A Soul of Steel (31 page)

The next morning we set out from Brown’s Hotel in fine weather. Flowers bloomed in window boxes above the shopfronts and the ubiquitous pubs. A pure blue sky dipped down between the five-story rooftops of the great city’s buildings.

Gentlemen’s clubs, I soon discovered, are like vermin: they lurk everywhere, but are seldom seen. Discreet doorways marked only by severe brass plates that would mean nothing to the uninitiated lead to such eccentric environs as “The Oryxians,” “The Fox and Hounds Club,” and “The Norfolk Jacketeers.”

Godfrey was quite right that I would not be admitted, although I was permitted to teeter on the stoop while he inquired within. My presence was helpful, however. I donned a perpetually doleful look so that Godfrey could point out “poor Miss Huxleigh, who has lost her only brother. Yes, quite genuinely lost. In Injah.” Would the hearer know a certain Captain Morgan who had served in that quarter, a renowned heavy-game hunter, particularly of tigers—?

His hearers always denied knowledge of renowned tigers or their hunters, although almost every club kept a mounted tiger head about the place. They were most adamant on their ignorance of “Captain Morgan.”

As we made our rounds, I became ever more annoyed at having to stand on the stoop like a domestic servant. However, I was not too lost in indignation to fail to notice the ebb and flow of people around us. Mother London’s thronging four millions never allow a citizen to feel lonely.

Godfrey, recognizing my irritation, paused at a flower vendor’s near Covent Garden to comfort me with a posy.

“Please, no, I don’t require such an extravagance,” I protested.

The flower girl, a young person with an extremely freckled face liberally powdered by soot, grimaced at me for discouraging a sale. She need not have worried.

“Nonsense, Nell.” Godfrey presented me with a knot of pansies and fragrant verbena that was all the more charming in contrast to its grimy vendor.

I had bent my head down to sniff the posy, when I spied a familiar face in the crowd.

“Godfrey!”

“Yes, Nell?”

“It’s that ruffian again!”

“Which ruffian?”

A good question, for the area teemed with ragged folk of all sorts.

I lowered my voice, speaking as I sniffed the posy in the best Irene-approved method of surreptitious communication.

“That boy that I saw outside 221 B Baker Street,” I mumbled into the petals, “and then in Paddington near Dr. Watson’s. I am convinced that he is following us.”

“That may be, Nell,” Godfrey said without alarm. “Then let us give him something to do and go along to the next club.”

So we did. It was a fine day, and despite my concern over the ragamuffin I savored the sights of Covent Garden. The vicinity attracted people from the opposite poles of London life> Though it literally shone as the theatrical district each night, by day it merely twinkled in the sunshine, genial and friendly.

Here the unlovely strains of pure Cockney echoed off the stone buildings, sounding like a convention of Casanovas. Here, too, strolled retired military men wearing old-fashioned muttonchop whiskers, their backs ramrod straight, their shoes mirror-polished. Fashionable ladies in flower-strewn summer bonnets of Neapolitan straw and summer wraps of the lightest lace, silk and wool ambled among them.

Children too wove through the passing parade, young girls in pleated skirts and wide-brimmed shade hats and very young boys in long curls and short skirted frocks, looking like miniature courtiers from another and more gilded age.

These small ladies and gentlemen capered like kittens beneath the benign summer sunlight. I realized that my visit to Grosvenor Square, as well as my warm encounter with the ingratiating Allegra, had led me to attach only the rosiest memories to my governess days. I reminded myself of tantrums and falsehoods and stubborn silences. No burst of nostalgia should lead me to seek such employment again.

“Your pardon,” snapped a dowager in mourning dress as she collided with me, the words courteous but the tone outraged.

I flushed, aware that I had been moonstruck.

“I am so very sorry.” I reached out a hand to steady her. She glared at me from under wild iron-gray brows before crabbing forward again without acknowledging my apology. On she went, navigating these crowded streets like a sable ship with her sails broken-backed, clothed from neck to toe in braided camel’s hair, mantled in a crape-banded black and bonneted in gauze and beads. Though stooped as if by a terrible, invisible weight bundled to her shoulders, her person suggested no fragility.

