The Memoirs of Irene Adler: The Irene Adler Trilogy

by San Cassimally

  When we had first met, after a few passionate weeks together, Cole and I had tacitly agreed that our relationship was going to be an open one. Each of us had taken others to their respective beds - an activity that never stopped us being each other’s best friend and confidant. Anyway, unexpectedly Coleridge appeared at my digs in Bethnal Green one afternoon, having been apprised by mutual friends of my desire to see him.

  Before I could rejoice in his visit I noticed a strange look on his face which I failed to interpret. My room was so small that all there was to sit on was the bed. We sat down next to each other and I took his rugged hands in mine, an action which strangely made me feel strong and powerful. I noticed that this made him uneasy.

  ‘What’s the matter, Cole?’ I asked.

  ‘I am in love, Irene.’ I knew he didn’t mean me, but as I am a bit of a tease I said, ‘So what, I am quite a bit in love with you too.’ My forced attempt at jollity disconcerted him a bit.

  ‘I met this fascinating woman called Harriet. A real lady I’m telling you. Scottish nobility.’

  ‘Good for you, Cole, I am delighted, I am truly happy,’ I said, meaning it- I think. ‘You know me,’ I added, ‘I mean, we never were Romeo and Juliet. Tell little sis.’ I suppose I am not normal in that I truly am not a jealous person.

  ‘No, I don’t really mean that I am in love with her, it’s more... I mean less ... oh Irene ... I am besotted with everything about her, her body, her voice, how she walks at an angle, as if she was squeezing herself through a passage that was too narrow, I don’t know if that makes any sense to you, but it’s enough to drive any man crazy with desire. You’ll never come across a more desirable woman in your life. She isn’t just a woman, she’s an apparition. Fit for a king.’ Cole did not know what a prophetic statement he had just made. She was indeed destined to become one of the many mistresses of Naughty Bertie, the Prince of Wales.

  ‘And how did this grand amour sprout, prithee?’ I wanted to know. His eyes lit up, as if he was reliving a pleasant dream.

  ‘One afternoon,’ he began, ‘the lady Arabella was closeted with her Viscount who loved to share his siesta hours with his inamorata and I was minding my business, plastering a wall when—’

  ‘Hold on, Cole,’ I said. ‘Who is the Lady Arabella? Who the Viscount? And what wall are you talking about?’ He smiled apologetically, acknowledging that he had got carried away.

  ‘Take a deep breath and tell sis everything.’

  Although Coleridge sometimes worked in the theatre in a variety of ways, including playing monsters and villains, the parts were few and far between. So more often than not he sought employment as an odd-job man, carpenter, cleaner, scene shifter, cook or painter, supplementing his meagre earnings by doing house redecoration and repairs for private individuals. Anyway, one day Harriet, who was staying with her cousin Lady Leith asked if she could watch him work. I was still very much in the dark but knew that I would be enlightened in due course, so I just let him pursue his so far incoherent tale.

  He had thought it was an odd request, but it was not his place to say so. ‘Yes, of course ma’am, I mean your ladyship.’ He had been aware of her eyes following him but he had always taken great care not to look at her directly.

  ‘As you know, you should never look directly at the sun.’

  He had not failed to notice that she was like a creature that might have been half human and half heaven-sent. The obvious way she was moving around him was becoming quite embarrassing. He nearly fell off the ladder when she said, ‘You have such strong arms Wordsworth, can I feel your muscles.’

  ‘Begging your pardon miss, eh... your ladyship, the name’s Coleridge.’ She had burst out laughing as if that was the biggest joke that she had ever heard.

  ‘ “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan, and not a host of golden daffodils then?” I did not know what she meant and just smiled,’ admitted Coleridge.

  ‘ “Come down and let me have a feel,” she ordered, and I had no choice,’ said Coleridge. ‘She not only felt my biceps but would not let go of my arm. I soon became aware that what she called feeling, I’d have described as caressing. You know me, Irene how easily I get aroused. I had no control over my movements, my thoughts or anything until I had my wicked ways with her, there and then on the carpet in the passage. All the time Lady Leith was closeted with Viscount Chatterwell, did I say that?’

