Irene Adler 08 - Spider Dance Read online

  “Not once, in all those pages and pages of exclamation points? Don’t bother to deny it, Irene. You write as if you were singing grand opera. Every paragraph is an aria, every sentence a dramatic revelation, and every word an impossibly high note.”

  “Do I take it that you find my writing persuasive?”

  “Excessively so. And yet you have used the most uncharacteristic restraint in omitting Sherlock Holmes from the cast list! I find that even more troubling than including him.”

  “How so?”

  Irene played the innocent as well as she portrayed the femme fatale. It struck me then that she would best serve her absent spouse by having her photograph made and sent to him, just as she appeared now.

  I have never seen a woman who looked so unnervingly well in the morning, her color warm even without the light enhancement of paint, her chestnut hair flashing gold and red glints like cherry amber, her face serene as a Madonna’s. Unfortunately, not many Madonnas were to be found in grand opera.

  Needless to say that Irene and I were, like most longtime companions, night and day in temperament. We were also opposite in looks, although Irene insisted, in her usual optimistic moments, that I was attractive.

  She was now frowning prettily and paging through her opus. “I suppose I could slip mention of Sherlock Holmes into one of these pages, if it would satisfy you, Nell.”

  “Me? It has nothing to do with me. And why trouble Godfrey when he is too far away to do anything about it?”

  “What would Godfrey do if he were here?”

  “Escort you everywhere, so you had no opportunity to consort improperly with that miserable man.”

  Irene smiled. “We really had very little to do with Mr. Holmes during our New York inquiries.”

  “No, he only appeared at the end when you had solved the unspeakable death, to drop portentous hints about your lost mother’s identity . . . in a graveyard, no less, and then marched off without even a word of farewell.”

  “Perhaps he expects to see us again,” she murmured to the infant serial novel on her lap. Just loud enough so that I could hear it.

  “And will he?

  She looked up through her dark eyelashes, as contrite as Miss Allegra Turnpenny at age fourteen, and I was cast suddenly again in my role of stern governess.

  “I hope not,” Irene finally said with deep feeling, an emotion I could heartily endorse.

  I allowed myself to take a breath of relief.

  “When I follow someone, especially Mr. Sherlock Holmes, I would hope to be quite invisible.”

  I should have known that Irene would be determined to pick up the gauntlet he had tossed at our feet at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn two days earlier.

  How Sherlock Holmes had been lured from London, and Irene and I from the pleasant village of Neuilly-sur-Seine near Paris, to arrive at this place of gravestones near Manhattan Island, would require a book to detail in all its convolutions.

  Nellie Bly, the crusading American newspaper reporter had been the catalyst, by tempting Irene with the notion that she had a long-lost mother whose life was being threatened. Irene, abandoned soon after birth, had always stoutly denied any sentimental need to find a delinquent mother, but add the melodrama of possible murder, and she would go anywhere. We’d discovered more than I wanted to know about Irene’s childhood years, and a truly appalling candidate for the role of Irene’s mother.

  So Irene and I culminated our investigations with a visit to the burial site of “the wickedest woman in New York,” or so the long-dead creature had been called more than a decade earlier, in 1877 on the occasion of her shocking demise. This pseudonymously named Madame Restell (she was an Englishwoman born, can you imagine!) had ministered to “women’s problems,” for decades, even to the point of forestalling births. Some considered this an abomination, others a boon. It was not precisely illegal in Madame Restell’s day, and the woman had become conspicuously wealthy, even building a grand mansion on Fifth Avenue where her clients would come to a side door in the dark of night. That some of them came from the surrounding mansions protected the Restell enterprise for decades. She also offered the same services to poor women at far less costly rates. Her clients regarded her as a savior. Her detractors considered her a devil. Charged by a morals crusader named Comstock, she had supposedly cut her own throat with a butcher knife on the eve of her sentencing, adding the sin of suicide to any roster of wrongdoing she would have to answer for before the Final Bar.

  Some question remained whether this lost soul had been the “Woman in Black,” who had apparently abandoned Irene at an early age to the care of the most freakish assemblage of theatrical folk I had ever seen, onstage or off.

