Chapel Noir (7 page)

Young Pink had done well to compare the scene to Les Halles. I had walked past hung carcasses of plucked fowl and disassembled pigs. In Shropshire, sheep country, the young parson’s daughter had also tended the old parishioners besieged by gangrene and bedsores. I could survive facing this. If I did not look too closely.

Irene pointed to the odd piece of furniture, which reminded me of a patten, those tall platform shoes worn by medieval women to keep their skirts from the offal on the streets.

It truly beggars my descriptive powers. Pink’s “barber chair from Versailles” it was, a strangely sinuous affair, perhaps purchased at some goblin market. Every surface snaked into the other in white-wood tendrils edged with gilt. Two arms lifted from its upholstered top, but curved backwards, like no chair arms I had ever seen.

At the front of both bottom and top surface bronze metal brackets protruded at each curved corner.

Around and through and within this tangle of wood and upholstered brocade and metal prongs draped a quantity of silken fabric revealing the hint of a vastly distorted body, actually
bodies
, behind and beneath it all.

Irene’s face was grimmer than I had ever seen it as I lifted my eyes from my jotted-down description of the scene.

“You see the lower bronze stirrups, on the floor-level upholstery?”

“Yes, but stirrups? This is a kind of rocking horse? As in a child’s schoolroom?”

“Not child’s play, this.” Irene eyed me worriedly, then without a word dropped to her knees on the costly Savonnerie carpet.

“Irene!”

“I must examine the trail of disturbances before the whole French prefecture arrives and tramples the carpeting like a herd of Indian elephants.”

“You expected to be making such a close inspection,” I noted in surprise, surveying the indignity of her hands-and-knees position concealed by the trousers and coat-skirt of men’s dress. “Why?”

“You remember the poisoned cigarette case in Prague?”

“Of course. A ‘gift’ from that Russian woman.”

“You remember how Mr. Holmes examined it, as if it were the veriest mote in God’s eye?”

“That man does believe he
is
God’s eye,” I agreed. “Most impious.”

“But
I
saw even as he saw. I am used to looking at the stage
enscène. En masse
. As an overpopulated picture framed by the proscenium arch that separates it from the audience. Full of power and glory, yes. But crowded. He looks at the scene as a scientist, through the microscope of his eye. He looks for the telling minutiae. So must we here. Look. Come down on your knees. You can see the footprints in the black background of the carpeting, as you can see fingerprints on black-velvet skirts, if only you get on a level where the light casts the past into a trail.”

I complied. “It is no difficulty getting on my knees at such a scene, Irene. Prayers are needed here, if anywhere.”

“While you are praying, Nell, could you see if that chatelaine of yours bears a quizzing glass.”

“Quizzing?”

“A magnifying lens!”

“I do not think so . . .” There we were, prostrate in the presence of vicious death, hardly daring to breathe and yet splitting hairs and carpet fibers. “My pince-nez, however, has magnifying properties.”

“Bless your nearsighted eyes! And hand me the spectacles.”

Irene barely glanced at my face as I removed my spectacles from the bodice locket that held them at the ready. She took them blindly.

“Ah!” she said a moment later, holding my pince-nez to her eyes like a mask.

“What is it?

“I don’t know. But it is something. Do you have in that bottomless pocket of yours some . . . container? And a pincer of some kind? I see a few crumbs worth preserving. They do not seem native to this room and its purpose.”

“Container? Other than my pocket itself—”

“That will not do. These tiny crumbs would crush to powder.”

I thought furiously. It is my role in life to be useful if not decorative, and a dereliction in utility is most humiliating. “I know! My, ah, my ah . . . etui!”

“You are sneezing from the carpet dust?”

Startled, it suddenly struck me that a word familiar to me would sound not like a word at all to Irene. Despite our grim situation, I found a nervous giggle bubbling in my throat. “An etui is not a sneeze, Irene,” I objected. “It is just the thing you asked for.”

“Forgive me, but an
etwee
is not from any vocabulary I have heard of,” she complained. “Pray tell me what it is, if it is indeed a ‘what’ and not an inarticulate wheeze.”

Despite her tart impatience, so unlike Irene, by now the laughter was threatening to choke me, so unlike me. I was ashamed, but helpless. “I’m sorry. I can’t. I can’t—” Now I did indeed sound as if I were about to sneeze.

Irene’s fingers clenched on my upper arm. “Hold tight,” she rather harshly advised me.

By now tears were blurring my eyes and streaming down my cheeks.

