"Habits, however, are the undoing of every criminal whose path has crossed mine." He set the leather bag to the side. I wondered whether he had appropriated Dr. Watson's equipage, but there was no monogram on the bra.s.s fittings. And then I wondered about the man with the sinister parcel in Whitechapel. Did "Lipski" carry an unseen doctor's bag? Was this it?

"I have work to do here, Huxleigh," he murmured absently.

I started as if stabbed.

"Your task awaits upstairs," he reminded me, unaware that I might take umbrage at being addressed in the brusque, impersonal manner of surname-only that betters use to servants, or men use between men. "Do remember that you have every right to whatever information you wish. You are temporarily my agent, and I am the agent of the Prince of Wales. You will not be intimidated?"

"Indeed not!"

Thus launched, I stomped back up the stairs and through the service areas until I was once again in the elegant portions of the house.

Imagine my horror after knocking on the madam's chamber door again and being invited in to find the room full of fallen women.

Not only fallen, but lounging about the furnishing in hose and corselet and gaping dressing gown, their hair frowsy bird's-nests and their bosoms barely contained.

Momentarily speechless, I could not at first discern Madame Portiere's figure of painted and melted tallow, rather like a burned wax museum piece, among the mob of demoiselles in deshabille.

I really had no idea where to look, for everything my eye fell upon was quite improper. I could only imagine what Sherlock Holmes would make of this a.s.semblage. I felt like a new instructress at a bizarre girls' academy. And Madame Portiere was headmistress!

Quel nightmare, as the French would say, if they had a word for nightmare, which perhaps they do, but I don't know it. Fortunately.

"The great detective delves below?" the madam's voice came from somewhere amongst this display of disintegrating lingerie.

She at least used English. I followed the sound to find her reclining on a chaise longue in a dressing gown with her stays loosened.

Sherlock Holmes had much to answer for by sending me into this den of indecency, but I approached the woman while her collection of coquettes watched and snickered.

"My business is confidential," I told her.

"So is ours." Enough of them knew English to laugh, and I imagine that they were used to English-speaking clients.

"Then sit beside me." The madam patted the foot of the chaise longue.

I had no desire to join this flock of half-attired women, but apparently she would offer me a private interview.

I sat, feeling I was in the midst of a colony of feral cats or chattering pigeons, for the women were both girlish and quite predatory, I suppose.

I also imagined that the gentlemen (I use the word as a courtesy) who came to claim their favors were also subjected to their united and disconcerting summation.

There was such a sense of lazy feminine power in the room. I had never encountered anything like it. Or was it a sense of forbidden knowledge, as if they were sibyls the G.o.ds had visited and made mad, and therefore were powerful where before they had no power?

I sensed that they would hold an equal contempt for both the guilty and the innocent. As for themselves.

While I regarded their disheveled hair and slack expressions, their vigilant eyes, I found myself longing for the clean, cutting company of Sherlock Holmes.

Oh, to be scrabbling on my hands and knees on the cold dirt of the deserted wine cellar than to be perched on these upholstered roosts for a flock of vultures in female guise. For the first time I understood the ancient Greeks' concept of the Furies.

"And what do you want, miss?" the madam demanded lazily.

"The name of the designer who constructed the, ah, couch that the two dead women were found upon."

"Crave one for yourself, no doubt," she responded.

I gazed into her slitted, mocking eyes and remembered what this interview was about.

"This is serious business, Madame. No doubt Mr. Holmes could extract this information from you in person, but his patron would be unhappy to hear he had been forced to deal with such minor matters personally."

She tried to push herself up against the chaise back, but she was too corpulent to manage the move with any dignity.

" 'His patron,' " she finally said, "commissioned that particular piece. He might not like that known. Why does not this Mr. Holmes who knows everything ask the Prince?"

"Because royalty will not be troubled with trifles, Madame. Bertie does not care who created this commission, as long as it suits him. He does care that his designated agent should have all possible a.s.sistance in stopping these vicious murders before the autumn horrors of Whitechapel become better known as the spring terrors of le tout Paris."

