Chapel Noir Read online

  Strain is past, and we feel free to doze in our upholstered seats, our foreheads nodding against the cold window glass, our eyes immune to the magnificent scenery dimming like a stage setting before us.

  We have climbed the mountain and made it ours, and all else is nothing.

  In the stillness that followed Irene’s last declaration, I caught my breath. I saw that I had not been crocheting for some time.

  “Well,” I said, “I do not know whether to cry Bravo or Brava. Quite a stirring passage. Thrilling one might say. I feel quite exhausted.”

  “I as well,” Irene admitted, staring into the moth-wings of flame beating in the small parlor fireplace. “Performance is so taxing.”

  “I had no idea riding a train to a mountaintop could be so enthralling, although I have been there myself.”

  “By yourself,” Irene added.

  I nodded.

  “And not by yourself.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that you made a return journey in the company of Quentin Stanhope. Did you not notice then the thrilling aspects of railway mountaineering?”

  “Ah, not in the manner Godfrey describes. Perhaps such a reaction is only for the solitary. When one has someone to talk to—”

  “Quite,” said Irene, fanning herself with Godfrey’s letter. Her face looked quite flushed in the firelight.

  “Is there not more of the letter to read?”

  She glanced at the last page. “Oddly, no. Obviously, the journey has released Godfrey’s powers of . . . description.”

  “They do say that travel is broadening.”

  “Yes, they do.” She glanced at me. “I was sure you would approve, Nell.”

  3.

  Nell and the Night Visitors

  “A Monsieur le Villon of the Paris police, I believe,

  speaks highly of your amazing deductive abilities.”

  “Monsieur le Villard,” Mr. Holmes corrected me.

  I bridled a bit, then showed confusion. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Is the French connection you speak of Monsieur le

  Villard, not le Villon?”

  “Yes, you are right! These French names are so similar.”

  —CAROLE NELSON DOUGLAS, THE ADVENTURESS

  At night the countryside is darker than death and quieter than a confession. One becomes aware that one’s cottage is an artificial island in a great dark sea of tossing fields and whatever chooses to prowl them.

  A fierce pounding at midnight on a thick oak-wood cottage door sounds like blunderbusses exploding under the casement windows.

  I sat up in bed, heart galloping like a coach-and-four.

  The moon was dark and so was the piece of night framed by my unshuttered window.

  The booming began again. Our simple cottage seemed under siege.

  A third bout of thunder forced my feet onto the chill bedside rug. I fumbled for the lucifers and lit my candle while my feet probed the dark for slippers to fill.

  A flash of light under my door made me seize my dressing gown and fight my arms into its commodious sleeves.

  Footsteps on the stairs!

  Were we being invaded?

  I tossed my long braid over my back so it should not catch fire in the candle flame, picked up the icy pewter holder, contemplating using it as a weapon, and rushed into the passage.

  All I glimpsed was Irene’s waist-length hair rippling like a chestnut brown river against her scarlet-brocade dressing gown. She vanished into the puddle of lamplight that preceded her down the stairs.

  Heedless as a child, I scurried downstairs in her wake, feeling no fear now but for her.

  She was already at the wide front door, wrestling one-handed with the latch. “Nell! Good. Hold this.”

  I was now the Lady with the Lamp, only I held my candlestick in the other hand.

  Irene attacked the latch again.

  “We dare not admit anyone, Irene. It could be robbers. It likely is robbers.”

  “Robbers don’t knock.”

  “Ruffians then, with unthinkable designs. Sophie sleeps at her own cottage tonight. We are two women alone.”

  “Not quite alone.” Irene smiled grimly and lifted the handle of the small pistol from her dressing gown pocket.

  Even as she pushed the hard latch over, and I opened my mouth to voice another objection, the knocks sounded again, virtually driving the door open.

  Irene snatched the oil lamp from my hand and stepped back, lifting the fluttering light to reveal our visitors.

