"Well?" I finally asked.

"He's off the train; that's what I wanted to ensure."

"How? We were already moving."

"So was he, when last I saw him. I wanted to make sure that the train was going fast enough that he couldn't leap back on again."

"He... could have been killed."

"So could have I." Irene shuddered for the first time in our acquaintance. "Not a pretty fellow, no court intriguer. Just a bully with an a.s.signment. I was forced to hold him at revolver point by the car door: had the train's motion dislodged my balance, I would have gone out instead, I a.s.sure you. Besides, he landed with all the grace of a grizzly bear and shambled off. He'll merely have a long walk back to the station."

She finished her cigarette and lowered the window to dispose of it, angling her neck to see if our tormentor was still visible.

"Gone, I hope," she said, "as I hope something else is not gone." Irene pulled down the three carpetbags and began examining our things.

"Irene, you suspect our baggage ...?"

"Of being searched. Ah, one has been disarranged, but not the other two. Was there a delay when you claimed the bags?"

"Of course there was a delay! I do not speak German and the man was slow to understand me."

"Doubtless paid to be slower. So they had caught up with us just before our departure. Pursuit is always exponential, my dear Nell. In Brussels they will be waiting for us."

She sat again, drawing the fourth carpetbag against her hip like a child. "Our soon-to-be footsore friend had a good long look at this rather appalling and thus easily identifiable Hindustan print. I must reconsider."

I nodded, too worn to speak. The recent excitement and my sleepless night combined to induce an odd state of detachment. I watched the outlying residences of Cologne slip behind us as countryside again commanded the view. Limpid spring green swirled past in a mist of steam and fatigue. I slept.

Shadows were long and the setting sun was burnishing the horizon when I awoke. Irene still sat where she had, her face looking drawn in the light of the compartment oil lamps.

"Brussels?" said I with a start.

"Soon."

"What shall we do?"

"Change trains as quickly as possible. It would be good if we could change our guises, but we have no time for that." She gave me a quick smile. "I'm glad you slept, Nell; you will be fresher for the last leg of our flight. Be of good cheer; there is always a way out of a trap; observe the humble mouse."

"I have observed the humble mouse-decapitated!-many a time."

"Only the dull ones, Nell. Only the dull." Irene stiffened as the train slowed. Shadowy buildings slipped past us in the twilight. "All we do must be swiftly done. I will take this case; you the tapestry one. We must abandon the other two."

I nodded. In moments the train sat panting in the station. Irene and I darted off and through a maze of pa.s.sages and stairs to the main station. At the ticketseller's window her German again sufficed. She turned well pleased from the bronze grating.

"Our boat-train leaves in forty-five minutes. We have only to keep out of plain sight and get aboard, which we will do just at the eleventh hour. Once our train reaches Ostend, it will go directly onto the pier where the pa.s.sengers board the packet steamers. When our boat lands at Dover we shall be on English soil and better able to elude our pursuers."

English soil. Those two blessed words. I never wanted to leave my native island again. We ambled through the station, attaching ourselves to knots of strangers like a thin, trailing fringe st.i.tched to the security of the greater shawl.

"A telegraph office, Irene! May I?" The notion of sending G.o.dfrey a cablegram seemed like a line of sanity thrown to a sinking cause, as did the thought of those blessed modern submarine cable lines leading across the English Channel to aboveground telegraph wires stretching all the way to London and home. England and G.o.dfrey-and, by all that's dear, that miserable, profane Casanova-seemed like visions of heaven at that moment.

Irene glanced from me to the telegraph office to the station interior. She nodded, her eyes urging speed. I rushed to the desk inside. The man there spoke English, thank G.o.d. Brussels was near the Channel coast and Ostend, for generations a major embarkation point for Dover.

My pen paused over the message: "We arrive at Victoria at 10 a.m. tomorrow. Require discreet lodging, utter secrecy." I hesitated to sign my name, remembering Irene's caution that telegraphed messages leave trails. I thought, then smiled triumphantly, and signed, "Casanova."

The man plucked the proper Belgian coins from my multinational collection and I dashed to rejoin Irene. She was smiling tightly. "I wonder what G.o.dfrey Norton will make of our adventures."

"I wonder if we will make it safely home to have the luxury of wondering what G.o.dfrey will make of anything!"

