Spider Dance (16 page)

“Pink works for the
New York World,”
I repeated for the third time as we stood on the bustling sidewalk and gazed at the unassuming building.

“Yes, Nell. But I have no intention of allowing Miss Elizabeth Jane Cochrane, familiarly known as Pink and publicly known as Nellie Bly, another opportunity to use my past as the key to a sensational newspaper story.”

I wore my new town gown that Irene had purchased for me at B. Altman during her shopping spree before broaching the Vanderbilt mansion in the guise of an Irish maid. For a ready-made costume it was fairly respectable. It was of cream-and-green plaid sateen, with the new three-quarter sleeves that were met by longer gloves, and the new slightly puffed sleeve at the shoulder. Irene was also attired for city
business, but her ensemble mimicked an eighteenth-century riding costume with its dashing copper-colored satin jacket with large revers and cuffs over a skirt striped in peacock green and copper. She carried a large black leather handbag rather than the more formal reticule that she preferred. And inside the handbag was a letter in a long envelope of heavy linen paper that I had seen for the first time that morning at our hotel rooms.

“What is that?” I’d asked when she’d paused to place it in her newly acquired handbag.

“It is a precaution, Nell.”

“Usually precautions are actions, not physical items.”

“This is both.” Her gloved fingers waved it once before she latched the bag shut. “Before we left Paris, I asked Baron Alphonse for a letter of introduction from the Rothschild agent in New York. This awaited us at our hotel.”

“You never mentioned it to me.”

“Things were rather hectic, as you recall. Besides, I had no use for it until now.”

“And what will you use it for today?”

“To introduce ourselves to Mr. James Gordon Bennett Jr. and to induce him to allow us to see the newspaper files for 1861.”

“The year Mrs. Eliza Gilbert died and was buried.”

“Exactly, Nell. I am weary of other people waving hints of my family origins at me. I will know the truth, and the entire truth.”

“Then you meant what you told Mr. Holmes.”

“Which was?”

“That you hadn’t the slightest intention of intruding on his assignment involving the Vanderbilts.”

“Oh, that. Of course I did. I will settle the identity of this Gilbert woman, discover whether there is any possibility she might have been my mother, and then we will unfurl our sails and breeze back to Paris and Godfrey as fast as Mother Ocean will let us.”

“Godfrey is not in Paris.”

“He ought to be.” Irene shook her head as if trying to dislodge
the veil furled on the keel of her sweeping hat brim. “What can be so fascinating in Bavaria that it should occupy an English barrister more than a week or two? I intend to wire the baron to that effect if Godfrey is not soon released.”

I could see that Irene meant every word she said. For me the news was both happy and, oddly, sad. We would track down the history of the dead Eliza Gilbert. We would confront our new theatrical acquaintances (actually Irene’s childhood caretakers) with whatever facts we found and either confirm or eliminate the woman as a possibility for Irene’s mother. We would then speed home again, a consummation devoutly to be wished . . . save that I might be leaving Quentin Stanhope behind. Along, or even alone, with Elizabeth Pink Nellie! Not a thing to be wished in any event.

So I regarded the dour office building now before us with a glum mood. Quentin had made it clear that his sojourn in New York City was Foreign Office business. He could not leave until it was accomplished. And I could not banish the conviction that, no matter how charmingly he partnered me at tea, his assignment had much to do with that inescapable and annoyingly forward and attractive young person named Pink!

“She is only a few years our junior, Nell,” Irene pointed out beside me.

“What?” Irene’s new habit of commenting on my unspoken thoughts was becoming as annoying as Pink herself!

“Our friend Nellie. She lied in Paris. She is in her midtwenties, and we have only edged past thirty.”

“How did you—?”

“You have been throttling the neck of the rose silk reticule I bought you at Macy’s ever since the child in the large pink straw hat brimmed with pink roses passed by.”

“Really? I didn’t notice her, Irene.”

“In any case,” Irene went on, “I agree that we are better off leaving Pink to her own devices and attending to ours. I hope this letter will be an ‘open sesame.’”

With that she mounted the short flight of stairs to the building, I in her wake.

For some reason newspaper editorial offices sit on the topmost floor. Irene and I labored upward, the building having no elevator, feeling the risers tremble beneath our feet as the great hidden presses kept their noisy pace.

We exited at a floor as filled with smoke as a variety theater. Ladies were not often expected here, for the floors were dusted with ashes and dark disgusting islands where that awful American habit of “chewing tobacco” has missed arriving at the awfully but aptly named spittoons.

Even the Rothschild letter, one would think, would not deign to be delivered here, were any such action up to a mere letter.

Irene sailed through the muck in an evasive path that missed the worst of the filth and I followed in her footsteps.

Our unusual presence finally inspired a man in rolled-up shirtsleeves and a homburg (indoors!) to lower his booted feet from a desktop and inquire, “Lookin’ for something special, ladies?”

“Mr. Bennett,” Irene said, smiling.

The man removed a thick cigar stub from his mouth and pointed with it to a closed door. “You’re lucky. He seldom visits the U. S. but he’s just back from Paris for a short time. There.”

There we went. Irene knocked. “Come in, dammit,” a voice commanded.

Within was an office as civilized as the outer areas were not, though the smoke and clatter drifted in.

Mr. Bennett was standing at a large mahogany desk, frowning at sheets of newsprint and chewing on the stump of an expired cigar like a mastiff on a bone.

“Mr. Bennett,” Irene said for the second time.

“Not me,” the cigar chewer said. “Him.”

We turned to regard a well-tailored man sitting in a leather club chair before the desk. His hair was edged in middle-aged silver, but his large, pointed mustache was still jet black.

He rose at once. “I am Bennett. How may I help you, madam?”

