Another Scandal in Bohemia (58 page)

All I heard was a click, like Irene’s pistol cocking. The lid sprang open, and I gave a small scream. Even Irene jumped back.

Mr. Holmes was as still as death. He finally stood and gazed down at the object now open to us all.

A magnificent blue enamel Fabergé cigarette case bearing the initial “I” in sinuous diamonds lay on the jeweler’s white satin.

Irene’s head drew slowly back from it as if it were indeed a serpent of sorts. “Poison?” she asked.

“A hidden prong on the right side of the lid, where you would rest the fingers of your left hand as you held the container in your right The venom would have gone into your second finger and straight to your heart.”

“Venom,” I repeated weakly.

“I have seen this method before,” Irene said, “but I was not expecting it.”

“Perhaps,” said Mr. Holmes, “you have had other things on your mind of late. I take it that you now know the identity of the originator?”

She nodded slowly, then looked him in the face, the bare face. For the first time, no guise stood between them. “How did you—?”

“Poor Rudolf is most disappointed in his erstwhile mistress. He resents her attempt to kill him, but before that he resented her showing that she had other interests. That is why he challenged your husband to a duel. He knew that Madam Tatyana was serious and that she had plans to eliminate you.”

“Eliminate Irene?” I repeated from the door.

Mr. Holmes barely glanced my way. “I will take this tidy trap back to England for further study now that it is disarmed—”

Irene’s hand lifted involuntarily. “Do you need the contents?”

“I doubt that the cigarette case itself has been tampered with. You mean that you actually wish to keep this macabre souvenir?” He regarded Irene as if she were almost as worthy of his full attention as the deadly box had been.

She half-smiled, half-shrugged in that disarming way of hers. “It does bear my initial, and I am fond of Fabergé.”

Mr. Holmes’s thin lips folded, whether in exasperation or amusement I was not close enough to tell.

“I’ll have to study it before I let you have it.”

She stepped aside, gesturing to the dressing table and light, and watched while he examined the inner case with the same exactitude with which he had studied the outer one.

We waited, like maids upon a master, until at last he rose, picked up the glorious thing—a blue like the deepest night sky studded with stars—and handed it to Irene with a bow.

“You will not let me convey my thanks later in more formal circumstances, I gather?” she said.

“I am here, dear lady, incognito, as are you, and return immediately to England.”

He pushed aside the cloak to draw out a pocket watch to read the time. The golden sun of the sovereign she had given his disguised self at her wedding swung from his watch-chain. Only I knew of his associate’s belief that Irene was the lone woman who had won this strange man’s admiration and... perhaps... touched his untouchable heart.

If that was true, today he had enjoyed the sublime satisfaction of saving one who meant much to him. I knew too well that exalted impulse, yet detected no sign of its fulfillment on his sharp, ascetic face. However, he did not resemble a drug fiend, either, and I knew him to be that sort as well.

“How did you happen to come to Prague?” Irene asked.

No one was spared her ceaseless curiosity, not even a man who only moments before had saved her life.

Mr. Holmes smiled then, an expression that humanized his features if it did not soften them. “I was drawn here by a matter you found expendable in the light of your own larger affairs: the death of two Worth bead-girls in Paris.”

“‘Two?” Irene’s shock was palpable. “Perhaps if I had stayed in Paris I could have prevented—”

He waved a dismissing hand. “You have done more than your share in Bohemia, Madam. An investigating agent must not confuse himself with a prophet, or a god, as I have more than one reason to know.”

“Then the fashion mannequins’ gowns were woven into a code between spies in the various courts of Europe!” Irene said eagerly. “And the murdered bead-girls must have realized the deception.”

I stepped boldly away from the door. “That is why that awful Madame Gallatin was so scathing when I dared to improvise the pattern—”

Mr. Holmes regarded me with an unspoken question that I found myself answering unbidden.

“I—I became a bead-girl for two days to learn more of Berthe’s murder just before we were diverted to Bohemia.”

“Madame Gallatin was the chief conspirator at Maison Worth,” he declared. “If you meddled with the bead design, you are fortunate not to have made the closer acquaintance of a pair of shears.”

Irene blanched as she had not at facing her own mortal danger just now. “Then Nell left that establishment not a moment too soon. At least this Bohemian venture accomplished that.”

He nodded.

“I did not have time to pursue the line of investigation at Maison Worth,” she admitted, “but using the queens of Europe as unsuspecting carriers was a diabolically clever scheme for secret international communication. I gather that the Foreign Office now takes a greater interest in women’s fashions than before?”

“As do I, Madam, as do I!” Mr. Holmes responded fervently.

Irene laughed. “I’m not surprised that you on occasion become involved in Foreign Office matters, Mr. Holmes, but how on earth did you come upon poor Berthe’s murder in Paris? Surely the affairs that draw you abroad usually involve far more elevated folk than bead-girls?”

“Allow me my secrets, Madam Norton, as I allow you yours,” he said cryptically. “I cannot... relate every clue to my competitors.”

Irene lifted her eyebrows. She had not missed his earlier advice than an investigator must not incur guilt in trying to play god; now he implied that he considered her a rival.

“This ‘competitor’ owes you her life,” she said in a low tone.

He shrugged. “And I owe you the discovery of a counterfeit king. I confess that you were ahead of me on that score, but then you had a considerable head start as well as a personal knowledge of the individuals involved. Rudolf will have much to say to us, and is more than willing. Your dagger, Madam.”

She took it and restored it to its place of concealment. This time he watched, with admiration. I was unsure whether his admiration stemmed more from her audacity or from his new appreciation of women’s fashions, down to the underlayers.

“If you attempt to credit me with any heroics here,” he warned, “I will have to deny everything. I have sworn Dr. Watson to complete secrecy on the matter. Now I require yours.”

