The Adventuress (v5) Read online

  Irene sighed in her turn, and I edged nearer to the fire. It’s uncanny how chill a room becomes at night, even in August, without a fire. If Irene was correct and this decrepit place was an illicit rendezvous, I could not imagine how the guilty parties could stand to commit even something as exhilarating as mortal sin in such icy surroundings.

  “Nell is worried,” Godfrey told Irene.

  She turned as if remembering me, then smiled. “Ah, yes. Keep a good grip upon that candle. We need all the light and warmth we can muster this night. If you are wondering, Godfrey has taken a bath in the Seine.”

  “Is that the... ah, the—” I came to a halt.

  “L’Essence de Seine that you smell,” Godfrey agreed, running a hand through his hair to dry it. “You find me in the fabled position of Bram Stoker: I have attempted to rescue a most uncooperative drowning victim.”

  The closet door swelled with blows as a torrent of fervid French issued from behind it.

  Godfrey said, “I have listened to that for three hours, yet I dare not release her; she would rush immediately for the riverbank again. She has the strength of a madwoman and is quite unreasoning.”

  “Hence the scratches,” Irene told me. “Poor Godfrey; we must wait until we get home to treat your face.”

  He winced as her fingers stroked the edge of his jaw. “I suppose I look a bloody mess. Madame DeFarge at the door certainly required a great many sous to make room for me, but I had to get the girl off the streets.”

  “I suppose she expects to make men pay extra for protesting girls,” Irene said. “You look drier now, and the screen awaits.”

  Godfrey glumly rose, took the carpetbag and went behind the screen. It might have been embarrassing to hear the sounds of his attiring, but the hoarse protests of the rescued girl obscured them.

  Irene looked down into the waning fire, then lifted her skirt and daintily kicked the stool into the embers. I stared at her. She shrugged.

  “Godfrey does not need it now, and we shall soon be free of this place, though we will have our hands full with her.” As she spoke, Irene stepped out of her skirt and petticoats to don a long men’s coat, muffler and bowler hat and stuff the skirts in the empty carpet bag. “Between us, Godfrey and I have paid the woman at the door enough to incinerate the entire establishment.”

  “But, Irene, whatever the reason, to hold this woman against her will is tantamount to kidnapping!”

  “That is why Godfrey sent for us. Perhaps we can instill some reason into her disordered brain.”

  “Us?”

  “As soon as Godfrey is ready, we shall have to attend to her. She is no less subject to chill than he.”

  I turned toward the closet door, which still vibrated with curses and blows. Early in my governess days I had known a hysterical ten-year-old who held his breath until his face turned as scarlet as the Red Sea and his parents acquiesced to his every demand.

  Irene squinted at the crude wooden chair Godfrey had braced under the doorknob. “Besides, we shall soon need that chair for the fire.”

  Godfrey emerged from behind the screen, looking more his usual self, save for the lurid scratches.

  Irene pocketed the revolver in her coat, then nodded to the closet. Godfrey pulled away the chair. The door exploded open as a wet, disheveled creature shot into the room, then halted to blink at each of us in turn.

  The sopping and tangled hair, the wild eyes, the raging energy so uncontained—I had seen them before. A tantrum carried to such extremes becomes dangerous.

  Without thinking, I stepped forward to confront this overwrought, overgrown child, my French crudely accented perhaps, but every syllable imbued with a language I spoke much more fluently: discipline.

  I heard my own commanding tones snap out like a ringmaster’s whip; I spoke as a parent, as a governess.

  “You will take charge of yourself,” I ordered. “You will attend to the disorder in your dress, and then we will address the disorder in your thoughts. Enough of this screaming and kicking. You are not a child. You will behave as an adult. Now, to the fire, for soon you will be shaking with chills. I am Miss Huxleigh. Mrs. Norton and I will see to you. We mean you no harm, which is more than you can say for yourself. What is your name, child? Speak up, we heard you well enough moments ago.”

  She muttered, “Louise.”

  “Ah, Louise, a most suitable name. Come then, there is not a moment to be wasted, child. You must be very tired.”

