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Overview
Opera singer. Adventuress. American abroad. Irene Adler is all of this...and is also the only woman to ever have outwitted the great man, Sherlock Holmes.
In Carole Nelson Douglas's novel Spider Dance, Irene has finally come home after numerous adventures, not out of loyalty to her native shores but because of a baffling puzzle, and the one thing that haunts her. Irene has no real memory of her childhood and has spent most of her life creating a persona to fit her passions. When Daredevil reporter Nelly Bly lures Irene to America by hinting that she knows of Irene's parentage, Irene takes the bait and in doing so, embarks upon a pursuit of the most notorious woman of the nineteenth century.
Before the intrigue-ridden quest is over, Irene will uncover murderous international political conspiracies, lost treasure, and finally . . . the full, shocking secret of her birth.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429911450 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Tor Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2007 |
| Series: | Irene Adler Series , #8 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 464 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Carole Nelson Douglas is the author of the historical suspense series featuring Irene Adler, the only woman to ever outwit Sherlock Holmes. She is also the author of the best-selling and much loved contemporary Midnight Louie Mysteries, which are set in Las Vegas. She lives in Texas with her husband.
In addition to tales of Midnight Louie, Carole Nelson Douglas is also the author of the historical suspense series featuring Irene Adler, the only woman ever to have “outwitted” Sherlock Holmes. Douglas resides in Fort Worth, Texas.
Read an Excerpt
Spider Dance
A Novel of Suspense Featuring Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes
By Carole Nelson Douglas, Claire Eddy
Tom Doherty Associates
Copyright © 2004 Carole Nelson DouglasAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-1145-0
CHAPTER 1
Unsuitable People
* * *
I only caught a glimpse of her at the moment, but she was a lovely woman, with a face that a man might die for.
— SHERLOCK HOLMES ON IRENE ADLER, "A SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA"
New York City, August 1889
Perhaps I have presumed. I, Penelope Huxleigh, have always considered myself the sole recorder of the life and times of my friend Irene, nee Adler, now Norton. (Irene, having performed grand opera under her maiden name for some years, now uses both surnames in private life. Propriety was never a sufficiently strong argument with this American-born diva with whom I have spent almost ten — can it be? — years of my life.)
So I was taken aback to witness Irene entering the sitting room of our New York hotel, her arms bearing a bundle of writing paper as if it were an infant of her recent and fond delivery. Her distinctive penmanship, exercised in eccentric green ink, galloped over the visible top page like a runaway horse.
"Is this the 'something' you said you had for the post?" I asked, setting aside my own handiwork, a petit point bellpull. There was no use for such a thing in a hotel, but I hoped that we would not forever dwell in a hotel, although it seemed as though we had already.
She regarded her foolscap progeny's bulky form as if seeing it clearly for the first time.
"I suppose this is more in the way of a parcel than a letter, but I had so much to tell, and even as many cables as I send Godfrey about our American adventures can barely scratch the surface."
She sat to straighten the unmannerly sheets on her lap. "Godfrey must be half-mad by now, languishing in the dully bucolic Bavarian countryside. I'm sure he'll welcome this more thorough report on our recent investigations in America."
"Godfrey would welcome reading the London city charter from your hand, but you can't possibly have told him about all of the unsuitable people we have met here in New York."
"Er, which unsuitable people? I'm sure, Nell, you could name a good many, but how am I to acquaint Godfrey with the outcome of our quest if I do not mention Salamandra, or Professor Marvel, or the Pig Lady?"
"Although those are unsuitable people, which I am thankful that you recognize, I did not have them in mind."
"Oh." Irene sat back in the small tapestried chair, sinking into her combing gown of puffed white silk and sky blue ribbons as into an exceedingly comfortable and flattering cloud. "You meant to say 'Unsuitable Person.' Singular."
"Sherlock Holmes is very singular, as well as very unsuitable."
"Then you will be relieved to know that I did not mention him to Godfrey."
"Not once, in all those pages and pages of exclamation points? Don't bother to deny it, Irene. You write as if you were singing grand opera. Every paragraph is an aria, every sentence a dramatic revelation, and every word an impossibly high note."
"Do I take it that you find my writing persuasive?"
"Excessively so. And yet you have used the most uncharacteristic restraint in omitting Sherlock Holmes from the cast list! I find that even more troubling than including him."
"How so?"
Irene played the innocent as well as she portrayed the femme fatale. It struck me then that she would best serve her absent spouse by having her photograph made and sent to him, just as she appeared now.
