The Illusion of Murder (18 page)

“Hear! Hear!”
the captain offers with his raised glass and the others follow suit.

Lord Warton sucks another drag and again stares up at the ceiling as he slowly blows smoke.

Selous, quietly observing the man, has concluded that the peer loves the limelight.

“It goes without saying,” his lordship continues, “that my friends in the Colonial Office would hold the steamship company and its employees responsible if this young woman is permitted to damage our position in regard to the canal.”

The threat was unnecessary, Selous reflects; the ship’s officers are not only patriots but smart when it comes to protecting their employment. If the shipping line got barred from use of the canal, it would be forced out of business.

As the discussion rumbles on, Selous savors his brandy, swirling it, sniffing it, to avoid participating in the conversation. Something outside the room, at the bow of the ship precisely, required his attention and he wanted the session to get over with as quickly as possible.

Listening to Warton speak of his brief service in Morocco as if he had been at the right hand of the foreign secretary himself, Selous has a hard time to keep from smirking.

Having spent the last two decades mingling with Colonial and Foreign Office personnel, he had heard a bit about Warton and knew infinitely more about Warton’s type—a man who got his job because of whom he knew rather than what he knew.

Selous, third generation of an immigrant French-Huguenot line Protestant that fled persecution in France, had a different view of the world than the peer. His name, Frederick Courtenay Selous, was not “British” sounding, a fact that got him into more than one fight at school with Warton types who counted their roots back to the Saxons.

Selous had heard that the first lord in the Warton line had been a wool merchant who bought his title by providing the king an eighty-gun ship of the line.

No other Warton had worked for a living since.

Although the situation with the American reporter has made them allies, Selous knows that Warton considers him his social inferior despite Selous’s personal accomplishments, his adventurous spirit, and the fact his family has a long history of success in business and science.

He had heard that Lord Warton was a slow burn, not one to jump into anything new or radical. With financial problems due to bad management of his estates and being unlucky at cards, he’d gone into government service not for queen and country but because he needed the employment—and the contacts it gave him.

He had now left public service after a short, undistinguished career and had a reputation of being accessible to business interests that wanted to do business with the government. Some, like Von Reich, were foreigners.

“Egypt is a tinderbox,” Lord Warton says, “ready to catch afire and fill the Nile with blood. When it does, thousands will die, our own people among them, not to mention that a loss of the Suez Canal would have political and economic ramifications around the world.”

Lord Warton locks eyes with the captain. “I recommend that any cables Miss Bly gives to the purser to send at our ports of call be reviewed by me to ensure there are no politically explosive false allegations.”

The captain looks to the others and back to Warton. “Rather unusual, don’t you think, spying on a passenger’s cables—and censoring them.”

“Based upon my connection with the government, you can consider the request as an official one.”

Selous stifles a yawn. The man’s a complete ass.

“Most business passengers prefer to send their own cables when they reach ports,” the captain says.

“Well, then, something will have to be done about that, won’t it?”

“That tactic has already been met with a resounding defeat,” Selous says.

24

After the captain’s meeting ends, Selous wanders on deck, smoking a cigar, making his way toward the front of the ship. He waits in the darkness at the bow area, making sure no one is in sight, and then slips under the rope barrier to the area where Nellie was attacked.

With little light coming from the moon and a thousand nooks and crannies for a small object to hide, finding anything on the deck is not going to be easy, but being a great hunter he has an eye for fine detail—a broken limb in a forest of trees, a single crushed leaf among thousands, the smallest detail can reveal his prey.

He knows the ship’s officers have inspected the area, but their examination would have amounted to walking to the bow and, short of tripping over a body, finding nothing of interest because they didn’t know how to look.

Evidence of a struggle on deck is obvious to him: smudges made by the bare feet of one man, the scuff marks made by the shoes of another as two men struggled, their feet trying to gain purchase on the damp deck as they shoved at each other in a fight to the death.

Using the soles of his shoes, Selous wipes out the marks.

Reconstructing the fight from the evidence, he finds what he had come to look for; it slid into an opening at the base of a piece of machinery—the crude, wooden-handled dagger the assassin had wielded.

Giving a quick look around to make sure he is not observed, he tosses the weapon overboard, hearing a faint plop as it hits the water and begins its journey to the bottom of the sea.

Making his way back to his cabin he thinks about the newspaperwoman who has thrown a kink into the best-laid plans of men—and nations.

She has botched things up on many levels. It’s easy to see that she will keep getting in the way—if she manages to stay alive.

25

“They’re trying to murder me, not you. They thought you were me, that’s why you were attacked.”

The statement from the woman barely penetrates my brain because I’m in a state of shock after finding out her identity.

I can’t keep from staring impolitely at her.

That she just took credit for being the intended victim of the deck attack on me is unimportant. All that is completely irrelevant at the moment as my mind tries to deal with the incredible sight in front of me.

Had Cleopatra left her tomb and wandered around the boat in widow black, I would not have been more surprised.

“Sarah Bernhardt,” I whisper.

