The Adventuress: A Novel of Suspense featuring Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “These letters are elaborate enough to decorate a medieval manuscript,” Godfrey complained, frowning handsomely.

  “If only we had been able to record the tattoos with a camera!” Irene said. “Nell’s eye or hand may have missed some telling detail in the translation from skin to sketch pad. Perhaps the resemblance to letters is meant to mislead us.”

  “You suggest that the meaning lies in the embellishment, not in the central figure?” Godfrey liked the notion. “That would be fiendishly clever.”

  “What of a mirror?” I inquired.

  “Mirror?” they chimed in unison like a pair of well- timed clocks.

  “Perhaps the designs make more sense backwards.” Irene and Godfrey rushed to the pier glass in the hall, each clutching a sketch. A moment’s study showed that the reflected images made no more sense than before.

  “Why do you expect these letters to bear more than face value?” I queried. “Could they not simply be initials for ‘Oliver’ and ‘Sidney,’ or some such?”

  “Why not ‘Olivier’ and ‘St. Denys,’ their French counterparts?” Godfrey asked. “Why need both be English?”

  “Then why not ‘Ophelia’ and ‘Serafina’?” I suggested. “Excellent point, Nell!” Godfrey explored this new line of speculation by staring fixedly at the ceiling. “Men who acquire tattoos often choose to honor a lady of their acquaintance.”

  Our quickly widening circle of theories annoyed Irene. “We must begin somewhere,” she said, pressing the sketches against the glass and manipulating them like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. “Initials seem logical. In any case, this is the only incident that shows any promise of developing into a curiosity at all.”

  A long pause, and then she snatched the papers away. “Oh, I am so bored with France!”

  With that she dropped the sketches and stormed into the music room, leaving Godfrey and myself to regard each other in the mottled old mirror. An excessively ferocious burst of Wagner soon thundered from the piano’s elderly strings.

  While I picked up the literal pieces, Godfrey retreated to the dining-room sideboard, where he poured a glass of sherry. Together we tiptoed to the music room, ignoring Casanova’s raucous rendition of “The Pilgrim’s Chorus.”

  Lucifer stood blinking on the rustic carpet, shaking his complacent black head. Obviously, he had been summarily evicted from slumber on the tufted-velvet piano bench. There Irene sat while she pounded out octave chords.

  Godfrey diplomatically deposited the sherry glass atop the piano case, then brought a lit candelabra from the mantel to illuminate the music on the stand, a melodious and apparently irrelevant Schumann suite. Tonight Irene played from memory and emotion.

  Godfrey arranged himself at the instrument’s inward curve and assumed a stance of rapt attention. I settled upon an ottoman. Godfrey would have to deal with Irene’s fit of pique, but I was far too curious about how he would manage it to withdraw discreetly, as I ought to have.

  During my long association with Irene, I had occasionally been treated to the excesses of her artistic temperament; Godfrey was perhaps only beginning to comprehend that where brilliance and art blaze bright, there also flare impatience and frustration.

  Irene’s playing smoothed so gradually that I could not say when the moderation had begun. Perhaps a modicum of Godfrey’s courtroom calm had reached her. The keys tinkled with the good-natured Schumann piece; then even that music faded as she paused to sip the sherry.

  “It is true,” Godfrey said in the sudden silence, “that we are strangers in a strange land, and further true that we are saddled with our own ghosts. But we are healthy, wealthy and wise, and we do have some resources at our disposal. You, my darling Irene, have your music and your mystery still; how many Paris ladies can arrange to be present at such a sordid activity as the removal of a corpse from the Seine? You, my dear Penelope—” Godfrey quite startled me by directing his thoughts my way; I preferred my “mouse-in-the-comer” view of things.

  “You, my dear Penelope,” he repeated, “are sustained by your habit of recording the world around you and observing life through others.

  “Even I have found some slight place here, through my legal work. One never knows what will turn up. Only this week I found myself making a London referral on the testy matter of a French will that bridges the two nations. I realized, with some chagrin, that I could recommend no finer English inquiry agent to Monsieur le Villard than Mr. Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street—”

  Irene stood so abruptly that she nudged the piano. The keyboard cover clapped shut. “Godfrey, you didn’t! You actually referred someone to Sherlock Holmes?”

