Chapel Noir (16 page)

At least the benighted doctor had the sense to describe Irene as deceased, although during the unfortunate erratic encounters between her and the detective Holmes after the Bohemian events it would have become clear even to a man not renowned for much perception that Irene Adler was far from dead. (And at least this Holmes had the wisdom not to enlighten his friend the doctor as to Irene’s remarkable state of preservation.)

No, it was not the doctor’s secret recounting of this incident from his own nearsighted point of view that had disturbed me.

It was especially the truth he spoke from that point of view. The words are scribed upon my soul:
To Sherlock Holmes she is always
the
woman. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex
.

As her friend and companion, I cannot deny that Irene is indeed remarkable . . . but I shudder to think that this odious man, an avowed opium-fiend from the doctor’s own account, should fasten his attention and admiration on my friend, who is now another man’s wife. Indeed, this impossible Holmes person even witnessed their wedding in disguise as part of his investigation! Has the man no shame?

The doctor did write that it was not “any emotion akin to love” this Holmes creature felt for Irene, that “love” was alien to the man’s “cold, precise” mind. I was not surprised to read that he “never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer.” I have since had occasion to observe this Sherlock Holmes more closely, and he is indeed very full of himself and the “reasoning machine” of his mind.

I was also pleased by the doctor’s closing comments, to the effect that Mr. Holmes had “used to make merry over the cleverness of women, but I have not heard him do it of late. And when he speaks of Irene Adler, or when he refers to her photograph, it is always under the honorable title of
the
woman.”

If Irene has taught him a lesson, good! Now all he need do is keep his distance and subvert his doctor friend’s attempts at publication, and we shall all be allowed to live out our lives in the peace, quiet, and anonymity we so richly deserve.

I, for one, sincerely hope that no unpleasant “problems”—as both Irene and Mr. Holmes seem to refer to these annoying mysteries of life which are really the police’s business and no one else’s—lurk in our futures. Such a course could even reconcile me to living in France.

But despite all these assertions, Dr. Watson is precise on one fact: “there was but one woman to him, and that woman was the late Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable memory.”

That is another irritation: how dare he slander her memory, even though she is not dead! The fool has no notion that she, and I, and Godfrey, and my former charges’ uncle, Quentin Stanhope, moved Heaven and Earth to save this miserable medical man’s life! All too successfully, unfortunately! Apparently our efforts were successful so that he could survive to write more such drivel. And so that my . . . so that
dear
Quentin was forced to engage in a mortal duel with a master spy and heavy-game hunter named Moran.

But I will not allow myself to become exercised, much as it is my right. I never told my companions of the doctor’s unpublished manuscript (may it forever remain so!), which is not of a quality or interest that will appeal to a publisher or a reader.

What would Godfrey say, or do, to know another man harbored such inappropriate feelings toward his bride?

What unsuitable pride might the fact that the world’s greatest detective considers her the world’s most admirable woman do to Irene’s already healthy sense of self-esteem, which I am daily devoted to urging to a more realistic level?

Of course it is some consolation that Dr. John H. Watson, however much he may be in the detective’s confidence, still did not know the whole story. In that fact I see a glimmer of relief, for obviously there are some stones which even Mr. Sherlock Holmes carries that he will not confide to his nearest companion, and Dr. Watson admits in his narrative that this Holmes man is far from the most sociable of beings.

Yet I am also disturbed to be the only one to know aspects of the affair that Mr. Holmes has kept to himself, as another less rigorously logical man might preserve a rose fallen from a woman’s bouquet. . . .

And according to Dr. Watson’s account, Mr. Holmes did keep the photograph of herself Irene had left for the King of Bohemia. It was the only additional reward he wanted, having already refused an emerald ring . . . Most worrisome.

If only I dared share my concerns with Godfrey. I owe him fierce allegiance. Godfrey, especially, perhaps because of our prior working relationship, has always been aware of my best interests and has even taken my part when Irene has been particularly . . . Irene-ish.

My eyes had blurred and my nose was congested. Godfrey was a prince among men! An amusing companion, a tireless adviser, a strong and sagacious man whose existence was a blessing to all womankind.

