Carefully, Watson swung himself onto the ladder and climbed down into the pit. Beyond the curtain, the crowd cheered – Satan’s act reaching its climax.
“A little more light, if you please,” Watson called up, choking on the dust that had been disturbed by his descent.
“Are you all right?”
“Never better,” he said, as if this was an everyday occurrence. “That’s it. Keep the lantern steady.”
“Can you see anything?”
Watson crouched on his haunches, running his hand over the grime-covered floor.
“Nothing yet, which in itself is curious. If someone had recently been down here, you would expect this grime to have been disturbed.”
I pointed down at the far corner of the pit. “What about that?”
“What?”
“I saw something glint in the light.”
“Really?” Watson exclaimed, turning in the tight space. As soon as his back was towards me, I placed the lantern on the edge of the pit, leaning down to grab the ladder. As smoothly as I could, I pulled it up from the hole in the ground.
Feeling movement behind him, Watson turned, staring up in confusion.
“What are you doing?”
My only reply was to place the ladder against the wall and retrieve the doctor’s jacket. I tossed the garment down into the pit and crossed to the trapdoor, heaving it shut with all my might.
“Mrs Langtry!”
The trapdoor was heavier than it looked. No wonder the waitress had struggled, but I had come too far to be confounded now.
Grunting with the exertion, I slammed the door shut, sealing Watson inside. I froze for a moment, convinced that the crash would have been heard in the drinking hall, but the music from the band blared on, and no one rushed to see what had occurred.
Of the doctor, there was barely a sound, the thick trapdoor muffling his cries for help. No one would find him here, not until I was long gone.
Stepping over the wooden lid, I put the lantern back where he had found it and extinguished the flame. The room was plunged into blackness, but I had already committed the route to memory. I was out of the side door and into the service corridor beyond within seconds, hurrying towards the back entrance that I had arranged to remain unlocked. I stepped out into a moonlit alley and was away, leaving John Watson to pay for his sins once and for all.
Back at my lodgings, time was of the essence. The train was leaving within the hour, but that would be ample time. It wasn’t as if I had much to take with me, not any more. I had packed, ready to leave, long before meeting Holmes and Watson that morning. All that remained was for me to cast off my disguise.
I made for the dressing table, intending to remove the damned wig that threatened to itch my scalp red raw, when there came a knock at the door, two sharp raps.
“Who is it?” I asked. There was no answer, save for another dreadful knock.
“Give me a minute!”
There was nowhere to run. The room’s small window led only to a three-storey drop, and certain injury. Out of options, I pulled open the front door.
The drunk from Le Cabaret de L’Enfer stood in the corridor outside, his face no longer merry, his eyes focused and cold.
Behind him, glaring over the fellow’s narrow shoulder, stood the Banquo at my feast – John Watson.
“May we come in?” said Sherlock Holmes, not waiting for an invitation. He stepped over the threshold, already removing his false beard, which he discarded on the bed.
I wanted to slump to the floor, but forced myself to stand, tight-lipped. Holmes would have to break the silence; he would have to speak, not I.
Watson followed the detective into my room, and closed the door behind them.
When Holmes finally spoke there was no kindness in that strident voice of his, no pity. He laid out the facts as if giving evidence at a trial.
“Your husband is dead,” he began, his words like barbs. “That much was easy enough to ascertain from a simple visit to his practice. Robert Langtry’s name has already been painted from the sign. But how did he die? A visit to the local newspaper revealed that, according to the public record, Mr Langtry had been murdered three months ago during a burglary at his home, along with his maid and footman. As for his grieving widow, well, she is still missing, presumed dead.”
I sank on to the edge of the bed, the weight of the last three months too much to bear.
“Dead, or in fear of her life? Which is it?”
There was no point lying, not any more. Not to him.
“They were agents of the Tsar, sent to retrieve the… evidence I held concerning his family.”
“The photo of you and Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovich of Russia.”
I allowed myself a bitter smile at Watson. “How clever of Dr Watson to protect us all with pseudonyms. The King of Bohemia. Irene Adler. Godfrey Norton. No one would ever know the true identities of the characters he splashed across the pages of The Strand. Or at least that’s what you obviously hoped.”
“They worked out who you were,” Watson intoned.
“No,” I replied, quietly. “They worked out who he was.”
“Who?”
“Who do you think?” I spat in fury, jumping back to my feet. “Your oh-so-dramatic visitor with his mask and his barrel chest and, what was it? Oh, yes – ‘the limbs of a Hercules’. Well, it appears that your Hercules is as unlucky in love today as he was then, and has found himself in the middle of another scandal. The vultures are circling and have seen beyond the smoke and mirrors. Once they had realised the true identity of your King of Bohemia, it didn’t take them long to work out which prima donna had so vexed him in London, the woman who still held proof of his past indiscretions.”
Watson’s face was pale, smudged only with the grime of his subterranean prison. “Evidence that could be used against him.”
“The last thing that Nicholas wanted was for his brother’s sins to be found out all over again and so the photograph that had kept me safe for so many years became my death sentence.”
“Or rather that of Robert Langtry,” said Sherlock Holmes.
The memory of that fateful night brought tears to my eyes. “They came to our house, demanding the photograph. They had already killed poor Cammi.”
“Your maid.”
“Robert tried to protect me, only to receive a knife to the stomach. They already had the photograph. There was no need for him to die.”
“You escaped.”
“Evidently. Our footman – Pierre – tackled my husband’s murderer, and in the confusion I managed to slip away. I ran from the house, from everything I owned. I had nowhere to go, no friends I could turn to. Do you think the Tsar’s agents would let me live, after what I had witnessed?”
“So you lost yourself in Paris, returning to the stage, rebuilding your life.”
I threw my hands wide and turned on my heels. “And here it is, my new nest.”
Holmes didn’t pass comment, but reeled off what I already knew, ever the showman. “The apparently fine clothes you wore this morning were as false as the name Watson gave you all those years ago, costume reproductions designed to fool an audience from the stage.”
“Or a doctor,” I added, with little humour.
“And when I kissed your hand, there was a distinctive odour, barely disguised by inexpensive soap and cheap perfume: sulphur, used to create the allusion of walking through a volcano.”
“Or an inferno,” Watson added with a grimace.
“The reason you dressed yourself as a man tonight is that you are known at Le Cabaret de L’Enfer, not as a customer, but a member of staff, perhaps one of the musicians who play from within the cauldron. There are usually six from what I can gather, although tonight there were only five. That’s where you discovered the pit. No one pays to be buried alive at the back of the cabaret. That was a fiction, designed to reel Watson in, appealing to his more melodramatic tendencies. His early grave was nothing more than a little used storage area, not opened from one year to the next.”