Irene Adler 08 - Spider Dance

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Irene frowned. This was not the image of Lola Montez the books had painted, although we had not read our way through all of them.

  “Your eyes,” the bishop pointed out, “are quite lively and vivid as well, but are decidedly brown.”

  “There was a father involved in the process of my being here,” Irene said.

  “Are you searching for his identity, is that it? You expect some inheritance perhaps?”

  “No. I prefer to owe nothing to any man.”

  The bishop’s eyebrow’s lifted with surprise and a bit of personal insult.

  “But of course I realize that the assistance of men in the business of this world is invaluable.” Irene’s most winning smile immediately won over the bishop again. “I am amazed that you found Lola Montez so substantial. I expected, frankly, to trace the path of a trivial, shallow woman given to impetuous affairs and fits of childish temper.”

  “She spoke well and made good sense, what can I say? That’s why I’ve never quite believed the reports of her excesses. They seem more scandal-ridden than one woman could amass in one fairly brief lifetime, for she was not forty when she died.”

  “The tombstone,” I interjected, “indicated she was forty-two.”

  “It was wrong, Miss Huxleigh. Father Hawks attended her and fussed mightily about the error. You see how even the most trivial facts can be engraved for eternity. I am no apologist for Lola Montez,” he said, turning to Irene again, “but from what I saw of her, once, on a lecture stage, when I was a callow youth of twenty-seven, you should not be ashamed to call her mother.”

  Irene was stunned. It was as if the bishop had spoken to some hidden fear she had not expressed even to herself.

  “Of course . . .” The bishop repressed a smile of recollection. “My uncle regrettably objected to her speaking at the Church of the Good Shepherd, despite my support of the idea, and she was most exercised with indignation at that turn of events. However, when she was mortally ill two years later, it did not stop her in the least from seeking solace from Father Hawks, and she died a member in good standing of the Episcopal Church. Even my uncle was touched by her passing.”

  “Would you have forbidden her that pulpit if you had been bishop then?”

  He gave the question a good minute’s consideration. “Probably. The papers can be scurrilous, and one must consider the reputation of the Church. We could welcome her as a member, but not as a cause célébre, hmmm?”

  “And some say the churches are hypocritical.”

  “You have a bit of fire and brimstone about you also, Mrs. Norton. Let us call it politics rather than hypocrisy.”

  “You are in good company then. But I don’t wish to argue with what happened thirty years ago, I wish to understand it. Do you think it possible she had a child no one knew about, in ’58, say?”

  “She traveled a good deal, had spent several years in California, then went to and fro from Europe and Australia. Women have their ways of concealing these things. It’s possible. Yet she made no mention, no provision, on her deathbed.”

  “I know. She left twelve hundred dollars—”

  “Not a mean sum in those days.”

  “I know. All of it to charity and the Church. None to her mother.”

  “It was not a happy connection from very early, I understand.”

  “None to any of the reputed men in her life.”

  “None survived her, except her first husband, Lieutenant James, who was utterly estranged. He not only charged her with adultery after they separated but when he sued her for divorce later, he ensured that neither of them was allowed to remarry. Ever. Father Hawks dutifully inquired, you see, who might be her heir, but her first husband obviously had no claims on her. Father Hawks was loath to let her leave all to the Church without due consideration.”

  “And you know this for a fact?”

  “We have talked about it, Father Hawks and I, and . . . I was much taken with her lecture. When she was shortly after leveled by a stroke, I took a personal interest.”

  This time Irene lifted skeptical eyebrows.

  “It shook me. That vibrant personality I witnessed at the lecture podium so soon having that wonderful voice stilled, those expressive limbs fettered, that mind imprisoned. I was young. I didn’t yet know the bitter paradoxes of life and death.”

  “I am strangely impressed by how much she impressed you in so short a time, Bishop. It is not what I expected to learn of her.”

  “We none of us are always what we are expected to be, I hope.”

