Lola Montez and the Poisoned Nom de Plume

by Kit Brennan

  As the second bath cooled, I still sat in it. What if George changed her mind, and had gone to the police instead of to Alex? What if I came out of the tub and straight into jail? Anything could happen; nothing seemed real. Yes, I was alive. I still couldn’t quite believe it. This time I had done it. I hadn’t quailed or lost my nerve at the last crucial second, and that was the only reason I was alive. If you’re faced with a poisonous rat that carries a plague, should fear or morality cause you to pity it, or stop you from killing it? How can that be a crime? That’s what I asked the harpies in my head, and with the question, they flew up into a howling, gibbering mass of recriminations. Murderess! Bad, wilful woman! Harbinger of bad luck and unfortunate destinies! Life could be over as you know it, and it would serve you right, they yammered. I fought them off, their bat-like bites and shrieks. At the back of my head: the truth of it all. The monster on its back, covered in gore, still emanating evil. I wasn’t sorry, not a bit of it—though I was frightened. I would die if I was put in a jail cell, I knew it.

  Courage, Lola. It hasn’t happened yet.

  I toweled myself dry with an almost steady hand, dressed in what George’s maid had given me, and brushed my hair with one hundred brisk strokes. I am ready for whatever awaits, I told myself. I won’t run.

  Finally—the sounds of chaotic life downstairs. “Lola!” George’s voice called up, and then I could hear two sets of footsteps racing up the stairs. George swung into the room, followed by Alexandre Dumas, and they stood there, puffing and blowing like dray horses, staring at me.

  “Lola, you will never believe—” said George, but Dumas reached out and silenced her with his hand on her arm.

  “Wait,” he ordered, and “Mon Dieu, je suis—ouff!” He plonked himself into a chair at the bedside. George threw herself down beside me on the bed.

  “Tell, tell!” she urged, thumping the mattress.

  Dumas raised one hand, took several deep breaths, and then began.

  “I arrived at the cemetery, and at first wasn’t sure where to look,” he said. “I urged my driver to go slowly and to circumnavigate the entire place. However, once well inside the gates, I could see a large group of blackbirds circling in the sky, and I told him to head in that direction, thinking that—as scavengers—they must have already found the body, but perhaps were being kept from landing by humans who had found it, too, and were taking a closer look. As we approached, however, I did not hear human voices. I heard growls and yips, and other sounds that I could not at first place. I tell you, the hair on the back of my neck was rising—I felt like a cat with its fur gone puffed, all around! Tail like a bottlebrush, fat as a fox’s!” He leaned towards us with his little eyes wide and full of fear, then reached out to clutch at George’s hand, which he squeezed convulsively. “I had no idea what was in store, just ahead—if I’d known, I would have turned tail and run!”

  George, with a shiver: “Mon Dieu, mon Dieu!”

  Dumas continued, dropping his voice to a hushed whisper. “Never in my life… Such a horror, beyond my wildest dreams…”

  George winced, retrieving her crushed hand and placing it over her lips.

  “Here is what happened next. We rounded one of the large family vaults, and then—sacrebleu, I tell you, it was an arresting sight! My driver cried out, and I think I did, too! A pack of feral dogs—the kind of dogs that one sees in Paris, big, little—abandoned, all—were at the body, ripping and tearing away at the throat, and quarrelling over other sections. I could see a large mastiff, off to one side, must have chewed off the right hand and had taken it further away to devour. At the far end of the body, a little once-upon-a-time lapdog was there, yanking stoically at the foot, trying to pull off the shoe so it could get at the delectable morsels encased—”

  “Alex!” George roared. “Stop that! Stay with the facts!”

  “I am! Vraiment.” He looked affronted, then shrugged, hands upturned. “Zut, let me speak of the extras, circle by degrees towards the ultimate horror… This is just the apéritif, believe me… We don’t want to faint—at least, I certainly don’t…”

  “Merde! Oh mon Dieu, what else?” George covered her eyes and flapped a hand in the air.

