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

petticoat pocket. I was now a dusting maid and could go anywhere in the establishment. My plain black skirt pocket hosted a prickly bouquet of pins and picks, so I set to work on the door lock.
    Once inside I confirmed one suspicion. The “Eminent Personage” determined to claim Sophie was the usual suspect, Bertie, overstuffed Queen Victoria ’s portly and randy son and heir.
    I knew this because I gazed on a glorious piece of bordello furniture that was also kept at Paris ’s most noted house of ill repute, Le Chabanais. This custom-made gilded and brocade siège d‘amour had figured in a pair of grisly prostitute murders I investigated in Paris just after Jack the Ripper’s similar 1888 slaughters in Whitechapel.
    That Paris townhouse was a hidden jewel box lined with rooms decorated in velvet, gilt, and tiger-skin. Bertie loved its exotic Hindu Chamber and the notorious champagne bath in a copper tub. For him was kept a custom-made love chaise, the twin to this one.  
    This siège d’amour was pristine and unbloodied, a two-level reclining affair that would allow His Royal Highness to entertain two women at once, or at least in turn. The rest of the bedchamber was appointed with lavish wallpapers and a bed as draped and overstuffed as Bertie’s mama but gaudy and rich and not suitable for mourning at all.
    On exiting, I relocked the chamber door and left my sheets in a linen closet. I tripped down the heavily carpeted stairs, a mass of loomed cabbage roses, to explore the quarters of those who ran the place.
    Being a brothel madam was one of the few professions where women were preferred over men. Two or three strong house thugs were all she’d need besides a whip hand with the girls, a silver tongue with the clientele, and a greedy disposition.
    The office featured a zebrawood and ormolu desk fit for Napoleon and the same over-deluxe furnishings. It was deserted this morning. The residents slept late for obvious reasons.
    I moved into the empty “Selection Salon,” a wilderness of divans, hothouse ferns, huge silken pillows and snake and furred animal skins fit for Sarah Bernhardt’s quarters, except her animal skins were all still inhabited by the original owners.
    Here the wispily draped and corseted goods lounged to greet their purchasers. I immediately noticed the gramophone on a shawl-draped corner table. This would play music much more raucous than Mr. Holmes’s discs stored in his monkish bedchamber.
    A larger table would be needed to house a recording device. I gazed about perplexed, dusting my way around the crowded room’s parameter until I spied a wheeled tea table covered with a paisley Indian scarf. Whisking the scarf aside revealed a bottom shelf laden with crepe-sized India rubber disks, a gramophone arm and stylus with no horn attached, and other alien devices.
    This table could be topped by anything from rose petals and feather teases to riding crops and rolled into any bedchamber to capture the sounds of assignation for stimulation or blackmail. The girls could no doubt cajole scandalous confessions from the liquor-soaked and pampered customers.
    “What are you doing here, missy?” a foggy female voice demanded.
    I whirled around, seizing upon a Cockney accent in the process. “Jest moy job, m’liedy. ’Ave to ’ave all these pretty curlicues polished up proper like.”
    An opera singer who can master foreign languages in three octaves can handle British Isle dialects with a twist of her lips. It’s all in the tongue placement, grand opera or gutter speech. Here in this town house, tongue placement was also an art but not my kind of public employment.
    My interrogator was a blowsy woman of forty with an Oriental dressing gown swagged off one plump shoulder and nearly off the equally plump breast beneath it.
    “Sarah’s supposed to keep you maids out of the salon until eleven,” she said.
    I swallowed visibly. “Hit’s all so pretty here, mum. Whot a sight it must be when the