  We had contemplated that very fact as we gazed at the monument for what might be Irene’s mother. I sincerely hoped not.

  Then who should appear but Sherlock Holmes in top hat and city garb, quite appropriate for the cemetery, actually, and the sober act of visiting the dead. He led us to another hill in the vast and picturesque park and to a small headstone that bore the very common name of Eliza Gilbert. Mrs. Eliza Gilbert, I noted to my great ease of mind.

  And there he had left us with the unspoken implication that this unknown woman was more likely to be Irene’s mother than “the wickedest woman in New York.” I was foolishly relieved. At the time.

  “How would he know?” I demanded as I unpinned my hat when we had returned to the Astor House Hotel on Broadway.

  “Apparently he does know, and knows more than I do. Than we do. I do not for a moment believe that Sherlock Holmes is in New York City in answer to Nellie Bly’s summons. He has business of his own here. The fact that I had come here on the thin trail of a mother who disowned me, and who might be in danger of death, according to our daredevil reporter friend, meant nothing but a moment’s mental diversion for Sherlock Holmes. Yet he insists on dogging my movements.”

  “Perhaps because you pursue these inquiries.”

  “How would he know, or suspect, who the Woman in Black was? He must have found clues here, for neither of us had the least interest in her until Nellie Bly’s cables drew us both across the Atlantic.”

  “And we shall have to cross that horrible, heaving body of water to return home to Paris again! I do not believe I can stomach that.”

  “Poor girl.” Irene patted my hand. “You didn’t stomach it at all on the voyage over.”

  “A week of terror and distress. I would almost volunteer to remain in this savage land rather than return by sea.”

  “You cannot fly, Nell. And walking on water is a prerogative of the Lord you would not wish to usurp. But fear not. We will stay on until we solve the riddle of Eliza Gilbert, and by then you may have somewhat forgotten the inconveniences of the voyage.”

  “You have today put me between the devil and the deep blue sea, Irene, and I don’t know which is the worst to contemplate.”

  “Then don’t think about either.” She bent her eyes to her pages and turned several periods into exclamation marks.

  Poor Godfrey. A benighted barrister toiling away on dull legal matters in Bavaria for the Rothschild banking interests, bereft of wife and unaware that she was bent on trying to out-Sherlock Sherlock Holmes himself.

  Brilliantly blind Irene! She was quite unaware that the cold-minded man of logic had developed an unreasonable addiction to her brains and beauty as well as cocaine and who knew what other vices?

  What a bother! I would have to make sure that Irene did not dance too near the flame when she sought to turn the tables on Sherlock Holmes.

  That might be just what the irritating fellow was hoping for.

  2

  BUSYBODIES

  A fair reader who confesses to an honorable admiration for

  the intrepid and energetic Nellie Bly THE WORLD, writes

  to inquire if this is the real name of that enterprising

  young woman. THE WORLD’S Nellie Bly is, I believe,

  in private life, a Miss Pi
nk Jane Elizabeth Cochrane.

  —TOWN TOPICS GOSSIP SHEET, AUGUST 1888

  FROM NELLIE BLY’S JOURNAL

  Though they would deny it to a man, and to the death, there is no gossiping old biddy worse than a gentleman of the press.

  So it was that their sly looks, and slyer chuckles, greeted me as I entered the New York World’s offices that summer afternoon.

  Immediately several men in my vicinity stopped hawking tobacco juice into their rank spittoons and began whistling “Nellie Bly.”

  Oh, I am so sick of the song that gave me my byline! Yet it does stick in the mind of the public, and that is a boon you can’t buy.

  I ignored their merriment and went to the desk I am given the use of. I come and go a great deal, and when I am off on one of my stunt impersonations, I am not to be found at the office for days or even weeks.

  “Don’t get too settled, Nellie,” Walters the sports columnist finally advised me for the room at large. “You’ll be in Pulitzer’s office soon enough.”

