Good Night, Mr. Holmes (39 page)

“An exaggeration, Mr. Norton,” Irene said drily, “most out of character for a barrister. We would leave...?”

He shrugged happily. “The day after tomorrow, and return in three days. I will make the arrangements first thing in the morning.”

Godfrey left soon after, leaving me speechless, but not for long.

“I suppose it will do me as much good as Casanova to croak about your plans,” I said. “I must express myself, however distasteful you find my opinion. Irene, this jaunt with Godfrey is most improper.”

She had returned to her book, so all I saw was the top of her hair where lamplight kindled auburn flames among its wood-brown luster. Her glance flashed its former fire.

“My dear Nell, if the outing were not half-mad and totally improper, it would not be any fun! Your friend Godfrey is well aware of that. He feels that I waste away here and wanted to provide me with an irresistible lure to action.”

“Apparently he has,” I huffed.

Irene smiled. “Apparently, but I think he has misjudged the lure.”

“You are not going because of the diamond auction?”

“No more than he is.”

“But why, then?”

She simply smiled again and shrugged. Later, I heard her humming
“Frère Jacques”
to Casanova.

Even the Temple’s almost celestial air of peace did little to quiet my conscience while I worked at the pile of manuscript in Godfrey’s Temple offices. The temporary typists employed during my absence had misplaced everything, lagging pitifully behind in their work.

I rapped the keys at my usual brisk pace, finding the activity a good method of dissipating my distemper. Pages flew through my platen, entering pristine and white to emerge soiled with type.

So I viewed the state of Irene’s reputation, until I finally considered that her liaison with the King of Bohemia, no matter how innocent, had likely ruined that reputation forever. And then, I could think of no man on this earth by whom I would prefer her to be improperly escorted than Godfrey Norton. In this case, he was the least of all possible evils.

Yet I also felt a sense of abandonment, as I had on Irene’s first removal to Europe. This time the pang was doubled; the two people most dear to me appeared perfectly able to dispense with my presence. So sometimes I typed through tears of self-pity, for which I berated myself, and then I made a stupid mistake and had to rip out the sheet of paper and start all over again...

Someone entered the office at a moment when I least felt like dealing with the public. I kept typing to the end of the sentence, then turned, about to exercise my frustration on whoever had been unwise enough to enter.

The visitor was a tall slender man with sharp features. His silk plush top hat was properly in his hand, but he looked at me so intently that I felt certain he could see the tears ebbing in my eyes.

“Mr. Norton, I perceive, is away from chambers for a few days,” he said swiftly.

I glanced through the open door to Godfrey’s sanctum. His wig and gown hung on their proper hooks and the cluttered desk retained an air of occupancy, perhaps because of his hasty departure.

“He is on the Continent,” I announced importantly. “But how...?”

The visitor smiled wearily, as if the question were all too familiar. “An empty envelope bearing the name of a Fleet Street ticket agent has fallen on the floor by the door. Obviously Mr. Norton discarded it just as he left.”

“With all this paper hither and yon you noticed that?”

“Observation is my profession.”

“Indeed. Many could say that. If I did not observe these handwritten documents properly, I should not be able to typewrite them accurately. I have a great deal of that very thing to do, so I suggest that you call again—”

“Perhaps you can settle my business now. Can you tell me whether Mr. Norton is a son of the late John Chappie Norton?”

The query doused my composure like a bucket of ice water. “How in the world should I know that?”

“You have worked with Mr. Norton for some time, although not in recent months. And you are observant, Miss—”

“Huxleigh!” I barked. “And it is true that I have... been away, but—” I would not, I would
not
ask this odiously prescient man how he had determined the length and interrupted nature of my employment.

He smiled briefly. It was not an expression that softened his angular features.

“You are reordering the documents on the shelf above you. Half the files are kept horizontally, half vertically, but the fattest—therefore the oldest—are vertical. Obviously, a substitute who is too lazy to reach a bit higher has interrupted your admirable system, Miss Huxleigh.”

“I had already concluded that the recent temporary was lazy, for the work is sadly behind. Any fool could see that.
He
apparently could not keep up.”

The gentleman smiled again. “But you have not answered my question.”

“I...” What to do? I couldn’t lie, yet I didn’t want to betray information Godfrey wanted to keep to himself. “It is not for me to say. Is it a matter of... inheritance?” I knew, of course, that Black Jack Norton had died penniless, but wished to ask the expected question.

“It is not for me to say,” the gentleman returned, “but I have been trying to trace relations of the late Norton for some time.”

I shook my head. “You must ask Mr. Norton when he returns.”

“And that will be?”

“Thursday.”

The gentleman nodded and replaced his hat as he stepped to the door.

“Sir! Whom may I tell Mr. Norton to expect?”

“Oh, I doubt he knows of me. But the name is Holmes, Sherlock Holmes. I will leave my card.”

I took it wordlessly and watched the tall figure move through the clutter with catlike precision. My eyes didn’t leave the door until long after he had closed it. When they did, they settled on the card, which contained not only the name of Irene’s rival for the Zone of Diamonds, but also an address that was hauntingly familiar, even from the day when Irene and I had first met, and then together had met the late Mr. Jefferson Hope.

“Two-twenty-one-B Baker Street,” I whispered, perhaps hoping that saying the address aloud would banish it. The print remained quite unaltered.

