Femme Fatale

Book 7: Irene Adler

by Carole Nelson Douglas

Genres: Historical Mysteries; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

Irene Adler is the only woman ever to have outwitted Sherlock Holmes... and the one who has come closest to stealing his heart.

She has competed (and sometimes cooperated) with the famous fictional detective over six popular and acclaimed novels, featuring her daring investigations across the Continent. All along, the beautiful and brilliant American diva-turned-detective has managed to conceal her background and history, even from her dashing barrister husband, Godfrey Norton, and her devoted companion and biographer, English spinster Nell Huxleigh.

But she has had some help along the way to do this, from such unlikely sources as the Baron de Rothschild, Sarah Bernhardt, and Bram Stoker, as well as the soon-to-be-infamous Nellie Bly, a daring American journalist who helped Irene hunt Jack the Ripper. Now Nellie has wired Irene some astounding news, news that will shake her world: Irene's mother is the target of an assassin.

Irene's past is shrouded in secrecy, and at first she is unwilling to divulge anything that would link her to America. But a series of bizarre killings in New York City draws her reluctantly back to her native country, where she must race with a murderer to find her mother, a woman of mystery who may turn out to be the most notorious woman of the nineteenth century.

As Irene forges a trail into her own hidden past, Nellie Bly draws another ace investigator across the Atlantic to join in the hunt for a serial killer, the last man on earth Irene Adler wants to discover anything about her shocking past... Sherlock Holmes.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Release date: April 1, 2007

Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

Print pages: 554

Sample

1.

Duet

He was an enthusiastic musician, being himself not only
a very capable performer but a composer of no ordinary merit.
—DR. JOHN H. WATSON, "THE RED-HEADED LEAGUE," 1891,

SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

at Neuilly, near Paris
August, 1889

"I cannot believe," I told Irene, "that you would agree to such a shocking thing without telling your husband!"
"Which can you not believe, Nell, that I would agree to a ‘shocking thing' or that I would not tell Godfrey?"
I had long since learned that my friend Irene Adler Norton was fashioned from an impossible human amalgam resembling iron brocade: apparently decorative but, in truth, nigh impossible to ruffle or bend. I might better exercise my lungs by attempting to blow out the fire in the grate as to move her resolve with the feeble zephyrs of my words.
I shifted ground. "I cannot believe that you would invite That Man to our common home without telling me."
"But I have told you."
"Just now…when he could arrive any moment! I am not prepared to receive a guest, even if you are."
I lifted my embroidery hoop from my lap in a gesture of exasperation. The trailing threads immediately attracted the snagging claws of the Persian cat, Lucifer, whose instincts for mayhem were as black as his long, silky coat. In an instant he was tangled in my rainbow skeins.
"Obviously," Irene continued, watching my struggle to unwind embroidery silks from Lucifer's claws with a certain clinical interest, "Sherlock Holmes is not a guest, in your estimation, but an intruder. You must understand that he comes here at my invitation, for a bit of very simple business. I merely have to honor my word and give him the English translation I have had made of the Yellow Book."
"Of course," I said grimly, my shredded threads tugged free of their attacker at last. "It is bad enough that demonic diary fell into our hands at the end of the Ripper affair. I still shudder when I think of the Unholy Trinity that was allied against us then. I doubt that the world will ever be safe from them, however obscurely, and deeply, and securely they are imprisoned. Now you only perpetuate that dreadful time by passing on the demented creature's scribblings to Sherlock Holmes."
"I promised him I would, Nell. And my making the translation allowed me to…protect any mention of my dear ones by what you rightly call a ‘demented creature.' If Mr. Holmes's presence is so undesirable, you could withdraw upstairs. I don't expect him to remain long."
"How I wish that urgent political depositions in Paris did not keep Godfrey away from home on just this very day! Oh, and I may leave if I don't like the company? Of course! Banish me upstairs to leave you alone with That Man! In Godfrey's absence? I think not. It is my duty to act as chaperon."
Irene sighed, bending to lift the cat free of what was left of my fancy work. "Duty is never pleasant, but I can see that you are determined to make it as unpleasant as possible."
I regarded her with suspicion, but said nothing, though my mind was busy imagining the worst. Was the forthcoming visitor why she had donned her most becoming housedress today? This was a trailing white silk gown with a black net overlay of jet beads and scallops of black lace. The overall effect was of charmingly girlish polka dots, which on closer examination proved far more elegant and sophisticated than that.
Of course, all of Irene's housedresses were becoming, a fact that Godfrey seemed to appreciate. Irene had been an operatic diva, after all, so even her most casual attire displayed inimitable panache. Perhaps that was only because she was extraordinarily comely, as certified by the words of a king: "She has a soul of steel. The face of the most beautiful of women," Wilhelm of Bohemia had observed before adding the unfortunate and equally true afterthought, "and the mind of the most resolute of men."
I had always been taught that masculine resolution belonged to the superior sex. Irene confounded that conviction in me, and in others, including Mr. Sherlock Holmes, the London consulting detective with whom circumstances had recently forced far more acquaintance than I liked.
Irene's own past efforts as a private inquiry agent for the Pinkerton agency in America, even before she descended on England in the early eighties to pursue her operatic career, did not help insure that the likes of Sherlock Holmes and other official and unofficial minions of the law would not darken our cottage doorstep in bucolic Neuilly. At least it was far enough outside of Paris to remain a simple village rather than a crowded and corrupt metropolis.
But now the London "sleuth" was to cross our rural threshold in person.
I glanced down at my striped skirt. And I would be forced to receive him looking like a milkmaid…not that a spinster past thirty like myself gave a fig for matters of dress, beauty, or unexpected visitors of the masculine persuasion.
"He will sniff down that sharp London nose of his at our countrified ways," I said. "I am surprised that you are not wearing your favorite Worth."