"Quite right, Nell. At the moment we must loiter in a professional manner. We are supernumeraries now, who make fading into a background an art. We must neither notice our surroundings too sharply, nor ignore them for a moment. We must do that which is most difficult to simulate. We must appear normal; in short, we must render a performance worthy of the great Ellen Terry."

"Oh, dear."

"In other words, be yourself."

"You are not being yourself," I replied a bit testily as we strolled through the vast station.

Her tone grew pensive. "Apparently I have not been myself for some time."

By ten minutes before our scheduled departure, we had idled our way to the gate leading to the great, tracked expanse of the rail yard. Our train trembled beyond it. A Daily Telegraph was now folded under Irene's arm. She carried both carpetbags and the cane, balancing all these items by some prestidigitation I couldn't quite a.n.a.lyze. My fingers went often to my lapel watch but I forbore to check its fateful dial. I could almost feel it ticking atop the rapid beating of my heart.

Someone brushed into Irene, almost knocking her aside.

"I say, sir!" she protested in masculine indignity.

Another someone b.u.mped, then steadied me with a firm hand. We were abruptly surrounded by someones, hemmed in at the wall.

Irene had no opportunity to drop her baggage and appeal to her revolver. Two men bracketed her, her arms in their firm custody. A third man had taken me by the elbow while a fourth confronted Irene with an expression of utter satisfaction.

German words exploded into her face. I frantically tried to translate, recognizing only the form of masculine address, "Mein Herr." Then an oft-repeated phrase began to come clear. They had recognized me, accepted her disguise and were asking Irene where Irene was!

She answered in rapid German, shaking her head. She seemed to be saying that she didn't know, for the surrounding faces grew grimmer and the men's color rose like a b.l.o.o.d.y tide. I felt fingers tighten cruelly on my arm, but said nothing, being mesmerized by Irene's awful predicament.

The men were large and needed shaving. I smelled damp woolens and stale beer. They were like a forest, those four, and we were lost within the circle of their force.

The fourth man kept asking, Irene kept denying. Without warning, his arm jerked back and he punched a fist into her mid-section. I would have screamed, but a salty, sardine-scented hand clamped my mouth. I bit a leathery finger and was rewarded with its withdrawal.

Irene had gasped and contracted at the blow, but was still standing. The attacker pulled back his fist with a respectful look at her slight masculine form. He shook his stinging fingers, crumpled them into a fist again and held it before her face.

I couldn't watch. He was going to strike her, not open-handed, as a villain strikes a woman in a melodrama, but with his fist, man to man. And I knew enough of how Irene submersed herself in her characters to know that she would endure it, like a man.

The German words flooded my ears, a brutal and ugly tongue threatening brutal and ugly things. I almost began to understand the refrain, "Where has she gone?"

I saw the brute's arm draw back. Irene braced for the blow.

"Paris, you fool!" I shouted in English. "She's gone to Paris with the trunks of all her best clothes. Do you think she would leave her wardrobe behind?"

The man lowered his arm, taking my desperation for truth torn from my weaker self. I recalled Irene's ironic acting advice: "You must appear normal, Nell; that is, be yourself." Certainly I could not have feigned my horror of what was occurring, my desire to stop it somehow.

The interrogator barked something at Irene. She slumped in her captors' arms, betrayed by my weakness. Her muttered German phrases apparently translated my words. I recognized "Paris."

Finally, the man nodded and the pincer around my arm released. The ruffians holding Irene freed her to take custody of the carpetbags instead.

As fast as they had hemmed us in, the men streamed back into the flow of indifferent humanity that churned around us.

"Your watch, Penelope!"

I finally felt free to consult it openly. "Two minutes!"

"Let us hurry!" Irene strode for the gate, for the stairs. She had the tickets in hand and was seeking the track number even as we flew over the ground.

"There!" she said.

Through a cloud of steam the dark metal body of the train was sliding past, drawing into daylight. Leaving.

"Quickly!" Irene said, taking my arm.

We ran. Dear Lord, how we ran. Irene had the advantage on me with her low-heeled boots, but we were freed of all burdens save ourselves and ran and ran and ran, chasing the iron coattails of the vanishing train.

Out of the huffing fog of departure I saw windows, incurious faces, a set of steps, Irene on them and I-I with my heart in my throat, my feet flying, my breath mingling with the steam and vanishing.

"Nell! Jump for it! Come on!"

An amber dragon's head loomed from the steam. I clung to that slender lifeline of extended cane and was abruptly pulled forward. I leaped into the mist, struck a step with my foot and crouched against a throbbing wall of wood and metal.

