FEMME FATALE

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  The maitre d’, however, was more easily impressed. “From England you say?”

  “Yes, have you seen him?” She glanced hastily over her shoulder at me and lowered her voice. “There has been a long separation, and my dearest friend, well, this meeting is quite crucial.”

  Here I almost overcame my natural reticence and shouted out my objections like a barrister before the criminal Crown Court at the Old Bailey. Irene, my dearest friend, was making me out to be a romantic interest of Sherlock Holmes! Had I not been anticipating the tart comeuppance she would shortly be giving him and our erstwhile associate Pink, I could never have held my tongue at being a party to such a travesty.

  The maitre d’ honored me with an inquiring, yet not unsympathetic glance. He appeared quite taken by my quiet dress and modest demeanor, for his gaze grew as kindly as a bachelor uncle’s: utterly mistaken but well-meaning.

  “There are several British gentlemen dining here tonight,” he admitted.

  “You see, Nell,” Irene tossed comfortingly over her shoulder, “I told you we should find Chauncey here and nowhere else in New York.” She smiled at the maitre d’. “Chauncey is a gentleman of the finest sensibilities and discernment. He is also somewhat over six feet tall and dark-haired.”

  “A handsome fellow?”

  This gave Irene pause. “Distinguished, rather. And I rather think he is with Miss Nellie Bly.”

  “Oh, madam, why didn’t you say so! Of course, though I should not hesitate to call him handsome,” he said with a nauseating smirk in my direction.

  I blushed deeply enough to merit our erstwhile friend Pink’s childhood nickname myself.

  “They are meeting again after a separation,” Irene confided to the waiter with the beaming pride of a matchmaking maiden aunt.

  That was, of course, completely true and conveyed the completely wrong impression. I have never known someone as adept at not lying as Irene, and yet as able at achieving the same results as lying.

  “I believe I can assist,” the maitre d’ said. “Please follow me, ladies.”

  Irene did, and thus I was forced to also.

  The rooms before us shone with electric lights glancing off fine china and crystal and ladies’s jewels and men’s spectacles.

  I felt distinctly underdressed, but then again I was the lost Chauncey’s country sweetheart and could be expected to be somewhat gauche, as the French so aptly say. I was in a sad state when I could only describe my situation with a French word. Jejune, also came to me. Apparently the French had many words for awkward women and I had learned every one.

  I have never dreaded a meeting as much as I did that one. Though I longed to see Pink disgraced in Irene’s and her own eyes, and possibly even Sherlock Holmes’s, I did not relish seeing Irene confront the one’s treachery and the other’s concealed admiration again.

  Both struck me as dangerous, though I could not quite say why.

  I saw Pink facing us at a table for four; her small beaded evening reticule lay at one empty place. Her head was tilted in that charming heliotrope velvet hat with the pink taffeta band as she gazed at the gentleman whose erect back faced us like a well-tailored wall.

  How odious of Mr. Holmes to be paging through the documents of Irene’s obviously irregular birth! How mean and selfserving of Pink to unleash the London bloodhound on the trail of my American friend’s humble, even scandalous roots. My hands made fists inside my cotton gloves as we approached.

  As bold-faced as Irene could be when she had to, I alone understood the sensitive soul of the creative artist beneath. I saw now the tiny child forced upon the stage, alone in life except for a freak show of kindly but eccentric fellow performers. However crude Pink’s own upbringing with her violent stepfather, she had at least had a mother and brothers and sisters. Irene had nothing. Except me, much later. Much too late.

  “I’m afraid,” the maitre d’ paused to tell us when we were still out of earshot of the table’s occupants. Why should he be afraid? “I’m afraid that the party has already ordered dessert.” He paused to interrogate a passing waiter whose face was as black and shiny as patent leather. “Yes. They’ve ordered dessert already. Baked Alaska, a speciality of the house, for the gentleman, and tuttifrutti, a fresh new ice cream confection for the lady. Would you care to join them?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Irene, beginning to pinch off the fingers of her finest white kid gloves with the prissy exactitude of a debutante. “I would definitely order two more tutti-fruttis for us. That will be all.”

