"Even Shropshire has its country b.u.mpkins," I retorted.

Irene began giggling in a way that I could only describe as girlish, and so G.o.dfrey found us when he arrived.

We had by then descended to speculation on the size of the unfortunate Clotilde's feet, which Irene likened to a form of American savage transport she called "snow-shoes." She was in the process of describing this fanciful footwear when Mrs. Seaton showed G.o.dfrey into the sitting room.

"Is it charades?" he asked eagerly, "because if it is, I have a mime to offer as well."

"Indeed." Irene sat back to give G.o.dfrey the floor.

This he took full advantage of, pacing the carpet, harried and hat in hand, knocking at many doors to make a pantomimed request.

"A beggar!" Irene guessed.

He quelled her with a look. "Only an agent of the merciless Irene Adler."

Next G.o.dfrey trudged down some mythical steps, lower and lower. He seemed to dodge hanging spider webs. He knelt before something he regarded with awe.

"A minister!" I offered.

"Sir Galahad and the Holy Grail," said Irene.

"Only a worshiper at the feet of Mammon, I fear," G.o.dfrey admitted.

His hands drew something toward him. He turned on one knee and presented the vacancy on his palms to Irene.

"I give up," she sputtered through her laughter. "You are too outrageously obscure."

"The Worthington Bank of Islington went bankrupt eighteen years ago," he told her. "Its unclaimed resources are stored in a warehouse in the Brixton Road. Among them is-"

"A safe-deposit box in the name of John Norton!" Irene stood, her eyes blazing with unexpected triumph. "I am brilliant! And you, dear G.o.dfrey, are"-she gazed into his eyes as he knelt before her "-ridiculously diligent. Now get up and let us go to the Brixton Road!"

"First I require the keys to your heart."

"What keys?" she demanded, growing restless at their mock-courtship pose, at G.o.dfrey's wicked smile.

"What heart?" I murmured under my breath.

"The keys are in the music room-" Irene began, moving to get them.

G.o.dfrey captured her hand with melodramatic finesse. "Fetch them, Nell," he ordered.

"I'll get them; stay!" Irene said.

Torn between two masters, I naturally obeyed the one least likely to take offense and fled the room. I found the keys and returned them to Irene, hoping to a.s.suage both my household G.o.ds at once.

"The keys, fair queen!" G.o.dfrey importuned.

She slapped the ring ungraciously in his upheld hand. "Oh, very well. You must have your applause, I suppose. Fairly done. Rise, I dub you Sir Persistence."

He rose just enough to seat himself on the sofa and turn the keyring in his hands. Irene stood for a moment, then sank reluctantly beside him.

A strange, awkward silence settled over us, broken only by the jingle of keys in G.o.dfrey's restless hands.

"There are many keys in my father's ringdom," he quipped at last. Suddenly we all laughed in shared delight. "Which one shall open it?"

"We shall try all if we have to," Irene said.

Her eye fell on the newspaper pages, which had dropped to the carpet in the excitement. The likeness of Clotilde Lothman von Saxe-Meningen stared up at us.

G.o.dfrey took Irene's clasped hands in one of his and, as they unfolded, filled them with the ring of tarnished keys.

"Mystery and music, Irene," he reminded her. "They are your proper kingdom."

She regarded the many-shaped keys spilling like brazen jewels from her palms.

"Both pursuits require keys," she said, "but I did not expect such a choice. These... possibilities"-she shook her hands until the keys and rings chimed like little bells-"result from my wit and G.o.dfrey's work, not any pedigree. I will follow them wherever they lead. I think that this is the lesson I learned in Bohemia."

Chapter Thirty.

THE GOOD BOOK.

A new object lay on the music room table along with the oddments from Black Jack Norton's treasure chest- a book in an elderly tobacco-brown binding.

This small rectangular object, plain save for the t.i.tle and author's name gold-stamped on the spine and front cover, was the sole fruit of plundering the safe-deposit box.

"Why would he hide away this, of all things?" G.o.dfrey demanded in utter mystification.

"He had no attachment to your mother's novels as the source of his brief good fortune?" Irene wondered.

"Good heavens, no! He abominated her fiction works. I can't believe that he ever had one in his possession, much less that he read one."

"Did you?" Irene said.

G.o.dfrey looked startled. "I? Well... no. I-I was not of the age to read these genteel romances and then, she had stopped publishing and it... never occurred to me."

"But you possess some?"

"I suppose so, somewhere among my bookshelves."

Irene cast her eyes heavenward, although the only illumination they found was the glow of the ceiling-hung gasolier. "So pa.s.ses all artistic glory. Her own son."

"Her books were considered suitable for a female audience," G.o.dfrey said stiffly. "For all that I resented my father commandeering the income from them, it never occurred to me to actually read one. And once she was dead, the exercise would have been sad as well as pointless."

Irene weighed the little book on her palm. "Where best to hide the key to a treasure but in an out-of-print book by a deceased author, one that the author's own sons-and one's own sole heirs-can be counted upon to overlook?"

"I don't follow you, Irene," I put in. G.o.dfrey, properly chastened for filial delinquency as well as literary sn.o.bbery, remained silent.

