A Soul of Steel (16 page)

At last an individual responded to Irene’s badgering with as many nods as a street puppet.
“Oui, oui,”
he squealed like a transported pig, and released a spume of French so rapid that I understood almost none of it.

“Excellent.” Irene pulled me away from the vendor’s river of information. “He has seen Mr. Stanhope in the vicinity—and more. He often goes to Les Halles, the great Paris market near Montmartre, and has seen our quarry about very early in that quarter. It sounds as if Quentin had rooms there.”

“Montmartre? But the district is a refuge of lowlife.” “And high life, remember, Nell—if you count the fashionable Bohemian cafés.”

“I count them for naught,” I returned. “And Quentin did not strike me as one to frequent cafés.”

“No, not in his current guise, though certainly no one in Montmartre would look twice at him. Visitors expect such examples of Bohemian dress to lounge about there. A wise address for a man who wishes to disappear.”

Her eyes fastened on the distance. “And
there
is a man whom I wished to appear, just when I want him. Godfrey has impeccable instincts for an Englishman.”

I turned to see her husband striding across the bridge over the Seine toward us, his polished ebony cane swinging jauntily, its gleam vying with the sheen of his plush beaver top hat.

“Nothing to be learned at the bookstalls,” Godfrey said as he drew near. “Evidently our friend Quentin had little time for dallying among the encyclopedias.”

“Ah, but he had a definite taste for the Bohemian. Nell and I are directed to Montmartre.”

“Speak for yourself,” I told Irene. “I want nothing to do with such a depraved place.”

“Then Godfrey will accompany me tomorrow, and you need not trouble yourself about how our search for Mr. Stanhope progresses.”

Irene took her husband’s arm and they strolled on.

Moments later, and breathless, I caught them up as Godfrey was whistling for a hansom. “I will go to Montmartre,” I said. “I fear that were I not present, one or the other of you might do some violence to poor Quentin.”

“Very wise,” Godfrey confided as he helped me into the conveyance. “One never knows what Irene will do with that discreet little revolver of hers.”

Of course the day’s entire agenda—from the hunt for traces of Quentin to a full schedule of social outings—was designed to distract me from my “loss.” A pity we were in Paris. We were taken first to the Louvre, where I wore myself out crossing large expanses of marble floors and endless staircases to view paintings almost as large as the exhibition halls—I think of David’s series on the coronation of Napoleon and Josephine—all bordered in miles of rococo gilt frame.

In a short time I felt I had surfeited myself on Swiss chocolates and was glad when our party withdrew to take another cab to a fine restaurant in the Latin Quarter. There, once I had eliminated such items on the menu as tripe, octopus, squid and liver in various innovative forms, I was able to consume a
crème
soup and a small
salade.
Much of the so-called “beauty” of the French language is adding a mere fillip to ordinary English words, which last the French would no doubt spell
“fillipe.”

To end what had been a perfect day in Paris—that is, fatiguing and over-self-indulgent—we adjourned to the Porte Saint-Martin Theatre to view Irene’s friend Sarah Bernhardt in
Lena
. A note that morning from Sarah herself had urged our attendance. I had hopes for this production, for it was based on an English novel
, As in
a Looking Glass.
Alas, I would have found a looking glass far more entertaining than what transpired on the stage for several hours.

Although the Divine Sarah is famed for her death scenes, this one was most repugnant. After caressing a dagger, she snatched a nearby bottle of poison, emptied it into a rather showy goblet and consumed it. Then she sat and faced the audience. Such were her powers of concentration that I detected a green tint to her skin.

I seized the opera glasses from Irene to confirm it, just in time to see Sarah mime a most unnecessarily convincing convulsion and fall face forward onto the floor. The curtain fell in great wallowing swaths of crimson velvet. I found myself heartily pleased that I had supped so lightly, especially when I noticed whey-faced gentlemen and ladies rushing from the theater for the retiring rooms after the play.

