Irene Adler 08 - Spider Dance

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “Irene, you always weave fairy tales around the simplest facts. This may be some mischief devised by Sherlock Holmes to keep you out of his way, which you have a habit of getting into.”

  She stopped to regard me. “You believe that Sherlock Holmes can be mischievous?”

  “Ah, no. Alas not. But he might be mischievous in a devious, obstructive sort of way. He must have been just that kind of boy.”

  “And you have a habit, dear Nell, or imagining us all as recalcitrant children who have escaped your tender supervision.” She frowned and started paging backward. “The obituaries are on the last page of the first section, but no Eliza Gilbert is listed there. If only we could take this edition with us to study in decent light.”

  “We can’t.”

  “Actually, we can.” Irene lifted her hem while eyeing me significantly. “It could be gently rolled and put into a petticoat pocket.”

  “That would be stealing, Irene.”

  “It would be borrowing.”

  “You plan to broach the Dragon Wheems again, coax him into taking down this same box, and surreptitiously returning the missing paper during a second visit?”

  “That is a possibility. I could say I needed to check additional facts.”

  “Adding lying to thievery.”

  “I need this paper, Nell.”

  “Not in my petticoat pocket.”

  “Very well. It will go in mine. All I require is your silence.”

  I looked at the ceiling, which unfortunately forced me to stare at one of those confounded electric lightbulbs of Mr. Edison. Progress was very wearing.

  “Silence,” she repeated.

  It was only one miserable newspaper, but it might be the only one from that date. “I will not return to this obnoxious place,” I said. “You will have to replace it on your own.”

  “I will, Nell. In fact, I wish I had come here on my own.”

  At that we both rustled back down the myriad aisles, reinstalling the looted box in its place, and then finally finding Mr. Wheems’s small station.

  He stared at our hands, which could have been shoveling coal.

  Irene smiled as if he were President Harrison. “We will tell Mr. Davis of your cheerful cooperation. I may have to look up one more thing at a later date, if I may.”

  “You may, but if Mr. Davis don’t say it’s right, you mayn’t.”

  Irene didn’t bother telling him that Mr. Davis had offered her carte blanche once he had seen Mr. Belmont’s letter. She would manage the return, I was sure, if she had to don her walking-out clothes and break into the place by night to do so.

  Once we had regained the ground floor and then the street, she eyed the avenue up and down until she spied a tearoom.

  “There! We can get a seat by the window and study this terrible smudged old print in daylight.”

  And so we did. But rake the obituary listing up and down as many times as we liked, we never came across the names Eliza or Gilbert.

  MEMOIRS OF A DANGEROUS WOMAN:

  Countess of Landsfeld

  I speak of Jesuitical lies . . . It was said, also, that I tamed

  wild horses, horsewhipped gendarmes, knocked flies with a pistol

  ball of the bald heads of aldermen, fought duels . . .

  and a multitude of other similar feats. Now, sir, do you

  see the sly Jesuitical, infamous design of all this? It was

  simply to unsex me–to deprive me of that high, noble,

  chivalrous protection, which is so universally

  accorded woman in this country.

  —LETTER FROM LOLA MONTEZ TO THE

  BOSTON DAILY EVENING TRANSCRIPT,1852

  I’ve been called many names, some of them quite rude: strumpet, whore, Republican. At the time I evoke here, I was known as Marie, countess of Landsfeld. Ludwig’s advisors wore out his ears trying to stop him from bestowing a Bavarian title on me, but I won out. I had been winning out so roundly over the Jesuits and Ultramontanes that they resorted to every subterfuge to turn the people against me: slander and lies were their sword and pistol. I determined that nothing should drive me out of Bavaria, not names, not death itself.

  The mob of six thousand assaulting my palace windows that night in Munich used most of the rude names granted me, and then some. I appreciate invention in an opponent, even it if has six thousand throats.

  My loyal Alemannia—young, brave, handsome fellows, my small army of student-soldiers and my self-appointed honor guard—stood inside with me, ready to defend me against all attackers. How many, I wonder, still live today?

