Free Another Scandal in Bohemia by Carole Nelson Douglas

paraded to the upstairs salon, Irene’s train dragging like a funereal peacock’s half-folded tail.
    Only the man-milliner himself was present on this occasion, wearing a puce dressing gown over his shirt and loose necktie. The spaniel deserted its well-dented sofa cushion to waddle over and sniff Irene’s hem.
    “En promenade,” Monsieur Worth ordered in dictatorial French. The language lends itself to dispensing orders. No wonder the nation spawned a Napoleon.
    Irene complied with the uncustomary meekness to which I was becoming used. Perhaps she felt as if she had inherited the earth. Certainly she looked it in the extravagant gown.
    She paused to let her green-gloved hands fan expressively. “What accessories should I carry, Monsieur? And jewels? Perhaps a simple diamond necklace?”
    “Nothing that is not by Worth,” he responded haughtily, nodding to the vendeuse. “Not so much as a stickpin.”
    The young woman bent to a large flat box spouting tissue and soon came bearing an encrusted undulating fringe like a living thing across her hands. This she put around Irene’s neck. The upstanding collar of iridescent jet exploded into a dusky firework of design over Irene’s décolletage, ending in a swaying rainfall fringe of supple beads. Diamonds did indeed seem redundant in the face of such extravagant artifice.
    Irene fingered the necklace through the cushioning gloves, a moment later reaching for an item the vendeuse also presented reverently on open hands, a similarly beaded reticule.
    “Monsieur Worth, what can I say?” Irene asked in bemusement, going on nevertheless. “The gown, the entire ensemble, is magnificent beyond words.”
    “Wear it and say nothing,” he advised. “A woman in such a gown should be seen and not heard.”
    “In that I fear you ask too much of me,” Irene replied. “I must at the least sing your praises when I appear in public in such a toilette.”
    He tilted his head, a moue of false modesty upon his world-weary face. Before he could answer, a door slammed in a distant area of the building.
    The man- millin er frowned, obviously unused to domestic disharmony, and clapped a hand to his forehead.
    “Please,” he murmured to no one in particular. “My migraine—”
    A person rushed into the room, the only one on whom his wrath could not fall. His wife, Madame Marie.
    “Charles!” she cried, giving the word its soft shhh French twist, instead of the forthright English chuh.
    “What is it, my dear?” he responded in concerned French.
    Luckily, I could follow short and sweet exchanges in this sour language, no matter how rapid, and there are no people like the French for chattering faster than a telegraph operator.
    “A terrible thing.” Madame Worth groped for the sofa and sat heavily, only then spying Irene, and perhaps myself. “Magnifique, Madame Norton,” she paused to murmur. Then she addressed her husband again. “I am devastated to intrude but... one of the bead-girls has died.” She eyed Irene distractedly. “The very girl, in fact, who made Madame Norton’s rainfall neckpiece only yesterday. Such an agile hand.”
    “Sad news, my dear,” he answered, “but hardly a matter of such import that it could not wait.”
    “Perhaps not. Yet—” Madame Worth’s plump, capable hands sketched a helpless gesture. “Not merely dead, my dear husband, but... killed.”
    “Killed?” he repeated dumbly.
    “Murdered?” Irene intoned in a rising tone of interest. The Worths regarded her, père and mère, their eyes dawning with the same notion at the same moment.
    Madame Marie clasped her hands in overwrought beseechment. “Oh, Madame Norton. You know about such matters. Could you not see to this one?”
    Monsieur Worth nodded until his mustache ends fluttered. “We will have to call upon the gendarmes, of course, if this proves to be a case of deliberate death. If not, perhaps Madame Norton could put our minds at rest.”
    “I should be delighted to assist