  He bowed at her dismissal and we were left alone to approach our conspiring betrayers.

  Pink saw us first and looked up, shocked. Then she flushed the color of her taffeta ribbon.

  “My dear Pink,” Irene said, “or should I say ‘Scarlet’? I understand that you are employing foreign spies in the New Jersey public records department. I can’t say that I’m shocked at your going behind my back. You are, after all, a conscienceless newspaper reporter who purports to be the conscience of the community while selling your acquaintances for the thrill of a headline, but I am shocked that you would attempt, and succeed, at recruiting this gentleman to your vile impertinences.”

  Irene’s voice radiated righteous rage. I should not have liked to have been the object of her regard at that moment, but the gentleman at the table turned to face her despite the acid etching her ordinarily mellow voice.

  For a moment, I felt pity even for Sherlock Holmes.

  The man’s head turned with the slow social arrogance I had observed in him before. I saw his profile.

  No. Not his profile. Not his profile.

  Another’s.

  I tried to breath in, to draw in the reality my eyes could not deny, but I had no breath. I had stopped like a clock in need of urgent rewinding.

  Sounds of clinking china and crystal and sterling silver kept easy enough time all around me. Voices murmured like waves, like the endless sick-making waves of the Atlantic Ocean. I was going to be sick, I was going to, going to . . .

  Irene’s gloveless hand seized my wrist and her nails dug into the bare flesh between glove and sleeve until the pain made my eyes swim in saltwater . . . my own tears.

  “We will leave you two to your just desserts,” she said with as much loathing as I had ever heard her use onstage when a role demanded it.

  She turned me with a clatter I took for the diners’ silverware all around us, chiming, chiming, but then realized it was only my own suddenly spun chatelaine, given to me by Godfrey, dear Godfrey, who was so distant and whom I so wished to be near me now.

  I was being propelled back along our path through the gay and glittering crowd, past waltzing waiters with trays held over their heads like shields, past eyes that glanced up at us and vanished into our wake.

  33.

  Desserted

  She proved to be a slender woman . . . clad in a dark blue cloth dress with a corsage bouquet of red roses, a somewhat stunning hat with a big gilt arrow on the side crowned a face of some regularity of feature and from under the hat to the rear projected that arrangement of women’s hair technically known as the “Psyche twist.”

  —A “RATHER PRETTY” NELLIE BLY TESTIFYING BEFORE THE ASSEMBLY

  JUDICIARY COMMITTEE, THE ALBANY ARGUS , 1889

  “I’m going to be—” I muttered.

  “No, you are not,” Irene insisted. “We are on solid land now, Nell, and you will not be sick. Granted, I don’t like the view, but we will not give anyone the satisfaction of either of us being sick. We will go back to the hotel and regroup.” “Regroup.” I laughed queasily. “We are hardly a group.”

  So swiftly had Irene retraced our steps that we were out in the overlit evening air in no time. I suddenly felt a deep sigh escaping me and I could breathe again.

  “You wanted to say something to Pink,” I pointed out, rather feebly.

  “At this point it is best that I say nothing to anyone. Oh, Nell! Nell.” She stopped to face me, her eyes shining s
uspiciously. “I have miscalculated so abysmally! And the worst of it is I have dragged you into this . . . maelstrom with no idea of what we really faced. If my own accursed past had not been involved, I might have seen . . . I might have spared you. I would give anything to have spared you—”

  At that moment, a man overtook us.

  “Nell! Irene! Nell! I don’t understand. Why are you here?”

  Irene rounded on Quentin Stanhope like a fishwife, but she said not a word. He stood looking back and forth from her gorgeous Medusa glare to my own evasive eyes with an air of utter confusion.

  “You are right,” Irene said. “We were not supposed to be here.”

  “If you won’t stay, at least let me escort you back to your hotel.”

