Good Night, Mr. Holmes (3 page)

My eyes wandered to the photograph again. I confess myself stirred by a new admiration for something more intangible in that familiar form than mere surface attractions.

“There is one thing I regret deeply about the Adler case,” Holmes confessed in a lazy drawl.

I held my breath. Had the unthinkable moment finally come when
“the
woman” would claim her final victory over the great detective’s infallible intellect?

Holmes sighed, his face assuming that state of dreamy concentration I had only observed at the concert hall. There, lost in the swelling orchestral chorus or the soulful aria of the solo instrument, Holmes permitted me to glimpse the stern mathematics of music erecting a bridge of glorious sound between his rigidly separated intellect and emotions.

“I regret,” the great detective mused gloomily, “that I have never heard her sing.”

Disappointed, I watched Holmes raise his glass to the photograph.

“Good night, Miss Irene Adler,” he toasted with a smile that even I could not quite decipher. “Wherever you are.”

Chapter One

T
EA AND
S
YMPATHY

By night,
when gaslights glitter through the fog and the cobblestones gleam like bootblack, London seems a landscape glimpsed in some
Arabian Nights
tale. By day the effect is more commonplace, as the city streets throng with omnibuses, hansom cabs and pedestrians.

Yet that daily, daylit London can intimidate even more than its dark nocturnal side; at least a respectable young woman like myself found it so in the spring of 1881. I walked the streets of London town, wondering how I came to be adrift on this tide of strangers, my few belongings tumbled into the carpetbag at my side. I was alone and friendless, and—for the first time in my four-and-twenty years—homeless and hungry.

My story was a common one. The only child of a Shropshire parson, himself widowed, I had been reared in spare comfort but utter emotional and physical security. On my father’s death, no relations close enough to claim me came forward.

Marriage was an impossible dream for a woman with only genteel poverty and a mild case of myopia to bring a prospective suitor. Indeed, I knew little of male company and—save for a visiting curate who possessed a golden tenor if rather overgrown ears—had never noticed a man in a sentimental way. Needless to say, the omission was mutual.

Although from time to time I might ponder my lost curate—Jasper Higgenbottom by name—an unfortunate onslaught of consumption had compelled him to take a foreign mission in a warmer clime. Even now he might be saving savage souls with the liquid syllables of “Lead, Kindly Light.”

As for myself, the parishioners soon found a local family in need of a respectable, well-read young woman to attend to their children—and, lo, I was a governess.

Inevitably, my need for continued employment drew me to the same magnet that has lured so many of my rural compatriots. My country family moved to London, that great hub at the center of the mammoth spinning wheel of the British Empire, on which the revolving sun truly never sets.

My subsequent position found me installed in Berkley Square in the home of Colonel Codwell Turnpenny, tending three well-mannered daughters and, on occasion, a less-than-well-mannered Pekinese dog. Life was comfortable, secure and predictable, and I was quite content until an incident occurred that permitted my sole glimpse of life as it is depicted in romantic novels.

My charges’ uncle, their mother’s brother, Mr. Quenton Stanhope, was a well-favored young gentleman of four-and-twenty with a merry disposition. How merry I discovered whilst playing a game of blind man’s bluff with my young ladies after some strenuous lessons in geometry. They gleefully blindfolded me, spun me like a top and set me loose in the schoolroom. I could find not a one of the minxes until a sudden hush came. I stumbled into an immovable barrier. My exploring fingers found an expanse of woolen frockcoat rather than the cotton pinafores of my charges. I hesitated, but their giggles goaded me on and upward: to a satin-faced lapel, a set of side-whiskers... really, I could not continue, nor could I imagine who stood silent and unrevealed before my tentative fingers. Then I realized that the girls’ laughter flowed with a freedom seldom exhibited before adults, save myself and...

“Mr. Stanhope,” I whispered.

“Free!” said he, undoing my blindfold. Even then I suffered from myopia. Mr. Stanhope hung in a haze before me, his features resolving into an expression I could not name.

“Why, Miss Huxleigh,” he said, “you look like one of your charges.” And his fingers brushed back a tendril of hair that had fallen onto my cheek. Then the girls were pulling me away by the hands and begging for another game; by the time I had smoothed my hair into a semblance of order again, Mr. Stanhope was at the door and bidding us good-bye with a wink.

After the Afghanistan trouble broke out in 1878, Col. Turnpenny’s regiment was assigned to the war, and Mr. Stanhope joined another regiment soon after. His nieces giggled upon seeing him on parade in his fine uniform. Soon, however, Col. Turnpenny’s wife and children returned to India, without me. The children were reaching that age of independence that they make quite plain to one and all around them, so my services were redundant. With the war, governesses were in oversupply, and my sterling references failed to secure me another position.

I studied the employment columns, with little success. Often my eyes strayed to the regimental reports, for which I admonished my foolish imagination, and turned my attention firmly to the news from Africa, where my first sentimental loyalties lay. Nothing could distract me from the seriousness of my present situation.

Even clerical employment seemed barred, for London offices had recently been invaded by a small black beast— a humped, clattering machine that spit words onto paper seemingly by itself. Although I write a fine and quite legible hand, the call now was for callused fingertips to punch the bewildering buttons—including a new-fangled shift key that made both upper and lower case letters possible— at a speed that defied human endurance, at least mine.

At length I found a position as a clerk in Whiteley’s emporium in Bayswater. My pay was low, but food and a room were provided. I found the fine-woven chintzes and silks that daily slid through my hands soothing, as was the murmur of shopping women’s voices, the clean slice of the scissors and the neat lengths of goods measured out on the cutting tables.

