FEMME FATALE Read online

  It winds and tightens, tightens and winds . . .

  . . . until the face is lost behind its disembodied coils, like a mummy’s . . .

  . . . until the voice that issues from that disembodied face screams and sighs and sighs and screams.

  Finally we stand, screaming as one, drowning out the sound effects, ending the delusion, finally acting not as an audience, but as a sort of demented Greek chorus.

  Someone—who knows where? who knows what?—makes the gaslights flare to full brilliance.

  The table crashes back to floor. Someone cries in tribute to a wounded toe.

  I can hear my fallen pencil snap under the force.

  After that dramatic plunge, and the thump of the table creaking back to earth, the room is quiet.

  Our medium’s face has fallen like a rose blossom too heavy for its stem.

  It lies upon the tabletop, open-eyed.

  Around its neck is wrapped coil after coil of stringy ectoplasm, now oddly solid and dormant, lifeless.

  No one moves.

  Then I do.

  I approach the dead departed.

  I touch the ectoplasmic scarf at her unmoving throat.

  It is . . . damp, fragile yet strong, as ropy as an umbilical cord, and I have seen such in my checkered career.

  It is also teasingly familiar, this limp, wet rag.

  I remember now. Some mediums are regurgitators who can expel yards and yards of consumed cheesecloth at will, like sword-swallowers.

  One expects a sword to serve as a weapon.

  One does not expect cheesecloth to serve as a garote.

  Here it has.

  I lift my head. The séance attendees remain assembled, standing, hands still locked, save for mine.

  By their faces I can see that they still see spirits.

  I see something different.

  I see a very clever and puzzling murder.

  1.

  Duet

  He was an enthusiastic musician, being himself not only a

  very capable performer but a composer of no ordinary merit.

  —DR. JOHN H. WATSON, “THE RED-HEADED LEAGUE,” 1891,

  SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

  at Neuilly, near Paris

  August, 1889

  “I cannot believe,” I told Irene, “that you would agree to such a shocking thing without telling your husband!”

  “Which can you not believe, Nell, that I would agree to a ‘shocking thing’ or that I would not tell Godfrey?”

  I had long since learned that my friend Irene Adler Norton was fashioned from an impossible human amalgam resembling iron brocade: apparently decorative but, in truth, nigh impossible to ruffle or bend. I might better exercise my lungs by attempting to blow out the fire in the grate as to move her resolve with the feeble zephyrs of my words.

  I shifted ground. “I cannot believe that you would invite That Man to our common home without telling me.”

  “But I have told you.”

  “Just now . . . when he could arrive any moment! I am not prepared to receive a guest, even if you are.”

  I lifted my embroidery hoop from my lap in a gesture of exasperation. The trailing threads immediately attracted the snagging claws of the Persian cat, Lucifer, whose instincts for mayhem were as black as his long, silky coat. In an instant he was tangled in my rainbow skeins.

  “Obviously,” Irene continued, watching my struggle to unwind embroidery silks from Lucifer’s claws with a certain clinical interest, “Sherlock Holmes is not a guest, in your estimation, but an intruder. You must understand that he comes here at my invitation, for a bit of very simple business. I merely have to honor my word and give him the English translation I have had made of the Yellow Book.”

  “Of course,” I said grimly, my shredded threads tugged free of their attacker at last. “It is bad enough that demonic diary fell into our hands at the end of the Ripper affair. I still shudder when I think of the Unholy Trinity that was allied against us then. I doubt that the world will ever be safe from them, however obscurely, and deeply, and securely they are imprisoned. Now you only perpetuate that dreadful time by passing on the demented creature’s scribblings to Sherlock Holmes.”

  “I promised him I would, Nell. And my making the translation allowed me to . . . protect any mention of my dear ones by what you rightly call a ‘demented creature.’ If Mr. Holmes’s presence is so undesirable, you could withdraw upstairs. I don’t expect him to remain long.”

  “How I wish that urgent political depositions in Paris did not keep Godfrey away from home on just this very day! Oh, and I may leave if I don’t like the company? Of course! Banish me upstairs to leave you alone with That Man! In Godfrey’s absence? I think not. It is my duty to act as chaperon.”