“She should have tried Hamlet,” Irene observed, replacing her opera glasses in their velvet-lined case.

A mistress of backstage maneuvering, Irene forged a path against the current of the departing masses, while Godfrey escorted me. The press was not as great as I expected, yet the dressing room was crowded, not only with people but with the miasma of powder and perfume that accompanied the actress as invariably as her diaphanous scarves and marabou boas. Sarah herself was the center of a frenzy of admirers, her extraordinary strawberry-blonde hair exploding from their midst like a firework.

She sizzled through them the moment she spotted our party.  

“Irene! My darling child! And my dear Godfrey, how splendid you look. And Miss Uxleigh—”

Irene and Godfrey suffered her kisses upon their cheeks. The actress merely clasped my hands instead, which would have been acceptable, or at least endurable, save that I glanced down to find living green bangles circling each wrist.

I pulled my poor hands free with a genteel shriek.

Sarah regarded her embellished wrists. “Ah, Miss Uxleigh recognizes my darling little Oscar, the so-sweet snake she gave me in Monte Carlo! Do you see, Miss Uxleigh, I have found such a charming companion for the poor dear. A mate. I plan to introduce them as the asp in
Cleopatra
soon. Only one serpent will play the part at once, but the footlights are hot, the death scene much extended, and I writhe about quite intently. Each snake will alternate appearances, lest the rigors of performance overcome it. Are they not a handsome pair?”

Here she thrust her ghastly bracelets under my nose. One raised a narrow scaled head to hiss.

“Most engaging,” said I, backing away. “I must not keep you from your public.”

“Ah, but my dressing-room guests are always my private public,” she answered. She flitted to her dressing table, opened a damask jewelry box and cavalierly stripped the serpents from her wrists into its padded velvet interior.

“They thirst for peace and quiet after their hour in the limelight. I wish I could say the same for myself. Ah, thank you, darling Maurice.”

I was intrigued to inspect the person from whom Sarah accepted a flute of champagne. Maurice was her son from her illicit union with a supposed nobleman. I observed an even- featured, polite youth of twenty-some, waiting on his energetic mother like a devoted pageboy.

This paragon of young manhood appeared at my side with a companion flute to his mother’s.

“You are the so amusing Miss Uxleigh that Mama speaks of most fondly,” he said in French. “She has many an endearing anecdote about your adventures in Monte, and is most enamored of your gift of Oscar. Few women appreciate Mama’s taste in accessories.”

I would have been compelled to correct this young man’s lamentable miscomprehension about my opinions of his Mama and her menagerie, save that Irene, waving about one of the champagne flutes that Godfrey had procured for them both, burst forth with an announcement.

“You will never believe it, my dear Sarah. Our Nell has unearthed a most intriguing gentleman.”

“Miss Uxleigh? A gentleman? French?”

“Only English, I fear,” Irene returned, “but he has lived in Eastern climes.”

“Ah. An adventurer. Is he rich? Has he found King Solomon’s mines? Or simply a small diamond mine would do.”

“We don’t know. He has vanished.”

“Ah.” Sarah smiled knowingly at me. “Gentlemen often do. And ladies are often more grateful for the fact than they admit.”

“Irene is misleading you,” I said. “This gentleman is merely a member of a London family which I served as governess many years ago.”

“It would not make a play,” Sarah declared with a small shake of her head.

I was tempted to answer that her current property did not make much of play either.

Sarah whirled to the mirror again before I could phrase my comment in the correct—or at least comprehensible— French, though the language is never more incomprehensible than when it is spoken correctly.

“I am so delighted to see my dear friends again. How did you like the play?” she asked.

“Mere words cannot convey our reaction,” Godfrey said with suave diplomacy.

“I, too, am speechless,” Irene put in demurely.

