A Soul of Steel (27 page)

“That is where all resemblance ends,” said I. “Despite drinking four pots of Earl Grey and consuming as many tea cakes as Irene once kidnapped from Wilson’s in lieu of lunch, the static nature of my vigil has not altered. Irene would never have stood for such a tame train of events.”

“Then—” he obligingly gulped down the rest of his tea and rose to draw back my chair “—we must accelerate matters.”

As Godfrey paused to pay the bill the serving girl brushed past, and leaned toward me conspiratorially.

“Now I see why your diary takes so much writing,” she whispered in a forward but mystifying way, casting her eyes toward Godfrey.

I blushed, not quite sure why, but I had been well reared and knew when I ought to. Soon we were on Baker Street again, facing the enigmatic facade of 221 B.

“I had expected a famous detective’s door to be a modicum more busy,” Godfrey admitted. “If you tire of surveillance, there is only one course left to us. We must inquire within.”

“Ring the bell?” I asked incredulously.

“It would seem so, Nell,” he conceded sadly. “I realize that Irene would never resort to so simple a stratagem, but I am, after all, a barrister, and used to taking the direct route.”

I was not so sure. Never had the door to 221 B been so forbidding. Never had I felt more obvious. Nevertheless, we marched up to the establishment. Godfrey rang the bell with a fine, determined flourish.

The plump, white-haired woman answered. “Yes, sir?”

Godfrey presented this simple soul with a dazzling smile. “We seek the residence of Dr. Watson.”

“You would have been successful, sir, only months ago, but since his marriage, Dr. Watson keeps his own establishment in Paddington. Is it Mr. Holmes you would wish to see instead?”

“No,” said I firmly, before Godfrey could say the opposite. “It is a medical matter.”

“Paddington, you say,” Godfrey added politely, at which prompting the woman disgorged the doctor’s new address.

We withdrew with murmured thanks.

“Well,” said Godfrey ten paces down Baker Street. “I had not anticipated that the doctor would be on his own.”

“All the better for us. We can inquire forthrightly into his past without fear of
the
man interfering.”

“Still....”

“Godfrey! You are fully as fascinated by
the
man as Irene is. You should be grateful that we can conduct our inquiry without having to tread near Mr. Holmes again.”

“You really think that she is so fascinated by him, Nell?”

I sighed. “A figure of speech, Godfrey. You know that Irene is devoted to you. It borders upon the sickening on occasion.”

“Really?”

He sounded most interested, but exploring such topics now would not advance our inquiry. It was too late to call on Dr. Watson in Paddington, so Godfrey quickly hailed a hansom and was amenable, if silent, on the journey back to Brown’s Hotel, where we received another surprise of the day.

Our routine inquiry at the desk produced a communication on pale-blue parchment paper addressed to me in a hasty hand. The return address was Grosvenor Square.

“Excellent!” Godfrey chortled in the lift, eyeing the communication.

I attempted to calm myself in the face of my most immediate concern: being in the interior of an overdecorated moving closet.

Godfrey had been correct about one thing. We required a discreet place to repair and compare notes—or at least peruse notes. My sitting room proved to be ideal.

“Well?”

“Please be patient, Godfrey. I must remove this rather smothering bonnet and veil, and my gloves first.”

He was so impatient that he seized my hatpin as soon as I had released it and began stabbing at the envelope.

“There is an opener here,” said I, taking the now-mangled correspondence to the small writing desk. Godfrey had never shown a subtle hand with the correspondence in chambers. I neatly slit the seam and pulled out a folded paper.

“Very fine quality,” I noted, as Irene might.

Godfrey sighed. “What does it say?”

“It is from Mrs. Waterston. Quentin Stanhope’s married sister, as Mrs. Turnpenny was.”

“What does she say?”

“Only that... my goodness!”

“Nell!”

I sat down. “She recalls me as her sister’s governess—is that not nice?”

“Wonderful! Sublime! What does she—?”

“She wants us to call as soon as possible. This evening if possible.”

