The Memoirs of Irene Adler: The Irene Adler Trilogy (21 page)

Her cousin Arabella had been widowed after only three years of marriage to the elderly Lord Leith and had promptly made up her mind that the role of reclusive widow was not for her. With massive inheritances from many sources, she had money to burn, and well she knew which end of the Lucifer stick to strike. She had moved to her husband’s palatial home in Knightsbridge, and although she had a string of lovers, she had formed a strong attachment to Viscount Emeric Chatterwell, who shrugged off his anonymous rivals and was very complaisant about the sometimes crowded situation.

Harriet had always been a spirited child, and everybody adored her, with the possible exception of her mother Lady Louisa. Everybody agreed with her home tutor that she had a superior brain. It took her less than half the normal time to learn whatever was being taught, leaving her with ample time to indulge in mischief and disruption. Strangely all this did not stop her being a devout Christian. Nobody was surprised when she declared at an early age that she wanted to become a nun when she grew up.

‘You’re not going to become a papist then?’ challenged older sister Clarissa.

‘You’re so stupid! We can join the orders too, I have already chosen mine.’ Although the sisters were close, they never stopped arguing.

Her favourite books were the St James Bible and Boccaccio’s
Decameron
. She loved Ovid and could quote big chunks of
Ars Amatoria
in Latin. She had read
Le Rouge et le Noir
in French. Although she never missed Mass on Sundays, when she could be seen praying with her eyes closed and with all the fibres of her body to the Lord to stop her straying from the path of righteousness, when she did open them, she could not help but allow them to flit from choristers to congregants and devotees. She even dared tell Clarissa that the young vicar, Father Alexander Robertson, was so beautiful he “made her tingle with lust”. But she never told anybody that she often dreamt of him. In fact her first kiss was in a dream and it was Alex who not only gave it to her but put his hand inside her knickers at the same time.

‘You’re not going to becoming a nun, Harriet,’ Clarissa told her once. ‘You’re going to become a hoor.’ She feared that her sister might be right. Cold showers did nothing to dampen her ardour. As she grew older, she became wilder. The Decameron began to take precedence over St James, Ovid over
Oliver Twist
. She was having more and more dangerous dreams, and when next Alex kissed her, he not only put his tongue in her mouth and his hand in her smalls, he placed
her
hand inside his at the same time. It did not take the saintly reverend long to start putting his member in her mouth, and to make matters worse, she often caught herself reliving those moments with her eyes open. She would lay prostrate on the cold marble floor of Moncreiffe House for hours in vain attempts to dispel those unwelcome fantasies and be overwhelmed by painful spasms, but all to no avail. This led her to experiment with other forms of self-flagellation, like spreading sand in her locked room and walking on it on her knees for an hour at a time.

One afternoon, the watchful Clarissa having gone riding, Harriet found herself drawn like a magnet to the stable where the young groom Sylvester was attending to
Chieftain
. The poor youngster opened wide his eyes when he saw her ladyship come towards him, her blouse unbuttoned and an unmistakable leer on her lips.

‘Sylvester,’ she said in her most bewitching voice, ‘put your arms around me.’ The eighteen-year-old who was friendly with dairy maids and shepherdesses began trembling with a mixture of sexual frenzy and apprehension, but in no time at all they were rolling in the hay. The upshot was that Harriet lost her virginity and Sylvester his job. He ran away fearing retribution, and was never heard of again.

Gardeners, saddlers and carpenters all had a taste of what the young lady had to offer, and rumours of Harriet’s generosity to the lower classes inevitably reached the ears of her older sister. Harriet’s attempt to swear her to secrecy having failed, Sir Thomas inevitably got to hear about it.

It can be argued that the seventh baronet (of that ilk) cannot have been terribly bright. A more charitable view might be that, having never set foot outside Perthshire, he was unaware of the reputation of his niece Arabella whom he still saw as the blushing curtseying teenager. He could think of no better remedy for the condition of her favourite daughter
than to entrust her welfare to Arabella. A decision redolent of all the wisdom of the mother sheep asking the wolf to mind her little lambs.

Thus was the sensual Harriet despatched for safe-keeping to her riotous-living cousin—no
Lustige Witwe
she!

