Irene Adler 08 - Spider Dance

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Hah! No one knew or guessed my taste in men except myself, and there it would stay until I said differently. It’s amazing how men in the working world want a woman hooked up to some other man so she will stay out of their hair . . . if they have any left.

  So Quentin was the perfect shill for the office gossips—I could cite my undying devotion to my absent Englishman for years after this—and he also would prove necessary on my quest

  He seemed to sense my goals, for as we left the building he took my arm like a considerate swain, rather than a husband.

  “It must have galled you to the bone, Pink, to agree to keep the Ripper story quiet.”

  “Yes,” was all I answered.

  “It wasn’t because anyone underestimated you as a journalist, it was because they knew all too well your effectiveness.”

  “So I’m to be a happy eunuch?”

  He winced, and not from the strong sunlight in the street. “I’ll aid you as you wish, but you might consider telling me what the object is. It’s possible I might have some insight to contribute.”

  “A modest Englishman! All right. We’re going to see a nursemaid at Bellevue.”

  “A nursemaid in hospital?”

  “In the hospital. That’s the way we say it here. She was stabbed.”

  “Who would stab a nursemaid?”

  “How about her employer?”

  This he mulled. In fact, he said nothing more until we arrived, which is most unusual for a man. Usually they insist on knowing where they are going, or pretend to.

  “Mrs. Mary Donnelly,” the nurse said, nodding to the figure lying halfway down a stark row of iron cots. The smell of carbolic acid tainted the air.

  She was wan but she had the Irish mouth: a thin determined slash above her overlong chin, which denoted stubbornness.

  “Are you feeling better?” I asked, taking the sole chair near the bed.

  Quentin Stanhope stood at my shoulder, pale summer straw hat in hand.

  “They tell me I’ll survive, no thanks to that lying Mrs. Hamilton. A common whore. God knows what happened to the babes they sold her.”

  “My name is Nellie Bly. I—”

  “Miss Bly! Really? “Tis Irish you must be, you’ve got such a heart for the poor and downtrodden. Excuse me drizzlin’. Such a bad time ’tis been. “Twas no way I could allow that poor man to be diddled about the nature of his own so-called child. And what happened to the previous babe, I ask you? My God, what these people were up to! I only tried to warn the mister! And she stabbed me like a pig at the marketplace! What would she have done to the babe . . . me babies? She didn’t care, that harlot, except for diddling a rich man of his money.”

  I was taking notes as fast as I could scribble. “You were so brave.”

  “Not really. I denounced her in front of her husband. Who else could make things right for the poor babe in her clutches? I never expected her to have a knife, or to try to cut the throat out of me. She was mad. And he didn’t understand, he could hardly move for the shock of it. Poor man. His babe not his own? His wife a baby-buyer and worse? Why would he believe me? But I had to tell! I couldn’t let her kill another babe and then find another to take its place. Mayhap to a man they all look alike, but to me each is its own angel and I could not be fooled.”

  Silence held at this, then Quentin spoke for the first time. I had told him the facts of the case an route to Bellevue.

  “Was Mrs. Hamilton accustomed to carrying a dagger?”

  “No, sir! I had no idea that lying whore would attack like a wolf! I only knew that the child they brought back from California was not the child they took. Men are such fools! A woman is a woman to them, a babe a babe. Ye cannot fool a nursemaid who has cradled a child at her breast. The little faces are hairless mostly, and all ears and no nose, but they are as different as one rosebud from another. If you haven’t looked at a bush in full bloom, you wouldna know! But I know. ’Tis my job, my curse to know. No child is the spittin’ image of another, no matter how young. No woman with the instincts of a mother would say such is so. Ah, she was a demon mother, who would sell herself and all those other mothers’ children so! I would denounce her again, her and all her heartless kin. Poor Mr. Hamilton. D’ye know how he keeps himself now? And what has become of that poor babe? Where is he?”

  She asked good questions, the kind I was wont to ask. I blushed to realize I hadn’t answered them before I came to her.

