A Soul of Steel (40 page)

Naturally, she smoked during this exercise, but fitfully, letting the cigarette in its gold-entwined mother-of-pearl holder smolder unheeded in a dish, until a pale length of ash crowned it like an eighteenth-century French lady’s powdered wig.

Or she would suddenly seize the holder and her pace would quicken, even as her eyebrows plunged together in a concentrated frown. She would sip swiftly from the delicate holder until her cigarette end burned a constant ember-red. And always wreaths of smoke drifted around her like the fine-net veiling they call “illusion.”

She finally stopped, turning at the same time, so her heliotrope train crackled before swirling to rest in a graceful spiral around her lower limbs.

“No doubt you all have wondered what I did today.”

We waited attentively, the gentlemen nursing after-dinner cigars whose odor reminded me of burnt burlap. I suffered much in their rank company, but confined myself to embroidering a handkerchief. The one with which I had attempted to clean the actual urchin’s face not four days earlier had been sullied beyond redemption.

“Dare we suppose that you have done as Quentin and I, and visited the London shops?” Godfrey said.

I glanced at Quentin, dashing in evening dress like Godfrey, as all good hotel dining rooms required. I had not inquired into the funds for Quentin’s outfitting, suspecting one of my friends’ quiet but spectacular acts of charity, from which I also had benefited in the past.

Irene sighed. “Not yet, I fear. 1 wish I had done something as interesting as that; I do not often have the opportunity to shop in London. No, my activities were far more commonplace. I was in Woking.”

“Woking again? Whatever for?” I burst out. “That is an excessively idyllic locale for one with your proclivities for mayhem.”

Irene smiled at me. “Mayhem is not snobbish about address; it may reside as well behind the moss-grown facade of the manse as the Whitechapel pub. Perhaps you have heard of the Poisoning Parson of Tunbridge Wells.”

“No, I have not. I think you have made that up.”

“I? Make something up? Heaven forbid, Nell.”

“It often does, but you never listen.”

“Do go on, Irene,” Quentin said. “I am most anxious to learn what you found so fascinating in Woking, though any place that you would honor with your presence would perforce become irresistible.”

Irene laughed heartily. “Clothes do make the man! Put a desperate exile into white tie and tails and he spouts drawing room hyperbole.”

Quentin bit at his infant mustache and smiled shyly. He seemed a stranger in civilized clothes. I found that I actually missed his air of wild incongruity.

Irene laid her cigarette holder in a tray, from which supple ribbons of smoke wafted up like visible incense. She crossed her arms and eyed us with that suppressed excitement that betokens revelations.

“I went to Woking because that is where resides the young gentleman upon whose behalf Sherlock Holmes’s most recent efforts have been made. Briarbrae is a most impressive house with extensive grounds, and in it dwell Mr. Percy Phelps and his fiancée, Miss Annie Harrison. Mr. Phelps has been ill and under a great strain, but I had a most pleasant tea with Miss Harrison.”

“I don’t know how you do it,” Godfrey said. “How you persuade strangers to give you not only tea but confidences.”

“That’s because you were trained as a barrister, Godfrey, and expect people to resist telling you things. I, on the other hand, tell them everything about me. They are so overcome that they reciprocate in kind.”

“It’s more than that,” I put in. “You make it seem that only by telling you everything will they have any possible chance of doing the right thing. It is a pity that women cannot take holy orders; you would make a most effective clergyman.”

“It is all a matter of convincing others of an Unreality,” Godfrey added. “Clergymen and actors are not so different.”

“Be that as it may,” Irene said, bringing our attention upon herself once again; indeed, in her flowing, royal-hued gown she did resemble a pagan priestess. “That simple tea in Woking answered an entire menu of questions.”

“The first one is why are you concerned about Sherlock Holmes’s last case?” Godfrey put in.

She smiled at him in sweet patience, faultlessly acted. “Because it is linked to the matter that Quentin presented to us.”

“I?” the man cited objected. “Surely not.”

“Surely so,” she replied, absently stroking the soft ermine of one revere. “I first sniffed the matter when I followed Mr. Holmes to the Diogenes Club—an extremely intriguing establishment! The membership is gentlemen only, but of course that was no barrier to me.”

I sighed pointedly. Quentin, who had seen Irene only as a street boy, not in the full and impressive range of her talents as a male impersonator, looked puzzled.

