Spider Dance (28 page)

I frowned at that last mention. “I don’t see how saloons can be improved.”

“Neither do I. They have served well as is for centuries.”

“I meant that they were too debased to be improved.”

“Well, apparently Lola Montez was not, to read the exceedingly treacly narrative of her last hours on earth.” Her forefinger stabbed Bishop Potter’s name in a current headline. “We shall have to call upon the good bishop.”

“How? You can’t just ring up and ask for an appointment for no reason.”

“I shall have the best of reasons.”

“Which is?”

“A donation to one of the bishop’s pet projects. I wonder if the Magdalen Asylum is still operative. That would lead nicely into the subject of the late, lamented Lola, for she left a bequest to it.”

“Irene, not only is this scheme dishonest and shabby but you would be required to make an actual donation.”

She shrugged. “One must sacrifice for the greater good at times, and what else use is that lovely letter to the Rothschild agent in New York? I am sure the charming Mr. Belmont can arrange for my bank in Paris to cable authorization for a few hundred dollars here to New York.”

“A few hundred dollars! Irene, that is an immense sum to pay for a chance of speaking to someone who perhaps remembers or more likely knows nothing of importance about Lola Montez.”

She whisked the clippings back into their envelope. “It’s for a good cause, Nell, in any event. And a paltry donation would not get us an audience with the bishop.”

“Us! I will not be present while you hoodwink a prelate of the Church.”

“Oh, don’t be stuffy, Nell. He isn’t even Anglican.”

“He isn’t?”

“No, they started out that way but now they’ve become completely Americanized, which is why they’re called Episcopalians. It’s not like they’re Church of England.”

“Oh.”

“So you wouldn’t be mocking the faith of your father, et cetera. Besides, our cause is good.”

“What is it?”

Irene did not think long. “We wish to found a New Magdalen Society, inspired by the touching conversion of Lola Montez and . . . and the eloquent detective investigations of Miss Nellie Bly into the sore-tried lot of the working girls and the poor.”

Her skirts swished back down the aisle as she returned the compendium of Bishops Potter I and II, to their shelf.

I remained nailed to the spot, contemplating how Irene had managed to transform herself into the fictional emissary for two such divergent persons as Lola Montez and Nellie Bly. It was utterly audacious. On this and this alone, Sherlock Holmes and I were in concord.

Only Irene, and only in New York.

A good while ago we gave you a tip to investigate Insane Akylum—
you remember
—
and we suppose that ‘Nellie Bly’ is the result
.
—NOTE TO JOSEPH PULITZER AFTER BLY WROTE
AN EXPOSÉ OF TEN DAYS SPENT IN A MADHOUSE

F
ROM
N
ELLIE
B
LY’S
J
OURNAL

The Affair at Noll Cottage burst upon the New York scene on August 26 of the summer of 1889 like the Johnstown Flood. Unlike the flood of the preceding spring that leveled thousands, this was an intimate atrocity, but no less devastating.

I will never forget that date. By a stroke of good luck, the shocking event all the city talked about combined the boring society coverage I had been relegated to lately with the elements of the most thundering melodrama on view in the Rialto theatrical district.

A bloodstained dagger!

A wailing infant!

Two hysterical women!

A mistress, a wife, a betraying nursemaid, a socially eminent husband.

Of course the
World
reported every breathless detail.

Imagine a late summer luncheon at fashionable Noll Cottage in Atlantic City. (Noll Cottage, of course, was as much a true “cottage” as the Vanderbilt, Du Pont, and Astor “cottages” in Newport, Rhode Island.)

The guests, men and women attired in the pale shades of late summer, are seating themselves at tables laid out in pastel summer linens, flowers everywhere.

Into this tranquil setting come, from above, a woman’s hysterical screams and the crash of fine furnishings smashing to smithereens.

Below, the men in their beige summer suits, the women in their white silks and dimities, are pushing back their chairs, deserting the melon balls and cold cuts and ices to stand, looking upward.

A waiter is the only one to act.

He runs upstairs to the find the nursery is the source of the commotion, to find his employers struggling and bloody.

The husband: Robert Roy Hamilton, yes, those Hamiltons. Grandson of Alexander Hamilton, who himself died in a duel.

The wife: Eva, beautiful as all society wives are beautiful, blond hair disheveled, stabbing at everything within reach with a bloody dagger.

The infant: only six months, wailing and flailing on the bed.

And on the floor, the child’s nursemaid: bloodied and unconscious.

Of course I was not allowed to cover a crime story, a front-page news story. I read of this event in the newspapers like everybody else. I was, however, perfectly free to find my own angle on it, and luckily, I’d already been investigating the general subject. I forgot all about Quentin Stanhope’s quest to keep me quiet about the Ripper.

I was now on the trail of a true and native American sensation.

The facts baldly stated were scandalous enough. The lies and deceit that underlay them might take weeks to reveal and must be even more sensational.

The
World
laid every one of those facts bare in the following days, but by then I was following one strand in the web of lies: the infant on the bed was not Hamilton’s own child, was not the supposed reason for his marrying Eva, his mistress of some time, and making an honest woman of one who previously had entertained in brothels for years.

The infant on the bed was, in fact it was later found, the
fourth
false offspring that Eva and her cohorts had palmed off on the befuddled Hamilton. The first infant had died, as had a replacement. A third didn’t resemble the first enough to fool even Hamilton, who was apparently easy to dupe, so this last child had been installed in the Hamilton cradle.

Only the nurse had detected the several switches and had revealed the truth to Hamilton that serene August luncheon day. She had testified in front of his traitorous wife, who drew a dagger and attacked. (One does wonder how poor little Eva ended up accessorized by a dagger like some hot-tempered Spanish dancer. I would think such foresight would only occur to the redoubtable Irene Adler Norton.)

Yet Eva, I sensed, was not the mastermind of the trickery. I read it all in the
World
, far more fascinated by Eva’s unsavory man “friend,” Joshua Mann, and his so-called “mother,” Mrs. T. Anna Swinton, who had produced the train of false infants.

This situation reminded me of one I had encountered before, involving a so-called Madame Restell, a midcentury New York abortionist who dabbled in such scandalous practices as contraception and placing society women’s unwanted children in unrelated homes.

Madame Restell’s doings and death was old news, twelve years old. Despite the sensational new information about her I’d learned through the New York investigations of Irene Adler Norton, I could make nothing newsworthy of it for today’s readers.

The Hamilton case was another story. My story, did I but pursue it in my own special way. Undercover, of course.

I had a homemade sensation to track down before I conquered the rest of the world.

In print in the
World
.

Quentin Stanhope, who was as attractive as he was obstructive, would have to wait.

Or would he?

Perhaps I had found a way to make him pay for balking my best journalistic instincts, along with all his cohorts.

The greatest of all seems to be Lola Montez, who alone is
able to keep up the applause and excitement which she created
when she first appeared behind the reading desk of Hope Chapel.
In fact, Lola seems to have beaten all her illustrious
rivals clear out of the field
.
—THE
NEW YORK HERALD
ON THE DAY’S LEADING LECTURERS,
INCLUDING HORACE GREELEY, 1859

Even Irene Adler could not conquer time and space.