I have never seen a woman who looked so unnervingly well in the morning, her color warm even without the light enhancement of paint, her chestnut hair flashing gold and red glints like cherry amber, her face serene as a Madonna's. Unfortunately, not many Madonnas were to be found in grand opera.
Needless to say that Irene and I were, like most longtime companions, night and day in temperament. We were also opposite in looks, although Irene insisted, in her usual optimistic moments, that I was attractive.
She was now frowning prettily and paging through her opus. "I suppose I could slip mention of Sherlock Holmes into one of these pages, if it would satisfy you, Nell."
"Me? It has nothing to do with me. And why trouble Godfrey when he is too far away to do anything about it?"
"What would Godfrey do if he were here?"
"Escort you everywhere, so you had no opportunity to consort improperly with that miserable man."
Irene smiled. "We really had very little to do with Mr. Holmes during our New York inquiries."
"No, he only appeared at the end when you had solved the unspeakable death, to drop portentous hints about your lost mother's identity ... in a graveyard, no less, and then marched off without even a word of farewell."
"Perhaps he expects to see us again," she murmured to the infant serial novel on her lap. Just loud enough so that I could hear it.
"And will he?
She looked up through her dark eyelashes, as contrite as Miss Allegra Turnpenny at age fourteen, and I was cast suddenly again in my role of stern governess.
"I hope not," Irene finally said with deep feeling, an emotion I could heartily endorse.
I allowed myself to take a breath of relief.
"When I follow someone, especially Mr. Sherlock Holmes, I would hope to be quite invisible."
* * *
I should have known that Irene would be determined to pick up the gauntlet he had tossed at our feet at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn two days earlier.
How Sherlock Holmes had been lured from London, and Irene and I from the pleasant village of Neuilly-sur-Seine near Paris, to arrive at this place of gravestones near Manhattan Island, would require a book to detail in all its convolutions.
Nellie Bly, the crusading American newspaper reporter had been the catalyst, by tempting Irene with the notion that she had a long-lost mother whose life was being threatened. Irene, abandoned soon after birth, had always stoutly denied any sentimental need to find a delinquent mother, but add the melodrama of possible murder, and she would go anywhere. We'd discovered more than I wanted to know about Irene's childhood years, and a truly appalling candidate for the role of Irene's mother.
So Irene and I culminated our investigations with a visit to the burial site of "the wickedest woman in New York," or so the long-dead creature had been called more than a decade earlier, in 1877 on the occasion of her shocking demise. This pseudonymously named Madame Restell (she was an Englishwoman born, can you imagine!) had ministered to "women's problems," for decades, even to the point of forestalling births. Some considered this an abomination, others a boon. It was not precisely illegal in Madame Restell's day, and the woman had become conspicuously wealthy, even building a grand mansion on Fifth Avenue where her clients would come to a side door in the dark of night. That some of them came from the surrounding mansions protected the Restell enterprise for decades. She also offered the same services to poor women at far less costly rates. Her clients regarded her as a savior. Her detractors considered her a devil. Charged by a morals crusader named Comstock, she had supposedly cut her own throat with a butcher knife on the eve of her sentencing, adding the sin of suicide to any roster of wrongdoing she would have to answer for before the Final Bar.
Some question remained whether this lost soul had been the "Woman in Black," who had apparently abandoned Irene at an early age to the care of the most freakish assemblage of theatrical folk I had ever seen, onstage or off.
We had contemplated that very fact as we gazed at the monument for what might be Irene's mother. I sincerely hoped not.
Then who should appear but Sherlock Holmes in top hat and city garb, quite appropriate for the cemetery, actually, and the sober act of visiting the dead. He led us to another hill in the vast and picturesque park and to a small headstone that bore the very common name of Eliza Gilbert. Mrs. Eliza Gilbert, I noted to my great ease of mind.
And there he had left us with the unspoken implication that this unknown woman was more likely to be Irene's mother than "the wickedest woman in New York." I was foolishly relieved. At the time.
"How would he know?" I demanded as I unpinned my hat when we had returned to the Astor House Hotel on Broadway.
"Apparently he does know, and knows more than I do. Than we do. I do not for a moment believe that Sherlock Holmes is in New York City in answer to Nellie Bly's summons. He has business of his own here. The fact that I had come here on the thin trail of a mother who disowned me, and who might be in danger of death, according to our daredevil reporter friend, meant nothing but a moment's mental diversion for Sherlock Holmes. Yet he insists on dogging my movements."
"Perhaps because you pursue these inquiries."