  Now, that was meant to strike fear into me. I confess the brave crimson feather on my hat might have quivered a bit. Our new owner was a most demanding editor. But ambition is a close friend of mine also, and I had determined to drive Bessie Bramble and Nell Nelson and all my rival sisters of the press from the front pages of this teeming city and the entire eastern seaboard.

  I was even now working on a most scandalous, shocking, and sad story, an outgrowth of my recent frustrating sojourn with my expatriate countrywoman, Irene Adler Norton. In trying to extract the secret of her American past, I had ended up finding mysterious deaths among a forgotten group of variety performers. Hardly front page material. If only I were free to reveal the indomitable Irene’s discoveries about the identity of Jack the Ripper . . . but I was bound and gagged on that account, by some of the crowned heads of Europe, no less.

  Ah, well. There is always another sensation somewhere.

  My current investigation, for one, should shake New York society to its roots.

  So I sat at the desk, writing on lined paper until the threatened summons from Mr. Pulitzer should arrive, if it did.

  I regarded my colleagues from under what I knew to be a particularly winsome hat, sapphire blue velvet with one large crimson ostrich plume rampant among the flock of smaller dove gray feathers.

  Most of my jocular persecutors were almost twice my age of twenty-four. “I’d relish talking to Mr. Pulitzer,” I said to no one in particular. “I’ve got a very keen story in the works.”

  Their unkempt brows knit below their balding heads as some twiddled their thumbs over swelling waistcoats dotted with lunches past. They tolerated my presence as an unnatural wonder, and were sometimes quite kind, and sometimes quite cutting. I weathered whatever way their winds blew. Elizabeth Jane Cochrane had learned to speak up for herself against a brutal and drunken stepfather at an early age. Speaking up for myself had made me into a daredevil reporter.

  I heard an office door crack open as the murmur of masculine voices oozed from the editor’s offices.

  Broadhurst, the drama critic who came into the office as seldom as I did, took pity on me. “It’s not Pulitzer’ll be wanting to talk to you, Nellie. It’s some Brit toff.”

  Well! There were, of course, no mirrors in the totally masculine New York World offices, but I did reach up to make sure my hat was properly anchored by the foot-long pin festooned with a glass-bead butterfly.

  I believe a woman should be attractively dressed, whatever her role in life.

  And . . . Quentin Stanhope looked a man who could appreciate that fact, despite poor stumbling Nell’s blissful ignorance of such things, and despite being my least favored nationality, English. No doubt it was because Mr. Stanhope was a renegade Englishman who had gone native in the world’s most exotic corners. My. How our reticent Miss Nell Huxleigh would fret to know that Quentin had called upon me at the New York World.

  I heard the usual small talk of farewell, then firm footsteps approaching me across the wooden floors layered in newsprint, a concession to my long skirts, so they should not sweep up trails of tobacco juice that had missed the spittoons. Newsmen were no different from the grubby newsboys hawking on the street corners: they reveled in the mischief of always looking and speaking too rudely for church.

  I turned, for I prefer to confront rather than to be confronted.

  Gracious! My visitor was not the dashing Quentin Stanhope. He was another sort of Englishman entirely, one most unworthy of my new hat, and one hardly in my good graces.

  “Good day . . . Miss Bly?” Sherlock Holmes towered over me like some character from Dickens, quirking his head to the side in a habitual inquisitive gesture.

  “That will do nicely,” I said, for few people knew my real name was Elizabeth Cochrane, even less that I had been called “Pink” from childhood.

  “Mr. Pulitzer agreed that you might be helpful to me.”

  So it was a conspiracy. “Pull up a chair. Most of us come and go, so any open desk or seat is fair game. Nothing ‘drawing room’ about a newspaper office.”

  He immediately turned to claim a golden oak armchair, not upholstered but still one of the more substantial, and heavy, chairs about the place.

  So he seated himself, cutaway coat, pinstriped trousers and all. His top hat and cane he laid across the newsprint-strewn desk.

  I smiled at the notion of Sherlock Holmes being taken for a city slicker by my compatriots. They hadn’t seen London and all the men running about the streets dressed up like undertakers at a robber baron’s funeral.

