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expensive mock-Fortuny Knossos scarves. Mary set to work in the hat room, mending a silk brim, reattaching black ostrich feathers. “A crab shelled in whalebone” was Aldous Huxley’s description of the Edwardian lady, and he called her plumed hat “a French funeral of the first class.” There were more than twenty such hats in this room, all huge gâteau-like confections, pearly white, rose pink, blue, yellow, black, festooned with roses, ribbons, feathers. On one wall was a
Vogue
cartoon from 1909 of a tiny woman wearing a hat as big as an umbrella on whose brim sat a rabbit gobbling up a cabbage.
    When she was in here or in the corset room, Mary often thought Irene Adler’s incursions into male attire—as when she whispers “good evening” to Holmes in Baker Street—entirely understandable. The crab in whalebone could have known comfort only in bed at night, never by day in the S-shaped whalebone stays, the buckled and webbed bodices, the crustaceous layers, and those furbelowed cartwheel hats. Other pictures on the walls showed Edwardian women attempting to mount stairs, board trams, and manage their hats on windy days.
    The first visitors began wandering through and Mary put her work aside. The Americans asked the most questions and there was a preponderance of Americans. She had expected a quiet slack day, as Monday usually was, failing to take into account that the tourist season was approaching its height.
    “How did they handle those trailing skirts in the rain?” someone asked. It was a stock question and one she could scarcely answer.
    “What about ordinary women?” was another. It was asked more and more often. “What did the poor do? The ones who couldn’t afford maids to dress them and cabs to ride in? How did they manage?”
    And always, “Who was Irene Adler?”
    They sold more copies of the Sherlock Holmes story
A Scandal in Bohemia
(Irene as crab in whalebone on the front cover and in jacketand breeches on the back) than all the catalogs and brochures put together. A favorite place was the facsimile of Irene’s drawing room, as it must have been at Briony Lodge, with the secret panel by the fireplace where the compromising photograph was kept hidden, open for all to see the secret spring. Gustav Klimt had not painted her, for he was real and she was fiction, but the mock-Klimt portrait of Irene in sequins and pearls posed against a gold-leaf screen, framed in narrow gilded wood, went back to hang on the walls of many a Midwest condo. Business was too brisk at lunchtime for Mary to leave the museum. It even looked at one point during the afternoon as if admission would have to be restricted for half an hour. But the crowd dwindled as five approached, by which time the shop had run out of calendars and Knossos scarves and Stacey was on the phone to the sales rep. Mary worried a little about Charlotte Cottage. Would Bean have let himself in satisfactorily at four-fifteen, found Gushi, and by now have brought him back? Would he have secured the front door behind him?
    She considered taking a taxi back, for she had had one good walk that day. But the sun was still shining and the wind had dropped, and once she had entered the park she forgot about a reluctance to walk, she forgot about Charlotte Cottage and Gushi, and turned southward across the broad open space. Strange, how seldom she had come in here at all while she lived in Willesden, and, though working at the museum, had scarcely ever crossed the canal or even set foot south of Prince Albert Road.
    Taking the path that leads down to the boating lake, she noticed for the first time how open the park was, how relatively treeless in its center, a great plain of green fringed with the towers and landmarks of London, the gold dome of the mosque, the slender column of the minaret beside it, the art deco edifice of the Abbey National in Baker Street, the Post Office Tower, and, behind her, the Mappin Terraces of the zoo. There were trees on the