“I must have been sleepwalking, Godfrey, to have collided with that poor creature.”

“She seems none the worse for wear,” he said to comfort me. Indeed the old dame was scuttering away at a brisk pace. “In truth, the fault was hers. She careened into you. No doubt her sight is failing.”

I sighed. “Certainly my foresight is. I seem to be walking in a fog. Perhaps I have been away from London too long.”

“Perhaps your distraction began in Paris,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Only that you have confronted your past. That is always a shock to the equilibrium.”

“That is the whole trouble, Godfrey! I have no past, only a history, like a public edifice. Sarah Bernhardt once said that a woman without a past is like a poodle without a pedigree: alive, but who is interested enough to notice?”

“And for how long have you heeded what Sarah Bernhardt says?”

“Never! But I remember. Even Irene seems to have a past.”

“Irene ‘seems’ a great deal of things.”

“Have you never wondered, Godfrey, about her life before you two met?”

He shrugged. “She lived with you for several years.”

“But before that? She did not burst upon London fully formed at the age of three and twenty. And she will say nothing of her American days.”

“Assuredly that makes them more interesting. Irene is never one to neglect sowing subtle seeds of interest.”

“As long as no one around her reaps the result! Perhaps that is what Sarah means by ‘a past’: the assurance that at some time one has been interesting. I have never been ‘interesting’; I have been in Shropshire.”

“Shropshire is, I am sure, most interesting.”

“But you have no desire to go there.”

“Not in the immediate future, no.”

“Never.”

“It’s not likely,” he admitted at last.

“I even
come
from a dull place. Irene would never allow herself to come from a dull place.”

“Nell, I am certain that New Jersey is a dull place, or else Irene would not be so close-mouthed about it. Has it ever occurred to you that an unmentioned ‘past’ may simply be unmentionably dull?”

“No, Godfrey, it has not.”

“Well, it may. Besides, the present is all that matters, and here is the next sporting club on our agenda, The Frontier Fusiliers.”

Another black-painted door with a brass knocker inset discreetly into a row of redbrick Georgian facades confronted us. Godfrey rang the bell, then introduced us and our business. This time the porter suffered me to enter the hall, where I waited on cold marble, not wishing to sit upon the red-velvet upholstered chair formed from animal horns, and glimpsing a warm red-damask room beyond where deer antlers bristled on the walls.

Godfrey soon returned, his face transparently disappointed.

“This club had a directory of the memberships of all the others; no Sylvester Morgan, Captain or not, honors their rolls. The senior member present suggested that Morgan may have been expelled from one of the other clubs years ago.” “Expelled?”

“Hunters’ clubs on occasion resemble their game for behavior. The odd member of the pack ‘goes rogue’ from time to time. He said this Morgan sounded like ‘a bad ’un’ who may have had less than honorable dealings with both the hunters’ fraternity and the public, if he dealt in rare pelts.”

“A perceptive gentleman. So what is our next course?”

“Retreat, I suppose.” Godfrey escorted me down the few stairs to the street.

“You are remarkably calm in the face of defeat,” I commented.

“I am remarkably calm at all times,” he retorted with a smile that I found winning. I also found the absence of his mustache disconcerting. Much as I deplore facial hair on men, I confess that I had grown used to it in mild amounts. Or at least I had made an exception to my prejudice with Godfrey.

We walked in silence. Irene made her investigative efforts look like larks, but without her we were a plodding pair.

“Something bracing is called for,” Godfrey announced suddenly, steering me with a featherweight pressure on my elbow toward an ABC tea shop. He was also guiding me away from a convention of beggars sprawled upon the walkway.

I hesitated. Under normal conditions, I am not swayed by public beggary, no matter how pathetic. Much of it is polished into a vehicle for the greed of the beseecher rather than the generosity of the giver.

Yet only weeks before in Paris one such unappetizing person had proved to be not only truly needful but an acquaintance. Impulsively, I cannot say why, I dug in my reticule for a few pence.

As I was about to drop them into the grimy hand extended, something flashed past with the utmost speed. My reticule was snatched from my hands, the proffered coins clinking to the pavement. The beggar was too stunned to even scramble for the coppers, although his younger fellows hurled themselves atop the bounty.

