"Now may we leave?" I said.

"Of course. We must repair to the Physic Garden to collect our legitimate quarry."

I sneezed my displeasure, but Irene was already tripping toward the house, which was fortunately still empty except for the maid, and out to the street.

We returned an hour later to the Wilde residence to find the mellow sitting and dining rooms afire with lamps and a merry company of red-nosed denizens of Chelsea gathered there, surrounded by an arcane collection of trivia.

In removing my wraps before the mirror I saw my nose was as cherry-bright as the others'-though Irene maintained a dignified pallor despite her exertions. When she spoke, however, her voice rumbled like a foghorn.

"Punch?" G.o.dfrey joined us, bearing cups of a steaming libation.

We downed it ravenously, like twin Oliver Twists in hopes of more.

"How went your hunt?" G.o.dfrey asked, but before Irene could answer, our towering host approached, a feather duster rakishly sprouting from his breast pocket.

"My dear Miss Adler and the cla.s.sical Miss Huxleigh! You are the last to return. What an inspired idea it was to suggest a scavenger hunt instead of the usual Sunday tea. It has all been too, too utterly delicious fun. Shall we compare lists and see who has carried off the prize?"

"By all means." Irene joined the ladies by sitting demurely on the sofa arm, the only vacant perch. The gentlemen lounged against the dado with their punch cups tilted.

G.o.dfrey drew a straight-backed chair from the dining room into the circle for me, and the evening's ceremony began. Each partic.i.p.ant flaunted the fruits of the night's hunting: several had dead grape cl.u.s.ters from the late Mr. Carlyle's garden. Irene produced a peac.o.c.k feather she claimed had been dropped by one of the late Dante Gabriel Rossetti's feral flock, which still wandered the vicinity.

Perfectly respectable actors, writers and painters (if any of those can be deemed perfectly respectable or even imperfectly so) flourished common objects and sprigs of pirated vegetation as though they were pearls of great price. Mr. Wilde had obtained the required feather duster from the cook three doors down, for instance, and you would have thought he had talked an angel out of its wings, such was the pride he took in its acquisition.

There were herbal trophies from the Physic Garden, that relic of the seventeenth-century botanical garden which had provided America with the cotton seed that resulted in Civil War. I could not approve of this venerable site's plundering. The room fairly reeked of desiccated eucalyptus, scents overcome only by the punch, which G.o.dfrey later told me was rum. Had I known, I never would have touched it, no matter how warming. As it was, I had three cups before I learned its composition.

Perhaps that is why we women were able to laugh at the sorry state of our skirts; Irene and I were not the only ones to have dampened ourselves-several gentleman wore wet and baggy knees.

The prize of the entire hunt was to be one of Oscar Wilde's yellow silk neckcloths with a mother-of-pearl cravat pin, which had been buried earlier that day and which no one had found.

The company deliberated at some length before declaring Bram Stoker the winner for having collected the most items from his list. He smiled with touching pleasure, this red-bearded giant, and gazed upon his tawdry array as if they were jewels.

"You see, Irene." I leaned close to whisper into her ear. "You likely have unearthed the major prize, but foolishly refuse to examine it."

"Yes... and no," she said.

"Poor Irene!" Mrs. Wilde said suddenly. "The hunt was in your honor and you have won nothing! That hardly seems fair."

"I have seen my friends enjoy themselves; that is reward enough," Irene answered, with a salute of her punch cup to the company.

Everyone toasted her sentiments. Our carriage arrived soon after, for St. John's Wood was a long drive. At Briony Lodge Irene showed a strange disinclination to examine her buried treasure. I was too weary and influenced by the rum to care. We parted to our separate chambers, but I could not resist making a prediction.

"You have unearthed no more than a tumbled array of bird bones and I am glad I shall not be present to see you discover it. Or, if you were lucky, you have recovered Mr. Wilde's saffron silk square and pearl cravat pin," I added thickly, longing far the sheets where Mrs. Seaton had installed flannel-wrapped warming pans for our feet. "You have carried off the prize of the scavenger hunt without even claiming it."

"Perhaps," Irene conceded hoa.r.s.ely from the doorway of her bedchamber, "we could consider that poetic justice."

Chapter Thirty-two.

DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER.

