The Adventuress (v5) Read online

  “You met the woman only once, and briefly, Irene. How can you be so certain?” Godfrey had leaned his elbow on a pile of books, looking as worn as a student who has stayed up too late.

  “You heard Louise herself say that her aunt was the only influence that made life in her uncle’s house bearable. Oh, what an error has been made!”

  “You refer to our decision to return Louise to her home as if nothing had happened?” I queried.

  “I refer to my decision in returning Louise to her home at all! It was obvious. The poor child was so convinced that her ordeal would make her an outcast to her relatives that she attempted to drown herself. Even an idiot detective like le Villard might have deduced a troubling severity in family life from that.

  “But, no, I must concoct a method of hiding the girl’s supposed fault, when the real flaw lay in the family situation. And into that situation I sent Louise, armed only with a jar of vanishing cream!

  “Godfrey, we must visit the Montpensier residence at once. I will not rest until I discover what has happened to Louise, and by whose hands.”

  Chapter Ten

  AUTUMN OF THE HOUSE OF MONTPENSIER

  The House of Montpensier resembled the falling House of Usher in Mr. Poe’s gloomy story. It was a gray, gaunt, raddled edifice. Stains veined the ancient mansard roof that drooped its hooded eyelids over the dark and melancholy gable windows.

  Although travelers wax rapturous over the narrow residences of Paris, with their rows of tall French windows, I find such architecture pinched and consumptive- looking. And although fog and smoke seldom clog the parks of Paris as they smother the London byways, the same sooty tracks of crowded urban life that veil London streak Parisian landmarks.

  So, in the chill rain through which we viewed it on that gray, early autumn afternoon, the house of Montpensier reminded me of a haughty French dowager whose face paint was melting.

  Godfrey upheld a black umbrella broad enough to shield myself and Irene on either side. We each wore unadorned black, as suited visitors to a house of mourning.

  Before we had left Neuilly, I had objected to my presence on the expedition, but Irene had overridden my protestations. “Of course you shall come, Nell! After all, you’ve met Louise, too. Besides, this is a most delicate mission. I will need all the aid I can get.”

  “How should it not be delicate?” I wondered aloud. “You have no connection whatsoever to the bereaved family. I am amazed that you would intrude at such a time.”

  “I must. How else can I make amends?”

  Irene’s expression of concern in no way resembled one of her habitual exaggerations for effect. I, too, sorrowfully recalled the soft brown rabbit who had been Louise Montpensier, alive in our Neuilly residence but days before.

  “It is settled!” Irene declared, rejoicing in the face of my silence. I know of no one else who can always find such cause for optimism in mere hesitancy.

  Godfrey took me aside moments later. “My dear Nell, I know it offends your sense of propriety to accompany Irene on her investigations”—I sniffed at the notion of ennobling this questionable outing with such a word—“but I also am most anxious to clear up matters. You, being less intimately involved in the tragedy, can offer a perspective unclouded by—”

  “Guilt?” I suggested.

  Godfrey nodded. “As a clergyman’s daughter, you know better than most that such an emotion can poison... or purge.”

  “I see. I suppose that if you put my presence in the light of a spiritual advisor—”

  “Exactly! You are so sensitive. You may perceive the true mind of the aunt, whom Irene believes to be falsely accused. You may detect—”

  “The true guilt,” I supplied.

  “Indeed. We rely upon you.”

  “In that case, I shall object no more.”

  “Wonderful!” Godfrey clapped me on the shoulder as if I had volunteered for foreign service. I began to see myself as a shuttle caught in the opposing pull of two highly persuasive threads of vastly different hue but of similar resilience.

  Actually, I believe that the necessity of converting me to their viewpoints provided both of my friends with a challenge they required on a daily basis, as athletes require exercise. I admit to taking a certain satisfaction in also providing them with an opponent of some mettle.

  Our living arrangement might strike some as bizarre, but in truth it suited each of our natures, as well as befitting social practice. It is not uncommon, of course, for inconvenient persons such as myself—that is to say, spinsters—to affix themselves to relations on some tenuous excuse and become family fixtures.

