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

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “Flimsy grounds, madam, exceedingly flimsy.”

  “And where is the gold sovereign with which I tipped the tipsy groom?” I looked pointedly at his waistcoat. “You wore it yesterday when you returned to these rooms to find me in residence but I have not seen it since.” Nor was my photograph any longer in view.

  He shrugged. “I was in disguise.”

  “You are not now,” I pointed out, eyebrows raised. “Dr. Watson’s story ended with your vow to wear it on your watch-chain in memory of our encounter.”

  “In memory,” he said, “not in perpetuity.”

  I smiled, knowing I would get no more. “And I owe you—?”

  “Nothing. This sordid matter required no great thought, but featured the usual messy marital maneuvers. Only the role of the gramophone was mildly of interest.”

  “Still, I am most grateful.” I offered my hand, recalling from Watson’s narration that he had refused to take Willie’s six years ago, King of Bohemia or not.

  Mr. Holmes hesitated. Then, observing it was gloved, did so.

  “I hope,” he said, “that you have a new appreciation for the uses of fern dust and gramophones.”

  I laid my hand delicately on his forearm, saying softly, “I do indeed, my dear Mr. Holmes, I do. My wedding, as you know, was hasty and sparsely attended. I’m afraid some of the niceties were neglected, so I take the liberty of amending one. You may kiss the bride.”

  ~~~~~~~

  Well, Nell, this is been a long letter, more in the nature of a report, of my recent visit to England so far and Sophie Montague’s successful scheme to frighten, shame, and reform her philandering husband. As a parson’s daughter and the soul of respectability, you’ll be pleased that virtue has triumphed over vice, though it had to be goaded to the task.

  As for my reunion with and ensuing farewell of Mr. Holmes, I do admit that it was very naughty of me to tease a man with an aversion to the complicated toils of gallantry and women. No doubt you will wonder about the upshot of my impetuous final proposal.

  I’m happy to say that we parted with the capacity to surprise each other, as we did on the very first occasion of our meeting and which we do not often encounter in our usual dealings with others. As I paused on the walk below to search the bustling traffic for an empty hansom, I heard the faint first throbs of a violin from the rooms I’d just left.

  What a divine instrument a violin is, Nell! Only the human voice may hope to echo its deep and soulful range of expression. I smiled to know that my visit had brought out the violin case, not the cocaine needle. You will be pleased to note that I am a good influence on Mr. Holmes and you will no doubt agree that this is the noblest role a woman may aspire to with a man.

  In fact, his last words to me were that he was glad to see I was still unswayed by royal titles.

  “I value honor over aristocracy,” I said, “and a man of impeccable integrity. I’ve been fortunate in my life to have met two.”

  Color tinged his high cheekbones as he turned to the mantel and the Persian slipper and the covering stage business of lighting a pipe.

  “And, one could say, I have married both.”

  AFTERWORD

  by Carole Nelson Douglas

  With the first chapter of the first Irene Adler novel,

  Good Night, Mr. Holmes

  Why Holmes ended up in a brothel

  A small publisher of attractively designed books contacted me because the Sherlock Holmes story in a forthcoming fiction anthology had failed to materialize. Would I write one? The pay was modest, but I always jump at the chance to write a Sherlock Holmes-Irene Adler story. Readers of the eight Adler suspense novels are in mourning that the series is on hiatus for the second time, and I write the novellas for them as well as myself.

  I didn’t think to ask the name of the collection before committing. I soon found out it was an eye-popping one: Sex, Lies, and Private Eyes. The collection featured classic sleuths far more modern, noir, and sexy, than the woman-allergic and ascetic Sherlock Holmes.

  For me, the challenge became how to abide by the title in a manner perfectly in keeping with the Sherlock Holmes stories’ late Victorian setting and personality, and with his continuing encounters, thanks to me, with the woman, the only woman to have outwitted him, American opera singer Irene Adler.

  My Irene Adler series debuted in 1990. That first novel, Good Night, Mr. Holmes, won American Mystery and Romantic Times magazine awards, and was named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times. The most recent (but perhaps not last) Adler novel came out in 2004.

