Irene Adler: Chapel Noir Part 1

CHAPEL NOIR.

AN IRENE ADLER NOVEL.

by Carole Nelson Douglas.

For Claire Eddy, with many thanks for her eagle editorial eye, and for her scholarly approach to the art of making books.

Acknowledgments.

The author owes much to the invaluable a.s.sistance of Delphine Kresge-Cingal, a professor at the University of Amiens, France, and her a.s.sociate, Thierry Melan, founder of a French Sherlockian research organization, the Centre de Recherches Holmesiennes et Victoriennes (http://www.crhv.org).

Thanks to the modern wonders of e-mail and the World Wide Web, both sources researched Paris both then and now, forwarding images of vintage Paris street maps and scenes.

Delphine also read the novel in ma.n.u.script, offering encouragement, research information, and explaining the fine points of French language and usage.

Where these have not been followed, it is due to English usage traditions with French words, or because the author needed to take a little literary license with the facts in what is ultimately a work of fiction.

Delphine and Thierry were tireless detectives on the trail of particular street names and facts, and performed tenaciously enough to impress Sherlock Holmes himself.

I also thank them for an honorary members.h.i.+p in the Centre de Recherches Holmesiennes et Victoriennes. I'm very glad that, at the end of Good Night, Mr. Holmes, I moved Irene Adler from London to Paris, where she has been so welcomed, and where her books are being reprinted.

Also most helpful were Barbara Peters of The Poisoned Pen bookstore in Scottsdale, Arizona, and "Ripperologist" August Paul Alesky Jr., of Centuries & Sleuths Bookstore in Forest Park, Illinois. I thank them both profoundly.

-Carole Nelson Douglas.

. . . she has a soul of steel. The face of the most beautiful of women and the mind of the most resolute of men.

-THE KING OF BOHEMIA, "A SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA"

Editor's Note.

The release of this volume is extremely satisfying. Discreet chiding in academic circles has for some time labeled me an outlaw editor. My "crime"? Allowing several years to pa.s.s before presenting this fifth installment of the Penelope Huxleigh diaries, which record the life of the only woman to outwit Sherlock Holmes, the late Irene Adler of revered and enduring memory. Even my publisher and the public have joined in the general clamor for more.

Rumors abound that the publication delay proves that the content of all the Huxleigh diaries is confabulated, that I am simply slow in carrying on the masquerade.

As is usual with clamor and rumors, nothing could be farther from the facts. The reason for delay is the astounding nature of the following testaments that I have spent so many years verifying.

In addition, I encountered among the Huxleigh material yet another doc.u.ment from a completely, shall I say, alien source? This yellow-bound journal or casebook apparently had been seized, or perhaps, more innocently, had fallen into the hands of the princ.i.p.als mentioned in the diary. It was written in a language other than English so I had to find a circ.u.mspect translator familiar with nineteenth-century usages who was willing to sign a letter of utter silence on the source and contents of this account.

Let my critics know that I am working feverishly to complete work on the next and companion volume even as this one goes forth to meet its public.

-Fiona Witherspoon, Ph.D., A.I.A.*

April 2000.

* Advocates of Irene Adler.

Cast of Continuing Characters.

Irene Adler Norton: an American abroad and a diva/detective who is the only woman to outwit Sherlock Holmes in "A Scandal in Bohemia," reintroduced as the protagonist of her own adventures in the novel, Good Night, Mr. Holmes Sherlock Holmes: the London consulting detective with a global reputation for feats of deduction Wilhelm Gottsreich Sigismond von Ormstein, King of Bohemia: the Crown Prince who courted Irene years before, then feared she might disrupt his forthcoming royal marriage. He hired Sherlock Holmes to recover a photograph of Irene and the Prince together, but she escaped, promising never to use the photo against the King. They crossed swords again in Another Scandal in Bohemia (formerly Irene's Last Waltz) G.o.dfrey 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 "typewriter girl" who lived with Irene and worked for G.o.dfrey before the pair were married, and who now resides with them in Paris Quentin Stanhope: the uncle of Nell's former charges when she worked as a London governess; now a British agent in eastern Europe and the Mideast, he reappeared in A Soul of Steel (formerly Irene at Large) John H. Watson, MD.: British medical man and Sherlock Holmes's sometimes roommate and frequent companion in crime-solving Inspector Francois le Villard: a Paris detective and admirer of the English detective who has translated Holmes's monographs into French and worked with Irene Adler Norton in The Adventuress (formerly Good Morning, Irene) Baron Alphonse de Rothschild, head of the international banking family's most powerful branch and of the finest intelligence network in Europe, frequent employer of Irene, G.o.dfrey, and Nell in various capacities, especially in Another Scandal in Bohemia.

Chapel Noir.

Prelude.

Little gleams of light . . . seem to come from tiny hut windows in the forest. "Driver, can't we stop a minute at one of those huts, where the lights are?" "Lights! They're wolves."

-K. MARSDEN.

FROM A YELLOW BOOK.

He is hungry tonight.

