The Adventuress (2 page)

INSPECTOR FRANCOIS LE VILLARD
:
a Paris detective and admirer of the English detective who has translated Holmes’s monographs into French

SARAH BERNHARDT
:
Internationally famed French actress

OSCAR WILDE
:
 
friend of Irene Adler; a wit and man of fashion about London

BRAM STOKER
:
theatrical manager for England’s finest actor, Henry Irving, and burgeoning writer, who will later pen the classic Dracula

THE ADVENTURESS

An Irene Adler Novel

by

CAROLE NELSON DOUGLAS

 
Prelude: Autumn 1888

S
EVEN
P
ERCENT
I
S
N
O
S
OLUTION

FROM THE DIARIES OF JOHN H. WATSON, M.D
.

Sherlock Holmes
stood by the window staring down at Baker Street, his left shirt cuff undone. In the languid droop of his hand I could read the presence of cocaine in his veins.

To see a figure of such singular energy and dedication, one whom I had often witnessed pursuing an investigation with the eagerness of a hound on the track, to see such a man inducing lethargy into his bloodstream on the sharp silver prick of a needle was more than a friend and medical man could bear in silence.

“Holmes! Surely some suitably inspiring case is in the offing.” I lowered my newspaper with a rustle. “Your retreat to a seven-percent solution seems due less to its usual spur—idleness—than to some morose turn of thought.”

He turned slowly, his tall, narrow silhouette limned against the window’s fog-filtered daylight. “Is that a deduction, Watson, or an inquiry?”

“I would never presume to deduce your feelings, Holmes. The fact remains that despite a plenitude of cases, you cling to the hypodermic.”

“Surely no crime.” He fastened his cuff as he sank bonelessly into the velvet-lined armchair and regarded me with an irritatingly placid smile.

“No, not a crime,” I admitted. “Any cognizant adult may purchase cocaine, morphine, opium, laudanum or other narcotic derivations at a chemist’s shop; even some of my fellow physicians indulge in such substances. Yet I must object before a habit becomes an addiction.”

“Oh, pooh, Watson!” He spoke without rancor. “You know that my mind requires exceptional stimulation and that true mysteries are as rare as dodoes these days.”

“What of these atrocious murders of the Whitechapel streetwalkers?”

Holmes’s eyelids flickered at my mention of the sensational killings that had galvanized all London that late summer and autumn.

“Mere butchery, Watson,” he said, dismissing the Whitechapel Ripper, “with no more resemblance to a masterpiece of crime than your melodramatic renderings of my cases bear a likeness to Greek tragedy.”

He stared toward the cluttered bookcase that housed memorabilia of his cases—or rather, toward a particular shelf upon which a certain photograph caught the tepid light. My diagnostic powers turned in a new direction.

“Is it possible, Holmes, that it is not the lack of formidable new cases but the irritant of an old one that discomfits you?”

“Speak plainly, Watson. I have merely indulged in a seven-percent solution of cocaine. I am not lost in an opium daze.”

“Very well, then.” I crisply folded my newspaper. “How can the trifling matter in which you untangled the King of Bohemia from the bewitching adventuress Irene Adler outrank the serial slaughter in Whitechapel?” Holmes smiled. His eyes rested on the lovely likeness of the lady in question.

“A connoisseur of crime is no moralist, Watson. The simple misdirection of a letter, accomplished on a high enough level of government, could topple nations. The exquisite irony of identical Christmas geese could—and did—foil a daring jewel theft.”

I nodded at his reference to his recovery of the Countess of Morcar’s fabulous Blue Carbuncle gem from a goose’s gullet.

The slaughter of the geese was incidental to the problem and its solution. Mere butchery—on any scale—will never command my curiosity; it is all too common.”

“Think what a man of your powers could do to rid society of such brutes, though! Certainly the police are helpless.”

“The police are always helpless. But my mind will not work solely in the cause of right; it must be piqued, it must be coddled. It requires the proper problem. Often it requires the proper opponent.”