  ‘What am I calling my wicked ways? It was she who had her wicked ways with me,’ he laughed in his loud guffaw in which you immediately discovered the soul of a bass tenor.

  I listened to my former lover without interrupting, not that I would have been able to, as he spoke without drawing breath. I now felt that I needed a clearer understanding of who were the dramatis personae of the comedy.

  ‘You have to illuminate my darkness, Cole, I followed your story, but who is Lady Leith, who is Harriet, who Viscount Chatterwell, who Arabella.’ He shook his head apologetically and smiled.

  These events happened a good few years ago, but now I have the wisdom of hindsight. Coleridge filled me in, and later Harriet herself would give me a full account.

  She was the fourth daughter of Sir Thomas Moncreiffe of the ilk, seventh baronet of Moncreiffe House on the Hills of the Sacred Bough, universally thought by all to be the prettiest of his eight daughters. She had acquired an early reputation for giddiness although her tutors spoke of her sponge-like ability to absorb knowledge. At the early age of fourteen she was caught in the hay with a stable boy and, although Sir Thomas doted on her, she spent a lot of her early adolescence locked up in her room in order to keep her out of mischief. An impossible job in view of the existence of windows.

  Her cousin Arabella had been widowed after only three years of marriage to the elderly Lord Leith and had promptly made up her mind that the role of reclusive widow was not for her. With massive inheritances from many sources, she had money to burn, and well she knew which end of the Lucifer stick to strike. She had moved to her husband’s palatial home in Knightsbridge, and although she had a string of lovers, she had formed a strong attachment to Viscount Emeric Chatterwell, who shrugged off his anonymous rivals and was very complaisant about the sometimes crowded situation.

  Harriet had always been a spirited child, and everybody adored her, with the possible exception of her mother Lady Louisa. Everybody agreed with her home tutor that she had a superior brain. It took her less than half the normal time to learn whatever was being taught, leaving her with ample time to indulge in mischief and disruption. Strangely all this did not stop her being a devout Christian. Nobody was surprised when she declared at an early age that she wanted to become a nun when she grew up.

  ‘You’re not going to become a papist then?’ challenged older sister Clarissa.

  ‘You’re so stupid! We can join the orders too, I have already chosen mine.’ Although the sisters were close, they never stopped arguing.

  Her favourite books were the St James Bible and Boccaccio’s Decameron. She loved Ovid and could quote big chunks of Ars Amatoria in Latin. She had read Le Rouge et le Noir in French. Although she never missed Mass on Sundays, when she could be seen praying with her eyes closed and with all the fibres of her body to the Lord to stop her straying from the path of righteousness, when she did open them, she could not help but allow them to flit from choristers to congregants and devotees. She even dared tell Clarissa that the young vicar, Father Alexander Robertson, was so beautiful he “made her tingle with lust”. But she never told anybody that she often dreamt of him. In fact her first kiss was in a dream and it was Alex who not only gave it to her but put his hand inside her knickers at the same time.

  ‘You’re not going to becoming a nun, Harriet,’ Clarissa told her once. ‘You’re going to become a hoor.’ She feared that her sister might be right. Cold showers did nothing to dampen her ardour. As she grew older, she became wilder. The Decameron began to take precedence over St James, Ovid over Oliver Twist. She was having more and more dangerous dreams,
and when next Alex kissed her, he not only put his tongue in her mouth and his hand in her smalls, he placed her hand inside his at the same time. It did not take the saintly reverend long to start putting his member in her mouth, and to make matters worse, she often caught herself reliving those moments with her eyes open. She would lay prostrate on the cold marble floor of Moncreiffe House for hours in vain attempts to dispel those unwelcome fantasies and be overwhelmed by painful spasms, but all to no avail. This led her to experiment with other forms of self-flagellation, like spreading sand in her locked room and walking on it on her knees for an hour at a time.

