Irene. A. (bohemianscandal) wrote in rooms, @ 2015-09-27 00:47:00 |
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Entry tags: | !penny dreadful(s), *log, irene adler, sherlock holmes |
Sherlock & Irene
Who: Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler
What: Teaming up (and a lot of annoyances)
When: Recently (fuzzy because of plot)
Warning: None
The East End was choked with people. The streets were filthy, a grime peculiar to this bit of London, slimed cobbles and the smell of people living close together, horse manure and refuse, with the salt and silt of dirt and the pungency of cooking. The paths were narrow, off the main concourse that was a-clatter with carriages, their shades drawn against all that ribald living of the East, the necessary traverse through an alien environment of the wealthy, but hansom cabs were the multitude rather than private carriages. The landscape was muted; sooty-grey brickwork, serviceable shades of brown and sober blue and black in the people’s clothes, the sky a drab wash of creamy-yellow under the fug of London smog.
Here an entire industry, Irene knew well. She was awake; late but necessarily so when she had not returned to her bed until the watchmen were walking the streets emptied of people. The hour was nearing noon, and the lodging rooms smelled of lavender water and tea, over beeswax and other solutions applied arduously to gleaming furniture.
The lodging rooms were the floor of a building given over to gentle decay. The ceilings were high, and the windows wide but shuttered. The bedroom was a double set of shuttered doors away from the sitting room, and beyond there was a dining room. The kitchens were below; Irene rarely ate at home. The maid (dumb, the work of a cruel man given to practicality when it came to secrets) was unobtrusively dusting within the dining room, and Irene seated at her dressing table, putting up her own hair.
The image in the mirror reminded her of the good doctor’s pencil sketch, the lines of her throat above the parted vee of her dressing-gown. It was not, she thought, with the creasing of a faint frown, wise to be put onto paper as he had done but the deed was done. She used a silver-backed brush that had initials engraved on it that were similar to, but not her own and the smell of lavender from the cuttings in a small glass vase on the mantle was thick in the air.
The apartments were littered carefully with things; it was tidy but clearly lived in. It was not immediately apparent that the things were not that of the woman who sat on the dressing stool, but rather that of her persona. The distinction was nuanced. Irene sipped tea from a china teacup thin enough that the china was darkened by the liquid and yawned.
Mr. Sherlock Holmes did not feel fatigue, and he had taken enough care with his appearance to make it seem that no one suspected the previous night's work may have worn on his nerves. Even Sherlock Holmes did not enter a building-turned-butcher-shop with impunity, and to inspect some forty-odd bodies with his customary attention to detail required reserves of fortitude from which he had not needed to draw since the Falls. As he came down the avenue, bustling on all sides with increasingly shabby trade and loud with the bells of vendors' carts (scraps of linen, steamed potatoes, re-appropriated tin), Sherlock studied the line of buildings, all of them as well-kept and oft-repaired as a poor lady's frock. The swept steps and tiny windows met Sherlock's academic approval, though the street excited his observational skills and therefore was no balm to his increasing fatigue.
At least all of these grimy bodies were yet living.
Holmes was attired like a gentleman with serious business, in a brown check tweed suit, a single-breasted overcoat in blue and gray, and a stiff collar shirt. His hat was not so high as to be a top-, and he certainly would not be seen in a bowler, but it was a sort of mix between the two in previous season style. His cane was topped in silver but otherwise contained little ornament, and perhaps he leaned on it a bit more than usual as he stood on a corner and looked over the lodging house, its multiple levels and white curtains of some concern to him before he approached.
He sensed movement around his waist and looked down to find one of his Irregulars, a grimy child recently grown out of the sweeps' service. The child had reported to him already that morning, and without speaking Holmes handed down a shilling. The boy took it in a flash, and with the coin in his fist he disappeared into the crisscrossing crowd of pedestrians and cabs. After adjusting his hat, Holmes progressed forward across the street, nimbly avoiding the same obstacles the boy had a moment before, and mounting the steps, tapped the door with the silver-shod end of his cane.
As he waited for a man to answer the door, he looked upward in the direction of Irene's dressing room, expression grim.
The children who ran through the streets - some shod, some barefoot - were ragged and unkempt but largely cared for. Those that were not were kept within the confines of the workhouse, where well-intentioned but oblivious young women cultivating an image of respectability and gentility brought cake and clothes and sought out servants. Irene’s maid had come neither from the workhouse nor from a home in which children were loved, even if they were small and dirty and smutted. She had come from a brothel, previously by way of the cruel master who had loved her not at all.
