Chapel Noir Read online

  “Hmmm. And our humble workman has been absent for about three minutes. I believe we will be received in another six minutes’ time, give or take thirty seconds. Shall we sit down?”

  “No. I shall pace the chamber until we are allowed the same easy entrée as a . . . ditchdigger.”

  With that I took several furious turns around the room while Irene watched me from the very same chair in which the miserable fellow had lounged but minutes before.

  Hence it was that my back was to the door when I heard it crack open again.

  “Please come in,” said a voice in perfect English, though a bit high-pitched and more than somewhat complacent. “I am delighted that two such noted ladies have consented to lunch with me.”

  It was as if a rasp had been drawn over my teeth. I recognized the voice instantly. We were being entertained by the man.

  Irene rose slowly, as if finally hearing a long-awaited cue that called her onstage. So had I seen her advance to a duel with swords against a man in Monaco. I suspected the weapons in this forthcoming duel would be much more subtle, if not less capable of wounding.

  “Thank you, Mr. Holmes,” she said. “I thought you would never ask.”

  18.

  An Unappetizing Menu

  You know my opinion of that sad string of events, Watson.

  The whitechapel Ripper is likely no more than a

  disenchanted ticket-taker seeking a bit of attention.

  —CAROLE NELSON DOUGLAS, ANOTHER SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA

  While my imagination had peopled the chamber behind our host with ogres and opium addicts, we found instead a small receiving room that had been furnished with a square table set for three.

  On the spotless napery lay a deceptively simple and wholesome repast, mostly cold, it is true, but filling nevertheless. There was not a slab of goose-liver pâté, or tripe, or any other foreign “delicacies” in sight.

  It did indeed seem odd to sit down to lunch with Sherlock Holmes, although I imagine even the pope in Rome ate lunch. Not even Irene knew of the unwanted yet intimate glimpse I had gained of the man and his habits—and of his particular and peculiar and dangerous romantic notions—during a less forthright encounter with the papers of his physician friend, Dr. John H. Watson, who apparently fancied himself a Boswell to a Johnson.

  Since those written revelations so accidentally read, I took on a new and secret role: human hedge between Irene and this strange man who was all too fascinated by her. Although that was a common state among men who had but to meet her once, I was wise enough to realize that Mr. Sherlock Holmes was not a common man. And his purported dismissal of women in general did not ease my fears one iota. Irene had never been a woman in general.

  Were it not for his formidable reputation as a solver of puzzles, I should not give the fellow a second thought. I had mostly seen him out of doors, either in some foolish disguise or else accompanied by hat and cane and appearing confident and insufferably certain. Our encounters were too many for my taste: his abrupt appearance years ago in Godfrey’s chambers at the Temple, quizzing me about this and that while Godfrey was out. He learned nothing. The second, the sweet occasion during my first foray into disguise at Irene’s hands, when I had opened the door to Briony Lodge to him, his doctor friend, and the King of Bohemia, only to announce the nest empty and Irene fled. A later occasion: him broaching Irene and me at breakfast on the terrace of the Hotel de Paris in Monaco, arrogantly warning her off a case she had all but solved. Perhaps the most dramatic circumstance had been in Irene’s dressing room at the National Theater of Prague, when he had saved her from that devil dancer Tatyana’s venomous parting gift. And then there had been our memorable foray in disguise into the heart of Baker Street itself. That masquerade had strung gray hairs through my coiffure that could not be rinsed out!

  Indoors and hatless, he seemed am unprepossessing sort: rather scholarly though taut-strung, like catgut on a violin, perhaps five-andthirty years old I should say, in the prime of life but past first youth: tall, thin, his clean-shaven face free of any distraction from the sharp hawklike nose and the sharper gray eyes. In the broadest sense, a description of Sherlock Holmes and one of Godfrey Norton would be similar, but the fine points made all the difference. Godfrey was both far better-looking and much more genial-natured than the consulting detective, although all three—Mr. Holmes, Godfrey, and Irene—possessed the apparent supreme self-confidence of those used to expressing themselves or their opinions in public. I say “apparent” because those who express themselves in public are often surprisingly shy when it comes to other matters. Irene was correct about the “armor” many people affect to hide their true worries and fears.

