Irene Adler 08 - Spider Dance

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Here, near the harbor, one could hear the eternal slap of waves against hull and piling and smell the sea in all its rank, commercial stink. Another scent was beginning to drown that out, and I recognized it. Blood.

  In the occasional glimmer of moonlight between the hulking warehouses, I saw that Godfrey was attired in a midnight peacoat like Black Otto, a former personage of his on an earlier, less dire adventure in Monte Carlo.

  I didn’t doubt that his hand in his right coat pocket held pistol, or dagger, or blackjack.

  I myself was ill accoutered for such a desperate expedition, save for the many useful articles on my chatelaine. But now I had to muffle this useful accessory with my hand to keep it from chiming our approach.

  A horse snorted in the distance.

  Godfrey stopped me with a hand on my wrist. We waited. Then moved forward.

  A Gurney and two horses had been pulled close to a building.

  We came near . . . and Godfrey bent over a bundle on the wet ground. The driver.

  “Dead?” I asked.

  “Perhaps. Certainly not likely to rouse until dawn.”

  We slipped past the horses, standing patiently in the way forced upon their kind, each with a forefoot lifted to ease the waiting.

  The sight of these beasts of burden with one foot lifted against their wearisome fate always stirred my heart. My ire against those who had raced this Gurney here, to what dire purpose, rose like a fire in my throat. That they had also abused the two priests only increased my fury. That Irene and Consuelo were even now at their mercy . . . I suddenly knew the fiery heart of Lola Montez, and deemed no weapon—pistol, whip, or dagger—beyond my just and present use.

  Godfrey’s cautionary hand on my forearm almost spurred a striking out.

  “Inside here,” he whispered in my ear.

  I was back, again—as in my dreams, my nightmares—in that ancient, crumbling maze in Transylvania, where creatures and rituals and rites unthinkable had required the utmost of my endurance. And resistance.

  Somehow, Irene and I had now stumbled into a new variety of atrocity.

  I breathed as deep as a well, inhaling all the brutal stench and stiffening against it. Then Godfrey cracked some unseen portal, and we eeled into a deeper, oily dark, a darkness silent and yet echoing with the drip of saltwater. Perhaps tears?

  We moved forward together, on tiptoe, as we had before, and stronger for the first trial.

  His fingers tightened on my wrist. My hand made a fist. And we stole further into the heart of darkness.

  Some interior light leaked into the scene ahead of us.

  I made out a high empty space, long steel tables, pulleys and huge hanging hooks. Scaffolding ahead, reaching up two stories. The smell here was as rank, but stale somehow.

  “A deserted slaughterhouse.” Godfrey’s whisper danced against my ear like a moth dying in the light.

  I nodded, not sure that he would detect such a feeble gesture.

  We paused again. And heard faint sounds ahead.

  So we moved on, sliding our feet along the rough floor, careful to keep from slipping or making any untoward sound that should betray our presence.

  Surprise was our only real weapon.

  The sounds became sharper, resolved into voices. Arguing voices.

  We saw a sort of interior office ahead against one of the towering brick walls. Just a lean-to of wood, with a door and windows with glass panes inset. An overseer’s office, I thought.

  And from it came the voices.

  We inched forward, stopping in tandem when a deep soprano joined the basso chorus. We clutched at each other in the dark. No words were discernible, but the tonal quality of Irene’s voice was as unmistakable as a cello among bass fiddles.

  I could hear the poor dumb beasts moaning and shifting in distant holding pens. The smell of their thousands and thousands of predecessors soaked this empty building with the metallic tang of spilled blood. This was an animal morgue, far cruder but no less brutal than the famous institution of Paris that attracted goggling crowds.

  Would it become a usual kind of morgue before the night was done?

  I noticed a glint in Godfrey’s hand. Black Otto’s businesslike dagger.

  By now we were near enough for the light that leaked through the filthy glass to wash our own figures. We dared not go much closer without alerting those inside the office.

  We hesitated. I glimpsed a motion atop the office structure, and pulled on Godfrey’s rough sleeve.