Some of the children who threaded the street deftly, and whose fingers were nimble enough to alight on a man’s purse in his pocket were Irene’s. Not birth or blood or even wards -- she was not familiar enough for that -- but by virtue of coin sliding from her pocket to theirs and they were her ears and eyes as an extension of herself, seeing into the cramped dwellings that required from her what she might give (or, necessarily, who might be easily subjected to blackmail enough to do her a favor).
The man who answered the door was neither child, nor maid. He was large, which was the most flattering thing that could be said for him (Irene chose not for looks, despite her tendency toward whim and appearance). He was broad shouldered enough that his coat strained a little, showing its seams at the join between shoulder and back, and his face was twisted scar-tissue from the left corner of his mouth to the tip of his eyebrow; it looked like an old wound, the skin now the color of sealing-wax.
He said nothing, simply looked at Sherlock from beneath blunted eyebrows.
“Please inform the lady of the house I am here.” Sherlock didn’t bother with pleasantries. He didn’t even look the man over. His mind made the usual calculations, observations, but he really noticed next to nothing, his mind obviously elsewhere. He stepped forward over the threshold, toe to toe to the man, and took off his hat with a sigh. He had no expectation he would be challenged. If the man did not let him in, it would go badly for him, and Sherlock suspected Irene would not want a scene.
He already knew she was bribing a good number of the local population, thanks to his Irregulars, who were a growing group on their third generation of recruits. The oldest still living was in his twenties, and they held considerable sway amongst various low-level street urchin groups. Sherlock never interfered with the homeless, the beggars, or the nonviolent pickpockets, and they looked fondly on him, like an eccentric uncle.
The man disappeared within the gloom of the hall. From the door, the furnishings were old and dark, and smelled strongly of vinegar and beeswax. It was not unfashionable, nor was it fashionable, it was simply heavy and old. Timeless. When next a face appeared at the door (which was very properly left only a sliver ajar, and doubtless the man remained on the threshold) it was the younger face of the tongueless maid.
She stepped back into the dark of the hallway, pregnant with scent and beckoned silently. She did not pause, nor offer to take Mr. Holmes’ hat, coat or cane as would be most polite to do. It was clear that Mr. Holmes’ description had been adequately conveyed to Irene’s people -- indeed, as the boy in the street had carried the message to her backdoor.
Irene would have countered the expression of bribery with a smile that floated upon superiority, like tannin on the surface of tea. She did not think of the nature of the relationship between her and the urchins as charity, because it was not. But nor did she think it as coercion. It was a symbiotic relationship, and it mattered not at all to her that the urchins were below the age of any kind of consent whatsoever.
The room the maid showed Sherlock to was the drawing room. Here the smell of lavender overcame the beeswax. There was a piano, with a few scattered photographs in silver frames of stiff people posing for the cameras, none of whom were immediately recognizable. There was one, of Irene. She was young(er) and dressed in something palely demure. She looked not remotely so, it was much like seeing a wolf dressed in lambskin.
“Mr. Holmes.” Irene appeared in the doorway with the sweep of slipper-satin and the smell of black tea and lavender and something warmly fragrant underneath, that was more Irene and less the lady who occupied the location. “Has anyone in London communicated to you the protocol of an At Home?” The dressing gown was rather deliberately half-tied. For another man, it would cause an apoplexy.
As Sherlock had been bribing the needy urchins of London’s streets for twenty-five years, he hardly had any objection to Irene doing the same.
He saw the maid, and, with the thoughtless progress of those of his class, bypassed the butler and handed him his hat and cane. It was not a question, he didn’t wait for the man to offer, he just handed them in his direction, the way he would have put a book on a shelf. If the man recoiled, then perhaps this visit was not as friendly as Sherlock initially thought. Then, keeping his coat and making no attempt to make himself at home in any way, he followed the maid into the drawing room, which was a logical place for the meeting to be.
Sherlock always enjoyed the scent of beeswax, as for him it smelled efficient and proper. The lavender was feminine and soothing. He ignored the photographs entirely. Props in a play, he thought, until he saw the one of Irene, and he was staring at it when she swept into the room.
