Good Night, Mr. Holmes (A Novel of Suspense featuring Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes)

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  As I recognized the title called, Irene rose from the front row and stood sheltered in the grand piano’s inward curve. The accompanist awaited her nod. A silence from an audience bored to restlessness greeted her subdued appearance.

  “At least we could have used the knotted fringe,” I moaned softly to myself. But it was too late to trim her gown, the day, the opportunity. All was lost.

  Irene nodded to the man at the piano, lifted her chin and began singing. She did not use full power, but her dark contralto ranged lightly through the melody. The restraint added a poignancy I felt even through the alien words.

  As for the gown—Irene had chosen impeccably. The white collar and cuffs drew all eyes to her expressive face and hands; the navy blue moiré gown acted as a dramatically dark curtain against which her pale hands pantomimed emotions that needed no translation.

  Because she was the last to perform, daylight was receding. The room darkened around her while the candles’ mellow glow waxed warmer, flickering on her face almost in time to the dusky, cello-sweet sounds swelling from her throat.

  The song had ended for several seconds before the audience accepted that finality. Applause burst forth like thunder. I was on my feet for joy, laughing and clapping and crying—and so were those around me.

  Irene nodded once, casting her eyes down, and slipped back to her seat. I rushed toward her but was anticipated by a short, stout gentleman.

  “Beauty-ful, beauty-ful,” he was murmuring, shaking her hand up and down like a pump handle, his eyes unabashedly bright with tears. “When I hear you at the Savoy I thought you might suit for this song. I prefer usually the tenor or the baritone. Nothing kills song so much as a wobbly contralto who must—the Italians say how?— use too much portamento, you understand?”

  “Si,” Irene answered quickly in Italian, with an unusually modest smile. “Too much gliding from note to note, rather than letting each syllable and tone speak for itself. Was my Bohemian passable, Mr. Dvořák?”

  “Passable? This means...?” The composer looked around.

  “Acceptable,” another gentleman supplied.

  “Beauty-ful,” the composer trilled, waving his hand to dismiss Irene’s worries. “You will be only woman to sing my songs so long as Antonin Dvořák has say in the matter. We must talk more later. Adler,” he mused with narrowed eyes, “I know you are American. Adler is German, no?”

  Irene retreated in a subtle way, as she did when anyone—including myself—inquired into her origins. “No,” she said, and said no more.

  Mr. Dvořák patted her hand. “Does not matter. Something in the soul is Slavic. We are easily touched people. But only by quality. Now go I to other peoples, but unhappily.”

  Waiting admirers quickly filled the gap the composer left. I toured the elegant rooms, contentedly eavesdropping on the praise being heaped on Irene’s voice, phrasing, demeanor and dress.

  How could I have doubted, after all this time? Irene was the ultimate mistress of molding the world to her will. Having witnessed and shared in her various adventures, from the seamy matter of the drowned sailor, which remains a mystery to this day, to the glorious subjugation of a concert audience, I of all people should have known by now that Irene needed none of my worry.

  Irene’s Dvořák recital was the first blast of the horns of change in our harmoniously orchestrated domestic lives. Our ordered life in London was never to be quite the same, although the great change itself was slow in coming.

  The cold, wet weather of autumn had become the cold dry admonishment of winter before that day arrived. I had borrowed Irene’s muff to make my long omnibus journey to the Temple. Godfrey Norton had called upon me again for a bit of typewriting, as he did from time to time.

  Irene had not regarded her muff with the same respect since that October day when she had arrived home with news of her command performance before Dvořák. It often lay about our rooms, abandoned like a no-longer-favorite pet. I had finally claimed it that morning, both for the practical warmth it lent and because I couldn’t bear to see an item once so necessary forgotten and tossed aside.

  Mr. Norton had heard my step and was at the chamber door before I could knock.

  “Come in, Miss Huxleigh, come in. A bitter wind blows through Fleet Street—why, what is the matter? Your face is rubbed raw from the cold!”

  “The... wind, as you say. Quite bitter.”

  “Indeed. Have a chair and a dish of tea.”

