Irene Adler 08 - Spider Dance Read online

  PRAISE FOR CAROLE NELSON DOUGLAS AND IRENE ADLER

  “To do justice to this remarkable heroine and her keen perspective on the male society in which she must make her independent way, the author adopts a saucy style and a delicious sense of humor.”

  —The New York Times on Good Night, Mr. Holmes

  (a New York Times Notable Book of the Year)

  “As a Sherlockian and a Ripperologist, I found Chapel Noir as stimulating and satisfying as whiskey-and-soda and three pipes of shag on a foggy night. Brava!”

  —Loren D. Estleman, author of

  A Smile on the Face of the Tiger

  “Carole Nelson Douglas gives us a chilling crime perfectly suited to the unique talents of her inspired heroine.”

  —Jayne Ann Krentz on Chapel Noir

  “A story of spine-tingling suspense and dark intrigue . . . Just take my advice, and read it with all the lights on.”

  —Kay Hooper on Chapel Noir

  “With Chapel Noir, Carole Nelson Douglas proves she’s a master of the historical detective novel.”

  —Gayle Lynds

  “This is a sumptuous read.”

  —Romantic Times (4½ stars, Top Pick) on Castle Rouge

  “Ms. Douglas’s plot ingenuity remains fresh and amusing, and for all its fanciful turns, the action never loses its jaunty, high-heeled pace.”

  —The New York Times on Irene at Large

  “Setting herself the task of creating a heroine worthy of Sherlock Holmes, Douglas succeeds smashingly . . . readers will doff their deerstalkers.”

  —Publishers Weekly on Good Night Mr. Holmes

  By Carole Nelson Douglas from Tom Doherty Associates

  MYSTERY

  IRENE ADLER ADVENTURES

  Good Night, Mr. Holmes

  The Adventuress* (Good Morning, Irene)

  A Soul of Steel* (Irene at Large)

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

  Chapel Noir

  Femme Fatale

  Castle Rouge

  Spider Dance

  MIDNIGHT LOUIE MYSTERIES

  Catnap

  Cat in an Indigo Mood

  Pussyfoot

  Cat in a Jeweled Jumpsuit

  Cat on a Blue Monday

  Cat in a Kiwi Con

  Cat in a Crimson Haze

  Cat in a Leopard Spot

  Cat in a Diamond Dazzle

  Cat in a Midnight Choir

  Cat with an Emerald Eye

  Cat in a Neon Nightmare

  Cat in a Flamingo Fedora

  Cat in an Orange Twist

  Cat in a Golden Garland

  Cat in a Hot Pink Pursuit

  Cat on a Hyacinth Hunt

  Cat in a Quicksilver Caper

  Midnight Louie’s Pet Detectives (editor of anthology)

  Marilyn: Shades of Blonde (editor of anthology)

  HISTORICAL ROMANCE

  Amberleigh** Lady Rogue**

  Fair Wind, Fiery Star

  SCIENCE FICTION

  Probe**

  Counterprobe**

  FANTASY

  TALISWOMAN

  Cup of Clay

  Seed upon the Wind

  SWORD AND CIRCLET

  Six of Swords

  Heir of Rengarth

  Exiles of the Rynth

  Seven of Swords

  Keepers of Edanvant

  *These are revised editions

  **also mystery

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.

  Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  SPIDER DANCE

  Copyright © 2004 by Carole Nelson Douglas

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  Edited by Claire Eddy

  Maps by Darla Tagrin

  A Forge Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor.com

  Forge® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  ISBN 0-765-34595-1

  EAN 978-0-765-34595-0

  First edition: December 2004

  First mass market edition: September 2005

  Printed in the United States of America

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For the many loyal readers who’ve asked for, supported, and enjoyed the further adventures of Irene Adler and company

