A Soul of Steel (35 page)

“Oh, I am famished!” Irene exclaimed as the booty was set on the floor amongst us, for there was no room atop.

“I am afraid that my lodgings will be less appetizing,” Quentin said, “but I have given the driver the address.”

“You have not been followed there so far?” Irene asked. “You are sure?”

“I am alive,” he answered wryly. “No, I have been doing the following these latter days, and busy work it is, too.”

“You must tell us more.” The backs of Irene’s graceful fingers tapped Godfrey’s breast pocket, a familiar gesture to me, but new to Quentin. He watched Godfrey produce a cigarette case with lucifers stored in the side, then offer Irene an Egyptian cigarette and a lit match.

She soon had swathed herself in an airy scarf of smoke.

“You smoke away from home, Madame?” Quentin, I noticed, always fell back on the French form of address when amazed by Irene. No “Mrs. Norton” then.

“And you do not?”

“Only the occasional cigar.”

“I smoke only the occasional cigarette. It helps me to think.”

“I would not believe that you require any assistance in that area,” Quentin responded.

Godfrey laughed. “There, Irene. You will have to give up all your beloved props, since peerless logic alone makes you fascinating to Quentin here.”

“Ne-vair,”
Irene answered in a perfect imitation of the Bernhardt manner. “Where are we going for our picnic?” she asked Quentin.

“Houndsditch,” he said.

“Fascinating,” was all Irene said, crossing her arms and lounging in her seat like the rude boy she enacted.

I bestirred myself. “You have said nothing of your own activities.”

Her half-shut eyes lifted to me. “No,” she said, and let them fall shut again.

I turned to Godfrey, but he was also lost in his own thoughts, looking most uncomfortable in his bobby uniform. Quentin, too, wore an abstracted, exhausted expression. I could not understand how three such energetic people had tired so easily, when I was as fresh as a... a nosegay.

The driver required a generous fare when he deposited us at a doorway that resembled something from the more depressing and lengthy fictions of Dickens.

“It is reasonably clean,” Quentin said as he stood and looked up at the four dilapidated stories looming above us.

“You are, I presume,” Irene said, “on the topmost floor?”

When Quentin nodded, she asked, “Can your landlady be trusted?”

“To a degree.”

“Then I propose we leave our baggage in her care on the ground floor. We shall have to find new quarters this evening. In the meantime, we will take the hamper and ourselves upstairs to plot and picnic.”

Chapter Twenty-four

A MESSY PICNIC

The '' we''
who took the hamper was Godfrey and Quentin, once they had transported our baggage into the dim front parlor of one Mrs. Bracken. This spare, gray-haired, gray-apron-clad figure made me long for the rosy cheeks and flyaway white hair of the landlady who presided over 221 B Baker Street.

The stairs were cramped and dim; I was unhappily reminded of the Montmartre stairway and the creature that met us at the top.

But the one large room, though roughly finished, was dusty rather than dirty. Sunlight slanted through a half-moon window and the chamber had the indolent, secret charm of a lumber room remembered from childhood games of hide-and-seek.

“Excellent!” Irene declared. She whisked the coverlet from the large old bed and spread it on the floorboards as on a close-cropped lawn.

Godfrey was unearthing the treasures of the hamper with the air of a blissful epicure. “By Jove, lobster! And ham.”

“Parma ham,” I corrected him.

“By Juvenal, then. Roman ham. And an inordinately assertive bottle of champagne.” He eyed Quentin with approval, even though his money had underwritten this bounty.

“Cleanliness before gluttony,” Irene declared. “We must doff our disguises. Where are your theatrical supplies?”

Quentin pointed to a small table surmounted by a basin and a mirror near the little window. She retrieved a damp square of linen from the tabletop, drew a wooden chair into a shaft of sunlight, and stood behind it, a barber welcoming a customer.

“Come, sit, Quentin. I must be utterly certain of the identity of those with whom I dine. A most creditable job of disguise,” she noted as he took the seat. “Had your posture not betrayed you, I should never have recognized you.”

“But I took great care to mimic a lifetime of military bearing!”