  Quentin Stanhope took my elbow and drew me to my feet.

  “We’re looking into it,” he assured her. “We shall find and account for both of the babies this gang presented as Mr. Hamilton’s child in turn. And when we find them, they shall have the homes they deserve.”

  I turned to stare. I knew better than to offer such unlikely guarantees. His hand on my elbow pinched a good deal. I realized then that I also would have to offer these guarantees.

  “That’s right, Mrs. Donnelly. We’re here to set things straight.”

  Her hand caught my sleeve. “I would take that second-to-last dear boy, if anyone would allow it. I loved him dearly, and it pierced my heart when I saw he did not come back from California.”

  We left the ward, and Quentin’s hand never left my elbow.

  “What of the boy,” he asked, “Eva Hamilton took to California and didn’t bring back?”

  “She gave him away, because he didn’t look enough like the first baby who died.”

  “Can we find him?”

  “If someone in California can.”

  “I suggest you wire that you have found a fine mother for the lad.”

  “Who are you to tell me what to do?”

  “Your unwilling confederate. If you need money, the Rothschild coffers will pay.”

  “Can you be sure of that?”

  “In this instance, yes. The Jews have suffered savagely for centuries from being falsely accused of killing Christian babies. This one will be saved.”

  “Two died,” I admitted. “The first baby Eva obtained, after only a few days. She got another, and it died. The third did not resemble the previous two enough, and even Mr. Hamilton would have noticed that. Thus this last one.”

  He shook my arm. “Any living babies of this atrocious string of fraud and deception must be found and provided for, especially this third baby who was lucky enough not to resemble the debased people in this matter. He must be found and delivered to Mary Donnelly, who has a deep and self-sacrificing attachment to him. That woman is worth three times any who have been involved in this tragedy.”

  “Agreed. But, Quentin, let go of my arm. I’m not the baby-dealer. I want to expose this hideous traffic. Will you join me willingly?”

  “More willingly than you wish,” he said.

  That is the trouble with unwilling tools. They soon develop a mind, and heart, of their own.

  I couldn’t help smiling. I had a most unexpected partner in daredevil reporting, one Quentin Stanhope, gentleman and spy, and Miss Nell’s errant swain.

  What would Irene Adler Norton make of this?

  35

  PAYING TRIBUTE TO VENUS

  The fearful constitutional consequences which may result from this affection . . . the fear of which may haunt the mind for years, which may taint the whole springs of health, and be transmitted to circulate in the young blood of innocent offspring are indeed terrible. . . .

  —DR. SPENCER THOMSON, 1856

  “Are we on the hunt for your family tree or for the family jewels?” I asked Irene the next day.

  “I thought Quentin looked exceedingly well last night.”

  “He always looks well.”

  “I should have been more specific. I mean handsome.”

  “I suppose so. You’re evading my question.”

  “America appears to agree with him. Or perhaps it was your company.”

  “Irene, I doubt my company has ever made a particle of difference to anyone but you.”

  “Are you forgetting your Coney Island expe
dition with Quentin?”

  I could feel my cheeks heating up. “No. That was . . . Quentin being thoughtful enough to take me off your hands for a while.”

  “Really? I thought I glimpsed Quentin having difficulty taking his hands off of you.”

  “Irene!”

  “I’m sorry, Nell. To answer your question, it may be that Lola Montez’s treasure has a good deal to do with her manner and place of death. In that case, it doesn’t really matter if she was my mother or not. I want to know how this woman ended her life in such reduced and forgotten circumstances. She had always mastered every situation before that, from Bavaria to California to Australia to this very New York City on more than one occasion.”

  “She was deathly ill from a stroke, Irene. Even the strongest will quails before that, and this new humility led her to seek forgiveness of God. Quite an inspiring story, really.”

  “Accounts differ,” Irene said sharply. “Some say Mrs. Buchanan exploited her when the stroke had weakened her. That Lola was neglected and even abused during her last weeks, that her money and jewels were signed over to Mrs. Buchanan when she no longer had her wits about her.”

