Spider Dance (2 page)

Irene Adler Norton
: an American abroad who outwitted the King of Bohemia and Sherlock Holmes in the Conan Doyle story, “A Scandal in Bohemia,” reintroduced as the diva-turned-detective protagonist of her own adventures in the novel,
Good Night, Mr. Holmes

Sherlock Holmes
: the London consulting detective building a global reputation for feats of deduction

John H. Watson, M.D
.: British medical man and Sherlock Holmes’s sometime roommate and frequent companion in crime solving

Godfrey Norton
: the British barrister who married Irene just before they escaped to Paris to elude Holmes and the King

Penelope “Nell” Huxleigh
: the orphaned British parson’s daughter Irene rescued from poverty in London in 1881; a former governess and “type-writer girl” who lived with Irene and worked for Godfrey before the two met and married, and who now resides with them in Paris

Quentin Stanhope
: the uncle of Nell’s former charges when she was a London governess; now a British agent in Eastern Europe and the Mideast

Nellie Bly
, aka
Pink
: the journalistic pseudonym and family nickname of Elizabeth Jane Cochrane, involved in the Continental pursuit of Jack the Ripper in
Chapel Noir
and
Castle Rouge;
a young American woman with a nose for the sensational and possessed of her own agenda

Baron Alphonse de Rothschild
: head of the international banking family’s most powerful French branch and of the finest intelligence network in Europe, frequent employer of Irene, Godfrey, and Nell in various capacities, especially in
Another Scandal in Bohemia

[She] came . . . one day, in the full zenith of her evil fame, bound for California. A good-looking, bold woman with fine, bad eyes, and a determined bearing, dressing ostentatiously in perfect male attire with shirt-collar turned down over a velvet-lapeled coat, rich worked shirt-front, black hat, French unmentionables, and natty polished boots with spurs. She carried in her hand a handsome riding crop, which she could use as well in the streets of Cruces as in the towns of Europe; for an impertinent American, presuming, perhaps not unnaturally, upon her reputation, laid hold jestingly of the tails of her long coat, and, as a lesson, received a cut across his face that must have marked him for some days. I did not wait to see the row that followed, and was glad when the wretched woman rode off the following morning.

—
FROM THE MEMOIRS OF MRS. SEACOLE,
AN ENGLISH LADY
, 1851

I was never in Cruces and had gone by way of Nicaragua.

—
THE NOTORIOUS ADVENTURESS IN QUESTION

Recognize the abyss that you are digging beneath your feet,
an abyss that will swallow you up together with the monarchy
if you persist in the direction you have taken
.
—
BARON DE LOS VALLES OF SPAIN

They drag me in from the balcony, kicking and screaming and brandishing my pistol. They prattle of danger from the mob outside, but I will face them off, one by one or by the tens and hundreds and thousands. I’ve always been more of a danger to myself than anyone else could ever be to me.

I have said that only twice is the life of a woman not intolerably dangerous: before she is old enough to bear a child and after she is too old to bear a child.

My life has been intolerably dangerous, I still reside in that danger zone, and I have given back what opposition I have gotten in full measure.

Of course, dangers depend. They are not always murderous mobs. They may be runaway horses, or runaway men . . . evil tongues or tongues that don’t wag about a woman at all. (In fine, I would rather be the victim of calumny than of indifference.)

Dangers can be unwanted children, or, as equally, wanted
children. And equally dangerous are faithless lovers and faithful husbands.

A woman is thought to have no will of her own. I have spent my life disputing that assumption. I have been famous, and once a woman dares to become so, she is then labeled infamous. I have struggled to have something, and came to want for nothing. Then lost it, found it, lost it again.

The one thing I have not done is give in. I give no quarter, nor do I take it.

This may be why I have been a wanderer, often persecuted and reviled. Still, I can’t regret anything, even now as I lay dying, virtually alone, and not quite penniless, but come down a great deal in the world.

Once I could have been a queen and an impossibly rich woman. Certainly I flouted convention and conventional religion. I had ideals of governance for the common people, and for my ideals I was hounded by an ancient conspiracy that wishes to keep all power in the hands of a few old and hidden men. Pharisees in the temple! Pretending to be noble even as they scheme to amass and cheaply spend everyone else’s lives and money and faith.

Now I am a supplicant at the foot of Our Lord’s cross, a Magdalene despite myself. I truly regret a great deal in my life, so perhaps that sincere contrition will open the gates of paradise to me. I am weary beyond my years, and have lived to see my fabled beauty fade to a ghost in the mirror, my arms that once wielded whip and pistol like an Amazon withered with inaction. My spirit that once dared anything fades into the wispy smoke that used to wreath my head almost constantly.

On the other hand, some things I will never regret, because they were honest and true, though I know they will never be written down that way. So I sit in this barren room, writing, as I have so often done in years past, only now my words must be formed slowly and deliberately when before they came as swift and forceful as the fire and fury of a dragon’s breath.

She was as wild as the wind, my younger self, and even
before I reach forty or die—and that will be a race to the end—she has already been lied about on three continents. In this new land of America I will write my own ending to the tempestuous and misunderstood history the world associates with my name.

Which, of course, is not really my name.

I only caught a glimpse of her at the moment, but she was
a lovely woman, with a face that a man might die for
.
—SHERLOCK HOLMES ON IRENE ADLER, “A SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA”

New York City, August 1889

Perhaps I have presumed. I, Penelope Huxleigh, have always considered myself the sole recorder of the life and times of my friend Irene, nee Adler, now Norton. (Irene, having performed grand opera under her maiden name for some years, now uses both surnames in private life. Propriety was never a sufficiently strong argument with this American-born diva with whom I have spent almost ten—can it be?—years of my life.)