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those we had brought. When it came to removing her basque, the girl began twisting and fighting, spinning into herself like a dervish.
    “Basta! ” Irene cried, exasperated into spitting out the Italian word for “enough,” much used in opera librettos.
    Irene’s voice had once held opera audiences spellbound and had caused a callous king to weep. Now it sufficed to arrest the rising hysteria of one young French girl.
    “You must remove your wet basque,” Irene insisted, plucking at the clinging sleeve.
    “I cannot,” the girl sobbed, still girding herself with her arms. “I am ruined. Oh, the shame! And it is not my fault—”
    “It generally is not indeed,” Irene muttered in English before returning to her persuasive French. “My poor dear, we will not hurt you. I am an actress who has heard much both off and on the stage. Nothing is more shameful than a society, a people, who use shame as a weapon. Please, we are here to help you. Nothing can shock us. We are women of the world.”
    Here I could barely hold my tongue.
    More tears squeezed through Louise’s spiked eyelashes and down her pale cheeks to her collar. She regarded Irene with dawning awe. “An actress, really, Madame? Like the Divine Bernhardt?”
    Irene smiled tolerantly. “Once upon a time. Now I am a respectable married woman—yes! You see how the past can be overcome.”
    The girl nodded and allowed us to begin unlatching the myriad hooks down her back. “But my stain will not wash away,” she said on a rising note, “not even with time.”
    “All things fade with time,” Irene hushed her.
    “Not this!” Louise blazed with sudden fury, like a fire fed fresh fuel. She tore the bodice from her left shoulder, the hooks parting with a metallic wrench.
    From concealment came revelation.
    Irene and I stared transfixed at the tattoo glistening just above Louise’s cameo-pale breast. It was a vivid, fresh representation of the letter “E.”
     

 
    Chapter Eight
    A T ROUBLE OF T ATTOOS
     
     
    “It is barbaric!” Godfrey paced our front parlor. “And she still refuses to return to her home?”
    “She will not even say where she resides.” Irene idly slid the third sketched initial across the polished table-top.

     
     “ Awraaaack , barbaric!” the parrot seconded with its ready grasp of key new words.
    Irene looked up to regard Casanova’s one visible unblinking eye for a long moment. He spit “Cut the cackle” from the side of his beak and edged down his wooden perch.
    “I believe that she is calm enough to tell you the tale now,” Irene told Godfrey.
    His pacing stopped. “I don’t want to hear it.” His hands lifted as if to repel an onslaught of candor. “The entire incident fairly makes my blood boil. This young woman is obviously from good family. If she were my sister—!”
    Irene was unstirred. “You shall have to quell your imagined fraternal indignation and hear the facts, Godfrey. Louise owes her rescuer an explanation for her resistance, not to mention an apology for having disfigured his face for a fortnight. And you may discern some clue to the affair in her account.”
    Godfrey, newly attired and looking fresh in every respect, including the rawness of his wounds, grimaced in the direction of the mirror. I shared Irene’s disturbance at seeing his not uncomely face so marked for having undertaken a singularly humanitarian act.
    “I am not certain that I am as solicitous of the girl’s welfare as I once was.” Godfrey patted his cheek tenderly.
    “Then what of my welfare?” Irene asked softly. His inquiring look brought plainer words. “I confess that the violence done this young woman draws me even more deeply into the puzzle of these tattooed dead men. I elicited but the bare bones of her story; you are a master of the courtroom query and may string the factual skeleton into some recognizable shape. Besides, Mademoiselle Louise must learn that not all men will misuse her. She could do no better