Chapel Noir Read Online Free PDF Page A

“Now that your objections to your duty are done, what is the nub of the matter? Which Great Personage has forced you to such an unpleasant task? Or is it a name that dare not be spoken?”
    While le Villard hesitated, Irene glanced at me. “I suppose we should offer you some refreshment.”
    “No!” Le Villard nearly shouted the word. “There is no time. You must accompany me into Paris at once. This matter is better understood when it is seen rather than heard.”
    The man at the fireplace stood and began to speak rapid French.
    As he talked, Irene leaned forward, then sat up straighter, and then straighter still, like a puppet being drawn to attention by an unseen force. She was virtually at parade attention, and I could not say why.
    Oh, how my head aches to hear a foreign language rattled off like a laundry list! Irene knew French like an Englishwoman’s maid in London, but I! Only the caught crumb of a familiar word here and there hinted at some meaning.
    Le Villard sat in my chair with his head and eyes cast down. The words “abbot noir” were bandied back and forth by the strange man and Irene more than once. Whatever he said drew her face into a mask of troubled disbelief.
    This nondescript man who accompanied Inspector le Villard was no servant, as I had first thought, but his superior.
    “I must go,” Irene murmured to herself and only incidentally to me. She stood, shaken out of her strange paralysis. “I must dress.”
    The men exchanged impatient glances.
    “Four minutes, gentlemen,” she said sternly, reading their concern. “If you wish to clock me—”
    She was clattering up the stairs like a racehorse before she finished her sentence.
    Inspector le Villard did withdraw a gold timepiece from the vest beneath his sopping cloak and dry inner coat. He clicked the lid open.
    I moved to Irene’s chair, but the unnamed man did not sit, not even on the vacant chaise longue by the now-crackling fire.
    Casanova, under his cage cover for the night, cackled eerily, startling both men.
    “The parrot,” I said.
    “Le perroquet,” the inspector repeated to his superior.
    They nodded gravely.
    A loud clatter in the hall announced Irene’s return, booted and . . . as I had feared, dressed in men’s clothing.
    The inspector leaped to his feet as I did to mine.
    “The time?” Irene demanded.
    “Four minutes, Madame,” he admitted.
    She came to the table to swoop the pistol into her frock coat pocket.
    She had twisted her hair atop her head into an burnt brown froth all more charming for its carelessness. She was not attempting actually to impersonate a man in this ensemble, although on occasion I had seen her carry off that guise uncannily well. Her attire now was a mere matter of speed, not deception, or so I thought at the time. Even I had to admit in my secret soul that this feminine interpretation of male dress, such as Sarah Bernhardt wore when sculpting in her art studio, had its charms. La Bernhardt affected pale colors, like the American author Mark Twain, but Irene wore black: dainty louisheeled boots and fine wool trousers and jacket, softened only by an ivory-silk ascot at the throat.
    Inspector le Villard spoke with some consternation. “You are aware, Madame, that you could be arrested for wearing such articles in the public streets?”
    “Really? The escort of yourself and the Prefect of Police himself, I pray, will prevent me from having my mission stopped for a trifle. I believe that this garb will serve us all better at the scene of the crime. Shall we go and find out?” She turned to me. “Nell, please do not wait up. This might take hours.”
    “I certainly do not intend to ‘wait up,’ ” I said stoutly. “I will accompany you, of course.”
    Even the man who did not speak English grasped my evident intentions. Had the situation not been so tense, it would have been amusing to watch the Frenchmen’s reaction, which was now far more appalled than it had been at the first