The Mystery of the Scarlet Rose Read online

  I laughed.

  It was true. A tiny unsolved mystery like this was, for Sherlock Holmes, capable of ruining a night’s sleep. I was about to ask him how he intended to proceed solving the mystery, and if I could help him in any way, when the door to the Shackleton Coffee House burst open.

  A striking figure appeared in the doorway in a gust of wind and snow. He was wrapped up in an elegant crimson coat, with a gray felt cap pulled down over his face.

  “I’ll be darned!” Sherlock immediately exclaimed, sitting up against the back of his armchair.

  A second look at the café entrance was all it took for me to be as flabbergasted as he was.

  The patron who’d just entered the café had taken off his hat and scarf, and his face was now clearly recognizable.

  It was Arsène Lupin!

  Chapter 3

  A SOUL IN TURMOIL

  “I knew I’d find you here!” crowed our French friend, throwing his coat onto the nearest chair. He looked at both of us and, after a moment’s hesitation, hugged me first, gently squeezing me. We lightly kissed each other’s cheeks like old friends. Then Lupin threw his arms around Sherlock. Their hug was more spontaneous, with wild pats on the back and a couple of rough handshakes. I looked at them, smiling, with a touch of envy.

  In the few months he’d been away, Lupin seemed to have grown a good deal more than Sherlock or I had. Despite the winter season, he was tan, his eyes were dark and shining, and his cheekbones and jaw were carved as if by a sculptor. He had a healthy, agile physique, with the poise of someone who leads an active life. His movements were never accidental or clumsy. Looking at him strike a pose in that foreign café with absolute ease was like watching a hot knife slip through a stick of butter.

  To tell the truth, that morning I disliked watching my two friends from the outside, separate, instead of being completely involved in the three of us reuniting.

  I mean, I was very happy but also so excited that I retreated inside myself a little, to protect myself from the effect that my two friends had on me.

  We all started speaking together, without even taking the time to sit down, and so, when a confused waiter came by to ask Lupin for his order, we burst out laughing and finally sat down around the table.

  “Now, then!” Lupin smiled at me, putting his hand on mine, which he stroked with affection. “What’s been happening with you all this time? Have I missed anything?”

  I felt my fingers tremble under his. I looked at Sherlock, because Lupin had asked both of us what had been going on.

  I gave a brief answer and then asked in turn, “But what are you doing here, all of a sudden, and without letting anyone know?”

  “Bof!” exclaimed my young friend. “Do you want the truth?”

  “As much as possible,” answered Sherlock. “As much as you can tell.”

  Lupin lifted his hand from mine with a final stroke, and I quickly put mine back in my lap, like a wounded little bird. I listened to the story that followed, confused.

  Arsène had had a fierce argument with his father, Théophraste, and had decided to leave the circus.

  “You mean you came to London . . . alone?” I asked him, astonished.

  He chuckled, halfway between being amused and offended, as if I should have seen a grown man in him and not a boy a few years older than me.

  “Bien sûr!” he answered. “And it was the best decision of my life.”

  He told us that his father’s traveling circus had stopped in Rotterdam not long before, where a rich city merchant had made fun of Théophraste’s acrobatic number.

  “Such an ignoramus, my friends! I couldn’t stand it,” Lupin confided to us, flashing that ferret-like smirk that made me happy.

  “So what did you do?” Sherlock asked him.

  “I challenged him to a game of cards,” Lupin replied, “that very evening. And, of course . . . I cleaned him out of everything he had — even his watch.”

  My eyes widened. “Cleaned him out?”

  He closed his fingers and then opened them as swiftly as a falcon. Between his index finger and thumb, he held the ace of diamonds. “Cleaned him out with great skill and sleight of hand!” he said.

  “Magnificent!” Sherlock exclaimed, slapping his hand on the table. “Now you’re talking!”

  I was not so easily convinced, however. “You cheated at cards for money?” I asked.

