The Adventuress (32 page)

Louise and I stood rapt at his evocation of the waterfront. When Caleb Winter waxed descriptive, one realized why he followed the newsman’s trade. The brandy had stopped his ague, but suddenly his eyes fixed behind us, as if he’d seen a ghost. I wheeled around.

A silhouette in dark trousers and a pea coat hovered in the bedroom doorway.

“Mr. Norton!” A pulse of relief throbbed in the American’s voice.

“No,
Mrs.
Norton,” said I, sorry to disappoint him.

Irene briskly strode in, the full lamplight revealing her male-clad figure’s delicacy as compared to Godfrey’s more substantial presence.

“Ready, Mr. Winter? You must show me where you last saw Godfrey.”

He rose, letting the blanket Louise had draped over his shoulders slide to the floor. “You’d pass for a lad in the shadows, but I won’t be responsible for what transpires if a sailor laddie spots a woman in that getup.”

“I don’t expect you to be responsible, Mr. Winter.” Irene produced the smuggled revolver from a side pocket, expertly checking its readiness. “Simply show me where Godfrey left you. I will proceed from there.”

“But that’s where that poor devil Singh lies dead!”

“All the better. I’d prefer to see the body where it fell. And I must examine the tattoo for myself as well. Shall we go?”

He was speechless, a rare condition in an American, I have observed.

“I will go also,” I burst out before they could take a step.

“In a watered-silk gown, Nell?”

“I will change clothes.”

“Mr. Winter is right; women are not welcome in that quarter.”

“I will dress as you do.”

That halted Irene. “An interesting offer, but there is no time to implement it. We must be off immediately. Mr. Winter, are you composed enough to climb down the trellis below the bedroom balcony?”

“I have not had that much brandy.”

“I meant the depredations of the evening.” Irene smiled and led him into the bedchamber.

I followed, Louise trailing me as speechlessly as her American suitor.

“Irene! What if Godfrey returns and you are gone?” I asked as she leaned over the balcony to verify a clear coast below.

“Then he will wait until we return also.”

“What if he insists on going after you two?”

She swung a leg over the stone balustrade as casually as a man swings astride a horse. “Then we shall chase each other all night until dawn comes, when we cannot fail to find one another.”

Her cap-covered head slipped below the railing. I rushed to the window, seeing only her gloved hands clutching the bottom of the balustrade. “What if Godfrey does
not
return?” I demanded in a hoarse whisper.

“Then we shall not, until we have him,” came the diminishing answer. Mr. Winter catapulted over the railing as soon as Irene had vanished. I heard much agitation among the flowering vines below, and then silence.

“Oh, Nell,” Louise whispered at my back, “are they all mad? I should kill myself if my muddled affairs were to cause Caleb’s death! Or Mr. Norton’s death, or Mrs. Norton’s, of course.”

“Nonsense,” said I, turning. “They also serve who only stand and wait upon the weaker among us. You’ve tried to kill yourself once and for less reason, and it did not go well. Now sit down and have some brandy, and do not bestir your mind or your body until they have all returned safe and sound.”

Louise knew my uncompromising tone by now and went meekly to an armchair. She accepted the glass of brandy I brought and sipped it as if it were milk, but then these French introduce their children to wine at a shockingly early age.

“It is so awful to wait, Nell,” said she. “What will you do?”

I sat at the table. “First, I will copy over this unsightly drawing onto a fresh sheet of paper. Your Mr. Winter shows a talented hand, but I fear he was forced to use his knee as a sketch pad.”

“What... what is the tattoo like?” she asked tremulously.

“Come and see,” said I, knowing that curiosity is the first sign of a reviving morale. She did so.

“It is a whole, brand-new letter that your fiancé has discovered. No wonder that Godfrey wished to ensure that he worked undisturbed. You see, under all these wriggling curlicues there lurks the noble ‘N’.”

“Oh,” wailed Louise, sinking onto a chair beside me in tears.

“What is it now?”

“ ‘N’ as in N-N-Norton.”

“ ‘N’ as in ‘no, not likely.’ They will be all right. They have always been all right. It is you and I who are in danger, my dear girl, in danger of being ninnies. I must enter this latest episode into my diary. Perhaps you could compare this new tattoo to the others I keep here, between the pages. Some people store pressed flowers within their diary pages, but, no, I must harbor tattoos. It is quite a topsy-turvy world, Louise, as you will discover when you have been in it longer. Now, we must try to make some sense of this new clue, so that we have something to show for our time when the others return.”

Chapter Twenty-five

A
C
ONSPIRACY OF
C
RETANS

Within an
hour, time proved me to be not only a model of sensible decorum, but a prophet, although we had failed utterly to make any sense of the “N.”

A veritable sirocco in the greenery brought Louise and myself rushing to the bedchamber window. Up they came, scaling the trellis like long-lost monkeys: Irene first, then Mr. Winter and, at last, Godfrey!

Louise embraced me with a happy gratitude as pleasant as it was misplaced. I had done nothing to ensure the prodigals’ return; I had only occupied her mind during their absence. To the young, that can seem miraculous.

Godfrey and Irene closeted themselves in the bedchamber to change clothes while we three waited impatiently in the parlor. Irene emerged first, wearing a voluminous violet taffeta wrapper. Shortly afterward came Godfrey in his emerald brocade smoking jacket. With Black Otto’s features rinsed away at the washstand, he looked as if he had risen from a sound sleep instead of from a chill, roistering night on the wharves. He pronounced himself no worse for wear, save for too many toasts with cheap rum among his sailor friends.

