When they reached shore, her crew unloaded the cargo with practiced motions, passing the chests to the Englishmen who stood with the merchant she always worked with, Sir John Archer, as well as the lieutenant of the English Army, Walter Bentley. The gentlemen doffed their hats to her, and she nodded her head at them.
“I’ve a favour to ask,” she said in their barbaric English.
Walter Bentley spread his hands. “What does the Lioness require?”
Jeanne motioned to Sancius. He disappeared for a moment and then came onto the deck carrying a slumped form. The merchant and the soldier looked at the body in consternation. Jeanne took her bottle of water and splashed some on the boy’s face.
Elyas de Blois groaned and his eyes opened. The first thing he saw was the Lioness of Brittany.
“I’m not dead?” he asked, confused.
“Not yet,” she said. She looked to Walter Bentley. “I need you to help this cub. Find him somewhere he won’t come to harm. A monastery, or a small town where he can learn a trade. He can’t go back to France.”
“Certainly,” Walter said. “It would be my pleasure.”
Sancius helped the unsteady Elyas to his feet. Jeanne took the boy’s arm and led him away from the others so they could speak privately. “Go with him,” she said, nodding to Walter. “He’ll find you somewhere safe.”
“Where am I?”
“England.”
He blinked at her. “So you are helping the English.”
“Don’t make me regret not killing you,” she said. “The country across the water may as well not exist for you. Do you understand? You must not send word that you live.”
He gazed out across the water, seeming very young. “I understand. France is gone.”
“Bien.”
“Why are you doing this?” he asked.
She shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Are you still going to enforce your justice on others?” he asked. “Kill everyone in your way?”
Her face was hard as she gazed out to sea. “Don’t think one act of kindness stops me from being the Lioness. Don’t think you’ve saved me from myself. Philip VI and Charles de Blois are out there. I still need to make them bleed.”
Elyas de Blois was still woozy from the drugs and from the shock that he was not dead. “I hope you find the peace you search for, my lady. I’ll do my best to find some of my own.”
“See that you do. Adieu, Elyas.”
“Adieu, Jeanne.”
He walked unsteadily back to Walter Bentley. Jeanne raised her arm in farewell and climbed back onto her ship, its red sails slack.
“We sail tomorrow, my lady?” Sancius asked.
“Yes. Back to the sea. There’s still more prey to catch.”
“The Lioness” by Laura Lam
CORA CRANE AND THE TROUBLE WITH ME
Sandra McDonald
Her first marriage ends in violence and divorce. At least he teaches her how to run a gambling house. The second marriage is to an esteemed British officer. Off he goes to colonial service in India, leaving her with the quaint title of “Empire widow.” Her third husband, common law if not properly contracted, dies tragically young after an exhausting and painful illness. His death burdens her with debts and the weight of broken literary promises. Her fourth husband kills her lover but is acquitted by a jury for a crime of passion. Her last lover would marry her in an instant but he can’t get a divorce from his wife.
Cora’s love life is complicated.
Was complicated. She’s dead now, buried in an unremarkable grave in the very beautiful Evergreen Cemetery in Jacksonville, Florida. All things die, sooner or later. They flare for a brief moment, nothing more than yellow candle glow in the long dark night of eternity. They flicker out and everyone forgets their name.
Cora’s marble headstone omits most of her names—the ones she was born with, the others she took through marriage, the pseudonyms she adopted for her writing and for her complicated business transactions. The establishments she owned in Jacksonville seaport and further east along the beach have long been ground down to dust. The husband she loved most is buried a thousand miles away. She had no heirs. She only had me.
What am I? Her undiscovered autobiography, trapped in an unmarked box in a forgotten room in Jacksonville’s library archives. Hundreds of brittle pages she typewrote in those last few months of her life, listening to horse-drawn carriages and newfangled motorcars while the dark blue ocean rolled in and off the continent’s edge.
I am the culmination of Cora Crane’s travels, travails, ruminations, and regrets.
The title page says, “The Trouble with Me”.
Let’s start this story with the whores, shall we?
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They call it the line: a row of brothels and parlour houses that cater to tourists or local men seeking sex away from their fancy or boring or steadfast wives. The year is 1896 and prostitution is so popular in Jacksonville that hotel desk clerks distribute maps and guide books free of charge.
The girls on the line know all sorts of pleasure tricks. They know how to use their fingers and mouths, how to take a man front or back, how to keep a baby from happening, how to treat themselves for lice and other unpleasant venereal diseases. They know to be coy and how to smile through a bad night. They know how to cat fight with one another and ignore the town folk who call them jezebels. They know many things except how to stop the passing years from grinding away their beauty and young faces, turning them to wrinkled middle-aged women with few prospects in the world.
Cora’s not much older than they are, but they call her Ma.