  But I was used to no such thing as supreme self-confidence, I reflected sadly as, despite the sights of the morning, we all fell to our meal of artichoke soup and potted crab with gusto but without any loss of manners.

  I could not help remarking aloud on our shameless conversion from horror to gluttony.

  “The hunt sharpens appetite in some people,” Mr. Holmes said at once. “Perhaps because it gives so little time for satisfying it. When I am truly on the trail, I cannot eat at all.” He turned his lofty attention to Irene. “How did you know that I was the laborer?”

  “Because I knew that you were in Paris.”

  “And how did you know that?”

  “If the Prince of Wales was worried enough to summon me from Neuilly to Paris at midnight, he certainly would have wired London for the aid of the famous Sherlock Holmes.”

  “Why? I had nothing to do with the Ripper investigations in London.”

  Irene ignored this statement and began demurely deshelling an egg, skepticism screaming from every gesture as well as her long silence.

  “It is true,” I put in meekly. “The newspapers never mentioned his participation. Not once.”

  Irene’s skeptical glance met mine. “Now that is a telling omission, and the key to the real story.”

  “Which is?” Mr. Holmes asked before I could. A rude man from start to finish.

  “Whatever is least reported is most true,” Irene declared. “At least that is my experience of the police and the newspapers when matters are most extreme. If you somehow managed to avoid involvement in the most sensational murders in the world, I cannot believe that you would avoid involvement in a similar case when your country’s heir apparent had the ill luck to be at the scene of the slaughter.”

  “As Watson has said time and again, Madam Norton, when you explain yourself conclusions prove a very simple matter indeed. Mere common sense.”

  “I don’t think so. I have never found sense to be very common. I hope, by the way, that you will find room on your watch chain for the sou I gave you yesterday, though it is not so grand as the sovereign I offered you on my wedding day.”

  “Ha!” His bark of delight, or laughter, was so abrupt that I nearly swallowed a bite of food the wrong way and was forced to drink a great deal of the luncheon wine I had determined to avoid.

  He slapped his napkin to the tablecloth, though he had eaten very little. “You see through me, Madam, like no other.”

  “Oh, it was masterfully done, my dear Mr. Holmes, but I was expecting you. Though not so near my own cottage stoop. Why did you come all the way to Neuilly?”

  “You came to my doorstep in disguise to wish me ‘Good night’ once, Madam. I sought to return the favor by coming to wish you ‘Good morning.’ ”

  “Hmmm.” Irene did not seem very convinced.

  Mr. Holmes lifted his watch to display the chain. A gold sovereign twinkled there like a morning sun. Beside it dangled the cold bronze moon of a well-used French sou.

  “Had I been able to fly like a gull across the Channel, instead of taking the boat train to Calais and rail again to Paris, you would never have been exposed to what you saw in the maison de rendezvous.”

  His words were both an apology, and a dismissal.

  “But we saw what we saw. Have you?”
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  His head was quick to shake. “No. The Sûreté had cleared the house with its famous dispatch. It hardly matters. They had trampled the site so thoroughly by then that no mote of evidence could remain, although I spent hours on my hands and knees examining the carpeting and was able to find some small shreds, signifying not very much, I daresay.”

  He savored the wine with the ease of a Frenchman. I added the charge of “dipsomaniac” to my lengthening list of Holmesian vices. It went very well with “opium addict.”

  “Then you are not interested in our observations of the death scenes?” Irene persisted.

  “I am sure that you noticed some of what I did: that precise timing or luck was needed in the house of ill repute; that the killer had some influence over the victims; that they must have been killed quickly and damaged afterward, also quickly. Quite like the Whitechapel Ripper, I grant you, but also quite unlike him. The second killing by the Eiffel Tower smacks more of Saucy Jack, but already these matters have diverged too much from the Whitechapel murders to be considered part of that sequence, if it is indeed a sequence.”

