The Adventuress (v5) Read online

  “ ‘O,’ ” Godfrey pronounced, studying Irene’s sketch of the first suicide’s tattoo. “And a needlessly ornate one. Devil of a thing to have inked upon one’s chest. What can it have to do with the seafaring life?”

  “More important” —Irene produced an impish smile—“what can it have to do with two men’s deaths?”

  Chapter Five

  LES INCONNUES DE LA SEINE

  “One would think, Irene, that you were going to the opera rather than to the morgue,” I remarked the next morning.

  Drawing on champagne-colored kid gloves, she smiled with satisfaction, then spun in the front hall so that the tiered lace flounces of her skirt fluttered like linnets’ wings. Irene’s ensemble was a symphony in mauve and ecru, from pale kid boots to the lace parasol that tilted over her shoulder.

  “Good cheer is always more welcome in a grim place than at a gypsy carnival,” said she.

  “Open umbrellas indoors are bad luck,” I retorted.

  “A parasol is nothing so serious as an umbrella, which is invariably large and black, like a beetle—not petite, dainty and quite harmless, as well as useless.”

  But she collapsed the contraption and rested its ivory ferrule on the hall stones, bracing it like a walking stick. From the front parlor, Casanova loosed an approving (I daresay) whistle.

  “The daintiest thing under a Paris bonnet, I swear,” said Godfrey, negotiating the narrow stairway at a gallop. He bowed to joust with the primroses on Irene’s headgear for brief possession of her cheek.

  “Then we are ready for La Morgue?”

  I retained an expression of neutrality. Godfrey nodded briskly, donning his shiny beaver hat once we had preceded him outside into the late summer.

  At the end of our meandering walkway, coach and coachman, called Andre, stood ready. Birds were trilling their tiny throats out, and bushes whispered in the breeze as the poplar tops along the main road heaved to and fro. It was all too, too utterly bucolic, to paraphrase a London acquaintance, from the thatch-roofed cottage at our back—I glanced at Casanova’s window; the old beggar crowded to his cage bars, and the plump shadow of Lucifer switched its tail in the sunlight on the sill—to the vista before us of fields and sun-flushed sky.

  “Really,” I said. “Why forsake this idyllic retreat for a useless inquiry into the sordid death of an unknown sailor? Have you any notion of how many bodies are pulled from the Seine each year?”

  “No, my dear,” Irene admitted. “Have you?”

  “Certainly not, but it must be... dozens.”

  “Probably hundreds,” Godfrey put in as he saw us into our conveyance.

  “And they are all probably still decomposing at the morgue, waiting to be claimed,” I added.

  “We will claim nothing but the truth,” Irene promised as our carriage rattled down the rutted country lane. “We’ve merely an honest interest in one of these poor drowning victims. Are you sure, Nell, that you don’t wish to claim a kinship? Think of the opportunity for thespian endeavor: the worried sister or cousin, brave but upon the brink of sobs!”

  “Irene, please! I expect I shall be on the brink of quite a different and even more unseemly reaction.”

  Godfrey gazed out of the coach window and whistled like a hedge lark.

  But even I had to admit that Paris sat very prettily under a bonnie-blue bonnet of sky veiled in wispy clouds. The clean construction fretwork of Sacré Coeur indicated the seedy environs of Montmartre, and Notre Dame’s towers dominated the misty distance.

  Cobblestones rang to our horse’s hooves as our coach neared the great cathedral—a green-copper-capped, gray stone mountain rising at the prow of Île de la Cité, the central boat-shaped island on which Old Paris had been founded. Bridges both old and new spanned the Seine’s forked waters, acting as flying buttresses to the Île de la Cité itself.

  On the Left Bank, our horse clopped dutifully past booksellers’ booths to the island’s stern, where the grim Palais de Justice threw up its old and bloody bulwarks. The delicate spire of Sainte-Chapelle lifted from it resembled a pristine white plume on a rather soiled hat.

  Sunlight sparkled from the stately new Hotel Dieu, its pottery chimney tops looming ahead of us like rusty lances. That same daylight did not favor the low, stone building before us. Despite its Greek pediment surmounted by gables and chimneys, La Morgue was a crude, anonymous structure hunkered on the banks of the Seine like a starving dog. From the mercurial river wafted the same fetid odor we had noted when the dead man was tugged ashore at the Île’s other end.

