The Private Wife of Sherlock Holmes (Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes novella) (2 page)

“Thank you for entertaining my ‘wife,’ Watson. I surmise that Madam Irene has delicate business to discuss. You might as well be off, old boy. She’ll never speak freely in front of you. She’s arrived on the boat-train from
Paris
just this afternoon, is attired for action of the City sort and has no use for a companion in addition to myself, or even your stalwart Army pistol. Am I wrong?”

I could only shake my head.

Watson stood, vanquished. “Very well, Holmes. I expect you to explain the lady’s astounding claim of wifehood later. I will call on you tomorrow.”

“Make it the day after.”

I tried not to look smug again.

“I’ll bid you both ‘Good Day,’ then,” Dr. Watson harrumphed in that way that Englishmen have mastered when under friendly fire. He picked up his hat, gave me a last, not unappreciative glance, and pounded down the long stairs in no good temper.

Holmes strolled to the mantel and selected a cigarette from a small box, eyeing me with raised eyebrows. I abstracted one from my case and accepted the lighted match he extended first to me and then his own cigarette.

We smoked in separate content for a few moments.

“Your self-advertisement must have taken a few years off Mrs. Hudson and Watson’s lives,” he commented.

“Surprise always gives one the advantage. I wished to wait for you here, not in the street.’

“
Hmm
. Not for reasons of social discretion but because you don’t want anyone to suspect that you have consulted me.”

“Exactly.”

“I am aware that you have pursued delicate private inquiries from time to time on the Continent these past six years.”

“I am aware that your have pursued your same interesting array of cases here, thanks to the published accounts of your Boswell, who is mightily annoyed with the both of us at the moment.”

“He is annoyed that I have banished him from the case, but I merely follow your preference in that.”

“The always prescient Mr. Holmes,” I murmured.

“Not always, or I would have anticipated your arrival.” He strode to the round table littered with this and that and seized that day’s
Times
.

“Ha! The
Belgravia
arrived at
Hampton
from
Ostend
. No. Ah. Here is an editorial screed against the scandalous numbers of houses of harlotry, etcetera, et cetera. I presume you announced yourself as my wife because you need a temporary husband on this island, not from any defection of Mr. Godfrey Norton’s.”

He eyed me quizzically over the folded and crackling newsprint, more interested in my reply than he expected me to notice. As an operatic performer, I know acting when I see it.

“Not from any defection,” I answered, watching his expression shift into either relief, or regret.

“You’re quite right,” I went on, “which is why I am applying to you. I have a most vexing duty to perform for an old friend and wished to both consult and enlist you in my cause. I’m in a far better position to afford your services now.”

“I take cases that intrigue me. The pay is . . . what you will.”

“I was of the hope that
I
still intrigue you.”

“Your bold appearance yet again on my doorstep certainly does,” he conceded, casting himself as casually and limberly as a boy onto the basket chair opposite me, taking a deep inhalation of smoke and closing his eyes. “Regale me, madam, with the particulars.”

“As you know, Mr. Holmes, my dark soprano voice made me difficult to cast in opera, yet I had managed a decent career until my ill-advised acquaintance with the Crown Prince, and then King, of
Bohemia
. I see that Dr .Watson turned first to that episode in cataloging your cases in fiction, and was in the dark about several aspects of the matter.”

“Good old Watson! I always find his direct approach to life invigorating and he much fancies himself as a vocational scribbler.”

“That is why I wish only you to know the circumstances I outline. This matter cannot ever be made public. A singer is an itinerant soul. Friendships wax and wane from capital to capital and opera to opera. Yet in those early days of my career I formed an attachment with a sister soprano, an English girl named Sophia Treadwell.”

“What of the formidable Miss Huxleigh, as much the soul of propriety as you are not?”

“Like your Dr. Watson, Nell came and went in my life during that time. Now she is with me in
France
, and the bane of all Parisian debauchery.”

His laughter was a rich bark of amusement. I always thought that Sherlock Holmes rather more appreciated Nell than he let on.

“The performing life is taxing,” I continued, “and not terribly profitable for all but international sensations like Sarah Bernhardt. Sophia was delighted to win the interest of a man from a prominent English family. Reginald Montague was twenty years older, but a ‘good catch,’ as the Society mamas put it in their mercenary way.”

“Montague.” He leapt up to consult a thick commonplace book on a shelf across the room. “A larcenous cloth merchant. Hardly. The nefarious thimble collector. No.
Hmm
. A
Shropshire
family dating back to the crusades. More likely.”

“The very one. Sophia and I have corresponded sporadically. Then, this spring, I began receiving distressed yet vague notes. Her last letter was nigh incoherent, so of course I came to see her.”

“You have the letter?”

I opened my reticule and gave him the envelope. “Sophie may be in emotional disarray but her situation, which she fully revealed only to me, is classic. She left the stage to devote herself completely to playing the society wife. She is spectacularly beautiful, masses of red-gold hair and a Pear’s soap complexion as dewy as clotted cream. Reginald has the money to dress her like a duchess. She’s been a major asset to his political career.”

“Many the beautiful wife is considered so, but she is also a liability.” Holmes was frowning and nodding as he perused the penmanship of Sophie’s letter. “Your friend has a warm but scattered character, not particularly bright but sensitive. As you say, the ideal Society wife.”

“And now she is a Society pawn.”

“Ah. Do I sniff the enticing aroma of blackmail?”

“Indeed you do. Sophie has done nothing wrong but Reginald has all the virtues, and vices, of his pampered position in life.”

“I don’t take cases involving unfaithful husbands.”