“Hush,” she whispered. “We promised no hysterics.”

“But I’m not,” I was able to choke out. “Having hysterics. I’m laughing, though I don’t know why.”

Her voice was low and urgent. “That is a form of hysteria, if you don’t contain it.”

I gazed at her, seeing only through a wavy pane of glassy tears. “I don’t know why I would laugh in such a grim circumstance,” I managed to get out on a wavery sigh of words and whisper.

“Because our circumstances are ludicrous, Nell.” She allowed herself to sink onto her hip, after glancing carefully around at the carpet. “We are searching for needles we don’t know are there in a haystack of rococo furnishings, on our hands and knees, in the presence of crude death.”

“I cannot tell whether I am laughing or crying now,” I complained, wiping my cheeks with the heels of my hands, which were impressed with the costly whorls of the Aubusson carpet.

Irene regarded me carefully, and somewhat wearily. “Why do you suppose the Greek masks of comedy and tragedy are always shown paired, tilted together like a pair of gossiping neighbors? When I was performing at La Scala in Milan, I encountered a composer, Ruggiero Leoncavallo, who was working on an aria by Pagliacci, the tragic clown. It is a virtuoso exercise in despairing laughter.”

I shook my head. What did opera have to do with my unforgivable behavior?

Irene took my wrists in her hands and pulled my fingers from my face, as one might demand the attention of a petulant child, save I was not petulant, but mortified.

“Nell, laughter and tears sit side by side in the chamber of the heart, as any actor can tell you. And any tenor who will someday sing Pagliacci can tell you that the same contraction of air and muscle that produces sobs produces laughter. The brilliance of Pagliacci’s aria is its interplay of forced hilarity and unsurvivable despair.”

Having settled to a discreet hiccough during her lecture on the finer points of stage performance, I finally nodded, relieved that the irresistible urge to giggle had sunk beneath an exhausted melancholy much more appropriate to the situation.

“Now. What is this object by any other name? Besides a rose?” Irene smiled slightly.

I recognized the Shakespearean allusion. Strangely, all this stagecraft talk had given me a sense of distance from the terrible scene in which we played such ludicrous parts.

“My needle case,” I said with sobriety. “Here.” I drew the long, narrow, enameled case from the chatelaine. I removed the needles, lancing them into temporary lodging in my skirt’s sturdy twill fabric until the case was empty. “It’s meant to hold needles and bodkins and toothpicks, but may serve for other things. Will this do?”

“Admirably!” Irene pronounced, inspecting it through her—my—spectacles. “And the pincers?”

I extended the small sterling silver tweezers. “I use these for picking up threads and beads.”

“Excellent.” In a moment she had bent to pluck some vague brownish yellow crumbs from the carpet. She dropped them into the enameled needle case.

She paused to eye me. “How are you doing now?”

“Doing? That is such an American expression. I am not doing at all. I am pretending to be in another place at another task, breathing other air. Will that do?”

“It will,” she said. “That is also a clue as to how our Mr. Holmes performs his miracles of detection in the face of human iniquity. He looks close, not far, dear Nell, and spares himself much anguish.”

“We are looking through a microscope then?”

“Yes. As a physician or a botanist. We look small, so that the large does not overwhelm us. Yes?”

“Yes.” I crawled forward behind her on my elbows and knees. “It is most undignified.”

“So should we be in the presence of such indignities to the human body and soul. Does this not remind you of something other than the fictions of Edgar Allan Poe about the rue Morgue?”

“Oh yes, Irene.” I found my voice quivering and cast a quick glance at the heavens, which in this room was a painted ceiling of naked cherubs and naked ladies, a pairing I shall never understand. “Despite the distance in location and in time, I find this scene most distressingly reminiscent of the depredations performed in London just last autumn.”

Irene rose to her knees, reminding me of some rearing centaur in her unnatural man’s garb. Her hastily piled locks seemed to writhe in the wavering lamplight like the Medusa’s snaky tendrils.

“Jacques the Ripper appears to have turned his ghastly attentions on Paris.”

“It does not make sense,” I objected.

“But it does make for murder,” she said. “And politics. And a most brutal puzzle.”

6.
Frere Jacques, Dormez-Vous?

Well I say, December’s here already and January,
February and March are waiting for us and I’m one of
those plants which can’t stand the cold of winter. Would you
like to see my legs? Then they say, Come along in. And
indoors it’s so snug and warm that one immediately wants to
strip to one’s chemise and stay like that. A fortnight later
one’s so completely forgotten the draughty street-corners up our
way that the mere sight of a wet overcoat is enough
to astonish us
.
—
LA BELLE OTERO,
MY DAYS AND NIGHTS

After our inspection of the death chamber, we were taken to another grand chamber and there sat down to wait. Inspector le Villard seemed much surprised by our composure.