  He glanced up to see what I saw. A dark, hunched figure almost a sort of giant monkey, with a crest upon its head like some tropical bird.

  To such an apparition, we would be as visible as statues in a museum.

  While we braced ourselves for the next move, something rose up behind the shadow and merged with it.

  A beast with two backs and four pummeling arms plunged to the floor.

  Godfrey sprang to the office door, not to rush through it but to wait and listen.

  Then the glass on the three visible office windows exploded outwards, a rushing figure at the center of each halo of breaking splinters. Glass flew like daggers of ice.

  One shadow sprinted through the door. Godfrey brought his conjoined fists down on its neck, and the creature rolled to the floor.

  Men, or beasts, came pouring out of the small structure, not counting the Quasimodo on the floor still contending with someone . . . one, two, three, four, five.

  A pistol shot fired and the bullet whined off some distant slab of metal.

  I crouched back, no match for any of the strivings before me, but perhaps able to startle or surprise at a later moment.

  For all the gentlemen’s vaunted desire to spare and protect me, at this moment, when my friends and foes were contending in a pitched battle for life and death, I mattered not a smidgeon. The first wrestlers rolled toward me, caught my skirt hem under their twisting bodies and nearly pulled me into their brutal wake.

  Then the battle shifted and they rolled away.

  I felt the floor around me. My hands shaped some mass of abandoned metal, heavy and so rusted I almost sneezed from the powder it left on my gloves as I lifted it. I struggled upright, the weight in my hands, and then staggered against the office wall.

  In the uncertain light within figures were writhing like demons on Judgment Day. I thought of Mary Jane Kelly’s cramped, vile room in Whitechapel and what slaughter had transpired there. I cowered, yes, cowered against the flimsy wooden wall.

  A high thin scream came from inside the office. I’d heard wounded animals and infants scream so, and hurtled through the open door despite myself.

  Then I stopped and blinked, blinded, in the light from an unshuttered lantern.

  When I could finally see past that brutal fist of artificial sunlight I saw Irene holding a pistol far bigger than the petite one she was prone to carry. A dark-haired child in a pale dress and stockings clung to her trouser legs. And a hulking male figure was before them, frozen like a statue.

  “Nell, behind you!” Irene called, raising the pistol to shoulder height.

  I spun, the weight in my arms lifting and spinning me faster and harder than even I had thought.

  I hit him in the stomach, some looming man with angry eyes and reaching fists.

  And continued spinning around, barely keeping my feet . . .

  . . . just in time to meet another man head-on as he charged out, brushing me aside. I fell like a sack of rocks.

  The impact dazed me. Before I could recover, Irene rushed past me, her pistol aimed as she discharged it.

  The sound exploded in the empty slaughterhouse.

  A pair of black satin slippers stopped by my nose.

  “Oh,” came a small, fearful voice. “Are you all right?”

  I sat up. “You’re all right, that’s what matters,” I told the slender child, smiling at her despite my sudden, pounding headache. “My, what a lovely frock.”

  She was an achingly thin willo
w of a girl, with a small trembling mouth and great dark lonely eyes. I hugged her, no longer worried. If Irene and her pistol were ahead of me, nothing fearful could lie behind me . . . except little Consuelo, who said: “That was a very good discus throw. I’ve been studying the Olympic Games of the Greeks, you know. Do you dance? Miss Irene said she would teach me.”

  I looked around, though the open door. In the vast, black empty chamber, figures even darker were scurrying away like monsters in a dissipating bad dream.

  Some of the figures came to the doorway and turned out to be Godfrey. Sherlock Holmes. Quentin. And Irene, looking royally annoyed.

  In fact, they all looked royally annoyed with me.

  Except for Consuelo. Children are often so much wiser than adults.

  52

  TALL, DARK, AND HOLMES?

  Energy rightly applied and directed will accomplish anything.

  —MAXIM OF NELLIE BLY

  FROM NELLIE BLY’S JOURNAL

  There is only so far that one may goad an Englishman or a beau.

  Quentin Stanhope had done a disappearing act on me.