  Contents

  Prelude: Memoirs of a Dangerous Woman: Exile 1847

  1. Unsuitable People

  2. Busybodies

  3. A Pocket Full of Death

  4. Clothes that Make the Woman

  5. A Bloody Game

  6. Together Again

  7. Millionaire or Mouse?

  8. Family Mystery

  9. Clearing the Table

  10. Speaking Volumes

  11. Raiding the Morgue, Act I

  12. Raiding the Morgue, Act II

  Memoirs of a Dangerous Woman: Countess of Landsfeld

  13. Tea and Treachery

  14. Taking the Fifth

  15. The Purloined Paper

  16. Imposter Mother

  Memoirs of a Dangerous Woman: Panama Passage

  17. House Alert

  18. Spiderwebs

  19. A Bookish Sortie

  20. Spider Dancer

  Memoirs of a Dangerous Woman: California Dreaming

  21. Pottering About

  22. An American Atrocity

  23. A Changed Woman

  24. Missed Fortune

  25. A Footnote to a Foolish Time

  26. The Last of Lola Montez

  Memoirs of a Dangerous Woman: Motherhood

  27. Untold Tales

  28. Ungovernable

  29. Lotta and Lollita

  Memoirs of a Dangerous Woman: Grass Valley

  30. Shadows of Lola

  31. The Dockside

  32. Helter-Shelter

  33. Dining at Delmonico’s

  34. What the Nursemaid Saw

  35. Paying Tribute to Venus

  36. And Baby Makes Three

  37. Mother Hubbard’s Cupboard

  Memoirs of a Dangerous Woman: Fields of Gold

  38. Forgery Afoot

  39. Taken by . . .

  40. Shaken by . . .

  41. Taken by Storm . . .

  42. Taken by Surprise . . .

  Memoirs of a Dangerous Woman: The Ultramontanes . . .

  43. Holmes Again

  44. Babes in Arms

  45. A Flock of Fathers

  46. Rescue Party

  47. The Governess’s Tale

  48. What the Gymnasium Revealed

  49. In the Pinkerton

  50. Sacrificial Goatee

  51. Abbot Noir Redux
>
  52. Tall, Dark, and Holmes?

  53. Sulphur and Smoke

  54. Shocking Connections

  55. Of Commodores and Queens

  56. The Bartered Baby

  57. The Belmont Stakes

  58. Family Plot

  59. No Vault of Mine

  60. Cryptic Matters

  61. A Fond and Frightening Farewell

  62. Leaving Lady Liberty

  Coda: Sex, Lies, and Obfuscation

  To all the men and women

  of every land

  who are not afraid of themselves,

  who trust so much in their own souls that

  they dare to stand up in the might of their

  own individuality

  to meet the tidal currents of the world.

  —DEDICATION TO THE ARTS OF BEAUTY

  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.

  —SHERLOCK HOLMES, GOOD NIGHT, MR. HOLMES,

  CAROLE NELSON DOUGLAS

  Cast of Continuing Characters

  Irene Adler Norton: an American abroad who outwitted the King of Bohemia and Sherlock Holmes in the Conan Doyle story, “A Scandal in Bohemia,” reintroduced as the diva-turned-detective protagonist of her own adventures in the novel, Good Night, Mr. Holmes

  Sherlock Holmes: the London consulting detective building a global reputation for feats of deduction

  John H. Watson, M.D.: British medical man and Sherlock Holmes’s sometime roommate and frequent companion in crime solving

  Godfrey Norton: the British barrister who married Irene just before they escaped to Paris to elude Holmes and the King

  Penelope “Nell” Huxleigh: the orphaned British parson’s daughter Irene rescued from poverty in London in 1881; a former governess and “type-writer girl” who lived with Irene and worked for Godfrey before the two met and married, and who now resides with them in Paris

  Quentin Stanhope: the uncle of Nell’s former charges when she was a London governess; now a British agent in Eastern Europe and the Mideast

  Nellie Bly, aka Pink: the journalistic pseudonym and family nickname of Elizabeth Jane Cochrane, involved in the Continental pursuit of Jack the Ripper in Chapel Noir and Castle Rouge; a young American woman with a nose for the sensational and possessed of her own agenda

  Baron Alphonse de Rothschild: head of the international banking family’s most powerful French branch and of the finest intelligence network in Europe, frequent employer of Irene, Godfrey, and Nell in various capacities, especially in Another Scandal in Bohemia

  Portrait of an Adventuress

  [She] came . . . one day, in the full zenith of her evil fame, bound for California. A good-looking, bold woman with fine, bad eyes, and a determined bearing, dressing ostentatiously in perfect male attire with shirt-collar turned down over a velvet-lapeled coat, rich worked shirt-front, black hat, French unmentionables, and natty polished boots with spurs. She carried in her hand a handsome riding crop, which she could use as well in the streets of Cruces as in the towns of Europe; for an impertinent American, presuming, perhaps not unnaturally, upon her reputation, laid hold jestingly of the tails of her long coat, and, as a lesson, received a cut across his face that must have marked him for some days. I did not wait to see the row that followed, and was glad when the wretched woman rode off the following morning.

  —FROM THE MEMOIRS OF MRS. SEACOLE,

  AN ENGLISH LADY, 1851

  I was never in Cruces and had gone by way of Nicaragua.

  —THE NOTORIOUS ADVENTURESS IN QUESTION

  PRELUDE: MEMOIRS OF A DANGEROUS WOMAN

  Exile 1847

  Recognize the abyss that you are digging beneath your feet,

  an abyss that will swallow you up together with the monarchy

  if you persist in the direction you have taken.

  —BARON DE LOS VALLES OF SPAIN

  They drag me in from the balcony, kicking and screaming and brandishing my pistol. They prattle of danger from the mob outside, but I will face them off, one by one or by the tens and hundreds and thousands. I’ve always been more of a danger to myself than anyone else could ever be to me.

