Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/1543718.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Graphic_Depictions_Of_Violence, Underage, Choose_Not_To_Use_Archive
      Warnings
  Category:
      M/M, F/F, Multi
  Fandom:
      Sherlock_(TV), Sherlock_Holmes_&_Related_Fandoms, Historical_RPF
  Relationship:
      Sherlock_Holmes/John_Watson, Irene_Adler/OFC, John_Watson/OMC, OC/OC
  Character:
      Sherlock_Holmes, John_Watson, Irene_Adler, Claudine_Holmès, Sidonie-
      Gabrielle_Colette, Daniel_MacIntyre, Lots_of_OCs
  Additional Tags:
      Alternate_Universe_-_Historical, Post-World_War_I, Consent_Issues, Mental
      Health_Issues, Drug_Use, Infidelity, Narration_Hijinx, Lies_and_the_liars
      that_tell_them, Often_to_themselves, Performative_Self-Presentation,
      Jealousy, Voyeurism, Clothing_Kink, Moresomes, imaginary_sex, Remembered
      Sex, Angry_Sex, Tender_Sex, Avoidant_Sex, A_whole_bunch_of_explicit_sex
      among_folks_of_different_genders, Families_of_Origin, Families_of_Choice,
      Country_House_Mystery, A_hotbed_of_Chekhovian_drama, Almost_all_the
      people_who_fuck_in_this_story_actually_were_fucking_in_real_life_that
      summer, Except_perhaps_the_fictional_ones_although_no_guarantees, The
      past_isn't_dead, It_isn't_even_past
  Series:
      Part 5 of Unreal_Cities
  Collections:
      The_Antidiogenes_Club_Book
  Stats:
      Published: 2014-05-13 Updated: 2014-08-10 Chapters: 12/24 Words: 76435
****** A hundred hours ******
by breathedout
Summary
     1921. Sherlock hasn't been to Paris since 1903; John since the War.
     At the request of Sherlock's cousin they cross the Channel, where
     they investigate a case nobody seems to want them on; do battle with
     the ghosts of their pasts; and make the acquaintance of a courtesan
     who seems different all the time, and is always different than she
     seems.
     Otherwise subtitled, "Thinking about Death Is Uncomfortable; Let's
     Fuck Instead."
Notes
     Hello all! Welcome to the long-planned "Unreal Cities Paris Novel,"
     which, as it turns out, takes place largely in Brittany. O the
     vagaries of the creative process, etc.
     As you can see if you read the tags, things get pretty dark at
     certain points in this story. I've tried to handle the difficult
     stuff—which is often also important stuff to me personally—in ways
     that felt honest, and neither trivializing nor fetishizing. That
     said, do heed the warnings, and feel free to send me an email or non-
     anonymous_ask_on_Tumblr with any specific questions or concerns you
     may have.
     This is a direct sequel to both The_Violet_Hour and Chez_les_bêtes.
     Neither is necessary to understand what's happening, although reading
     Chez les bêtes will add a lot of depth to the Irene characterization,
     and probably make her plotline more compelling (this is the middle
     story of three in her particular arc). A hundred hours is also a
     direct prequel to Ein_Zimmer_Mit_Bad, so if your primary anxiety is
     over whether or not John and Sherlock stay together, spoiler: they
     do. In other news, as in Chez les bêtes, there is French dialogue
     scattered throughout; in most cases understanding exact phrases
     shouldn't be crucial to the scene; but if you're curious you can
     hover over most French phrases to display a translation. The
     exceptions are when French occurs in John's point of view, because he
     doesn't understand it himself.
     Tremendous thanks to everyone in Antidiogenes for the ceaseless
     encouragement over the many months it's taken me to write the first
     nine chapters of this monstrosity; to Moonblossom for the lovely
     relationship map; to Pennypaperbrain for a smart & thorough Britpick;
     to Sandy for the checks and corrections to my French; and, as always
     and with my whole heart, to greywash/fizzygins for the hand-holding;
     cocktail-making; meticulous proofreading; history-related rhapsodies;
     spurs to rewrites; drunken communing over Narrative on breezy twilit
     patios with Edith Piaf playing in the background, and—well
     essentially it would be easier to list the things I'm not thanking
     her for, which are, when it comes down to it, vanishingly few.
***** Patient to some degree *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
     You cannot face it steadily, but this thing is sure,
     That time is no healer: the patient is no longer here.
     When the train starts, and the passengers are settled
     To fruit, periodicals and business letters
     (And those who saw them off have left the platform)
     Their faces relax from grief into relief,
     To the sleepy rhythm of a hundred hours.
     Fare forward, travellers! not escaping from the past
     Into different lives, or into any future;
     You are not the same people who left that station
     Or who will arrive at any terminus,
     While the narrowing rails slide together behind you;
     And on the deck of the drumming liner
     Watching the furrow that widens behind you,
     You shall not think 'the past is finished'
     Or 'the future is before us'.
             —T.S. Eliot, from "The Dry Salvages"
[relationship map]
(click_to_zoom)
  
**** Part 1: A hundred hours ****
Wednesday, August 24th, 1921
2pm (Hour 0)
Irene Adler watched her own hands, drawing aside the heavy curtains. Thin they
were, still. Still smooth; still white; red-tipped against endless black
brocade. She felt herself a drop in an ocean: black brocade draperies on the
walls and the windows and the massive four-poster bed. She'd demanded it, once
upon a time; the whole room was done up. Seven years, she thought, of black
brocade; and she sighed.
Three stories down in the street, Charles was huffing along towards the Rue St.
Anne, like an old biddy hen in a tight-fit waistcoat. Irene ought to have him
plucked. She narrowed her eyes; he'd stopped now to berate an ill-met flower-
girl. His broad back was to Irene, but she would bet his blond face was
flushing up. Yes, she thought: plucked. Trussed up with twine, and basted with
fresh salt butter. His arms bent tight against his ribs at the elbows.
The polish, she saw, on the fourth finger of her right hand, was chipped.
Charles, she thought. Lord. Charles.
One accumulated such a store of hangers-on, staying so long in a city. One
began to absolutely drown in personal addresses and black brocade, and
bothering bustling explainers like Charles Humbert. Still, she thought,
watching him crowding the girl—Léonie it was, on top of of everything—back
against the wall. Intriguing, what he'd assume when given the chance.
He turned the corner, still flapping his elbows back at poor Léonie and her
sunflowers. Irene pursed her lips. She turned from the window; let fall the
curtain. Léonie adored finest drinking chocolate, and Irene's hands in her
hair. She was sixteen; had no notion, how her lips parted when Irene used her
nails. Léonie'd do anything, Irene thought, if Irene only asked: she'd forget
the nerve of him; she'd remember it until her dying day. Irene sat down on a
red morocco steamer trunk (bird details; anything but brocade) thinking:
Charles. Christ. She hadn't thought of that night in ages. It hadn't even been
Charles, in the first place, that she'd been—. And here he came to her place of
business, bursting in at one in the afternoon. Ranting and raving. She ought to
hang up his hock in the drawing room. His toenails still attached like the
hairy hooves of Spanish hams.
And oh, she'd have to go out, anyway. She'd the Marquis de Beausergent this
evening, and he was particular; he would look at her hands. She would tie him
to the black brocade side chair, right up next to the mirror, floor to ceiling.
She'd have him gagged with black brocade but with his eyes open, wide open, so
that he could watch her hands on his throat as his face got redder and redder.
He would whimper and moan and watch her hands in the mirror as she took one off
his neck and dug her claws into the flesh of his inner thighs; marked him and
mauled him, everywhere except his drooling untouched prick. Anastasie would
have to see about her nails.
She looked down at the chip, stark in the red polish, and then back at the
curtains, smoothing down her hair. It hadn't been Charles she'd been after,
that night; but if he was spending his afternoon bursting into people's
establishments—well. She'd kept up with both of them, after the War.
Irene rose from the trunk; regarded herself in the big gilt mirror—mounted,
inescapably, on black brocade. Bloody hell, she thought. Black brocade behind
her eyelids. Black brocade pressing lines into the skin around her mouth. When
she was back in London, after she tired of traveling, she would do up her rooms
in pale yellow: yellow and violet; and today she would wear the white, the new
white Chanel. Léonie, with her freckled skin and long carnelian-coloured hair,
would look a treat in black brocade. Irene could get in a dressmaker; oversee a
whole new wardrobe. She could leave the girl gorgeous in this very drawing-
room, sucking the marrow out of ox-bones. Presiding at table over a Spanish
ham-hock and a tureen of drinking-chocolate.
Charles, thought Irene: of all the absurdities. But she'd an open afternoon.
Anastasie's shop was just round the corner from the newspaper offices; and she
could always fit her in.
And so, two hours later, Irene's nails were perfect, and her dress was white.
The summer clerk at the front desk at Le Matin was somebody's nephew, she
thought; fresh from Rouen and looking sour when she breezed in off the street
in the middle of the afternoon, chatting about the August holidays. Paris so
empty this time of year, she said; it was frightfully solitary, didn't he find?
She sat on his desk and lit her cigarette, and within minutes he was telling
her about the August holidays of everyone from Mademoiselle Trébuchet the
stenographer, who had accompanied her aunt to the Alps, to the editor and his
famous wife, Monsieur and Madame Jouvenel, summering at their cottage in
Brittany. Well, he amended. They called it a cottage.
'St Malo?' Irene asked. 'I always so loved St Malo,' putting on a London accent
that had never been hers, and the kid got a look about him so smug she could
smell it. 'I doubt you would know it, Mademoiselle,' he said. 'Roz Ven, outside
St. Coulomb. So small they don't even put it on the maps.'
'Ah chéri,' Irene purred, 'You are a helpful one.'
Past his shoulder, through the set of cracked doors to the editors' offices,
she could see where drawers had been pulled out, and papers scattered over the
floor. Oh, she thought: predictable. And it really was deserted here; this
provincial the only one who had seen her. She wanted to ruffle his hair. She
slid past him to the tune of his half-hearted bleating, wondering if Charles,
even in late August, would have had the gall to show his great blond face here,
where everyone from the mail clerks on up could recognise him. The gall, she
thought, or the initiative: both seemed unlikely.
The double doors were frosted glass, lettered in the pre-War style: Henry
Jouvenel, Rédacteur en chef. Just to the left, the second door said Colette
Jouvenel, Rédactrice littéraire, and under this, in slightly fresher paint:
Critique dramatique. Irene glanced between them; Charles's boy had been
thorough. Charles's boy, therefore, could hardly have been past in the few
hours since his master had graced Irene with his clucking and carrying on. She
wondered if Co—if they'd come down from St. Coulomb, when they'd heard. She
wondered if—.
She pushed open the right-hand door.
A great wooden desk; papers everywhere. When she shifted aside the top layer of
debris, there was another layer of debris, only with thicker dust. At the
corner of Jouvenel's desk, the mailbox overflowed, even with some of the
correspondence knocked to the floor. The bin was overturned; the blotter was
black. Shoved off to one side were photographs: a petite blonde in a Vionnet
gown from the '21 Spring line, signed Bisous, XOXO; a large group shot, posed
on the stone steps of a country house; and—
Irene trailed fingertips over the frame: perfect glossy red over faded sepia.
But, she thought: this picture must be ten, twelve years old. Colette in a pre-
war traveling-suit, wiry and muscular as she'd been on the stage, years ago,
years, with her haughty eyes and the sharp bones of her face not yet softened,
as they were now in the newspapers, by flesh. Here was Madame Colette, young
again, almost as Irene—.
Lifetimes ago. Stuck behind the photograph of the blonde, in her four-month-old
dress.
Irene allowed herself a press of fingers to temples. Pressing, not rubbing;
digging into the dull ache; preserving the powder. What did she hope to find,
after all, in all this rubble? Plainly Charles hadn't got what he'd wanted; not
if he'd come bursting into Irene's drawing-room hours or days afterward. It
was, she thought, getting late. She ought to go. She'd have to bathe, and do up
her hair; array herself for Beausergent. She drew Jouvenel's door to, and
hesitated there on the threshold. The boy at the desk had gone off somewhere.
Possibly there was some kind of guard. Possibly they were on their way.
Amusing; tiresome. At her back, the door labeled Rédactrice littéraire still
stood ajar.
Down the corridor a clock struck the hours with a thin scraping chime, and she
counted them off. Three; four; five. Irene ought to go. With her lips pursed
and her shoulders back, she slid through the crack into the second office.
Charles's boy had made his mess here, too; papers all over the floor; the
chairs; the desk. Irene cleared a path through them with the toe of her shoe.
Chaos: though when she moved the top layer of papers aside on the wooden desk,
she saw fresh blotter-paper, with a row of pens and nibs across the top, and a
spectacle-case aligned to the left. Irene tapped the ruler with one scarlet
nail.
Down on the street, a girl called out adieu in a musical voice; a rough chorus
answered her back. Au revoir, they said. Au revoir. Au revoir. Irene adjusted
her bracelet, and recalled a dressing-room of old. Camisoles and stays
scattered over Colette's chaise longue. Love-letters loose on the vanity, damp
from the bath. She looked down at the regimented writerly tools; touched them
one-by-one. On the desktop here, there were no photographs at all.
The clock down the hall struck the quarter. Irene smoothed the jumble back over
the neat lines of pens, and nibs, and blotter, and ruler. Next to the desk the
window was open onto the Boulevard Poissonière, a light mist settling onto the
pavements and the leaves of the trees, and the head of the goodnight girl.
Irene thought of the gown on the little blonde in the photograph on Jouvenel's
desk. Yards upon yards of silk, in those wisps of dresses. Vionnet cut
everything on the diagonal. Threw out more cloth than she sewed up. Biaisée,
they called them: biased gowns. Skewed dresses, fickle dresses. Irene, petting
over the pile of papers, her fingers catching on an envelope so that some scrap
fluttered to the floor, thought: she should order one in white. And one in
scarlet, perhaps, to go with her new morocco trunks.
She stooped then, to pick up the scrap. It was a single letter, cut from a
newspaper headline: an N. Sepia like the photographs on Jouvenel's desk. The
newsprint stuck to her finger. She turned over the envelope next to her other
hand, and indeed: MmE JOUVE EL it said, letters pasted on hurriedly,
haphazardly; several in the process of falling off. Irene leant back against
the desk of the woman who was now, according to her glazed-glass door,
according to her correspondence, 'Madame Jouvenel'; she turned over the
envelope again, and drew out a single sheet of drugstore paper:
uN PaQUET vouS ATtend à l'HÔTEL vErnet
25 rue VErnet (8iEme)
The clock in the hall clanked out the half-hour; Irene stared down at the odd
little sheet. Charles? Dull, fretful Charles, leaving Co—Madame Jouvenel, a
sort of pasted-up ransom note, like a gangster in a penny dreadful? Leaving her
a package, waiting at a hotel across town? Leaving her—well. Anything at all?
But if not Charles…?
Outside, from the far end of the vestibule, came returning footsteps, and the
drawl of provincial French. The boy was bringing someone back. Irene slid the
sheet back into the envelope, and the envelope into her bag, and herself back
out into the main room. She showed the boy and his bored-looking colleague a
flash of her white, white teeth as she pushed wide the door.
Out on the street the rain had stopped. The clouds hunched, still; dark and
flat on the horizon. But down the long stretch of the Rue de Faubourg
Poissonière, the sun slanted bright gold beneath the massed grey, gilding the
shutters and the mullions and the sandstone chimneys of Paris. Irene had hours
until Beausergent. She had red morocco steamer trunks, and a late-night
engagement with a package behind a hotel desk in the back avenues of the eighth
arrondissement. She bought a gladiolus from a flower-girl at the corner; tucked
it into her hair, and let her lips curve up into a smile.
  
Wednesday, August 24th, 1921
6pm (Hour 3)
'I wasn't aware—ouch,' said John, stumbling across the threshold; catching
himself on the jamb; standing to the side. 'Your French cousins doing all right
for themselves, then, Holmes?'
Sherlock came up behind him. John was rubbing at his shoulder where he'd banged
it on the compartment door. Sherlock should do that, he thought; and thought:
your French cousins, with a clenching in his chest. But the door was open, so
he shoved his trunk in behind John's, up against the foot of one bed, by the
little writing desk with the brandy decanter. The rumbling of the rails picked
up, he could feel it in the soles of his feet; and outside the curtained
windows, the Calais harbour slipped away.
'Knowing this particular cousin,' he said, straightening up, breathing out,
'it'll be something in the nature of a joke. At my expense.'
'Oh yes?'
Sherlock gestured; John reached behind himself and latched the compartment
door. 'Cousin Claudine, you said? I like her already.'
It was, indeed, elaborate luxury for a journey of less than five hours. They
would arrive in time for a fashionable Parisian supper, but in the meantime it
seemed they'd been settled in—well. A private sleeper carriage: polished
mahogany, gold detailing worked into elaborate peaked moulding, and everything
else done up in navy, and gold: navy and gold curtains; navy and gold accent
tiles in the little white washroom; navy and gold on the linens and the
cushions on the two tight-tucked single beds: one lengthwise under the windows
across from the mirrored wardrobe; the other, perpendicular, along the
compartment's short side.
'Paris, then,' said John. 'And what do you mean, a joke?' He was pouring out
measures of brandy for them both, perched on the little leather bench in front
of the writing desk, with the green fields of France unfurling behind him;
still rolling his shoulder and giving Sherlock that dear wry look from under
his brows, one raised. Sherlock—Sherlock thought he could look at him forever.
But now John was holding out a glass to him, and it wouldn't do for Sherlock
still to be pressed up against the door. He cleared his throat, shook his head.
Crossed and took the glass, and stood with his knees bracketing John's knees,
ducking his head to accommodate the curved and rattling ceiling of the railway
carriage.
Cousin Claudine had done the thing thoroughly. It was very fine brandy. But she
couldn't have known, thought Sherlock, that when John drank Armagnac his Adam's
apple gave a tiny extra bob, as if he pressed his tongue, twice together, to
his palate. He did it now: a tiny shadowed motion in the dappled sunlight. He
swallowed and turned his head, and looked up at Sherlock through dirty-blond
lashes.
When Sherlock drank Armagnac, the taste went sharp on his tongue. His mouth
watered.
But John pursed his mouth in his skeptical way; so Sherlock must exhibit. He
drained his glass; set it down with a click and a flourish on the writing-desk,
and turned away.
'Paris,' he repeated, throwing himself down on the bed by the desk. 'I'll take
you to the Jardin des plantes. Lamarck's cabinets; Cuvier's anatomy
collections. How can you have served in the War and not seen them?'
'Most people, you know,' said John, his mouth curving up at the edges, 'are
talking about the Louvre when they say things like that.' But Sherlock waved a
hand.
'It's a perfect preserved battleground of early evolutionary theory,' he said.
'No amusement like that at the Louvre. Not to mention, they've stripped all the
skin off a corpse, and posed him with a fig leaf between his legs.'
John turned a chuckle into a cough. Oh wide blue eyes.
'It wasn't at its best, you know, Paris,' John said, 'in 1914. I imagine they'd
probably packaged up the—your fig-leaf chap—and shipped him off to the
countryside. And remind me what were you doing during the War, Holmes? Sitting
in a government office with a set of telegraph transmissions and a—'
'Not even the hammam?' Sherlock cut in. 'I mean come now, Watson. A bit of
steam and pummelling? I know we'd all got to make sacrifices for the War
effort, but damn it all—'
'Do you!' John barked. Crows' feet; blue, blue. Sherlock stretched out his
neck, gestured with his hands where John could watch them, saying:
'—It's really quite excellent for clearing the mind, you know. Mycroft
maintains that with a bit of time in the steam room, Clemenceau himself might
have seen reason at Versailles. Now that I know of all your—' (John with his
hand to his forehead, his mouth curving, curving) '—degenerate tendencies, you
can confess to me Watson; I'll not hold glistening Arab youths against a
soldier's poor muscles.'
'Oh Christ,' said John, laughing now outright behind his hand. 'Not much time,
sorry to disappoint you, Holmes, for glistening Arabian youths.' Wiping his
eyes. 'And come now, out with it, what do you mean a joke at your expense? From
what I can tell you're doing—.'
Sherlock reached out a hand for his glass, let the last drops of brandy fall
onto his smarting tongue.
'Admirably,' John finished. Cleared his throat. Sherlock craned his neck back
to watch John not-quite-watching Sherlock's face. He swallowed, and John
blinked.
'Hmmm,' Sherlock said. Swung his legs back over the side of the bed and stood,
hoping the train might lurch or sway, but his way was smooth back to the brandy
decanter. The colour was up a little, in John's face. Sherlock poured him
another glass and smiled at the bob-bob of his Adam's apple, then sat on his
trunk at the foot of the other bed, knees rubbing up against the side of John's
thigh.
'The winter I met my cousin,' Sherlock said, drawing aside the curtain to watch
the steady roll of grey-green fields, 'I was eleven. The sum total of my
knowledge of her family, when I arrived in Paris, was that her mother, whom her
father had never seen fit to marry, now languished on her death-bed; and that
my father, being the upright middle-class—'
John snorted.
'—gentleman farmer that he was,' corrected Sherlock, 'was taking us across the
Channel to fulfil our blood obligations, by paying our last respects to her,
his fallen relation. I took this charge, as you might expect, Watson, extremely
seriously.'
'You'd have been completely impossible,' said John.
'I arrived,' agreed Sherlock, 'prepared to shower my poor, orphaned cousin with
pity and condescension.'
'You were eleven.'
'Mmm,' Sherlock said, letting the curtain fall to. 'She was twenty-six.'
John groaned, laughing.
'She was a journeyman boulevardienne,' Sherlock went on. 'Supported herself and
her two sisters and her layabout brother; had done for years. Her skills as a
violinist vastly outstripped my own. She lived alone in white-washed rooms,
four floors up, with shuttered double doors that gave east; from her great
white bed she could drink wine and watch the sunrise over Montmartre; and she'd
done so with more women than I'd ever shaken hands with.'
'Oh,' said John, 'no,' with tears running out the corners of his eyes.
'I mean to say,' went on Sherlock, waving a hand, 'they made efforts to shelter
me from all that, but it was an—.'
His voice stuck in his throat. Absurd. John was still laughing, leagues and
leagues away; he hadn't noticed.
Sherlock cleared his throat with the compartment suspended around him.
Motionless above the earth. He leant forward and said, mouth clumsy around the
words: '—an educational winter.'
'I can imagine it was,' came John's voice. 'Oh, God. So all this, this posh
treatment, she's rubbing your nose in it?'
'Did you go to the Palais Garnier, at least?' Sherlock asked, too loud. His
voice echoed in his own head. In the mirror across from the bed his face stood
out, preserved ghost-white against the dark draperies. 'When I was there in
aught—,' he continued, but John, indignant, said from oceans away:
'Don't change the subject. She's making fun of you, then, this cousin Claudine?
Honestly I'm surprised we're on our way to answer her telegram, after all this
time. I hope she gave you hell. You must have been a holy horror, at eleven, in
the grips of a do-gooder—'
'Not at all,' Sherlock managed. This was nonsense, he thought, with a bad flat
saltless taste in his empty mouth, it was all years ago now, years. 'No,' he
said, 'Claudine was. She was my saving grace, that winter.'
'And what did your parents think,' went on John, but Sherlock—he pushed to his
feet, awkward, unmoored; stumbled over John's lap, shoving his brandy glass
back onto the desk. Caught himself with his palm on the table-top and landed
half-straddling John, his limbs nonsensical, his mad unruly heart beating out
of his chest.
'Well,' said John. 'Hello. And what did you and Cousin Claudine like to talk
about, in her east-facing rooms by her big white bed?'
Sherlock just kissed him. Tried not to sound too lost while he kissed him with
his hands on John's shoulders, John's neck, John's back. Kissed his eyebrows
and his soft laughing lips; sucked the sweet brandy from his tongue until his
mouth lost its acid tinge; until Sherlock could taste nothing but home and
John, and oh, and he licked at John's neck beneath the ear, seeking salt.
John hummed into him, low and lovely. It helped, it—Sherlock could feel his
body again, wrapped around John's body. Moving against John's body on the small
rectangular bench. His heart was going still; not skittering so but pounding,
hammering blood out into all the far reaches of him. And John pressed up and
Sherlock pressed down, down through John's humming flesh into salt and wood and
earth and rumbling steel; pressed himself forward into John, pressed back
against the desk-edge. Pulled John in by the blue silk tie. Kissed him again,
pressing Sherlock back into himself; hungry for it, as John laughed around
Sherlock's tongue.
'I shouldn't be,' said John, then distracted himself, his hands under
Sherlock's summer jacket, grabbing at Sherlock's arse and the space between his
shoulder-blades. Then: 'I shouldn't be jealous, I suppose? Your parents really
would have kicked up a fuss if you'd sat in your cousin's—,' and Sherlock
pushed his own hips tight into John's stomach; tightened his hand in John's
hair.
John moaned, then chuckled. Sherlock pulled John's head to the side by the hair
while he worked his tie loose, up over his collar. John's jaw, tipped back; oh,
John's panting smiling breath. He was here, right here; Sherlock cinched blue
silk back up against John's bare throat and ground himself into John's stomach
with his lips at his ear.
'I did not, in fact,' he said, 'take an interest,' breathing in the dusty-sweet
smell of John's hair; 'I do not take an interest'; as John moaned, breathless,
and then—'the only person whose lap I take an interest in occupying, sir, is
your own'—snorted with laughter. John shifted under him, warm, compact,
pressing up with his solid thighs, fingers dipping under Sherlock's shirt and
undershirt and the waistband of his trousers and Sherlock said, 'the only
person tempting me to—to perversion, to—,' undoing the buttons of John's shirt,
licking the salt of his skin where the blue silk tie cut into his bare throat,
'—to felony in a foreign land—,' and John gasped and pressed up, hard through
his trousers under Sherlock's arse, the way he moved; but John said 'It isn't,
though—not here,' and Sherlock, light-headed, laughed.
'Yes,' he said. 'True, yes, perfectly legal, isn't it, two men together, but
this isn't,' and he tipped his weight, hard and sudden. Dragged the both of
them sideways, into a cocoon of navy and gold, while their shins and their
thighs tangled up on Sherlock's trunk at the foot of the bed.
John was laughing again; Sherlock could see him. Ungainly; beloved; scooting up
towards the pillows to save his knees. Sherlock followed; got his legs and his
arms working; felt himself grinning. He wrestled John around onto his side,
facing the long window, and nuzzled into his hair, arm locked tight around his
chest from the back.
'For public exposure,' Sherlock panted. He worked at John's flies, his whole
front pressed to John's back, rumbling steel under their shoulders tight
together on the too-narrow bed. John kept laughing and then moaning, soft, with
his face so close to the window that his breath nearly fogged the glass.
Sherlock could feel him hard and moving, twitching through his trousers; and
when the train-carriage (moving) flickered into shade he could see over John's
shoulder, John's reflection biting his own lips.
'For lewd conduct,' Sherlock went on, breathing the words into John's skin
while John's helpless hands reached back and back, clutching at Sherlock's arse
and his thighs, 'they could have us in the docks,' and oh, Christ, John was wet
already; even through his smalls. He pressed, pressed himself heedless into
Sherlock's palm.
'Oh you—,' John said, gasping, and Sherlock brought his hand up; licked his
palm. Worked it inside the flap of John's smallclothes and drew him out, red-
flushed and leaking in the pale-grey Brittany sunlight. A low noise dripped out
around the lump in Sherlock's throat. He made a fist, gentle around John's
cock. John's reflection tipped his head back; moved. Panted, and squirmed.
'I may as well,' said Sherlock, 'be frigging you in the open air'; and John
twitched his hips forward, wanting-not wanting. 'I may as well be—anyone who
happened by, anyone who looked up, who looked at the—. God, you—.'
John cursed, in a whisper; fucked hard once, twice, into Sherlock's fist.
Sherlock swallowed. Over John's shoulder green fields unrolled in the beginning
twilight. Miles of cows, and sheep, and the little brown dogs that nipped at
their herds' heels and ran back to their masters. Surely no one really would
look up. Not just at their car; not just as John sped past them, flushed
helpless and moaning. Surely the outdoor reflections. (But the lamps, the
little lamps on the writing-desk and the wall above the bed.) Surely they had
picked up sufficient speed—?
John panted softly and thrust his hips and Sherlock said, 'Anyone could—just
anyone could look up here and see you like this, see you—see you in your
rucked-up traveling-clothes with just your cock out and so hard for me, John,
Christ, Christ,' and he pushed his hips hard against John's arse and groaned.
'Jesus, you—you menace,' John gasped, too breathless to laugh. Sherlock pressed
and pressed against his back, nipping at his sweat-slick nape. He tightened his
fist and tried to keep them both steady, but warm and John and salt down to the
ground and he thrust his hips so hard that the tip of John's cock smeared wet
against the window.
'Oh,' John said, 'hell,' his reflection staring down the length of his body.
'Oh Sherlock, hell,' and he shuddered forward, and did it again, and
Sherlock—he had to—he wanted inside, his—his trunk was just there, just at
their feet, if he could only reach. But peeling himself away from John's back
when John was trembling for him, grounding him into his very skin—. He
couldn't, he had to just—just rut John's arse through four layers of cloth, his
mouth panting open, as John fucked Sherlock's fist in short shivery strokes and
outside the window a young farmer, streaked with dirt and twisting a fence-wire
in one hand, glanced up from his labours and wiped the sweat from his startled
eyes.
'Oh God,' John breathed. 'Oh, God.' He throbbed in Sherlock's hand.
Sherlock swallowed and said, 'The high point of his day, I don't doubt,' and
John laughed, high-pitched and wild.
'He can't have seen—,' John said, 'oh,' as Sherlock shifted his grip forward to
get his fingers wet, sticky, John leaking all over Sherlock's knuckles and his
palm. Sherlock said, 'No, he must have, he can't have missed it, he—he can't
have missed you writhing around on a train berth like you couldn't help
yourself, you—getting the window all wet because you couldn't, he couldn't have
missed—,' John throbbing, grunting, close, he was close, he was going to come
all over the window, as Sherlock said, '—probably made his mouth water, wanting
to get you into it, probably—probably he'll stretch out later under a fruit
tree, under a Callery pear with his cider and his strawberries and imagine the
thick—oh God how you taste—' and John groaned and ground out,
'Probably—probably saw you behind me, probably thinking about—about that lovely
fucking—fuck, about you sodding him in a posh train carriage like he must've
thought you were—'
And Sherlock just—just couldn't help himself. Scrambled half-over John's body
while John groaned 'Oh you bloody cock-tease bastard,' twisting round onto his
back, grabbing Sherlock wherever he could reach him, laughing and trying to
pull him back but Sherlock couldn't—. Sherlock flung open the lid of his trunk,
on his knees with his head and shoulders off the foot of the berth, Christ
Vaseline, Vaseline, why had he not packed properly? as John, under him, knocked
apart Sherlock's kneeling thighs, wriggled between them to tear at Sherlock's
trouser-flies and his smalls and the hems of his shirts.
'John,' Sherlock said, 'no, God, John.' He thought of cold, of clear water; he
tried to curl his hips away from John's fingers and John's laughing nuzzling
face without giving up the search through the awful, the just—awful trunk,
things thrown in at random, but John had undone Sherlock's belt; had yanked his
trousers and underwear halfway down his hot thighs with John's hands just
everywhere between Sherlock's legs, kneading his arse, tugging at his balls.
'Hell, John, John,' he cried out, panting—cool, neutral water—rummaging through
the—the ties, and shirts, and bloody endless useless trouser socks, Jesus,
nothing, absolutely nothing of use. And he could feel the smile against the
inside of his thigh as John lifted his head and said 'On display to the farm-
boys of France, was it?' and swallowed his cock to the root, his hands hard on
Sherlock's hips.
'Oh wait,' Sherlock gasped, 'I want,' but oh John's mouth. His mouth, wet, wet;
hot; rumbling steel; salt to the ground. Sherlock's elbows locked and his eyes
slammed shut and his fists closed on the edges of his trunk and John hummed
while Sherlock, face flushed hot with his trousers around his thighs, let out a
sob; gave in and gave up and fucked down hard into John's warm clenching
throat.
And Sherlock was—fists hard on leather hot with the rumble of steel underneath
him and his arse up wet for any milkmaid or goatherd to see, sweat on his
throat on his collar, face just burning up hot pumping shallow and deep and
shallow and frantic into mouth could they see John, could they see John letting
him, could they see his aching swallowing throat full of Sherlock's prick,
would they see him in seconds in—in moments with his mouth all full to
overflowing with hot wet with Sherlock dripping down his chin—'John,' Sherlock
moaned, shaking, and John reached up and grabbed him hard around the base of
the cock, pushing Sherlock's hips back, pushing him out of John's mouth and
backward until he was upright, sitting upright and panting on the bed.
'Oh,' Sherlock heard himself say. A long whine. His arms were shaking; his
whole body was shaking in place; it was on top of him, he couldn't—'John,' he
gritted out, with his eyes still screwed tight shut—and heard John, sitting up
in the vee of Sherlock's legs, panting and laughing at him.
'You idiot,' John said, breathing hard. 'God, look at you, you gorgeous—well.
You did it to me first. Come on, I thought you wanted something.'
'If I—,' said Sherlock, swallowing. 'If I even move.'
Between his legs John shifted on the bed, and Sherlock needed not to—. Sherlock
breathed. Breathed, and waited, the aching, pulsing want dripping slowly into
the darkness, as John held as still as he could and Sherlock tried not to so
much as think.
John's weight, slipping from the bed. Rustling sounds, hands on cloth. Sherlock
breathed in; breathed out. Cloth on cloth; cloth on wood. The pressure at the
core of him easing, millimetres at a time. The bed dipped; John's weight.
John's murmur: 'Keep them closed,' pressing something cool and hard into
Sherlock's palm.
Sherlock breathed in; breathed out. Kept his eyes shut, warming the tin in his
palm. Brushes of John's bare arms on Sherlock's hands, on his arms; bare knees
brushing him, light hair and warm skin. Sherlock breathed. 'Hold,' John
murmured, so Sherlock held the tin steady while John uncapped it. Light
pressure; release. Shifting weight on the bed. Kneeling up, must be. Moving for
Sherlock, though Sherlock couldn't move. Viscous sounds; creaking; John's soft
and grunting breath.
'Are you—,' Sherlock said, with his eyes still closed. 'Two,' said John, and
Sherlock said, 'Oh, I. I want to be watching, I.'
'Yes,' John said. 'Christ.' Sherlock didn't open his eyes.
'You're naked,' Sherlock murmured, breathing in, and out, still in the
ruination of a full summer suit. He plucked at his jacket with the fingertips
of his empty hand and John moaned, heartbreak-quiet.
'I could open my eyes,' Sherlock said.
'You could,' John grunted. So breathless. 'You can.' His voice angling up like
it did; Sherlock knew he was touching his cock, he was—.
Palms sweating. John moving for him, in the darkness on the other side of his
eyelids. His hand on the tin kept clenching on it; letting it go. Moving.
Sherlock's body was moving and John's body was moving next to it and they were
moving at speed on steel rails as Sherlock held so, so still. John's breath was
getting short, shallow; Sherlock if he listened could hear the motion of both
his separate hands. Sherlock's left hand clutched the tin and his eyes were
closed and his right hand was so empty, and somewhere in the vast distance
eight inches in front of him John was naked, touching himself inside and out,
for all of Picardy to see. Sherlock dipped his first two fingers into the
warming jelly; heard John's intake of breath.
'Three,' John said, and Sherlock laughed a little, ragged around the edges, and
nodded, and dipped in his ring finger; spread the stuff out with his thumb.
John's skin would be. Would be flushed up golden-pink, in the grey and
flickering light. Sherlock held out his hand; didn't open his eyes.
John's hand, closing on his wrist; John's shuffling knees. Sherlock got up on
his knees as well (bagged trousers, ruined trousers; he had other suits, he had
a trunk of other suits) so he could kiss John's mouth with his greasy fingers
reaching down to feel where John was slick and stretched already, his own
fingers drawing out of him as Sherlock moaned.
'Oh Christ,' Sherlock said. 'Oh Christ I want—John,' putting his fingers in him
blind, sliding blind and hot, slick, as John bit Sherlock's mouth with his head
on Sherlock's shoulder and made little abortive movements, to turn around.
'This—like this now, like this,' John panted, shuffling them around on their
knees, his back to Sherlock's front, easing Sherlock's fingers out and onto his
waist. 'Hold me up again,' so Sherlock hooked one arm around John's chest, chin
to his shoulder while, light against Sherlock's side, John's left hand moved on
his prick. John was grunting now, squirming; Sherlock fumbled two fingers back
in him; felt him twitching inside and felt, oh, empty that John was so empty;
Sherlock leaking against his leg.
'In—in me now, inside,' John panted. So Sherlock spread his knees, and angled
his hips; rubbed his cock up into the slick cup of his palm with every, just
every nerve in his body awash in blood.
'I might—I still might come off as soon as I'm—as soon as—oh,' Sherlock moaned
into John's shoulder, drawing out his fingers, pushing his cock into their
place, tight, hot, and he felt John start to clench down on him, reaching back
to wrench up his head by the hair and saying, 'Sherlock, Christ, Christ, oh,
look, Sherlock, open your eyes.'
And Sherlock, head held face-forward by John's hand, opened his eyes. Opened
them onto the mirrored doors of the wardrobe; opened them on the sight of
himself in rumpled dark wool, suited arm holding John's chest and his naked
hips as John held Sherlock's hair; opened them on John's flushed-red golden
body in the half-light; on John's flying hand and John's struggling half-mast
eyes. Opened them wide just as John's cock in the mirror twitched and started
to—Christ started spilling over his hand, over—and his body arched against
Sherlock's body, and his head tipped back, and in the mirror Sherlock's eyes
went wide, wide, and his hips moved once, twice, and he buried himself deep
inside and pulsed and whined, and bit John's ear to keep from closing his eyes.
'Oh,' John was saying then, turning in Sherlock's arms as Sherlock slipped out
of him, moving against Sherlock's front and the palms of Sherlock's hands; 'oh
Sherlock,' and Sherlock kissed John's shoulder and his neck with John's muscles
tensing and shifting under the skin; feeling the blood rush in his own ears,
the pulse in his lips and his fingertips; and John kissed him as the green Ile-
de-France fields rushed by.
Chapter End Notes
        1. Charles Humbert and Henry de Jouvenel were real rivals. Humbert
           was the hawkish vice-president of the senate army commission
           during the lead-up to the First World War; when the War began
           he became the director of Le Journal, a conservative daily
           paper in Paris. He used both his posts to advocate for
           expansion of the French military. Jouvenel served as a sergeant
           in the infantry; before and after the War he was the editor of
           Le Matin, a more centrist or slightly left-leaning paper.
           Neither of these rags was anything close to far-left, even in
           1921, and both became steadily more Fascist-sympathising as the
           1920s stretched into the 1930s. They were competitors, though,
           and at this point also ideological rivals.
        2. Marquis de Beausergent: Not a real person; a minor ageing
           aristocrat character in Proust.
        3. Coco Chanel's boutiques at Deauville and Biarritz had become
           famous during the War, and she was very much in demand for the
           simple, modern lines and younger, more active silhouettes of
           her clothes. In 1921 she had just opened her iconic couture
           house at 31 Rue Cambon.
        4. Madeleine Vionnet and cutting on the bias: OK, this is an
           anachronism and I am just blatantly leaving it in "because
           character development." Vionnet was already an active and well-
           known designer by 1921, but she didn't invent and introduce the
           bias-cut gown until 1927.
        5. Georges Cuvier and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck were French
           naturalists and pre-Darwinian evolutionary theorists, and the
           natural history collections at the Muséum national d'histoire
           naturelle and the Gallerie d'anatomie comparée were (and still
           are, to some extent) organised according to their theories.
           Lamarck posited that all beings were evolving in an orderly
           fashion along a preexisting great chain of complexity, and that
           offspring inherited the traits acquired by their parents.
           Cuvier was an anti-evolutionist, who argued that each organism
           is a closed logical system, dictated by the functions of each
           of its parts. Stephen T. Asma's Stuffed Animals and Pickled
           Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums is
           absolutely fascinating on how these different philosophies
           manifested themselves in museum curation. (The skinned corpse
           with the fig leaf is also from Asma.)
        6. 1914 in Paris: Paris was actually quite calm during most of
           WWI, but during the late summer of 1914, before the German
           advance was halted, the French government and other key
           cultural guardians fled to Bordeaux. They returned in late
           fall, when the Germans had been held at the Marne.
        7. Georges Clemenceau was the French Prime Minister and the
           staunchest advocate of harsh reparations against Germany at the
           1919 peace negotiations at Versailles. In The_Violet_Hour
           Mycroft makes a comment about backing Keynes's arguments
           against reparations, believing that they would (as they indeed
           did) bankrupt Germany and lead to another world war.
        8. Claudine Holmès is tricky ground in this universe because her
           character is almost completely fictionalised, but her existence
           and backstory are historical. Everything Sherlock outlines on
           the train could have happened, and it's plausible that
           Claudine's mother could have been a French cousin of the
           family, were Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes themselves historical.
           Claudine's father, the poet Catulle Mendès, cohabited with but
           never married her mother, the programmatic composer Augusta
           Mary Anne Holmès—who was, in turn, frenemies with the likes of
           Franz Liszt and Camille Saint-Saëns. Augusta Holmès was of
           Anglo-Irish descent, but was born in Paris, and there raised
           her five children (three girls, two boys), first with the help
           of their father and later without it, supporting them with the
           proceeds from her compositions. In 1888, before Holmès and
           Mendès separated, Pierre-August Renoir painted their three
           daughters in the work entitled Les filles de Catulle Mendès.
           Claudine, age 12, is shown holding her violin.

