Chapel Noir (15 page)

Although I have no liking for spirits, I felt the presence of another, personified spirit here: the soul of France itself, which had amassed lifetimes of the vintner’s arts that passeth the comings and goings of generations and noble families and revolutions and the Rights of Man and the number of falling stars in a millennium.

“Here.” Pink vanished into the dark beyond Irene’s candle glow. “I found it here.”

I glanced at the floor, scarred by the pickaxes that had roughed it out from stone and dirt. I remembered that many monasteries distilled rare liquors, that hooded monks might pass in ghostly array among these bottles and kegs of their hidden brewing . . .

Irene’s boot toe scraped the stone in a wide arc. “Shattered glass. Someone could not wait to decant some of these wines.”

I looked down horrified to see dark burgundy stains on the floor.

“Wine, Nell. Merely wine.”

Under another broad arch we went, into a niche of sorts.

Pink had squatted on her heels like a child inspecting tadpoles in a murky pond. “Here, Mrs. Norton, Miss Huxleigh!”

Irene and I stood over her, our candle casting a surprisingly wide circle of illumination.

Dollops of wax . . . red and black and gold candle wax blotted the stone floor like so many careless signet seals.

I saw some crude marks, as if stone had scraped stone bone-bare. I saw—

“Ah!” Irene lifted a pale crumbly object between her forefinger and thumb like a snippet of flesh. “Your etui, Nell?”

I had not neglected to bring my chatelaine, and brought it jangling into the candlelight.

Miss Pink frowned at my racket, but when I elevated another tiny crumb pincered from the etui beside the larger piece Irene held, her ingenuous features gaped in amazement.

“What is that?” she asked.

“A remnant from the murder room,” Irene said. “And this is the motherlode”—she glanced at Pink with a familiarity that left me completely in the dark—“from which this ore has been mined, or I miss my guess.”

“Oh, yes indeed,” said Miss Pink, beaming. “Isn’t this place strange? So oddly sinister? As if someone awful had passed through here but moments before us?”

I was loath to agree with her, but then a faint breeze stirred a loosened filament of hair along my cheek, and I shuddered.

“I do think,” said Miss Pink contemplatively, “that it connects with the sewers of Paris. Isn’t that absolutely wonderful?”

16.
Jacques the Ripper

The earth below the city was not the firm clay known
across the channel in England. It was a battling
honeycomb of abandoned stone quarries, of age-old river
deposits . . . of a seeping blanket of water that turned dirt
hopelessly to slush
.
—
TAMARA HOVEY,
PARIS UNDERGROUND

Even Irene Norton, nèe Adler, was not about to wade into the sewers of Paris wearing my best walking skirt, thank the Lord.

We stood on the lip of a greater darkness than currently surrounded us, staring into the candle reflections on a glassy black expanse of water which did not ripple so much as tremble in an invisible, insensible wind.

“We are not equipped to explore this channel,” Irene said regretfully, “but I am not ready to loose the police on so promising a path without more knowledge of my own. You will remain here a while longer,” she told Pink. “See if anyone of the household, or a visitor, shows any interest in this wine cellar.”

She had led us back to the main cellar.

My nose, fresh from the dank, sour air of the underground water, detected the musky scent of spilled wine here now.

Irene began a circuit of the walls of wine kegs and bottles, her toe pointing out more shards of dark green glass, a jagged bottleneck even, scattered corks.

“An unauthorized wine-tasting, I think. I believe the events that led to the deaths above began here.”

“Jack the Ripper came by way of the sewers? Perhaps that explains his quick escapes in Whitechapel,” I said.

“The Paris sewers are far vaster and traversable than those of London,” Irene objected. “Perhaps it does explain this attack upon women in a luxurious house. The sewers are the great levelers that underlie all Paris. A highway for the aspiring murderer.”

“Thanks a lot,” Pink said. “I will sleep like a Latter-Day Saint on that thought, Mrs. N.”

“You might as well call me Irene,” she answered.