Godfrey was bounding after the cutpurse, coattails flying, and I hurried after. I had my suspicions. I had nursed them all along, and now I was certain. No one would make off with my reticule twice in the same week, and only one person would remember a similar incident of many years ago....

I shortly came even with Godfrey, who had paused to search the crowd from his not unrespectable height.

“I fear the scamp has escaped, Nell,” he told me.

“No,” I told him, “I fear that you have
let
‘the scamp’ escape.”

“Why, what do you mean?”

“Only that I am tired of this charade! I am not the oblivious fool you take me for! Cablegrams from Paris indeed! Such ‘foreign’ communications may be arranged from London. It has all been a farce: our search for the mythical Captain Morgan; Irene remaining in France.

She is here in London, do not bother to deny it, and hot on a more rewarding trail. Do you think that I have failed to notice the suspicious persons along our route? I have seen that miserable boy three times, and I warrant that you were unable to catch him only because you did not want to!”

“Nell, come into the tearoom and sit down until you collect yourself—”

“No!” I shook off his gentlemanly hand. “I will not be made a public fool, and if Irene does not produce herself soon, I cannot say what I will do!”

“Excuse me,” came a deep voice.

Godfrey’s eyebrows lifted at the new arrival behind me.

I turned. An old soldier stood there, snowy muttonchops frothing at his jaws, thick spectacles with a dark tint shading his weak old eyes. Apparently there was nothing wrong with his weak old legs, or his weak old arms, for he had the very lad in question by the scruff of his tatterdemalion jacket.

“I caught this one running as if the Queen’s Guard were behind him. Since street lads seldom dress with such nicety, he plainly was the reason for the furor down the street. Might this be yours, miss?”

The old man extended my reticule, which I took with relief.

“Anything gone?” Godfrey inquired.

“Not a thing,” I replied triumphantly, eyeing the writhing youth. He was a strapping lad. Such street urchins looked depressingly similar, but no matter how he hunched and wriggled, it was obvious he had attained the size of a grown woman.

“Really,” I said, regarding the lad unpityingly. “You could not resist the grand gesture, could you? Was it not enough that you cast yourself in my path at every opportunity? Did you expect me to remain completely duped?”

“Nell—” Godfrey said urgently at my rear. I turned on him with great pleasure.

“And you, you... henchman! Oh, I have been very thick, but that is past now.”

“Nell, in all good conscience—”

“Godfrey, do not try to dissuade me. I am certain that it will be most mortifying, but she needs to be taught a lesson. Sir, will you keep a good hold on that lad? Thank you.”

I took a handkerchief from my retrieved reticule and reached out to scrub at the filth smudging the boy’s features. Immediately a lighter cast of skin shone through.

“You see?” I spared Godfrey a triumphant glance.

He had a most odd expression. I turned back to my victim, who was cursing in a Cockney screech so unintelligible it fortunately spared my sensibilities.

“Irene, it’s no use,” I advised the captive. “You cannot fool me, though of course you had to rub my nose in your deception. Now I am rubbing your nose and it looks far better so. And as for this ridiculous cap—” I reached for the item of apparel in question “—anyone could see it was a clumsy disguise, too large only because it hid a great, feminine quantity of hair—”

At this I lofted the offending headgear. By now my demonstration had drawn a crowd of onlookers: the beggar family, more used to entertaining than being entertained; several nicely dressed children; even the old lady in mourning, with whom we had apparently caught up again.

“You see,” I said to my mesmerized audience. “The game is up. This is not a lad,” I announced. “This is a grown woman who likes to play silly games!” I looked back at the miscreant.

The sunlight shone down on a dull tangle of cropped black hair, not the shimmering lengths of cinnamon-brown I had expected to unveil. The captive’s squirmings and epithets increased.

Well, I had heard of theatrical wigs before. I grasped the unappealing head of hair and jerked.

“Owwwwwww!”
The creature howled as if to wake any dead within earshot and every living soul all the way to Gretna Green.

“I cannot hold him much longer,” the old soldier gritted between a set of wooden teeth. “Do you want to call a bobby or continue on your own?”

“Nell,” said Godfrey in soft rebuke that only I could hear, “this is not Irene.”