Irene Adler 08 - Spider Dance

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  That her own father had run off to England with a trunkful of her hard-gotten gains when she had been only six might have had something to do with her refusal to outgrow her childish onstage roles. Who would want to grow up in such a world?

  At the end of the play we stood with the rest of the audience and applauded until our glove palms overheated.

  Irene hastened us from the box before the rest of the throng was moving. She swiftly led us down the side aisles to the back of the theater, and then even farther down into the bowels of the backstage area by a narrow, dark stairway.

  Quentin took my elbow. (I was garbed in gloves past that point, but still I felt the residual heat of his hands through the two layers of fine cotton.)

  “Step carefully,” he whispered to me. “Irene knows backstage mazes the way a snake knows its burrow, but we poor mongooses could trip and break something.”

  “Messalina is fine,” I said, rather sharply, aware only that we were alone in the dark and he had me very firmly in hand.

  “Delighted to hear it. You are looking exceptionally charming tonight.”

  “How can you see, in the dark?”

  “I noted that fact much earlier.”

  “Do you have any idea why we are here tonight?”

  “I imagine for the usual reasons, to play supporting characters to Irene’s leading role. Do you know what she wants of Lotta Crabtree?”

  “A possible connection to Irene’s own mother.”

  He held me back from moving, halfway down the stair. In the dark.

  “Poor Irene.”

  “Few would consider her so.”

  “We know our mothers, and she doesn’t.”

  “Our mothers are . . . were, in my case, from vastly different classes.”

  “But we are in America now, where class doesn’t matter.”

  “Of course it does! It always matters. It merely goes under different names in America.”

  “And what name do you go under in America? Nell.”

  I felt his breath on my bare neck agitating the slim satin ribbons that tied on a cameo from Irene’s jewel box. I also felt, though barely through the whalebones and thick sateen, his hands circle my triumphantly narrow waist.

  Oh, dear. I hadn’t really imagined the consequences.

  He had, however, and applied them. Thoroughly.

  I admit I felt much vindicated, vis-à-vis Pink, also known as Nellie Bly.

  A theatrical hiss from below interrupted the histrionics above. Quentin ebbed away from me, reluctantly I thought. Or perhaps hoped.

  “Nell! Quentin? What’s keeping you?”

  Neither of us answered, although we tripped down the stairs hand in hand.

  Here, on this level, the need for darkness to safeguard the theatrical set above from too-obvious observation, was over.

  Electrical lights lit our way down a wide, long hall lined on either side with racks of costumes.

  This aisle gave way at last to various doors, and finally, to one marked with a star. A name was embossed within that golden shape: Lotta Crabtree.

  A dapper man of medium height in the finest evening broadcloth I had ever seen, as silken as a wet otter, bowed to Irene. His dark eyes and classically cut profile gave him an elegance I’d seldom seen in an American man, though he must be near sixty years of age.

  “August Belmont at your service, madam. I trust the seats were acceptable.”

  “Impeccable, my dear Mr. Belmont. Baron Alphonse could not recommend you enough,” Irene added. “These are my friends, Miss Huxleigh, and Mr. Stanhope.”

  “Ah, Stanhope, at last we meet.” He shook hands with Quentin with an odd air of relief. “I trust your American assignment is proving tractable. Miss Huxleigh, you are most welcome.”

  In fact, I did feel so after being the recipient of his most graceful bow.

  “Miss Crabtree is waiting for you.” Mr. Belmont opened the door and bowed us into the inner sanctum like a butler.

  And that is when his name finally impressed itself upon me: one of the banking Belmonts of New York City. Baron Alphonse did not associate with the lower levels.

  The dressing room proved similar to the many in which I had visited Irene: amazingly small, considering, equipped with a mirror flanked by gaslights. The performer herself sat front and center in that mirror on a nondescript chair.

  A piquant face peeped from under fountains of red-gold hair and gazed back at me in the mirror. Here was Sarah Bernhardt at age twelve, uncorrupted. Here was meat for an English governess.