  We all three pressed to the coach windows to gaze at this infamous structure for a sober moment.

  “Not the original morgue building, of course,” Godfrey said. He smiled reassuringly at me. “And certainly not where the victims of the Terror ever lay. That was the Grand-Chalet, demolished early in the century. Its function was soon moved to the Right Bank, nearer to the Louvre, and then—all too appropriately—to a vacated butcher shop on the Left Bank. This is the third location, from my reading of Paris history.”

  “I can quite see why nobody would want it,” said I, frowning at the morgue’s gruesome bulk.

  “No body alive.” Irene beamed upon the grimy, smoke-singed pile as a miser might upon stacked gold louies. “Shall we join them?”

  Île de la Cité thronged with seven-story buildings whose hunched mansard roofs cast us in constant shade. Irene twirled her gay parasol nevertheless. On our left, the Seine flowed by, crowded with flat barges and jaunty “fly boats” crammed with passengers. The quayside was a low, broad road of stone, so to speak, reached by stairs from the tree-lined boulevards above. Along it people strolled, the odd idler lounged, and some poor women even scrubbed their washing, laying it to dry along the stair rail.

  Near the morgue, no such homely activities thrived. Here only silence and shadow hovered over the dark water. A short, narrow bridge led to its gates. From the bridge one could glimpse an odd-looking, wide barge drawn up alongside the morgue, and men with stretchers bearing the dead to line the bottom of the boat.

  “Hardly the watery way to Avalon,” Irene commented. “Let us storm this unpleasant place and be done with it.”

  Godfrey, who had accompanied us with grave restraint thus far—a testimony to his impeccable manners— proved invaluable when we entered the building. The officious Frenchmen within were no match for his fluid mastery of the language and his even more adept command of the national love for debate and rivers of red tape.

  Godfrey produced several thick papers bearing ribbons and sealing wax, the latter engraved with obscure symbols. He waved these and his hands with equal zest at the morgue-keepers we encountered—three of them, each with more numerous badges upon his person and a more pronounced sneer upon his features—until it seemed that Godfrey and his questioners were engaged in an endless, arcane duel of gestures.

  At last we were led past a gate and through a series of vast, echoing chambers, each one as welcoming as a crypt. Godfrey turned to me, recognizing that unlike Irene, I stumbled rather than strode in the French language.

  “I have established my connections with the French legal system and the nature of our query. Now our hosts must consult their records to determine where our particular corpse rests.”

  “How... delightful.”

  “Twelve corpses have been snatched from the Seine’s watery arms in the past two days alone. We would not want to inspect the wrong one.”

  “Certainly not.” I glanced at Irene, who had seemed remarkably meek during the long discussions.

  She read my thought. “A fishwife on the bank may cow the Gallic fisherman; French officials are less susceptible. Observe the fate of the great French beauties during the Terror. Sometimes maidenly reticence has its uses.”

  My shrug concealed a shiver. This great stone pile was as cold as its silent residents.

  The records chamber was a high-ceilinged horror. Our guide leafed through a massive ledger, looking as if he playe
d St. Peter on Judgment Day. Rather than contemplate the depressing number who had died in Paris over the centuries from plague, guillotine and even, I suppose, old age, I studied the architecture.

  My eyes came at last to the sole angelic image amid the empty elegance—a wall-hung plaster likeness of a young girl’s face, her expression rapt, her eyes closed, yet seeming to see straight up to heaven.

  Irene had spied the plaster head also. She was regarding it with an expression less uplifted than my own— rather, with a kind of disbelief, as if this innocent young visage were a marble Medusa that chilled her blood.

  She whispered something to Godfrey, who glanced at the bust and then froze as he imbibed its strange power. He directed our guide’s attention to it.

  A bored glance, a Gallic shrug, a sharp burst of French.

  Godfrey looked again to the face, his features reflecting Irene’s odd expression of distress.

  “What is it, Godfrey?” I asked.