  “Gracious! You needn’t sound so fierce! I wasn’t mere.”

  “No, you weren’t. Nor was I. More than one helpless invalid dies leaving all the goods divided between the Church and a final caretaker. Suspicion always arises in such cases. Even Lola’s own mother—whose marital machinations she’d fled, not wisely but well, twenty-some years before and never laid eyes on again—even she made a long and costly pilgrimage to America to, what . . . find out how much of Lola’s fabled wealth remained? Maybe Lola hadn’t been already hoodwinked out of it. Maybe she’d hidden it, anticipating just such greedy forays.”

  “What an odiously negative view of humanity, Irene! You would have poor Father Hawks, who later sought sainthood for Lola Montez, certainly the most publicized sinner of her day, conspiring to bilk her at the end?”

  “His search for saintly recommendations could have covered a hunt for her money and jewels.”

  “Irene, do you regard no one as safe from suspicion, including the clergy?”

  “Now you have it, Nell! Oh, I would trust Parson Huxleigh, were he alive and here, but that is about all. You witnessed my kindness to the poor clergyman who fell injured outside our house in St. John’s Wood two years ago . . . and how that act of charity would have been rewarded by the masquerading Sherlock Holmes had I not seen through his scheme and fled. Father Hawks was tormented to death, Nell, as men have not been since the Inquisition or women since the witch hunts. He must have known something crucial to someone very implacable. A humble priest? Tortured to death in this day and age. Why?”

  I frowned, for I couldn’t dispute her, however much I wished to.

  “People commit such atrocities, Nell—at least in human history as we know it—for only two reasons: fanatical religious conviction or maniacal personal gain.”

  I wrung my hands. Father Hawks was to be deeply pitied, even revered for his death that so mimicked Christ’s, not viewed with suspicion.

  “What gain could be great enough to merit such atrocious acts?” I demanded.

  Irene’s eyes flashed with conviction. “You have asked the crucial question. Exactly: why and who? Only something . . . paramount, something . . . legendary, could evoke such extreme measures. I am not a religious woman, Nell, which you know and lament. But the instant I saw that poor, abused body on the billiard table I . . . I found myself making the sign of the cross. Yes, it was in my character as an Irish housemaid, and yes, I am actress enough to reach for the facile gesture. And, no, I am not a Roman Catholic, and I realize you Church of England folk have no time for such, but the gesture was sincere. It surprised me. I truly felt myself in the presence of such an enormity of human misbehavior that only an appeal to a higher force would answer. Perhaps it was because of all the evil we encountered during our last . . . travail. Sherlock Holmes felt that awful awe as well. I realized that also. Otherwise he would have seen through my stage colleen, but he didn’t until he too reassembled his composure.

  “I would think that man did not have a religious bone in his body.”

  “No, he is reason personified. But what we saw defied reason. I think that even his ardent agnosticism is lit by the occasional flash of what he would officially dismiss as mere superstition.”

  “Why do we care what he thinks or feels?”

  “Because if anyone will solve that crime, it will be he.”

  “Good! Let him do it.

  “So he will. Meanwhile, we must recognize that our examination of Lola Montez may take us in directions far removed from the mere sentimentality of motherhood.”

  “Such as?”

  “Fatherhood. I must have had one. Still, I remain unconvinced that parents are essential, especially at my age.”

  “Gracious!” The forgotten men. “Given Lola’s reputation, your father could be anyone!”

  “Anyone on three continents, for Lola traveled between Europe, Australia, and the U.S. during the crucial time period I was told I was born. And her habit of wearing shawls could have easily concealed a delicate condition.”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know who your father was, as well?”

  “No!” Irene bounded out of her chair, agitated. “I’m finding one delinquent parent heartache enough,” she burst out, her strength of feeling surprising me. “None of the men in Lola’s life are ones I’d care to call father.”

  “But he could be a prince or a millionaire, or this mysterious Dr. Adler.”

