Irene Adler 08 - Spider Dance

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “Someone who did not want Lola elevated to the ranks of Episcopal Church saints at any cost, I would imagine. I would number myself among that honorable society.”

  “People no longer murder for theological issues, at least not in America, I hope.”

  “Wasn’t Lola herself the object of what she called religious persecution?”

  “Yes. She was dead set against the Jesuits, or, rather, they were dead set against her. She even claimed that they had followed her to America to bedevil her.”

  “That I can believe, Irene, whatever else of her personal testimony might be self-serving, or, in the way of theatrical personalities, wildly exaggerated.”

  “I have taken note of your slur upon theatrical personalities.”

  “Ah, but you will not remodel yourself as a result. I must say that we in England are not enamored of the Jesuits. In fact, we executed a great number of them during the Reformation years, when they were sneaking into our shires and cities weaving plots against our king and country.”

  “So Lola perhaps was not imagining things when she accused them of conspiracies to undermine her libertarian influence on King Ludwig.”

  “Most likely not! I have grown up on tales of Jesuit spies and their treachery in my own land for decades, even centuries. They masquerade as missionaries, but are highly educated and wily, and always scheming to bring down our government. In fact, I find it disturbing that the notorious fallen woman Lola Montez was so politically astute on this issue. If the Jesuits were plotting in Bavaria as they had been for generations in England, she was indeed a national heroine and a stout friend to the king for opposing them.”

  “Religion and politics, I confess, are two subjects that bore me to tears, but I see I have neglected too much of my education on this score.” Irene gazed out the window at the passing congestion of Broadway. “Still, why would such very European matters have emigrated to America now? Our form of government is both too secular and too multifaceted to topple with such denominational schemes. The strict separation of church and state does not lend itself to mischief from treacherous clerics. We have no one man to dethrone, like a king, as in England or Bavaria.”

  “No, but England still has its queen and Bavaria a king who is descended from Lola’s Ludwig. I can’t imagine anyone bothering to unseat a cipher like President Buchanan, though.”

  “Buchanan. That reminds me. That old school friend of the young Eliza Rosana Gilbert who reunited with Lola in America shortly before her illness and death. I wonder if she or any descendants remain in New York. She would only be seventy today.”

  “And how shall you find specific Buchanans among this noisy, crowded, teeming populace?”

  “I see you’re regarding the passersby with disapproval, Nell, but the vitality of even the meanest of these streets below Washington Square encourages me. Perhaps our best path is to follow Lola’s final addresses as so kindly listed in the books about her. Someone in the neighborhoods may remember her or Mrs. Buchanan.”

  I said no more, for I did not wish to lose my composure in public.

  The next morning we set out again for the Episcopal Club.

  Irene had telephoned the previous afternoon and I’m sorry to say the bishop extended her every courtesy. I suppose there is no end to what $300 may buy under the guise of charity.

  We were received in the same somber chamber in which the bishop had seen us, but he had sent an emissary. This was a young cleric whose prominent ears bore a striking resemblance to those of the freckle-faced curate who had inspired my youthful admiration long before I’d left my parson father’s home in Shropshire. I hadn’t thought of Jasper Higgenbottom in years, but doing so now, in this context, brought me to the brink of a blush.

  I fidgeted while he handed Irene a list and explained its contents. His youth and unprepossessing appearance did not contrast well with Quentin’s seasoned dash. How could I have ever deceived myself that a country parson’s daughter was any match for such a gentleman of good family and global travels?

  Meanwhile, young Father Edmonds was warning Irene that the areas we proposed to visit were not fit for ladies.

  “Poor Father Hawks,” he said, “kept ample files on Miss Montez. He listed some of her latter-day addresses in New York, but these areas have changed much in almost thirty years, and I can’t guarantee that even the street names remain.”

  “Information is valued for what it may reveal, not guarantees,” Irene said.

