The Adventuress (v5) Read online

  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

  FALSE PRETENSES

  “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 be
neath 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 time 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.”

  “She would do it again, a thousand times!” said I, eager to reassure Godfrey that Irene’s restlessness owed nothing to her domestic state. “If only—”

  “Say it, Nell. You know that I rely upon you for the truth.”

  I blushed. “I am not convinced that performing is a proper avenue for Irene just yet. The Paris theater bristles with petty jealousies and corruption, even more so than ours at home. A respectable married woman—”

  “I thought Irene had served notice that she would never be ‘a respectable married woman’.”

  “Surely she did not warn you so also?”

  “But she did, and I quite approve. Respectability often cloaks the ugliness of hypocrisy, Nell. If Irene is free to be herself, she will earn the respect of those whose opinions really matter.”

  “Then perhaps you will not find my next suggestion out of order.”

  “Which is?”

  “That you keep an eye open among your new associations for some small assistance that Irene can give you, in her old way of... looking into... matters.”

  “You mean that I should find her work as an inquiry agent? Not a bad notion, Nell, although the kind of law that is practiced across borders and language barriers is tedious, unexciting stuff. Land and coin transactions, titles, inheritances. A missing heir is the tastiest bone I’m likely to turn up. Tame work, after Irene has unearthed an executed queen’s diamond girdle and escaped a vengeful king.”

  “Still, it would not hurt to find something to occupy her.”

  “You amaze me, Nell.” Godfrey finished his sugarless tea without complaint. “I thought you disapproved of Irene’s investigative ways.”

  “There is much I disapprove of and cannot change,” I replied. “I disapprove of idleness more, for therein lie the seeds of mischief.”

  “Perhaps Sarah Bernhardt will draw her into a tangle,” he mused. “Irene is as curious as a cat; she cannot resist a locked door or a buried body.”

  I could not help glancing at Lucifer, whose cream- dotted whiskers were disappearing beneath the tea table.

  Then Irene came in, boot-heels rapping the slate hall floor, cheeks pinked by the evening air. A small, dark cigarette was clasped between her pale lips. She cast herself into a chair, her trousered legs stretched to the fire that Sophie had lit earlier.

  “What a frolic!” she began, regaling us with chapter and verse of her excursion with Sarah Bernhardt to the cafés. The recital took some minutes, only ending when Irene rose to mimic the needle-thin Sarah lounging among the dandies, and herself accosting an acerbic wit who had challenged her to a duel for the crime of topping his witticisms.

  “A duel! That is going too far,” I said weakly.

  Irene flourished her cane like a sword. “What an experience for an actress! We women are never allowed to execute—” Irene lunged fiercely with her blade at the fireplace poker—“the adventurous parts, not even in operatic trouser roles. Sarah could be my second. Don’t worry, Nell, these boulevard wits are great cowards; one cannot sit about and drink absinthe all day and cast bon mots into the air like seed to pigeons and still have any sang-froid left for duels.”

  Irene lounged again on the chair. “But duels are not my interest, and I fear that these boulevard wits shan’t be for long, either—shallow, vain, foolish souls whose monocles magnify their own images rather than the world around them.”

  She crossed a leg to reveal pale spats. “Well, Godfrey, what did you do today?”

  “I didn’t see enough of you,” he answered promptly. Irene laughed and ran her fingers through her loosened waves of hair. Their eyes feasted on each other with such sudden intensity that I excused myself and retired to the music room.

  At dinner an hour and a half later, Irene shone like a diva in one of her bare-shouldered Paris gowns. Her cheeks were flushed and her mood mellow, an effect I attributed less to her hours in the public company of Sarah Bernhardt and more to a private hour with Godfrey Norton, thank God

  Chapter Three

  WHAT THE FISHERMEN FOUND

  If as showy a hothouse bloom as Irene Adler, now Madame Norton, suffered the pangs of transplantation, a shy violet such as myself underwent its own quiet attack of wilt.

  I had not felt so displaced since I had become suddenly unemployed in London in 1881. The green girl whom Irene found faint from hunger and anxiety outside Wilson’s Tea Room and swept under her brown and copper faille wing had matured into an independent woman who had supported herself as a typist for the barristers of the Inner Temple—until now.

  Although Irene insisted that the proceeds from selling Marie Antoinette’s Zone of Diamonds to Charles Lewis Tiffany be divided three ways, Godfrey and I knew that all of the money was rightfully hers. Godfrey at least had a claim through his late, unlamented father’s original possession of the jewels. John “Black Jack” Norton had been a scoundrel even his wife and son had disowned), if not by marriage to Irene, matters that neither of them would consider relevant.

  I had no claim except Irene’s generosity, and I was ever an ill recipient of charity. So I chafed at my idle state, but I could not soon repair it. Although I wrote and read French, I spoke far less Frenchily than the raucous Casanova, whose Parisian accent embellished scurrilous lines of Baudelaire.

  A typist who requires a translator that she may function is no boon.

  I felt as stranded in Ile-de-France as I had been on London’s teeming streets seven years earlier, dazed by foreign si
ghts and sounds, dreadfully afraid that I was somehow being found wanting again.

  Friendship had bonded me to Irene—that, and the notion that I was of some use to her. Now I had a rival even in that role, a red-haired broomstick of an actress who cast her sinuous coils around admirers like one of the gigantic parlor snakes she kept in her exotic rooms on Boulevard Pereire.

  I mentioned none of these fears to Irene or Godfrey. Spinsters grow used to feeling redundant, I suspect, and to saying nothing.

  Yet I hoped that Irene’s infatuation with Sarah Bernhardt would fade. They were too much alike; Madame Sarah’s erratic flame would ever vie with Irene’s steadier radiance.

  “You have been quite as confined to quarters of late as Casanova,” Irene observed one morning as we lingered over breakfast. Godfrey had left for the day.

  “There’s not much occasion for an outing in Neuilly,” said I.

  “But there is all Paris!” Irene’s sweeping gesture threatened to overturn her teacup, filled with vile black coffee in the American fashion. Now that she had means, I had discovered that small cigars and cigarettes were not Irene’s only vice.

  “Paris is a day’s expedition, and I do not care to risk myself or my French in such a frenetic capital.”

  “Then we shall bring Casanova as translator.” Irene rose to feed that devouring beak the last of her croissant.

  “Gracious, no! Should a Frenchwoman overhear his vile doggerel—”

  “She would recite it along with the bird. Paris is not the bland, boiled-shirtfront city that London is. Paris is fresh, inventive, sophisticated—”

  “Dissolute,” I finished.

  “Daring,” Irene said in reproof. Her eyes sparkled a challenge. “Where would you like to go in Paris? Name a destination and it is yours.”