Spider Dance (21 page)

A new and confusing burst of quotes issued forth next: “From Ireland . . . ‘neither creditable to her native land nor useful to society . . .’ England: ‘We do not think it desirable to narrate the adventures of unfortunates of her class, however prominent.’”

“‘Unfortunates,’” I burst out. “Irene, in London that means—”

“I well know what that means.” Irene regarded Professor Marvel with eyes of cut steel. “Who
is
this Maria Dolores Eliza Rosana Gilbert whom I have never heard of, but apparently the whole world knows, or knew, and you personally as well.”

He shrugged again. “She was best known by a diminutive which became her stage name. I think you have heard it. Lola. Lola Montez.”

Irene stepped back from the wall. Her arm fell to her side like a duelist who has fired her one and only shot and now must await the fate of another’s action. I was able to slip the newspaper from her nerveless fingers and finally read it for myself.

“Lola Montez,” Irene repeated in tones of deep contempt.

She might have just been told she was suspected of having a black widow spider for a mother. Indeed, the mysterious woman of her earliest childhood had reportedly worn black.

“That name is vaguely familiar,” said I, hardly realizing I spoke aloud.

Both ignored me. Irene had turned to face the professor as if they were opponents in a court of law.

“You realize,” she said, “that I am seeking the identity of the mother who bore me. You realize that person cannot possibly be
Lola Montez.”

“Certainly not, Irene,” I put in. “If she was indeed an ‘unfortunate,’ no one of that immoral class could possibly be your mother.”

“Of course she could, Nell!” Irene turned on me, with something resembling fury. “All the more reason for bearing an inconvenient child and abandoning it. But I would claim
any
unfortunate save her. Do you know who, and what, she was?”

“Immorair?”

“Worse!”

“Worse?”

“Say if I exaggerate, Professor! She was considered . . . haughty, vain, selfish, and worst of all, an abominably untalented dancer and an even more execrable actress. She was booed and hissed off the major stages of Europe for her sheer ineptitude. She can’t possibly have been my mother; I would have been born without a scintilla of talent. I would have booed her myself from the womb. How, Professor, can you have admired such a woman, even in your benighted youth?”

His expression retained the warmth of benign memory. “She was a great beauty, Irene. You should have seen her. No painting or photograph captures her. She exploded with vitality. Black, shining hair, eyes of brilliant dark blue, flashing bolts from the gods on Mount Olympus. The daintiest little foot to touch hardwood stage floor and enough fiery spirit to instill the wildest stallion. It didn’t matter how well
she did anything, Irene. Everything she did was with her whole heart and spirit and that was always . . . electric.”

“‘
Mrs
. Eliza Gilbert’ was on her headstone,” I said softly.

“And a bigamist, if I recall!” Irene charged suddenly. “The more I remember, the more I am appalled.”

“She had an irregular childhood,” the professor said.

Irene would hear nothing of the old man’s defense. “So did I. But I can sing on key. And act outside of an opera. And dance better in my sleep, no doubt.”

“Can you dance?” I asked, thinking that might settle the matter.

“Yes. And fence. And I have never been booed off a stage.”

“A pity,” said the professor. “One can never learn true humility until one has faced that cruel situation.” He clearly had.

“I do not need to learn true humility,” Irene retorted.

“Spoken like the late Lola Montez.” The professor smiled.

Meanwhile, I had been rapidly looking farther than the article’s first page, which quoted both damning and admiring summations of Lola Montez’s life.

“She was involved with King Ludwig of Bavaria?” I asked the professor in some amazement.

“Her most famous, or infamous association. She, and he, claimed their friendship was purely platonic. He had a queen, after all, but he made her Countess of Landsfeld and a citizen of Bavaria, under her duress, it was said. She was forced to flee the country during the late ’40s revolution that cost Ludwig his throne. Many blamed his association with Lola for that.”

I glanced at my friend. “How interesting. Irene was . . . acquainted with the King of Bohemia.”

The professor beamed. “Like mother, like daughter.”

“You sly rascal,” Irene challenged him. “You are enjoying comparing me to this wretched woman. I do not have blue eyes, electric or otherwise, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“I believe a father is involved in this process,” he said.

“And,” I said slowly, “she did perform upon the stage.”

“Nell,” Irene warned me, beginning to pace. She also began to dig in her reticule for her cigarette case and lucifers while continuing her interrogation.

“It says in this newspaper, Professor,” I went on, “that she first had a stroke, then died of pneumonia contracted during a walk in wet weather. And she was not yet forty!’

“Some say, scurrilously, that she died of diseases associated with her immoral life, but in fact she had always had weak lungs.”

“Weak lungs? Well, she certainly could not have sung.”

“But she smoked.”

Irene stopped pacing, a telltale cigarette sending a flurry of smoke signals thick enough for a Red Indian to read into the air above her hat. “Smoked?”

“Incessantly,” the professor said as Irene hurriedly stabbed her cigarette to death on her teacup saucer. “She was high-tempered,” he went on, nodding to the photograph again. “That riding crop was a frequent accessory, and she used it, whether on an impudent man who accosted her in public or a mob screaming for her blood in Bavaria. She was as fearless as a cavalry officer.”