  “Not a mere ‘someone,’ my dear girl; Francois le Villard is a prominent member of the French detective service. I felt that he would benefit from observing Mr. Holmes’s methods. And now that you no longer operate in London, you would hardly begrudge a fellow sleuth the custom.”

  “Oh, Godfrey, you are incorrigible, outrageous! Why did you not tell me?”

  The storm had evaporated. Irene was laughing as she sank again onto the piano bench. This engendered an injured cry and a frantic leap from Lucifer; the sly creature had taken instant advantage of her temporary desertion of the seat.

  “It’s a trifling matter, Irene,” Godfrey went on. “Besides, I’m curious to see what Holmes can do, and I am in no position myself to investigate the London arena. So, you see, life goes on despite upheaval, even despite outrageous good fortune. I am willing to wager my share of the Zone of Diamonds that you will decipher these troubling tattoos and the odd deaths of their bearers.”

  “But I am twice removed, Godfrey! As you and Nell so forcefully reminded me only minutes ago, I am on foreign ground, where even initials may speak a different language. London was an alien venue at first, but at least the tongue remained the same, if dialects did take strange twists. But here... here I am liable to assume more than I should.”

  “The tattoos seem a rather sordid matter,” I ventured to say. “Perhaps a new puzzle, one involving a more highly elevated element of society, will present itself soon.”

  “Outings to the Petite Trianon instead of La Morgue, eh, Penelope?” Irene smiled fondly as she stroked the keyboard cover and turned her gaze back to her husband. “You are right, Godfrey, as you were when I returned from Bohemia; I despair too soon. One might think I was a heroine of grand opera.”

  She struck a resounding chord that drove Lucifer from the room and ended our investigations for the evening.

  My pathetic suggestion to Irene that evening soon proved so prophetic that I briefly considered obtaining a crystal ball and a skull-shaped lamp, the better to set up shop on the Rue Toucan.

  The very next day a note from Godfrey arrived soon after lunch. “He has never felt it necessary to communicate so urgently before,” Irene noted with a demi- smile.

  I averted my eyes while she read, assuming that these billets-doux between spouses contain such excesses of affection that the reader might blush and the observer wish herself in Outer Mongolia.

  “Well!” The hand with the message lowered to the table. Irene’s cheeks were aglow with nothing so delicate as a blush; it was a glow more like a recurrence of the investigative fever I had seen before. “Listen to this! Ah, I will omit the, er, salutation.” Here she did lower her lashes demurely. “At any rate, Godfrey is exceedingly short with the main import of his message. He requires our presence—”

  “Our?”

  “At an address in Paris I have never heard of.”

  “Then it cannot be respectable!” I wailed.

  “Yes, you must be right.” Irene grinned. “And that explains the rest of it, or at least part of it.”

  “The rest?”

  “Yes. We are to bring a change of clothing for Godfrey—and for myself.”

  “A sudden journey? Oh, Irene, do you suppose—?”

  “And my little revolver.” Irene fairly scintillated with satisfaction. “I see that Godfrey now repays my terse
note commanding you to Bohemia so many months ago. No more explanation than I gave. Why?”

  “He sent the message with the coachman. Why could he not have come himself?”

  “Apparently it is more amusing to bewilder us, or else some situation compels him to remain in Paris. We shall go, of course. Immediately. What clothing do you suppose would suit a gentleman and lady about to... flee the country? Apply for work?”

  “Something neat and restrained, Irene, is suitable for all occasions.”

  “What a pity. I have nothing that fits that description. I shall have to investigate your wardrobe, then.” Thus it was that my gray plaid skirt and yellow shirtwaist joined Godfrey’s change of clothing in my old, worn carpetbag.

  Andre, our stoic coachman, rolled his eyes when Irene instructed him to take us to Godfrey, but he said nothing. It was now late afternoon. Waves of linnets lapped at the sunset-tinged clouds as the day’s redolent breath grew chill with the onset of twilight.