  “In the late ’50s, she had rented a flat on Clinton Place north of Washington Square in Greenwich Village,” he said. “That is still a respectable neighborhood. Father Hawks notes that at this time she was living as Mrs. Heald, so she would hardly be remembered in that neighborhood as anyone special. After her stroke in June of 1860, she was taken by her childhood friend, Mrs. Buchanan, to a summer place in Astoria, opposite Eighty-sixth Street. That October, she was moved to a boardinghouse at One-ninety-four West Seventeenth Street, only three blocks from the Buchanan home on the same street, which was just off Broadway. And there Father Hawks ministered to her until the day of her death on January seventeenth of the new year. I can’t speak to these addresses being respectable today, or even how respectable they were in Miss Montez’s day.”

  Finishing this speech, he handed the paper to Irene and directed to me a broad smile.

  “That is quite a becoming hat, madam.”

  “Miss,” I corrected.

  He lifted a skimpy eyebrow and his ears turned red. “Is it possible I have met you somewhere before, Miss—?

  “Huxleigh. And no. I am British and Anglican.”

  “Then we are cousins.”

  “I am quite alone in the world, without relations of any sort.”

  “I was speaking metaphorically, of the common communion of our churches.”

  “Common indeed, I fear.”

  Irene regarded this exchange with polite amusement, then stood to thank the young man again, and we left.

  “I believe you have made a conquest, Nell,” she told me when we had regained the street.

  “I can’t imagine why. I said not a word the entire time until he began badgering me.”

  “No doubt he was smitten with your looks and manner.”

  “Ridiculous! There is nothing special about either.”

  Her laughter rang out so merrily it attracted quite of lot of unwanted attention from the men in the street. “You must not expect everyone to agree with you there, Nell. I suspect he recognized a kindred soul, modest, devout, eligible. . . .”

  “I will not be discussed in this manner.”

  “It would not hurt to make Quentin a little jealous.”

  “What a devious and immature notion.”

  “Nevertheless, it’s tried and true. Jealousy is both a symptom of deeper regard and a goad to it.”

  “Really?” I contemplated that in silence, for I certainly felt embarrassingly jealous of Pink. I was wise not to express this to Irene, for she would have insisted that it was a symptom of my deep regard for Quentin, and then I should look like the fool I knew I was to the one person whose regard meant the most. Irene already had forgotten my potential swain and was studying the list he had given her.

  “Let us begin where she ended, the boardinghouse where she died. People tend to remember death chambers, and perhaps there was talk about who she really was in the neighborhood at the time.”

  “I doubt anyone even noticed, Irene. If she was calling herself Mrs. Heald and was buried as Mrs. Eliza Gilbert, Lola Montez truly ran against all her previous history: she slipped off the final stage of her life quietly and anonymously.”

  “Hmmm. A sad ending to one of the most dramatic sagas of midcentury. I wonder, given the fate of Father Hawks, if she slipped off the planet unaided.”

  “Irene! You think she was murdered?”

  “She was not yet forty, Nell, despite the inaccurate date on her tombstone. Purportedly, she caught a chill by taking a walk, her condition
having improved enough to permit it. She was speaking again, and writing a journal. To some all those signs of recovery might have made her a dangerous woman.”

  “Irene, she was a dangerous woman all her life.”

  “Exactly my point. If these ‘Ultramontanes’ she mentions and the vengeful Jesuits from Bavaria had followed her to America, as she maintained frequently and publicly, they might have hastened her end. She was lecturing often on Romanism as well as the British and women’s fashion.”

  “It is idiotic to think that a scandalous and mediocre Spanish dancer would be worth assassinating.”

  “You forget the furor she spawned in Bavaria. The mobs nearly killed her more than once.”

  “The mobs, not individuals.”

  “But we all know that hirelings are paid to stir up such mobs and raise a ruckus. Then it’s reported in the newspapers and a tempest in a teapot can overthrow a monarch.”

  “Lola Montez was far more than a tempest in a teapot!”

  “I’m glad you agree.”

