A Scandal in Bohemia (Adapted)

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On a March evening in 1888, Dr. Watson climbed the stairs at Baker Street to find his old friend Sherlock Holmes in an unusually cheerful mood. "We are expecting a visitor tonight," said Holmes, handing him a note, written on expensive paper and signed with no name at all. "He will be wearing a mask. Were he not a man with a great deal to lose, he would hardly bother."

At a quarter to eight, a tall, broad-shouldered man entered the room with a black mask covering the upper half of his face. He claimed to be a mere count, but Holmes saw through him at once. "Your Majesty," he said calmly, "you may as well remove the mask. You are the King of Bohemia." The visitor tore off the mask in frustration. He explained that he was about to be engaged to the daughter of a strict Scandinavian king, and that an adventuress named Irene Adler was threatening to send the royal family a compromising photograph of the two of them together. "She's sworn to do it on the day the engagement is announced," he said. "Should it ever become public, it would be a scandal in every court in Europe. I've offered her money, and I've even had her house searched. Nothing I've tried has worked."

Holmes agreed to take the case. The next afternoon, disguised as an unemployed stable hand, he watched Miss Adler's villa in St. John's Wood and learned that she was married, quite unexpectedly, to a lawyer that very day. Holmes and Watson were dragged into the church as witnesses, and Holmes later confessed that never in his life had he been so amused.

That evening, he devised a plan. Watson was to wait outside the villa, and when Holmes was carried into the sitting room, apparently injured in a street brawl, he was to throw a smoke rocket through the window and shout that the house was on fire. "A woman will always run to save what she values most," Holmes explained. Everything went as planned. In the confusion, Irene Adler hurried to a recess behind a sliding panel, and, had Holmes not been watching closely, he would never have seen exactly where the photograph was hidden.

The next morning, Holmes and the King arrived at the villa, ready to claim the prize. Instead, the housekeeper informed them that the lady and her husband had left for the Continent by the early train. The panel was open, and the recess was empty, apart from a photograph of Irene Adler herself and a letter addressed to Holmes.

In it, she admitted that she had been completely deceived by his disguise. Only when she remembered having been warned about him had she begun to suspect him, and by then it was too late. She assured him, however, that she loved her husband and had no intention of harming the King. "I shall keep the photograph," she wrote, "merely as a safeguard, in case he should ever try to act against me."

The King was delighted and offered Holmes any reward he wanted. The detective asked for only one thing: the photograph of the woman who had outwitted him. From then on, whenever Irene Adler was mentioned, Holmes referred to her simply as "the woman," and he never forgot that, for once, it was he who had been beaten.