The Private Wife of Sherlock Holmes (Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes novella) (4 page)

“This gilded palace of fashionable decadence and enterprise indeed confirms that. Were it located in the lower-class slums of the
East End
it would have been raided by the police and demolished and all its inhabitants and clients locked away in prison. Instead, a prince and his pedigreed ilk patronize it and use it to ruin respectable women. Finish your wine and inspect your pistol while I adjourn to return as a
London
gentleman of leisure.”

There was no need to inspect my small firearm. It was always loaded. I wondered that he should think it necessary. Even though the current mode for floor-sweeping skirts was less full, I was easily able to conceal it in a pocket. A pity the June weather was too warm for muffs. I find them most useful as pistol holsters.

I not only finished my wine, I took another inspection stroll around the famous front room where so many people high and low had come to consult the amazing Mr. Holmes. My old suitor, King Willie, Wilhelm von Ornstein, had stood on this very carpet to engage the English detective to wrest the photographic portrait of us together from my possession.

Its release could have destroyed his royal marriage as utterly as his secret forthcoming union destroyed his courtship of me. Willie was undoubtedly infatuated with me, but I wondered if even he would have been unfaithful. Titled gentlemen, I’d come to realize, especially after meeting Bertie, are spoiled boys who must have all the Christmas candy.

My hands in their supple kidskin gloves fisted. It was intolerable that Sophie should be exchanged to a greedy princeling like an unfeeling fashion doll. Perhaps she was considered so easily bartered because her origins were ordinary and she had performed on the stage. Such women were considered honorless. It dawned on me that we were about to interfere with the desires of the future King of England. I lived in
Paris
and cared not. Mr. Holmes surely had served the Queen and someday might serve the King. His courage surprised me.

Or was he the only man in
England
as arrogant as its royals, because of his supreme intellectual powers?

I heard a noise from the other room. Out stepped a tall man with a powerful torso and luxuriantly groomed beard and mutton chops. It took a second for me to recognize the imposing facial hair and bearing of the King of Bohemia.

“An ideal disguise,” I admitted, amused at his mimicry of my former Prince Charming. The disguise was ironic, but it was also pitch-perfect for our task.

VI.
  
Evening Callers

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

W
e arrived at the brothel just as its evening was beginning. The clientele was not quite yet assembling. The liveried man at the door had a lantern jaw raw from a dull razor and brutish eyes as dull.

Holmes spoke. “Mr. Asquith Fleming to see the, er, lady of the house.”

The fellow eyed me in my elegant
Paris
gown and cape with confusion. If I wasn’t prey, what was I? But he admitted us and indicated the empty selection salon and the office that lay beyond it.

“New blokes see her in the office first,” he said.

I’d described the house thoroughly to Mr. Holmes over supper, so he escorted me briskly over the animal rugs to the door the man had indicated.

“Ah!” He spotted the shawl-covered tea cart I’d described the moment we entered, moving to it with the speed of a striking snake. Gone was ponderous King Willie. Holmes bent to examine the recording equipment in the lamplight. “Yes.
Hmm
. Clever. But the recorded discs are not kept here, only the single empty one under the stylus.”

“I wasn’t able to locate them before the madam found me here.”

“This room is a jungle,” he observed, frowning, “but ferns are a fragile plant and leave a fairy dust of sorts when disturbed. If you would be so useful as to block the door . . .”

I went to stand guard while he whipped a magnifying glass from his evening cape pocket and began to prowl the perimeter of the chamber.

“If there is a safe we are out of luck for tonight but I suspect these villains believe their misuse of the gramophone is so modern and clever that no one else would ever think of it. That is why crime is best left to the criminal classes, who are wise enough rely on skill instead of self-regard. Ha! No doubt you don’t see the delightful trail of dust the fern fairies have left for us.”

“I can’t believe that I hear the logical Mr. Holmes extolling ‘fern fairies.’”

 
“Botany, dear lady,” he said, crawling along the carpet and over the bear and tiger-skins like an African explorer, “is queen of the smaller sciences. There is a secret world of plants that propagate both indoors and out, that eavesdrop on our words as well as drop leaves on our walkways and carpets. I can learn more from a crushed blossom than I can any six human witnesses.

“As for your merriment at my mention of ‘fern fairy dust,’ I admit that fairies are not a rational subject but I will direct you to
England
’s fairest dramatist, Mr. William Shakespeare. In
Henry IV
, the playful prince and his Falstaff scheme to rob a rich merchant, much as we do here, in a way. In the play, Falstaff’s henchman claims they can invade a castle invisibly because they have ‘fern-seed.’ We, of course, know today that ferns have no seed, but reproduce from a dust of surface spores.”

I much appreciated Mr. Holmes’s use of “we” in that statement, as I hadn’t known.

“For centuries, though,” he went on, “the question of fern seeds was of great moment. Since fern ‘seeds’ could not be seen in Shakespeare’s day, before the invention of microscopes, it was assumed the seeds were invisible and their possession might make one invisible too. The legends said that one could only collect the seeds at midnight on Midsummer’s Eve, when it fell from the plant on the shortest night of the year. You would stack twelve pewter plates beneath a fern frond, and,
poof!
the seed would fall through the first eleven plates and be caught by the twelfth. Fairy dust. But in fact, the fern, if shaken, leaves a minuscule trail that adheres to anything nearby.”

By then he had crawled his way back to the door and my person.

“Ah. You did not change your shoes from your maid’s adventure this morning.”

“Rather, Mr. Holmes, I wore a lady’s slipper under my maid’s skirt. I’m traveling and didn’t have time to access a working woman’s brogue.”

“Can you lift the sole into the light?”