  He wasn’t at his hotel, and had left no word as to where he might be. I next tried the hotel of Sherlock Holmes. Presto! Also unavailable.

  At last I called at the Astor House Hotel, and found Mrs. Norton and Miss Huxleigh “not in.”

  Well.

  If there’s one thing I can smell, besides a Paris perfume, it’s a rat.

  His name is Quentin, and now I knew my docile English spy-cum-nursemaid had gone rogue. Oh, he was very good at squiring me about the lower quarters in search of baby-sellers. But once he was on a true trail, it was bye-bye, Nellie Bly.

  I can’t say I was surprised. I always knew he was in America solely to keep me from doing things. This may sound conceited, but I understand I’m a dangerous woman to some, at home and abroad, because I won’t leave well enough alone.

  Leaving well enough alone is the way women and horses have been kept in harness for generations.

  That very first article by Quiet Observer saying girls should stay to home and not intrude on the working world had gotten my ire up at the age of seventeen, and I haven’t stopped since then, although I’ve since made peace with the curmudgeonly old columnist who goes by the coy initials of Q.O.

  Any one man may be all right. In a bunch, they’re a cowardly nest of nay-sayers to free women anywhere.

  Quentin Stanhope is no different. Nor that hoighty-toighty Sherlock Holmes. As for Irene Adler Norton and Miss Nell, I wouldn’t trust them as far as I could toss the trunks they brought to New York.

  Bunch of Continental snobs, if you ask me!

  Now to my next step.

  It came to hand on my exit from the Astor House in the form of a begging Street Arab. I never stint on a source.

  “Here’s fifty cents, my lad. I wish I knew when a certain lady with a lapel watch left this hotel a few hours ago.”

  One could count on these street rapscallions to spot and value articles of jewelry faster than a Forty-seventh Street diamond dealer.

  “Nothin’ simpler,” said the filthy-faced lad. “If ye have anither fifty-cent piece.”

  “I’ve the fifty cents, but have you the information I want?”

  “Love the hat, ma’am. M’name’s Archy. It was just a couple hours ago, at dusk. A tall, dark fellow had me watchin’ for when a bustlin’ lady wearin’ a silver belt come out, and where she went.”

  “Hmmm,” I said, recognizing Sherlock Holmes at once. “I suppose you can’t tell me.”

  “The lady took a horsecar with another gennelmen in a checked suit. Fast fellow. And Mr. Mayberry’s hack followed with the tall dark fellow. A regular Brit in a top hat. Handsome as the undertaker’s horse. It’s a regular Madison Square farce.”

  “Here’s a fifty-cent piece that says I want Mr. Mayberry’s hack for myself.”

  “He’s just back on his favorite corner, there. Wait! My fifty-cent piece!”

  I threw it behind me and bounded into the conveyance in question, beating out a top-hatted swell escorting a Union Square fan dancer.

  “Where to, ma’am?” my genteel driver inquired.

  “Where you took your last fare.”

  “It’ll be pitch dark with night there by now. You’re better off stayin’ in the lights of Broadway. That’s no fit place for a lady alone.”

  “I don’t expect to be alone long,” I told myself, not worrying a whit what he thought about overhearing me.

  But my brave words came back to haunt me when the driver began taking darker and sharper turnings into the unsavory area that led to the docks.

  I couldn’t imagine Nell Huxleigh going here, or Sherlock Holmes permitting her to do so.

  Yet if the tall dark man who called upon her hadn’t been Holmes, it must have been Quentin. Yes, Quentin would be the more likely candidate to squire Miss Nell around at night . . . but why here?

  When the driver stopped near a completely darkened building, I leaned out over the doors that kept me a passenger, reluctant to get out.

  The area was utterly deserted, and had that disused atmosphere you find in abandoned buildings.

  While a I hesitated, I heard the distant rattle of harnesses and carriage. Shortly after, a Gurney came grinding down the damp cobblestones, its horses straining as if overloaded.

  “What on earth can that Gurney be doing here at this hour?” I speculated aloud.

  My driver heard me.