  Irene was waiting to drape Godfrey’s cast-off blanket over the girl’s shoulders, which began to heave with cold and the icy backwash of excessive emotion. She began sobbing and wailing, rather than kicking and flailing. Irene and I eyed each other over her bent head and nodded our mutual relief.

  Irene spoke then, her French as fluid as the Seine, her tone musically coaxing, all solicitude and sympathy where I had been all iron and starch.

  Godfrey observed us with almost comical amazement before drawing me aside. “The girl was absolutely incorrigible with me. When I insisted that she calm down, she called me a brute. When I soothed her, she accused me of being a seducer. Yet you and Irene play the same old tunes in quick succession and she gentles like a lamb.”

  “It is a matter of delicate timing and decisiveness, Godfrey,” I said with some satisfaction as Irene crooned a French lullaby of little nothings in the girl’s ear.

  Once certified as reasonably dry, Godfrey was sent below to wait with the coachman. Irene and I remained above to extract the distraught girl from her wet clothes.

  Irene repeatedly asked for her family’s name.

  “Non, non!" the waif wailed, shaking her damp hair until rattails whipped at our hovering faces.

  Even when we had lured her to the privacy of the screen, she balked at removing her clothing. “Ruine,” she moaned over and over. “Je suis ruine!"

  I am ruined. Even a sheltered spinster such as myself well knew what that meant. Obviously, a gently bred girl lay beneath the raw despair and hysteria. Some unprincipled man had lured her into a compromising situation. I thought of the angelic plaster face we had seen at the morgue. That poor girl’s story had been sealed by death. No wonder the one before us had fought Godfrey so savagely for saving her life.

  Irene unclasped the cameo pinned to the girl’s soggy collar and handed it to me with a significant glance. Even I, with my dull appreciation of fine jewels, recognized an exquisite carving that surely dated to the last century.

  A gold bangle of good quality circled her right wrist; she fought briefly as I unclasped it. On her left hand, a gash across one knuckle mirrored the scratches Godfrey had suffered.

  Once we began to undo her clothing, she began to struggle again. In vain did Irene urge my freshly laundered skirt and shirtwaist upon her. Louise’s agonized charcoal-hued eyes darkened further and she shook her head, her arms crossed protectively over her chest.

  “Child, you cannot go out into the night in these wet things,” Irene said.

  Her appeals succeeded by degrees; we managed to obtain Louise’s wet petticoats and skirt in exchange for those we had brought. When it came to removing her basque, the girl began twisting and fighting, spinning into herself like a dervish.

  “Basta! ” Irene cried, exasperated into spitting out the Italian word for “enough,” much used in opera librettos.

  Irene’s voice had once held opera audiences spellbound and had caused a callous king to weep. Now it sufficed to arrest the rising hysteria of one young French girl.

  “You must remove your wet basque,” Irene insisted, plucking at the clinging sleeve.

  “I cannot,” the girl sobbed, still girding herself with her arms. “I am ruined. Oh, the shame! And it is not my fault—”

  “It generally is not indeed,” Irene muttered in English before returning to her persuasive French. “My poor dear, we will not hurt you. I am an actress who has heard much both off and on the stage. Nothing is more shameful than a society, a people, who use shame as a weap
on. Please, we are here to help you. Nothing can shock us. We are women of the world.”

  Here I could barely hold my tongue.

  More tears squeezed through Louise’s spiked eyelashes and down her pale cheeks to her collar. She regarded Irene with dawning awe. “An actress, really, Madame? Like the Divine Bernhardt?”

  Irene smiled tolerantly. “Once upon a time. Now I am a respectable married woman—yes! You see how the past can be overcome.”

  The girl nodded and allowed us to begin unlatching the myriad hooks down her back. “But my stain will not wash away,” she said on a rising note, “not even with time.”

  “All things fade with time,” Irene hushed her.

  “Not this!” Louise blazed with sudden fury, like a fire fed fresh fuel. She tore the bodice from her left shoulder, the hooks parting with a metallic wrench.

  From concealment came revelation.