“Miss Adler.” The change of address was unmistakable, his expression grim, and he put aside the game they usually played with those two words. “I am sure you may spurn me as churlish among your acquaintance at a time better suited for such trivialities.” He bowed at her (a perfunctory sort of bow) and sat down. He didn’t pay any attention to where he sat, too tired to bother.
“This... Beast in the East End is a serious problem for both of us.”
The butler would have disappeared the hat and cane into the recesses of some more of the dark and gloomy furniture without comment (possibly because it would never make a return from the recesses upon Mr. Holmes’ leaving). The maid vacated the room as swiftly as she had shown Sherlock in and Irene watched him from beyond the crack in the door for a half-second, and a smile curled on her lips, pure satisfaction when she saw him twitch to alertness over the photograph that stood amongst the rest.
But verbal badinage thusly doffed as easily and neatly as the hat, Irene drew the image she had created, of a woman much ruffled to be disturbed at home and a home trimmed with femininities, together much as she might gather shreds of cloud together in a sky. Without them, the movement she made across the room was sharper, cleaner. Her mouth had changed shape, was less soft and her eyes were cool.
She’d tightened the dressing-gown belt by the time she sat. Irene Adler sat the way most men did; with her knees spread enough to accommodate a gentleman’s presence, and with the sublime confidence in doing so that made it look natural. “The Beast?” Her eyebrow curled. “Is that the newspapers, or you?”
She looked toward the window, and the thin rattle of noise beyond the sill. “You’ve been looking into him. What have you found so far?”
Divesting Sherlock Holmes of his hat was sadly not much of an accomplishment, as he was constantly losing such small accessories over the course of a day, and was more likely to parade outside without them as much as think to wait for their reappearance. Even bare-headed he was a formidable fellow, lots of mantis-like limbs to fold up into the armchair he had acquired.
He opened his mouth to reply and looked up, but stopped what he was about to say in surprise at her attire. Or rather, lack thereof. Having ascended into middle age ten years previously, and much a product of his generation, he was startled to be in the presence of a lady in a dressing gown. He eyed her with a frown, perhaps a trace of alarm. He was more unsettled by the belt and lace than he had been by the scarlet and skin.
He recovered eventually, and settled his interlaced fingers in front of his chin. “It will soon be both, I imagine. There is not much question that is what he is.”
Sherlock rolled his thin lips together. “He is an unimpressive man, neither especially ugly or especially handsome. About your height, perhaps somewhat less. He comes from moderate wealth, though not the peerage. He has traveled abroad, a considerable distance, I think, and he has had his little habit for some time. There is some evidence to suggest he is not British. Possessed of some imagination, he has a wife or sister that is blonde and well-favoured.” He tapped his fingers together. “None of this is especially helpful in divining why such a man would go violently mad.”
Had Irene had any intention of deliberately unsettling Sherlock Holmes (oh, she had, up until this meeting became about business she was interested in) she would have taken pleasure in the uncertainty of his expression. It lacked confidence, even a touch of consternation about the mouth. Irene noted it in passing, tucked away the notion that a state of undress caused even the great detective some difficulty, and drew one foot up and tucked it beneath her thigh.
“You don’t write for the headlines, Mr. Holmes,” Irene remarked. Her voice was calm, smooth. It was untroubled by the description of either the man or his antics, and her face was extremely blank. It was usually an indication that Irene was thinking rapidly, too quickly to bother much with an outward display of one thing or another. “If you call him a Beast, it is because of his manners. Unless you believe he is a creature.” She batted not an eyelid at the possibility; Irene was acquainted with the doors to other worlds. It was entirely possible this man had stumbled in.
“Some evidence?” She seized upon the suggestion, “What evidence? And how have you divined the woman? Have you asked of her?” She looked at his fingers. “Surely you’ve thought of asking the woman why he has gone mad.”
A woman in a dressing gown would cause any man of the age some difficulty, up to and including married men. It just wasn’t done. But then, Sherlock hadn’t known that women folded their legs up like that on furniture, like cats. His attention, however, moved rapidly away. It was difficult indeed to keep him mulling over such a subject, when it had little bearing on his current affairs.
“Manner of killing, perhaps. Though certainly, a beast would do a more efficient job of it.” He brushed the tips of his fingers, still interlaced, over the joining of his lips, a vague motion he was not aware of. With one knee over the other, he could sit there for hours. “There is something of… a very young creature, maybe. A kitten slashing at victims in the dark.” His eyes narrowed as his tone drifted off.
