Spider Dance (61 page)

Mr. Artemis Conklin had to stop every few yards to gawk about like a country bumpkin. Then he had to search his pockets, pull out a large cigar, and light it.

He again peered intently around the neighborhood, which was decorated with the usual peddlers and loungers. Then he ostentatiously took my arm (it was all I could do not to unceremoniously jerk it away), and said loudly, “So you last saw this Father Edwards at the club, you say.”

“Edmonds!” I corrected before I could stop myself.

“Don’t worry, miss, we Pinkertons always get our man. Or woman.”

At this he chuckled and we again preceded toward the club.

I heard a furtive jingle, like coins, and jerked around to look behind us. But the street was quiet. The loiterers were growing invisible in the shadows of the looming six- and seven-story offices. Night was falling with a thud here, along this narrow street hemmed in by these towering buildings.

Again the clinking sound. I observed a peddler’s cart across the street, attended by a man slouched against the wall as if asleep. Somehow the wind must be moving among the clutter of goods.

A gas lantern glowed alongside the steps ahead on our left. The farther one got from Broadway, the more old-fashioned gaslights were still in use. Once again I broached the doors of the Episcopal Club. I was beginning to feel like an American member of the congregation!

Despite my unlikely escort, I was recognized by the attendant and we were allowed in.

The dinner hour found Bishop Potter in. He greeted us in the parlor, listening with a kind, worried face as I explained the disappearance of my friend, and implored him to assist this fine detective, Mr. Conklin of the Pinkertons, in finding her.

“Such a shock, Miss Huxleigh,” the bishop said. “Do you know we haven’t been able to find Father Hawks? And Father Edmonds, such a fine young priest, has also gone missing. Now you say our revered donor, Mrs. Norton is not to be found. Appalling! Of course I will do anything, Mr.—?”

“Conklin, sir. Father. Bishop, that is. I guess yer kissin’ cousins to the high clergy of me own Catholic faith.”

Here the bishop’s genial expression curdled somewhat. What could he do? More than half the population of New York was Irish Roman Catholic these days. They were tenement shop workers, domestics, laborers, bartenders, and policemen. Even private policemen.

“I need information on the good fathers,” said Holmes, taking out a tiny stub of pencil, licking the lead and applying the blunted point to a smudged and crinkled notebook. “Where were they last seen?”

“Why, here, I suppose. Both had official positions at the club, and therefore roomed here. We also have a library and club rooms and direct our charities to the poor from here as well.”

“You don’t room here?”

“No. No, of course not. I have the official residence.”

“Then why do ye spend so much time here?”

“To dine, of course, in a more communal atmosphere. The cook is quite fine. And to escape the pomp of my office.”

“I don’t suppose you invite any Catholic priests here.”

“Prelates, from time to time, but not priests. The large Irish population of New York requires us to set aside denominational differences on occasion. Our congregation, of course, is more . . . stable.”

“No Irish need apply, eh, Bishop?” Holmes had strolled insolently to the bay window overlooking the street. “No Jesuits either, I s’pose?”

“Jesuits? No. Hardly. They are the aggressive arm of that ancient religion. Brilliant but doctrinaire. Bishops, on the other hand, well, we all have to be diplomats.”

Holmes turned from the window that looked out on absolute blackness now.

“I don’t s’pose you allow cigar smokin’ inside here?”

“Not in the library. In the club rooms, but—”

“Nothing to it. I’ll take meself outside for a think and a smoke. The two often go togither. Maybe Miss Ruxleigh has a question or two to ask you about Father Edmonds. She was much taken with him.”

“Huxleigh! And I was no more taken with Father Edmonds than I am with you, Mr., uh, Cronklin.”

Holmes had oiled out of the door, the disgusting snuffed cigar already in his hand, ready for a relighting.

Really! I’d never been seen in such debased company before, even if it was a pose, and blushed for the crudity of my companion.

The bishop, being a man of sensibility, immediately sensed my humiliation. “These police types are but a step up from the petty criminals they pursue, my dear,” he consoled me with a fineness of feeling I much appreciated.

I glanced out the window to see a bright ember flare against the dark. The revolting cigar. I do wish Irene would stop smoking such things!
Irene
. . . My eyes teared over.

“Please, Miss Huxleigh, do sit down again. Believe me, I’ll do all in my power to assist in your search for Mrs. Norton. Such a handsome woman. One hopes that . . . well, much evil happens on the streets of New York. I understand your need to employ an inquiry agent, but perhaps Mr. Conklin is not the best person. He seems eager to be off.”