  Irene sighed, bending to lift the cat free of what was left of my fancy work. “Duty is never pleasant, but I can see that you are determined to make it as unpleasant as possible.”

  I regarded her with suspicion, but said nothing, though my mind was busy imagining the worst. Was the forthcoming visitor why she had donned her most becoming housedress today? This was a trailing white silk gown with a black net overlay of jet beads and scallops of black lace. The overall effect was of charmingly girlish polka dots, which on closer examination proved far more elegant and sophisticated than that.

  Of course, all of Irene’s housedresses were becoming, a fact that Godfrey seemed to appreciate. Irene had been an operatic diva, after all, so even her most casual attire displayed inimitable panache. Perhaps that was only because she was extraordinarily comely, as certified by the words of a king: “She has a soul of steel. The face of the most beautiful of women,” Wilhelm of Bohemia had observed before adding the unfortunate and equally true afterthought, “and the mind of the most resolute of men.”

  I had always been taught that masculine resolution belonged to the superior sex. Irene confounded that conviction in me, and in others, including Mr. Sherlock Holmes, the London consulting detective with whom circumstances had recently forced far more acquaintance than I liked.

  Irene’s own past efforts as a private inquiry agent for the Pinkerton agency in America, even before she descended on England in the early eighties to pursue her operatic career, did not help insure that the likes of Sherlock Holmes and other official and unofficial minions of the law would not darken our cottage doorstep in bucolic Neuilly. At least it was far enough outside of Paris to remain a simple village rather than a crowded and corrupt metropolis.

  But now the London “sleuth” was to cross our rural threshold in person.

  I glanced down at my striped skirt. And I would be forced to receive him looking like a milkmaid . . . not that a spinster past thirty like myself gave a fig for matters of dress, beauty, or unexpected visitors of the masculine persuasion.

  “He will sniff down that sharp London nose of his at our countrified ways,” I said. “I am surprised that you are not wearing your favorite Worth.”

  Irene burst out laughing as she untangled Lucifer’s claws from the lace at her elbows. “Sherlock Holmes would as much notice the exquisite couture of Charles Frederick Worth, even though the eminent ‘man-milliner’ of Paris is a distant relation of his by marriage, as he would Lucifer’s savage ‘disembowing’ of the ribbons along your skirt revers.”

  “Oh! That dreadful cat! He has indeed managed to undo all my ribbons.”

  I tossed the embroidery hoop aside and began retying the endless rows just as a knock sounded in the hallway.

  I redoubled my efforts. On no account was Mr. Sherlock Holmes to see me with my bows undone, especially since he had witnessed my shockingly irregular attire during the dark events of our previous adventure. I was, after all, an Englishwoman, if not a lady born.

  Sophie, our maid of all work and mistress of far too little of it, soon appeared in the parlor door, making what passed for a curtsy. “Where should I place the gentleman’s coat and chapeau, s’il vous plait.”

  We had so few caller
s here in the country that no protocol governed their disposition.

  “The newel post will do for the coat, Sophie,” Irene said airily, “and the hall table for the hat.”

  At that moment The Man himself appeared in the doorway, cloaked in country checks with a plaid hat known as a deerstalker upon his head.

  Having only previously seen him in the stripped trousers and top hat of city wear, I straightened red-faced from my bow-tying labors and tried to suppress a snicker. The visitor looked more countrified than ourselves! In fact, I had to admit that his attire was more suitable for a Neuilly visit than city garb. Could it be that Mr. Holmes was less insensitive to the subtle social language of attire than Irene thought?

  “Madam,” he said with a bow to Irene. “Miss Huxleigh,” to me. He handed his coat to Sophie (the poor woman disappeared behind its massive long folds like a mushroom behind a checked mountain) and flung his cap out of sight toward the hall table.

  I was irritatingly sure that it had landed where aimed, though I could not see for sure.