If anyone had ever told me I should be standing in an elegant English brothel with Sherlock Holmes at my feet asking to examine the sole of my slipper like a demented Prince Charming, I would have said that person was mad. I was not so sure at the moment that I wasn’t.

I lifted my hems and my foot so my sole could undergo close inspection.

“Yes. Your soles this morning gathered crushed fern dust. From the depressions in the carpet, I have determined your route as you searched the room. You found nothing more to do with the gramophone. The recorded discs must be in an unexplored area—”

He stood to strike out toward the divans in the center of the room, finally circling a huge python-upholstered ottoman with the giant serpent’s taxidermied head and neck coiled around the edge.

“They counted on a natural human revulsion,” he noted. “However, nothing repulses me but attempted crime carried out clumsily.”

With that he bent to feel along the scaled skin until the head and neck raised at the click of a latch. Inside was a storage space filled with upright discs.

“This python,” I noted after going over to see the cache, “has swallowed a most indigestible meal.” I knelt beside the ottoman to pull out some discs, each labeled in the middle with the name of its subject.

“Montague is not the only fly caught in the gramophone’s audible web,” Holmes noted as he examined other discs. “Here is his record.”

I took it in my gloved hand, knowing my fingers held Sophie’s fate. I stood to slip it into my capacious skirt pocket.

“Women are much better attired for subterfuge,” Holmes observed, “especially with the sleeves presently in fashion, although they make passage on the street difficult.”

I couldn’t but agree with him. Fashion now called for an extravagant version of a Regency riding jacket over our bell-shaped skirts, this meant lace collars up to our chins and fabulously wide leg-o-mutton sleeves above the elbow. I no doubt could thrust at least four vertical recording discs down each sleeve of my lace-lavished pastel-flowered jacket. The tight lower sleeves to the wrist laces would hold them prisoner in their airy, lace-winged cages. So I suggested.

He fell to rapidly investigating the other names,
tsk
ing repeatedly as he handed them up to me. “Revelation of this would tumble the financial markets. This the House of Lords. This the Church of England! What a blackmailer’s treasure chest! Do you think the Eminent Personage knows what game’s afoot here?”

I’d deftly inserted the hard circles under my flagrant jacket lapels and into the huge puffed sleeves that forced me to turn somewhat sideways to pass through most doors.

“I doubt it,” I said. “He can be selfish and self-gratifying, but his vanity requires an illusion that his many conquests come to him totally willingly.”

Holmes rose, dusting off his hands as if they had been contaminated by poisonous “devil dust.” “I must ensure that this operation ceases at once.”

Before we could discuss the matter further, the door latch snapped.

Mrs. Hemphill stepped in to find me perched on the snakeskin ottoman and Mr. Holmes with his back to her holding a stereoscope to his face like a mask. This clever modern device was a viewer that made double images seen through lenses look vividly dimensional. The photo cards available for the popular parlor toy usually showed scenery, but those kept here were presumably French postcards, for the backs of his ears were very red.

“Mr. and
Mrs
. Montague,” she greeted us. “You’re a bit early.”

She eyed me up and down, her gaze so searching that I hoped no vestige of that morning’s maid remained. I was very glad that modern invention didn’t yet permit looking through clothing, which would no doubt be quite the entertainment here.

 
“Now I see why our Eminent Personage is so taken with Mrs. Montague. She is a peerless beauty, good sir, fit for a Peer of the Realm. I see you’ve finally made her see reason. Being a bit early is all to the good. She’ll need to change into one of our piquant French dressing gowns. Our EP is not one to dawdle and he has an important dinner later.”

So poor Sophie was to be a quick appetizer! Really, Bertie should be shot!

“The recording, Mr. Montague, will be given to your wife when she leaves the establishment.”

Holmes set down the stereoscope and turned to reveal his face.

She gasped, then recovered herself. “Ah. The husband has chosen another escort, I see. Wise perhaps. Husbands are an inconvenience here, men never.”

Holmes spoke with authority. “I will stay to ‘escort’ Mrs. Montague and the recording home.”

“An odd sort of emissary you are. I can’t quite fix your station. You are neither thug nor gentleman, but a bit of both.”

Holmes laughed coldly. “You have exactly put your finger on it, Madam madam.”

I had no idea what we were to do next, but I intended to wait for Bertie and then give him a fair-sized piece of my mind. Debauchery was one thing. Forced debauchery was quite another, even for a spoiled Prince of Wales.

A knock on the door made me raise my brows and glance at Holmes. This was beginning to feel like a French farce.

“Enter,” Mrs. Hemphill said over her shoulder, clearly expecting an employee.

Instead, in walked another finely attired couple Sophie and her husband!

This
was
a French farce, were it not so sordid.

Reginald Montague was a fit-looking man of fifty with graying curly golden hair and mustache. His expression on entering veered between sheepish and frightened. Encountering witnesses to his act of turning his wife over to a bawdy-house madam made his ruddy skin pale.

“It’s only because,” he stuttered to no one in particular, “that my . . . that the Party’s good depends on this bargain. I have reconsidered—” He glanced at his wife for support. “Sophie? I am trying to undo my mad bargain. I will pay . . . anything you like but my wife,” he told Madam Hemphill with such anxiety that it undercut the offer.

At six-and-thirty, I was a woman in full bloom. Sophie was twelve years my junior, delicately blond where I was fulsome brunette, her figure slight and girlish where I was, well, fulsome. It speaks to the underlying anxiety of princes that they like their conquests young and fresh and frightened.

Sophie did not look frightened now, as when she had begged me to extricate her from this situation, but triumphant. I frowned, seeing that the madam would win either way: a fortune from Montague and a quick offer of a threesome to the Eminent Personage to console him, or Sophie solo and a grateful EP for future services.