  One afternoon, the watchful Clarissa having gone riding, Harriet found herself drawn like a magnet to the stable where the young groom Sylvester was attending to Chieftain. The poor youngster opened wide his eyes when he saw her ladyship come towards him, her blouse unbuttoned and an unmistakable leer on her lips.

  ‘Sylvester,’ she said in her most bewitching voice, ‘put your arms around me.’ The eighteen-year-old who was friendly with dairy maids and shepherdesses began trembling with a mixture of sexual frenzy and apprehension, but in no time at all they were rolling in the hay. The upshot was that Harriet lost her virginity and Sylvester his job. He ran away fearing retribution, and was never heard of again.

  Gardeners, saddlers and carpenters all had a taste of what the young lady had to offer, and rumours of Harriet’s generosity to the lower classes inevitably reached the ears of her older sister. Harriet’s attempt to swear her to secrecy having failed, Sir Thomas inevitably got to hear about it.

  It can be argued that the seventh baronet (of that ilk) cannot have been terribly bright. A more charitable view might be that, having never set foot outside Perthshire, he was unaware of the reputation of his niece Arabella whom he still saw as the blushing curtseying teenager. He could think of no better remedy for the condition of her favourite daughter than to entrust her welfare to Arabella. A decision redolent of all the wisdom of the mother sheep asking the wolf to mind her little lambs.

  Thus was the sensual Harriet despatched for safe-keeping to her riotous-living cousin—no Lustige Witwe she!

  Sir Thomas repeatedly told Lady Louisa that his lovely niece would watch over the young delinquent “like a hawk”, but it is not known whether her ladyship felt reassured by this.

  Arabella had no intention of subjecting her young cousin to any rigours whatsoever. She often expressed the belief that life is too short for imposing restrictions to one’s too few pleasures. Look at poor Leith. So she did nothing to stop the young Harriet from following her lead and never did anything to stop her offering her favours to any man, young or old, who had caught her fancy.

  The young widow did, however, raise an eyebrow when she noticed that her young wilful cousin was spending too much time supervising the black Coleridge who was repairing the wall of her house in Knightsbridge. She called her into the library one morning with a solemn expression on her face. Harriet felt like laughing, so unusual that was, but made an effort to stop herself.

  ‘You know I promised Uncle Thomas to watch over you, so you have to listen to me.’

  ‘I am all ears.’ Arabella walked towards the bookshelves and came back with a tome.

  ‘All my instincts tell me that no good can come out of our associating with inferior people,’ she said, ‘but I am too giddy myself to give you a rational reason. I will therefore let Mr Dickens, who is known for his great intelligence and humanity speak for me. Listen to this.’ And she opened the book and began reading:

  Take the Bushman... I think it would have been justifiable homicide to slay him—I have never seen that group sleeping, smoking, and expectorating round their brazier, but I have sincerely desired that something might happen to the charcoal smouldering therein, which would cause the immediate suffocation of the whole of the noble strangers.

  She looked at Harriet, who was too bemused to react, but she had not finished. ‘I will read another bit, and if that does not convince you, nothing will. And flicking through the pages, she found what she was looking for:

  I call him a savage, and I call a savage a something highly desirable to be civilised off the face of the earth.

  Harriet just laughed. ‘Coleridge is not a savage, he speaks English and wears proper clothing, not skins, or hadn’t you noticed?’ Arabella shrugged, she had done her best.

  As the older cousin often slipped out of the house to keep trysts with other men behind Chatterwell’s back, it was easy for the lascivious young girl to invite the young black man to her bed, and for some time she felt no need for other men. She even thought that she was in love with him. He certainly was with her.

  The naughty girl regularly wrote home with exaggerated, but not untruthful, accounts of their regular church visits, their sober dinners with bishops and nephews of cabinet ministers. Lady Louisa who had by now been informed in no uncertain manner of the behaviour of the merry widow, wondered how two balls of fire could coalesce to form a lump of ice.

