Log: Penny Dreadful Who: Sherlock Holmes and Mrs. Irene Norton. What: Tea. Verbal badinage. When: Recently. Where: A quality tea-room.
The hotel did not see many women like her. Irene assessed its outside as well as any young pickpocket might look over his quarry: the facade was marbled over with soot, the windows swagged with heavy fabric. It looked like the kind of hotel that had a doorman, she surmised. All the better places did. It was terribly staid. Irene was not. Deliberately so, because she thought Mr. Holmes would mind it far more if she looked antagonistically out of place than she minded herself being seen in the same room as him. It might cause a certain soupcon of discomfort, it had to be said: some of her acquaintances did not approve of detectives. But the one she cared most about didn’t habit this part of London and it was too early for him to be roused.
So she wore red. Provocative red, the deep color of claret wine spilled over cloth. Her hair was piled high, a mass of frivolous curls and her mouth was carmine in daylight, which everyone knew meant she was for money, even if she wasn’t cheap. Irene took a certain pleasure in that, the estimable Mr. Holmes taking tea with a woman who wasn’t and hadn’t ever been a lady, but the smile was wiped clean when she stepped across the threshold, and undid the clasp of her cloak.
He had every possibility of toppling her carefully constructed house of cards, and that was not amusement. He’d latched on so, to that bore of a man who had died inconveniently in such a manner as to draw attention, and he’d associated that with this. Irene turned her head toward the door, alert to the entry and exit of men in sober colors, as she seated herself, knees beneath a fall of snowy linen. Sherlock Holmes could be maddening, and the only way she knew to handle it was to be as unsettling as possible.
The carmine stamped her lips against the bone-china, her gloves were soft, shell-pink kid. “Mr. Holmes.” She didn’t look up; blackened lashes lowered, the expression almost demure. “Do sit down.”
“Most kind,” Sherlock Holmes said, and proceeded to make himself at home on the brocade seat across from her. He really was elegant in his tea-finery, and though he no doubt would have preferred a cuppa in his smoking jacket at home, here he was, and the sober black and white cuffs were not the slightest bit out of place in the room, filled as it was with chinking chandeliers and china. He was fully able to join the ongoing murmur of tea-room conversation, but he didn’t, just like he hadn’t do more than bow in her direction before arranging his long legs under the extensive snowy fall of the table cloth.
He did not venture an initial sally of conversation, watching her instead with a keen attention in his grey eyes. The incomparable stare was naturally without equal, and he imagined she felt the same about that dress. It was incredibly rude to stare down her front, but he was looking at the stitching and narrowing down tailors. After a fairly thorough catalog of seams and flounces, he glanced once at the delicate gloves, and then finally let his gaze travel up to her face.
He watched her a moment still, considering other things not so easily read as her choice in present profession, and (frankly) waiting to be poured a cup from the silver pot on the tray.
He was unsurprisingly well-clad for such an event. Had it really been merely a cup of tea taken in different surrounds, Irene thought perhaps the snowy white of his cuffs would be less emphatic. But she was not merely a companion over Darjeeling, but a mark: she knew it as well as he did and it was the reason for the carmine and the sober folds of his jacket and that was its own small amusement, and as much a mark of control as the slowly rising eyebrow at the absolute refusal to bow as was right and proper.
She bore up under the cold stare with admirable lack of sensibility. The bone china cups were thin, and the heat of the tea bled through to the gloves even as the china’s pattern darkened, filled as it was with the undiluted liquid. There was milk, but she had no interest in doctoring the liquid until it was pallid and sweet and the taste of the leaves completely destroyed. Irene rather thought Holmes was similar, not only in the alignment of taste but in the dogged stubbornness to have things as they were rather than disguised.
He didn’t seem to like the dress. The tailor was not singular: the flounces and furbelows stitched along the bodice were the responsibility of herself and her maid (her maid having never dabbled in tailoring prior to her employ, but there was a natural sort of gift there). She allowed him his purview of the landscape (rather more than any gentleman who she imagined was actually doing so with any attention paid to her bosom) and her voice was milk-and-sugar as he finally rested eyes somewhere in the vicinity of her face.