  “I refer to her childish tantrums, which clearly could have benefited from an association with a good governess. She was spoiled, wild, willful, and sometimes possessed by such fits of temper that I’m amazed she was not imprisoned.”

  “Men like to believe that women are weak little things requiring their protection. Prosecuting Lola for being a wildcat quick to raise a whip, dagger, or pistol in her own defense would have made them look mice instead of men indeed. So she was safe to carry on. I don’t doubt that she meant every word and deed, either.”

  We took a hansom to Broadway and Seventeenth Street, then walked the few blocks to Lola Montez’s final residence.

  The day was warm and the street was lined with four- and five-story brownstone buildings. Tall wooden poles surmounted by dozens of electric wires defaced an already dreary prospect.

  I can’t say that I was impressed by New York City’s domestic side. Paris was far airier and more interesting, even in the poorer quarters.

  We reached 194 West Seventeenth Street to find a building as alike to its neighbors as one berry to another in a patch.

  Irene seemed almost intimidated as we studied that soot-stained facade. Not even a personality as fiery as Lola Montez’s could have made much of an impression on its stolid ordinariness, even at the end of her life.

  “We must go in,” she said, “and ask after residents of thirty years.”

  “Irene, this is a boardinghouse. New York is stuffed full with ones just like it. The very point of a boardinghouse is that the residents come, and go. There is no chance.”

  “There was no chance that I would find a link to my mother, and here I am on the trail of Lola Montez. We can but try.”

  I gazed into her eyes, wishing I could see the fabled blue orbs of La Lola. I believe they would have echoed the stubborn set of Irene’s expression and the determined fire of her glance.

  “We can settle it one way or the other,” I agreed.

  Up the exterior stairs and in we went, to imbibe the eternal reek of the boiled corned beef and cabbage the immigrant Irish imported to New York City along with counties’ worth of red hair.

  “The smell alone must have been Parma violets to an Irish girl,” I noted as we paused in the narrow, dark hallway.

  Irene turned to me, her eyes warm with some unnamed emotion.

  “She ended with her own, with her school friend and Irish neighbors. There are worse ways to die.”

  I thought of pitiful Father Hawks, and could only nod agreement.

  A parlor was to our left, a dining room to our right, both empty. Both rooms were also dingy, shabby, and smelled none too clean. Irene walked through the dining room to the kitchen area beyond it, and there we found a plump woman in a plaid cotton house dress and apron pummeling a mound of dough on a floured tabletop.

  Her sleeves were rolled up to her elbows and tendrils of her gray hair clung damply to her reddened face. No wonder so many children and even adults lolled idly on the tenement steps; the summer heat made the building interiors into furnaces. I felt my cotton blouse wilting against my skin and my cheeks growing feverish.

  “Is it rooms you’d be wantin’?” The woman brushed her wet tendrils off her face with one bare wrist, leaving a swath of white flour in her hair.

  She also managed to eye us up and down in a swift assessment. “Quarters here are plain.” Her tone implied that she had judged us “fancy.”

  “We seek information about a . . . relation,” Irene said.

  “You’re lookin’ for relatives? There are some here who don’t much want to be found, I’ll bet. I ask their names and take their money and have me husband throw them out if they don’t pay, and that’s all I know about them.”

  “Have you been landlady here long?”

  “What do you think?” The woman almost snorted her disbelief at the question. “I didn’t go gray performin’ in Mr. Barnum’s circus first, now did I? Me man Kelly and I arrived on these golden shores when our countryfolk were too weak from starvin’ to do much, but we scraped enough togither to get this building, and here we have been since, cookin’ an’ cleanin’ for strangers, and all our young ones scattered hither and yon to earn what they can.”

  Irene picked up a bowl of flour from the washstand and moved it closer to our cook at the table.

  “Then you were here in ’59?”

  “For sure. In New York City, but not at this place. I’ve not got all day to be standin’ here tellin’ strangers my business.”

  “That’s just it,” Irene, putting her hand out to the woman’s arm. “We may not be strangers. I’m searching for my mother, and have information that she had lived here.”

