A Soul of Steel (A Novel of Suspense featuring Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes) Read online

  Table of Contents

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  CAST OF CONTINUING CHARACTERS

  FOREWORD

  THE NAVAL TREATY

  READERS GUIDE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY THIS AUTHOR

  Praise for A SOUL OF STEEL

  “An absolutely ripping adventure, [with] a color and texture which will give you a vivid sense of 'being there,' and time spent with unique and immensely enjoyable people.”—ANNE PERRY, New York Times bestselling author of A SUNLESS SEA

  “Setting herself the task of creating a heroine worthy of Sherlock Holmes, Douglas succeeds smashingly. Narrated with credible Victorian style and sensibility by Penelope ‘Nell’ Huxleigh, this lively caper establishes Adler’s sleuthing skills... A truly original perspective of the one whom the great detective himself dubbed ‘the woman.’ She’s a superior woman at that: readers will doff their deerstalkers.”—Publishers Weekly

  “Douglas has made Adler a superb detective and invented a perfectly delightful—and perfectly puzzling—series of cases for her.”—The Fort Worth Press

  “Douglas has penned a delightful romp in this [third] Victorian adventure novel about the only woman Sherlock Holmes ever admired, and indeed she lives up to the honor.”—Publishers Weekly

  “A hundred years from now, readers will still be raving about the world's greatest detective, but for many the name on their lips may very well be Adler instead of Holmes.”—RT Book Reviews

  “Holmes and Irene do their most charming (if in Holmes's case, unwitting) work together.”—Kirkus Reviews

  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

  A SOUL OF STEEL

  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 title was changed because another publisher started using confusingly similar titles to mine. A Soul of Steel is the third novel about Irene Adler, the only woman to outwit the great detective, and has never been published in eBook, so I’m delighted to be able to make it available again. I hope you enjoy this novel—as well as the next five 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

  A Soul of Steel

  Copyright 1992, formerly published as Irene at Large

  First Kindle edition Copyright October 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 Copyright 2010 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 Richard Adcock, a good friend

  who knew everything about computers and writers

  and made them both work

  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, beginning with 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

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

  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 pair were married, and who now resides with them in Paris

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

  EMERSON QUENTIN STANHOPE: The dashing young uncle of Nell’s first charges as a governess, sent to war in Afghanistan and encountered again in Paris as a mysterious figure.

  WILHELM GOTTSREICH SIGISMOND VON ORMSTEIN: the recently crowned King of Bohemia. He courted Irene once, then feared this might disrupt his forthcoming royal marriage. He hired Sherlock Holmes to recover a photograph of Irene and the Prince together, but she escaped them both, promising never to use the photo against the King.

  BRAM STOKER: theatrical manager for England’s finest actor, Henry Irving; a writer of sensational stories, who will later pen the classic Dracula

  INSPECTOR FRANÇOIS 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 literary wit and man of fashion about London

  FOREWORD BY FIONA WITHERSPOON

  My previous works collated the nineteenth-century diaries of Penelope Huxleigh, a parson’s daughter, and recently discovered fragments from the supposedly fictional accounts of John H. Watson, M.D., regarding the activities of Sherlock Holmes, the world’s first consulting detective. Readers of these works will know that it violates the scholar-editor’s code to intrude into the material at hand.

  In previous volumes, I confined myself to the discreet afterword. There I merely smoothed out apparent inconsistencies between the Watson-related accounts of Sherlock Holmes so far published and new revelations from the Huxleigh diaries about the only woman admitted to have outwitted Sherlock Holmes, Irene Adler.

  Readers will also know that I have insisted from the first that Sherlock Holmes was no fictional construct, but a historic personage. Additionally, I argued that the Huxleigh diaries—with the details of Irene Adler’s life both previous and subsequent to her allegedly fictional meeting with Holmes in the story titled A Scandal in Bohemia—support my theory: Holmes was real; Irene Adler was real. Indeed, to my mind the only suspect personage in the Holmes canon is Watson. This may have been a convenient pseudonym for the actual biographer, wh
o has successfully hidden behind the “authorship” of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for a century.