Sir Thomas repeatedly told Lady Louisa that his lovely niece would watch over the young delinquent “like a hawk”, but it is not known whether her ladyship felt reassured by this.

Arabella had no intention of subjecting her young cousin to any rigours whatsoever. She often expressed the belief that life is too short for imposing restrictions to one’s too few pleasures. Look at poor Leith. So she did nothing to stop the young Harriet from following her lead and never did anything to stop her offering her favours to any man, young or old, who had caught her fancy.

The young widow did, however, raise an eyebrow when she noticed that her young wilful cousin was spending too much time supervising the black Coleridge who was repairing the wall of her house in Knightsbridge. She called her into the library one morning with a solemn expression on her face. Harriet felt like laughing, so unusual that was, but made an effort to stop herself.

‘You know I promised Uncle Thomas to watch over you, so you have to listen to me.’

‘I am all ears.’ Arabella walked towards the bookshelves and came back with a tome.

‘All my instincts tell me that no good can come out of our associating with inferior people,’ she said, ‘but I am too giddy myself to give you a rational reason. I will therefore let Mr Dickens, who is known for his great intelligence and humanity speak for me. Listen to this.’ And she opened the book and began reading:

Take the Bushman... I think it would have been justifiable homicide to slay him—I have never seen that group sleeping, smoking, and expectorating round their brazier, but I have sincerely desired that something might happen to the charcoal smouldering therein, which would cause the immediate suffocation of the whole of the noble strangers
.

She looked at Harriet, who was too bemused to react, but she had not finished. ‘I will read another bit, and if that does not convince you, nothing will. And flicking through the pages, she found what she was looking for:

I call him a savage, and I call a savage a something highly desirable to be civilised off the face of the earth
.

Harriet just laughed. ‘Coleridge is not a savage, he speaks English and wears proper clothing, not skins, or hadn’t you noticed?’ Arabella shrugged, she had done her best.

As the older cousin often slipped out of the house to keep trysts with other men behind Chatterwell’s back, it was easy for the lascivious young girl to invite the young black man to her bed, and for some time she felt no need for other men. She even thought that she was in love with him. He certainly was with her.

The naughty girl regularly wrote home with exaggerated, but not untruthful, accounts of their regular church visits, their sober dinners with bishops and nephews of cabinet ministers. Lady Louisa who had by now been informed in no uncertain manner of the behaviour of the merry widow, wondered how two balls of fire could coalesce to form a lump of ice.

Unbeknownst to Arabella, however, Coleridge took Harriet to visit the Alhambra where he happened to be doing some work, and she declared that she had fallen in love with the theatre and swore that she would become an actress or die.

‘But I wish things had worked out differently,’ Cole protested as we sat on my bed in my small cubicle. ‘I mean that it had been different.’ He kept talking in circles without coming to the point and I had to worm it out of him in the end. It was he who had introduced Harriet to PQR, who immediately offered her the part of ‘Clara’ that he had already promised to me. Coleridge knew that Harriet and PQR had a fling in the changing rooms the same afternoon, but he was prepared to overlook this, in the light of his awareness of her inability to resist an invitation to share almost any man’s bed.

‘Had I known that PQR was betraying you,’ Coleridge assured me, ‘I’d have asked Harriet to refuse. It’s truly not her fault. She is in complete ignorance of the fact that you were already rehearsing the part.’

She was, however, not going to play
Clara a
fter all, for Coleridge felt duty-bound to inform her of Paul’s treachery, whereupon she went to him straight away and told him that she was not one to take the bread out of the mouth of another. If he wanted her to share his bed again, he had better reinstate me. He agreed and went down on his knees and begged her to stay at the Alhambra, promising her parts in his future shows. In the meantime he appointed her as my understudy. That was how I got to know her with some degree of intimacy. Know and love her.