  As I feared: strange men. Two of them.

  Even Irene recoiled from the dark, overcoated forms filling our doorway like the night made incarnate.

  Her trusty little pistol, I reflected, had looked a bit too little. I searched the hallway for handy cudgels. Only the umbrella stand, alas, and Irene stood between me and its contents.

  “Madame. Mademoiselle,” one man said, nodding rather than bowing.

  As I suspected! They were French. Worse and worse. And they knew that one of us was married, the other unwed. They had been studying us.

  “You are alone?” the stranger inquired, looking past us.

  What did he think? That we entertained visitors at half past-whatever in the morning? Only the Frenchman!

  Irene had retreated as far as she intended and withdrew the pistol from her pocket.

  “Madame Norton,” the speaker rebuked, at last doffing his slouch-brimmed hat.

  “Inspector le Villard,” she returned, also returning the pistol to her pocket. “You look a thorough villain in that hat and coat. Why didn’t you announce yourself at once? Come in, then.”

  I clutched my dressing gown close.

  “We apologize for intruding at such an hour,” the French policeman went on in his execrably accented English. “It is not our wish, but there is no help for it. When the Great demand, the mice must scramble.”

  “Oh, you are not a mouse,” Irene answered, laughing. “Nor am I.” She turned to see me cowering behind her. “Nell, hurry upstairs and dress while I settle our visitors in the parlor. Their business is obviously too urgent for the formalities.”

  I started up the steps, grateful to creep out of their sight in my shocking state of disattire. On the other hand, I was most anxious to hear what had brought the French police inspector and his companion to our country door at such an indecent hour.

  Irene, as usual, was right: one of us must be properly garbed and able to attend to the situation with dignity. I rushed upstairs to don my petticoats and corset in the almost-dark, lace my boots askew and misbutton my gown.

  The flickering candlelight kept time with my shivers as I dressed in the chill bedchamber, my icy fingers mismanaging every stage.

  At last I was reasonably clothed and hurried downstairs.

  Irene had lit the two oil lamps in the parlor. The man with Inspector le Villard hunched over the charred logs in the fireplace, coaxing flames from the remnants of the woodbox.

  Irene’s pistol lay openly on the small table beside her chair, as I might leave a crochet needle in plain sight.

  None of my implements was in view, however, for Inspector le Villard had set his dripping hat atop my worktable and had taken my chair.

  I was forced to perch like a parrot on a tapestry-upholstered stool beside Irene’s chair.

  “You understand that I am entirely against this,” François le Villard had been saying when I entered the room. He had utterly ignored my entrance and did not quite look at Irene. The inspector was a dandified individual much given to waxed facial growths, yet I was pleased to see that he possessed enough gentlemanly instinct to dislike addressing a woman in her dressing gown.

  Irene had few qualms about being so addressed. No doubt it was a result of her many years on the stage. Actors and singers are always being seen half-dressed both offstage and on. It quite destroys their sense of propriety.

  My reaction to the scene could not be farther from her mind. Her fingers
were tapping the tabletop near the pistol. When she was abstracted or impatient her fingers often mimed playing some mute piece of music.

  “You have fully stated every objection you could to coming here, being here, and remaining here, Inspector,” Irene noted. “Now that your objections to your duty are done, what is the nub of the matter? Which Great Personage has forced you to such an unpleasant task? Or is it a name that dare not be spoken?”

  While le Villard hesitated, Irene glanced at me. “I suppose we should offer you some refreshment.”

  “No!” Le Villard nearly shouted the word. “There is no time. You must accompany me into Paris at once. This matter is better understood when it is seen rather than heard.”

  The man at the fireplace stood and began to speak rapid French.

  As he talked, Irene leaned forward, then sat up straighter, and then straighter still, like a puppet being drawn to attention by an unseen force. She was virtually at parade attention, and I could not say why.

