A long-promised "sequel" to Reichenbach, showing more about Struthers, and another visitor, to the Falls. Yes I know there are distinct flaws in her dialogue. Bear with me for this mere sketch, while I'm learning.
Struthers pulled at him in frustration. "Dammit! First you tell me that you refuse to be seen--demanding a sworn silence from me that I still don't understand. Then you speak on and on about events and people I know nothing of, but which I'm trying to understand just to get you to cooperate with me. Now you go returning to the very place that everybody is looking for you!"
"Struthers, unhand me!" He pulled away and continued further on the path to the Falls.
She trudged after him in the hazy twilight, still glancing around uneasily. "And suppose that Watson should happen to be here, and see you, and die of apoplexy at the sight of his old friend's ghost?"
"He shan't see me," he repeated, striding onward. He gestured impatiently at the ground. "His tracks left ages ago. Since that day, he has been too prostrated with police interviews ... and grief, to return again." He cut off Struthers's guilt-inspiring look by dismissing the subject of Watson once more. "Can't you tell whose tracks we're following? Haven't you any eyes at all?"
She noticed then that, faintly picked out in the soil, were the heel and toe marks of a woman's high boots. "So some village woman or tourist has come to luridly view the area's latest attraction. She'll still see you, and if she recovers from her hysterics, will report your presence to the police, the press, Watson--"
She spoke no further, for they turned around a bend to meet a woman returning down the path.
The other woman halted with a gasp, as would only be natural at the sight of the famed detective, recently reported dead. She paled considerably and stood speechless with shock, her eyes widened at both Holmes and the female figure behind him. Then she seemed to recover a bit, looking more narrowly and sharply at Struthers.
"You're not Helen," she virtually accused.
Struthers blinked at this most surprising statement. She was, as yet, slowly getting used to Holmes's strange, repeated references to this mysterious Helen Stoner, but for this complete stranger to know about Helen entirely startled and unnerved Struthers. She stepped forward, frowning. "No, I'm not. What of it?"
Holmes brushed Struthers aside impatiently. He did not care to explain, and his thoughts had been sparked along the old lines again by the mention of her name. He looked within himself with a kind of weariness. "Miss Adler," he acknowledged the other woman with a nod.
She jumped a little at the name, having been distracted for a moment as she had tentatively approached Holmes with a frown upon her face. Upon closer inspection, Struthers could now see that Miss Adler was a strikingly beautiful woman, who also possessed a certain intense concentration and thoughtfulness in her face.
The elegant woman incongruously poked at Holmes's arm very lightly, like a curious child. She laughed and shrugged at her own silliness. "Well, you're not ghosts at any rate. I never did believe in them except for just now when you shocked the life out of me."
"Hardly, Miss Adler," he said humourlessly.
"It's Norton--" she corrected this time, puzzled by his repeated mistake.
Holmes merely ignored her comment and stepped around her as if he didn't see her. He continued some further yards up the path, stopping and staring at a large boulder as though fascinated by some detail there.
Both women gazed after him briefly, then looked at each other in bewilderment. Left to her own devices with this most strange puzzle, Struthers inwardly cursed Holmes.
Finding the silence awkward, the other woman boldly took the liberty of introducing herself. She put out her hand. "Irene Adler Norton," she spoke with an odd accent on her first name. She glanced toward Holmes for a moment, murmuring almost to herself, "Though Mr. Holmes appears to not remember... or more likely, is passing judgment." Then she looked back and smiled more brightly again, clarifying, "Mrs. Norton."
"Diana Struthers," she answered, and bit her lip at the thought of clarifying. She cleared her throat. "If you don't mind, Mrs. Norton, may I ask how you know Helen Stoner?"
She smiled, laughing. "I'm an old friend of Helen's, that's all. I'm from [New] Jersey, and we met in New York." She shrugged. "We were what you might call sisterly to each other, Helen and I, and we gave each other support and understanding at times when we both were in need of it." She looked wistful and confiding. "Of course, we fought too. I kept telling her that all men were selfish cowards at the core, and she kept telling me to wait until my emotions had settled and I had a clearer mind before I believed in such generalisations. Always the one to remain rational, she was, against what she called my 'operatic' excesses of passion."