  “She—it—is famous among les inconnues de la Seine. The unknowns of the Seine,” he translated. “Drowning victims who are never identified.”

  “She drowned and was never identified? Then how can she be famous?” I demanded.

  “Her fame is anonymous, but wide nevertheless,” he replied. “She was found decades ago, with an expression so... hellishly... exalted that a death mask was taken from her unclaimed corpse. From that mask, thousands of plaster casts were made; everyone had to have one. She decorated cottages and drawing rooms; for a time women even used a whiter face powder in tribute to her. Then the fashion subsided, as all such enthusiasms do. The morgue still keeps her bust as a memorial.”

  “The expression is remarkable,” I admitted. “Yet the French are shockingly bloodthirsty; I have heard that they took death masks of Louis the Sixteenth and Marie Antoinette fresh from the guillotine.”

  “Not only that,” put in Irene, “but the same young woman who had sculpted the Bourbon royal family in pre-Revolution days was set to molding death masks of the severed heads. She has brought her handiwork to London and has set up an exhibition in Baker Street. ‘Madame Tussaud’s,’ it is called.” Irene smiled savagely. “You and I must visit it some day, when we return.”

  “How grotesque! I am amazed that another address on Baker Street could attract your notice, Irene, you are so taken with No. 221 B. But this girl’s story is macabre, and quite sad. However violently she met death, she must not have feared the afterlife.”

  “How much better,” Irene said, “had she not feared earthly life so much that she welcomed death with such visible joy. This lovely likeness is a monument to inhumanity, not to heaven, Nell. She has given up all hope. That is what much of so-called ‘saintly resignation’ amounts to and why I consider such virtues a sin.”

  I again studied the sculpture—no, the actual, dead face, preserved uncannily all these years. Those empty, unpupiled eyes, that sad, slightly slack mouth. She could have been a seraph about to sing... or a ruined shop girl about to sink. Certainly she had been alive once; alive and obscure, not a curiosity for anyone to gawk upon.

  I clasped my hands, suddenly aware that shadow chilled the dour old building, that stone and plaster and the endlessly lapping river water were cold comfort even to a corpse. The official crackled a stiff page of the ledger as his fingers tripped down another roll of the dead.

  “Aha!” he announced. His finger stabbed a number with no name after it. A moment later he swung a huge hoop of keys from his belt and led us onward.

  Now we went below to even colder climes. Shallow stairs coiled deeper and deeper into the building’s dark belly, lit by oil-fed sconces that exhaled a thick smoke. Various chambers housed the dead in low-ceilinged, cellarlike rooms. We entered one and were ushered to a bier far less polished than Bram Stoker’s dining table.

  “How fortunate they have not yet removed the clothing,” Irene said. I agreed with mute intensity. “What did you say, Godfrey, was our purported relationship to the corpse?”

  “A former servant who had turned to the water trades.”

  “Ah.” She nodded to the left hand that lay upon the rude wood. Its pallor emphasized the coarse black hairs clustered upon the first joints, the grime-caked fingernails, and especially the missing middle finger.

  “An old wound,” Godfrey said. “He might have been born so, save for the scars.”

  “And neatly done,” Irene added, “as if by a cleaver, or a guillotine, hmm? No other finger has been nicked. There is a deliberate look to the injury, as on the man in Chelsea. Is that not so, Nell?”

  “If you mean you expected raw tissue, I concede that there is a certain surgical neatness to the remaining joint. Wouldn’t a physician have attended it afterwards?”

  “Even a surgeon can’t repair a ragged injury. I say this man sacrificed his finger, as did the drowning victim in Chelsea.”

  “Allowed it to be... taken?” Godfrey sounded dubious.

  I also was skeptical. “But that was years ago, Irene. How can that be?”

  “Perhaps both men lost their fingers at the same time, if not their lives.” Irene smiled angelically at the attendant, a morose little man whose mustache ends drooped to his chest. “Mon-see-oor,” she said in studied mispronunciation, “may we—that is—” Her dainty gloved fingers stuttered on a gesture that hovered on the brink of being French before she turned to Godfrey.

  Godfrey intervened manfully with a string of French.