  “For the family honor,” Lupin specified, my question not shaking his self-confidence in the least.

  “Quite right,” said Sherlock, who seemed more interested in how Lupin had made a card appear in his hand than in the rest of the affair.

  “But it wasn’t your money!” I blurted out.

  “That’s what my father said,” Arsène replied, stung. He looked at us in search of agreement. “He scolded me the whole evening, ordering me to return the money. You should have heard him. He lectured me — tried to take the moral high ground with me! After all the work we had to do to get him out of prison! And after everything he did when he was young!”

  Exactly, I thought. “Perhaps that’s why he didn’t want you to —” I began, but I was interrupted by a second enthusiastic outburst from Sherlock Holmes.

  “A drink for my friend!” he cried to the waiter, abandoning all traces of British poise. “And for us, too!”

  At the time I didn’t know, except for a tiny intuition I had, that Sherlock had a personal reason for agreeing with Arsène, for admiring his friend’s decision to leave his family.

  Upon the death of his father eight years earlier, Sherlock, the middle child, had shouldered many of the family responsibilities. He cared for his littlest sister, making up for the excesses of his older brother Mycroft. Sherlock’s mother had decided to invest their few financial resources in Mycroft, allowing him to attend the best schools. As a result, Mycroft became a successful politician in London society some fifteen years later. But he never was an immortal character like Sherlock Holmes, who studied his brother’s schoolbooks on his own, without any recognition.

  This, then, explained the reason Sherlock understood immoral acts like cheating, stealing money, and disobeying one’s father, which only seemed like childish choices and bad taste to me.

  I did not yet know what inner turmoil could be unleashed in a child’s heart upon discovering the truth about one’s own family and real parents. What I mean is, I already knew with some certainty that my mother and my dear papa were not my real parents. But I didn’t have the least idea who my real parents were . . . nor of how profoundly this knowledge would change the course of my life.

  “I heard that there’s going to be an exhibit in Paddington of the latest technological wonders in the world,” Lupin said at that point. “What do you say we go on Friday? It’s on me!”

  I was deeply disturbed about how Lupin seemed to be enjoying his freedom, and when I saw him shelling out the wad of banknotes he’d won from the merchant, I showed every bit of my disapproval and stood up abruptly.

  “What’s wrong?” Sherlock asked. Only then did my two friends realize how distant I was acting toward them.

  “Nothing,” I lied. “I just promised my mother something.”

  “So what?” Lupin said. “Tell her you changed your mind and that you’re going with us to the fair!”

  I put on my gloves, annoyed. “I’m afraid that’s simply not possible, Arsène. That’s not how it’s done.”

  Still seated with the banknotes in his hands, he blinked a couple of times. “Pardon?” he asked.

  Just then, Sherlock got up. “Arsène is right,” he said to me. “It’s a lovely idea. Let’s all three of us go.”

  “Do you think so, Sherlock?” I asked him, in a more snobbish tone than I’d really wanted to use.

  “Rebel before it’s too late!” Lupin exclaimed. “Make the most of your time!” r />
  “It’s not what you think,” I lied. “My mother and I need to do something very important!”

  “You’re wrong,” Lupin said. “Those are just promises. And you have to toss them behind you like my friend Hilda did.”

  “Hilda?” I repeated.

  “Yes, Hilda!” said Lupin. And looking at Sherlock, he explained. “She’s a girl from a good family who I met in Hamburg. Believe me, she’s very, very pretty. And she ran away from home to join our circus!”

  It was too much.

  I turned on my heel and walked out of the Shackleton Coffee House.

  Let those two talk about that Hilda and pretty girls, if they wanted. But they would do it alone.

  * * *

  My singing lesson was a complete disaster, and when Mr. Nelson came to pick me up in the carriage at six, he asked me what had happened.

  “Did you have a fight with your friend, Miss Irene?” he asked me in an understanding tone.

  “Absolutely not,” I answered.

