Cobra,’ and who reminds you of that fact by using cobras as assassins. Did you ever know his true name?”

  Godfrey refilled Quentin’s glass, but he sat regarding Irene as if she had suddenly turned into the many-armed goddess Kali.

  “You are a sorceress.” Quentin watched Irene sip her champagne with a regal air, cross-legged on the coverlet. “No,” he answered at last. “I doubt that anyone knows his genuine name. He used many identities, for he was a spy, as I was. How then have you ‘met’ him?”

  “We were introduced at the Paris salon of a friend. Does the name Captain Sylvester Morgan mean anything to you?”

  “He could call himself Peter Piper and it would mean nothing to me. How can you be sure we allude to the same person?”

  “Because this man is a killer—oh, I speak not in any moral sense. I refer only to his nature. It is as brutally and honestly devouring as that of a shark. I am convinced that he is as adept at that specialty as Mr. Holmes is at problem-solving, as Dr. Watson is at healing, or as I am at singing. Or Nell at blushing, for that matter.”

  “Irene!” I objected.

  “I am hurt,” Godfrey put in, perhaps to distract her from teasing me so unmercifully. “You have left out my specialty.” Irene was not contrite. “I am ever aware that Nell records our doings in her diary; I do not wish to force her into censorship,” she said primly, “but you are certainly most agile at the law, too.”

  Quentin paid not the slightest mind to this banter, but was staring into the single shaft of sunlight as if the dust motes that drifted lazily through it were golden. “How are you so sure that you have met my nemesis?” he asked Irene again.

  “For o
ne thing, our meeting with this Captain Morgan occurred after your stay with us at Neuilly. For another, it was arranged by the Empress of Russia, who broke custom to ensure that I would meet her—and especially him, I think. For the last and most damning reason, it was after I slew the snake in your Montmartre garret. This Captain Morgan showed a most persistent interest in my reptilian victim. He wanted the skin. He said that he collects cobras and wanted mine.”

  Quentin shuddered suddenly. “He wants my skin. He said as much nine years ago, before any of this transpired, that the man who crossed him was... tiger bait.”

  “Not yet,” Godfrey noted.

  “I presume,” said I in a small voice, “that threat applies to women as well.”

  “Nonsense,” Irene said. “Women and doctors are only cobra bait, from the evidence so far. And some cobras are very nice indeed.”

  Mortified, I blushed. Again.

  “One of them saved Dr. Watson’s life,” Irene added.

  I glanced wildly at Quentin, who was looking startled.

  “We have a mystery,” Irene announced with suppressed amusement. “Perhaps you can solve this one small matter, Quentin, being an old India hand. Your friend Dalip died of cobra venom, but the cobra that confronted me in that garret was not the snake who bit him. And now Godfrey tells me that the dead snake he found in Dr. Watson’s consulting room had not been shot or stabbed, but appeared to have had its neck broken. I believe that you’d been keeping watch on Dr. Watson’s establishment, that you found the cobra in the consulting room, or saw it introduced there—and disarmed it, shall we say?—before it could harm the good doctor.”

  “You credit me with too much. I cannot crush snakes with my bare hands,” Quentin said evasively.

  “But you did have an accomplice, one who has traveled with you since Paris, and before. One brought with you from India, who escaped that fatal Montmartre garret along with you.”

  “Irene! He has admitted to the company of the dead Indian, but no other. Are you accusing Quentin of lying?”

  “Not yet, Nell. He has not yet answered me.”

  Quentin’s hazel eyes narrowed, which only increased his distinguished appearance, in my opinion. “It is impossible to conceal anything from Mrs. Norton. How did you guess—?”

  “I never guess, my dear man! I merely put myself in your place, quite literally. I asked myself who and what I might take with me from India for protection from a madman who would use any means to harm me.

  “How, I wondered, would a ‘Cobra’ protect himself against one of similar cunning and subtlety? Of course the empty milk dish was a clue to the presence of some creature, though I was misled by the fact that Nell’s little green snake, Oscar, drank watered milk. On reflection I realized that Oscar was an aberration and only warm-blooded animals drink milk, so the resident of the vacant cage was unlikely to be reptilian.”

  Quentin made a resigned gesture, then rose and approached the dilapidated trunk at the foot ‘of the bed. He threw off a torn scarf and opened it, bending to withdraw something—a boa of sorts, a dark fur-piece perhaps two feet long... that wriggled!

  “Poor little beast.” Quentin stroked the object he held. “The trunk admits air enough to keep her alive, but it is not home. I had to leave her cage behind in Montmartre. She had killed the first cobra, but I never dreamed that a second was still loose to slay Dalip when he came in after I’d left. Out the window and over the rooftops we fled together with a sack of my belongings and money. I did not want my absence to cause a stir, so I took the cobra’s corpse with me.”

  Irene’s eyebrows raised. “And—?”

  Quentin looked sheepish. “I... deposited it in a handy drainpipe. This one”—he stroked the dense, coarse fur— “rode inside my tunic front, which she likes to do. I’ve had her for many years.”

  He placed his pet on the floor, a long, low, weasel-like creature with clever clawed paws. It pattered swiftly to our picnic, thrusting its ratlike snout among the remains of the game pie.

  “Oh, the darling!” Irene laughed and applauded. “I’ve never seen one. Does she bite?”

  “Only to eat,” Quentin replied wickedly.

  “How would she kill a cobra?” Godfrey asked.