“I don’t fault you for that. A very tiresome though prolific problem. I’m afraid Sophie can live with Reginald’s infidelities. She takes dubious comfort that he expresses himself with ladies of professional standing rather than rival socialites, so she is not humiliated in public. Or would not be, except that an Eminent Personage has taken a commanding interest in
her
.”

Holmes sat up. “A virtuous woman tried. We have the makings of melodrama here.”

“I find that when such things happen to others, they are melodrama. When they happen to you, they can be true tragedy. Sophie’s anonymous suitor is He Who Must Be Obeyed.”

Holmes nodded, needing no more explanation. The voracious sexual appetite of the beloved Prince of Wales, Edward Albert, known as “Bertie,” went beyond carnal gluttony to an unspoken
droit de seigneur
. Any woman his eye fell upon and he desired, from parlor maid to Earl of England’s wife, would be his. Given his equally prodigious culinary appetite, one wondered how this extraordinarily fat princeling could perform. Well,
I
wondered. I doubt Mr. Holmes would ever consider such a sordid trifle.

“Take her out of the country for a few months,” the consulting detective said. “His Highness seeks instant gratification.” Holmes’ keen eye fixed on me. “You have traveled in the same circles as he on occasion. How is it you’ve escaped his amorous orders?”

“How can you be sure I have?”

“Come, come, madam. The King of Bohemia was far more comely and you resisted him to his despair. My interest is not salacious but strategic.”

“I’ve convinced the Prince that he has already conquered me. Like many would-be rulers, his obsession is fresh territory.”

“And how did you convince him of this falsehood?”

I hated to admit my less than scientific method. “Mesmerism. Nell is most upset that I would let him even
think
such a thing.”

“That was a certain practical concession to royal reality that I doubt Miss Huxleigh would ever tolerate herself,” he agreed.

“To have been desired by the Prince of Wales is a mark of status in some circles,” I said demurely. “Actually, he can be a charming and good-natured fellow as well as a disgustingly greedy boy in these respects but one must never forget that he will be King.”

“Not for long,” Holmes said, pressing his forefingers to his lips as he thought. “This is all prologue, of course. Avoiding Bertie is no problem for the determined man or wife. Enter blackmail.”

“Correct. The indiscreet Reginald has gotten himself recorded listing his rather embarrassing preferences at the city’s most fashionable brothel.”

III.
  
An Infernal Device

~~~~~~~~~~~~

“N
ow,” said Mr. Holmes, “enters the modern wonder, Mr. Berliner’s gramophone, in its first debut role as a criminal accessory. The master flat disc, unlike the former wax cylinders, can be duplicated and released to interested parties and the press unless Madam Reginald gives herself to the brothel’s most celebrated client. Nasty business for a
Windsor
, but there was that
Cleveland Street
house of boys matter a few years ago involving Bertie’s suspiciously late brother, Prince Eddy. Is there no way the recording could be refuted or brushed aside?”

“Sophie, who refuses to hear the content, has been assured by her contrite husband it would ruin him, and her. So the gramophone can be used for evil?”

“The method of the future. I have one of the first, fresh from the American Gramophone Company. This is a forward-thinking brothel owner as well as an unscrupulous one.”

“You have such a wonder, Mr. Holmes?” I asked, although I’d already noticed that he did. “You are indeed ahead of the times.”

“It is for entertainment only. I have a fondness for fine music.”

“So I am led to understand,“ I murmured. “I’m considering recording my best
lieder
on these miraculous rubber disks.”

“Indeed. A classical song cycle would be a most modern marrying of medium and Meistersinger.”

“That is a most Gilbert and Sullivan expression,” I said, laughing at his able and complimentary phrase. “May I see it?”

“See what? Gilbert and Sullivan? Only at the
Savoy
.”

“Your gramophone.”

I had not seen much of Mr. Holmes and less of him in person, for on two of those occasions he was in disguise, but there was no disguising his awkwardness now.

“Ah, my dear madam, my dear Mrs. Norton, the gramophone is . . . in here.” He moved to the door from which he had recently emerged. It was his bedchamber.

My faithful spinster companion, Nell Huxleigh, would have been scalped by a Red Indian before entering any single man’s bedchamber and especially her arch enemy’s. A married woman has certain advantages. I swept inside, my silken skirt hems rustling over a threshold I would wager no woman but Mrs. Hudson had ever crossed.

This narrow room was easily surveyed. A window overlooked the street. The tidy space contained a single bed made up with military neatness and a table holding the gramophone at the bed’s foot with a large metal box next to it. A door opposite the window led to the back stairwell. The sitting room fireplace provided a hearth and mantel here on the other side of the wall. A series of framed men’s photographs marched down the opposite wall, too many to be relatives or friends.

“A rogue’s gallery of criminals guards your sleep?” I asked over my shoulder.

He stepped past me to quickly indicate the machine in question, with its hearing trumpet-styled speaker attached to the stylus arm. The round flat disk was at the trumpet’s rear and a small hand crank was at the front.

As Mr. Holmes turned the crank, clear musical strains filled the modest room.

“
La
B
elle Hélèn
e
from the
Offenbach
operetta,” I exclaimed.

“Only instruments so far, no voice yet. This form would suit your lyric mezzo.”

Before I could answer, he abruptly stopped the music and led me from the chamber. “But we have shabbier business at hand. Like all modern inventions, the gramophone can be put to celestial use or serve as a vehicle for humanity’s worst criminal impulses.”

“From what the furious Reginald has admitted to Sophie,” I said, “the
maison de rendezvous
he patronizes is also the Eminent Personage’s favorite retreat. Apparently the equipment for recording the discs was purchased from the manufacturer at great cost.”