How could I have ever thought just a few days ago that I was enjoying a return to the days of Irene and my solely female domesticity? If I missed Quentin as much as I did when I allowed myself to think of him, imagine how Irene must feel the loss of her husband! I had been utterly and foolishly selfish, and the realization lacerated my conscience like a cat-o’-nine-tails.

While I struggled with these questions, Lucifer encountered no such fits of conscience. He pounced full weight upon whatever he wrestled, and vanished under the bed to finish the battle.

An advancing snatch of aria warned me that Irene was up, energetic, and about to roust me from my peaceful bed.

The door swung open, and her figure filled it, looking as pert as a barmaid in a German opera, a tray between her extended arms.

“Breakfast?” I deduced, pushing myself upright in the bed linens in such a way that I was able to discreetly wipe away any unshed tears of repentance. “In bed? For me?”

“Indeed. You have slept a full twelve hours, as well you deserved. Do not move, but let me place this on the bed. There! The teapot is not only heavy, but full of boiling water fresh from the woodstove.”

I eyed the bounty on the tray. Hot porridge with currants and fresh cream, steaming bacon, slices of lemon for tea like sunny smiles of citrus, snowy napkin . . . I was, of course, highly suspicious.

“You are in good, high spirits,” I noted.

“Here.” Irene pounced like Lucifer on an object atop my bed table. “Don your spectacles so you can fully appreciate this repast.”

“I only need them for close work and reading,” I pointed out. “I suspect my table manners are adept enough that I don’t need them to eat.”

“Of course not. But”—Irene patted the pocket of the most unlikely apron she wore (she never wore aprons)—“there is a new letter from Godfrey.”

“A cause for celebration, yes, but hardly for breakfast in bed. Sophie must not be pleased to be usurped by you, even if you are the mistress of the house.”

“Sophie needs a small domestic insurrection now and then. She is entirely too domineering. And there is something else in the post . . .” She paused.

“And?”

“An urgent summons to Paris.”

“Again?”

“I will dress while you eat, and then return to see you dressed. Meanwhile, you can entertain yourself with Godfrey’s letter. I have read it, and he is in full descriptive cry. Adieu.”

With that she was gone, leaving me chewing like a cow on my cud in amazement and distress.

Of course I gulped the whole, hot, and steaming mess down as quickly as I could, glancing at Godfrey’s many pages with regret. She had obviously left me with the most innocuous document while keeping the provocative summons to herself.

Thus would she lure me on my way to Paris again, saving the news for the moment when I was safely fed, clothed, and tucked into the carriage.

At least, I reflected as I swished horribly hot tea around in my mouth hoping it would cool, she was presuming upon my accompanying her. Given the notorious characters who awaited her in Paris, I would have it no other way.

17.
La Tour Awful

Ridicule . . . only ever kills the weak and the false. The
tower has continued to scribe the ever-changing sky with its
gold-tipped silhouette and to hold its lacework calculus erect
like a desire
. . .
—
SCULPTOR RAYMOND DUCHAMP-VILLON

Among the many interesting and useful sights in London is the Time Signal Ball near Trafalgar Square, a six-foot-diameter zinc ball that drops ten feet at one o’clock every day. This is not only a visual landmark, but a most practical device, against which all may set their timepieces according to the world standard of Greenwich Mean Time, also an English invention.

In Paris, in the year of Our Lord and incidentally of
l’Exposition universelle de 1889
, there is, alas, the Eiffel Tower.

There, in a nutshell, you have the difference between the two capitals, the two countries, the two nationalities. What is useful and interesting in London is useless and overpowering in Paris.

To my mind, the construction now rising from the Champ de Mars along the Seine is a modern Tower of Babel. Befitting the god of war who names its location, and the Red Planet, this iron giant has been painted crimson. At least it has not been painted pink! Never has so much overweening pride in the form of twisted metal stretched an ugly fist to Heaven, gold-tipped penultimate finger notwithstanding.

For once I am not alone in my disdain of this French landmark, but am joined by a committee of outraged French artists and persons of importance. I cannot imagine what future generations will make of it, though surely it will be torn down by then. My fellow thinkers have used such apt phrases of description as “barbarous mass” and “factory chimney.” I particularly liked “foul and bolt-encrusted pile of sheet metal.”