Irene burst out laughing as she untangled Lucifer's claws from the lace at her elbows. "Sherlock Holmes would as much notice the exquisite couture of Charles Frederick Worth, even though the eminent ‘man-milliner' of Paris is a distant relation of his by marriage, as he would Lucifer's savage ‘disembowing' of the ribbons along your skirt revers."
"Oh! That dreadful cat! He has indeed managed to undo all my ribbons."
I tossed the embroidery hoop aside and began retying the endless rows just as a knock sounded in the hallway.
I redoubled my efforts. On no account was Mr. Sherlock Holmes to see me with my bows undone, especially since he had witnessed my shockingly irregular attire during the dark events of our previous adventure. I was, after all, an Englishwoman, if not a lady born.
Sophie, our maid of all work and mistress of far too little of it, soon appeared in the parlor door, making what passed for a curtsy. "Where should I place the gentleman's coat and chapeau, s'il vous plait."
We had so few callers here in the country that no protocol governed their disposition.
"The newel post will do for the coat, Sophie," Irene said airily, "and the hall table for the hat."
At that moment The Man himself appeared in the doorway, cloaked in country checks with a plaid hat known as a deerstalker upon his head.
Having only previously seen him in the stripped trousers and top hat of city wear, I straightened red-faced from my bow-tying labors and tried to suppress a snicker. The visitor looked more countrified than ourselves! In fact, I had to admit that his attire was more suitable for a Neuilly visit than city garb. Could it be that Mr. Holmes was less insensitive to the subtle social language of attire than Irene thought?
"Madam," he said with a bow to Irene. "Miss Huxleigh," to me. He handed his coat to Sophie (the poor woman disappeared behind its massive long folds like a mushroom behind a checked mountain) and flung his cap out of sight toward the hall table.
I was irritatingly sure that it had landed where aimed, though I could not see for sure.
With this cavalier gesture, he crossed the threshold into our feminine domain. I saw he wore a brown tweed suit, suitable for travel or shooting holidays.
Irene had risen to extend her hand.
Mr. Holmes took it, hesitated, then shook it in the American fashion.
I could not imagine him kissing it in the Continental fashion, although Quentin Stanhope, or even Godfrey, could no doubt manage that Frenchified sort of salute quite skillfully.
The thought of Quentin kissing a hand, my hand, caused my traitorous heart to skip several beats. I had so stupidly failed both him and myself on the last occasion we had spent time together! Granted, we had both survived great perils and were not ourselves. Yet despite the heightened emotions of the moment, everything severe and cautious from my sheltered Shropshire childhood had risen up to deny him. I could still see the tenderness in his too-truthful hazel eyes fade into such unnecessary apology. I could still hear Nellie Bly, who had accompanied him during the last leg of the rescue mission, calling him "my dear Quentin" not an hour after our disastrous reunion! A reunion that was only disastrous after certain, unforgettable…passages between us.
No, no one could hold a candle to Quentin in the handkissing department, certainly not a man who considered himself a self-appointed tutor to all humankind!
I clasped my own hands behind my back to avoid any possibility of awkward social contact. If the gesture made me look like a green schoolroom miss, so be it. I knew things about Mr. Sherlock Holmes that even Irene with all her fabled perception could not and would not imagine. It was not that I was especially perceptive, only that I once had occasion to peruse the papers of his associate, Dr. Watson, and had found some thankfully unpublished scribblings about the affair that had first introduced Mr. Holmes into our acquaintance, a manuscript the would-be literary doctor had melodramatically titled "A Scandal in Bohemia."
We were not in Bohemia now, thank the Lord, but France, which was quite another kettle of poisson. Odd that the French word for "fish" is so close in spelling to that fatal word in English, poison, but not really odd when you consider how fish taste and smell. That is how I regarded Mr. Sherlock Holmes. As poison to be avoided like the plague. There!
"You are looking better, Miss Huxleigh," The Man noted with his usual superior air, "than when last we met."
"I should hope so," I replied. "I have since then been removed from the enforced company of a number of odious persons."
He could not fail to miss that I included him along with the truly heinous villains of our previous adventure.
His smile was private as he turned again to Irene. All men turned again to Irene. She was a magnet whose force could not be denied on the operatic boards or on the more intimate stage of private life.