  Indeed, the occupation of governess is predicated upon just such a system, save that there is no blood relation and the children’s inevitable maturation forces a governess to change family circles from time to time.

  Since I had no near relations, I was doomed to a solitary existence unless I sought a lodgings partner, as I had found in Irene. I felt quite capable of leading a solitary life; at times, in fact, I felt that I should insist upon it. But it was far more agreeable to reside with Irene, as before, and Godfrey, as now—the one my dear and longtime friend, the other my respected erstwhile employer and advocate.

  Any fears of inadvertently interfering in their marital life soon had proven themselves moot. Godfrey and Irene were, for all their charm and bravado, obsessively private persons. I seldom glimpsed the more intimate side of their lives, or if I did, perhaps I was too inexperienced to mark its symptoms.

  So we three lived as congenial members of one household, at times prone to differences or fits of pique, but always respecting one another and relishing the interplay that challenged our individual assumptions.

  For myself, I enjoyed the role of ever-reliable brake to their imperious progress against the grain of propriety and convention. For their part, it cheered them enormously, I believe, to have so near at hand a person upon whom to exercise their considerable force of personality and persuasive abilities. Nowadays Irene had no “audience” save me to manipulate, and Godfrey no “jury” but myself to argue before.

  So we had forged a natural chain of three links that occasionally pulled one against the other, paradoxically reinforcing the strength of the connection rather than weakening it.

  That is why we stood together in the twilight rain before the Montpensier mansion. It is also why Irene and Godfrey solicited my opinion. They had seen the residence before; mine was the fresh eye.

  “A forbidding place,” I said.

  “Of course, it is raining,” Irene said doubtfully. “The house struck me simply as imposing on the evening that Godfrey and I returned little Louise to it.”

  Since her death, Louise had acquired the adjective “little,” a sign that Irene’s strong sense of injustice had been stirred to action.

  “What were your impressions of the Montpensier couple?” I inquired in my role of uncompromised observer.

  Irene and Godfrey consulted each other silently past the crepe veiling of my bonnet. I had never been so aware that they exceeded me in height until we huddled under the same umbrella.

  “Strained,” Irene pronounced.

  “Suspicious,” Godfrey said.

  “Imagine how much more so they will be now that Louise is not merely overdue, but dead.” It cheered me immensely to inject the proper sobriety into our expedition. “Shall we enter?”

  The tall manservant who admitted us was as beefy as a pugilist, with a tuppence-size crimson mark on his left temple.

  “Monsieur and Madame Norton, and Mademoiselle Huxleigh, come to convey our sympathies to Monsieur and Madame Montpensier,” Godfrey said.

  “I will say you are here,” the man promised after accepting our outer garments. He lumbered off in squeaking shoes.

  “There is no fire in the grate,” Irene whispered with a shiver. “And that servant seemed far too surly for a butler.”

  I, too, was struck by the icy, deathly still atmosphere. The hall’s stone tiles da
rkened under our conjoined dripping until the floor resembled the carpet upon which Bram Stoker’s unfortunate corpse had rained years before.

  At length the dour manservant returned to lead us to a parlor. There we found the establishment’s master, the uncle of Louise’s narrative himself, staring down into the pallid flames of a dying fire.

  I received an impression of hulking, tapestry-upholstered furniture with gilded legs and arms gleaming in the fitful firelight. So dark were the shadows that a circle of huge hounds with golden collars and halters might have been crouching silently around us. Certainly my imagination cast bogeymen into the corners of this gloomy chamber. The man occupying it did nothing to disperse them.

  “Monsieur Montpensier.” Irene glided to the fireside in a rustle of black taffeta. “Allow us to express our most sincere condolences on the loss of Louise. Monsieur le Villard has told us the sad facts.”

  The man whirled to face her, revealing a scornful aristocratic aspect. He would have been distinguished in appearance had life not softened his character. World- weary features sagged over their bony underpinnings like melted wax. “What did the so-called detective tell you?” he demanded.

  Godfrey stepped forward at the uncle’s harsh tone. “He spoke of your niece’s apparent death, Monsieur, of the difficulty it has caused your household.”