Despite myself, I am learning to read French, if not to speak it fluently. I do particularly well with words which the French have borrowed from the English, such as
“exposition universelle.”
Of course the French must ever be contrary. They do not pronounce it properly and add a fancy finale to the “universal.”

But I can now translate enough French to have informed Irene and Godfrey some months ago that the committee managing the competition for the signature building of the exposition had found Mr. Eiffel’s design “more appropriate to the barbarism of America, where good taste was still not very developed.”

Irene had remained unperturbed. “Exactly why America thrives, my dear. And we did have the good taste to accept the Statue of Liberty from the French. I understand that an earlier plan for the Paris exposition landmark, since this year is also the centenary of the French Revolution, was a three-hundred-meter-high guillotine. So I see no reason why they should blame us for Eiffel’s imaginings, which they ultimately accepted anyway, when they had originally intended a monument to organized slaughter.”

Indeed they had embraced bad taste, for here Gustave Eiffel’s tower stood, complete, the towering symbol of
l’Exposition universelle
that would continue drawing millions of gawkers to the Champ de Mars until early November.

Whatever my opinion of this ungainly structure, it certainly is something to steer by, as old-time sailors used the Pole Star. Three hundred meters high (I will forever envision a matching guillotine of that height, thanks to Irene’s unwelcome information), it is the world’s tallest structure—it exceeds the highest cathedral spire—a show of mechanical modern hubris overstepping hand-hewn medieval piety.

When our carriage stopped, Irene and I could not help sticking our bonneted heads out the open windows and gaping like peasants. The tower loomed over us like a gigantic red tack upholding the gray baize of the overcast Parisian skies, gaudy as a Chinese pagoda built for a Cyclops.

From its very top, a lightning rod almost too tiny to see, the French tricolor fluttered in the upper winds.

Though the tallest sight, the tower was not the only excess strewing the vast area. Domes, minarets, tents, huts, pagodas, and colonnades created a global village on the Esplanade des Invalides adjacent to the tower grounds. Behind and beyond and above it all loomed a massive domed pavilion backed by smokestacks flying pennants of smudge. The exposition celebrated, after all, industrial achievement, and industry is a thing of drudgery, machines, and smoke.

It was only a moment after taking dazed stock of the scene thronging with workmen that I noticed the uniformed gendarmes infesting the parklands.

Alas, the gendarmes also noticed us at the same time.

Three immediately approached our coachman and ordered him to decamp to a nearby street.

Irene, today attired in full Parisian splendor (that is to say a Worth walking suit in plum scalloped faille decorated with falls of jet beads and the newly fashionable broad-brimmed velvet hat supporting a flotilla of plumes instead of the modest bonnet that tied so sweetly under the chin like a child’s cap), burst forth from the carriage like Athena from her father Zeus’s forehead, and was as prepared to give any surrounding males a god-sized headache.

She cast the names of princes and financiers as pearls before swine, but only achieved a result when the lowly syllables “le Villard” passed her lips.

At that, our warders became our escort and we were soon threading our way amongst pieces of construction for the surrounding pavilions to an area a bit distant from the exposition grounds. I kept my parasol open and sheltering me from any view of the stiff and awkward mass towering above us. Irene kept hers closed and used it as a walking stick and pointer.

It was also quite a novelty that I would feel encouraged to spy Inspector le Villard’s mustachioed face under its round-crowned hat, but so I was.

He was most apologetic for our brusque greeting by the gendarmes, as well he should be, and nervously smoothed his curling mustache.

Soon he was escorting us down some dim stairs into the bowels of an excavation. If I was not pleased to contemplate the tower itself, I was even less enthralled to visit some sewerlike delving in its vicinity.

At a narrow, low portal, the inspector paused to light an oil lamp.

“I am sorry, Madame, Mademoiselle,” he said in English at last. “I must advise you that an appalling sight awaits us beyond this point. Also, the ventilation is not as generous as at the
maison de rendezvous
. I would not conscience escorting ladies onto such a scene, but since you, on your own insistence, witnessed the atrocity of the other evening, your opinion of this site would be of use, if you are willing.”

