Irene Adler 08 - Spider Dance

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “It’s possible, as I’ve suggested, but a stroke wreaks havoc with the victim’s reason, and you can’t squeeze sense from a stone. I do hope her end was natural, and that the presence of the clergy kept any mischief at bay. The unwelcome visit of her greedy mother seems to have been the worst torture inflicted upon her.”

  “How sad.”

  “So, it’s settled. We revisit the Episcopal Club.”

  “I’m not sure I wish to keep on deceiving the clergy.”

  “We are not so much deceiving them as not fully informing them. And you must go, Nell! That young Father Edmonds who took a shine to you will no doubt be more generous with information than if I go alone.”

  “That’s all nonsense, Irene!”

  But I fetched my hat and gloves.

  We took a streetcar, I think because Irene wished to salve my penny-pinching nature. While we jolted through the bustle and odor of high summer traffic, I considered the fact that I indeed had become an object of interest to strange young men. Was it the freer social atmosphere of America? The department-store clothing? My new Nellie Bly waist? Or some substantive change in myself? I was not about to ask Irene her theory on the subject, nor would I interrogate the bookstore clerk or Father Edmonds either. And especially not Quentin.

  We grew not a little warmer walking the two blocks to the Episcopal Club. When we asked within for Father Edmonds, we were told that he was not available. After Irene introduced us, we were shuttled to the parlor to await the bishop himself again.

  “My dear ladies,” he greeted us as he turned to close the door behind him. “What can I do for you today?”

  “We didn’t mean to impose on you personally,” Irene said. “We’d asked for Father Edmonds, but he was unavailable.”

  “It’s no imposition,” the bishop said with a ready smile. “Please. Ask away.”

  “I wondered about the Mrs. Buchanan who attended Mrs. Gilbert in her last illness. Would it be possible to find and speak to her?”

  “A shame Father Hawks is not available.”

  “Is he the only priest who was pursuing information about her?”

  “Certainly! You must understand that we tolerated his devotion to her memory because of his age. The likelihood of him uncovering any striking information about her was slim. The most he had to offer were reports of occasional strange noises in the room in which she had died when it was empty, reported by the landlady. The building had suffered recent renovation, so the rooms might even be hard to assign with confidence nowadays. As I told the newspaper gentleman who called, Father Hawks is a sincere man who perhaps has been overimpressed by this woman’s sad yet repentant death.”

  “The newspaper gentleman? When did he call?”

  “Why, just before you first did, or after. I don’t quite recall Frankly, I wasn’t as forthcoming with him as with you. I don’t want poor Father Hawks’s odd notions paraded in large type before all of New York. Your own inquiries are personal, and I’m sure that you wouldn’t wish them to become public.”

  “Certainly not!” I spoke for the first time, and rather adamantly.

  “Exactly, Miss Huxleigh. I could see from the first that you were women of sense and sensibility. As for your quest for Mrs. Buchanan, Mrs. Norton, she would be quite old today, but the family was a solid one. Still, the population of New York City is much greater than it was almost thirty years ago.”

  He paused to consider. “I can only suggest you inquire at her old neighborhood.”

  “And will the newspaper gentleman be there before us? How would we know him?”

  “Tall, stooped fellow. A bit old for the ink trade, but most avid. A civilized fellow, yet I wasn’t inclined to help him, for obvious reasons. The newspapers chase sheer sensation these days, especially all those muck-raking lady reporters. I don’t care to have the Church as a subject of lurid speculation in the public press, you do understand.”

  “Of course!” I said. “It is shocking what such ink-stained wretches will do to get a sensational story these days.’

  “Miss Huxleigh, I agree entirely. Is there anything else you wish to know, Mrs. Norton?”

  “Just where Father Edmonds might be. He was so helpful in your absence during our last call. Miss Huxleigh and I wished to thank him, perhaps to invite him to tea.”

  “Alas, young priests are called from pillar to post to serve their superiors. I can’t say when he will be available again.”

  This last sentence he addressed to me with great sympathy, as if I had any reason to care! Oh, Irene! She was forever pushing people into the most unlikely situations.