"I have taken the liberty," she said, returning his smile, "of having a small repast laid out in the parlor window that overlooks the garden. Perhaps you would join us for tea. Meanwhile, I will retrieve the manuscript that is the object of your visit."
"The manuscript that you so fetchingly spirited away from that terrifying castle before I could read it," he pointed out.
"It was in a non-romance language, Mr. Holmes."
"I can read a bit of some non-romance languages, such as the German in Psychopathia Sexualis. I must thank you for introducing me to such a rare volume of criminal lore. In fact, I am only now returned from the University of Graz in Austria, where I met with Professor von Krafft-Ebing who heads the Neuro-Psychiatry clinic there, the author of that volume you so kindly…lent me."
"It was not a loan, Mr. Holmes, and you need not thank me. It had served my purposes already." Irene had dropped her role of gracious hostess as a man might have cast a gauntlet upon the castle floor. "Do you mean to tell me you have consulted with Baron von Krafft-Ebing? The man himself? Recently?"
"Why else did you think I was abroad again, my dear lady?"
"I assumed another case involving foreign heads of state, of course, my dear sir."
Much as I feared the unwanted secret that I harbored—that Sherlock Holmes was both contemptuous of women's wit in general and enamored of Irene's wit in particular—I realized that I was witnessing a joust, not a tryst. These "my dears" were mere nicks in the verbal fencing match between civilized opponents, not anything personal…beyond a keen professional rivalry.
"The book itself," she said, "would seem to be plenty enough food for thought. What more could the author add to his compendium of infamy?"
"There is always more to be learned in the vast arena of crimes of passion around the globe. Professor Krafft-Ebing has achieved something remarkable in the annals of criminal history. He has recorded the acts and particulars of a certain breed of killers he calls lust-murderers as a scientist, not a policeman, would. These are cold and factual case studies, naked of political conclusions and moral confusions. Simple facts. He records the acts, repulsive as they are to any civilized person, without emotion or distortion. And in multiplicity, there is no denying the universality of human wrongdoing. No detail, however debased, escapes his observation and analysis. The book is a classic and the man is a wonder."
"I wonder," said I, "that any civilized person would wish to know more about such grisly matters."
I expected Mr. Holmes to debate me. Instead, he laughed, voicelessly. "Dr. Watson, my esteemed physician friend, would agree with you. He strongly feels that some subjects are not fit knowledge, especially for a woman's sensibility."
"I don't agree with that," Irene said sharply. "What women don't know will hurt them."
Mr. Holmes's expression was both challenged and chagrined. "I said that was Dr. Watson's opinion. I myself do not flinch from the brutal. I have recently been involved in a matter in which a man's thumb was severed as he sought to escape kidnappers."
"Gracious!" I could not help saying, thus unwittingly drawing the man's attention again.
"I am sorry to offend your sensibilities, Miss Huxleigh, though I must admit that I am pleased to see that your thumbs are still attached and busy at household arts, but the world of wrongdoing is full of such deliciously insane events. Professor Krafft-Ebing enlightened me a good deal in that regard."
"Perhaps," Irene said, "the dainty treats of the tea-table are not suitable after such conversation. If you will excuse me, I will fetch the translation." She turned to the hall, then paused and turned back. "Did you find any new evidence in Whitechapel? Anything that would absolve the criminals we captured in the Carpathians earlier this summer?"
Mr. Holmes fingered the small gold sun of a coin that dangled from his watch-fob, a coin that figured, I am sure, in the good doctor's manuscript titled "A Scandal in Bohemia."
"Nothing that would release any of the villains in the case, and nothing that would fully indict them either."
"Nothing?" she asked sharply.
"I did discover more traces of identifiable cork and candle wax, enough to buttress the case against them, but nothing so conclusive that anyone dare announce a solution. This matter would best be forgotten and buried in the newspaper morgues," he replied.
"A pity. It was so spectacularly grotesque. I imagine the name ‘Jack the Ripper' will be used to frighten children into good behavior for some time."
She nodded and turned to leave again, but this time his voice gave her pause, instead of the reverse.
"I do hope, Mrs. Norton, that you are giving me a full translation, with no…expurgations."
"My dear Mr. Holmes, if you can read Professor Krafft-Ebing's much despised book on lust-murders and even discuss it with its controversial author, I am sure that I would not be so bold as to Bowdlerize any other volume for your consumption."