  With this cavalier gesture, he crossed the threshold into our feminine domain. I saw he wore a brown tweed suit, suitable for travel or shooting holidays.

  Irene had risen to extend her hand.

  Mr. Holmes took it, hesitated, then shook it in the American fashion.

  I could not imagine him kissing it in the Continental fashion, although Quentin Stanhope, or even Godfrey, could no doubt manage that Frenchified sort of salute quite skillfully.

  The thought of Quentin kissing a hand, my hand, caused my traitorous heart to skip several beats. I had so stupidly failed both him and myself on the last occasion we had spent time together! Granted, we had both survived great perils and were not ourselves. Yet despite the heightened emotions of the moment, everything severe and cautious from my sheltered Shropshire childhood had risen up to deny him. I could still see the tenderness in his too-truthful hazel eyes fade into such unnecessary apology. I could still hear Nellie Bly, who had accompanied him during the last leg of the rescue mission, calling him “my dear Quentin” not an hour after our disastrous reunion! A reunion that was only disastrous after certain, unforgettable . . . passages between us.

  No, no one could hold a candle to Quentin in the hand-kissing department, certainly not a man who considered himself a self-appointed tutor to all humankind!

  I clasped my own hands behind my back to avoid any possibility of awkward social contact. If the gesture made me look like a green schoolroom miss, so be it. I knew things about Mr. Sherlock Holmes that even Irene with all her fabled perception could not and would not imagine. It was not that I was especially perceptive, only that I once had occasion to peruse the papers of his associate, Dr. Watson, and had found some thankfully unpublished scribblings about the affair that had first introduced Mr. Holmes into our acquaintance, a manuscript the would-be literary doctor had melodramatically titled “A Scandal in Bohemia.”

  We were not in Bohemia now, thank the Lord, but France, which was quite another kettle of poisson. Odd that the French word for “fish” is so close in spelling to that fatal word in English, poison, but not really odd when you consider how fish taste and smell. That is how I regarded Mr. Sherlock Holmes. As poison to be avoided like the plague. There!

  “You are looking better, Miss Huxleigh,” The Man noted with his usual superior air, “than when last we met.”

  “I should hope so,” I replied. “I have since then been removed from the enforced company of a number of odious persons.”

  He could not fail to miss that I included him along with the truly heinous villains of our previous adventure.

  His smile was private as he turned again to Irene. All men turned again to Irene. She was a magnet whose force could not be denied on the operatic boards or on the more intimate stage of private life.

  “I have taken the liberty,” she said, returning his smile, “of having a small repast laid out in the parlor window that overlooks the garden. Perhaps you would join us for tea. Meanwhile, I will retrieve the manuscript that is the object of your visit.”

  “The manuscript that you so fetchingly spirited away from that terrifying castle before I could read it,” he pointed out.

  “It was in a non-romance language, Mr. Holmes.”

  “I can read a bit of some non-romance languages, such as the German in Psychopathia Sexualis. I must thank you for introducing me to such a rare volume of criminal lore. In fact, I am only now returned from the University of Graz in Austria, where I met with Professor von Krafft-Ebing who heads the Neuro-Psychiatry clinic there, the author of that volume you so kindly . . . lent me.”

  “It was not a loan, Mr. Holmes, and you need not thank me. It had served my purposes already.” Irene had dropped her role of gracious hostess as a man might have cast a gauntlet upon the castle floor. “Do you mean to tell me you have consulted with Baron von Krafft-Ebing? The man himself? Recently?”

  “Why else did you think I was abroad again, my dear lady?”

  “I assumed another case involving foreign heads of state, of course, my dear sir.”

  Much as I feared the unwanted secret that I harbored—that Sherlock Holmes was both contemptuous of women’s wit in general and enamored of Irene’s wit in particular—I realized that I was witnessing a joust, not a tryst. These “my dears” were mere nicks in the verbal fencing match between civilized opponents, not anything personal . . . beyond a keen professional rivalry.

  “The book itself,” she said, “would seem to be plenty enough food for thought. What more could the author add to his compendium of infamy?”

