The Private Wife of Sherlock Holmes (Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes novella) Read Free

in its first debut role as a criminal accessory. The master flat disc, unlike the former wax cylinders, can be duplicated and released to interested parties and the press unless Madam Reginald gives herself to the brothel’s most celebrated client. Nasty business for a Windsor , but there was that Cleveland Street house of boys matter a few years ago involving Bertie’s suspiciously late brother, Prince Eddy. Is there no way the recording could be refuted or brushed aside?”
    “Sophie, who refuses to hear the content, has been assured by her contrite husband it would ruin him, and her. So the gramophone can be used for evil?”
    “The method of the future. I have one of the first, fresh from the American Gramophone Company. This is a forward-thinking brothel owner as well as an unscrupulous one.”
    “You have such a wonder, Mr. Holmes?” I asked, although I’d already noticed that he did. “You are indeed ahead of the times.”
    “It is for entertainment only. I have a fondness for fine music.”
    “So I am led to understand,“ I murmured. “I’m considering recording my best lieder on these miraculous rubber disks.”
    “Indeed. A classical song cycle would be a most modern marrying of medium and Meistersinger.”
    “That is a most Gilbert and Sullivan expression,” I said, laughing at his able and complimentary phrase. “May I see it?”
    “See what? Gilbert and Sullivan? Only at the Savoy .”
    “Your gramophone.”
    I had not seen much of Mr. Holmes and less of him in person, for on two of those occasions he was in disguise, but there was no disguising his awkwardness now.
    “Ah, my dear madam, my dear Mrs. Norton, the gramophone is . . . in here.” He moved to the door from which he had recently emerged. It was his bedchamber.
    My faithful spinster companion, Nell Huxleigh, would have been scalped by a Red Indian before entering any single man’s bedchamber and especially her arch enemy’s. A married woman has certain advantages. I swept inside, my silken skirt hems rustling over a threshold I would wager no woman but Mrs. Hudson had ever crossed.
    This narrow room was easily surveyed. A window overlooked the street. The tidy space contained a single bed made up with military neatness and a table holding the gramophone at the bed’s foot with a large metal box next to it. A door opposite the window led to the back stairwell. The sitting room fireplace provided a hearth and mantel here on the other side of the wall. A series of framed men’s photographs marched down the opposite wall, too many to be relatives or friends.
    “A rogue’s gallery of criminals guards your sleep?” I asked over my shoulder.
    He stepped past me to quickly indicate the machine in question, with its hearing trumpet-styled speaker attached to the stylus arm. The round flat disk was at the trumpet’s rear and a small hand crank was at the front.
    As Mr. Holmes turned the crank, clear musical strains filled the modest room.
    “ La B elle Hélèn e from the Offenbach operetta,” I exclaimed.
    “Only instruments so far, no voice yet. This form would suit your lyric mezzo.”
    Before I could answer, he abruptly stopped the music and led me from the chamber. “But we have shabbier business at hand. Like all modern inventions, the gramophone can be put to celestial use or serve as a vehicle for humanity’s worst criminal impulses.”
    “From what the furious Reginald has admitted to Sophie,” I said, “the maison de rendezvous he patronizes is also the Eminent Personage’s favorite retreat. Apparently the equipment for recording the discs was purchased from the manufacturer at great cost.”
    “Then it is a blackmail emporium.”
    “I suspect the gramophone’s recording function gets the most frequent use, for the entertainment of the guests who may wish a vivid memento of their visit to play in the privacy of their homes afterward. The madam claims to Montague that she only succumbed to using such a recording