She sighed, smiling with a faraway look again, "And yet, she was strangely romantic too, in her own way. When I was in London, after an unpleasant experience with one of those cowards, Helen told me to give up my fixation upon bitterness and hatred over my past. She had the nerve to insist that I open my eyes to a certain gallant and uncondescending lawyer who had befriended me, in spite of all my troubles. I refused and stalled, thoughtlessly pointing out to her that all who loved or didn't love her had left her. She stopped speaking to me for a time, and rightfully so. Yet in the end her generosity won out enough for her to finally write back to me again." She cocked her head toward Holmes, "She warned me that a certain 'prince'," she spat the word, "from my past would surely try something against me, and that I should secure the help of Holmes as soon as possible against whatever machinations he intended. I had too much pride and resentment for that, though. Besides, why not see what I might do to undermine the 'prince'... or his agent?"
Struthers's eyes widened, beginning to catch the slightest glimmer of understanding then. Just how tangled did Holmes's business and personal relationships get?
Mrs. Norton continued, "And Helen had the last laugh on me, even still! She reminded me once again to take heed of my gallant lawyer's gentle attentions toward me. She gave me all the warning in the world, and yet Godfrey's proposal took me by surprise nonetheless." She chuckled. "Storming into my parlour one morning, demanding in an operatic rage--a comic opera, surely--that I forget my old 'prince' and pledge my love to him once and for all before he was forced to murder someone for me! He was such a bad actor, and shaking all the while. He carried the part through to the end, though, whisking me away to church and 'marriage' in the most funny, yet tender, of elopements." She shook her head, "I did not need to hear his explanations afterward to know that Helen had put him up to it, in letters that he hadn't ever shown me. She was a back-handed, conspiring girl, at heart."
Struthers smiled too, in spite of herself. Still not quite seeing how Holmes fit into this, she found it amusing nonetheless to see a lighthearted side to this Helen Stoner that Holmes had not revealed in all his talk.
Mrs. Norton grew wistful again, sighing. "All this, for me, and without a thought to how I might myself try to resolve a heartache of her own, if she would only ask me to intervene for her..." She raised her eyes toward Holmes's silhouette in the distance, whispering, "How she warned me. And how I should have warned her." She looked down to her hands and twisted the wedding ring upon her finger.
Struthers frowned and felt that perhaps a ghost of Helen might be here today after all. She looked up and saw Holmes moving away in the distance again, disappearing around the other side of the boulder. "Holmes!" she called out.
She picked up her skirts and hurried after him, forgetting all courtesies in her sudden panic. "Holmes! Where are you going?"
He carefully made his way toward the fatal ledge, then paused to turn at her shouts.
"Holmes!"
"For goodness sake, stop it!" he halted her with irritation. "Don't be hysterical."
"But what--"
"Rest assured that I never repeat an impractical impulse, once decided against. Not of that sort, at least." He turned and knelt down at the ledge, already trampled completely by police footprints. "I merely wish to pay my last respects to Professor Moriarty." He gazed silently into the depths of the Falls.
Struthers stood chastised, but unapologetic. He'd already given her more than enough shocks to make her believe him capable of anything. She caught her breath and was silent.
Mrs. Norton came up quietly from behind them both, catching up to them in dignified, measured paces. She cleared her throat, "Mr. Holmes, is it inappropriate for me to ask, or may I know what grand scheme of yours this is, which has resulted in these most convincing circumstances that prompted me to come pay my respects to you?"
He looked up and turned, having nearly forgotten her presence. He hesitated. "It... is a matter of some discretion, I'm afraid."
She smiled. "Then I shall endeavour in imitation of Dr. Watson. By all reports, he has thoroughly convinced the police and press alike."
He had a twinge of guilt about Watson again, and he avoided Struthers's glare that silently admonished, "Even she assumes that you would not leave Watson out of this secret!"
Holmes cleared his throat and whispered, "Most kind of you, Miss Adler."
Apologies, the sketch is unfinished because of difficult details, like so much in my novel--
This is where she brings up her married name again, and Holmes pursues the argument as a distraction. She says that she understands that her farewell letter in SCAN may have made her marriage seem like a convenient lie used in order to get her safely out of London without being followed by the King's agents; however, she insists that she truly did love and marry Godfrey Norton. Holmes insists that he saw the wedding (Irene had not realised he was the groom witness); the ceremony was quite preposterously illegal according to all known church regulations of the time, which a lawyer should have known. She explains that Holmes witnessed a romantic, staged wedding, but that they did have a legal ceremony, with servants as witnesses, later that night when she and Godfrey realised they had to escape to the Continent. And Godfrey is alive and well, but Irene just came here alone to visit because of how close she was to Helen.
There! All this stuff is merely to resolve loose ends in the SCAN story, and to finish refuting my Holmes and Irene heresy published in Foxhound's Hive. (I swear, you don't need to know anything about the Laurie King books to understand my Holmes and Irene story. It's simply a twist on the standard Baring-Gould theory of an affair with Irene Adler in Montenegro.)