SPIDER DANCE.

by Carole Nelson Douglas.

For the many loyal readers who've asked for, supported, and enjoyed the further adventures of Irene Adler and company.

To all the men and women of every land who are not afraid of themselves, who trust so much in their own souls that they dare to stand up in the might of their own individuality to meet the tidal currents of the world.

-DEDICATION TO THE ARTS OF BEAUTY.

I would give a great deal to know what inevitable stages of incident produced the likes of Irene Adler. Show me a method of forming more women so, and I would show more interest in women.

-SHERLOCK HOLMES, GOOD NIGHT, MR. HOLMES.

CAROLE NELSON DOUGLAS.

Cast of Continuing Characters.

Irene Adler Norton: an American abroad who outwitted the King of Bohemia and Sherlock Holmes in the Conan Doyle story, "A Scandal in Bohemia," reintroduced as the diva-turned-detective protagonist of her own adventures in the novel, Good Night, Mr. Holmes Sherlock Holmes: the London consulting detective building a global reputation for feats of deduction John H. Watson, M.D.: British medical man and Sherlock Holmes's sometime roommate and frequent companion in crime solving Godfrey Norton: the British barrister who married Irene just before they escaped to Paris to elude Holmes and the King Penelope "Nell" Huxleigh: the orphaned British parson's daughter Irene rescued from poverty in London in 1881; a former governess and "type-writer girl" who lived with Irene and worked for Godfrey before the two met and married, and who now resides with them in Paris Quentin Stanhope: the uncle of Nell's former charges when she was a London governess; now a British agent in Eastern Europe and the Mideast Nellie Bly, aka Pink: the journalistic pseudonym and family nickname of Elizabeth Jane Cochrane, involved in the Continental pursuit of Jack the Ripper in Chapel Noir and Castle Rouge; a young American woman with a nose for the sensational and possessed of her own agenda Baron Alphonse de Rothschild: head of the international banking family's most powerful French branch and of the finest intelligence network in Europe, frequent employer of Irene, Godfrey, and Nell in various capacities, especially in Another Scandal in Bohemia

Portrait of an Adventuress.

[She] came . . . one day, in the full zenith of her evil fame, bound for California. A good-looking, bold woman with fine, bad eyes, and a determined bearing, dressing ostentatiously in perfect male attire with shirt-collar turned down over a velvet-lapeled coat, rich worked shirt-front, black hat, French unmentionables, and natty polished boots with spurs. She carried in her hand a handsome riding crop, which she could use as well in the streets of Cruces as in the towns of Europe; for an impertinent American, presuming, perhaps not unnaturally, upon her reputation, laid hold jestingly of the tails of her long coat, and, as a lesson, received a cut across his face that must have marked him for some days. I did not wait to see the row that followed, and was glad when the wretched woman rode off the following morning.

-FROM THE MEMOIRS OF MRS. SEACOLE.

AN ENGLISH LADY, 1851.

I was never in Cruces and had gone by way of Nicaragua.

-THE NOTORIOUS ADVENTURESS IN QUESTION.

PRELUDE: MEMOIRS OF A DANGEROUS WOMAN.

Exile 1847.

Recognize the abyss that you are digging beneath your feet,

an abyss that will swallow you up together with the monarchy

if you persist in the direction you have taken.

-BARON DE LOS VALLES OF SPAIN.

They drag me in from the balcony, kicking and screaming and brandishing my pistol. They prattle of danger from the mob outside, but I will face them off, one by one or by the tens and hundreds and thousands. I've always been more of a danger to myself than anyone else could ever be to me.

I have said that only twice is the life of a woman not intolerably dangerous: before she is old enough to bear a child and after she is too old to bear a child.

My life has been intolerably dangerous, I still reside in that danger zone, and I have given back what opposition I have gotten in full measure.

Of course, dangers depend. They are not always murderous mobs. They may be runaway horses, or runaway men . . . evil tongues or tongues that don't wag about a woman at all. (In fine, I would rather be the victim of calumny than of indifference.) Dangers can be unwanted children, or, as equally, wanted children. And equally dangerous are faithless lovers and faithful husbands.

A woman is thought to have no will of her own. I have spent my life disputing that assumption. I have been famous, and once a woman dares to become so, she is then labeled infamous. I have struggled to have something, and came to want for nothing. Then lost it, found it, lost it again.

The one thing I have not done is give in. I give no quarter, nor do I take it.

This may be why I have been a wanderer, often persecuted and reviled. Still, I can't regret anything, even now as I lay dying, virtually alone, and not quite penniless, but come down a great deal in the world.

Once I could have been a queen and an impossibly rich woman. Certainly I flouted convention and conventional religion. I had ideals of governance for the common people, and for my ideals I was hounded by an ancient conspiracy that wishes to keep all power in the hands of a few old and hidden men. Pharisees in the temple! Pretending to be noble even as they scheme to amass and cheaply spend everyone else's lives and money and faith.

Now I am a supplicant at the foot of Our Lord's cross, a Magdalene despite myself. I truly regret a great deal in my life, so perhaps that sincere contrition will open the gates of paradise to me. I am weary beyond my years, and have lived to see my fabled beauty fade to a ghost in the mirror, my arms that once wielded whip and pistol like an Amazon withered with inaction. My spirit that once dared anything fades into the wispy smoke that used to wreath my head almost constantly.

On the other hand, some things I will never regret, because they were honest and true, though I know they will never be written down that way. So I sit in this barren room, writing, as I have so often done in years past, only now my words must be formed slowly and deliberately when before they came as swift and forceful as the fire and fury of a dragon's breath.

She was as wild as the wind, my younger self, and even before I reach forty or die-and that will be a race to the end-she has already been lied about on three continents. In this new land of America I will write my own ending to the tempestuous and misunderstood history the world associates with my name.

Which, of course, is not really my name.

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.