Chapter Twenty-eight

T
HE
R
ETURN OF
S
HERLOCK
H
OLMES

“Sherlock Holmes!”
Irene exclaimed.

I was too bursting with the news of my recent encounter to withhold it a moment after my friend’s return to the door of Briony Lodge.

Now she stood in mid-threshold, her face blank with shock.

“Who,” Godfrey asked from behind her frozen figure, “is Sherlock Holmes?”

“Sherlock Holmes
was making inquiries about Godfrey’s father?” Irene repeated in disbelief.

“More about Godfrey, actually,” I said.

Irene glided like a sleepwalker into the hall, reaching to unpin her bonnet—a smart new one with “Paris” written all over it. Godfrey hovered behind her as she lifted her veil before the mirror. Despite her shock, Irene’s face radiated well-being. Three days in Paris had erased weeks of heart-break in Bohemia, as if that clever Parisian milliner had put stars in her eyes and roses on her cheeks along with the fashionable bonnet atop her head. I developed new respect for millinery then and there.

“Irene.” Godfrey spoke low, his gloved hands pausing urgently on her shoulders, “what is so sinister about this Holmes fellow inquiring about my father? I no more like having my family history unearthed now than when you did it, but surely the matter is not so serious as you seem to think.”

She gave him a vague, reassuring smile. “No, it is not, Godfrey. It is simply that the paths of myself and this Mr. Holmes have nearly crossed at times in the past. The first occasion was when Mr. Tiffany employed us both to trace the Zone of Diamonds.”

Godfrey set hat, cane and gloves on the hall console. “So the trail warms again. I wonder why?”

“Likely for the same reason that you wish me to concentrate on finding the Zone—the sale of crown jewels we have just attended in Paris. Perhaps Mr. Tiffany has engaged Mr. Holmes to renew the investigation.”

“Or this Holmes fellow has stumbled on a new clue,” Godfrey said. “I suppose I shall have to see him; better I be forewarned.”

“I regret greeting you with such disturbing news,” I put in, feeling utterly forgotten and more than somewhat aggrieved since my dramatic news had precipitated the conversation, “but when the gentleman gave his name, I thought my poor heart would stop.”

But my past cardiac condition was not as pressing to them as the present matter of Sherlock Holmes.

“What is this man’s interest anyway?” Godfrey sounded a trifle annoyed—perhaps not only by this revived interest in his unhappy family but also by Irene’s fascination with the man Holmes. I had never observed a possessive streak in him before.

“All mysteries are his interest,” Irene said, warming to her subject and growing even more radiant. “Sherlock Holmes is a consulting detective and a splendid one. From what I’ve read—or inferred—in the papers, his fine investigative hand has touched every criminal sensation of the past decade.”

“I have never heard of the man!” Godfrey objected.

“Of course not. The police are quick to claim all credit for themselves. Subtlety was never their chief virtue.”

“Apparently subtlety is not this man Holmes’s virtue, either,” Godfrey grumbled, “or he would not have come openly to my chambers.”

“How could he know that your type-writer girl has an astute nose for intrigue and a very long memory?” Irene, amused by Godfrey’s discomfiture for some odd reason, smiled fondly at me. “We must consider this latest development that Nell presents us, but first I will change.”

I accompanied her upstairs while Godfrey cooled his heels in the sitting room. I privately pitied him, for the news of Sherlock Holmes had eclipsed his inspired trip to Paris as a thunderclap outshouts a firecracker.

“How was Paris?” I asked, helping Irene to remove her traveling things.

“Divine! We saw the Tuileries from which the Zone was looted in 1848—the flower beds were breaking into fragrant bloom and the stone goddesses posed as if alive among the greenery. We took tea at an open cafe in Montmartre. The air was fresh, everything so delicate and clean, the city afloat in an amber wash of sunlight. It was superb!”

“And the jewels? From the illustration in the papers they seemed rather... large.”

“Large, oh, yes, and more than superb.” Irene sat on the dressing chair, her eyes glittering. “Such jewels will never be seen again in their present form, for Mr. Tiffany, whom I saw there, plans to sell the stones separately. You should have seen, Nell! The Empress Eugenie’s favorite comb had nine flexible diamond streamers cascading to the shoulders, a waterfall of sheer white fire! Mr. Tiffany bought six of the comb’s eighteen lots for two hundred-eighteen-thousand francs. I told him that the piece was meant to be whole.”

“Irene, you didn’t! What did he say?”

“He laughed and said, ‘Yes, and on your head, Miss Adler, no doubt.’ He said that the diamond corsage he lent me for the Milan opera is finally finished and is to be displayed at the Paris Exhibition next year. He was
most
pleased, however, that I wore his son’s brooch the day of the auction.”

“The agonized octopus? Why, I’d forgotten about it...”

“I had not, nor had Mr. Tiffany. His son, he said, is doing rather well with craft work, stained glass and the like. Perhaps this will be worth something someday,” Irene mused, removing the disgusting Tiffany brooch from her reticule.

“Did Mr. Tiffany mention the Zone?”

“Indeed. He said it was a pity that I hadn’t been able to trace it. I responded,” Irene said firmly, “that the greater pity was that it would have been sundered if I had. He reminded me that good business is never a pity. At least I know to whom to sell the Zone if I find it.”