Chapel Noir Read online

  “Ah. The Red Indians, you mean.”

  “Ah, the White Devils, I mean.”

  “Is that not an English play by Webster?”

  “You have me there, Nell, as usual. No, what I mean is that because you have not been exposed to the incivilities of life that I and Pink have—”

  “That chit!”

  Irene eyed me until I blushed. “She is most forward,” I said.

  “Perhaps she has had need to be.” Her look was so abstracted that

  she spoke to herself more than me. “He, of course would make a thorough job of it. It is not enough to see signs if you cannot read them.”

  I did not ask who “he, of course” was. “We have the contents of my needle case,” I said in consolation, removing it from my pocket.

  “Which are teasingly familiar to me, but not in this form.” She frowned as she took the slender enamel container to a white-marble table topped by a great-globed lamp.

  Sitting beside the table, she shook a pale brown fragment onto the glaring marble.

  “A crumb, as you said,” I suggested as I followed her to the impromptu specimen table. “But why would anyone have eaten in there?”

  “A crumb could have been picked up on a boot or shoe and have dropped off in the murder chamber.”

  “Then it could have dropped off the footwear of those poor women.”

  I fought the memory of their feet, one of the few recognizable portions of their anatomy, clad in rumpled silken hose and embroidered satin shoes. Cinderella shoes. And then I remembered the Grimm fairy tale about the girl whose bloodred shoes would not come off until she had danced to her death.

  Irene lifted my spectacles to her face again, peering at the single crumb as through a lorgnette. “Not bread, though brown and crumbly. Yet it reminds me of something. Ah, well.” Her smallest fingernail prodded the mote back into the Oriental needle case, which I could finally think of again by its proper name, etui. It was shocking to think that my humble case had carried a grain of evidence from a scene of such chaos.

  “The police are right about one thing,” Irene said.

  I waited.

  “They will not know what really happened here until they examine the bodies at the morgue.”

  “You don‘t believe that we—?”

  “Should view the remains? The police would not let us, and even our anonymous . . . er, client, would not be interested in our opinion of that.”

  Irene straightened and absently turned down the lamp, an economy we practiced at Neuilly because the oil for them must be hauled in by the barrel.

  Here, in this palace of luxurious decadence, I believe her gesture was an instinctive effort to soften the bright light and harsh shadows that made every scene seemed etched in the black-and-white cartoon of a sensational newspaper drawing.

  “What do you know of the Jack the Ripper murders in London, Nell?” she asked.

  I started, guilty. I recalled feeling the same unhappy emotion what now seemed ages ago (and had only been hours ago), when I realized that I relished the notion of Irene and I alone together again.

  Indeed we were.

  I started guiltily now because last autumn I had suffered from an irresistible curiosity about that string of atrocities in the city we had left in haste only months before. I had such a case of curiosity, in fact, that I devoured any English-language newspapers available. Luckily, Godfrey acquired them regularly for the political and legal news. Naturally, after seeing the lurid sketches of the Whitechapel horrors, my jaded eyes saw this far-removed death scene as drawn in charcoal on dun-colored paper.

  “I ask,” Irene said, “because I confess I did not pay them much attention, except to be glad of leaving a capital that was so beset.”

  “Oh. You do not know much about them.” What a rare opportunity. I personally thought that Irene was rarely interested in newspapers unless she was in them. “I could hardly avoid reading of the atrocities. Truly, a madman was abroad. He was so often almost glimpsed, yet still eluded everyone, like some ogre out of a wicked fairy tale, chopping up children, except these women were hardly innocents. No reason for it all but unreasoning savagery. It did not seem at all English.”

  “No?” Irene’s gaze was piercing. “What of Balaclava? Or Mai-wand?”

  “Well, that was war. Men murdering men, and used to it. Whatever those poor women were, they were defenseless.”

  “And poor, quite literally.” Irene sighed and handed me the etui. “Store this for a while. It is time to revisit Pink. Now that we have seen what she has seen, she will be more forthcoming.”