  I stood absorbed in the exchange occurring before me. It was all writ plain on the attendant’s sallow face: polite puzzlement, disbelief, a shocked glance to Irene and myself, stern resistance, uncertainty, reluctance, distaste....

  Through it all, Godfrey’s French flowed like the Seine, placid and unceasing.

  At last the attendant stepped to the corpse and began undoing the man’s clothing with a last glance at us ladies.

  “Anglais,” he murmured in disgust.

  I deeply resented my countrymen bearing the blame for Irene’s brash American curiosity, but I was helpless to protest. And indeed, as the dead man’s chest and shoulders were bared, I could not help feeling a pulse of anticipation: what if he, too, bore a strange ornamental tattoo? Would it mean only that both men—both drowning victims—had been sailors? Or that some other, less apparent, yet possibly sinister, link joined them in death, if not in life?

  Irene sighed unhappily. I leaned past her shoulder to view the pitiful corpse. On a chest upon which black hairs coiled there lay another dark scrolling: the letter “S” in sinuous detail, at least three inches high.

  Irene sighed again.

  “Are you not pleased by this ghoulish discovery, Irene?”

  I drew out my notebook so that she could record the mark. I wished my diaries complete to the last detail, no matter how odious, since they had proven valuable before now.

  “Not only a tattoo, but another letter of the alphabet... and in the same rather rococo style. Proof that ties this poor creature to the man we saw on Bram Stoker’s dining-room table so long ago, though what that can mean, I can hardly conceive... Irene?”

  Irene asked me to sketch the mark, which Godfrey and I immediately compared to the original. To my surprise, the depiction was perfect.

  Irene had ceased regarding the tattoo at all, a rather ungrateful reaction after all that Godfrey and I had undergone in order that she should see it. No, her gaze clung instead to the dead man’s face, an unremarkable, full-featured expanse the color of overbleached table linen.

  “What is it?” Godfrey leaned forward intently. The attendant rolled his eyes and muttered “Anglais” again.

  “I have seen more than I expected,” Irene said at last, straightening from her inspection and handing me the note pad. “The features are not French, but Celtic, as I expected. But I did not anticipate the bruises upon the throat. If only we had examined the Chelsea corpse more thoroughly! This man was throttled first and drowned as an afterthought. Perhaps the man in Chelsea was marked
by attempted strangulation as well.”

  “Perhaps his rescuers caught him by the neck,” Godfrey said. “Surely a more logical explanation.”

  “Forcefully enough to leave marks?” Irene sounded dubious. She noticed the attendant, plucked a lacy handkerchief from her reticule and dabbed her eyes, shaking her head.

  “No, no... no! It is not poor Antoine after all.” Her eyes, miraculously and suddenly red, turned on me. “Is that not true, Philippa? Not whom we seek at all. Thank you, Monsieur.”

  Godfrey translated this false speech to the attendant, but Irene’s acting spoke more strongly than words: the fellow was already ushering us out.

  I managed to trail the trio—I am always being overlooked; it must be due to my inbred Shropshire reticence—and had only moments in which to jot my last impressions onto the note pad before the others reached the archway and I was compelled to join them.

  We left en masse, as we had come, leaving the dead to their meditations. I could not resist a parting glance at the unearthly dead girl’s face pinned like an albino butterfly to her dank stone wall.

  Chapter Six

  A SORDID SUMMONS

  “An Irish-linen handkerchief soaked in ammonia!” Irene announced, producing this repellent item and waving it. “An old melodrama trick.”

  “That explains how you can induce teary, crimson eyes on cue, if not how you are to rid yourself of them,” said I. “What accounts for these two similar and serpentine initials?”

  We three had gathered around the parlor table after dinner to consider the sketches of these curious tattoos by lamplight. Even Casanova had pressed against his cage bars, scrawny head craned over the table and neck feathers ruffled.

  “These letters are elaborate enough to decorate a medieval manuscript,” Godfrey complained, frowning handsomely.

  “If only we had been able to record the tattoos with a camera!” Irene said. “Nell’s eye or hand may have missed some telling detail in the translation from skin to sketch pad. Perhaps the resemblance to letters is meant to mislead us.”