Spider Dance (62 page)

From the shifting bars of gaslight that entered the Gurney windows, I detected thick bull-hide soles and lanolin-soaked uppers. Hardly Regent Street.

Crude men, I decided, from crude climates. As for the unshod one . . . I’d already formed some idea of his origins. In fact, I’d researched the notion a bit. What I found was more disquieting than anything I’d yet seen, including Father Hawks’s ravaged body.

Imagination, however, is the great enemy of logical deduction.

Anything I learned now would help me save the Vanderbilt child, and her ambiguous abductress, and myself for that matter, later.

And it was a good deal later, almost half an hour, I should estimate, before the Gurney came to a stop in an area reeking of sea salt, manure, and blood.

Distant ships sounded, mournful as distant whales, while they left and attained the great harbor.

Such lofty matters were remote from the doings here.

I was pulled out of the carriage onto the damp cobblestones, inhaling another dose of salty mist and blood, dragged to my feet between two fellows clad in dark, damp, and cheap wool, and marched into a building as huge and inky as the night around us.

“Hurry!” ordered a voice in English. A voice that had never spoken my language from birth.

The fools had thought binding a man’s hands was sufficient That left his feet, eyes, nose, and brain perfectly free to operate.

I hadn’t anticipated brilliant opponents, but madness makes up in power for a great deal of stupidity.

I was half dragged over perhaps forty yards of hard stone floor, glimpsing a roof as high as a cathedral, or more aptly, the wings of a theater, for I saw distant metal mechanisms above, reflecting the light from the bull’s-eyes lanterns they bore.

Lanterns indoors indicated a deserted warehouse of sorts.

“Here,” cried the one voice that used English.

I was rushed from the dark into a chamber haphazardly lit by paraffin lamps. Their smell mercifully dampened the inescapable odor of new and old blood throughout this echoing building.

I was half sat on a wooden chair placed before a crude wooden table.

“This man came to the club seeking information.”

Another man jerked my head back by the hair—my atrociously shaped bowler hat had been left to be windblown about the street in front of the Episcopal Club.

My eyes blinked from the unaccustomed light, but not before they had registered the sight of Madam Irene Adler Norton, smoking a small cigar and standing before me with a pistol akimbo on her hip.

I must admit to being momentarily speechless, but luckily the occasion didn’t require comment.

Behind her I noticed the child in her pale lace stockings and frock, half sitting, half reclining on a table, like a nymph in an absinthe advertisement, her thin legs tucked under her. Then I realized the reason for her sitting on a table. Rats.

Even as I thought it, I heard the snakelike rasp of their tails over the stone floor.

“He was going about the club, asking questions about everything,” the first man said

“And who are you?” Madam Irene demanded, giving immediate notice that she was playing some role to mislead this gang.

“Artemis Conklin, but I go by Artie.”

She lifted the pistol and aimed it at my forehead. “What are you?”

“A Pinkerton by profession, but not for long,” I added.

“Pinkerton?” The man behind me sounded confused, and extremely annoyed that he was. I felt his grip on my hair tighten.

Given his barefoot companion, this was not a happy observation.

Madam Irene shrugged. Her hair was down and disarranged, and her trousers stained, but her manner was as calm as if she stood in a chapel instead of a slaughterhouse, for that was what this great empty building had been.

“Pinkertons are a sort of domestic detective,” she told the man behind me. I would describe her tone as a dismissive sneer. “They are hired to look into errant spouses and do some antiunion work for the kingpins of commerce, but are otherwise no threat.”

“This one was with the woman who earlier was with you.”

“No threat also. I had to mount my own inquiries before I, er . . . encountered you and your compatriots. Unimportant tools, my dear Reisling. You can understand my need for them.”

“Then you think this man knows nothing?”

She regarded me for a long, torturous moment. It appeared that during her short time with these thugs she had become their leader, or at least their guide.

She blew out a considering stream of smoke that teased my nose like a fresh slipper of shag on Baker Street. Alas, both shag and Baker Street were far from this sink-hole of iniquity.

“I doubt he knows anything worthwhile. You can see by his suit that he’s a humbug sort of detective.”

“Still, we should let our savage pet have at him. A little manicure job and he will say whatever we want to hear.”

At this I was hauled up from behind and slammed facedown of the rough wooden table. My bonds were loosened, but no sooner had my elbows unflexed than two men turned me over and threw their full weight on both my arms.

I saw nothing now but the crude wooden struts of the small chamber’s ceiling above my head. I heard, however, the poor child whimper.

My arms were pulled outward and my wrists pinned.

A face from a nightmare . . . dark, painted with the image of bones, raised a knife over me.

I heard a pistol cocked. Another stream of smoke diffused through the lantern light that revealed every fiendish feature of my torturer’s face.

“It’s him or the Vanderbilt spawn,” the English speaker said. “One or the other will make a nice donation to the decor on Fifth Avenue. Vanderbilt needs another warning.”

“A waste of time,” Irene Adler Norton said with studied ennui, “but you’ll do what you will do.”

I bunched every muscle in my body for resistance . . . or endurance.