“Mr. Holmes. I thought perhaps I had lost you. This is tea, isn’t it? Not the theater.”
Sherlock finally got around to noticing her expression, or taking any note of her reaction to his scrutiny, and he was secretly gratified to find her composure still in place. Too many ladies took exception to Sherlock's purely scientific observations, and he never grew more cautious, simply less tolerant of their objections. Certainly his supposed-death and movements through the continent had done nothing for his temper or patience, not the way they had bronzed his skin or weathered his cheeks. He looked spare and half-starved, though his expression was collected, like a hawk that had weathered a thin hunting season.
"My dear madame, I can always count on you for a superlative performance, regardless of the venue." He didn't smile, not in the usual way. One could perceive a sparkle at the edges of his gray eyes, however, a twinkle of unlikely good humor. He was a peculiar man, Sherlock Holmes.
"Ah, thank you." He seemed to genuinely enjoy the obligatory show of hospitality as she poured and he took the saucer into his keeping. He began adding sugar. "I am delighted you could make time for me in your busy schedule, Mrs. Norton," he said. "And I think I am very much mistaken if your presence in that spectacular frock will not be a very nice scarlet feather in my cap." He said the word 'frock' with deliberate dry-bone tones, though he was obviously enjoying the construction of his sugar-tea syrup. He stirred with a tea spoon.
Irene did not care much for Mr. Holmes’ surveillance of her gifts, rather because she thought the man entirely without normal appetites. He was, she judged, far too quick to look at the trimmings on a woman’s corset to identify the particular origins of the lace, too much so to notice that the woman had disrobed in front of him. He looked, she imagined fondly, somewhat more corpuscular than he had previously, although such sightings had been limited to that taken at a watchful distance. He didn’t seem remotely disappointed she hadn’t objected: she was merely taking note of the room as to whether anyone helpful might have observed Holmes’ fixated stare of an actress of outrageous sensibility.
“You’re so very kind,” her mouth curled into an expression that was neither truly a smile nor was it really a softening of her face at all. Irene knew her own merits: she was a liar, one of the best there was, but she didn’t feel like bestowing the echelons of her talents upon the detective. Firstly, because (and this was ego she knew required flattery rather than squashing) she thought he might see through it regardless, and secondly, because this entire ridiculous scene had been staged at his behest.
“One presumes a performance is put on for the collective, rather than the singular. Are you suggesting we are being watched, Mr. Holmes?” He doctored his tea to the point of being sincerely undrinkable, she observed. A wrinkle (delicate, but present) was acquired at the bridge of her nose. “Do you intend to drink that, or is it nervous habit?”
She smoothed one hand over the rustle of silk. “Really? Where do you intend to wear that cap, sir? Covent Garden?” She named the infamous district.
Quite the contrary, Sherlock did have appetites. The difficulty was he didn’t recognize them when he had them. There were some men who felt no pain, others no conscience, but in fact Mr. Holmes had many other things that he did not recognize when he felt them. It was not the same as an emptiness, and the lack was only on his face and manner, not in his heart. Expression and knowledge of self was what Mr. Holmes was missing. He was missing it in droves. It was fortunate for the world that Sherlock Holmes felt pain and conscience. With his other abilities, the horrors he could weave under the unknowing feet of society knew no bounds.
Mr. Holmes made room for only useful things in his logical clockwork soul. So he liked to think.
He waved an elegant hand, long fingers of Italian statuary and dead nobility. “I am not kind. I have been told this time and time again. I do like your manners, though, when you care to have them.” He twinkled at her again.
“And no one cares. Just society, and tomorrow they will have more to chew on with their aperitifs,” Holmes snapped, in fine show of his more mercurial moods. He sipped at his sugared tea without grimace, obviously enjoying it without any graceless smacking of lips. “I am a man of many hats,” he said now, in answer to her question, and obviously not bothered in the least by the implication. Holmes visited all sorts of gutters and whorehouses in his less savory guises. He’d just come from a hot stew of sand and superstition (as much the coast of France as the Sahara, by the way).