           [Les filles de Catulle Mendès]
           Augusta Holmès did indeed die in January 1903, the winter
           Claudine was 26. According to Shari Benstock's Women of the
           Left Bank, her music went on to become popular in the lesbian
           bars of pre-WWI Paris:
                There were clubs whose specialties were fondue and
                dancing, and cabarets where the blue haze of cigar
                smoke hung over a zinc bar, and a contralto with a
                faint mustache sang Augusta Holmes.
           I choose to imagine that this niche popularity had something to
           do with the life and career choices of her violinist daughter.
           Everything else about Claudine's career and private life are,
           however, fiction.
        9. Palais Garnier: The Paris opera house, finished in 1875.
***** Hints of earlier and other creation *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
Wednesday, August 24th, 1921
9pm (Hour 7)
Sherlock had wondered, after all—only for a moment, boarding the ferry, but he
had wondered—whether he would recognise his cousin. The memories of an eleven-
year-old boy, forged in a month and left to moulder for two decades, were not
ideally suited to the quick identification of a forty-five-year-old woman in a
crowded railway station.
As it turned out, though, in high August the Gare du Nord was near-deserted;
and when a fleshy blonde, just as they pulled into the platform, bustled
through the doors in dropped-waist silk, clearing her way with the end of a
cream-coloured parasol, Sherlock was in no doubt who it must be. There were the
Holmes stature; the Holmes jaw; Sherlock glanced sideways, half-amused, half-
apprehensive. John, indeed, looked mildly alarmed at the sight of Cousin
Claudine, as she shooed her way through a flower vendor, a flock of pigeons,
and several small dogs; and finally came to a halt at the platform edge.
'Pity and condescension, was it?' John murmured. 'Your cousin looks as though
she eats brigadier generals on toast at tea.'
'Brigadiers-chefs, over here,' Sherlock said. 'And did tales of Champagne at
sunrise have you picturing a starry-eyed Romantic?' Down on the platform,
Claudine widened her eyes, and raised her parasol to gesture vigorously up at
their compartment.
They were descended upon, as soon as they handed out their trunks. 'Ah cher
cousin,' said Claudine, 'all grown up,' kissing Sherlock's cheekbones firmly,
one after the other, in a manner suggesting that once kissed they had better
remain so. She drew back to look at him, tutting, dusting invisible lint from
his (new, fresh) summer suit. It ought to be insupportable—and yet somehow he
was smiling. 'All grown, mon petit cousin,' she said, 'et si célèbre. I have
seen you in the English papers. I tell my friends at Le Matin, bring him over,
this English detective; he will solve your crimes for you. You can report the
answers before the police!'
She guffawed at her own joke, hand to her silk-covered belly, cracking the tip
of her parasol repeatedly against the floor. Sherlock watched her; brought her
back up in his mind; or rather, burrowed down through the layers of years
accreted about the young woman he had known in her white rooms, in 1903. She
was broader now, in voice and in body. But though she kept her hair dyed
(expensive job; oils to counter the bleach; last touch-up a fortnight ago
though she'd been in the country; made a special trip up to Paris just to have
it done), and wore a corset though the girls these days were leaving them off,
she still snorted when she laughed, and crinkled up her eyes and her nose as
she used to do. She had never given the impression, Sherlock thought, of
apologising. Not even—not for anything.
'They don't listen, of course they never listen,' Claudine was going on,
summoning a luggage trolley seemingly from thin air, leading Sherlock by the
elbow through the cavernous peaked arrival hall and out onto the cobblestones,
with John trailing bemusedly after them. 'They have their little ways about
them, and who am I? A old woman, simplement.' She shook her perfect coif,
gesturing for a cab while Sherlock raised his eyebrows and John leapt in to
protest that surely she was far from elderly, why she was yet in the prime of
life. A taxi pulled towards them. Claudine turned about, catching John by
surprise with her closeness.
'Ah,' she said, 'and the dear Doctor Watson, my apologies,' drawing John in by
the hand. Smacking kisses on both cheeks, a hand heavy on his shoulder. She
studied his face as the driver loaded their trunks into the boot and John
shifted from foot to foot, and let his gaze flick over to Sherlock, who wasn't
sure whether to laugh or intervene.
'You are charming, Doctor Watson,' Claudine said at last, with a firm nod. 'My
cousin mentioned you would be coming. Very charming indeed; I imagine you do
absolutely—.' She paused. John licked his lips. 'Vous aussi,' said Claudine, in
that French, that old remembered Parisian French, 'êtes dans la force de
l'âge.'
'I don't—,' John started, but Claudine had smacked him on the shoulder and
turned about; was already bustling them into the taxi, issuing instructions to
the driver in that same tongue, so rapid that Sherlock could scarcely follow
even as his mind formed itself back into the rhythms of it. Back into the
rhythms of—he remembered her castigations, in her whitewashed rooms: Non, she
had said, ton accent, ce ressemble à celui du fermier provençal. Comme ça, she
had said, like this, like a Parisian, and had made him repeat himself, over and
over until he had it perfectly; over and over until he was calm.
'You didn't used to speak to me in English,' Sherlock said, when the cab was
pulling away. 'You used to insist you didn't understand it.'
'But I never fooled you,' said Claudine. Sherlock looked at her over steepled
fingers.
'Didn't seem to matter, at the time.'
'Ouf,' Claudine groaned, blowing out her cheeks. 'We have changed, we have all
changed, the world has changed. And you are here to help me, n'est-ce pas? In
place of me, helping you.'
'Yes,' Sherlock said. Then added, in a rush, as John was looking back and forth
between them with drawn-together brows: 'And you said—break-ins? Why call me
in? All the stories one hears about the Paris police, I should think they'd be
up to looking into a thing like that.'
'But that is the problem exactly,' Claudine said, cracking her parasol on the
floor of the cab. 'They are impossible, the Paris police. Into nothing, or into
everything. And Henry—bon, they are both famous, you know, Henry and Colette.
Husband and wife. She is more famous than him, though I don't recommend saying
that to his face. Yes, Doctor Watson'—for John had snickered—'you know his
type, I think. He is famous for his discretion, and she for her indiscretion;
he cannot hope to compete.'
Sherlock hid his smile behind his hand, then felt ridiculous. It was only John,
he thought, and there was no reason, with Claudine—so he took his hand away,
and chuckled.
'But he does not want—,' went on Claudine. 'He is discreet but he is not
innocent. And he was only just—I don't know what they report about us, in your
English press—but he was just elected Senator, for Corrèze.'
'Hang on,' said John. 'I just—Jouvenel, that Henry?'
'Oui oui,' Claudine said. 'It is a change, of course. After years of newspaper
life, and the War, you can imagine. And even before all this, he worried about
his wife's past. She was in the dance-hall; she was divorced; she took up with
men and with,' Claudine's mouth twitched up, and Sherlock's followed, 'women.
And how does it look, you understand, to the public? He is preoccupied, and he
doesn't want—'
'Any unnecessary attention,' Sherlock finished, as the cab pulled up outside a
pension, beside which an electric street-lamp was just flickering on. Sherlock
put his hand on the door, but then Claudine's hand was on his wrist.
'Let the doctor take down the trunks,' she said. 'You must be famished. We can
stop here a moment, then go to a café by the basilique.'
'Watson—his shoulder—,' Sherlock started, but John said, 'Don't be stupid,
Holmes; talk with your cousin,' and slid out the other side of the compartment.
His heels sounded on the cobblestones, and then: the clunk of the trunks
leaving the boot.
'L'aubergiste is expecting you,' Claudine called out the window. 'One night
only, name of Holmès.' John nodded, and waved, and dragged the trunks after him
by their straps, up the stoop and into a darkened vestibule.
'Oh, he's lovely,' said Claudine, in an utterly different tone. Sherlock's head
whipped round and she was sitting there with her eyes slit; with that slow,
sly, delighted smile. Ages; lifetimes past. As if he'd never—. He sat there
nearly winded, and then: 'Enjoy your private compartment, did you?' she said,
and he felt himself blush hot.
'Yes,' he said. She waited, expectant, so he said: 'Merci mille fois,' in his
best Parisian accent. She laughed outright.
'You are very welcome. Ought I to remind him to air the suits you changed out
of, or isn't he the type to forget? You certainly would have, when I knew you
years ago.'
Sherlock, choking with something strangely like laughter, said, 'I flatter
myself I've developed many fine qualities, since we last met.' Claudine hooted;
snorted; then shook, silent in her seat. Sherlock's cheeks were wet.
'If I were still a young woman,' she said. Sherlock said, 'You don't, even—do
you?' and she shook her head, hiccuped herself into silence and dabbed at her
eyes. John was coming back down the steps.
'No,' she said, as John slid back into the seat next to Sherlock, and then,
leaning forward, with her hand on his knee: 'I am truly happy for you,
Sherlock.' He put his hand over hers, and squeezed. She leant back and rapped
on the glass with the handle of her parasol, shouting up an address.
'I got you rooms close to the gare,' she said to them both, as the cab pulled
back into the flow of traffic, 'since we will all be traveling up to St Coulomb
together tomorrow. It might have been faster for you to come directly from
Calais, but there are—. You see, I wanted—.'
They waited, watching her, but she'd harrumphed herself into silence. She sat
and stared out the window long enough for John and Sherlock to exchange looks.
The cab was uncomfortably still. They climbed steeply, into twisting, narrowing
streets.
'Well!' Claudine said at last, shaking herself from her reverie. 'No use
discussing these things, when we are all starving to death. I know a place, my
cousin will remember the arrondissement. Though it has changed, Sherlock, you
will hardly recognise it. The huge, you remember, catastrophe at the top of the
hill, all the digging and scaffolding? But it was finished before the War, the
Sacré Coeur, la basilique. It is the new favorite pass-time to detest it
absolutely. You will see,' she added, shaking her parasol at them, 'you tell
the serveur at the café, you have not been to Paris since aught three, and the
thing looked better as a hole in the ground. Tell him!' she said again, nodding
emphatically at John, who was snickering. 'I tell you, if you do he will bring
you wine at no charge.'
Sherlock shifted in his seat. What was it, this talk of wine, and basilicas?
His cousin, in perpetuity, was nothing if not staunch. And this was—office
burglaries? Why not have it out? Her skittishness made him fidget.
He opened his mouth, and narrowed his eyes at her over the tips of his fingers.
But Claudine, now, was scowling playfully, as if he'd imagined the last five
minutes; and John, beside Sherlock, his hand brushing Sherlock's on the leather
upholstery, fairly radiated enjoyment. Sherlock closed his mouth again, eyes to
the heavens. Claudine beamed.
'You ought to know better,' John was saying, 'than to tell him things like
that. He'll do it, you know, and they'll—'
'Cover you with gifts,' Claudine barked, so Sherlock said, 'They won't, we're
English, they'll throw us out on our ears.'
'Oh Christ,' John said. 'Now he's sure to do it. Nobody worse for getting his
way.'
'I can think of one person at least,' Sherlock muttered. It had been pitched
for John's ears only, but Claudine, after all, had spent a lifetime listening;
and she snorted with laughter and slapped his knee, just as John squeezed his
wrist in amused warning. He looked out the window to hide his face.
Unaccountably pleased.
'Well, you can test it if you'd like,' Claudine said, as they drew to a stop
outside a bright-lit café perched at the top of some stone stairs. Light
streamed from floor-to-ceiling windows along two sides; and at tiny round
outdoor tables, August or no, men and women crowded: laughing and gesturing,
sharing each others' cigarettes, stealing each others' wine; their hair mussed
and their arms bare to the night.
'Go on!' Claudine was scolding John. 'Go on!! My cousin is good for nothing if
he has forgotten how to get a table in a Paris café. I will pay the fare, I
will follow you, go!'
'She's—memorable,' John said, in the narrow entryway. 'I can't believe—well.
You obviously get on like a house afire. I'm surprised you've never mentioned
her before now.'
'A table for three,' Sherlock said, the French coming to him with a swiftness
almost surprising as the lanky blond maître-d arched an eyebrow at them. Then
to John: 'Yes, you two seem to have formed a bit of a mutual appreciation
society.'
The blond was leading them to a table towards the back, away from the street,
when Claudine's voice boomed out 'Michel!' for all the restaurant to hear. The
waiter turned, face transformed, boyish and delighted, and she beckoned to him,
sweeping through the entranceway. Kiss-kiss, cheek to cheek, and she was
bombarding him with words, so rapidly that Sherlock, though less than before,
had trouble keeping up. My cousin featured prominently, and the window and you
silly boy, and she leant close with her hand on his waist, and he batted her
away, laughing, his wrist crooked. The upshot was that they ended up at the
prime window table in the corner, beside the big glass doors open out onto the
sidewalk. A carafe of Chablis materialised at Sherlock's elbow; but Claudine
was the one who took the first taste.
'Oui,' she said, 'magnificent,' and then, lower: 'It's always easiest, don't
you find, to lose oneself in plain sight. And they are drunk,' she added,
gesturing fondly with her glass at the other patrons smoking and giggling
together on the pavement. 'They are drunk from ten to noon.'
But John, whose back, anyway, was to the street, was pointing between the
cousins, looking shrewd.
'Hiding in a crowd,' he said. 'Did you teach him that? He says that all the
time.'
'Does he?' said Claudine. She beamed at Sherlock, and Sherlock coughed.
'In any case,' he said. 'You really think all this is necessary? Our driver
might have been some kind of—of undercover agent, might he? Intent on details
of criminal investigations?'
'I doubt it,' Claudine said, sucking her lips. 'Is that the kind of work your
English cabbies take up, then? As pastimes?'
John snorted; Sherlock felt his lips tug up at the corners. 'Ah,' he said. 'Of
course. The scandal-sheets.'
'Exactly.' Claudine nodded, and leant forward. 'They all read them, and you
never know—. Bon. I told you in my telegram there had been a forced entry at
the office of Le Matin.'
'Yes indeed,' Sherlock said, settling back. His hands settling. 'Which is—the
newspaper is the Jouvenels' place of employment?'
'Yes,' said Claudine. 'Or I should say—Henry has given his duties to another
for the length of his Senate term. But he keeps the title of editor-in-chief,
and Colette is both the literary editor, and the theatre critic. Their offices
are next to one another. Both were, ah. Fouillées? Deranged?'
'Mmmm,' said Sherlock. 'Ransacked. Was anything taken?' Claudine shifted in her
chair. She looked out into the street, where a bleary youth was wobbling
towards his waiting bicycle.
'I don't believe so,' she said.
'You don't believe so? Didn't anyone check?'
'I—yes, of course,' said Claudine. 'Of course they checked. Colette came up
with her secretary on the first train, the day after we heard. They found
nothing missing.' But she still wasn't meeting Sherlock's eyes. Out on the
corner the young man had at last got a firm grasp on his handlebars and was
staring down at his own hands, swaying slightly.
'But?' John prompted, from Sherlock's other side. Claudine cleared her throat.
'It will sound very strange,' she said, and cleared her throat again. If she
would just speak. Sherlock bit his tongue, at a glance from John. Behind him a
young girl walked amongst the tables, calling out about flowers for sale.
'You've not seen what they are like,' sighed Claudine, at last. 'Out at Roz
Ven. I made them call you in, you know, because I am… concerned. They don't
realise that it's not just the two of them affected by these things, that—that
other people rely—other people stand, stand to lose—.'
She was breathing hard.
'Would it be easier in French?' said Sherlock, in that language; but Claudine
shook her head, impatient.
'Then,' he went on, 'do you stand to lose—' but at that she laughed.
'Nothing like that,' she said. She bit her lip, hand to her temple as at the
table just outside the window, a young redhead caught sight of someone across
the street. The girl raised her hand; called out; stood up in a rush. One of
her gloves dropped unnoticed to the ground.
'Ah,' said Sherlock. Speaking to his cousin as he looked out the window at the
young girl.
'They've a whole household,' Claudine said, 'that follows them around, from the
city to the country. That relies on them and their money and their—their
reputation.'
'But only one of the bunch,' said Sherlock, as John made a little noise of
realisation across from him, 'merits such a show of your protection.'
'That's not,' said Claudine. 'Not true in the least—Colette, for example, she
is an old friend. We were in the pantomime together, years ago now. I shouldn't
like to see her harmed. We were—we...'
Sherlock just looked at her. Claudine looked away first.
'She won't be a common servant, your lover,' Sherlock said. 'But employed by
Madame Jouvenel in an official capacity, since you say money, and linked with
her in the public eye, since you say reputation. Possibly a ladies' companion,
still included in the household though Madame Jouvenel has remarried; or a
photographer for the paper, who shares her byline, or a—'
'—a secretary,' said Claudine. She didn't continue.
'A poet,' she said, then, with her chin up. 'Hélène Picard, perhaps you know:
Province et capucines? L'instant éternel? Nine volumes, she has published, but
it doesn't pay. So she works as secretary to Colette. One of two.'
'And you are afraid—'
'I don't like to think! If they are robbed, blackmailed; if they must tighten
their belts; Colette's other secretary, Mademoiselle Beaumont, she is extremely
capable, with less of her own work to do; already Colette takes her to Paris
instead of Hélène, and if Hélène loses her position, or is implicated, God
forbid, in some, some criminal—'
'All right,' said Sherlock. 'I understand.' Out on the street, he saw, the
redhead from the front table was returning, grinning, one strap of her green
dress falling from her shoulder, with her hand through the elbow of a dark
young man. He'd a sketch-book and a pencil-box under his other arm, and was
leaning down to speak into her ear. She made the introductions, scooting back
her chair; its leg ground her glove into the stone.
Sherlock sat forward. Clapped his hands together. 'Tell me about the
Jouvenels,' he said, and Claudine took a breath, nodding; while John's foot
pressed, under the table, into the top of Sherlock's shoe.
'In their own ways,' Claudine said, after a time, 'they have both made so
many—I will not say enemies, but—so many have cause to resent them both. They
have been married, unfaithful, divorced, remarried. Roz Ven itself, the house
you know: it was a gift from Colette's lover before Henry, the woman she
abandoned when she met him. And he! He likes to imagine himself in harems, I
think. Down there now with his mistress, and his wife, and his previous
mistress; and his three children by three different women. His ex-wife is
Claire Boas, you know of her?'
John and Sherlock shook their heads. Claudine blew out her cheeks.
'Ouf, society woman, what you call…do-gooders? Yes. Huge house in the septième,
holds large parties there for noble causes. All the money she can spend—her
father owns factories. But Henry is a baron, and she is the daughter of a Jew.
'Claire Boas' doesn't have the euphonie of 'Claire de Jouvenel'; not as many
people come to her nights. She wants to keep his name. It is, she says, not as
good for her son, Henry's son; she sent the boy Bertrand to plead her case.'
'And what did his father say?' said John, who was following the story like he
would a melodrama out of Drury Lane, his toe still inching up Sherlock's calf.
Claudine guffawed.
'She sent him to plead with Colette,' she said. 'Not with Henry.'
'Oh,' said John. 'And—did she allow it, then?'
'Oui,' said Claudine, shortly. John raised his eyebrows, but she didn't
continue.
'And just how old is the boy?' Sherlock asked, elaborately casual. John's head
whipped round at his tone, but Claudine just shook hers, slow and wry, pursing
her lips.
'Seventeen,' she said.
'I—,' said John. 'Are you—her own step-son?'
'He is beautiful,' Claudine said, shrugging. 'And he was offered in the nature
of a bribe.'
'Ah,' said Sherlock, as John said 'A bribe?' and Claudine gestured with her
glass.
'Colette is forty-eight years old, and had, when Bertrand's mother introduced
him to her, a novel in serial publication: the story of a fifty-year-old
woman's love affair with a seventeen-year-old boy. It is a matter of life
imitating art. In any case, he is willing. Even Henry seems not to mind, so
long as the affair remains private.'
'Is that likely, though?' said John. 'The novelist wife of a senator, sleeping
with the senator's teen-aged son? I know you have different—different
standards, over here, for scandal, but—'
'Not that different,' said Claudine, straight-faced. Sherlock snorted. 'But
this is what I mean to say. This is why I needed to call you in: because they
both, Henry and Colette, they go on as if none of it will ever catch them up.
They go to the country with their little suite, their little band; they believe
it is the whole world, and that nothing could possibly—could possibly
interfere.' She clenched her hand; looked down and, very consciously,
unclenched it. 'And you know,' she said, 'they are convincing performers. After
a time one starts to believe it, too.'
'Come now,' said Sherlock, 'you've got more sense than—' but his cousin held up
a hand.
'I am just trying to tell you: it's not only to keep the police away, that they
did not act on the forced entry. It is the same reason they believe their
doings are secret; they only care for hurt they feel themselves, and I think
they believe—perhaps they believe they can only be hurt by one another.'
Sherlock sat back, eyebrows up. 'Admirable friends,' he said, and Claudine
coughed, low in her throat, as John applied himself to his coq au vin. Out on
the pavement, the young newcomer to the front table had opened his sketchbook,
and was glancing back and forth between it and the young girl. He bit his lip,
Sherlock saw. His shoulder moved in ways that spoke of quick, bold lines.
'Colette did come up to Paris,' said Claudine, in a more normal tone. 'She
stayed one night only, and came back having been made over at her favourite
salon. She seemed more put out that her secretary Mademoiselle Beaumont had
undone the new coiffure she'd been treated to, than that their place of
business had been disturbed. But it is like her. You know, in the—in the War,
she followed him everywhere, Henry. She went to the Front and wrote pieces on
it in Le Matin. All about how charming and brave and comfortable everyone was.
Incredible! No one was comfortable. It was only, she was in love.'
Claudine tipped her glass back, set it down with a grimace. Sherlock took a sip
of his, too, flipping back through his mental catalogue: France; politicians;
novelists; the wary condescension of the English press. But the whole affair
was outside his purview: Continental scribblers and scandal-mongers and their
goings-on behind closed doors. Michel had returned; had taken John's plate and
was bending politely so that Claudine could bray in his ear and pass him some
counted-out coins. Sherlock squinted back out at the street.
'The world,' he said, 'warped by the lens of sentiment.' Claudine grunted her
agreement, but John, in his warm post-supper voice, said 'Is that, I don't
know. Engraved on the Holmes family crest, then?' with such obvious tenderness
that Sherlock looked round.
Claudine, out of nowhere, gave her bark-like laugh.
'But if you don't like it,' John said to her, looking braced, 'I mean. Surely
it would be easier to simply invite Hélène back with you to Paris, get her out
of—unless you think—.'
Sherlock could have told him that she did think so, but there would hardly be
any point to it now. Claudine, though, Sherlock remembered, was forever hard
when one might fear her to be soft, and soft only when least expected. Her
heavy hand came down again on John's shoulder.
'Mon cher,' she said, 'she would not follow me to the corner shop.'
'All right,' Sherlock said, getting to his feet, so that Claudine glowered and
hoisted herself up in his wake, and John put his serviette on the table and
followed. 'Come on. Surely you'd worked that out, Watson, must we spell it all
out for you?'
'Only a Holmes,' said John, 'would take that tone about—'
'Bollocks,' said Sherlock, and John laughed, turning to gather his suit-jacket
off the chair-back, as Claudine said, 'And you, Doctor Watson, if we Holmeses
are cold, then how do you explain your own presence in—' then cut herself off,
mid-sentence.
Sherlock looked where she was looking. The back of John's head; John's
shoulders; John frozen in a half-crouch, staring out at the sidewalk tables.
'What's—is there something wrong?' he said. But John was shaking his head. He'd
turned back at the sound of Sherlock's voice. He'd his hand over his mouth.
'Watson,' said Sherlock, and then, 'J—,' but John said, 'No, nothing, nothing,
it's just.' He closed his eyes, hard, and opened them again. Rubbed them;
breathed in, and out. 'Someone I knew. In the War.'
Sherlock glanced back over to the pavement tables, with his heart thudding
thickly in his chest. John's body had pointed, frozen. Which one—the man by the
door was ex-military, but French; an officer, most probably, or—
'Bon!' said Claudine, 'you will introduce us!' and John said 'Oh, no, I. It's
really not—,' as Sherlock scanned to the centre table, where the young artist
was turning his sketchbook around, and the redhead and her shadowed companion
were laughing uproariously in response. But surely—surely he was very young,
wasn't he? To have been in the War?
Nevertheless, Claudine had her arm about John's shoulders, now, and led him
forward. Sherlock followed behind; he could see when John, on the café side,
tried to steer them towards the street and away from the line of tables. But
Claudine had two inches on him and probably a stone; she pulled at his
shoulders, and was a damned woman, and he let himself be led. Sherlock pressed
forward, but the crowd milled and clumped. Michel waylaid Sherlock on the
threshold, leaning close: he hadn't realised, of course he hadn't, that
Monsieur Holmes was Mademoiselle Claudine's cousin; he would of course have
shown him the very best if he had only—and Sherlock nodded, and nodded, and
pushed his way forward, watching as the girl leant her ginger head on the
artist's shoulder, and the artist let his lips brush her hair, and Claudine
steered John straight towards them both. It was the third person at the table,
a blond man in a straw hat, who looked up inquiringly at the approach of
two—three—strangers; but the motion of his head caught the artist's eye, and
his head twisted round, and—
'Aïe!' said the girl. 'Daniel, you hurt me!' Sherlock looked: the young man's
hands on her shoulders, indeed, had gripped tight. He unclenched them, slowly,
rubbing her arms in apology, as he blinked, and blinked, looking up at John.
John appeared to be holding his breath.
'I'm—pardon me,' Daniel said, at last. Scots accent: the boy sounded Glaswegian
but Sherlock, swallowing around his heart, knew he came from Edinburgh.
'I don't mean to stare,' Daniel went on, 'it's only—you look remarkably like an
old War mate of mine. I don't suppose—you wouldn't be any relation to Captain
John Watson—'
All three of them interrupted him at once. Sherlock said, 'Actually—,' as
Claudine let go of John in order to more effectively gesture at him, saying
'But yes, he is—,' and John, with a curt nod of his head, stepped forward at
last, saying loudly enough to overpower them both: 'Mark Watson,' putting out
his hand. 'John was my brother.'
Claudine's jaw snapped shut with a click. Sherlock would have laughed at her if
he hadn't been breathing, deep and steady, and watching the lines in the young
man's—in Daniel's—face, smooth out into even relief. He allowed himself a
little nod, a moment later, when Daniel took his hand off his girl-friend's
shoulder to shake John's, and said, grave but steady, in the way of the very
young and the mildly drunk entrusted with missions of great importance: 'Daniel
MacIntyre, Mr. Watson. It was my pleasure to serve with your brother. He died
bravely in the line of battle, sir, defending British freedom and the freedom
of France.'
A golden youth, John had said, a year ago, now, in the upstairs bed at Baker
Street. Believed he was—was preserving the sacred English way of life. I never
had that kind of faith. Sherlock, with his whole skin still vibrating at the
nearness of John's skin, had rubbed circles into John's naked hip as John had
said: I think I felt, somehow, that his would rub off on me if I just got…
close enough.
So this, thought Sherlock, was Daniel MacIntyre. The lost, damaged boy of
John's nightmares. The lad whom John had thought ruined; whom he'd thought
contaminated irrevocably by the War or— absurdly, as if such a thing could be;
and yet John had shouted it at Sherlock, that awful day last year—infected
somehow by John himself, by his touch and by his devotion. Yet this very martyr
was now sitting laughing, with a beautiful young woman, at a Paris café. The
locked-up son, abandoned forever on a ward in Bresse, was this very moment
smiling, rubbing a girl's shoulders, laughing against her cheek. Was gesturing
now for John, for all three of them, to sit down. Showing around his
sketchbook, which—Sherlock held out his hand, smiling into Daniel's smiling
face, 'Sherlock Holmes,' he said, 'It's a pleasure'—showed the redhead, not in
her sleeveless green evening dress, but reclining nude on a chaise with her
hands behind her head, à la Goya's famous Maja. Sherlock thought the
proportions remarkably plausible.
It was all—bizarrely companionable. Michel appeared at Claudine's elbow the
moment she sat down, with another carafe of Chablis. John and Sherlock pulled
up chairs on either side of Daniel and his muse ('Agathe,' she said, extending
a hand, 'enchantée'), and Claudine sat almost in the lap of their blond friend,
and howled with laughter when he gamely put a hand around her waist. Agathe
professed herself fascinated with Sherlock's work—had she not seen him in the
English papers? It would have been sometime last February, she said, when they
were doing reclining poses at the atelier and she could read the papers while
she worked. No wonder he'd got her proportions, Sherlock thought, as he said,
'And where is Monsieur MacIntyre's atelier?' Oh, quite near the university,
Daniel chimed in, they were all together at the Sorbonne, but came up to
Montmartre when they could; at which Sherlock caught John's eye and said, in
his best Parisian accent, that he had been here in 1903, and had found the
basilica more attractive as a pit in the ground. Daniel threw his head back and
laughed; Agathe clapped her hands. Daniel bought the next round, and then
Agathe, and Sherlock felt he'd woken up in someone else's dream.
By the time they were weaving back down the hill to the auberge, pouring
themselves into their room and then half-falling onto one of the narrow beds,
John reaching for him, clumsy and gentle and carefully silent but for his hard
breath as Sherlock clambered down his body to get him, half-hard, into his
mouth—by the time Sherlock was anchoring himself through a Chablis haze to the
heavy fleshy weight of John, gasping under him with a hand over his own eyes,
Sherlock had almost forgotten those seconds on the pavement when John had stood
frozen in place; and the moment, earlier, when stalwart Claudine had thought of
Roz Ven, and the whole cab had been enveloped in silence.

Thursday, August 25th, 1921
2am (Hour 12)
In the lobby of the Hôtel Vernet, a three-piece orchestra was wrapping up their
set. A single couple swayed together, blonde head to black-clad shoulder, to
the shuffling bass-line and the wash of sleepy piano notes. In the quiet, the
entrance swung open: a heavyset matron clicked through in t-straps and sable;
and the porter, holding open the door, hid a yawn behind his hand.
Irene stood in an alcove by the coat-check counter. She shrugged off her jacket
(black, again, and her dress; eternally in black, but one was never out of
place); looked about her; didn't move.
It was unexpected, this beating of her heart. Why should she care, she thought.
Why was any of it of any interest whatsoever? But she had hardly been able to
concentrate, all through her appointment with Beausergent. She'd smiled, once,
and his eyes had lit up with fear; but she'd only been wondering about the
little scrap of pasted-together paper, waiting at the bottom of her bag. Un
paquet vous attend, she had thought; and he had gibbered, and she had smacked
him across the face to occupy his mind.
She really must be tiring of Paris, she thought: if Charles's botched-up ransom
note could catch her interest like this.
Across the lobby, the furred matron retrieved her room key, and bustled over to
the lift. The orchestra slid into a half-time rendition of 'Avalon.' Irene put
forth an effort, and did not bite her mouth.
It was only, she thought, that the target was so unexpected. Charles? Leaving
an anonymous note for Madame Jouvenel? Had the two of them even met? Since the
War Irene had—well. She read the papers, like anybody. It wasn't unusual, with
a client list like hers, to take three, four, even five of the daily rags: and
if two of those happened to be Le Matin and Le Journal, what of it? Surely
those two would be on most people's lists, were they in Irene's position. But
most people wouldn't, would they, keep the kind of album Irene kept, in a lock-
box under the false bottom of her black-and-gold wardrobe.
The lift dinged. The matron clicked inside, as Irene thought: most people kept
albums of their families.
In any case, she thought she would have known if Charles Humbert and Madame
Jouvenel had ever met in public. It might easily have happened: at a press
dinner, for instance, or one of Claire Boas's charity balls. But the press
photographs of Colette (heavy about the face now; lines around her mouth)
hardly ever included even her husband, these days. Let alone his political
rivals.
Beside the bay, the piano crooned, and Irene's mind sang along. I found my love
in Avalon, and I sailed away. Behind the front desk, the concierge was riveted
to the shape of the lavender-clad dancing girl, though she was now barely
moving against her partner's front. Enough of this, then. Irene folded her
jacket over her arm, slipping across the lobby in time with the slither of the
snare.
She came up in the concierge's blind spot. By the time she purred 'Good
evening,' her mouth was practically against his ear. He jumped, hand to his
heart, spluttering in indignation; then apologised when he saw the cut of her
dress.
'A parcel,' she said, 'for Jouvenel.' She smiled, slowly, leaning on the
counter, looking into his eyes.
'Yes,' he said, 'yes, madame, one moment,' rubbing his elbow where he'd banged
it when he'd jumped. He turned about. Rummaged in the bank of cubby-holes.
She'd expected him to have to look elsewhere—a full-size tintype, Charles had
said, details writ large for anyone to see—but he came back with a plain
envelope, small-to-middling.
'Is that all?' she said. He nodded. She raised her eyebrow, and he nodded
again. 'Thank you, then,' she said, and was just turning, wrapping her jacket
around the envelope, when he cleared his throat. She grit her teeth. Turned.
Pardon, he said, but he had expected—well. Jouvenel. Was she any relation,
perhaps….? He had cast his vote, he said, for the senator just this past
January, and he had thought…
She smiled. Was it not the senator, then, she asked, who had dropped the packet
by to begin with?
But the man only shrugged. He didn't know; he didn't believe so. It had been
René working that night, but he had said—the man felt sure that he had heard
the person who dropped it was a woman.
Irene, thoughtful, nodded. The clerk stepped forward. Ridiculous, as the desk
was in the way. There was a relation, then? he asked, a look on his face like a
dog at suppertime, and her lip curled up as she turned away.
'A distant cousin,' she called back, over her shoulder. 'A distant cousin of
his wife.'
I found my love in Avalon, Irene's mind parroted back to her, all the way home
in the cab. The tempo ratcheted up and up her hands sweated on the fabric of
her jacket, draped around the little package. I left my love in Avalon, and I
sailed away.
She did not move her lips to the tune; she did not jiggle her leg. She sat
upright, but not overly so; and gazed out the window with a studied calm, not
biting her mouth. IleftmyloveinAvalon! Besidethebay.
When they pulled up in a narrow street in the Latin Quarter, she counted out
the bills with a steady hand. Swung her hips walking up the stairs to her door,
and made a point of looking through her bag for her latchkey. Inside; upstairs;
even then she didn't rush but climbed the three flights at her usual steady
pace. Only when the door of her own flat did she let herself exhale, one hand
flitting briefly to her throat.
The place in Rue Garancière was an extravagance. Most of the girls lived in
their quarters at Le Chabanais; half the time Irene did, too. She hadn't been
here in a week. And she could see now, even by gas when she lit the lamps, that
a week's worth of dust stood on the little table; on the cups and and the
window-sills. If she opened the taps, she knew, they would scream, and run
brown for minutes.
She stripped out of her dress. It was Jean Patou, after all (in black,
eternally); and with all this dust—. Le Chabanais, if nothing else, kept
chambermaids. She hung the dress and the jacket in the wardrobe. In her
knickers and suspenders, jittery now and biting her lip, she took two steps to
the kitchen to fetch a rag; then one step back the other way, to the table. She
cleaned the surface free from dust, methodical; deposited the dirty rag back in
the sink, and wiped her hands on a flour-sack. Fetched the small gas-lamp from
the bedside. Positioned it on the table and breathed out, hand to her hair.
Yes. That was fine. And when she turned, there was the envelope, still in the
pocket of her hanging jacket; she smoothed its edges and sat in the straight-
backed chair at the little table, with the shutters still closed on the Rue de
Vaugirard and one tiny corner of the gardens of Luxembourg.
It wasn't as if she didn't know, or at least strongly suspect: and yet when she
tipped the film negatives into the halo of the gas lamp, she heard her breath
catch. There must be, oh: two, three packs' worth of film, here. Irene tried to
remember. Had they changed it out? Had someone slipped away to the en-suite?
Taken the time, exhausted and drunk as they had been, fumbling in the dark, to
close up one film pack; then open the camera back, and slot in another? Which
of them had done it? And when? It would have to have been—well. Jouvenel
(Henry, that night, Henry) had been rather indisposed, hadn't he? She laughed,
and thought: it had to have been Gretha, or idiot Charles; or Irene herself.
Could Irene have forgotten that? Gretha slipping away? And Irene—but it was
years ago, now. And perhaps, she thought, holding up a nitrate rectangle to the
lamp, there were more images here than the ones taken that night. Perhaps,
after all, none of them had been.
But no. In this square, at least, she could make them out. Not their faces, but
their bodies: the four of them, Irene and Gretha flanking Henry and Charles,
in—in the wraparound booth, surely, in the centre of Le Chabanais. Four wartime
years in the place and she'd have laid odds on identifying any uniform in
Europe, even in colour-reversed gaslight. And Charles great and dark (blond in
life), and Henry lightly suave (almost Persian, really), sprawling at the table
with their moustaches and their cigars. Six years ago; seemed an lifetime. And
how might Irene's own eyes look to her now? How the expression on her younger
face, if she should make a print on heavy, glossy paper?
Prints. She lifted another rectangle, and another. She had expected prints,
after all, not negatives. Charles had said The largest print of the whole
bundle, Irene; he had said to my damned daughter, I had thought better of you.
She lifted another rectangle, wondering precisely which of these images young
Agnès Humbert had been treated to, two days before. Surely not this one:
Charles's face was hidden; it could have been anyone pinned under Gretha's long
skirts and her hips. Or this one—well. Someone had changed the film, certainly.
That particular shot had to be from quite late in the evening, from after Irene
had untied Henry. Someone had—Christ. She couldn't remember. And Irene prided
herself on her memory; always had done, always. But then—well, they'd none of
them slept, had they? Not for days, maybe. Officers' leave and they would draw
the curtains: it had always been midnight in Le Chabanais, that summer.
Agnès, thought Irene: the Humbert daughter with a tintype in her hand. Was it
one Irene remembered being taken? Gretha in her jewels, Charles's arm around
her in the Chabanais dining room? Henry gesturing, laughing, Irene in her
black-velvet choker? Or one she'd forgotten entirely: her own arse (higher,
slimmer than it was now, she could tell even by the negatives how she had aged)
in belt and suspenders, hand at his throat, and Henry's panting mouth—? It must
have been Charles, then, or Gretha, who had amused themselves with the camera.
It made her sweat, that she couldn't remember.
Her hand slipped too close to the gas lamp, and a dark hand, and a slim nitrate
leg, curled up in flame. She dropped the film on a bare section of table and
crushed it out with the base of the lamp; then sat back, her hand to the back
of her neck. The room was stifling, suddenly. She rose, and reached over the
table; unhooked the shutters and pulled them open. Down on the street students
were laughing. Holding each other up. The cool night air washed over her wet
neck, and her face.
There were prints, she thought. Enlargements, with her face in them, and
Gretha's face: and someone was using them for—what? And Irene couldn't
remember. And someone—some woman—had left the negatives, only the negatives—and
surely that was backward, from how blackmailers normally worked—in a generic
stationer's envelope behind a hotel desk off the Champs Elysées; had left them
for a Jouvenel, for Colette, had left them for—
Not for Irene, that was certain.
She looked down at the little pile of film squares, stacked on the table. The
breeze came in off the gardens and laid its cool fingers on her belly and her
thighs. Jouvenel, the envelope proclaimed, and the desk clerk at Le Matin had
said: Roz Ven, outside St Coulomb. So small they don't even put it on the maps.
Tomorrow, Irene thought, undoing the clips on her stockings; loosing her
brassière. Tomorrow the train; and her red morocco trunk.
Chapter End Notes
        1. Pretty much all the details of the marriage/relationship
           between Henry de Jouvenel and Sidonie-Gabriel Colette are true.
           They had a stormy courtship, in which he "stole" her from her
           aristocratic butch lesbian lover Missy (Mathilde de Morny, the
           Marquise de Belbeuf), who had bought Roz Ven and deeded it to
           Colette in 1910.

           In 1912 Colette became pregnant and Jouvenel divorced his wife
           (Claire Boas) in order to marry his lover before the birth of
           their daughter Bel Gazou. Henry de Jouvenel served in the
           infantry at Verdun, and was elected Senator for Corrèze in
           early 1921.
        2. In comparison to that in London, the Paris police force was
           developed earlier and given more power. Kate Summerscale, in
           the early chapters of The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, gives a
           good run-down of why the spectre of the supposedly all-powerful
           French police force was a deterrent to (especially upper-class)
           British acceptance of an English equivalent. Essentially,
           practices like searching suspects' houses and persons struck
           the 19th-century upper-class English as invasive and
           unsportsmanlike.
        3. The Sacré Coeur Basilica was finished in 1914, at the summit of
           Montmartre, after roughly 40 years of construction. It was
           immediately unpopular as an eyesore; people found it outdated
           and in bad taste. It was also politically controversial, being
           a monument to monarchy, religious piety, and conservative
           social values constructed in the midst of the city's most
           rebellious and bohemian neighbourhood.
        4. Everything related about Colette's love affair with Bertrand de
           Jouvenel, and his mother Claire Boas's role in facilitating it,
           is true, as taken from Judith Thurman's Secrets of the Flesh: A
           Life of Colette. Colette had written, and was in process of
           serially publishing, Chéri (which revolves around the love
           affair between the 48-year-old courtesan Léa de Lonval and the
           17-year-old Fred Peloux), when Madame Boas sent her 17-year old
           son to plead her case with his stepmother. After offering him
           to her secretary Mademoiselle Beaumont, who refused the
           pleasure, Colette seduced the boy herself, and they were
           involved for the next few years. In a delightful turn of
           events, given the economic gist of the Unreal Cities universe,
           Bertrand Jouvenel in later life went on to become a Keynesian
           economist.

           John is also correct in guessing that the affair wouldn't
           remain unnoticed for long; the Jouvenels divorced three years
           later, amidst much scandal on the subject.
        5. Henry's many affairs were likewise historical.
        6. "Avalon" was a tune popularised by Al Jolson in 1920, and
           written by Vincent Rose and Buddy DeSylva. It went on to become
           a jazz standard, but in 1921 was still very new.
        7. Le Chabanais was one of the swankiest and best-known licensed
           brothels in fin de siècle and WWI-era Paris. It was named for
           the street where it was located, and operated between 1878 and
           1946 (when prostitution, and hence the maisons closes, were
           outlawed in France). At the close of Chez_les_bêtes, Irene is
           working at a back-alley lesbian-centric brothel in Montmartre;
           a move to Le Chabanais at the outbreak of the War would have
           meant less specialised, but more glamourous and lucrative
           work—and also that she was becoming well known in her field.
        8. Jean Patou: Patou was a popular fashion designer at the time,
           specialising in activewear (particularly tennis ensembles) as
           well as eveningwear in the new, boxier, less restrictive
           "flapper" silhouette.
        9. Agnès Humbert: The real-life Charles Humbert did indeed have a
           daughter Agnès, who at this point was an art student in Paris.
***** The menace and caress *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
Thursday, August 25th, 1921
2pm (Hour 24)
From the white wood sign with its black-lettered ROZ VEN, half-hidden by vines,
a sea-path stretched down through grass and sand. Irene, one hand to her hat,
held with the other to the fence-posts as she picked her way down. Her stomach
rumbled. The sun beat hot on her shoulders, and back at the road something
tacky had stuck itself to the ball of her foot. Still, at the path's base,
stretching out sullen blue, and held fast by craggy black arms at either end of
the sand: Oh, she thought. The sea.
She'd been on it only once, the sea. And she'd been weak, still; painfully
young; standing on the deck of a ship at the end of June with the brisk salt
air in her face. And then: a summer on the pantomime boards in Le Havre, sewing
up the same damned shift every night, smoking Madame Colette's stolen fags on
the docks in the afternoons, and then: Paris. She looked out at the waves, hand
on the decaying fence, thinking: she hadn't left Paris for thirteen years.
To her right, up a steep slope through a patch of wheat-brown grass, a
trampled-down footpath led up and up. She turned, and lifted her face to see.
At the top of the hill was a great brick country-house, half-obscured by wind-
stripped pines. Whitewashed shutters stood open all along its seaward side;
glass glinted in the sun. The windows shone like eyes, and Irene felt, for a
moment, quite exposed, in her white shift under the sudden sun. It had been
such an overcast summer, she thought; irrelevantly. Up until now.
Still, her best information said the family was away for the morning. There
might be servants, certainly; but if she approached from the other side of the
hill…
She held to her hat; made her way. Slowly. The provinces had proved themselves
provokingly slow. A person, after all, could hardly hire a motor-car to go
house-breaking; and so small they don't put it on the maps was small indeed.
Irene had taken rooms at the resort in St Malo; even there, she had seen the
porter eyeing her red morocco trunk. Not to mention her clothes. She'd been
eyed by the cab driver from the train station, and by the boy in the bicycle
rental booth, and by the elderly woman in the beach-side shop where Irene had
bought three ensembles in execrable tourist taste, and mussed her own hair.
Before her train had even left Paris there'd been two men, running breathless
onto the platform as she opened the window to flick her cigarette onto the
rails. They'd been too late. The shorter one had cursed and caught his breath,
but the taller one had scanned the compartments as they passed, and Irene had
drawn down her sash again with a click. Christ. It was no wonder she felt, now,
that the very house was staring down at her, with Charles Humbert's rheumy
little eyes.
She circled round through a grove of Scots pines; came up by the side entrance.
For minutes together she stood still, under cover, watching the door. No sounds
came from the house. Nothing stirred at the shutters, shadowed on this side. By
the granite steps, in the dirt, a strange striped bird with a bright orange
crest stabbed at something on the ground, over and over in a staccato motion,
with its long, thin beak.
When Irene finally left the trees, the bird rustled its feathers at her. Bold
little thing, she thought, as it fluttered black-and-white and whistled at her.
Shush, she wanted to tell it; or to rush at it, drive it away. But it flapped a
few feet off, still complaining, before she got close. She walked on to the
steps, and then the door, and she didn't even need the pick-locks in her
pocket: it opened easily for her, creaking a bit in the silence and the shaft
of sunlight she let spill onto the hardwood floor.
She knew, with a tight buzzing at the back of her neck, that she was late.
She'd have to hurry. The hotel had taken ages; and then, bicycling all the way
from St Malo had taken upwards of an hour. At least, she thought, making her
way up the narrow wooden stairs, a bicycle could be covered over with vines.
You couldn't say the same for a Rolls Royce.
Irene took her gloves from her shoulder-bag; pulled them on as she passed the
first floor and climbed all the way to the top. Four sections of staircase with
landings in between, and she was up on the partial third storey, just a faded
canopy bed and blond hardwoods, with a washbasin under a window overlooking the
sea. She crossed, and looked down, feeling: now she was the glinting eye; and
this room the monumental head of the house, scowling down at that girl—that
woman—that hapless man in the tan trousers, strolling along the beach. She
brushed the edge of the chest of drawers, peering out, and then looked down,
startled: a solid quarter-inch of grime on the pads of her fingers. She had
made dark trails through the dust. The washbasin was encrusted with the stuff.
She glanced round; shivered. Dust on the work surface; untouched. Dust on the
window-sill. When she turned to look at the bed, she was struck by a sneezing
fit.
And now, looking back towards the stairs, eyes watering, she could see the
prints her own feet had left. She cursed in silence; rummaged in her shoulder-
bag for the awful tourist jacket, and rubbed out her trail. It was still plain,
now, but free from the prints of her feet. A moment later she wondered whether
she ought to have left it. Servants must come up here, mustn't they? But no: it
seemed not. The best room in the house, she thought: left to moulder.
She wiped out her footprints on the stairs back down. A blue-and-white runner
stretched all along the first-floor corridor, and here, on the side-tables and
the moulding, there was no dust at all. Only doors: white doors to both sides,
with ornate cast-metal handles. Sea-side; garden-side. Irene thought: pasted-
together note. Someone whose hand the lady knew, who knew her place of work.
But that was surely true of anyone here; anyone she had invited to stay. And
Irene, pointlessly, tried to recall: amongst all the notes passed between
performers backstage at the pantomime, had Madame Colette ever seen Irene's
hand?
Well. It hardly mattered, now. Irene crossed to the first room on the seaward
side, and pushed open a door. A massive oaken four-poster; a wardrobe full of
summer suits. Henry Jouvenel, it would be. Senator; master of the house. She
made a quick search of the room, but found nothing and expected nothing: they
would ruin him, those pictures, but he would hardly leave the negatives waiting
behind a hotel desk for his wife. And the desk clerk had said—and Charles had
said—a woman.
Irene moved objects only far enough to search around them. She put them all
back where she found them, thinking of servants. Anyone could surprise her at
any time.
She slipped next door, and was ambushed by a riot of fabric and colour. Already
searched? she thought; and then: a band of artists? But no: only two people, on
closer inspection. Two women: one to have moved the writing-desk up against one
window and cracked the casement for the cool air, a black cardigan over the
chair-back; another to have draped the armchair in dozens of pastel woolen
scarves, and leant her violin case up against them. Irene moved amongst the
mess: violin case; desk-drawers; mirror-backs; trunks. Nothing.
Nor was there anything in the room next door, where the books and the journals
and the taped-up notes of the resident male overwhelmed almost completely the
faint rouge smudges and rinsed-out knickers of his... wife, Irene thought. A
lover would demand more attention. She passed the next door without so much as
a glance. The last sea-view must be Madame Jouvenel's, and Irene would—
She was breathing so hard. She was running out of time.
Nothing, nothing: nothing in the garden-side room with the double windows,
where every surface was littered with sketches and new-cut gowns, and in the
wardrobe hung the white Vionnet from the photo on Jouvenel's desk. Nothing,
either, in the room next door, looking out towards the ancient garage, where
the bed was made with hospital precision, the severe black steamer trunk
perfectly square with the foot-board, and the pens and the pencils marched in
military lines along the top of the desk. (Female, though, from the chiffonier
full of blouses and out-of-date shirtwaist skirts. Irene wondered how much
Madame Jouvenel's ordered desk at Le Matin owed to the woman in this room.)
Irene, now, was coated in other people's dirt; weighed down with their ballast;
and still there was nothing. Her hands sweated in her gloves. The clock ticked
on the landing. The penultimate room was stuffed with short pants and
illustrated novels: surely, she thought, a child wouldn't—. And she moved on to
the last, next to the stairs, which swam in cravats and slim-cut trousers;
high-button waistcoats that could have fitted Irene herself. A spoiled boy from
the septième, she thought. Playing at being a man. Five minutes under the bed
and in the wardrobe-bottom, and she'd found his second-rate smut and his third-
rate poetry, and her own image nowhere in either one.
She was filthy; sweat-soaked; empty-handed. She straightened up and listened to
the clock tick in the hall. No other sounds from indoors; not from the
abandoned bird's-eye room or the floor below. Outside in the garden the orange-
crested bird, like a child with a tin whistle, kept up its call, and in the
distance—but there, she thought, catching at the sound: clattering wheels on
the long dirt road.
Downstairs in the entryway she paused, then slipped back out the side door. The
ancient garage was just there, up a slight incline; if she kept far back in the
trees she could watch. And yes, the rattling increased; and yes, just there: a
decrepit Renault wagon lumbered up the drive, and behind it a new Citroën with
the top down and—that must be her, must be Madame Jouvenel at the wheel,
headscarf and shaded spectacles and pursed dark lips. Beside her the boy dandy
(last room on the garden side), and in the back seat—.
Irene blinked hard. When she opened her eyes the cars had passed.
She buzzed, and shivered; she was breathing too hard. It was only a glimpse,
but she'd seen, she knew it—and she felt again, on her back, Charles's watery-
eyed gaze. Absurd. She shivered, and buzzed. She circled round towards the
garage, so that when the two men emerged from it, the taller one gesturing
impatiently at a close-lipped Madame Jouvenel, Irene could be in no doubt. They
had followed her, then: followed her down from Paris on the afternoon train.
Hired by Charles? Or—as he emerged from the garage himself, on the arm of the
tiny blonde from the desktop photo and the sketch-filled garden-side
bedroom—Henry Jouvenel?
Irene stood in the trees, biting her mouth. Watching. The Jouvenels and spies
and assorted guests all trailed into the house, and Irene was just about to
turn away, to pick a path back through the pines and retrieve her hidden
bicycle, when two more figures emerged from the garage: a rail-thin woman in
English black, and by her side, hand held in a death-grip: a pot-bellied, grim-
faced little Jouvenel girl.
 
Thursday, August 25th, 1921
4pm (Hour 26)
'Coucou!' called Madame Jouvenel, 'We return, Estelle, where are you?' cutting
Sherlock off in the midst of another question about the state of her office as
she'd left it in July. He stopped, confounded, in the hall, his mouth working
pointlessly in the silence echoing back from the far end of the house.
'Estelle!' the lady called again, and John almost ran into Sherlock's back: a
warm press of fingers on his spine. There was no answer. No sound from either
floor. Madame Jouvenel made a tutting noise, and moved off down the hall to see
about her missing domestic. Outside in the garden, an unfamiliar bird called,
over and over, in a detuned doubled whistle. It grated on Sherlock, just
between his eyes.
'And you two,' said Cousin Claudine, coming up behind John in the bottleneck
forming at the foot of the stairs, 'will be up in the top bedroom.'
He felt it as John turned, to follow her up the spiral stairs; heard him saying
'The top—we don't want to put anyone out,' and Claudine scoffing in her old
way, 'Between those two? Which of them would take it?' Sherlock, though, still
stood and scowled after the retreating back of the lady of the house. And did
you leave any manuscripts in progress? he had asked, firing questions into her
ear the whole way out from St Malo. And no papers were missing? Nothing marked
or altered? But she had just waved him off; had talked of the sun, which was
finally warming them up after this unseasonably cool summer; had told them how,
last year, she had taught Bertrand—her arm about the boy's shoulders, and he'd
smirked over his cravat—to swim. And the clerk at the front desk saw nothing?
And did guests often visit your office, or your husband's? And was the room
generally ordered as it you left it in July? But it was no good. She only
snorted; said Mademoiselle Beaumont saw to all that, and Mademoiselle Picard.
Why have secretaries, she asked, if not to handle the tiresome and the banal?
She was sure—with a glance in his direction—that either of hers would be glad
to speak to Monsieur Holmès. Assuming, she added, smugly, that he could track
them down.
And so on, and so on, a half-hour through the wide salt-choked pastures of
Brittany. Why, Sherlock wondered, watching the rest of the party parading now
through their own front door as if it were the entrance to a stage, should they
bother to send out a whole battalion, to meet two people whose presence they'd
determined to ignore? Here they came, one after the other: the Jouvenel
husband; his foppish son; his tiny blonde mistress; even the dour eight-year-
old child, and her English nanny. 'Holmes,' came John's voice, from the upper
landing, and Sherlock turned, blinking away his cousin's tense smile, thinking
that the only two people excluded from the welcoming committee were,
conspicuously, the two apparently qualified to answer his questions.
He trundled up, in any case. Creaks on the second stair from the bottom and the
fourth from the top (long corridor on the first floor), and up another flight,
where—
'Ouf,' Claudine was saying. 'Estelle is just impossible! She was to have
prepared this room,' at the same time that Sherlock, stopped in the doorway,
said: 'But there's been another break-in.'
'Pardon?' said John and Claudine, more or less in unison, with their accents on
opposing beats. Sherlock pointed to the floor, and the wide, clear swathe in
the dust.
'Who else,' he asked, 'would want to obscure their own footprints?'
'Well,' she said, doubtful. 'Do you really think—?'
Sherlock crossed to the window, which looked down at the sea. Beneath it, on
the top of the chest of drawers, four clear smudges marred the perfect blanket
of dust. Slender fingers; slenderer than his own. He held his hand in the air
over the marks. Fresh, they were. From today, certainly.
'How long has this room gone unused?' he asked. He bent down, examining the
drawers and the grimy wash-basin. Apart from those finger-smudges the thing was
pristine in its filth. 'Eight? Ten years?'
'They have been married ten,' Claudine said.
'Shame,' said John. He had cut a path around the wiped-clean section of floor,
and was looking down at the shore through the second seaward window. 'What a
view.'
'Missy used to say,' said Claudine, though she stood biting her lip at the
dust-trail instead of joining him at the casement, 'that she could lie in bed
with Colette, and see all the way to England, on a clear morning.' Sherlock
snorted. 'Well,' said Claudine, 'Missy always did have a Romantic imagination.
Had a carriage made, after the one of your Lord Byron; two black horses and she
called them Ail and Vanille.'
'I don't—,' said John. 'Garlic and vanilla?' But Sherlock laughed, and Claudine
said, distracted, 'Une gousse: a bean or a—a clove. It's what they call women
like Missy. And me.'
'Brazen,' said Sherlock.
'She was, ah. Very brave, in those years. And also,' she added, stirring
herself to motion with a little sigh, 'very rich.'
'She bought this house, then?' said John. 'You said she's Madame Jouvenel's
former lover, who bought her this place? So this room was their—?'
'Mmm,' said Claudine. Sherlock flung out a hand to arrest her movement when she
neared the wiped-clean path, but she stepped over it, neatly. He supposed—he
supposed he oughtn't to have thought she'd do otherwise. Her gaze wandered
between it and Sherlock—until, after long seconds, she looked away.
By the big red-draped bed she stopped; touched the mound of ornamental
cushions. 'Two great blacks,' she said. 'Missy was mad about horses.' Sherlock
glanced up: there indeed was a faded black Thoroughbred, rearing in needlepoint
with its whip-bearing rider half-obscured by his cousin's hip. 'And Colette, of
course,' she went on, gesturing to another pillow, 'has always been a fool for
cats.'
'You mean to say,' said John, 'that actually nothing has been—that this is all
still as they—?'
'We should get back downstairs,' Sherlock said. He straightened up into the
quiet. 'Find the other guests; see if their rooms were disturbed.'
Claudine took a breath. Looking down at the cushions.
'Yes,' she said. It hung in the air, suspended between Sherlock and John.
Falling on neither and on both.
'Yeah,' said John, at last. 'All right.' Claudine turned; he backed from the
bed to let her pass. Shoulder to the window he glanced out again, and his eyes
tracked, for a long moment, the progress of—Sherlock followed his gaze—a woman,
black-clad on the sand, facing full into the wind.
Sherlock clapped a hand to John's shoulder, then led the way back downstairs.
John and Claudine trailed after, with her saying, hearty and unconvincing:
'—stayed with them in aught-nine. She and I were in the panto, still; Missy
adored her. The two of them, in the tower for days, and silk and monocles in
all the first-floor rooms. Never a dull moment, never—'
But here was a dull moment, Sherlock thought, looking up and down the first-
floor corridor. Eight doors, eight rooms; and half of their occupants had come
to meet him; but now all was silence. Maddening. Beneath them, from the wooden
stairs, came a petulant thud of feet.
'This,' said Claudine, raising her voice a bit, clearing her throat, 'will be
the youngest member of our party,' as a square-faced spotty boy trudged onto
the landing. He started when he saw them; then lifted a shoulder, in eloquent
and all-encompassing apathy, and pushed past Claudine to the second garden-side
bedroom.
'Not the youngest,' the boy mumbled on his way past them. 'There is Bel-Gazou.'
'Of course,' said Claudine, 'I meant—the youngest to sit at table.' But she had
always used to grimace like that to cover a lie. Sherlock recalled,
Sherlock—and Sherlock thought of the bullish little girl; he doubted there was
a person in the house who dwelt on Bel-Gazou Jouvenel with pleasure. A moment
later, oddly ashamed, he felt John's warmth at his back.
'Can I help you,' called the boy, crashing about inside his room. John and
Sherlock exchanged a look. John set off down the hall to check the other rooms,
as Claudine, eyebrows raised, stage-whispered to Sherlock: 'Renaud Jouvenel.
Henry's son by—well. His mother is lodging in the rooms above the garage.'
'Child of the baron's second connection, then?' Sherlock said. 'Naturally he
wouldn't forget the most recent addition.' Then: 'Renaud,' he called, and
proceeded to brave the lair, rapid-firing questions: the boy was to look
carefully; was anything disarranged? Was this the normal state of the room?
Where had he just been? Had he seen anyone about the place? To which Renaud
replied in grunts and monosyllables: no, yes, by the shore, no; all the while
hiding his toad face behind the cover of an illustrated novel. And his mother
was staying with them? Sherlock asked, at which the boy raised his shoulder
again, shrugged his chin out towards the single slim window that gave onto the
garden.
There it was, indeed: moss-covered and falling-down, as it had been a half-hour
before when they'd arrived, with a gabled roof that must leak dreadfully in the
rain. There had been—indications of a presence, he remembered, raising the
sash: the back stairs clear of debris, a flash of colour in the upstairs
window. A cast-off mistress, though, of all things, living above her rival's
garage. In the tree opposite, the tin-whistle bird repeated and repeated its
call; and from down the corridor came the soft opening and closing of doors.
'My mother is a Countess,' came a mumble from behind the illustrated novel.
'Countesses don't need to break into other people's rooms.'
'Renaud,' said Claudine, leaning in the door, as Sherlock ignored the boy.
'You're being a nuisance. Monsieur Holmès is my cousin; and someone has been
disarranging the rooms.'
'It will be Mademoiselle Patat,' the novel mumbled. 'Looking in Bertrand's
room. Wants proof he's fucking his stepmother, force a divorce. As if everyone
here couldn't testify to it in front of a court.'
'Mademoiselle Patat was with your father, actually,' Sherlock said, still
looking out at the garage. If the apparent Countess had been in her rooms, he
thought, she'd have an unimpeded view of the side-door. And if she hadn't been,
then she'd know that nobody else shared it. 'As were your stepmother and your
half-brother. They came to meet Doctor Watson and me, at the train.'
The novel grunted.
'Mademoiselle Beaumont, then,' it said. 'Tidied her own room until she couldn't
stand it, she had to mess with other people's.'
'Yours would be the first on the list, in that case,' said Claudine. 'Thank God
that I never had children.'
'Oh,' said the boy, dropping the novel with a huge false gasp and a glare at
Claudine, as Sherlock turned from the window, and John came up to the door,
shaking his head. 'Oh, Monsieur Cousin, I know who it must have been. It was
Mademoiselle Picard. She was sneaking around in the Carcos' room.' The boy was
speaking in a sing-song voice now, and Claudine's jaw was set. 'Mooning and
sighing over all Monsieur Carco's things,' he crooned. 'Touching his suits.
Does she make you wear his cologne, Mademoiselle Holmès?'
'For God's sake,' Claudine said. 'What a bore.' She made it look, sweeping from
the room, unhurried; but her hands were in fists as she turned, and stalked
out.
'To what depths the modern aristocracy,' Sherlock murmured. And then, with a
false smile: 'The maid did it,' tossing the boy's book back on the bed as he,
too, left the room.
Out in the corridor, John had his hand on Claudine's shoulder, but she brushed
him off as Sherlock appeared.
'Mademoiselle Picard, then—,' Sherlock said, and Claudine said 'Hélène,' so
Sherlock went on: '—is she lodging...?'
Claudine drew her shoulders back; led them across to the second seaward room.
She opened the door on a jumble of fabric: wide swathes of black amongst
Claudine's pale pinks and blues and violets.
'A poet, you see,' said Claudine, gesturing to the desk with its pens and its
piles of notebooks, pushed up against the window. 'Like I told you. Like
Monsieur Carco. It is a point of affinity, she feels, between them.'
She met his eyes; clenched her jaw. John shifted from foot to foot in the
silence of the room, and Sherlock didn't know—so he stood, stupid, one hand at
rest on the Picard woman's discarded black cardigan.
Claudine cleared her throat, then. Faced away from Sherlock to gaze down at the
long sweep of grasses and sand spreading out towards the sea. John said,
'I'm—sorry,' in an oddly hesitating voice, but Claudine just snorted, and shook
her head, and John licked his lips. Nodding, and nodding. Sherlock, suddenly,
didn't want to look at either of them.
Against the shawl-draped armchair by the second window an old violin case was
resting. Faded light-brown leather contrasted with violet wool, and Sherlock—he
couldn't remember, quite. Was it the same? The one she'd opened in the
Montmartre evenings, and made him play to the skeleton of the new basilica,
while she scolded him on his technique? It was disconcerting, not knowing for
certain.
'Madame Jouvenel,' he said into the silence. Bending to touch discreetly the
old case. 'I assume she was the one who assigned the rooms?'
Claudine shaped her mouth to answer, but then her face just—just transfigured.
Lit from within. He wondered if someone watching him when John—
'That's Hélène,' Claudine said, 'just there. Down on the shore.'
She opened the casement further; leant out, and waved—looking briefly, for the
first time in the past hour, herself. Along the sea-path a wiry black-clad
figure wended its way, a floppy white hat on its head and a satchel over one
shoulder. It paused, and looked up. Raised its arm in greeting. John's woman in
black.
'She'll be up in five minutes, or ten,' Claudine said. She leant back in, and
fished a sleek cigarette-case from somewhere in her skirts. Lit up: looking,
Sherlock thought, distastefully fortified. Saying: 'What did you ask? Ah, the
rooms. You're thinking that Madame Jouvenel likes to move the knife in the
wound.'
'The thought had occurred,' Sherlock said. John had moved over to the window,
and was watching Hélène Picard appear and disappear among the dunes.
'You are not wrong,' said Claudine. 'Henry Jouvenel no longer cares much for
how his wife carries on, so long as his colleagues don't find out. But there
was a time when he cared a great deal. And women together… it's a sore subject,
still.'
'And so she uses you to remind him of it?' said John, bristling up. 'Hardly
sporting.' Sherlock swallowed, tender-throated; touched again the brown leather
case. Claudine just shrugged.
'I mind it more,' she said, 'that she keeps the Carcos on the other side. The
heads of the two beds, you know, are against each other, with only the wall in
between.' She took a long drag on her cigarette, and exhaled towards the
ceiling. 'How anyone could spend the summer, li—listening to the way he treats
her, and still fancy herself in love—.'
'Violent?' John said, sharp, but Claudine shook her head.
'Only… indifferent. He is the enfant terrible of the avant-garde. He wants a
new language, and a new world, endless nights of absinthe and poetry, and she
wants… a child. She bores him, utterly.'
'And Mademoiselle Picard—?' John said. Claudine grimaced; exhaled.
'She bores him too, I think. But that is not much comfort, since she does not
bore me.'
She looked back out the window, at that, but Mademoiselle Picard had vanished
behind a dune. Claudine dragged on her cigarette until it almost burnt her
fingers, and Sherlock breathed in the scent. If he could open the violin case,
he thought—if he could open it now, while his cousin stubbed out her hand-
rolled cigarette and looked down at the sea—then he would know by the smell,
for certain, if it were the same.
Claudine shook herself, and turned to face them. 'On Madame Jouvenel's part,'
she said, 'It is not precisely spite, it is…' She blew out her cheeks, and
shrugged. 'Something of a joke, perhaps, and something of a—an artistic
position. She puts Mademoiselle Patat across the corridor from her own room,
you realise? So that Patat must walk the entire length of the corridor, to get
to Jouvenel.'
On the stairs, across the hall, came a quick clatter of feet. Long legs,
thought Sherlock, but a light frame; shoes sensible, and small. Anyway, there
was no need to conjecture: Claudine's face, again. Luminous. John, by the
window, was looking at her, his left hand clenching and unclenching from a
fist.
'We,' said Sherlock, and cleared his throat. 'We should—does the Countess take
sieste, then? We could go down, and—'
'The Coun—? Ah, la Panthère?' Claudine said. Fidgeting towards the door.
'I—well. To tell the truth, I have no idea. She seldom even comes to table, you
know. She would no doubt be glad of the visit, if you were to—'
'Yes,' said John, and Sherlock nodded, too fast. Though there was no sense in
fleeing, was there, from a wiry, large-hatted woman in a black dress?
It was too late, in any case. Picard was through the door, and upon them.
Cheeks were kissed; pleasantries exchanged. She was, thought Sherlock, in her
late forties, and had that particular breed of slenderness that crinkled in on
itself in middle age. Her face was lined, and fine-boned. It looked to have
faced for years into the wind and the sun. He couldn't escape her fast enough.
Amongst the trees at the edge of the side-yard he caught his breath. Leant
against a pine, fumbling a cigarette to his lips, with that bloody bird hooting
tinnily above him, and the house at his back.
'Well,' said John, coming up at Sherlock's side. 'Quite a motley assortment of
friends your cousin has collected. Mademoiselle Picard seems at least civil, if
a bit...'
—a point of affinity, she feels, between them—
'Pathetic,' Sherlock said. He lit his cigarette, glancing up through the trees.
High windows, looking down. His breath hitching as John laughed, 'Distant, I
was going to say,' and Sherlock, shuddering, that distant echoing down his
spine, was surprised to taste his own Dunhills, rather than the rich old
Turkish tobacco that Claudine had rolled for him in endless rice-paper, sitting
on her balcony in 1903 as Montmartre spent itself at their feet. Distance,
Christ. Christ. He hadn't—hadn't thought. Hadn't tasted that in years.
And now: smoking, face-forward. Does she make you wear his cologne? the brat
had said. And Claudine, standing alone there and bearing it. And John's gaze,
now, heavy on the side of Sherlock's face.
'Are you—,' said John, low. Where had John been, in January 1903? Sherlock
closed his eyes.
'You mind,' John said. 'You really mind. Seeing them together.'
'Don't be absurd,' Sherlock said.
'Am I being?'
John. His John. Just here, by him; too far away. His hand on Sherlock's waist
through cotton shirting.
'Yes,' Sherlock whispered, and John said 'She's a grown woman, Sherlock, she's
been a grown woman as long as you've known her,' thinking—what? Touching
Sherlock across a gulf, unacceptable; intolerable; with the house glowering
down at them through the trees full of all its estranging pettiness when just.
Christ. 'Christ,' Sherlock said, and turned John; pushed him against the
puzzle-rough bark of a Scots pine; bent to kiss his worried mouth with the
Dunhill dropped amongst the pine needles.
And John just—just opened.
Pressed up. Up. Right up against him, overlapping with him. God, with his eager
tongue in Sherlock's clumsy mouth. John, pressed—pressed close, pressed inside.
See how it can be, he thought. Let them see, let them—
'Oh,' he breathed. Swallowed and, and pressed, and swallowed. His mouth,
flooding. Hands full of John's tacky nape, and his sweat-soaked back, and his
belly (shaking), as John kept, kept opening his mouth his arms his hips for
Sherlock to fit inside. Enclose. Pressing up, and up.
'We're in, in view of the house,' John panted, but his fingers dug hard into
Sherlock's arse through his trousers.
'Let them,' said Sherlock. 'Let them, useless lot of—hell,' at the press of
John's hip between his legs.
And John groaned. And John kissed him. Hard and close and Sherlock could fold
himself together to fit under John's tongue. Wet ocean musk and salt skin; and
the breeze off the brackish sea. If they washed out together they would float
as one on the wide waters. Sherlock groaned with his tongue out. The sounds his
John always made for him.
'The boy's mother,' John said, 'the—you wanted to—,' as Sherlock bit at his
ear, at his neck. John shook for him. For Sherlock, where all those turncoats
could—could see Sherlock's cigarette, dropped in the needles; see Sherlock's
hand on John's—'Holmes!'—stretched-tight flies, Christ, Sherlock's panting
writhing—
Sherlock's John. Bowed like John bent. Shivering like John shook. Pressed all
against Sherlock who was aching, so—so fast, he was—
'I want to have you down my throat,' he gasped into John's ear. 'Show them all
how you fit, how you—John,' riding John's hip and his thigh while John gasped
and gasped, and turned his eyes towards the house turning its eyes down at
Sherlock, having him.
'I'm—you're going to come in your trousers,' said John. Panting. His hands on
Sherlock's arse, holding him close. Sherlock felt his face heat, and he didn't
stop, he—'God, not five minutes and you're going to—,' with John's hands on
him, 'you want,' said John, 'you want to have me in your smalls where everyone
can see us—bloody—' as Sherlock pressed his hips into John's belly and his
forehead into the bark of the tree and trembled apart.
'Oh God,' John was saying, petting, too quick and desperate, at the back of
Sherlock's head and his waist under his summer suit. 'Oh Christ, what was
that.'
'I'll still,' Sherlock mumbled, getting his breath. 'I meant it, I'll—,'
groping his palm to the front of John's trousers, and 'Sherlock,' John groaned
for him, 'you don't need—,' but he was pressing forward, halting, prick to
palm.
Sherlock's mouth, still flooded wet. His smalls flooded wet. 'I don't,' he
said, 'need to,' dizzy, fumbling at John's flies, his voice oddly well-
regulated in his own ears. 'But you'll—won't you let me, won't you—?'
John, panting. 'You,' saying, 'God—' with his hands clutching at Sherlock's
shirt and his trousers as Sherlock's clumsy fingers got him out. Got him open.
Sherlock was awash; the seawalls, flooded over. But he moved aside; just a bit;
cleared a path to look up at the house looking down; and clenched his hand—and
John groaned.
For him. For Sherlock. Sherlock wanted to burrow into the sound.
John bit his lip. Moved, barely at all. Tiny thrusts through Sherlock's
fingers. They'd hardly see it, if they were looking.
'You—' John said, '—what are you—'
'Look up,' Sherlock told him. John looked up and hissed. Bucked forward,
just—just a bit. Four shining panes, reflecting down through the trees. Look at
him, Sherlock thought, elated and furious. Look at how we are.
'Who do you think has got back?' Sherlock asked him. 'That fastidious spinster?
All her pen nibs and her neat ledgers on the desk that looks down, right this
way. She'll find you,' writhing; sweating, struggling in Sherlock's clenched
fist, 'quite a spectacle.'
'You,' said John, breathless for Sherlock; half-laughing, 'in full view of
your, your clients—'
Sherlock pressed closer against him. Steadier. A body of water, contained.
Breathing. Mouth to John's ear, pouring into it:
'Nothing new to that mercenary little blonde, though. She'll skip up to her
room with some, some abomination of an American cocktail. See you down here,
thrashing and—'
'Christ.'
'—moaning for me, and she'll want to come down and—' John whined, and Sherlock
lightened his grip, teasing, '—join in. Advise me on technique,' letting the
plosives go crisp so John would feel them against his skin, 'how to touch you
and tease you. But she's doesn't know you, does she, like I do?' John's head,
thrashing side to side: no. She doesn't know me like you do, no. Sherlock felt
he was flying. 'She'd have nothing to contribute,' he said. 'She's nothing to
what I can do to you.' He firmed his grip again, so that John's breath caught,
and he pulled back so just the head—
'Garage,' John panted. Close now, Sherlock could smell it. Wanted to taste him,
flooding, as John got out, 'The garage, too, you could—could walk over there
with your shirt untucked and your smallclothes f—filthy and go put on bloody
airs with a, God, a countess—Sherlock—'
Eyes screwed shut. Inches from it how he said his name. Sherlock's beautiful—
'Or our hostess's young diversion,' Sherlock said, voice low. 'After a year
like his, in company like that, he'd find the sight of you, Christ, impossible
to resist—' but John—
John recoiled against him. Startled. But, Sherlock was thinking, come back and
No—
But John was stilled. Wrong breathing. John was saying 'Stop, stop, Holmes,
stop,' so Sherlock took his hand away with his mouth dry and open, and John,
panted, eyes closed.
Sherlock stood and stared. Breathed. The thin skin of his container
reassembling around him. Why had he said—idiotic. Another of those tin-whistle
birds. Crying out.
Slowly, slowly, biting his lip at the touch, John eased himself back into his
trousers. Above them, the house with its blank-paned windows seemed, absurdly,
to gloat.
And then, gentle, with his eyes still closed, John reached out with a trembling
hand towards Sherlock's chest. Tugged him in by the lapel. Kissed him,
trembling, then pushed him back, just inches; smoothed out the lines of his
jacket and his tie.
'I just,' John whispered. Swallowed. Shaky. Sherlock's heart, squelching at his
ribs.
John opened his eyes, at last, and let go Sherlock's lapels with a little nod.
Said, turning: 'Let's get you changed for supper.'
So Sherlock followed mutely up the hill towards the house, which loomed in
silhouette against the bright-gold glare of the sun.
Chapter End Notes
        1. Roz Ven is a real house, which really was, in the summer of
           1921, the site for the party described here, minus Claudine
           Holmès, Sherlock Holmes, and John Watson. Their professions,
           relationships, and comportments as depicted are more or less
           true to Judith Thurman's account in Secrets of the Flesh: A
           Life of Colette, with the obvious exceptions of the places
           where they intersect with the lives of fictional people. So:
           Mademoiselle Picard did not have a female lover with her at the
           house that summer, but she did spend it pining unrequitedly
           after Monsieur Carco, dressing like a nun, and writing poetry.
           The arrangement of rooms, and who is quartered in which, are
           both invented, although based on what I could gather from
           Thurman and from exterior shots of the house. Some visual
           references are below.
        2. The "white wood sign with its black-lettered ROZ VEN":