“How good to be among honest friends!” Sarah declaimed. “But I am so
glad
of your presence! Irene, I have had the most marvelous news. The Empress of All the Russias, Maria Feodorovna, has expressed a desire to meet you. She has heard from her acquaintance, the Duchess of Richelieu—our friend Alice from our amusing scheme in Monte—of your singing privately for Prince Albert there.

“Her husband, a great stick-in-the-mire, as you say, frowns upon French and German connections for his aristocracy, and the Empress never consorts with mere artists like myself. Yet I have been assured that she would honor my salon with a visit if
you
would be there. Say that you will, and I will be the happiest woman on earth. All the other actresses in Paris will be jealous, as they should be, no?”

“No,” Irene answered promptly. Sarah began to frown, but Irene laughed. “And yes. How can I resist satisfying an empress’s curiosity? And I confess that the Empress has stirred mine by requesting my presence. What do you know of her?”

“How should I know anything, my dear Irene? She has held herself above me.”

“Sarah, if it has to do with aristocracy, art or money, you know all. Tell me.”

The actress preened, dropping her air of innocence as if it were a snake she had been toying with.

“A lovely little lady, this empress. Danish by birth. Dagmar by birth name and a sister to the Prince of Wales’s enchanting Princess Alexandra. She adores the dressmakers of Paris, in whom she shows excellent taste. She obeys her husband in all minor matters and rules him in most major ones. Someone must! Alexander the Third is six feet six inches tall. Can you imagine a man of such height? And a royal personage as well? That is doubly commanding, no?”

Irene kept notably still, for the czar’s physical presence was a twin to that of the King of Bohemia, with whom she had such unpleasant dealings not two years before. I myself wondered if some relationship existed between the two rulers, though the Czar of All the Russias was a far more formidable regent than Wilhelm von Ormstein, King of pretty little Bohemia at the edge of the Austro-Hungarian empire. A common ancestor, perhaps?

“The Czar is a complete autocrat, I understand,” Sarah said. “So rigid, these northern European men. No wonder many keep mistresses of artistic temperament—the ballerina, the actress or the opera singer. Something must melt that Nordic ice, no?”

Sarah rattled on, oblivious of Irene’s sudden quiet, or of Godfrey’s instant attention, as her words cut dangerously close to Irene’s past.

“It would be a superb coup for me, the Empress of the Stage, to welcome the Empress of All the Russias to my salon. So you must come and sing a bit, but only a bit. It is my salon, after all. Say you will! And bring the adorable Godfrey, of course. And your Miss Uxleigh of the intriguing but lost gentleman. I must hear more of this fellow. Perhaps I can locate him. There is not a man worth knowing in Paris who does not find his way to my doorstep on the boulevard Pereire.”

“That is one place, I venture, where we will never find him,” I murmured, “nor anything that will aid our search.”

“What do you say, Miss Uxleigh? Speak up!”

“Nell says,” Irene interjected tactfully, “that she is feverishly awaiting this next occasion to visit you at home. She had feared that she would never encounter such an opportunity again.”

We left soon after on another wave of social insincerities, which are to theater people as air is to the rest of humanity.

Chapter Thirteen

HISSTERIA

Moving from
the tawdry glitter of the dressing room to the decadence of Montmartre resembled a plummet from the gargoyle-ridden spires of Notre Dame into the rank river that lapped at its foundations. So Irene and I were hurtled after luncheon the next day as our open carriage bore us up to the infamous environs of Montmartre.

Oh, both the Seine and the Montmartre window glass sparkled in the sunlight of a Paris afternoon. So did the rooftops of the city visible below the Butte, the highest part of Montmartre upon which shone the white bulwarks of Sacré Coeur, still under construction. Far away and below us, the rusted steel pin of the audacious tower of Eiffel, also under construction, poked into a ragged pincushion of clouds. It reminded me of some monstrous modem bridge piling bereft of its span.

Godfrey did not accompany us. Irene had suggested that he inquire into certain immigration matters at the embassies. He was at first loath to allow us to venture unescorted into such a notorious section, but Irene insisted it was safe by daylight.