But the inspector and Irene had not been speaking of my
mythical head monk at all. Not Abbot Noir, but abattoir,
a word I did know even if I did not expect to hear it
spoken in polite society.
Slaughterhouse
.
—
NELL HUXLEIGH IN
CHAPEL NOIR
BY CAROLE NELSON DOUGLAS

Soon our horse’s clopping hooves were no longer part of the constant equine drumbeat along Broadway but became a singular effect. Godfrey’s and my hansom turned down darker and even darker streets.

We’d borne west, not east. I’d assumed the slums of the East Side, teeming with tenements, would be the destination of so dangerous a criminal element desiring to hide.

But our hansom was slowing to navigate the damp, salty air of the docks. There was no way to muffle the horses’s hooves. Both Godfrey and I felt as if our presence were announced with every step as definitely as by a footman pounding a staff at a royal reception to shout out the name of each arriving guest.

The rank odor of wet wood and dead fish was mild compared to another reek that hit us in the open hansom like a slap across the face.

“Godfrey—?”

He thumped on the trapdoor until the driver’s top hat was visible, if not his face beneath the ragged brim.

“Where are we, man?”

“Holding pens,” was the muffled answer. And another word.

“The Gurney?” Godfrey asked.

“Turned down this alleyway. I don’t see or hear it, sir.”

“Then stop at once. We’ll get out here.”

“But, sir, ‘sno place to take a lady.”

Godfrey released us both from the hansom. We stood on damp cobblestones shining faintly from some unseen light.

I glimpsed another gold coin handed up to the driver.

“Wait for us.”

The top hat nodded, even as the gold piece disappeared. I wasn’t sure he’d wait, but then, I didn’t care. If we weren’t successful in finding Irene tonight, no ride back to Broadway would bring the light back into my life, or Godfrey’s, again.

“That odor!” I said as we walked away. “It’s like a barn, but a thousand times worse.”

“That’s because these barns house thousands of farm animals.”

“Thousands? This is a—”

“An area of slaughterhouses, I think.”

I stopped dead in my tracks. “An
abattoir
.” Of course I was familiar with the French word for slaughterhouse. I had, in fact, once visited the great Paris open market of Les Halles, where butchered meat hung on hooks and passersby had to be wary of slipping on the odd misplaced entrail. . . . One visit had been more than enough.

I also recalled once mistaking the word
abattoir
for a personage: Abbot Noir. This had been on the scene of the worst human slaughter Irene and I had ever encountered, only last spring.

“You can return to the hansom and wait.” Godfrey seemed to sense my internal recoil. “In fact, I’d like some extra assurance that the driver will wait.”

“No. If Irene and Consuelo are in this terrible place they’ll need us both.”

We resumed walking without more debate, each of us listening, but hearing only the muffled bawls of penned animals awaiting brutal death.

“Perhaps,” I told Godfrey as we pushed as quietly as we could farther into the silent dark, “we are in the way.”

“Perhaps. But I can’t let Irene’s fate rest in another’s hands, no matter how expert, any more than you can. We must be discreet, Nell. If it appears that our presence will interfere with Holmes’s scheme, we must defer.”

For a moment, I said nothing. I recognized that
the
man had put himself in danger to resolve this mystery. That he had intended to risk himself and only himself. And perhaps Quentin.

I also recognized that Godfrey’s and my claim upon Irene superceded any intent Sherlock Holmes might harbor. Besides, Holmes’s first professional obligation was to poor little Consuelo Vanderbilt. Not Irene. No matter how personally he might wish to save her, he was committed to Consuelo. No one else. And certainly not to Godfrey and myself, whom he’d left flailing about in front of the Episcopal Club like a prize pair of turkeys!

Here, near the harbor, one could hear the eternal slap of waves against hull and piling and smell the sea in all its rank, commercial stink. Another scent was beginning to drown that out, and I recognized it. Blood.

In the occasional glimmer of moonlight between the hulking warehouses, I saw that Godfrey was attired in a midnight peacoat like Black Otto, a former personage of his on an earlier, less dire adventure in Monte Carlo.

I didn’t doubt that his hand in his right coat pocket held pistol, or dagger, or blackjack.

I myself was ill accoutered for such a desperate expedition, save for the many useful articles on my chatelaine. But
now I had to muffle this useful accessory with my hand to keep it from chiming our approach.

A horse snorted in the distance.

Godfrey stopped me with a hand on my wrist. We waited. Then moved forward.

A Gurney and two horses had been pulled close to a building.

We came near . . . and Godfrey bent over a bundle on the wet ground. The driver.

“Dead?” I asked.

“Perhaps. Certainly not likely to rouse until dawn.”

We slipped past the horses, standing patiently in the way forced upon their kind, each with a forefoot lifted to ease the waiting.

The sight of these beasts of burden with one foot lifted against their wearisome fate always stirred my heart. My ire against those who had raced this Gurney here, to what dire purpose, rose like a fire in my throat. That they had also abused the two priests only increased my fury. That Irene and Consuelo were even now at their mercy . . . I suddenly knew the fiery heart of Lola Montez, and deemed no weapon—pistol, whip, or dagger—beyond my just and present use.

Godfrey’s cautionary hand on my forearm almost spurred a striking out.

“Inside here,” he whispered in my ear.

I was back, again—as in my dreams, my nightmares—in that ancient, crumbling maze in Transylvania, where creatures and rituals and rites unthinkable had required the utmost of my endurance. And resistance.

Somehow, Irene and I had now stumbled into a new variety of atrocity.