Irene Adler: Chapel Noir Part 42

"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 wh.o.r.e. 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 wh.o.r.es 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 G.o.d 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 wh.o.r.es?"

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 wh.o.r.e, 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 siege clamour should shortly send me to my Maker.

"You do not want to slay before the eyes of one of G.o.d's servants," Mr. Holmes said.

A silence. "G.o.d's servants, if they be true, are all down on wh.o.r.es."

We four remained silent, the expression "down on wh.o.r.es" from the supposed Jack the Ripper letters echoing in our pounding ears.

I could hear my blood pulsing, as if eager to escape my skin under the quick glide of the upholsterer's knife.

I put a hand to my left ear to try to shut out that incessant thunder in my veins.

The edge of steel at my throat, thin as a violin string, pressed harder.

Sherlock Holmes was only three steps away. Irene five. Elizabeth ten. They might as well have all been in Afghanistan.

And then I realized that I must be my own salvation.

"All greedy, lying wh.o.r.es must die," the madman Kelly was intoning in my right ear.

I moved the fingers clapping the left side of my head delicately, as if penetrating a sewing basket filled with naked pins and needles.

Practicing the domestic arts develops a fine touch. Blindly, I withdrew the jet head of a hatpin and struck the long steel tine at the rough hand resting where my neck joined my shoulder.

Kelly yowled as three forms converged on us like leaping hounds, and I let myself slide to the floor.

I was not too proud to scrabble away from the fray on hands on knees, despite the filthy condition of the floor.

When I looked up, Sherlock Holmes had wrestled Kelly into firm custody. For a gaunt man he seemed to possess incredible strength. But more than Mr. Holmes was responsible for Kelly's sudden absence of struggle. Irene stood beside him, her pistol barrel pressed against his temple. Even a madmen recognized the futility of arguing with that.

Mr. Holmes slung him back to the stool like a bag of coal.

"Now, my son," he said sternly, "you will answer my questions with no further outbursts, and ignore these women. Do you not recall that in the er, Good Book, sometimes, ah, angels appear in unlikely forms."

I could tell that Mr. Sherlock Holmes was only familiar with the Bible and the usages of the Christian religion in the vaguest of terms.

Kelly's eyes narrowed in calculation. "I see. This is a test. I am to prove myself fit to follow in the Master's footsteps by heeding his priest, no matter what temptations surround me."

He folded his arms and straightened his shoulders. "Yes. I will prove my ability to resist these devils, which you say are angels in disguise."

"Excellent." Mr. Holmes again paused. "You have worked on an elaborate article of furniture for Durand Freres?"

Kelly squirmed on his stool. "A piece of angel's work for the acts of the devil, but I did not know its purpose until I accompanied it to the house of sin and shame."

"Of course you did not," Mr. Holmes soothed the fellow, as if he were indeed a clergyman. "You were the innocent tool. But once there, and once you had realized-"

"I left, Father. As soon as I could."

"You did not dally on the premises?"

"Dally? Who'd want the likes of me at such a place?"

"You did not visit the house's wine cellar?"

Kelly's expression hardened, either with distaste or the effort of appearing not to lie. "Wine? I like my pints too well, I admit, but wine is for the Master and the Ma.s.s, not the sort of doings that go on in a place like that. Not for the likes of me."

"So you claim that you left the house as soon as the . . . lounge was delivered?"

"I am a workman, Father. I do the job and then go."

It was not lost upon me that Kelly might consider the elimination of fallen women an occupation or even a calling.

"Hmmm," said Mr. Holmes, with as much skepticism as I felt. "Now you must tell me what your mission from G.o.d is, and how you have gone about it."

Had we not been three, with a celebrated detective between us and him, I am sure none of us would have remained in the chamber with him for the next outpouring. Well, I wouldn't have at any rate, not after endless moments in his homicidal embrace. To judge by the fascinated expressions on Irene's and Elizabeth's faces, fear was the least emotion they were feeling, though my skin crawled as if the man's vitriolic hatred were poisonous spittle that was sprinkling my physical person as well as my senses.

His theme was simple. Women were conniving, vicious, diseased beings who wanted his money and forced him into unwanted relations. G.o.d had given him a mission to stop them for the sake of good men everywhere, and when he found an opportunity, he did. He related a horrific number of attacks, but his accounts were so disjointed and confused that it would take hours and hours of questioning to sort out what was true and what a jumble, and he really admitted nothing when it came to the London horrors, although he seemed very familiar with them. But then, what Whitechapel resident would not be?

During this inconclusive recital, I began to see why the London press had a.s.sumed the Ripper would soon be dead or confined to an insane asylum.

Obviously a formal and longer interrogation was needed. We remained in Kelly's miserable room while Sherlock Holmes delivered the resident to Inspector le Villard and two gendarmes in the street below.

No curtains concealed the window, but Irene flattened herself against the adjacent wall, dingy as it was, and peered down into the street.

"Is that it?" Elizabeth asked breathlessly of no one in particular. "We have witnessed the capture of Jack the Ripper?"

"It would seem so," Irene said. She glanced pointedly at Elizabeth. "But it would be premature to make any announcements to the public."

"And that is . . . was Sherlock Holmes himself?"

"Not quite himself."

"I should like to meet him."

The words were barely out of her mouth when the narrow door to the chamber creaked open to reveal the tall form of the French priest.

We all turned, then converged on him. Perhaps he had absorbed some of Kelly's mania, for he seemed taken aback, and drew away.

"Is he arrested?" Irene wanted to know.

"Is he the Ripper?" Elizabeth demanded.

"Is he mad?" I piped in.

He ignored our questions to present his own. "I recognize the marshal-general tendencies of Madam Irene Adler Norton," he said with a flicking glance at her. "But I cannot discern which fair flower of French womanhood is Miss Nell Huxleigh, and which is Miss Pink from the rue des Moulins."