  “A pity,” Irene said, blithely ignoring my unease. “Miss Huxleigh had been minded to knit some useful article for him in thanks for his previous assistance. Perhaps you shall have to be the recipient”

  “I am honored,” the bishop said with a bow, smiling as he stood to show us out.

  I was too outraged to speak, which was just as well.

  “I cannot believe it!” I told Irene when we stood atop the steps of the Episcopal Club again. “There were women in my father’s parish who’d set their caps at the widowed parson, you may be sure. You made me look like the worst of those churchgoing hussies. I would never—”

  “It gives us another excuse for visiting and asking questions, don’t you see, Nell? If I weren’t known to be married, I would have put myself in that role in a wink.”

  Before I could summon the outrage to answer this dubious reasoning, she spoke again.

  “The elderly newspaperman disturbs me.”

  “You think it is Mr. Holmes. You led him to the Episcopal Club, though he showed scant interest.”

  “Yes, it could be he, but that wouldn’t disturb me.”

  “Who else would it be?”

  “Someone far more sinister.”

  “Such as—?”

  “The older priest who was not Father Hawks.”

  “I had forgotten about him. So what are we to do now?”

  “You noticed that ‘noises’ have been reported in Lola’s former room. Not an expression of saintly phenomena, I think, but of repeated searches. The gullible landlady would take each such ‘visitation’ as a sign.”

  “Yes, we ourselves have contributed to the phenomenon.”

  “But I think we are the only searchers to take something away. I doubt the disruptions will stop until something has been found, so we must see to it that something is.”

  “What are you suggesting?”

  “That we unplug the hole in the walled-up fireplace we exposed and ‘salt’ something provocative in the hidden niche. Then we can watch to see who comes to discover it.”

  “We can hardly ask to see the room again.”

  “The landlady had decided to move the occupant.”

  “We can hardly march in again and take it apart.”

  “Not by daylight, no.”

  “By night?”

  “The better to observe unobserved.”

  “And what item will you put the place of Lola’s diary?”

  “Why, some clever, coded forgery of your own devising, Nell. If you are not going to knit something useful for poor enamored Father Edmonds, you could at least put your skills to excellent use concocting a wonderfully confusing diary for Lola Montez.”

  “That’s fraud, Irene.”

  “Did poor, dying Lola Montez deserve all the vultures gathering around her then? And now? I doubt it. Who would most appreciate the skill and audacity of a faux diary designed to ‘smoke out,’ as the dime Western novels say, the tormenters of her loyal and martyred priestly advocate?”

  “Somehow you’ve made deception seem like a noble ploy in a holy war, Irene.”

  “Exactly.”

  Whatever disapproval I might have mustered vanished before the challenge of the handiwork in question: forging Lola Montez’s diary. What boundless invention was in store. . . .

  We returned to the Astor House, where Irene pampered me as if I were da Vinci
working on the Last Supper. I’d always relished the intricacies of the ladylike domestic arts. Now my small helpful sketches had evolved into a masterwork. Studying the worn papers from the actual hand of Lola Montez, I set about fashioning a facsimile that was as authentic looking, but even less readable.

  The passages in the actual document I could translate were religious quotes from the New Testament, especially those relating to Mary Magdalen and forgiveness. “I wish to have my terrible and fearful experience given as an awful warning to such natures as my own.” I meditated on this passage, wondering what “terrible and fearful experience” she referred to. This seemed more dire than mere illness. I envisioned a deathbed visit from someone more unwelcome than her long-unseen mother . . . the same Ultramontanes she accused of pursuing her everywhere she went, including America, and who were pursuing her after death, older but no less intent, or vicious, as poor Father Hawks would testify. I must mislead them, discourage them from our own trail by dropping feverish hints in this document to convince them that Lola knew and hid nothing in her last days. In her own hand, Lola would possibly help save her own daughter! I began work on my project of deception.

  Irene was at my service for once, dashing out to gather what I required as soon as I realized it.

  “Paper. Thick, creamy paper,” I ordered.