  I’d been the first author to make a woman from the Holmes “Canon” a protagonist of her own adventures, with Holmes and Watson in their proper supporting roles, and the first writer to move into the crowded arena of Sherlock Holmes spin-offs with a female byline. Since then, a few female-oriented Sherlockian novels appeared and some endured. Mrs. Hudson has headed a mystery series and the retired Sherlock finally took a very young wife named Mary Russell. Recently, two British directors have created updated film versions of Holmes and the characters.

  In Rachel McAdams, Guy Ritchie created a charmingly larcenous minx for Robert Downey Jr.’s steampunkish action hero-calculator Holmes. Now, at the first blush of 2012, Steven Moffat of Doctor Who fame has given his Asperger-asocial young detecting genius Sherlock Irene Adler as a crop-brandishing dominatrix.

  Every new interpretation reflects the time and mindset of its creators, but “my” Irene Adler was reinvented in reaction against the glib “Victorian bimbos or vamps” men who reimagine Holmes automatically produce and subconsciously use to invert the triumph, the wit, heart and nerve shown by “the woman” in Conan Doyle’s very first Sherlock Holmes short story in 1891.

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, one of the first writers to be trapped by the global commercial success of his early work, wouldn’t have cared what anyone did with his creation. He said so in a famous telegram sent to the American director William Gillette, who’d asked permission to marry Holmes in the first Sherlock Holmes play. “You may marry him or murder him or do whatever you like with him.”

  But a reader like me, hooked in childhood on the characters and stories, does care.

  And the reason Gillette asked Doyle’s permission to marry Holmes was the character’s firm denial of any “softer” emotions like romantic love. That facet of the character is one of many that made him immortal, so Irene and I have joined forces to explore that famous aloofness in “The Private Wife of Sherlock Holmes.”

  Here’s what Sherlock Holmes tells Watson about “the woman” at the beginning of Good Night, Mr. Holmes.

  Prelude: June, 1894

  A Baker Street Reminiscence

  “I see, Watson, by an old issue of the Strand magazine, which was lying about for some reason, that yet another narrative of one of my little problems—the Irene Adler affair—has reached the public,” my friend Sherlock Holmes remarked over the remains of Mrs. Hudson’s ample dinner one warm summer evening.

  I hid my smile of plea sure in a sip of burgundy. It invariably struck me as ironic that my companion, the most observant man alive, could so successfully ignore the stack of Strand magazines I imported to our lodgings whenever a fresh story of mine was among its monthly offerings. Such accounts had appeared for the past three years, commencing only after Holmes had been presumed dead in 1891.

  It was my fond hope that Holmes, now resurrected, should acquaint himself with my past efforts to memorialize his astounding deductive abilities. Yet his public stance of belittling his own achievements reflected on my literary offerings. Thus any admission that the great detective actually read his own adventures as penned by myself was a singular and rewarding occasion.

  “These little stories seem quite popular,” I remarked mildly.

  “Popular, hmm.” Holmes’s angular features grew momentarily unfocused as he groped for his postprandial pipe. “No doubt the lurid title accounts for it.”

  “I deemed ‘A Sc
andal in Bohemia’ quite an accurate description of the case.” My tone harbored some asperity, as no amateur author writes but for praise.

  “Did you?”

  Holmes’s reticence only spurred me on. “And what would you have titled the affair, may I ask?”

  His eyes sharpened through the blue mists of tobacco smoke. “‘A Superior Woman.’”

  “The King of Bohemia did not find Irene Adler a superior woman, Holmes, or he would have married her.”

  “If lineage outweighed suitability as the criterion for investigative work, Watson, I should be hard put to acquire the few genuinely intriguing problems that come my way. Besides, you forget”—the relish of Holmes’s smile promised a rare mood of reminiscence—”His Majesty himself exclaimed, ‘Would she not have made an admirable queen?’ It was his only sensible remark in the entire affair. But you mistake me, Watson. I quite understand the need for exaggeration in the press. What I object to in your account is the key fact you have got wrong.”

  “Key fact? Wrong?”

