Chapel Noir (39 page)

“Merci, Mademoiselles
,” the priest said, bowing. “I will help this unfortunate back to his rooms. Apparently he is suffering from dementia.”

“We will assist you,” Irene said.

I tugged mightily on her gown sleeve. I had no wish to go up to whatever dreary room lay behind that gaping window.

“Non, non
.” The elderly priest smiled with sweet urbanity. “These young ladies must be about their business and leave this poor soul to me.”

He was really quite a commanding figure, despite wearing skirts, and I was beginning to think I spied a glint reminiscent of my parson father’s kindly expression behind the spectacles that lay under his thick snowy brows as “eyebrow” windows underline a mansard roof. . . .

Irene spoke again. “I will be about my
father’s
business, indeed,” she said. “This is not my first encounter with elderly clergymen in the street.”

His gaze sharpened as he took in her attire. “If that is so, then you are obviously in need of instant shriving, and should seek the nearest church.” He drew the man’s arm over his neck and began guiding him back into the building.

“We are as wicked as you are saintly,
Père
,” Irene called after him in tones I could only call ringing, and when a contralto opera singer wishes her voice to ring, she is a full carillon. “We will accompany you.”

Elizabeth and I exchanged quick glances. Irene said “sit,” we had sat. Irene said “go,” we would go.

We stepped forward as one, or three.

The face of the man named Kelly grew frantic. “No! Keep them away from me! They are tainted. You’re a holy priest. You must save me from them!” His words alternated English and French phrases, like one new to a foreign language, and I understood the whole.

Instead of struggling to elude the old man’s custody, Kelly now sank to his knees and clutched the cassock folds like a terrified child.

“I will confess anything,” he cried, “only keep those fiends of hell from me.”

“I think,” Irene said to the priest in French, “we will be of good use to you.”

His once-sweet old face grew sour.

“Oh, very well,” said Sherlock Holmes, in French, not English. I think this was the gist of it: “I suppose you assisted in his capture, although I would have had him secured by the café at the corner. I was about to suggest you would do best sending for le Villard, but I am not ready for him yet.”

He gazed at the confused man now down on his knees in the street, clutching his skirt hem, but he spoke to Irene. “Come along, if you must, but the place reeks of boiled tripe and garlic.”

37.
We Three Queens

All three had brilliant white teeth, that shone like pearls
against the ruby of their voluptuous lips . . . something about
them that made me uneasy, some longing and at the same
time some deadly fear. I felt in my heart a wicked, burning
desire that they would kiss me with those red lips. . . . Faugh!
. . . They are devils, of the Pit!
—
BRAM STOKER,
DRACULA

These unsavory cooking odors, and others too unpleasant to spend time naming, crowded with us into the small passage, where we confronted the place’s guardian.

The concierge was a sharp-faced woman with hair of the same lurid shade as in a poster for some Montmartre establishment of low repute. She ordinarily would not have let even President of the Republic Carnot go unchallenged, I am sure.

Still, she was so taken aback by our cortege—stately priest, distraught lodger, and three painted women—that she let us proceed inside without a word. I heard a series of clicks after we passed. She was either fumbling for her rosary beads or her absinthe bottle. With the French both are props of the soul in times of uncertainty.

We trudged up the dark, narrow stairs, single file, our prisoner first, then Father Holmes, then Irene, Elizabeth, and I.

The hapless Kelly resided in a room on the first floor, just off the stairwell.

Docile, though still apparently unnerved, he led the priest through a door that was still ajar. We followed until we were fully in a mean little room bare of any but the most necessary furnishings.

While Sherlock Holmes sat Kelly down at an uneven-legged table matched with a pair of rickety stools, I surveyed the cot covered with soiled blankets, a visible night jar near it, and a chair missing its back struts in a corner. There was no fireplace, only the one door, the window over the street, and a smaller window high up on the sidewall.

The upholsterer’s room sported not one piece of furniture that was covered with anything more than grime or dust.

Without a word being said by anyone, Irene marched to the long window overlooking the street, whose frame held glass windows split into two in the style known as “French doors.”

She swiftly drew the gaping side closed to match its sister, then jerked her head to summon Elizabeth, who sped to take a position before the secured windows.

I was nearest the door. At Irene’s nod, I shut it and stationed myself there.