           [║ - "La Naissance du jour"]

           The throughway down to the beach:

           [■ - "La paix chez les bêtes"]

           The beach at La Touesse, on a sunny day (the seaward side of
           the house looks down on this beach):

           [La Touesse]

           The house itself. You can see the four upper-story windows
           across the top, with one full-size bedroom on the level above
           them. Based on that I hypothesised eight guest bedrooms on the
           middle floor, with the fancy master suite above, and the
           servants' quarters and common areas below.

           [Roz Ven]
        3. Apropos of nothing in particular, the bird that plagues Irene
           and Sherlock throughout the next few chapters is a hoopoe.
        4. The story about Missy's Byronic carriage, and her horses, both
           of which she essentially named 'Dyke,' is true. ('Une gousse'
           is the word for both a vanilla bean and a garlic clove.) She
           had a fabulously wild aristocratic youth, which included
           morphine, women, and dusk-to-dawn debauchery. By the time she
           became involved with Colette, she had to some extent finished
           sowing her wild oats, and she envisioned settling down with her
           lover at Roz Ven; but as it turned out, Colette had not
           finished sowing hers.
        5. I must say: I'm just so delighted that there happens to be a
           historical decaying Countess, historically nicknamed 'The
           Panther,' at this house party. Sometimes history thwarts my
           fiction-writing efforts, but other times it's very, very kind.
***** The sea howl, and the sea yelp *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
Thursday, August 25th, 1921
8pm (Hour 30)
'You just seem to be,' said John, 'taking it all a bit personally,' as
Sherlock, not looking at him, slapped an open palm to the wall of the fourth
and final inn in St Coulomb, spitting 'Oh this is pointless,' staring daggers
down the country lane. A perversely optimistic sign declared the little road
the Grand-Rue de la Poste.
'I don't know what you expected,' John said. 'August in Land's End, they'd all
be Londoners. Here they're all from Paris. Almost nobody lives year-round in
towns like this, and they don't generally visit each other.'
'I'm aware.'
'Well. On the bright side, there're still only about forty visiting Parisians
to choose from, who arrived in the past two—,'
'Oh for God's sake, Watson, it's nobody here. Any house-breaker with half a
brain is bound to be staying in St Malo, or Dinard, or—Christ.'
He sucked his teeth. Off down the lane, a rotund little crone pottered about
her garden with a pair of pruning shears.
'You've taken the case of the Jouvenels' house-breaker very much to heart,'
John murmured, close behind him. Very close. 'Unusual for you, to be more upset
about a case than the clients themselves.'
'Never before,' Sherlock bit out, in the direction of the elderly gardener,
'have I been engaged by a group of people too self-involved to notice that
there's anything meriting investigation.'
He kicked the wall of the inn again, for good measure, and set off down the
lane, towards the little exchange where the Grand-Rue de la Poste quietly
transformed into the Rue de Bel Air.
Infuriating, he thought to himself. Infuriating. If it weren't, after so much
time, for the pained way that Claudine—
The Jouvenel husband had harrumphed, and his blonde Patat mistress had smirked,
and they had both taken a single glance into their rooms and declared
themselves unconcerned, leaving Sherlock to prowl about in their absences.
Monsieur Carco, when Sherlock had first mentioned burglary, had let his jowls
quiver and his Gitane bob; but as soon as he'd counted his notebooks he'd
relaxed and begun grilling them instead about the novels of Mr Lawrence and Mr
Joyce, before setting out on a defiant walk to the village with Hélène Picard.
Madame Carco, a slip of a woman with black curls all down her back, had not
even gone in: Francis, she had said, could tell them if anything was disturbed.
She hadn't much she cared about, she said, in any case. Meanwhile, the lady of
the house was berating her maid; her boy was at the sea-shore. Claudine was
closeted with her violin; the Panther reported herself ill; and the elusive
second secretary, Mademoiselle Beaumont, she of the pencil-regiments and knife-
edge hospital corners, was nowhere to be found. Nor, it seemed, had any
conspicuous visitor materialised of late in the tiny village of St Coulomb:
only a parade of middle-aged tourists, chasing the waters and the cool sea
breeze.
'There's only one road in this whole bloody town,' Sherlock muttered, as John
caught him up. (Measured breath behind his left shoulder.) 'They just re-name
it every time it passes a new building.'
'Oh come on,' John said. 'There's the road out of town, too, and the—the beach
road, the one down to La Touesse.' But Sherlock, turning finally to face him,
gestured at the little tile on the building opposite: Route de la Touesse, it
said: so this was the beach road, too.
John made that little noise in his throat, that meant he was trying not to
laugh. His eyes, scrunched up. Sliding sideways and down.
And: Oh, thought Sherlock, standing in the dusty lane in the heat while his
anger seeped out of him by drips and John Watson curled up his fingers in front
of his mouth, to hide his smile. The sky was pinking up to the west, light
bright-gold and rose-coloured on the stone walls, and the absurd street-signs,
and the lashes of John's eyes.
'Wouldn't you,' Sherlock said, 'if you found evidence that some—some stranger
had broken into Baker Street—?'
'Yes,' said John, looking back at him. 'Yeah. I would, but I—.' He cleared his
throat. 'I have more call to credit your word, you know. Than some.'
Sherlock's chest hurt. 'Buffoons,' he said. 'The lot of them.' Wishing he might
have—back at Roz Ven, under the trees, John had said go put on bloody airs with
a, God, a countess, and A countess, is it?, Sherlock could have said. And me,
he could have said, taking her hand, kissing it, with mine still smelling of
your—, and he could have, ought simply not to have mentioned—golden youth—
'You want to go back, then?' John murmured. 'Might be in time for supper, if we
hurry.'
Sherlock looked away, down the lane. At his waist and his shoulders and the
nape of his neck, summer suiting rubbed his skin. All the chairs full of
faithless Jouvenels, he thought: their spawn and their hangers-on. And
Claudine's anxious, hopeful face.
'There was that inn,' he said, gesturing. 'Down by the water, a few name-
changes down.'
'Yes?' said John. 'We could sit outside. This time of night.'
But twenty at least of the forty new Parisian tourists, splotchy with the
sunburns they'd forced upon their skins on the first hot day of a cool summer,
had taken the light-gilded tables overlooking the Anse Margot. So Sherlock and
John were shown to seats in the back corner, by the door onto the back alley.
The lamps indoors were already lit; the golden glow of the sunset outside was
reduced to wavery reflections in the mirrors over the bar.
At the table the air was close and heavy. Sherlock's head felt packed full, and
John a weight by his side. When he closed his eyes, he saw Claudine, with a
melancholy expression, reaching out to touch a needlepoint cushion; and Colette
Jouvenel, smirking in her Citroën, nails at her step-son's nape; and John,
stepping forward with a curt nod to shake a young man's hand. It wasn't at its
best, you know, John had said, in 1914; and Sherlock had listened; he had. But
they had all sat together, after; and laughed.
The fish and the cider arrived. Sherlock took a deep swig, crisp and dry on the
tongue. Autumn air against the wet weight of summer. He blinked towards the
door, and blinked across the table, and John was watching him, chewing on a
bite of sea bass.
'Back with us?' said John. Sherlock exhaled; rolled his shoulders.
'Apologies,' he said. His voice (John was my brother) sounded distant in his
own ears. On a white plate by his glass lay half a mackerel. It shone grey-gold
in the lamp-light, with seared lines black-blistered across its skin. It is not
much comfort, Claudine had said, since she does not bore me. Sherlock, looking
at his plate, took another sip of cider. He lifted the skin from his fish with
the tines of his fork.
'Look, what really went on—,' started John, at the same moment Sherlock heard
himself say, 'Daniel seems to be—to be doing well.'
The restaurant flickered, vague and oceanic. John huffed a little; looked down
at his bass.
'Yes,' he said. 'He er. He does.'
He shook his head. Lifted another forkful into his mouth, and Sherlock,
watching the working of John's jaw, could almost feel the rubbery give of fish-
flesh between his own teeth. He put down his fork with a clank. His cider
tasted clean, and bright.
'Must have been strange,' he said. His tongue heavy, and unstoppable. 'Seeing
him again, like that.'
'Yes,' said John. 'You could say.'
Sherlock waited; nothing more. Nothing but John in the corner: tightening his
mouth, tightening his shoulders. Hunching in on himself, away from Sherlock's
eyes. Sherlock drank, and thought himself towards him. Toward—how it must've
been. John, trench-bound, with his back curled up. Tried to imagine. Sherlock
had seen the zeppelin damage in London, of course; had traveled down with
Mycroft from the house in Oxfordshire, and he remembered feeling—almost
relieved; hadn't he. Relieved, at the privilege. Relieved to escape the
stifling commandeered study behind the stairs, just himself and his brother and
the windowless deciphering of spycraft's more numbing banalities. Barring two
sets of proper equipment I refuse to work any longer with agent J18, and
strapped for cash; have had to ensnare officer from Verdun; send 5k francs,
painstakingly transcribed to the nagging background noise of the half-dozen
black-coated men who came and went at all hours, whispering about Room Forty in
phlegmy Continental rhotics. In London, Sherlock had been glad of the open air.
Glad of the feast of unfamiliar faces; unknown details to be deduced. As to the
possibility that he'd be damaged—or that Mycroft, of all people, might be
harmed—well. It had seemed irrelevant. He'd been so young. But—but not as
young, he thought now, as that boy in the café, shaking John's hand.
Across the table John sliced and chewed, sliced and chewed; with near-
mechanical precision.
'Good?' Sherlock asked.
John looked up, startled, then back down to Sherlock's uneaten portion. The
specimen was starting to sweat now, Sherlock saw. The fat-sheen of its flesh
had begun to dull, and congeal. He fumbled in his jacket pocket for a Dunhill,
but John's face had softened. He had put down his knife, and his fork.
'You should try it,' he said.
Sherlock just smoked. Tang of stone fruit, coating his throat, while his
fingertips traced the cool rivulets on the side of his glass.
'So,' said John, pushing away his plate. 'Anything interesting?'
'Hm?'
'Come on, that nest of vipers? You must've deduced their life histories, by
now. All their dirty little secrets.'
Sherlock squinted through his cigarette smoke. John was smiling, open and
expectant; the way he had, from the first. Sherlock's stretched-tight strings
all loosened, together, half a turn.
'Whom would you like?' he said.
'Oh, let's not make things easy for you. What about…la Panthère,' exaggerating
his atrocious English accent so that Sherlock snorted.
'I'm not a magician, Watson,' he said. Half a turn. 'We never even met her.'
'Go on then. Impress me.'
Sherlock exhaled at the ceiling, sitting back. 'Nothing you haven't worked out
for yourself, I shouldn't imagine. Title-rich and cash-poor, though judging
from the family crest on that Methuselah of a Renault she did have money once,
most probably Henry Jouvenel's. Clings to her ancestry hard enough that her son
throws it at people like a weapon; meaning that she's probably done the same to
him all his life. Once fancied a beauty, for a man like Jouvenel to take her as
his lover. But unsuitable for marriage, as everyone refers to Claire Boas, and
only Madame Boas, as his ex-wife. Most probably married, then, before she met
him, and not widowed, or not then. Not divorced, either, not in a family as
Popish as hers is likely to be; but with her married status rendered moot,
since Jouvenel legitimised her son. Possibly a scandal: her husband ill, or
mad. Mad is most likely: less social stigma attached to moving in with her
lover. Tall woman,' he added. 'Red-haired, once, going by the greens and
russets of the dresses hung in her window. Though now, if she's as ill as she
says—and she is; Madame Jouvenel wouldn't house her, otherwise—she must be
grey. Can't drive herself into town, after all.'
'You're stunning, you know.' John spoke low, so quiet even Sherlock could
barely hear.
'Don't be absurd,' he said. Stupid. But his fingers tingled on his glass, and
all along his arms the hair pricked up. John pushed the mackerel a bit closer
to him, and Sherlock lifted a bite to his lips, just to please him. It was
soft. He could swallow it with hardly any chewing at all.
'Let's have—,' said John, and Sherlock's throat (our hostess's young diversion)
clenched (as she does not bore me) for a moment; but John only said: 'the
lovely and, ah, versatile Mademoiselle Patat,' with a smirk. Sherlock took
another bite of fish, with a hot flooding mixture of shame and gratitude;
raised his hand for a second cider 'and an Armagnac for this gentleman'—because
John was helping him, and he ought to have known.
And then his own voice, gathering speed. 'Interesting choice, Watson,' he was
saying, 'she really isn't nearly as decorative as she makes out. Styliste de
mode, of course, and some time in the business if the quickness of her sketches
and the breadth of her fabric samples are anything to go by. A pragmatist: she
had gowns from three of her competitors' most recent lines hanging in her
wardrobe alongside her own, with faint soiling around the necklines and under
the arms. Meaning that, unlike our starry-eyed novelist friend Monsieur Carco,
who hadn't a book in his rooms in danger of going into multiple editions,
Mademoiselle Patat is familiar with the market, and tests out her competitors'
gowns to see how they wear. Presumably she puts her findings to use in her own
work. Her coiffure, cosmetics and manicure are all expensively done, in Paris;
she must travel up for the day at least once a week. But her teeth say middle-,
even lower-middle-class origins. Meanwhile, Jouvenel's pocket square bears her
label, along with his embroidered crest; she's using his baronetcy to publicise
her business, as much as he's using her beauty to advance his status and
satisfy his flesh. He spends money on her; but she doesn't depend on it, not
like the Panther did. Mademoiselle Patat is unlikely to find herself, in her
advancing age, living above her one-time rival's garage.'
John wet his lips with his tongue. He lifted his glass, and sipped, and his
Adam's apple bobbed twice. Sherlock realised, belatedly, that he himself was
chewing on lukewarm mackerel.
'Come on,' he said, looking at his glass with his face flushed up, swallowing
it down. 'You're putting it on. You've heard me do this hundreds of times.'
John didn't answer; but he opened his mouth, and closed it again. His thumb
tapped restlessly at the side of his Armagnac glass. He raised the brandy to
his lips again, and his throat contracted—as heat dripped through Sherlock and
he throbbed.
He took another bite. It was easy, he thought, swallowing. The restauranteurs
had opened the doors, back and front. A warm breeze swept through off the bay.
He took another bite, and another, with John, shoulders back, watching him
across the table.
'Shall I tell you about the master of the house?' Sherlock said. 'Some high
times in the War, if I'm not mistaken, though there's not much you couldn't
deduce yourself from those moustaches and the—'
'Sherlock,' said John, very gentle. 'What happened, that winter?'
'—way he,' Sherlock said, voice faltering, 'handles the Renault,' and cleared
his throat, and shut his lips.
John's hand, on his wrist.
'You know,' John said. 'The winter you met Claudine.'
Fish-flesh in rubbery strings, at the back of Sherlock's mouth. He laid his
fork by the side of his plate. He reached for his cider glass, and swallowed it
down like a dose.
'I just mean,' John was saying, as Sherlock looked round at the smiling
wavering patron-faces, 'if all this is. If we're here for Claudine, you know,
to do our best by her, which I—I certainly want to do. And if it all goes back
to some, I don't know, some history between you, then I can't—'
'I,' said Sherlock, with his throat closing, 'it doesn't, it—'
'—and then, with Mademoiselle Picard. You hate it, to see them together, you
couldn't wait, you just—just bolted down the stairs—'
'—so what do you,' Sherlock got out, 'want to know, I—'
But he couldn't. It was fine, it would be fine, it was only—not just now. Not
after he'd said—and John—. He blinked and the grey-skinned old woman, humming
thready arias, coughing in her sleep. His mother in her weeds, looking up over
the bed at—and his—his father, demanding the papers from London as the rain
beat, and beat, and beat. Claudine on the balcony, stripped down to her stays,
with dimpled elbows and a hand-rolled cigarette, putting her violin into his
child's hands. The thrashing; the soiling of sheets; the sheets sent to wash.
The flask passed round the bedside. The cousins. All the sisters,les
cousines,and the one—. Claudine in her blue wool shawl: Non, saying non, comme
ça, like a Parisian; and the death rattle. John was watching him swallowing.
Sherlock was standing. It was fine, it was only—he only needed some air.
'Holmes,' John was calling, after him. Sherlock needed some air. He was
swallowing bones, heading for the door.
Out the back, by the light of the moon, he reeled in breaths and pushed through
a white wood gate, topped by a cross. (Per istam sanctan unctionem et suam, the
priest had intoned, and his mother had looked up across the bed at—) Sherlock
pressed his back against the wood and the stone. Peeling paint to his right,
under his scraping fingertips. Lavender to his left; and John coming through
the gate.
'Holmes?' John said. Sherlock's fist closed on fragrant flowers. Tactum,
gressum deliquisti. His John, warm and solid, coming up on his right side.
'Sherlock,' said John, quiet in the warm dark of the night, as Sherlock
breathed too fast and held to the shrubbery. Absurd. It was ages ago; ages and
ages. Claudine's brisk hands and her chiding voice. Another world.
'You all right?' John said. Sherlock nodded. He exhaled. He looked straight
ahead.
'I shouldn't have,' said John, his hand warm now on Sherlock's stomach over his
shirt, under his jacket; with John's mouth to Sherlock's ear. 'Tell me what you
were saying about—about any of them. Yes? Tell me about—,' and Sherlock
groaned. Too hot; too full. He shut his eyes, tight, tight, and turned his face
towards John's.
John's lips, John's—precise, wetted, tightening lips, John—tasted of sea bass
and Armagnac, John—small and solid in the dark in the night. Tell me, he had
said, so Sherlock, with his hands inside John's shirt in an open footpath—:
'She wears black in August,' Sherlock got out, as John brushed a hand down over
his hip.
'I didn't mean,' said John, low, 'you don't—I meant anyone,' but the words just
came. Claudine in the café, with her head thrown back. John at the window,
looking down at the sea.
'Black in August but white on her head,' Sherlock went on, with John's hands
pressed to him through his clothes. 'She's not in mourning; she fancies herself
a n—uh, a nun. Fancies herself ce—celibate. Remote. When my cousin had her pick
of all the girls of Montmartre, for ages and—and ages—' and John's hand
faltered on Sherlock's flies so Sherlock, gasping, pushed off from the alley
wall and turned him, rough. John's back bounced on the stone.
'God,' John muttered. Sherlock said, tongue thick in his mouth: 'I told you I
would—I want to—John,' with his hands at John's trouser-flies, and John made a
sound. Muffled; biting his own hand. Sherlock dropped to his knees, listening
to him do it, and his fingers burrowed in John's smallclothes. Hard, musk-
smelling flesh. Auditotum, odorátum, gustum. Sherlock, whimpering; and John was
petting his hair.
His fingers fumbled flaps; pulled down trousers and shorts in the new style,
the army style. Sherlock's smalls were long, like he'd worn as a child in
Montmartre, but habits change and John had been in Paris, in the War. (It
wasn't at its best, you know, Paris, in 1914.) Sherlock closed his eyes and
nuzzled his cheek against John's cock and it twitched; and John's breath
caught, in the quiet of the lane.
'Raised in Le Marais, by her accent,' Sherlock muttered, with his hands shaking
on John's hips, and John's hand on the back of his head. 'And Claudine—she
always said girls from Le Marais—' He hauled in air; John was hard, John was
leaking. John was trying—trying not to move, and Sherlock could—'She said they
never got over themselves,' he choked out, with his mouth watering. 'Girls from
Le Marais.'
John's hand clenched, quick, in his hair, and Sherlock groaned, and got his
mouth around him.
'Sherlock,' John breathed. Sweated. Shifted his shoes on the hard dirt.
Sherlock's throat clenched, and then. Then his whole body just hollowed open to
make room for John, and he wanted to do without—without air, without—.
Swallowing around John with his hands on John's arse and John's hands on his
head and John's hips moving just a—just a little; he was so hard; he didn't
want to hurt Sherlock, but Sherlock wanted to be—I wasn't at my best, you know,
in 1914—. He opened his throat with his palms full of John's arse, and buried
his nose against John's pubic bone close with Sherlock's knuckles scraping
against stone.
John's voice was nothing like dying at all.
Sherlock's kneecaps bit into ground and his skin throbbed. He was aching,
trousers half-undone. He pulled back and breathed and his head swam with the
smell of lavender with the smell of dirt with the smell of John, and home.
Sherlock's mouth, overflowing. Drawing John into himself like tides. He nosed
under John's cock; licked awkwardly at his balls where the scent was strongest.
Soaked, he thought, taking one in his mouth while John's thigh-muscles jumped,
he wanted to be—to be stained with it. The lavender was wrong but John's noises
were the noises Sherlock knew; how he knew him; John's sweaty desperate
familiar smell was leaking down all over him, inside and out. If Sherlock were
Parisian—comme ça, like a Parisian, as he suckled quick-gentle on John's ball
and John cursed—if Sherlock were a Parisian then the lavender would be part of
him; would be part of the mess of home and John, and Sherlock would want it
too, would want it dripping down over his face and his neck and his lips and
the back of his throat until the two of them were so intermixed that they would
never have to—. He shuffled absurdly closer on his knees.
And John was panting for it. Panting for Sherlock's mouth back on his swollen,
wet—Christ. John mewling around the hand in his mouth with his ankles tethered
by his trousers, God, Sherlock could—. He rubbed his face at the top inside of
John's thigh and pulled on John's balls which were dripping with Sherlock,
which smelled of Sherlock's mouth and John's body. If Sherlock were from (not
at my best, you know, in 1903) Paris, then he would pass through the galleries;
would stop at Cottan and buy a cake of fine-milled soap, scented with lavender;
he would bathe with it and leave it in the bath and then later John would laugh
at him in that wry fond—Christ, closer, impossible, more together, Sherlock's
fingers petting behind John's balls as John twitched against Sherlock's
cheek—and later John would take it and use it on all his secret hidden places
and then when Sherlock stripped him bare and rubbed his own skin against John's
skin and licked him up with his tongue John would smell like Sherlock, if
Sherlock were from Paris.
'Christ, Sherlock,' John whispered. He was leaking so. Dripping down Sherlock's
cheek. John probably couldn't see that, in the moonlight, but his fingers still
shook when he reached down, pressed himself against the side of Sherlock's
face. 'Oh please soon, all right? Please soon.'
'Shhh,' Sherlock whispered, against John's skin. 'Shhh.' He raised his left
hand, and John bent his head and opened his lips, and fucked his own mouth on
Sherlock's fingers. And the sound Sherlock made. He didn't make such noises.
They would hear; they would find them. They would find John, sweating, with his
spine curled over, two of Sherlock's fingers down his throat; how together they
could be. If John were from Paris he would understand the words they would call
him. Garlic; vanilla. Lavender. If John had been in Paris, if John, not at my
best, you know, in the War—
John sobbed around Sherlock's fingers, and just—broke. Pressed with a flat palm
to the side of his own cock so that the other side pressed harder against
Sherlock's cheek. Sherlock gasped while John, curled-up, made jerky desperate
thrusts between Sherlock's face and his own hand. Everything wet with sweat and
with John, where he had smeared against him. Per istam sanctan unctionem, the
priest had said, and she had looked up—
Sherlock couldn't breathe. John's mouth fell open, two of Sherlock's fingers
still holding down his tongue, and he whined, rutting. Saliva dripped down
Sherlock's palm and his wrist and the inside of his arm.
So wet. So close; John so close; pressed under Sherlock's cheekbone, grunting.
Whining. Sherlock took back his soaked hand, and John moaned; didn't close his
mouth. The smell of him in this state. Reeking of home and the both of them;
Sherlock smeared John's saliva over John's balls and John's thighs getting his
soaked hand up between John's legs so he could press two fingers against John's
hole and make John—yes, speed up his—Christ. There was a trail of saliva from
John's mouth to Sherlock's cheek and Sherlock looked up and opened his mouth
against John's skin just as John cried out and pulled back; painted Sherlock's
cheek and his chin on the way to stuffing himself back into Sherlock's mouth
and pulsing and pulsing.
'Sherlock,' John whispered. Sherlock's head was spinning; vanilla; holy oil;
pear blossoms and cider, swallowing with John still half-curled over him.
Aching, trapped inside his clothes. Breathing hard with his forehead to John's
hip. Lavender.
'Sherlock,' said John again, plucking feebly at his jacket, so Sherlock pulled
up John's trousers and his army-style shorts, and buckled John's belt with
slippery hands. (Not at my best, you know, in 1914, with his shoulders hunched,
at the window, looking down at the sea.) If Sherlock had fought in the War, he
might wear the same. He and John, in the same cotton and the same wool and the
same skin. If Sherlock were from London—but John said 'Come up, let me, come
on,' so Sherlock wobbled up on creaking knees and John took his face in his
trembling hands and licked himself off Sherlock's skin.
John's tongue, curling against Sherlock's tongue. Sherlock pressed his whole
front against John's against the wall. If Sherlock had fought in the War then
John would be able to push his trousers and shorts down together and
just—Christ, a hand on his bare skin anywhere and Sherlock would be spilling on
the ground. He heard himself whimpering; and John making quiet amazed little
sounds, touching his shoulders, kissing his neck.
If Sherlock had fought in the War (John with his hands everywhere through
Sherlock's shirt and his trousers, breathing 'Christ, when you're like
this—')—if Sherlock were from London—but no, that was—if Sherlock were from
Edinburgh, then John would smell of heather, and and peat. Wet wool, he
would—they smelled of wool, the both of them, together in the winter in Baker
Street, when they gave chase through wet alleys and he knew John down to his
breath behind him and the falls of their feet brick-echoing through the fog
('beautiful, you're so beautiful'); knew they could die. John, touching him
everywhere but bare skin. If Sherlock were from Edinburgh he'd have fought in
France; gorse and heather and deep smoky burning whisky on the fields of Ypres,
thinking Per istam sanctan unctionem, bruised and concussed, et suam piissimam
misericordiam sucking John's cock under cover of darkness while John told him
you're beautiful, Christ, so young in a voice Sherlock would know, for certain,
while John fucked his mouth and thought they both might die, visum, audtiotum,
odorátum, gustum et locutiónem, as John panted and kissed Sherlock and drew him
out of his old-fashioned smallclothes; as he made him come in billows and
sodding crests with just two light fingers rubbing at the head of his cock.
Behind them, on the other side of the gate, the inn-door slammed.
John buttoned him back into his clothes, and moved him off down the alley.
Sherlock could barely stumble after. They branched off through a side-lane, and
another, and Sherlock made them stop in the shadows at the corner of Grand-Rue
de la Poste, to gather up all his sagging strings, draw them tight before he
went any further. John chuckled under his breath. He squeezed Sherlock's hand.
After that they made their way in peace, with just a few comments murmured
between them. And they mentioned nothing, even as they walked up the hill in
the waving grasses beneath a starved sliver of moon, about any year in any city
at all.
  
