The Adventuress (3 page)

Although the news of Irene’s—and her bridegroom, Godfrey Norton’s—demise in an Alpine train wreck was as greatly exaggerated as was Mr. Twain’s adventure into presumptive quietus a decade later, at first it seemed the ideal escape from an awkward situation. Now, in the autumn of 1888, after the Great Adventure, it was proving merely inconvenient.

I had joined Irene and Godfrey at their villa in Neuilly, a charming village near Paris, to indulge in a period of self-congratulatory elation.

Numerous champagne flutes were lifted by the newlyweds; I myself frown on alcoholic beverages. (In France, I admit, it is hard to frown on anything, which is no doubt why that country has such a wicked reputation.)

We toasted their marriage; we saluted Irene’s successful escape from London, and her continued possession of the photograph of herself with the King of Bohemia despite all attempts to wrest it away from her. Even I lifted glass and eyebrows in the hush that always followed mention of the name of our esteemed opponent, the consulting detective of 221B Baker Street.

We toasted, too, Irene’s virtuoso hunt for Marie Antoinette’s famed Zone of Diamonds, a floor-length girdle of knuckle-sized stones now absorbed into the workshops of Tiffany & Company. These were emerging anonymously one by one in brooches and dog collars adorning the world’s wealthiest and loveliest bosoms and necks—some of the latter actually canine, such are the lavish ways of our day.

Irene’s own souvenir of the long-lost bauble—a twenty-five-carat diamond in the old French cut that would serve as a ring or convert to a pendant—blazed gloriously at her throat on formal occasions.

Aye, there was the rub, as our Bard put it long ago in a different context. The diamond burned her throat like a fiery badge of mingled triumph and despair.

For she was mute to the world. The erroneously reported death—the Nortons had missed the fatal train, upon which they had reserved a compartment—had stilled Irene’s singing career more effectively than had the king two springs before, when he had caused her summary dismissal from the Prague National Opera.

The magnificent gemstone, won by her own wit and no mere man’s favor, could not be flaunted on the stage, where her performing sisterhood flashed the booty of their offstage labors in millionaires’ boudoirs.

All the belated appreciation of her art rang hollow. Expeditions to the fitting rooms of Worth or Paquin could not console Irene for the loss of her work, her fame, her very identity. She bought gowns and boots and hats like a fiend in that first flush of escape, of triumph, of wealth that had been beyond supposing when she and I, the late Parson Huxleigh’s impoverished daughter Penelope, had shared humble rooms in London’s Saffron Hill district.

Yet none of these glorious gowns could appear on stage. When Irene faced French society, it was as “Madame Norton,” the unknown wife of a transplanted English barrister, not as Irene Adler, the American-born opera singer whose beauty of voice and visage had brought her worldwide recognition and adulation. Indeed, should anyone have recognized Irene—and she took an actress’s care with her coiffure and clothing that no one should—she would have denied herself so convincingly as to lay her past to rest even more deeply.

As for her more subtle reputation as a puzzle-solver, that was left as far behind as were Saffron Hill and Baker Street.

Irene Adler—my friend and former chamber-mate, retired opera singer, one-time amateur detective, erstwhile actress—had all to which a woman of thirty could aspire: a handsome and devoted husband, money enough to live comfortably for some time, undiminished beauty and a wardrobe with which to embellish it; in short, she had unlimited time on her pretty, piano-playing hands... and nothing whatsoever to do.

Even mock Death does have its sting.

Chapter Two

F
ALSE
P
RETENSES

“Irene, have
you gone mad?”

She was flinging shawls, shoes and bloomers from the deep drawers beneath her bedchamber wardrobe.

“Mad?” A flushed face lifted from her labors. “Of course I have gone mad. How could I have purchased so many things that I cannot find the only items I wish to locate?”

She recommenced pawing through a writhing mass of ribbons and corset laces with the frenzy of Lucifer—the black cat she had given me—worrying a rug into the proper tangle for a nap. That beast joined the fray even as my thoughts evoked him, his claws snagging snakes of flying laces.