  “There is always more to be learned in the vast arena of crimes of passion around the globe. Professor Krafft-Ebing has achieved something remarkable in the annals of criminal history. He has recorded the acts and particulars of a certain breed of killers he calls lust-murderers as a scientist, not a policeman, would. These are cold and factual case studies, naked of political conclusions and moral confusions. Simple facts. He records the acts, repulsive as they are to any civilized person, without emotion or distortion. And in multiplicity, there is no denying the universality of human wrongdoing. No detail, however debased, escapes his observation and analysis. The book is a classic and the man is a wonder.”

  “I wonder,” said I, “that any civilized person would wish to know more about such grisly matters.”

  I expected Mr. Holmes to debate me. Instead, he laughed, voicelessly. “Dr. Watson, my esteemed physician friend, would agree with you. He strongly feels that some subjects are not fit knowledge, especially for a woman’s sensibility.”

  “I don’t agree with that,” Irene said sharply. “What women don’t know will hurt them.”

  Mr. Holmes’s expression was both challenged and chagrined. “I said that was Dr. Watson’s opinion. I myself do not flinch from the brutal. I have recently been involved in a matter in which a man’s thumb was severed as he sought to escape kidnappers.”

  “Gracious!” I could not help saying, thus unwittingly drawing the man’s attention again.

  “I am sorry to offend your sensibilities, Miss Huxleigh, though I must admit that I am pleased to see that your thumbs are still attached and busy at household arts, but the world of wrongdoing is full of such deliciously insane events. Professor Krafft-Ebing enlightened me a good deal in that regard.”

  “Perhaps,” Irene said, “the dainty treats of the tea-table are not suitable after such conversation. If you will excuse me, I will fetch the translation.” She turned to the hall, then paused and turned back. “Did you find any new evidence in Whitechapel? Anything that would absolve the criminals we captured in the Carpathians earlier this summer?”

  Mr. Holmes fingered the small gold sun of a coin that dangled from his watch-fob, a coin that figured, I am sure, in the good doctor’s manuscript titled “A Scandal in Bohemia.”

  “Nothing that would release any of the villains in the case, and nothing that would fully indict them either.”
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br />   “Nothing?” she asked sharply.

  “I did discover more traces of identifiable cork and candle wax, enough to buttress the case against them, but nothing so conclusive that anyone dare announce a solution. This matter would best be forgotten and buried in the newspaper morgues,” he replied.

  “A pity. It was so spectacularly grotesque. I imagine the name ‘Jack the Ripper’ will be used to frighten children into good behavior for some time.”

  She nodded and turned to leave again, but this time his voice gave her pause, instead of the reverse.

  “I do hope, Mrs. Norton, that you are giving me a full translation, with no . . . expurgations.”

  “My dear Mr. Holmes, if you can read Professor Krafft-Ebing’s much despised book on lust-murders and even discuss it with its controversial author, I am sure that I would not be so bold as to Bowdlerize any other volume for your consumption.”

  “Hmmm.” His murmur expressed either satisfaction . . . or doubt.

  Irene decided to take it for the former, and smiled again before rustling up our hall staircase.

  “Have you read it?”

  The question was both abrupt and harsh, and I moved my gaze from Irene’s departing skirts to find Mr. Holmes’s gimlet gray eyes fixed upon me with the sharpness of a needle point.

  “I? Gracious, no. I saw enough of depravity at that Carpathian castle to last me a lifetime. I really cannot understand why you should wish to pursue such matters with the author, and now with that . . . loathsome diary from the hand of a person whose crimes are unimaginable.”

  “There are no unimaginable crimes, Miss Huxleigh,” he said, bending his gaze near my hemline.

  I cringed to think that he had noted my unfastened bows, but when I glanced down, I saw that Lucifer, the wretch, had hidden under my skirts and was now thrusting out a suspicious paw, his fat furry foot resembling the toe of a black, ostrich-feather mule.

  I stepped back at once to reveal the cat’s full form. It was unthinkable that Mr. Sherlock Holmes should believe me capable of wearing anything so frivolous as an ostrich-feather mule!