"Hmmm." His murmur expressed either satisfaction…or doubt.
Irene decided to take it for the former, and smiled again before rustling up our hall staircase.
"Have you read it?"
The question was both abrupt and harsh, and I moved my gaze from Irene's departing skirts to find Mr. Holmes's gimlet gray eyes fixed upon me with the sharpness of a needle point.
"I? Gracious, no. I saw enough of depravity at that Carpathian castle to last me a lifetime. I really cannot understand why you should wish to pursue such matters with the author, and now with that…loathsome diary from the hand of a person whose crimes are unimaginable."
"There are no unimaginable crimes, Miss Huxleigh," he said, bending his gaze near my hemline.
I cringed to think that he had noted my unfastened bows, but when I glanced down, I saw that Lucifer, the wretch, had hidden under my skirts and was now thrusting out a suspicious paw, his fat furry foot resembling the toe of a black, ostrich-feather mule.
I stepped back at once to reveal the cat's full form. It was unthinkable that Mr. Sherlock Holmes should believe me capable of wearing anything so frivolous as an ostrich-feather mule!
He made no remark on the cat, instead strolling to where the small round table looked out on the side garden. To do so he had to pass the piano, and his eyes fixed on that instrument with some intensity as he went by it. It was an old-fashioned square piano of rosewood, closed for now and wearing a Spanish shawl. Its lower legs were not swathed in velvet pantaloons, as had been the custom since the days that piano legs were thought too suggestive of women's limbs to reveal.
Mr. Holmes did not appear to direct any licentious glances in their direction, which was a point in his favor.
He clasped his long bony hands behind his back and gazed into the garden, which was entering its autumn stage.
In the parrot cage behind the piano, Casanova edged his gaudy red, green, and yellow plumage down the perch to comment "Good day, Matey," in that odd distant voice of parrots that always sounds like an echo.
The consulting detective ignored the bird's greeting. Indeed, I had the notion that his mind was far removed from this quiet (except for Casanova) parlor in Neuilly outside Paris.
In fact, his entire mien struck me as pensive. (Not the bird's, the man's.) I immediately found my indignation rising on Irene's behalf. Supposedly, the man was secretly besotted with her. Surely he could produce some better reaction to being in her home and her presence than a moody pout!
"The mongoose has slain a snake, I see," he said out of the blue.
"Mongoose!" I dropped my already abused embroidery hoop to the floor as I stood. "Snake! Not a small green one."
"No, a medium black-and-green striped one." He turned, his features tautened with amusement. "Nothing so large and lethal as, say, a cobra, Miss Huxleigh. But then I imagine you have not had an opportunity to see such a fearsome snake in your experience."
I certainly had! More than once. In fact, the mongoose in my care, Messalina, had dispatched more than one when we had occasion to revisit London to save this very man's Boswell, Dr. Watson, from persons with evil intentions toward him.
"A garden snake," I diagnosed with relief. "Messy is fed very well and does not need to eat anything, but at least the victim is not one of Sarah Bernhardt's green snakes that I inherited."
"I imagine the mongoose acts for the sport of the chase, not from hunger. Other creatures than ourselves enjoy the constant game of hunter and hunted."
"I do not, Mr. Holmes. We can all rise above our beastly natures."
"Some of us do not want to," he commented, "which is when I find myself being consulted." He glanced over his shoulder as if eager for Irene's reappearance.
I could only suppose that listening to Casanova, watching the garden, and trying to make awkward conversation with me were not pursuits that suited the man's temperament. He struck me as a strider and a pacer, an indefatigable walker in town and country.
Rapid steps on the hall stair saved us from further attempts at conversation. Irene, as usual, was clattering down the staircase like a schoolgirl.
"Here it is," she announced, a bit breathlessly.
Instead of the producing the small, yellow moiré-bound diary kept by one of the principal villains during our Continental pursuit of Jack the Ripper after Whitechapel, she cradled a sheaf of papers in the crook of one arm, a raw manuscript, written by hand.
Mr. Holmes met her halfway across the room, accepting the untidy sheaf of paper with avidity.
"Excellent! May I ask whom you employed to translate it?"
"An east European actress. I told her it was from a novel."
This was news to me, but while I stared agape, Mr. Holmes nodded. "The tale this tells reads better as fiction, I suspect. A discreet and clever solution to a vexing problem. If the material is unabridged."