  “No. Not even bishops.”

  He hesitated before speaking again. “I don’t wish to mislead you. She herself felt she had sinned much. Her last few years were spent in good works, and her penitence as death neared so touched Father Hawks that he, well, as he aged he became a bit undone by it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He has the notion that her religious repentance at the end was almost . . . saintly.”

  “St. Lola?!”

  “Exactly. You have it, Mrs. Norton. You’ve heard how even to this day her evil reputation follows her. Almost no one knows of her last months, of her honest religious fervor. So I told Father Hawks, but he was adamant not only on the genuineness of her conversion but insisted that she had amassed jewels from her many admirers that she intended to leave to the Church. He believed they had been stolen after her stroke, and hidden by those greedy enough to counter a dying woman’s last wishes. These twin convictions, her saintliness and her lost jewels, became a mania with the poor soul, particularly after age forced him to retire from active service.”

  “He is alive?” Irene was standing, no longer bothering to soften her commanding personality, blazing like some avenging angel herself.

  “Well, yes. Quite elderly, even tetched a bit perhaps, but . . . yes. He was here last week, pestering the members about her beatification, querying them about those people who took her in during her last illness.”

  “I must see him, meet with him.”

  “Certainly.” Her conviction had drawn the bishop to his feet as well, and he turned to delve in the top drawer of a nearby desk. “Here is his carte de visite, which we clergy leave with congregation members.”

  I crowded over Irene’s shoulder to view the simple rectangle of white the bishop had handed her.

  How newfangled everything was becoming. This card included a photograph of its bearer as well as an address and a telephone number for the club.

  Irene wove slightly on her feet. I felt it because I stood so close to her. Her face had gone as white as the paper of the carte de visite.

  “Thank you, Bishop,” she murmured. “This is a most valuable referral. Now we must. . .”

  “Go,” I said, taking her firmly by the elbow. “Thank you for your courtesy and the, er, ginger snaps.”

  I led her out of the chamber and down the short hallway to the door. Once we stood at the top of the usual flight of steps, breathing the warm, heavy air of late summer in the city, she shook me off.

  “What is the matter, Irene? You looked as if you had seen a ghost.”

  “I had, Nell, most unfortunately.”

  “Unfortunate for the ghost, I presume.”

  “For him, and for our quest.” She glanced at me, totally restored to her usual sardonic metal. “And for your peace of mind, I fear. Father Hawks is the poor tortured shell of a man whose body I saw on the Vanderbilt billiard table, with Sherlock Holmes himself in attendance.”

  “No!”

  “Yes. How dreadfully distressing. I’m afraid, in good conscience, we must let Mr. Holmes know immediately. Get a grip on yourself, Nell! You don’t wish to swoon at the top of a flight of stairs, not with all the summertime offal of the city of New York awaiting you at the bottom. And while wearing your brand-new ready-made ensemble from B. Altman’s. Before Quentin has seen you in it.”

  Sometimes Irene could outdo a long sniff of smelling salts for bracing effect.

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r />   MISSED FORTUNE

  . . . having countless bands of soldiery trained, organized, and

  officered as such a soldiery never was before or since; and backed by

  an infallibility that defies reason, an inquisition to bend or break the

  will, and a confessional to unlock all hearts and master the

  profoundest secrets of all consciences. Such has been the mighty

  church of Rome, and there it still is.

  —LOLA MONTEZ ON ROMANISM, 1858

  “You do realize, Nell, the key piece of information Bishop Potter revealed among the cornucopia of possibilities he presented?”

  “Besides the utterly odious fact that the dead man in Mr. Vanderbilt’s billiard room was poor Father Hawks?”

  “Yes, besides that. And I believe that your use of the extreme expression ‘utterly odious’ refers more to the fact that Sherlock Holmes was present at that scene than to the inhumane condition of Father Hawks’s body.”

