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words and music, and humming snatches of melody.
    “Written for both English and French. I recognize Oscar’s fine Irish hand in the libretto, too. Most intriguing, Nell! Most fascinating.”
    I was happy to see Irene toying with resuming her singing career, despite the source of the inspiration. The King of Bohemia and Sherlock Holmes both knew now that she was alive, and neither wished her ill. She no longer needed to hide behind the false report of her and Godfrey’s deaths in an Alpine train wreck after escaping London more than eighteen months before.
    “Nothing would please Godfrey more than your returning to the stage to use your magnificent gift,” I noted. “As Mr. Holmes said, it is a crime to conceal such a remarkable instrument. I must admit that I could wish for fewer questionable people to be involved in this project.”
    “Questionable? You can’t mean Bram Stoker! You like him. And Oscar is a remarkable talent in his own right, he has only to find his métier and he will make sparks fly.”
    “He is a dandy,” I said. “And Sir Arthur Sullivan’s partner Gilbert is a well-known ladies’ man—”
    “And Mr. Holmes is quite the opposite, so surely that cancels out Sir Arthur’s unsavory professional association.”
    “Scandal does not work like that, Irene. It is not a matter of mathematics. And who knows what scandalous tendencies a man who answers only to himself, like Sherlock Holmes, might harbor?” I said as darkly as I could without making charges I would have to verify. “He has, after all, given you two gifts today: that ridiculous little book and the libretto.”
    “It is tit for tat. He knows I could have refused to share the Yellow Book with him, and then, no doubt, he would have been forced to housebreak on his way back from Germany to England, to get it. And he knows I’m rather good at hiding things. Nell! You saw today that he only has eyes for the violin, if you have suspicions otherwise. That man is as close to a monk as any nonbeliever could be, I tell you! Any passions he might have are reserved for his investigations, and, perhaps , the occasional musical interlude.”
    “Which you now are.”
    She laughed, shaking her head. “You are such a romantic, Nell! Really! Besides, nothing could come between Godfrey and myself.”
    That last I believed.
    “What of the violin?” I asked, regarding where it lay on the piano like a dead thing.
    “Oh. Yes. Now that I know it is valuable, I will have to take it into Paris to be restored. I had no idea it was in such a sad state. It’s just that I haven’t thought of my old life in America for years, for some reason . . . or of the maestro.” She stroked the violin’s crackled surface. “Poor old maestro. I wonder if he’s still alive. Itwould be wonderful to see him again, and he had traveled in Europe in his youth, before I was born. No! He must be dead by now, and if he isn’t, too frail to ever return to Europe. How he used to play up storms of pathos on this very instrument. He said I must sing with as much passion as a violin could under the right hands.”
    “ He is not an accomplished musician, Mr. Holmes, I mean, it seemed to me.”
    “Quite passable, actually, yet music is not his profession. Apparently he is accomplished at unpredictability and that is more valuable in his line of work than even a Guarneri.”
    “He may have diagnosed this wrongly. I have never heard of such an instrument,” I sniffed.
    “Nor have I.” Irene hummed a long, lyrical phrase. “How I shall enjoy portraying all of Henry’s wives! Henry really didn’t know what to do with them when he was alive, but I certainly know what to do with them now that he is dead.”
    “And what is that?”
    “Why, give them the last word, after all.”

2.
    News from Abroad

    Nelly Bly, Nelly Bly,
bring de broom along
We’ll sweep de kitchen clean, my dear,
and hab a little song .
    —STEPHEN FOSTER, 1850
NELLIE BLY, BYLINE FOR A MUCKRAKING