He hefted the manuscript, matching his gesture with a lilt of one dark eyebrow. "I should put it in my coat." With that he vanished into the hall, allowing Irene and I to exchange several significant glances, none of which was quite clear to either of us. Consultation after his departure was clearly needed.
He returned so swiftly he was caught in the crossfire of our latest voiceless consultation. His hand still held the manuscript, which was odd.
Then he hefted it up for our inspection and I saw it was a small red-bound book rather. "I offer an exchange of prisoners," he said. "Please accept this small token: my friend Dr. Watson's first foray into authorship."
Irene took it before I could intercept her.
Oh, no! Had that dreadful manuscript called "A Scandal in Bohemia" actually been printed by some penny-dreadful press? And would Sherlock Holmes have the colossal nerve to pass on a fiction that publicly described his fascination with the very woman, the very married woman, who now held the dangerous volume in her hand? Would Godfrey be forced to challenge him to a duel because of it? Godfrey and Sherlock Holmes…would it be pistol or sword? Would I risk seeing both of my dear friends distraught and perhaps even destroyed because of this miserable bit of fictioneering?!
I rushed to snatch the small volume from Irene's hands. "Dr. Watson? An author? Oh, I must see! Right now!"
"Nell—!" Irene remonstrated mildly.
One oddity I noticed at once. "It says ‘by Conan Doyle.'"
"Watson is modest," Mr. Holmes said, "and doesn't want his medical profession confused with his literary hobby. That is the name of his literary agent."
"Hmmm." The publisher was Ward, Lock and Company, a London house, at least, I observed. I paged through, encountering some illustrations. In one a lounging gentlemen had ranks of scruffy street Arabs lined up and saluting like some grubby regiment. The caption read: "'Tention," cried Holmes in a sharp tone.
Although the figure purporting to be Holmes more resembled Oscar Wilde, I could just see him ordering around an array of street Arabs.
"The illustrations are by Mr. Doyle's father, Charles Altamont Doyle, a rather well-known sketcher in his day."
"Hmmmm." I was not about to admit that I found the entire package mystifying as well as disturbing.
I closed the volume. My fingers traced the large elaborate letters of the title, which seemed composed of Oriental slashes. A Study in Scarlet.
There was nothing scarlet about Irene's Bohemian adventure, unless you cast her in the role of Scarlet Woman.…The villain! That is exactly the sort of lurid character assassination I should expect from a physician who has nothing better to do than scribble stories instead of prescriptions. If Irene was utterly upright in any one area, it was in resisting any temptation to become what the French so coyly term a Grand Horizontal: in other words, a woman who will sleep for her supper.
"I cannot believe you would give us this book!" I said sharply.
"You are right," Mr. Holmes answered. "It speaks of shameless self-advertisement, but, believe me, I offer you this volume, not because it catalogues one of my more interesting cases, but because I believe both of you ladies met one of the principals."
Of course we had "met one of the principals"! The King of Bohemia had been Mr. Holmes's client, Irene's suitor, and my, my mortal…enemy, because he was at bottom no friend to Irene's integrity.
Irene was by now eyeing me reprovingly. "One of the principals?" She had no reason to jump to the unhappy conclusion I just had.
"A Mr. Jefferson Hope of the United States," Mr. Holmes went on with relish, surprising me. "The poison-pill killer of the Mormon hypocrites who had forced his innocent beloved into a loveless marriage and spurred her early death in the far-off salt flats of the West. It was among my most satisfying and sensational cases, I might add. The American West produced an avenging angel with a sense of justice as well as of mission. Jefferson Hope was captured in my rooms, answering a trap I had laid in the agony column claiming to have found lost Lucy's ring. He was by then already deadly ill of a heart condition that would claim his noble, if savage, soul soon after. Before that he raved of meeting ‘two angels of mercy' who had forgiven him the sins he had committed in order to avenge his dead…ah, fiancée. His description of the ‘angels' was so physically exact, and indeed memorable, that I realized later that they must have been you and Miss Huxleigh."
By now Irene was freeing the blasted book from my numb fingers, one by one. Jefferson Hope. Yes, we had met that doomed man. That was how we had first learned of the existence of Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson, and Baker Street. So had, I imagine, many readers of Beeton's Christmas Annual by now. That perfectly respectable publication had first serialized the story that led to this single-volume novel, according to its cover.