“Marvelous!”

“She says that her aged mother is most interested in news of her long-lost, dear son Quentin... Oh, Godfrey—”

“What?”

“She does not know of his... condition. We cannot disabuse poor old Mrs. Stanhope of her illusions.”

“We will not. We will relieve his relations of the information we require and give them next to nothing in return.”

“Is that fair?”

“No, but it is useful.”

“You sound like Irene!”

“Thank you.”

I sank unhappily onto the Louis XIV chair before the escritoire.

“We are here to serve the greater good, Nell. That may require... compromise.”

“I am not used to compromise.”

That gave him pause. “Neither was Quentin Stanhope. Until Afghanistan.”

“Oh!”

Godfrey came and leaned over me in a most emphatic manner, his hands braced on the chair arms. “Nell, we are thrust into matters of great moment. Nicety has no place in our calculations. We must steel ourselves to serve the truth, and hope that it will hurt no one for whom we care.”

“I do not even know these women.”

“No, but you know their lost loved one. Irene would never have let you come if she had suspected that you would succumb to such qualms of conscience.”

“Let me come! Irene cannot come because she is known here!”

“Would that stop her? She thought that the trip would do you good.”

“Do me good? Why?”

Godfrey withdrew, suddenly subdued. “You are the springboard of the current puzzle. Irene thought you deserved the opportunity to investigate your own mystery.”

“I see.”

“Do you?”

“You need not glower like the Queen’s Counsel, Godfrey. I understand that I am broaching my past, and Irene’s past as well, in this affair. Very well; I will call upon Mrs. Waterston and endeavor to learn what we must know in order to best serve her true interests, even if we cannot confide fully in her.”

“Brava, Nell.” He smiled like a man relieved of a burden not his.

Godfrey glanced at my veiled bonnet lying like a wounded pheasant on the pier table. “And I think you can dispense with that bonnet. The idea is for you to be recognizable in Grosvenor Square.”

Chapter Eighteen

A NOSY NIECE

Godfrey again
perused my list of Baker Street visitors in the cab en route to Grosvenor Square, shaking his head. “Not promising, Nell. Obviously Holmes is either gone or keeping to his rooms. None of the visitors is a candidate for the doctor, except this stocky chap who arrived with the pale-looking man. The old lady is likely the housekeeper, or landlady, as you surmise. When our interview on Grosvenor Square is done, we shall have to take steps.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that we will have to inquire after Dr. Watson ourselves,” he said.

“I as well? Mr. Holmes could be lurking about, and I have been seen by him.”

“But in circumstances in which he would be likely to overlook you.”

“I thought he was a formidable detective. How should he overlook me?” I asked.

“Irene has said that he has a weakness for women.”

“Indeed! That is the first that I have heard of such a failing.”

Godfrey smiled. “Not in the common way that the phrase is meant. She claims that he is uninterested in women to a fault, so that he is forever underestimating their importance and wit. That gives women a kind of invisibility.”

“He appeared perfectly capable of noticing Irene, and found her on the crowded terrace of the Hotel de Paris in Monte Carlo.”

His smile faded. “Ah, but that was Irene. Irene is always noticeable unless she is taking especial care not to be. Here is number forty-four.”

Anyone who has lived in London is well aware that Grosvenor numbers among the city’s most lordly squares. Our cab drew up before an imposing stone fence. A piece of antique statuary peeked from beyond the manicured greenery of high summer.

“In truth, Godfrey,” I said, my eyes surveying the blank expanse of windows lining the great house, “I dare not confront this family again. I am but a mere mote in their memories....”

“Fortunately their son and brother is not,” he said in firm tones, stepping down from the cab to help me out before he paid the driver. “And we are expected.”

I sighed. “I suppose it is my duty.”

“Of course it is.” He drew my hand through the crook of his elbow. “Yet it would be more amusing to regard this as an adventure.”

