The Memoirs of Irene Adler: The Irene Adler Trilogy Read Online Free PDF Page A

please tell us everything you know.’
    ‘I was so much hoping ... you see, I do not know anything for sure. What I told you ... you must pardon me for misleading you ... they were just suspicions, rumours. I must own that I lied when I said that he comes home drunk. Fact is he’s quite abstemious,’ she added after looking away. ‘I’m afraid I made it all up to ... to ...’ she was unable to finish the sentence.
    ‘Oh!’ I said, ‘but he beats you, you said no man was crueller.’ Rosa looked at me defiantly.
    ‘Mr Lernière, sir, one does not have to lift a finger to crush someone. My husband does it with his looks, with his sneer, with his words. Oh, if only you knew the power of words, sir. The hurt that they cause stings more than the whip. They penetrate your soul and eat into you to the extent that you begin to doubt your humanity’ She was speaking with such feeling that although to begin with I was angry with her for misleading me, I readily understood what made her tell those lies. With genuine tears she told me a tale of unhappiness, the like of which I have rarely heard.
    The judge only married her to have someone to look after his two children after his wife died.
    ‘I am sure she killed herself,’ said Rosa without giving any evidence for this
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. ‘He drove her to self-immolation. He must have.’
    Rosa’s father, Arthur Feathers, had been a junior clerk in some second-rate chambers and the prospect of marrying his daughter to judiciary royalty had made him force her to accept this man whose very sight she found repulsive. No, she did not mean that he was ugly, she said, but that he is just the sort of man you want to enter your room in the middle of a heatwave, she said. I did not follow.
    ‘I mean the moment he walks into a room the temperature drops by a good few degrees.’ I could not help smiling. He was sarcastic and mocked her all the time. He loved the boy Maurice and had no time for little Emmeline. Rosa had done everything in her power to make the children happy. She was pleased to say that she had established the most excellent rapport with them. No, she did not claim to be a second mother to them. She had tried but it had not worked. Instead, she concentratedon being a good friend and teacher and that worked better. When the divorce comes through she knows that she will miss them.
    Rosa Feathers had studied very hard to earn her Teaching Certificate. The limit of her ambition had always been to become a teacher. Marriage was never something she contemplated. She never understood the other girls at school or Training College who were always casting furtive glances in the direction of the boys, whispering remarks about how good-looking they were. ‘I was very much the exception’, she claimed. ‘I and Ursula Verdi. The two of us, we could never understand.’
    ‘Oh yes, you said you were hoping that a divorce settlement from your husband would go towards the creation of your own nursery school, to be run by you and Miss Verdi, am I right?’ I asked. She nodded and explained that they had already seen a house on Primrose Hill which seemed ideal for the purpose, with a room upstairs for each of them and ample space on the ground floor, as well as a play area in the garden.
    ‘You and Miss Verdi would then live together?’ I asked innocently, but Rosa Selbow’s vehement protest took me by surprise.
    ‘Sir, I’ll have you know that this is England, not France.’ She looked at me with ill-disguised hostility. ‘We were both brought up as devout Christians and I swear that we have never indulged in anything like like... eh...like you seem to be...to be...’ I did not point out that I had not suggested anything. ‘And I swear,’ she went on, ‘that if we do plan to share a house, it is purely on practical grounds. We’ve been friends for years, I mean we’re both ... we will both be spinsters without family, and in need of a roof, and as we happen—’
    ‘Mrs