A Soul of Steel (6 page)

“He saw you,” she interrupted. “He saw you and could not believe that he knew you.”

“The f-feeling is mutual,” I stuttered, aware of onlookers gathering around us. “I tell you I have never seen this man before, nor do I hope to again.”

Godfrey had bent to examine the creature at the same moment that a waiter from the café rushed over with a glass of red wine. The French belief in the curative value of wine rivals only their conviction in their own cultural superiority. More of that gruesome liquid fell upon the man’s barbarously embroidered shirt than on his lips, but he stirred at this bloody baptism, his eyelids fluttering.

“Miss Huxleigh,” he murmured as if dreaming.

I stepped back, appalled, my hands clasped at my throat, which was dry. “I have never met the fellow, I swear.”

Irene regarded the fallen man from the lofty pinnacle of consideration for a moment; though she was the softest-hearted of women when moved, she was not one to be deceived by false weakness. Then she addressed me dryly.

“Although you pride yourself on strictly abiding by the Holy Writ, Nell, it is not necessary to follow the New Testament example and deny any association yet a third time. Whatever your memory of a connection, this, er, gentleman clearly knows you and your name. Since he has been taken ill—”

“A ruse!” I interrupted, my cheeks hot with anger at the attention the bounder had drawn in my innocent direction.

“A ruse by another name may be a true illness.” Irene waited for Godfrey to report on the fellow’s condition.

“I am no medical man,” he said, glancing up with a sober face, “but it looks like a legitimate illness to me.”

Irene nodded briskly, her ostrich plumes bowing faintly to the gesture. “We will take him back with us to Neuilly, then. Our carriage will accommodate him if you ride up with André,” she told Godfrey.

She gave me a wicked smile. “Or perhaps Nell would prefer to ride with the coachman rather than with our mysterious charge.”

My throat felt stuffed with cotton, but I managed to speak. “If you wish to play Good Samaritan to this
stranger,
far be it from me to interfere. However, I would never agree to anything so improper as riding with the coachman.”

“Good,” Irene returned. “I knew I could rely upon you, Nell, to do the proper thing. Godfrey, you must tend the poor man while Nell and I fetch the carriage. Guard him well.”

With that cryptic instruction, Irene took my elbow and steered me into the crowd milling before the great stone cathedral.

“Paris is unlucky for us,” I commented morosely when Godfrey came down the narrow stairs of our cottage at Neuilly after helping the coachman install our mysterious invalid in an upstairs bedchamber.

Godfrey frowned at the chamomile tea our maid, Sophie, had prepared for me, and went to the sherry decanter instead. He returned with a half-full glass and presented it with a bow. “For thy stomach’s sake. It has had a turn.”

I seldom partake of alcoholic beverages, but my throat was still dry so I sipped the potion, which struck me as no more unappealing than drinking from the perfume flagon Irene kept on her dressing table. “He may have contracted some virulent Oriental disease,” I muttered.

“He may have,” Godfrey admitted. “We are taking him on faith, given his acquaintance with you.”

“You must not! As I told Irene, I do not know—” Footsteps descended the stairs. I paused, loath to subject myself to another reminder from Irene that the wretched man knew me even if I did not know him. Our buxom maid appeared in the hallway.

“You need help?” Godfrey asked in rapid French that I had only lately begun to follow well. “André has gone for Dr. Mersenné in the village.”

“Non,
Monsieur,”
Sophie replied, adding—if I understood her correctly—that Madame Norton was having no difficulty disrobing the man!

I turned on Godfrey like an angry goose, so furious I could only hiss my disbelief.

“No, no, Nell. André and I disrobed him for bed. Irene is merely searching his clothing for clues.”

“Worse! They might be disease-ridden, vermin-infested—”

“Decently clean, if a bit worn,” came Irene’s cheery overriding tones from the foot of the stairs. She entered the parlor, her eyes belladonna-bright, though curiosity was her only cosmetic.

“Such a puzzle,” she added happily, perching on the arm of Godfrey’s chintz-upholstered easy chair. “His Eastern outer clothing hides European underwear and his body is sun-browned to the waist, yet his legs are as white as a fish belly.”

“Irene!” I remonstrated faintly.

“I am sorry, Nell.” Irene sounded genuinely contrite for once. “I should not have said anything so forward as ‘fish belly.’ “

“You are having fun with me. At least until now your interest in the condition of strange gentlemen’s bodies had confined itself to corpses.”

“We may have one on our hands yet,” Godfrey put in a trifle grimly.

“This man may... die?”

“But you must not worry, Nell,” Irene said. “You do not know him.”

“That does not mean I wish him to die, disreputable as he is. He may have had a tragic life... have been cast out while a child. He may have contracted a dreadful malady in far-off China while ministering to the heathens.”

“Nell is right in one thing,” Godfrey told Irene. “It has the look of a foreign fever. Dr. Mersenné may know what, I hope.”

Irene nodded, equally grave. “I also hope Dr. Mersenné can diagnose the large puncture wound in his upper right arm.”

“The bite of some huge, exotic foreign spider,” I suggested.

“More like the injection of some huge, exotic needle,” she returned.

“A needle? You mean a syringe? Then he has already seen a doctor.”

Irene leaned over and lifted my barely touched glass of sherry from the marquetry table upon which it sat. “I do not think so.” She sipped consideringly. “I believe we may have a mortally ill man upon our hands, and one so recently stricken that he did not yet know it himself.”

