Free Another Scandal in Bohemia by Carole Nelson Douglas Page A

you.” Irene managed to subdue the relish in her voice to a hushed tone of concern.
    Yet even I, God help me, felt a welcoming thrill at this possibly macabre diversion. There would be no more talk of Bohemia and King Willie’s lack of marital effort if a murder victim were in the vicinity.
    Monsieur Worth collapsed to the sofa, groping for either the spaniel or an abandoned compress. Madame Marie absently thrust a vial of smelling salts into his hand and stood.
    “Follow me, Madame.” She nodded briskly at me as well. “Mademoiselle.”
    Thus we found ourselves hastily winding down the rear, far less grand stairs of Maison Worth on the heels of the establishment’s dignified mistress.
    Despite the fashion house’s grand but discreet exposure along the rue de la Paix, it contained much unsuspected space. We found ourselves weaving through workrooms crowded with French sparrows—those thin, doe-eyed, working-girl waifs one often sees rushing home in the Paris twilight from twelve hours of labor in the shops and factories.
    Ordinarily these industrious creatures chatter with that peculiar French effervescence, but now their large eyes were serious as they watched us pass. Irene’s unearthly gown went uncommented upon, if not unnoted.
    At last the endless rooms and worktables and rows of white-fingered girls opened into an empty room, one vacant only because of the ghost-faced mademoiselles clustered outside it.
    One girl remained in the room, lying apparently asleep upon the empty table glittering with a comet’s tail residue of jet, beads, and diamante stones. A small, richly dressed figure stood on the table before her, like an idol worshiped by a mute supplicant.
    “The supervisor did not at first suspect.” Madame Worth’s deep voice hushed in the presence of sudden death. “So many of them fall asleep at their work.”
    Irene approached the motionless figure while our guide held back. I followed her, patting my skirt pocket for the small mother-of-pearl-covered notebook and pencil Irene had bought me since our arrival in Paris. I had remarked that such grandeur was inappropriate for the minor or macabre matters I might jot down on an outing.
    “Au contraire ,” she had enunciated in her perfect French. “Macabre matters require more formality than most. Consider the funeral.”
    I did consider such macabre ceremonies as I stood gazing over Irene’s fountain-of-tulle shoulder at the slumped figure of the bead-girl. I noticed little: the cheap woolen bodice and skirt; fingertips still reddened from the pressure and punctures of the thin beading needle; a knot of tobacco-brown hair; a pallid slice of face.
    All the shopgirls were wan, even the youngest, and the French naturally tend to sallow complexions, but no doubt I am jaundiced, so to speak, against them.
    “Perhaps she has merely fainted,” I suggested.
    For answer, Irene stepped aside, the movement acting as the drawing of a bejeweled black curtain on a living tableau. Tableau vivant, the French put it in that Frenchy way of theirs, only this scene was a depiction of death.
    Now I saw it—the means! Sewing shears embedded to their large, looped handles in the maroon wool of a bodice back; a darker ring of red soaking into the surrounding fabric.
    “An eternal faint,” Irene commented, leaning over to eye the pearls and crystal beads that scattered from the dead girl’s extended hand like semi-precious birdseed. The figure before which the tiny treasures were flung stared open-eyed at the human sacrifice before it.
    Irene nodded to the figure’s lavishly beaded skirt. “The bead-girl was working on this fashion doll when she was murdered.”
    “Fashion doll?” I stared at the small form, which had previously struck me as some wicked, well-dressed fairy presiding over the death scene.
    “Fashion doll,” Irene repeated a bit impatiently. “The finest French dressmakers send samples of their latest styles to the great ladies of many lands, to