  She returned in one hour with four samples, three of which I rejected out of hand. “This one might do.”

  She was gone to buy more. And black ink.

  I rolled up the paper in an apron and crinkled it. By the time she returned, I was in an artistic snit.

  “I’ve tried pressing this paper with your curling iron, I have beaten it with your glove stretcher, and it will not crinkle suitably. This project is not only insane but impossible. I wash my hands of it.”

  Irene studied the single, abused sheet. It looked decidedly abused, but not aged.

  She gazed at me, my haggard expression, my disheveled hairdressing. With one releasing gesture, she let go of the result of two hours’ worth of labor. The paper dropped to the carpeted floor.

  Her expression became both haughty and commanding. “I believe, Nell,” she said, “you need a demonstration of Lola Montez’s spider dance, of which we both have read so much.”

  I admit I was confused.

  Irene caught her skirt up on one side and anchored it with her hand on her hip.

  Her other hand lifted above her head at a graceful but rather distorted angle.

  Her high-heeled embroidered walking boots assumed a balletic position.

  “In Spain,” she declaimed,”in New York City, spiders are everywhere. Small, unseen, spinning webs. Deadly.” She shook her head in a rebellious gesture. Her posture grew instantly vigilant and tempestuous. “I stamp upon them. I shake them loose from their mooring in my petticoats. I crush them beneath my heels.”

  And thus she began stamping at a furious pace upon my poor paper, twitching her skirts from left to right, her feet thundering until the carpet must have cried out for mercy.

  “Irene, what is this madness?”

  It’s the Spanish tarantella, Nell, so named after the large and fearsome tarantula spider. I see that my skirts and petticoats are infested with these deadly crawlers, and won’t stop shaking them loose until every last spider is . . . as still as death.”

  I recalled with a shudder the false spiders of cork, rubber, and whalebone Lola would shake from her skirts on occasion.

  By now a sea of petticoats and skirt were frothing about Irene’s knees. Her toes and heels were hitting carpet in such a thundering rhythm that I feared for the folk below, whose ceiling was our floor.

  Stamp, stamp, stamp. ”Estampa, estampa!” Irene called out “So Lola Montez would serve the floral bouquets tossed to stage in her honor, stamping them into crushed petals and scent . . . Andalusia. Barcelona! Carmen! Ole!”

  Irene stopped, hands akimbo on hips, her hems hiked as high as Lotta Crabtree’s, and gazed at the ruin beneath her neat boots. “Is the paper sufficiently aged yet?” she inquired.

  I gingerly plucked it out from under her bootheels.

  “Thirty years’ aged,” I said. “Quite impressively scored and torn. I suppose you shall have to subdue every page I manufacture in this way. Wherever, whenever did you learn such a savage dance?”

  “Carmen,” she said shortly. “An opera by Bizet that’s well suited to my dark soprano, which I never had the opportunity to sing. But I learned the dance.”

  “Perhaps you are indeed the bastard daughter of Lola Montez!”

  Irene laughed. “This storm of motion was worth it to hear that word from your lips, Nell. And, yes, I understand Lola’s art. You see how it must have shocked the Europe of her time, but it is only a folk dance of Spain, that’s all.”

  “It’s a fine aging agent for paper,” I said, admiring her footwork. “Now I must water down the ink just enough to mimic old age. I’ll be sure to request my needed sheets of paper during the midday hours tomorrow, when the guests below are likely to be out and about.”

  Irene’s heels and toes beat a last, scorching drum roll on the floor.

  39

  TAKEN BY . . .

  I want to wear boys’ domes, and will as soon as

  I can get other women to join me.

  —OLIVE SCHREINER, 1884

  By now both Irene and I had read enough about, and by, Lola Montez that I had no difficulty producing many mock pages in her hand and style of expression.

  “Wonderful, Nell!” Irene slouched in the chair in her walking-out clothes to study my pages, and hers. When dressed as a man, she quickly assumed the less precise posture of one. “You could have quite a future in the forgery way. Such a shame to thrust these away for inconsiderate villains to find.”