  “Indeed.”

  “Surely not. The case is replicated from my notes, and I am used to recording details accurately in my profession. Admittedly, the events occurred six years ago, but—”

  “It is not your relation of the case’s particulars I contest, Watson. It is your acceptance of later, unascertained facts on face value.”

  “Which facts?” I demanded, setting aside Mrs. Hudson’s excellent lemon tart half eaten.

  “The facts of Irene Adler’s—now Norton’s—untimely demise. You quite unforgivably refer to her as ‘the late Irene Adler.’”

  “The report of her death was in the Times. A terrible train wreck in the Italian Alps. Both her husband, Godfrey Norton, and herself were listed among the fatalities.”

  “Much is in the Times, my dear Watson, which is not true.” Holmes had assumed the professorial tone that I often found myself contesting for the pure sake of it. “And many deaths are prematurely reported. Consider my own.”

  Holmes alluded to the matter of the Reichenbach Falls, recalling my own cruel delusions as to my friend’s disappearance and death.

  These had only been banished by his startling “return from the dead” the previous April. Authorial vanity absconded as I followed the path Holmes had paved for my less nimble mind.

  “You actually believe, Holmes, that Irene Adler, too, is still alive?” said I with some astonishment.

  Holmes’s gaze moved to the framed photograph of the woman in question, which occupied an honored place among his memorabilia.

  “She is one of only four individuals—and the sole woman—to outwit me, Watson. Why should she not cheat death as well?”

  At times I found Holmes’s colossal but unpremeditated vanity as annoying as I found amazing his ability to deduce volumes of testimony from the smallest shred of evidence.

  “You believe she is alive?” I demanded again.

  “I suspect it, Watson,” he answered crisply after a long pause. “I have not investigated, hence it is pure supposition. But you know on what methods my supposition is based.”

  There was no quarreling with Holmes’s phenomenal reasoning powers, which honed instinct on some inflexible inner logic until it attained a lethal edge.

  I again studied the photograph of the woman in the case. Although she had married Godfrey Norton before fleeing London and a confrontation with Holmes—signing a letter she had left for Holmes ‘Irene Norton, née Adler’—it was as Irene Adler, operatic prima donna and adventuress, that I invariably thought of her.

  Like many actresses, she had been a markedly handsome woman.

  I had only glimpsed her once from a tantalizing distance during the course of the case, but the photograph conveyed all her regal bearing, crowned as she was by richly arranged masses of dark hair. She wore formal attire in the photograph, bare about the bosom—and a magnificent bosom it was, even I was unbiased enough to concede—but the gown and jewels only set off her graceful form and beautifully composed face.

  According to Holmes’s index, Irene Adler had been a full- blown beauty of thirty when we had encountered her six years before in 1888. Holmes himself had been only four- and- thirty. I confess that his open admiration then had nursed my hopes that the world’s most dedicated deductive machine harbored some hint of manly susceptibility among the admirably efficient gears of his mind, heart and soul.

  “And then there’s that twaddle you wrote about my lack of regard for the fair sex in general,” Holmes murmured, breaking into my reverie.

  “Twaddle? I fancy I explained it rather scientifically.”

  “Love in my life would be ‘grit in a sensitive instrument,’” he mocked good-naturedly. “What a way to describe the emotions that drive nine- tenths of the human race, Watson! You are becoming quite a romantic in your middle years.”

  “And what is wrong with a bit of sentiment in this harsh and often rude world?”

  “Nothing, so long as it does not conflict with the facts.”

  “But it invariably does! Facts have nothing to do with the emotions. Witness those who love against all likelihood, even love vicious murderers.”

  “Exactly my point. And you are right in that, Watson, I cannot go against reason. I cannot allow the glamour of a fair face to obscure the facts my being is dedicated to lying bare. Besides, why must you be compelled to explain my solitary way of life? I am not the first man to eschew the company of women for the pursuit of an intellectual aim.”

  “You have, as usual, put your very finger upon it, Holmes! Why must you equate the company of women with diminution of your intellectual powers?”

  “Because most women are impediments.”