  Oh, how my head aches to hear a foreign language rattled off like a laundry list! Irene knew French like an Englishwoman’s maid in London, but I! Only the caught crumb of a familiar word here and there hinted at some meaning.

  Le Villard sat in my chair with his head and eyes cast down. The words “abbot noir” were bandied back and forth by the strange man and Irene more than once. Whatever he said drew her face into a mask of troubled disbelief.

  This nondescript man who accompanied Inspector le Villard was no servant, as I had first thought, but his superior.

  “I must go,” Irene murmured to herself and only incidentally to me. She stood, shaken out of her strange paralysis. “I must dress.”

  The men exchanged impatient glances.

  “Four minutes, gentlemen,” she said sternly, reading their concern. “If you wish to clock me—”

  She was clattering up the stairs like a racehorse before she finished her sentence.

  Inspector le Villard did withdraw a gold timepiece from the vest beneath his sopping cloak and dry inner coat. He clicked the lid open.

  I moved to Irene’s chair, but the unnamed man did not sit, not even on the vacant chaise longue by the now-crackling fire.

  Casanova, under his cage cover for the night, cackled eerily, startling both men.

  “The parrot,” I said.

  “Le perroquet,” the inspector repeated to his superior.

  They nodded gravely.

  A loud clatter in the hall announced Irene’s return, booted and . . . as I had feared, dressed in men’s clothing.

  The inspector leaped to his feet as I did to mine.

  “The time?” Irene demanded.

  “Four minutes, Madame,” he admitted.

  She came to the table to swoop the pistol into her frock coat pocket.

  She had twisted her hair atop her head into an burnt brown froth all more charming for its carelessness. She was not attempting actually to impersonate a man in this ensemble, although on occasion I had seen her carry off that guise uncannily well. Her attire now was a mere matter of speed, not deception, or so I thought at the time. Even I had to admit in my secret soul that this feminine interpretation of male dress, such as Sarah Bernhardt wore when sculpting in her art studio, had its charms. La Bernhardt affected pale colors, like the American author Mark Twain, but Irene wore black: dainty louisheeled boots and fine wool trousers and jacket, softened only by an ivory-silk ascot at the throat.

  Inspector le Villard spoke with some consternation. “You are aware, Madame, that you could be arrested for wearing such articles in the public streets?”

  “Really? The escort of yourself and the Prefect of Police himself, I pray, will prevent me from having my mission stopped for a trifle. I believe that this garb will serve us all better at the scene of the crime. Shall we go and find out?” She turned to me. “Nell, please do not wait up. This might take hours.”

  “I certainly do not intend to ‘wait up,’ ” I said stoutly. “I will accompany you, of course.”

  Even the man who did not speak English grasped my evident intentions. Had the situation not been so tense, it would have been amusing to watch the Frenchmen’s reaction, which was now far more appalled than it had been at the first sight of Irene’s unconventional attire.

  They spoke at once, in French, to each other, then to Irene, and finally to me. They ordered, they pleaded. They almost wept with the intensity of their argument, as Frenchmen can when sufficiently stirred.

  I imagine that the burden of all of it was that my presence was not required.

  Or so Irene translated the jabber to me.

  I swept into the passage. That is one of the many advantages of female dress: one can sweep. And one who sweeps has the advantage. I had learned that years ago from Irene, who was unsurpassed in the art of both sweeping and imposing her will on others.

  “Nonsense,” I said, eyeing all three with my sternest expression. “Irene, your accompanying these two men, even though one is known to you, alone . . . at night . . . on who-knows-what errand, is completely improper. I must accompany you. Explain it to them.”

  Irene, looking amused, did. They remonstrated some more, and more loudly, simultaneously spewing both French and English at me so that I could understand neither.

  “If there is need for speed,” I told Inspector le Villard, “you would do better arguing with me in the carriage on the way to Paris.”

  Incredulous, they looked at Irene.