Thursday, August 25th, 1921
9pm (Hour 31)
Hours later, hours; and still Irene was buzzing.
Back in St Malo. After hacking through the underbrush; after scraping her legs;
after an hour on her bicycle on back roads, she'd ridden up in a lift and
opened the door into her red morocco trunk. A bath, she'd thought, and then she
would drop. She could order supper in her room, if she lasted that long; the
salt air had her craving Champagne. Perhaps this close to the sea there would
be oysters, even in August.
But in the bath she couldn't settle. She fidgeted, and sighed; had a vision of
splashing water all across the white tile. And after, in her new lilac dressing
gown, with the windows open to the balcony, she paced the floor.
After such a day anyone, she thought, would be—but there was no word she liked.
She was not angry, not upset at the sight of an ageing actress scribbler and
her half-grown brat. Her mother hadn't held the girl's hand, even. That black-
clad martinet had held it, and Madame Jouvenel had swept into the house with
her beautiful boy and her husband's hired spies.
Irene stripped off. She was not angry; she did not strip off angrily. Her
fingers were steady as she untied the belt, as she arranged the light purple
silk over the foot of her golden bed. She did not storm, or rage. And in any
case: if she were displeased, it was surely because someone, still—here, or in
Paris—was walking about with images of Irene's face, and Gretha's face; was
using them in ways that Irene couldn't—in ways concerned with idiot men. That
made her angry, certainly. That made her bite at her mouth, pacing the floor.
And Christ, her room was stifling. The clouds had closed over the heat of the
day, had sealed it in; and she didn't want, somehow, to show herself on the
balcony. She thought of the two men herded into Roz Ven with the Jouvenels; and
of Charles Humbert's squinting piggy eyes.
It was supper time. She forced herself to stop in front of her trunk; forced
her lips smooth, and her brows. Looked at the horrible tourist clothes from the
shop down the way, but she couldn't—couldn't bear them. Yellow, then, pale
yellow: the dress was another Patou, and she stepped into it with a smooth
motion of thigh and ankle. Red her lips; and yellow in her hair. Her arms left
bare, and she wasn't angry; she descended the stairs and smiled at a fellow-
lodger, showing her teeth.
Down in the restaurant, since she'd thought of it earlier, she ordered
Champagne; and a stew of fish harvested from the waters off La Touesse. She
didn't mention, of course, that she'd been. The serveur heard her accent and
took her for a Parisienne; treated her to three minutes on the area attractions
before she cleared her throat at him with a look, and he scurried away to fetch
her wine.
She was sat at the bar, buzzing. The supper hour drew itself together. Three
stools to her left, a banker sort in a grey suit sipped at a glass of white
Burgundy (engaged, thought Irene; unfaithful); and two stools to her right,
nursing the dregs of a gin fizz, with the handles of a dowdy carpet-bag hooked
over her foot, a mud-haired girl in a shirtwaist blouse and trumpet skirt
hunched over the bar. She had rather a fine nose, Irene thought; though a mouth
like a schoolteacher's. Irene cleared her throat.
'Unhappy in love?' she said. In English; bit of a gamble. But then: American
cocktails; unfashionable clothes. The young woman moved her head as if worried
by flies, but when she swung round, her eyes just locked to Irene's. Ages, it
seemed. Unlooked-for; electric. Well.
'You could say,' the girl at last replied.
Irene slid over a stool, and beckoned to the bartender: another drink for her
new friend. 'So,' she said. 'Did he leave you for another woman?'
'Which he?' The girl's inflection was Paris, but middle-class. Irene upped the
vintage on her London by a few notches.
'Oh,' she said, eyebrows up. 'Goodness.'
The girl blew her cheeks out, and straightened her back.
'They're batards, anyway,' she said, the s slipping out of the word, seemingly
without intention. 'Fu—fuck them. Both.'
Irene put on the scandalised face expected in such circumstances, as the girl
gave her drink a little nod. There was a wobble in it; and after such a day.
Christ. It would feel lovely, Irene thought, to loosen her own joints, her hips
and her shoulders; to—to tie the girl down and bugger her. Lick into every
crevice of her flesh until she squirmed. Irene would order up the names of her
lovers; the girl would only whine. Irene recrossed her legs. Sipped her wine.
'Is that a memory,' she said, 'or a request? Miss Wren, by the way.'
'You're—,' said the girl. Licked her lips, with her eyes shining, but finished:
'English.'
Irene thought: ah. Well. And what had Irene expected from a dowdy shop-girl,
frightened to have said the word fuck in a public restaurant to a rouged
stranger? Irene was not angry, but a flare of loathing licked at her ribs. She
was turning back to the bar when the girl said, blushing: 'I—I did. Both
married, but I let them. And ever since they've been just—. I've nothing to
show; I was only trying to—.' And she shut her mouth, and knocked her drink
back in one.
Fair, fair skin. The way she flushed up all along the bridge of her long nose.
'Your English is quite good,' Irene said. No response, so she went on, her
spine curved towards the girl: 'You've a friend, then. A woman who—they let
her. Don't they?'
'I—,' the girl said, blushing and blushing. Strawberries in June.
'Olivia,' Irene said. She clicked the base of her glass against the girl's
tumbler, and the girl almost tripped over her own tongue to say 'Ger—Germaine.'
Germaine took a sip of her drink, and looked back up at Irene. Just a flick of
her lashes over the rim of the glass, but there was that current. Pale green-
flecked irises, she had. Wrapped round with jade, they would mirror it back.
Irene thought of turning them; of greening them; of binding the girl fast;
olive and emerald at her neck and her wrists. There was, somewhere, a snapped
green cord, and it would fasten Germaine together: the stuttering shop-girl in
the middy-blouse, to electric aventurine eyes.
Irene set her glass down on the bar. She wanted to lean in, but she didn't. Did
not press her mouth to a blushing ear; or to the nape of a blushing neck.
'I once had a man,' she said instead, 'who gave me just that scent.'
Germaine startled, but stayed. She got redder. Irene watched her get redder and
redder as she thought it through. Irene said: 'He told me he fancied me a free
spirit. Mitsouko, the exotic—,' murmuring gooseflesh all up the girl's neck,
how she'd feel on the tongue, '—fruit and Chinese spice,' whispering now:
'Briseuse de coeurs.'
Germaine gave a little gasp. 'My employer gave it to me,' she blurted, shifting
her hips on the barstool. Irene laughed.
'No,' Germaine said, 'no, c'est vrai, I am the secretary to a—to a writer, she
has ideas, she—she is more like a mother to me. Gives me things, gives me,' she
gestured around her, 'nights off.' She laughed. 'You can see how glamourous I
am. Getting here, it's more trouble than it's worth, but she tells me to go and
I do. I can never—never stand up to her. We are staying all the way in St
Coulomb.'
Irene stared.
'Is that right,' she said.
Around her, the hotel lobby yawed.
Irene Adler did not bite her mouth. She did not steady herself, even for a
moment, with her fingers on the surface of the bar. 'More like a mother, you
say.'
'Yes,' said Germaine, dully. Irene raised her hand to the bartender for another
drink. She arranged her lips into a kind of a smile.
'And,' she said, 'how did that come about? Exactly?'
'Oh, she,' Germaine sighed, waving a hand. 'She was the best friend of my
mother. My mother's very best woman friend. And Maman—she died, oui, merci,' to
the barkeep, who was sliding her drink under her nose, 'she was strong like a
horse, always; but she died in the 'flu, during the War.'
'I'm sorry,' Irene said.
So many had, in '18. The strong, and the young. She'd heard it was the same, in
England. She'd heard in Limehouse—
'Bon,' said Germaine, while Irene did not shift on her stool, did not lean
closer. 'I had no father, either. An orphan, at twenty-five, and I had the 'flu
myself. I cried for days, in my bed. She—Madame Jouvenel, she burst in
frowning. Carrying—I think it was grapes.' Germaine laughed; shaking her head;
it wrinkled up the skin on her nose. 'I wasn't seeing visitors, but you can't
deny her, and she—she sat on my bed, and wouldn't cry; and said only: "Physical
pleasure, it can overcome even the worst grief." And then—' Irene recrossed her
legs; Germaine shrugged, '—she threw my hat at me. Took me to Prunier's, for as
many prawns as I could eat.'
Irene—not touching her fingers to the hollow of her throat—thought of Le Havre;
and of fish stew from which all the fish had already been taken. 'And now
many,' she asked, 'was that?'
'A number, believe me. I'd lived on broth for three weeks. And then when I was
done, she—she offered me a position.'
'And here you are.'
'Yes,' said Germaine, and pushed her mud-coloured hair off her forehead. It
stayed where she put it; wet palms. 'Here I am. Reviewing foreign crime novels
and the Jouvenel datebook by day. Unlucky in love by night.'
'Letting them—,' Irene said, and Germaine said 'Oui,' and slurped at her drink,
staring straight ahead.
Irene sat back, eye on Germaine. The girl had been drinking, already, when
Irene came down: two cocktails, at a guess, and Irene had bought her two more.
She was leaning on her elbows. Not looking over. Germaine didn't look at Irene,
because when she did—
'Your employer,' Irene said, 'does she…let you—?'
Germaine made an incredulous noise in the back of her throat. Her knee was
bouncing. It was moving her skirt, and her foot, and her elbow on the bar. So.
'I had a man, once,' Irene said, in her airiest voice. 'Wounded in the War.'
'I think we all—,' Germaine began, but Irene spoke over her.
'I mean—in a chair, you know. Wheeled himself about.'
'Oh,' said Germaine. 'Yes?' Hand to her neck, just below her ear. Mitsouko.
'Best lover I ever had,' said Irene. 'I always wondered…well.'
Germaine didn't speak. Irene coughed, and looked at her watch.
'In any case,' she said. 'I should be going. It's a ways back to—over in
Dinard, you know. Across the bay.'
'I'm staying—,' Germaine said, too fast, her glass clacking onto the bar, 'up
in 415, it's my—,' and 'Oh,' said Irene, 'but I thought you were—,' and
Germaine said '—glamourous night off, you know,' and jiggled her leg, staring
down into her empty drink.
'Ah,' Irene said. 'Well. I suppose I—I'm a bit tipsy yet, after three glasses
of wine.'
Germaine fidgeted her leg. Her chest rose-fell, rose-fell. Irene did not cast
up her eyes.
'You should—should come up,' Germaine said, at last. 'And ah. I believe they
have tonic water, you could—'
Irene waited. She let herself bite her mouth.
Germaine swung to her feet. She looked right at Irene; she didn't flinch. 'Come
up,' she said, and her eyes sparked green.
She lifted her dowdy brown carpet-bag onto her shoulder, and didn't look back.
Irene, staring down the barkeep, threw cash on the counter. It wouldn't do to
have Germaine's gin fizzes charged to 513.
In the corridor to the lift, Irene followed after Germaine; followed her black
trumpet skirt and her awful brown bag. Irene's mouth watered; she bit her
tongue. Germaine muscled the accordion cage out of the way, and Irene,
entering, let her shoulder brush Germaine's bust.
There was a hum, and a clatter. Irene snuck glimpses. Germaine out of breath;
eyes raised to the lift ceiling. Wondering at her own daring. Naughty thing.
The girl's corset was modern though her skirt was fifteen years out of fashion;
it would have shown to best advantage in an s-curve from the gay nineties. Bust
thrust out in front; arse behind. Irene's fingers were relaxed on the straps of
her clutch. More like a mother, in truth. She wanted to spank the girl raw.
There was a clatter, and a hum. Irene stood still while Germaine wrenched open
the accordion gate. Mitsouko in spiced waves.
At the door to 415 Germaine fumbled the key. Irene's hand hovered at the small
of her back while Germaine's fingers slipped and slithered until at last the
thing swung open. Irene on the threshold stumbled; let Germaine catch her arm
and steady her against the wall.
'Ah,' Irene said. 'Merci,' looking up into blue-green shocked-wide eyes.
Germaine wasn't small, Irene realised; though she'd thought of her that way all
evening. It was the way she'd hunched into herself at the bar. But now she was
thick; and middling-tall; her heavy breasts pressed up against Irene's sternum;
and Irene had to lift her face to meet Germaine's gaze. Strong brow; strong
jaw. 'Merci beaucoup,' Irene said again, with her lips inches from Germaine's,
and Germaine swayed, and—
'Tonic,' Germaine murmured. Then she coloured, and stepped back. 'In the
sideboard, I—I am sorry, pardon me,' blushing like mad as she backed towards
the en-suite.
All right, Irene thought. She was nothing if not flexible. It was hardly
likely, but—best to be sure.
The room, after all, was much like her own. Same exposure, even; on the
building's western side. Supposing a girl like Germaine had prints like those:
she would reckon them too large for the old painted-up mail slot; too important
for the desk drawer. Water ran in the en-suite, and Irene searched the
mattress—the rug—the niche in the window-seat—behind the wall mirror—under
under the back of the floor mirror. If the girl was only pissing—. The en-suite
the tap was still running. Squeamish? Irene wondered, distracted, as she ran
fingers over desk bottoms and chair-bottoms and the inside surfaces of the
wardrobe. Nothing. Would the girl be squeamish about the rest of it? She
blushed and fumbled and talked of being an orphan, but her eyes—!
In the en-suite the water still ran. But in the WC there was nowhere, Irene
thought, picturing her own. The tank of the toilet; the medicine cabinet; the
tub. She ran quick hands over the drawers and shelves of the little bar. She
took two deep breaths and a glass from the bar, and poured herself a water as
the tap in the en-suite quieted at last; then jammed her fingertips back into
the top of the left-most drawer, and slid the thing two inches shut on the skin
of her own hand.
'Je suis déso—but what's wrong?' Germaine said, emerging from the en-suite.
Irene furrowed her brow at her own fingers.
'It's nothing. I went for a glass and I just—a splinter—.'
'But you're bleeding,' said Germaine, wide-eyed, 'let me see,' stumbling up to
the counter against which Irene had backed herself; taking Irene's long fingers
in her fresh-scrubbed hands. Standing facing, with both their heads bowed over
Irene's wound, Germaine's breath came hot on the top of her head.
'I washed it off,' said Irene, low in her throat, 'but it's still—.' Blood
oozed from the little cut.
Germaine's hands and her wrists were plump. Babyish, Irene thought. More like a
mother to me, with Germaine, gawky and out-of-date, trailing along in the wake
of her mum's old friend. Tutting and obeying, and putting things in order. Does
your employer let you, and Germaine had scoffed, and Irene—
'I always liked that fellow,' Irene said. 'The one who—who called me a free
spirit. Who gave me your perfume.'
Implausibly young, she sounded. She knew what she could pass for, and it wasn't
twenty. But Germaine just frowned at Irene's finger. She was bent close, this
girl who was like a daughter to—but Irene wouldn't know about that. She could
feel the girl's breath on her skin. She wanted to—to press, to force her
fingerprints into Germaine's pale—plump—bruiseable skin. Against her lips, and
her teeth.
'He called me a free spirit,' said Irene, fast and high, 'but really, you know,
it was him. He was the one, he would—whenever he got ahold of a few francs, he
would,' —orphan girl, done unto— 'he would spend it all on olives and
Champagne, and a new white dress to take me out in. And he would keep me—,'
Germaine, resting her forehead against Irene's forehead in the hotel kitchen
paid for by—her employer, '—he would keep me out dancing until dawn. Kiss me in
the back of the bar. Get his hands inside my dress and touch me everywhere,
everywhere except—.' The girl was panting into Irene's palm, and: '—teasing
me,' Irene whispered. 'And then, at sunrise, I'd be tipsy still, putting his
hands back in my dress, I wanted him all over my skin, and he'd take me home,
he'd spread me out on the bed and finally touch—'
And Germaine, at bloody last, pressed forward, aim bad but intentions good,
making broken-off fretting sounds as she mouthed at Irene's lower lip. Irene
let her, and let her. When Germaine snuck her tongue past Irene's lips, Irene
sucked on the tip of it.
'Oh,' Germaine gasped. Breathing heavy in the space between them with her eyes
green and panicky, but Irene put on a helpless face, and raised her bleeding
finger to Germaine's mouth. Blood on the girl's lips as she kissed them.
Trembling at the verges of chastity.
Irene whispered: 'I had always wondered, always—,' and thankfully, Germaine
stopped her mouth, pushed her back clumsily against the tile.
And what Irene could do to her; more like a mother to me. She could turn her
over her knee. She could tie Germaine's wrists with the girl's own corset-
strings, heavy, looping; she could pull them so tight Germaine could barely
breathe, her breasts overflowing the top of the thing; and Irene could knot the
strings behind her and then tie her wrists with the excess so when she tried to
get up off the bed she'd have to flop about on her fair dimpled elbows and her
round pale swelling hips. The gay nineties, Irene thought: she'd a store of
those corsets herself. They would shove the girl's great round arse out behind
her; Irene could have her squirming on the bed, panting. More like a mother
really and Irene could, God, get her wet, get her pink, spank her to watch her
quiver and then suck at her arsehole until she shocked herself begging.
(Germaine traced a trembling thumb around the side of Irene's throat; Irene
heard herself moan.) She would get her wet with her mouth. Get her dripping.
The girl would beg, and sob, and be scandalised that all she could think of was
Irene's tongue, and Irene would pull back and put a whip-handle in her like a
tail to mark her place. Turn her on her side with her hands still tied behind
and her waist still cinched and the whip in her arse and then rub her open from
the front. Put fingers into her, one after the other after the other; fuck her
from the wrist, maddeningly slow until she started to tighten around them; then
take them away and listen to her wail; turn her again and fuck her arse with
the whip-handle while she leaked all over the bed and tried to hump herself
down into the covers, nothing to show; turn her back over with her face a wreck
and her breathing shot and her cunt dripping, wet to her knees; put left-hand
fingers back inside her while the right held the whip, refusing to move, just
watching her struggle and cry and try to fuck herself both ways at the same
time. Christ, Irene could ruin her.
But she stood against the counter. She let Germaine tremble and coo, kissing
Irene's neck and her cheek while Irene reached up to let down Germaine's
Gibson-girl hair. Old-fashioned clothes; old-fashioned coif. Irene wondered at
this fixation on the past.
Germaine's hair tumbled down, and Irene put her hands in it. Light pressure, so
light on the base of Germaine's skull, made Germaine's breath catch; made her
press her lips hard to Irene's lips. So eager. She would just crumble, if Irene
only—but no, Germaine had let them; Germaine had nothing to show. Germaine
thought she wanted—
Irene let herself melt against the counter. Let herself (the whip-hand, wet;
the corset, tight) breathe hard; let her knees fail. Germaine caught at her
shoulders. There was a chair just outside the kitchen, and Germaine, with her
hands on Irene's arms, steered her over; sat her down; then made to pull back,
biting her swollen lip, but Irene still had hold of her skirts. Germaine
stumbled, thigh to Irene's palm through wool. She caught herself; fell into
straddling Irene's lap, apologising. Irene, for the first time in years,
thanked whoever might be listening for that summer of training in the
pantomime.
More like a mother, Christ.
'I'm sorry,' Germaine said again. Irene hushed her. She let one hand snake
round Germaine's waist, up the back of her old-fashioned blouse; let the other
fall to her hip. Regiments of buttons, under every one of her fingers. When she
ran her hand down the row at Germaine's spine, she felt she girl shiver, and
shift.
'My God, your skin,' Irene said, into her ear, undoing tiny loops at her nape,
and down between her shoulder-blades. She could feel it, actually feel it as
the blush spread over the girl's back. 'Such things with a woman, I've
never—but you flushed downstairs, and I thought of strawberries.'
Germaine made a helpless little noise. Squirmed on Irene's lap with her shaking
hands on Irene's waist. Irene pretended to take it as confusion.
'Des fraises,' she said. 'Your cheeks. So different from a man's.'
Germaine panted.
Irene thought of the whip (wet) and the corset (tight, Christ). She kept
unbuttoning. Unbuttoning and unbuttoning as she ran her mouth over Germaine's
round cheek and her throat. Let herself mark her with lip-paint, since Olivia
Wren wouldn't realise. Scarlet stripes, Jesus, on the girl's soft flushed-pink
throat.
'So soft,' Irene breathed into Germaine's ear. 'My mouth watered.'
She made it a kind of purr. Germaine's hands tightened on her waist, and she
actually scooted her hips forward. Almost a thrust. Irene could have cheered.
Instead she just shifted. Brought up her knee just a little, as if by accident.
By accident she moved and by accident Germaine, with a shocked unshuttered
look, and her blushing back now bared to the room, could hardly help but ride
her thigh. Irene said 'Oh,' like this was a novelty for her, watching a timid
young secretary lose their mind in her lap, with her hand on their hip, coaxing
them on like one might a skittish dog. Yet still it was—compelling. At times.
Germaine moaned like she would crack open. It was compelling, here and now.
'Oh mon Dieu,' Germaine said. Whimpering now, shoving herself in short, shaky
thrusts against Irene's thigh as Irene unbuttoned dozens of seed-buttons at her
hip. 'C'est impossible, je ne fais pas—avec toi—'
'And what would you like to be doing?' Irene murmured. 'With me?'
Germaine shook her head; bit her lip. Irene had the girl's skirt open now; she
pushed it down from the waistband and took hold of her hips. Corseletted;
strapped and flattened. She no doubt despaired of her lovely spreading arse.
Irene got two handfuls of it through silk, and ground her forward hard, so that
Germaine gasped.
'What did you used to—,' Germaine said, then stopped. Losing her English. Irene
ached between her legs.
'Unn,' Germaine said. Irene slid Germaine's blouse off her shoulders and onto
the floor. She nuzzled her face into the pink-and-gold scrap left covering her.
Germaine's panting breath. Germaine's nipple, hardening against Irene's cheek
through pink silk. Irene took down a strap and got her mouth around it, just
grazing with her teeth, and Germaine cried out.
'So beautiful,' Irene said. She licked at Germaine's gooseflesh, and looked up
at her face. Eyes glazed; tensing her thighs. Irene could smell her through the
bloody Mitsouko. Germaine's hand on her neck again, at the back of her throat;
Irene let her eyes fall shut.
And at last, at last: 'What did he do with you?' Germaine got out. Irene didn't
smile. 'Your—soldier lover,' Germaine said. 'What did he—'
'Mmm,' Irene said, 'he kissed me,' and Germaine just surged forward; pressed
her lips to Irene's lips. Needy; wet and small-tongued. Irene smiled. She
kissed back, smiling, with the weight of the girl's breasts heavy in her hands.
'Not there,' she said then, when Germaine pulled back. And she sat and watched
Germaine's breathing change as she realised; watched the flush deepen and
spread down her chest.
'Did they ever?' Irene asked. She painted Germaine's breasts with her lips and
waited for an answer.
'Once,' she said at last.
'Did you like it?'
Germaine didn't answer. Wouldn't meet her eyes.
'I always thought,' said Irene, against her skin, 'I always thought I'd like
it. Like to do it, I mean; I thought, when he—when he put his tongue on me and
his lips—'
'Dieu,' whispered Germaine, at the ceiling.
'—I always wondered how I felt, against his mouth. I always wondered. After the
first—first time he did it I took a hand-mirror, looked at myself. Spread
myself apart and touched myself and tried to—to think how it felt on my
fingers, how it would feel on my tongue, on my—my whole face—'
'Oh mon Dieu oui; merde—yes,' Germaine said. Scrambled back off Irene's lap and
Irene let her go. Followed her up and let her step out of her skirt. Skin
smeared with lip paint. Wide, green eyes.
Irene licked her lips and peeled out of her dress. 'Yes,' she repeated, and
followed Germaine; pressed her back on the bed and kissed her school-mistress
mouth.
Germaine. Flat on her back with all her mountains and valleys. Irene thought of
Le Havre girls, half-unbuttoned from their dancing-dresses that summer Irene's
fingers had been bloody from sewing up Madame Colette's shift every night, and
her eyes red from—thought of of stolen minutes in the bathing-houses with those
lovely fleshy girls as she unhooked Germaine's suspender clips. Kissed the
bridge of her stockinged foot; and her calf; and her dimpled knee. Kissed up
the insides of her spread-wide thighs; got her hands under Germaine's corselet,
full of Germaine's delicious fat arse. Germaine squirmed, hands to her flushing
face—which would never do.
Irene reached up and grabbed the girl's elbow, pulled her hand away. 'I would
always watch him,' she told her, still holding on as she kissed her navel and
the warm soft rolls of her belly. Christ, those girls before the War. Flesh in
such abundance, there used to be—and she was struck by a nostalgia so strong
she felt herself colour, with her hand around Germaine's wrist and her nose now
flush against her thigh.
'I liked to watch him,' Irene went on, swallowing. 'I would be as you are, and
he would be here; and I liked to watch when his tongue came out.' She held
Germaine's eyes as she made her tongue to be soft and broad, and licked over
the folds of her with a long wet dragging slide. Germaine made a strangled
sound but her eyes stayed open; so Irene pointed her tongue and burrowed down.
Hot: the first truly hot day of the whole summer, with only one door open out
onto the balcony and no cross-breeze, and her head buried between sweat-soaked
quaking thighs. So soft, so wet; hot like the days that July in Le Havre, like
those wartime summers in Paris when the girls had still been—Christ, soft
curving flesh. Her face wet with sweat and with Germaine; and Irene licked up
her with the flat of her tongue, like catching the frothing head down the side
of a cold cider-glass.
'Did you—,' Germaine gasped, above her, 'did you. Kiss him, too?'
Irene, with her face wet and her fingers tangled in the tops of Germaine's pink
stockings where they cut into her thighs, had a sudden vision of herself in her
harness and her big black cock; of Germaine on her knees with her mouth wet and
stretched around the tip of it. She moaned against the girl's skin. Flicked
into the heat of her with the point of her lizard-tongue. Germaine cried out.
'Did you—is that what he did?' she said again, 'is that—that—,' and Irene
nodded and (I've always wondered, always—) let her feel a brush of teeth.
'Dieu,' said the girl, 'I'll never remember. I—let me, let—unh,' sounding lost
and panicky and Irene Adler would keep her there, just there, beautiful and
overwhelmed, but Olivia Wren in her yellow dress—
'Turn,' said Irene, pulling back, stroking down the insides of Germaine's
thighs so she spread them even—Christ, even wider. Oh, Irene Adler would say,
look at you, but Olivia just said 'turn on your side.' So Germaine turned on
her side. Panting, with a crease between her brows. And Irene, skin buzzing,
shuffled round on her knees, and lay down on her side too. Drew Germaine's
thigh over her shoulder. Nosed into her thatch of dark-brown curls.
'Easier to remember,' she said, 'if you follow my lead.' She glanced up to see
Germaine, with her forehead to Irene's thighs, looking down the length of her
own body and nodding and nodding and nodding, so Irene—Irene liked biting and
hard tongue, being bitten into like a peach, but Germaine—Irene licked another
stripe up the centre of her, and Germaine, breathing too hard, licked a stripe
up the centre of Irene.
Gentle; lizard-flicks and ale-glass stripes, and Germaine was following but she
was trembling; Irene pressed her tongue and fluttered it, and Germaine pulled
back. 'Attends!' the girl panted, 'wait,' so Olivia pulled back. Didn't shove
her hand inside her or press her teeth against her or make her swallow her huge
black rubber cock so her soft expressive throat—
'Quand tu étais,' Germaine panted, 'when you were—were close, what would he—'
So Olivia opened wide her mouth; bit down as into a peach and Germaine jerked
back a bit but she followed; bit down peach-like and oh God. God, God, Irene's
jaw clicked she opened it so wide, and bit, and Germaine bit, teeth, Christ, so
(should she? Done unto, I let them, it had been ages since she'd had it like
this. And Irene could imagine the girl starved; she feasted on Germaine and
Germaine bit back, fruit of fruit of feasting flesh, she had to—)
Her tongue, soft again, flickering gentle against the wet hard heat of the
girl, but Germaine didn't stop.
Germaine didn't stop. Irene cried out. Irene relaxed her mouth and made her
tongue so gentle, so gentle, and Germaine was vibrating under her hands and her
mouth but she bit at her, still; Irene felt swollen in Germaine's mouth and she
was shaking too. Shaking.
Gentler. Germaine fucked her with her tongue and Irene, shaking, drew back
until she was hardly moving, just an open mouth with her tongue out, broad and
flat against her lip and her chin, letting Germaine touch—touch (sparks)—touch
herself to Irene's flat immobile tongue. So hard. Small, and surrounded in
swollen, wet-hot—
She heard herself, crying out. Hot; clenching down; so she pressed fingertips
inside, hooked and pulled while her tongue just tapped-tapped-tapped against
Germaine and she felt her tighten and pulse and it was–
A relief, she thought, flat on her back, coming down from it. From having
curled her body around Germaine's body, curling around hers, bearing down.
Relief. And as Germaine groaned, and turned her forehead against Irene's
(Olivia's) thigh, she reached down, and petted her hair, and let herself close
her eyes.
Chapter End Notes
        1. Although Sherlock exaggerates a bit, the street-naming
           conventions in Saint Coulomb do tend to favour the strategy of
           just re-naming a single street over and over again in honour of
           whichever local landmarks it is passing at the moment. All its
           iterations here are taken from life.
        2. "The novels of Mr. Lawrence and Mr. Joyce": Basically, Carco
           thought of himself as an avant-garde modernist. DH Lawrence's
           Women in Love had come out in 1920, and would have been of
           interest for its (for the time) frank sexual themes and blatant
           homoeroticism. James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young
           Man had been serialised in 1914-1915, but Joyce would have been
           most notorious at this time, especially with people like Carco,
           for Ulysses, which was only partially available. It had begun
           serialised publication in Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap's The
           Little Review, but publication halted in 1920 (with the
           "Nausicäa" episode) when Heap and Anderson were convicted of
           publishing obscenity. The book wouldn't be published in full
           until 1922, when Sylvia Beach released it from Shakespeare and
           Company, in Paris. As such, in 1921 it would have been the
           subject of MUCH gossip and speculation among literary types.
        3. Room Forty was the shorthand name for the nascent British code-
           breaking department in WWI. It was formed shortly after the war
           broke out in 1914, and named after 40 Old Building, Admiralty,
           where it was mostly located. Much of their work centred around
           decoding the Imperial German Navy's codebook, which was
           recovered from a German destroyer early on in the war. The idea
           that the family seat of the Holmes brothers was a covert
           outpost of it is obviously fictional, but not outlandish given
           how new and untried it all was.
        4. Sherlock is, of course, correct in all his deductions about
           "The Panther." The Countess de Comminges, eccentric titian-
           haired Amazon and accomplished horsewoman, was married off to a
           wealthy Parisian banker at a young age to shore up her family's
           faltering fortunes. He then suffered a psychotic break,
           believing himself to be a dog, and was institutionalised by his
           family, leaving his wife to move in with her lover and bear his
           child, Renaud. By this point, her health and her beauty were
           both failing—which was, as Sherlock suggests, the main reason
           Colette agreed to house her.
        5. Mademoiselle Patat was, likewise, much as described by
           Sherlock, although more of her personality is invented. She
           was, however, an up-and-coming clothing designer and a petite
           blonde, and spent the summer at Roz Ven as Jouvenel's
           acknowledged liaison.
        6. In case it's not obvious, all the Latin is from the Catholic
           Last Rites.
        7. Smallclothes in the new, army style: A new, shorter, more
           accessible style of mens' underwear was developed during World
           War I, and the fashion caught on and remained popular after the
           war. The old style looked more like what we now think of as
           Long Johns: essentially a one-piece bodysuit, or an undershirt
           and a set of leggings that extended most of the way down the
           calf. The new style looked closer to modern boxer shorts.
        8. Again, Sherlock's deductions about Hélène Picard are mostly
           correct, with the exception of her accent: she was actually
           from the South of France. The comparison to a nun is taken from
           Colette herself; Thurman writes:

           "She lived "a nun's life," as Colette calls it, while writing
           her "unbridled but chaste" books. Her last collection and
           "masterpiece," according to Colette, was a volume of
           "scandalous" love poems entitled For a Bad Boy and inspired by
           her obsessive yet unrequited love for Frances Carco: "A life as
           pure as hers can't fail to seem mysterious."
        9. Cottan: a swanky soap and toiletries retailer in Paris.
       10. Everything about Germaine Beaumont and her relationship with
           her employer Colette, including that fantastic story about the
           prawn dinner, is taken from Judith Thurman's Secrets of the
           Flesh: A Life of Colette, up to and including her unhappy love
           affairs with two married men—but not, so far as I know,
           including the identities of those men.
       11. Mitsouko: Guerlain released their now-famous Mitsouko scent for
           the first time in 1919. It was indeed associated with free-
           spirited bohemian youth.
       12. The Spanish 'flu pandemic of 1918 killed 50-100 million people
           worldwide, disproportionately previously-healthy adults and
           young adults.
***** Their faces relax from grief into relief *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
Friday, August 26th, 1921
11am (Hour 45)
Stepping on leaves. Kicking underbrush over her bicycle frame. From two feet
away the thing was invisible, and Irene thought I'm improving at this, with a
wild giggle bubbling up into her chest. Mademoiselle Adler, skilled provincial.
Who'd ever have thought.
Up and around the hill she went. Out of the sun, hot already at mid-day,
keeping to the cover of the Scots pine: it was a kind of second nature, now.
She was black-clad and light-limbed. She felt unfindable. It was almost as if
she watched herself from above, as she circled close to the lawn; and looked
down, down, from behind a stand of trees, on a long white table set for
luncheon.
Or déjeuner, Irene supposed. The first real meal of the day. White lace and
silver, flashing in the heat, as a desert-thin woman bent her head to the
extravagant gestures of a shirtsleeved man. Wraith-like, in black; melting
towards him. The sun glinted on his spectacles. Glass, and yellow wire.
There was a wisp of a girl on the fellow's other side, gazing at his shoulder,
with her black curls all down her back. She could've been a ghost, for all the
notice he took. At last, she turned to her left: to the foot of the table,
where old Henry Jouvenel with his paunch and his moustaches pounded his place-
setting with a pudgy fist. Irene reckoned he'd put on—what? A stone? Two, since
the War? Like a pasha with his harem: a girl on either side. Jouvenel in Le
Chabanais, she remembered: his lips shining with sauce from the stew.
Irene circled around. The sun was hot; and the matron across the table from the
wraith in black—but surely. Surely, Irene thought, squinting through the trees:
that was Claudine Holmès? Thicker now, and greyer, and tugging her shawl—light
grey; dusty rose—closer about her shoulders despite the heat of the sun?
Mademoiselle Claudine, Irene remembered, always had gone in for pastels. Blues
and violets back then: a wavy blonde cloud spilling down over her shoulders as
she scrubbed her face pink in the evenings after the panto shows. And now:
light grey, and dusty rose.
Irene shivered.
Jouvenel gestured and his ladies smiled. Claudine Holmès looked across at the
wraith, patting down her hair, adjusting the lace at her bust, as the man next
to her—
There, Irene thought. There. The smaller man, the blond man, from the train
station, blinking and smiling in his eager, anxious way. Brought down
by—Jouvenel? By Charles? The fellow's dark-haired companion was nowhere to be
found, but there he was, anyway: smiling up at the side of Claudine Holmès's
head. Licking his lips. Speaking to Claudine as she drew her shawl about
herself, and turned to face him. As she shifted: a hand on his arm.
Irene circled, and watched the two of them. Both dirty-blond, both open-faced.
Both smiling with sad eyes. His gaze flicked down to her décolletage, and she
laughed, and Irene thought, sharp and brutal: Christ. Those girls, before the
War.
And then, from the house, bustling through the door as if on cue, came
Germaine. Sweeping in, lips pursed, with her wide hips and a fresh, lace-less
replica of her out-of-date school-mistress shirtwaist: work-a-day cousin to the
blouse Olivia had unbuttoned all down the back and left lying on the floor
before the balcony—its fabric crushed, fleetingly, in the light of morning, by
Irene's bare foot.
Germaine stopped a moment on her way round the table. Stopped to speak to the
hacking crone, in the centre on the house-ward side; the red dye half grown out
of her hair and a gown fit for evening in '89. A haughty air. And Germaine: so
easy. Laying a light-meant hand on the dowager's arm, and the woman squinting
up, up: towards the sun.
Irene watched the crone cough into her baguette. She watched Germaine take a
seat at the straight-backed chair left empty near the table's head; watched her
tuck her serviette round her thighs by the side of the half-grown boy, clanking
his knife on his plate; watched her reach for the butter as she opened her
mouth, a little tilt of her head towards the head of the table, seated as she
was at the right hand of C—. Of Madame Jouvenel.
Irene, in the Scots pine forest, closed her eyes. She closed them for a beat;
for two; with the after-image of white lace seared bright-hot into the backs of
her lids. When she opened them again, she was looking up at the sky. Cloudless.
Cornflower. Neither beast nor bird. And she lowered her gaze by inches, by
feet; until it found again the tops of the seaward larches; and the gabled roof
of Roz Ven; and the white-faced, black-haired figure at the dormer window,
looking down at the company with something like loss in his eyes.
 
Friday, August 26th, 1921
11am (Hour 45)
Jacket, cigarettes, and—there. Notebook. Sherlock breathed out and straightened
up through years of wardrobe-dust to face the bed, and the window beyond.
He'd swept a mountain of cushions off the head of the bed; pushed them to the
floor in the corner, and still: all this needlepoint, and white lace. Detritus
from a false life, Sherlock had found himself thinking, in the aftermath of
last night's… display. And then he had thought: idiot. Had been thinking it
already; skin hot and crawling; walking up the stairs.
Even so. Stretched out behind John, with the window open to the night,
Sherlock's unmoored fingers had kept searching out shoulder; hip. The old
known, familiar scars.
Laughter echoed up, faint through the open window. Sherlock twitched aside yet
more lace to look down at the long white table. And there they all were, of
course. Of course they would be. Even the elusive, militant Mademoiselle
Beaumont (for it must be she, in her stolid shirtwaist at Madame Jouvenel's
right hand) was settling to her coffee. Sherlock rapped John's notebook against
the window-sill with a dull, leathern thunk.
One must consider the thing (Sherlock thought) impartially. A sequence of
events, like any other. Only seven years had passed, after all: a shot through
the neck in an open-top car in Sarajevo, and: action, reaction. Alliance;
declaration; counter-declaration. War had come to the Western Front, and the
harridan now shaking a finger at her fresh-skinned boy, had followed a flame to
Verdun; while her austere, desert-faced second, alone in some Paris flat, had
written verses and hauled in river-water; fancying herself a nun. Cause and
effect; a continuous line of descent, surely, from those moments down to this.
Sherlock, in Oxfordshire, in the room under the stairs, had listened to the
whispers of Mycroft's men. In Paris, they had said, children picnicked at the
Marne: picked up shell-casings as souvenirs. Souvenired: to be pierced with a
bullet; to be taken back in time. War had come to Reims, and young men had
fallen. Impartially: thousands upon millions.
Thunk went John's journal on the window-casement.
And then. There were the rest of them.
Down at the table Claudine was leaning forwards to speak to Mademoiselle
Picard, and John (trenchfoot outside Amiens) turned instead to his right, to
Mademoiselle Patat. She smiled (lovely and, ah, versatile); she laughed. John
gestured to her dress and she bent her hand, lazy from the wrist. Her practiced
laugh filtered up through the window. She must be glad, Sherlock
thought—looking at Monsieur Jouvenel (on horseback, at Verdun) and back at the
man's lover—to have, on a sun-drenched Friday in August, John Watson at her
side.
Thunk, the journal said. Sherlock should go down.
But Mademoiselle Patat was turning now; craning her golden neck. And John was
craning his; as Claudine still leant forward, eyes on Mademoiselle Picard,
while Mademoiselle Picard looked up towards the door, and Mademoiselle
Beaumont, getting to her feet, put down her coffee-cup with a clink Sherlock
could almost hear. She bustled forward like one born to it. Patting at her
waist, now; snapping open her chatelaine bag to tip the telegraph boy. She
waited to open it until he'd been ushered away, but did so without hesitation
once he'd gone; then delivered the thing with steady hands to the head of the
table.
Claudine was turning too, now. They were all turning; one from the other,
action and reaction; dominoes falling along both edges of the table to look up
at their hostess as she—
—as she did nothing more than groan. And wave a hand. And smile at young
Bertrand Jouvenel in his cravat as she balled up the telegram, and tossed it
down the table. Above the coffee-pot the wind caught it. Claudine darted a hand
out; arrested and unfolded it. Whereupon Madame Jouvenel (writing platitudes
home from the front) raised her eyes, ringed with kohl, to the heavens, and
pursed her claret-coloured mouth. She looked at Claudine; then at Monsieur
Jouvenel; then spoke a few words. A low buzz went up amongst the company.
Thunk, went the journal on the casement, with Sherlock looking down at
Claudine's spine as it stiffened. Thunk as she brought her palms down hard on
the table-top, and Sherlock turned, at last, from the window. He could breathe,
he found, striding through the doorway; galloping down the stairs. Action;
reaction; a sequence of events moving him clear of needlepoint and lace. From
the set of his cousin's shoulders, no one else would be getting a word in for
quite some time.
*
'It is—absolutely incredible,' Claudine was bellowing, when Sherlock emerged
from the sitting room into the bright light of the garden, 'that anyone could
be this stubborn, this—cousin!' as she caught sight of him, and changed over to
English. 'Kindly inform them that they are being impossible!'
Sherlock, looking from one Jouvenel to the other as they casually failed to
meet his eyes, would have done so wholeheartedly and on general principle. For
all the good it would have done.
'Oh, I doubt that,' he said, instead; his voice sufficiently treacly that John
had to stifle a laugh behind his serviette. Familiar; beloved. Action, and
reaction.
'About what could such charming people be impossible?' Sherlock said. Madame
Jouvenel made a tutting sound with her teeth, not looking at him, and Sherlock
beamed at full strength in the direction of Mademoiselle Patat. He flattered
himself she looked a bit dazed. Then Claudine pressed the telegram into his
hand.
'Another derangement,' she was saying. 'Just after the other two. At the home
of Henry's ex-wife.'
'What nonsense,' spat the lady of the house, in French, as her husband rumbled
to life at the other side of the table with a long string of newspaper
qualifiers in the vein of no reason to believe and any connection at the
present time.
'Someone,' said Claudine, her eyes on Sherlock and with the Holmes set to her
chin, 'ought to go up to Paris.'
'Ouf,' from Madame Jouvenel. She made a lazy gesture to her right.
'Mademoiselle Beaumont can go. Poor child; must be starving for a few well-
furnished men.'
'I would prefer not,' said Mademoiselle Beaumont. Clipped, and prim. In the
Scots pines, that strange bird let out its tin-whistle cry.
Sherlock, into the silence, said 'Monsieur Jouvenel,' and followed it with a
string of questions in Claudine's Montmartre French: had he seen his ex-wife
recently? (Monsieur Jouvenel really didn't think—an outsider and a foreigner,
after all—.) Had anyone seen her recently? Her son? (Bertrand shook his
artfully-tanned head.) Was there a planned rendezvous in the future? He had
heard Madame Boas threw balls—at which Mademoiselle Patat, apparently unable to
stop herself, burst forth with 'Yes,' in very broken English, 'on the—on the
first. A fancy dress ball. Mesdames Jouvenel et Carco, they are—are wearing, my
gowns.'
The mesdames in question looked respectively fatigued to be reminded of the
conversation, and mortified to be mentioned in it by name.
'You're all attending?' asked John.
'But of course,' drawled Madame Jouvenel, still in French though she must know
John could not understand. 'It's quite the spectacle, Madame Boas's costume
ball.'
'Well,' said Claudine. 'Almost all. Not Renaud. Or the Countess, of c—.'
'Oh no,' interrupted a nasal, over-cultured voice, as Madame Jouvenel, under
her breath, groaned 'Oh for God's sake,' glaring at the crone, who rose with a
clatter to her feet, and Sherlock realised he'd yet to actually hear the
Panther speak—but he was hearing her now.
'Oh no,' she went on, nearly spitting: she wasn't to come, was she? She was no
longer invited to Claire Boas's precious fêtes, not like in the old days. Not
like the days when she'd been sought out, consulted on the most suitable dates.
Not like the days when their fine host here—what was he now? senator? soldier?
(on horseback, Sherlock thought, at Verdun)—had forced his young wife to smile
and grit her teeth, and consult with the Countess on gowns and Champagne. Not
like the masked balls where he'd spirited her away under his lady's very nose,
when he'd called her 'chère Isabelle', and kissed her neck in that cupboard
that gave onto her very bedroom, his hand over his Isabelle's mouth when that
shrew came in for her wrap, so she wouldn't hear them laughing; oh no—and she
was taken, briefly, by a fit of coughing, her spotted shoulders shaking in the
noonday light—they wouldn't catch her there, not for anything.
Madame Jouvenel blew out her cheeks. Her husband fidgeted.
The Panther, with a final glare, stalked away towards her garage loft, green
velvet trailing behind her. John's eyes were wide and his chin drawn down with
that wild well-known mirth; and Mademoiselle Patat had her silk handkerchief to
her mouth; tears of laughter on her cheeks.
'One has to admire the woman's spirit,' Monsieur Carco muttered, and Madame
Jouvenel said 'Her malevolent devil spirit'; but the corner of her mouth curved
up as her husband scrutinised the nonexistent clouds overhead—and Sherlock, in
mild shock, felt his own doing the same. The Countess receded, coughing gently
into the breeze.
'Doctor Watson could go,' Claudine said. All eyes swung back to meet her where
she stood, looking mulish on Sherlock's other side.
'Absurd,' said Sherlock.
'But yes,' said the blonde, as John cut over her: 'I'm really not sure,
Mademoiselle Patat, if—,' and she dimpled up, saying: 'Germaine, please.' And
then, in a sing-song flirtatious tone: 'Tout le monde me tutoie.'
'Doctor Watson has never even met Madame Boas,' Sherlock told Claudine. 'And in
any case, whoever goes ought to be someone who can venture an opinion on the
evidence, on whether anything in her home has been disturbed. Someone who can
look around himself and observe; someone with a modicum of—' sense; but
Claudine tightened her hand around his wrist.
He said instead, 'Someone she trusts.'
'But any woman would—would trust Doctor Watson,' said Mademoiselle Patat, with
a furrow between her (lovely, versatile) eyebrows. Sherlock's teeth clicked
together.
'Consider the matter,' he said to Claudine, hand on her knuckles around his
wrist, 'as if it were—'
'But look,' came a voice, from his other side. He turned to see, of all people,
Mademoiselle Beaumont, getting to her feet. Saying, with an air of measured
logic: 'Look at who is here. Madame Boas's ex-husband. Her first replacement as
mistress. Her replacement as wife. Her second replacement as mistress. Her son,
whose loyalty is suspect for his last year's liaisons. Her rivals' children.
Her rivals' friends. The lovers and, ah. Employees, of her rivals' friends. I
can only suppose that, all things considered, she would be charmed to speak
with a stranger about this sad circumstance.'
Claudine's eyes burnt hot on the side of Sherlock's face, and that bird again.
High up, in the Scots pines.
'Your English is very good,' John said, smiling at Mademoiselle Beaumont.
'So I have gathered,' she said.
Her voice was breeze-thinned. She was turning her head already, looking away.
 
Friday, August 26th, 1921
11:30am (Hour 45)
The spies exchanged a look, behind a mass of mud-coloured hair; and in St Malo,
Irene remembered, at three in the morning—
At three, she had awoken in the cool breeze through the balcony doors,
Germaine's hot breath on her nape. She had let her eyelids flutter once; twice.
Surprised at herself. Burrowing against another body, solid at her back.
Germaine had snorted in her sleep; Irene had laughed into her pillow. Had let
out a breath, and another.
At six she was awake again, remnants of Olivia Wren clinging to her like a
skin-husk about an adder. The hour before dawn. The sky through the double-
doors was still dark, still royal, stars still winking over St Malo as she slid
out from under sheets and Germaine's damp, heavy arm.
Olivia probably loved the early mornings. Irene hated them. Always had. Factory
work; shop work; work in the markets. Every morning, her brother had risen at
four. Irene still thought of Dylan, at times; when she greeted four o'clock
from the other side.
She stumbled. Slow. Gathered up the wrinkled mess of her yellow Patou, and the
ball of her foot crushed Germaine's cast-off cotton blouse. Tiny buttons dug
into her heel. Her eyes watered.
In the WC, she clicked on the electric lights; winced; wished for candles. Late
nights in the city, all her nerves lit up; she could feel a glance like a
caress, and would wind it about her; let it touch her skin. In the mornings,
though. Her eyes, sore in their sockets. She shielded them from the glare with
a tender flat-planed palm.
Irene shut the door, and slithered into the cramped space between the stone
washbasin and the toilet. She leant over the tub. Opened up the taps. Sat on
the cold ceramic lip, naked, her dress in her hand; and blinked in the harsh
modern light until she could see.
Cool air dripped down her back: a trickle from the air shaft. She climbed up
onto the far edge of the tub and breathed it in, her adder-skin peeling away.
Then she reached up; hooked her hand around the chain, and pulled the little
glass door shut. Steam rose around her in waves.
She hung the Patou in the midst of the bath-steam and plunged herself in the
hot water up to her shoulders: once, twice. Olivia hadn't taken the paint off
her face, last night: hadn't let down her hair. Olivia, this morning, would
wash herself and comb out her coiffure and borrow a spare dressing gown off
Germaine, with whom, feeling scrubbed-clean and fresh, she would be drinking
strong coffee in an hour and a half; but Irene—.
Irene scrubbed from her shoulders down, then towelled off, and used the hot
water to fix her hair. On glass shelves over the bath were ablutions,
Germaine's and the hotel's: glass jars of dried lavender, of cotton swabs and
sponges; an ivory bristle-brush full of long dark hair. An empty pack of
Wrigley's Doublemint; and Irene hadn't thought of chewing gum since 1918 had
brought American boys to Le Chabanais. Hair pins; clothes-pins; a tiny pack of
thread with a sewing needle and a tapestry one. Off by itself, on the uppermost
shelf: the gold-toned bottle of Mitsouko, with its circular label and its
lovely teardrop stopper. She picked apart a cotton swab. Wrapped it round her
finger and fixed her face. She smoothed layers; removed layers; and left just
enough to pass for what she could: day to her night, twenty-four to her thirty,
Rouen to her Paris to her London.
Now she was sharp. Fresh-skinned. Scenting the air. She went through the items
on the glass shelves. Did the thing thoroughly. Ran her hands along the back of
the tub, the back of the mirror; climbed up on the back of the toilet to fish
around in the tank. It all took less time than Olivia would have spared for her
morning bath. By the time she was done, the yellow dress was smooth and warm,
fluttering down into her hands. She drained the tub, and opened the air-vent;
and five minutes later, when she slipped out the door of 415 with her stockings
in her handbag and a dab of Mitsouko on her wrist, Irene Adler blew a kiss to
Germaine Beaumont, still snoring under the coverlet as the sunlight tipped
peach-pink over the roofs of St Malo, and into the sea.
*
And now here she was, in a Scots pine forest behind a gabled roof in the midday
August sun: watching, as the two men, the spies, hired by the husband of—of
Madame Jouvenel, who was after all in late middle age, now; enamoured of men,
now; boys, now; now hidden away from any but private audiences and really,
after all, had very little connection with anyone Irene had ever, ever known.
As the two spies, then, looked deep into each others' eyes. Germaine between
them.
Somehow, Irene wished it were the little blonde in that position. Or Claudine
Holmès. Or the painstakingly tanned young dandy in the aubergine cravat. She
squinted through the needles. She narrowed her eyes at Germaine's stodgy,
blousy sleeves.
One could hardly pick and choose, however. At the head of the table the modern-
day Madame Jouvenel was snickering. The spies were having an extended, wordless
conversation; Germaine was looking away. They could hardly pick and choose,
themselves.
Irene tiptoed to the edge of the trees. At the edge nearest the two men, she
could still only hear a low hum of voices; nothing distinct. Over the head of
the blond man she could see the top of Germaine's mud-brown chignon, and
standing over them both: dark curls, and a scowl.
The pale spy, the one who had looked down from the gable: he was gesturing now,
towards the head of the table and towards its foot, holding the newly-arrived
telegram in one hand. Germaine leant forward, on her elbows, as Madame Jouvenel
waved a languid hand towards the garage. That painted crone, she must mean.
Living above that ancient Renault wagon.
A journey, then. A journey, when they'd only just arrived. News from Paris, it
must be. They were the kind of people, she thought (their rooms, in disarray),
for whom one city had become their entire world; news would only come from one
place. And she shifted, a little uncomfortably, her hand at the throat of her
black blouse.
And now the blond spy was reaching around Germaine to put his hand on the other
one's arm; speaking up at him while the man scowled at the company, and at the
countryside in general. Balling up the telegram in his fist. Looking everywhere
but his companion's face. Looking, Irene thought, oddly familiar.
But: news from Paris; they would travel back. Irene's heart beat under her
hand. She caught herself staring at the crumpled telegram-paper as if she could
divine the words on it. Oh Charles, she thought, almost fondly. She could have
giggled.
Or perhaps not Charles. The hotel clerk had said a woman. So: Agnès Humbert,
perhaps, if not her father; but someone, Irene thought, feeling like a skulking
black-clad schoolgirl, someone had made themselves her unwitting accomplice,
and now—
She looked up at the attic room, from which the pale face had looked down. A
journey. Irene had people of her own. She could crook her finger and they would
swarm. And these men had followed her here but they had lost her. So lovely to
be helped to disappear: so lovely to be doubly invisible. Now they would
journey away from her, believing her elsewhere.
At the table Claudine Holmès was gesturing even more extravagantly than the
dark-haired man had done. Her voice, thought Irene, was startling: it had
always carried, but now it boomed. Even so, only a word here or there reached
the trees: Paris, indeed, and il faut considerer, and impossible. Madame
Jouvenel, turned three-quarters away from Irene, just shrugged, and Claudine
stamped her foot. When Irene looked back at the blond spy, he was gazing at
Claudine with an odd amusement in his eyes.
But Irene needn't stay, now. They would go, that was plain: one of them, at
least; and she knew their rooms. Already the wraith-woman and the paunchy
expressive man were peeling off, edging away from the table. Tiring, no doubt,
of a debate in which they had no part. They wandered with their notebooks
towards the lawn-chairs on the bluff, while the little blonde stifled a yawn
behind her hand.
Irene drew back; back into the trees, feeling ghoulish and delighted. She
would—not sleep, surely; and even she could not crook a finger at her people in
Paris, armed only with vague descriptions and an unsettled sense of
familiarity. Names, though.
She would keep to the forests; bicycle back to St Malo and bathe properly. Dine
in the restaurant, early, with all this giddy relief bubbling up through her
blood. Return at twilight and wait it out; and by morning, surely, she could
give them names.
 
Friday, August 26th, 1921
11:30am (Hour 45)
'Yes, all right,' Sherlock heard himself saying, as Mademoiselle Beaumont
nodded her satisfaction, and Claudine, at last, let go his wrist. 'No,' he
said, 'it's a fine idea. Send Watson. Ladies are wont to find him charming.
Madame Boas won't suspect.'
Everyone looked at him. Would wonders never cease.
'Good then,' he said. 'When can he go?'
'There is a train just after one,' said Mademoiselle Beaumont—who would be the
first, wouldn't she, to get to her pocket watch—adding, 'if Doctor Watson takes
the Citroën…'
'Yes,' Sherlock said. 'The Citroën. Excellent.'
He clapped his hands together, making as if to turn, and Monsieur Jouvenel
broke in with, 'But Claire—Madame Boas—it's her house. What would she have to
suspect?'
'Surely it's occurred to you,' Sherlock said, 'that in her campaign to continue
aligning herself with your family—a family which is currently being preyed upon
by a housebreaker or series of housebreakers—' Madame Jouvenel snorted, but
Sherlock kept on: '—that staging a similar theft at her own home could hardly
hurt her cause in the public eye.'
'But the… break-ins,' said Monsieur Jouvenel, 'are not in the public eye.'
'A state which is certain to last,' said Claudine. She turned from the table,
casting her eyes to the heavens, and caught Sherlock's as she did. Below him,
still seated, John (in his chair, at Baker Street) covered his lips with the
back of his hand.
'Well,' Sherlock said again. 'Good. And where are the keys to the Citroën?
Watson here is an excellent driver, though I assume the man of the house—'
'The woman of the house, actually,' Madame Jouvenel interrupted. 'And take it,
take them. Bertrand can bring them to you. Myself? I am going down to bathe in
the sea.'
She heaved herself to her feet. Made a mock-deferential bow. Left John to
square his shoulders and Sherlock to follow in his wake, towards the garage; as
Mademoiselle Patat stretched pale-gold arms towards the sun, and Bertrand
scurried for the keys, and Mademoiselle Beaumont watched them all, biting her
lip as if convinced that there were some more logical manner in which the whole
affair really ought to be conducted.
Sherlock—well. He was hardly in a position to disagree.
Just inside the garage, to the accompaniment of the Countess's petulant
footsteps overhead, John gave him a searching look; and told him, 'You could
come too, you know.'
He said it with his shoulders still set; with that look on his face. Sherlock
could have sketched from heart the line of John's mouth, just from the burr
creeping in at the back of his throat.
'Nonsense,' Sherlock said, clearing his throat. 'They'll be back tonight.'
'The housebreaker? They're all the way up in Paris, surely.'
'One person is up in Paris. One person is quite close by. You saw the Matin
offices, and you saw the top room here. You can't think the same person was
responsible; one was chaos, and the other was barely touched. They'll most
likely be back tonight.'
'We can both be back in time, then,' John said. 'Take the afternoon train, go
see this Madame Boas, look at—'
'Come now, Watson,' with his wrist still aching, 'it doesn't make sense—'
'—her house, get an early supper and be back here by ten. Nobody will be in bed
yet, it'll be—'
'Don't be absurd,' came a voice, and their mouths snapped shut. Claudine.
He turned from John and John turned from him, and there she was. Scowling and
sweeping through the garage door, with her parasol and her driving-hat. The old
force of nature he remembered.
'And I will drive back,' she said. 'One shudders to think of my cousin behind
the wheel.' Then she clucked her tongue. Disgusted; a mother-hen. 'An early
supper,' she went on. 'In Paris, on a Friday evening. I'm ashamed of you, my
own flesh and blood.'
'Pardon?' said Sherlock. 'I'll be staying here. Watching the house.'
'I am in no doubt of that, Sherlock,' Claudine said, very severe. 'But Doctor
Watson—and he ought to stay in my flat. Or an hotel, I can recommend—Jeanne and
Yves just opened a new place, telephones in every room,' as John was saying,
'The entire house party will still be here, you don't think one or more of them
could keep an eye—'
'Ah yes,' said Claudine, 'because they obviously take the threat so
tremendously seriously.' Sherlock snorted; then looked back at John in time to
see him lick his lips, with that narrow stubborn fold between his brows.
'Anyway,' Sherlock said, swallowing. 'It will be quite all right. It's one
evening, in a house full of people who scarcely acknowledge my existence. How
much trouble can possibly arise?'
'I can be back this evening,' John said, instead of answering, and Claudine
huffed as she held the car-door open. Sherlock settled back in his seat, right
hand circling left wrist where the marks of his cousin's fingers might (a
sequence of events) bruise up a few hours hence; and Claudine, sliding behind
the wheel and straightening her hat, only barked instructions about cafés and
hotels, until John broke into a reluctant, half-charmed smile.
Chapter End Notes
        1. To the extent possible, all the war-memories are accurate.
           Jouvenel served in the infantry at Verdun; Carco was an
           aeroplane pilot. After the initial flight from, and return to,
           Paris in 1914, the French capital was remarkably sheltered from
           the war raging on the northern and eastern borders. The detail
           about Parisians taking picnic day-trips to, and harvesting
           souvenirs from, the site of the Battle of the Marne, is taken
           from Peter Englund's excellent The Beauty and the Sorrow: An
           Intimate History of the First World War, which I HIGHLY
           recommend, on general principle.
        2. This particular charity ball is a fabrication, but it's true
           that Claire Jouvenel (née Boas) was an inveterate entertainer
           and society maven—also historical are her "new" family money,
           and her preference for using her ex-husband's surname.
        3. Incidentally, I spent quite a number of hours, to no avail,
           trying to track down the historical make and model of Colette
           Jouvenel's car. It may or may not have been a Citroën. It was
           some variety of pre-War sports car, which Jouvenel bought for
           her during the early days of their courtship, when he was in
           the process of breaking from the Countess (and his wife), and
           Colette was in the process of breaking from Missy. And it's
           lucky he did, because he soon had need of it. Thurman writes:

           "The baron [Henry Jouvenel] then hastened to inform Mme de
           Comminges ["The Panther"] that he was leaving her for another
           woman. She told him she would kill her rival. Colette reports
           to Hamel:

           "A desperate Jouvenel conveys this threat to me...I go to her
           and tell the Panther, "I'm the woman." Whereupon she falls
           apart and begs me. A brief fit of weakness, because two days
           later she announces to Jouvenel that she plans to murder me.
           Re-desperate, Jouvenel has me picked up by Sauerwein in the
           car, and comes with me...to Rozven, where we find Missy icy and
           disgusted, having already been informed of the affair by the
           Panther. Then my two bodyguards leave me and Paul Barlet mounts
           guard, clutching a revolver. Here begins a period of semi-
           sequestration in Paris, where I am guarded like a precious
           reliquary by the detective squad...This period has only just
           ended, brought to a close by an unexpected, providential, and
           magnificent event! ... M. Hériot [one of Colette's rejected
           suitors] and Mme la Panthère have just embarked together on
           [his yacht] the Esmerald for a six-week cruise, having shocked
           Le Havre, their home port, with their drunken orgies. Isn't it
           nice? Isn't it theater?"

           Even better, throughout this whole ordeal, Jouvenel had his arm
           in a sling because of "a dueling wound that he had incurred
           defending the honor of Le Matin against a slur from its rival
           [and Charles Humbert's paper], Le Journal."
***** Different voices, often together heard *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
Saturday, August 27th, 1921
1:30am (Hour 59)
Sherlock, at the desk near the doorway, listened to the last of the dinner
guests make their way down the corridor below. The clicks of latches. The
creaking of boards. By his left hand a telegram: WILL STAY NIGHT AFTER ALL STOP
BACK TOMORROW STOP JW. He looked down to find his fingers caressing the thing
without design. Outdoors the tin-whistle bird-cries had quieted; all that
reached the top room was the heat-breeze, and the far-off roar of the sea.
John Watson thawed the ice on which he leant, Sherlock thought. Without him at
Roz Ven Mademoiselle Patat, and Madame Carco—even Hélène Picard had increased
their distances from him. That of the Jouvenels had had only to be maintained.
With Mademoiselle Beaumont, Sherlock had had an impeccably bland, perfectly
accommodating conversation. Yes, she organised Madame Jouvenel's office. Yes,
she could provide him a list of the ways in which it had been disarranged. Yes,
there could be any number of people with a grudge against the paper, or its
senator editor, or his novelist wife. No, she'd seen nothing more out of the
ordinary. Certainly, she could show him any portion of the house and grounds he
would care to request. Ought they to begin in her own room? The more pointed
his questioning, the smoother and pleasanter her expression had become.
In the hall below, now, all was quiet. Sherlock rose from the chair; he could
station himself in the niche by Renaud's room, by the stairs—or, more
comprehensively, patrol the first- and ground-floor corridors. On the ground
floor was only the cook, and the grim English governess, and the dour, ignored
girl-child, Bel-Gazou. Unlikely targets, given their poverty. Unlikely
perpetrators—except, perhaps, for the governess—given that the cook lived in St
Coulomb, and the child wasn't yet nine years old. Still. Best to keep a
thorough watch.
He slipped down the stairs; creaks on the fourth from the top and the second
from the bottom. Soft murmuring behind the door across the corridor. Monsieur
Jouvenel's deep voice against a soft backdrop of feminine notes.
Claudine, at least, had sought him out, in the garage and on the shore; had
spoken to him in her old, garrulous, reassuring way. Had demanded his thoughts
on the Jouvenels, and on London—and had bullied her way back, through the past
eighteen years. Hadn't mentioned his infrequent, reluctant messages, curt to
the point of rudeness, tacked on to his mother's letters. It had been, somehow,
as if they'd never been apart. Sherlock's tongue grew actually tired from
talking. And when he'd paused, throughout the afternoon; or attempted to steer
the conversation elsewhere, there she had been: the old rock, against which he
could dash himself to no avail. Yet it was not the same, was it. That was what
had spooked him so shamefully, the day before: it was not the same, not
remotely. For in her rooms in 1903, she had been focused on him, and him alone;
or on her music; or on the wine that she drank with closed eyes. Whereas today,
all the time, she'd been—she'd been pulled, hadn't she, almost tangibly,
towards whatever port sheltered Hélène Picard. Hélène, who flowed in the
direction of Monsieur Carco—who cleaved to the books of Messrs Owens and
Pound—which plodded frozen-footed through the trenches outside Paris, where
John—. Such a traceable sequence of events. It was convenient, really, Sherlock
thought: Claudine, by his side, measuring out the distance between 1903 and
1921.
Now, in the night, Sherlock passed his cousin's door, and heard nothing. No
murmuring; no moans; no strains of the violin. Claudine Holmès and Hélène
Picard, bedding down in silence.
That afternoon, as there was nothing to ferret out before the silence of
supper, he had sat with Claudine in the grass, under the shade of the larches
by the shore. Hélene Picard and Francis Carco had been up by the house,
scribbling in notebooks in the lawn-chairs that faced out to sea. Claudine had
been willing her own smile not to waver; willing herself not to turn her head.
Her eyes would twitch, and blink too often, and she would swallow against it,
as people did, though previously she never had: is she touching him? Is she
looking this way? What is she writing, in her notebook, as he looks on?
Sherlock had read a treatise in her face, but—these odd urges towards kindness.
Was it kindness? Or self-preservation.
'Doctor Watson,' Claudine had said, raising her voice over the sound of the
surf, 'seemed to bear up well, seeing his old friend.'
eiπ = -1 , Sherlock had drawn in the sand, and then: 'Yes,' he'd said, and
rubbed it out again with the heel of his hand.
'That is. He told me, this morning,' Claudine had gone on, 'it was very odd for
him. Having so many memories all at once. He told me—you know. About the young
man's illness. The damage to his brain. The reason that Doctor Watson did not
use his real name with the boy, and—well. He said it was. Difficult.'
She'd squinted over at him. Near-bruised, her eyes had looked. Awake in the
night, with the Carcos' headboard at her back. Claudine in '03 had fallen into
bed at dawn, still in her clothes; and awoken fresh-faced in time for luncheon.
And now, in the dark of the early morning, he passed on. At the end of the
corridor a window stood open to the ocean. Sherlock paused. Listened. Looked
out at the sweeping lawn and the sliver of moon. There was a still, solid mist,
settling over the grass.
And loud then, sudden: a belly-laugh from the room of Madame Jouvenel.
Sherlock's teeth clicked together. Another guffaw rang out, and trailed off
into a moan.
'Did he say all that?' he had asked—lightly, nothing ridiculous—down on the
shore while his cousin tried not to look back towards the house. 'I
suppose—yes. Difficult. It must have been.'
'He said he had thought never to see his friend again,' Claudine had said. She
had looked out towards the waves. 'He said he'd expected the boy would be dead.
He said it was a—a shock.'
Sherlock had not replied.
But of course, he thought now—walking down the stairs, passing Monsieur
Jouvenel's room, from which came a muffled cry of 'Germaine!' and rapid
pleading murmuring from Mademoiselle Patat—of course it was predictable,
logical, that John would feel it incumbent upon himself to explain. To smooth
the waters. To talk to Claudine—to Claudine, whom John had only met the
previous afternoon—to talk to her about Daniel; even though the night previous,
when Sherlock had asked him, John had looked down at his fish and flexed his
jaw.
It meant nothing, Sherlock thought. His skin hot, and crawling. A chain of
dominoes, falling from then to now: nothing had changed.
In the entranceway and the sitting-room all was still. A carriage clock ticked
on the mantel; in the kitchen the supper dishes had been washed and put away.
Someone had filled a single wine glass with water, and left it in the basin;
and through the window, the faint moonlight caught at its edges. Smooth;
shining and sharp.
Sherlock breathed out, and in. Between himself and John, nothing had changed.
This story of Daniel: it was nothing that John hadn't told Sherlock a year ago;
and again in the months since. John would want to be welcoming, would want to
be polite. Would not want to seem difficult to his lover's cousin. Would feel
compelled to tell Claudine what Sherlock already knew: about Daniel's fraying
nerves, sodden feet and clenched teeth in the trenches of the Somme. About the
the shell-blast to the head; about Daniel's subsequent refusal—no, inability,
John would have said, as Claudine would have widened her eyes, and forgotten,
for a moment, Hélène Picard—to recognise Captain John Watson, though Captain
John Watson stood three feet from his face. A golden youth, John had told
Sherlock: and three years ago—adoring the boy and also feeling himself,
nonsensically, to be somehow responsible for his madness—Captain John Watson
had had got leave; had taken Daniel to the madhouse himself.
All the pieces were quite the same, after all, as they had always been. And of
course John wouldn't have wanted Sherlock there, making an exhibition of
himself in a—listening in. He'd told Sherlock all about it, a year ago, while
Sherlock held him from behind, tracing patterns with one hand on his naked hip
as John clung to his other. In the upstairs bedroom at Baker Street. When
they'd both known for a certainty that he would never see Daniel again.
On the stairs back up to the first floor Sherlock stumbled. A cat stretched its
long black back and showed him its white teeth. Sherlock jerked back; caught
himself on the bannister. The beast shot off into the darkness. He cursed under
his breath; and in the scuffle he almost missed the clunk and skid from what
surely must be his own rooms, two floors above.
 