  “We shall never make Paris in daylight,” I said. “No,” Irene agreed. She had been abstracted for most of our journey, not even noting when our horses’ hooves rang on cobblestones instead of hard-packed country earth. She smiled suddenly. “But I do not think you would care to be observed arriving at this particular address.”

  “You said you did not know the address!”

  “That is why I know it is not respectable, as you so swiftly discerned. And this...”—Irene lifted the revolver from her handbag—“this, too, is not a sanguine sign. Godfrey would not request my revolver unless he needed it—or believed that we might.”

  “I am amazed that you have not donned your ‘walking out clothes’,” I answered.

  “I’d thought of it, Nell. But Godfrey told me to bring a change of clothing for myself; obviously, he expects me to be conventionally attired, as I do not have an entire wardrobe of men’s clothing to choose from.”

  Our carriage wheel hit a loose paving stone and we lurched as the compartment bucked on its springs.

  “We must be near our destination,” Irene said, drawing aside the window covering to peer into the dusky streets.

  I was reminded of our first hansom cab ride together when we had a murderer—the late Jefferson Hope—for a driver. It was down just such rough and twilight streets that our initial encounter had propelled us.

  “I must admit, Irene,” I said, “that I had begun to fear I had no use in your new situation, and no excuse to spend my days in idleness in a foreign land—” A jolt disconnected my thoughts for a moment.

  “I suppose that amusement is not sufficient excuse?” Irene inquired calmly when the springs subsided.

  “Certainly not! But I see now that it is fortunate that I am near at hand. Apparently Godfrey has a bent equal to your own for untoward events; at least I am here to see that you do not hurtle”—here the carriage swayed around a corner, hurling Irene and me like dice across the tufted leather upholstery—“into more difficulty than we... you... can manage.”

  “Folly does require an escort.” Irene regained her spot in the seat opposite, pinning her hat in place.

  “Why does André harry the horses so?!” I burst out.

  Irene had been peeping through the shades again. “I believe he does not care for the ambiance of the vicinity.”

  “It is a slum?”

  “It is worse than a slum; it is an extension of Montmartre—a place that attracts those in search of idle amusements. I think we turn toward the river.”

  “Why do you say that—? Oh.” I, too, had inhaled the faint rank odor of cool, dark water.

  Another jolt surprised us by being the last. We waited until Andre opened the walkway-side door. “Madame wishes me to wait?” he asked in his husky French.

  Irene nodded and took his gnarled hand as she stepped out of the conveyance. I followed.

  We stood on a narrow street, dark save for some lighted bistro windows at the corner, from whence wafted the scent of onion soup and the sound of drunken sea shanties.

  André pulled his coat collar up around his neck and nodded to a flight of steps, “lci, Madame.”

  “Et... Monsieur? ” Irene asked. Only I could see that her handbag was slightly open so the revolver should be at the ready.

  “Ici, Madame, ” Andre repeated with a nod toward the unsavory structure before us.

  Even Irene paused before entering this unknown destination. A group of men who had been lurching down the street brushed by us on a wave of sour wine and garlic.

  Many “Excusez-mois” and “Mademoiselles" were bandied from drunkard to drunkard. I felt a hand firmly clasp my forearm. Then Irene was propelling me up the dark stairs, through a peeling painted door and into a close, dim hall.

  Here the odors were more confusing but no less unpleasant. A woman with a face like a dyspeptic bulldog sat behind a half-door.

  “Oui?” she croaked.

  “Monsieur Norton,” Irene said.

  What was left of the woman’s eyebrows—a long, scant hair or two—lifted. She eyed us up and down, then mumbled something about the poor maligned Anglais again. A seamed palm extended for money.

  Irene parted with a few sous.

  The woman shrugged unhappily and nodded to a set of stairs even steeper and danker than those by which we had entered the establishment. “Upstairs,” she said in French slow enough for me to follow. “Third room on the right.”

