The Adventuress (28 page)

I felt a schoolgirl again and suspected that we both looked it. We had not enjoyed so casual yet pleasant an evening for years, not since we had shared quarters in London before Irene’s opera career drew her to the Continent and her unfortunate adventures there. Certainly we had not had an opportunity for such a satisfying conference since her marriage to Godfrey. What Godfrey would think of us when he returned, I could not guess.

The Meissen clock on the mantel tinged once for the half hour. Irene lay her head against the gilt chair arm and stared dreamily into a half-full goblet of Burgundy.

“One could write a monograph on the national characteristics of clock chimes. English clocks are no-nonsense and spout grand basso booms, like Big Ben—
dong, dong, dong
. French clocks are coquettes, their tones light, amusing, almost teasing.
Ting
. There. And
ting
again.”

“What of German clocks?”

“Oh, they are strict, like the English clocks, but they break a simple ‘dong’ into smithereens. Clicks and nudges, preparatory
rurrrring
gears. Much marching of the hands into position and then,
harumph
—
bang bang bang
.”

“What of Swiss cuckoo clocks?”

“The same, only gone quite mad.”

“And Italian clocks?”

She closed her eyes. “Sonorous. Dignified. Long, sustained notes. Mellifluous.” She practically sang the last word and I laughed, for her description of each country’s clockworks had summarized the national character. The stage of any land had lost a premiere performer with Irene in retirement. The notion saddened me, or perhaps it was the uncustomary wine.

“What of American clocks?” I asked.

She considered. “I have not heard one in a decade. All business, bustle, and as bright as new brass. Full of self-important alarm and as ready to broadcast danger as to intone such mundane practicalities as the time. Fire! Flood! Foreigners! Indians!”

“Indians? Really? In New Jersey?”

She laughed. “Yes, but not since the French and Indian wars. Only cigar-store Indians nowadays, Nell, not the genuine untamed variety. Oh, sometimes I wish I had gone West instead of East.”

“There are no opera houses in the American West.”

“Not so! Culture is creeping its way out West. European performers are in demand, even on the frontier.”

“You are not a European performer,” I pointed out.

“No, I am not even a performer at all anymore.”

“You will always be a performer, as I will always be a parson’s daughter.”

“You think so?” Irene smeared a clot of the vile brown stuff on a cracker and crunched, oblivious to the crumbs that studded her dressing gown.

“Your life is a performance.”

“One could say that of anyone. We each are handed our prime roles at birth. Penelope Huxleigh: Parson’s Daughter, modest and conventional, with few expectations but many surprises waiting.”

This nettled me, although I could not say why. Perhaps because it was true. “What of Godfrey?”

“Godfrey Norton: Wronged Woman’s Son, hardworking and honorable, law-abiding, conventional and extraordinary.”

“And yourself, Irene?”

Her eyes shone with mischief and more, a kind of melancholy. “Irene Adler: Itinerant Adventuress, actress and stage manager of other lives, independent and unconventional.”

“You define Godfrey and myself by our parents, yet you stand alone. What of your antecedents? Have they had no influence?”

“I do stand alone,” she said firmly. “I am my own creation and no one’s creature, as the King of Bohemia discovered to his discomfiture, if not to his sorrow.”

“Oh, he was sorry, Irene. If you had seen him at the last, when he and Mr. Holmes and Dr. Watson came to St. John’s Wood to find you gone. He cast himself about like a bewildered, lost and angry child. I do not think he had ever before failed to have anything he truly wanted.”

“You did not tell me that Willie was so humbled!”

“You did not ask me,” I said drily. “You had ears only for what Mr. Holmes said and did.”

She was silent for a moment. “And if I had not been gone, Nell? What would the repentant Willie have done? He would have gloated at recovering my one poor weapon against his royal force; he would have relished my besting. He might even have repeated his dishonorable offer, as a sop to a desperate and broken woman. If I had lost, rather than won, His Highness would have dispensed a fatal generosity, the kind such men always offer when they wish to kill a woman with kindness. Or for it.”

I had never heard Irene speak with such fire before, the anger in her voice barely bridled.