Saturday, August 27th, 1921
1:30am (Hour 59)
The Jouvenels, it seemed, dined late. Irene had still been able to see them
through the big double-doors, open to the breeze, as they sat at the long table
just outside the kitchen, tearing into bread and meat. Parisians, playing
provincial. She had clicked off her torch, feeling her way through the
underbrush with her feet, and thought: just like me.
Because she had made calls, hadn't she? Hadn't been able to resist the chance
that a general description and an instruction to meet the 4:15 from St Malo,
would be enough to secure a tail on whichever spy or spies alighted on the
platform. And then she had gone downstairs, to the hotel dining room, and
swallowed around her urge to fuss: the bread not like in Paris; the wine not
like in Paris; in Paris they were serving the meat simply dripping with blood.
And then she had bicycled back here. Even at half eleven, she'd been pouring
sweat. It was lucky, she'd thought, that the Roz Ven chimney, with its trellis
and its Russian Vine, were at the far end of the house, away from the kitchen
and the outdoor table; because her wet hands had slipped on the struts, and her
feet had scraped. Her gasping and clattering, as she climbed, had sounded in
her ears like rifle-shots; and she'd paused, again and again: sure she'd be
found out clinging to the trellis, with her hair sticking to her forehead and
the back of her neck. She'd watched the flickering yellow lights from the
house. Breath held.
No one had heard, though. No one had come. The faint sounds of clinking and
chatter had gone on, and she had hoisted herself, at last, onto the roof. For a
minute together she'd just sat there, at the edge, looking down at the shadows
on the grass; and then she'd slid, crab-like, inch by inch, over the rough
wood-shingles to the gable at whose window, that afternoon, the pale-faced spy
had looked down.
Breathing almost normally, then: her side pressed against the side of the
gable. And she would have swung herself around, and prised it open, but for a
flicker of movement in the shadow sloping down the roof. Not everyone at supper
then. Or in Paris. She'd let out a breath, eyes fixed on the shingled patch of
light. A fall of white lace billowed out, then settled; caught by the breeze.
Down below, the supper guests had never stopped moving. She could hear them
pouring out their digestifs; could see them taking turns on the grass. But
through the dormer window the stillness was almost perfect. Only once, as Irene
sat in the shadows, hugging her black-clad knees, had she heard the scrape of a
chair; and a man's shadow had gathered and solidified in the light from the
window as he'd pulled aside the lace, and looked out at the night.
Irene had fallen into a kind of reverie. The diners had finished their drinks,
and called out their bonnes nuits to one another, and the night had refused to
cool. She had gazed down at the scene, side-by-side with the unknowing spy.
Then he had moved, at last, from the window, and back to the desk; and she had
been alone. The surf had crashed, and the diners had trailed up to bed. And now
again, the scrape of the chair. He moved away from her, away: and she was more
solitary still.
She breathed through her mouth, and counted to three hundred. Then, carefully,
she flexed the muscles of her calves and her shoulders, stiff from holding
still. Around the window-casement she curled a scraped palm (Anastasie, she
thought, would ban her on sight), and scooted down the shingles. Peeked round
the corner: an empty room.
And she breathed out.
And she breathed in.
And she ducked in past the white lace, skinning her shoulder a little on the
window-pane but without any real clatter. She wrangled her limbs and squeezed
through the opening, and then she was standing on the hardwoods with white lace
twisting at her back. She flicked on her torch. And Christ, the room looked
like—like 1914 in her suite at Le Chabanais, before she'd had it refitted with
miles of black brocade. Those girls, she thought, before the War. She breathed
out, and in. Names.
On the desk by the door were papers, newspapers, a telegram. She ruffled
through them, in the suffocating still air. JW, as the telegram was signed, was
staying the night in Paris 'after all'; but nothing else. In the corridor down
the stairs, she could hear footfalls: a tall man; alone. More likely the pale
spy than the sandy-blond one.
Names; names. The wardrobe, just by the desk. She tiptoed to it; eased open the
door and it creaked. Harsh against her ear-drums in the quiet. She breathed
through her mouth. Inhaled, and could almost taste the wool and cotton. But
down the corridor the footsteps continued on.
Jackets. Trousers. Rooting around in pockets with her torch in her teeth.
Nothing. She clicked off her torch; slid a hand under the wardrobe door, and
took the weight off it as she swung it back into its cradle. No creak; no
sound. Breathing out, and in.
Names, she thought, peering around in the dark. Divan? Night-stand? But no,
there: tucked by the wall, half-hidden behind the bed, was a steamer trunk.
Surely it must be directed. She padded towards it, careful to step high and
light over the hooked rug, as in the distance a man's voice cried out:
Germaine!
Irene stopped short. Endless buttons, undone. The same voice cried out, again.
He was desperate, she could hear it. Close; seconds from it. One of Germaine's
married men, no doubt: filling her up, on the floor below, spilling inside her
with her beautiful breasts in his hands.
Irene's eyes snapped back open: a creak, from the stairs. Headed up, or down?
She waited; saw in her mind's eye the pale mask of her own face in the
darkness. She didn't dare move, or he would hear: and her, exposed, dead-centre
in the heart of the room. But then the clump-clump-clump came of footfalls
receding. He was heading down to the ground level; and she let out a great
lungful of air, and crept the rest of the way to the trunk.
It was old-fashioned. Worn. Leather straps and wood panels coated with decades
of city grime. She clicked her torch on and shone it over the top and the
sides. No labels, no address. So she eased the lid back against the bed, biting
her lip, running her hands over leather and wood and bundles of cloth until:
there. A neat laid-paper square, curling at one corner, was affixed to the
inside of the domed lid, and she leant over the torch-beam to make out:
Sherlock Holmes
221B Baker Street, London
She could almost have laughed. Christ. No wonder she'd thought he looked
familiar. And: JW, as well. She ought to have guessed.
From down the stairs, across the corridor, no sounds filtered up now; the
lovers had finished, she supposed; he had, anyway. She rocked back on her
heels, grinning, feeling oddly free. Sherlock Holmes, and John Watson: she
wouldn't even need to provide a description; she'd have their life histories in
her hands by lunch tomorrow. And Germaine, whom she'd imagined—well, it hardly
mattered now; she would leave Germaine dozing in the arms of her awful married
man, down the stairs and across the corridor as Irene slipped back out the
window; heavy and sated in the first room on the first floor, with the big oak
bed by the side of—of—
A clatter: her torch, slipping from her fingers and crashing to the wood floor.
She gasped and scrabbled for it, hearing someone stumble on the stairs two
flights below; it skidded and spun, and came to rest illuminating a needlepoint
cushion, stuffed into the corner, with an image of a great black leaping horse.
Feet were pounding now, up the steps, and she lost a second—two, staring at the
thing. A remnant from another age. It was as if she fell, through it, into the
crush and the reek of greasepaint, backstage on the panto boards; towards a
magnetic actress who had marked Irene's arms and drawn her gaze and barked
orders at her as Irene had seethed and writhed and snuck into her rooms and
slipped into her silk Parisian knickers; and towards that actress's lover,
bearing down on them in a Thoroughbred-drawn trap. Ail et Vanille. Crash,
crash, crash, came the feet on the stairs; came the hooves on the cobblestones;
came the stamping of the audience's feet; and Irene didn't think; just reached
out and grabbed her torch and the cushion from the floor, and threw herself
across the room—out the window—across the rough shingles of the gabled roof,
and down, and down, and down.
 
*
 
'Yes,' said Irene, at eight in the morning, washing down her pastry with a
mouthful of coffee. 'Sherlock Holmes. All over the English papers, as I recall;
I knew I ought to have kept the Daily Mail in my usual rotation. Buy up the
last six months' worth, if you can do it discreetly, and see what we've missed.
Yes. There's a flower girl on the corner of les Poissonières; she can help you.
Léonie Favre; tell her it's a favour for Irène.'
On the other end of the line, Antoine went on about wild dahut hunts and time-
wasters; did she think he'd been sitting on his hands all night? Newspapers, he
said, disgusted; and could this—this flower-seller of Irene's even read? Irene
listened to him, licking pastry crumbs from her fingers. The tarts, she
thought, were not quite like in Paris; though the berries here were fresh.
'No,' she told him. 'She can't read, but she can recognise shapes of words.
Show her the name Holmes and set her searching.'
Irene paused, and listened. She stretched out an arm, put her pastry-plate on
the side table on top of her black leather notebook, and rolled her shoulders.
The morning was warm, already; the breeze from the double-doors ruffled her
light-weight dressing gown; and on her lap, as Antoine rattled on, her fingers
toyed with the edging of the cushion on her lap.
'I don't care,' she said, tipping her head back. 'Just get me everything you
can on the man. I don't suppose—his partner, the one whose train I had you
meet: you didn't manage to—?'
And from Antoine, another impatient flood of words: yes, the train, the train,
he'd been trying to say—the blond man with the green blazer and the—'Watson,'
she breathed, 'you found him,' and Oh yes? he said, as she sat up, grinning,
straightening lavender silk around her neck, reaching back to the side-table.
'Yes,' she said, nails digging into needlepoint. 'How delicious. You did.'
 
Saturday, August 27th, 1921
11am (Hour 69)
'Watson?' Sherlock said, waving away Mademoiselle Beaumont, who was hovering
officiously by the telephone niche. 'Watson,' as he fought the odd desire to
lower his voice, and to grip too hard the receiver, 'is everything all right?
What did you find at the Boas house?'
The connection fuzzed, and spluttered.
'Nothing was taken,' came a voice—John's voice—but thin-sounding. Absent-
sounding. The connection, Sherlock reminded himself, was bad. He shielded his
other ear, and curled his spine towards the instrument. Outside on the lawn, in
tennis whites and to the accompaniment of much shrieking, Mademoiselle Patat
was singlehandedly trouncing her lover and his younger son at a game of
badminton.
'Nothing at all?' said Sherlock, into the receiver.
'She went over the whole place with me,' said John's voice, 'along with her
housekeeper.' Fuzzing; crackling; and something, too, in John's voice. Sherlock
squinted. As if by looking, he could make it out. '—probably have given me
measurements down to the inch,' John was saying, 'on everything that was moved.
Two of the rooms were ransacked. Madame Boas's bedroom and her smaller sitting-
room, some curio cabinets. The two cupboards where they keep wrapping paper,
family albums. Things like that.' There was a pause. 'Madame Boas said she was
just glad they hadn't disturbed the ballroom,' John added. 'Or the garden.'
Sherlock snickered, nervously. It rattled back, strange through the earpiece.
He cleared his throat.
'A similar level of disorder as we saw at the Matin offices, I take it?'
'If by 'similar' you mean a high level of disorder,' said John, 'then yes.'
Sherlock laughed, hand pressed harder to his other ear as the Jouvenel child
yelled something about a cheat. He cleared his throat, simply holding to the
receiver. John. 'Yes,' he said, at last. 'So. This fancy-dress fête. She's
already started on preparations, then?'
The static increased; washed over him; so that John, for a moment, was lost.
When it subsided again: '—detail d'you want?' John was saying, and Sherlock
wanted—his hand clenched on the receiver. He wanted John here, with him. He
wanted to be there, with John.
'—mostly concerned with whether reporting the break-in would mean more people
or fewer at her ball on Tuesday.' John was saying. Then, sounding scraped-up,
foreign: 'Holmes? Do you want—'
'No,' Sherlock said, shaking his head a little. 'No, it's fine. So. So Madame
Boas isn't inherently opposed to involving the Prefecture, the way the rest of
the Jouvenels seem to be. Interesting. Has she reached a decision about
reporting it?'
'She was leaning towards yes,' John said. 'Any limelight is good limelight. And
the theme of the fête was already, er. "Crimes of passion", or some such. She
reckons more people might show up if they run a chance of seeing a real
criminal.'
Not in the public eye, my foot, Sherlock thought. He'd never met people who
lived so firmly inside it. 'That would support the theory that she staged the
thing herself.'
'About that,' John said, and cleared his throat. Renaud stomped past Sherlock's
niche, kicking at the furniture, while out on the lawn, Mademoiselle Patat
crowed with victory. Static, down the line.
'At this point,' said Sherlock, feeling clammy, 'I'd like slightly more detail
than you—'
'Yes, yes,' John said. 'Er, the front desk at the hotel tells me someone called
for me. Very late, last night.'
Up the stairs clomped the dirty pouting boy.
'Very late?' said Sherlock. 'Your passion for specificity is—.'
'Three thirty-nine,' John said. 'In the morning.'
That was late indeed.
'Look,' said John, almost too fast to make out over the connection, 'I tracked
down the fellow on duty at the front desk, and I questioned him. He said the
call came in at three-thirty, and it was a female voice, definitely a female
voice, but he said it sounded muffled, like—'
'Through a handkerchief,' Sherlock supplied, thinking: surely the phones ring
through to the rooms. Claudine had said, specifically: Jeanne and Yves put
telephones—
'—and maybe like the woman was trying to lower the timbre of it,' John went on.
'And he said she spoke in English, which. Struck him. Um—cross-Channel tourism
means he sees all sorts, so I asked him, did she sound like a Londoner, what
did her accent sound like. He said—he swore she was French.'
'Parisian?' Sherlock asked, and 'Difficult,' John said, 'to tell.' A pause. 'He
said it was difficult to tell. What with the handkerchief and, and her doing a
false voice and. She didn't talk for long. All she said was—hold on, I wrote it
down—''
Over the crackles and pops came sounds of rummaging, and of—of possibly an
opening drawer, and of John's harsh breath. A drawer: but he wouldn't have put
such a note in a drawer anywhere away from him. He was speaking from the
telephone in his rooms.
'All right,' John said, coming back on the line. 'She asked for me. And then
she said, and I, I'm reading now: Call your dogs off Claire Boas. The whole
mess has nothing to do with her. Leave her alone. And then she rang off.'
'That's… quite dramatic,' Sherlock said. Outside, Mademoiselle Patat was
collecting her winnings in the form of kisses from Monsieur Jouvenel. Sherlock
blinked. 'I wasn't aware we had any dogs,' he said. 'I assume you had the thing
traced.'
'It came from a public phone box in La Rue de Bel Air. Which is what they call
the road in St. Coulomb. You know, where it—''
'Passes in front of the druggist's,' Sherlock said. 'I saw her, Watson. Last
night.'
'What? Really?'
'Yes. There was another break-in here, last night. She made straight for—for
our rooms. Made off out the window and down the trellis. I gave chase, but I
lost her in the trees.'
'Christ. Good thing you stayed.'
'I,' said Sherlock. A sequence of events. 'Yes,' he said. 'Well, I did mention.
It was only common sense that there would be—'
'Did she make off with anything?'
Sherlock ran his hand over his own face. Saw in his mind's eye the rows of café
tables lining the pavement, with the light spilling golden out of a stencilled
window and young people, bright in their painted lips and their paint-brushes,
smoking and gesturing, laughing late, late, late into the night.
'Holmes?' John was saying. 'Holmes?'
Out on the lawn, past the badminton net, a listless-looking game of croquet had
sprung up between Mademoiselle Carco and the Countess. Those left behind,
Sherlock thought, for sunnier climes.
'Yes,' he said, turning from the window. 'She took one thing, though I've no
idea what to make of it. It was that awful bed-cushion. The one in red and
cream, with the rearing black needlepoint horse.'
Chapter End Notes
        1. I am copy-pasting my original note on Daniel MacIntyre's mental
           illness from The_Violet_Hour, since it all still applies. In
           addition to PTSD, Daniel is suffering from a rare but real
           disorder called Capgras_Syndrome, which sometimes results from
           severe head trauma. Victims retain normal cognitive ability
           with the exception of the delusion that a person or people (or
           objects) close to them have been replaced with imposters. Huge
           thanks to Emma de los Nardos for helping me sort out the
           neuropathology of this syndrome and apply it to my preexisting
           ideas about Daniel’s backstory.
***** The sea's lips, or in the dark throat *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
Saturday, August 27th, 1921
2pm (Hour 72)
Even in the shade of the buildings of St Malo, even with the breeze coming in
off the sea, the heat was oppressive. Sherlock wiped the sweat from the back of
his neck, which only meant slicking his fingers. His shirt stuck to his back.
Nothing moved that could avoid it; and from the larches and the pines no
insects buzzed, no birds called.
Leaning out his window the night before, he'd panted into the darkness with the
cool breeze against his face, listening. The crash of the surf (nothing), and
the susurrus of the curtain (nothing)—and then a scrape and a rustle at the
base of the chimney, and he had scrambled out onto the roof. Crab-wise he'd
gone, over the steep slope; his foot had slipped and his stomach had dropped
and he'd taken his eyes from the darkness of the lawn and clutched, scraping
his hands on the shingles, trying not to fall.
Breathing hard. No noise in his ears but his own heart as he blinked back down.
There had been a breeze off the water. The air had smelt of salt and dirt and
there'd been movement all over: the waving tops of the trees, and the bats
swooping over the lawn, and the darker shadows on the grass where the clouds
obscured the moonlight. He'd eased himself towards the trellis, squinting into
the gloom—and was that a shape? Out there, on the grass, was that—
—the bright light of a torch, already at the top of the hill. Moving fast.
Slight and spare-boned in silhouette, with upswept hair: a woman.
Now, in St Malo, he dripped and panted. Twenty-three hotels just along the
shore-line; and four bus routes; and five bicycle-rental establishments. For
she wouldn't, logically, be staying in St Coulomb; and John had said the woman
had phoned from the telephone box in the centre of the village.
Or, Sherlock corrected himself: that was what the local exchange had told John,
at ten the next morning, when John had asked. When John had—had only just come
in? When John had stopped on his way out? How could one deduce? Maddening, that
Sherlock had never stayed at the Hôtel Bel Ami; that he had never even seen it.
Maddening to be ignorant of the lobby geography; of the number of clerks
staffing the desk; of the o'clocks of their cigarette breaks, and the statuses
of their love affairs; of hotel quiet hours and of the mechanism by which calls
rang through to the rooms; of the likelihood that a guest, newly arrived from
London and asleep in his bed, who had surely instructed that all communications
be put through to him at once, might receive a call at three thirty-nine in the
morning and yet not be connected—and of the likelihood, on the other hand, that
John Watson in particular might refuse such a call, or sleep through it; or
else, at half three in the morning, be somewhere else entirely: not in the
hotel at all, or listening to the clangour of the bell; but surrounded by
different sounds, and looking on different sights. Maddening, here in the
blasted-hot village street, that Sherlock should not know.
Maddening, that he hadn't brought himself to ask.
Sherlock wiped sweat off his forehead. It dripped off his fingers and the tips
of his hair. Call your dogs off Claire Boas, the caller had said, in a woman's
accent which the front desk clerk (at ten in the morning) had told John sounded
French. What kind of French? What kind of woman? Sherlock wanted to bite off
his own tongue. Ten more minutes of this, he thought, and he may as well jump
in the ocean fully-clothed. He was, already, soaked with salt; and his feet
were squelching in his shoes.
Call your dogs—. It sounded like something out of a penny-dreadful. And all
she'd taken was a single cross-stitched bed cushion. Nothing about the bloody
thing added up. This whole mess is nothing to do with her, you hear? Like the
villain in some American film. In the street, in St. Coulomb, no one else was
about. The sun beat down, and down, and down.
Sherlock trudged up the steps of the Grand Hôtel, the sixth of the twenty-
three, and delivered his speech. My cousin, he repeated in French, the
syllables stagnating on his tongue, So careless, I've misplaced her room
number. Slight, dark-haired? With a sharp face, just down from Paris? He'd
broken into two rooms already, on the vague recollections of a series of front-
desk clerks. His throat was parched, and aching, but at least he wasn't back at
the house making an utter—at least it was something sensical, to do.
He was almost thankful when the clerk at the Grand Hôtel told him no slight,
brown-haired Parisiennes had checked in within the last week. He trudged back
down the steps; hesitated on the steps before plunging back out into the
baking-hot sun.
In St Coulomb, after a few hours of restless sleep, he had spoken to the
druggist, and to the grocer, and then, waiting impatiently for the lunchtime
doors to open, to the keeper of the village inn across the street. Yes, the man
had said, surprised and wary at the Englishman lying in wait on his stoop. Yes,
as a matter of fact. He had been out at half three. There had been, he said, a
woman in the telephone box across the way.
For such a promising lead, it had been of absolutely no use at all. Was she
dark or fair? Sherlock had asked. Tall or short? Heavy or spare? But the man
had shaken his head. About average, he had said; sort of medium weight, in a
bulky coat; and then added that he hadn't put on his spectacles. And after all,
he'd said, he'd only been out in the middle of the night because his wife was
ill, and he'd been emptying her chamber-pot.
Useless, thought Sherlock, dragging himself up the steps to the seventh shore
hotel. Bloody useless idiots, who saw strange figures in telephone boxes at
half three in the morning and felt no curiosity about them whatsoever.
My cousin, he said, at the seventh hotel; So careless, he said, at the eighth,
and the ninth, and the tenth. Slight? he said. Dark-haired? He broke into two
more rooms, more reckless each time about his searches, but still: nothing.
Just down from Paris? he said, at the eleventh, and the twelfth, and he was
just contemplating the horrible possibility that she had booked rooms at an
inland hotel, when the desk clerk at the Chateaubriand said 'Oh yes,
Mademoiselle Wren.'
Yes, he said, wearily. Mademoiselle Wren. And after trailing up the stairs he
rested with his back against the wall next to 503, rooting about in his pockets
as the cleaning woman trundled past, her cart full of dirty plates, flies
buzzing around her head. Mademoiselle Wren. Hotel thirteen of the sixteen on
the shore, and how many more inland? Sherlock shut his eyes. The wheel of the
maid trolley caught on a divot in the carpet, and he grit his teeth.
When she pushed the damned thing, at last, over the moulding at the front of
the lift, he brought out his pick-locks. The lock was ancient and stubborn. It
took him ages. An old man limped by with a cane; Sherlock had to feign a
coughing fit that went on and on and on. His throat, ripped to shreds with the
pick-locks slipping in his sweating hands.
And then the old man was past, and the tumblers fell, and Sherlock, in his
sweat-sticking shirt, slipped through the door and pulled it shut. Dark; cool.
Mademoiselle Wren had bolted the big glass double-doors that faced towards the
sea, and pulled to the curtain; so that the room's only light snuck in through
cracks between cloth and wood.
Sherlock fumbled. He inched along. He opened a single curtain, and a beam of
sunlight, hot and harsh, cut across the room. It sliced from the casement to
the hardwood to the rug, to the near post of the four-poster bed. And on, and
on: over the wool blanket and the dark-gold coverlet; and up to the bed-
cushions, where a cross-stitched rider on the back of a rearing stallion
brandished a threaded whip.
Sherlock sagged against the wall. Let out a breath with his hand over his eyes;
then left the window open to the sea, and, having drawn a glass of water,
settled down on the chaise longue to wait.
 