He paused at the door for her assurance.

“Oh, I would not dream of doing such a thing, Mr. Holmes, especially when it makes me look such an innocent. Who would believe a dead woman, at any rate?”

“Not in certain quarters, Madam, not in certain quarters.” He gazed at her for a long, odd moment, then bowed and brushed past me. Then he paused to look down his long nose directly into my face. “I have seen you before,” he said, “in London.”

I swallowed, searching for my voice. “And you will see me again, no doubt,” I managed to say stoutly, as a watchdog would warn a housebreaker against further incursions in the same neighborhood.

“I sincerely hope not,” was his impolite reply, as he shouldered out into the deserted hall.

His footsteps died soon, but the silence he left in his wake outlasted them.

“Well.” Irene’s fingertips smoothed the cigarette case’s gleaming enamel with its incised pattern of endless waves. “How fortunate that we leave Prague after my performance tonight.”

“We leave tonight? I am not packed.”

She smiled. “Not immediately after the performance, but tomorrow morning, first thing.”

“I did not know that.”

‘‘I had not decided that.”

“Perhaps you should not sing—”

“Impossible. Now, more than ever, I must sing. If I will not be silenced by the King of Bohemia, I will certainly not be silenced by a common Russian ballerina with no sense of borders!”

Chapter Thirty-nine

COMMAND PERFORMANCE

We sat
in the royal box of the National Theater facing an architectural ambiance that resembled the interior of a gigantic Fabergé egg—vaulted, ornate white wood and plaster, red velvet curtains, and garlands of shining gilt everywhere.

We sat alone—Allegra and Godfrey and I—gazing down on an empty luxuriance of crimson velvet seats toward a curtained stage draped in more velvet and gold fringe.

In the dark pit below the limelights, the orchestra in evening dress made a checkerboard of solemn black and white. The warm wooden and bright brass gleams of their oiled and polished instruments drew our eyes.

Besides we three, the members of the orchestra were the only visible humans in all that extravagant immensity. Not even the King and Queen of Bohemia were here to witness this strangely stirring occasion: Irene singing the role of which she had been defrauded eighteen months before.

If ever revenge could be tailor-made in heaven, perhaps hers was the crowning design of some celestial Worth.

Then the world-famous composer, Antonin Dvořák himself, walked onto the stage, bowed to our paltry but heartfelt patter of clapping, and took his place in the pit.

The overture began with the startling impact of apocalyptic trumpets. Sound positively throbbed in that empty house, with no rows of absorbing flesh and fashionable clothes to dull it.

We all clutched new-bought opera glasses and—as the house lights dimmed and the huge curtain began to roll back like some somnolent beast—we lifted them so as not to miss a moment’s sight.

No wonder Irene had dared to sing this role with little preparation.
The Spectre’s Bride
was a cantata consisting of chorus, baritone, tenor, and soprano. Rudimentary sets sufficed, though stagehands drew pulleys and pulled strings that made various curtains and set-pieces lift and lower.

Yet, to us, the lone and attentive audience, music and not stage illusions provided a dazzling, deft magic. When Irene began to sing, mere magic became magnificence.

I had witnessed Irene in an operatic role,
Saint Ludmilla,
only once, here in Bohemia. Godfrey and Allegra had never seen her perform a major work. So we sat rapt as her voice thrilled over the footlights to fill the entire empty house until every surface reverberated with her presence, her power, her voice.

I cannot convey the shock of a significant piece of music to those who have witnessed only drawing room recitals. I knew that Irene sang like the proverbial angel, that her voice had the deep, dark undercurrent of a cello, with all its clarity and sweetness. I knew that she was an actress born and could imply the heartbreak of a sob in a shimmering glissando of sung syllables, but I had never truly
heard
her before, until this night, until this performance, this cantata.

Godfrey did not move, nor seem to breathe. Allegra was only a frozen shadow on his other side, her eye-whites glistening in the dark. Our only motions were the duel we fought between employing our opera glasses, so we could see Irene and her every expression close up, or using only normal sight, so that we could view the entire spectacle, with Irene a tiny figure below that yet rang like a bell to inundate and overwhelm all our senses.

How little it mattered that we did not understand the Bohemian language. Music and motion spoke a universal tongue. The subject matter was Gothic, even grisly. Irene played the young “bride” of the title, whose dead sweetheart comes to spirit her from her humble cottage to his lordly castle—a tomb in the nearby cemetery! How appropriate for our recent adventures in Bohemia.

What was inappropriate was Irene’s “costume” throughout: a shimmering, flimsy nightgown as unanchored as the robe in which Tatyana had entertained Godfrey—and myself, of course.

While we watched, listened, absorbed, time flew like flocks of swallows. I especially watched for the effective orchestration she had mentioned on the line,
“Psihoufem ve vsi zavyli,”
which she had translated as “The dogs, awakened, howled and cried.”

Now that I saw the work’s tone as the cantata reached its graveyard climax, I understood the reference. Although it was ironic that Irene sang
The Spectre's Bride,
given that she had once cherished the notion of becoming the King of Bohemia’s bride, the gruesome story mattered little to the performance. All was sound and emotion and artistry. Triumph.

I glanced at Godfrey to see if his eyes glistened, as had the King of Bohemia’s when he heard Irene sing. Only the normal moisture reflected from them, though he sat like a statue of stone. He was, after all, a British banister.

Allegra and I were another story. On either side of the rapt but stoic Godfrey, we wrung our handkerchiefs in our laps, bit our lips, and tried to sniffle unnoticed during a swell of chorus.

In fact, I was often so overcome that I was forced to look away from the stage, lest my companions glimpse my distorted expression.