  “Why so?”

  “Shared shock creates bonds between strangers.”

  “And why should we want a bond with a girl who is already on the path to perdition?”

  Irene leaned close enough to whisper, every word clipped. “Because we might change her path, Nell. Is that not a noble goal?”

  “But it would require consorting with a fallen woman.”

  “And how are they to be kept from falling even more if the righteous will not consort with them?”

  “I suppose they won’t. But the chance for infection—”

  “You are saying that the righteous are weak?”

  “No. Only that evil is contagious.”

  “So,” said Irene, “is ignorance. I believe that if we can discover why someone would kill these women in such a fashion, we shall know a great deal more about evil, and righteousness, than we did before.”

  “Oh, my head is spinning like a compass. We should not be here. We should not be inquiring into these morbid matters: we should not be encouraging a girl of tender years in a life of depravity.”

  Irene drew back, some of the censorious glint in her eyes dimming. “This place is depraved, I’ll grant you that, Nell.” Her expression softened as it rested on my troubled expression. “That young woman will be better for sharing her horror. Perhaps this incident will cure her of a life of luxurious vice,” she added dryly.

  “That is true,” I agreed, hastening after her out the door with new heart. “One theory about Jack the Ripper was that he sought to discourage women from taking to the streets.”

  “An annuity would have perhaps been more persuasive,” Irene threw over her shoulder. “I am so relieved that you have some acquaintance with the previous work of this monster.”

  It was one of those times when I sensed that Irene’s words were as double-edged as the most lethal of swords, but I could not say why, nor determine who was the recipient of her highly honed instincts, Jack the Ripper, or I.

  Pink had not moved. She might have been the portrait she had resembled when I first saw her.

  Her head lifted as we entered the room, and I realized that our ammonia-scoured nostrils were failing to detect the new odor of the charnel house that clung to our clothing.

  Pink’s face hid in her open hands. “You’ve seen it.”

  “As much as we can make out,” Irene agreed, resuming her former seat.

  “Both of you?” Pink asked incredulously, lifting her eyes from her fingertips like a naughty child peeping through them. They queried me.

  “Both of us,” I said. “It is not necessary to smoke little cigars to face death.”

  “But it is so much more dramatic,” Irene put in, producing one of the objects in question and lighting it. “All of the gentlemen entertaining firing squads do it.”

  Her motion distracted Pink’s attention from me. Really, she was a charming girl, and I could not believe she had been fully corrupted. I sensed of a sudden that Irene’s cigar was masking any unkind odors that clung to us.

  “You are a most dramatic individual, Madam.” Pink regarded Irene almost as intently as Irene was regarding her. “I take it that you and Miss . . . Foxleigh—”

  “Huxleigh,” I hastened to correct.

  “I take it that you both have encountered recently dead people before.”

  “Recently,” Irene agreed, “and not-so-recently dead.
Is that not right, Nell?”

  “Only twice,” I said. “I would have been content to leave it at that.”

  “Well,” said Pink, “you two are certainly good scouts about it. I’m sure that I would have not been so upset if only I’d had a chance to go west instead of east, and had seen the frontier life for myself. I apologize, ladies, for acting like such a fading violet.”

  I felt like something of a fading violet myself, now that I had heard the young lady’s Americanisms in full flower. And she still seemed such a placid and well-bred girl for a harlot.

  “I should worry had you not been upset,” Irene said. “But why did you go east instead of west, and how did you end up in the trade you follow?” She sounded as if she were interviewing a dressmaker and not a globe-trotting tart.

  “I was the thirteenth of my father’s fifteen children,” she began.

  “Good heavens,” I cried, “fifteen!”

  She went on as if I had not spoken. “My father died when I was just six, and my mother, who had outlived one husband before him, was eventually forced to take another to avoid utter poverty for herself and the six children she had borne my father. Although my father had been a respected judge, he died without a will, and any assets were scattered among the children. My mother left the marriage with some furniture, the horse and carriage, the cow, and one of the dogs, and you will quickly see that most of her ‘inheritance’ required even more feeding than her six children.”