“Exactly. I knew you had been a military man. Your imitation was too excellent. A retired soldier no longer has to take such pains, and that shows the merest bit—a fine point only an actor would notice.
Hmm.
The false facial hair and florid greasepaint well served to hide your sunburned skin.... You know, I often have used this red paint for lip and cheek rouge, but mixed with white it makes a splendid base for a splenetic gentleman—it also covered your difficulty.”

Irene had whisked the crape hair and paint away. Godfrey and I stared at the denuded face of Quentin Stanhope, which looked as if he wore a tawny half-mask over the eyes and nose.

He grimaced at our expressions. “I shaved off the beard thinking to disguise myself, but forgot that the pale skin beneath it had seen no sunlight in many a year. And there was no time to grow another beard.”

Irene fetched two small jars from the table, the contents of which she blended in her palm. Then her fingers passed quickly over Quentin’s upper face. When they came away, the top half had lightened to match the lower portion.

“Goodness, Irene!” I could not help exclaiming, though I’d seen her perform such tricks with her own appearance. “He looks as if he had never left Grosvenor Square.”

She smiled. “Not fine enough to fool a mortal enemy, but sufficient among friends. Next I shall ‘shave’ Godfrey and then wash myself. Nell we can leave alone; as usual she has done nothing to alter her natural appearance, not even so much as apply a bit of color on the tip of a rabbit’s foot.”

“I should hope not.” I colored quite naturally at this attention drawn to my appearance—or lack of one.

Godfrey had happily removed his overbearing bobby’s helmet the instant we were secure in Quentin’s lodgings. Calling him to the chair, Irene quickly softened the adhesive holding on his dreadful, bristly false mustache, which was the color of a bleached muskrat.

“You too have a wan upper lip, my love,” she said when the mustache fell away like a dead rat-tail, rubbing a forefinger over her palm and then passing it under Godfrey’s nose. As if by magic his skin color was of a piece all of a sudden.

Irene finished her transformations by rinsing the artistic arrangement of “dirt” from her delicate features. She turned, still clad like an urchin, but angel-faced.

“There. We are a better-looking crew, except for Nell, who was always lovely.” Irene collapsed on the coverlet like the street arab she had impersonated. “We can discuss our situation while we eat.”

Quentin turned to me, gallantly extending his arm. “May I assist you to the floor?”

“You already did that most effectively in Neuilly,” Irene pointed out archly.

I blushed like a schoolgirl while Quentin took my hand in his to steady me until I was safely seated on the floor.

“What is ‘our situation’?” I asked Irene, bending my knees into a “side-saddle” position to sit more comfortably. “And why on earth did you suggest that Quentin might be Sherlock Holmes in disguise?”

“Because Mr. Holmes was there, or else I have seriously misjudged his interests and his intelligence!”

“Who is this Holmes?” Quentin asked as Godfrey opened the food containers while Irene and I passed out utensils, plates and goblets.

“Ah!” Irene clasped her now-clean hands in mock rapture. “Do you hear that, Nell? An innocent who is mine to educate. Sherlock Holmes, dear Quentin, is the foremost consulting detective in Europe—”

“England,” Godfrey interrupted sternly.

Irene flashed him a melting look. “Thank you, my dear. What is not debatable is that Mr. Holmes is the greatest master of disguise in—”

“England,” Godfrey put in again, opening the champagne with a pop that made me jump.

“In England,” Irene repeated docilely. “And by the most delicious of coincidences, he is the dear friend, nay, the former chambermate of the same Dr. Watson who aided you in Afghanistan.”

Quentin frowned even as he accepted a large slice of cold game pie from Irene. “You mean that you have found my Watson and that he has a protector?”

“I mean that we have found your Watson and that now he has a barrier against both the assassin and ourselves. So far as I could determine during my own investigations, Mr. Holmes has been engaged on a matter of extreme delicacy. It involves an unfortunate young man who was well placed in the Foreign Office until a violent illness overtook him more than two months ago. I followed Mr. Holmes and Dr. Watson to Woking the day before yesterday and the matter appears to be settled, although after Dr. Watson returned home to Paddington yesterday, Mr. Holmes paid a visit to an extremely discreet and odd establishment called the Diogenes Club. My instincts tell me that the case is not as settled as Sherlock Holmes wishes his old friend to think.”