"If Black Jack Norton loathed his wife's novels," she said, "why hide even one, with the key to it buried in a ma.s.s of keys? I tried twenty keys before finding one that turned that rusted old lock. This is the true clue to the Zone's whereabouts. It must have pleased your father's perverse sense of humor to know that if he died with the secret to the Zone forgotten, it would be because his wife's work was forgotten by all, even his sons. Especially his sons."

"You are not being fair to G.o.dfrey, Irene. He has been an exemplary son to both his parents. Certainly he supported his mother when no one else would."

"Hear, hear," she said in good humor. "But his time would have been better spent reading his mother's tomes, for then we might know why"-Irene peered at the spine's glinting gold- "Cloris of the Crossroads was so particularly important to the late Black Jack Norton."

"A message might be p.r.i.c.ked out beneath certain letters," G.o.dfrey suggested.

"Wonderful! I shall set Nell and her pince-nez to reading this devilishly small type looking for p.r.i.c.ks that are not merely the tracks of bookworms!"

Irene set the volume down, slightly open, on its spine, then did it again. And again.

"It opens to variant pages, Irene," G.o.dfrey said. "I already attempted that trick; it is not the clue."

"Invisible ink!" said I with sudden inspiration.

"And how do we make it visible?" Irene said.

"Hold it over a fire, like in the melodramas!"

"These brittle old pages would flash into flames. Besides, Black Jack could have written in invisible ink on anything. He did not need one of his wife's books."

"Except that he thought no one would look into it," G.o.dfrey reminded Irene, reviving her own argument.

"There is only one thing to do," Irene declared.

"What?" we begged, glad of any action.

"I will have to read the book myself."

Irene marched to the sitting room, sat and began reading. So she remained that entire afternoon, hardly stirring even when I rustled into the room at twilight to light the lamp at her elbow.

G.o.dfrey and I toyed with the chess pieces in the music room.

"Do you play?" he asked me once, glancing at the piano.

"I was taught to execute a few pieces-and execute them I did. I dare not touch the keys with Irene nearby; I would not benefit by comparison. Were you-are you- musical?"

He laughed. "As musical as a hedgehog! I am of a more literal bent, I fear, as are you. The mathematics of music-and the puzzling aspects of mystery, go hand in hand."

"Yet we unmusical creatures attend Irene's performances."

"They also serve who only sit and clap," G.o.dfrey observed, paraphrasing Milton.

I drew the keys across the table cloth, watching them spin randomly on the ring. It was the chance aspect of mystery that annoyed me, the unpredictable combination of the tedious and the inspired.

The chiming keys recalled the tinkling chimes in the Prague orchestra pit. "The King of Bohemia must have been most musical," I mused. "He wept to see Irene sing."

G.o.dfrey was quiet for a moment. "Then we differ, he and I. If I would weep, it would be to see her not sing."

"Perhaps that is not a matter of music at all, G.o.dfrey. For all his easy feeling, the King had little faith in Irene. And you can take credit for rousing her from her malaise."

"I have done nothing. Work has, in both arenas."

We heard a single clap from the sitting room. Irene found us moments later, the finished novel held prayerfully between her hands.

"Well?" G.o.dfrey rose.

"I have learned much. Cloris of the Crossroads was the only daughter of a harsh Scottish laird, an innocent driven onto the moors for daring to love a crofter's son. After much travail she had a hand in rescuing Bonnie Prince Charlie, fomenting an uprising of the Scots peasantry and engaging in a secret mission to the Court of France."

G.o.dfrey sat beside me again. "And you would have had me read this folderol? Then the book is a cul-de-sac"

"Not necessarily, but I shall have to think it over. It would make a grand opera-tragedy both political and personal with room for tender arias among the heather... Do you remember, G.o.dfrey, where your mother was living when she wrote it?"

"How can I forget? In Chelsea, down the street from that impecunious Leigh Hunt and half the other poor but artistic denizens of Chelsea in that period. It's hard to credit that the same neighborhood is so fashionable three decades later. t.i.te Street, I believe."

"The number?"

"Sixteen. But the neighborhood has changed utterly since."

"Hmm," Irene said, and would say no more.

I put my hand out for the book. "May I read it now that you have finished?"

Irene playfully withdrew it. "I do not know, Nell, it is full of toil and trouble of a most sordid nature, not to mention certain ardent although unsanctified unions."

"Oh, Irene, don't be such a prig! It's G.o.dfrey's mother's book and he is the one to say whether I shall read it or not."

"Then you shall," G.o.dfrey obliged, "for two heads may bring more light to bear on the puzzle. And after you are finished, I will read it."

"This literary unanimity is admirable," Irene said, "but I think it will get us nowhere."

My opportunity to consume Claris of the Crossroads was short-lived, however. Irene commandeered me at eleven the next morning.

"Hurry, Nell. The landau is coming around shortly and you must dress better than that when calling upon your dear former admirer, Mr. Oscar Wilde."

"We have not seen that popinjay in years; he is not my admirer. And you claim that we are going to call upon the creature?"

"Indeed."

"Where?"

"At his home, of course. Number sixteen, t.i.te Street."