“My first object was to lead them away from Singh’s body, but then I couldn’t escape. Convivial, custodial arms thrown around shoulders, toasts shouted to the wickedest captains of the seven seas and all that. I did learn where our Gerry lifts his tankard. We can seek him out tomorrow if our heads will stand it.”

Caleb Winter groaned but took another tot of brandy anyway. Cold had painted his nose a cherry-red, or perhaps the brandy had. “I’ve never before seen a dead man; no, not in all my reporting years.”

“You barely did,” Irene reminded him. “The body was gone when we returned to the spot. Who’s to say it will ever appear again?”

“Gone!” I felt an odd stab of loss, remembering the Indian’s mute presence on that dreadful train ride. He had done me no harm, save by the cosseting of a sinuous pet. “Murdered then, for certain!”

“Another tattooed sailor su
nk
from sight,” Godfrey intoned a trifle more morosely than he might have done without so much rum.

“Another sailor,” Irene agreed, frowning as if she did not truly concur and could not say why.

“And another tattooed letter discovered,” Louise said brightly, indicating the sketches, which she had arranged into a cross before her. “An Esse, Ay, Oh and an En.” Irene smiled, struck, as was I, by the extreme French accent with which Louise spoke the English she had learned from, and for, her American swain. “We had surmised the ‘N’ from the multi-lettered seal on your uncle’s letter. Still, surmise is not as good as certainty!”

“E-N-O-S,” Godfrey spelled aloud. “Enos? Something biblical?”

“E-O-N-S?” Mr. Winter suggested. “Or O-N-E-S? That might signify the conspirators.” He smiled modestly. “I work with words, you know.”

“N-O-S-E!” I blurted, an unconsidered inspiration that met blank stares all around.

Irene shook her head at each of us in turn. “You presume that the word, if these letters do indeed spell a word, is English. What does Louise make of them in French?”

The girl’s eyes brightened at Irene’s invitation. “I can only think of the French word
once,
which has three of these four letters and means ‘ounce,’ or—less commonly—a snow leopard.”

“Snow
leopard!” Caleb Winter clasped his fiancee’s hands triumphantly. “That must be it, for the phonetic English spelling of snow could be S-N-O-E.”

“Snow in Monte Carlo?” I queried.

“I can think of no other word,” Louise said wearily. “There is no ‘W’ in French.”

“There is no ‘W’ in French,” Irene repeated pensively, her dark eyes glinting. She leaned over the sketched letters, moving them around and around in the cross-like configuration Louise had chosen: two above each other, two beside the central pair. Then she clapped her hands.

“Of course! So simple. I should have suspected on the train!”

We blinked in conjoined weariness and waited.

“What rail line took us all to Monte Carlo?” she demanded.

Godfrey had forgotten this minor detail, but I had the advantage in having jotted down such facts in my diary. My dear father considered the act of writing a great aid to memory.

“The Ouest line, Irene, although only the French would call a railway line ‘West’ when it travels south.”

“West indeed! But there is no ‘W’ in French, so they spell it—?” She eyed Louise, her eyes sparkling with anticipation.

“O-U-E-S-T.”

“Exactly. Ou-west. The English west. The other directional words begin the same initial even in French:
Nord, Sud, Est
.”

“North, South, East and West,” Godfrey repeated.

“And what do modern sailors navigate by but... compass points? Capitalized, as these tattooed letters are. When I place them in the proper position—North above, South below, East to the right, and West (in this case, Ouwest) to the left—and move them over one another so the decorative scrolling intersects in just the correct way, it is likely that we will have a design, an arcane clue to this conspiracy.”

We stared politely at the assembled compass rose, dubious, but hopeful of conversion.

“We must find a better way to overlay the sketches,” Irene admitted. “Nell?”

“Tracing paper!” I suggested. “I employed it as a child when practicing my penmanship.”

“Very well. Louise and Mr. Winter will procure some tracing paper tomorrow”—Irene glanced at the dawn-burnished windows—“later today, rather. Nell will copy the individual tattoos onto it, overlapping their forms. Godfrey—” Here Irene’s face showed regret. “Godfrey will resurrect the unlovely Black Otto long enough to discover if news of the missing Singh spreads in the bistros. And I...” She sighed. “I will try to discover how Monaco Palace’s private sealing wax came to be on letters mailed by unlettered sailors from ports whole continents distant.”

Despite the sleepless night, weariness fled the next morning as we went about our appointed tasks.

Luckily, Monaco attracts legions of would-be artists. Louise and Mr. Winter soon returned with a thick pad of delicate tracing paper and I set to work. I was so taken with my task that I went over my pencil work with India ink, the better to slide one tracing over the other and still see through several layers.

Louise and her young man hung admiringly over my shoulder for most of the morning, slipping away only for luncheon. They returned with a tray for me and a pitcher of black coffee with cream. I found myself imbibing this rank liquid in hopes of keeping my eyelids from fluttering shut while I pursued my exacting work.

At last my task was done. We eagerly ushered the four pieces of tracing paper over each other. They made patterns as suggestive of hidden shapes as Chinese damask, but no telling configuration pointed to any purpose other than that of a compass rose.

“A jumble.” Mr. Winter huffed unhappily as he collapsed on a chair.

Louise frowned, trying with the stubbornness of the born puzzle-solver to interlace the letters’ scrollwork into a new configuration.