“I entered the premises,” Irene explained, “as a waiter in hopes of a position. I regret to say that I failed to achieve one. It must have been my Italian accent.”

She shrugged soulfully. “However, I did learn two or three interesting points about the place. The Diogenes Club is one of the oddest, if not the oldest, in London. Members retreat there for utter isolation and silence, not fellowship. Among them is a certain Mycroft Holmes. According to my hasty but thorough reading of the visitor’s ledger, this Mycroft Holmes is indeed sought after by the most highly placed men in London, including his relation—a brother, I’d think—Sherlock.”

“So after penetrating the Diogenes Club, you next go gadding off to Woking?” I asked.

“Yes. How nicely put. I gadded off to Woking. But first I made a few other trifling inquiries. At the Foreign Office, for instance, I had a long chat with the commissionaire’s wife, a rather surly woman. However, once I professed myself a friend of ‘poor Percy’—remember, he worked there—she kindly revealed that he had been under suspicion over a ‘missing paper.’ She also indicated that ‘even a decent God-fearin’ woman’ was suspect in the case, namely herself. She was not treated gently by Scotland Yard, I gather, when she was subjected to a search, always a mistake with the humbler classes. They take offense and are exactly the type to fume and fuss about the matter to all comers.”

“That paper sounds like a sensitive document.” Godfrey thoughtfully knocked the ash from his cigar into a low dish.

She answered his comment with a question. “How sensitive would you consider a secret naval treaty between England and Italy?”

Quentin looked puzzled. “I have long been ignorant of current foreign affairs, thanks to my sojourn in Afghanistan.”

Godfrey pondered the question. “The only interested parties would be those who would lose by the alliance. Perhaps... France,” he suggested. “Both Italy and France have Mediterranean ports.”

“Bravo!” Irene said. “That is exactly it.”

“And how did you know this?” I asked her.

She donned a modest expression. “Rumors of this event reached the press last spring. I looked up back copies of the
Telegram
and the
Times.”

“Anyone could do that!” said I indignantly.

“Of course. But
would
anyone? And would anyone know what to make of this fact as regards our end of the tangle?”

“ ‘Our’ end?” I repeated.

“Ah, you do miss Casanova, Nell, but I do not require an echo at the moment. There is another nation, as well, that would squirm at news of any such English alliance abroad, and that is her ancient enemy in another quarter of the world.”

“By Jove—that I do know!” Quentin was sitting up, his precious cigar abandoned in the dish beside him. “Russia! Russia has no European ports. She would be most uneasy with such a treaty, especially since Czar Alexander spurns European connections, except for those few French ones he tolerates for his Empress’s sake.”

Irene’s smile grew radiant. “There speaks the soul of a spy. There stands the link to the two puzzles: the Afghanistan events of ’eighty and the recent hushed scandal of the missing English-Italian naval treaty. I propose that solving one muddle will resolve the other.”

“It is preposterous,” Quentin said, sadly. “Ingenious... Ireneous, even, but erroneous,” he added with a flash of humor I had not yet seen in him. “If you can posit a connection between the disaster at Maiwand, Maclaine’s death, my and Dr, Watson’s recent brushes with death and this obscure treaty, my hat—nay, my head—is off to you, Madame Mystery-solver.”

Irene positively glittered at the challenge. “You think it is impossible? Then listen to what Miss Harrison told me at tea.”

“Irene,” I asked, “how did you persuade the young woman to tell you anything at all about such a secret matter?”

“I told her the truth,” Irene answered.

“Shocking,” Godfrey muttered. “You must have been desperate.”

“We did not have much time together,” she said tersely. “I had already learned that her fiancé, Mr. Phelps, had spent several weeks abed with brain fever and that recently, to gather from the behavior of Lord Holdhurst, his uncle, and others in the Foreign Office, all pressure had lifted from him. A significant figure present in this matter was Sherlock Holmes, I might add.

“So when I called upon Miss Harrison I told her of my concern for a noble-spirited Englishman who was a virtual exile from his homeland because of a false disgrace in war. I also told her that I’d heard rumors of her recent trouble and that a Mr. Sherlock Holmes was said to have assisted in the matter. Did she think Mr. Holmes could do anything for me?”