  “If there are any,” I answered. “How can you be sure anyone will find anything?”

  “I’ll leave a faint trail of soot. Those bricks are still filthy with ashes.” She glanced quickly at me. “You needn’t come in while I ‘salt’ our paper mine, but you must wear men’s garb while you wait in the street for me to rejoin you.”

  “You have just your own.”

  “Not anymore.” Irene grinned like a newsboy. Something about men’s clothing made even a smile bigger, broader, cruder. “I stopped at a flea market during one of your requests for paper. If you’ll take that parcel into your room, you’ll soon be ready to go.”

  I had seen the string-wrapped brown paper bundle, but had hesitated to inquire about it.

  Irene laughed, lighting up a small cigar, sans holder. “You regard that package as if it were a sack full of spiders! We are done spider dancing around Lola’s diary. Tonight we place it, and then stand back to spring the trap!”

  I would have begged off, but half suspected that such a move would please Irene. I picked up the parcel and retreated to my bedchamber.

  Although she would have been happy to help me dress, as I had often helped her, I was too annoyed to rely on her at the moment. I released my corset by the speedy method of pushing the stays together so the front hooks separated. Ah! How did Pink breathe with such rigorous lacing? I’m ashamed to say that I had worn gentleman’s garb on one or two occasions previously, so was able to dress myself in trousers, shirt, and jacket quite quickly. Irene had purchased a billed, checked cap large enough to swallow up my hair like a boa constrictor a rabbit, and had provided a dingy white silk scarf to conceal my feminine throat, especially once I turned up my coat collar.

  I had to roll up the trouser legs once, but the area we visited housed laborers, so my dark serge suit was almost too formal for the location. Impromptu cuffs added a nice touch, I thought. My own black walking boots would merely peep out from the long trouser legs and suffice, since we planned our larcenous expedition for the dark of evening.

  “Very nice, Nell!” Irene greeted me, rising to adjust the lay of my collar and scarf and cap, nevertheless. “A pity you don’t smoke. A pipe would abet the masquerade. But you
have quite the jaunty look of a former newsboy about you, so we shall let you play the young gentleman.”

  We slunk out the back servants’ stairs of the hotel, as usual when up to no good.

  The alley reeked as badly behind the Astor House as it did on the Lower East Side.

  Irene quickly relit her cigar. For once I welcomed the pungent scent of the sulphur on the lucifer, what the Americans call “matches,” and the tobacco.

  “We’d better walk, but it’s only a dozen ‘blocks,’” Irene said blithely, and off we set.

  My gait was not as practiced as hers, but the trousers pulling at every step forced me to extend my stride. No one gave us a second glance as dusk darkened the city and street lamps came out like large, falling stars someone had stopped only three yards from earth.

  Actually, to be abroad at such an hour, ignored, was most refreshing. I almost felt invisible. I almost felt that our bizarre enterprise had a hope of success.

  As we turned down Seventeenth Street, the lights became fewer, and I felt an uneasy recall of Whitechapel and what had happened in the dark and murk there less than a year ago.

  And yet! We knew the Ripper as no others did, and we knew him to be safely harnessed. He was not here, though others as heartless and vile as he might roam.

  I hastened to keep up with Irene by lengthening my stride. And it was odd, these long, loping steps increased my confidence. I felt almost a hound upon a trail, a horse reaching for the end of a race. I had never been one to move at more than a stroll, but suddenly the cooler night air was an intoxicant and I rushed to meet it.

  My overlarge leather gloves pinched her rough coat sleeve. “Quentin would have been a better partner tonight.”

  “Quentin might ask questions I wouldn’t want to answer, as Holmes would. I’m not giving up the edge we have in the affairs of Lola Montez unless we have to. She is my mother. Maybe.”

  With this I couldn’t argue. I knew where my mother was buried, as Irene might know, but most of all I knew my mother for a tranquil, loyal, loved parson’s wife. As Irene did not. Indeed, it seemed no one had loved Lola Montez as much as she herself had, and therein was truly a tragedy.