  “With speed, daring and skill. She darts in and out at a great rate, teasing the snake until its guard is down. Then a quick twist and a pounce, and she is behind it, the snake’s head caught in her tenacious teeth. A proper shake, and the cobra’s skull is cracked, with one bite.”

  “Ah!” Irene sat back and nodded. “Rather like a rat terrier. I thought so. You see, Nell and Godfrey, that explains the deceased cobra in Dr. Watson’s consulting room. One must set a thief to catch a thief. In this case it took a Cobra to forestall a cobra’s killing: a human Cobra and his pet mongoose.”

  “Is that what this is?” I inquired carefully. I dared not move, as the creature was nuzzling my lace-edged sleeve.

  “Her name,” Quentin said, “is Messalina. I call her ‘Messy’ for short.”

  “That is undoubtedly true,” I noted, watching the animal overturn a tin of Irene’s beloved pâté and lick it clean. “And Irene guessed its existence from an empty milk dish?”

  “And from the empty cage, which we first assumed had been used to contain the snake,” she said, handing Godfrey a fresh tin of pâté to open. “But if the cobra had been imported to the premises in order to kill someone, why leave the evidence of the cage behind? Therefore, the cage must have belonged to another—and now missing—animal. Besides, I could not envision Quentin traveling with a cobra, a rather large and infamous snake to conceal, whereas a mongoose might be mistaken for a weasel or a monkey, and accepted as a pet in the poorer quarters he haunted. Still, having the creature forced him to seek even tawdrier lodgings than his finances or inclinations required.”

  “She is a remarkable creature,” Quentin said fondly, offering Messalina a bit of boned chicken. “To see her dance with a cobra is to watch an ultimate exercise of beauty and terror. I often feel pity for the cobra.”

  “A misplaced emotion,” Irene declared, waving about a pate-smeared cracker, “in a world where cobras abound and mongooses are far too rare. Now that you have finally introduced your accomplice, you must tell me everything you know or guess about this Tiger. Hold nothing back. You do realize that the mysteries of the Montmartre garret reveal him to be a formidable opponent who will stop at nothing?”

  “How so?” Quentin asked.

  “Surely you’ve reconstructed the sequence of events that produced the dead cobra you found, and later left your friend Dalip dead of venom not administered by a snake, as well as a second cobra hidden to attack Nell and me when we arrived after you and Messy had fled.”

  Quentin was most sober, almost stunned. “No, Madame, I have not.”

  “Ah.” Irene wriggled happily into a more comfortable and therefore less ladylike position on the coverlet. “Allow me. Tiger, seeking your death and unaware of your association with poor Dalip and the mongoose, entered your garret while you were out and left two cobras to ensure your demise. Before he could release them, he was surprised by the return of Dalip, overpowered him, and resorted to a more sinister method of administering venom: via human snake.”

  “Tiger is poisonous?” I exclaimed, for I would put nothing past this abhorrent man.

  “Not quite literally, but almost. Twice he has used an air rifle to attack Quentin: once in Neuilly and now again in the Museum of Natural History and Modem Curiosities. A famed heavy-game hunter would have a mastery of weapons, would even invent his own. I posit that Tiger has applied the spring-loaded mechanism of the air rifle to a smaller and more subtle form, one that can be silently and discreetly used at close quarters—”

  “By Jove!” said Godfrey, sitting up. “Quentin’s poisoning near Notre Dame—a spring-loaded syringe of sorts!”

  Irene nodded sagely. “And the same weapon was used on Dalip, to preserve two full measures of cobra venom for Quentin. Of cou
rse Tiger could not know of Messalina.”

  Quentin confirmed that. “I kept her cage in the trunk, but I found it open when I returned. When I saw the dead cobra, I knew she had escaped in her frenzy to confront the creature; she is clever. But I never saw Dalip dead....”

  “My dear Quentin, Nell and I barely noticed him in that dusky garret. I assume the second cobra could have been dormant for some reason, and hidden.”

  “Or hiding,” Quentin added. “It had seen its fellow killed by a mongoose and would not wish to repeat the ritual.”

  “This Tiger must be the very devil,” I finally put in, “to so cold-bloodedly kill poor Mr. Dalip!”

  Irene for once agreed with my estimation of someone’s character, and looked severely at Quentin. “That is why you must be absolutely frank with me now, my friend. Tiger has already marked me and mine for his loathsome interest. I cannot afford to tangle with the likes of Sherlock Holmes while only possessed of a smattering of the truth.”

  “What I know is only half-truths and suspicions,” Quentin said.

  “They were enough to have stirred you out of Afghanistan,” Godfrey pointed out. “We are all endangered now. And the first explanation you owe is to Nell.”

  “Not at all!” I objected in confusion. I would never aspire to claim that Quentin Stanhope “owed” me any attention whatsoever, nor could I bear to have him think that I so presumed.

  “Godfrey is right,” he said with a level look at me. “I fell upon your hospitality, upon your friendship, like a starving wolf, and then absconded at the first opportunity. You must understand my state of mind. I was ill when I met you, and half poisoned, if Mrs. Norton’s theory is credible.

  “Further—” he regarded me with a troubled gaze “—I had encountered unexpected forces from my past. It was as if I was awakening from a dream that had lasted for almost a decade.

  “First my life was attempted in Afghanistan, after years of safe obscurity. Suspicious that the attempt stemmed from the sad events of the past, I attempted to trace this Dr. Watson through the military and medical records, and found that another had been there before me, and had abstracted those very documents.”