The Adventuress (v5) Read online

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  CAST OF CONTINUING CHARACTERS

  PRELUDE

  CODA

  READERS GUIDE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

  Praise for THE ADVENTURESS

  “Some women are just born to have grand adventures. Such a woman—the woman to the bewitched Sherlock Holmes—was the American actress Irene Adler, who shrugged off her untimely literary demise in "A Scandal in Bohemia" to reappear as the heroine of Carole Nelson Douglas's captivating history mystery, Good Night, Mr. Holmes. This vibrant creature is back..., holding court in Paris and laughing up her fashionable sleeve at the rumors of her death.... "Independence," Irene says, "does wonders for a woman.”—Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times

  “an absorbing, witty adventure that all mystery fans, including serious Holmes devotees, will find a delight.”—West Coast Review of Books

  “Douglas dazzles us again with the continuing chronicles of the Great Detective's greatest rival... wonderful prose makes every word and phrase a sheer delight to read. Add clever plotting and a subtle touch of the absurd, and this novel leaves no doubt that Douglas is destined to become one of the first ladies of the mystery scene."—RT Book Reviews

  “Good Night, Mr. Holmes was an impressive enough performance to demand an encore.... this new yarn is a rollicking and complex story brimming with Victorian atmosphere.”—Publishers Weekly

  "a very clever and accomplished novelist...this old, jaded, tired reader was seat-glued."—John Bennett Shaw, B.S.I., eminent Sherlockian

  "From France to Monte Carlo, three main characters blaze through the pages of The Adventuress, a late-Victorian-era mystery... clever wit, plot, and fascinating characters."—VOYA

  IRENE ADLER ADVENTURES:

  Good Night, Mr. Holmes

  The Adventuress * (formerly Good Morning, Irene)

  A Soul of Steel * (formerly (Irene at Large)

  Another Scandal in Bohemia * (formerly Irene’s Last Waltz)

  Chapel Noir

  Castle Rouge

  Femme Fatale

  Spider Dance

  SHORTER FICTION

  The Private Wife of Sherlock Holmes

  *These are revised editions

  THE ADVENTURESS

  A novel of suspense featuring Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes

  by

  CAROLE NELSON DOUGLAS

  www.carolenelsondouglas.com

  AUTHOR’S NOTE: This eBook contains minor material not in the original hardcover and paperback editions of this novel. The original title, Good Morning, Irene, was changed because another publisher started using confusingly similar titles to mine. The Adventuress is the fourth novel about Irene Adler, the only woman to outwit the great detective. It has never been published in eBook, so I’m delighted to be able to make it available again. (Caution: eBooks are a fluid technology; minor typos that can’t be eliminated may rarely appear.) I hope you enjoy this novel—as well as the next four novels featuring Irene Adler’s detecting career and future encounters with Sherlock Holmes, and various Adler novellas. A Reader’s Guide for discussion groups is at the end of this eBook. Thanks for your interest and support.—Carole Nelson Douglas

  Copyright

  The Adventuress

  Copyright 1991, formerly published as Good Morning, Irene

  First Kindle edition Copyright November 2012 Carole Nelson Douglas

  eBook published by Wishlist Publishing

  Proofreader: Pat Martin

  Images Copyright iStock.com

  Cover design and cameo: Jennifer Waddell Null

  Irene Adler silhouette Copyright 1990 by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Author photo by Sam Douglas

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The copying, reproduction, and distribution of this eBook via any means without permission of the author is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and refuse to participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s intellectual rights are appreciated.

  A WISHLIST B00K

  http://www.wishlistpublishing.com

  “She has a soul of steel... the face of the most beautiful of women and the mind of the most resolute of men.”

  For the late Betty Roney,

  an exquisite writer,

  and an even better friend

  CAST OF CONTINUING CHARACTERS

  IRENE ADLER: an American opera singer abroad, introduced in the first of Sir Arthur Conan’s Doyle’s sixty Sherlock Holmes stories, “A Scandal in Bohemia,” now the diva/detective protagonist of her own adventures. She just became the only woman to outwit Sherlock Holmes in the New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Good Night, Mr. Holmes

  SHERLOCK HOLMES: the London consulting detective with a global reputation for feats of deduction

  PENELOPE “NELL” HUXLEIGH: the orphaned British parson’s daughter Irene rescued from poverty in London in 1881, a former governess and “typewriter girl” who lived with Irene and worked for Godfrey before the pair married, who now resides with them in Paris

  JOHN H. WATSON, M.D.: Afghanistan war veteran, medical man and Sherlock Holmes’s sometimes roommate and frequent companion in crime-solving

  GODFREY NORTON: the dashing British barrister Irene married just before they escaped to Paris to elude Holmes and the King of Bohemia

  WILHELM GOTTSREICH SIGISMOND VON ORMSTEIN: the handsome, recently crowned King of Bohemia, who hired Sherlock Holmes to recover a photograph of Irene and the Prince together before she realized he meant her to be a mistress, not a consort. They cross swords again in Another Scandal in Bohemia (formerly Irene’s Last Waltz)

  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

  SEVEN PERCENT IS NO SOLUTION

  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 regarde
d 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 reminded 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

  LIFE AFTER DEATH & OTHER INCONVENIENCES

  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.’ ”

  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.