  Dumas settled back upon the chair, wiped his lips and turned to me. “Well, let me deliver the good news first—if any part of this horror can be considered ‘good.’ I do not think you have any fears about discovery, Mademoiselle Lola, and I will tell you why—if our bon amie here will allow me.” He flashed a hurt expression at George, then leaned towards us again, first looking both right and left to ensure we were alone.

  “I climbed out of my carriage to take a closer look. My driver was concerned, and tried to urge me away—to go to the police immediately, and leave the scene of destruction. But, though my nerves and my body still felt as puffed as a fox’s tail, I urged myself forwards, waving my walking stick in front of me aggressively. The dogs were angry at me for interrupting their meal, you see, but, well, I called forcefully—and with some fear, I admit—to my driver to come and assist me, and together we managed to persuade them off with some choice oaths and, on my part, a few hard whacks with the stick. And mon Dieu, once they’d retreated, that’s when I really registered the buckets of blood, all over the ground! It was disgusting. The dogs had made quite a mess as well, let me tell you—most of their muzzles were slick with it, and their paws.”

  At this, George moaned. I thought of the many dogs she kept at Nohant, running freely around the stables, happy on their own business.

  “Just at that moment,” Dumas began again, “I could hear sounds of another carriage driving along the cobbles—whether coming or going, I couldn’t tell—but knew that I didn’t have long for a private inspection.”

  “Who was it?” I asked him.

  “I never saw. The sounds stopped; it just—disappeared.” We regarded each other solemnly, then he continued, swiftly. “I leaned over the body. There was fearsome damage to the entire face. The nose was gone, the eyes gouged out… Not to make too fine a point of it: the face was ripped off, in fact, and the neck torn open.”

  George and I both screamed at the same time. Then she jumped up and rang a bell. Dumas began wiping his face and throat with a large handkerchief. We sat there, all of us, trembling, until the maid arrived. George sent her off for the brandy bottle and glasses. None of us said another word until those items had been placed before us, and a swift shot had been sent down each of our throats. Dumas was shaking as much as the two of us together.

  He shivered as the brandy scorched its way through him. “Ooff, merde!” Then: “Believe me, Lola, no one will ever see a switchblade stab to the jugular, for the jugular no longer exists.”

  I swallowed hard. This was graphic—but it was true. By God, it was true!

  “However—now that we are fortified,” he went on, speaking in a frenzied whisper, “I have to tell you that is not the end of what I found.” His voice dropped even lower in volume. We were all leaning in towards each other—for comfort or protection, who knew? “This is the crux of the matter. There was blood everywhere, as I say. So now, picture this: the coat had been ripped away from the chest, as had the shirt. The chest was revealed, in other words. And inside that chest—well. Zut alors, how can I say this without causing you both to be sick?”

  “Just say it,” I managed, as George grabbed my hand.

  “The heart was gone. And not eaten by dogs—or certainly, not taken from the chest by dogs. No. This is the appalling truth: there was a neat surgical incision cleaving the sternum, followed by a violent pulling apart of the chest cavity, which in turn revealed that the valves and arteries had also been neatly severed. Then the heart had been plucked out. A bloody, empty hollowness was all that was left, inside!”

  We sat staring at each other for some fraught moments.

  “What does it mean?” George asked.

  “Someone did it,” I said, “between the time I galloped away and when you arrived.”

>   “Yes,” Dumas added, “and perhaps the heart was in the mysterious carriage… Perhaps the severer had just finished, and had placed it there, as I arrived…”

  “Still seeping onto the carriage floor…” From George.

  “Or,” from Dumas, “let me think…” His eyes were sweeping over all of the objects in the room that were within his gaze, backwards and forwards. “Of course, perhaps this… As soon as I’d stumbled back, hurled myself aboard, and my driver had whipped up the horses to carry us away, the severer could have leaned out of the unseen carriage and thrown it to the dogs… The still warm organ! One of them—perhaps the mastiff—would then have raced off with its ultimate treat, the little lapdog in hot pursuit—”

  “Alex, enough, enough!—assez!” George howled. Then we all laughed, shakily, at Dumas’ final storytelling flourish and the image it had conjured: a little dog chasing a big one, yapping excitedly. Had he said it to console us? To augment and embellish, take the story almost into the realm of the absurd? Or—could it have happened? We’d never know.

