The Private Wife of Sherlock Holmes (Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes novella) (6 page)

Prelude:
 
June, 1894

A Baker Street Reminiscence

 
“I
see, Watson, by an old issue of the Strand magazine, which was lying about for some reason, that yet another narrative of one of my little problems—the Irene Adler affair—has reached the public,” my friend Sherlock Holmes remarked over the remains of Mrs. Hudson’s ample dinner one warm summer evening.

I hid my smile of plea sure in a sip of burgundy. It invariably struck me as ironic that my companion, the most observant man alive, could so successfully ignore the stack of
Strand
magazines I imported to our lodgings whenever a fresh story of mine was among its monthly offerings. Such accounts had appeared for the past three years, commencing only after Holmes had been presumed dead in 1891.

It was my fond hope that Holmes, now resurrected, should acquaint himself with my past efforts to memorialize his astounding deductive abilities. Yet his public stance of belittling his own achievements reflected on my literary offerings. Thus any admission that the great detective actually read his own adventures as penned by myself was a singular and rewarding occasion.

“These little stories seem quite popular,” I remarked mildly.

“Popular,
hmm
.” Holmes’s angular features grew momentarily unfocused as he groped for his postprandial pipe. “No doubt the lurid title accounts for it.”

“I deemed ‘A Scandal in
Bohemia
’ quite an accurate description of the case.” My tone harbored some asperity, as no amateur author writes but for praise.

“Did you?”

Holmes’s reticence only spurred me on. “And what would you have titled the affair, may I ask?”

His eyes sharpened through the blue mists of tobacco smoke. “‘A
Superior
Woman.’”

“The King of Bohemia did not find Irene Adler a superior woman, Holmes, or he would have married her.”

“If lineage outweighed suitability as the criterion for investigative work, Watson, I should be hard put to acquire the few genuinely intriguing problems that come my way. Besides, you forget”—the relish of Holmes’s smile promised a rare mood of reminiscence—”His Majesty himself exclaimed, ‘Would she not have made an admirable queen?’ It was his only sensible remark in the entire affair. But you mistake me, Watson. I quite understand the need for exaggeration in the press. What I object to in your account is the key fact you have got wrong.”

“Key fact? Wrong?”

“Indeed.”

“Surely not. The case is replicated from my notes, and I am used to recording details accurately in my profession. Admittedly, the events occurred six years ago, but—”

“It is not your relation of the case’s particulars I contest, Watson. It is your acceptance of later, unascertained facts on face value.”

“Which facts?” I demanded, setting aside Mrs. Hudson’s excellent lemon tart half eaten.

“The facts of Irene Adler’s—now Norton’s—untimely demise. You quite unforgivably refer to her as ‘the late Irene Adler.’”

“The report of her death was in the
Times
. A terrible train wreck in the Italian Alps. Both her husband, Godfrey Norton, and herself were listed among the fatalities.”

 
“Much is in the T
imes
, my dear Watson, which is not true.” Holmes had assumed the professorial tone that I often found myself contesting for the pure sake of it. “And many deaths are prematurely reported. Consider my own.”

Holmes alluded to the matter of the
Reichenbach
Falls
, recalling my own cruel delusions as to my friend’s disappearance and death.

These had only been banished by his startling “return from the dead” the previous April. Authorial vanity absconded as I followed the path Holmes had paved for my less nimble mind.

“You actually believe, Holmes, that Irene Adler, too, is still alive?” said I with some astonishment.

Holmes’s gaze moved to the framed photograph of the woman in question, which occupied an honored place among his memorabilia.

“She is one of only four individuals—and the sole woman—to outwit me, Watson. Why should she not cheat death as well?”

At times I found Holmes’s colossal but unpremeditated vanity as annoying as I found amazing his ability to deduce volumes of testimony from the smallest shred of evidence.

“You believe she is alive?” I demanded again.

“I suspect it, Watson,” he answered crisply after a long pause. “I have not investigated, hence it is pure supposition. But you know on what methods my supposition is based.”

There was no quarreling with Holmes’s phenomenal reasoning powers, which honed instinct on some inflexible inner logic until it attained a lethal edge.

I again studied the photograph of the woman in the case. Although she had married Godfrey Norton before fleeing London and a confrontation with Holmes—signing a letter she had left for Holmes ‘Irene Norton, née Adler’—it was as Irene Adler, operatic prima donna and adventuress, that I invariably thought of her.

Like many actresses, she had been a markedly handsome woman.

I had only glimpsed her once from a tantalizing distance during the course of the case, but the photograph conveyed all her regal bearing, crowned as she was by richly arranged masses of dark hair. She wore formal attire in the photograph, bare about the bosom—and a magnificent bosom it was, even I was unbiased enough to concede—but the gown and jewels only set off her graceful form and beautifully composed face.

According to Holmes’s index, Irene Adler had been a full- blown beauty of thirty when we had encountered her six years before in 1888. Holmes himself had been only four- and- thirty. I confess that his open admiration then had nursed my hopes that the world’s most dedicated deductive machine harbored some hint of manly susceptibility among the admirably efficient gears of his mind, heart and soul.

“And then there’s that twaddle you wrote about my lack of regard for the fair sex in general,” Holmes murmured, breaking into my reverie.

“Twaddle? I fancy I explained it rather scientifically.”

“Love in my life would be ‘grit in a sensitive instrument,’” he mocked good-naturedly. “What a way to describe the emotions that drive nine- tenths of the human race, Watson! You are becoming quite a romantic in your middle years.”

“And what is wrong with a bit of sentiment in this harsh and often rude world?”

“Nothing, so long as it does not conflict with the facts.”

