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

secretly for blackmail when the Eminent Personage demanded another client’s wife.”
    “And this husband would have permitted this?”
    “Mr. Holmes, Society expects this. Many men of London ’s first families have been permitting this for years. What is unusual is that Sophie objects.”
    “Bah, “Holmes barked, taking a turn on the bearskin rug before the fireplace. “Society is as much a sinkhole as Whitechapel. The problem is simple. The disc manufacturing machine’s position in the house must be discovered and turned against its operators. You need a supposed ‘client’ to trap the madam and Mr. Montague into a conversation that shows complete complicity?”
    “No, Mr. Holmes, I need a supposed client with a wife he is seeking to prostitute to the EP.”
    “I will impersonate this creature?” His sharp features curdled with distaste.
    “I have seen with my own eyes your transformation from a saintly old clergyman fainting on my doorstep to a rough groom ripe with the odors of the stable. Surely a gentleman of beastly appetites is not beyond your acting ken. I will enter the establishment disguised as a new maid and find the recording machine and also appraise the character of the brothel owner and what thugs are about the place. I suspect they’d be discreet as ever thugs could be. Yet I’d think even the Eminent Personage would be in danger of having this new toy used against him, and we can’t have that.”
    “My dear madam, I can seem at home in opium dens. I doubt a brothel will tax my powers of disguise or detection. I will impersonate less well-mannered but finer men in the meantime to discover who comes and goes at this house of assignations, and when.”
    “Agreed” I said. “Here is the address. Sophie is to be handed over tomorrow at seven P.M. before the house fills up with post-dinner custom. Shall we meet here again tomorrow in the late afternoon?”
      “In our guise of patrons, I suppose.”
    “Yes. I must hide my identity, for I am somewhat known in London .” Here I let my gaze graze the photograph of myself on the mantelpiece.
    Holmes quickly registered my gesture even as he grimaced at the sordid nature of our forthcoming investigations.
     

 
     
    IV.    A Woman of Many Parts
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~
     
    I f I were to admit at a London social gathering that I was not unfamiliar with brothels that served polite society I could expect to be stoned with tea scones at the least.
    Our age’s brothels cater to the higher classes, for doing it in the streets would indeed scare the horses, as they say, except in Whitechapel. My own investigations are often made among these very Belle Époque figures. I have seen the luxurious interiors of such places more than once, particularly in Paris , where the crass commerce of the bawdy house has been raised to a fine and expensive art.
    So my maid’s uniform, surreptitiously borrowed from the costume rooms of the Savoy Theater, whose plays boast a quantity of maids, was of finest black sateen with a frilly cap hiding my hair and beribboning my features. I only had to slip into the place’s side entrance, pop into the vast and steaming laundry room and gather a cloud of sheets into my arms.
    Maids changing sheets in a brothel are such a common backstairs sight that they are as good as invisible. Even the Mashers don’t waste their precious time swiping at a petticoat-massed maid’s backside when far more toothsome professional pursuits await mere feet away.
    The bedchambers upstairs were the usual over-upholstered array of lavish spectacle, sometimes accessorized with certain items that betrayed the future occupants less common erotic exercises. I doubt that Mr. Holmes would recognize them, but then he was amazingly well acquainted with arcane artifacts.
    One bedchamber door was locked, despite the absence of clients until early evening when the merriment began. I dropped my bed linens and whipped a white turkey-feather duster from my hidden