“What mercy would Mr. Holmes have offered?”

“Respect, at least, even in victory. And I think he is sufficiently self-assured to offer it in defeat, which is remarkable in a modem man.”

“Surely men are not such a sorry lot!”

“They have not been reared to be anything better, at least toward women. The long-cherished notion of ‘chivalry’ disguises an arrogant disregard of a woman’s deepest concerns. We women are much to blame, for asking no more of them.”

“For all your disdain of the Lords of Creation, you are a married woman, and I am not.”

Irene smiled. “Isn’t it amazing? What did Alice call Godfrey—an extraordinary ordinary man? She meant, I think, that he has no noble blood but great nobility of character. That’s true also of Sherlock Holmes, I suspect. Willie, king or not, is a pauper in the aristocracy of mind and soul. He shall never win any man or woman’s esteem, only their fear or obedience.”

“Why did you describe Godfrey as conventional, then, a moment ago?”

“Because he is, bless him. You have no idea of the persuasions it took to transform him into Black Otto and send him forth to spy. Deception is anathema to his character, as it is to yours, for different reasons. You have ingested the churchly tenets of truth-telling no matter what. He saw hypocrisy crucify his mother upon a cross of social disapproval. He is a crusader, our Godfrey; he wishes to make what is wrong right. He may even be heroic for having such an aim. And that makes him supremely conventional.”

“Do you not wish to right wrongs? Else why rush to the aid of Louise Montpensier and her aunt?”

Irene sat back like a demure schoolgirl. “I wish only to amuse myself, to occupy my idle hours, to stretch my slack brain. To have fun.”

I rose to my knees in outrage at her self-deprecation and was surprised to find the room spinning a bit.

“Irene, you will never convince me that only selfish motivations rule your actions. I know your game! Your role is to torment the conventional, to prick bubbles and shatter complacency. You impel us—Godfrey, myself— beyond the bounds forced upon us. You are freer than we; I don’t know if you were born that way, or became it, or if it’s just that American brashness you hear in the clock chimes. But
you
are an alarum, and you peal us both out of our sleepy beds, blinking our eyes at the world and the danger hidden all around us, danger that we would never see without your caroling.”

I expected an amused dismissal. I expected Irene’s habitual sleight of speech to glide over my sudden passion and slide into other topics. Instead, she regarded me soberly—which was quite remarkable, considering that she had consumed the preponderance of the wine.

“Am I right, though,” she asked, “to counter society’s assumption of common sense and tradition? Is it wise to encourage Godfrey to don a false face, to send him amongst lascars, thugs and tarry old salts? You are correct, Nell; danger
does
lurk beyond the safe social strictures of ordinary life. Real, physical danger. I have brought you to its brink on occasion, and now, Godfrey.” She glanced at the open door to the bedchamber. “If he should not return through that window, if he—”

“He will! Godfrey is most capable of handling difficult situations, even those you create for him. I am surprised. I thought you quite unconscionable when lashing one of us to outré endeavors.”

She shrugged. “Some responsibilities I take seriously.”

I smiled cautiously. “Irene, we have never spoken of your past. I have grown not to mind, only—”

“It is good that you do not mind, for I am not minded to discuss it.”

“—I question the present. Why did you, with all your scoffing at convention, with your almost frantic disdain for its impediments, why on earth did you marry Godfrey?”

“Perhaps you have noticed, Nell. He is a most prepossessing and persuasive man,” she said.

“Certainly I have noticed,” I snapped. “He is handsome and clever and kind. You are deliriously lucky to have him. Perhaps my spinsterhood makes me thick about such things—”

“Perhaps?” One eyebrow raised.

“It is true that my experience of the intercourse between a man and a woman is somewhat limited—”

“Somewhat?”

“Oh, do stop mimicking me like Casanova! I know that I am lamentably naive on such matters. But why, with so little regard for convention on your part, did you marry Godfrey? Why do you not do as your friend Sarah Bernhardt does, as the Duchesse de Richelieu and her prince do?”

Irene tucked her knees up and rested her chin upon them. “I never thought that I would hear you urging so improper a course as taking a lover.”