Saturday, August 27th, 1921
6pm (Hour 76)
Irene, blouse still damp under the arms and down her back from bicycling in the
hot sun—and there’d been nothing, nothing of interest at all at Roz Ven this
afternoon, unless one counted Germaine Beaumont in full-length black sleeves in
this impossible heat, fussing around the head and shoulders of the now-soft,
idle Madame Jouvenel as that lady reclined on the front lawn with a novel; and
though Irene was honest enough to admit that she did find a certain appeal in
the spectacle, she would hardly have ridden an hour through the blazing 90-
degree afternoon in order to observe it—Irene, with her calves aching and her
face no doubt shining-wet, pushed open her hotel door to the sight of a long,
thin, winter-cool man, sprawled at ease on her chaise longue.
She stood with her hand on the latch. She could, she thought, be dryer; still,
there were worse places for her shadow to run her to ground.
'Mr Holmes,' she said. 'I do hope I haven't kept you waiting long.'
'Not at all.' Sherlock Holmes: stubbornly present in her drawing-room.
'I'll just freshen up a bit, shall I?' she said, and ducked behind her Chinese
screens. Picked at her buttons. God, it was hot. Without Holmes here she'd be
stripping off and sinking into a cool bath, and then: the lightest wisp of
cotton. Or lying naked on her coverlet until the sun set. With him here…
'To what do I owe the pleasure?' she asked, raising her voice over the top of
the screen as she wrapped herself in black brocade.
'You seem to be well apprised of my identity already,' he said, and she cast up
her eyes though he couldn't see, as she transferred the black leather notebook
to her dressing-gown pocket, along with her cigarette case. She ran a cool
cloth over her neck, and her forehead; then patted them dry. Smoothed back her
hair. Looked in the mirror, and touched up her battle face. It would have to
do.
'I mean,' she said, coming back around to the front of her screens to find him
in just the same sprawl as before, 'who is your client?'
'You know I'm staying at Roz Ven.'
'Mmm,' she said. 'Which is not an answer at all. Whiskey, by the way? Only I've
been out in the sun for ages.'
She was like a child, playing house; and he her little school-friend. The ice
was all melted in the bucket, but the water still held a vestige of cool. She
wanted to plunge her hands into it; pour it over her head and let the icy
splash soak the silk about her shoulders. Instead she just reached in for the
bottle; poured two tumblers neat and passed one to him as he sat up and
stretched out a hand. It was gratifying, that he pressed the side of the glass
to his cheek before taking a sip.
'Well,' she said, arranging herself on the sofa across from the chaise longue.
'Quite civilised accommodations,' said Holmes, 'for a house-breaker's
provincial holiday,' as Irene crossed her legs towards the little side-table,
with its ash-tray and its lamp. The little black notebook she placed between
the two.
'And Doctor Watson still in Paris,' she said. 'How are we getting on, all on
our own?'
'You're quite up to date, are you?' he shot back. 'On the current population of
Paris.'
'Easy to keep track this time of year. The fashionable people have all fled to
the country. The only ones left are either boring or deeply, deeply
interesting.'
'And what about Claire Boas?' he said. His pale, darting eyes. 'Is she deeply
interesting?'
Irene swirled her whiskey. Claire Boas. Didn't move her head; gave a measured
smile.
'I like a good fancy-dress ball as much as the next girl,' she said. 'Why, is
she your client? I once went to her fête de Noël as an American prospector,
and… dug for gold.'
He barked with laughter. 'I can only imagine that you did.'
'How do you generally go to a fancy-dress ball, Mr Holmes? As Pierrot? Pining
for your Columbine?'
'I'm a confirmed bachelor,' he said, head cocked, with his mouth curling up,
'Refer to any of the papers'; and: 'Oh,' she breathed, 'you know I needn't do
that.'
His eyebrows, rising and rising.
She ran her nail down the spine of her notebook: red lacquer against white skin
against black leather. Said: 'It takes one to know one, Mr Holmes.'
He laughed, incredulous. She looked at him from under her lashes.
'Are you telling me,' he said, 'that you go in for the abstemious life? Retire
early? Not prone to late-night telephone calls, or—'
'Are you telling me,' said Irene, 'that you don't love a spot of house-
breaking?' She tipped back her glass and let the liquor at her throat. The
other side of her skin, which was… not cool; but warm with that humming warmth
that meant she didn't mind it. Her visitor's cheeks were flushed.
'You admit to breaking into my—'
'Not your house,' she corrected, 'surely. And the Jouvenels seem none too eager
to press charges.'
'You admit to breaking into the Jouvenels' offices?' His face was straight but
she could almost smell a smirk in the air. A sheen on the skin at his open
collar. She could have laughed.
'Don't be stupid,' she said. 'I'd never leave such a mess. I only dropped by,
after the fact. But I was in your rooms last night. As you very well know.'
'Doing what?' he said, leaning forward. 'To what purpose?'
'Oh,' she said, with teeth, 'taking the air. I love a musty attic room on an
August night, don't you? Trying out your mattress. Lying down on the side you'd
just left, and then the side your charming blond friend abandoned for the, ah.
Paris art world.'
He went, for a scant moment, utterly stiff. His open mouth, unmoving.
'Art—' he said, and stopped; and he—oh, she thought, with her skin fairly
buzzing, he didn't know.
'Mmmm.' She couldn't help but purr it. She let a nail pierce the side of her
little notebook, split it open so its pages parted; and she read, glancing back
and forth from her slanting black writing to his reddening face.
'Subject was joined at his table in Chez Manière,' she read out, 'by a young
man with a sketchbook and pencils, whom subject seemed to recognise. Animated
conversation over two bottles of wine, then a bottle of—'
'And what were you doing at—'
'—Glenkinchie,' she went on. 'An interesting choice, don't you think, Mr
Holmes? Lowland blend? Someone in the party from—'
'—one in the morning?'
'—Edinburgh?' with his eyes going paler now, his weird exotic snow-dog eyes.
'No? Both parties gesturing and touching, yes, hands and knees. Quite eager,
wasn't he, your friend? Oh you keep him on a tight leash, I imagine. Just look
at you. You can hardly bear it.'
'Was this intelligence,' he got out, 'being gathered while you were—' but she,
raising her voice:
'Left café at one in the morning. Goodness me: after having arrived at nine.
One's backside would be—
'—placing a call from the telephone box in the village of St Coulomb?'
'Never use the things,' she said. 'Unhygienic.'
He gave a mean, hard laugh. Looked at her like she must be soiling the
upholstery just by sitting on it: unhygienic.
'Much,' she said, 'like Doctor Watson's final destination of the night. Are you
familiar with the Hôtel Marigny, Mr Holmes? Le Temple de l'Impudeur"? Quite a
bohemian choice, on the part of Doctor Watson and his—'
'What were you doing,' he snarled, hand coming down hard enough to rattle the
glass on the side-table, 'in my rooms?'
She swirled the liquid in her glass. Smiled across at him.
'Going through your trunks,' she said. 'What else? Finding out the names of the
spies who followed me down from the city. Listening to the master of the house
fucking his wife's secretary.'
'Fucking his—'
'Germaine Beaumont is an… acquaintance, of mine. From Paris.'
His harsh breath; and blinking blinking blinking of his pale wolf's eyes.
'Germaine Beaumont,' he repeated.
The little notebook still rested in Irene's lap. She tipped up her glass again,
and the ice clinked.
'You assumed,' he said, drawing all his lines together, 'that you were
overhearing your acquaintance with Henry Jouvenel, when he called out her name
in the night; which I don't doubt says more about you, and your willingness to
believe yourself the centre of any unfolding dramatics—'
'Oh really—'
'—than it does about Monsieur Jouvenel and Germaine Patat.'
Germaine—
'Yes,' said Holmes, blinking again, hard. 'His mistress. Acknowledged as such.
Tout le monde la tutoie, apparently; though I somehow doubt her business
competitors do."
'And you,' said Irene. Licking her lips, with her heart beating oddly. 'Are you
alarmed by successful businesswomen, Mr Holmes?'
'No,' he said. 'But I don't make the mistake of taking them for harmless
ornaments, simply because they tell me to.'
'Oh no?'
'No. Particularly when I can see they've come so far. Stepney, was it?
Wapping?'
She blinked. Blount Street, and the Cahill Arms, and her mother asleep on the
narrow pallet bed on the floor in the filthy walk-up.
'Limehouse, actually,' she said. He didn't miss a beat.
'Well within the sound of the bells, then, anyway. Quite a distance between
that, and last season's House of Chanel.'
'Ah,' she said. Tried to laugh, but the bottom fell out of it. 'I'd be wearing
this season's, but.' She waved her hand. 'Here in the provinces.'
'You're trying to blend in.'
'Needs must, Mr Holmes.'
'I don't believe for a moment,' he said, lip curling, 'that your powers of
dissimulation exhaust themselves with the application of a six-month-old suit-
jacket, Miss Wren.'
Not her school-friend anymore, was he. As if she'd know one to look at.
Brutish, and pale; hardening under his skin: but he'd played his hand, just
now. If he'd known the name Adler, he certainly would have said it. Would
Charles—would Henry Jouvenel—take on a detective, and not bother to tell the
man whom he was following? Her lungs, expanding in her chest.
'Ah,' she said. 'You don't underestimate a girl, do you. Not like,' with her
fingers playing again over the black-brocade notebook, 'not like your Doctor
Watson. Though perhaps it's not girls he underestimates. Is it?'
He flinched; then smoothed out his face to blankness.
'Do you know what they specialise in,' she asked, 'at Hôtel Marigny? Apart from
beautiful Italian boys, served up in sun-warmed clusters, like grapes? But ah,'
she added. 'Being raised in Mayfair, you'd hardly know of such things.'
'Doctor Watson,' Holmes said, 'is hardly the object of this visit.'
'No,' she said. She snapped the book shut. 'I imagine the object of your visit
is something tedious, relating to my photographs.'
And that: that dead space, that widening of the eyes: that wasn't feigned, she
was sure. But then—
'Your photographs,' he said.
'You didn't know,' said Irene. Slowly. 'You're—you didn't know about any
photographs at all. So you—what? Asked after my physical charms in every hotel
on the shore? Did Jouvenel even have the grace to give you an image of me?'
'I had no need of one,' he said. Gathering himself together, from the shoulders
on down. 'I saw you myself, from my window. After you broke into my rooms for
the second time, and made off with—I give you credit for originality—a cross-
stitched bed cushion, and seemingly nothing else; but before a person you claim
wasn't you made a call to Paris from the village phone box at three-thirty-
nine. I am, Miss Wren, of a congenitally inquiring disposition. I was not hired
by any Jouvenel; indeed, I believe by now they'd all smile to be shot of me.
But,' he added, sitting forward, 'if I didn't share your pursuit of these
photographs before, I certainly share it now.'
Ice-grey steady eyes in the August heat.
'Who did hire you?' she asked. He gave her a wolf-smile.
'Tell me about these pictures,' he said, 'and I might not turn you in to the
gendarmes for housebreaking.'
'They won't get on their horses, for a twenty-year-old bed cushion,' she said,
but she found that the name Humbert hovered on her lips. Blustering Charles, it
must be: just dull enough to hire a detective and then keep things from him.
'They might do,' Holmes said. Eyes flicking down. 'For a woman of your…
attractions.'
'Oh Mr Holmes,' she said. Her hand at her neck; she could feel her beating
pulse. She drew out her cigarette case from the pocket of her dressing gown,
and caught a faint, spiced whiff of Mitsouko, smiling. 'I always did love a low
blow.'
He gave a dry laugh, as she lit up. Not her school-friend, at all.
'All right,' she said. 'Let's try this. Three days ago one Monsieur Charles
Humbert stormed into my place of business and demanded to know why I'd accosted
his daughter.'
'Had you?'
'Christ, no,' she said. With her steady hands. 'She's not my type.'
Irene blew smoke at the ceiling, with her heart beating, as he smiled—and
failed to react to the name Charles Humbert, one way or the other. But if not
Charles, and not Jouvenel—
'Is Claire—'
'Not her, either,' said Irene.
'Well then: were you acquainted with the fellow?'
'Oh yes,' she said, thinking: if not Charles, and not Jouvenel—?. 'I knew
Charles of old. But if he were your client, you'd have known all this already.'
From the double-doors and the street below no breeze stirred, and no motorcars
rumbled past, and she thought, repeating, faster and faster: if not Charles,
and not Jouvenel—?.
Beat-beat. Holmes narrowed his ice eyes; she felt almost cold. But surely it
couldn't be—
'I'd have known he was once your client, you mean,' Holmes said. (Beat beat.)
Rising to his feet; pacing by the double doors. 'During the War, probably,
while he was back in Paris on leave. Given your familiarity with what you claim
to be one of the more esoteric of the teeming hordes of Paris brothels, odds
are excellent you work at one yourself, but you are also in possession—' beat-
beat '—of a first-class wardrobe; brand-new, hand-tooled luggage; and the
freedom to come down to the provinces for a few days' housebreaking. So:
definitely a higher-end establishment, yours, and you one of their star
players. All this traveling about in pursuit of photographs: your line of work,
and Monsieur Humbert's fury at his daughter's exposure to the prints—'
'One print,' Irene corrected—but who else—beat—and he nodded.
'One print, then, which points all the more to their explicit nature, if one of
them is sufficient to scandalise. They presumably document an interlude,
involving—' beat '—you, Henry Jouvenel, and this Charles Humbert. In order to
afford your prices, Monsieur Humbert will have been highly positioned in his
line of work; given that your initial assumption was that Jouvenel—'
(but she hadn't found the note; Irene had; and who else even would beat-beat
beat-beat and Holmes came towards her, furrowing his brow)
'—Henry Jouvenel, that is,' he said, and Irene's stomach dropped, 'had hired
me, the odds are that Humbert, too, is in either journalism or politics, or
both. In your opinion he is also a self-important bully and what I believe the
people of your old neighbourhood refer to as a right bottle-and-glass—' as
bubbling up frantic, she laughed out loud, '—and having spent the last two days
at Roz Ven—' beat beat '—I can join you in that estimation of his honourable
colleague. I am working for neither of them. It seems to me, therefore, that we
find our interests well-aligned. Shall we lay our cards on the table? Or
continue preening for each others' benefits?'
She took a breath. Wolf eyes, like ice, and her heart.
Beat, and she stubbed out her cigarette. Beat, with lips stretched in a smile,
and the summer heat, who else would, and she looked at him standing in front of
her beat—beat—beat—
'Irene Adler,' she said. 'It's a pleasure to meet you, Mr Holmes.'
Chapter End Notes
        1. The Hôtel Bel Ami does actually exist in Paris, but 'Bel Ami'
           would also suggest to Sherlock the Guy de Maupassant novella by
           that name, which has to do with the serial and manipulative
           love affairs of journalist Georges Duroy. So the phrase itself
           would suggest infidelity.
        2. Pierrot is the iconic Commedia dell'Arte 'sad clown,' naïve and
           often pathetic, pining after his love Columbine, who generally
           leaves him for the character Harlequin.
        3. Chez Manière is the former name of the Montmartre café now
           known as Le_Cépage_Montmartrois, a fact which greywash and I
           painstakingly reconstructed, via much trawling of Google Maps
           and some judicious abuse of French Scrabble cheating sites,
           from an illegible five-year-old vacation photograph I had lying
           around. Because she and I like to make our own fun. Basically
           nothing about the establishment, beyond its placement on a
           Montmartre corner at the top of a flight of stairs, is based on
           fact.
        4. Glenkinchie is a single-malt Scotch whiskey distillery, just
           outside Edinburgh. It would be notable because most prestige
           single-malt Scotch is not produced in the Lowlands, but in
           Speyside (or the larger Highlands), or Islay. Daniel, being
           from Edinburgh, might be partial to it.
        5. The Hôtel Marigny, or Temple de l'Impudeur (Temple of
           Indecency) at 11 Rue de l'Arcade, was a homosexual brothel
           owned by Albert Le Cuziat, established in 1917 with the
           probable financial backing of Marcel Proust. Proust was, in any
           case, definitely a patron of the establishment, and Le Cuziat
           both reported about, and let Proust observe, his other
           clients—an act which, for Proust, seems to have been half
           novelistic research, half sexual voyeurism. He put it all to
           use in the brothel and BDSM scenes revolving around the Baron
           de Charlus in A la recherche du temps perdu—one specialty of
           the house, as Irene hints.
***** Useful, untrustworthy *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
Saturday, August 27th, 1921
7pm (Hour 77)
He'd got his feet back under him, Sherlock Holmes.
She took his hand.
'Miss Adler,' he said, with the corner of his smirk turned down, then shook out
his cuffs like the both of them weren't dripping with sweat; and her heart:
beat, beat.
Beat.
She uncoiled herself from the sofa. Slid the black notebook to the side-table,
and rose up before him.
'These… photographs,' he said; and she said 'Your client'; and his eyes and
'Oh,' he said, 'I think not, Miss Adler,' clicking his tongue against his
teeth.
'Besides,' he said, drawing out the sound. 'Why does it matter to you, who's
paying my way?'
Chest to chest, with the heat from his breath on her face.
'I'm just managing how the world sees me, Mr. Holmes. It's what any performer
would do. But it is remarkable,' with a fingertip tracing his jaw, 'that you
should find yourself on my tail, and not know about the photographs. Given how…
germane they are, to your interests.'
'My—pardon?' That bobbing of his throat: she could dig in her nail.
'It was lost on Henry Jouvenel, too,' she murmured, 'that I was the belle of
the ball.'
And she turned her shoulder to him, to cross to the drinks trolley. His feet
under him. His gaze at her back. But she'd had him, for a moment—his weird,
pale, hardening eyes. She reached out a hand for her empty glass, and it didn't
shake.
'Couldn't have maintained his apathy long,' Holmes said, at last.
'Couldn't he?' Her voice light. Her hands steady. She refilled her glass,
thinking forward, forward; with Holmes's eyes mint-sharp on her back.
'I could tell,' she said. 'I could tell, looking at him. It's why they took me
on: I could sniff out what people liked. And I could smell it on Henry Jouvenel
as soon as he swaggered into the Chabanais dining room. War hero, famous
editor, husband and father: all of it dead weight 'round his neck. Management
wined and dined him, but he wanted—'
'Someone who wouldn't.'
'—someone who would push him,' she said, turning to face Holmes. 'Hard.'
He met her eyes and didn't look away. Lowered himself and his eyebrow and his
stubborn smirk back onto the chaise: decorous, ankle over knee. Her beating
heart.
'I always took the star guests,' she told him, 'and I was more than up to
Jouvenel.' She swallowed. Said, 'I thought I knew what kind of a night it would
be. Pinching his thigh in the horseshoe booth while I whispered in his ear.
Ordering him about upstairs; a common enough night. But then.' She laughed.
'Then Charles Humbert walked in. You know: I wasn't even watching when Jouvenel
saw him? I had my face turned to Jouvenel's ear. But I knew to look 'round,'
she added. 'I could smell it on him.'
Holmes shifted, just barely, in his seat: oh.
'You'll know that smell,' she said, 'won't you, Mr. Holmes? A sort of musk,
of—oh. Recognition.' He didn't answer, so she said: 'It gets all mixed up, of
course, with the scent of wet flesh,' and watched, smiling, as he flushed up a
dull, reluctant pink.
'I'll bow, in this particular area,' he said, 'to your... professional wisdom.'
'Yes,' she said. 'Probably for the best.'
And she touched her hair, smiling, with her sleeve falling back; he cleared his
throat, and she swung her hips on her way to the sofa.
'Jouvenel and Humbert, then,' he said, 'they were—'
'Rivals,' Irene supplied. 'Competitors. Charles was serving at Verdun at the
time, alongside Henry; and both before and after that he ran Le Journal, it's
the—'
'Tory rag.'
'Right you are,' Irene said. Lounging back. 'Right you are. They'd been taking
pot shots at each other in the press for years. Taking more than that, before
the War. A duel, once: pistols at daybreak. No ladies allowed.' She toasted
him, from her seat.
'They wanted one another.'
'Oh. Well. You know how that sort get, when they've been settled a few years.
Bored. Restless. Craving their own.'
His chin up. His quick, sharp, difficult breath.
'They wanted one another,' she told him, 'like a lion does meat.'
'Did they.' Swallowing.
'Mmm.'
'So it was—'
'A godsend, for a woman in my position. My work would be half-done for me,
wouldn't it, with the two of them going at each other's… throats.'
He inhaled, careful; and she smiled.
'So I hailed a, a visiting colleague,' she said. 'Gretha. A bit of decoration
for Charles's arm. In the horseshoe booth we took the outside seats; jostled
the men together, and laughed at their jokes. Fed them simply bottles of
Champagne.'
Her arm extended, languid, to the side table; and she let her nail slip between
the pages of the brocade notebook while she watched Holmes's flushed-up cheeks.
His gaze, for the barest moment, followed the movement of her hand, before he
snapped it back to her face.
'So lovely in the summertime,' Irene said. 'Don't you find? Champagne in a
Paris café?'
'And these photographs,' said Holmes. 'These—'
'Why, they're of the four of us,' she said, 'at supper.'
'At… supper.'
Irene smiled with teeth, into his eyes on hers.
'There was a photographer,' she told him. 'A kid from one of the scandal
sheets. He saw two political rivals, dining together; and he started snapping
pictures. Well. Henry Jouvenel didn't like it. Got grand and puffed-up, and
Charles—Charles climbed right over the table for him. Wrestled the camera away
from the boy. Such bravado. As if he didn't have a hundred pounds on the poor
child.'
'Defender of the young and the innocent, are you?' Holmes said. 'The rest of us
should tremble in our boots.'
'The rest?' Thinking: Germaine. Léonie. 'I might count you among that number,
Mr Holmes.'
'You might be surprised.'
'It's possible,' she said. 'It has happened before.'
He didn't answer. Irene sipped her drink.
'They became more,' she said, 'involved. Wrestling, at first, for the camera,
until Gretha got it away from them both. Then they were just reaching for each
other's bottles, and each other's jackets; hands at each other's
knees—waists—hips. Even in Le Chabanais, one didn't like to be so open. Not
between officers; not when there were press-men about. People wouldn't like to
think—'
'Quite,' he said. His voice broke; he cleared his throat. She let her fingers
caress the notebook again, as if unconscious; tracing the black-flocked
brocade.
'We got them moving,' she said. 'Gretha made a game of it. Holding up the
camera and then backing away, so they would chase her. We got them onto the
back stairs, which were—are—narrow. Dark. I kept running up against them:
Charles and Henry, pressed up against the wall. Charles biting at him, licking
at him, and Henry just, just trembling. Like current—' Holmes, visibly,
flinched '—arcing between them.'
He swallowed. Holmes swallowed. His hands unmoving, on his thighs.
'Your work, as you say, was almost done for you,' he got out. 'In your position
I'd have—have left them to it. Slipped out with your colleague. A cocktail in
the bar.'
'You wouldn't,' Irene said, and then laughed. For half a second together his
face was a picture of offence. She leant forward, lowered her voice. 'You make
your living observing people, Mr Holmes. The same as me. Secrets and lies: you
feel them out, where they're graven on the body. Everyone you meet is a
whetstone for your blade. So tell me: if you've a witness who wants something
as badly as that, and it's in your power to give it or keep it from them: what
do you do?'
The sheen of sweat, on his face.
'You kept them from each other, then,' he said. 'Humbert and Jouvenel.'
'Got them through the door to my rooms,' she agreed, 'and I—Henry was the more
interesting, the more—' married three years; Irene shook her head '—desperate.
I always enjoy my witnesses when they're desperate, don't you? Yes. I can tell
that you do.'
Beat. Beat.
She wasn't breathing as hard as Holmes.
'I kicked the door shut,' she told him. 'Heaved Henry off Charles—though he's a
big man, you've met him— and Henry practically whined for him. Gretha dragged
Charles towards the bed; started cooing at him about his war work, teasing him.
And I opened Henry's trousers, against the wall; and I sucked him in the French
way. Most men in that position, Mr Holmes, would grab my head, grab my hair.
Henry Jouvenel put his palms against the wall, and closed his eyes. Can you
imagine,' she asked, 'what he was doing?'
'Listening,' Holmes blurted. Voice chased deep, deep into his chest. 'Listening
to—to Humbert.'
'Right you are.' She raised her glass to him. 'And what would you do, Mr
Holmes, if you were me? You'd have your mouth full, knees on the rug—and you'd
be listening, too, wouldn't you? A man like you'd be—' shifting his restless
legs '—listening, already, to the talk across the room. Gretha asking, But
aren't you afraid, Capitaine, of the Hun? and, But what if a mean old German
snuck into your tent during the night? You'd listen to him stammering out his
replies, and when she asked, Would you shoot him? Or tie him up so he couldn't
escape? you'd feel Henry Jouvenel's cock twitch so hard you'd almost choke on
it.'
'You're a—' he got out. 'A professional.'
'Doesn't mean I can't be taken by surprise.'
'Or you wanted to—' Holmes swallowed. Christ, look at him fight. 'To make sure
Humbert knew how Jouvenel was… affected.'
'Oh, Mr Holmes,' she said, 'you overestimate me. Keep it up.'
His mouth, stretched in a grimace. Her heart: beat, beat.
'You're right, though,' she said. 'I heard Charles notice. I heard him curse. I
pulled back and listened to—to Gretha, behind me. She was hardly taxing his
intelligence, but Charles was groaning and stuttering; and whenever he'd start
up—it's easier, he would try to say, if you can get hold of—of something
solid—Henry would make these sounds. I could hear Gretha laughing, saying, I
still don't understand, Capitaine Humbert, and, Why don't you show me what you
mean? Show me on Sergent Jouvenel.'
Holmes grunted; inhaled, and let it out slow.
'You can imagine Henry's reaction. And behind me Gretha was giggling. Snapping
pictures of Henry's panting face, and of me, on my knees in front of him.
That's one of the prints we're after, you and I. That and the one later, after
Gretha passed the camera to me: Henry, with his broad backside on my Louis
Quinze parlour chair, Charles behind it, tying his hands, and Gretha looking
on. Christ, the men could hardly breathe. Can you imagine it, Mr Holmes?'
'Vividly.' His chest, rising quick and shallow and hard.
'Mmm,' she said. 'And now that I've told you, you'll know what you're looking
at if you—'
'When I—'
'—find the photographs in question. Shall I continue the list? There are quite
a number like those. Charles just couldn't stop touching him, you see. Gave me
time to get the scene from different angles: Charles wrapping the rope around
Henry's wrists, licking his lips while he tightened it down. Henry with his
front thrust out, and his cock jutting up hard out of his open trousers while
Charles stuttered out some nonsense about how to make the knots.'
Holmes's breath. Tightening his whole chest on the exhale: she kept bracing for
the blow.
'You were. Taking pictures,' he managed.
'Yes,' Irene agreed. 'But the three of them went on so long that the—'
—film ran out, the canister ran out: the metal body imprinted on the black
brocade rug and then who picked it back up—
'—only thing I could do,' she said, 'was to put the camera down. Sit on Henry's
knees. Play with him. Gretha was still asking Charles, oh: I thought you'd done
this in the field, and, Surely he could escape by simply twisting his wrists.
And Charles—'
'He wouldn't like,' Holmes said, sounding strangled, 'he's a, a braggart, he
wouldn't like to be doubted,' and she smiled, slow.
'That's right,' she said. 'He puffed himself up, our Charles. Breathed in hard
and moved his hips and said, Any of the boys at Verdun could tell you, you've
got to cinch it properly. Properly. Henry just—'
'Couldn't have—'
'—lost his wits.' In a whisper. She swirled her drink as he sat there, hunching
his shoulders like he hurt. 'Charles,' she said, 'did something with the rope,
and Henry started panting. Struggling in his bonds. So I sank—'
'God—'
'—down around him, while Gretha said, like an innocent, What if you wanted them
tighter?. And Charles. Oh, Mr Holmes. He said, Elbows, you tie the— elbows.
Fumbled the rope. I could see his lips, trembling.' Holmes's lips, trembling.
'Henry, he stopped moving, in that way that means someone is—close. So I
slapped him. Slapped his face, hard, and he moaned.'
Holmes. Fingers tensing; hands on his thighs.
'Gretha says,' said Irene, 'What if you wanted him tighter?, and Charles
cinched his elbows closer together so Henry thrust up. Gretha said, Oh, you're
sogoodat that, and Henry moaned, so I slapped him again, and he moaned, again,
and Charles—can you guess, Mr Holmes? He was—'
'—incensed—'
'Well,' she said, 'yes, but—'
'—hard,' he choked out, blinking and blinking, 'he'd be—'
'—gasping,' she said, 'Just gasping for it. I saw him move to press his hips.
Up against Henry's back, between his shoulder-blades, in the round empty oval
of the chair-back between his trussed elbows. Pressing them because he couldn't
help it. And Henry, he shuddered through his whole body. Mindless, like a fit.
He started fucking up into me just—wild, feet hard on the floor, so I slapped
him again. Charles, all the while, rubbing little secret circles with his hard
slick leaking cock through layers of fabric into Henry's back.'
Holmes got to his feet. It wasn't a stagger, but he wasn't—he curled his spine.
Uncomfortable. She'd wondered. He made his way to the drinks trolley, with his
empty tumbler and his mouth twisted up, Christ. She licked her lips.
'Jouvenel,' she said, 'with my handprints on his cheeks. Moving like he wanted
to fuck through me. Charles's hands on his—his shoulders, and his wrists, and
his neck; he was close, and Gretha said, What if Irena—'
His hand shaking, on the whiskey decanter—
'—what if Irena weren't on his lap?, she said, so I climbed off him. He sobbed,
and Gretha. Charles even forgot he was supposed to be answering. So Gretha
said, Don't you see? Sergent Jouvenel could slide his hands over the chair-
back. It sounded like Charles was dying, trying to answer her. Tie his, tie
his, his ankles, he said, and Gretha leant in and told him, Oh yes, show me how
you tie his ankles, while Henry groaned, so I—' smiling, mean, full of
Limehouse thinking bitterly, Why, it were seeing his wifey get slapped 'round
by her lady-love what got me into this business, and what a pair, what a pair
the two of 'em must make '—hit him. I hit him again.'
It was a shame she oughtn't to say it aloud. Husbands and wives. Holmes stood
hunched, with an arm braced on the drinks-trolley; breath ragged as he held
himself up. Irene wanted—
'Gretha,' she said, 'got Charles 'round the front of the chair, somehow. You
can imagine, the way he was walking. He went down on his knees in front of
Henry and just stared up at his face, shaking. Running his hands up Henry's
thighs. Tender. Like he'd forgotten himself.' She breathed in. 'To be a witness
to such a thing, Mr Holmes.'
Her mouse-quick heart in her chest, and he swallowed an awful noise. If he were
sick into the ice bucket, she thought—while her smooth red thumbnail rubbed
circles on the notebook on the table by her side.
'You can imagine, it,' she murmured. 'Can't you. You can... relate. You know he
has a—well. A history with the other man. You've heard about it; read it hinted
at, but you needn't have. With both of them together you can feel it, can't
you? Every time they look at each other. Every time they touch. The weight of
it all, what they haven't said to their—'
'You—'
'—wives, or their children,' with his breath loud and her voice breathless, 'or
even their lovers, but they needn't say it to each other, do they? They were
both there. No one else can feel it—'
Hard crack on wood. He'd dropped his tumbler; and took a deep, a shaking
breath.
'—not,' she said, 'the way they can feel it, with each other. But if you keep
them together, Mr Holmes. If you only watch them long enough, and—and observe
the—'
'Observe,' he repeated; then laughed, too loud. 'Set them loose.' A strange
hard stillness to him; her ribs tight and her whole skin gooseflesh. 'Read the
whole of it,' he said, 'just in the—'
'—way they touch each other. The way they move. And they won't be able, will
they, to keep the truth from you? Not a man like you. Not if you're watching
properly, not if you're—'
'—close enough,' and he turned to face her with a shuttered look, and:
'—right up next to them both,' she said, 'next to their bodies; and you refuse
to look away.'
'And you,' he said. 'You, of course, would never look away.'
She was breathing so hard. His eyes cut to her hip, to the needlepoint cushion;
and drew together all the bleak lines of his face.
'I didn't,' she told him. 'Not that night.'
'Well. In that case, do go on. I imagine Humbert next removed Jouvenel's
smallclothes. Shorts, were they? In the new army style?'
As if commenting on the market price of salt. As if he were doing her a favour;
as if he had never dropped a glass of whiskey on the Chateaubriand parquet. Her
pounding pulse in her veins. She rose to her feet as he strode towards her
across the room.
'Yes,' she said, 'they were. And I—Gretha and I.'
From feet away he made her a little bow. Like a young gallant might to do to
his dancing-partner, bloody bastard.
'Gretha went,' Irene said, through her teeth, 'and knelt down by Charles. Cooed
in his ear about show me and his ankles, you're so good at it,' backing Holmes
towards the chaise longue but he was smiling his strange closed smile as she
said, 'undoing all Charles's fastenings. While Charles stared at Henry, and
Henry panted back at him. Rope, Gretha said, over Charles's shoulder, so I
fetched them more rope. Coils on the floor by the chair; and the length that
Gretha pressed into Charles's hand. Henry's eyes, Mr Holmes, went so bloody
wide.'
Holmes's calves against the chaise; she gave his chest a little push and he let
himself sink down, smirking.
'Yes,' from below her, 'I can see them now, like dinner plates; I imagine he
could scarcely see. Though he'd try, wouldn't he? For the sight of your young…'
'Colleague,' she said, with black brocade falling off one shoulder, so close he
could hardly avoid looking.
'…friend,' he said, 'getting Humbert to truss up his ankles. That must have
been a treat. With his face right up next to Humbert's thighs, and you
looking—'
'Observing,' she said. Oh, to slap his face. 'I had time, Mr Holmes, to watch
them very carefully. It was Charles, you see,' and she leant in: 'he couldn't
stop putting his mouth on him. And there I was: observing. Thinking how my…
tool-chest, was against the wall, behind Henry's back. And Gretha had Charles's
trousers open, now. I could estimate.'
'You have a selection?' he drawled.
'Would you go housebreaking,' said Irene, 'with only one type of pick-lock?'
His smile like a slow slippery snake. She slid 'round the edge of the chaise;
perched, hip to his shoulder. His eyes narrowed and his pink tongue, coming out
slow to wet his bottom lip. He let her see it.
'I gather you opted for one of the smaller models?' he said.
'I may,' she said, 'have exaggerated. Slightly.'
Holmes laughed, harsh and giddy; and: 'It was worth it,' she said, as he
reached up, long hand on her hip; and pulled her hard into his lap.
His trousers rough on the insides of her thighs. Black brocade, pooling around
her arse and his knees, and she settled herself, grinning, as he smirked back.
'I'd lay odds he liked it,' he said, his vowels pure Mayfair. 'You on—what
would it have been, to make up the height? A box? Standing on a crate to shove
your cock between his shoulder blades?'
'I like it,' Irene said. Arms around his neck. 'Black,' she told him. 'Hard,
and thick. Taking off my skirts. I like the leather straps against my skin.'
His mouth was open. He was breathing through it. Eyes into eyes into slippery
ice-floe blue.
'More whiskey,' she offered, 'Mr Holmes?'
'Do you expect I'd like more whiskey?'
'No,' she said. 'I suppose not.'
'Clever girl,' he said. She ground down against him: half-hard between her
legs, which meant—but he was still interested, plainly. Hot breath against her
collarbone, saying, 'You must've come back to quite a show. Your little friend,
and Captain Humbert—'
'—thrashing about,' Irene said, 'on the floor. Stripped, on his back, with his
head between Henry's tied feet; Gretha on top of him with all her long skirts,'
and she rolled her hips, 'spread out around them and Henry—'
'Staring down,' he said. 'Near drooling, he must have been—no?'
'Yes,' she said, and his hands came up. Clenched in the silk at her sides; his
stony smile.
'And Charles,' he said. Holding her down by the hips. 'Held down by your—'
'—twisting his head,' she told him, 'one side to the other with his tongue
sneaking out, like he wanted to, to lick. And Henry—to a thing like that—'
Holmes made a noise in his throat. 'Started to cry, did he?' he said. She put
her hand down; he was hard. 'Started to—?'
'I thought he might,' she said, and pressed, and he tried to jerk away. His
fingers: bruising-hard on her hips. 'Henry struggled,' she told him, 'and
moaned; and I tugged on his ropes, up behind him. Took off my shift, close—'
into Holmes's ear, all his lines drawn taut and humming '—so he could feel it.
You can't even move, I told him; you're—'
'—helpless,' he growled, 'powerless—'
'—tied too well; and when I let him feel my cock between his shoulder-blades he
gasped and gasped. Couldn't stop. Must have—'
'—made himself dizzy,' Holmes said.
'Mmmm,' Irene agreed. 'Gretha told Charles, Lick his foot.' Holmes laughed,
breathless, and she said, 'Henry sobbed so I slapped him from behind. In all
the tumult it was a minute before I realised Charles hadn't done it.'
'Couldn't take an order?' said Holmes. Grabbed at Irene's arse. It caught her
off-balance; she gasped, and he grinned, and ground her down harder. Oh she
thought: good boy; and pulled his head back by the hair and he snarled.
'He was starving to,' she told him. Mouth right up next to his ear as his
throat worked, wrenched back. 'Rubbing the back of his head all over the rug,
with Gretha saying, Lick, Charles and I want you to taste him. But he
wouldn't.'
'Needed to feel,' managed Holmes, with his throat working, 'he was one-up on
all and sundry.'
Irene laughed. Let go his hair and when his head came up she kissed him hard,
like a slap. He gave it all back with teeth. When she pulled back his face was
blazing.
'Do you think so?' she said.
His Adam's apple, and his angry mouth. She reached over: in the drawer of the
second side-table, a fresh pack of cigarettes.
'You could've made him,' he said. He ground her down, and she moved with him.
She said, 'With a show like that?' Laughing. Unkind. Lighting a fag, saying,
'With Henry, whining, trying to—to draw his knees together? Pull his tied legs
closer to Charles's face?'
'I suppose,' he said, 'you go in for that kind of thing'; and she said, 'With
him opening up to answer Gretha, but his mouth—' Holmes's panting mouth
'—watering so much he just slurped and shook his head.'
Holmes shook his head, like a dog.
Smiling. With her own clenched in her teeth, she put a cigarette between his
lips. He closed around it, staring at her as she leant forward and lit it from
her own. 'Needed to feel,' she said, 'he was one-up on all and sundry,' as he
drew breath and the spark glowed.
'And what about your little—,' he said, 'playmate, your little—she'd not be
pleased, she'd be—'
'She was almost spitting,' said Irene, 'climbing off him. Stay on the floor,
she told Charles, and left him there—'
'—fussing,' Holmes said, around the fag, with his hands still hard on her hips,
and her hand behind his head with her cigarette burning, 'and—whining—'
'Mmm,' purring, 'while Gretha took off her dress. Walked up to Henry, and sat
on his cock.'
His hands tightened. Her dressing gown, gaping wide.
'With you,' he said, 'whispering in his ear.'
'Telling him, mmm,' she said, 'Shame about the French letter, while Gretha
lifted herself up—' his palms on her arse, his smoke-streaming mouth and his
mean eyes '—and let herself down. Otherwise, I told him, Gretha could go back
to Capitaine Humbert, and you'd leak out all over his bollocks, while he fucked
up into her and licked your—'
'Bloody—'
'—feet. And Charles, on the floor. He was—' sitting back on his thighs,
dragging on her cigarette '—touching himself, I think.'
'Yes?' Holmes said, laughing around his fag. 'You imagine he might have been?'
and shoved his hand under—
—and she shoved her hand down against him, and he growled.
'You think he might've,' he said, his face all red but his eyes drained out,
with one palm on her bare skin, 'might've tried for—'
'Yes,' she said. Rubbing him through his flies; look at him hate her. 'Yes,'
sickly-sweet, 'but Gretha said not to move. Henry whining now because he
couldn't see Charles; and Gretha said, said, Stay still with a little nod, and
you see, Mr Holmes, I—I can take a—'
'Oh,' bucking up against her, 'can you—'
'So I circled 'round, and picked up the, the camera—'
(with a good, what, eight exposures in, and she'd turned the scene over again,
and again, Jouvenel already tied when she'd put the thing down, herself
accounted for, must be Charles, or Gretha, or Charles and Gretha: in the dark
en-suite which smelled always of perfume, sweat, onions from the kitchen;
Charles who had, after all, wrested the film away from the scandal-sheet boy,
or Gretha—and now Irene, teeth and elbows, with Holmes stubbing out his
cigarette and his wolf-blue eyes)
'—I picked up the camera,' she said, 'from the carpet. Charles looking up at
Gretha between Henry's legs, and the flashbulb,' she said with a wet mouth,
hand between his legs and—
A muffled slipping thump through silk to her arse; and then, without thought:
her hand hard to his cheekbone his digging fingers to her hip smack to his
knotted-up mouth, and again, and she wrenched his hair and twisted off and and
up and away from his surprised-sharp cutting teeth and she hit him again, and
pushed his shoulders hard.
His skull hit the back of the chaise before he caught himself. A breath. She
could see him hard in his trousers.
'Quite an image,' he panted.
She stood on the parquet with her dressing gown open and the sound of the surf.
Holmes sat up gingerly. His swollen mouth. Feeling with his fingers the
flushed-up tender side of his face, with his other hand still clenching in his
lap.
'He thought so,' Irene said. 'Henry.' Her cigarette, still burning in her hand.
'Because I—I told him. Gretha told Charles not to move, and I said, He can see
you, Sergent Jouvenel and, He's watching you fuck her, watching you, and he did
it harder, and Charles. His wide,' she said, 'blond face.'
Holmes had his handkerchief out, now. Dabbing at his mouth and the sweat on his
forehead, elbows on his thighs. She took a drag; wrapped her dressing gown
about her.
'I took a photograph,' she said, stubbing out her fag-end. 'Told Charles to get
up on his front, and he did. And I said, put your mouth on his feet, and he
just couldn't—couldn't wait—'
She breathed out; steady. Steady on. Holmes said, 'You took a—'
'Charles,' she said, 'kissing Henry's heels, his legs. The skin all raw from
the ropes at his ankles. With Gretha's—Gretha's hands on Henry's shoulders, and
her hips slamming down.'
Holmes folded up his handkerchief. He tucked it back in his pocket, and didn't
meet her eyes.
'I told him,' she said, 'You can taste him when he—'
'Did you.'
'—and Charles: the angle was bad, but he got his mouth up between them. His
face up between Henry's legs, Gretha's arse against his cheek, that's in a
photograph—'
Holmes's laugh was stony. She tugged black brocade closer about her, oddly
grateful, as he pulled a new cigarette from the pack on the table.
'After Henry finished,' she said, 'I turned Charles 'round in the space between
Henry's legs. Wrapped him in my fist, and asked: did he want it it like this?
Or did he want Gretha?'
Holmes tongued at his bleeding mouth. Irene remembered weeping, in the bottom
of Madame Colette's wardrobe. She thought of the newspaper on Armistice Day,
after Gretha was gone. She yearned, suddenly, to be alone.
'Charles very much did,' she said, 'want Gretha.'
Holmes levered himself off the couch; made his way past her to the drinks
trolley. He bent; then straightened up, with the fallen tumbler cupped
carelessly in his big hand.
'I made him beg,' Irene told Holmes's back, 'before I took my hand away. Gretha
got in his lap, and it was...'
She cleared her throat. A soft click of glass on metal, as he, with great care,
set the thing down.
'Well,' she said. Well. 'It was more or less immediate, after that. We untied
him after, Gretha and I. Charles and Henry were both limp: nothing to do but
put them to bed, and go tidy up. The en-suite was just through the door, and
the kitchen was just down the hall. We didn't think we'd be a moment. It was
stupid to leave the camera, but.'
'Oh yes,' he said. 'Quite,' with a perfunctory smile.
'They were dead to the world,' said Irene. 'But then. We were waylaid in the
hall. Questions from the other girls. From the cook.'
'Chaos must have reigned,' he said, solicitous. 'During the War.'
She shivered, though the breeze through the window had hardly cooled at all;
threw back her shoulders, and let her dressing down settle across her chest.
'By the time we made it back,' she said, with half a shrug, 'the men, and the
camera, were gone.'
Holmes nodded; unperturbed. Almost unconcerned. It was fully dark out, now, but
the air trickling inward from off the sea was still hot; stagnant. Irene's
draperies hung straight down. A person could stand, she thought, on the
footpath below: look up at the wall of bright-lit windows, craning up to the
fourth floor, to the narrow slit of blazing light.
'Should I,' she said, 'remove the tail from John Watson?' and Holmes laughed,
and pushed off from the drinks trolley with the palms of his hands.
'Why on Earth,' he said, making his way to the door, 'would I ask you to do a
thing like that?'
Saturday, August 27th, 1921
9pm (Hour 79)
Sherlock made good time. Just flew along, on the walk back from the train
station. His jacket swung from his arm and his shoes crunched on the gravel and
he nodded to the elderly gardener, now smoking in a chair on her front porch.
Showed his teeth, because he could. The old woman inclined her head as if to
someone she approved, and he thought: well, why not? He could be the type.
Rue de Saint-Malo became the Place de l'Église and it was hot, still. Stagnant,
and sweltering. The heat set up mirages: one gasped, and pointed. One doubled
up with laughter in the open street (Sherlock, in the open street, snickered),
when one saw, for example, emerging from the heat haze, plain Monsieur Oran the
grocer—as though one had expected someone quite different.
Someone different altogether.
In the street behind Sherlock a motorcar honked its horn. He flattened himself,
obliging, against the stonework wall. The driver waved a hand in thanks and
Sherlock, on a whim, doffed his hat and then followed it through into an old-
fashioned bow. Some giddy young man he could be, tonight, with no one to say
different. Some hopeful romantic, en route to—to an assignation, or a political
meeting, or the reading of a will; as a middle-aged vigneron motored by with
smoke in his eyes and sweat trickling down his face. Sherlock might emerge from
the heat-blur a barrister, perhaps. A sailor adrift; or a robber baron. What a
lark! He might emerge as anything at all.
At the twilit crossroads the Place de l'Église intersected itself; then turned,
as he crossed it, to the Rue de Bel Air. Snuffed itself out, he supposed:
swallowed its own tail. And along its whole length not a church in sight.
There must have been one, once. People, he thought, lighting a cigarette with
careless hands: what sentimentalists they were. Four walls and a set of pews,
and they kept on about the thing for years after it had burnt or been replaced,
or whatever happened to churches. They'd stumbled upon the chance to start
afresh, and yet still: here they were. Referring each other to God, in an empty
street.
And even the best ones, even—
Even Lamarck, for instance. (Sherlock breathed deep: English Dunhills in the
black of the night.) Great Lamarck, with his shining galleries in the Musée
d'histoire naturelle. Lamarck with his vast chain of being: every creature in
Nature, straining upward along it towards the pinnacle of Man. With all his
genius, Lamarck had looked into the face of chaos and come away with—what? A
woman in a weaving-house, throwing a shuttle until the skill she pricked and
pummelled into her fingers became graven in the cells of her daughters. It was,
Sherlock thought, not only naive but observably wrong. The bloody fool. The
street turned to the Route de la Touesse and he strolled along, blinking sweat
from his eyes, as heat swamped him in waves.
At the top of the path, he stopped to unlace his shoes; to remove his socks.
The Scots pines obscured the moonlight; but still he launched himself down at a
run. Battered his feet on roots; scraped them on needles. The sand on his soles
was cool, and cool, and then—as he came close to stumbling over a piece of
moonlit driftwood—sun-warmed; then wet. He stopped in the surf, sweating. Short
of breath. The moon silvered the sand, and the surf, and the looming silhouette
of Roz Ven, with all its windows dark. Water lapped around his trouser cuffs;
then around his knees. Undignified, he thought, but—well. Some people were; and
he, after all, might be anyone.
He waded out to his waist; to his chest. The buoyancy of the salt water, and of
the waves. And how cool it was. His untucked shirt ballooned out all around
him. Sherlock, on his back in the moonlight, might be a consummate swimmer. The
type who sought out water wherever he went. He might be soaring above his own
body. He might be miles away.
He might be an unknown village youth, dripping on the lawn in the front garden,
where Madame Jouvenel stood with a glass of wine and what looked to be a bone
china saucer.
'Good evening,' he said, in French that sounded alien. Certainly her head came
up; and she gave him a hard, suspicious stare before grunting good evening in
her turn. 'Kiki!' she trilled, soft, under her breath. Sherlock thought for a
wild moment she was coining him a new nickname, until she turned and carefully
placed the saucer on the ground.
A rustling, from beneath the rhododendron bush. Nothing came out. They both
looked over anyway: her crouched low on her haunches, and him standing behind
her, with his dripping shoes and socks in his hands.
It's continuing hot, the village youth might say; since perhaps he knew Madame
Jouvenel to nod to. Perhaps he'd seen her at the station, or visiting the
shops. He'd know of her fame; well, her face was in the papers. 'It's
continuing hot,' he would say; said; just as she trilled, again: 'Kiki!' and
the undergrowth stirred.
'The others are mostly,' she said, in an undertone, not looking at him, 'away
at some… play.'
'Oh yes?' the dim-witted village youth might say. Said.
'So-called. In St Malo; you can imagine the provincialism. I excused myself, on
the grounds of having taste.'
It was a clever remark. And there was a rough warmth to her voice; people
smiled. Sherlock with his stretched face might be a friend of hers: just come
up from Paris to take the waters. He pushed his wet hair out of his eyes.
'One imagines,' her Parisian friend might say, 'that the presence of Le Matin's
drama critic might be more than the others bargained for.'
She snorted, softly, and he got down on his hands and his knees; then, careless
of the dirt, lay on his stomach, in the grass in front of the rhododendron.
'Claudine is inside,' she said.
The smell of the soil. He rested his chin on his entwined fingers. Madame
Jouvenel's friend, just up from Paris, might have met Claudine. Might have been
accosted by her in the kitchen, and treated to a—might not want to go in.
'Henry,' he said, as a friend of the family might say: 'he's with—'
She opened her mouth, and then, seconds later: 'Yes.'
'And Mademoiselle Patat?'
He felt it, on the side of his face, when she slid her eyes at him sideways;
but his own stayed straight ahead.
'What's Mademoiselle Patat to—'
'Shhhh,' he said, barely moving his mouth: a mottled nose peeked out from the
gloom.
The stillness of the sea air settled around them: only the faintest breeze.
Shared silence, he thought, with academic interest, could be almost like
touching. Perhaps there should be clinics. Perhaps patients might sit together:
silent in the company of other dumb beasts. Probably Madame Jouvenel's friend,
just up from Paris, adored cats.
This one was white and ginger, with a single black splotch over its left ear.
It lapped daintily at cream in the saucer; then picked its way through the
grass. Rubbed its sides against Sherlock's salt-wet face and he brought his
hands up, slow, to pet with damp fingers through its patchy fur.
'I hadn't thought,' she said, and then: 'Do you… incline, that way?'
'Oh,' he said, startled, 'no.' But then Madame Jouvenel's friend from Paris
could—he might be—no, as the cat bolted into the night and she raised her voice
to its normal, strident pitch: 'I'd have thought, after all, if you had it in
you—you English, with your genital obsession—'
He laughed. Rolled on his side in his salt-encrusted untucked shirt, and
perhaps Madame Jouvenel's friend, just across the Channel from London for the
sea air: perhaps he was prone to such things. 'Oh come,' his hostess was
saying, as he rolled in the dirt, 'you understand completely that I am correct,
you would—'
'Putting—,' he got out—
'—hardly—'
'—my cousin,' levering himself up onto his elbows, to watch her being
affronted, 'and her lover in the room next to your husband, because you know he
dislikes two women together? Putting the Carcos next to them, so that
Madamoiselle Picard can listen to her would-be lover with his wife? You feel
yourself left behind for a much younger woman, so you take a lover young enough
to be her son; young enough to be your—'
'English prudery,' she sniffed, with her mouth curling up. 'Someone must
educate the boy.'
'—grand-son, and you want to tell me about English prudery?'
'I only meant,' she said, 'that here, things are more… advanced. One is free to
choose, one is free to—'
'Take lovers,' he said, because her London friend, having come so far, would be
allowed certain liberties, 'in full view of your husband.'
'Even in England surely it would be easier for you both. If you were to marry,
or Doctor Watson—some cosmopolitan girl.'
He laughed. He was still laughing. Rising up in the back of his throat against
the thought of three thirty-nine in the morning—no.
'More distasteful than hard labour, then, a wife?' She tutted. 'I only thought,
if you had it in you, to live as a real man... I had thought that, living as
you did, you must not incline so.'
The surf was a low roar below them, somewhere off to the left.
'And you, you're… cosmopolitan, are you? About his other women?' She didn't
answer, and he said, 'Claudine,' with his palms flat on the grass and the dirt,
'said you dropped her in a hurry, your last—Missy.'
'Missy!' she said. Laughed. Shook her head, and shifted down so she was sitting
next to him. 'Ouf. And what did Claudine tell you about Germaine Patat?'
'You're—'
'You English,' she said. 'Do you find that shocking? That my husband and I
might share a lover?'
'She is,' Sherlock said, 'lovely.'
'In very truth,' said Madame Jouvenel. In her left hand, faced away from him,
she still held a glass half-full of wine; she looked as surprised as he was, to
remember it. But she raised it to him, and toasted his health; took a sip and
then, considering, passed it over. He swirled it in the glass. Inhaled. Wet
fur, and soil. Raised it to his mouth.
'Then,' he said, 'your placement of Mademoiselle Patat in the room across from
yours: it was for your own convenience. Not a matter of annoying your husband
at all.'
'I am always,' she said, with her hand out, and he passed back the glass,
'attempting to annoy my husband.'
Softly he laughed; her friend from London would laugh softly.
'Last night?' said Sherlock, and she nodded, looking up at the house.
'Last night,' she said.
'Because you… enjoy her.'
She raised one kohl-sharpened eyebrow at him.
'Not a matter, I mean,' he said, 'of punishing the girl,' as in the backlit
doorway he noticed a haloed blonde head atop an Amazonian frame.
'That,' said Madame Jouvenel, 'is a matter between myself, and Mademoiselle
Patat.'
'And Henry,' he said, 'who might he—?'
'Ouf,' she said. 'Well. He and my secretary carried on a bit, last year.
Mademoiselle Beaumont, you know. Perhaps they were… reviving old flames. One
has only so much attention, don't you find, Monsieur—'
'Yes,' he said. Getting to his feet as Claudine watched them from the doorway
and the surf softened the edges of the distance. Saying 'Saumur Champigny,'
nodding to the glass, for perhaps Madame Jouvenel's friend from London was a
specialist in Continental wines. 'It always reminds me of—of leaves in a
forest, of—'
'—a certain… animal musk,' she said, stifling a smile; and her friend from
London would put out his hand so he put out his hand, and helped her up.
'Thank you,' he said. Closing his eyes against the light of the door. Opening
them. 'The fresh air, the—the sea,' and she grasped his knuckles, with a hard,
shrewd look.
'It's nothing,' she said. Dusting off her backside; taking his hand. 'Don't get
any ideas, Monsieur,' as he flinched, and she said: 'Mr. Holmès.'
Chapter End Notes
        1. Henry Jouvenel actually did fight a duel defending the honour
           of Le Matin against a slur from Charles Humbert's paper, Le
           Journal, though whether he historically fought against Humbert
           himself I'm not sure. It happened just prior to the First World
           War, in the heady first days of his and Colette's courtship; he
           incurred a wound to the arm that necessitated a sling.
        2. Henry Jouvenel was historically on leave during August of 1915;
           was also historically bored with his marriage and very probably
           historically visited Le Chabanais or someplace like it, during
           this time. Humbert was also in Paris that summer. Their long-
           time adversarial relationship was much as described.
           Essentially, the entire foursome episode is a fiction with no
           direct evidence in reality—but nothing much to contradict it,
           either.
        3. See the note to Chapter 1 for Georges Cuvier and Jean-Baptiste
           Lamarck; Lamarck was a pre-Darwinian evolutionist who posited
           that all beings were evolving teleologically along a great
           chain of being, of which humans were the head. He also
           theorised that offspring inherited traits acquired by their
           parents.
        4. "To live as a real man": Colette had a complex relationship
           with same-sex desire/relationships, both her own and other
           peoples'; but when she left Missy to be with, and later marry,
           Henry Jouvenel, one of her standard phrases in letters and
           conversation was that she was now going to go "be a real
           woman." As she almost universally passed harsher judgment on
           other people than she did on herself, I think it's a fair bet
           she'd extend that hetero-preferential mentality to Sherlock.
        5. According to Judith Thurman, the likelihood is high that
           Germaine Patat was indeed historically sleeping with Colette as
           well as with Henry during this summer, though Colette herself
           almost certainly wasn't sleeping with her husband, and her
           acknowledged liaison was with her husband's son. Are you dizzy
           yet?
***** A problem confronting the builder of bridges *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
Saturday, August 27th, 1921
10pm (Hour 80)
Claudine was leaning against the jamb. Looking down at Sherlock, looking up. He
climbed the hill, hearty and jovial: a sea-mad Londoner who'd held still for a
cat.
'The water is superb,' he called up in English. He waved his sodden shoes at
her. 'I couldn't resist. Run, fetch your bathing costume; we can go back
together. It's perfect for a midnight swim.'
'My God,' she said, raising her voice. 'The salt water, on that suit. Who could
imagine that an English Holmès—'
'Not at the play, I see?' he said.
'No, I—'
'To what are they subjecting the Roz Ven voyagers, then? Something overly
ambitious, I gathered from our hostess. Molière? Balzac? Tell me they're not
attempting Ibsen, I think I'd have to agree with Madame—'
'I take it Doctor Watson isn't with you?'
'—Jouvenel: it's an offence against all taste. One comes to the provinces,
after all, with a certain social contract in mind.'
'He is staying in Paris another night, then,' Claudine said. 'Well, no doubt—'
'If you wouldn't—' he said. Gesturing to his soaked-through suit, on the Roz
Ven threshold. 'A cloth, or—'
'—he will make good use of my—'
'Are you this,' he said, 'interfering with everyone, or do you only persist
in—'
'Sherlock—'
'—coddling me because you're still, despite my best efforts, labouring under a
misapprehension about how tremendously reassuring I find a mother figure with
your particular set of—'
'Sherlock!'
His empty working throat. All the fight gone out of him.
Claudine squinted into his face.
'What did she say to you?' she said.
'Pardon? What did who—ah.' Madame Jouvenel, still on the Roz Ven green.
Observing the whole absurd exchange from afar. He permitted Claudine's hand on
his arm.
'Nothing,' he told her. 'We just—just chatted. There was a cat.'
She frowned at him. He closed his eyes.
'I'm wet,' he said. 'If you could—'
'Of course,' she said. 'Of course.' She took her fingers from his elbow, and
shifted her weight to let him past her.
In the ground-floor WC the shelves were heaped with clean white towelling. He
unbuttoned his shirt; applied cotton terry to his hair and his shoulders. He
might draw a bath, he thought. A civilised person, just over from London, would
draw a bath. A civilised person would open the taps; sink down under near-
scalding water—but here was a knock, on the door.
Claudine opened it a crack without waiting for an answer, and thrust his summer
pyjamas through the gap. She must have run upstairs. Rifled through
their—through the trunks. And now she shook the pyjamas at him—an impatient,
disembodied hand—so he bestirred himself to cross the tiny room and take them.
The hand withdrew. The door clicked shut. He stood on the other side of it,
blue cotton in one hand and white towelling in the other.
'I know she can be… difficult,' came Claudine's voice, and then she said:
'Colette.'
Sherlock rubbed at his face.
'You no doubt think—I can hardly imagine what you think,' said Claudine.
'Probably that I've gone soft in my old age. That I ought to remove Hélène by
force; drive back to Paris and sell the Jouvenels' dirty secrets for enough to
keep us both. Cut ties with the whole Jouvenel lot, and consider
myself—consider myself lucky.'
Sherlock's grunt echoed off the tile. He'd bought these pyjamas, he seemed to
recall, in a shop off Regent Street, on a chilly October afternoon.
'I hadn't really thought,' he said. 'Though you had, apparently.'
'I couldn't.'
'No. I suppose not.'
'Even if Hélène—even if she wanted it of me.' Claudine sighed. 'But she
wouldn't.'
Sherlock pulled blue cotton over his tacky knees, and his hips. The shop-
woman's husband, he remembered, had been planning to leave her: the cash-
register drawer newly fixed after years of scraping, and lipstick stashed away
in the back room in a colour that didn't suit his wife. She hadn't suspected.
Probably the whole business was forgotten, by now. 'And in any case,' Claudine
was saying, 'Colette is—she's my friend.'
'I know,' Sherlock said.
He gathered up his salt-damp trousers, and his shirt, and his sandy jacket; and
considered the empty bath with his hands full of cloth. He might at least have
run his hair under the taps. It was drying around his forehead in an itching
salty crust.
Out in the corridor Claudine was leaning against the wall. He'd half-expected
her to have gone off somewhere. After Hélène Picard, perhaps. But Mademoiselle
Picard, he remembered, was at the play. At the St Malo village theatre, who
were getting up Voltaire, or… Shaw, perhaps. Perhaps Wilde.
'Have you eaten?' Claudine asked. 'There are fresh peaches. A baguette. Some
cider.'
He didn't answer. She shifted back to standing, so he followed her into the
kitchen: salt scraping his sunburnt nape, and grainy between his toes. Claudine
stood with her back to him, at the cutting block. Anyway, he thought, supper
meant another hour in which the linens on the big bed in the attic room could
remain… undefiled. Her startled eyes, over her shoulder: he must have made a
noise. Undefiled. His lips, stretched in a grin.
Must look like a clown's face. Crust cracking off it. He perched on a spindly
white kitchen chair; hands on his jaunty thighs.
'She isn't,' Claudine said, slicing into a peach, 'just a friend, you know.'
'Oh,' said Sherlock, 'Christ.' High-pitched noises—giggles, weren't they?
clawing up the back of his throat. 'Oh Christ, not you as well.'
'I don't—'
'Is playing bed-warmer for its owner, then,' he got out, 'some kind of—of Roz
Ven boarding fee? Will I too be—' doubled over '—called upon, to settle my
debts? Only I'll have to plan ahead. Visit the market. Smooth my way with
enough wine, or cider, or—or a solution of—'
Tears on his face. He couldn't breathe.
'I never went to bed with Colette,' Claudine said.
'Ah, well.' Wiping his eyes on his pyjama-sleeve. Gasping. 'Don't give up hope.
Statistically, the odds in your favour are, not to say overwhelming, but—'
'Stop it.'
His teeth clicked together. Salt trails through salt. The silence stretched
out.
'What happened?' said Claudine, at last.
He shook his head. Gestured, vaguely, towards the sea.
'There was,' she said, 'a cat?'
'I patted it,' Sherlock agreed.
'And then?'
'It ran off.' Waving his hand. 'Into the night.'
'Sherlock.'
Claudine's voice was bent back wrong. Sentiment: anxious. Heartbroken. Only,
Sherlock had gone for a swim. He had patted a cat. He hadn't laughed so hard in
weeks.
'All right,' he said. His voice, lately of London, ought to sound just so.
'Tell me about you and Madame Jouvenel.'
Claudine slid the peach and the knife onto a plate. She brought them to the
table and sat down across from him, in one of the flimsy chairs.
'Your work,' she said. 'The way you live. It—you found it, and it lifts you
up.'
Sherlock swallowed, bitter in the back of this throat. He didn't answer.
'But there was a time,' Claudine said, 'when it didn't.'
Her kitchen-knife clinked on the plate, to the wet thlunk of peach slices
hitting porcelain.
'I remember,' said Sherlock.
Like so.
'Then. If there were someone who had helped you from—from one place to the
other. And if that person were, themselves, in—'
'I'm here,' he bit out. Too fast. 'Aren't I,' and then he shut his teeth, hard,
and closed his eyes.
'Well,' Claudine murmured, after a long moment. 'One does the best one can.'
On the wall of the kitchen, across from his seat, black saucepans hung on
hooks. A house-fly buzzed, one to the next; and wouldn't settle.
'That person,' Claudine said, raising her chin at him, 'for me, was Colette.'
'Pardon?'
'Just as I say.'
'She's not a violinist,' he blurted out (too familiar, too—), 'I've seen her
hands.'
'Nor did I teach you,' said Claudine, 'to deduce secrets, or solve puzzles.'
Sherlock took a breath; sighed it out. His skin itched. His eyelids and the
backs of his knees and the cleft of his backside. He was suddenly very weary.
By his left ear the house-fly buzzed.
'I thought you met on the stage,' he said.
'We met at the home of my father's fiancée. Or, as I called her to her face
that day, my father's whore.'
'You wouldn't,' he said. Humouring her. Buzz, buzz, buzz.
'By the time I met you, of course not. The winter my mother died I was, what?
Twenty-five?'
'Twenty-six.'
'Twenty-six. I should have been called it myself by then, and much worse. But I
was scarcely eighteen, the spring of 1895. Eighteen, with my mother's
compositions out of fashion; two younger sisters and a brother who—well.'
'Was not precisely swelling the family purse?' Sherlock managed. His tongue
felt sharp in his mouth but loose laughter was welling up again, welling up in
him from whence? Towards where? She wouldn't like it; so he blinked and blinked
his salt-encrusted eyes.
'He'd gone to sea,' Claudine was saying. 'Already, by that time. Shipped out
from Portsmouth on his twenty-first fête.'
Sherlock nodded: a civilised visitor, just over from London. She slid the plate
of peach-slices towards him and he took one. The juice ran down between his
fingers: a thing that was allowed on holiday. When he licked it up the salt
mingled with the sweet.
'So,' she said. 'I was to be the well-behaved daughter. Putting my sisters
through school, giving violin-lessons to brats from Le Marais. I knew I was
not—not marriageable, you understand. And if I were not to marry… I thought I
should be trapped in that room forever. I hated my father, and his woman, and
my sisters too. Hated them all; as one only can at eighteen.'
At eighteen, Sherlock thought, or at—
'So you sought her out,' he said. 'Your father's fiancée.'
She jiggled the plate. He took another dripping slice. The fly buzzed-buzzed
and the heat sat heavy on their heads.
'Her name was Moreno,' Claudine said. 'Marguerite Moreno, and she lived in an
apartment off the Rue de Bellechasse.'
She sat back, digging in; Sherlock closed his itching eyes. He might be an old
traveller, he thought. A Victorian gentleman, just over from London; who had
known well the demimonde in the Rue de Bellechasse, twenty-five years before.
'And I had,' Claudine was saying, 'well, it hardly matters. A girl, an artist,
she had asked me to go with her to Barcelona. I felt, if only this slut had not
lured my father away. And then I was so angry, all that afternoon, with my
students. One boy left in tears; so I'd lost that money as well. And there, in
the Rue de Bellechasse, this glamourous woman, this actress. So, yes, I marched
over to her flat. She was having coffee with a friend and I screamed at her. My
God, the things I screamed. No doubt you can imagine them.'
'No doubt I can,' he said, with his eyes still closed. One's smile in such
circumstances should be wry; yet amused.
'Marguerite,' she said, 'just sat there, her spine straight under a brand-new,
oh, Worth, probably, green satin gown. And me in five-year-old linen. And this
young Bourguignonne friend—'
'Ah.'
'—with her country accent and her long hair falling over her shoulder, laughing
at me.' Claudine, now, starting to laugh herself. The table shaking in tremors
under his fingers. These Continental women, the visitor might think: with their
volatile tempers.
'A girl,' she was saying, laughing, 'from the provinces. Scarcely older than I
was. I, who had lived in Paris all my life. And she didn't even try to hide it.
Shrieking with laughter while I shouted myself hoarse.'
'Quite the kind of thing,' he agreed, 'that your Madame Jouvenel would enjoy.'
'Madame Gauthier-Villars, then. Married only two years. She was the toast of
Paris because the scent still lingered on her: fresh country air and the slate-
dust of a provincial girls' school. Can you imagine?'
He opened his eyes and let out a breath; made it shake into a clubbish chuckle.
'Not,' she went on, as he ran his tongue around his sticky mouth and pictured
them both: slips of things, ghosts of girls, screaming in a drawing room on the
Rue de Bellechasse, 'not that I knew that, then. I only shouted at Marguerite,
while she stared and this country girl laughed, oh, it was dreadful. My voice
broke. I started to cry. The little provincial falling out of her chair
laughing. To feel so ridiculous, at eighteen.'
The window above the sink was black now, between white mullions: nothing to be
seen. There could be, for all he knew, someone on the other side; someone
looking in at Claudine with her hand half-obscuring her mouth and her
distinguished relation in his Regent Street pyjamas, a man who had patently
never been eighteen, or eleven, talking of the old days in Madame Jouvenel's
whitewashed country kitchen. It would look… cosy. Well. Perhaps it was.
'Yes,' he said. 'Feels unbearable, doesn't it.'
'I ran out,' Claudine agreed. 'Ran down the stairs, could not see; skinned my
knee. Me, and my visions of—of Barcelona, with a lover. Laughed out of a
whore's flat; crying in the street like a child.'
The house-fly buzzed against the black glass and the mullions. Sherlock moved
his head with the fond forbearance of a Hyde Park grandfather in the summer,
his eyes slow against the movement of his skull. He blinked. Blinked. Got to
his feet with his head aching, the plate clicking in the sink. It was almost as
if he might leave himself behind.
'Colette caught me up,' Claudine was saying to Sherlock's back, 'before I had
walked half a mile. She took me to a bistro; ordered a bottle of Bourgogne and
a plate of prawns. She called me a bitter, mediocre bastard while I ate her
food and drank her wine; said Paris was full of girls like me, said she'd seen
it already; said that what I needed, if I were to make my own way, was to make
an impression.'
'An impression,' he repeated. 'She would know.'
'She would,' said Claudine. 'Even then. She told me: they will notice, if you
do the unexpected thing. They don't expect, that a girl like me and a woman
like Marguerite could be—well, she needn't spell it out. And had I bothered to
find out, she asked, how my father's new mistress spent her days?'
If Sherlock were outside, looking in, he would be staring into his own face.
The face of a distinguished traveller. A man just over from London.
'And did she,' he asked Claudine, his heavy tongue moving from miles down the
garden, 'allow you time enough to answer?'
'No,' she said. 'Not really. I nearly choked, you understand. An actress! I
said, but she spoke over me: Marguerite Moreno, the most promising young
actress since Bernhardt. And I had told her I played the violin: was I good? I
said I'd been playing since the age of three; had she not heard my mother's
name? And well then, she said: had I any notion how much more I could bring in:
a young, blonde, premier violinist for a drama on the boulevards, than an
eighteen-year-old tutor in a garret studio?'
Sherlock nodded; the skin of his neck hurt him, when he moved his head. Any
sunburnt visitor would cross to the ice box. Sherlock crossed to the ice box.
Chilled cider-bottle against his smarting nape. 'You, of course,' he said, with
his voice like so, 'were incensed.'
'Of course,' Claudine said. 'I stood up at the table, to leave. Was she telling
me, I shouted, to ask my father's whore for a position?'
Cool glass. Ice-wet against his neck. The gentleman from London, someone would
think, looking in the window at the scene, is suffering from the sun. The
English were always greedy for it, weren't they. Almost a match for the Germans
for burning up on a sunny day. And the Frenchwoman going on. Saying, 'Colette
just laughed at me.' Saying, 'Nibbled on a prawn.'
Saying, 'She told me: for God's sake don't say it like that. Swallow your
dislike; do not show it on your face. People will say how men and women have no
power over you. She told me she would prepare the way with Marguerite. Told me
Marguerite felt for the children my father had left behind; and if she felt—if
she felt she were doing something, and that I loved her for it—well. Then she
would feel better about her marriage.'
'Ah.' Marriage. Glimpsed from without, he thought, their faces must have
changed.
'Indeed,' said Claudine. 'I felt sick, and she said, oh yes, he is going to
marry her. Your mother can write a song about it; and you can play it to crowds
on the boulevards. In a beautiful silk dress.'
The house was silent. The cider was cool.
'And did you?' Sherlock asked, for the benefit of the ghostly visitor, who
might even now be standing on his toes outside the kitchen window, face to face
with the long-time Londoner, unaccustomed to the sun.
'She spent a week,' said Claudine, 'telling Marguerite how charming I was; how
talented, though she'd never heard me play. By the time I went 'round again to
her flat, Marguerite welcomed me. Got me a place in the pit at the show she was
playing. It was the beginning of—of the life I chose. And Colette made it
possible, that I pay my own way. That in my bed last night Hélène—'
'Yes,' he said, and she said: 'And so you see, whatever she may have said to
you—'
'No,' he said again. 'Of course.'
He put the bottle down by the sink, her eyes reflected in the window.
Sentiment: pleading; expectant. If he turned around, there they would be.
Anyone, he thought, would offer something in return. Some morsel of fellow
feeling. It could be anything. Any little thing. It hardly mattered what he
said, with his voice just so.
'Do you hear from him, then?' he asked her. 'Raphäel?'
Claudine inhaled.
'Dead,' she said. 'These four years.'
He nodded. He cleared his throat, at his image reflected back. His sun-pink
salty face.
'He did tell me,' Claudine said, 'before he left, he took me aside—' and the
London gentleman ('Oh, I'm certain,' Sherlock said) ran his hand over his face.
Doubtless tired from all the fresh sea air.
'I don't—are you,' Claudine said, and licked her lips, and then: 'Doctor Watson
has only gone to follow up a lead, in Paris.'
Glenkinchie. Three thirty-nine in the morning.
'But one never knows,' said Sherlock. He turned. And smiled.
The visitor from London, one might think, as one squinted through the gloom and
the dirty glass into the warm-lit kitchen, had business to attend to; had
thoughts that were returning, inexorably, to the City; to the fog and the
vaults and the unanswered correspondence that must await him at his desk. He
was, one would assume, a man of weight. A man of consequence, unflappable;
turning over papers in a dark-wood room. Saying, serene: 'One never really
knows. Does one?'
And he kissed his cousin's perplexed forehead, in the quiet evening; and she
let her fingers slide along his arm; and he took himself up to bed.
 