Again ensconced in a grand but empty room, I occupied myself making sketches of the footprints on the scene in my tiny silver-encased notepad.

“Four sets,” I noted. “Some dainty slipper impressions. A large man-size imprint, but narrowed with dandified daintiness at toe and heel. A massive imprint as undefined as a bottle side. And many man-size boot prints, uniform in shape if not in size.”

Irene nodded as she studied my sketches over my shoulder. “The ladies, the police in their uniform boots, and two men, one well shod and one ill shod.”

“What would an ill-shod man be doing in such a room in such a place?”

“An excellent question, Nell. We shall have to see if a doctor was called previously, but I doubt it. Officialdom will only fully invade the scene now that our Eminent Personage is well away from the carnage.”

Her last word suddenly took my mind and eye from microscopic distance to the enlarged view of everyday reality. I felt my stomach and my senses spinning.

The only remedy was to resume my close-work. I began to wonder if this was why fancywork attracted me.

I attempted a far more challenging artistic task: to draw an approximation of the barber’s chair.

Irene inspected my efforts. “Very good.”

“What is this thing?”

Her lips pursed as she eyed me. “You have held up very well, Nell.”

“You always manage to say ‘well, Nell,’ as if you were declaiming ‘how now, brown cow.’ ”

Her laugh was weary. “Guilty. I have underestimated you, I admit. But then, you were not reared in America, and are unused to uncivil atrocities.”

“Ah. The Red Indians, you mean.”

“Ah, the White Devils, I mean.”

“Is that not an English play by Webster?”

“You have me there, Nell, as usual. No, what I mean is that because you have not been exposed to the incivilities of life that I and Pink have—”

“That chit!”

Irene eyed me until I blushed. “She is most forward,” I said.

“Perhaps she has had need to be.” Her look was so abstracted that

she spoke to herself more than me.
“He
, of course would make a thorough job of it. It is not enough to see signs if you cannot read them.”

I did not ask who
“he
, of course” was. “We have the contents of my needle case,” I said in consolation, removing it from my pocket.

“Which are teasingly familiar to me, but not in this form.” She frowned as she took the slender enamel container to a white-marble table topped by a great-globed lamp.

Sitting beside the table, she shook a pale brown fragment onto the glaring marble.

“A crumb, as you said,” I suggested as I followed her to the impromptu specimen table. “But why would anyone have eaten in there?”

“A crumb could have been picked up on a boot or shoe and have dropped off in the murder chamber.”

“Then it could have dropped off the footwear of those poor women.”

I fought the memory of their feet, one of the few recognizable portions of their anatomy, clad in rumpled silken hose and embroidered satin shoes. Cinderella shoes. And then I remembered the Grimm fairy tale about the girl whose bloodred shoes would not come off until she had danced to her death.

Irene lifted my spectacles to her face again, peering at the single crumb as through a lorgnette. “Not bread, though brown and crumbly. Yet it reminds me of something. Ah, well.” Her smallest fingernail prodded the mote back into the Oriental needle case, which I could finally think of again by its proper name, etui. It was shocking to think that my humble case had carried a grain of evidence from a scene of such chaos.

“The police are right about one thing,” Irene said.

I waited.

“They will not know what really happened here until they examine the bodies at the morgue.”

“You don‘t believe that we—?”

“Should view the remains? The police would not let us, and even our anonymous . . . er, client, would not be interested in our opinion of that.”

Irene straightened and absently turned down the lamp, an economy we practiced at Neuilly because the oil for them must be hauled in by the barrel.

Here, in this palace of luxurious decadence, I believe her gesture was an instinctive effort to soften the bright light and harsh shadows that made every scene seemed etched in the black-and-white cartoon of a sensational newspaper drawing.

“What do you know of the Jack the Ripper murders in London, Nell?” she asked.

I started, guilty. I recalled feeling the same unhappy emotion what now seemed ages ago (and had only been hours ago), when I realized that I relished the notion of Irene and I alone together again.

Indeed we were.

I started guiltily now because last autumn I had suffered from an irresistible curiosity about that string of atrocities in the city we had left in haste only months before. I had such a case of curiosity, in fact, that I devoured any English-language newspapers available. Luckily, Godfrey acquired them regularly for the political and legal news. Naturally, after seeing the lurid sketches of the Whitechapel horrors, my jaded eyes saw this far-removed death scene as drawn in charcoal on dun-colored paper.