“How recently?” I asked, puzzled.

“Even as he paused to observe us outside the café. In fact, I believe that he has ‘fallen ill’ because he recognized someone.”

“Some... one?”

Irene toasted me with my own glass. “You, my dear Nell. I must congratulate you: you have led a most delicious and likely dangerous mystery straight to my doorstep.”

She eyed Godfrey with rather ferocious jubilation. “To
our
doorstep, my dears. Now we must keep our guest alive so we can learn who is trying to kill him, and why.  

“And we must discover why our formidable documenter Nell does not recall a man who remembers
her
so vividly that the passage of years and a major dislocation in place does not deceive him even on the brink of physical collapse.”

“He is not in the least respectable,” I protested in explanation of why I should not be expected to recognize such a man.

“That,” said Irene severely, “is no excuse.”

Chapter Six

A POISONOUS PAST

The cottage
at Neuilly was becoming a routine rest-stop for wayfaring strangers.

I watched from the front parlor that afternoon as Dr. Mersenné arrived in an officious hush and was rapidly ushered upstairs. I was reminded of Louise Montpensier’s arrival on the premises just last autumn: disheveled, wet, hysterical and freshly tattooed.

In Louise’s case, there was the evidence of good jewelry upon her person to recommend her. All the turbaned stranger bore in the way of mitigating accoutrements was European underwear, according to Irene, hardly a recommendation in conventional circles!

Still, I shared the anxiety that attends a crisis. My worry was increased by the troubling fact that the man had indeed seemed to know me—or to recognize me, rather. Irene’s assertion that the fellow had been attacked in some invisible way right before our eyes—or behind our backs, to put it more accurately—was even more disturbing.

It promised that this inconvenient person would not simply vanish from our lives as swiftly as he had appeared, at least not until Irene had satisfied herself as to his identity and discovered a reason for the apparent attack.

I should inject here an architectural note. Although our residence at Neuilly was commonly referred to as a “cottage,” this was not the humble, squat dwelling to be found dotting the English countryside. This cottage was two-storied and rambling, like all buildings that date to an assortment of centuries past. It offered narrow stairs, low doorways, and floors paved in slate, stone or broad wooden planks. The place thronged with dormers and unexpected window seats, and the kitchens were a flagstone-floored horror reminiscent of Torquemada’s torture chambers, replete with wrought- iron hooks and a massive, man-high hearth perfect for spitting a pig. Numerous bedchambers nestled under the lead-tiled eaves above.

The entire arrangement demonstrated that French facility for combining the grand and the cozy. I must admit that I found it amenable.

So we had room aplenty for any unclaimed wretch lucky enough to fall into the path of Irene’s curiosity. I kept my own curiosity, which Irene has often accused of being more sluggish than Lucifer after a culinary expedition to the surrounding fields, well reined, despite the hustle and bustle overhead.

At last patience was rewarded. A parade of footfalls on the ancient stairs brought the doctor down first, then my friends. I was reading the
London Illustrated News
with great concentration.

“A most bizarre case,” Dr. Mersenné was declaring. “You are correct about the puncture wound, Madame Norton, but no ordinary medical needle made it. A hypodermic needle, no matter how fine, is hollow. Whatever pierced our friend’s arm was not. Furthermore, it has taken a rather crude bite of his flesh. Most clumsy. Mademoiselle.”

Dr. Mersenné nodded at me as Godfrey gestured him to the chintz armchair and offered him a glass of brandy. I have never known a physician to refuse spirits, and the French especially are no exception.

“Furthermore,” he continued as Irene and Godfrey seated themselves before him like attentive pupils, “what is the point of skewering a fellow with a narrow point if one is not injecting some foreign substance? To get his attention?”

“His attention had already been deeply engaged by one of our party,” Irene answered. “You are certain that our guest has not received a recent dose of poison, then?”

“How can I be certain, unless the miserable fellow dies?” The doctor laughed long and easily. “Your own English doctors,” he said, like everyone else wrongly assuming that because Irene was married to an Englishman and was friend to an Englishwoman she must be English and not American, “would perhaps nail down the diagnosis with a harder hammer, hut my guess is that the man suffers from a chronic fever contracted on the Indian subcontinent.”

“India.” Godfrey narrowed his eyes and tented his fingers in his best barrister manner. “His dress, of course, comes from that part of the globe.”

“I did not see him dressed.” The doctor drained his glass and rose, his scuffed black bag again in hand. “But his complexion bespeaks many years in a foreign clime, if he is indeed an Englishman, as you surmise.”

“He addressed us in English,” Irene put in, “or, at least, he addressed Mademoiselle Huxleigh in that language. His accent was perfect.”

“So is your French accent, Madame,” Dr. Mersenné said with a bow that was a little too low and a little too long.

“That is true.” Godfrey led the doctor to the passage. “Appearances can be deceiving and so can aural impressions.” The two men ambled toward the front door.

“Well,” I asked Irene, “is it poison or fever, and will he live or die? Like most physicians, Dr. Mersenné was indefinite.”

She regarded me closely. Lucifer chose that moment to stalk into the parlor and brush against my skirts. Irene rummaged in a Sèvres box on the marquetry table until she had found a cigarette and one of Lucifer’s namesake matches. I found her habit of prefacing the answers to momentous questions with such stage business most annoying.