Then he came back to her question. “A great deal of evidence. Such a crime scene, the warren of an entire building, renders mountains of evidence. That most evident is the murderer’s footsteps, a sole I have never seen before, hence the supposition he is from very far away, as I have made some study of shoe soles.” His eyes skewered over the top of his fingers in her direction. “I have not met her,” he said impatiently. “It is the hesitation whenever one of his victims met this description; blonde women received different treatment from the others. More precision, you could say. This suggests their appearance has some relevance to him, and statistically that would be a wife or a sister. Perhaps a mother, but unlikely. That he passed unnoticed in that area suggests that he was not especially fair of hair and complexion.”
Irene cared very little about what was done and what was not. She perhaps, envied the freedom of a man’s dress, the freedom to swing one’s legs, and to stride in a way that was not possible within the trappings of a woman. A woman was not comfortable. Irene, when she was not play-acting at being one woman or another, was very much a creature of comforts. She had spent much of her early life in front of other people to the point of being utterly un-self-conscious about it, and the foot curled under her thigh was warm, and her other curled and flexed as she listened to the unraveling of a case that sounded very much like a man. Her eyes were sharp, and they caught the tic briefly, and she wondered whether Holmes was, like so many men, fixated that way.
And then her attention was drawn sharply to the description. “Your study of shoe soles tells you nothing as to whether they are expensive, or poor? What of the tread, are they shabby, are they old, are they stitched or glued?” The questions slid smoothly, like a rapier parried over silk.
Oh, Holmes was a sentimentalist. Or he saw it in others. “You think him in love with a blonde woman, or loved by one? That would suggest thought within his malady, not too crazied to see a fair woman amongst the many.”
“I told you of the man’s fortune. That they are so foreign of make and oddly worn leaves only theories as to their precise value in their country of origin. There is no speciality of wear, and it is difficult to know when one is discussing soles, what is the cobbler’s intent, and what is not. Hence the need for study. One cannot talk about shoe soles without care,” he lectured.
He started the tips of fingers across his lips again. “There is… something about the lean. I think perhaps the man was injured on one side. Not recently. A very faint lilt. Perhaps… an arm, a shoulder? It is only a theory.” He took in a shallow breath. “Do you know such a man as I describe?” It was a doubtful question. He thought it unlikely.
Irene suppressed a smile upon instruction on cobblers’ intent. It was so perfectly like the man who was oblivious to his own self-importance. “I asked,” she said, without a hint of annoyance, although the edge of her voice was whetted a sliver, “Because regardless of whether they are foreign or they are not, quality is measurable. What do you mean when you say oddly worn? Is the man a cripple?”
Injured, and that made its own particular form of sense. “You think him injured and also capable of mass slaughter?” It was not impossible, but it suggested a driving force to murder that inured the man to his own failings. “No, I do not, Mr. Holmes. I am not in the habit of socializing with madmen who murder swathes of opium-addicts,” her voice crispened. “Nor do I know of such a man.”
She looked toward the window, as the maid stepped close, silent with a tray of tea. Her finger tapped her chin. “You have evidently made enquiries amongst the blonde ladies who circulate that particular area of London? The kind to notice a man out of the ordinary?”
“Quality is not measurable in this case. Thin soles may be the fashion in some God-spurned end of the world.” He decided she was being irritating about his shoe soles on purpose, and gave her a scowl suitable to the occasion. “You cannot make assumptions about this sort of thing, madame!” He split his fingers with a maddened gesture and hurled himself out of his chair. A certain doctor would have hardly have been surprised. Sherlock paced back and forth on the other side of the tea tray. The maid may as well have been a chair or table, a thing in his path.
“I think the injury not recent. Mild, as I said… if it is indeed an injury. Perhaps the man is simply not capable of walking straight.” Flick flick went the long fingers through the air. “Three sugars, please.” He kept pacing. “I am not cozy with the ladies of the night at the moment. I am too dark for most of my disguises on that side, and will be for some months yet. Cursed French coasts.” He put his hands behind his back and leaned forward like a hound on the hunt. “I do not… believe the man would find blonde… er… substitutes. It is not that kind of efficiency.”