Sherlock Holmes had ignored our movements, concentrating his attention on the prisoner as he pushed him onto one stool.

Irene went to the chair in the corner, and sat.

Kelly’s eyes followed our every move as if Mesmerized.

I was not used to inspiring dread in anyone, and was amazed that I could do it only in so debased a guise, though I myself should have shrunk from us three in the streets, not knowing our true characters.

Yet in this room, only one person was in his true character, and that was the suspect.

“You will keep them away from me, Father?” he whined.

How could we harm him, really? Especially if he was upright enough to resist the temptations posed by such women as we impersonated.

But he kept twisting on his stool to assure himself that we remained at the fringes of the room. I sensed that he would rather perish than attempt to cross a threshold we guarded.

“You are James Kelly, the East End upholsterer?” Mr. Holmes asked him, also speaking in English.

Kelly blinked, his muddy hazel gaze sharpening for an instant. “Strange. I am hearing in tongues. That is such sweet heavenly music, a chorus speaking in dozens of tongues. Here there are two tongues anyway. Your holy presence keeps those demons at bay, Father, and I have been permitted to hear your French words in English. Do not leave me, I beg you! They will fly upon me like mad things and force me into lewd acts.”

“Rest easy, my son. I can tell that you are not well.”

“Not well! I have been tainted by these devilish women! A pox upon them who have given me a pox, innocent lad that I am. It is a foul conspiracy. Can you not make them vanish, Father?”

“Alas”—Sherlock Holmes looked over his shoulder at Irene seated in the corner, glanced at Elizabeth and me standing guard at the window and door—“I have hoped for such deliverance before, but it has not yet been granted. Now.”

He drew away, looked down on the man, and his voice assumed an authoritarian certainty. “You are an upholsterer by trade, and that is your most recent pursuit, but I see that you followed the sea for some time. You were born in Liverpool, have been briefly married but descended into drink and debauchery. I see the blood of a murder on your hands.”

Irene and I had witnessed Sherlock Holmes’s skill at assessing people’s pasts from the present testimony of their speech eccentricities, their dress and demeanor, and the telltale marks of professions or pursuits upon their anatomy.

James Kelly had not. His eyes protruded like a puppet’s. For a moment he forgot the demonic presence of three fallen women, two of whom were innocent of all wrongdoing.

“Y-you know? But I have seen Him already. The Master came and gathered the flock until the Holy Spirit descended in tongues of flame everywhere, and all we disciples prayed in tongues and drank the blood of Our Lord. Our Lord was a carpenter and I am a mere upholsterer, but still I pounded the bloody nails and must atone, must atone. I have seen the Master and you are not He. How can you be He who will save me?”

A distinctly uncomfortable expression passed over Sherlock Holmes’s disguised features. Although his detective work might have “saved” innumerable clients from disgrace and even death, I suspect that he found the notion of spiritual salvation a repugnant one, at least in relation to himself as either the object or bestower of it.

As Irene had often told me, he relied on evidence and logic and science. Anything other than that earned his disdain, including the finer feelings, I think. In his own way, he was as intent as the cowering man on the stool in keeping us wicked women at a distance.

In my case, I took it as a compliment.

Kelly spread his hands, as if looking for Sherlock Holmes’s dramatic blood evidence. “They were to hang me,” he said, “but I knew God would not permit it. He had a better plan for me. A mission.”

“And why should you be so chosen of God?” Sherlock Holmes demanded.

“I was raised in a religious home, Father, good Catholics all, and was apprenticed by age fifteen to the upholsterer’s trade, happy in all things, until I learned one day of my so-called good fortune. I’d inherited a substantial sum, held in trust for me for ten years, but mine through one John Allen, a master mariner and no relation.”

“God’s fortune did indeed shine upon you, my son.”

“No! It was the Devil’s own bargain. I was Satan’s bastard, born out of wedlock and left for my whoring mother’s mother to rear while off my bedamned dam went and later wed this mariner. I was, for my own ‘advantage,’ taken from my trade and packed off to business school and then to work in a pawnbroker’s shop, which is only one step up from the practice of usury, in my opinion. Only four years later did my misery persuade those who held the purse strings on my tainted inheritance to give me the money to resume the upholsterer’s trade. I went to London.”