  I smiled at Lotta Crabtree’s reflection as if she were my very own charge. She smiled back, a trifle less collected than before.

  It was a promising start.

  29

  LOTTA AND LOLITTA

  The face of a beautiful doll and the ways of a playful kitten.

  —THE NEW YORK TIMES, 1883

  “My dear Madame Irene Adler Norton!”

  Lotta Crabtree greeted Irene as the French do (most excessively), with barely touching kisses upon both cheeks.

  (Quentin, I am happy to say, appeared not to have mastered the affectation.)

  “I have heard of your European triumphs,” Lotta added, showing adorable dimples. She stood barely over five feet tall, and her curled masses of hair were light red, although glints of darker crimson caught even the dimmer lights of the dressing room.

  “Exaggerations, no doubt,” Irene said. “And I have heard of your American triumphs.” Irene delicately did not say for how long. “How charmingly you keep! You are still the elfin child prodigy you were in Grass Valley.”

  Lotta sat, her long strawberry-blond tresses and the flounces of her short skirts bouncing with equal vigor.

  “Oh, I am a long way from Grass Valley. How did you hear of that?”

  “First,” said Irene, “I have followed your career with admiration. Alas, I left New York as you arrived.”

  “You left for Europe. Of course you are a prima donna, and I a mere coquette and songstress.”

  “‘Mere’ does not adequately describe your talents,” Irene returned.

  Lotta eyed Quentin in the mirror. “And this is your husband. I heard you had married a prince.”

  “Mr. Stanhope is a prince among men, and among Englishmen, but not my husband, who is in Bavaria at the moment.”

  “No! I had heard you’d married the king of Bohemia, but now you say it is the king of Bavaria. I hear . . . what can I say? . . . that he is quite mad . . . not for marrying you, I’m sure.”

  “No, not for marrying me, for he has not. King Ludwig the Second of Bavaria died three years ago, and his brother, Otto, assumed the throne. He is mad, that is certain. I am not married to either the past or present king of Bavaria, alas. I am wed to an Englishman.”

  “Not this Englishman, though,” she said, studying Quentin.

  He bowed. “Alas, not. I am unwed. So far.”

  He had not let loose of my left hand, which twitched in his light custody.

  Lotta shook her head at all this intricacy of who was and was not married to whom. “I’ve never married,” she announced in her merry, piping voice, “and never will, any more than I shall ever sing grand opera.” Her eyes returned, fascinated to Irene. “You sang at Milan and, and . . . someplace German.”

  “That was Prague, in Bohemia. The rulership is German.”

  “Ah, the king you did not marry. But you wore a fabulous spray of jewels somewhere, I saw in the newspapers here.”

  “The Tiffany corsage of diamonds,” Irene admitted. “I wore it for my debut as Cinderella at La Scala in Milan.”

  “Yes! I drooled over that sketch for days. I even looked into purchasing the piece, but was told the Rothschilds had scooped it up.”

  Irene only nodded, not volunteering that the priceless necklace was in her custody in France, a gift from Baron Alphonse de Rothschild for services rendered and to be rendered. Indeed, Godfrey was laboring on behalf of the Rothschild interests in Bavaria even
now.

  “Of course,” Lotta went on, bending toward the mirror to dust her hair with some red powder or another, “I had made my fortune playing merry little boys, so I have little call for such imposing pieces on stage. And I do not have your stature to wear it.”

  “Great jewels become whomever they deck.”

  “I would not care to compete with them for attention, I suppose.” She saw me watching her powder her hair. “Paprika,” she explained.

  “Isn’t that a pepper?”

  “A spice made from a very hot pepper, but I don’t have to eat it. It adds a lovely sparkle to my hair onstage and off. Now, Madame Norton and company, is there anything I can do for you?”

  “There is indeed,” Irene said promptly, “but perhaps we could adjourn to Delmonico’s for supper first?”

  “Oh, no. I prefer to head home directly after a performance, but pull up some chairs and we can visit awhile.”

  Quentin promptly did the pulling up so Irene and I could do the sitting and visiting.