  “Furthermore,” Dumas added solemnly, forefinger raised like a warning beacon, “I have not told you the final matter: out on the streets, when we left the cemetery. Some sort of vehement protest was taking place—students and other angry young men. They were waving their fists, shouting. Then several bent down, picked up rocks and began hurling them at the windows of shops! And one at me! Missed me by a whisker! We galloped away with the sound of breaking glass and violent curses in our ears, hooligans running in each and every direction! I tell you, we haven’t seen the end of the unrest these dangerous factions have stirred up.”

  George nodded. “I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: we are heading towards an enormous class struggle, and it will not be an easy victory for anyone.”

  “Bad times ahead.” Dumas patted her hand. “I’ve decided—just now, just this second: I will take young Alex with me on my travels. I’m heading out later this month, and I’ll convince him—get him out of Paris, keep an eye on him. Get him away from that tarty Anäis Lievenne. He’s in a weak state as it is—still in mourning for Merci Duplessis. Wants to write about her, about their love, before it went wrong. Who knows, maybe it can be the making of him…”

  Silence for some further moments, during which a dawning realization—a kind of dark joy—began to percolate through my body, a bit like the familiar red gush of rage, but this time, of relief. The police would not be coming after me. I could go on with my life. It seemed—could it be?—that the hideous deed itself had died with the fiend.

  As if aware of my thoughts, the big man whispered, “Vraiment, I think you are safe. Too much damage was done to ever implicate you, Lola.”

  With feelings of awe and wonder at the vicissitudes of fate, I thanked them both from the bottom of my heart, and they vowed to never reveal anything of what had happened—ever.

  “Not even in a story,” George added, poking Dumas’ plump thigh with a forefinger several times to push the promise home.

  “Very well,” he nodded, still wiping at his brow with an unsteady hand. “Though that will be difficult—it is so damnably good!”

  At this, he rose with a groan, and headed off to the nearest gendarmerie to report what he’d found.

  *

  I stayed that night at George’s in the Square d’Orléans. Chopin was still feeling miserable with his cold, so George invited herself into the room I was occupying, with a bottle of red wine in one hand and two glasses in the other.

  “It’s just like old times, Lola,” she said with a smile. “Remember our first journey together, when you were so frightened of Countess d’Agoult?”

  “I remember it well.”

  “Shove over, I’m getting in.”

  She slipped in beside me, and poured us each a big glass. Then she left the bottle on the table beside the bed and plumped up the pillows behind her, to lean on.

  “So what does it mean, this discovery of Alex’s?” she wondered, still thrumming with the horrors of the day.

  “I don’t know what to think,” I replied. “Cleaving the sternum? That sounds like a professional job—a doctor, or a butcher. Oh God.”

  “Who cut the heart out?” George asked. “That’s what we need to know.”

  I shuddered, then immediately thought of Eugène Sue’s butcher character in Les Mystères de Paris. Eugène was a doctor, of course, a surgeon… So was the horrid Koreff—a doctor of sorts. Other potentially violent men? There was Beauvallon, of course. Good God. “What was someone else doing there, so quickly?” I asked. “There’d been no one around when I needed them, certainly—no one at all in the entire cemetery to come to my aid!”

  “But what if,” George whispered, eyes wide, “what if there was someone there all along: waiting and watching.”

  “Oh Jesus, don’t say that!” I cried. “Do you know how terrifying that is to me?” Waiting and watching was the Jesuit’s stock in trade, I thought. Then I wondered: maybe it was the modus operandi for the society itself? Could it have been another member of the Exterminating Angels? Sent as back-up? And as punishment for de la Vega’s failure, they rip out his heart? Oh yes, a brotherhood of wolves—as close to a live dismemberment as they could get… But why, if so, didn’t they come after me, as I rode—so disturbed, so jangled—from the cemetery? Finish me off, once and for all. Instead, I rode away. No, nothing made sense.