“Irene,” I told him informatively, “once took a riding crop to a set of gossiping women at the salon of Maison Worth in Paris.”

“Really?”

The professor joined me in studying Irene as she continued to pace before us.

“Lola would wear men’s clothes on occasion,” he said. “To escape Bavaria, for instance, or during the harsh overland Panama crossing to the California gold fields.”

“Irene has done that very thing,” I told him, with the sense of discovering I was chatting with someone with whom I had much in common, “and more than rarely. She fought a duel with swords in male disguise once, and Sherlock Holmes himself could testify personally how effective she was in such guise, much to his chagrin and professional embarrassment—”

“Don’t be ridiculous!” she told us. “A man like Sherlock
Holmes does not embarrass, and neither do I. You are both enjoying tweaking my self-respect, but these are the merest coincidences. Any independent woman in this age of milksop females might be expected to be as inventive and forceful in her habits and actions. I shall have to see a great deal more evidence before I believe that there is any possibility that woman could be my mother.”

“You are in luck,” the professor said.
“I
believe that more has been written about her than any woman who lived in the middle of this century with the possible exception of your queen, Miss Huxleigh. In fact, she has written one of these books herself. She retired from the dancing stage here in New York after her return from California. Following a few final trips to Europe, she became a noted lecturer. I never saw her stage work, but in the lecture hall she was spellbinding. Alas, her decline in health soon followed. I believe she became quite religious in her last year.”

“Professor,” I asked, “do you preface your last sentence with ‘Alas’ because her health declined or because she became religious?”

His watery eyes regarded me for a long moment. “I must have meant only the former, Miss Huxleigh, for I believe it only right that a person leaves this earth in good order with her God.”

At that Irene threw her hands into the air and returned to her chair before the tea table.

“This is arrant nonsense,” she said in calmer tones. “This is some foolish lark dreamed up by you and Sherlock Holmes to distract me from a search for my genuine mother.”

“I do not know this Mr. Holmes,” he objected.

“I’m surprised he didn’t contact you since he arrived in America. He is a possessive man, and our paths have crossed during his investigation of his various cases, as well during mine.”

“Ah, yes. Your youthful work as a Pinkerton agent here in New York. You have continued with this in Europe?”

“I do private inquiry work at times, yes. So simply because
Sherlock Holmes leads me to a headstone in Green-Wood Cemetery does not mean the inhabitant of that grave leads back to me.”

She picked up her cigarette case again, lighting one with deliberate, lingering grace, as if to blow smoke in the face of this theory. Then she spoke again, to the wall of memorabilia.

“I do fancy the idea of carrying a riding crop, though. It does make so much more sense for the modern woman than a parasol.”

She regarded the professor. “Since this woman had snared your youthful imagination, I will investigate her further, if only to utterly disabuse you of this fancy. Can you suggest where we should begin?”

“Irene, I—”

The professor spread wide his hands. “All of New York City is filled with the ephemera of Lola Montez. You should begin as one of those fevered collectors do, and find the books and posters of thirty and more years ago.”

Irene frowned. “New York City has no Left Bank like that in Paris, full of book vendors’ stalls and old and quaint memoirs of the past.”

“No,” the professor conceded, “but here we have do have the Rialto area of bookshops and especially Brentano’s Literary Emporium, and that should be a fine place to start.”

Came Lola Montez one day, in the full zenith of her evil fame,
bound for California. A good-looking, bold woman, with fine,
bad eyes, and a determined bearing, dressing ostentatiously in
perfect male attire . . . She carried in her hand a handsome
riding crop, which she could use as well in the streets of
Cruces as in the towns of Europe
.
—FROM THE MEMOIRS OF MRS. SEACOLE, AN ENGLISH LADY, 1851

I was never in Cruces and had gone by way of Nicaragua
—THE NOTORIOUS ADVENTURESS IN QUESTION

I first wore black in Paris after Alexandre Dujarier died in 1849 in a duel I was but minutes too late to prevent. This was just after Ludwig and Bavaria, and for once the uproar was not about me but about politics and pride. Paris is made for tragedy and my poor Alexandre helped write the script for his own destruction, choosing pistols over swords when his opponent was a famed marksman.

I did not wear only black, however. I put a red flower in my hair to remind me of the one true love in my life. He had left me some theater stock and shares in his newspaper but soon I was caught up in the “gold fever” searing all of Paris,
and invested several thousands in a California gold mine called the Eureka.

In 1849 all the world echoed with the Gold Rush. California! Eureka! The very words rang with adventure and optimism. Shortly after, all Paris was buzzing that the companies selling mine stock were fraudulent. I was forced to find less costly quarters.

Still, I was not yet forced to find less eminent escorts. I renewed an acquaintance with Prince Jung Bahadoor, an Oxford graduate who was the ambassador for Nepal. Parisians called him “the educated barbarian” but he was a man of the highest caste in his land. We amused ourselves by startling the sneering Parisians when we would chat together at length in a Hindu dialect. How odd that a notably accomplished man of foreign lineage and a slandered woman of suspect talents were both gossiped about . . . and invited everywhere.

The prince and I attended Meyerbeer’s
L’Africaine
at the opera house, which had been refitted to resemble a San Francisco theater . . . red velvet on the seats, red silk upon the walls.