"The smelling salts were in the atrociously patterned carpetbag we left to the King of Bohemia's henchmen," Irene said. "Sorry."

"I don't require smelling salts," I replied indignantly, sitting up in the compartment. The lumpy seat felt soft as home, the motion of a train at full thirty-miles-an-hour speed like rocking-cradle safety. I was unsure of how I had arrived here and didn't wish to know.

"We are...?" I said.

"On our train, bound for the English Channel." Irene sounded most satisfied.

"But the carpetbags! The money! The photograph-your only defense!"

She smiled at my last word and touched her midriff. "So it was."

"Oh, Irene! I don't know how you survived that terrible blow. It quite... undid me. Surely you are not a secret pugilist? The brute acted as if you were stronger than he expected."

"As indeed I was, Nell. Righteousness shall arm thee in the camp of thine enemy."

"Irene, when you quote Scripture, even if it's pseudo-Scripture, I become suspicious."

" 'Oh, ye of little faith...'" She patted her vest again. "I did have a secret defense, though. A nice leather-bound, padded defense, directly over my solar plexus, to put it delicately-or at least medically."

"The cabinet photograph! You'd moved it from the carpetbag to your person."

"Indeed." She smirked.

I sat back to consider this. "Yet we've lost all the money you earned in Warsaw and Prague, money that is rightfully yours!"

"And so it still is." Here she removed her hat, not from any belated sense of courtesy, but to reveal the lumpish bag stuffed into the crown.

She chuckled. "If that fellow had struck me in the face a flood of gold coins and paper money would have inundated the station floor."

"That is all you worried about if he hit you? He was treating you like a man, Irene! There would be no mercy."

"But you were acting like a woman, Nell! I could not have done it better myself. It quite wrung my heart to see you capitulate and tell them all you knew. I admit I was surprised to hear you utter a falsehood, but it was effective. Here we are, bound for Dover. Safe, and not sorry. I... trust not sorry."

"Lying in the face of villainy is hardly that. You took nothing from Bohemia that was not yours, paid to you or given to you. Oh-what of the King's brooch?"

Her face deadened. She lifted a ruby glint from the pocket that held the revolver. "Some gifts are thorns, but perhaps they teach us something. I never wish to forget the lesson I learned in Bohemia."

"What is that?"

Her hands parted in a weary little gesture. "I do not know yet, only that it was a lesson."

Ostend was a blur, the steamer packet an abomination of motion that my const.i.tution did not relish.

Victoria was merely another cavernous railway station-a palace for the aristocracy of travel-save that it was Home. I had not expected G.o.dfrey to meet the train, and indeed quite started when a tall, dark man descended upon us from the crowd. I noticed that Irene's hand had automatically gone to her right pocket.

"My dear Miss Huxleigh, my dear Penelope! Nell..."

G.o.dfrey took my gloved hands and shook them. Irene walked on as I hastened to catch up, knowing how weary she was and how much effort it took to continue her masquerade.

"I'd no idea what sort of accommodation you required," G.o.dfrey said as we threaded through the maze of people, "but have found respectable rooms in a quiet neighborhood. Your baggage?"

"We have none," I admitted.

"Lost?"

Irene muttered in a convincing baritone, "Lost between trains in Brussels."

G.o.dfrey regarded her in a puzzled manner. "There are indeed a good many changes of trains on your journey. You must be exhausted," he said to me.

I nodded, beyond words. Sensing that, he asked no more questions, but saw us to the hired carriage. Irene waited while G.o.dfrey helped me in. They eyed each other, then Irene entered and sat beside me. She gazed out the window while G.o.dfrey sat and pounded his cane on the carriage ceiling to signal the driver to go.

"You seem to have left Bohemia in haste," he noted. "And secrecy. Your cablegram, Nell, was as curt as the letter that originally called you there. And the signature!"

"How is he?" I asked at once.

"Who?" Irene wondered gruffly.

"Casanova," G.o.dfrey supplied with a smile at me.

Thoroughly confused, we all stared at each other and looked away.

"I don't understand," G.o.dfrey finally told me, "I had a.s.sumed from your cable that your friend, Irene Adler, was to accompany you. You both seem exhausted and I'm sure there's a tale behind that, but I do believe that introductions are finally in order." He looked pointedly at Irene.

What could I say? The story was so long and convoluted and Irene's history and guise so complicated...