He came home, such as it is, exhausted, confused, clad in a rough s.h.i.+rt other than he had worn on leaving. I insisted he wash his hands. (This is one habit he resists). The wash water swirled with a pink, pulpy substance he could not explain.

He is a wanderer, as am I. Homeless and free, like a wolf in the woods, a hawk in the air.

Sometimes I think he is a G.o.d and I am a devil.

Sometimes he is a devil and I am a G.o.d.

Which will win, good or evil?

Who will win, G.o.d or Devil?

I love this awkward language that yet plays a bit of unholy fun: subtract an "o" from "good" and you have a G.o.d. Subtract a "d" from "good," add it to "evil," and you have a devil.

Another game of words: an Englishman, surely one of G.o.d's most contradictory creations (or the devil's) would like this. G.o.d backwards, in English of course-and to an Englishman there is no other country, no other ambition, no other arrogance-spells "dog."

So, another game of words: in the place of G.o.d or devil, let us put master and beast.

So I am his master.

So he will be my beast.

And which of us is most G.o.d or devil? He, she. You, me. Good or evil? Writing in a language not one's own permits all. Living in a land not one's own excuses all. Having no G.o.d destroys the devil, so we cannot have that.

This I record, whatever b.e.s.t.i.a.lity it celebrates, whatever G.o.ds and angels fall, whatever devils triumph.

This I have chosen as my experiment. And one last question. Which is stronger, life or death?

The answer is not as obvious as all the civilized world likes to think.

Somewhere in Paris.

I often have this strange and moving dream of an unknown woman. . . .

-PAUL VERLAINE, MON ReVE FAMILIER, 1866.

FROM A JOURNAL.

Sat.u.r.day, May 18, 1889.

I must be strong and record my impressions before they fade.

Yet . . . no wonder my penmans.h.i.+p resembles the thin, palsied scrawl of a very old lady, though I am not yet twenty-five. My hand shakes despite myself, as my body s.h.i.+vers despite the snapping flames I sit so near.

I had hoped that my unconventional life thus far had prepared me to face disagreeable things, things that those who lead more circ.u.mscribed lives might call distasteful, even bizarre. Brutal. Shocking.

But this . . . where to begin?

With the beginning, I tell myself now. I take pride in not being the green girl I am taken for by the blind old eyes all around me. Buck up, my dear childish self! You are a mistress of deceit, and besides, the world will need to know the truth. Someday.

How odd it is that when one is a.s.saulted by the unendurable that the mind fastens on the irrelevant.

So I stood alone and undiscovered on that horrible threshold and elected to notice that the center of the chamber was occupied by the most bizarre piece of furniture I had ever seen. A sort of barber's chair by way of Versailles.

Barber's chair. The phrase puts me in mind of Sweeney Todd, the murderous "demon" barber of Fleet Street in London, the city which I last visited before this one.

And, of course, thoughts of the barbarous Sweeney Todd made the rivulets of drying blood encrusting the chair's brocade into something more than . . . distant and gruesome embroidery.

Having forced my mind to admit what my eyes had already seen and repudiated by looking elsewhere, I forced my gaze to the figures that occupied the b.l.o.o.d.y appliance.

My first thoughts are unforgettable, and so unlike me, who has seen much unpleasantness from an early age: I will not swoon.

I will not vomit.

I will not go mad.

I WILL NOT!.

Somewhere in France.

Never go to France unless you know the lingo, If you do like me, you will repent, by jingo.

-THOMAS HOOD, 1839.

A secret is a stone. You pick one up and think, Oh, this is not so heavy. And it's rather interesting, isn't it?

So you walk along carrying it for a little while. And you find it heavier. Yet you dare not just drop it anywhere, for simply anyone to find, so you walk with it for a long distance, for a long time. Then you find that you cannot let it go no matter how much you wish to. And you realize at length that it weighs the world.

We all carry secrets we have picked up almost unwittingly. Almost, but not quite unwittingly. Some are mere pebbles. Others true loadstones.

All weigh more than they are worth.

I recently have found myself weighing one of my secret stones, the heaviest I have ever carried. I turn it over, examine it, consider pa.s.sing it on to another. A secret shared has wings and becomes a confidence. And sometimes unwanted confidences can become insupportable stones for another.

And so I walk on alone.

Nothing is more soothing to the female soul than a quiet evening of needlework, if I do say so myself.

This thought came to me as I crocheted a charming cover for the tabletop bell by which we summon our maid-of-all-work, Sophie. I do not know why a bell should require a crocheted cover, save that it would keep the dust off of it. Somewhat.

Irene was reading a book, a French novel, I am afraid, on the chaise longue across the room. She would have been pleased that I thought she looked almost as decadent as Sarah Bernhardt in one of her swooning portraits.

On his perch near the antique grand piano by the window Casanova was currently torn between gnawing a half-devoured grape and his own scaly foot. (I cannot choose which is the more loathsome occupation myself.) Occasionally, the parrot would croak out a word, but we two humans managed to remain silent and engrossed in our peaceful occupations.