  “No. We wouldn’t want your baked Alaska to melt,” she said in tones as icy as the dessert’s name. I admit that even in my desperate straits I felt a wistful desire to know just what a “baked Alaska” was.

  “I can’t let you leave like this. Let me at least find you a cab.”

  “We found one to get here and we can find one to leave.”

  “Please.” He was looking at me. I looked away. “I’m quite at sea. I had no idea you were here in America. You two. At least tell me where you’re staying.”

  Irene considered. Her cheeks held round circles of rouge that were far too obvious to be painted there by anything but strong emotion. I had never seen her so furious, and that it was on my behalf almost made me dissolve into the tears I would rather die than release.

  “You may call on me at the Astor House,” she said finally. “I may receive you.”

  “Irene!” He cast another, mute appealing glance at me, but dared not say my name.

  The intensity of his look made me turn away, and that in turn revived Irene’s anger. She grasped my forearm and drew me with her to the curbside. We walked along the sidewalks of Fifth Avenue, which thronged with fashionable, merrymaking pedestrians alongside a frothing river of vehicles and horses of every description.

  “Is he—?” I asked at length.

  “Gone back inside. A gentleman does not desert a lady at table.”

  “Does not desert . . . dessert,” I added, hiccoughing and laughing and crying at once.

  “Are you still going to be sick?”

  “Possibly.”

  “If I hail a cab will that make it worse?”

  “Possibly.”

  “What will make it better?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Then I might as well hail a cab.”

  I could not object to that, so we were soon jolting back to our hotel, Irene’s forearm twined around mine as if she would never let go.

  “I was just so surprised,” I finally said. “I thought—”

  “So we both thought, but I should have known better. I am a stupid vain creature to think that Sherlock Holmes would cross a puddle in Cheapside to meddle in my puny affairs, much less the Atlantic Ocean.”

  “I assumed the same, and I am not vain, though I have been known to be stupid, especially lately.”

  “Oh, Nell, we are neither of us stupid, only angry at ourselves because we are so angry at others. I would smoke, but that would make you sicker.”

  “Actually, the scent of sulphur is bracing. I rather like it.”

  “Then I shall light lucifers until we get home.”

  “How often a hotel has been our home. Perhaps we travel too much.”

  A scratch sounded in the demidark of the hansom cab, and then the tiny flare of a flame and the sharp smell of the devil’s sulphur.

  “You looked like a Fury back there,” I said.

  “I felt like one. I don’t like to be surprised, and I don’t like you to be shocked, especially by other people. That is my job.”

  “You do it well.”

  “Thank you, Nell. A demanding audience drives a performer to her highest levels.”

  “He calls her Pink.”

  “So do many people. It means nothing.”

  “Being in New York means something.”

  “We are here and it means nothing yet.”

  “Only because you have not figured out what it means, but you will.”

  “Not at this rate. Nell, I am so sorry I did not anticipate this.”

  I was silent for a while. “But I did, you know. Oh, not this particular instance, but the general . . . situation.”

  To that she had no answer, this glibbest of women. We descended our cab, moved through the Astor House’s crowded reception rooms and took an elevator to our floor without me even noticing how crushingly close such conveyances were. We said little more that evening, being both exhausted and disappointed, perhaps for slightly different reasons.

  It was barely nine o’clock the next morning when a bellman brought up a card. Quentin’s.

  Irene tossed it on the nearest table and stalked to the window. I retrieved it. I didn’t know that Quentin had a card. I wondered what it would say. Very little. QUENTIN STANHOPE, it read, BEL-GRAVE SQUARE, LONDON, ENGLAND.

  “I doubt he still lives in London,” I noted.

  “Nor do we.”

  “Such an address is not on your card.”

  “I am not a spy,” she hissed exactly like one of Sarah Bernhardt’s pet snakes. “A spy who turns on friends.”

  I couldn’t defend him. It was not that I wouldn’t, even now, only I couldn’t think of a reason.

  “Did you sleep, last night?” she asked.

  “Some.”