“And you have lost a worthy adversary twice over,” I said with a nod to the photograph. I was referring to the report of Irene Adler’s death last autumn, along with that of her new husband, Godfrey Norton, in an Alpine train accident.

Holmes remained silent, his hawklike profile sunk upon his chest. I was re
mi
nded of photographs of Abraham Lincoln, the melancholy American president who presided over that nation’s bloody Civil War. When Holmes glanced up again, I was struck by the roguish twinkle in his eyes.

“Ignore my carping reservations about your literary efforts, Watson! Such a drama you concoct from the simple fact: Irene Adler flees England with the photograph of herself and the King of Bohemia still in hand.

“Your romantic soul assumes that her promised silence on his unprincely behavior cannot assuage that royal person’s wounded heart at the loss of the woman he would have made his mistress but not his queen,” Holmes declaimed derisively.

 “Well, Watson, such a bittersweet resolution would satisfy Robert Louis Stevenson, but you do not stop there; no, you further propose that the world’s only consulting detective has also fallen under the lady’s spell and that he—myself—pines at the fact of her absence and apparent death. Bravo, Watson; it shall make a fine play. Perhaps you can title it
Heloise and Holmes
.”

“Fine for you to jest, but surely you are not pleased to have been outwitted by the lady.”

“The King of Bohemia was right in one respect. She had a soul of steel. I admit to relishing our duel and would deign to say we fought to a draw. If she won, it was not by much, Watson, not by much. And besides—” Holmes’s long, flexible fingers lifted from the side table a heavy gold snuffbox of exquisite workmanship. “—His Majesty was sufficiently satisfied with the results to send me a handsome gift beyond the gold he paid for my slight services. No, Watson, my attempts to escape ennui are not due to romantic causes. It is obvious that your own mind leans in that direction... were you not lurking at the window after the recent visit of Miss Mary Morstan,
hmm?”

“How could you surmise that, Holmes? You went out immediately.”

“Ah, but I looked up from the street, my friend.” He spoke on before I could muster any defense. “Besides, I lack no cases. Observe my desk. It overflows with communications, including some from François le Villard of the French detective service. I am lending him assistance in the vexing matter of a will. He returns the courtesy by translating my trifling monographs into French.”

“Someone else is recording your cases?”

“Easy, Watson, dear fellow. No one else is recording my investigations. You have sole, if inaccurate, jurisdiction over that portion of my life and work. I have penned some pieces of my own, however—monographs on matters that intrigue me; the one hundred and forty varieties of tobacco ash; methods of tracing footsteps; manufacture marks of leading hatters, mad or otherwise; the trademarks of a secret international society of master criminals; the arcane history of pocket watches, whose commonplace faces can tell the astute investigator far more than the time... But I bore you, Watson. My ramblings no doubt arise from a state of lamentably altered consciousness, while I wallow in romantic mourning and such utter idleness that I can hardly choose which project to attack next.”

“Enough, Holmes!” said I, taking up my newspaper again as a shield against this relentless pricking of my poor imaginative bubbles. I should have known better than to think that my detective friend could suffer such blows to the heart as mortal men feel.

Chapter One

L
IFE
A
FTER
D
EATH &
O
THER
I
NCONVENIENCES

The tragic
and premature death of my friend Irene Adler was perhaps the most difficult circumstance of her life.

Dying while still young held a certain romantic, even operatic, appeal for a nature such as hers, with its keen sense of the dramatic. She eagerly scanned the London, Vienna and Prague newspapers, lapping up the homage of her obituaries with unconcealed glee.

“Listen to this from the
Times
: ‘possibly developing into the age’s supreme dramatic soprano... a voice as darkly velvet as the finest Swiss chocolate, suited to the most melting renditions of Lieder since these classic songs’ composition. As Sarah Bernhardt’s Divine Voice elevates the spoken word, so the late Irene Adler’s dusky soprano enthroned the sung syllable.’

“Why could I not have garnered such perceptive reviews when I was alive?” she demanded. “And I don’t fancy that ‘possibly.’ ”