Femme Fatale Read Online Free

and smiled again before rustling up our hall staircase.
    “Have you read it?”
    The question was both abrupt and harsh, and I moved my gaze from Irene’s departing skirts to find Mr. Holmes’s gimlet gray eyes fixed upon me with the sharpness of a needle point.
    “I? Gracious, no. I saw enough of depravity at that Carpathian castle to last me a lifetime. I really cannot understand why you should wish to pursue such matters with the author, and now with that . . . loathsome diary from the hand of a person whose crimes are unimaginable.”
    “There are no unimaginable crimes, Miss Huxleigh,” he said, bending his gaze near my hemline.
    I cringed to think that he had noted my unfastened bows, but when I glanced down, I saw that Lucifer, the wretch, had hidden under my skirts and was now thrusting out a suspicious paw, his fat furry foot resembling the toe of a black, ostrich-feather mule.
    I stepped back at once to reveal the cat’s full form. It was unthinkable that Mr. Sherlock Holmes should believe me capable of wearing anything so frivolous as an ostrich-feather mule!
    He made no remark on the cat, instead strolling to where the small round table looked out on the side garden. To do so he had to pass the piano, and his eyes fixed on that instrument with some intensity as he went by it. It was an old-fashioned square piano of rosewood, closed for now and wearing a Spanish shawl. Its lower legs were not swathed in velvet pantaloons, as had been the custom since the days that piano legs were thought too suggestive of women’s limbs to reveal.
    Mr. Holmes did not appear to direct any licentious glances in their direction, which was a point in his favor.
    He clasped his long bony hands behind his back and gazed into the garden, which was entering its autumn stage.
    In the parrot cage behind the piano, Casanova edged his gaudy red, green, and yellow plumage down the perch to comment “Good day, Matey,” in that odd distant voice of parrots that always sounds like an echo.
    The consulting detective ignored the bird’s greeting. Indeed, I had the notion that his mind was far removed from this quiet (except for Casanova) parlor in Neuilly outside Paris.
    In fact, his entire mien struck me as pensive. (Not the bird’s, the man’s.) I immediately found my indignation rising on Irene’s behalf. Supposedly, the man was secretly besotted with her. Surely he could produce some better reaction to being in her home and her presence than a moody pout!
    “The mongoose has slain a snake, I see,” he said out of the blue.
    “Mongoose!” I dropped my already abused embroidery hoop to the floor as I stood. “Snake! Not a small green one.”
    “No, a medium black-and-green striped one.” He turned, his features tautened with amusement. “Nothing so large and lethal as, say, a cobra, Miss Huxleigh. But then I imagine you have not had an opportunity to see such a fearsome snake in your experience.”
    I certainly had! More than once. In fact, the mongoose in my care, Messalina, had dispatched more than one when we had occasion to revisit London to save this very man’s Boswell, Dr. Watson, from persons with evil intentions toward him.
    “A garden snake,” I diagnosed with relief. “Messy is fed very well and does not need to eat anything, but at least the victim is not one of Sarah Bernhardt’s green snakes that I inherited.”
    “I imagine the mongoose acts for the sport of the chase, not from hunger. Other creatures than ourselves enjoy the constant game of hunter and hunted.”
    “I do not, Mr. Holmes. We can all rise above our beastly natures.”
    “Some of us do not want to,” he commented, “which is when I find myself being consulted.” He glanced over his shoulder as if eager for Irene’s reappearance.
    I could only suppose that listening to Casanova, watching the garden, and trying to make awkward conversation with me were not pursuits that suited the man’s temperament. He struck me as a strider and a