A Soul of Steel (23 page)

“Unusual,” I put in despite my uncertain French pronunciation, “but fortunate in this case. The creature was preparing to strike Irene.”

“It was frightened, Mademoiselle,” the doctor began.

“So was I!”

“Miss Huxleigh is not terribly sympathetic to snakes,” Irene said, “and I do not blame her. What have you learned, then, of the man and the snake, beyond the intriguing fact that they had nothing to do with one another despite a common Indian origin and their admittedly... close association in death?”

“From what the inspector tells me, the Indian is unlikely to be identified. Such men are nameless, usually of the servant or sailor class. They come and go as their masters and ships do; few know or note their progress. The cobra is as common, at least in its native land. An Asian cobra is only one and a half meters long—some five feet in your measurement in England, or America, Madame ‘Sharpshooter’—” the last word was delivered in English with a pronounced French emphasis “—no very great length as cobras go. It is not as if it was a king cobra. Now those reach—you would say?— eighteen feet.”

I must have made a whimper of distaste, for all regarded me attentively.

“A most royally attenuated serpent,” I admitted. “Madame Sarah would adore it.”

Dr. Sauveur shook his grizzled head at me with some sympathy. “What eccentrics, these performers, eh?” He smiled unctuously at Godfrey, who regarded him with the cold, cobralike stare that a good barrister can produce in court.

The physician swallowed the last of his sherry in one greedy gulp and rose. “There is little more to say. I was asked to report and have done so. The man is dead by cobra venom. The cobra was not the source and it is also dead, by pistol shot.”

“Have you no speculations?” Irene asked incredulously.

The doctor’s lip curled. “No, Madame. I am not paid to speculate, only to examine. However, a colleague of Inspector Dubugue’s, Inspector Le Villard, suggests that only one man may be able to unravel such a conundrum, a Mr. Sherlock Holmes of London. He is an English amateur who has written monographs on various matters. Le Villard is translating them to our language. Perhaps you have heard of this man?”

“No,” said Godfrey quickly, as quickly as Irene said “Yes.”

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.

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. ’ ’