“Irene, please.
Calmez-vous, s’il-vous-plait.”
My use of French always caught her attention, perhaps because my accent was so dreadful.

“I do
not
please to be calm, and your French is not soothing, Penelope. If anything, it is inciting. Oh, where are the blasted things? Just when I need them so desperately!”

I joined her and the wretched cat on the Aubusson rug, on which sunlight splashed as if onto warming pond water, and tried to tidy the rejected articles of clothing.

“Oh, leave it! You are not a maid, Nell,” Irene objected in a way foreign to her.

I quieted. “Perhaps if I were, I would have more to do.”

“I’m sorry.” Her hands clapped contritely to her face for a moment. When she eyed me again, peering over her fingertips as over the scalloped rim of a fan, rueful amber-brown eyes begged forgiveness. “I took lunch with Sarah Bernhardt today and—”

“Sarah Bernhardt!”

Irene smiled. “You pronounce that name as if it were ‘Marquis de Sade.’ She is only an actress.”

“She is a scandal beyond her profession! How can you consort with such a woman, Irene? She has taken dozens of lovers... some of whom last but a day. She is beneath you!”

Irene’s eyes flashed like molten gold, heated enough to incinerate the footlights had she been before them. “Sarah is a consummate performer. We have much in common. At lunch we compared notes, so to speak, on our vocal techniques. Sarah attacks words as I attack F sharps; she is a wonder.”

“How did you meet this immoral creature?”

Irene’s head shook impatiently. “I introduced myself. Then... we were fast friends.”

“Introduced yourself! Surely not. You cannot reveal your identity.”

“I identified myself as Madame Norton, an American who has sung in the States and who is an admirer of Mademoiselle Bernhardt. Don’t pout, Nell; it is all true.”

“All but your admiration of that awful woman, I hope! I cannot believe that you, who refused to use your profession as a royal road to men’s beds, would deign to make her acquaintance.”

“Bernhardt is an artist first; she chooses and refuses men as fancy takes her. She is the first actress from the Comedie Français to form her own company and tour internationally. She is a force unto herself; perhaps she finds the concentrated attentions of a single man debilitating to her career and shares herself among many in order to devote herself to none. There is much to be said for turning the tables on the male sex.”

“Irene.” I was speechless beyond intoning her name.

Lucifer had settled in a swath of sunlight to observe us with the calm, approving gaze of a libertine, a role he doubtless played to the hilt on his nightly prowls. I shuddered for the genteel, unsuspecting female cats of Neuilly.

Irene patted my hand. “Don’t fret. Godfrey need not worry. Ordinary, middle-class marriage can be enthralling with an exceptional man. But I judge Sarah Bernhardt by no standards save her own. What did the King of Bohemia say of me to Mr. Holmes? That I had a ‘soul of steel.’ So does Sarah, only hers is cut steel! That is why I wish to find my old walking boots. We have an assignation on the Boulevard tonight.”

Irene sighed with satisfaction as her hands at last pulled the desired boots—and the dark serge shapes of her male “walking out clothes”—from the abyss of the drawer.

“A bit somber for Gay Paree,” she complained. “Perhaps Sarah can find me more-dandyish attire in the theater wardrobe—though not too effeminate. That would give the game away.”

Irene held the musty old things to her bodice and smiled dewily, as if crushing velvet and damask to her bare skin.

“Irene, you are not... you and this woman are not walking out as men this evening? Surely?”

“Of course!” She snatched up a brush and began cleaning the frock coat until Lucifer blinked his green eyes in a whirlwind of dust motes and decamped. I sneezed.

“Oh, Nell, even your sneeze sounds disapproving. This will be a
petite
adventure, that is all. Sarah has never gone out
‘en homme’
in public; it is quite a necessary exercise for her acting. Besides, respectable women are not commonly welcome in the great cafés of Paris, and I am eager to see these boulevard wits in action.”