  He had moved to larger chambers some months before, so I found myself installed in the sheltering arms of a leather wing chair in the inner sanctum with a piping cup presented to me shortly after.

  The odor of peppermint tea wafting under my red nose undid me. I pulled a handkerchief from the recesses of the muff—Irene had long ago showed me its secret pockets—and buried my face in its unfurled folds.

  “My dear Miss Huxleigh, what is the matter? You must tell me.”

  “It’s the tea,” I sniffled openly and not too logically. “The very kind Irene bought me when she saved me from the urchin on the pavement, don’t you see? Peppermint.” Off I went into a most humiliating wail.

  “No, I don’t see, but I think I’d better. Why don’t you start at the beginning?”

  I glanced with what I knew were very crimson eyes at Mr. Norton. I confess that his solicitude sat very pleasantly upon me, who was not used to gentlemen, handsome or other wise, taking any notice of me at all. Now I saw the sincerity behind it. I forgot completely that I had first met him in connection with a case of Irene’s. I was amazed to find myself regarding him as a friend.

  “Irene has had another piece of great good fortune,” said I. “I learned of it just yesterday.” He stiffened slightly, as he always did at mention of Irene. “I must be weeping because I’m so happy for her.”

  “Oh? Has she found herself another prominent client?”

  “A prominent mentor.”

  Mr. Norton’s face tightened. I knew he still regarded Irene with suspicion.

  “Oh, no, nothing of that nature! It is her singing career. Mr. Antonin Dvořák, the composer, heard her sing in the autumn and was so enamored—taken—with her talent that he recommended her to the director of La Scala and Irene has been invited to become an understudy in Milan.” I paused before I should hiccough. “They need her immediately. She will study all the suitable major female roles; it will give her formidable versatility and I have no doubt she will be a prima donna one day.”

  “She seems to have mastered the role already,” he hazarded.

  “You have not seen Irene at her... warmest,” said I. “Nor have you heard her sing. She has a divine voice, difficult to cast at times, because her range straddles dark soprano and contralto, so this latest opportunity is what she has been waiting for, working for—”

  “And she leaves for Milan...?”

  “Within the week. Oh, you should have seen her! She came home so... vibrant. Even speaking she seemed to be singing. I had not realized how hard this life was for her, the struggle to train her voice and obtain small singing roles, to pursue these ‘cases’, as you call them—she was like a bird released from a cage, laughing and flitting about the rooms. Very like a nightingale.”

  “Hmm.” Mr. Norton lifted a dark eyebrow at the cup now cooling in my hand, and I dutifully drank. “Yet she leaves you behind in a cage of your own and never notices.”

  “Oh, no.” I sat forward, sobered by his assumption of Irene’s dereliction. “She wanted—assumed that I would accompany her to Milan. Milano, she calls it.” I couldn’t help smiling to recall her exuberance. “I pointed out that I do not translate Italian and there would be no employment for me there.”

  “She had not thought of that.”

  “No. Her face quite fell as it dawned on her. She had not considered the practicalities, you see.” I sipped more tea, as braced by its mint flavor as I had been four years earlier when Irene had prescribed it for me on another occasion when I had felt lost and alone. H
ow odd that Godfrey Norton of all people should be extending the same succor to me now on the loss of Irene.

  He nodded stiffly. “I remember my mother on the sale of a novel, that same wild exhilaration.”

  “Irene said she would provide for me, but I pointed out that her understudy’s pay was barely sufficient to keep her in respectable circumstances in a foreign land. Also, I reminded her that I had always paid my share of our expenses, my later earnings making up for the early days when I had depended on her. I am not about to abdicate my independence now.”

  “Brava, Miss Huxleigh. Miss Adler is not the only star in the firmament of women’s independence. You have sterling qualities of your own, you know.”

  “I do?” I must confess that the depth of Mr. Norton’s personal regard both startled and pleased me. His kind eyes rested on me, a hint of amusement in their slate-grey depths, like sun glancing off winter water.