  I held my tongue for a count of twenty before I spoke again. (Conversing with Irene always took more self-control on my part than with anyone else on the planet.)

  “From our selfish point of view,” I admitted, “it’s extremely frustrating that the one man who could shed light on your possible mother’s last weeks on earth has died just one step ahead of us.”

  “That fact is frustrating, yes, but it also is highly suggestive, and, I must say, extremely sinister.”

  “I do not like you to use that word.”

  “Which word? Suggestive?”

  “Sinister. You know that you can’t resist the sinister.”

  Irene was lounging on the sofa, a wisp of smoke from the little cigar in her serpent-wrapped mother-of-pearl holder haloing her pompadour, looking like a femme fatale in the Sarah Bernhardt School.

  “Blame it on my theatrical upbringing,” she said. “You haven’t mentioned the key fact we learned, beyond the obvious shock regarding the identity of the victim on the billiard table. Poor Mr. Holmes! I doubt he has a prayer of tracing that ravaged shell to Father Francis Lister Hawks.”

  “He has proven himself quite the match for you in previous encounters.”

  “No need to speak so sharply, Nell. I realize you don’t want me getting ahead of myself. You know, this game of one-up really doesn’t matter. Stopping these criminals is what the true ‘game’ is about, and this is a particularly gruesome and confounding one.”

  I took a deep breath. “I find it most provocative that Father Hawks was proposing sainthood for the late Eliza Gilbert. It strikes me that any sensible prince of the Church might commit any number of sins to prevent that outrageous notion from even becoming public knowledge, much less being acted upon.”

  “‘St Lola’ does have a gloriously contradictory ring. I can quite envision a play of her life. It would be a stunning role, to say the least.”

  “There is a play of her life; she wrote it and performed in it.”

  “But the last, most poignant act was missing. Also any mention of issue, such as myself.” Irene bestirred herself to extinguish the cigarette, then shook her head. “You’re quite right, Nell, that a churchly body might recoil from attempts to establish a world-famous sinner as an inspiring example of eleventh-hour salvation. Still, I doubt today’s hierarchy would resort to such medieval solutions for disagreements in doctrine as torture and murder.”

  “Who better?” I put in, “especially as the Catholics may be involved, given Lola’s loathing of the Jesuits. I must say that I do find her sensible in that one regard. You do recall the Inquisition?”

  “I also recall the witch hunts. They were a nondenominational persecution, you will admit.”

  I nodded as I shivered in my summer weight gown. “This death at the Vanderbilt house sounds that medieval.”

  “And it smacks of the churchly,” she admitted at last, sitting back again. “I must take credit for pointing out to Mr. Holmes that the body bore the marks of crucifixion. However, the key fact for me yesterday was Bishop Potter mentioning thahas become of memt Father Hawks believed Lola Montez had been robbed of her jewels. From what little we read, they were plentiful and spectacular. Even as early as the mid-’40s, she traveled with one entire trunk holding her ‘capital’ and jewels. And that was before King Ludwig lavished more gems upon her. One does wonder what has become of them. Wealth is a more universal motive for misdeeds nowadays than religious differences.”

  “And if you really are her daughter, her only daughter, you would be the natural heir of such wealth.”

  “Two large ‘ifs,’ Nell. While I am never one to scorn rightful endowments, I’m far more concerned about the jewels and what religious opinions of a long-dead adventuress would lead to the death of a humble retired priest in New York City this summer.”

  “Obviously, he knew something others killed him to keep anyone from finding out.”

  “No . . . I’m afraid someone killed him to find out what he knew, specifically. I suspect his death was accidental, in that such brutal treatment of one his age had an unexpected result. Not that his tormentor, or tormentors, would have freed him afterward anyway.”

  “What difference does it make? His death was horrible beyond imagining. I wish we could go home and forget about it.”

