“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
~~~~~~~~~~~~
“Now,” 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 Belle Hélène 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.”
“Then it is a blackmail emporium.”
“I suspect the gramophone’s recording function gets the most frequent use, for the entertainment of the guests who may wish a vivid memento of their visit to play in the privacy of their homes afterward. The madam claims to Montague that she only succumbed to using such a recording secretly for blackmail when the Eminent Personage demanded another client’s wife.”
“And this husband would have permitted this?”
“Mr. Holmes, Society expects this. Many men of London’s first families have been permitting this for years. What is unusual is that Sophie objects.”
“Bah, “Holmes barked, taking a turn on the bearskin rug before the fireplace. “Society is as much a sinkhole as Whitechapel. The problem is simple. The disc manufacturing machine’s position in the house must be discovered and turned against its operators. You need a supposed ‘client’ to trap the madam and Mr. Montague into a conversation that shows complete complicity?”
“No, Mr. Holmes, I need a supposed client with a wife he is seeking to prostitute to the EP.”
“I will impersonate this creature?” His sharp features curdled with distaste.
“I have seen with my own eyes your transformation from a saintly old clergyman fainting on my doorstep to a rough groom ripe with the odors of the stable. Surely a gentleman of beastly appetites is not beyond your acting ken. I will enter the establishment disguised as a new maid and find the recording machine and also appraise the character of the brothel owner and what thugs are about the place. I suspect they’d be discreet as ever thugs could be. Yet I’d think even the Eminent Personage would be in danger of having this new toy used against him, and we can’t have that.”
“My dear madam, I can seem at home in opium dens. I doubt a brothel will tax my powers of disguise or detection. I will impersonate less well-mannered but finer men in the meantime to discover who comes and goes at this house of assignations, and when.”
“Agreed” I said. “Here is the address. Sophie is to be handed over tomorrow at seven P.M. before the house fills up with post-dinner custom. Shall we meet here again tomorrow in the late afternoon?”
“In our guise of patrons, I suppose.”
“Yes. I must hide my identity, for I am somewhat known in London.” Here I let my gaze graze the photograph of myself on the mantelpiece.
Holmes quickly registered my gesture even as he grimaced at the sordid nature of our forthcoming investigations.
IV. A Woman of Many Parts
~~~~~~~~~~~~
If I were to admit at a London social gathering that I was not unfamiliar with brothels that served polite society I could expect to be stoned with tea scones at the least.
Our age’s brothels cater to the higher classes, for doing it in the streets would indeed scare the horses, as they say, except in Whitechapel. My own investigations are often made among these very Belle Époque figures. I have seen the luxurious interiors of such places more than once, particularly in
Paris, where the crass commerce of the bawdy house has been raised to a fine and expensive art.
So my maid’s uniform, surreptitiously borrowed from the costume rooms of the Savoy Theater, whose plays boast a quantity of maids, was of finest black sateen with a frilly cap hiding my hair and beribboning my features. I only had to slip into the place’s side entrance, pop into the vast and steaming laundry room and gather a cloud of sheets into my arms.
Maids changing sheets in a brothel are such a common backstairs sight that they are as good as invisible. Even the Mashers don’t waste their precious time swiping at a petticoat-massed maid’s backside when far more toothsome professional pursuits await mere feet away.
The bedchambers upstairs were the usual over-upholstered array of lavish spectacle, sometimes accessorized with certain items that betrayed the future occupants less common erotic exercises. I doubt that Mr. Holmes would recognize them, but then he was amazingly well acquainted with arcane artifacts.
One bedchamber door was locked, despite the absence of clients until early evening when the merriment began. I dropped my bed linens and whipped a white turkey-feather duster from my hidden petticoat pocket. I was now a dusting maid and could go anywhere in the establishment. My plain black skirt pocket hosted a prickly bouquet of pins and picks, so I set to work on the door lock.
Once inside I confirmed one suspicion. The “Eminent Personage” determined to claim Sophie was the usual suspect, Bertie, overstuffed Queen Victoria’s portly and randy son and heir.
I knew this because I gazed on a glorious piece of bordello furniture that was also kept at Paris’s most noted house of ill repute, Le Chabanais. This custom-made gilded and brocade siège d‘amour had figured in a pair of grisly prostitute murders I investigated in Paris just after Jack the Ripper’s similar 1888 slaughters in Whitechapel.
That Paris townhouse was a hidden jewel box lined with rooms decorated in velvet, gilt, and tiger-skin. Bertie loved its exotic Hindu Chamber and the notorious champagne bath in a copper tub. For him was kept a custom-made love chaise, the twin to this one.
This siège d’amour was pristine and unbloodied, a two-level reclining affair that would allow His Royal Highness to entertain two women at once, or at least in turn. The rest of the bedchamber was appointed with lavish wallpapers and a bed as draped and overstuffed as Bertie’s mama but gaudy and rich and not suitable for mourning at all.
On exiting, I relocked the chamber door and left my sheets in a linen closet. I tripped down the heavily carpeted stairs, a mass of loomed cabbage roses, to explore the quarters of those who ran the place.
Being a brothel madam was one of the few professions where women were preferred over men. Two or three strong house thugs were all she’d need besides a whip hand with the girls, a silver tongue with the clientele, and a greedy disposition.
The office featured a zebrawood and ormolu desk fit for Napoleon and the same over-deluxe furnishings. It was deserted this morning. The residents slept late for obvious reasons.
I moved into the empty “Selection Salon,” a wilderness of divans, hothouse ferns, huge silken pillows and snake and furred animal skins fit for Sarah Bernhardt’s quarters, except her animal skins were all still inhabited by the original owners.