  “You do. I would go to court to defend the proposition. I wonder how Miss Adler will get on without you?”

  “Splendidly, I know it. Our association was one of convenience, not likeness of temperament, surely. Still—-” I felt a shower of tears gathering and quickly swallowed the last of the tea, now lukewarm.

  “What will you do now?”

  “Help Irene prepare. She intends to take very little; there isn’t time.”

  “Will you move from Saffron Hill? The neighborhood is rough.”

  “Not to a native, and I am that now. I even speak the occasional Italian phrase and have grown used to the ... the ease of the vicinity. I can afford to keep the rooms myself now, thanks to such generous payment as I get at the Temple.”

  “Nevertheless, it will be a great adjustment, my dear Miss Huxleigh. I wonder that you answered my call under the circumstances.”

  I set aside the tea to stroke the muff that lay, petlike, upon my lap. “To tell you the truth, I needed to escape our rooms for a bit, to get my mind off her leaving.”

  He took the cue briskly. “And so you shall.” He swept a pile of documents off a corner of the desk. “These await and are guaranteed to divert you from all other matters.”

  “Exactly what I need.” I set aside my wraps and extracted my pince-nez from the muff. “It is quite a relief to have expressed my feelings. I fear you are a captive recipient—”

  “Not at all. I am honored by your confiding in me. I comprehend your position better than you think, even if I do not understand the inestimable Irene Adler.”

  “You would like her if you knew her,” I put in mildly.

  “Such certainty!” He smiled. “But I shall not have the chance now, shall I? She will be the toast of the Continent, and you and I shall stay behind on this dull little isle and write deeds.”

  The picture he painted was so ridiculous that I laughed, and once having done that, found it impossible to weep again.

  I returned home before dark fell—Mr. Norton insisted that I leave early enough for that—to find the paraphernalia from Irene’s bedroom flowing into the front room like effluvia of years past.

  “What shall I take, darling Penelope!” she cried in distraction. ‘The climate will be quite different. The summer things, of course—but it is northern Italy. Alas, I feel like a character adrift in the wrong opera; I do not know my part and must improvise as I go.”

  “Here,” I said, taking charge. “We must divide the things into seasons and then into categories—under-things, over-things, basques, jackets, skirts, bonnets, shoes.”

  “Yes, I see. Quite right.” Irene looked up gratefully from under her disheveled forelocks—she had been unearthing clothing and dragging boxes and trunks around all day.

  I sat on the floor with her and began sorting the explosion of items.

  “I shall miss you dreadfully,” she declaimed suddenly.

  “And I you. But this relocation seems too opportune to miss.”

  “Will you not be ... lonely?”

  “Yes.” I thought of peppermint tea and braced myself. “Perhaps I will buy a bird. A canary. I am used to music around the place.”

  There was a silence into which neither of us would leap.

  “Poor little Sofia,” I said with a half-laugh that edged into a sob. “Who will teach her to sing her scales now?”

  “You can! God knows my perfect pitch stood the child no good at all. What harm can you do? Or—you can sell the piano, if you like.”

  “No... I can cover it and put the birdcage on it.”

  “I’m sorry to leave you with this mess.” Irene fondly took in the eccentric array, her fingers absently moving across the melee as if bidding farewell to old friends. I knew that every ribbon told a tale to her—of where she had bought it and where it might have originated and how she had transformed it into a key part of her chameleon wardrobe. “You can sell it on the Portobello Road.”

  “Or you may need it and send for it.”

  She nodded. “How will you do? Alone?”

  “Quite nicely, especially now.” I couldn’t help looking smug. Irene wasn’t the only one to come home with surprising news of her profession.

  “You sly boots! What is it? You have news!”

  “Only that I have a permanent position, so I shan’t have to worry about an ebb and flow of income.”

  “A permanent position? Is it congenial?”

  “Very much so. I find the work amenable and the vicinity soothing.”

  “At the Temple?” Suspicion embroidered her voice.

  “Yes—”

  “The Inner Temple? Oh, Nell, you are not going to rely on working only for that man?”