  Our guide produced a cheap copper candleholder with a dirty plinth of wax impaled in its socket. The palm appeared again. For a sou, she pushed the light across the sill at us. For another, she offered a crude lucifer, which Irene struck on the wooden ledge, causing the woman’s eyebrow hairs to waggle in surprise. Irene lit the candle, then drew a cigarette from her handbag and lit it, too, before the flame flickered out.

  Now the shrewish concierge was truly piqued. Irene shook out the lucifer and thrust it into a wilted bouquet sitting on the sill. I confess that it was good to smell the sulfur of an expired lucifer and the tang of a cigarette instead of the leftover scents stewing in that close entryway.

  We climbed the stairs, our shadows flung behind us. Irene went first, smoke haloing her bonnet like a veil as she puffed on the cigarette. I held the candle so that she might wield her cigarette and keep her other hand ready with the revolver.

  On the first floor, light shone from under a dozen doors, lurid yellow light set into lengths like tallow. We climbed another set of stairs, each riser creaking abominably. I heard a groan behind me and stopped. “Someone is being attacked—or attacks us!”

  “I think not. We must go on.”

  “But I should—”

  A woman’s cry came, low and pained.

  “Irene, we must intervene!”

  I turned, but an iron grip stayed my candle-bearing arm.

  “Our intervention would not be appreciated, Nell.”

  “Still, duty—”

  “No one is being harmed,” Irene said impatiently. “This is a house of assignation.”

  “A house of assignation? What, pray, is a house... of assignation? Oh, you mean—?”

  “Yes, I do. The French call it a maison de rendezvous.”

  ‘Then that odious woman below must have taken us for—”

  “Assuredly she did.”

  “But Godfrey is here!”

  “Evidently.”

  “But why? How? What are we to do?”

  “Go to the third door on the right on the next floor and find out.”

  “How humiliating! That woman thinks—”

  “Who cares what she thinks?”

  “No one! Except... she sneered at us.”

  Irene laughed. “I venture that she sneers at everybody; she has nothing better to do. But we do. Now, upward and onward! Only to the valiant come answers to unthinkable questions.”

  Chapter Seven

  DEMOISELLE IN DISTRESS

  No other woman could have encountered what we found in that room with the equanimity that Irene
managed.

  A shivering Godfrey opened the door to us. My candle, lifted to illuminate the scene, revealed tattered wallpaper, one feeble paraffin lamp on a table, and a brass bed so mounded with a dingy feather comforter that it seemed a storm cloud had fallen from the gray Parisian skies.

  No fire warmed the grimy hearth. Godfrey was wrapped, Indian style, in a disreputable blanket he had found God knows where. His hair lay damp around his face, which was scored with deep scratches in rows as regular as those from a frenzied cat. Besides the door by which we entered, the room contained but one other, and it was braced shut with a tilted chair. Its doorknob shook as if ague-stricken, while enraged cries in French issued from beyond it. The voice was young and female.

  “Either you have encountered an abusive variety of ghost,” Irene remarked, removing her gloves and placing the revolver on the table, “or you have taken a prisoner. In either case, you shall certainly perish of influenza before you can tell the tale if we do not warm this room.”

  Irene went to the decrepit washstand, lifted the porcelain bowl and thoughtfully swirled the murky water around. In a moment she had moved the bowl to the table and had lifted the stand to smash it against the side of the fireplace.

  The rickety wood splintered obligingly. Next, Irene drew a handful of wadded newspapers from where they had been jammed along the sole window and held it to her lit cigarette until the old paper caught fire. She deposited it gently on the remains of the washstand; in moments a fire was flickering in the mean, blackened, brick mouth of the chimney.

  “So inventive, these Americans,” Godfrey murmured, drawing a three-legged stool to the blaze.

  I stood stupefied. Irene finished her cigarette and tossed it into the snapping flames. “Another chamber?” She nodded to the still-quivering door.

  Godfrey looked abashed. “A closet. It was all I could find.”

  Irene noticed the screen askew in a corner. “Then you shall have to change clothing behind there, once you have dried off. I suppose she is as wet as you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And not nearly so manageable?”