  “I don’t know quite how to broach the matter,” said Irene, who could, and did, broach the Prince of Wales on the subject of his rakish ways. “I’m searching for my mother, you see.”

  “Is she lost? Mine is at home, waiting for me. She has been a stalwart support during my entire career.”

  “We were separated at birth, my birth,” Irene explained.

  “Oh, how tragic! I don’t know what I would have done without my mother. She would sew my costumes when I was just a tiny thing, and before you knew it the miners were throwing golden nuggets at my dancing little feet. Can’t your father help you find her?”

  “I never knew him either.”

  “I’d be sorry for you,” Lotta said, “but if I had never seen my father, my mother and I would be richer for the trunk of gold he ran off with when I was six. As much of my earnings as he could carry. I hear he went to England and lived like a gentleman on it.”

  “I can’t believe your own father robbed you!” I expressed my outrage.

  “Quite thoroughly, Miss . . . Huxleigh, isn’t it? Well, my mother had come to this country by way of India and met up with John Crabtree in New York City. ’Twas he wanted to go west and find gold, but my mother and I were most successful in mining the camps via my feet. I suppose he left me with a memorable last name that looks well on a marquee, and the sense to invest my money wisely.

  “But—” She turned to Irene again. “I sympathize with your lack of a mother. Mine has been a foundation to me all my life.”

  “That’s why I’ve sought you out. I’m told, by some, that you might have known my mother years ago, when you were a mere child, and I was a mere mote in the future’s eye.”

  Irene had been as delicate as possible in softening the years that lay between them, her being the younger by eleven years, yet Lotta Crabtree was tressed and dressed like a girl many years Irene’s junior.

  “Knew your mother? Really?”

  “I refer to . . . Lola Montez.”

  This was the second living person who had actually met Lola, and the first woman, though she had been but a child.

  Lotta perked her lively eyebrows, and whistled through her tiny teeth, a boyish whistle she must have employed in her trouser roles.

  “The Countess of Landsfeld. Land o’ Goshen! I haven’t thought of her in years, nor anyone much else from Grass Valley either. Oh, she was a human hurricane, Lola Montez, impossible to ignore when present, but, like all forces of nature, easy to forget when gone.”

  “A rather tragic epitaph,” Irene noted.

  “Oh, but she had fun when she was here!” Lotta’s laugh rang out sweet and loud. “Smoked like a gold-camp chimney! Always had her pouch of tobacco by her side, the way other ladies had their fancywork. She would roll one of her smokes, inhale like a fire breather, and after four or five puffs, dampen it and roll another and smoke that.”

  Lotta’s child-size hand reached for a case on her dressing table and opened it. “I suppose these are my legacy from Lola. Care to try one, Madame Norton?”

  “Don’t mind if I do.” Irene took one of the thin, dark cigars, as did Quentin!

  I shook my head and the box never even came within sniffing distance.

  Quentin took Lotta’s matches and lit first hers, then Irene’s, and finally his own smoke.

  I watched aghast as smoke and memory silently filled the small dressing room, and I “smoked” by proxy, simply by continuing to breathe. And cough. Why is it that smokers believe all around them inhale the same clouded air and enjoy it as much?

  As if reading my thoughts, Irene laid down her cigar after two or three puffs. And Quentin excused himself and retreated to the hall.

  Lotta Crabtree, however, went on smoking as if every inhalation retrieved a memory.

  “She charmed all the gentlemen, of course. Gracious, she had married and divorced a San Francisco businessman named Patrick Hull before he quite comprehended either state. She horsewhipped the editor of one newspaper and challenged the other to a duel over critical reviews of her dancing. But mostly she retired to Grass Valley and held a sort of salon where anyone of note or artistic leanings eventually showed up.”

  Irene kept nodding at each of these bits of scandalous information, as if begging for more . . . and she got it.

  “What a horsewoman she was! She taught me to ride. And insisted on teaching me the fandango and the Highland fling. She wasn’t the best dancer, to be frank. I had better rhythm and grace at six than she did at . . . what?”