  “Doin’ what I long to do, Miss. Gettin’ the hell out of this nasty place.”

  I still made him drive forward a hundred yards or so, though he swore that where we had stopped had been where he’d left “the gentleman” (that had to be Quentin, not Holmes; Holmes was too brusque to be taken for a gentleman) “and the lady off.”

  There was obviously nothing here.

  No lady, and no gentleman.

  No Holmes, no Nell.

  No Quentin.

  I felt a bit like a jealous spouse trying to trail an illicit couple. Disappointed, and foolish.

  I knocked on the trapdoor to let the driver know he could hie for the safe, electrically bright lights of Broadway again.

  Whatever anyone had been up to in the dark of night, Quentin would be mine again in the morning.

  53

  SULPHUR AND SMOKE

  Men for a little gain cross the seas, enduring at least as

  much as we, and shall we not, for God’s love do

  what men do for earthly interest?”

  —SAINT ISAAC JOGUES’S LETTER TO HIS MOTHER ON

  LEAVING FRANCE TO BE A MISSIONARY TO THE INDIANS

  IN NEW YORK AND NEW FRANCE (CANADA), 1636

  Luckily, the driver of the Gurney used to abduct Holmes had proved to be only stunned. He was groaning and sitting against the front wheel when we recovered our wits and gathered ourselves into a party.

  A quite respectable party, if the light didn’t blaze upon our disheveled apparel: we were three men, two women, and a child, and could just crowd into the Gurney if Consuelo sat on my lap, and Irene on Godfrey’s, which didn’t seem to be an imposition to either of them.

  First we returned Consuelo to her distraught parents, who had, in the meantime, hired half of the actual Pinkertons in New York to guard her and their house. Mr. Vanderbilt overflowed with thanks and promises of reward. Mrs. Vanderbilt simply snatched the girl’s hand from mine and marched her up those long, imposing stairs that so frightened the child. Alva Vanderbilt’s promise of an immediate bath sounded like a punishment. The woman knew nothing about cajoling and everything about enforcing.

  Poor Consuelo had only been persuaded to return home after promises from Irene and myself to visit. Irene was to teach her to dance, and I was to teach her to discus throw.

  Given Consuelo’s social-climbing harridan of a mother, I believe that discus throwing would prove to be the more valuable skill.

  Mr. Vanderbilt could not quite meet my eyes as I turned
them from the staircase after Consuelo and her mother had disappeared.

  “Very grateful,” he murmured to me personally. “I will show how much later, when things are set to rights here at home.” He glanced up the palatial staircase, fit for a Cinderella to flee down, as if he too feared the height.

  Then we all five adjourned to the Astor House, where our state of clothing was the centerpiece of every eye in a lobby blazing with electric lights.

  Safe and uncommented-upon in the elevator at last, we took final refuge in Irene’s and my rooms. Godfrey had ordered brandy as we passed through the lobby, by the bottle. Two of them! The man delivering them almost arrived at our door as soon as we did. He peered inward in rank curiosity while Quentin tipped him and accepted the heavy tray.

  I surveyed my male escorts. Sherlock Holmes’s previously loud clothing now actually shouted with dirt and rips. Godfrey as Black Otto had apparently been caught in a buzz saw. Quentin, attired in the rags of a street beggar, now beggared description. Irene in men’s clothes was beginning to look commonplace to me, except her hair was an unpinned snarl and she looked wan and worn.

  I myself was a sight, my hair half-undone, my gloves red with rust.

  My weapon, it turned out, had been a disused pulley wheel, round and flat enough to pass for a discus, after all.

  “Let go of that heavy, cumbersome thing, Nell,” Irene urged after we’d assembled in our hotel parlor.

  “No. I . . . rather fancy it. One never knows what will come plunging down from the ceiling in New York City these days.”

  “What was that thing on the office roof?” Godfrey asked Quentin from his position presiding over the brandy. “Some sort of orangutang?”

  “Slippery enough to finally elude me in the dark,” Quentin complained. “Perhaps a thing half-eel and half-man.”