  “Difficulty! Hah.” The man glanced to the servant, who still slouched on the threshold like a negligent guard. “You hear that, Pierre? The girl has been naught but a difficulty. This last is... only this last.”

  So this was Pierre, the uncle’s personal servant who had dogged Louise’s final footsteps. He was indeed a sinister figure. Yet he played butler in this awful house.

  “How did she die? Where, when?” Irene was asking with true concern.

  The uncle turned his back on us, fanned his hands over the fire, then gestured beyond the brocade-draped windows. “Behind the house lies an ancient mere. Animals are always falling into it. Louise was seen visiting it frequently by dark, or so the servants”—he glanced at Pierre—“reported even before her sudden ‘illness’ in the city. Two nights ago—a scant day after you returned her—Louise was observed leaving the house. Two cloaked figures met near the mere. When the house was alerted, I found only my wife there, and a silk scarf that Louise used to wear against the evening chill.”

  “Then there is no certainty—”

  The fellow turned to stare at Godfrey, his once-handsome face as adamant as if carved in salt. “There is certainty,” he said with satisfaction. “The gendarmes dredged the area. They raised a sunken tree limb; on it was snagged the bracelet Louise has worn since a girl. Her father had given it to her.”

  “May I see it?” Irene stepped forward, a graceful hand outstretched. Most men would have put something in it without thinking, for this was a woman who had received jewels from the King of Bohemia, as well as from the king of aristocratic commerce, Charles Lewis Tiffany.

  “See it, Madame?” Monsieur Montpensier looked as if he would spit. “What is to see but a tawdry bauble my worthless brother bestowed long ago on his wife, and later on his daughter? They are all dead now, the end of an enervated line.”

  “Still, I would like to see it.”

  He looked away. “Honoria has hidden it. That is another quarrel the police have with her. She was always sentimental. The bracelet was, like my brother Claude, worth virtually nothing. The police may want its return as evidence if there is a trial.” He seemed unconcerned that his wife would likely be in the dock should such an event transpire.

  “Where is your wife?”

  He nodded upward with a sharp, contemptuous motion. “The detectives questioned her, though she had no answers. Honoria is too milk-hearted to have drowned Louise. The girl’s stubborn nature accounts for her death. Of late she grew absentminded and even more unreliable. Some frivolous errand or another was always drawing her to the heart of Paris.”

  “Which is why you assigned the dependable Pierre to escort her,” Irene said with a smile.

  “Someone had to watch the chit! You yourselves saw the trouble she had caused herself and others—evading Pierre, then falling faint among strangers. Oh, I suppose I am sorry for her passing, but she brought it upon herself, as her father did his fate, and I cannot excuse that.”

  “May we see your wife?” Irene asked. “I am sure the loss, coupled with these accusations, must threaten to unseat her reason.”

  “Reason! That’s it. I ask you, what reason would my wife have to kill my niece? So I demanded of the detective, le Villard. My niece was penniless as well as senseless. No one had anything to gain from her death, certainly not I nor Honoria; that is why the idiotic detectives have had to cease questioning my wife. As for Honoria, she is mad herself. See her if you wish, and good luck to you!”

  I was glad to retreat to the chamber doors after this dialogue. Pierre still stood guard there, his birthmark gleaming at us like a bloody coin in the fire-flash. Irene murmured thanks to the ungrateful uncle and we rustled out in our black garb into the forbidding hall.

  Pierre fetched a candelabra; by its wavering light we were led up a long, dusty spiral of stairs. Near the top, gilt valances glittered above the windows. I almost expected to find the noxious Casanova perched upon one, ready to call down a greeting. “Nevermore,” perhaps?

  When Pierre knocked at a door in the upper hall, I was not prepared for the harsh, thick voice that answered. “Yes?” it croaked resentfully.

  “Pierre,” the servant said.

  “Away, you ghoul!” a woman shouted, unaware of our presence.

  Pierre shrugged with sour French indifference and turned to depart.

