Carole Nelson Douglas [Irene Spider Dance (epub)

[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.I’ve always been more of a danger to myself than anyone else could ever be to me.I have said that only twice is the life of a woman not intolerably dangerous: before she is old enough to bear a child and after she is too old to bear a child.My life has been intolerably dangerous, I still reside in that danger zone, and I have given back what opposition I have gotten in full measure.Of course, dangers depend.They are not always murderous mobs.They may be runaway horses, or runaway men.evil tongues or tongues that don’t wag about a woman at all.(In fine, I would rather be the victim of calumny than of indifference.)Dangers can be unwanted children, or, as equally, wanted children.And equally dangerous are faithless lovers and faithful husbands.A woman is thought to have no will of her own.I have spent my life disputing that assumption.I have been famous, and once a woman dares to become so, she is then labeled infamous.I have struggled to have something, and came to want for nothing.Then lost it, found it, lost it again.The one thing I have not done is give in.I give no quarter, nor do I take it.This may be why I have been a wanderer, often persecuted and reviled.Still, I can’t regret anything, even now as I lay dying, virtually alone, and not quite penniless, but come down a great deal in the world.Once I could have been a queen and an impossibly rich woman.Certainly I flouted convention and conventional religion.I had ideals of governance for the common people, and for my ideals I was hounded by an ancient conspiracy that wishes to keep all power in the hands of a few old and hidden men.Pharisees in the temple! Pretending to be noble even as they scheme to amass and cheaply spend everyone else’s lives and money and faith.Now I am a supplicant at the foot of Our Lord’s cross, a Magdalene despite myself.I truly regret a great deal in my life, so perhaps that sincere contrition will open the gates of paradise to me.I am weary beyond my years, and have lived to see my fabled beauty fade to a ghost in the mirror, my arms that once wielded whip and pistol like an Amazon withered with inaction.My spirit that once dared anything fades into the wispy smoke that used to wreath my head almost constantly.On the other hand, some things I will never regret, because they were honest and true, though I know they will never be written down that way.So I sit in this barren room, writing, as I have so often done in years past, only now my words must be formed slowly and deliberately when before they came as swift and forceful as the fire and fury of a dragon’s breath.She was as wild as the wind, my younger self, and even before I reach forty or die—and that will be a race to the end—she has already been lied about on three continents.In this new land of America I will write my own ending to the tempestuous and misunderstood history the world associates with my name.Which, of course, is not really my name.1UNSUITABLE PEOPLEI only caught a glimpse of her at the moment, but she wasa lovely woman, with a face that a man might die for.—SHERLOCK HOLMES ON IRENE ADLER, “A SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA”New York City, August 1889Perhaps I have presumed.I, Penelope Huxleigh, have always considered myself the sole recorder of the life and times of my friend Irene, nee Adler, now Norton.(Irene, having performed grand opera under her maiden name for some years, now uses both surnames in private life.Propriety was never a sufficiently strong argument with this American-born diva with whom I have spent almost ten—can it be?—years of my life.)So I was taken aback to witness Irene entering the sitting room of our New York hotel, her arms bearing a bundle of writing paper as if it were an infant of her recent and fond delivery.Her distinctive penmanship, exercised in eccentric green ink, galloped over the visible top page like a runaway horse.“Is this the ‘something’ you said you had for the post?” I asked, setting aside my own handiwork, a petit point bellpull.There was no use for such a thing in a hotel, but I hoped that we would not forever dwell in a hotel, although it seemed as though we had already.She regarded her foolscap progeny’s bulky form as if seeing it clearly for the first time.“I suppose this is more in the way of a parcel than a letter, but I had so much to tell, and even as many cables as I send Godfrey about our American adventures can barely scratch the surface.”She sat to straighten the unmannerly sheets on her lap.“Godfrey must be half-mad by now, languishing in the dully bucolic Bavarian countryside.I’m sure he’ll welcome this more thorough report on our recent investigations in America.”“Godfrey would welcome reading the London city charter from your hand, but you can’t possibly have told him about all of the unsuitable people we have met here in New York [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

Pokrewne