A Soul of Steel (34 page)

“It is Mrs. Norton!” exclaimed the old soldier beside me, thus sealing his identity.

“Only yesterday you were simply a miserable street lad!” I complained bitterly.

Irene smiled through her filthy ragamuffin’s face. “Yesterday I was a Covent Garden flower girl,” she corrected me. “Since you so thoughtfully demonstrated that the young thief was utterly authentic in front of so many crucial witnesses, it made the perfect, foolproof guise today. Thank you, dear heart.”

“I suppose I am the fool against which it was proof,” I said.

“Oh, no. I rather hoped it would be Captain Morgan and Mr. Holmes. We shall soon see.” She pressed against the window and peered out. “No hansom in apparent pursuit, but smugness is premature.”

She rapped the roof of the carriage and shouted, “On to Brixton after you reach Chelsea, and drive like the wind incarnate. There’s a half-sovereign in it.”

She sat back and beamed at the bobby, who had remained a dark, silent presence in our midst. “I hope you do not mind my borrowing a page from your book, my dear.”

At this Quentin turned his dignified head to glare at the bobby. I studied the policeman’s eyes under the helmet brim, the slightly aquiline nose that bridged helmet and mustache, the chin strap that slashed across his cheek to the tip of the chin, much altering the features....

“Godfrey?” I attempted.

He doffed his official headgear with a bow. “For God and country and Sir Robert Peel.”

“Well.” I sat back feeling very put upon. “It appears that I am the only person in honest guise among you. Would any of you care to explain?”

“It is Mr. Stanhope who has the real explaining to do,” Irene said a trifle sternly, “and much of his explanation is owed to you, Nell. But Godfrey and I will unburden our deceptive souls first, because it is such fun to reveal the moves of a game once the object has been won.”

“And what is the object of your game, Mrs. Norton?” Quentin inquired stiffly.

“You,” Irene replied with an urchinlike grin.

Her expression and tone sobered as she continued. “The ensuring of your bodily safety, as well as that of the distinguished Dr. Watson. Also the uncovering of the plot that enmeshes you both in death and deception, so that your futures can be secure. And the disarming of the villainous and implacable nature behind this scheme that has unwound for nearly ten years. And lastly, my object is the well-being and peace of mind of my dear companion, Miss Penelope Huxleigh, who has come to expect from a gentleman a private explanation rather than a hasty departure by night.”

I would have thought it impossible for the old soldier’s florid complexion to flush further, but it did.

“Miss Huxleigh’s safety and that of yourself and your husband were my sole concerns in Paris,” he said. “Hence my abrupt departure. You have no idea of the dangerous waters into which you plunge, Madame.”

“Do you?” Irene asked with a wicked gleam in her eye. “And I think a liquid analogy does not become a matter which began in arid Afghanistan.”

“Yes, this did begin with attempted murder years ago in Afghanistan. Now more of the same erupts in Paris and London. The situation is far too volatile for new and uninformed players in the game, as you call it.”

“Oh, fiddlesticks, Quentin,” Irene said. “The Great Game between England and Russia has been waged on the steppes of Afghanistan for decades. While you play the noble spy and tell half-truths and melt into the shadows, the real villain is getting away with murder. What do you know of the Indian gentleman who died of cobra venom in your Montmartre lodgings?”

“Dalip is dead?” Quentin performed the impossible again and paled beneath his greasepaint choler. “By cobra bite?”

Godfrey bestirred himself at the sight of a fine point slithering free. “Cobra
venom.
A cobra was on the premises, but was not the source of poison. Irene shot it.”

“Good God.” Quentin turned to her in wonder.

“Only after Nell had alertly pointed it out to me,” Irene admitted modestly.

Quentin turned to me in even greater disbelief.

“The room was quite dim,” I explained. “I only saw a... swaying silhouette, but Irene had her revolver and so—”

Quentin abandoned his upright military posture and let himself thud back against the tufted leather cushions with a stunned sigh.

“Poor Dalip. A sepoy soldier at Maiwand, and my sole friend in the years after. I begin to feel my supposed age. Do you mean to say that you two ladies were alone in my Montmartre quarters with a cobra and a dying man?”

“He was dead by the time we arrived, Quentin,” I assured him. “It was perfectly proper.”