  “I suppose,” I said, “this place is a bit crude for your taste.”

  “Not in the slightest, Miss Bly.” He turned to survey the room as alertly as a hawk on a telephone wire. “Fascinating. And it even offers the charming fogs of my home city.”

  I sighed at his reference to the clouds of cigar smoke polluting the air. A newsroom was something of men’s club, after all. And, at bottom, I was not as welcome in it as even an unknown Englishman like Sherlock Holmes. But he didn’t need to know that.

  “How did Mr. Pulitzer think I could help you?”

  “With the lay of the land, specifically regarding the first families of New York. I am quite the new student in that regard.”

  “And why do they deserve your study?”

  “Call it an English eccentricity.” His eyes were hooded, his expression bland. “We put much stock in family and title.”

  “There are no titles here, except what the newspaper cartoonists come up with, and they are invariably rude.”

  “Exactly so. I need not tiptoe around the information I seek, but ask it openly of an expert source like yourself.”

  If I didn’t know better, I would think we were fencing. Or flirting. “I’m no expert. My stories are about the girl in the street, and how she’s abused by all and sundry. The Four Hundred are as above me as the Queen must be above you.”

  “Oh, I fear you underestimate us both.” Before I could decipher his reference to the Queen of England—Had he really met her? Had he in fact been of service to her? It was possible—he spoke on. “The fact is that rich Americans do not shirk publicity. I must say that as a consulting detective I applaud such refreshing frankness. Much about them is common knowledge that would never be publicly discussed about the London nobility. However, it is not common knowledge to a newcomer to your shores. I wish to be as knowledgeable as the man on the street, that’s all.”

  “Which families interested you?”

  “I have heard some names. Belmont, Vanderbilt, Astor.”

  “You’ve heard right. That’s the Holy Trinity of New York society, all right, though some of them are less holy than others.”

  “Exactly what I needed to know.”

  I leaned back in my own wooden chair, thinking madly. What did Sherlock Holmes really want to know, and, more important, why? How had he gotten entrée to and aid from my boss, Mr. Joseph Pulitzer? Not that we didn’t get on. M
r. Pulitzer liked my “pluck.” That didn’t save me from getting stuck with some stupid flower show story now and again. I always had to fight for my big stories, had to go out and do things like checking myself into a madhouse to get good placement in the paper. Trouble was, I’d done all the usual street stories. My latest project did in fact touch on the same high levels of society that Mr. Holmes was inquiring about

  “So you’re not leaving New York immediately?” I asked him.

  “I’m not eager to waste a week of ocean travel by turning right around again. I understand that crime runs as rife here as anywhere.”

  “Even among the Four Hundred?”

  “I would assume especially so. Where there is great wealth and display there’s always some magpie eye on it. And some hunting hawk watching the magpie.”

  “You are the hawk, no doubt.”

  “I am a mere seeker of what’s common knowledge to most New Yorkers. What is unholy about these three families?’

  “Ambition, Mr. Holmes.”

  “That is not unknown among even costermongers.”

  When I frowned, he quickly added, “Street peddlers.”

  “Yes, but among the rich it’s two-pronged.” I had interested him. “The men are rabid to outdo each other at business, buying entire railroads just to foil a rival. The women, however, cross swords socially. Mrs. John Jacob Astor was the undisputed queen of New York society.”

  “Was.”

  “The famous Four Hundred was the exact number of first citizens who could fit into her ballroom. And mere money did not qualify for an invitation from Mrs. Astor.”

  “So who with money did not fit in her ballroom?”

  “Commodore Vanderbilt and all his many progeny. Didn’t bother the old man, who died a few years ago, one bit. But his eldest grandson’s wife, Alva, was a different story. She besieged Fifth Avenue, put up a gleaming white Parisian chateau amidst all the glowering, four-square brownstones of the Astors and their ilk, the ones rather like Madame Restell’s unhappy former residence across the avenue from 660 Fifth. Of course Mrs. Astor would not recognize her new neighbor, Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt, until Alva held a ball so extravagant that Mrs. Astor’s own daughters were mad to attend. You can imagine the outcome.”