Another Scandal in Bohemia Read Online Free PDF

fully indignant, Nell, and therefore adequately attired to administer a dressing down.” And she marched down the hall toward the lightly laughing voices.
    Never had my duty been so painful: I must follow, witness, and pick up the pieces.
    As I scurried after her, there was no mistaking the proper door. Irene had paused, looking like a vengeful undergarment advertisement, and thrust open a door without knocking. Laughter choked and stopped.
    I rushed to follow in her footsteps before I was shut out, and skittered over the threshold to find her momentarily facing me as she had turned to shut it behind her... quite softly.
    She said not a word to me, but turned to face the women in the room. Five or six, I saw. I was too agitated to count precisely. Most sat on a pair of brocade sofas at right angles in the corner. Two, I noted with relief, were in equal dishabille to Irene, though they had not deserted their private rooms to parade in the passage as she had.
    One stood by the long mirror in a hunter’s green riding habit, her auburn hair filling a net snood beneath a jaunty riding derby.
    “Forgive the intrusion,” Irene began in a tone that asked no such thing, “but I am helpless to resist a good round of gossip, especially when I am the subject of it.”
    A worried looking woman with light brown hair spoke up. “You are m-m-mistaken, Madame—?” In the interrogative lilt, I recognized the flute, as well as a false note in her performance.
    “Norton,” the woman in green at the mirror finished for her—and for Irene. The bassoon. Her sharp-featured face wore the cold indifference of the hunter as she looked Irene up and down even more narrowly than Monsieur Worth had. She won no advantage there: Irene wore only the most exquisite underthings. Much as I disapproved of their public debut, I had to admit that Irene’s undergarments were as imposing as most women’s outerwear.
    Besides, Irene was not one to let whatever she wore put her at a social disadvantage.
    “You have the advantage of me,” Irene told the woman by the mirror, “but please do not bother to introduce yourself. That will save me the momentary effort of forgetting you. I must, however, correct your misapprehensions.”
    The woman at the mirror whirled to face us. “We need take nothing from you, including correction. Now get out.”
    “I think not... yet.” Irene smiled, her voice adding a fourth and dominant instrument to the chamber orchestra here gathered. She was the cello—rich as chocolate-brown velvet, deep and overpowering.
    She began to prowl back and forth like a wolf in deceptively frilly grandmother’s garb.
    “You suffer from certain delusions,” she announced. “I do not complain about your attacks on my cleverness. Cleverness is most effective when it is underrated. Nor do I object to your debates about my talent and my physical attractions. These qualities are often the stuff of debates, and I have rather firm opinions of your failings in these areas myself, now that I have seen you all.”
    A joint indignant sigh escaped six well-laced sets of lungs. One woman, partridge-plump with jet-black hair and rice-powder skin, half-rose.
    “We need not stay to be insulted,” she said.
    The other seated women stirred, even the unclothed ones, as a mass exodus threatened.
    “I differ,” Irene said. “You definitely must stay. I insist.”
    “Who will make us?” demanded the woman at the mirror. In her stern riding habit, she appeared most formidable. I shrank behind Irene as she stepped toward us.
    Irene snatched something off the fragile Louis XV table by the door and held it up. At first I took it for a parasol.
    “Sit!” Irene commanded the bestirring ladies on the sofa. She brandished her new accessory like a pointer—a riding crop, I saw, its base trimmed with a green plaid taffeta bow. The effect was akin to seeing an organdy bow gracing the neck of a bulldog.
    Five ladies eased back obediently with a sighing rustle