Irene smirked in the face of his scowl. He looked, she had decided, rather like a three year old deprived of his favorite bear. “So the soles were thin,” she said with some decisive triumph tinging her voice, and looked down her nose at Holmes. It was difficult, seeing as she was at least several inches shorter than he, but she drew herself up and made herself so grave that it was possible.
She dismissed the maid with a flick of her fingers; she did not do so to inure Holmes to the maid he was treating as insubstantially as furniture (or perhaps, moderately less well) but to defend the maid against Holmes.
“If he’s haunting opium-dens, darling, he’s hardly likely to be capable of walking straight usually,” she pointed out with some satisfaction in having pieced together some logic of which Holmes had seemingly overlooked. “You can’t possibly want three sugars. You’d be drinking molten sugar instead of tea. You may have one. And a half.”
Irene rather thought the ‘women of the night’ understood who Holmes was even when he was in disguise. While there were practical things Sherlock Holmes could do to disguise himself, she thought it impossible that he could fully resemble the sort of man a woman of the night most frequently encountered and that sort of woman was used to looking for signs out of the ordinary, as they usually meant danger of some kind or another. “You blame the French for your poor luck with women?” she deliberately misunderstood, and the smirk bloomed up one cheek as she poured tea.
“So he’s not tupping the blonde, but he will kill her.” Her face was focused, her eyebrows drawn together. “That doesn’t say lover at all.”
“Not especially,” he said back at the shoes. “Certain places. Extraordinarily firm sole. Shaped tread in odd places. It’s not natural, I tell you.”
Another mad wave. “No, no. It’s a habitual lean, not a wavering one. It isn’t the opium. Generally, the particular compound in use at this establishment makes men--and women--slow and lazy.” One keen gray eye glinted once in her direction. “As you well know. When the people there moved from one place to another, it was as a top leaves the hand of a child.”
Another fierce scowl at the tea tray. “That is how I have it. Stop making an infernal fuss about what I put in my teacups.” Again, he was sure she was doing it on purpose, but it was not the mountain that would move him from his purpose.
Naturally a good number of the ladies knew who he was. The majority, in fact, as a number of cases had required his identity be revealed. He knew this, and so did they. It was only that they knew him in a certain kind of appearance, and Sherlock liked to be consistent. No one in certain areas of the city liked a man that wore the hat and cane he surrendered that morning. There was also an undeniable manner that Sherlock brought with him. It was intense. Distracted. Dutiful.
“Extraordinarily firm, as though it were not leather?” Irene had been in and out of other doors that bore little resemblance to the one in which she lived and Galatea’s glittering world of silver-screens was not, she knew, the only one that lay beyond the hotel’s doors. “Not natural, because you do not consider it within nature,” she corrected him, archly. “Simply because it is not known to you, sir, does not mean it is unknown.”
A habitual lean suggested an old injury, but one that could not be adjusted to as time went by. Perhaps it was new, or so severe that it could not be accommodated. Of course Irene knew the compound that was used; being alive to the competitor’s mode of operation was simply a requirement and she judged it wise, to lull their customers into a state of satiated sleepiness. Much easier to get rid of, that way. It was practical, and Irene approved of practicality.
She dropped one spoonful of sugar into the thin china cup, darkened with tea now -- just one -- and slid the tea-cup across the table to the man in the suit. And then she summoned back the maid, handing her the tray as she took her own teacup and curled back in her seat. Irene took her tea dark, Russian-steeped, when she could. When the part did not call for it to be milked and sugared.
It was dark now. “So you haven’t spoken to the ladies. Have you enquired upon the books?”
“Not leather?” Sherlock’s head jerked upwards, eyes unfocused. “No. Perhaps not. Not natural, indeed.” He suddenly rocked backward on his heels and stared upward at the aged ceiling. “Indeed,” he muttered.
He picked up his cup (he hardly noticed what was or was not in it) but did not drink. He began to pace again with it, balancing the thin, delicate little thing in his hand without spilling a drop. He obviously did this often.
He stared at her. “The book, you say?” he asked, blankly.
“There are substances soles could be made of that are not leather,” Irene said, enjoying the upper hand as one might upon entering in on a gambling game against a dab hand suddenly appearing to lose his luck. “I’ve heard there are significant advances elsewhere.” She had not yet ventured deeply enough into a door to acquire clothing beyond the red dress Clementine had gifted her with, and even then she had worn it with her own boots.
She watched Sherlock pace with some satisfaction that the cup that accompanied him was filled predominantly with tea rather than cane sugar, although noted that despite its presence, he seemed oblivious to its existence.
“Please do not spill tea upon my carpets,” she said crisply, swinging her legs down and disappearing beyond the screen doors that divided the living quarters from the bedroom. Her voice still managed to fill the drawing room nicely, thrown as it was with some expertise.
“The book. The means by which you make contact with others. You do have a book, do you not?”
“Elsewhere?” he demanded. His precious shoe sole research was obviously quite paramount. He’d expended tobacco ash, years ago. “Where?” He drank half the tea, obviously not tasting it, and then abandoned it on a side table where teacups did not belong. He snorted derisively at the idea of her carpets having any bearing on the situation, stained or not.
“Ah,” he said, vaguely, as if it mattered little. “That book.”
He watched her depart with obvious astonishment and, somewhat thoughtlessly, adjusted his position to peer around the screens. He hadn’t any idea what was beyond them, and no calculation as he moved.
“Elsewhere.” The pronouncement floated from the room beyond the screens. Had the angle to which Sherlock tilted his head been the one most able to see beyond the screen’s function (the purpose of them being drawn thus, of course, was to preclude such angling) he would have a sight far beyond that of slipper-satin. Irene detested corsetry that could not be undone quickly -- having been summoned back by one’s corset-strings twined around a man’s broad palm and yanked rather undid any desire to be trussed up so. So the corset was abandoned, and the chemise was serviceable rather than frippery; it was designed to be worn rather than to be taken off, and the pantalets beneath were serviceable too, both made of sturdy white cotton.
Getting into both, of course, required rather more skin bared, but Irene was shimmying into the dress within seconds. Most of the clothes she owned were discreetly capable of being taken off or put on by herself without the assistance of the extremely biddable maid.
“Yes, that book. Have you asked it? Indeed, have you asked it about the soles. There are people from other times where other soles are doubtless employed; have you even been through the door?”
Sherlock pulled his head back faster than a turtle encountering a crocodile. After several moments’ stunned silence, he returned to the centre of the room, and then started a mildly futile hunt for his lost teacup. “I do not have any desire to leave London at the moment,” he grumbled. “There is enough to do here rather than indulging these wild fantasies.”
After a moment or two’s rustling and the tap of well-shod feet over thin carpet, Irene’s voice swelled once more. “It’s on the side table.”
Some minutes later, when she re-entered the room, looking respectable in dark blue and utterly unremarkable, aside from the swathe of red hair she was pinning upon the crown of her head with the impunity of refusing to acknowledge it was inappropriate to do so in public, Irene noticed his retreat.
“And should outside London provide the answers, does it remain an indulgence or simply a piece of the puzzle you wish to continue to ignore?” Smirk.
“You may ask it, if you think the oracle of all those idiots would help,” Sherlock said, contemptuously. He eyed his cold tea, dumped the remainder in the fireplace, and then freshened the cup. He was adding his third sugar lump when she reappeared, having decided that apparently Irene Adler was some sort of reckless savage that disliked proper manners. He would not be surprised by anything she did hence, clothed or unclothed, because it was pointless to have expectations of such a person.
Still boasting a sour expression, he stirred the hot liquid. “If we must expand our search beyond the borders of England, it will indeed be a long search.”
Irene raised one perfectly curled eyebrow at the presumptive addition of sugar to what could only be a new cup of tea. She resumed the curled position upon the chair, although it was obviously made more difficult by the bulky addition of skirts and petticoats - although the absence of a corset was obvious, if only in the supple stretch of her spine beyond the limits of steel banding.
“It needn’t,” she said impatiently. “That is entirely the point in asking those with the books. It is a minimum of effort and it is entirely possible, sir, that one individual or another might know of the individual who has committed such atrocities. Perhaps they know a blond woman who knows such a man, perhaps they are the blond woman. You might, sir, be the esteemed detective, but you seem to have misplaced your logic. If you and I might leave London at any opportunity simply by stepping through a door, the borders of your search are an artificial constraint only you have placed upon it, through sheer, stubborn oversight.”
Her voice had not raised in pitch, but it lifted a touch in volume and it steeled a little. There was nothing flirtatious about Irene Adler in that moment.