Saturday, August 27th, 1921
10pm (Hour 80)
'Terrible, isn't it?' Irene said; and the woman next to her said, 'Hm?'
Huge brown eyes. Black curls down her back. If the woman seemed any less tiny
removed from the bulk of Henry Jouvenel, it was a close thing; her bare ankle
might fit the circle of Irene's thumb and her middle finger. Bowed over the bar
with that look about her like she'd buckle in moments for a kind word; a soft
hand at her back. Irene's hands, after Germaine, and Holmes, were twisting into
shapes. Wanting to turn into some hard thing.
She'd watched his back from her balcony as he'd disappeared into the dark.
Having struck; longing to strike. Longing to flex and spar. She couldn't settle
and she hadn't wanted to so she'd thrown on the black Chanel with the red edges
and her shoes (red) and her lips (red) and she'd filled her handbag (black)
with paint and mirrors and come out swinging. And then: right in her lap.
Parked outside the St Malo theatre was the ancient Renault from the garage at
Roz Ven. Exquisite she'd thought, with her mouth watering and her hand cupped
to its dirt-streaked window. Delicious as she'd slithered past the porter and
into the bar, peeking past the dozing attendant into the theatre. The play was
dreadful and the Roz Ven lot had Paris palates; surely some quarry would break
cover and could be drawn out. Her photographs could be, this very moment, in a
handbag perching on a restless knee. She'd thought: sublime.
'Terrible,' she drawled, now. 'Execrable.' Putting on Paris like a mantle;
gathering it about her with an offended face.
The woman's head, drooping over her wine glass, nodded vaguely.
'I mean to say,' said Irene, 'their Kristine and Rank are fine, I suppose. But
with a Nora like that! Ouf. And the children.'
The woman flinched. 'One mustn't expect too much,' she said, 'with regard to—to
provincial players.'
Mustn't one, Irene didn't say, or isn't this my lucky night or in Le Havre,
before the War, but only: 'Goodness! I should think one might dissuade them
from looking directly at the audience, in any case. And from swallowing half
their lines. Between my neighbour's snores and the wailing of the brats—'
The woman bit her lip.
'Oh,' Irene said. Only now saying: oh. Such moneyed viragoes were always so
self-involved. 'Oh,' she said, 'I'm so sorry. I had thought—you did leave, you
know. After the first act.'
The woman shook her head. A curl tumbled in front of her eye.
And so Irene shifted; cleared her throat. Disconcerting, they would be: these
comings-down to the level of the populace. She shuffled and hemmed; and as she
fussed her handbag from one knee to the other, she caught the faintest lift at
the corner of the woman's stretched-tight mouth.
'Diane,' she told her then. An uncomfortable smile. 'Diane de Lamartine.'
Diane bestowed her Christian name like a favour; like a gift-wrapped box held
aloft on her outstretched hand; and Irene liked her neighbour more for every
moment the woman eyed it, unconvinced. When she shifted her weight at last, it
was to clasp the tips of the fingers, briefly, with a whisper-light touch.
'Madame Carco,' she said, with subtle stress on the Madame. That's me, Irene
thought, put in my place.
'I fear I've alarmed you,' said Diane.
'No, I—'
'Let me buy you a drink.'
'It's not—'
'But I insist,' Diane said, and: 'All right,' said Madame Carco, after a beat.
So: Diane's hard hand signaled to the bartender, for another of the same. He
set to.
'You are here alone?' Diane asked. Making conversation, with her mouth pursed:
see? she would be thinking. She could converse with the commoners, in the lobby
of a provincial theatre. 'You are staying in St Malo? In one of the hotels
along the shore?'
'No,' said Madame Carco, 'we—the summer house of a friend of my husband's, from
Paris—'
'Oh you're married!' exclaimed Diane, who had as a flimsy excuse the glass
blocking Madame Carco's left hand; and, as a less flimsy one, her own
narcissism. 'I was married, you know. Only a few years we had, before I lost
him. The War took so many brave boys.'
'Oh,' said Madame Carco, shifting on her seat. 'I'm sorry.' Then took a too-
large sip of her drink, and choked when Diane, absentmindedly, patted her hand.
'Thank you, dear,' Diane said; and then, supremely unconcerned, 'Oh no,' as the
woman coughed and spluttered. 'Are you quite all right?'
Madame Carco's shoulders shook. Diane cast down dubious glances, spine very
straight; and when their eyes met, Madame Carco's were narrowed. Getting there,
Irene thought, as Diane pursed disapproving lips.
Any of the Roz Ven men would've been simpler targets, if they'd only had the
sense to leave the play themselves; but then Irene had always risen to a
challenge. A shame she couldn't race him at it, really: Holmes. Given the same
prize and the same course, surely she'd finish noses ahead; he was so
wonderfully distractible. They could play it over the course of an evening,
perhaps. Best four out of seven, choosing each others' marks.
Another moment and Madame Carco really was quite all right; though with wet
eyes and flushed cheeks, and a hand that kept clicking nails against her glass.
'And your husband, dear,' said Diane, as the clicking picked up, 'what did he
do, during the War?'
'He was an aviator,' Madame Carco snapped. Irene, conjuring an image of the
man, pontificating at Roz Ven with his gold glasses glinting in the sunshine,
let Diane raise her eyebrows and cut her eyes away so that Madame Carco
amended, 'He had his license, anyway. And he was stationed with an air unit, in
Gray, as—'
'Mmmm.'
'—a bursar of the post.'
Her thin shoulders drew together, defiant. Her chin tipped up. She was no doubt
trying to meet Diane's eyes—but Diane, as it happened, was looking away.
'That's all right, dear,' said Diane, vaguely. Gazing over at the front door,
through which nobody in particular was walking. 'That's all right. Only so many
Georges Guynemers, aren't there? They can't all be heroes. Especially when one
must think about putting—' waving a hand, 'food on the table, as they say.
Better that you got him back, wasn't it? You and the children.'
Like a slap; like a thunderclap: lovely. The woman started almost off her
stool. Her hand came down on the bar, catching her weight and clinging on;
while Diane, examining the wall, resumed patting at her tensed white knuckles.
'Just think,' Diane was saying. 'One could hardly hire a nanny off the pension
and live on it as well. Why, I find the checks hardly worth the trouble of
depositing. You'd have had to go out in the world yourself, and leave your
little ones with strangers; unless, of course, you've relations nearby?
Though,' she added, eyeing Madame Carco's dress, 'not family in Paris, surely.'
Though in truth it was only neglected, the dress. The dress, and the woman's
wild curls, and her skin. She held herself perfectly still, a tiny battered
wall against the onslaught, and Irene saw again, in her mind's eye, the room at
Roz Ven that must have been the Carcos': his manuscript pages tacked up on all
the walls; and in the WC her sad washed-out under-things, hung to dry on the
far side of the bath. Grief, maybe, and fury: Irene could drink her from a
Champagne flute. A woman like Diane, though: she would never know the
difference.
Diane would say, as indeed she was saying: 'In any case, this way you needn't
trouble them, and you needn't move house. Only proper, for a married
establishment. And you can raise your children yourself, which I hear is all
the rage amongst women of your—'
'I haven't any,' Madame Carco whispered; at last.
'I beg your pardon?' said Diane. The girl's face. Irene could play it like a
harp.
'I have no children,' Madame Carco said.
'What, not any? I'd thought—didn't you say you had?'
'I want—but my husband—'
'My dear girl,' said Diane. 'Not even during the War?'
Madame Carco flushed up. Knuckles stretched tight, still, on the bar.
'I came out to the bar,' she said, 'because those precious children—and Nora
seemed not to care.'
Nora, Irene thought, had seemed to be half-asleep, being fed her lines by a
barely-concealed stage-hand; but she supposed that qualified as a disregard for
the children. More likely Madame Carco had read the play to please her inflated
husband.
'But surely,' Diane said, dismissive, 'men are very like children. You must
only make him realise it is to his advantage to give you what you want. Another
man, to make him hoard his toys; another girl to make him hungry, just as you
happen along—why,' she added, looking as if in surprise down at her own body,
with its beads and its pearls and its legs bare to the knee, 'is your seat
still vacant? I can have him in your bed by an hour after curtain, my dear.'
She almost meant it. Almost laughed. Stumbling in, half-tipsy, in the guise of
a dizzy American; giggling with him through the interminable third act,
over—what? Imagined expatriate exploits in the Quartier Latin, no doubt. Mr
Pound said to Mr Joyce, with her dress falling off her shoulder; winding him up
tight, tighter, and then flinging him at last into the path of his wife. She
was half-off her stool, with a quickness unseemly in Diane de Lamartine.
But Madame Carco fidgeted; wouldn't look at her. A shame, Irene thought,
climbing back onto her seat. It would have made for some amusing pillow-talk:
husband and wife, comparing impressions of that singular woman from the
theatre.
'During the War,' said Madame Carco, 'he would. With me, and with—but it made
no difference.' Irene speculated whether there was anywhere on her body the
woman wasn't blushing. Diane just said, 'Heavens.'
Down the bar a young scion, hair and necktie rumpled, had just poured himself
onto a stool. He winked at them. Diane smiled back. 'With you so much in love,'
she said to Madame Carco, 'that is a difficulty. And not so much as a real
indiscretion to justify you, from your bursar of the post.'
'You don't know,' Madame Carco said, 'the first thing—' with a weird wet hiccup
that turned even Diane's head. 'Not the first thing.'
'Oh darling girl,' said Diane.
'Not a thing,' repeated Madame Carco, and then squeezed her eyes shut as the
bartender brought them another round.
'You're setting yourself up as what, dear?' said Diane, treacly, as Madame
Carco knocked back half her glass. 'A secret Bohemian? No dreams of a banking
post and medals on your husband's coat? Of afternoons in the park with the
children and conversation at dinner about how Versailles has made the world
safe for—'
'I do,' said Madame Carco, very quiet, 'so I went to bed with our married host,
just.' She laughed. 'He's got children on three women at least.'
'Oh,' Irene said, 'my'; her hands steady. 'And when was this, then, this…
scandalous behaviour?'
'Last night,' Madame Carco said, with Irene practically mouthing along. 'I
don't think he even wanted to, really. I was the only woman at the house under
the age of forty whom he hadn't—I think he wanted to complete his collection.'
'Plenty to be said for women over the age of forty,' Irene said, not thinking,
not even—Diane would never. She could have clapped a hand to her idiot mouth;
and now the Carco woman was looking at her strangely, like coming out of a fog.
'I… suppose,' she said.
'If he was only adding a beast to his hunting-board,' said Irene—said
Diane—'you must have been keeping track of your time.'
'Of course.'
Diane nodded. Irene nodded. 'I hope,' she said, 'it takes.'
'Thank you,' said Madame Carco, her small features twisted into a mask of
puzzlement, her drink empty, her eyes scanning the room. From inside the
theatre came the sound of sleepy applause; and the doors across from the bar
swung open to release the first of the staggering audience.
'My husband,' Madame Carco said. 'The rest. I should—,' gesturing to them as
they stretched and groaned into the lobby.
'Yes,' Irene said.
They were crowding now, from the doors. Madame Carco ought to be meeting them.
'Yes,' Irene said, again. 'Well, dear. It was lovely talking with you. I
hope—,' and she nodded, as Madame Carco smiled and slid off her stool. Across
the lobby, from the corner of her eye, Irene caught the figures of Henry
Jouvenel and his beautiful blonde; and the stout spectacles of Monsieur Carco,
who, spotting his wife weaving her way through the crowd, put up a hand.
'Germaine!' Irene called, in a roughened, lowered Germanic accent at Madame
Carco's retreating back; and watched her startle; and stop, and turn her head
to scan the crowd; but by the time she'd completed the turn, Irene had slid off
her stool, and taken cover in the shifting mass of bodies, headed for the
doors.
Chapter End Notes
        1. This week, in 'History: I Couldn't Make This Shit Up': the
           historical Catulle Mendès (poet, and father to both the
           historical and the fictional Claudine) actually did leave the
           historical Augusta Holmès (composer, and Claudine's mother) for
           the actress Marguerite Moreno, who in 1895 met and became close
           friends with the young Colette, still married to her first
           husband. In 1895 Mendès was planning to marry Moreno, although
           that never panned out, because later that year she met the
           symbolist writer Marcel Schwob, and ended up marrying him in
           1900. Judith Thurman writes that Marguerite Moreno became
           something unusual, for Colette: not a rival, a lover or an
           acolyte, but a friend and peer.
        2. Please enjoy a gratuitous image of this beautiful 1895 Worth
           tea gown, which I have Marguerite Moreno wearing for her coffee
           with Colette: [Worth tea gown 1895]
        3. Sarah Bernhardt was a dramatic actress whose fame, by 1895, had
           reached superstar proportions. Marguerite Moreno went on to
           share the stage with her at the Comédie Française, and later,
           in 1903 left that company to work at the Théâtre Sarah-
           Bernhardt, which Bernhardt directed.
        4. Re: Rank, Kristine, and Nora: As Sherlock feared, the play
           being put on by the provincial St Malo theatre troupe is
           Ibsen's A Doll's House.
        5. The little snippets of information about Francis Carco's
           military career are essentially true: he had his aviator's
           license but spent most of the War as a bursar of post; late in
           the War he was transferred to an airborne division, but didn't
           get to spend much time flying.
        6. Georges Guynemer: Possibly clear from context, but Guynemer was
           a French flying ace and national hero, who was shot down by the
           Germans in 1917.
        7. Also true: Germaine Carco's given name. Three Germaines, one
           country house, three weeks in August of 1921. Sounds like the
           recipe for a summer blockbuster to me.
***** Unweave, unwind, unravel *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
Sunday, August 28th, 1921
9am (Hour 90)
'Good Lord,' Irene said, as her coffee cup clicked, indignant, in its saucer.
'And you roust me out of bed at—did you sleep at all, last night?—for a little
chat about this...'
'Imbecile.'
'Because I must not encounter many of the type, in my daily life. I'd be
missing them.'
Holmes, across her little balcony-table, practically out in public and drinking
her tea like some parody of a civilised person, pulled in his chin with his
eyebrows up.
'You,' he said, 'of all people, can recognise a useless man.'
'I don't believe for a moment you're—'
'Who,' he interrupted, 'sees a strange woman at the public telephone at half
three in the morning, and doesn't feel curious?'
She narrowed her eyes; but his face was blank. If she hadn't seen him herself
when he'd been shaking; growling; trying to slap—
'Similar thoughts,' she said, 'had crossed my mind.'
'So,' he said; and she said: 'So.'
She sat up. Refilled their cups from the coffee pot. He smiled at her, quick
and desultory: like the man they hired to keep the accounts at Le Chabanais,
with whom Irene sometimes shared a pastry in her dressing-gown and hair-papers
as he massaged their accounts. He holidayed with his granddaughter in Rouen.
Irene, on the balcony, patted surreptitiously at her coiffure.
'But he told you,' she said, 'it was a young woman.'
'Seemed to have no doubt. Though with such paltry skill at observation, it
could just as well be a diminutive man in a dress.'
'The person was small?'
'The person was assumed to be a woman, at twenty yards, in a coat, despite the
heat. Was probably carrying things, needed places to store them. But a man in a
full-length coat—and besides…'
He sipped at the steaming cup. Down on the promenade, a gaggle of white-clad
girls sauntered past, chattering to set up an ache in her head.
'And besides?' she prompted him, and he let out a breath.
'I have reason to believe that if the person who placed that call from the
telephone box in St Coloumb wasn't you—'
'You've already said the person was French.'
'For which you could easily pass,' he said; but there was no heat to it. 'And I
saw you fleeing Roz Ven shortly after two-thirty: had you been traveling on
foot, that timing would work out about right. Only, from the marks on your legs
when you returned to the hotel yesterday, you'd stowed a bicycle.'
'I had,' she said, 'yes.'
'So. If you had intended to telephone to Paris from St Coulomb, why loiter
about for the better part of an hour, when at the time you had no intelligence
of—' no hitch, she listened for it but it didn't come '—Doctor Watson's
movements, and therefore no reason to prefer one time over another? No, I can
extend you the benefit of the doubt in that particular regard.'
Irene massaged her temples.
'Not,' she said, 'on the strength of my wit and charm?'
'No,' said Holmes. He almost smiled.
'Then we've got,' she said, 'we've got, well. Plainly I was the one breaking
into Roz Ven, wasn't I, looking for my photographs and then for your name. And
the break-ins at Le Matin and Claire Boas's house were—'
'Could have been—'
'—some half-rate burglar hired by Charles Humbert, but we still don't know,'
with his clean empty eyes watching her over the rim of his coffee cup, 'who has
my photographs. Or who might have called Doctor Watson from the village.'
'True,' he said, 'but that wasn't my point.' He set down his cup with a click
as the girls on the promenade set up another round of squealing. 'I have reason
to believe that our telephoner, if it wasn't you, was someone present at Roz
Ven that day. During the luncheon.' He sipped his coffee. 'Before Doctor Watson
went back up to Paris.'
Snarling, he had been. Spitting. Twisting away from her hands; and now it was
almost as if he could scarcely keep his attention on their conversation. As she
was no doubt supposed to do, she watched him watch the sea.
'Oh yes?' she asked him.
'I made a comment,' he said, waving a lazy hand, 'that implied I thought Madame
Boas herself might be responsible. I think the call to Doctor Watson was a
reaction. Meaning—'
'Meaning,' she mused, 'that one can rule out small-boned men.' He laughed,
unexpected, into his coffee.
'Indeed,' he said. 'Unless one of the Jouvenel boys made the trek into St
Coloumb. Renaud could never pass for an adult woman, but Bertrand might; though
whether he could speak in a convincing female voice is another question. But
supposing the caller was neither boy, it certainly can't have been, as you say,
Henry Jouvenel, or Francis Carco.'
'The women, then,' she said.
'We can do better than that, I think,' said Holmes, pedantically. Irene was
visited by the desire to kick him, just a little. 'Isabelle de Comminges,
otherwise known as The Panther, might summon up unsuspected reserves of energy
to take her old Renault out under cover of moonlight; but I checked before I
left this morning, and the mileage gauges on both cars remain untouched since I
checked them on Friday afternoon. The woman is theatrical, which is a point
against her; but she is also genuinely ill; Madame Jouvenel no doubt requested
a doctor's signed promise of imminent death before letting her rival onto her
property. The Countess won't have walked the distance.'
'Theatrical,' Irene repeated. Her voice was bland, but the syllables sat heavy
on her tongue.
'It's a point against you, as well,' he said, gazing out to sea.
'Madame Jouvenel,' she said, 'could have—' but Holmes shook his head.
'I heard her quite distinctly, in the early stages of love-making just after
two.' The early stages.
'Profiterole, by the way?' said Irene, with a smile.
'And again,' said Holmes, looking vaguely repulsed at the suggestion, 'as
nobody took either of the cars into the village, she'd not have had time to
walk; and in any case she strikes me as the type to take her time.'
Irene's face, she made sure, was blandness itself. On the boards in Le Havre,
before the War.
'Your cousin,' she said, sinking sharp teeth into pastry. 'Claudine Holmès
could have walked the distance, easily.'
'She could,' he agreed.
'She's theatrical,' said Irene. 'Did you hear any love-making from her room?'
He shook his head. Sipped his coffee with his delicate fingers cradling the cup
and his legs crossed at the ankle. He had panted, she reminded herself; he had
writhed.
'No,' he said, 'though, having braved the wrath of the united Jouvenel front in
order to bring me across the Channel, I somehow doubt that my cousin would have
gone to such trouble to protect Claire Boas.'
'Whoever stole those photographs,' Irene said, speaking in a wide arc around
the nitrate squares and the pasted-up ransom note and the Hotel Vernet, 'they
must be a person with some reason not to simply publish.'
'Like you, for example.'
'I am out in these hinterlands in order to track the things down. And in any
case, I've no allegiance to Claire Boas. I've scarcely met the woman. Let her
hang.'
'An admirable sentiment.'
'Oh, don't pretend. You take my meaning perfectly. You and I haven't the—the
scruples, of whomever is running about with my photographs. Not like, say, your
cousin, who wants to protect her friend.'
'Or the Panther, who wants to protect her son; or Mademoiselle Picard, who
wants to protect her position; or Mademoiselle Patat, who wants to protect her
business. The problem with the Jouvenels seems to be that everyone has reason
to resent them; yet everyone owes them something they don't want to give up.'
Irene opened her mouth; then closed it. Below, on the promenade, the chattering
girls had finally moved on to some point out of earshot. Holmes sighed.
'If it truly was a young woman, calling from St Coloumb,' he said, 'and it was
also a person present at luncheon on Friday, then we are left with:
Mademoiselle Patat; Mademoiselle Beaumont; and Madame Carco. Mademoiselle
Picard and my cousin are also young enough to pass for it; though Claudine says
that Mademoiselle Picard was in her bed that night; for whatever that's worth.'
'She would say so.'
'Probably,' he agreed. Hardly even blinking; his eyes very wide. 'Meanwhile,
both Jouvenels were hard at it, audibly, a relatively short time before the
call was placed. Sadly for young Bertrand, neither was with him: the lady of
the house tells me that she was entertaining the lovely Germaine Patat.'
'Was she,' Irene said.
'So she claims. I must say,' he mused, 'for a stout woman, just shy of fifty,
she doesn't lack for company. I don't see the appeal, but then that's more your
milieu.'
Sticky pastry cream at the back of Irene's throat.
'Pardon?' she said, and he flicked his eyes to her for a moment before looking
away.
'Women,' he said.
'Ah,' she said. 'Yes. Women.'
Germaine Beaumont. Gretha and Léonie. And Madame Jouvenel of Paris, all mixed
up with Madame Colette in Le Havre. Odd to hold them all, fan-like, in her
hand. One night in another life Irene had won a diamond bracelet off an heiress
at La Garçonnière with nothing more than nonchalance and a pair of sixes. The
fastenings had been real gold. She'd had nothing to wear it with, back then.
Holmes cleared his throat. Refilled his coffee.
'By an odd coincidence,' Irene said, boredom in every gesture, 'I learned last
night that Madame Carco's Christian name is also Germaine.'
'What,' he said, 'are you sure?' His crinkled-up nose: oddly undignified.
'Positive,' she said.
'Well. Perhaps Monsieur Jouvenel fancied collecting the whole set.'
His spoon, tapping at the side of his coffee cup. Irene carelessly laughed.
'One never knows,' she said, 'about people. I've only seen the Carcos together
from afar, of course, but I'd have said that Madame simply dotes on her
husband. Perhaps…'
'Perhaps unreasonably,' Holmes agreed.
'But then,' said Irene, 'one can dote excessively on a person, can't one, and
still misbehave with someone else.'
'Can one?' he said. An audible breath. 'What news from Paris?'
He'd been gutted. Hollowed out and gasping. Now his jaw clenched and his eyes
stretched open and behind them a pale grey void.
'This hotel takes all the city papers,' said Irene.
'You kept your tail on Doctor Watson, I believe.'
She held his gaze, black silk on her shoulders. Not shifting her eyes towards
the double doors, or the side-table by the chaise longue, or the telegraph held
down by a blown-glass globe. She drew out a fag from the case by her coffee
cup.
'Cigarette?' she said; and he exhaled; and leant in for her light.
'So,' she said. 'Who remains to us? Germaines Carco and Beaumont; Bertrand
Jouvenel; Claudine Holmès; Hélène Picard, yes? One of them is sufficiently
guilt-ridden, or sufficiently protective of Claire Boas, to place that call
from the village. Odds are good that the same person has my photographs.'
Holmes, unblinking. Her coffee cup raised, and the smile strapped to her teeth.
'On strength of motive,' he said, when he looked away from her at last, 'or
lack thereof, I'd eliminate Claudine Holmès and Mademoiselle Picard. Though
I've no doubt you'll reach your own conclusions.'
'I've no doubt I will.'
'In any case. Perhaps we ought not to discount young Bertrand Jouvenel, if his
stepmother-cum-lover wasn't with him. Assuming he could—and would, for some
reason of his own—put on a convincing female voice, the message given to the
hotel desk did reek of the kind of melodrama found in those penny-dreadfuls he
reads. Claire Boas is the boy's mother, after all.'
Click-click-click, went something just outside Irene's field of vision. Like a
camera-shutter, snapping open.
'I searched his room,' she said.
'As did I. He might have an accomplice, I suppose. If it was definitely a woman
who accosted Agnès Humbert.'
Click-click. Click.
'I suppose,' she said. Her eyes focused half-inward.
'Both you and I,' he went on, 'heard Henry Jouvenel, well after two, calling
out Germaine to a woman whom I took to be Mademoiselle Patat; whom you,
probably correctly as it turns out, identified as Germaine Beaumont; but who
could also, in theory, have been Germaine Carco.'
'As a matter of fact—' said Irene—Click—but Holmes's flat blank voice gave the
slightest English tilt to the name Beaumont, and—Click—she thought: penny
dreadfuls, and heard—Click—suddenly—Click—clear as day, in Germaine's French-
tilted English—Click: Here I am. Reviewing foreign crime novels and the
Jouvenel datebook by day. Unlucky in love by night.
And Irene—
Irene—
Holmes talking on, and on, as: the lovely, Irene thought, the untested,
virginal girl. The magnificent bitch; shocked-wet and open and riding Irene's
thigh: C'est impossible, Germaine had said, je ne fais pas—avec vous, and
Irene, like a naïve bloody fool, like an ass in its blinkers, had thought the
reference had been to her sex. Had smirked, had pretended—fireworks up her
spine; the—the mouth on her—
'Mademoiselle Beaumont,' Irene managed, somehow, 'did tell me once—' had, had
said, with her electric eyes sparking green when they snapped to Irene's eyes;
and her face that had flushed the moment, the bloody moment she'd seen her; and
her schoolgirl mouth stuttering out the word fuck while Irene smirked at her
and all the while Germaine called up, in her mind's eye, the image of Irene
with a cock down her throat, strapped into a Christ '—that she'd taken up with
a married man.'
'Rekindling an old flame,' came Holmes's voice, from far away, 'was the phrase
Madame Jouvenel—'
Irene laughed. The phrase Madame Jouvenel had used, indeed. A wild fluttering
in her chest and she was laughing. She rose to her feet on her balcony and
thought, with a shock, that she might not be able to stop; might twist free of
black silk and the sea and continue up, and up, and—more like a mother to me,
Germaine had said, of Madame Jouvenel—Madame Jouvenel who for Irene, always,
always, came overlaid on the old phantom Madame Colette—like a mother the
girl's lips had said; as behind her eyelids, when she'd blinked, a strapped-up
young-limbed Irene pulled on the yanked-tight ropes they'd—
'—employed,' Holmes was saying. Irene's hand to her hurtling heart. Swallowing
floods, the mouth on the girl. 'Which means our caller,' Holmes went on, 'could
be either Bertrand Jouvenel, who has the greatest investment in Claire Boas but
is the poorest candidate physically; or Germaine Carco, who's a bit of a dark
horse, and if she harbours any allegiance outside herself, her husband, and
their potential future child, I've yet to worm it out of anyone; or Germaine
Beaumont, who—'
Penny dreadfuls, Irene thought, fumbling her cigarette as the breeze licked at
all the sweat-stuck flooded creases of her, hot, burning-drowning—Danger, she
thought, your voice if you speak now, danger but—
'—has the plainest reason for a grudge against Henry Jouvenel; but may have an
alibi in the form of—'
'—spending all night fucking him.'
—she said it anyway. Burning. Slick mouth sodden face and her tongue wreathed
with smoke, making the word fuck a wavering tension-burst at the back of her
throat but he just—danger—stretched languid legs as the deeps spread out
beneath her and beneath her Germaine had licked—had opened her soaking lips—
Irene's filmy black silk was stuck to her back. She was soaked through.
Laughing; transparent.
'Well,' said Holmes, eyes wide but apparently unseeing, 'whoever it is we're
after, they're about to take the photographs back with them to Paris. My cousin
tells me the family will be shutting up the house this afternoon.'
'Are they?' she said. Her quivering sweat-dripping flanks and her flaring
nostrils. Germaine had looked straight into her face and in her mind's eye seen
her fucking—seen her hurting—seen her with her hands around the throat, head
over the shoulder, kiss—and had said to Irene, You should come up.
Irene, pulling up on her reins, said: 'Today?'
'So I gather.' Hollow in her head. He said: 'Spread across four different
trains; and then Madame Jouvenel and her young amusement are motoring back
together.'
'Quite the logistical challenge, then,' Irene said.
The sea-birds circled and her mind slid onto rails. Madame Jouvenel would want
him to herself; she had always been most covetous of a thing just as it was
ending. And Paris, Irene thought, along rails and rails: the secretaries,
the—the cutthroat bloody Christ, they'd be sent ahead, wouldn't they, to smooth
the way. Germaine was probably—probably waiting already, in her high-waisted
full unfashionable skirt and her button-backed blouse in the heat of the
station, her luggage lined up in a perfect row. With the photographs—
'…for Claire Boas's fancy dress ball,' Holmes was saying; as Irene, stubbing
out her cigarette on the balcony rail, managed a line about supposing she'd
have to arrange a costume, and thought: she'd searched Germaine's room at Roz
Ven, hadn't she? And her room and her person, her—her begging deceitful
beautiful body, at the Chateaubriand. Irony of ironies, if Irene had embarked
on this—this provincial cycling holiday, while the prints remained ensconced in
Paris. ('Crimes of passion,' Holmes was saying, and Irene laughed, far away:
'Claire Boas always did have a lively imagination when it came to fêtes.')
Germaine had left the negatives, after all. The conniving little bitch had left
the negatives for Colette—no, for Madame Jouvenel, more like a mother to me,
really, after having accosted Agnès Humbert with an image of Agnès's father,
and of Germaine's lover, and of—and of Irene, herself.
'As I recall,' Irene said—awash; alight; turning from the balcony rail, 'you
were asking after the news from Paris, Mr Holmes.'
Even caught mid-sentence, he hardly faltered. Hardly blinked. Though last night
he had gasped and struggled (as Germaine had—gasping—had been dowdy and meek
but had ordered Irene up to her room though she'd known; had feasted on her;
had let Irene pretend to innocence as Germaine had panted with her mud-brown
hair all down her back, screwing shut her eyes as Irene's mouth watered and she
fucked her and wanted to mark her, whip her, shove her crop in her to save her
place—and Germaine had been seeing, all the time, Irene pushing her cock into a
man's back; Irene hitting Jouvenel's face; Irene kissing, kissing—)
It shouldn't matter, here and now. But Irene, making her way through the double
doors, thought: surely there could be some approximation of camaraderie. If she
and Holmes could put on conspiracy and smile into each others' faces—school
friends, she thought, again. She might like that. Gossiping behind each others'
backs.
'Is there any?' he asked her. 'News?'
She turned, and there he stood: leaning on the jamb; with only the faintest
tightness about his eyes. She did not grin at him; but she was falling, flying,
wet from stem to stern—and it must show.
'We're both returning to the city,' she said, 'the offer stands: shall I remove
my man from your Doctor Watson?'
'If I accepted,' he said, 'what would you actually do?'
'Why, I would remove him at once.'
Holmes pushed off from the jamb. Sauntered towards her where she stood,
radiant, with her hand on the blown-glass globe on the side-table by the chaise
longue. When he came up level with her, he put out his hand; and into it,
resplendent, she placed the telegram in its cheap brown envelope. She could've
kissed him. She could have kissed that giggling schoolgirl, or the mother of
that squalling infant, earlier, in the street. Holmes seemed not to struggle to
meet her eyes.
'Well,' he said. 'This has been civilised. I've no doubt I'll see you in Paris,
Miss Adler.'
Sunday, August 28th, 1921
10:30am (Hour 92)
Not even mid-day, Sherlock thought. Difficult to believe; when the heat hit his
face like a solid wall as he stepped out of the St Malo telegraph office. All
along the fortifications people dragged themselves up and down. Mopping their
slick napes with neck-scarves. Adjusting their wide straw hats. An old man in a
white suit, bowed under the weight of the sun, propped his cane with great care
against a stone piling and lowered himself to a public bench, breathing through
his mouth like a dog.
Roz Ven, thought Sherlock. A half hour in a crowded bus after waiting God knew
how long in the open-air station just south of St Malo. But what could one do?
There was Monsieur Carco to be found out. The Jouvenel boy ought to be talked
to. In his summer suit with his jacket over his shoulder, Sherlock walked north
along the battlements, squinting against the sun.
In the telegraph office, it had been cool and still. It had been Sherlock, and
a small neat woman with a small neat dog in her small neat handbag, and the
sleepy telegraph clerk scribbling figures on the back of a form in the half-
dark. Sherlock had stood at the counter with the chill of the stone floors
filtering up through his shoes: PLS INVESTIGATE THROUGH STANDARD MEANS IRENE
ADLER COURTESAN EMPLOYED LE CHABANAIS PARIS RUE DE LA FAUBERG POISSONIERE
STOP—his pen scritching over paper with her brown envelope folded in half in
his inside jacket pocket. The dog owner had engaged in a ten-minute debate with
the clerk over per-word rates to a chemist in Lyon while Sherlock had stood
there, his eyes feeling oddly sandy, oddly heavy, staring down at the form.
Heaven knew why he felt the need to stare at it so. It was, he thought, just
what Sherlock Holmes would write. BACK TONIGHT 735P he added, at last—and then,
because John so often chided him for not economising on words when sending
telegrams: HOPE YOU CONTINUE WELL STOP HAMMAM IN RUE DES BLANCS-MANTEAUX
PLEASANT WALK FROM BD POISSONIERE, then crossed out everything after 'well,'
and transferred the remainder over to a fresh form, with his heart stuttering
in his chest.
And now the old man panted, on the rampart in the heat of the sun. Fear no
more, the line went; though Sherlock, walking along the sea wall, thought that
wrong. Fight no more, perhaps. He put one squelching foot in front of the
other, past lovers who couldn't bear to touch and children drooping from their
nannies' hands, thinking: Fight no more the heat of the sun; nor the desolate
winter's slumbers.
The bay viewed from the battlements glowed jade. Teeming with life. He might be
a poet, he thought, fighting his heavy eyelids: for all these people knew.
By a tower and a staircase descending to the sea, a sunburnt vendor-woman sold
cups of sorbet from a little stand. The night before, Sherlock had scrubbed the
flavour of Claudine's peaches from his mouth, and since then he hadn't—well. He
might be able to, now.
She took pains to smile up at him, when he handed over his francs. He forced
the thought: he might be the kind of person, after all, at whom one smiled over
lemon ices. On holiday, in France, he smiled in the sun as he handed over his
coins.
Down the sea-stairs he went, with his cup. What shade existed was thronged; so
he walked off down the beach. A few minutes on, he hung his jacket from a sun-
bleached branch and perched on a piece of driftwood.
Cold sweet lemon slipped down Sherlock's throat. He hardly had to swallow. He
licked the sticky dregs from the paper cup; then folded it up tight, and
slipped it into his pocket.
His white jacket waved truce-like in the breeze off the sea. He might reach for
it, he thought. His heavy limbs in the hot sun. He would have to reach for it.
He closed his eyes and saw—and opened his eyes and listened to the surf on the
sand, and the shrieking children soaked to their skins. If he could just—
If he could stand up. If he could walk away, happy-go-lucky on a Continental
holiday. Or, failing that, if he could melt like pitch into the sands. Fight no
more the heat of the sun, he thought, and breathed deep.
Half a mile down the beach a dark-haired man in khaki held a kite in his hands.
Purple, flapping in the wind, as a little girl ran down the sand with her
fingers through a string-wound spool. Sherlock took a breath. With every nerve,
every tendon trained on the idea: he might, he thought, be a young
father—brother—uncle; with a young niece. He might. (Breathe.) He might have
watched for days, for the wind to be just so. Her father might have left, and
she might—kites, he thought, his eyes watering, with the brown paper envelope
open in his hands.
She might want to learn about kites.
Sherlock would collect her at her mother's house. Walk with her down to the
beach. She'd be clamouring the whole way to hold the kite. Perhaps people let
children do such things. They would arrive and he would hand her down the
spool, and tell her to run. Run far away, Simone, he would say, and she would:
she would run down the beach, past a middle-aged Englishman on a piece of
driftwood with a brown paper envelope. Sherlock wouldn't notice in the
slightest as the man read:
516 WATSON LEFT TEMPLE DU IMPUDEUR WITHOUT MACINTYRE OR OTHER COMPANION
605 PROCEEDED ON FOOT TO—
The older Englishman in the summer suit would be taking a deep breath. But
Sherlock, a mile down the beach, would hardly notice, as his niece yelled Look!
Look, uncle, it flies! it flies! and ran and ran and let the spool burn her
fingers. And, Very good, Simone!, he would shout, as the middle-aged Englishman
on the driftwood bench turned his gaze back down and:
—JARDIN DES PLANTES AND THEN TO—' Simone with her ankles in the surf, he would
be watching '—MUSEE D'HISTOIRE NATURELLE. 831 RETURNED TO HIS ROOMS. 2005
DEPARTED HOTEL BEL AMI WALKED TO RIGHT BANK 2107 STOOD HALF HOUR MET NO ONE
2136 CROSSED TO RIGHT BANK—'
Sherlock—
Sherlock might be a young barrister, down from Paris for the week-end; on
holiday at the sea-shore with his niece. He might be shouting down the beach to
her now; might be telling her to run, to run, as he let go the kite like so,
face into the wind, don't look back, Simone, run on, as he sprinted down the
sand, past the nondescript Englishman with his crumpled ice cup and his
driftwood seat and his envelope, limp in his hand in the hot harsh August sun.
Chapter End Notes
        1. A nod to Woolf's Mrs Dalloway via lines from Shakespeare's
           Cymbeline: "Fear no more the heat of the sun, / Nor the furious
           winter's blast; / Thou thy worldly task has done, / And the
           dream of life is past. / Golden lads and girls all must /
           Follow thee, and come to dust."
***** And the way up is the way down *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
Sunday, August 28th, 1921
1pm (Hour 95)
In the stone entranceway it was blessedly cool. Roz Ven, empty, hunched around
Sherlock with its windows tied open and all its lawn-chairs folded up against
its sides, like knees drawn to a naked chest.
Could a house, Sherlock wondered, really hollow itself out so, overnight? The
little girl's room empty; the bed stripped in the room at the top of the
stairs, so her father gone too, no doubt with his own (lovely, versatile)
Germaine. Sherlock's steps clunked on the floor-boards, in the afternoon heat.
The Carcos gone; the Picard woman gone; though Claudine (a tightening beneath
his ribs) lingered on: had returned her violin to its case and bundled her many
scarves back into her trunk, then had thrown all her luggage together in a
haphazard mound just inside the door. From the window at the end of the
upstairs hall he spotted her: reclining, in white, in the shade at the edge of
the lawn. Waiting for the news, no doubt; for a report from some long-lost
relation. From her cousin, lately estranged. The man would have so much to tell
her, Sherlock thought; as soon as he got back from town.
For just a moment, in the silence and the sea-breeze, he let his eyes close,
but—open, then. A man of consequence, a banker from London, had—would have
weighty matters to attend to.
The first two rooms on the garden side were empty, too: the floor of one
littered with fabric scraps and cotton balls, the other in strict order. But
when Sherlock's knuckles rapped against the boy Bertrand's open door, a yelped
'I'm doing it!' and a hasty rustling started up from inside.
Sherlock came around the jamb. Bertrand didn't even bother to uncoil himself
from his unmade bed, where he was sprawled in tight trousers and a half-undone
cravat, with one hand propping open a copy of L'Éducation sentimentale, and the
other crinkling some papers on his desk just for the rustle they made. When he
glanced up to find it was only Sherlock in the doorway, he left off even doing
that.
Bit spindly, Sherlock thought. Beautiful eyelashes; bad skin. Ribcage of a
young martyr. Madame Jouvenel probably liked him in all this silk. The way he
was touching it: he liked it too. But, in the way of boys, did he ever take out
his father's old uniform and wish…?
'Clinging to the vestiges,' Sherlock asked, 'of your provincial holiday?'
Bertrand just shrugged. Spared his visitor a withering glance, from head to
foot. Sherlock supposed he wouldn't be up to a Flaubertian standard of personal
grooming; not after trekking all the way to St Malo and back. And now to be
here: standing in front of a boy who was thinking, Philistines—one could see it
in his eyes—the Commonwealth, indeed. Sherlock had to stifle a weird hobbled
chuckle behind his hand.
'Your stepmother is…?' he said.
'Down at the water.'
'And you, I'd imagine, are meant to be packing.'
Bertrand flopped about. Said, 'Plenty of time.'
'Still,' said Sherlock. 'You wouldn't mind a bit of help.'
And he found himself halfway across the room already; motion, he realised, not
quite suited to a London banker. Best not to stop now, however. Best to see it
through. Flaubert, anyway, had fallen shut on the bedclothes.
'I… suppose,' Bertrand said.
'My cousin always told me to empty out my trunk, and start over by putting my
shoes at the bottom.'
Bertrand stretched his long arms over his head, so that his shirt gaped. 'Your
cousin,' he said, 'has a separate trunk for her shoes alone.'
Her violin case resting atop it in her room, as she sat out on the lawn.
Sherlock turned and slid open a drawer in the bureau, and Bertrand said 'What
are you—'
'Helping!' Sherlock called out. 'Mustn't keep your stepmother waiting. I
imagine she's formidable when crossed, and you have all these cravats that need
packing. You are prepared to return, by the way? To the bosom of your actual
mother?'
'To Paris, yes,' Bertrand said. 'Nowhere,' he added, with a lazy wave of his
hand, 'is quite like Paris.'
Sherlock might have fallen over laughing. Might have—might have slept where he
landed. Behaviour not becoming a London banker; so he transferred opera glasses
and swim costumes from the drawer to the trunk, feeling along the bottoms of
the drawers. Nothing.
'You're quite the dandy,' he said. 'You must be the guest of honour, at your
mother's fêtes.'
'Hardly even make an appearance, anymore.'
'Really.' Sherlock moved on to the bottom drawers: sweater-vests and, Christ,
short pants. No doubt insisted upon by Madame Jouvenel. 'Your mother,' he said,
'has persuaded you into considerable sacrifices to ensure the success of this
ball.'
'A man like you would think it a hardship,' the kid said, and Sherlock felt his
spine snap straight.
'Affectionate towards your mother, are you?'
'I—'
'Defend her, would you? If you felt it were warranted?
Hard-backed and grainy-eyed beside the hat rack by the wardrobe. But one never
knows he had said to Claudine, lips tacky with peach juice; now the boy's mouth
was open.
'Get yourself stirred up,' Sherlock asked him, 'over wrongs done to her? You
can resent her but nobody else can? Venture out under cover of night, would
you, to defend her honour?'
'I suppose anyone might, given the proper—'
'Anyone,' Sherlock snapped, 'isn't here to answer.'
The kid shut his mouth. Sherlock turned to face the wardrobe; nudged open the
left-hand door.
'Ah,' he made himself say. Staring down into knife-edge trouser folds and
pressed white collars, with motion at his back. 'Seems you, too, have quite a
collection of—'
'Don't look in—'
Sherlock's grin: a poorly-affixed prosthesis. His lungs a bellows and his neck
craning back over his shoulder.
'Where shouldn't I look?' he asked. 'In here?'
The boy just stood on his carpet, chewing on his thumb.
Sherlock knelt, with his eyes flicking back to Bertrand, and let his hands
stray towards the floor of the wardrobe. No reaction. Standard assortment of
men's city shoes—nothing suitable to the sand or the forest floor, nothing that
might pass for a woman's—while out loud he said: 'How old are you?' and
Bertrand said, 'Seventeen.'
Not reacting to stuffy, English, middle-aged hands up the inside edges of his
wardrobe.
'When I was seventeen,' said Sherlock, drawing London back around him as he
mussed the hems of Bertrand's many coats to no visible result, 'I used to climb
down the drainpipe outside my window, and wander about the town.' No reaction
as he touched the wardrobe-ceiling. 'I wrote down my findings in a tiny
journal. Kept it in a hollowed-out copy of Harting's Our Summer Migrants on my
mother's shelves. "An Account of Migratory Birds Which Pass the Summer in the
British Islands." I enjoyed the irony of the thing, you see: it had been a
gift; she'd never know. You, on the other hand—' a wince from the boy as
fingers skimmed the edge of the little set of drawers, suspended inside the
wardrobe '—I wager you'd opt for a somewhat more pedestrian—ah.'
Tacked to the bottom of the drawers: a brown envelope, thick with sheets. Worn-
soft paper. Welcoming to the touch. But tacked through? Surely not even a half-
grown idiot would—
'Go on,' Bertrand was saying, and Sherlock looked up to see him squaring his
shoulders. 'Read them. As if I care. You're not even Parisian.'
It was true. Sherlock was a man of affairs, from London.
'All right,' he said.
He watched the boy watch him, as he pulled out sheets of scribbled-over paper.
Cast his eye over one. And another.
'I can see,' Sherlock said, reading, 'why you'd keep these from the literary
editor of Le Matin. Especially if she were in the habit of letting you—'
turning a page, letting his eyebrows rise, 'lap at her womb-rich dew.'
He could almost admire the boy, still keeping his chin up. But: a man like you.
'Not the extent of your little hoard, though,' Sherlock murmured, as Bertrand
flinched towards his bed, realised what he'd done, and flushed red. 'Are they?'
Sherlock said. 'Something a bit more visual—'
'How do you—'
'—beneath your mattress?'
Bertrand swallowed. Sherlock, with his smile still affixed, meandered towards
the foot of the bed near the window. Bertrand shifted. He wasn't exactly in
Sherlock's path. Couldn't exactly stop him. As Sherlock's knee hit the
mattress: 'I thought you were helping me pack?' the boy said. Would-be jaunty.
As if Sherlock were one of his own. As if they'd arranged to meet in some café
in—in Paris.
Absurd. Such children were beneath his notice. He ought to have spectacles, or
a pince-nez.
A man of affairs, he settled back on the bed. Turned over a page. A man of
affairs read juvenile pornography copied out in a fussy hand. Hardly the
inspired range of subject matter one might expect, given what was under his
mattress. Still.
'What is your considered opinion,' said the man of affairs, 'about your person
being used as a bargaining chip between your mother and stepmother? In
England,' he added, 'it's the sort of thing over which we might hold a grudge.'
Bertrand shrugged. His face tender-red. He started piling silk from the
wardrobe into his trunk in great messy armfuls. Every time Sherlock shifted on
the bed, the boy flinched.
'To us in England,' Sherlock said, laying the papers on the bed next to him,
'it might feel a relief in that circumstance, to have something we could hold
over our tormentor's heads.'
Bertrand Jouvenel made a tiny, strangled sound. The man of affairs bowed his
ancient spine; lay down on his stomach, on the side closest the door.
'We might like to take it out,' he told him, pedantically, 'and look at it when
we were angry.'
Bertrand kicked his trunk. 'I thought you English never got angry.'
'We just manage to do it without making a fuss. Though,' added the man of
affairs, 'knowing your family—'
'And why should either of them care?' said Bertrand. Watching his guest push
his fingers between the box spring and the mattress, against a thin edge of
paper. 'Either my mother or stepmother? And why should I be thinking about them
when—'
'True,' drawing out the envelope, 'when it's your father in the—'
'My—pardon?'
'—starring… role.'
But there was no need to open the envelope. Bertrand's face was shocked open,
incredulous. Just a boy: a kid who had never seen—never seen Henry Jouvenel
tied to a chair; never seen Irene Adler in her elaborate acrobatics; never seen
the fields of—just a boy; and now here he was. He gaped on the hardwoods at the
absurd Englishman perching on his bed, with sagging skin and sandy corneas—
'My father,' Bertrand repeated. 'What's… my father?'
—clearing his throat. Opening the envelope, crisply, like a crisp, cool man of
affairs.
Four utterly banal examples of mainstream photographic smut, of the type for
purchase in Regent Street, back home; in the lot not a rope nor a bit of black
rubber nor a military man with his tongue on the feet of his old—
Sherlock opened his eyes.
'No matter,' he said, then. 'My mistake. I'll,' waving to the mess of the room,
levering himself up off the bed, 'I'll see you in Paris. At your mother's
costume ball.'
 
Sunday, August 28th, 1921
3pm (Hour 97)
 