  “Thirty-six, she would have been then,” Irene said quickly. Without calculation. She had been reading long and thinking hard about Lola Montez.

  Lotta shook her abundant curls. “She went later to Australia, I think, and finally back to New York, where she died, right here, wasn’t it?”

  “Very near here,” Irene said.

  “I’d bet she left her heart in Grass Valley.”

  “With that man she married, Hull?”

  “Him? No. Men were fancies with her. She liked the gender, and always imagined that the Grand Passion was only one man away, yet she always found him wanting. Even when she was married to Hull she took up with a charming German baron. He called himself Dr. Adler, dispensing with his title in the West, and relishing such homely tasks as building Lola a wine cellar and fencing her property. They’d hunt together in the mountains, although she never shot game. Their forays were really nature expeditions. He knew the name of every flower. I suppose there are mountains in Germany. Anyway, I well remember the day Lola found it too cold to accompany him, and he never returned. Someone said an ‘accident’ was the cause, but no one learned much about it. And I was just a child, so no one bothered telling me.”

  Adler. Irene and I exchanged glances. Was it possible?

  “Did Lola take his death well?”

  “Now that I think of it, Lola retreated from society after he was gone. Eventually she hired a French chef and began holding soirees at her home filled with all her European treasures. Dr. Adler’s wine cellar with the bottles chilled by an underground spring got constant use. He must have been a clever man.”

  Lotta frowned as she drew slowly on her cigar. How bizarre it was to see that dark roll of tobacco visiting that cherubic little girl’s face . . . and shook her head.

  “Lola often brooded in those days, wanting to be alone, though she was invariably generous to the beggars who came to her door. Still, her spirit was legendary. Once, when her Indian servant boy was shoved and called a ‘damned nigger’ by no less than the editor of the Grass Valley Telegraph, Lola seized her riding crop and went to the store where it happened. The editor fled the premises, and Lola stood guard over the boy, whip tucked beneath her arm, while he finished shopping. That was when I decided to make her acquaintance, for my mother could never stand up to my father. Lola liked to watch us arriving at the School for Young Children near her house. I was only seven, but one day I marched into her yard to pay her a social call. Sh
e adored my imitations of personalities in the town and began to tutor me. It was a wonderful apprenticeship; really renowned performers were always stopping at Lola’s house, the Booths, Ole Bull the violinist, Laura Keene, the actress of the day.

  “What a house! Crammed with precious goods. She sold most of her marvelous furnishing and property before she left Grass Valley. I was only a child, but I’d seen much of life from the lip of a stage, and raw, gold-field life at that. She seemed to be unburdening herself of things. I felt a change in her, that she was fading . . . not just leaving. I knew I’d never see her again. I knew she’d never dance again, and that I would, for a good long time.”

  “And so you still do today,” Irene said, “the most popular and highly paid star on Broadway.”

  “I won’t die in New York City, though,” Lotta said, stubbing out her ugly little cigar. “I’ve places in New Jersey and Boston. I’ve donated a fountain to San Francisco. I intend to live for a good long while longer, and I don’t intend to fade.”

  She reached for the powder puff and dusted her red-gold curls with more paprika, until a shimmering red glitter fell upon her blond, baby curls in the gaslight.

  Irene snuffed the slow-burning cigar in the tray beside her.

  “Thank you for that last portrait of Lola; only you could have painted it.”

  “Do you think she was really your mother?”

  “What do you think?”

  Lotta grew unusually sober. “She loved teaching me and urged my mother to take me to Paris. There was no envy in her, of my youth or my talent. She was a second mother to me.” Lotta stood, a childlike figure with her skirts about her knee. “Whether she was a mother to you or not, I couldn’t say.”

  As I gazed at them, it would have been easy to mistake Irene for the mother, Lotta for the eternal child.

  I“m sure,” Irene said, glancing about the dressing room filled with flowers, “she would have been very proud of you.”

  And so we left that room of full-blown blossoms and cigar smoke and joined Quentin in the hall outside.

  MEMOIRS OF A DANGEROUS WOMAN: