Irene. A. (bohemianscandal) wrote in rooms, @ 2015-10-03 15:42:00 |
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Entry tags: | !penny dreadful(s), *log, clementine murphy, declan murphy, irene adler |
Clem M, Declan M, Irene A: Penny Dreadful(s)
Who: Clementine M, Declan M, Irene A
What: A ball. ~Distraction.
When: Post-tiny plot, post-Daniel-seeking
Warnings: TBD: nothing expected
Irene Adler's business was up in smoke. Not literally. The building remained, broad wood beams within and lathed plaster outside and the place had been a canker in a sea of near-respectability with the oily smell of the Thames from the front door. The building remained, and for that Irene was grateful in a curling, desperate and fleeting way like soot choked into her lungs. She didn't know what it was she would have done, if the building had not. But there were two businesses on the books that could not be contained within. The place above, where practicality dictated she must find other lodgings - the girls needed paying and the men would find an alternative place for amusement, their attention dying as quickly and without ceremony as the flowers she put in the rooms weekly. The den below, and Irene wasn't certain how she would resurrect it, when even opium-addicts feared death, bloody as the one that had come to her clients. All this, practicality. All this, cool and calculated in its nature. It was black and red in a ledger, and debt calculated, stacked up and owed. (That, that would wake her, cold sweat and expectant late at night, and she'd call for the tongueless maid who would bring clothes that allowed Irene to walk and pace instead of stay locked up in her own bedchamber like a bad-dream). Beneath the calculation - seething fury. It had no passage or pathway to the surface, Irene couldn't afford boiling anger, so it teemed beneath the surface, shook her hands when she smiled with calm perfection at a man who owed her a rather large favor over china tea-cups in a hotel known for being discreet. Holmes hadn't found the man. He'd found the man's woman, but sent her sharply in the other direction, scenting danger. Holmes did not care, only to draw a line beneath the open case. Irene cared. She cared enough that she wanted to kill the man responsible, herself. The prevailing sense that eyes were trained on her back, that her own skin could crackle and burn beneath those eyes - it was not unfamiliar, but it was unwelcome. Irene hadn't been a rabbit in the trap for some months. So of course, the respite. The door to the hallway in the hotel had been carefully propped ajar. It led, not to Irene's staged quarters but to the place she kept as an alternative place to host half-way across town, funded by a gentleman who was extremely indulgent. (She did not, it had to be said, put it beyond Sherlock Holmes' purview not to maintain a watch on her home, and her out-of-town guests were not his concern). The room within was gaudy, gilted over fussy wallpaper, and the heavy smell of lilies kept in vases in closed rooms. Below, the noise and laughter of an event just beginning. Irene was applying maquillage before a mirror, the drape of her gown, green silk under daringly thin black gauze left her arms and decolletage practically bare. The party had no cause, or purpose beyond a celebration. It was not precisely fashionable, because fashionable was boring, but it was exciting and so everyone in town beyond the boring had turned up. They were waiting, of course. But there was music, the strain of strings, and champagne was in circulation. It was almost as if forty people hadn't died in the East End just a handful of days before. |