  “Irish, was she?”

  Irene’s glance to me was rueful. Eliza Gilbert was Irish, all right (not that accident of birth is any recommendation to me), later claimed to have Spanish blood and even later became a Bavarian countess.

  “That she was,” Irene said at once. “Limerick born, although some say Sligo. Either way, she didn’t stay long. I’m told she died in this building.”

  “Not recently.” The landlady looked affronted at the very idea, although death must visit Seventeenth Street as often as it did any address in Manhattan.

  “No,” Irene admitted, “it will be thirty years ago next January.”

  “Thirty years?” The woman brushed her palms on her apron. “Why didn’t you say so at the first? As it happens you are not the first to inquire about this lady.”

  “We aren’t?” I asked, speaking for the first time.

  “No, ma’am,” she answered me, looking from one to the other of us. “Why, what a coincidence. The good father was here inquirin’ not a week or two ago.”

  “‘The good father’?” Irene’s facile voice held a controlled note of excitement, or perhaps anxiety.

  “Yes. Of course I told him all I could, which was little, but he interviewed all the current boarders in one evening. So very tiring for a man his age. In fact he took a little whiskey before he left. I couldn’t let him leave without something to restore his strength.”

  “Was his search successful?” Irene wondered.

  “I don’t know. He said it was church business, very important church business.”

  “Indeed it is,” Irene said, assuming a tone I could only describe as suddenly sanctimonious. “Miss Huxleigh and I are here on church business as well. I have approached the bishop wishing to make a substantial donation in the name of my late mother. He directed me to the good father, who has apparently been . . . led into another place by his mission, and is not available, alas, to consult with us right now.

  “What is this about?”

  Irene edged closer. “I’m not at liberty to say, but the bishop mentioned the process of evidence-gathering. For sainthood.”

  “Holy Mither o’ God! The good father mentioned the lady in question had been most devoted to her prayers, but nothing of this. A saint in the building? No wonder he wa
s searchin’ for the room she occupied, died in. A shrine. I have a shrine in me house.”

  “Quite likely, but you must say nothing to anyone until it becomes a fact.”

  “And this lady was your mother?”

  “It’s possible. We were separated at my birth. The Troubles, you know.”

  “Indeed, and a brutal time it was back in the ’40s and ’50s when the people of Ireland were reduced to eating the furze in the ditches like sheep, thanks to the murderous English. ’Tis no wonder a saint would come out of that heinous time.”

  I was suddenly glad I had only spoken once, and too briefly for my accent to register. Besides, this entire spurious discussion of the late Lola Montez as a candidate for sainthood was so outrageous I was too furious to speak anyway. Irene was exploiting this poor woman’s superstitions as heartlessly as a confidence man.

  “Do you know,” Irene was asking now, “which chamber was so blessed? Whether the good father found what he sought?”

  “I believe it is the ground floor room at the right rear. There have been some alterations to the ground floor rooms throughout the years. The dining room was expanded and we added gaslights.”

  “May we see this chamber? I have been searching for my mother my whole life.”

  “Why, of course, madam. And what would be the name of this holy lady?”

  Irene stood flummoxed for a moment, then resorted to the string of Spanish names Eliza had tacked onto her birth name. “Maria. Dolores.”

  Mrs. Kelly shut her eyes in awe. “Maria. Dolores. The Holy Virgin Mary, Our Lady of Sorrows. She was well named.”

  “By herself,” I almost snapped, but of course I could not reveal my kinship to the “bloody English.”

  “I’ll take you to the room. The current resident is a traveling button salesman, but now that I know the import of the chamber’s long-previous resident, I will move him to another room at once, and keep this one vacant. How soon will the Church know its decision on Maria Dolores?”

  “These things take much time and testimony,” Irene answered gently. “Meanwhile, if we may?—

  “Of course. Of course.” She wiped, then wrung her hands in her apron. “The room has not been tidied as it should be, I didn’t know, God have mercy. . . .”