His use of that particular, overadvertized word reminded me of Quentin. How could I tell a man who had faced the unthinkable in India and Afghanistan that I was reduced to a quailing girl by his own family? Not that I was ever likely to see Quentin Stanhope again. Still, passing up that long, formal walk into that long, formal house was for me a return to a once-pleasant past that now seemed beyond reach. I was nothing to these people except a link between our common history and their lost member.

The butler who answered the door was impeccably noncommittal. I felt like a pair of galoshes that had been inadvertently left on the steps. Godfrey’s hat, stick and gloves were swiftly stripped from him; at least women could retain the accessory armor of hat and gloves indoors.

We were shown into a front receiving room full of strangers.

“Please, come right in!” cried a pretty young woman in a buttercup-yellow mousseline tea-gown, rising to draw us in as we paused politely on the threshold. “Why, Miss Huxleigh, you have grown so smart!”

Her words astounded me, but her identity amazed me even more.

“And you have simply grown! Miss Allegra?” I asked rather than exclaimed. “Miss Turnpenny now, rather.”

“No, I am Allegra still,” said this ingratiating creature, taking my hands and laughing. “But what has happened to Miss Huxleigh’s mouse-gray skirts and cream cotton shirtwaists?”

“I have... changed,” I said, “and so have you.”

“And are you still Miss Huxleigh?” inquired the impertinent young person, eyeing Godfrey with an interest unbecoming to a well-brought-up girl.

“Indeed,” I said hastily. “That has not changed. May I introduce Mr. Godfrey Norton, a barrister who practices in Paris? He, too, is aware of the news I have come to convey.” At least here we could use our true identities.

“Then you must meet the others.”

The young woman spun to introduce the array of middle-aged ladies seated behind her: her aunt, Mrs. Waterston; her mother, Mrs. Codwell Turnpenny, who had grayed greatly since Berkeley Square; her other aunt, Mrs. Compton. These three women were Quentin Stanhope’s older sisters, I realized with a jolt. Looking into their genteel, concerned faces, I wondered what on earth I should tell them about the fate of their baby brother.

We were seated and plied with tea and crumpets of a vastly superior variety. Godfrey accepted the female doting they bestowed with calm good grace, refusing all offers of cucumber sandwiches until the social flutter had died a natural death.

“It is wonderful to see you, Miss Huxleigh,” Mrs. Turnpenny finally ventured over her cup of tea. “You do not look a day older.” I could not truthfully say the same of her, so remained attentively silent. “Now, please, you must tell us what you know of Quentin.”

“Perhaps,” Godfrey intervened, capturing their instant attention by being both handsome and a man of affairs, “you should tell us what you know first.”

Their eyes, all pale watercolor shades of blue and gray, gently consulted each other. I imagined a family portrait— perhaps by the Florence-born American, Singer Sargent, who in his London studio attired his female subjects in such a swooning shimmer of pale paint—with the sisters portrayed as the fading Three Graces. I then pictured the brother and beloved uncle we had first seen in Paris—bearded, bronzed, berobed, ill—thrust into their midst. No. Quentin Stanhope as he now was made a more proper subject for one of those Bohemian bistro painters of Paris—a Mucha or a Chéret.

Mrs. Turnpenny spoke. “I am a widow. Yes, my dear,” she explained with a glance at me, “Colonel Turnpenny died in Afghanistan. Not at Maiwand, but ironically in the victorious battle that followed it.”

“I am so sorry,” I murmured.

“Our elderly mother is a widow also,” Mrs. Turnpenny added. “She is upstairs in her rooms. We did not wish to upset her unnecessarily. We knew Quentin had been wounded at Maiwand, and that he had been reported missing or dead. Later, the Army insisted that he was alive, and indeed, we finally received a letter in a shaky hand that was certainly his. So we waited for him to recuperate and come home.”

“He never did!” Allegra interjected this in the aggrieved tone of a disappointed child. “Uncle Quentin never came back. The others had given him up, and certainly it was better for Grandmama to think him dead if we had no word or sign of him, but I have never understood why he left us. Do you know something more, Miss Huxleigh, please? Can you tell us something more?”