“What was most improper,” Irene said, retrieving something glittering from her urchin’s garb, “was leaving this token behind in Neuilly. You cannot outrun your past, Quentin.”

He hesitated before taking the small golden object Irene extended. “Medals make a tawdry memorial for the costs of Maiwand.”

“Medals are not made to memorialize the dead, my dear man,” Irene told him, “but to remind the living of just those costs. If you choose to give it away, I hope you would do it for better reason than that it weighs heavily on your memory.”

His closing fingers eclipsed the small glimmer. “Perhaps you are right. Mementos must be tended gladly, not outrun. I will keep it—for now—as a remembrance of my last peaceful days, in Neuilly.”

“What is the plan now?” Godfrey asked in the lengthening silence.

Irene rubbed her grimy face with her hands, a sign more of mental fatigue than a desire for cleanliness. “We must return to Brown’s and change hotels. Obviously, Nell was followed to and from it. Nell, since you alone are yourself, you must handle the transfer. Once we have found new headquarters we can restore ourselves to normal, and then compare notes.”

Godfrey groaned. “Must we change hotels? That is much to ask poor Nell to stage-manage alone.”

“Indeed,” I seconded him.

“Unless you care to find a sleeping cobra as a foot-warmer, I suggest that we do so immediately.”

No one objected after considering this argument, and the confused driver was instructed to make his way to Piccadilly. How I arranged for payment and the packing and transfer of Godfrey’s and my things to the waiting carriage does not make for absorbing reading even in a diary. Let me state merely that I managed it.

“Now, where is Irene staying?” I asked when our luggage was finally piled atop the four-wheeler and I had joined the other three within it.

A silence. “Well?”

Godfrey answered. “Irene was staying with me, Nell.”

“With you? From the very beginning? Then that is why you insisted that I required a sitting-room suite, and why our conferences were always held in my room! My sitting room, that is,” I added with a quick glance at Quentin. “It was utter deception from the first.”

“I am afraid so,” Irene said with no compunction. “And great fun it was. Hovering about unbeknownst to you was most amusing.” Her expression grew misty-eyed.

“There’s no place like London for surreptitious following. These grim gray buildings and narrow streets and byways, the gaslit evenings when fog becomes one’s uninvited accessory. The broad boulevards, sprawling public buildings and all the electricity of Paris cannot hold a candle to it!”

Godfrey cleared his throat, a favorite courtroom signal of his for attention. Irene reluctantly shook herself out of her reverie, sending more locks of hair cascading over the shoulders of her ragged jacket.

“I digress,” she admitted. “Well, Mr. Stanhope, shall we repair to your lodgings for the time being?”

“My—?” He glanced at me askance. “They are not suitable for ladies.”

“Wonderful! Where else would such a desperate character as yourself go to ground? I do so long to see them!”

“Truly, I cannot allow it,” the poor man said. “A fellow who has lived in the squalor of India or in the wilds of Afghanistan may camp out in a metropolitan sinkhole, but ladies... see here, Norton, can you not talk her out of it?”

“Not a bit,” Godfrey answered. “Besides, I am curious myself.”

“But Miss Huxleigh—” Quentin finished with a plea in my direction.

“—lived in Saffron Hill with me in the early ’eighties,” Irene pointed out. “We are both adapted to the Bohemian life.”

“Saffron Hill was merely a foreign section, not beyond the pale,” he argued. “I am mortified enough as it is that you saw the garret I occupied in Paris.”

Irene clasped her hands as if about to deliver a most heart-wrenching aria. “It was superb, my dear Quentin. Quite perfect for a setting in
La Bohème.
You underestimate the attractions of the tawdry. The romanticism. The adventure.”

“You
are
speaking of that unspeakable garret in Montmartre?” I inquired.

“Indeed. Where else could a civilized woman go to shoot a cobra?”

“The salon of Sarah Bernhardt,” I interjected in acid tones.

Quentin laughed. “She’s got you there. Even I have heard of La Bernhardt’s menagerie.”

Irene refused to be ruffled. “If I am to shoot a cobra, which I really do not wish to do unless it is a matter of self-defense, I certainly would not want to do it in a drawing room. No. A garret in Montmartre provides the proper artistic ambience. When you know me better, Quentin, you will understand that the proper artistic ambience is always a major consideration with me. Now, tell this most impatient driver where to take us. I do hope it will be interesting.”