As for herself, Cora knows she’s not beautiful. But she is stylish and confident, and educated, too. She reads voraciously. She can calculate losses and revenue. By the age of thirty-one she has bought the Hotel de Dream, a rooming house near the line, and turned it into one of the city’s most exciting destinations. She has competition: Lyda de Camp runs a popular bawdyhouse, as does the fierce woman they call Russian Belle. Cora, however, takes the best care of her girls. She feeds them good food, encourages dental hygiene, and forgives them when they run off owing her money.
Money’s a sore spot for Cora. Husband One’s funds diminished long ago, and Husband Two won’t answer her letters from his post in India. After a good night, she banks large wads of cash while ignoring the cold stares of the proper women in town. On slow nights, as the River City settles to sleep around her, she sits by the yellow light of a lamp and writes about men, manners, love and adventure.
Ideas burn in Cora’s blood. Words float through her dreams. The only thing better than a wealthy man in her parlour is a rich sentence in her head. She aspires to worldwide travel and journalism like that intrepid female journalist Nellie Bly, who famously had herself committed so that she could report on the madness of asylums.
One day Cora too will be celebrated for her writing. She promises herself that. Her books will be in the finest bookstores and libraries, so lauded worldwide for their insight and wit that no one will care about brothels and scandal.
Until then, she buys beer cheap and sells it at for exorbitant profit. She gathers painted girls to her side and deploys them to the sailors, merchants, bankers, travelers, and railroad men who have money to spare. She puts on fine blue hats and walks the wooden sidewalks with her head held high, ignoring the whispers of scandal that trail her like the morning mist.
One cold night in November, and by cold I mean temperatures positively tropical when compared to the frigid North, a young journalist named Steve Crane steps off a train, takes up lodging at the fine St. James Hotel, and heads out into the darkness seeking pleasure. He knows where to go. He’s been to town before. Fumble-mouthed with women, already wasting his good looks and health with alcohol and tobacco and opium, he has enough money to pay for some good times before he ships off to cover the rebellion in Cuba.
He and Cora meet. She’s read and admired his book ab
out a poor girl in the city, and the other one about a soldier in the Civil War. He enjoys her flattery, her direct gaze, her vision of a future filled with mutual prosperity and success. After his boat founders on the way to Cuba, she takes him home and helps him write the tale for newspapers and later Scribner’s. He asks her to close the Hotel de Dream and come with him to Europe.
She is in love. She makes mistakes.
They journey to Greece to cover the war and then take up residence in verdant England, making friends with fellow refugees from proper society. In a rented country estate they entertain Henry James and H.G. Wells and Joseph Conrad, along with assorted wives, lovers, children, dogs, and eccentric visitors. Viva la vie Bohème! That Cora and Steve are not officially wed is the matter of some gossip, especially among those who know of Cora’s still-binding marriage to the British man in India who will not respond to her letters. She ignores what she can’t change.
They run up debt. Steve runs away. To Havana, to New York, to distant whorehouses, to hotels where he can sit without distraction and pen his stories in black ink. He doesn’t write to her. Cora’s temper grows short as she tries to juggle payments to grocers, butchers, landlords, and servants. She tells invented stories about Steve to anyone who will listen and lend her money.
“Full of deceit and cruel to others,” Cora writes in her diary. “That’s the trouble with me.”
Only after Steve begins coughing up traces of scarlet blood does he return to her caring embrace. She forgives his escapades. What else can she do? After his candle flickers out in a sanitorium in the Black Forest, his American family refuses her financial support.
She returns to Jacksonville and slides back into the pleasure business with a lavish new parlour house that becomes the best bordello in town. We don’t need to talk about her next husband, who persuades a jury to acquit him of murder but gets his just reward when his next wife shoots him dead.
Meanwhile, the intrepid Nellie Bly has married a millionaire manufacturer. Now she has fame and fortune both. Cora has a lonely bed that she fills with entirely unsuitable men.
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Because Nellie is only a year older than Cora, Cora imagines them as spiritual sisters separated at birth. The socialite Jennie Jerome is a decade older than Cora, but they are both daughters of America who prefer the streets and sights of London.
Just as bad with money, just as in love with life, witty and beautiful Jennie makes every wise decision that Cora does not. She marries an Englishman with good prospects and doesn’t divorce him. Of course there are dalliances with handsome lovers and one future king, but she waits for her Lord Randolph to die before moving onward to new and dubious marriages. Jennie writes plays, but doesn’t let literary daydreams derail her considerable charity work and duties to society. Jennie makes and keeps a wide variety of influential friends and associates, many of whom help her political ambitions.
Jennie’s family owns an enormous palace. Cora and Steve don’t have modern plumbing or electricity, but their country estate is at least rumored to be haunted. Jennie marries for love and money. Cora can’t marry Steve thanks to that stubborn man in India, but throughout her life she chases love across continents and lavish rooms filled with the smoke of men’s cigars.
They are friends, Jennie and Cora, charming their fellow members of Society of American Women in London. Witness this black and white photo from a summertime dinner, hundreds of women in corsets, hats and frills. Jennie and Cora sit in the center of them all, united and resolute. On the topic of feminism, however, they disagree. Jennie fights for a woman’s right to vote and captain her own destiny. Cora has no quarrel with the power of men in society until her Stevie dies and she finds little support from creditors, solicitors and publishers.