The morrow was chill. Irene's voice had faded to a croak and I fought the sniffles. Rain rapped its fingers on our windows all day long, while Irene played bits and pieces of a half-dozen composers and I refused to inquire after the boxy rock she had unearthed in Oscar Wilde's garden.

G.o.dfrey arrived unannounced that afternoon, unimpaired by the previous night's labors but oddly strained. He joined us in the music room.

"We are most mawkish today," Irene warned him in a contralto rumble.

His eyebrows raised at her unlovely speaking voice, then he studied my reddened features. "I fear you will feel more mawkish when you hear my news."

We c.o.c.ked our heads in tandem, neither wishing to waste our energies in speaking.

G.o.dfrey spread his hands helplessly. "I discreetly induced a man in the foreign office to apprise me of any unusual movements by London-bound Bohemians."

Irene pressed a dramatic, trembling chord on the piano keys, as if underlining the dialogue at a melodrama. G.o.dfrey ignored her irreverent response.

"I have learned only this morning that a... personage from Prague has reached London."

Irene's fingers left the keys. The little color remaining left her face. "A personage? What does that mean?"

"It means that the traveler is identified as 'Count von Kramm, a Bohemian n.o.bleman.'"

"That is ridiculous." She paused to gather some timbre for her shattered voice. "No such n.o.bleman resided in Prague when I was there. You think this man is an agent of the King?"

G.o.dfrey frowned. "My dear Irene, I think he is the King."

"Even more ridiculous! The King is to marry this spring. Why rush to London when his agents have been unable to procure the photograph after two attempts?"

"Two? You have not been frank with me."

G.o.dfrey looked quite angry. I really wished myself out of the room, but G.o.dfrey had paused near the doorway and left no gracious exit for me. I cleared my throat but neither one heeded me.

Irene stood slowly, her fingers fanned at her throat as though to press the voice from her abused larynx. "You truly believe the King is in London?"

"What is worse, this Count von Kramm's secretary has made inquiries at the foreign office after the services of a specialist."

"Specialist?"

"He was directed to Mr. Sherlock Holmes of Two-twenty-one-B Baker Street."

Irene sat even more slowly, as if uncertain that the bench-or indeed the floor-remained beneath her. "Sherlock Holmes. Oh, I would give a great deal to meet, to match wits with that gentleman, but not now! And not both of them together, the King and the detective. How unfair life is sometimes, G.o.dfrey!" Her fist hit the keys.

"Always, Irene. What do you wish to do?"

She stared for some time at her hands. I found it hard to believe that these pale, delicate fingers with the nails clipped short for the piano had joined mine in clawing at Mr. Wilde's garden turf only the night before.

Irene seemed so diminished at the moment-her voice, both her glory and her weapon in meeting the world, blunted; all the promise of her past having become a threat in the present. She lifted her head then as if having heard my worry made audible.

"What do I wish to do? I wish to go into the sitting room."

G.o.dfrey and I exchanged a worried glance. Yet Irene still possessed that commanding calm of hers. We followed her across the hall and watched as she paused before the bookshelves.

"You promised to read your mother's novel," she said to G.o.dfrey. 'Take it"

Some unspoken strain was thickening her voice, though G.o.dfrey was deaf to it, as most men are to the nuances of women's emotion.

'Irene, we have no time for novels now; it is possible that you have been written into the climax of a rather sorry story yourself."

"Please, forget this... rumor. I want you to take your mother's book."

Both G.o.dfrey and I stared at the humble brown spine on the shelf.

G.o.dfrey was beginning to sense her fevered emotional pitch. "Irene, this is ridiculous. We must make plans for your defense, perhaps for your swift removal from London."

Irene closed her eyes. "G.o.dfrey, please!" she pleaded, her magnificent voice in shreds. "It is vital to me. I wish you to take your mother's novel. Do it!"

He stepped forward like a duelist, in one long stride, and sharply pulled the book from the shelf. There came a rapid patter, like raindrops or running mice feet. Splashes of random light spilled from the s.p.a.ce the book had occupied. A papist rosary seemed to dangle there, crystal beads strung in neat decades-perhaps my clerical background was deceiving my short-sighted eyes...

G.o.dfrey lifted a slow hand to the object as though dislodging a cobweb in a dream. He pulled the strand of light. There came more clicking, more tumbling of bright white beads to bookshelf, length after length until the droplets were pooling like hailstones on the shelf below...