  “Don’t let’s talk about it anymore,” I said. “I’m leaving tomorrow, leaving France altogether, and I need to keep my nerve.”

  She sobered and nodded. “Where will you go?”

  “I still don’t know.”

  “What about Germany?”

  “My table dancing in Bonn was remarked upon in the press. Very unfavourably. I’ve already been warned out of Germany after slashing an officer.”

  A brief laugh. “What about Belgium? Or Switzerland?”

  “I know nothing about them.”

  “They seem mild sort of countries; they like money and chocolate.” She put one finger to her lips. “What about England?”

  With the word, I recalled the dapper little shit who had made my life a misery after my London début—some sort of government man, who’d been spying on me and kept me in a locked room overnight, to cool off and await questioning. He too had warned me, told me I was unwelcome on British soil: “Go away and try not to cause any more mischief in the future, or you may not be so lucky,” he’d said. Bastard! Pompous twat! “The door might be closed there, too,” I told George with a shrug.

  “C’est dommage.” She reached over to the table beside the bed and handed me an envelope. “I think it’s time for this, then. For you. From Alex. He came by earlier this evening, left it with Chopinsky.”

  I tore the envelope open and peeked inside. Several sheets of paper lay there, folded.

  “Bank drafts,” George said. “He’s decided to sell a number of Henri’s paintings—will put them up at auction soon, but he knows at least the approximate value, and so, these are for you. With love from Henri. Alex thinks it’s only right.”

  My heart filled. My Bon-bon.

  George drew herself up, pursed out her lips, and gave a brilliant rendition of a Dumas boast: “‘Alexandre Dumas’ word is his pledge, and a lady in distress will never be in distress if I have something to say about it.’”

  We had a laugh. Both of us had seen Alex’s generous and flamboyant promises in action: sometimes successful, sometimes with a dubious ending. Merchants preferred cash to bombast.

  “It’s so kind of him,” I said.

  “Yes, it is. But we all know that it is also what Henri would have wished.”

  I felt the truth of that, and held back tears.

  “As well, there is this,” and George pulled a small package from her skirt.

  “What…?”

  “Also from Alex.”

  I tore the wrapping open; inside was a soft leather belt with a pouch. There was a note: “To be
worn inside your clothing, against the skin. To keep the money safe. And—with permission—I will think of it there, quite often. Your friend, Alex.”

  We really chuckled at this, and I was grateful for the cunning item. Those bank drafts were a lot of cash to have on my person.

  “Not to change the subject… But I presume you are still into men, my sweet?” George asked after a moment.

  I looked over; her face was impish.

  “You’re not allowed to be melancholy. I’m just thinking,” she went on. “Who can I introduce you to? I know that young Bobby—Robert Peel junior, that is, an English baronet-to-be—has been batting around at a bit of a loss.”

  “Oh bother,” I said. I had too much else to worry about.

  “I’ll send him a letter, is what I’m telling you, Lola, if you want me to do so. Do you?”

  “No, George. I don’t think so.”

  “Le Chopinet had a thought, as well. There’s a Russian Baron from Latvia that he knows—”

  “You’re sounding like a mother, or a madam,” I retorted, and at this, she threw her head back and let out a honk of a laugh.

  “I am!” she cried. “How perfectly absurd!”

  “I want to go somewhere on my own.” As soon as I said it, I knew it was true—and at that instant, I realized something else as well. “As a matter of fact, George,” I said, now perfectly serious and perfectly sad, “I think I am through with love.”

  “Oh, one can never be through with love, dear Lola,” she protested. “Though I do think that you should give the fairer sex a chance.”

  It was my turn to laugh.

  “I’m not joking now,” she told me earnestly. “You’re not ready yet, perhaps. But never underestimate your own sex. Our love is vast, and equally enjoyable.” She was leaning against me, her body very warm—like a furnace, in fact, generating its own heat. I took a sip of my wine, and after a moment, she sighed and leaned against the pillows once more. “I can’t and won’t tell you what to do, dear. But one thing I do know: no one can be both a Cleopatra and an Aristotle. Use what you have, my sweet Lola—take it as far as you can.”