  “So you plead poverty for your profession,” I suggested in a tone more kindly than critical.

  It was not taken thus. Pink’s hazel eyes darkened with temper. “I plead nothing, and apologize for nothing.” Her gaze returned, mild again, to Irene.

  “Within three years of my father’s death we had been forced to sell the horse and carriage and cow, and had acquired a stepfather, a Civil War veteran.”

  “Wonderful,” I interjected, eager for a happy—and quick—end to this story. “A soldier is just the sort of upright model for fatherless children. One of my charge’s uncles—I was a governess for a brief time—fought in Afghanistan. Quite the dashing hero when he returned.”

  Pink’s utterly emotionless eyes turned on me. “Jack Ford was a mean, drunken lout we suffered for five years. He berated my mother for money, but never brought any home himself, called her names I suppose no Englishwoman wishes to admit exist, and one New Year’s Eve when mother and us children went to church against his wishes, he threatened mother with a pistol and instant death.”

  “Military life does not agree with all men,” I put in lamely.

  “So,” said Irene, “how soon after that did it end?”

  “How did you know it would end soon?”

  “Because it could not go on without bloody murder otherwise. And if your father had killed your mother or your brother, that is where your story would have begun.”

  Pink shrugged. “Nine months after that New Years’ Eve he went berserk again, at dinner. He flung his coffee to the floor—”

  (In that I could not condemn the man, but I refrained from saying so.)

  “—threw the meat bone at my mother, then drew a loaded pistol from his pocket. My brother Albert and I jumped between them to allow our mother to escape out the front door. The other children followed.”

  “And you were not even living in the Wild West,” I murmured in distress.

  Another flat look. “There is nothing wild about Pennsylvania except the turkeys, Miss Huxleigh.”

  I could not seem to speak without irritating this artlessly immoral young lady, so I subsided.

  “It was obviously the end of the marriage,” Irene said.

  “Right.” Pink’s cheeks were flushing to match her gown. “Jack Ford nailed the doors and windows shut and went in and out by way of a ladder. When Mother finally got in a week later to get the furniture, the house was a wreck. There was nothing to do but the unthinkable. She sued for divorce.”

  I gasped. Yes, I had resolved to comment no more, but divorce was a scandal of such proportions that I imagine it even shook this backwater town in Pennsylvania.

  Pink looked straight ahead, as if my gasp echoed a legion of them years ago.

  “I testified, and so did Alfred.”

  “How old were you?” Irene asked.

  “Old enough. Fourteen. Mother’s was one of only fifteen divorce actions in the county that year, and one of only five brought by the wife. The neighbors testified that Jack Ford was usually drunk, never provided for her, swore at and cursed her, threatened her with a loaded gun, had kicked and broken the household furniture, had ‘done violence to her person,’ as they put his beating her. They also testified that she had always washed and ironed his shirts (though I had seen him throw them on the floor when she was done and dirty and throw water on them so she’d have to do them all over again), bought and paid for his underwear out of her own money and was never cross or ugly to him, no matter how he treated her.”

  Her tone had become positively corrosive.

  “She got the divorce, but the shame of it forced her to leave the town.”

  “And you, Pink?” Irene inquired softly.

  “I determined to make my own way in the world, and that did not include marrying any man.”

  I opened my mouth to point out that she had “married” many men, thanks to her immoral profession, but Irene was giving me such a stern look urging silence that I converted my gesture into a yawn, which Young Pink’s recent lurid testimony of married life in America, guns and all, hardly merited.

  No one was paying me the slightest attention after that, anyway.

  “A truly sad history,” Irene said soothingly. “Now we know that you have been a fine and brave witness from an early age, tell us exactly what happened, remembering that you need not spare us any impression, any fact. We are all women of the world, after all,” she added most speciously.