“And this Holmes fellow was at the museum today?”

“Mmm.”
With great relish Irene was doing something disgusting involving the
pâté de foie gras
and soda crackers. “That means that he was following one of the principals in the case. He was either Queen Victoria’s grandmother or the Quasimodo-like scholar.”

“And you cannot be sure which one you libel with your suspicion?” Quentin asked.

“I libel neither of them. The other was decidedly the man who has been pursuing you so lethally, and who tried to murder Dr. Watson through the intervention of an Asian cobra.”

“Good God!” Quentin would have started up, except that Godfrey had filled his hand with a brimming flute of champagne, which he quickly downed as if it were pale ale.
“He
was there? You cannot know what you say, Madame.”

“Indeed I can. I have met the gentleman.”

“What gentleman?”

“The man you fear more than death itself, whom you call ‘Tiger.’ The man who once called you ‘Cobra,’ and who reminds you of that fact by using cobras as assassins. Did you ever know his true name?”

Godfrey refilled Quentin’s glass, but he sat regarding Irene as if she had suddenly turned into the many-armed goddess Kali.

“You are a sorceress.” Quentin watched Irene sip her champagne with a regal air, cross-legged on the coverlet. “No,” he answered at last. “I doubt that anyone knows his genuine name. He used many identities, for he was a spy, as I was. How then have you ‘met’ him?”

“We were introduced at the Paris salon of a friend. Does the name Captain Sylvester Morgan mean anything to you?”

“He could call himself Peter Piper and it would mean nothing to me. How can you be sure we allude to the same person?”

“Because this man is a killer—oh, I speak not in any moral sense. I refer only to his nature. It is as brutally and honestly devouring as that of a shark. I am convinced that he is as adept at that specialty as Mr. Holmes is at problem-solving, as Dr. Watson is at healing, or as I am at singing. Or Nell at blushing, for that matter.”

“Irene!” I objected.

“I am hurt,” Godfrey put in, perhaps to distract her from teasing me so unmercifully. “You have left out my specialty.” Irene was not contrite. “I am ever aware that Nell records our doings in her diary; I do not wish to force her into censorship,” she said primly, “but you are certainly most agile at the law, too.”

Quentin paid not the slightest mind to this banter, but was staring into the single shaft of sunlight as if the dust motes that drifted lazily through it were golden. “How are you so sure that you have met my nemesis?” he asked Irene again.

“For one thing, our meeting with this Captain Morgan occurred after your stay with us at Neuilly. For another, it was arranged by the Empress of Russia, who broke custom to ensure that I would meet her—and especially him, I think. For the last and most damning reason, it was after I slew the snake in your Montmartre garret. This Captain Morgan showed a most persistent interest in my reptilian victim. He wanted the skin. He said that he collects cobras and wanted mine.”

Quentin shuddered suddenly. “He wants my skin. He said as much nine years ago, before any of this transpired, that the man who crossed him was... tiger bait.”

“Not yet,” Godfrey noted.

“I presume,” said I in a small voice, “that threat applies to women as well.”

“Nonsense,” Irene said. “Women and doctors are only
cobra
bait, from the evidence so far. And some cobras are very nice indeed.”

Mortified, I blushed. Again.

“One of them saved Dr. Watson’s life,” Irene added.

I glanced wildly at Quentin, who was looking startled.

“We have a mystery,” Irene announced with suppressed amusement. “Perhaps you can solve this one small matter, Quentin, being an old India hand. Your friend Dalip died of cobra venom, but the cobra that confronted me in that garret was not the snake who bit him. And now Godfrey tells me that the dead snake he found in Dr. Watson’s consulting room had not been shot or stabbed, but appeared to have had its neck broken. I believe that you’d been keeping watch on Dr. Watson’s establishment, that you found the cobra in the consulting room, or saw it introduced there—and disarmed it, shall we say?—before it could harm the good doctor.”