Femme Fatale Read Online Free Page B

believe you would give us this book!” I said sharply.
    “You are right,” Mr. Holmes answered. “It speaks of shameless self-advertisement, but, believe me, I offer you this volume, not because it catalogues one of my more interesting cases, but because I believe both of you ladies met one of the principals.”
    Of course we had “met one of the principals”! The King of Bohemia had been Mr. Holmes’s client, Irene’s suitor, and my, my mortal . . . enemy, because he was at bottom no friend to Irene’s integrity.
    Irene was by now eyeing me reprovingly. “One of the principals?” She had no reason to jump to the unhappy conclusion I just had.
    “A Mr. Jefferson Hope of the United States,” Mr. Holmes went on with relish, surprising me. “The poison-pill killer of the Mormon hypocrites who had forced his innocent beloved into a loveless marriage and spurred her early death in the far-off salt flats of the West. It was among my most satisfying and sensational cases, I might add. The American West produced an avenging angel with a sense of justice as well as of mission. Jefferson Hope was captured in my rooms, answering a trap I had laid in the agony column claiming to have found lost Lucy’s ring. He was by then already deadly ill of a heart condition that would claim his noble, if savage, soul soon after. Before that he raved of meeting ‘two angels of mercy’ who had forgiven him the sins he had committed in order to avenge his dead . . . ah, fiancée. His description of the ‘angels’ was so physically exact, and indeed memorable, that I realized later that they must have been you and Miss Huxleigh.”
    By now Irene was freeing the blasted book from my numb fingers, one by one. Jefferson Hope. Yes, we had met that doomed man. That was how we had first learned of the existence of Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson, and Baker Street. So had, I imagine, many readers of Beeton’s Christmas Annual by now. That perfectly respectable publication had first serialized the story that led to this single-volume novel, according to its cover.
    I stood confused. This book was certainly not the manuscript relating the Bohemian affair I had seen in the doctor’s office. Still, it showed that he not only intended to publish, but had achieved it, which boded ill for that damning manuscript remaining secret. My current relief could not ease my fears for the future.
    Even now Irene’s palm was caressing the cursed cover. “Jefferson Hope. A most remarkable man. I’m pleased to have this remembrance of him, for he gave me his Lucy’s ring and I still treasure it.”
    “You have the ring! He didn’t say that before he died.”
    Irene regarded him for a moment. “So now that I have solved an old mystery for you, Mr. Holmes, perhaps you can solve one for me.”
    She moved toward a trunk that served as a side table, its homely origin hidden under another flagrantly figured silk scarf. Belatedly, I recognized it as one of the second-hand trunks she had used to store costume pieces from our early lodgings in London’s Saffron Hill district.
    As Irene whisked the shawl aside, a wave of nostalgia swept me back to a time seven years ago, before Irene and I had ever met Sherlock Holmes, or Godfrey Norton, for that matter.
    Irene knelt to open the ancient trunk and began attacking its contents, shunting crackling pieces of taffeta and limp lengths of lace aside almost as roughly as Lucifer exercising his claws among my embroideries.
    Mr. Holmes watched her with an air of puzzled disbelief. It was not the ordinary hostess who fell to her knees to ravage the contents of a trunk on some unknown whim.
    I knew Irene and her unknown whims, and I knew that they always had a purpose.
    “Here!” She turned and flourished a shabby black case like a magician producing a top hat accoutered with a rabbit. “I knew I still had it. Poor old fellow! He asked me to keep it instead of a pawn shop. The legend of the starving artist is based on