“Why have you returned to London, Mrs. Norton? There are hundreds, thousands of cities in which you could ply your trade by easier means.”
Mr. Holmes would have been a great deal easier had she the habitual reliance upon those appetites Irene thought he scorned. She fondly imagined him alike to a priest, or a monk, or a scholar sequestered with dusty books and a burning desire only for the academic. It made him unpredictable. Perhaps a good volume of Marvell or Mills might do what frills did not: Irene judged him over the rim of her tea-cup with blackened lashes lowered. She couldn’t think of a single book that might render him as the dress might have engendered another, more mortal, man. Death had made Sherlock Holmes impervious.
“My manners are well-tutored, Mr. Holmes,” she set the tea-cup carefully upon its saucer and adjusted the lip of the cup with one kid-gloved finger a smidgen to the right until the pattern upon saucer and cup lined up exactly. The stamp of carmine-red lip-print was unsmudged, poppy-scarlet against thin bone-china. “They are tailored to precisely the circumstances, surrounds and individual to whom they are directed.” This time her smile was slow, sweet as honey. It was a dazzling look, one well crafted (including in front of the mirror, but all women learned to ply their assets the best way they knew, didn’t they?) and the sort of look thrown across a room to an admirer. It (almost) entirely took the acidic sting from the snub.
And it entirely overwhelmed his twinkle with something far less salubrious than tea.
“I hadn’t imagined you a milliner,” she said, with her tongue pressed against her teeth, the implication of insult dipped into that honey but still retaining something of form. Holmes gave every impression of not simply ignoring fashion, but staring it down until it backed into a corner and turned face to the wall. She had heard enough of circumstance and gossip in the back-streets of the gutters of London to know exactly which haunts Sherlock Holmes cared to frequent.
And then the honey slid away, the bored look resembled that of a piqued and polished miss in a ballroom. “Really, must you be quite so conventional. My trade is as easily plied here as well as there, why wouldn’t I return? I’ve done nothing to merit banishment.”
“Hmph,” Sherlock Holmes said, in answer to her manners. “They are decent enough, for an American.” It was an old and casual sally, which she had no doubt heard many times, and he did not expect it to land with much force. A feint, as it were. “They are especially good when I point them out to you.” He would not be distracted by her tea cup, from which he had already derived all he wanted to know some time ago. He blinked at the crafted smile. It might as well have been a heathen yodel across the foreign glaciers of Burma for all he had any understanding of its intended purpose.
At least his twinkle had been honest.
“Your imagination,” Sherlock Holmes said, obviously enjoying himself, “is somewhat limited.” Anywhere that she had heard of him he intended to be heard. Sherlock did enjoy his disguises, and he was at least as good at them as she was, particularly in London, where he was able to blend with ten times the mastery of any linguist or spy. He took over teapot duties after draining his sugared tea, offering it to her with a subtle dip of the silver pot before topping his own beverage with a generous dollop.
“I am sure the various political personages you have bewitched out of their purses in exchange for solid reputation would disagree with that,” he said, cheerfully, pulling the sugar back toward him again and frowning at the lack of biscuits.
Her smile bloomed just as richly against the spear of flung conjecture as it might as if Holmes had just applauded her excellence among women. He clearly knew nothing more than he had ascertained the last time there had been this dangerous chess-game at the edge of some society gathering or another, and relief, Irene discovered, felt like having corset-laces loosened, the gasp of air from uncramped lungs. She didn’t so much as blink, but there was a curl of satisfaction in the smile that wasn’t designed.
“Perhaps I hope,” she suggested, placing her chin in the cup of her hands, her elbows on the table now in a flagrant disregard for proper manners at all (and the soft fall of snowy linen obscuring some, but not all of the daringly low bodice and what the posture did for it), “That by commenting on mine, you might discover the practice of your own.” He really was all the more irritating because he slid in and out of circumstance like a minnow slicing neatly through water, one moment here and the next elsewhere with all the comfort of adaptation. It was all the more annoying whenever he lit upon her as if he could see exactingly when she did the same thing.