  “Wait.” Irene knocked gently on the chamber door. “Madame Montpensier, it is the American woman and the Englishman who found Louise several days ago. We would speak with you.”

  “No!”

  “Madame, please, I beg you. We wish to offer our sympathies. We were quite taken with Louise—”

  “Go away, can’t you? I’ve had enough talk, enough questions!”

  “Madame—”

  Godfrey intercepted Irene’s gloved hand before it could knock again and shook his head.

  I shook mine as well. These two, master and mistress of courtroom and stage, had no notion of how to approach a sulking individual, especially one considered a likely murderess. Such a person must be firmly led. I neared the door and mustered my best French.

  “Madame. It is possible that you yourself have slain your niece, in which case I can understand why you would not wish to see anyone. It is also possible that Louise’s death was a terrible accident, in which case you would wish to know how kindly she spoke of you, only days past.”

  A long silence.

  Then a lock turned, a hinge groaned, and the massive wooden door swung inward. Shrinking behind it was a tiny woman with burnt-orange hair and a face the color of fresh snow. Pierre’s candelabrum blazed into eyes as dull as blueberries, sunk into maroon circles of skin. I had seen women painted in such lurid colors on posters around Paris, although Madame Montpensier’s hues were the shades of deep distress, not of fevered gaiety.

  Irene swept through the opening. Godfrey’s prompt hand on my elbow urged me forward. I saw him bow sardonic thanks to Pierre before he firmly shut the chamber door upon us all and pointedly slammed the latch home.

  This room was vast and chilly also, save for the fire in the grate. I heard a scratching sound and looked down to see a fat little spaniel waddling over to sniff our boots.

  “It is—was—Louise’s.” Madame Montpensier bent to lift the creature.

  No one in his right mind could question the ravages of emotion that had turned her face—undoubtedly once beautiful—into a gargoyle of grief. I looked at Godfrey and Irene. They, too, seemed thunderstruck by the woman’s appearance.

  “Hush, Chou-chou,” Madame Montpensier chided the whimpering dog. “He knows something is amiss. But why have you come? How have you heard
... What have you heard? That I—?”

  “Please.” Godfrey took the wriggling dog in one arm and guided Madame Montpensier to the high-backed chair that faced the fire. “Sit down. Perhaps you can enlighten us on how this terrible thing has happened to Louise. And to yourself.”

  She glanced up sharply. Godfrey Norton “leading” a witness, that is, posing questions that demand answers, was a phenomenon that even a statue would have had difficulty in resisting. I had seen him robed and bewigged in the Royal Courts of Justice on Fleet Street, his barrister’s face assuming an innocent concern, a profound understanding, that surpassed all suspicion. At such times, even a murderess might forget herself and confess all.

  Madame Montpensier drew herself up as if recognizing this quality. She looked at Irene and then at me, wonderingly. “It is kind of you to take an interest in our affairs.”

  “It is nothing of the sort,” Irene said quickly. “We, after all, feel responsible for having returned Louise to a situation that has led to her ‘apparent’ loss of life. And it is indeed our business, in a way. We are”—she glanced roguishly at Godfrey and myself—“experienced inquiry agents into matters criminal and, occasionally, merely puzzling. We wish to see justice done.”

  The poor woman eyed me uncertainly.

  Irene continued. “Miss, ah, Mademoiselle Huxleigh is our valued friend and assistant. There is obviously more to this matter than even the Paris police suspect, Madame. I think you can tell us something more of it than you have hitherto revealed.”

  The woman shrank into the chair while we gathered around, our backs to the fire and basking in the fact. Godfrey gently deposited the small spaniel in her lap.

  She absently stroked the creature’s silky ears while she spoke.

  “I wonder that you discern so much of the situation from such slight acquaintance with it—and us.”

  “Obviously,” Irene put in, “Louise was kept under strict supervision by her uncle. Few Paris demoiselles require the unattractive likes of Pierre to shepherd them through the city. One would think your husband feared kidnapping by pirates. But we are not prescient, merely observant. Louise told us of the mysterious letters that came to your husband. And of another matter that we are sworn to keep secret—”