Although the first time I met her, I was still sore about her cutting the grass from under my feet, albeit in ignorance, she had such innocent eyes and such good nature that I could feel no resentment towards her. If anything I too was immediately struck by her beauty and fell for her charm. She was as slim as the reflection seen in the hall of mirrors at the carnival, which made one appear lanky and wraith-like, but in fact she was no taller than me. Her neck was as long as those tribal women with rings around that the
Illustrated London News
had recently published the photographs of. Her nose was fashioned in the same manner as Effie’s in the Millais painting. Her eyes changed from languorous, reminding one of small opals, to twinkling and mischievous. On top of her oval head flourished a luxuriant crop of auburn hair which seemed like a living entity, which had the capacity of moving in a single bundle in a manner I have never seen hair move before, as if there were small springs concealed in it.

She was not just a beauty but an apparition, a
Peri
from the
Arabian Nights
, Coleridge had said. Although I do not consider myself a sensual or sensuous woman and have little or no Sapphic inclination, I could easily imagine myself developing an unnatural attraction for her. Yes, I admit to often wishing that I could promenade my fingertips over her small
derrière
which she usually kept firmly (indeed some might say too firmly) trapped by her knickers and skirt.

As my understudy she had an easy time of it, but she immersed herself into her task with such intensity that anyone would have thought
that the future of the English theatre depended upon her performance. I felt so sorry for her that I declared that I was unwell and took two nights off just to enable her to realise her ambition of appearing on the stage. I own that she was a natural.

She adopted the stage name of Thelma Barrington and was soon more popular with the London theatre goers than I have ever been. The surprise was that no one in Perthshire got any whiff of her double life. I am not one to pass judgement on others or keen to spread gossip, and am only mentioning this because of what was to happen later: she had a succession of lovers of both sexes. I found her charming and affectionate. She was always giving her friends presents of ribbons, scarves or cameos. I once said that I thought a silk stole she was displaying was quite fetching and she immediately took it off her shoulders and put it around mine. Whatever
The Alhambra
paid her was spent on pastry for actors and theatre hands at the coffee shop just outside. Although the baronet gave her a handsome stipend she was always short of money and often had to sell items of jewellery when she wanted to buy something that had caught her fancy. ‘I was quite bored with that diamond brooch anyway,’ she would say. Her no less extravagant cousin Arabella on whom Viscount Chatterwell positively doted and who showered jewellery and furs upon her, would also press her to accept gifts of money. Maybe this is not relevant to the tale now unfolding, but she and Arabella were regular visitors to the gambling dens of Wellington Road where they lost not inconsiderable sums of money.

We became good friends and often would we go on picnics and boating trips together.

It took the baronet two years before he started believing the intelligence reaching him (courtesy anonymous letters), to the effect that his beloved daughter was not living like a nun. He became greatly alarmed. It is every father’s wish to marry off his daughter well. He sent his secretary Alasdair Orr-Hamilton to London to find out. The latter visited Lady Leith in Knightsbridge and was brazenly assured that there was no foundation whatsoever in the rumours. Orr-Hamilton was on the point of going back to Perthshire when he remembered the name Sherlock Holmes, whose fame had spread even among the lochs and munros of
the Highlands. He took a hansom to Baker Street and ended up engaging the services of the famous detective. Sadly the detective all too easily pierced the mystery of the young delinquent. Harriet’s likenesses having often appeared on posters meant it was not a Herculean task to discover the truth. Dr Watson makes this into a tour de force as he exults in showing to the world what a genius his friend was. Orr-Hamilton sternly instructed the wayward young woman to pack up her things and she was duly taken to Moncreiffe House with despatch. It was thus that I lost all contact with her for a few years.

The events described in the following paragraphs took place in my absence, but Harriet was always in the news after she married the English Conservative Member of Parliament Sir Charles Mordaunt who was twelve years her senior. I would become privy to many landmarks of her history as time went by.

Harriet combined a hot head with a passionate body and never hid from anybody that she had led a scandalous life in London. In spite of being forced into matrimony, Harriet had promised herself that once she had exchanged vows at the altar, she was going to do everything in her power to regain the full fervour of the religious faith of her youth, and strive to become a virtuous wife. She made up her mind that she would take churchgoing more seriously. Even when living in Knightsbridge, after a riotous Saturday night, she and Arabella would regularly attend Sunday mass. If to the older cousin it was just a meaningless ritual, a fixture, Harriet was sincerely transformed into a repentant slave of Christ, albeit for the duration of the service.