  She shrugged, a very Gallic shrug. “She is English,” she said, as if that explained everything.

  Perhaps it did.

  4.

  Not So Sweet a Home . . .

  It has been thus enjoined to the maîtresses de maison only to

  receive those whose physical appearance suggest that they have

  reached at least their seventeenth year. . . .

  —CIRCULAR, 1842

  Irene and I were shortly facing each other across the divide of leather-upholstered carriage seats while the driver cracked his whip above the poor horses’ withers until our four-wheeler careened down the dark country road like a runaway beer wagon.

  Bands of light from the carriage lamps streaked across our faces, and there was no talk during this jolting journey, not until the cobblestones of Paris came under our steeds’ hooves, and mist-filtered rays of gaslight streamed into the open carriage windows like skimmed moonlight.

  I could smell the river and the evening damp, the incense of wood fires, the faint odor of manure.

  At last Irene began conversing with our escorts in French, soft-spoken, probing. They answered shortly, almost gruffly. She turned to me.

  “A ghastly crime of some sort has been committed. We are not to know the details because I am needed as a translator. They do not wish foreknowledge to taint my role. A young American girl was apparently a witness. It is she I will be questioning.”

  “Inspector le Villard speaks English passably enough to interrogate an American witness.”

  “You think so, Nell? His superior does not, and in such a case I agree with him. A woman will win her confidence much sooner.”

  I lifted an eyebrow at her attire.

  “If this crime is as brutal as I have been led to believe, my mode of dress will not even catch the poor child’s attention.”

  “She is a child? Then it was well I came along. An English governess can handle a child like none other.”

  “As you say.”

  I always worried when Irene did not disagree with me.

  “You did bring your notebook and pencil, Nell?”

  “I am never without it. And I brought something else.”

  “Oh?”

  I leaned close to whisper into her ear, which was more accessible than usual with her hair pinned up. “My chatelaine. Did you not notice its ostentatious—and noisy—presence at my belt?”

  Irene smothered another quirk of her lips. I suspect she had less faith in the powers of my chatelaine—a gift of sterling si
lver trinkets from Godfrey—than I did. But to me it served the same function as her little pistol, and I felt quite naked without it. What an exaggerated expression! I, of course, never felt naked at all; nor should any decent woman.

  Our vehicle had drawn up behind a grand building, one of the magnificent hôtels of Paris, I perceived as Irene helped me dismount the high carriage. In Paris, hôtels had been the palatial city dwellings of noble families for centuries, and only had turned to other ownership and uses in our new industrial age. I do not know why the French must confuse the issue and call buildings “hôtels” that are not meant for public accommodation.

  I lifted my skirts to keep them from sweeping up soot, mist, and other less discreet flotsam of the city streets. We soon were bustled into the maze of rear service rooms that support the massive facades of these grandiose erections.

  A man in a rumpled suit awaited us in the ill-lit pantry. The inspector snatched a lit oil lamp from a crude table and led us onward by its light.

  Soon we were coiling up a narrow rear staircase that reeked of the sweat of many workmen’s brows and . . . oh, garlic and coal and other noxious domestic scents that are banished from the front rooms.

  My attention was fixed on not stumbling over my hems on the narrow, turning steps. The unintroduced Frenchman behind me seized my elbow quite firmly to pilot me upward without mishap.

  At length we came to the third floor, where we were led down a hallway that went up three or four steps here, and down four or five steps there, until we finally entered a passage wide enough for us four to walk abreast.

  It soon transpired that the three walked abreast, and I rustled behind. They were conferring in French again, whispered words I would have had trouble translating even had I been close enough to hear well. Again much mention of the mysterious “Abbot Noir.”

  Irene’s operatic background had made her a mistress of languages. I had noticed during my brief career as a governess that those who excel at musical matters also have a numerical and language aptitude, although I cannot say that Irene had any head for numbers at all. Unless they be on bills of exchange.