  Irene and I stared transfixed at the tattoo glistening just above Louise’s cameo-pale breast. It was a vivid, fresh representation of the letter “E.”

  Chapter Eight

  A TROUBLE OF TATTOOS

  “It is barbaric!” Godfrey paced our front parlor. “And she still refuses to return to her home?”

  “She will not even say where she resides.” Irene idly slid the third sketched initial across the polished table-top.

  “Awraaaack, barbaric!” the parrot seconded with its ready grasp of key new words.

  Irene looked up to regard Casanova’s one visible unblinking eye for a long moment. He spit “Cut the cackle” from the side of his beak and edged down his wooden perch.

  “I believe that she is calm enough to tell you the tale now,” Irene told Godfrey.

  His pacing stopped. “I don’t want to hear it.” His hands lifted as if to repel an onslaught of candor. “The entire incident fairly makes my blood boil. This young woman is obviously from good family. If she were my sister—!”

  Irene was unstirred. “You shall have to quell your imagined fraternal indignation and hear the facts, Godfrey. Louise owes her rescuer an explanation for her resistance, not to mention an apology for having disfigured his face for a fortnight. And you may discern some clue to the affair in her account.”

  Godfrey, newly attired and looking fresh in every respect, including the rawness of his wounds, grimaced in the direction of the mirror. I shared Irene’s disturbance at seeing his not uncomely face so marked for having undertaken a singularly humanitarian act.

  “I am not certain that I am as solicitous of the girl’s welfare as I once was.” Godfrey patted his cheek tenderly.

  “Then what of my welfare?” Irene asked softly. His inquiring look brought plainer words. “I confess that the violence done this young woman draws me even more deeply into the puzzle of these tattooed dead men. I elicited but the bare bones of her story; you are a master of the courtroom query and may string the factual skeleton into some recognizable shape. Besides, Mademoiselle Louise must learn that not all men will misuse her. She could do no better than to begin that lesson with you.”

  “Thank you, Irene.” Godfrey’s jaw tightened; then he turned to me. “But I shall be lost without my faithful amanuensis. Nell, will you be so good as to take notes? We may as well treat this as a formal inquiry. If her family is as highly placed as I believe, the police may eventually figure in it.”

  “It may come to even more formality than a police inquiry,” Irene said grimly. “Behind the disparate pieces of this puzzle there lurks a vastly complex scheme that has shadowed many lives and threatens to cripple others before it is ended.” She went upstairs to fetch the unfortunate girl.

  “Doesn’t it strike you, Godfrey,” said I in her absence, “that Irene weaves conspiracy on a very broad loom? The likelihood of your happening to rescue a suicidal girl whose distress is related to a pair of tattooed sailors drowned in two great rivers many years apart—”

  “—is not the mad coincidence you hope, Nell.” He smiled, then winced as the expression stretched his scratches. “I was strolling by the Seine, puzzling over the tattoos, and was very near the spot where you and Irene saw the dead man drawn from the water. It was then that I noticed Louise thrashing about in the river.”

  “But that low, dead sailor could have had nothing to do with a genteel girl such as Louise!”

  Godfrey shrugged. “Irene is right. The sinews that bind together any sequence of events seldom resemble one another. Clues are no more than connective tissue, vital for their function, not for their substance.”

  Footfalls in the passage announced the girl’s approach under Irene’s gentle shepherding.

  Louise entered, and we both stared. Dried, brushed and soothed by an actress’s expert hands, she cut quite a different figure in our cozy, lamplit parlor, with its English chintz, rush-seated chairs and gathered draperies, than the one she had presented in the house of ill repute.

  Louise was a more weighty young woman than she had appeared at first; no wonder Godfrey had been hard put to rescue her. The lamplight revealed large, expressive, almost black eyes and shining, nutmeg-colored hair, a piquant but decidedly stubborn profile, and hands that seemed far too dainty to have inflicted the scratches that even now seared Godfrey’s cheeks.