  Unbeknownst to Arabella, however, Coleridge took Harriet to visit the Alhambra where he happened to be doing some work, and she declared that she had fallen in love with the theatre and swore that she would become an actress or die.

  ‘But I wish things had worked out differently,’ Cole protested as we sat on my bed in my small cubicle. ‘I mean that it had been different.’ He kept talking in circles without coming to the point and I had to worm it out of him in the end. It was he who had introduced Harriet to PQR, who immediately offered her the part of ‘Clara’ that he had already promised to me. Coleridge knew that Harriet and PQR had a fling in the changing rooms the same afternoon, but he was prepared to overlook this, in the light of his awareness of her inability to resist an invitation to share almost any man’s bed.

  ‘Had I known that PQR was betraying you,’ Coleridge assured me, ‘I’d have asked Harriet to refuse. It’s truly not her fault. She is in complete ignorance of the fact that you were already rehearsing the part.’

  She was, however, not going to play Clara after all, for Coleridge felt duty-bound to inform her of Paul’s treachery, whereupon she went to him straight away and told him that she was not one to take the bread out of the mouth of another. If he wanted her to share his bed again, he had better reinstate me. He agreed and went down on his knees and begged her to stay at the Alhambra, promising her parts in his future shows. In the meantime he appointed her as my understudy. That was how I got to know her with some degree of intimacy. Know and love her.

  Although the first time I met her, I was still sore about her cutting the grass from under my feet, albeit in ignorance, she had such innocent eyes and such good nature that I could feel no resentment towards her. If anything I too was immediately struck by her beauty and fell for her charm. She was as slim as the reflection seen in the hall of mirrors at the carnival, which made one appear lanky and wraith-like, but in fact she was no taller than me. Her neck was as long as those tribal women with rings around that the Illustrated London News had recently published the photographs of. Her nose was fashioned in the same manner as Effie’s in the Millais painting. Her eyes changed from languorous, reminding one of small opals, to twinkling and mischievous. On top of her oval head flourished a luxuriant crop of auburn hair which seemed like a living entity, which had the capacity of moving in a single bundle in a manner I have never seen hair move before, as if there were small springs concealed in it.

  She was not just a beauty but an apparition, a Peri from the Arabian Nights, Coleridge had said. Although I do not consider myself a sensual or sensuous woman and have little or no Sapphic inclination, I could easily imagine myself developing an unnatural attraction for her. Yes, I admit to often wishing that I could promenade my fingertips over her small derrière which she usually kept firmly (indeed some might say too firmly) trapped by her knickers and skirt.

  As my understudy she had an easy time of it, but she immersed herself into her task with such intensity that anyone would have tho
ught that the future of the English theatre depended upon her performance. I felt so sorry for her that I declared that I was unwell and took two nights off just to enable her to realise her ambition of appearing on the stage. I own that she was a natural.

  She adopted the stage name of Thelma Barrington and was soon more popular with the London theatre goers than I have ever been. The surprise was that no one in Perthshire got any whiff of her double life. I am not one to pass judgement on others or keen to spread gossip, and am only mentioning this because of what was to happen later: she had a succession of lovers of both sexes. I found her charming and affectionate. She was always giving her friends presents of ribbons, scarves or cameos. I once said that I thought a silk stole she was displaying was quite fetching and she immediately took it off her shoulders and put it around mine. Whatever The Alhambra paid her was spent on pastry for actors and theatre hands at the coffee shop just outside. Although the baronet gave her a handsome stipend she was always short of money and often had to sell items of jewellery when she wanted to buy something that had caught her fancy. ‘I was quite bored with that diamond brooch anyway,’ she would say. Her no less extravagant cousin Arabella on whom Viscount Chatterwell positively doted and who showered jewellery and furs upon her, would also press her to accept gifts of money. Maybe this is not relevant to the tale now unfolding, but she and Arabella were regular visitors to the gambling dens of Wellington Road where they lost not inconsiderable sums of money.