It was imperative, Irene thought, to concentrate. Imperative to decide.
Imperative to run Germaine to ground in whatever haunt she'd absconded to: the
home of the Jouvenels, perhaps, or the Matin offices, or running errands on the
Rue de Faubourg Poissonière. It ought to be so terribly simple. A matter of
determining the likelihood of one action over another. But—
—but all the way out on the train she had—had panted; had twisted in her seat,
horror-struck and aching, with sweat coming up on her face in the heat of the
day. She wasn't like this, not since—and she'd dug her nails into her palms.
Thought: Germaine would be preparing Paris for the arrival of the Jouvenels.
Would she go first to the paper? Would she chat with the desk clerk? Flirt with
him? Lie to him? Brush past him and through the glass doors to arrange her
employer's, her foster-mother's, Madame Jouvenel's, Colette's fountain pens in
neat marching lines like buttons unfastened on an old-fashioned blouse as she
had gasped, pas avec toi, she had said, not with you, with Irene held in check
by Olivia Wren though all the time Germaine had, Christ, seen Irene's name in
beating-blood letters when she closed her eyes—
And now, in a cab trundling south, she had a running clock. Irene Adler, coming
to pieces on the Rue de la Fayette over a twice-jilted secretary two decades
out of date. Her leaking palms and her bloody beating heart.
She supposed she must have told the cab driver something. He stopped in front
of the Matin offices and she marched through the double doors and there, lined
up neatly with the foot of the stairs: a severe black steamer-trunk, its straps
cinched tight.
She moved forward in a strange white heat and Germaine—
Was in Madame Jouvenel's bloody office, in the end. At the file box, with her
back turned, sorting through cards with her ruthless efficiency in her
unfashionable skirt. Half-turning, tensing at the sight of O—of Irene, but not
moving to stop her from pressing up against her from behind.
The musk of the girl. Mitsouko in waves, and under it the things she hid. Her
hand on the file-card was making it shake. Perhaps she (swallowing). Perhaps
she meant it to.
'You brought your trunk,' Irene said, into Germaine's ear, 'to your place of
employment. Something you want to keep close?'
'I didn't think I'd,' Germaine said, 'see you, I—'
'Where are they?'
'I don't—'
'Where?' She twisted Germaine's arm back. Germaine grunted. File-cards fell to
the floor and fanned out by their feet; neither of them moved to pick them up.
From the door Irene would appear an interested friend, peering around the side
of Germaine's shoulder.
'Guillaume will see you,' Germaine said.
'You'd like that, would you? For him to call the watchman? It won't matter;
I've—I've a man outside. Just waiting for my word. He'll follow you home for a
look through your things, would you like that?'
Germaine, with her sweat-soaked back and her shaky laugh.
'You've got,' said Irene, 'something of mine; you had—had them in the hotel,
under your mattress in the hotel. Thinking of the man who threw you over while
we were—and he'll find—'
'No,' Germaine said.
'No? Not thinking about Henry bloody Jouvenel strapped to my—'
'We're not all like—'
'Which is your favourite, then?' Seething hot, too hot in her lit-up skin.
'That's the one thing my man won't be able to tell, you see: which ones you
like best to look at when you take them out, when you—'
'You'll be wanting,' faltering, 'to come up.'
'I don't think I ought.' Hands to wrists, tight. 'I think I ought to go get my
man outside, let him—'
'I brought my trunk,' Germaine said, with the careful crispness of the drunk or
the drugged, 'because I live in the flats upstairs.'
Irene's hands: sprung traps. Sweat in her eyes, and Germaine, with her breath
shaking out, pressing back into her front.
'Do you,' Irene heard herself say.
'Yes,' Germaine whispered. The next moment she let loose a shriek of nervous
schoolgirl laughter because—because of Guillaume, apparently: hovering at the
office door. Irene pulled back, blinking; Germaine was laughing again, her hand
on Irene's arm.
'Oh Mathilde,' Germaine was saying. 'Your stories were always so shocking.'
And Irene—fairground-dizzy—with the conviction ringing through her gasping
chest gripping skull she'd have—
She'd have believed it. She'd have believed it all. Every spare un-showy
gesture: Germaine stripped down to a gawky girl, awkward since school. So
serious but for the one wild friend who could make her laugh. No theatre about
her, just accident: like movements through a back window long-forgotten, never
cleaned—and Irene, flooding hot through her crinkle-thin snakeskin, swearing on
her mother's grave that this girl was real.
'I assure you,' she got out, 'every word is true.'
'All grown up,' said Germaine, wiping tears of laughter from her eyes, 'and
still up to your old tricks. Mathilde,' to hovering Guillaume, 'was quite the
Magdalene in our little village. She once went with two men at one time.'
Irene was mirror-warped and trembling under the mantle of this… Mathilde, was
it. Mathilde, whom Germaine had—had made for her to wear. Throbbing,
thickening, she pulled her on like crimson silk: Mathilde who shocked the
village; who once went with two men at one time.
'I should leave,' she told her friend, trying for a laugh. 'If you still find
me shocking then I should leave now, before you catch on. After all, you—you
live in Paris now. Probably get up to. All sorts of things.'
The table cut into her palms where she pressed back. Her eyes on Germaine who
was everywhere: in the sharp delighted giggle. In the shuffling embarrassment,
after. 'Oh,' Germaine said, caught out by Mathilde for Irene to see. 'But I
could never be so daring as you. Letting them bring their girlfriends along.'
—their girlfriends—
'In a tiny provincial town,' Germaine was laughing. 'The things they said she'd
done!'
'What things,' said Irene—Mathilde, said Mathilde, 'to still be thinking
about,' as Germaine's damp hand clamped down on her wrist.
'It was like something out of Madame Jouvenel's novels,' Germaine told
Guillaume. 'It really was.'
'I,' Irene said, 'I don't know whom you considered anyone's—anyone's
girlfriend.' Wives, do you mean? she couldn't quite say, so she twisted her
wrist in Germaine's grip. Strong and slippery and her big hands. Young
Guillaume, thunder-struck, stared between the two of them.
'Henry,' Germaine murmured, 'Henry Tailler, he told it differently back in the
village. He said it was—was quite a spectacle. Said you let them watch while
you kissed—'
(—broken open and kissing pleading with a wet mouth Gretha in her veils over
the shoulder of the bastard Jouvenel who moaned and begged and hadn't a glance
to spare for either of his girlfriends—)
'I suppose you thought,' Irene said, 'it ought only to be you, with whom I
misbehaved.'
And Germaine's face: almost shy. Almost pleading. 'We did, didn't we?' she
said. 'The two of us, Mathilde? Misbehave?'
Irene thought: it was a game. It was her best game.
'Quite Germaine's crowning moment,' said Mathilde to Guillaume. 'She'll no
doubt drag up that time before our terminal year of secondary school, our
summer at the seashore—'
(imagine, remember: the girl Germaine, before the War, in a white dress by the
sea)
'—Dinard was it? Or St Malo?'
(with Mathilde's secret red marks all down her arse and the tops of her thighs,
and her Christ)
'In any case I've done what I can, I think,' Germaine was telling Guillaume,
'so if you'll let Madame Jouvenel know,' with her strong damp hand still
circling Irene's—
(wrists)
'—I'm never sure,' Mathilde was saying, 'what gets into her about that night,
but she will go on about—'
(flicking up the hem for Mathilde to see it, shift—shifting on the sand so
Mathilde would look at her how)—how she was looking at her now—
'Oh you're fond of reminiscing,' Germaine was saying, 'just as much as I.'
Irene watched her back. Wearing Mathilde like a frock Germaine had sewn, and:
'My friend and I,' Germaine said, 'were just about to retire to my rooms. Yes,
Mathilde?'
Yes, Mathilde. The girl Germaine, repeating to her schoolfriend the stories
they told at the bar in the bistro. Laughing with her until their stomachs
ached. Yes, Mathilde; so she followed her. The entranceway; the foot of the
stairs; along the landing. The woman Germaine, with her secrets and her strong
thick thighs. Opening the door for Irene to the fourth-floor corner room where
she'd touched herself to thoughts of—what? of Henry Jouvenel in his uniform,
or—or Gretha—
They entered, and didn't speak. The girl Mathilde. The woman Germaine. Irene
was gasping. Trying not to gasp.
'Henry,' she repeated, 'and a girlfriend?' leaning back on the door as it
latched behind her. Great heaving breaths.
Germaine still had her back to her. She was fussing in the corner over, over
coffee? Irene could have laughed.
'Where are they, then?' she said. 'In your trunk? In these rooms? Tell me and
I'll—'
'Hm?' said Germaine.
'He said you let them watch,' Irene parroted back in her wrong broken voice,
'while you kissed?'
'Ah,' said Germaine, to the coffee pot, 'well. You know how men like this kind
of story.'
'I—'
'Don't you,' said Germaine.
Irene did laugh, she thought. Her fingers slid on the handle, on the lock, on
the bureau beside the door on the leather armchair on the plain brown linen of
Germaine's skirt and underneath it her hot moving skin.
'You know bloody all about it, you—you think you know bloody well.' Germaine
under her hands, tensing. 'You think—what? She was Henry Jouvenel's little
plaything? she—did you know she was barely a fortnight in Paris,' clutching
with her hot wet hands through cotton and linen, 'and you think we, you think
we tied him to a chair and took off our clothes, kissed each other blind as a
little, a little treat? A little bonbon for him and his—his bloated self-
important—'
'Who?' said Germaine but her hands trembled on the coffee pot. Coffee. Irene
was burning up.
'She was,' Irene said. Aching, like she could rub Gretha's memory intact
through the too-solid membrane of Germaine's skin. Pressing; trying. Telling
her: 'She wasn't meant to be in France, she'd had—had problems with her
contract, or—so she gave a few dances at my club. Just. Among friends. And I
wanted—I noticed her,' she said, 'the moment I saw her dance.'
'Who?' Germaine repeated, dry-throated, and Irene swallowed and said, 'Gretha.'
A small, neat click from the coffee pot as Germaine set it down. Irene's lips
slick at her nape. The susurration as she turned.
'A friend of yours?' Germaine said, with her mouth in a neat, prim line.
A friend of yours?
Irene eddied. Throbbed. Blinked and blinked and reached up her hollowed-out
mouth and kissed—
Kissing like pleading. Kissing a schoolgirl, like the schoolgirl Germaine had
made for them to wear. Kissing some—some secretary in a second-rate flat.
Starving mouths over some bastard's shoulder as Irene dripped all down her
helpless thighs for Germaine's open mouth and her cunt like a peach and her
hands on Olivia's—Irene's—Mathilde's—God, burning craving skin. Irene pressed
up, up against her, as if to get inside her, pressed, pressed and it stretched
on for years.
Germaine pulled away. 'Mfh,' said Irene, 'mm, no.'
Germaine was heaving. Was panting. For show, could be for show, or, or she
couldn't help it. Irene had to put her hands back on Germaine's hips.
'No,' Irene said again, 'she was never my—I never wanted her to be my friend.'
'I don't imagine you have them,' said Germaine.
But you were my friend, she could have said. Absurd; bereft. In your white
dress and your scars, at the seaside craning up to kiss Germaine, kiss—false
tongue failing heart hot fresh-forged skin—
'She was so beautiful,' she told her. Germaine pulling back by inches.
Loosening. Mouth on Irene's neck. 'They said she wasn't even a courtesan. Just
a dancer.' Licking her, Christ. Tasting. 'She was lodging with us; she would
borrow my things, and I would think about.' Her hair. The way she smelled.
'She'd tie up her hair in my curling-rags and wear them to bed and I would stay
awake—' touching, pressing '—and when she gave them back they would smell of
all her—' panting working throat and the noises coming from it—
'What happened?' Germaine asked; and Irene, tingling and betrayed, said, 'But
you know.'
Germaine's shoulders, going tight.
'No,' she said, pulling away, 'how could I?'
'But,' Irene said, 'if' (couldn't bear it, couldn't) 'if your friend Mathilde,
in the village in, in what?'
'Petit-Couronne,' Germaine gave her, and Irene: nodding and nodding.
'If your—your friend,' she said, 'you would have had friends, they'd all have
loved you for—for getting so much done—' Germaine snorted, good, laughing,
Irene's hands petting petting petting from her shoulders down her held-tight
arms, 'if your friend Mathilde had gone with two men and one of their—their
girlfriends, and then you heard about it down at the café, how they—'
'—agreed,' Germaine said, 'to do for money whatever the men asked them.'
Irene laughed. Sobbed.
'Oh,' she said, 'It was all for the men.' Gasping. 'Is that what they're
saying, these days?'
Germaine made a doubting noise that hummed against Irene's lips so she opened
her mouth. Opened it wider, Christ. Craven. Ought to be terrified but she was—
'I was so,' she said, pressing into Germaine's awkward body, 'so hungry for
her.'
Germaine's soft hands in her hair. On her face. Tipping back Irene's head to
get a look at her, and oh uncertain green eyes. And how could they be? When
Irene, with a touch—when in St Malo they'd lied to each other straight out and
she'd ordered Irene up to her room, and let Irene inside her, hands, mouth,
dripping wanting—
'They said,' said Germaine, 'of my friend Mathilde, that she was so eager to
get on her knees for Monsieur Tailler that—.' She bit her lip. Irene's ragged
breath. 'They said she couldn't wait, that she almost choked on it—'
Irene groaned. 'So that Gretha could watch,' Irene said. 'So that she could
see—' Germaine's teeth in her bottom lip, her breath picking up '—my mouth, so
she could see me making him—making him gasp, backed up against the door with
the mirror on the other side. She'd a perfect view of my throat and I could
hear her keep—keep losing track of what she was saying to Charles—'
Germaine's oh was a tiny breathless thing. Irene needed—needed her mouth back
on her. Needed to kiss it out of her, to rub up against her just a little, just
enough, just—she swallowed. Germaine's trembling fingers on her throat, tracing
the line of it down and down.
'I'm sure the gossips,' Irene managed, 'down at the café did better than that.'
'They…' said Germaine, then trailed off. She shifted her leg. Shifted so it
pressed between Irene's, and Irene let herself rock, just a, God, just a little
against the soft give of Germaine's thigh. Eyes viridescent and she didn't pull
back; beautiful that she didn't pull back; Irene was moaning just a little,
just a—
'He said both the girls,' Germaine said, 'were so desperate for him—'
'For—!'
'—that they tied him up so he couldn't move while they took turns f—fucking
him.'
Rocking, unbearable. Couldn't stop. Staring up at Germaine looking down, her
bitten mouth and her brilliant searching eyes and Irene shaking.
'He said she kissed the other woman,' Germaine said, 'behind because he liked
it, but I think she must have—'
Hands in her hair. Sudden hard parting lips raised thigh pressing tongue
pressing forward so Irene could ride her now, unabashed, rubbing and rubbing
and kissing her. Pressing her back. Closer. Up against the little table,
breathing in Mitsouko; the weight of her. 'Yes,' Irene said, and she couldn't
stop, she couldn't—Germaine's bitten open mouth. 'All right,' she said, and
kissed her, pushed at her climbed on her, put her hands on her: her hips and
her gorgeous arse hot skin through fabric in the singeing hot and a—a yelp, and
a crash.
Irene stood a foot back, shaking her scalded wrist. The little coffee pot,
tipped onto its side on the floor, glugged brown liquid onto the hardwood.
They stood there watching it. Breathing like a pair of distance runners.
'Shit,' Germaine said. 'I—the kitchen.'
Irene nodded.
Hand to her pounding chest while Germaine walked away. From the kitchen, the
sounds of cupboard doors.
Irene lowered herself to her knees. Set the coffee pot upright. She was soaked
and tender between her legs; every time she shifted she could feel it. She
might put anything at all up against her and she'd be shouting. Her wrist. The
bloody table-leg. She straightened up and there was Germaine, paused in the
doorway with flannels in her arms and in her hand a bowl full of great chunks
of chiseled-out ice. Irene stood there absurdly with the coffee pot in her
hands.
She put it on the table. Made each of her fingers relax away from its smooth
metal sides. Germaine wet a flannel; held it out. Irene, for seconds, couldn't
think why. By the time she remembered about her wrist Germaine had laid the
cloth on the table, and got on her knees on the floor.
'She must have been mad,' Germaine said, laying neat layers of flannels to soak
up the coffee sliding in rivulets along the floorboards.
'Who?' said Irene, with a little laugh, and Germaine said: 'Gretha.'
Soft and hesitating. Hesitating: Germaine, with her head bowed.
'Yes,' said Irene. 'Mad. She must have been.'
'I mean,' Germaine went on, 'watching you, with—doing that, to him.'
How was it possible for the girl to flush? Irene clenched her thighs together.
Could still come off with a hard touch. Could take those two steps over to
where Germaine was kneeling on the floor, put her hands in Germaine's hair and
rub off against her flushing face. She grasped the table-edge, breathing in.
Breathing out.
'I would,' Germaine was saying. 'I mean. I used to—'
'You mean you'd take out my photographs,' Irene said. 'You'd take them out and
look at them.'
Germaine pressed her palms down needlessly into the towelling, and opened her
mouth but didn't answer. Irene laughed.
'Come now,' she said. 'Tying a man named Henry, to a chair?'
'You said—'
She could stride over. Could shove herself against Germaine's teeth.
'Which of the shots,' she said, 'do you particularly enjoy?'
'My friend Mathilde—'
'Oh,' Irene said, 'of course. Your friend, Mathilde.'
Germaine coughed, where she knelt on the floor. She looked smaller, somehow. It
was absurd to feel guilty.
'When I heard,' Germaine said, 'the rumours. I would think about—about
Mathilde, letting him do what he—I would think about her, li, um—'
'Her lips,' Irene said, softly, but Germaine seemed not to hear. She still
pressed flannels into rivulets of coffee, her hair falling down out of its
twist.
'And then,' said Germaine, very fast, 'I would wonder how it happened, because
he was in her mouth and the next—the next thing I heard—' so red, her face was
so red '—he was tied to the chair, and I—I wondered,' gasping, and then easing,
and sitting up. 'I thought the other woman might not have liked it,' she said.
'I thought… she might have wanted him to stop. I'd have.' She swallowed. 'I'd
have wanted him to stop.'
Sharp, dark. Like menstrual pain at the small of Irene's back.
'You thought,' she said, 'that Gretha was jealous.'
Germaine shrugged. In the bowl next to her, the big chunks of ice were
sweating. She dipped the last clean flannel in the ice-water; swirled it about.
Took the pieces one by one from the bowl, and wrapped them in cloth.
'It's only,' Germaine said, 'I heard that she—that the other woman watched
while Henry was tied. That she helped. And I thought—I wondered.'
Irene closed her eyes, and—
Gretha, giggling with Charles over the knots. Pressing herself into him: Oh,
you're so good at that and Irene with the camera. Watching through the lens
(through the keyhole). What if you want him tighter? Gretha had said. Had said,
Surely Monsieur Jouvenel could simply twist his wrists, looking up at Irene and
winking and then—Germaine had wondered. In St Malo, and the Matin lobby: Oh
Mathilde, the girl had said, your stories are always so shocking, and, Pas avec
toi—pas avec...
—flinched away, startled, from the sudden hand on her arm.
Ice wrapped in a flannel dripped onto the floor. Germaine shuffled her feet.
'Unless you enjoy it,' said Germaine. She nodded towards Irene's burnt wrist.
Irene let out a slow, slow breath, curled into herself. She shook her head, but
didn't move.
'It was Gretha,' Irene told her. 'She suggested the ropes, while I was—she said
Charles should show her how to tie someone… properly. She said he should show
her on Henry.'
'Yes?' said Germaine. Cool fingers on Irene's forearm; coaxing. Turning her
hand.
'Yes. To get me away from him, it must have been. Like you said,' and her back
prickled up, 'because she was jealous. Because she wanted—' and her bitter
tongue.
Germaine put a hand on the inside of Irene's wrist; held the ice to the outside
with the other. Her mouth was very close. They kissed until Irene was shivering
all over and her wrist was numb.
'She kept stuttering,' Irene said. 'She did, she—I'd take him deep and she'd
start repeating herself, Oh Captain,' and she laughed; gasping like crying:
'you've so much responsibility, haven't you, out there in the War? I got that
one out of her three times but Henry was on the verge of it and she must have
wanted—'
'I'd have wanted,' Germaine said, 'your, your mouth,' and moaned, and rested
her forehead against Irene's.
Irene tilted up her face. Breath, between them, and that blade in her back. She
coaxed Germaine's lip out from between her teeth and gave her her mouth. Gave
and gave. Germaine was burning hot. Slippery to hold.
'I'd have been going mad,' Germaine said. 'Watching you get him like that. All
three of them watching you on your knees. When I s—since you told me, I can't
stop thinking—'
'You really mean me,' harsh in the quiet, 'to believe—'
Germaine's hot face and her bitten lip. Irene twisted her neck away with ice-
water still dripping down into her open palm.
'Given the choice,' she said, 'of your lover, in a situation like that, and—and
Gretha: you spent time, did you, thinking about me?'
'I heard—' said Germaine. 'I thought about how all of them. All three of them,
were looking right at you.'
Out the window there was nothing to see: tree-leaves, and the sides of
buildings. Irene took a breath, and turned her head.
'You have my photographs,' she said, but Germaine shook her head. Pas avec toi,
she had cried, half-stripped in Irene's lap as the sun set over the sea, and
now the stubborn lying—Irene, with her hand clenching down on Germaine's hand
on her numb wrist, said, 'You keep them in your trunk. Fuck yourself while you
look at them.'
'No,' said Germaine, so Irene had to kiss it out of her mouth.
Had to. Shivering and sweating. Take. Tongue in her mouth she didn't argue.
Germaine melting into her thinking—thinking Irene had let it go, or—or just
thinking of a good hard bloody fucking—Christ. Cold water soaked the cotton
over Irene's thigh and trickled down between her legs and she yanked the ice
from Germaine's hand and pressed it to Germaine's nape and the girl gasped. All
the hollows of Irene's body. Pressed it to Germaine's cheek and her forehead
and fumbled open her blouse; so she'd wanted her, had she? pressed the ice
sloppy to the swell of her breast and two ice-cool fingers into her mouth and
watched her suck. She pressed down on Germaine's tongue and Germaine went to
her knees.
Some sound. An animal sound Irene had made. Germaine, kneeling, with her shirt
all open and her tight-shut eyes and her warm wet mouth suckling at Irene's
fingers, needing, mad for it and Irene—Irene followed her down.
'You want me to believe,' Irene said, 'that you've never seen—that you've no
idea what I mean when I talk about photographs?' Germaine shook her head with
her mouth still full, so Irene half-opened the flannel and pressed bare ice to
the single layer of silk over her right nipple. Kept it there. Germaine's
noises: cooing into whining. The ache of it. She pressed harder and Germaine's
hips twitched forward.
'Oh yes?' Crowding closer. 'You like it?' Germaine nodded, nodding, fingers in
her working watering mouth. 'Or you think I want you to like it?' and she
moaned. Irene with her free hand grappled at buttons and buttons down the side
of Germaine's skirt. Pushed it down. Pushed her knickers down. 'You want to be
another Henry, another—another Charles?' she said, and Germaine slurped at her
hand so she took it away; clenched it in Germaine's hair. 'You want me to do to
you what I did to them?' she said. 'But they're powerful men, Germaine. Why
would you think to compare? Unless you'd seen it happening and imagined just
what you'd do, in their place.'
Germaine empty-mouthed gasped like a fish on ship-deck, 'I'd want you to—'
'You have my photographs,' Irene said. Pulled back Germaine's head to show her
throat. 'And I'd wager,' steady now, 'if you really did want to look at—at me
in all that wreckage I know what I'd have looked at, I know—'
Water, welling from Germaine's skin. Welling from her eyes. Irene with a fist
in her hair moved the ice to her lips. Stuffed it in its flannel in her mouth
like a gag and Germaine groaned, and sucked: how she loved to use her mouth. A
woman might let her lick her for hours, let her—let her tunnel into the folds
of her, drink her like wine—insensible—
'You're lovely,' Irene said. Her voice hardly shook. 'You're lovely,' she
repeated, 'stuffed all full for me, you look—you know what I—'
And the sounds she made. Reaching down, touching—'Don't touch,' Irene said, and
Germaine whimpered and—
'—you know what I'd have looked at,' Irene asked her, 'if it really was like
you said? Gretha was—' tightening her fist, pulling her hair '—fucking Charles,
fucking him on the floor between Henry's legs, telling him to lick Henry's feet
but Charles wouldn't mind her. So she climbed off him and took off her—'
—took off her—
—
—yanking the ice from Germaine's numb drooling mouth and shoving it between her
legs with the flannel half-open so it cooled and then burnt—and then kissing—
'Gretha,' Irene told her, 'was famous,' on her knees, 'for taking off her
dress.'
Germaine squirmed and panted. Twisting away from, into, whimpering. Irene still
tugging on her hair.
'And she got off him, looking—looking. Right at me. I was staring and the men
might have been as well but Gretha was looking—' pressing the ice to Germaine's
clitoris so it would hurt and make her—she gasped—'right at me,' Irene said,
and Germaine said, 'Please.'
'But I couldn't be outdone. Could I? I'd strapped myself into—well you know,
you've seen. Haven't you, hm?' and she pressed with her ice hand but Germaine
just twisted and and squirmed and begged please, so Irene: 'I stepped to the
side. Let her see the leather straps and my black cock under my skirts so hard
for her, and she picked up the camera,' shoving the last of the ice inside
Germaine along with two fingers and the girl sobbing, convulsing, her whole
body trying to fold in on itself beating in waves around Irene's hand as Irene,
breathless, said, 'was that your favourite?'
'Oh,' Germaine panted. Eyes near-closed; loose-limbed; obvious she'd crumple to
the floor without Irene to hold her up but she was still—still fucking herself
weakly on Irene's fingers so Irene tightened down hard in her hair oh, oh, 'I
want you to,' Germaine, crying out.
'Tell me,' Irene said, 'where you keep my photographs,' but Germaine just
panted and moaned and twisted her hips with her hot creature smell dripping out
of her around the melted ice. How many times would it take, Irene wondered,
curious, as Germaine said, 'Oh God she'd have wanted you so—Gretha, she would
want, she would want,' and Irene—Irene couldn't—
'You've,' Irene said.
Her hands repulsed.
Touching nothing.
'You've got to change your clothes.'
Germaine, down on the floor. Trembling on her knees with her brassière half-
soaked and her blouse hanging off her shoulders and her mouth open and her
eyes—
'You'll be wanting to wash,' said Irene, turning back to the window. 'And to
change your clothes.'
Ages passed before she heard the girl stir. She didn't look around.
She just stood in the nonexistent breeze through the open window and listened
to the sounds of sliding drawers in the next room over. The clink of metal in a
dish. Taps opening, and the splash of water around a shifting body.
She would want, Irene thought. Christ.
But perhaps so. Perhaps Gretha had. Perhaps later she'd thought—perhaps she'd
regretted. Germaine said so, and she had been looking at the photographs for
months. Had obsessed on them, memorised them. Denied them and lied about them;
carried them close to her skin. Oh God, Germaine had said. She'd have wanted
you so.
A woman by a window in a flat in Paris, who was neither Mathilde nor Olivia
Wren nor Diane de Lamartine nor Irene Adler, breathed out slowly; and closed
her eyes.
She crossed the room. The flat was hot, and quiet.
She leant against the door jamb; and there, oddly familiar, was Germaine
Beaumont in the bath, already watching the door when Irene walked through it.
There was no telling whether her faint tremors were for show.
Irene, clearing her throat, felt oddly achy not to be touching her.
'The nonsense with the rope was a stunt,' she said. 'One of Gretha's… stunts.
It was meant to wind me—it was meant,' she corrected, 'to distract me.'
Germaine opened her mouth, and closed it. She was sitting up in the water,
hugging her knees. The tremors kept on, in her shoulders and her hands.
Irene sighed. She stripped out of her skirt and her blouse; folded them and
laid them on the closed toilet lid. Bra, knickers. The wet patch from the ice,
she saw, had almost faded.
In nothing but her made-up face she crossed the room and Germaine watched her
over her knees. How much could the girl lie, Irene wondered, with only her
body? Enough, probably. The tap dripped into the bath and Irene perched on the
lip of the bath.
'Gretha came to my rooms one night,' she said. 'After I'd been with a client.
She was no fool, she knew a—a puppy crush, when she saw one. I was coiling
rope, and she teased me. Sat at my vanity and said she was sure she didn't know
what they saw in it: getting tied up and whipped and all the things I did at Le
Chabanais. Well, there was money in it, I told her, because she always
respected—'
Germaine's hand twitched, on her calf. A twisting in Irene's gut.
'But Gretha said she could make her own money,' she went on, 'quite well
enough. Had I seen the dress she was wearing? It had been a general who had
bought it for her, she said. She could talk about her men for hours, so I. I
wanted to shock her, perhaps. Perhaps—'
She sighed. Germaine watched her. Oh God, Germaine had said, she'd have wanted;
and Irene hadn't seen so much as a newspaper clipping of Gretha since 1917.
'She saw me move,' Irene said, 'and tried to block me. We ended up tussling on
the floor. She was laughing. She seemed so, oh, delighted. Open. She was
laughing and I got the rope around her wrists, not properly, I didn't know if
she'd want—but I held them down so that she pushed up onto her elbows. Asked
me, was that the best I could do, and then she twisted her wrists out of the
hold. And she kissed me.'
And Germaine's eyes, green, green.
'And then she avoided me,' said Irene. 'For a week, ten days, after that, I
don't know. That night in the photographs was the first time we were together,
since.'
The tap went drip; drip; drip. Germaine didn't answer but her knees unbent,
just a little.
'I always took care of Henry Jouvenel,' Irene said. 'Whenever he came in. I
knew your—your employer once. And then—well, he visited us often.'
'You knew—Madame Jouvenel.' It came out too flat. Irene wanted to put her hand
in Germaine's hair.
'Call it,' said Irene, 'I don't know. Sentimental of me.'
Germaine looked away; Irene looked too. The bath was white and the tile was
white and the decades-old grout was as light as scrubbing could make it.
Germaine stared straight ahead; then nodded, only just.
'But Henry didn't want me that night,' Irene said. 'He wanted Charles Humbert,
and Gretha—Gretha liked the rich men, the important men. I knew she'd want to
see to Charles, even though he was insufferable and a self-important bully
and—'
'Is,' said Germaine.
Irene looked down at her, staring at the dripping taps.
'Charles,' Irene said. But of course.
Germaine nodded, into her knees.
'He was your... Charles Humbert was your other married man.'
Germaine nodded again. Irene allowed herself: her fingers, running through
sweat-dark hair.
'You,' she said, close to laughter. 'Ah. When it comes to men. It may be
possible to choose more wisely.'
Germaine leant, barely perceptibly, into her hand. Irene petted her forehead.
Finger-pads through the frizz at her temples.
'That's where you got my photographs,' Irene said. 'You stole them from
Charles.'
Germaine nuzzled her cheek against Irene's palm with her eyes closed, mouth
open just a little. Her skin was tacky damp and Irene was tingling and very
naked, perched on the lip of the bath.
'All right,' said Irene. Her thumb petted soft cheek-fuzz and Germaine tried to
catch it in her mouth: whimpered, but didn't answer. 'All right.' Petting her
hair. 'You don't have to,' Irene lied. 'It's all right.'
Germaine, body twisted towards the taps, still trembled.
Irene climbed in behind her back to sit on the narrow edge of the bath. Said
'come here,' and spread her legs for Germaine to sit back between them. Her
soft shoulders. The little curling tendrils of hair at the back of her neck.
'It was all so,' Irene said. 'Absurd, I suppose. She'd kissed me, hadn't she,
and I thought—she was new to France, new to the business, and I'd been in it
since aught-eight, but she'd kissed me and then avoided me…'
'Hid from you,' Germaine said, and Irene said, 'If you like.'
Her fingers worked Germaine's hair-pins free, slowly, one by one. Sections of
hair fell down onto her damp, trembling back. She was homely, and beautiful. It
made Irene's stomach hurt under her ribs.
'I felt quite the clown,' she said, 'later. Thinking how she must have laughed
at—oh, at how casual I tried to be that night, pulling her into our little
group. At dinner I kept—kept sneaking looks at her, like a love-sick
schoolgirl. I thought it was promising, then. That every time I looked, she was
looking back.'
Tink on tile and the last freed locks curled down onto Germaine's shoulder.
Irene let her fingers dig in: from scalp to neck. Germaine made a deep cat
noise in her throat; rolled her shoulders under Irene's hands. No more tremors,
now.
'And then,' Irene said, 'thinking how she must have laughed to herself, seeing
me on my knees. Thinking of her telling Charles, You could tie a man properly
no doubt, so he couldn't get away. She'd be watching me get red, I could feel
myself—if she had wanted me to tie her properly I'd have had her trussed on the
floor so she couldn't move, have had her—
Germaine made a stifled noise. Biting her lip, oh. Could be for show, Irene
thought, queasy and naked all over. She made a fist and rolled her knuckles
into the back of Germaine's neck; into the soft flesh of her shoulders and the
dip of her clavicle.
'Oh,' said Germaine. Panting softly. 'It feels good.'
'Yes?'
'Go harder?'
Irene went harder. Germaine's soft noises echoed off the tile.
'The whole time,' Irene told her, 'that they were fiddling about with the
ropes, she kept—kept needling me. Smiling at me. Secret smiles like we were in
on a joke, and Charles so enchanted with her he'd never notice. Oh Captain you
must do this all the time, in the War, and But Captain, he could simply twist
his wrists to escape—because she knew I'd be thinking about how she'd twisted
up to kiss—'
Germaine's breath faltered. Irene waited, but there was nothing more.
'Harder?' she asked. Germaine nodded and let her head fall forward onto her
knees. The line of her neck and her soft plump shoulder. Irene thought
confusedly that she could bite; could soothe; could kiss—she let her nails dig
in, and Germaine panted.
'She was standing behind Henry,' Irene said, 'asking Charles things to make me
think of her—to make me want to be closer and so I. I went over and sat on
Jouvenel's cock and her—her breath did catch—' her nails on Germaine's scalp,
too hard, a bit too hard, fist in her hair but Germaine said 'Yes,' and moved
her hips in the water and didn't say anything else.
'She—' said Irene, and her throat closed.
'Kissed you,' Germaine gasped.
'I almost came just from—'
'Please,' said Germaine, and 'Christ,' Irene heard herself say. 'Turn around
then,' and between Irene's legs Germaine turned. Knelt in the water. Irene
turned her head by the hair and kissed her as Germaine's hands fluttered like
birds. Helpless lying Germaine, wanting her. Her soft seeking mouth and her
breasts pressed up against the wet insides of Irene's thighs.
'And then, later,' Irene told her. She sat Germaine back, on her heels in the
water with her eyes closed, panting. Germaine didn't like being pushed away but
somehow Irene had to say it, to say: 'after she danced for—for me—and the men
were taken care of, we—'
Swallowing and swallowing as Germaine whined.
'—it was stupid to leave the camera but I—we couldn't wait, we, we had to. In
the storeroom down the corridor—'
Her hands on Germaine's neck and her face and Germaine turned her head like a
flower seeking the sun. Eyes closed; mouth open; lips closing around Irene's
ring finger, Christ. Irene gave her two and Germaine groaned.
'In the storeroom,' she said again. Queasy; skin prickling all up her back. 'Up
against the wall I tasted her just—yes, like that, like—and she turned us and
went to her knees and told me to show her how I'd sucked him—she let me—'
gasping '—hold on to her hair—'
Her stomach, in knots. Her aching skin. She licked into Germaine's mouth around
her own knuckles as Germaine moaned and sucked and 'Yes,' Irene told her, 'it
was just like that,' moving her hand just a little, just a tiny bit. 'She got
her fingers up me,' she murmured, 'and I could see my cock in her throat—' and
Germaine's sloppy eager tongue. 'Can you try for me?' Irene said. Fingers
pressed in further with Germaine moaning; sucking-swallowing; and Irene, so
gentle, fucking her mouth with her hand.
'Good,' she said. 'Christ, you.' She laughed, weak. Shaky. Kissed Germaine's
forehead, breathing hard. Hurting. Hurting her.
'It took minutes,' she said, 'only minutes, I was desperate, I was—was bent
over her head with my fist in my mouth and her hand inside me and then I got
her down on the—oh on the floor and, and she let me eat at her mouth and, and
fill up her cunt and she told me to, told me all right, yes, yes,' as Germaine
pressed forward, forward between her legs and Irene took her hand back to brace
herself and Germaine's wet—hot—mouth—
—and Irene, crying out shaking with Germaine's hands holding open her legs—
—and Germaine's greedy slurping moaning noises under her skin, vibrating—
—and bright—sharp—hard tongue slicing her open all her insides bursting
drowning them and Germaine's teeth—
'Christ,' Irene said. Germaine made a sound that could have been anything and
Irene said 'Jesus,' and slid down into the cool water and yanked Germaine's
head back and pinned her against the side of the bath and filled her mouth with
her tongue and her cunt with half her hand until Germaine cried out—out—and
again—
'Oh,' Germaine said, and kissed her. Irene clenched her hand on the lip of the
bath, so that Germaine didn't slip sideways into the water. She kissed her.
Kissed her. Oh.
'Gretha,' said Irene. 'There was a knock on the door. And she was
more—clothed,' laughing, with the bottom dropping out of it as Germaine softly
grunted. 'So Gretha went to answer and whoever it was—Luce, or Marie—led her
away, and I unstrapped myself and—'
Germaine's eyes, unfocused. Blinking and sleepy. Irene a raw wine-skin,
stitched together with catgut. Continuing to be touched.
'When I got back to the room,' she finished, 'the camera was gone.'
Germaine licked her lips. Blinked her eyes. 'I just want…' she said, and
wrapped her legs around Irene's hips, so Irene kissed her, exhausted. Not
moving much. The little half-window above the bath showed peaches and violets.
Irene sagged into the girl's soft front. Her skin sealing back up. Kissing.
Irene's foot on the plug. Her toes, pulling the chain. The gurgling draining
bath.
'Mmmm,' said Germaine. Irene could about breathe.
'If I'd known,' she said. Breathing. 'Modesty doesn't pay, you know, for a
woman like me. But if I'd known about you and Charles, and I'd a flutter on who
in those photographs you'd look at, I'd have put myself dead last.'
'But nobody really likes Charles,' Germaine mumbled. 'His own daughter—'
Irene took a breath. Held it. Sounds of horses and motor-cars filtered up from
the street below.
'She only seemed sort of—sort of interested, Agnès,' Germaine said at last.
Rousing; sitting back; rubbing her forehead. 'She seemed bemused, I think, when
I handed her the print of her father, licking another man's tied-up feet.'
Irene let out her breath, and couldn't stop laughing.
Chapter End Notes
     JE Harting's Our Summer Migrants: An Account of the Migratory Birds
     Which Pass the Summer in the British Islands, Illustrated From
     Designs by Thomas Berwick came out in 1875.
***** And the way forward is the way back *****
Sunday, August 28th, 1921
4pm (Hour 98)
Minutes later, Irene was laughing still.
'Christ,' she said. 'I—' but then started up again. Her aching stomach. She'd
slid down to lie in the bath, gasping, back flat against porcelain. Germaine
pulled herself up onto the lip and scowled and scowled and then giggled and
Irene couldn't stop.
'That's what you were holding out for, was it,' she gasped out. 'A little
petting and story-telling in the bath? In future—' Germaine snickering, poking
Irene's stomach with her toe '—I'll know to skip over all that business with
the ice and the—'
'Don't.' Toes clenching against her pubic bone.
The ball of Germaine's foot, pressed against the crest of her. Irene rolled her
hips on a breath; coiling-uncoiling.
'Mmmm,' Irene said. 'You liked it, then.'
Germaine made to pull her foot back but was checked. Irene exhaled, her hand
around Germaine's ankle and her wild laughter settling into stillness.
'I'm glad you liked it,' she told her. A careful smile and she rolled her hips
again; pressed herself into the girl's foot. Quivered. 'I wondered, back in St
Malo. I thought you might like me to lace you into a swan-bill and take a
switch to that lovely great arse of yours.'
Germaine coughed, flushing. 'Not something,' she said, 'not, not quite
something she would have tried, though. Miss Olivia Wren.'
'I—yes. It did seem rather beyond her, didn't it.'
'Would you,' said Germaine, very fast, 'some other time,' and held her breath
with every muscle in her leg locked up. Irene stopped biting her mouth and
smiled.
'Tell me, then.' On Germaine's ankle her hands were slick. 'Who were you
putting on, in Paris, when you set out to scandalise Agnès Humbert?'
'I wasn't—' Shaky breath; foot unclenching. 'I never thought it out. I make an
awful… blackmailer, or—it's all chance I wasn't found out at once.'
'Charles didn't recognise you, though. From his daughter's description.'
'Oh Lord,' Germaine said. Toes curling; squirming. 'Nor would you have done.
Dowdy Mademoiselle Beaumont, always dressed against the fashion.'
'Suits you,' Irene said. 'You might be a schoolteacher, and I a pupil's angry
parent.'
Germaine, laughing and flushing. Irene swallowed. Around the girl's ankle the
flesh was starting to redden.
'But,' said Irene, 'I hear Agnès Humbert studies art. A frump makes a better
character study than some fashion plate.'
'Yes, that's the point, I was—well.' She sighed. 'I'd come back to the city
with Madame Jouvenel to see about the first break-in. Only she couldn't be
bothered. I kept telling her, I kept saying we should go by the office, see
about the damages, and she would say, oh yes, Germaine, just after we drop in
at the Rue Cambon, just after luncheon, just after the nail parlour, just after
we do something about that—'
'Ah.'
'— hair of yours.' Her hands in fists. 'And so you see I looked quite unlike
myself, by the end.'
'You're—you're angry,' Irene said. Gripping Germaine's ankle. 'Something about
it makes you—' and Germaine laughed.
'What doesn't?' She scrubbed at her own face as Irene rubbed her marred-red
calf.
'I thought it might be Charles,' Germaine said. 'The timing of it all; and
then, the man on the telephone had said Monsieur Jouvenel's office was worse
than that of Madame. Charles would think of his great rival, wouldn't he, if
his little prize went missing? And then of his rival's wife, and not at all
of—well. I was the one who took the call, you know, and I asked particularly.
It was almost a confirmation, that he hadn't even thought to search my desk.'
'You—'
'He hadn't bothered,' Germaine went on. 'And then Madame Jouvenel, not
bothering either, not bothering to try to defend herself, to limit the damage
after months of Henry, just—he was just at her all the time. All the way up
from Paris to Roz Ven and then all summer: how scandalous she was. The trouble
he had, to cover up her past. That he was a senator now and she'd been on the
stage and—and I do their accounts, I know who pays for their things. And him
out in public with Mademoiselle Patat and—and Charles was just the same.'
Germaine was shaking like she might burst out of her skin and rise up in fury,
resplendent on behalf of her mistress; Irene, stripped and wet under her in the
heat. She ought to let go. To wrap up in terrycloth. Her mouth watered.
'He gloated to me, you know,' Germaine said. 'Over those pictures, he—all
right, I snooped a bit to find them, but his hints were so broad I hardly
needed to. What I could do to Henry Jouvenel, he'd said, with the little
treasures I've got.'
'Had an itemised list, did he?' Irene got out.
'Well he couldn't really do anything. Not unless he wanted all of Paris to know
that the upright family man of Le Journal had licked the feet of his libertine
business rival and crawled on his knees to—to Gretha.'
To—yes. Irene forced herself to sit up. She looked away. Her squelching heart
in the heat. Germaine talked on as Irene wrapped a towel around herself,
crossed to the toilet and sat on the lid.
'But he liked to go on about it,' Germaine was saying, fierce, 'about—oh,
blackmail, disgrace. Going on about taking over from Henry at Le Matin, and
with Mademoiselle Patat. And he nagged me to know whether Henry had, ever. With
me. I think it was most of the reason he wanted me in the first place, the idea
that he had, but I—I never said.'
Irene closed her eyes. Resting her head against the cool cabinet beside the
bath, wondering to herself if Germaine Beaumont had ever fucked anyone she
didn't hate and Germaine said 'Yes. I have.'
Irene—clenching-unclenching hands—couldn't have spoken without meaning to,
didn't make such mistakes. But Germaine was saying, 'I have now.'
Irene lurched to her feet. No surface as cool as it might have been. Germaine
fierce and shaking and her snake-venom eyes and Irene's nape was dripping.
'You knew then,' she said. 'You knew Charles had some kind of little—little
hoard.'
'He mentioned it enough,' Germaine told her. Irene breathed, looking away. 'And
then one day when I was back down from Roz Ven,' said Germaine, 'and he got a
telegram and went out without a word and I was left alone in his apartment I—I
barely had to roll over, to find the photographs. He kept them tied with a
ribbon, in his bedside bureau like a love-sick girl. I didn't look at what they
were, just walked away from his building and walked and walked. I was afraid to
take them out. Afraid to go home. Felt passers-by must see in my face what I'd
done. I quite forgot I was supposed to meet Madame Jouvenel at the offices at
four; the next morning she was shocked speechless at me and I was—'
'—satisfied,' Irene said. Germaine grunted and Irene—Irene said, 'It's a heady
feeling, shocking people. And you must not often get the chance.'
'Nice, anyway,' murmured Germaine, 'that she missed me. And by that time, of
course, I'd been back here. I triple-checked that all my shutters were closed
before I could make myself open my bag and untie Charles's absurd lilac ribbon
and really look—'
'And is that,' Irene said, open mouth with words coming out of it, 'Madame
Jouvenel, is that—is she why you kept seeing them both, Henry and Charles?'
There was a silence. Green eyes at her back. She straightened her spine.
'She knew about Henry,' Germaine said, at last. Irene nodded, nodded. Germaine
said, 'I'm almost sure she did; and she knew there was another man. And she
treated me… better. Less like a child, once she knew. She said she'd worried I
would turn out—but two men, two lovers. She bought me Champagne at Pruniers,
when she heard.'
'Is that where she took you the—the other day, then? For luncheon, after
Chanel, and the hair salon?'
'Yes,' said Germaine, sounding suddenly so weary that Irene looked around.
There the girl sat, still: only Germaine, rubbing her eyes; straightening her
back on the way to her feet. Saying, 'It's a favourite of hers. Normally we
order the prawns, but having just come from a month on the coast she got us the
flank steak. She attacked hers like she hadn't eaten for ages and I just—just
sat there. Swilling Champagne with the photographs in my handbag, listening to
her chatter on and while I—'
'You carried them,' said Irene, 'about with you, then.'
'Mmm,' said Germaine. Irene blinked and leant against the doorframe and thought
of Germaine's ugly carpet bag and Germaine's nudging boots and the gin fizzes
Irene had bought for her in the lobby of the Hôtel Chateaubriand, thinking she
was Bernhardt, and Germaine a rube off the street.
Germaine who stood before her, gesturing backward out of the WC.
Irene cleared her throat. She flattened her spine against the wall to make
room; then followed the girl's long undone hair and her spectacular arse down
the corridor.
In the little bedroom—Germaine. The edge of the coverlet, exactly parallel to
the floor. The bookshelf with every volume octavo, all bound in brown leather,
all flush with the shelf-fronts. Germaine. Strange, Irene had barely noticed
the WC or the sitting room but here—the vanity-mirror hadn't so much as a
smudge.
'You should come with me,' Irene heard herself saying, a vise around her ribs.
'Come with me, when I go.'
'Pardon?' said Germaine.
She could sit down on the side of the bed, Irene thought. Could close her eyes;
she was so tired. She didn't make such mistakes (except: Madame Colette;
except: Gretha). So it must be only wise: pretending to attachment until she
had her photographs in hand.
'I'm leaving Paris,' she said. Standing straight, with her chin up.
'You're not serious, it's your entire—'
'It's all,' Irene went on, loud, 'got a bit dull. I thought: a year spent
touring the Continent. Vienna. Berlin. Venice. Well, wherever we want.
Constantinople, perhaps, and then back to London. You ought to come with me,
when I go.'
Germaine stood against her bed, gaping. Surely she must be tired too. She
looked more naked, anyway, than she had done in the bath.
'Well,' Irene told her. 'Something to think on, in any case.'
'Yes,' said Germaine. 'Yes, I—I will.'
Irene Adler could be a brave fleshy smiling machine so she made her body creak
back into its accustomed tracks. This was how it was done: dropping the towel
with an eye to Germaine's view. Strolling to the wardrobe where she blinked
back shoes lined up in high-shined pairs and fresh-pressed sets of brown skirts
and bleached blouses. But what else, she thought, could there be? Shoes and
skirts and blouses that had hung in witness when Germaine came home and checked
her shutters three times and made herself open her bag and—on a hook, on the
back of the door, was a white cotton dressing gown. Germaine had even ironed
the belt; Irene couldn't quite bring herself to put it on.
'If I bought you a peignoir,' she said. 'Silk mousseline in—in green, to go
with your eyes. Patou, or—'
'I'm not…' said Germaine, and Irene said, 'No.' Paper-thin, smiling. 'I suppose
not.'
Under her fingers the wardrobe closed with a click. She turned, smart,
practiced, towards where Germaine sat perched on the side of her own bed.
'You kept them on you, then,' Irene said, and Germaine let out a breath. 'My
photographs. You carried them about with you all the time.'
'I didn't want anyone to find them,' said Germaine. She rolled her bare
shoulders. Held her arms away from her sides: the heat, still. Somehow Irene
had almost forgotten. 'I didn't want,' said Germaine. 'You know, I never
thought out what I'd do. I never had a plan about them, I never—and I would
never have wanted some—some stranger to... what it would do to Madame Jouvenel.
And all right, I was angry with her, that day at Pruniers, but then I saw what
I'd done and I wanted to make it up. I would never want—I wouldn't take the
chance.'
'You took them with you,' Irene repeated, 'everywhere. You had them at the
Chateaubriand, then?'
Germaine, lip between her teeth, lifting her arm in the slanting sun from the
window. Her reddish-brown fur, twilight-gilt. In Constantinople and Vienna
Irene might let her crawl to her. Put her tongue in her. Germaine nodded and
she shivered.
'But I searched your room,' Irene said. 'I searched your whole room and then
I—I got up before first light, and searched your WC.'
'Chewing gum,' Germaine mumbled. Irene's hands, she realised, were gripping the
girl's shoulders.
'Chewing gum,' she echoed. Germaine's fingers inched up Irene's flank to rest
on Irene's hip. Chewing gum again and then: 'The airshaft.'
'I'm taller than you,' Germaine agreed. Rubbing light circles on Irene's hip as
she said, 'So even if you thought to look, I—did you? Think to look? And anyway
I couldn't think of anything else. It was, it was you and you were waiting in
my room, and I'd—I'd put the pictures in an envelope, fastened shut. One day in
the steam wouldn't hurt them. I chewed the gum and then crawled up on the lip
of the bath. I reached up the airshaft as far as I could, and stuck the
envelope to the wall.'
Light circles, light, light. Such racking tenderness. Germaine's mouth, turning
down at the corners.
'I thought for certain,' she was saying, 'that you'd see through me. I thought
they'd all see through me at once but somehow it just kept on and on and I feel
like I haven't slept for simply. Ages.'
Irene stroked Germaine's forehead, which rested on her belly. Mud-brown waves
tangled around her fingers like her mother had used to do for Irene. Perhaps,
she thought. Perhaps when she left Germaine in Düsseldorf, or Vienna—perhaps
before they left Paris—perhaps on a sleeper train they might—
But Germaine, in her exhausted voice, plodded on.
'That afternoon at Pruniers. She—Madame Jouvenel. She fed me steak and
chattered at me like her husband chattered at her and Charles chattered at me
and I—I drank a bottle of Champagne and only told her—told her I was off. Told
her to go see to her office without me, I needed. Needed a bit of air.'
'You went to find Charles?' Irene said. Germaine was nuzzling against her
clenching stomach like an animal. Butting her with her head like some dumb
beast and Irene had said it, tossed it out like nothing: You ought to come with
me, when I go.
'I was going to,' Germaine mumbled, 'to finally make him see… something.
Reason, or—or…'
Irene petted her hair. Her hands kept moving on their own. She could feed them
to Germaine, to make them still.
'But of course it all went wrong,' Germaine said into Irene's skin. 'Charles
wasn't at home; nobody was home, even servants. His daughter was standing
ringing his bell, and she thought—well.'
'She'd have seen your done-up face,' Irene murmured. Touching her ears. Her
mouth, moving, on Irene's queasy belly. 'And,' she added, 'your hair.'
Germaine was pressing into her and she didn't make mistakes. Irene Adler, who
recognised people; who knew what people liked. She wouldn't be ill with
Germaine's fingers digging into her hips. It would be all right. Hands in the
girl's hair.
'It made me even—even worse,' Germaine was saying. 'That she thought I was
cheap. Grasping.'
'Furious,' said Irene. In Berlin before she left her she could take her by the
hair—'You'd have thought,' she said, 'that presuming bitch.'
'I wanted—'
'And your eyes,' Irene heard. 'So green.' In Madrid it would be all right; she
would want to. She could take her hand from Germaine's head; move Germaine's
hand away from her hip. Between her legs. Slide two of Germaine's fingers
inside her and squeeze them with her body and Germaine's eyes—
'There,' Irene gasped. 'She must have been blind, not to see you.'
'I—' said Germaine, but Irene squeezed her again so she moved her hand, a
shaking little. 'Good,' Irene told her, 'more'—so bloody tender—
'You wanted,' Irene said, 'you wanted to show her. You wanted her to see, well,
what was it? Charles on the floor? Charles, with his tongue up—'
'—Gretha,' Germaine gasped, 'on top of him.' Irene was bruised. Sore. 'Hard,'
she said, and Germaine said, 'Gretha riding him and his head between Henry's
legs. You must have been—have been—'
'Practically on top of them with the camera, harder—'
'Agnès, she—she started a bit but then she just laughed.'
And Irene, laughing, 'Cunt,' as fingers clutched in her, hot, in Paris—
'I ran away,' Germaine said. 'I just left. I felt—you're, God—I felt she must
be following me; I was practically running. Must have looked like a clown, with
my, my face paint and my curled hair and thinking all of a sudden: what had I
done to Madame Jouvenel?'
A jolt.
'Curl your fingers,' Irene said, though she didn't want, not again. But in the
months alone, in Rome, and Barcelona—
'I couldn't stop thinking what I'd done,' Germaine gasped. Moved, moving. 'Sure
they'd—they'd come for me, and I'd not a leg to stand on, and I—I ran for ages.
Want to taste you now, I—
'Tell me,' said Irene. 'Tell me, first.'
'I, oh. Couldn't think where to go. Thought of—of reading manuscripts for the
Jouvenels, American ones. All the, oh, all the same. Tommy guns and midnight
telephone calls and—'
'—ransom notes—' said Irene with her entire hand up her in Chicago, beating and
beating, left dripping in a train station in New York—
'I ended up,' said Germaine, 'miles away. In the eighth. And where could I go
at—Christ, Christ—'
And Irene didn't want—but in Constantinople she would move her hips—
'—at ten in the evening? I thought of, of ransom notes. I bought papers from a
kiosk, but I didn't know—I'd passed a dozen hotels, but surely they could all
see me—'
'I—'
'I want you to—'
'Go on, go—go on.'
Germaine swallowed. Germaine was solid and naked and halfway inside Irene's
fractured body that in Lisbon would leave her and in Amsterdam would need but
in Paris Germaine went on. 'I took a back table,' she said, 'in a café, and,'
moving her hand, 'ordered more food than I could eat. I didn't touch it, I
just, just cut apart the newspaper and made my note. Christ, my heart. And I'd
passed a place called the Hôtel Vernet, so I put that in the—'
'Make me—'
'—note, ungh,' Germaine said, and pushed, and Irene buckled, forehead to knees,
grinding, wanting it, wanting—
'Please,' said Irene, alone in London, far from all and everyone, 'please—'
'I couldn't decide how much to, to give her, but I—surely the negatives were
enough of a—a gesture of good faith. And the man behind the,' panting, 'counter
took my envelope and I—I was sure,' she said, and Irene too never made such
mistakes, 'that every passer-by would see through me but they didn't, they
didn't, all the way to the paper where I snuck in and put my note on Madame
Jouvenel's desk and then I didn't sleep the whole night and the next day I took
down my hair.'
Irene, jackknifed. Shoving her pubic bone, into Germaine's palm. Building,
cresting, Le Havre and St Malo and a Limehouse tenement before the War as waves
of too much—Germaine—
'And wiped off my face-paint,' Germaine said, from far, far away. Irene was a
rain-soaked paper doll, somewhere in Europe.
'And when Madame Jouvenel woke up,' Germaine went on, 'I tried to get her to go
to the paper, but she said she'd dropped by the night before. She got us on the
first train back to Roz Ven just as you—you were probably getting to her office
as we pulled out of the station.'
Irene, with her lungs heaving, looking down. Panting. Germaine, soaked and
defiant, who had got away with theft and deception and almost blackmail, whom
Irene could crawl to in Morocco or leave weeping in Paris or be left by
gloating in St Malo or take back to London in that unfashionable brown wool
skirt, back to Limehouse on Irene's arm where Florence would still be living,
younger than ever and asking no questions so that Irene would be delighted to
say, Germaine and I, Mama, me and Germaine; and would never again tire of the
stale air of the same three rooms or the endless bland Limehouse faces; and
would never more run out gagging for the fresh air of Gracechurch Street or the
Champs Elysées; but would sow her mother's flat with gifts and would reap her
smiles and would sleep on fine sheets and be always, always happy. You should
come with me, she had said, when I go.
Minutes later, or hours, stretched out next to Germaine on the bed, she might
have asked about the photographs. What did you think, she would say, when you
looked at them, that first night? But Germaine just shifted in her sleep.
 
Sunday, August 28th, 1921
6pm (Hour 100)
If he could only just shut his eyes. Surely it would be easier. If he could
only sleep.
Why, though? So many times, hundreds of times on cases he'd gone days at a time
without even wanting to blink. His head fell back towards the top of the train-
seat and he thought maybe that was the key: to be swept along; to forget to
want to; and then they wouldn't slide shut by accident and he wouldn't see—
John, pulling ropes tight around Henry Jouvenel tied to a chair asking Sherlock
do you know what they specialise in here? Apart from beautiful Scottish boys,
served up like steaks? and Irene Adler's cold-echoing laughter you'll have to
content yourself with watching, Mr Holmes, you can't even swallow a mackerel
filetas John chuckles,Oh he likes to, he likes to show everyoneChrist,oh you
beauty, halfway down Daniel's throat
—and jerk awake, bent nearly in two over his knotted-up stomach in the second-
class train carriage which (breathe) had been the only seat available on such
short notice.
Steady. Observe.
Across the aisle a pair of provincial newlyweds sped towards the city in their
re-soled shoes and let-out hems. The bride kept reaching, surreptitious, into
her handbag, to fondle the coins there: Paris would pinch, even in the off-
season. But she was very pretty, Sherlock thought. Out of the groom's league,
before the War. No doubt he wanted to stake his claim. Let all of Paris see her
on his arm.
Outside the window the fields were browner, even now, than when he and
John—than they had been, days ago. His burning stinging open eyes.
But this could be a case, he told himself. Was a case. In that racing mid-
stream current of an interesting problem he never wanted to sleep. At times
like that his whole body used almost to disappear.
Well. Irene Adler, of course, was as interesting as problems came. A woman at
the top of her trade; the star player at the star establishment of its type,
with the men of Paris at her feet and a reputation, already, for a repertoire
on the far side of the exotic. Not exactly a secret, Sherlock didn't imagine:
the staff of a place like Le Chabanais. A shrewd businesswoman, yes; but in
Irene Adler's position, scandal would only bring her further into the public
eye; would bring custom banging down her door. Or, he thought, considering the
nature of her specialty, perhaps begging for—
John panting moaning begging tied to a chair with Daniel MacIntyre at his feet
and Irene Adler on his lap but John wanting just toseeand Sherlock—Sherlock
behind him watching Daniel. Telling Daniellick himas Sherlock's mouth waters
and waters and John moans in that way that makes Sherlock—always, always makes
himneedto kiss him like Sherlock will die unless he can but the mouth against
his is viscera-red and Sherlock is hard and ashamed and she's biting his mouth
pulling hard hard hard on his hair
Short of breath. Soaked in sweat. The newlyweds must notice, he thought, for
disgraceful seconds together before realising how absurd it was. The two of
them were sweating, themselves. Dark stains under the arms of the woman's
blouse. It was upward of ninety degrees and Sherlock could be one of the crowd.
Outside in the browning fields, cows flicked their tails at stinging flies.
So: she had kissed him. His case. Who catered to men, but preferred women. Who
had preferred, plainly, her foreign colleague—friend—to either of her officer
clients. And Sherlock preferred… not Irene Adler. Not—not Italian boys
(clenching clutching in his chest) in sun-warmed clusters, like grapes.
Sweat in his grainy open eyes.
But surely it needn't be a secret, he thought, if a whore wanted to meddle with
her colleagues in her off hours. A draw, if anything. There were men who sought
out such things. Did she put on shows, for clients who enjoyed such things?
Plenty of that in the city. Men who wanted to watch, wanted to—
with ropes around his wrists, Irene Adler cinching them tight, as oceans apart
on the bed John's golden legs and Daniel's darker ones and they laugh and kiss
and rub—rub up against each other and John moans and pants and Sherlock moans,
leaks and, and needs and Irene saysif you keep them together, Mr Holmes. If you
only keep your eyes on them long enoughand Sherlock, panting, tries with
everything he has to
—watch.
He rubbed his face. Probably quite a living to be made. From people like that.
But she'd known he wasn't one of them. Hadn't she? And she, in any case, was
leaving Paris. Boredom; new trunks; English newspapers. What was it to her,
what the city thought? Yet, threatened with the exposure of these photographs,
she traveled out to the provinces just to retrieve them.
Certainly, Sherlock thought, it ought to be a sufficient puzzle. Was. Ought to
be.
Screeching; steam. The train clunked to a stop at a mid-sized platform with
signage that began to look suburban rather than provincial. The bride dabbed at
her face with a handkerchief; her husband cleared his throat. A few more bodies
boarded the carriage. No one disembarked.
So: his, his case. Not so different, he thought, from anyone: the things she
did for money and why she did them. And if certain things were advantageous for
a woman in her position, others must be the opposite. Things she wanted, and
things she feared. Everyone, he thought, feared things and—
dusky young Daniel, tongue out and teeth, drooling all over John's feet as
sinuous Irene, in John's lap, rolls her teasing hips and he moans, so close, so
close Sherlock can smell it, Sherlock stripped and straining and hard, hard,
tied down miles away on the miles-wide bed as John closes his eyes and begs for
Daniel to give it him and moves like he wants to just—to fuck through her
sayingSherlock, sayingPlease Daniel, and Gretha sayingWhat if Irena weren't on
his lap?
—and wanted them.
Sherlock needed—he needed to. To train his aching eyes out of the window and
think not about John Watson but about. About Irene Adler, who would fear:
obscurity. Disinterest. A clientele with whom she became boring or—or fell out
of fashion.
And Paris was nothing if not fashionable. And London, in its own way, was the
same. Feuding spinster sister to a flighty young thing; but the whole family,
after all, had gone through the War.
And so now the fashion, he thought, was for survival. The fashion was for
forgetting; for prosperity and forgiveness and the triumph of youth. Irene was
nearing thirty if not upon it; but those pictures must show her at twenty-five,
twenty-six. Living freely in the new fashion; wanting her colleague while her
clients wanted each other and everyone forgot the Somme. A draw, if anything.
Unless they cast her, somehow, as a reminder of the War. Unless they cast her
as against—against survival.
Across the aisle the young bride was worrying at her plait. Sherlock, eyes
smarting, lids heavy, looked at her. Her faded let-out hem and her threadbare
coin purse.
Of the four of them in those photographs, he thought, three had not only
survived, but grown to something more than life-sized. They were excessive.
Rouged-up and vicious. And Gretha, asking questions; newly visiting Paris,
though she wasn't supposed to be in France—
what if Irena
He closed his eyes. Couldn't help it. Felt the rumble of the train beneath him
as it left Brittany behind.
And Sherlock, half-sleeping, knowing what he would see when he did, still
thinking: in such a fashionable city, the only people who couldn't be forgiven
were those already punished. The only ones who couldn't survive were already
dead. In such a fashionable city, it wasn't done to dwell on them; or to
associate with those who had.
The English, Sherlock thought, slipping back under, said Irene. The French said
Irène. You had to go east, before you heard Irena.
[END OF PART 1]
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