I took a deep, indignant breath.

“And Miss Huxleigh would much prefer that you called her Nell,” Irene said, neatly forestalling me from expressing my true preferences.

“I would,” I interjected into this conference of girlish confidences, “prefer a Christian name to call you by.”

I caught Miss Pink’s eye, and held it.

Her lashes fluttered like a butterfly’s in a net, but my years as a governess had given me an authority less obvious than Irene’s stage presence, but no less commanding.

“Elizabeth,” the girl muttered, as if ashamed.

“A fine name, Elizabeth, with many splendid diminutives . . . Eliza, Beth, Bess, even that American derivative ‘Betsy,’ if you prefer and don’t mind sounding like the ragman’s horse—”

“I prefer ‘Pink,’ ” she insisted despite my generous suggestions, “but you may call me Elizabeth if you must.”

Frankly, I was loath to call a girl of ill repute by the name of England’s revered Virgin Queen, but it was either that or Pink.

I remembered Irene’s remark that the nickname “Pink” was the only true thing our companion had told us about herself. I wondered if Elizabeth was also true, or merely another lie.

I could not understand why Irene was drawing this mere witness into our orbit, and on a first-name basis now, really! However sad Pink’s personal history, it did not mean she had to misbehave in the present. I feared that their common American background was creating an instant and false sense of intimacy that was unearned. At least Irene was not totally taken in by the girl, and that cheered my spirits a trifle.

What also cheered my spirits quite a bit was leaving Elizabeth, Bertie, and Jacques the Ripper behind in Paris as we returned to the peace of Neuilly-sur-Seine and the French countryside.

We crept into bed late, as we had recently, and I didn’t awaken until the linnets were serenading the shutters.

I lay abed, watching threads of sunlight creep across the wide wooden floorboards.

I am not a lazy person, but this morning I relished all things about our life outside the city and its compromises and corruptions.

Even the unauthorized presence of Lucifer sprawled by the wall, also watching the sunlight edge across the floor, could not dampen my good cheer.

Suddenly the huge furry cat leaped and trapped something between his paws. A dust mote? Sunlight? Or a skittering vermin visible only to that predatory eye? If it was the latter, Lucifer was welcome to it. The fewer skittering vermin on my floor the better.

Naturally, the thought of skittering vermin brought my mind where it was not wont to wander: back to the
maison de rendezvous
, the horror in its strange bedchamber, and the musty mysteries of its wine cellars.

I was deeply suspicious of the young American courtesan who had “happened” to discover the death scene, despite the easy artlessness of her gown and manner, like a debutante among the dissolute. I recalled the creatures we had brushed past, the women attired as the epitome of innocence, a nun and a bride, walking and giggling together. I shuddered to imagine how such an establishment could turn good upon its heels into evil. How would a girl christened “Elizabeth” come to be known as Pink? It wasn’t in the least likely, so perhaps Irene was correct, and it was simply true. The unlikeliest things had a nasty habit of being true, including the fact that the Prince of Wales was the worst sort of wastrel.

Like any good Englishwoman, I tried to honor what was best and brightest about my betters. Now I had discovered that the First of them was the Worst of them. I still did not wish to speculate upon the precise nature of any immoral acts that were going on—or were about to go on—at the
maison
, but might have to reconsider Jack the Ripper as a force for good insomuch as he had interrupted evildoing on a grand scale.

Then my mind skittered, like the doomed bug that Lucifer still harried by the window, to the only compromising position I had ever found myself in: alone with Quentin Stanhope during days of solitary rail journeying across most of Europe to France. The situation had been highly improper, of course, but despite that I had not been immune to the tender and delicious thrill that ran beneath our everyday talk and mutual courtesies. Indeed, we had really begun to know each other on that journey, so much so that parting was something of a shock, to me, at least. I would not dare to think that a man who lived and worked on the Queen’s secret commission at the long, ever-unraveling selvage edge of Empire in the dangerous East would in the slightest miss a parson’s daughter who had briefly been governess to his sister’s children.