“I do
not
urge it! I merely question why you resisted it, when your philosophy does not object.”

“You mention Sarah and Alice’s irregular romantic lives. Both of them are independent women, by temperament and by virtue of economic freedom. Both set the course of their romances. Alice even ventured to love far beneath her station, not once, but twice. Yet she remains prisoner of her sex. Her millions are inherited from father and husband. The husband may be dead and unable to say anything about her behavior, but the father is ever ready to rush into his grown daughter’s life and govern her actions.”

“She is too dutiful,” I concluded slowly, amazed at myself. “Had she been truly unconventional, she’d have never given up the doctor... er, doctors.”

“Yes. Above all, the Great God Hypocrisy rules her life. Despite her Jewish family roots, her own father objects to her association with a Jew, and enforces it. Alice is free only by appearances. Sarah is free to her soul, yet pays for it. As much as men applaud and pursue her—and often achieve her for a moment—they resent her, for she does not docilely meet their ideals of womanhood. She is cruelly caricatured by the cartoonists, who depict her as a garden rake. Why do you think she wears her signature scarves about her neck? To disguise its thinness. Why affect such flowing robes? Again, to hide the fact that she does not fit the model of female voluptuousness currently in vogue. She is an urchin at heart, Sarah, and ever at war with her world even when she rules it.”

“So their freedom is an illusion.”

“Yet they have more than Lillie Langtry, who has truly surrendered to the man’s game and is little more than what the French so aptly call ‘La Grande Horizontale,’ a woman who rises in the world via a reclining position. She moves from man to man, title to title, millionaire to millionaire. One day she will be old and no longer negotiable, like paper money that has passed through too many hands.”

I shuddered. “Still, you have not said why you married Godfrey.”

“He wished me to do so.”

“Irene! You never do anything merely because someone wishes it.”

“And he is one of those ‘uncommon common men’ Alice so envies me.”

“You never did anything merely to make others envy you.”

“And there are his personal attractions.”

“The King of Bohemia had as many personal attractions, in his way, and you did not marry him.”

“Ah, Penelope, but I would have. Once. When I was young.”

“You would not now?”

“Never!”

“Then... Godfrey?”

Irene swept her hands wide. “You are a merciless inquisitor, Nell; I shall have to set you on a suspect. Who can interpret the human heart? He is peculiarly suited to my odd brand of honor. Godfrey grew up counter to his beast of a father. When his mother could stand no more of her husband and dared to take her three sons and support them by her novel-writing, Godfrey saw her shunned by the same society that had tolerated her husband’s abuse. Then he watched that that society’s regulatory system, the courts and the law, support his father’s claim to all money that his wife had earned, even while living apart from
him
.

“Marriage does not protect a woman, as is commonly put forth; it confines her. Caroline Norton found that out, and so did her son. So perhaps Godfrey is the
only
man I would dare marry, that I would ever care to marry, the one man who will not make a prison of his love.”

“Love. You finally mention that.”

“Love is not to be discussed as casually as the weather, unless it is only casual love. I will say this: that while in the relationships between men and women there is much stuff of comedy and tragedy, there can be found in the marital bed an intimacy that mingles the best of the human and the divine.”

Her words brought me far over a threshold I had merely meant to peep past. I don’t know if I colored, but I could not keep myself from asking one last thing.

“Irene, I’ve never inquired about your past experience of... men. You seem to grasp this mystery by some... some mysterious process.”

“It is not a mystery, Nell. It is merely kept so to most women, for their own ‘protection’.”

“Well, do you think, possibly, that I, I might someday—”

She regarded me with tilted head and a frank expression. “I cannot say, Nell. You have been reared to be a perfect ass on the subject, you know.”

“I’m not as indifferent as I might seem. In fact, before my father died and I was cast adrift on the world far from Shropshire, I had conceived an... affection for a curate in the neighborhood. Jasper Higgenbottom. He was, of course, unaware of my interest—”

“Of course.”

“—and I naturally was unwilling and unable to make plain my regard—”

“Not naturally, but go on.”

“—and I frankly have virtually forgotten him, for a wider experience of the world has shown me that he was narrow in more senses than his features—”