  “You doubt the Whitechapel horrors are the work of Jack the Ripper?” I was startled into asking.

  That quick, piercing gaze, as searing as a hot iron, focused on me and me alone. Oh, dear.

  “Apparently you do not, Miss . . . ?”

  “Huxleigh.”

  “The typewriter-girl in the Temple,” he said with narrowed, amused eyes, remembering our first, unpleasant encounter. “Quite the watchdog for the absent barrister.”

  “I am always proud to serve as watchdog for my friends.”

  “No doubt why the bulldog is the British mascot,” he murmured, my unspoken challenge not lost on him. “But you are convinced of the existence of the Ripper?”

  “It is a given, sir. Any informed person—”

  “Has read too many newspapers too uncritically. I assure you, Miss Huxleigh, I could make a convincing case that any of two dozen persons were the Whitechapel Ripper, from street sweeper to tree surgeon to prime minister.”

  “Why do you doubt the Ripper’s existence?” Irene asked.

  Those gimlet eyes returned to her, and I was momentarily relieved to escape their gaze, though I had resolved to sacrifice myself for Irene’s sake.

  She, however, had that hazy acceding look she wore when winning a game of chess with Godfrey or dealing with an operatic director who wanted her to sing a role a certain way. She looked quite amenable in an intelligent way, but was growing as stubborn as Satan beneath the affability.

  “I do not believe in frightening horses in the street or ladies at luncheon,” Mr. Holmes noted, “but, since you insist, I will only note other events of the year of 1888 in the working-class sections of London. You realize, of course, that the Ripper’s supposed victims were all middle-aged women of the lowest orders? Is there anyone who does not recognize that quintet of names: Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catharine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly? They are as famous as wives of the Henry VIII.”

  “They also are as dead,” Irene muttered in a stage aside.

  “Ha! Why is there not an opera on that subject? You could play all the wives admirably.”

  For a moment her composure shattered. “That is a rather brilliant idea, Mr. Holmes.”

  “Then I hope you will act upon it and leave investigating these poor women’s deaths to those who must delve into the lowest impulses of man. I have investigated many criminous matters, but that a voice such as yours should be silenced from the stage is the greatest crime I have ever encountered.”

  I have seldom—nay, never—seen Irene at a loss for words, but she was tongue-tied then. In fact, her eyes brightened suspiciously, and I leaped into the chasm of silence.

  “It takes constant practice to maintain a fine voice, Mr. Holmes, and such a discipline allows for very little life of any normal sort.”

  “A life of ‘any normal sort’ is very little indeed, Miss Huxleigh,” he replied abruptly. He, too, seemed suddenly stricken in some strange way. “You and Dr. Watson!” He sounded rueful and also a trifle envious.

  I hastened to change a subject that was becoming unsettling to us all.

  “I do not understand your earlier point, Mr. Holmes. Each of the women you named was murdered within proximity of the others, in similar and too-loathsome-to-mention ways, within a period of time ranging over two and a half months. And then there were the letters signed ‘Jack the Ripper’ taking credit for the crimes. He even predicted two of the murders before they happened.”

  “Indeed.” The eagle eyes were back on me and the topic of murder most foul rather than Irene and her wounded singing career. “You are suspiciously well-read on this subject, Miss Huxleigh.”

  “It was a sensation worldwide, after all. And . . . it was news of home,” I added lamely.

  “There was other news of home that did not draw worldwide attention, also in the year 1888.”

  He glanced once at the tabletop as if to assure himself that we had eaten and drunk our fill. Then the long fingers on his right hand flared, and his left hand began ticking them off, starting with the small finger.

  “In February of that year a thirty-eight-year-old widow of Spitalfields was stabbed in the nether region by an unknown man wielding a clasp knife.