I stood confused. This book was certainly not the manuscript relating the Bohemian affair I had seen in the doctor's office. Still, it showed that he not only intended to publish, but had achieved it, which boded ill for that damning manuscript remaining secret. My current relief could not ease my fears for the future.
Even now Irene's palm was caressing the cursed cover. "Jefferson Hope. A most remarkable man. I'm pleased to have this remembrance of him, for he gave me his Lucy's ring and I still treasure it."
"You have the ring! He didn't say that before he died."
Irene regarded him for a moment. "So now that I have solved an old mystery for you, Mr. Holmes, perhaps you can solve one for me."
She moved toward a trunk that served as a side table, its homely origin hidden under another flagrantly figured silk scarf. Belatedly, I recognized it as one of the second-hand trunks she had used to store costume pieces from our early lodgings in London's Saffron Hill district.
As Irene whisked the shawl aside, a wave of nostalgia swept me back to a time seven years ago, before Irene and I had ever met Sherlock Holmes, or Godfrey Norton, for that matter.
Irene knelt to open the ancient trunk and began attacking its contents, shunting crackling pieces of taffeta and limp lengths of lace aside almost as roughly as Lucifer exercising his claws among my embroideries.
Mr. Holmes watched her with an air of puzzled disbelief. It was not the ordinary hostess who fell to her knees to ravage the contents of a trunk on some unknown whim.
I knew Irene and her unknown whims, and I knew that they always had a purpose.
"Here!" She turned and flourished a shabby black case like a magician producing a top hat accoutered with a rabbit. "I knew I still had it. Poor old fellow! He asked me to keep it instead of a pawn shop. The legend of the starving artist is based on all-too-true facts, and Erich was a maestro."
Mr. Holmes actually extended a hand to help her up, but Irene filled it with the handle of the mysterious black case and leaped up as if she were the magical rabbit, with no sense of effort or strain, and certainly no consciousness that a gentleman should assist a woman in all things.
Her face was radiantly pink after the effort of unearthing the black case from her treasure trove of forgotten fabrics. I winced to see her looking so happy and pretty in front of Mr. Holmes.
Yet he had eyes only for the case.
I saw, now that it was unveiled, that it was a pear-shaped violin case.
"Irene!" I couldn't help exclaiming. "I've never seen such a thing in your possession before. Has it always resided in your trunk?"
"I almost forgot about it myself, Nell. The poor old maestro left it in my care as a parting gift, and it soon was lost beneath the flea-market fabrics. I suspect that this old violin is a rather good one. Is it, Mr. Holmes?"
He had laid the object atop the piano and opened the case, almost as slowly as he had explored the poison-bearing cigarette case on an earlier occasion when we had been forced to accept his presence.
Then, he had saved Irene's life.
Now, he attempted to preserve the integrity of an obviously old object.
I glimpsed dusty and flattened rose velvet and flabby leather hinges.
Irene gazed into the case like a child at Christmas, all the actress's artful composure fled, her hand at her mouth as if to hold in excitement, her coiffure trailing loosened tendrils.
"Is it good?" she asked again, clearly unable to wait for a verdict.
Sherlock Holmes was occupying some other place or time. His face lost its habitual hawkish cast. Suddenly I glimpsed the boy in him, the boy at Christmas who did not have many heartfelt presents, and none that spoke to his secret soul. I knew this in my governess's heart, and, as much as I feared the man, even more, for this moment, I pitied the boy. My throat grew suddenly thick.
He neither saw nor noted my reaction, or even Irene's. He lifted the instrument from the case…up, up to the light of the window. So a dipsomaniac might hoist of glass of claret, holding it poised on the fingertips of both hands, as if a touch might turn it to powder.
He sighted down its length both front and back like a hunter weighing a field piece. He peered into its recesses, bent to study the faded velvet. Said nothing.
"Perhaps Amati?" Irene prompted.
"No."
"Surely not Stradivarius."
"No."
"Then it is worthless. How sad. I had hoped for the maestro's sake it was not."
"A Guarneri."
I couldn't resist breaking the strange spell that enwrapped them and disquieted me. "Is that a dread disease, pray tell? Like tuberculosis?"
"The Guarneris were a family of violin makers active from the sixteenth into the eighteenth centuries," Mr. Holmes answered me with equanimity. "They were instrumental geniuses of the first water, though their