Here the wispily draped and corseted goods lounged to greet their purchasers. I immediately noticed the gramophone on a shawl-draped corner table. This would play music much more raucous than Mr. Holmes’s discs stored in his monkish bedchamber.
A larger table would be needed to house a recording device. I gazed about perplexed, dusting my way around the crowded room’s parameter until I spied a wheeled tea table covered with a paisley Indian scarf. Whisking the scarf aside revealed a bottom shelf laden with crepe-sized India rubber disks, a gramophone arm and stylus with no horn attached, and other alien devices.
This table could be topped by anything from rose petals and feather teases to riding crops and rolled into any bedchamber to capture the sounds of assignation for stimulation or blackmail. The girls could no doubt cajole scandalous confessions from the liquor-soaked and pampered customers.
“What are you doing here, missy?” a foggy female voice demanded.
I whirled around, seizing upon a Cockney accent in the process. “Jest moy job, m’liedy. ’Ave to ’ave all these pretty curlicues polished up proper like.”
An opera singer who can master foreign languages in three octaves can handle British Isle dialects with a twist of her lips. It’s all in the tongue placement, grand opera or gutter speech. Here in this town house, tongue placement was also an art but not my kind of public employment.
My interrogator was a blowsy woman of forty with an Oriental dressing gown swagged off one plump shoulder and nearly off the equally plump breast beneath it.
“Sarah’s supposed to keep you maids out of the salon until eleven,” she said.
I swallowed visibly. “Hit’s all so pretty here, mum. Whot a sight it must be when the gaslights go on.”
“You look a pretty piece but you’ll never work here, missy. We deal in a higher class of girl and speech. Better tend to your drudgery because the only place you’ll turn a tuppence with your sweet face or bum is in the streets. Now get along.”
I curtsied as for the Queen and fluttered away. I couldn’t help thinking what Mr. Sherlock Holmes would make of my practiced imposture or my success in locating the recording equipment. He could be a maddeningly self-certain man but was always a challenge to impress… and a joy to behold when one actually did it and that brisk, brilliant façade softened into grudging appreciation.
I retrieved my sheets, left them in the laundry, collected my shabby capelet from the entry way, and burst out onto the clamoring, harness-creaking, iron-wheel-grinding, manure-sprinkled London streets.
I could hardly wait to hear Mr. Holmes’s report of his investigations or to see him disguised as a sensual pig of a plutocrat that evening when we broached the house of harlotry in tandem. One wondered why they were named disparagingly for the women within when the men from outside who made all that possible were called “gentlemen callers.”
V. The Way of a Man with a Maid
~~~~~~~~~~~~
“Ah,” Mr. Holmes said when I presented myself at 221B at five o’clock that afternoon. “A far more impressive ensemble than your guise as Polly the Parlor Maid earlier today.”
“You saw me? I did not see you.”
“That was my intention.”
“Were you the beggar on the pavement?”
“No, my dear madam.”
“The ‘copper’ at the corner.”
“Alas, no. The uniform is too obvious.”
“The ragman following the dray wagon!”
“Again no, alas.”
I huffed out a frustrated breath.
“Come,” he said, laughing. “Like Watson, you will be annoyed by how simple all my explanations of wonder are. Mrs. Hudson has prepared an early supper. Sit and tell me of your success.”
Like Watson—for I had read several of his scribblings in The Strand magazine, not merely the one that featured me; I am a simple woman, not a diva, offstage—I was easily seduced by good simple food and an excellent bottle of wine into sitting across from the Master and hearing his exploits.
“I was the cabbie, of course. A top hat is very flattering to my profile, do you not think?”
In truth, the insufferable man was correct. His hawk-like nose, so domineering in the parlor, took on Caesar-like dignity under a shiny beaver brim. I instantly recalled the cabbie now that he mentioned it.
“Your horse had come up lame, so of course you could stand there all last night and this morning to tend it and watch the people come and go, always acting as if the injury had occurred just moments before.”
“Patient creatures, these hack horses, and happy to stand on three legs, resting one, without having to pound these hard cobblestone pavements like a copper. Dobbin had a good holiday from drudgery while I leaned agains
t a wall on one leg and summed up the clientele.”
“I’ve found the recording device and how it’s disguised and deployed,” I reported. “I also met the madam. What have you discovered?”
“That this ‘house particular’ is a shabby enterprise, yet tolerated and well known. I’ve learned the identity of the madam’s financial backers, which include the Eminent Personage, and the fact that your friend Sophie’s husband has been a thrice weekly visitor. Can he possibly be that debauched?”
I was about to laugh when I realized that the great Mr. Holmes’s question was sincere. No wonder he used the worldlier Watson as amanuensis, soldier-in-arms, and guide to the salacious side of life! Opium dens held no secrets for him but brothels were obviously a mystery. Then I remembered his fondness for the seven percent solution over the selection salon. Perhaps he knew more of obsession than I suspected.
“Yes, that frequency of debauchery is possible,” I said, accepting the pale flow of a rather lovely Riesling into my wine glass.
“What a sordid affair! That’s why I’ve always preferred criminal pursuits to carnal ones. What did you think of Madame Hemphill?”
“The woman who runs the place? She has a hard head for business before pleasure. She would be easily capable of blackmail. And perhaps worse.”
“Do you still carry your little pistol?” he inquired.
“Of course. The world is even more wicked than when we met in 1888.”
“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.”
The Private Wife of Sherlock Holmes (Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes novella) Page 2