  “As a matter of fact, I am. I find Mr. Norton a most considerate employer.”

  “He is using you,” Irene said, her eyes flashing.

  “How?” I challenged. “You will be gone. You are stymied at the moment in pursuing the Zone of Diamonds. There is nothing for him to learn from me.”

  “I mistrust him.”

  “Might he not want to engage me for my talents, my skills, rather than my association with you? I have worked for him from time to time for some years now. He has known most of that duration that we share lodgings, and he has never sought to use that knowledge in any way.”

  “I’m sorry, Nell! Of course he would want a typist girl of your cleverness and skill—and your experience in my little investigations makes you an ideal assistant for a barrister. I meant to imply nothing except my... own fear of leaving you on your own.”

  “I am better fit to be on my own than before I met you,” I said softly.

  “Thank you,” Irene said, an odd tightness in her voice. “Thank you, my dear Nell.” We folded petticoats in silence. Then. “Perhaps I have misjudged Mr. Norton. His family tale is a sad one. I can even see why he might think himself entitled to the Zone.”

  “Oh?” I had never heard Irene concede another’s right to the object of this treasure hunt before. “The odd thing is that he has never seemed to think that himself. I fear he doesn’t believe in it as you do, Irene. You will take the chest with you, I imagine.”

  She stood, stiff from a day of delving into bureaus and wardrobes. “Take it with me? Yes, I should. Certainly it would not do to leave it here with you; it might attract some sinister interest.”

  “I doubt it; not after all this time. And even you cannot decipher the contents.”

  “No. They must hold some very specific meaning.” Her voice trailed into silent thought. Then Irene glanced down at me, her warmest smile lifting my spirits. She extended me a hand. “Come, Penelope! We will have tea-cakes toasted on the fender like old times—I bought three bags full today—and a bottle of champagne.”

  “Alcohol?” I said nervously, still not certain that ladies should consume such things.

  “Ambrosia!” Irene insisted. “In this particular form it is ever so much more bracing than peppermint tea.”

  Even at the last Irene’s prescience staggered me. How had she known what libation Mr. Norton had given me only th
at morning? Then I saw that she, as I, simply remembered our common past, which would have no role in our separate futures—save remembrance.

  I saw Irene off at Waterloo Station. From there she would travel to Southampton and thence by boat to France and by rail to Milan.

  She looked ever so handsome and brave under a bonnet of crimson feathers. She had taken the muff, after all. It guarded her arm like a talisman. Her other arm lifted to wave farewell.

  Already the dusty carriage window had softened her image in my eyes; the engine chugged from the station, raising storm clouds of steam to obscure the passengers. And so Irene Adler vanished into the mist from which she had appeared. I turned and trudged through Waterloo Station’s mausoleum-like immensity and made my way by foot to the Temple.

  A long walk it was, but welcome. I arrived to find Godfrey Norton, fists on his hips, studying an object whose weight was crushing the many papers on his desk.

  I gasped when I saw it. He looked up, mystified, then handed me a letter. “It came by messenger—with this,” he said. I recognized Irene’s dashing hand in her signature green ink instantly.

  “Dear Mr. Norton,” the missive began. “I embark for a new country and a new chapter of my performing career. I doubt we shall ever meet again, but perhaps the possession of this chest, which belonged to your late and universally unlamented father, will be of some consolation in my absence.” I looked up, almost hearing Irene’s most acid tones sear the room in that last sentence.

  Mr. Norton nodded, and I bent my head to read more.

  “I know you have scant faith in the existence of such a prize, but it is my belief that the contents of this chest spell out a clue to Marie Antoinette’s missing Zone of Diamonds. I have been unable to decipher them. With your knowledge of family history you may have better luck.

  “As for pursuing the sort of distasteful inquiries for which you berated me, those days are behind me. I am happy to wash my hands of the last vestiges of such necessity and wish you good fortune in your quest.

  “You cannot do better if you seek advice, support or a faithful friend than to rely upon Penelope Huxleigh. She is the true treasure I leave to you. Appreciate her well, as I always will.”