I sat up in bed, as if gripped by a conscious nightmare. Godfrey! Thinking of Quentin had brought his dear, familiar face and voice into my thoughts. . . .

He had first entered our lives like a thunderbolt, storming our Saffron Hill lodgings in London because he had detected Irene’s interest in his late father’s possible possession of Marie Antoinette’s lost Zone of Diamonds. Like Sherlock Holmes was to do later, and repeatedly, he had accused her of meddling, a charge she took then no more gracefully than she does now. And, after all, she has accepted private inquiry commissions for as long as she has pursued an operatic career, so who can say which is the prime, and which the secondary, pursuit?

At any rate, I eavesdropped on Godfrey’s splendid tirade, all in defense of his family honor and especially his wronged mother. No wonder he was a barrister. Godfrey is most impressive in high dudgeon. And, of course, he was even more handsome when so animated.

When I went (Irene would say I was sent) into the Temple to work with him as a typewriter-girl, I came to know Godfrey as the considerate and temperate gentleman any woman would be proud to call brother.

Of course he was a barrister, and I an orphaned parson’s daughter, and I would never think of him in any other role. I must admit that when circumstances brought him back into Irene’s hunt for the Zone, and they actually worked in concert, I had no idea that events would take such a rapid turn and that Irene should feel no constraint whatsoever in regarding Godfrey as other than a brother! I am afraid it is her American upbringing, but I couldn’t really object, though I was most surprised that their sudden trip to Paris in pursuit of the Zone had led to other sudden alterations in our heretofore simple and separate relationships.

I am a little vague about when it happened, or what happened, but by the time Sherlock Holmes was hot on Irene’s trail at the behest of the King of Bohemia, Godfrey was firmly established in Irene’s heart. They wed and fled, although neither the King nor the detective ever knew anything of the Zone of Diamonds.

I was left to close down the establishment in the Serpentine Mews in St. John’s Wood. Imagine my surprise on visiting the newlyweds in Neuilly, the village near Paris where they had settled to avoid further pursuit, when they insisted I join their household. I tried to demur, but they were intractable.

I am not ungrateful for my continued presence in the Norton household, even if it must be in exile in France. There is no creature as alone in the world as an orphaned spinster, and I do all I can to make myself useful, whether it is wanted or not. I am assured that an unrelated spinster is more than any pair of newlyweds might want on the premises, but neither Irene or Godfrey has for an instant made me feel unwelcome.

Yet what should I do if my stable domestic arrangement with Mr. and Mrs. Godfrey Norton were upset by the near and present danger of Mr. Sherlock Holmes? (Whom, I admit to my secret self, Irene finds fascinating in his way, though purely as a deductive force, I am sure.)

And there is where my heaviest secret stone lies, at the bottom of a well of unwanted knowledge, obtained by rank and shameless subterfuge.

For the events involving the King of Bohemia’s pursuit of Irene to London brought her to the attention of another Englishman, the detective’s friend and associate, a medical man named Watson, who, I had later learned to my secret horror, harbored literary aspirations.

This discovery has left me to trudge on alone with my most worrisome stone. Yet the horrifying words I read many months ago will not let me turn the page in my mind that has lain full open since I skimmed the private papers in Dr. Watson’s desk and found the dreadful truth, or the truth as he believes he knows it.

My intentions were always honorable . . . well, as honorable as acquiring access to the doctor’s office under false pretenses could be. I went there to help save his life, and ended up risking my peace of mind.

I had come across a manuscript in his desk, a work clearly intended for future publication, in which he committed to paper Sherlock Holmes’s side of the Bohemian affair. (My own, and accurate, recounting of the full and true circumstances of the case remains entombed in the privacy of my diary, and shall stay there so long as I live.)

But this Watson person, this physician with obviously far too much time upon his hands, has written his own muddled account of the events and will no doubt seek publication, for no one is more persistent than a person with one perfectly good vocation who aspires to distinguish himself in another.