  Eyes cast down, she settled into the chair Irene indicated and crossed her ankles. I noticed that Irene’s generosity had extended to the loan of my best black-kid house slippers and hoped that Louise’s equally generous feet would not stretch them.

  Godfrey and I knew, of course, that Irene already had plied our guest with soft, glancing queries; it was time for a concerted interrogation.

  “You are feeling better?” Godfrey began courteously.

  “I am dry, Monsieur, and warm. Yet I feel no better.” Even, white teeth pressed a pale lower lip. “Madame Norton has told you of the... attack?”

  “You must not blame yourself. It was through no fault of yours. Perhaps you would care to share the circumstances with us.” Louise remained silent. “As a barrister, I may find some way of discovering and punishing the culprits.”

  “What is there to discover?” the girl cried suddenly. “Except to know that these men are, were, mad!” The outburst propelled Louise forward, her white-knuckled hands clutching the arms of the chair.

  She sank back, exhausted and troubled, looking twice her likely age. “Oh, Monsieur Norton, your wife has assured me that you are a wise and sympathetic man, that your own sister was the victim of a similar senseless attack—”

  Here Godfrey and I looked to Irene, who shrugged as if to say: well, you gave me the notion, Godfrey....

  “I understand your interest,” Louise went on, “and I truly apologize for resisting your noble efforts to save me. I was quite mad in my own way by then, having awakened in a strange place in an even stranger condition. It was unclear in my mind what had happened; I assumed the worst upon finding my basque disarranged. Then I felt a dull ache and discovered the... disfigurement. Not only had the villains abducted me, but they had marked me forever with their cruelty and my shame!”

  “Barbaric,” Godfrey murmured in a low, angry voice, so sincerely that Louise looked directly at him for the first time. She was barely twenty, I estimated, and certainly not immune to so dashing a champion as Godfrey.

  “My dear young woman,” he said, sensing his advantage, “you must tell me the exact circumstances if I am to help. Who were ‘these villains’? When and where did they abduct you?”

  Louise forced her hands to her lap, where they folded and remained as still as if cast in plaster.

  “First, Monsieur, you must understand my position. I am of good family”—smug looks were exchanged at this confirmation of previous speculation—“though of impoverished circumstances. My mother died in childbirth and my father, distraught, began to lead the careless, dissolute existence that was to end his days prematurely.

  “I became the care of my Aunt Honoria, no relative save by marriage, but devoted to me and very kind. Her husband b
ecame my guardian. Uncle Édouard was Father’s older brother; to him had gone all the family’s lands and assets.

  “As I grew older, I learned of my father’s weaknesses, particularly for games of chance. I also learned that my uncle might provide me with some small dowry should I prove myself a steady, well-behaved person prone to none of my father’s follies.

  “I cannot complain of my childhood, though Uncle Édouard was remote and stern, as if expecting me to follow in my father’s footsteps. Aunt Honoria was my salvation, particularly when my father died in so shocking a manner.”

  Louise paused. We kept silent, each wondering how to broach the indelicate subject.

  Casanova’s voice floated from the other room: “What? What?” he croaked.

  “What manner, you ask?” Poor Louise was so distracted that she had not noticed the nonhuman nature of her interlocutor. “By the rope. Oh, not by legal decree, but by his own hand. In Monte Carlo. The casino, you see. He had lost everything, save the little that remained. I was only five. From that moment on, Uncle Édouard began to watch me as if I, too, would succumb at any instant to gambling fever, or to scandal, or to some misstep.

  “It was only long after my father’s death, which was highly publicized of course, that letters began coming to Uncle from Central America, London, the south of France, even from Africa. They began three years ago and upset him enormously. After one was received, he would glare at me as if I were a criminal. The entire household came to dread the appearance of one of these ominous missives upon the silver salver in the front hall. All of our breaths hushed, mistress and maid alike, until Uncle came home at six o’clock and read the post. The letters were sealed with a clot of marbled black-and-crimson wax impressed with some strange device. The sealing wax smelled of sandalwood.”

  ‘The wax was foreign, then?” Godfrey inquired.

  “So it struck me.”

  “But the letters came from many nations,” Irene put in.