  I have said that only twice is the life of a woman not intolerably dangerous: before she is old enough to bear a child and after she is too old to bear a child.

  My life has been intolerably dangerous, I still reside in that danger zone, and I have given back what opposition I have gotten in full measure.

  Of course, dangers depend. They are not always murderous mobs. They may be runaway horses, or runaway men . . . evil tongues or tongues that don’t wag about a woman at all. (In fine, I would rather be the victim of calumny than of indifference.)

  Dangers can be unwanted children, or, as equally, wanted children. And equally dangerous are faithless lovers and faithful husbands.

  A woman is thought to have no will of her own. I have spent my life disputing that assumption. I have been famous, and once a woman dares to become so, she is then labeled infamous. I have struggled to have something, and came to want for nothing. Then lost it, found it, lost it again.

  The one thing I have not done is give in. I give no quarter, nor do I take it.

  This may be why I have been a wanderer, often persecuted and reviled. Still, I can’t regret anything, even now as I lay dying, virtually alone, and not quite penniless, but come down a great deal in the world.

  Once I could have been a queen and an impossibly rich woman. Certainly I flouted convention and conventional religion. I had ideals of governance for the common people, and for my ideals I was hounded by an ancient conspiracy that wishes to keep all power in the hands of a few old and hidden men. Pharisees in the temple! Pretending to be noble even as they scheme to amass and cheaply spend everyone else’s lives and money and faith.

  Now I am a supplicant at the foot of Our Lord’s cross, a Magdalene despite myself. I truly regret a great deal in my life, so perhaps that sincere contrition will open the gates of paradise to me. I am weary beyond my years, and have lived to see my fabled beauty fade to a ghost in the mirror, my arms that once wielded whip and pistol like an Amazon withered with inaction. My spirit that once dared anything fades into the wispy smoke that used to wreath my head almost constantly.

  On the other hand, some things I will never regret, because they were honest and true, though I know they will never be written down that way. So I sit in this barren room, writing, as I have so often done in years past, only now my words must be formed slowly and deliberately when before they came as swift and forceful as the fire and fury of a dragon’s breath.

  She was as wild as the wind, my younger self, and even before I reach forty or die—and that will be a race to the end—she has already been lied about on three continents. In this new land of America I will write my own ending to the tempestuous and misunderstood history the world associates with my name.

  Which, of course, is not really my name.

  1

  UNSUITABLE PEOPLE

  I only caught a glimpse of her at the moment, but she was

  a lovely woman, with a face that a man might die for.

  —SHERLOCK HOLMES ON IRENE ADLER, “A SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA”

  New York City, August 1889

  Perhaps I have presumed. I, Penelope Huxleigh, have always considered myself the sole recorder of the life and times of my friend Irene, nee Adler, now Norton. (Irene, having performed grand opera under her maiden name for some years, now uses both surnames in private life. Propriety was never a sufficiently strong argument with this American-born diva with whom I have spent almost ten—can it be?—years of my life.)

  So I was taken aback to witness Irene entering the sitting room of our New York hotel, her arms bearing a bundle of writing paper as if it were an infant of her recent and fond delivery. Her distinctive penmanship, exercised in eccentric green ink, galloped over the
visible top page like a runaway horse.

  “Is this the ‘something’ you said you had for the post?” I asked, setting aside my own handiwork, a petit point bellpull. There was no use for such a thing in a hotel, but I hoped that we would not forever dwell in a hotel, although it seemed as though we had already.

  She regarded her foolscap progeny’s bulky form as if seeing it clearly for the first time.

  “I suppose this is more in the way of a parcel than a letter, but I had so much to tell, and even as many cables as I send Godfrey about our American adventures can barely scratch the surface.”

  She sat to straighten the unmannerly sheets on her lap. “Godfrey must be half-mad by now, languishing in the dully bucolic Bavarian countryside. I’m sure he’ll welcome this more thorough report on our recent investigations in America.”

  “Godfrey would welcome reading the London city charter from your hand, but you can’t possibly have told him about all of the unsuitable people we have met here in New York.”

  “Er, which unsuitable people? I’m sure, Nell, you could name a good many, but how am I to acquaint Godfrey with the outcome of our quest if I do not mention Salamandra, or Professor Marvel, or the Pig Lady?”

  “Although those are unsuitable people, which I am thankful that you recognize, I did not have them in mind.”

  “Oh.” Irene sat back in the small tapestried chair, sinking into her combing gown of puffed white silk and sky blue ribbons as into an exceedingly comfortable and flattering cloud. “You meant to say ‘Unsuitable Person.’ Singular.”

  “Sherlock Holmes is very singular, as well as very unsuitable.”

  “Then you will be relieved to know that I did not mention him to Godfrey.”