“You may indeed help, but it is Baron de Rothschild and his agent, Mr. Belmont, you will oblige the most by aiding me.

Irene extended the letter even as the man’s eyes moved from Irene to myself, and then back to Irene. “And you are—?”

“Mrs. Godfrey Norton, and this is my companion, Miss Huxleigh.”

By then he had opened and skimmed the letter sufficiently to return it to the envelope and hand it back.

“How may I assist you?”

“I need to consult the back issues of your newspaper for a certain date, or a few dates.”

“What are they?”

“Quite old, I fear. January of 1861.”

“Ah, the Civil War years.”

“That will cause a difficulty?”

“On the contrary. This newspaper dates back to early in the century, but news chases the future, not the past, and copies were not always kept well. However, the war years would be more likely to be preserved. Davis.” He turned his eyes and voice to the man fretting over the desk full of newsprint “Write these ladies a chit so the dragon who guards the back copies below will let them browse amongst our wares.” He turned back to us. “You may only consult the papers, not take them.”

“Information is all we seek,” Irene said.

“And what would two such genteel ladies need with ink-stained editions from nearly thirty years ago?”

“I seek to trace relations.”

“Ah. Lost in the war, eh? Not likely to be found at this late date. Dispense with your gloves, is my advice. Ah. Thank you, Davis. You can return to worrying the front page.”

Irene held the note between her white-gloved fingertips. “Thank you so much for your assistance, and your sanitary advice.”

“The morgue—what we call our library—is on the basement level. My regards to Mr. Belmont. I hope to see him in
Paris again one of these weeks. I live abroad now that I’ve founded the
International Herald
English edition. Good day.”

“Perhaps I can return your hospitality in Paris one day,” Irene said. “We live there as well.”

His eyebrows peaked with surprise, giving him a slightly satanic look, as we murmured the appropriate farewells and returned to the loud, reeking room outside.

“Basement,” I commented, shuddering. “I had enough of cellars and catacombs and other dread underground places last spring.

“‘Dragon.’” Irene quoted our former host. “That should be fascinating.”

The basement was indeed belowstairs, and as dark and dank a near neighbor of Gehenna itself as one would fear.

Similar ropes of electrical wires that swagged ten feet high across every New York City thoroughfare like giant musical staffs also had done their duty for this “morgue.” Bare electric lightbulbs dangled over the aisles between rows upon rows of filing boxes on shelves. The watery light they gave created as much shadow as illumination, and the rectilineal vastness and order was indeed reminiscent of a graveyard.

“Note from Mr. Davis, eh?” demanded a bent, wizened old man whose spectacles pinched his nose so hard it had turned scarlet. Or else the drink had done it.

“Ladies,” he further observed, looking us up and down and left and right in a most ungentlemanly manner. “Don’t get much ladies down here. I suppose it’s some picture of yourselves at Mrs. Astor’s latest ball you forgot to save and now must ransack my files to get. No issue leaves this place, not one, for no one.”

He plucked a huge cigar from its resting place in a white porcelain soap dish and puffed until we were wreathed in smoke.

“Our quest is not so lighthearted as you had hoped,” Irene said soberly, as if breaking bad news to our guide and gatekeeper. “We are in search of an obituary.”

He peered through his own fog. “You’re not wearing black.”

“The deceased passed on in 1861. I believe the traditional time for wearing black is long past.”

He harumphed in admission of his wrong inference and puffed more smoke. If he had been the big bad wolf and we had been pigs’ houses, we would have been blown down by now.

But smoke was not a deterrent to Irene, and I had grown used to being so assaulted, although I coughed delicately, by way of a hint. A hint not taken, or even noticed.

“Sixty-one.” His eyes narrowed above the spectacles, though that may have been more from his own smoke than a pretense at deep thought.

Irene gave him the date.

“I can show you the section, but you ladies will have to get your dainty white gloves dirty, for you’ll have to page through the papers yourselves.”

“We can remove our gloves, Mr.—?”

“Wheems. And here I thought you ladies were born with them on.”

He turned and led us down a maze of aisles: straight ahead, left, right, ahead again.

In the eerie silence our skirts rustled behind him like the dragging tails of herded rats in a dungeon . . . and I do have reason to know that loathsome sound.

“In luck, ladies.” He had paused to peer at a shoulder-height shelf. “This here’s the very box you want.”

He assailed the box in question with several puffs of smoke, then looked at us.

Obviously such a bent wizened creature couldn’t get the box off the shelf, especially with the cigar in his careful custody.

So Irene reached up to slide a corner free, and we both caught it.

“A table?” I asked.

“This here’s not the public library on Fifth Avenue,” he reminded us unnecessarily. “No lions outside
our
door. There’s a table around the end of the aisle. Put the box back when you leave.”

This last instruction was called back over his shoulder in a haze of departing smoke.

“Irene . . .”

“I know, Nell. It is a filthy habit. I do plan to renounce it.”

“When?”

“Not when I am a stranger on another shore, digging through newsprint almost thirty years old.”

We huffed and puffed our own way to the opposite end of the aisle and found the promised table, a slatternly thing of peeling paint and split boards and protruding nails and . . . spiderwebs bracketing its legs.

”Oooph!”
Irene let her half of the box thump to the tabletop with a creak of old wood. “Old newsprint smells fusty and mildewy.”

“Our gloves are already a loss,” I said, sliding my half of the box onto the uncertain surface and raising my dust-smudged palms.

“Gloves will wash, Nell. The past only rarely opens its gates to us. Eliza Gilbert must at least be mentioned in the contents of this box for the date of her interment, if she did not merit a separate death notice.”

We took off our gloves, and removed the first papers.

“Ah!” Irene read the first page. “The funeral was the nineteenth of January and these papers are stacked from last to first of the month. We shall have a slightly shorter dig than the other way around.”