  For although the events that are burned into my brain occurred on another continent and more than a decade ago, they visit my dreams even now. Especially poor old Wiirtz, who was murdered so vilely.

  I saw him dead before I quit that place I had once loved as nowhere else. To this day it is as if a photographer’s flash powder lit that scene. Only that convinced me to abandon my palace. Did I say that I saw him dead? More than that. I saw him after having been tortured to death by the damned, conniving Ultramontanes, his brutalized body left in my own elegant rooms! Who knows why, perhaps merely to freeze my notoriously temperamental Latin blood.

  Now I am myself not dead but nearly so. I live in no palace now, but rented quarters in a humble area of a bustling city, on the sufferance of others. Once I ordered. Now I ask. I will not write “beg.” There is not much that I want now, after all.

  I was once famous for the variety, fame, and number of my reputed lovers—Liszt, Dumas, princes petty and pettier. My most intimate companion now is the Cough, which visits often, but without warning. The Cough racks me so violently that my pen grows palsied on the paper, so I must stop. And my left side is crippled by a stroke. Yet I can lift a pen in my right hand and write between the Cough’s ceaseless spasms. I can’t hold a cigarette anymore.

  I am told that I was the first woman to be photographed holding a cigarette. Why not? I was painted and photographed my whole life through. Until now I had hoped for a more distinguished record of achievement. I am also the first white woman to have been photographed with an Indian. I smile as I view that portrait from 1852. I was still handsome then, my face framed by dark curls above a sweet round white collar. So demure, so dangerous. My left hand, still useful, was linked through Chief Light in the Clouds’s arm, although he stared ahead like a statue, his dark face framed by long black braids.

  Always the opportunist, I first escaped what others determined should be my life by jumping the traces and running while barely in my teens: a fourteen-year-old girl pledged to a disgusting old man. I’d rather have been mistress to an unrespectable young man, and achieved that ambition several times in my life.

  Chief Light in the Clouds knew nothing of my history or reputation, nor I of his. We met at a Philadelphia photography studio, he fresh from visiting the “Great White Father in Washington,” I fresh from adventures and disappointments in Europe.

  We were both hopeful in that photograph, and both born to be betrayed long after it was taken.

  Do people in their last days always digress? I feel as old as Lilith, but am not yet forty.

  The room is cold. This winter season in a northern clime befits my decline: it is the autumn of 1860. Even as the sounds of rocks crashing through windows and chipping at stones echo in my memory, someone comes in and knocks the cot leg with the chamber pot. Consider it a triangle sounding in a funeral march.

  Is that always the outcome of history? Once I made it. I broke hearts and made newspaper headlines and even toppled a kingdom, now . . . now I don’t have the strength to finish filling the space on this small page . . . to wield a pen, much less a whip or a pistol.

  Lord God, I do fervently wish I could have a cigarette! One last cigarette before the firing squad. But the Cough, my constant companion now, says no.

  13

  TEA AND TREACHERY

  Jealousy, the jaundice of the soul.

  —DRYDEN


  Irene withdrew to a retiring room to install her illgotten gain in her petticoat pocket, which was easier to extract from than return to.

  I sipped my tepid Earl Gray. Americans seemed afraid to make really good scalding hot tea. I gazed idly at the street. Sitting in a tearoom is one of the few places where a lady is free to stare at passersby. I found myself smiling to recall that a tearoom was where Irene and I first met, and she had resorted to thievery on that occasion also . . . slipping the remaining cakes and sandwiches on our tray into her capacious muff for later consumption.

  Of course we had both been half-starving young spinsters then, Irene an aspiring opera singer, myself an unemployed governess, and then an unemployed drapery clerk.

  The paper was a minor matter, and I was glad to see Irene pursuing her own past rather than the lurid murder she had stumbled onto just as Sherlock Holmes was consulting on the event.

  I should be grateful that Irene was committing only petty theft now, instead of traipsing after Sherlock Holmes on a gruesome case as awful as the Ripper hunt.