"How would he know, or suspect, who the Woman in Black was? He must have found clues here, for neither of us had the least interest in her until Nellie Bly's cables drew us both across the Atlantic."
"And we shall have to cross that horrible, heaving body of water to return home to Paris again! I do not believe I can stomach that."
"Poor girl." Irene patted my hand. "You didn't stomach it at all on the voyage over."
"A week of terror and distress. I would almost volunteer to remain in this savage land rather than return by sea."
"You cannot fly, Nell. And walking on water is a prerogative of the Lord you would not wish to usurp. But fear not. We will stay on until we solve the riddle of Eliza Gilbert, and by then you may have somewhat forgotten the inconveniences of the voyage."
"You have today put me between the devil and the deep blue sea, Irene, and I don't know which is the worst to contemplate."
"Then don't think about either." She bent her eyes to her pages and turned several periods into exclamation marks.
Poor Godfrey. A benighted barrister toiling away on dull legal matters in Bavaria for the Rothschild banking interests, bereft of wife and unaware that she was bent on trying to out-Sherlock Sherlock Holmes himself.
Brilliantly blind Irene! She was quite unaware that the cold-minded man of logic had developed an unreasonable addiction to her brains and beauty as well as cocaine and who knew what other vices?
What a bother! I would have to make sure that Irene did not dance too near the flame when she sought to turn the tables on Sherlock Holmes.
That might be just what the irritating fellow was hoping for.
CHAPTER 2Busybodies
* * *
A fair reader who confesses to an honorable admiration for the intrepid and energetic Nellie Bly The World, writes to inquire if this is the real name of that enterprising young woman. The World's Nellie Bly is, I believe, in private life, a Miss Pink Jane Elizabeth Cochrane. — TOWN TOPICS GOSSIP SHEET, AUGUST 1888
From Nellie Bly's Journal
Though they would deny it to a man, and to the death, there is no gossiping old biddy worse than a gentleman of the press.
So it was that their sly looks, and slyer chuckles, greeted me as I entered the New York World's offices that summer afternoon.
Immediately several men in my vicinity stopped hawking tobacco juice into their rank spittoons and began whistling "Nellie Bly."
Oh, I am so sick of the song that gave me my byline! Yet it does stick in the mind of the public, and that is a boon you can't buy.
I ignored their merriment and went to the desk I am given the use of. I come and go a great deal, and when I am off on one of my stunt impersonations, I am not to be found at the office for days or even weeks.
"Don't get too settled, Nellie," Walters the sports columnist finally advised me for the room at large. "You'll be in Pulitzer's office soon enough."
Now, that was meant to strike fear into me. I confess the brave crimson feather on my hat might have quivered a bit. Our new owner was a most demanding editor. But ambition is a close friend of mine also, and I had determined to drive Bessie Bramble and Nell Nelson and all my rival sisters of the press from the front pages of this teeming city and the entire eastern seaboard.
I was even now working on a most scandalous, shocking, and sad story, an outgrowth of my recent frustrating sojourn with my expatriate countrywoman, Irene Adler Norton. In trying to extract the secret of her American past, I had ended up finding mysterious deaths among a forgotten group of variety performers. Hardly front page material. If only I were free to reveal the indomitable Irene's discoveries about the identity of Jack the Ripper ... but I was bound and gagged on that account, by some of the crowned heads of Europe, no less.
Ah, well. There is always another sensation somewhere.
My current investigation, for one, should shake New York society to its roots.
So I sat at the desk, writing on lined paper until the threatened summons from Mr. Pulitzer should arrive, if it did.
I regarded my colleagues from under what I knew to be a particularly winsome hat, sapphire blue velvet with one large crimson ostrich plume rampant among the flock of smaller dove gray feathers.
Most of my jocular persecutors were almost twice my age of twenty-four. "I'd relish talking to Mr. Pulitzer," I said to no one in particular. "I've got a very keen story in the works."
Their unkempt brows knit below their balding heads as some twiddled their thumbs over swelling waistcoats dotted with lunches past. They tolerated my presence as an unnatural wonder, and were sometimes quite kind, and sometimes quite cutting. I weathered whatever way their winds blew. Elizabeth Jane Cochrane had learned to speak up for herself against a brutal and drunken stepfather at an early age. Speaking up for myself had made me into a daredevil reporter.
I heard an office door crack open as the murmur of masculine voices oozed from the editor's offices.
Broadhurst, the drama critic who came into the office as seldom as I did, took pity on me. "It's not Pulitzer'll be wanting to talk to you, Nellie. It's some Brit toff."