  And that was all I felt like saying. The truth was that my heart was confused, and that night I had difficulty falling asleep.

  The promise I’d made to my mother was to sew little rag dolls that would be sold to benefit the city’s poor children. And when I began to work on them a while later, I threw myself into it with the ironclad conviction that it was the right thing to do. I thought that with the help of those dolls, I would stop thinking about Sherlock and Lupin. Especially Lupin. But it didn’t work. It seemed my hands couldn’t move. My mother talked to me the entire time, and I answered in monosyllables without remembering a single word she said.

  I don’t know what made me feel worse: having judged Lupin over cheating at cards, feeling judged myself by my friends, or more simply, jealousy of that Hilda. Who was she? Why had she joined the circus? And why had Lupin felt the need to say that she was very beautiful?

  I felt ashamed by the idea of what Lupin might have ever said about me, ashamed of the kiss stolen when we were hidden in the room of the Hotel Albion, and ashamed of the fact that I was wondering whether he considered Hilda to be more or less pretty than I was.

  I spent an entire dinner looking at myself in my mirror, instead of at the table eating with my mother, trying to decide whether or not I was very beautiful, too. I had a small nose and a delicate chin, yes, but maybe my eyes were too round. And my mouth, except in profile, seemed out of proportion, with lips that were too large. And too toothy! And my earlobes? Were they too close to my neck? My neck was very long . . . funny-looking probably. And I wasn’t sure if my bodice should draw so much attention to the shape of my figure. I was very tall, certainly, and this seemed nice. But I was a girl . . . perhaps a beautiful girl shouldn’t be tall. Or maybe it was that beauty mark that my friend didn’t like.

  But how was I really so sure that Arsène didn’t like me? And did it really matter so much to me?

  I rearranged my long red hair from one side of my face to the other, gathered it uselessly into braids and then a bun. I finally stopped, as full of doubt as I’d ever been.

  A few minutes later, I found myself in my bed, sleepless but exhausted. I tossed hopelessly from side to side. Everything looked white to me, although it actually was dark. All of London was resting serenely outside my window. The only sound that reached me from time to time was the tolling of the bell from . . .

  I turned over again, trying not to rack my brain to figure out which belltower it belonged to. I sank my face against my pillow, grumbling into it. My nightgown was soaked with sweat.

  “Stop it!” I cried out, when the persistent tolling became unbearable. How many times did that bell have to sound in the dead of the night?

  As if to satisfy me, the tolling suddenly stopped. I turned on the lamp on my nightstand, thinking that if I wasn’t going to sleep, I could at least read something. But not Flaubert, I thought. Let other people read his detailed descriptions of romantic sentiments. I only wanted to read about mysteries, adventures, and terrifying locations. Where were Mary Shelley, Sheridan Le Fanu, and that American, Edgar Allan Poe, whose stories Mr. Nelson loved?

  I placed one foot on the floor and took a step, which made the floor creak. Then the bells started up again.

  A shiver ran down my sweaty back, and my brain suddenly fogged up. It wasn’t a distant bell, but something close to me. A series of rhythmic blows against the wooden shutters, as if . . . something, or someone . . .

  Struck by a strange idea, I crossed the room and cracked the window open. A voice from outside called to me, “Irene?”

  I brought my hand to my throat, afraid. But then, without even thinking about it, I finished opening the window and shutters. I had barely done so when I found myself face to face with Sherlock and Lupin, who were clinging to the gutter.

  “What are you two doing here?” I asked, stunned.

  “May we speak with you . . . a little more comfortably?” begged Sherlock. The effort of hanging there had clearly begun to take its toll on him.

  I doubt that the family rules I had so energetically upheld at the café would have included allowing two young daredevils such as Sherlock and Lupin to sneak into my bedroom and receive them, whispering, in my nightgown.

  But I didn’t hesitate to do so.

  I sat on my bed while they perched on the two uncomfortable seats across from me in the shadows.