While Irene assured the inspector of our complete willingness, I was busy delving in my skirt pocket for my chatelaine, and particularly the vinaigrette. This time I was prepared: I had dosed two linen handkerchiefs with the contents of the vial. I handed one to Irene. The other I clapped to my own nostrils.

Despite the breathtaking effect of my improvised mask, not only did I still detect the fetid scent of stale water and long-unturned earth, but an odd metallic tang that was quite unpleasant, which I attributed to the surrounding ironwork.

I heard the distant tick of a clock, then realized how unlikely that was. Perhaps in the empty, dark passage I was hearing the second hand moving on the watch pinned to my bodice; certainly I could almost hear my heart beating.

Deeper we went on inclined ground, the lamp casting watery lights on the rough but solid soil. The place had the close, subterranean feel of a crypt, and I was all too sure that it in fact had been turned to just such service, and only recently.

Irene had been surprisingly silent. No doubt she much lamented the encumbrances of her woman’s dress in this rude area meant for workmen. No doubt that Inspector le Villard much regretted our submersion in this raw atmosphere.

Then the tang that pierced the handkerchief pressed to my nose became more than metallic . . . it became the reek of a great quantity of fresh blood. My mind did an unwelcome quadrille. I felt I was standing on the other evening’s elegant threshold again, confronting inelegant death.

The inspector’s lamp revealed a natural rotunda in the stone tunnel ahead, and I was startled to see . . . bones. Leg bones and arm bones piled like a library wall of parchment scrolls, with rows of jawless skulls interspersed in the shape of a cross, a design both reverent and macabre. I had braced myself to confront fresh death, not the stale toothpicks of
La Mort’s
last dinner in Paris.

“This is part of the catacombs then, Inspector?” Irene asked, her voice muffled by my handkerchief.

Catacombs! Of course.

“Paris is underlaid not only by our famous sewers,” he said in English, “but by hundreds of kilometers of granite quarries first cut by the Romans. Just before the Revolution, the church and the police prevailed upon the inspector general of the quarries to move the bones into the catacombs. Paris was growing beyond the once-rural cemeteries, which were contaminated by poor burials and mass graves. People grew ill, and some churchyards’ ground level had risen ten to twenty feet from the volume of human remains.”

I inhaled deeply and pointedly into my handkerchief to let the inspector know that I did not appreciate such lurid detail.

He cleared his throat. “Most of the cemetery bones were moved into the catacombs south of the Seine. This site was unknown until the Tower workmen found it recently, but more undiscovered sites no doubt remain, housing nameless bones. However, the latest addition here is unfortunately all too fleshly.” His lamplight swept over the floor and a pale pile of rags that lay heaped there.

This was coarse fabric, sailcloth as might be used under painters’ scaffolds, I thought at first. Irene took a deep breath next to me, pressing my makeshift barrier to her face. I realized that I was seeing a tumble of common linen petticoats.

“Another woman?” Irene asked.

“Another slaughter,” the inspector said somberly.

“Who?”

“We can only speculate. Perhaps a bread-seller, perhaps a prostitute.”

Irene lifted the smelling-salts compress away from her face.

I moved involuntarily to stop her, aware of the foul melange of odors she invited to invade her lungs.

She inhaled so deliberately I saw the arch of her nostrils flare, like a hound’s.

“Irene! The odor must be hellish in this closed-in place.”

“It is. Like a battleground, I suppose. Blood and . . . guts. A certain rank dankness. And—” She stooped to the floor, gesturing the inspector’s light to a spot near her feet.

Her fingers, bare now of gloves, swept through a dark puddle.

I drew back, thinking of blood, and cringed to see her ruddy fingertips in the lamplight.

“Wine,” she said. “Red wine.” Her fingers swept the stones again, then came to her face as she sought to identify what was on them. “And something stronger.”

“Madame must not play the bloodhound,” the inspector said, as repulsed as I to see her crouching in such a ruinous place. “We will bring in the dogs shortly.”

“Really?” Irene stood, wiping her fingertips on my fresh and freshly supplied handkerchief. “Bloodhounds are a dramatic touch, Inspector, but I doubt they will do much good. I should send for a sommelier myself.”

With that she turned, clapped the handkerchief to her nose and mouth again, and led us out of that dreadful place.