A Soul of Steel (32 page)

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.

My late father, I told Godfrey, would not have approved such extravagance as a hansom cab, even on his own behalf. Since it is virtually impossible to argue with the dead, Godfrey relented, and soon I was on my separate, if not merry, way.

As I jolted out the Brompton Road toward Kensington among an anonymous mob of fellow travelers, all of us advertising “Dr. Morton’s Amazing Foot Powder,” I brooded on the extremes to which my attempt to help Quentin Stanhope had driven me. I had never willfully deceived anyone to whom I owed so much. Yet I had known Quentin before I had ever met Godfrey, if one may call such a brief acquaintance as ours “knowing.” The poor man had quite literally stumbled across me after all these years and had seemed to take some comfort in that. I had no choice but to see him.

I felt obliged to stop at Holy Trinity and offer a prayer for my father, who had died in mid-February rather than July. Still, my visit to Holy Trinity did me good, and steeled my resolve. I set out for the museum.

This entire quarter of London just south of the velvet-green summer quilt of Kensington Park bristled with new constructions. In the near distance I could spy the awesome spires and domes of the Queen’s monuments to domestic bliss and connubial bereavement: the Gothic spires of the Prince Albert Memorial bristling beyond the redbrick hulk of Albert Hall, a modem glass-and-iron domed concert arena.

The Museum of Natural History and Modem Curiosities dated only to the early ’Seventies, and faced the strong sunlight as yet unstained by London’s smoke-misted autumns and wet, sooty winters. With its twin spires and central nave, the terra-cotta and slate-blue exterior offered a most reassuring, contemplative and churchlike appearance, though it was a bit Byzantine for my taste.

Within, the religious similarity ended. In the vast entry area loomed some monster of the primordial swamps in all its bony glory.

Yet, like a church, the Museum of Natural History and Modem Curiosities was ever mindful of death. As I wandered its many exhibit rooms, for I had arrived well in advance of the appointed time, I felt I toured a mausoleum rather than a museum. All of the exhibits, insect, reptile, bird or mammal, were dead, whether shown in the bare bones or in the furred and feathered simulacra of life.

Bright glass eyes stared at me without wavering. Creatures posed as patiently as if for a photograph, only these subjects would never move again, and I was the moving camera that recorded their bizarre forms. I almost wished that I could huddle under a black cloth and peer at them in secret. This public display of so much death, of so many creatures killed so that a few of us could gawk at them in echoing marble splendor, seemed truly primitive.

I passed the bloated reptiles coiling in their great wooden cases, stopping before a cobra raised up as I had seen one do in life only recently, its famous “spectacle”-marked hood wide as an eighteenth-century lady’s calabash. The maw was open so the fangs glimmered bone-white under the electric lights.

This serpent looked as regal as any Queen of the Nile; for a moment I saw it not as a thing of loathing or the Form of the Fall, but rather as a bejeweled and magnificent creation wrested from its true setting, the natural world. And then I shuddered, for it was a serpent after all, and deadly.

Yet the true predator was not the venomous serpent, but the one who sought to put the snake’s natural weapons to unnatural, human ends, unthinkable crimes in garrets and consulting rooms.

As I looked about, the vastness of the museum oppressed me. I felt as if I had been immured in some gigantic sarcophagus. What a site Quentin had selected for our clandestine meeting!

With relief I entered the vertebrate area, devoutly hoping that fur would mask all the macabre zoology exhibits. Instead, I was again unnerved. Exotic creatures were fastened high on the walls or imprisoned in glassed-in wooden cabinets oddly reminiscent of Mr. Tiffany’s well-secured jewelry cases at 79 rue Richelieu. A faint odor of stale fur and formaldehyde reminded me of the Paris Morgue.

Weaving past the room’s mounted occupants, I concentrated with some relief on the moving, human exhibit, the visitors. How should I recognize Quentin? Certainly he would not be attired in the fantastic foreign garb that he had worn in Paris. In that City of Lights the lunatic is a patron saint. In London, only mild eccentricity is tolerated.