The Adventuress Read Online Free Page B

followed—coaxing, bullying, flirting. The Fisherman of Rome, the Pope himself, could hardly have brought himself to deny this charming, cajoling gamine who had materialized beside me. Irene’s hands spoke as quickly as her voice— pointing to the corpse and the opposite shore, lifting to the watered-silk heavens as she shrugged or laughed, clapping once when an answer pleased her.
    The men might as well have tried to stand mute on Judgment Day. There was no mercy. Irene skinned them of their testimony as she might peel a grape at table.
    In the end, two of them escorted us back up the path, their rough hands, redolent of cod-liver oil, at our elbows.
    “Merthi, Monthieurs,” I murmured as our escorts left us on the upper path.
    Irene inhaled happily and stroked her kid gloves smooth over her knuckles, wriggling long fingers as if anticipating a piano exercise. No such wholesome occupation was planned.
    “I must go to the Paris morgue, Nell.”
    “The morgue! Is nod one corpsth a day suffithient, Irend?”
    “You know, your French accent is much improved when you breathe through the mouth. I noticed that when you thanked the fishermen. You must exercise so, as a singer does. But first, how to storm the morgue? Parisian authorities are likely to be most uncooperative to English ladies wishing to view the remains of dead strangers.”
    “You are Americand,” I said indignantly, forgetting to breathe normally. “I amb English, and I cerdainly do nod intend to visid the Parith morgue.”
    “Oh, but you must! You are crucial to the identification. I fear you stood too far back here to make a reliable witness.”
    “Idendification of what!? Widness to what? He was... is... a dead French fitherman.”
    “Oh, no. Not French. Decidedly not French. Dead, yes, but not French. And not a fisherman, I think, though his dress was crude.”
    “Irend. I wished a simble stroll along the book boodths. I did nod antidipade hurling to the riverbank to view a corpsth and then being dragged from Seine-thide to morgue!”
    “But you did not view the corpse, Nell, or you would never question my need to examine it more fully. We have seen one like it before.”
    “We? Before? Whend? Irend, whend have we viewed a corpsth before?”
    She gazed at the chestnut trees shading our path. Below us, the men grappled with the body; behind us, pages of old books rustled like leaves of dry grass.
    “London. Chelsea. September of eighteen eighty-two, I believe, although I shall have to consult your very useful diaries for the precise date. We saw the dead man, still dripping from immersion in the Thames, lying most docilely upon Bram Stoker’s dining-room table.”
     

 
    Ch apter Four
    FROM A P ARSON’S D AUGHTER’S D IARY
     
     
    Florence Stoker was accounted a beauty, but next to my friend Irene Adler, she was merely pretty.
    Both women’s faces radiated the assurance that beauty gives its possessors, but introspection, not intelligence, animated Florence Stoker’s eyes. The delicate eyebrows sketched by such diverse artists as Edward Burne-Jones and Oscar Wilde seldom lifted or fell with vital emotion, not even when her young son hung bawling from her skirts, as he did at that moment—until a servant pried him loose and took him upstairs.
    An odor of seawater and sewage mingled with the dim chamber’s scents of beeswax and gaslight. I stood in the Stoker front parlor at 27 Cheyne Walk feeling as needful of clinging as young Noel, yet too irrevocably adult to admit the impulse. Instead, I studied the two lovely women so seldom in proximity—anything to avoid regarding the thing on the dining-room table.
    Irene leaned over it, rapt, one hand pressing her scarlet bonnet ribbons to her breast so they would not impinge upon the corpse, ribbons that swayed in the evening gaslight like strands of dripping gore.
    Yet only water beaded the waxed tabletop. And only water blotted the figured carpet with goutlets as black as blood.
    “How