“Yes, yes.” Mr. Holmes seemed about to say something, then clasped his hands behind his back and strode to and fro in the manner of an agitated cleric. “It is best to confess quickly, in one long rush. Tell me what you did in London.”

“Upholstery jobs, Father. It were good work. I liked it. Always did. Pounding the little nail heads nice and neat along the trim. I was a ‘finisher.’ They don’t let just no one be a finisher.” He frowned, glanced at the door, the window, at us three silent witnesses.

“I got to having a pint or two after work. Everybody did.” His expression darkened. “Then
they
came around. Them painted demons from Hell! What’s a young lad to do? I didn’t know. The drink fuddled me! I was a good boy ‘til then. Then they made me bad. I tried to resist but they were always there, always comin’ ‘round, teasing, wanting money.”

His head jerked around to view each of us, then he clamped his hands to his face so he couldn’t see us. “I did the best thing. Took off. Took to sea on a man-o’-war, where they don’t have those demon women.”

“A man of war? How would you be taken on such a ship?”

He shrugged. “It was American. But I had to come back. ‘Twasn’t home. Home was . . . Curtain Road.”

“Curtain Road?”

“In the East End. Did upholstery work there, then got some casual work around the docks, shipping back and forth from the Continent. I was a seaman now, too. But the pints and the whores was still there, and the Devil had drunk down my spirit, and I couldn’t resist. So I thought, like the Book says, ’tis better to marry than to burn. I found Sarah and we started walking out. Nothing nasty now! Nothing your lot do.” He glared at us again, then clapped his hands to his ears.

“I can’t stand the sight of ‘em! But I got to hold my hands to my ears ‘stead of my eyes. They hurt so, the pain between them, and sometimes my brain is rotting-like, and the bad smell and pus comes oozing out my ears.” He shut his eyes, keening and rocking with apparent pain, or the remembered agony. “Some mates said I’d caught a, a . . . disease from the filthy whores, God damn ’em all for making me go wi“em!” He looked up, dull-eyed. “A year later we wed. Sarah an’ me.”

“When was that?”

“When?”

“What year, man?”

“Ah . . . eighty-three. I think. A bad year.”

“You told Sarah nothing about your condition before you wed?”

His head shook. “The moment we became man and wife, I saw she was just another dirty whore. A harlot who’d lured me into sin. All she wanted was my money, like the rest of ‘em, only she was smart enough to marry me to get it. She probly’d given me the oozing pox, I told her. And the pain in my head, my ears . . . I took my penknife one day and . . . and I was going to dig out the filth in her ears that she got into my ears. I stuck the blade in under her ear and dug and dug. Her mother went screeching into the street, but the whores wouldn’t help her. The copper pulled me off Sarah, but I’d lanced the evil and it ate her up and she died a day or two later. So I was up in the dock for murder, when anyone would know I was the wronged party. Even the jury recommended mercy, but the judge sentenced me to hang, though I told ’em God had forgiven me and had a mission for me.”

“You didn’t hang,” Mr. Holmes noted, with a touch of distaste.

“No, and I won’t, for who would blame me for killing whores?”

A mad scrabbling along the wooden floor confused me. Kelly had lurched off the stool and, still crouched like an animal, ran around Mr. Holmes for the door.

I stood before it.

He was there so swiftly, seizing my arm and spinning me around and away from the door. But he didn’t release me and flee. Instead, he caught me close and pressed something hard and cold and sharp against my throat.

I could smell his fear through the medium of days-old clothing and nearly gagged.

Had I been wearing proper street clothes, my high collar would have protected my neck, but my slatternly costume afforded no such protection.

“There,” he said, breath and spittle spraying my ear. “The world won’t miss one more whore, and I shall be gone about my Master’s business in one more moment.”

Everyone else in the room had leaped forward at his charge and then frozen in place, in horror.

He had been quick and sure.

I now stood in the same position the victims of Jack the Ripper had faced in Whitechapel instants before their throats shed lifeblood onto the chill cobblestones.

A dagger of fear pierced my heart, but I could not move nor speak. I was as paralyzed as my would-be defenders all too, too far away.

Nothing could beat the swift stroke of a master upholsterer. I found it odd that the hand that had ornamented the Prince of Wales’s
siège clamour
should shortly send me to my Maker.