First, however, Quentin and I were ejected at nearby Fortnum & Mason’s in Piccadilly near Duke Street, under orders to return with enough comestibles for an impromptu luncheon at our destination. Godfrey showered me with pound notes before we descended from the carriage, and soon we were wandering the impressive aisles in canyons of piled tinned goods from the world over.

“Mrs. Norton is right,” Quentin murmured to me once we were inside the famous emporium. “I owe you an explanation, and an apology. But I must ask why we have been delegated to feed our party.”

“We are the least likely to attract undue attention, as we are the most respectable-looking of the quartet. I know Irene’s methods. An urchin and a bobby would hardly be shopping partners at Fortnum and Mason.”

“And you and I?”

I glanced at his most successful disguise. “A retired colonel, widowed, on an outing with his... spinster daughter.”

“Not a retired colonel, widowed, on an outing with his second wife?”

I could have sworn that there was a teasing gleam in the pale eyes under the bushy white eyebrows.

“Mine is the more likely assumption. Besides, I have never been anyone’s first wife, so I should not know how to enact a second one. Oh, really, I do not know what to buy.” I gazed at a depressing display of tins with French labeling. “Irene loved this goose-liver mess in Paris, but I cannot abide it. Do choose what you want to eat. I have quite lost my appetite.”

“Are you ill?”

“No! Merely... feeling a fool.”

He laughed and smoothed his full, white and totally false mustache. “How do you think I feel? My clever plan to approach you without attracting notice apparently drew a full house. Now I am compelled to draw you all further into my sordid life—”

“Oh, you must not think of it that way! Irene is right, you know, in her maddening way. Interesting people often lead... irregular lives. I suppose I notice that because I am not interesting.”

“My dear Penelope, I cannot tell you how interesting you are to me. Norton has his hands full with Mrs. Norton, I see.”

“I do not believe that he would have it any other way, Quentin.”

We had begun walking down the aisles, Quentin taking my arm, or rather leaning upon it in what I chose to consider quite a fatherly way as befitted his semblance.

“I suppose,” I mused, “we do not want any tinned peas? No.”

“Your friend Mrs. Norton does not strike me as one highly enamored of tinned peas.”

“You must call her ‘Irene,’ as I do, and she has asked you to.”

“I prefer calling her Mrs. Norton,” he said.

“Then you must take the state of matrimony very seriously.” I was suddenly aware of what a personal intrusion this comment was.

“Not necessarily,” he returned easily, “but calling such an exotic woman as your friend by the utterly commonplace name of ‘Mrs. Norton’ amuses me.”

The warmth in his eyes unnerved me, and I fell back on my best governess behavior. “I am afraid that you are amused by very trivial matters.”

“All amusement is trivial, Penelope. That is why there is so little of it in learned books.”

“Does ‘Miss Huxleigh’ amuse you?” I made my next, bold offer rather breathlessly. “Otherwise, you may call me ‘Nell.’ “

“And will you call me ‘Stan’?”

He asked so gently that I was quite undone and spoke more sharply than I meant, spoke in the most contrary tone to what I felt.

“I think not.”

“You see, commonplace names do not suit us; we are too ordinary to begin with. We shall have to go a long way before we do anything so dignified that it would be droll to call us by nicknames. But I would be delighted to call you ‘Nell’.”

His logic had become convoluted, or else I was too distracted to follow it. I would have thought that he was mocking me, were it not that a man whose life is in danger, it seems evident, will not stoop to frivolity... or flirting. Of course he meant nothing by it, but our chitchat did not settle the matter of what we should eat. I told him so.

“Why then,” said he, “we must outfit ourselves.”

With that he steered me to the picnic hampers—great, wicker contrivances large enough to house a dozen cobras—and told the gentleman in morning coat who attended us that he wished a good supply laid within of game pies, lobster, prawns, smoked salmon, Parma ham, sandwiches, Stilton cheese and (unfortunately)
pâté de foie gras,
as well as champagne and a trifle for dessert.

“We must celebrate our reunion,” he said with a grin at the clerk and a wink at me. Old age apparently entitles a gentleman to all manner of liberties.

Godfrey’s pound notes vanished as if swallowed by anacondas, but the hamper was soon full and fitted out as well with napery, cutlery, pottery, china and crystal. Two men carried it out behind us to the waiting carriage, and if we had desired discretion, it was a vain wish.