The Private Wife of Sherlock Holmes (Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes novella) Read Online Free PDF

next, but I intended to wait for Bertie and then give him a fair-sized piece of my mind. Debauchery was one thing. Forced debauchery was quite another, even for a spoiled Prince of Wales.
    A knock on the door made me raise my brows and glance at Holmes. This was beginning to feel like a French farce.
    “Enter,” Mrs. Hemphill said over her shoulder, clearly expecting an employee.
    Instead, in walked another finely attired couple Sophie and her husband!
    This was a French farce, were it not so sordid.
    Reginald Montague was a fit-looking man of fifty with graying curly golden hair and mustache. His expression on entering veered between sheepish and frightened. Encountering witnesses to his act of turning his wife over to a bawdy-house madam made his ruddy skin pale.
    “It’s only because,” he stuttered to no one in particular, “that my . . . that the Party’s good depends on this bargain. I have reconsidered—” He glanced at his wife for support. “Sophie? I am trying to undo my mad bargain. I will pay . . . anything you like but my wife,” he told Madam Hemphill with such anxiety that it undercut the offer.
    At six-and-thirty, I was a woman in full bloom. Sophie was twelve years my junior, delicately blond where I was fulsome brunette, her figure slight and girlish where I was, well, fulsome. It speaks to the underlying anxiety of princes that they like their conquests young and fresh and frightened.
    Sophie did not look frightened now, as when she had begged me to extricate her from this situation, but triumphant. I frowned, seeing that the madam would win either way: a fortune from Montague and a quick offer of a threesome to the Eminent Personage to console him, or Sophie solo and a grateful EP for future services.
    Holmes stepped forward, his brisk and commanding self shining through his brutish façade.
    “A desperate woman will suffer any indignity to preserve the fiction of her marriage,” he said. “A despairing woman will destroy herself rather than allow the one man who should protect her to trade her like a bolt of cloth. A clever woman is quite another case. I stand here surrounded by clever women. Madam and madam.” He bowed to me and Mrs. Hemphill in turn.
    “Yet the cleverest woman is she who convinces others to do her work for her.” He bowed to Sophie. “Mr. Montague,” he went on to the astonishment of the entire company, “it is cheering that your wife has persuaded you to revoke your cowardly skin-saving offer of her body to another man. It was never necessary , however.
    “Madam,” he said to me, “it’s to your credit that you would exert yourself to save the honor and well-being of a friend but it was never necessary .”
    “Madam,“ he told the madam, “you deal in selling flesh and will ever be unclean, and in this case you have been caught. It will never be possible again for you to turn Mr. Edison’s invention and its descendents into a devil’s workshop, at least not in this place and this time. I set Mr. Montague as guard upon the python until I send someone to collect and destroy the recordings within.
    “Mrs. Montague, having accomplished her mission, may go home. Or wait with her husband.”
    “But the Prince—” Mrs. Hemphill gasped. “I mean . . . the Eminent Personage. He is expecting. . .   .”
    Here I took on a task I was the most suited for, for only I grasped what Holmes had been implying. “I will greet the EP and explain.”
    “No, Irene,” Sophie cried, disturbed for the first time. “You need not sacrifice yourself in my place. I . . . It was—”
    “Never necessary,” Holmes decreed again.
    “It happens that His Royal Highness and I are previously acquainted,” I assured Sophie, and left for the one locked bedchamber.
    It was still locked but my picks soon had me sitting upon the siège d‘amour in my street gown and hat, leaning one gloved hand on one of the paired golden metal stirrups at the far end .
    Not long after, a discreetly