“But it invariably does! Facts have nothing to do with the emotions. Witness those who love against all likelihood, even love vicious murderers.”

“Exactly my point. And you are right in that, Watson, I cannot go against reason. I cannot allow the glamour of a fair face to obscure the facts my being is dedicated to lying bare. Besides, why must you be compelled to explain my solitary way of life? I am not the first man to eschew the company of women for the pursuit of an intellectual aim.”

“You have, as usual, put your very finger upon it, Holmes! Why must you equate the company of women with diminution of your intellectual powers?”

 
“Because most women are impediments.”

 
“Impediments? That is cold, Holmes. Even you are not so inhuman as to dismiss half the human race as a nuisance!”

Holmes produced the tight, tolerant smile that meant an opponent had fallen into a verbal trap of his setting.
 

“I know you are somewhat prejudiced in the matter, given your close association with the former Mary Morstan, unfortunately and truly the late Mary Watson,” he murmured sympathetically, “and an excellent woman she was. But regard the whole, not the worthy exception, Watson. Think! How would an ordinary female accompany me through the night streets unhailed and unhampered? How would she navigate the suburban outlands we have trod together, upholstered in thirty yards of train and a veiled bonnet? Could she pick up a revolver and leave upon a midnight moment’s notice, as you often have? How would one reared to faint upon the slightest pretext remain conscious in the face of violent death?”

“We have met some brave women in the course of your cases,” I put in.

“We have encountered some admirable women, particularly those independent creatures thrown by fate upon their own resources. Your own Mary Morstan showed herself possessed of great nobility of character in deeming her inheritance of so little consequence compared to her regard for a modest doctor of my acquaintance.

“Yet did not even she swoon as the case reached its climax? It is written in your own account of the affair, which you call ‘The Sign of the Four.’ “

I colored to find my more tender premarital moments exhumed by my friend’s relentless memory. “Irene Adler did not swoon,” I muttered in confusion.

“Exactly my point, Watson! Irene Adler did not swoon. Nor is she the kind to perish in a train wreck, any more than I am likely to fall off a cliff, even in Professor Moriarty’s lethal embrace. Not so passive an end is permitted the likes of Irene Adler.”

“That is hardly a logical reaction.”

“It is the result of the most impeccable logic. Review the facts. Has not Irene Adler demonstrated time and again an indisputable control over people and events around her? She was perceptive enough to foresee the King of Bohemia’s forthcoming royal marriage and wise enough to flee when she saw herself supplanted in his plans, if not his affections.

“She also anticipated a need for future protection and brought with her the compromising photograph of herself and the King. She evaded his best agents on five separate occasions. When his Majesty allowed my humble self to partake in the problem, she not only detected the net closing around her, but had the audacity—the audacity, Watson!—to follow my disguised self, and you as well, to the very doorstep of
221-B Baker Street
. There, dressed as a young man, she boldly bid me, ‘Good night, Mr. Sherlock Holmes.’ “

Holmes sat back against the chair, smoke rising from his fevered face like steam from an overtaxed locomotive. “I bother to quote the King of Bohemia on only one subject: ‘What a woman!’”

“Forward hussy, if you ask me,” I put in, still defensive about my fine-natured Mary.

Holmes smiled ruefully. “How unfair it is that enterprise is called a harlot when it wears a female face. How did you put it in your account, Watson—‘the late Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable memory.’? You call her an ‘adventuress’ as well. Two centuries ago the word designated a woman who lived by her wits; today it has been debased to describe a woman who lives by her willingness—especially in regard to men of influence and wealth.

“I believe you misjudge Madam Irene there, but you may speculate upon her character as your authorial right. Her death, however, is mere rumor until proven. No, Watson, I fear we have all played our roles in L’Affaire Adler as mere supporting actors to the woman’s wit and will. Had she been a man, I should have immediately penetrated the charade of her greeting—and farewell—that night here in
Baker Street
. Being hampered by the strictures of her sex, she uses our arrogant male underestimation of her to camouflage a daring nature.
The
woman is without equal.”

 
“You do especially admire her, then!” pounced I, for to him she is always the woman.

“And to much better purpose than romantically, Watson, although it would please those monthly readers of your little tales and your conventional heart if my admiration were merely amorous. “You see, I suspect that she fled En gland not only because the King of Bohemia was on her trail— and not simply because I myself was about to close the net on her. I suspect she had other reasons, some of them involving the mysterious Mr. Godfrey Norton.”

Holmes’s eyes narrowed fiercely. “But Irene Adler is not dead—oh, no, Watson, no more likely than that Moriarty did not exist. I would stake my life upon it!”

I sat silent in the face of such wholesale conviction. I had never known Holmes to be wrong when he expressed himself so strongly. As much as logic directed his remarkable detective powers, so too did a knowledge of human behavior, sifted through his inhuman isolation from the softer sensibilities.

“Yet, Holmes,” said I finally, “so many of our cases require delving the deepest emotions in their solving. Perhaps you encounter enough misdirected passions and misunderstood family matters, sudden disgrace and death in your work; you need not import such heartache into your personal affairs.”

“Quite right. Many cases depend upon reasoning back to events of years ago—family secrets, vengeance visited even onto the second generation. In a sense, the past shapes those who become victims or villains in the melodramas of my cases.

“It is my role to act as playwright to the whole, to draw the curtain open and then reveal the scenes in one logical series. Every event must be cobbled into place in the long train of previous events, as rungs make a ladder of logic. I would give a great deal to know what inevitable stages of incident produced the likes of Irene Adler. Show me a method of forming more women so, and I would show more interest in women!”