I came over, a dream walker myself. They were not beads of crystal, but diamonds, an entire Zone of Diamonds.

Tears were glittering on the sickle of Irene's lower lashes, tears of suppressed triumph.

'1 wished to surprise you, G.o.dfrey, but you would not cooperate! Your mother's book was the one true clue, if you had only read it. Cloris of the Crossroads, don't you see? It was at the crossroads on the moor that poor benighted Cloris first lost her true love, there that she rallied the prince and the peasants, there that her heartless father died at novel's end-clutching the Celtic cross that marked the roads even as he expired and there that the family jewels were found buried beneath the stone cross.

"Your mother penned that novel in the very house we visited last night. Nell and I found this Zone buried beneath the same Celtic cross that inspired your mother and your father in two very different ways, possibly the only thing besides their children that they truly shared."

She paused, exhausted, while G.o.dfrey numbly drew the lengths of white fire through his hands.

"It is glorious, Irene, beautiful. Nell?" He held the glittering skein out to me and I drew closer, as one mesmerized.

The piece was antique, the stones cut in the old French style, but the fiery length of it was stupendous. We truly regarded the last vestige of the Ancien Regime, something that belonged more to the past than to any present claimant.

G.o.dfrey finally looked from the Zone to Irene, bemused.

"I thought you had failed to find it when you were so subdued last night."

Now she was surprised. "You... expected me to find the Zone? Surely you did not suspect when I proposed a scavenger hunt to the Wildes?"

"But I did. I knew precisely why you manipulated that particular entertainment for the evening in that particular neighborhood."

"G.o.dfrey! You are not prescient. You are not Sherlock Holmes. How did you know?"

"Irene," I put in, "you mustn't strain your voice."

"Oh, be quiet, Nell!" she snapped, turning once again on G.o.dfrey like an angry lioness. "How could you know, G.o.dfrey Norton?"

"I simply took some good advice; I skimmed my mother's novel days ago. When you proposed this expedition through Chelsea, I deduced that you knew the site of a local Celtic cross."

"Why did you not tell me? Why did you not ask last night?"

He shrugged rather sheepishly. "I wanted you to have the fun of finding it."

"Fun?!" I squealed in my own wracked voice, remembering the dark and the damp and digging.

Irene drew back. "But... I could have concealed the fact that I had it. Even Nell did not know. I could have fled London, as you are about to advise me, and have kept the Zone to myself. You would not have even so much as seen it."

G.o.dfrey smiled. "One does not miss losing what one has never had. That is why the King of Bohemia is so tenacious. He knows that he can never reclaim you; the photograph is more than a threat to him, it is the sole momento of what he has lost."

G.o.dfrey lifted the Zone like a tangle of dew in his hands and held it out to Irene. "This is a sorry memento of my father's wrong-headed pursuit of pleasure instead of honor. Now that I have seen it, I do not need it. Nor, I think, do you, now that you have found it."

Irene stared bemused at the diamonds girdling her hands. "I cannot believe that the dazzle of so fabulous an artifact can fade so quickly. I had wanted you to discover the Zone for yourself because I wanted to give you something that you felt ent.i.tled to. Now I find I have failed at that, that the Zone was never as important to you as it was to me. I have not given you something that you wanted at all."

"Perhaps you can give me something other that I want even more," G.o.dfrey said.

Irene looked up from the Zone of Diamonds, puzzled.

'I think, my dear Irene," he said, "that first you should spare your voice."

For once in our a.s.sociation, I saw it before she did.

I clasped my hands at my breast, bit my tongue, paused, and fled the room.

Neither of them appeared to observe, but I glimpsed the Zone of Diamonds clattering unnoticed to the thick Turkish carpet and G.o.dfrey stepping to Irene as I drew the doors shut I found and instructed Mrs. Seaton on no account to go into the sitting room and retired to my bedchamber, where I applied a cool cloth to my temples, in the accepted treatment for incipient hysteria.

Chapter Thirty-three.

SMOKE SCREENS.

I crept down to breakfast the following morning with a raging headache. It was only to intensify. My appet.i.te was strangely delicate so I took only a cup of tea and wandered into the music room, where I found Irene staring fondly at the piano she had once refused to touch.

She looked up as I entered, a strange expression in her eyes.

"Poor Nell," she said in greeting.