  I tucked my nightgown under my knees and asked, “So? Are you crazed . . . or what?”

  The two looked at each other, as if to decide who should start explaining. It fell to Lupin.

  “Listen, Irene . . . the thing is . . . ” He paused and sighed. “Sherlock and I want to apologize.”

  “Ah,” I said. “What for?”

  “You know very well,” Lupin said.

  He was right, of course, but I still waited for him to continue.

  “I’m very sorry,” he went on. “I . . . we are very sorry. Today in the café I behaved like a real fool.”

  “And I with him,” said Sherlock. He kept his eyes down, ashamed.

  “We didn’t mean to offend you,” Lupin continued. “Especially . . .”

  He stopped. A noise from the hallway seemed to have worried him.

  “Especially?” I asked.

  “Especially, we didn’t want you to leave,” Lupin continued. “I came to the Shackleton Coffee House just because . . . it was the one place where I knew . . . I thought . . . I hoped . . . I would find my friends.”

  As he spoke, my blood felt warm as it coursed through my veins. But I stayed silent and listened, not wanting to admit it.

  “My only two friends. One and the other,” Lupin said.

  “Arsène and I wanted you to know that nothing has changed since those days in Saint-Malo,” Sherlock added. “From the friendship we formed there.”

  “That’s right,” Lupin confirmed. He nodded slowly.

  Since it seemed as if he didn’t have anything else to tell me, I whispered, “I’m glad.”

  “And to prove this to you,” Lupin exclaimed suddenly, “Holmes has some sensational news to tell you.”

  “Really, Holmes?” I asked, turning toward him.

  “Quite so,” he answered, pulling three small books out of his jacket as he walked toward my bed, ignoring the fact that we were immersed in deep shadows.

  “Sherlock . . .” I tried to interrupt him, but he was absorbed in thought, opening the three volumes and placing them on my bed.

  “The fact is,” he went on, “I finally solved the problem of the Black Friar. Do you remember it? Just as we thought, it wasn’t a chess problem but a code.”

  I mentally thanked him for giving me partial credit for forming that hypothesis, given that he had really come up with it on his own.

  Sherlock pointed a finger at the middle of one of the three books, making the s
econd-rate paper it was printed on crackle. “The code didn’t indicate the coordinates of a chessboard, but a specific place in London as it appears in Furlong Street Guide, the most accurate map of the city that exists.”

  “Oh,” I said, far from captivated.

  A strange silence fell. It was broken by the quivering voice of Lupin, who whispered, “Tell her, Sherlock.”

  Sherlock hesitated a little too long.

  “Tell me what?” I asked, leaning forward so I could see his eyes.

  “The amazing thing,” he began, and I felt myself swallow a glob of saliva, “is that the code is across three lines, and every line indicates a place on the map of London.”

  “So in all there are . . . three different locations?” I asked.

  “Exactly. And at the first one . . . ” Sherlock said, lowering his finger on the map a little, “a horrible murder has just been committed.”

  Chapter 4

  THREE CHILDREN AT SCOTLAND YARD

  The next morning, I awoke very early. I kept flipping through the newspaper that Sherlock had left for me. It was a copy of the second evening edition of the Standard, one of the most widely read papers in London. It was the copy that Sherlock’s brother Mycroft had brought when he’d come home, and it was the same copy that had made my friend jump from his chair as soon as his eyes fell on the short article.

  It reported the murder of a certain Samuel Peccary, a rich fur merchant who was stabbed at his luxurious waterfront mansion in the suburb of Twickenham.

  According to what Sherlock and Lupin had managed to explain in those few excited moments in my room that night, the “chess problem” consisted of three codes, each referring to an exact coordinate on a specific page in the Furlong Street Guide.

  As soon as Sherlock had figured out the possible nature of the Black Friar’s coded message, the two had rushed to the nearest bookstore to purchase the three volumes of the guide.