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

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  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

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~

  We 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 t
o rapidly investigating the other names, tsking 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.

  Holmes stepped forward, his brisk and commanding self shining through his brutish façade.

  “A desperate woman will suffer any indignity to preserve the fiction of her marriage,” he said. “A despairing woman will destroy herself rather than allow the one man who should protect her to trade her like a bolt of cloth. A clever woman is quite another case. I stand here surrounded by clever women. Madam and madam.” He bowed to me and Mrs. Hemphill in turn.

  “Yet the cleverest woman is she who convinces others to do her work for her.” He bowed to Sophie. “Mr. Montague,” he went on to the astonishment of the entire company, “it is cheering that your wife has persuaded you to revoke your cowardly skin-saving offer of her body to another man. It was never necessary, however.

  “Madam,” he said to me, “it’s to your credit that you would exert yourself to save the honor and well-being of a friend but it was never necessary.”

  “Madam,“ he told the madam, “you deal in selling flesh and will ever be unclean, and in this case you have been caught. It will never be possible again for you to turn Mr. Edison’s invention and its descendents into a devil’s workshop, at least not in this place and this time. I set Mr. Montague as guard upon the python until I send someone to collect and destroy the recordings within.

  “Mrs. Montague, having accomplished her mission, may go home. Or wait with her husband.”

  “But the Prince—” Mrs. Hemphill gasped. “I mean . . . the Eminent Personage. He is expecting. . . .”

  Here I took on a task I was the most suited for, for only I grasped what Holmes had been implying. “I will greet the EP and explain.”

  “No, Irene,” Sophie cried, disturbed for the first time. “You need not sacrifice yourself in my place. I . . . It was—”

  “Never necessary,” Holmes decreed again.

  “It happens that His Royal Highness and I are previously acquainted,” I assured Sophie, and left for the one locked bedchamber.

  It was still locked but my picks soon had me sitting upon the siège d‘amour in my street gown and hat, leaning one gloved hand on one of the paired golden metal stirrups at the far end.

  Not long after, a discreetly attired equerry opened the door and stepped aside as an imposing and instantly recognizable figure entered. The door just as instantly shut behind him.

  “Good Lord,” his Royal Highness said. “What a start you gave me. An attired woman merely sitting on my chaise. Outrageous as ever. What are you doing in London, Irene?”

  I had hopped down to curtsy. “You were expecting Sophie Montague, I realize, Sir. She had recruited me for her chamber drama as well as Your Royal Highness. I must say your playing the melodrama villain has been highly effective with Reginald Montague. He will be the most faithful husband in London from now on, so faithful that Oscar Wilde will write a play mocking him and call it ‘A Man of No Importance.’”

  The “Uncle of Europe” grinned into his beard. “Sophie is my hatter’s god-daughter; I find it most amusing to play the hero instead of the seducer. Quite a saucy child to appeal to me for this charade, but at least it has allowed me a chance to see the peerless Irene again.” He nodded to the beautiful but bizarre piece of furniture that was the centerpiece of the room. “You’re sure you—?”

  “Now, Your Highness, we did agree not to ruin so sublime an occasion by vulgar repetition.”

  “Of course.” He sighed, then brightened. “Mrs. Hemphill will be most worried that I was ‘cheated’ of my prize and no doubt send me something really delicious. Perhaps several somethings.”

  I left Bertie to contemplate his forthcoming feast an
d rejoined Mr. Holmes in the office, now empty of Montagues and madam. The Prince’s equerry stood guard over the python ottoman and its contents. One wondered if Bertie would destroy the recordings right off, or peek first, Holmes’s thought exactly.

  “At least,” he murmured to me as we left, “you have the most incriminating discs up your sleeves.”

  ~~~~~

  Back at Baker Street I divested my sleeves of their booty in the parlor while Mr. Holmes shed his latest disguise in his bedchamber.

  “One thing I must know,” I told him when he emerged in his own guise, attired in City vest and suit. His clean-shaven face in an age of mustachios was an empty canvas for his disguises, I realized, and I quite liked it.

  “How do I intend to destroy the compromising gramophone discs?” he anticipated me. “It will be a first. I suppose I’ll smash them with a hammer.”

  I smiled to picture Mr. Holmes performing such a task, a veritable Carrie Nation breaking liquor bottles.

  “Not that,” I explained. “I want to know why Dr. Watson’s story of our first encounter so badly garbled the scene of my wedding, which you witnessed in disguise at St. Monica’s.”

  “Watson ‘garbled’ nothing. I, er, omitted certain unimportant details when relating the event to him.”

  “Importance is in the eye of the beholder. I wonder that you didn’t regale him with the remarkable circumstances. Godfrey’s arrival at St. Monica’s was delayed and there was some question that the marriage wouldn’t be legal if it didn’t transpire immediately. The clergyman drafted a nearby idling groom as proxy bridegroom.

  “I was forced to stand beside a tipsy side-whiskered lout as the ceremony began, until Godfrey stormed in and you were demoted to a mere witness. Is that not a much more dramatic moment than the good doctor penned?”

  He waved a dismissive hand. “Grand opera has accustomed you to high drama. A trifling fine point. We stood together at the altar only a minute or so.”

  “Nevertheless, I believe that circumstance justified introducing myself into your chambers on that pretext.”