  “Right. Women of the world.” The phrase seemed to infuse the girl with backbone. “It was like this: I am new to the place, and was taking a . . . stroll to get my bearings.”

  “Then you were not expected in that particular chamber?”

  “Oh, no. I wasn’t expected to do anything except dress myself up, with the help of the French maid, and make myself available for inspection later. But . . . I am never one to wait well.”

  “Nor I,” said Irene.

  “Patience,” I put in, “is a supreme virtue.”

  Pink eyed me. “Maybe in your line of work, if you have one. Not mine.”

  Our return had indeed made her bold.

  She resumed her story, directing her words and glances to Irene.

  “So I was looking things over, peeking into this room and that to get the lay of the land, when I tried to push open the door to that room.”

  “Tried?”

  “Yes, ma’am! It didn’t open at first. The handle was stiff. But I pushed, and I was in like Blackstone the magician.”

  “Did you determine what kept the door from opening at first?”

  “No. I forgot that the moment I took my first breath over the threshold. I am from western Pennsylvania at least, and we have a few barnyards nearby, but I never smelled anything quite like that.”

  “Except in Les Halles,” I murmured.

  “Oh. I’ll not go there again. Slipping on pig’s intestines and all that.”

  “It is an honest marketplace,” I said.

  Her cheeks pinked scarlet at my meaning, and I suddenly understood the reason for her nickname.

  “I won’t be lectured,” Miss Pink told me sharply. “I’ve been on my own for some time now, and do the best I can.”

  “Have you done it here?” Irene asked. “Yet?”

  Pink’s cheeks remained cherry red. “None of your business, Missus Adler Norton. I have just been introduced to the house and procedures before that is made formal. I was strolling about to get acquainted with the lay-out. I hadn’t reckoned on finding what I found, though at first I could
n’t quite make out what was what.”

  “Were all the lamps still on?”

  “Bright as sunshine. If the odor had not warned me . . . but I soon saw the blood, then realized—”

  “What did you realize?”

  “That he’d done it again. The Ripper. The way those two women were cut up, carved up.”

  “How good a look did you get?”

  “I tiptoed as close as I could without . . . well, getting sick. You can’t really see much.”

  “Thankfully.” Irene doused the second little cigar end in the graveyard of the first. “I should like you to come home with us.”

  “Home?”

  Seeing an opportunity to save a soul, I leaped. “The most charming cottage in a village near here, Neuilly. Of course what is considered a cottage in France would be a country manse in England. We have a parrot there, and a cat, even a mongoose. And some . . . snakes.” My list trailed off. Miss Pink’s hazel eyes were not widening in youthful interest.

  “I have seen snakes before, Miss Huxleigh. We had plenty around Crooked Creek.”

  “Crooked Creek?” I repeated faintly.

  “Well, it’s no worse than Pondham-on-Rye or dozens of other English hamlets that are named like something you eat rather than live in. Wild western Pennsylvania’s the place I hail from, and I am proud of it.”

  “I am from New Jersey myself,” Irene put in, thus sealing the alliance between the Americans. “Tame eastern New Jersey.”

  “New Jersey? Really? How did you come to live near Paris?”

  “If you would join us in our palatial cottage”—here Irene glanced at me a bit sardonically—“I’d have time to tell you.”

  “Oh, no.” Pink’s curled head shook firmly. “I went to far too much trouble getting established at this place to leave now.”

  I made one last plea. “But surely the murders are enough to encourage removal! And you have not even, even—” I could not find a single phrase to decently describe what Pink had not yet committed.

  She stood, picked up the brandy glass, and finished its contents in one swallow.

  “I am sorry if my temporary shock misled you, Miss Huxleigh, but I am quite a determined sinner and not about to give up my chosen profession. Thanks for the invitation.” She glanced to Irene and back to me with a bright, brave smile. “I have work to do here, and am not in the market for ‘saving.’ ”