  I sipped more tea and blinked my eyes open as I recognized a hat passing on the opposite side of the avenue. Pink Cochrane! How that girl flaunted her lavish-brimmed hats and her eighteen-inch waist!

  The New York World was erecting an impossibly high building next to the Herald and the Times . . . twenty-six stories, I had read in the Times. The new owner, a Polish immigrant named Pulitzer, sought to bring the less regarded World into direct competition with the larger newspapers.

  Apparently “Miss Bly” was inspecting the new quarters, which would be crowned with a gilded dome like St. Peter’s in Rome, only smaller, one would hope. Nothing like Roman Catholics and newspapers for sensational display!

  While I was exercising my Anglican distaste for show, I suddenly spilled what was left of my tea into the saucer. Pink had an escort for her promenade up Fifth Avenue . . . Quentin Stanhope. Even now he was lifting his walking stick to indicate some point high on the Sun and Times buildings.

  I half stood to better view the pair, and in so doing, tilted my tea-filled saucer into my lap, where it drenched my new green plaid skirt.

  Thus Irene found me, flailing with a napkin at my skirt and craning my neck nearly around the window frame to catch the last, unwelcome glimpse of the passing couple.

  “Nell! You’ve had an upset.”

  An upset indeed! “Yes, I turned to look out the window and my cuff must have caught on the teacup.”

  “Gracious. It will dry, of course, and we can have the hotel staff clean and press the skirt when we return.”

  “We must return right away. I am not about to stroll Fifth Avenue looking like something a pet Pekingese has had its way with.”

  “But my next destination is on the way downtown, and I am anxious to put this matter of Eliza Gilbert to rest.”

  “Eliza Gilbert has already been put to rest by those more entitled to do it than you.”

  “Nell!” she rebuked me for my temper.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Irene. I’m even sorrier that everything is ruined.”

  “It’s only a department-store skirt, Nell. We can get another tomorrow if the mishap ruins the outfit for you.”

  “You’re right, Irene. Spilled tea is hardly spoiled expectations or ruined hopes. But our gloves are unwearable, and—”

  “August in New York is quite warm enough to do without gloves. We shan’t be the first women to dispense with them.”

  I sniffed, but had no heart to argue proper attire with her. What did it matter where I went, wearing what?

  14

  TAKING THE FIFTH

  It is admitted by everybody that the newspaper woman does better

  work than her male competitors on the society and fashion pages

  of the great dailies. Nellie Bly has shown that a woman can make

  her mark as a traveling correspondent and as a special writer.

  Still, there is the general impression that the newspaper woman is

  confined to a narrow field. Perhaps this is a mistake.

  —THE ATLANTA CONSTITUTION

  FROM NELLIE BLY’S JOURNAL

  I gazed at the bare ground across from Park Row, then back at the towering facades of the New York Tribune and the Times building to its right. It was all I could do not to whoop a hurrah at the impressive sight of what was known as Newspaper Row.

  Then I turned my attention to my escort. He did quite nicely, for all that he was of that abominable, self-satisfied breed, an Englishman.

  I was often recognized on the street nowadays, not only because we girl stunt reporters were the talk of the newspapers themselves but because my novel, The Mystery of Central Park, had appeared last year with my likeness, wearing a large and most becoming hat, on the cover.

  I must admit that I was one of the first to dispense with the fashion of the modest little bonnet and embrace the newly popular hats with their swashbuckling wide brims and plumed panache. As rare as girl reporters still were, it didn’t hurt to have an instantly recognizable trademark (unless I was undercover), and a hat can’t be missed.

  And, of course, I stirred a great deal of curiosity about my gentleman friends. How odd that when a woman becomes known for the work she does, the first thing people want is to marry her off.

  I made sure no scandal attached to my attachments, and they were nearly nonexistent. All the better to have people talking about one. And the more they talked about me, the better stories I would be allowed to pursue and the more I would cement my position.

  I summed up the Englishman beside me as I knew the people who nodded to me in passing were doing.

