Chapel Noir by Carole Nelson Douglas Read Free Book Online Page B

open behind us.
    “This is not a scene to commemorate, Madame.”
    “You will rely on memory, then, and notes?”
    “We will photograph the bodies at the morgue, when the full extent of the wounds can be shown.”
    I was abstracting my notebook and pencil from my other pocket as they spoke. The activity kept me from observing the gruesome centerpiece of the room.
    “If you will leave us,” Irene was saying, as I drew the items from the folds of my skirt.
    “Impossible!” Inspector le Villard said.
    “It is quite possible,” she rejoined, “and necessary if we wish to examine the scene without supernumeraries present.”
    He jerked as if avoiding a dash of cold water at being called a spear-carrier on a stage where he was accustomed to being in utter charge.
    “The First Gentleman of Europe who insisted on our assistance would want us to have all the facts,” Irene continued. “We can best assemble them if left to ourselves.”
    Although I was not sure who the First Gentleman of Europe might be, Inspector le Villard was sufficiently impressed to pale. “This is outrageous, Madame! This scene is not fit for females to see, and to leave you alone with such carnage—!”
    “Apparently it is fit for females to be the object of such carnage. I assure you that Miss Huxleigh and I will neither swoon nor disturb the scene.”
    A brave speech, but I noticed that Irene’s complexion looked a trifle green and felt in my pocket for the smelling salts.
    The other man murmured to the inspector, and they withdrew, not without muttered French imprecations on Inspector le Villard’s part.
    As soon as the door closed silently behind them, Irene turned to me.
    She met the uplifted vial in my hand with surprise, then a quick sigh of relief. We both inhaled mightily at the tiny perforated ending.
    “No photographs!” she objected to our absent guides. “Of course not. They do not wish to implicate the aristocrat who was expecting to dally with these ladies.”
    “Ladies? Bodies? Plural? How can you tell?” I glanced sidelong at the contorted piece of furniture piled with contorted limbs, clothing, and bloody bits of things it was best not to identify.
    Young Pink had done well to compare the scene to Les Halles. I had walked past hung carcasses of plucked fowl and disassembled pigs. In Shropshire, sheep country, the young parson’s daughter had also tended the old parishioners besieged by gangrene and bedsores. I could survive facing this. If I did not look too closely.
    Irene pointed to the odd piece of furniture, which reminded me of a patten, those tall platform shoes worn by medieval women to keep their skirts from the offal on the streets.
    It truly beggars my descriptive powers. Pink’s “barber chair from Versailles” it was, a strangely sinuous affair, perhaps purchased at some goblin market. Every surface snaked into the other in white-wood tendrils edged with gilt. Two arms lifted from its upholstered top, but curved backwards, like no chair arms I had ever seen.
    At the front of both bottom and top surface bronze metal brackets protruded at each curved corner.
    Around and through and within this tangle of wood and upholstered brocade and metal prongs draped a quantity of silken fabric revealing the hint of a vastly distorted body, actually bodies , behind and beneath it all.
    Irene’s face was grimmer than I had ever seen it as I lifted my eyes from my jotted-down description of the scene.
    “You see the lower bronze stirrups, on the floor-level upholstery?”
    “Yes, but stirrups? This is a kind of rocking horse? As in a child’s schoolroom?”
    “Not child’s play, this.” Irene eyed me worriedly, then without a word dropped to her knees on the costly Savonnerie carpet.
    “Irene!”
    “I must examine the trail of disturbances before the whole French prefecture arrives and tramples the carpeting like a herd of Indian elephants.”
    “You expected to be making such a close inspection,” I noted in