  She snorted, but I had no heart to correct her. “I was awake half the night myself, asking why he was here and what Pink’s true game is.”

  “A sensational story, you said it yourself.”

  She turned from the windows, the wine velvet draperies resembling a stage curtain behind her. “If so, I am not the sole subject of it. I am hardly well known enough that my foggy origins should raise a stir anywhere. Pink believes a murderer stalks my past. That must be her goal, unmasking the murderer. My past is incidental.”

  “No one’s past is incidental to their present.”

  Her smile was broad. “ ‘The past is prologue.’ Antonio. Act Two, Scene One. The Tempest. Quite brilliantly said, Nell, although Shakespeare anticipated you by a few hundred years. Why did Henry the Eighth kill so many wives?” she asked out of the blue.

  “They were inconvenient to him. And some, he claimed, were unfaithful.”

  “Inconvenient and unfaithful? And what is the incontrovertible proof of such behavior?”

  I shrugged more casually than I felt. The incontrovertible proof was being caught in the unexpected company of the wrong person. “The evidence of one’s eyes?”

  “Sometimes the evidence of one’s eyes is unreliable.” Irene came to take Quentin’s card from my unresisting fingers. “Let’s have the fellow up to explain himself. You can wait in the bedchamber.”

  “I suppose I should. That way you would have free rein to question him and I could . . . eavesdrop.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Eavesdropping is rather unforgivable.”

  “Not as unforgivable as secretly consorting.”

  “Indeed.” I bustled away and carefully set the chamber door to remain ever so slightly ajar by stuffing a rolled-up stocking in it.

  I had some time to wait, but finally a muffled knock sounded on our hall door. Muffled voices drifted across my threshold.

  I pressed my ear to the opening.

  “. . . insanely inappropriate to call now . . .”

  “. . . utterly astounded,” Quentin was saying. “I had no idea you were in New York.”

  “Why were you here yourself, then?” Irene was asking.

  “Some remaining matters related to the Ripper case.”

  “What matters?”

  “I am not at liberty to say.”

  “Why were you meeting with Pink?”

  “She knows New York, and she invited me to do so.”

  “And did you visit the New Jersey record
s departments at her behest?”

  A long pause, during which I fought against an overwhelming urge to sneeze, as one always does when it is most crucial not to.

  “Yes.”

  “That is all the answer you have? There is no other reason why you would spend more than a week crossing an ocean merely to pry into my antecedents, or lack of them?”

  “She said something about some present story of hers being related to your origins and that a foreigner wouldn’t attract comment, as he might have ancestors who had emigrated here and be interested in tracing them. It seemed harmless enough, spending a few hours assisting her. She was asked to remain mute about the murders of the century, after all.”

  “And you felt no guilt about going behind my back?”

  “I had no idea I was going behind your back, as you put it, because I had no idea you were on the scene yourself. Irene, she said some crimes she was considering for a story seemed to involve persons who might have known you as a child. It struck me that I would be doing both of you a favor to perform this trifling task.”

  “And why would you be so willing to do Miss Nellie Bly a favor?”

  I held my breath.

  “Because that was the price of her silence!” he burst out. “Did you think that you and Sherlock Holmes insisting on it would have much effect after she returned to New York? She buttonholed me before I left the castle and demanded that I contact her later. When I did, she called me here. If I would do as she wished, so she could procure this new and, she said, equally appalling story, she would remain silent on what had transpired in Transylvania.”

  “Quentin, that is blackmail.”

  “It is bargaining, Irene, and I am used to such secret arrangements. I never dreamed it had anything to do with you personally, believe me, or I would never have agreed to it. And even when I arrived here, she said you were purely ‘peripheral’ to the story.”

  “Peripheral!” Irene did not like that.

  He laughed at her deliberately exaggerated air of wounded vanity. “Of course you are never peripheral to anything you choose to involve yourself in. And I would never had been so reckless as to accommodate Pink had I known she was flying in the face of your personal wishes. She has apparently bent both of us to her damned sensation-mongering.”