“Who did you tell her you were?” I asked suspiciously.

“You,” she answered promptly. “The poor wronged gentleman’s fiancée.”

“Irene!” I could not look at Quentin—an agonizing surge of pleasure made my cheeks bum at Irene’s blithe endorsement of our mock engagement as an actuality to be appropriated for her own purposes—though I was well aware that he looked at me. “And what did you learn as a result of this outrage?”

“Much.” Irene rubbed her palms together in the approved Del Sartian acting method for conveying intense satisfaction.

She resembled a glamorous Lady Macbeth immediately after the Gruesome Deed.

“You see,” she went on, “a woman will confide almost anything to another woman if it involves a matter of the heart. And the treaty has been safely returned—yes, thanks to Mr. Sherlock Holmes. Her Percy is now blameless. She could not praise Mr. Holmes more highly. The only trace of sadness was when she confessed that her brother, Joseph, who had recently lost heavily in the stock market and knew that the Russians or the French would pay well to see the document, was the culprit who had taken the treaty, it was thought impulsively.”

“ ‘It was thought,’ “ Godfrey repeated.

“Yes, Casanova?”

“You don’t think it was a spur-of-the-moment theft?”

“No, I most certainly do not, and there is where Mr. Sherlock Holmes has made a fatal mistake. By the way, Joseph was punished for his act by an awful irony. He hid the treaty in his bedroom at Briarbrae—but that was the very room where Percy Phelps was confined when he collapsed at once of brain fever and where he stayed for almost two months. And there the treaty sat, unreachable to either man.

“According to Miss Harrison, Mr. Holmes lured Joseph into attempting to recover the document, then took it by force when Joseph attacked him and fled. Mr. Holmes presented it to Percy over breakfast in Baker Street, after first pretending that the document was unrecoverable. Poor Percy fainted, but luckily Dr. Watson was present to revive him.

“I told you years ago, Nell—” she glanced my way “—that a detective like Mr. Holmes would find association with a physician handy. Suffice it to say that this ‘surprise’ has redeemed Phelps and the Foreign Office. Joseph fled, and no one is minded to apprehend him now that the treaty is recovered. In a matter of weeks the alliance will be public knowledge, anyway.”

“So the treaty matter is closed,” Quentin said. “That has nothing to do with cobras appearing in my Montmartre garret or Dr. Watson’s Paddington consulting room.”

“One would think not,” Irene said demurely.

“One would,” I parroted. “What would Irene think?”

“Ah, Nell, you do anticipate my methods. First there is this puzzling paper we have retrieved from Dr. Watson’s Afghanistan bag. I wonder if he will ever miss it?” She shrugged. “Quentin, you have had time to study it, as you did not nine years ago.”

He lifted it from the marble-topped side table with a shake of his head. “I have played with it until my eyes ache. It is written in Cyrillic Russian, and combines elements of a map and a communication. Frankly, I believe it is a fragment and I cannot make head or tail of it. Certainly it was not worth my pains to preserve it,” he added ruefully.

“It is worth great pains to someone. If it is not for the contents, could it be for the mere fact of its existence?”

Quentin dubiously regarded the heavy, soft paper that wilted in his grasp like a leaf of yellowed cabbage. “Only one person might wish to destroy this, and I know you suspect him of the evildoings. Tiger.”

“Tiger.” She articulated the word with relish. “Whom we suspect to be Captain Sylvester Morgan, whom in turn we now know to be one Colonel Sebastian Moran, late of Her Majesty’s Indian Army. Thank you, Godfrey, for your investigations among the military records.”

He bowed his head slightly and smiled.

I could not help commenting. “This fabled Tiger certainly showed little imagination when it came to false identities.”

“This man secretly wishes credit even for his misdeeds,” Irene answered. “And the long, lashing tail of his arrogance will be the thing that will trip him up. Quentin, does the word ‘Tiger’ appear anywhere on that paper?”

“Why, yes. The salutation. That’s why we had code names.”

“Then if that paper came into hands that could trace the identity of Tiger then and now, it would link him to the Russians?”

“I suppose so,” he answered doubtfully. “Certainly there were rumors that he had been seen in their territories, which is why I suspected him of betraying us at Maiwand. But I can’t prove any of it! No one cares at this late date. The villains have been designated for the history books. The issue is moot.”