Irene allowed him to pour her tea (moderately drinkable, still. Good hotels did not permit tea to stew, and the pot was whisked at discrete intervals, to be refreshed. She had a horror of stewed tea: it meant no one had waited on you appropriately to ensure it never happened) and whisked the cup back before he could even threaten the sugar-spoon.
“But your imagination is unparalleled,” she told him loftily, watching the sugar dish spill a fragmented crumb onto the tine of the nearest fork. “To hear you posit theories, I’m the veriest of villains. Prove it, Mr. Holmes. Make fact of your flimsy little fictions.”
Sherlock was getting what he wanted out of the conversation, well pleased with it, and he did not trouble himself with her superior little smirk. He did not think that Irene Adler was doing anything so heinous as murder or true concerning blackmail, not yet, and therefore he looked upon her more as an intellectual challenge, a newspaper puzzler in carmine. His winged eyebrows sketched upward at her sudden girlish disregard for manners when she leaned upon the table in a public tearoom, and for the first time he looked ever so slightly discomfited, the proper Victorian man, aware of rules being broken.
It didn’t happen often, but it did happen.
“Imagination is a waste of time in my profession,” he lectured, narrowing his eyes as she pulled the sugar out of his polite reach, “as it is better to gather facts before embarking upon wild conjectures. Unless one is using them to elicit criminal response.” He leaned ever so slightly backward in his chair, tea cup in hand, and threatened to forget he was holding it long enough to gesture theatrically.
“You are also mistaken again, madame, to think that I am here to prove anything regarding your activities. In fact--” here he glanced at the nearest mantelpiece, “I have an appointment with a dead body in a few minutes.”
Irene had been made a study of before. She watched him look at her, the stern line of his eyebrows winched in his examination of her, but there was nothing of substance behind his assessment. She felt him look over instead of through her and her lips parted: relief again. Of course there was nothing to see: the gaming hell on the water wasn’t tied neatly to her skirts like a train and blood didn’t cling once you’d scrubbed your hands clean, she knew. The slender fingers in their pink kid clenched, the napkin rumpled and set aside.
He hadn’t seen anything. And the appearance, while doing nothing for her nerves, had been brief. He was unlikely even to be rising now, and she could tidy up this little interlude and be back where she was expected well before the hour. Irene’s gaze slid to the ornate little clock, and her smile as his cup slid precariously in his grasp, was an error.
“Are the dead very precious about keeping time?” she said smoothly, as she slid out from behind the tablecloth, and rebuttoned the cuff of her glove that didn’t require re-buttoning at all. “Any particular body, or are they all the same to you?” It sounded careless. It sounded like disinterest in the answer, but Irene’s eyes glittered like stone catching the light.
When you were Sherlock Holmes, there was always something to see. Always. He had dissected her tailor and her current living arrangements, cataloged her influence on the social world around her, and allowed himself the pleasure on withholding judgment about her less obvious activities. The sally about blackmail had gone exactly nowhere, suggesting that her current games were being played in other places, and there was only so many square leagues of London and surrounding available to her. He would find out, he was certain. For some reason, he hoped it wouldn’t be for a little time.
As she stood, he did so as well, immediately, with the iron and respect of a trained soldier, returning teacup to saucer and brushing nonexistent crumbs off his coat lapels as he turned to face her. “Corpses do not last forever,” he said, obviously unaware of the suitability of the topic to tea conversation and shocking several nearby patrons. “This one apparently has a striking resemblance to a new client. It also bespokes a pattern, though I’ve yet to see a third corpse. Two is chance, three is a pattern.” He sounded positively cheerful.
He stepped around the table and reached out to catch the kid-sheathed fingers, freely, and then he bowed over them with all the elegant grace of a prince. “A pleasure, as always, Mrs. Norton.” Then he straightened, smiling, and stood back to give her room to sweep out in all her scarlet finery.