  Now I have uncovered evidence of such a startling nature, an “adventure” of Sherlock Holmes (although it is actually a lost adventure of Irene Adler) that is so linked to documentable historic events that I believe no rational person can read it without admitting that Holmes is far from a figment of anyone’s imagination. In addition, this new material sheds fascinating light on a personage later to become a key figure in the Holmes saga.

  Because this evidence stems from incontestable historic events in the complex region known as “Afghanistan” only for the past century, I find it imperative to insert a modern section to preface the Huxleigh diaries and Watson fragments and to provide the needed narrative continuity. Rest assured that I have not abandoned the scholar’s code. To convey an authentically compelling tone, I have commissioned an unemployed historical novelist and former schoolmate of mine from Forth Worth, who steeped herself in the proper disciplines in order to portray the flavor of the times and the events themselves. Even the Holmes biographer (who may or may not have been Sir Arthur) on occasion used the omniscient third-person voice to depict events that none of the principals had witnessed.

  So I follow in established footsteps, but beg the reader’s pardon and patience nevertheless. Chronology is paramount to the narrative that is about to unfold, which has sinister application to the conflict in Afghanistan in our day, as well as that in the twilight of the nineteenth century.

  Fiona Witherspoon, Ph.D., F.I.A.* November 5, 1991

  *Friends of Irene Adler

  Oh, Gods! From the venom of the Cobra, the teeth of the Tiger,

  and the vengeance of the Afghan—deliver us.

  —Hindu Saying

  Chapter One

  WHEN TWO STRONG MEN...

  Near SANGBUR, AFGHANISTAN: July 25,1880

  In the very lap of Asia lies a land so fierce and desolate—if not undefended—that were the demons of every faith to collaborate in creating a Hell that would prostrate Christian, Hebrew and Moslem alike in united terror, its name would remain... Afghanistan.

  Stretching horizontally across the neck of the Indian subcontinent like a hangman’s noose, Afghanistan bridges Persia on the west and Tibet and China on the east; British India on the south; and to the north—the great outstretched Russian bearclaw.

  Searing in summer and frigid in winter, this unholy landscape huddles behind the scimitar curves of two great mountain ranges—the Himalayas and Karakorum on the east, and on the west the six hundred ridged miles of the Hindu Kush.

  Wherever men of adventure and a martial bent gather, the Hindu Kush is spoken of in awed tones. To the timid home-bound soul, it is enough to say that the phrase translates as “dead Hindu.”

  No wonder is it that neither India nor Russia has extended its borders to meet across this dread wasteland. Nor is it any wonder that in the closing decades of the nineteenth century the two great nations of Russia and Britain should nervously dart closer to armed conflict there, like two dogs fighting over the same hideous bone. Possession and advantageous position are the only prizes of what has been called the Great Game between two strong empires. The bone itself is worthless, and bitter gnawing at that.

  This is Tartary, ancient road of merchants and conquerors, the no-man’s-land separating the northern frontiers of India—Kashmir and the Kush—and the southern fringes of Russia—Tashkent and fabled Samarkand. A lonely wasteland to the unobservant eye, the arid vastness of Afghanistan supports dozens of warring tribes, united only in their devotion to freedom from foreign meddling and their willingness to wreak havoc on interlopers. The traveler, and woe to anyone foolish enough to go solitary into these bleak acres, is never as alone as he may think—or as he may be allowed to think, for a time.

  Thus, should a wheeling vulture spy a human form cast lengthwise in a notch atop a bleak ridge, he will not swoop closer to investigate unless he is especially hungry. Such culinary booty is common after the bandits have made their usual forays. Every abandoned traveler is assured of a final, grisly welcome somewhere.

  But the lone man visible only to the airborne vulture on this particular summer’s day was not lost, or mad, or abandoned. He was present for a purpose, and so was the telescopic spyglass pressed to one eye, its brass carefully darkened so no unnatural twinkle should alert any lurking marauders.

  Even a spyglass could barely penetrate the jagged profiles of distance-blued mountain ranges and the tiny camel caravan trickling down a steep incline like a broken string of amber beads. Both men and the tough, two-humped beasts native to these forbidding steppes seemed cloaked in the sere shades of the desolate region, hardly more animate than the darker patches of thorn bushes and other scrubby vegetation that punctuate the frozen waves of sand and rock.