  “So do I, Nell.” Irene stood and went to the window overlooking Broadway. “I can’t believe that in this day and age someone would so abuse an old man, or any human soul. But, then, we had ample evidence in Paris of what still goes on, this globe over, that one would think had been eradicated from the earth with the Huns. That’s why I shall have to let Sherlock Holmes know of this development.”

  “I knew it! Any excuse to intrude on his investigation.”

  “Our investigation has intruded for us. And I’m not willing to let Father Hawk’s death go unsolved or unpunished, are you?”

  “No, of course not. I merely . . . dislike that man.”

  Irene left the window and came to me. “Nell, you are loyal beyond belief, but you must forget the minor role he played in the King of Bohemia’s pursuit of me two years ago. You yourself remained in St. John’s Wood to ‘welcome’ the hunting party after Godfrey and I had made our predawn escape. You yourself reported what the king, Mr. Holmes, and Dr. Watson said. You admit that Mr. Holmes obviously regretted working for the king. By your account, he even rejected a costly jewel in exchange for the portrait of myself I’d left as a memento for the king.”

  “Yes, but have you ever thought why he did so, Irene?”

  Bemusement was not a common expression with her, but I had evoked it now. “Why, to express his contempt for the king, of course. After all, I’d left my portrait in exchange for the formal photograph of the king and myself posed together, which Willie was so anxious to reclaim. How indiscreet of him to allow me to wear the Crown Jewels, even for a private occasion, when he had never intended to marry me. I’ve seen enough of Mr. Holmes to know that he doesn’t suffer fools gladly.”

  “Irene, he was the fool! He refused a huge emerald-and-gold ring and accepted only your portrait instead!”

  She thought for a bit, then wrinkled her nose. “I should have done the same. King Willie has rather Teutonic taste. Emeralds are often flawed and quite fragile and, I think, too gaudy for the well-tailored man, especially an Englishman and a no-nonsense Englishman like Mr. Holmes. I myself prefer sapphires and rubies, as a matter of fact. Perhaps Mr. Holmes does too.”

  “Irene, you are being deliberately obtuse.”

  “Thank you, Nell, for implying I have to make an effort to be obtuse.”

  She was smiling as she sat beside me and took my hand, a gesture rare between us, perhaps more because of my natural reserve than hers.

  “My dear, dear Nell. I know what you fear, and must say that you have been too good a student of the fears instilled in women rather than the freedoms available to them.”

  “Women have no freedoms,” I objected without thinking.

  “Exactly.
Not unless they take them. I learned early that some unknown fairy godmother—perhaps even Lola Montez, who knows?—had bestowed upon me the curse and the blessing of a comely face. I am well aware of the effect it has on people. With strangers it may grant me a wider berth and some small favors. With those I associate with more closely, it has brought me envy from many women, and false regard from many men. It has brought me more tears than smiles, because I have not known whom to trust. As you saw in Bohemia.”

  I gazed at her, and swallowed.

  “I tell you that if Mr. Holmes holds any special regard for me, it is not because of my face or form. He is simply not a man to be swayed by such surface considerations.”

  “He is a man,” I argued.

  “He is a man of the mind, first and foremost, and that sort of admiration I will accept gladly. You mustn’t worry, Nell.” She shook my hand with a fond, governesslike admonition I well recognized. “I am not susceptible to admirers, even ones who treasure my brain rather than my beauty. It’s you I worry about.”

  “Me?”

  “You are susceptible to hasty judgments that spring from fear. It’s not your fault It’s how you were born and bred to be. But, have faith, Nell! The world will not bite you, and if it does, my goodness, you can always bite it back!”

  “I can?”

  “Indeed, and you have already taken a nip or two out of it on occasion. You must relish the chance to dance near your fears, for that’s how you conquer them.”

  “So nothing I can say or do will keep you from bearing the tale of Father Hawks’s identity directly to Sherlock Holmesr?”

  “No. It is the right thing, the only thing, to do.”

  There was such conviction in her tone, and a mute echo of agreement in my heart, that I argued no more.

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