  “Or a newspaper publisher or an itinerant actor. Whoever he was, he wouldn’t have remained with Lola even if she’d had a child.”

  I, reared by a father only, was loath to relinquish Irene’s. “He could have been somebody like Godfrey.”

  Mentioning her absent husband had an instant soothing effect. “Well, if he was like Godfrey I’d look for him straightaway. But who is like Godfrey?” She sighed, and settled back in her chair again. “If only he were here! Godfrey lends a clarity to my mind that is like bright north light to a painter. And he had less than conventional parents as well. I wish I’d followed my instincts and had never sought my so-called mother.”

  “Oh, Irene, motherhood is a supposed to be a sacred state. This should all be so simple and innocent.”

  She eyed me askance, as if she were a governess and I still a child. “Nothing is ever either of those things, Nell. You’d do well to keep that in mind.”

  “I? I’m not searching for a lost mother.”

  “No.” Irene smiled, withdrew a cigarette, then paused. “Speaking of innocence, or lack of it, some later biographies of Lola hinted she might have died not from a stroke but from the wages of her presumed sins.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “Syphilis, Nell, is the disease one gets from a life such as Lola is reputed to have lived.”

  My face reddened truly, for I had heard whispers of such an unmentionable thing, “a delicate disease,” it was called. I’d never heard any specific word attached to it until now. Syphilis. It sounded like the name of a Greek deity. Or was I thinking of the wretch who had to roll a boulder up a hill, and forever fell back and had to start again? Rather like our current quest.

  She hesitated before speaking again. “Usually such things are passed from the man to the woman.”

  “Except in marriage,” I said quickly. Moral distinctions must be made.

  “Marriage is no exception. The man passes on the condition because men far more often than women break marriage vows. It’s the way of the world. Such diseases are a matter of—” I watched Irene search for a delicate way to put it. She shrugged, having found none. “Of having numerous lovers.

  If Lola did suffer from a venereal disease,” Irene added, finally lighting her cigarette and shaking out the lucifer that had achieved that task, “such a condition is inherited. By any offspring. And it often leads to madness and death even
in the second generation.”

  It took a moment for her implication to become clear. If Lola Montez was truly Irene’s mother, and had suffered from “a delicate disease . . .” I do believe I almost made the sign of the cross myself, King Henry the VIII forgive me.

  I didn’t sleep a wink or a blink that night

  I’d heard whispers, of course, about certain dissolute noblemen behaving madly. I suppose I knew why, but I never admitted it

  Now that awful ghost was hovering over my own house.

  Irene’s eyes had darkened to an onyx glitter as she pointed out this unwholesome fact. I realized that this worry had absorbed her from the moment we received the many biographies of Lola Montez. With her more worldly outlook, it must have occurred to her far earlier than when she had finally told me.

  We must determine if Lola was her mother, or neither of us would sleep a wink again . . . and Godfrey! Oh, I missed him too, and his ever-so-tactful way of explaining to me confusing worldly matters. Was it not possible, even likely, that if such evil was transmitted to the younger generation it could be transmitted to whomever one . . . um, whomever?

  Was it possible that . . . unsanctioned kissing could transmit the curse? Was that why religions were so strict about such matters?

  Had Quentin . . . no, I would not think about it. Quentin would never do anything to harm me, and surely, like Irene, was worldly enough to know how to ensure that

  But Irene could not help who her mother was . . . or what she had died from.

  I tossed and turned, furious at my own ignorance and yet tortured by my speculations. My hair matted against my sopping scalp and face. And then I shivered as the cool air in the room attacked my feverish body.

  Madness and death.

  Already the unfriendly accounts made Lola look a bit mad. But then, she’d always behaved like a woman who recognized no limits, and that is considered madness in many circles.

  Only one course would answer this dreadful uncertainty. We must discover whether Lola was Irene’s mother, or not. And then we must know how Lola had died and what part this pretty word syphilis that signified such disaster might have played in that ending.