I spoke with hauteur, which the French respect above all other att.i.tudes. It did not come naturally to me, but I had been taught by masters: Irene Adler and now, latterly, Sherlock Holmes.

"Durand," she snapped through lips curdled with paint and disdain. "In the rue Caron. Why the great Sherlock Holmes should chase a cabinetmaker, I do not know."

I stood. "That is why he is the great Sherlock Holmes and you are just . . . Madame. Madame."

I nodded and took my leave. The demoiselles cooed like pigeons behind me, and I did not dare imagine what they would be doing in the many nights to come, on what examples of the cabinetmaker's art.

Couched in Ambiguity

The manifestly made-up woman is too atrocious a blot on

the landscape to even discuss.

-HARRIET HUBBARD AYER

"Very well," said Irene, daubing more soot on her wet eyelashes, "I will take only Pink then."

The room stank of sulphur, as h.e.l.l must. A long row of burnt lucifers lay on the dresser next to the pier mirror before which we stood.

Speechless, I wrung my hands.

"I don't know why Sherlock Holmes left you to investigate the cabinetmaker, Nell, but I'm glad that you chose to obscure your information."

"I could not actually lie, of course, not even to him," I admitted (though I could happily avenge myself for that unthinking "Huxleigh"). "I can only say that my French is pitiable and Madame Portiere's English is almost as bad. I cannot help it if Durand in the rue Caron sounded more like Durant in the rue Cap.r.o.n when I reported our conversation to Mr. Holmes."

"Poor man! I hate to mislead him, but I'm certain that I will extract better information from the cabinetmaker than he would. Matters involving the secret personal habits of royalty require a subtle approach."

In ill.u.s.tration of which, she turned from her image in the mirror, hands on hips, confronting me with frizzled hair, a powdered face so pale it looked both ghostly and ghastly, reddened lips and cheeks, and charred eyelashes.

"You are still far more presentable," I pointed out, "than Madame Portiere."

"I dare not look too raddled or I would not be taken for someone who had a refined and wide enough clientele to require, much less pay for, a siege d'amour."

"Refined!" I glanced at Elizabeth across the chamber, who was shaking out the flounces on her absinthe green taffeta skirt. Irene had curled and snarled the girl's dark hair into a bird's-nest festooned with too many ribbons, and her face too was a mask of thick whitening paste, rouge, and burnt-lucifer black.

"Please come with us, Nell," the minx pled. "Three would be more convincing than two."

"I would not be convincing at all in the role you two a.s.sume."

"You would not need to say anything," Irene suggested. "Just add . . . presence."

"I have no presence."

"You will when I am through with you."

That could be taken as either a threat or a challenge. I was annoyed enough to rise to both, but decided that this was more a matter of duty. While Elizabeth's experience in a house of tolerance was undeniable, Irene, for all her knowledge of princes and prosceniums, was still a respectable barrister's wife. Since the respectable barrister was not here to rein in her whims, I must be there to do it for him. It is amazing into what shocking straits I must continually put myself merely by trying to keep others on the straight and narrow path.

"Very well," I said with a heavy sigh. "Do your worst."

Of course, later, I was rather sorry to have said that.

The only consolation was that I looked quite unlike myself.

After half an hour's labor with the iron, my hair had been tortured into a series of tight curls around my face, which itself resembled a china doll's that had been attacked by a set of rogue watercolors.

My gown was also courtesy of Irene's forays into the Paris street markets, which, she told me, the French call marches aux puce, puce being the enterprising fleas so often found on discarded clothing. She a.s.sured me that no fleas inhabited my gown. It was of plaid silk in the colors of poison green-chartreuse to the French, who are never too weary to find a new word for decadence and which is taken from the green-colored liqueur that another monk (naturally, France is full of brewer-monks) invented-and pink, for which I already knew the French did not have an exact word, no doubt because of its baby-innocent connotations. The gown's arrangement most resembled those frilly draperies known as Austrian curtains. The bodice neckline was barely suitable for evening, "bare" indeed being the case. I refused the use of powder and rouge upon my bosom, although Irene a.s.sured me that the Princess of Wales used all these artifices for evening events.

"The poor woman is married to 'Bertie,' " I spat. "She cannot be expected to have any judgment whatsoever."

"Of course," Irene added, using the rabbit's foot to daub the fruits of the rouge pot lightly at my forehead, nose tip, and chin, "such stratagems are best employed with a much lighter hand. China ink and rosewater for the lashes, for instance, instead of burnt matches or cork. And I have never countenanced drawing blue veins on my skin to imply a translucent complexion. One begins to resemble a road map. But perhaps I am wrong to overlook this 'vein' artifice. We do not wish to be subtle."

"I certainly do not feel subtle."

My neck was already stiff, for the back of my hair had been left down and lay heavy on my shoulders. This fact alone made me feel completely undressed, although I was, in fact, lamentably overdressed. How could that be?

Elizabeth eyed me enviously in the mirror. "Oh, Nell, you make up so deliciously more tawdry than I do." She fitfully jerked her neckline out of order, to little effect. I became aware that I was more generously equipped than she. I was not used to being "more" of anything than anyone, and it was an unsettling discovery. "Perhaps it's because you are usually so much more proper than I. We do make a trio, though, don't we?"

She pranced over to link arms with Irene and me, forward girl! We looked like the Three Musketeers of the Moulin Rouge in the looking gla.s.s: feathered and frilled and off for adventure. Still, our grossly frivolous appearance poignantly reminded me of Annie Chapman's "jolly bonnet" and Liz Stride's treasured "piece of velvet" that she had left for safekeeping with a friend. Forever.

Perhaps that friend was wearing it now in Whitechapel, standing up against some wall like a sheep, hoping for pence to buy a bed for the night . . .

I tore my gaze from our altered images in the mirror. This was a game of pretend. The rest was real.

"Nell! Are you all right?" Irene shook my arm.

"Of course. But you will have to do all of the interrogation."

"Mais oui, mademoiselle. You two are just for show. Together we compose an entire house of disrepute, and thus will be taken seriously."

Still, she led us out the back stairs of the hotel. We pa.s.sed a chambermaid and a footman.

They looked away, but didn't comment or raise an alarm. I realized that they were used to seeing fallen women slinking up and down the back stairs, and perhaps were well paid by the gentlemen guests to hold their tongues.

It was indeed another world into which I walked, or tottered, rather, on Irene's second-best satin dancing slippers. Which pinched.

Although the sun had not yet warmed the late afternoon with its rose glow, we were still far too flagrantly got up for the hour and won many arched-eyebrow looks on the street. Too many apparent gentlemen tipped their hats.

"Shameless!" Irene hissed to us as a stage direction. "Remember. Our own mothers wouldn't know us."

"I've never known my own mother," I put in.

"Nor I," Irene admitted.

Pink was silent. When I looked at her she shrugged. "As you recall, my mother was widowed twice and then forced to divorce her brute of a third husband. I was the eldest girl and expected to earn my way for the whole family."

"They expected this of a young girl!?"

"No. I did some office work first, but the pay was not enough." At this she looked away as though to indicate she would say no more on the subject.

Irene had hailed a cab with a flagrant wave of her gaudily gloved hand. In moments we three were stuffed into the seat meant for two and were jolting toward the cabinetmaker's.

"What kind of establishment will this be?" I wondered.

"Respectable, I presume," Irene said. "The elegance of the piece we saw created for Bertie bespeaks that. Like all businesses that prize royal patronage, it will be discreet and certainly not specific about what the royally commissioned furniture was in this case."

Irene paid our fare after we dismounted the carriage. The blase driver flicked his horse onward without a backward look.

A dusty gilt sign above the door read Durand Freres. There was no display window, not even a bell above the door to announce us.

"No doubt Durand Freres call upon clients, rather than the clients calling upon them," Irene said, thinking aloud. "Since we are unconventional clients, we will have to brazen it out."