  The caravan was too immeasurably distant to alarm the watcher, but he rolled over suddenly, aware of the vulture’s scant shadow, and turned a dark face to the blazing blue sky. Summer spread its searing, fawn-colored tent over Afghanistan and the heat was horrific, even under the billowing shade of a burnoose.

  In an instant, the man collapsed his instrument and tucked it into the leather kit bag belted at his waist beneath the flowing robes. From the bag he pulled something that glinted in the hollow of his hand, a pocket watch, which he consulted. Then he snapped shut the engraved lid and quickly put it away.

  The vulture shadow fattened without warning. The man scrambled to his haunches, stretching an arm for the Enfield rifle that lay alongside him, but caution came too late. Another robed man stood motionless below him on the ridge back, a Snider breech-loading rifle slung over one shoulder carelessly enough to be instantly available.

  “You are late,” the first man said in a language shocking amid that arid wasteland—English.

  “I forgo carrying a Burlington Arcade timepiece in Afghanistan,” the other said sardonically, moving closer. “One day all of your native dialects will not suffice to talk you out of some tight corner, Cobra.”

  “Nor will your fabled trick of padding up behind a fellow unheard always save your skin, Tiger,” the first man replied with a mirthless grin that revealed disarmingly blackened teeth.

  Tiger sat on a rock, baggy Turkish trousers ballooning around his knees. He doffed his burnoose’s hood, revealing a turban. Under those native wrappings lay a broad, intelligent brow and strong, pugnacious features that indeed boasted the ferocious jaws of a tiger—and unblinking eyes of bright, lapis blue.

  “I need that tracker’s skill,” Tiger said with harsh pride. “I lack your facility for passing among these mountain bandits as one of them. But stealth serves me as well as boldness has served you. We are both yet alive.”

  Cobra grunted. Unlike the other man, his skin had been toasted to the nut-brown color of a native, and his eyes, if a trifle hazel, seemed almost black in their swarthy setting. Yet beneath it all, and especially in conference with one of his own kind, lurked the aspect of a young English gentleman, no matter how dangerously he played at native tribesman.

  “There will be battle,” Cobra said, weary of their usual jousting. He did not like Tiger, did not trust the man, though he was an old India hand; Cobra could not say why.

  The turban nodded. “Battle, blood and dust. We will have a rare round of it in a day or two. The command underestimates the Amir’s forces, as usual. Burrows is a fool.”

  “He has not seen much action,” Cobra admitted with the unease of a young officer discussing the commander. “And Ayub has some crackerjack artillery: two elephant-drawn heavy batteries, twenty-two horse artillery batteries and eighteen mule-drawn mountain batteries, not to mention seven bullock-drawn field batteries.”

  “The lad can count!” the older man sneered in a way meant to pass as humor-at-arms. “You will soon be heading behind-lines to report all this?”

  Cobra nodded. “Not that the command much listens to me.”

  “The sash-and-sword set never puts
much store in the advice of London lads gone native like yourself. You should have stayed in the regiment and clung to your spit-and-polish.”

  “After the war it is the political chaps who advance,” Cobra put in. “And do they heed your reports any more than mine? So is your scouting done?”

  “Oh, aye, I have sashayed up the ridges and down the gullies ’til the vultures are sick of the sight of me.”

  “Better to be seen by them than by the Ghazi fanatics or the Afghan tribesmen.”

  “Or the women!” Tiger gave a mock shudder. “The Ghazis may kill everything that moves for Allah, but I would rather face one any day. At all costs, do not get wounded and let the village women have at you, boy. They have a real taste for torture, even more than the men. Better to shoot yourself.”

  “War stories.”

  Tiger smiled. His teeth were strong and yellow, like a big cat’s, leaving no question of why he had earned his nom de guerre. “War stories tend to be war truths. Remember that, and remember who told you.”

  “But you have scouted no surprises for our troops?” Cobra asked.

  “No hidden caches of elephant-drawn artillery, no. I have spent two weeks crawling around this bloody dust-laden kiln, and I should know.”

  “Odd.” Cobra got out his spyglass and swept it over the parched landscape below. “Hyena said he had seen you up north recently, in Balkh, near the Russian border.”