What could I do? Irene was her own woman, to say the least. She left the cottage at four o’clock in the guise of a British gentleman, leaving a message for Godfrey that she would return by nine.

Her eyes danced as she tipped her glossy top hat and flourished her cane at the door. The coachman, having been summoned to the front gate, inquired where “Monsieur” wished to go.

“To the devil,” I whispered as I watched Irene depart in the open landau, looking for all the world like a young gentleman about town.

Godfrey came home at six. As exquisite as was Irene’s young-gentleman guise, the sight of Godfrey made one aware of the noble reality of the sex she aped.

He was tall, nearly six feet, raven-haired, and possessed of excellent manners as well as good sense. The regularity of his features and his impeccable dress often earned him the epithet of “dashing,” but it was the acuity and kindness in his gray eyes that had won my undying admiration. At my parson father’s death, I was left an orphan. Had I had a brother, I could not have wished a more ideal candidate than Godfrey.

He left his hat and stick in the hall, then glanced into the music room, where the antique grand piano lay open. Irene was wont to spend hours in this room, playing melancholy Grieg upon the worn ivory keys.

“How was your day?” I asked with sisterly duty.

“I made some acquaintances among the Academie Français. There appears to be need on this side of the Channel for an attorney with a knowledge of British law, especially in regard to the performing arts.”

“With your mastery of French, you are ideal to set up such a practice, Godfrey.”

“Would that I had a similar mastery of French law!” Godfrey laughed and rolled his eyes in a mock-Gallic way. “No wonder Moliére satirized the profession; it is a labyrinth of ancient custom, of amendments enacted and rescinded by each new wave of revolution... and of outright self-interest.”

He glanced around, his eyes resting first on the dreadful parrot, Casanova, cracking seeds in his foot in his window-side cage; on Lucifer, crouched beneath Casanova’s abode with obvious hopes; on Sophie, our stout maid, who was delivering a late tray of tea, and lastly on me again.

“She has gone out,” I said, handing him Irene’s note.

“Oh? It can’t be the dressmaker’s at this hour.”

“Nor the hairdresser’s. It is the... costumier’s, I fear.”

“Irene planning to act again?” Godfrey asked. “She could, you know, under a pseudonym. Her French is exquisite, thanks to her operatic language studies.”

He sounded so approving—and relieved—that I loathed to disabuse him of his innocent fantasy, but I did. “She is with Sarah Bernhardt,” I blurted.

He showed no alarm. “An excellent associate for a rising foreign-born actress.”

“They are strolling the Boulevard. In male dress. Together.”

“Ah. Until nine, she says.” Godfrey refolded the note and took the cup of tea I offered, although in my agitation I had forgotten to add his customary sugar.

“You are not shocked?”

“Why should I be? The second ti
m
e I saw Irene, she was so appareled. The sight of her lifting the homburg to release those waves of chestnut hair remains one of my fondest moments.”

“It was one of my most mortifying,” I confessed. “Although you knew me as your typist, you had not known Irene then, save for the quarrel of your first encounter. You had no notion of her ability to alter her looks and dress so radically. I dreaded what you should think of her bold disguise, even though we owed to it our escape from Bohemia and from the king’s agents.”

He smiled with that older-brother air that annoys as much as reassures me. “My dear Nell, pardon me for not telling you exactly what I thought of Irene when she revealed herself to me in that carriage; some things are best kept between man and wife.”

“I—indeed,” I rushed on. “It is not for me to inquire into your private affairs, that is to say, into your domestic business... er, your intimate—” Everything I said treaded nearer to indelicacy.

Godfrey laughed and sipped his unsweetened tea. “Irene must have her adventures, Nell; marriage will not change that, nor will locale. I am glad that she is finally venturing into her new surroundings. It is nothing for me to start again in a foreign land; I was not known publicly in my own. I can practice law here, even visit London fairly anonymously. Irene”—he frowned and stirred a small silver spoon in his cup to better blend the absent sugar— “Irene has given up a great deal to marry me, to leave London: her career, her very identity.”