Elizabeth and I exchanged glances, our gazes resting of the same overprinted female visage. We could have been Siamese twins, and smiled at each other, pleased to have confounded Sherlock Holmes in one small respect.

We extended our hands until they clasped, smiled, and turned to face Sherlock Holmes as one.

"Ha!" A long accusing forefinger isolated me. "I told you our habits betray us, Miss Huxleigh. Now that the lunatic and his howlings are removed from the scene, I hear the unmistakable clink of a pocket chatelaine."

I thrust a hand between the folds of my skirt and deep into the concealed pocket without thinking.

"Thank you." He turned and bowed to Elizabeth. "I have not seen Miss Pink in a week, but must say that she looked far better as a true rather than a false courtesan. It was a pity you knew so little of the murderous incident when first interviewed there. Perhaps you know a bit more now." He glanced to Irene. "You are both American. Is that as far as the acquaintance goes?"

"So far," Irene said. "You haven't answered our questions."

"You will excuse me," he said. "I do not wish to visit the quarters of the Surete in my present guise."

He strode to the closed windows and used the reflective surface of one long pane as a mirror while he literally peeled the likeness of the French priest from his features.

Irene was too much at home in the theater to regard the act of removing makeup as an excuse for silence.

She went to hover behind his shoulder like a ghost in the impromptu mirror.

"Kelly was one of the London police's suspects," she declared.

"Indeed. They were most interested in Mr. Kelly, especially when he disappeared right after Mary Jane Kelly's gruesome death. The police became intrigued by his movements, but they had lost him. I did not, finally determining he had walked eighty miles to Dover before taking ship to Dieppe. Since there were other candidates more likely, I pursued them. All such suspects proved unsatisfactory for one reason or another, which is why the official police conclusion is that Jack the Ripper was one Montague John Druitt, a barrister and schoolmaster, quite mad, whose body conveniently surfaced in the Thames on the very last day of 1888, December 31. He was judged to have been waterborne for at least a month. His own family had suspected him of the crimes, for he had long been known to be what is called 's.e.xually insane.' "

"And you think that Druitt-?" Irene asked.

"Was convenient and dead. That is all." He had by now removed the putty that had enlarged his honest English hawk nose into something that would have plunged Cyrano de Bergerac into even greater despair, the bushy white eyebrows, and head of hair.

Emerging from the imposing clerical guise with his natural dark hair sleeked back, he resembled some clever bird-beaked otter. When he began undoing the long row of ca.s.sock b.u.t.tons that ran from neck to hem as if strange women were not in the room, I looked away.

After no gasps emerged from Irene or Elizabeth, who were made of sterner stuff, I looked back. His street dress had fit under the encompa.s.sing black garment. It took him only moments to straighten his cuffs and tie, then fold the ca.s.sock into the same Gladstone bag I had seen him carry earlier.

"Mustn't keep the constabulary of any land waiting unduly," he announced, the persona of the French priest now totally in the bag. He turned from his makeshift mirror to face us with satisfaction.

"For your information, ladies, there were two other leading candidates in the London police's estimation, which I found fairly unlikely. One was Kosminsky, a Polish Jew who hated women, particularly prost.i.tutes. The other was Michael Ostrog, a Russian doctor and also a convict, always an intriguing combination in the history of crime. I have long told Watson that a doctor who turns to crime is liable to commit the most fiendish offenses. I believe that once one has abandoned the Hippocratic oath, there is no holding him back."

"What made Ostrog a suspect?" Irene asked.

"Why, he was a homicidal maniac, known to carry surgical knives. And he was cruel to women. I must give the police credit for turning up an admirable number of these misfits, but I believe all these men were more legitimate candidates for the lunatic asylum than the gallows. You see that even such a known murderer as Kelly escaped the gallows for the asylum. Luckily, his escape has ended here, and so, we hope, has the career of Jack the Ripper."

He retrieved a top hat from the bag, donned it, and went to the door like a doctor bidding a healed patient adieu.

"I think that you all may consider your meddlings over. Kelly is a demented man already convicted of murder once. He may not ever see trial in England for such crimes, but he is sure to be incarcerated in a French madhouse. The Ripper furor has abated in London, the murders in France have been successfully underplayed, and it is now best to let sleeping mad dogs die.

"I do not approve of your efforts in this matter," he added, "but concede that your appearance and presence today was useful in upsetting the suspect and thus revealing his manias. So, in this instance, you have been of accidental aid. I believe that such worldly ladies can find your way back to the Hotel du Louvre without escort, and bid you good-bye."

He stood aside in the hall, so that we could exit through the open door.

Elizabeth was the first to leave. "I should like to speak with you more someday, Mr. Holmes."

"That is extremely unlikely, Miss Pink."

I went next and said nothing.

"I suggest French and possibly geography lessons," he said acidly. "There is a rue Cap.r.o.n but there is no Durant firm of cabinetmakers there, which I soon found out."

Mortified, I skittered into the hall.

Irene came last and paused before him, chin lifted to put her face in whatever dim light seeped into the pa.s.sage from the uncurtained window through which a madman had leaped to the street not two hours before.

"We were of more than accidental help, Mr. Holmes, which I think you will realize before much time has pa.s.sed. You may call upon us at the Hotel du Louvre when you are so inclined."

He gazed down at her for a moment. For that one moment I thought he would speak sense instead of superiority, but I was wrong. "Alas, I fear events will not make such a social call possible or necessary. I will return to England soon."

"Oh, it will not be a social call, I fear. I hope that you are as good at antic.i.p.ating the worst as you are at divining the past." Irene smiled and sailed past him like a ship of the line.

We all clattered down the stairs, past the still-bemused concierge and into the Paris streets.