“I ask,” Irene said, “because I confess I did not pay them much attention, except to be glad of leaving a capital that was so beset.”

“Oh. You do not know much about them.” What a rare opportunity. I personally thought that Irene was rarely interested in newspapers unless she was in them. “I could hardly avoid reading of the atrocities. Truly, a madman was abroad. He was so often almost glimpsed, yet still eluded everyone, like some ogre out of a wicked fairy tale, chopping up children, except these women were hardly innocents. No reason for it all but unreasoning savagery. It did not seem at all English.”

“No?” Irene’s gaze was piercing. “What of Balaclava? Or Mai-wand?”

“Well, that was war. Men murdering men, and used to it. Whatever those poor women were, they were defenseless.”

“And poor, quite literally.” Irene sighed and handed me the etui. “Store this for a while. It is time to revisit Pink. Now that we have seen what she has seen, she will be more forthcoming.”

“Why so?”

“Shared shock creates bonds between strangers.”

“And why should we want a bond with a girl who is already on the path to perdition?”

Irene leaned close enough to whisper, every word clipped. “Because we might change her path, Nell. Is that not a noble goal?”

“But it would require consorting with a fallen woman.”

“And how are they to be kept from falling even more if the righteous will not consort with them?”

“I suppose they won’t. But the chance for infection—”

“You are saying that the righteous are weak?”

“No. Only that evil is contagious.”

“So,” said Irene, “is ignorance. I believe that if we can discover why someone would kill these women in such a fashion, we shall know a great deal more about evil, and righteousness, than we did before.”

“Oh, my head is spinning like a compass. We should not be here. We should not be inquiring into these morbid matters: we should not be encouraging a girl of tender years in a life of depravity.”

Irene drew back, some of the censorious glint in her eyes dimming. “This place is depraved, I’ll grant you that, Nell.” Her expression softened as it rested on my troubled expression. “That young woman will be better for sharing her horror. Perhaps this incident will cure her of a life of luxurious vice,” she added dryly.

“That is true,” I agreed, hastening after her out the door with new heart. “One theory about Jack the Ripper was that he sought to discourage women from taking to the streets.”

“An annuity would have perhaps been more persuasive,” Irene threw over her shoulder. “I am so relieved that you have some acquaintance with the previous work of this monster.”

It was one of those times when I sensed that Irene’s words were as double-edged as the most lethal of swords, but I could not say why, nor determine who was the recipient of her highly honed instincts, Jack the Ripper, or I.

Pink had not moved. She might have been the portrait she had resembled when I first saw her.

Her head lifted as we entered the room, and I realized that our ammonia-scoured nostrils were failing to detect the new odor of the charnel house that clung to our clothing.

Pink’s face hid in her open hands. “You’ve seen it.”

“As much as we can make out,” Irene agreed, resuming her former seat.

“Both of you?” Pink asked incredulously, lifting her eyes from her fingertips like a naughty child peeping through them. They queried me.

“Both of us,” I said. “It is not necessary to smoke little cigars to face death.”

“But it is so much more dramatic,” Irene put in, producing one of the objects in question and lighting it. “All of the gentlemen entertaining firing squads do it.”

Her motion distracted Pink’s attention from me. Really, she was a charming girl, and I could not believe she had been fully corrupted. I sensed of a sudden that Irene’s cigar was masking any unkind odors that clung to us.

“You are a most dramatic individual, Madam.” Pink regarded Irene almost as intently as Irene was regarding her. “I take it that you and Miss . . . Foxleigh—”

“Huxleigh,” I hastened to correct.

“I take it that you both have encountered recently dead people before.”

“Recently,” Irene agreed, “and not-so-recently dead. Is that not right, Nell?”

“Only twice,” I said. “I would have been content to leave it at that.”

“Well,” said Pink, “you two are certainly good scouts about it. I’m sure that I would have not been so upset if only I’d had a chance to go west instead of east, and had seen the frontier life for myself. I apologize, ladies, for acting like such a fading violet.”

I felt like something of a fading violet myself, now that I had heard the young lady’s Americanisms in full flower. And she still seemed such a placid and well-bred girl for a harlot.

“I should worry had you
not
been upset,” Irene said. “But why did you go east instead of west, and how did you end up in the trade you follow?” She sounded as if she were interviewing a dressmaker and not a globe-trotting tart.