Well! There were, of course, no mirrors in the totally masculine New York World offices, but I did reach up to make sure my hat was properly anchored by the foot-long pin festooned with a glass-bead butterfly.
I believe a woman should be attractively dressed, whatever her role in life.
And ... Quentin Stanhope looked a man who could appreciate that fact, despite poor stumbling Nell's blissful ignorance of such things, and despite being my least favored nationality, English. No doubt it was because Mr. Stanhope was a renegade Englishman who had gone native in the world's most exotic corners. My. How our reticent Miss Nell Huxleigh would fret to know that Quentin had called upon me at the New York World.
I heard the usual small talk of farewell, then firm footsteps approaching me across the wooden floors layered in newsprint, a concession to my long skirts, so they should not sweep up trails of tobacco juice that had missed the spittoons. Newsmen were no different from the grubby newsboys hawking on the street corners: they reveled in the mischief of always looking and speaking too rudely for church.
I turned, for I prefer to confront rather than to be confronted.
Gracious! My visitor was not the dashing Quentin Stanhope. He was another sort of Englishman entirely, one most unworthy of my new hat, and one hardly in my good graces.
"Good day ... Miss Bly?" Sherlock Holmes towered over me like some character from Dickens, quirking his head to the side in a habitual inquisitive gesture.
"That will do nicely," I said, for few people knew my real name was Elizabeth Cochrane, even less that I had been called "Pink" from childhood.
"Mr. Pulitzer agreed that you might be helpful to me."
So it was a conspiracy. "Pull up a chair. Most of us come and go, so any open desk or seat is fair game. Nothing 'drawing room' about a newspaper office."
He immediately turned to claim a golden oak armchair, not upholstered but still one of the more substantial, and heavy, chairs about the place.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Spider Dance by Carole Nelson Douglas, Claire Eddy. Copyright © 2004 Carole Nelson Douglas. Excerpted by permission of Tom Doherty Associates.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Prelude: Memoirs of a Dangerous Woman: Exile 1847,1. Unsuitable People,
2. Busybodies,
3. A Pocket Full of Death,
4. Clothes that Make the Woman,
5. A Bloody Game,
6. Together Again,
7. Millionaire or Mouse?,
8. Family Mystery,
9. Clearing the Table,
10. Speaking Volumes,
11. Raiding the Morgue, Act I,
12. Raiding the Morgue, Act II,
Memoirs of a Dangerous Woman: Countess of Landsfeld,
13. Tea and Treachery,
14. Taking the Fifth,
15. The Purloined Paper,
16. Imposter Mother,
Memoirs of a Dangerous Woman: Panama Passage,
17. House Alert,
18. Spiderwebs,
19. A Bookish Sortie,
20. Spider Dancer,
Memoirs of a Dangerous Woman: California Dreaming,
21. Pottering About,
22. An American Atrocity,
23. A Changed Woman,
24. Missed Fortune,
25. A Footnote to a Foolish Time,
26. The Last of Lola Montez,
Memoirs of a Dangerous Woman: Motherhood,
27. Untold Tales,
28. Ungovernable,
29. Lotta and Lollita,
Memoirs of a Dangerous Woman: Grass Valley,
30. Shadows of Lola,
31. The Dockside,
32. Helter-Shelter,
33. Dining at Delmonico's,
34. What the Nursemaid Saw,
35. Paying Tribute to Venus,
36. And Baby Makes Three,
37. Mother Hubbard's Cupboard,
Memoirs of a Dangerous Woman: Fields of Gold,
38. Forgery Afoot,
39. Taken by ...,
40. Shaken by ...,
41. Taken by Storm ...,
42. Taken by Surprise ...,
Memoirs of a Dangerous Woman: The Ultramontanes ...,
43. Holmes Again,
44. Babes in Arms,
45. A Flock of Fathers,
46. Rescue Party,
47. The Governess's Tale,
48. What the Gymnasium Revealed,
49. In the Pinkerton,
50. Sacrificial Goatee,
51. Abbot Noir Redux,
52. Tall, Dark, and Holmes?,
53. Sulphur and Smoke,
54. Shocking Connections,
55. Of Commodores and Queens,
56. The Bartered Baby,
57. The Belmont Stakes,
58. Family Plot,
59. No Vault of Mine,
60. Cryptic Matters,
61. A Fond and Frightening Farewell,
62. Leaving Lady Liberty,
Coda: Sex, Lies, and Obfuscation,