I leaped up from my chair like a fox startled by hounds and whirled to look out the window. No ember glowed in the dark. I had been . . . seduced and abandoned.

Holmes was off on the real business of the night and I was sitting here exchanging inanities with the bishop.

“I must go.”

And I did, ignoring the bishop’s sputtered objections behind me, prating of dark streets, of Irene’s recent fate, promising he would find me an escort. . . .

I had
had
an escort, and he’d quite neatly deluded . . . and eluded me.

I burst out into the street. Night black now, and no one visible there. Not a soul.

Rushing down the stairs, I squinted at the far gaslights, searching for anything moving.

Something tinkled in the sparse summer breeze that crept down this misbegotten street.

Then someone swooped from the dark and captured my arm.

I didn’t waste time screaming, but fumbled among the objects on my chatelaine for the sharp, small scissors.

“Nell!”

I paused at hearing Godfrey’s voice. “Where’s Holmes? Oh, Godfrey, he has slipped us both, as he always intended.”

“Perhaps.” Godfrey whistled. A clatter of hooves came charging out from the mews behind the Episcopal Club. We were up and into a hansom cab before—as Americans say—I could whistle “Dixie,” although why I would do such a vulgar thing, I can’t imagine.

“A carriage came past just now,” Godfrey said after ordering the driver to make for Broadway as fast as he could. “It paused between the peddler’s cart Holmes ordered me to man and the Episcopal Club. When it moved on, Holmes was gone: kidnapped or willingly away. I don’t know which. Perhaps we can still catch it.”

“What’s he up to, Godfrey?”

“Finding Irene and Consuelo Vanderbilt. Without our participation.
He’s accomplished his goal. He’s been taken by the ones who took them, and he left us behind.”

“What about Quentin? Where is he?”

“Either duped, as we were, or already on the trail. It could be that Holmes regards you and me as amateurs, as emotionally wrought-up amateurs better left out of the picture. He told me to arrange for the hansom to wait so I could escort you safely back to the Astor House.”

“What arrogance!” I sounded like an Amazon. “What shall we do?” I wailed the next moment.

“I for one intend to follow him if I can. This cab will go where I tell it. Unless you object.”

“Object? I applaud.”

Godfrey was leaning half out of the hansom to see ahead as it turned onto the brightly lit thoroughfare of Broadway.

“There! That Gurney with the two black horses ahead of the horsecar.” Godfrey pounded his walking stick on the trapdoor above us. “Follow that Gurney, but at a decent distance.”

I heard a grunt in answer.

“Will the driver heed you?”

“A half-eagle gold piece says yes. What did you learn inside the Episcopal Club?”

“Nothing! Holmes engineered this outing merely to attract the wrong attention.”

“At which he succeeded brilliantly,” Godfrey said with a rueful chortle.

“Godfrey! This entire plan was based on duping us.”

“But he hasn’t quite, has he?”

I saw Godfrey’s keen features illuminated in the flash of a passing electric streetlight. They were as sharp and intent as Holmes on the hunt for scintillas of evidence on a carpet. We were all hurtling toward a way to find and free Irene.

If she needed freeing.

That sober thought I didn’t share with Godfrey. Irene was as willful as any wayward child. If she had secret purposes of her own she would think nothing of following them to any extreme required.

The stage lost a fine actor, even as science lost an acute reasoner,
when he became a specialist in crime
.
—
DR. WATSON IN “A SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA”

F
ROM THE
C
ASE
N
OTES OF
S
HERLOCK
H
OLMES

My abductors, of course, had to be quite rude about it.

The moment I had been snatched inside their rattling Gurney, I was thrust on the floor at their feet and my hands secured behind me.

I made no resistance. The idea was to remain conscious and hear, see . . . and smell . . . what they were up to. Where they were up to it was no more a mystery after a deep inhale or two of their noxious footwear.

We were headed toward the harbor, naturally, where a rat maze of warehouses permits any manner of concealment.

The one barefoot member of the party, whose tracks I had spied at the boardinghouse the night Madam Irene disappeared, provided the most provocative and chilling aroma. Blood. Fresh blood.

I admit the revelation chilled my own blood. I’d never doubted these were desperate villains willing to commit mayhem in order to gain their ends. I hadn’t expected the smell of fresh blood and the fears it gave birth to, for both Irene Adler and for the child she had taken, apparently these . . .

Well, what were they? My bones and head received the endless jolt of the cobblestones, bereft of any softening springs, but I can think in a thunderstorm.