Their lives differ in one other crucial way. Jennie bears two children. Her oldest son Winston becomes prime minister of England. Cora has no children, although she helps bury one or two after her girls succumb to pregnancy.
I’m Cora’s legacy, and my letters fade more each day.
◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊
This is their best year. 1899. Steve has returned from his flings in Cuba. The tuberculosis has not yet begun to waste him into the shriveled man of his final days. Money is tight, distractions too plentiful, but Steve has a new book coming out and Cora’s essays are blossoming in print as well. She is known as a gracious hostess, if eccentric and lofty. She cooks doughnuts that delight her guests. She imagines the bright future unfolding.
Steve’s novel is not well received. The debts continue to grow. Scarlet blood stains his lips and cigarettes. Every day brings new bills demanding payment. Each week Steve sends out letters beseeching publishers for advances on books and stories he will never write. Cora prods and pushes him, as she does herself, and they argue until he storms off to go sleep with his favourite dog.
“Harsh speech that cuts too deep,” Cora writes in her diary. “That’s the trouble with me.”
Winter comes with bitter air, but nothing prevents Cora and Steve from hosting a lavish holiday party for sixty of their closest friends. They invite the ghost who lives in the house and write him into a romp complete with music and song. They do the two-step and then a waltz by firelight, such a loving couple. The next day, Steve collapses with a lung hemorrhage that begins his long sad decline to death.
He dies in June, huddled in a clean white bed and holding the damn dog.
◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊
An alternate history: Steve Crane comes to Jacksonville and makes his way down the line, stopping at Lyda de Camp’s house to dally with some soiled doves who’ve never read his work. He sails to Cuba, survives the sinking, writes his story “The Open Boat” without help, and eventually reaches Havana. He covers a near-fatal ambush of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders in the dangerous hills. Returning to his family in New Jersey, he succumbs to their concerns over his health and seeks medical treatment with the very best doctors. He dies not at aged twenty-eight but instead the age of fifty, having published several more successful novels.
Cora Taylor, as she is then known, never has reason to close the Hotel de Dream. She remains one of Jacksonville’s most popular madams. She enters into a long relationship with a local businessman, Ernest Budd, and never moves to England, never meets Jennie Jerome, never dines on midnight snacks with H.G. Wells and Henry James in a haunted English castle. Ernest eventually wins a divorce from his shrewish wife, and he and Cora move to the seaside happily ever after.
Cora and Steve could have been ships that passed unnoticed in the night. Instead, as Steve observed in poetry, their love was full of the water’s turmoil, passing yellow lights, and then the silence of the dark sea.
◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊
This is Cora’s life in the spring of 1900: Steve is dying. Since Christmas, his mind and pen have faltered to the point he can barely read his correspondence, can’t pull together a story, can’t be bothered to worry about the crushing debt weighing more heavily with each passing day. The tuberculosis he caught while young in New York City, the malaria he suffered in Cuba, the fistula that has bothered him since summer—who can say for sure why he is diminishing, but his thin body won’t last much longer.
Cora is frantic, exhausted, desperate. Her only hope is a trip to specialists in the Black Forest of Germany, but the journey is exorbitantly expensive and Steve is so tired, so frail. She begs for money from every available source, hires nurses, arranges for train tickets and coaches, and even brings along Steve’s favorite dog Sponge.
She will do anything to keep him, but he leaves her anyway.
And here is Cora in the summer of 1910: she lives mostly at the beach these days, watching the ocean while managing the Court from afar. Forty-five years old, no longer slim and fashionable, she is trying to recuperate from a slight stroke that turned the left side of her face numb. Ernest spends as much time with her as he can hide from his cruel wife. I
t’s a relief, really, to call most her time her own. Perhaps, like Steve in his bed at Christmastime, she has a premonition that her days are dwindling. Certainly some low feeling in her gut drives her to type late into each night, detailing long-ago soirees and long-lost friends and old failures. She can almost hear Steve’s voice in her ear, cataloging the disappointments of his career and hers.
“Hold too tight to soured dreams,” she writes. “That’s the trouble with me.”
What of Jennie Jerome? She’s still in England, and now married to a man the same age as her son Winston. That union will soon end in divorce. She’ll have one more mismatched marriage before high heels and a bad fall lead to gangrene and death in 1921. She’s buried next to her first husband, Lord Randolph, who proved that a fortuitous marriage early in a woman’s life can make all the difference to her lasting success.
And what of Nellie Bly? She is widowed now, and the company she inherited from her millionaire husband will collapse into bankruptcy in 1911. Her story is far from over, for World War I will open up another chapter for her that Cora will never read about. Even that good fortune fades. In 1922, Nellie dies alone and poor in a New York City hospital. Pneumonia, they say. She is buried in the Bronx under her pseudonym and real name, Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman. Although during her lifetime she made much more money at writing than Stephen Crane, she is far less remembered.
Cranky Ladies of History Page 31