  Of course there is nothing like an Englishman for tailoring, and in this Quentin Stanhope was in the running with the best of his breed. No sacklike lounge suits for him! He wore summerweight wool in a gray-and-ivory check, although he had conceded to the heat with a straw boater hat. Despite the soft summer tones, he seemed as hard as a steel etching, perhaps because his light eyes narrowed at all he examined, as if he took instant measure of every person and thing around him. His sun-darkened skin was oddly attractive against the light clothes, and he flourished his walking stick with an ease that reminded one it could also be used as a club. He was, in fact, a walking contradiction, a thoroughly civilized Englishman, as few Americans can emulate, and a thoroughly dangerous man.

  At the moment he was being charming, but I was well aware his fount of that was about to run out.

  “You said,” he reminded me in his clipped accent, “that this stroll would be enlightening.”

  My, was that fabled British patience wearing porcelain thin? I was irritated to consider that while he chafed to serve as my escort, he would willingly consort with that ninny Nell Huxleigh.

  “This hole in the ground is very enlightening,” I told him. “You see how the Tribune and Times buildings face the park along here?”

  “Quite impressive,” he said, sounding not at all impressed. “They must tower fifteen stories or so, and the single spire atop the Tribune must reach twenty. I don’t doubt that Wonders of the World will soon be springing up in New York City.”

  “And I intend to be one of them.”

  His lazy gaze sharpened on me in that intimidating manner. “Aren’t you getting a trifle above yourself?”

  “I aim high and am not ashamed to say it. The new World building goes right here. It’ll be twenty-six stories and have a gilt dome atop it.”

  “Rather like St. Peter’s in Rome.”

  “Like nothing in New York, except City Hall next door, and the World dome will be much, much bigger and higher. It will be the tallest building in the world when finished next year. There’s a story about Mr. Pulitzer. This site where the World will soon reign supreme housed the elegant French’s Hotel at Park Row until Mr. Pulitzer bought and razed it to make way for the new World building.”

  “Amazing waste.” Quentin shook his head. “We’re not so hasty to tear down the old and erect th
e new in London. We wait a few hundred years at least.”

  “Ah, but here’s the rest of the story. A bit more than twenty years ago, when Mr. Pulitzer was a fresh Hungarian immigrant and volunteer Union Army cavalryman during the Civil War, he was ejected from French’s Hotel because his battle-frayed uniform annoyed the fashionable guests. You see what this says about America?”

  “That snobs are everywhere?”

  “Don’t tease, Quentin! This is a land of limitless opportunity. In just a few years, Mr. Pulitzer has managed to bring the World to dwarfing the circulation of James Gordon Bennett’s Herald. Now his new World building will literally dwarf the neighboring presence of Charles Henry Dana’s Sun.

  “Mr. Pulitzer plans to excel the Tribune and the Times as New York’s most important newspaper, and I intend to be part of that.”

  “What are you telling me, Pink?”

  I must say that the sound of my nickname in that accent, on those hard-cut lips, was far more inciting than the many sweet nothings American gentlemen had whispered in my impervious ear.

  I would not be deflected by them, and I would not be deflected by him.

  “Only that my silence on the capture of Jack the Ripper last spring is an extraordinary requirement. To obey it, I must have extraordinary support.”

  “I can’t remain in America as your nursemaid for much longer,” he warned.

  “I never had, nor needed, a nursemaid. I’m telling you that I want a story. A story the entire world will marvel over. I don’t care in what odd corner of the globe it may be found, and I know you are very familiar with the world’s oddest corners. I want a sensation, and soon, or I will give Mr. Pulitzer the only such story I have: Jack the Ripper.”

  All pleasantries were over. Quentin Stanhope looked exasperated enough to consider beating me with his walking stick. Of course he did no such thing.

  “Doing that would seriously antagonize the governments of several European nations, and the queen and prime minister of England.”

  “Not to mention Mr. Sherlock Holmes.” I couldn’t help laughing. “I’m not afraid of any of you. So perhaps you’d better think of another story I can pursue that will earn me the unbridled support of the governments of several European nations.”