  “In March a thirty-nine-year-old woman was stabbed twice in the throat by an unknown man with a clasp knife. In April a forty-fiveyear-old widow of Spitalfields was . . . unspeakably attacked by an unknown man. In August, a thirty-nine-year-old hawker of Spitalfields who hawked herself as well as her wares was stabbed thirty-nine times in Whitechapel. And on August 31, Mary Ann Nichols’s mutilated body was found in Bucks Row, Whitechapel.”

  He had reached his thumb and flared his left hand to continue the count. “Then: Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catharine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly, the roll call of the so-called Ripper.”

  His little finger remained upright after he had ticked off the victims. “Mary Jane Kelly is buried on the twelfth November. And in December, Rose Mylett, described as ‘a drunkard,’ is found dead, though unmutilated. A murder verdict is brought in.”

  Irene bestirred herself. “You are saying that many murders as vile as the Ripper’s have occurred in Whitechapel before and after his reign, and still will.”

  “What is remarkable about the Ripper case is the public furor, not the victims of the crime, nor even the acts of violence. I assure you that did I wish to solve sensational crimes rather than interesting ones, I could be in the papers every fortnight with a new atrocity.”

  “You would not be involved in solving these crimes at all, were it not for Queen and country,” Irene observed with some surprise.

  The man sighed, then glanced to us both. “Would you object if I smoked?”

  “Not at all,” said Irene, “if you do not object if I smoke.”

  I added “nicotine fiend” to my list of the man’s vices.

  We had removed ourselves to the antechamber, where the smoke of my companions could lose itself among the plaster-and-gilt ceiling cherubs, who no doubt wondered why they had won a place in Heaven only to inhale the fumes of Hell.

  “Dr. Watson is not in France,” Irene noted as she and her host directed companionable streams of smoke toward the ceiling.

  I was not deceived. The duel was continuing on different ground, but the feints were as fierce. I would rather see her jousting with the dreadful detective than conjoining with him.

  “No, as he was not in Whitechapel. I could not allow him to enter an arena where one with his skills was so suspect. All this twaddle about Jack the Ripper having medical skills—”

  “He does not?”

  “The work was mere butchery, Madam. Even butchery may show a certain order. But you would find it incomprehensible how many respectable persons were suspected of being the Ripper during the height of the fever.”

  “Perhaps,” I said, “but the public suspects wer
e usually of the lower orders.”

  “Sacrificial lambs,” Irene said. “So the mighty were not immune from suspicion, despite the Whitechapel setting?”

  “The mighty have been known to lower themselves.” He shook his head impatiently as he drew on his pipe. “This is a most sordid affair, ladies. I cannot discuss it freely with you. Count yourself fortunate that you have matters other than the revolting excesses of madmen to occupy you.”

  “And your ultimate message is . . . besides luncheon, of course, and the pleasure of your company?” Irene asked in a silken tone I knew enough to avoid like a honed razor edge.

  “That your loyalty has been welcome to His Royal Highness. That I am here now, and you are not needed. That this subject matter is not suitable for ladies. That I have the case in hand, and your services are no longer useful. That your Prince appreciates your subjecting yourselves to much unpleasantness. And that you are free to resume your pursuits innocent of the tawdry details of brutality and murder.”

  “Thank you.” Irene stood, crushing her small cigar in a crystal dish. “I do appreciate knowing my place in the scheme of things. I wish you luck in hunting this new, not-Ripper, and am happy to have given a sou, however humble, to the cause.”

  Oh, my. The man may have been a nine days’ wonder in solving murderous conundrums, but he knew nothing of the fury of a woman scorned. When Irene Adler applied the word “humble” to herself . . . well, the shoe was about to slip on the other’s foot before he could say . . .

  “Thank you, and farewell.” The man stood, bowed to us both, dismissed us.

  I found myself sharing Irene’s outrage. We had not asked to be drawn into these atrocities, but we had suffered and seen more than gently reared women should, and no thanks, however princely or glib, could restore what had been lost in us.

  Irene glided to the door, remembering at the last moment to pause to let our host open it for us, to release us.

  He hesitated, almost urbane for a moment. I thought he would take her hand and kiss it.