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good jewelry upon her person to recommend her. All the turbaned stranger bore in the way of mitigating accoutrements was European underwear, according to Irene, hardly a recommendation in conventional circles!
    Still, I shared the anxiety that attends a crisis. My worry was increased by the troubling fact that the man had indeed seemed to know me—or to recognize me, rather. Irene’s assertion that the fellow had been attacked in some invisible way right before our eyes—or behind our backs, to put it more accurately—was even more disturbing.
    It promised that this inconvenient person would not simply vanish from our lives as swiftly as he had appeared, at least not until Irene had satisfied herself as to his identity and discovered a reason for the apparent attack.
    I should inject here an architectural note. Although our residence at Neuilly was commonly referred to as a “cottage,” this was not the humble, squat dwelling to be found dotting the English countryside. This cottage was two-storied and rambling, like all buildings that date to an assortment of centuries past. It offered narrow stairs, low doorways, and floors paved in slate, stone or broad wooden planks. The place thronged with dormers and unexpected window seats, and the kitchens were a flagstone-floored horror reminiscent of Torquemada’s torture chambers, replete with wrought- iron hooks and a massive, man-high hearth perfect for spitting a pig. Numerous bedchambers nestled under the lead-tiled eaves above.
    The entire arrangement demonstrated that French facility for combining the grand and the cozy. I must admit that I found it amenable.
    So we had room aplenty for any unclaimed wretch lucky enough to fall into the path of Irene’s curiosity. I kept my own curiosity, which Irene has often accused of being more sluggish than Lucifer after a culinary expedition to the surrounding fields, well reined, despite the hustle and bustle overhead.
    At last patience was rewarded. A parade of footfalls on the ancient stairs brought the doctor down first, then my friends. I was reading the London Illustrated News with great concentration.
    “A most bizarre case,” Dr. Mersenné was declaring. “You are correct about the puncture wound, Madame Norton, but no ordinary medical needle made it. A hypodermic needle, no matter how fine, is hollow. Whatever pierced our friend’s arm was not. Furthermore, it has taken a rather crude bite of his flesh. Most clumsy. Mademoiselle.”
    Dr. Mersenné nodded at me as Godfrey gestured him to the chintz armchair and offered him a glass of brandy. I have never known a physician to refuse spirits, and the French especially are no exception.
    “Furthermore,” he continued as Irene and Godfrey seated themselves before him like attentive pupils, “what is the point of skewering a fellow with a narrow point if one is not injecting some foreign substance? To get his attention?”
    “His attention had already been deeply engaged by one of our party,” Irene answered. “You are certain that our guest has not received a recent dose of poison, then?”
    “How can I be certain, unless the miserable fellow dies?” The doctor laughed long and easily. “Your own English doctors,” he said, like everyone else wrongly assuming that because Irene was married to an Englishman and was friend to an Englishwoman she must be English and not American, “would perhaps nail down the diagnosis with a harder hammer, hut my guess is that the man suffers from a chronic fever contracted on the Indian subcontinent.”
    “India.” Godfrey narrowed his eyes and tented his fingers in his best barrister manner. “His dress, of course, comes from that part of the globe.”
    “I did not see him dressed.” The doctor drained his glass and rose, his scuffed black bag again in hand. “But his complexion bespeaks many years in a foreign clime, if he is indeed an Englishman, as you surmise.”
    “He addressed us in English,” Irene put in, “or,