So I might have continued into frugal old maidhood had I not, after three years’ employment, swiftly and unfairly been cast onto the streets. In short, I was dismissed without warning, and without a reference. Numb with shock, I soon found the stipend of a weekly wage indispensable. The day came when my choice was food or lodging. My landlady ordered me to pack my few possessions into whatever would hold them and vacate the premises.

So I wandered London’s teeming streets, hearing the hooves of passing horses ring like the great black beast’s keys clanging my doom in three-quarter time. My late father had always chastised me for an over-vivid imagination, but that day I had no idea of where I would go or what would become of me.

Set, indifferent faces swarmed by as I passed shop fronts where once I might have idled among the goods. Now I felt barred from all human intercourse and commerce. Penniless! I cannot tell of the horror that word conveys to a sensibility such as mine.

I began to notice the filthy boys who prowled even the better streets of this great metropolis, wondering how they fed and housed their scrawny bodies. I even began to conjure a tinge of horrified sympathy for the haggard, wretched women who resorted to selling themselves on the dingy byways of Whitechapel.

Thus brooding, I shouldered through passers-by, my right arm leaden at my side, the carpetbag beating against my woolen skirts with every step. Hunger had passed into that happy state in which it is felt as weakness but forgotten as an urge. When night fell, I did not know where I would be.

An abrupt tug on my carpetbag, as if it were caught, roused me from stuporous despair. I glanced down. A street Arab crouched at my side, avid eyes bright as two pennies in his dirt-tarnished face.

“Yes?” I inquired, too dazed to be rude even to such an ill specimen of London life.

Before I could act or the awful child could answer, someone else was in our midst. A lady had wheeled from the crowd to seize the lad’s arm. Had she not been so well dressed, my protective instincts would have led me to defend even this wretched ragamuffin.

But the lady was magnificently attired—a sheared beaver muff cuffed one entire forearm. The brown felt hat smartly tipped over her brow was lavished with velvet ribbons and crowned with a peacock-blue bird in full flight.

She descended upon us like some glorious goddess, her dark eyes flashing fire, her pendant amber earrings swaying exuberantly. Then that angelic face screwed into an unlovely snarl. A stream of Queen’s English translated through the scullery poured from her mouth.

“ ’Ere now, you scabby little guttersnipe! Let loose that lyedy’s baggage or I’ll ’ave you washed and folded into pieces yer own mum wouldn’t know.”

“Got no mum!” the boy snarled back in the same disgusting patois. Yet the pressure on my carpetbag was suddenly released. I realized with a start that the lad had intended to take it.

The lady’s grip on his arm was not so slack. “Shouldn’t wonder,” she retorted in a softer snarl. “’Ere’s a farthing. Keep your ’ands off decent folks for a while. Git on wi’ you.”

The sly grin the lad bestowed on his benefactress would have done credit to a ferret. But he pocketed the coin, had the temerity to tip his greasy cap to us both and wriggled away into the crowd.

My fingers tried to tighten on the bag handle, but shock had squeezed all the blood from them. With a gesture so quick I barely saw it, my alley-tongued rescuer caught the handle as it slipped my grasp.

“Th-thank you,” I managed to stammer. “How did you know—? How did you see—?”

Her features had assumed a serenity that imbues beautiful women’s faces, and that is oftentimes mistaken for smugness.

“I have a bizarre avocation,” she confessed, smiling. “I watch people.”

The oddity of her words barely struck me; I stood mesmerized by her voice alone. It came as rich and expressive as a cello—no trace of Cockney lingered, although her accent did not sound quite... proper, either.

“My name is Irene Adler,” she continued in the face of my mute confusion. Her eyes—a gold-lit dark brown that reminded me of a rich amber velvet among my former shop’s most costly fabric rolls—darted over me. “This incident has given me a turn. Won’t you join me for tea in that shop there?”

I hesitated, aware of a weakness in my knees and a greater hollowness in my purse than in my stomach.

“I’m quite respectable, I assure you—in most instances,” she added mockingly. “And a... lady doesn’t care to enter a public place unaccompanied.”

The irony in her tone warned me that she spoke more for my benefit than her own. Yet her eyes remained kind despite the slight, quick curl of her lip on the word “respectable.”

“Please be my guest,” Irene Adler urged. Her gloved hand paused gently on my elbow, as if it had never wrung

the urchin’s arm but moments before. “I would appreciate your company while I recover from my fright.”

Irene Adler was no more a victim of fright than I was Empress of China, but I found myself reluctantly drawn through the tearoom door to a cozy seat by the window.

“Tea. Peppermint, I think,” Irene commanded the aproned girl who appeared beside us. “And a pastry selection—your largest, please.”

I observed her in silence, as an audience absorbs the actions of a player on stage. Her walking suit was of dark Havana brown faille, a sensible costume for a brisk March day. The polonaise that surmounted its trailing skirt was draped back into a bustle and secured by heavy silk cord knotted in the Dominican style. My years in the draper’s department had attuned me to fashionable nuances, but nothing had prepared me for the intimidating dash of my tea partner.

Irene Adler set down the imposing muff and began peeling off her leather gloves with dainty efficiency, finger by finger. She had, as I had noted, a face that could sell soap, as Miss Lillie Langtry’s did Pears’—deep-set brown eyes, that changed from black to pale gold with her emotions, like the semi-precious gemstone called tiger’s-eye; a generously curved mouth and straight nose; great thick eyelashes and a complexion like camellia petals. Her hair was obscured by the bonnet, but was a burnished chestnut color.

Everything about her was smart, and brisk, and disturbingly sure.

I forgot my hostess when the first bracing whiff of tea invaded my nostrils. How good and hot it was! It washed the bad taste of the past few days from my palate. I gawked like a schoolgirl at the three-tiered tray ringed with cucumber sandwiches, cakes and biscuits, each one shaped into tempting bite-size. A hunger pang pierced me like a dagger, and then another.