“Yes, yes, I’ve already told you, in the flesh.”

“The Divine Sarah.”

Sarah Bernhardt is not a person, at least not in the sense that I am one, that the president of the United States and the occupants in the next stateroom are persons.

The Divine Sarah is a living goddess.

The most glamorous actress in the world, the most revered tragedian, most beloved, most sensuous,
the most everything
, with fame, scandal, and love affairs that provided juicy tidbits for gossip columns and afternoon teas all over the world.

The woman every woman desired to be;
the woman every man wants to love
.

From reading gossip columns I know that she was born in Paris, her mother was Jewish, her father probably Dutch, but no one knew for sure because his sole contribution appeared to have been slipping into her mother’s bed just long enough to contribute his seed.

Sarah cloaked herself in glamorous scandal as other women hid themselves behind layers of clothes and respectability. Struggling to earn a living as an actress, she became a courtesan, her beauty and charm making her a favorite paramour of nobles and royalty.

Her love affair when she was nineteen with Belgium’s Prince de Ligne produced her only child.

As she grew in years and fame—she had to be over forty as she paced in front of me, but looked a decade younger—she had become a living legend, the Divine Sarah, the greatest actress in the world, and an Aphrodite whose rich and famous lovers were rumored to include even the Prince of Wales, a playboy whose romantic romps to Paris were legendary.

She goes back on top of her coffin with her long cigarette holder and blows cigarette smoke at me. “Young woman, we must get beyond your amazement that I am on board.”

“I thought you were that Winchester woman.”

“Who?”

“It’s too complicated to explain. What are you doing on board … incognito? Hiding in your cabin?”

Sarah slides off the coffin again and paces with the nervous energy of a caged animal in the small room, using her foot-long ivory cigarette holder as a music conductor’s baton to highlight her words.

“I cannot reveal my mission. It is a matter of importance that is unequaled in human affairs.”

I have no idea what she is talking about, but it sounds important. Exciting, in fact. “Unequaled in human affairs” brought to me images of the march of armies on darkling plains, war ministries called into secret sessions, dispatches carried through the night by spies on galloping horses.

She is the greatest actress in the world and I naturally assume that she is playing a role, but it didn’t alter the fact that there had been a murder in the marketplace and attempts at Tanis and now aboard the ship.

It cannot be a coincidence.

The world’s greatest actress, the consort of kings and millionaires, the toast of three continents, is telling me that she is involved in the same intrigues I have become entangled—but she won’t tell me her role, though she has cast me as her understudy for the attack on the bow of the ship.

Just as important, she offers me no clue as to what game is being played that could mean war between nations.

As I watch her pacing, I realize that while I have solved the mystery of the woman in black, I have not made any headway as to why a man died in the marketplace or why an epidemic of violence seems to hover around me like a maelstrom ever since.

Had I not been such a dunderhead, I would have realized the real identity of “Sarah Jones” days ago.

Everyone knows the Divine Sarah sleeps in a coffin because it helps her understand roles involving suffering and tragedy.

LIFE HAS TAUGHT ME THAT IF ONE IS TO BE SOMEBODY, IT CAN ONLY BE AFTER DEATH.

—SARAH BERNHARDT

26

Trying to get Sarah to sit still and discuss the situation is about as easy as stopping the ship by dragging my foot in the water. It is not so much that she is flighty, as bursting with energy. I suspect that she needs a release after being cooped up in a cabin for days.

When she finally sits quietly back down on her coffin, and has me sit in a chair, she gives me an assessing look.

“I’ve heard about you,” she says. “My steward says you’re an eccentric, rich American heiress, traveling about with a hairbrush and a bank book, with nothing to do, so you do strange things to get attention.”

At first I’m furious and then I break into a giggle. “I am guilty of having a hairbrush.”

“Who are you exactly?”

“Exactly, I am a newspaperwoman. I have done a number of exposés that have brought about social reform or exposed corruption.”

As she asks pointed questions about my career, I give her details explaining how I got started as a reporter when I was working in a Pittsburgh factory, doing the same laborious job as a man but only being paid half a man’s wage.

Angered by a
Pittsburgh Dispatch
article that essentially said a woman’s only worth was as a helpmate to a man, I wrote a letter to the editor pointing out the injustice of that position and signed it “Lonely Orphan Girl” out of fear I would lose my job.

That letter got me a job as a reporter, but after a few searing articles about how the common worker was being mistreated, a group of businessmen paid a visit to my editor and I found myself covering weddings and funerals.…

Even after I made a daring trip to untamed Mexico at my own expense to show I could handle a foreign correspondent’s job, I was still assigned a “proper job for a female reporter”—the society page.
*

“I abruptly left my job in Pittsburgh and went to New York, certain my success would open doors for me. Instead, I found that there was no room for a woman reporter even in America’s largest city. After banging on doors for months, and down to trolley fare, which I had borrowed after my last cent was stolen, I physically barged into the office of Joseph Pulitzer and informed the startled publisher that I could do a story that would turn the city on its head.”