  “Impediments? That is cold, Holmes. Even you are not so inhuman as to dismiss half the human race as a nuisance!”

  Holmes produced the tight, tolerant smile that meant an opponent had fallen into a verbal trap of his setting.

  “I know you are somewhat prejudiced in the matter, given your close association with the former Mary Morstan, unfortunately and truly the late Mary Watson,” he murmured sympathetically, “and an excellent woman she was. But regard the whole, not the worthy exception, Watson. Think! How would an ordinary female accompany me through the night streets unhailed and unhampered? How would she navigate the suburban outlands we have trod together, upholstered in thirty yards of train and a veiled bonnet? Could she pick up a revolver and leave upon a midnight moment’s notice, as you often have? How would one reared to faint upon the slightest pretext remain conscious in the face of violent death?”

  “We have met some brave women in the course of your cases,” I put in.

  “We have encountered some admirable women, particularly those independent creatures thrown by fate upon their own resources. Your own Mary Morstan showed herself possessed of great nobility of character in deeming her inheritance of so little consequence compared to her regard for a modest doctor of my acquaintance.

  “Yet did not even she swoon as the case reached its climax? It is written in your own account of the affair, which you call ‘The Sign of the Four.’ “

  I colored to find my more tender premarital moments exhumed by my friend’s relentless memory. “Irene Adler did not swoon,” I muttered in confusion.

  “Exactly my point, Watson! Irene Adler did not swoon. Nor is she the kind to perish in a train wreck, any more than I am likely to fall off a cliff, even in Professor Moriarty’s lethal embrace. Not so passive an end is permitted the likes of Irene Adler.”

  “That is hardly a logical reaction.”

  “It is the result of the most impeccable logic. Review the facts. Has not Irene Adler demonstrated time and again an indisputable control over people and events around her? She was perceptive enough to foresee the King of Bohemia’s forthcoming royal marriage and wise enough to flee when she saw herself supplanted in his plans, if not his affections.

  “She also anticipated a need for future protection and brought with her t
he compromising photograph of herself and the King. She evaded his best agents on five separate occasions. When his Majesty allowed my humble self to partake in the problem, she not only detected the net closing around her, but had the audacity—the audacity, Watson!—to follow my disguised self, and you as well, to the very doorstep of 221-B Baker Street. There, dressed as a young man, she boldly bid me, ‘Good night, Mr. Sherlock Holmes.’ “

  Holmes sat back against the chair, smoke rising from his fevered face like steam from an overtaxed locomotive. “I bother to quote the King of Bohemia on only one subject: ‘What a woman!’”

  “Forward hussy, if you ask me,” I put in, still defensive about my fine-natured Mary.

  Holmes smiled ruefully. “How unfair it is that enterprise is called a harlot when it wears a female face. How did you put it in your account, Watson—‘the late Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable memory.’? You call her an ‘adventuress’ as well. Two centuries ago the word designated a woman who lived by her wits; today it has been debased to describe a woman who lives by her willingness—especially in regard to men of influence and wealth.

  “I believe you misjudge Madam Irene there, but you may speculate upon her character as your authorial right. Her death, however, is mere rumor until proven. No, Watson, I fear we have all played our roles in L’Affaire Adler as mere supporting actors to the woman’s wit and will. Had she been a man, I should have immediately penetrated the charade of her greeting—and farewell—that night here in Baker Street. Being hampered by the strictures of her sex, she uses our arrogant male underestimation of her to camouflage a daring nature. The woman is without equal.”

  “You do especially admire her, then!” pounced I, for to him she is always the woman.

  “And to much better purpose than romantically, Watson, although it would please those monthly readers of your little tales and your conventional heart if my admiration were merely amorous. “You see, I suspect that she fled En gland not only because the King of Bohemia was on her trail— and not simply because I myself was about to close the net on her. I suspect she had other reasons, some of them involving the mysterious Mr. Godfrey Norton.”