Spider Dance (32 page)

“Ladies.” He stepped back to allow us entry.

A round table near the window already bore a tea tray.

“Oh,” I said, “I hope the water is still hot.”

“The hotel has learned to deliver it scalding,” he said, doing us the courtesy of pulling out first one chair and then the other over the heavy carpet.

Irene ignored the first chair and sat in the position with her back to the window. “I have seen enough of Fifth Avenue this trip,” she murmured.

I took the chair offered, and Mr. Holmes settled next to me, looking amused.

“Perhaps,” he told Irene, “you have tired of having the footlights in your face.”

I immediately did what I did best: began tinkering with the tea things so that we should each have a cup of properly prepared tea as soon as possible.

I remembered that Mr. Holmes took nothing in it. In some ways he was a perfect monk. Irene abjured milk but liked lemon. I took mine with milk but not sugar.

While I was dispensing my domestic duties, Irene helped herself to some of these hard, crumbly, indigestible American biscuits.

Mr. Holmes and I refrained, which left him free to speak.

“Your note was most provocative.”

“So I intended,” Irene said. “I have it on good authority from Brigid, lately the Vanderbilt housemaid, that there can be no question about the identity of the man on the billiard table.”

“The devil you say!”

He had leaped up like Punch in a park puppet show.

“I take it you had not yet determined his name or state in life?” Irene sipped tea in a missish way most unlike herself. She was toying with him.

“Not a bit,” Mr. Holmes admitted, pacing as if two ladies were not sitting at tea but three feet away. “The case is aggravatingly unmotivated, a form of blackmail and intimidation without any clearly stated ransom. The perpetrators believe that the victim understands the import of this death.”

“And Mr. Vanderbilt doesn’t?”

“Nor do any of his household.” He stopped to regard Irene sternly. “How do you come by this so-called knowledge?”

“By accident,” I put in, “believe me. If Irene were not troubled by a most admirable sense of obligation, we should not be here.”

“Obligation?” His gray eyes were all steely interrogation.

“I intruded myself into the house and thereby saw the murdered man,” Irene said. “How can I rest content to leave him there unnamed, unmourned, when I know who he was?”

She reached into her reticule and extracted the carte de
visite. “I saw his features in a dreadful flash. They will never fade, even as disfigured as they were.” She laid the card faceup on the tablecloth and pushed it toward Mr. Holmes.

He regarded its slow approach much as Messalina the mongoose would watch a garden snake slithering into her range of combat.

He snatched it up as quickly as Messy at her most lethal. “‘Father Francis Lister Hawks.’ How did you come by this?”

I had to say, with some niggling bit of smugness, “We received it from the Episcopal bishop of New York, whom we visited yesterday.”

“Why?”

I glanced, penitent, at Irene. She may not have wished Mr. Holmes to know our source. My moment of lording it over him was dear-bought.

She, however, appeared unflappable, a vestige of her stage career that was most useful in real life, even if often it was only a pose.

“I had a donation to offer for a good cause,” she answered piously, taking my lead.

By now Mr. Holmes was tapping the card on his opposite thumb.

“Come now,” he said, “you can’t expect me to believe you would cross the Atlantic to make donations to churchmen you had never seen nor heard of before. You must have been—”

“Ah, caught out,” she cried in mockery. “We were, of course, following the trail you set us upon. Which makes one wonder, has that path always been as useful to you as to me?”

“No.” He paced again and when he turned the full light of day bared his features. He was exactly where Irene had wished him to be: surprised and in no position to conceal it.

“I had hoped, if I may speak bluntly to ladies who have insisted in the past that they need not be spared the harsher realities—”

“Go on, Mr. Holmes,” Irene said, “but, pray, when have you ever not been blunt?”

“I had hoped,” and his tone showed that hope was now as dead as Father Hawks, “that the search for your ancestress would permit me the freedom of the city in any matters that I’m investigating.”

“That is why you bothered to wave the name of Mrs. Eliza Gilbert at us in Green-Wood Cemetery. You had hoped we’d go on a wild-goose chase for this figment of a woman buried under a name she never bore in life. Did you know then who she really was?”

“Of course. She wouldn’t have made a good diversion if there weren’t grounds for her to be the Woman in Black. I saw Professor Marvel’s wall of beauties when I investigated the previous case.”

“You really think that Montez woman was my mother?”

“There is small resemblance, but stranger things have happened. My brother, Mycroft, and myself are seldom taken for brothers, for instance.”

This made me madly speculate how his mysterious brother—the man Quentin had said was the Foreign Office—differed from him. Was Mycroft Holmes short? Stout? Fair? With a beard and mustache?

Irene was not so easily diverted. “That was not kind of you, Mr. Holmes, to toy with a woman’s search for her mother.”

“Kind is not what you expect from me.”

“I didn’t think I expected anything from you.”

“But you do.” He smiled. “And right now you expect the ‘passkey’ of this card to buy you information about how this man came to be on the Vanderbilt billiard table. I’m afraid I can’t tell you.”

“Won’t tell me.”

“Can’t And wouldn’t if I could. This case is confidential.”

“You don’t believe that Lola Montez could be at the bottom of it?”

“Ha! The stage has lost a playwright as well as a performer, I see.” He laughed, an annoyingly short and sharp reaction, a private kind of mirth. “I keep a commonplace book at Baker Street, an index of biographies of persons of
possibly criminal or merely passing interest. Unfortunately I can’t consult it from here, but Lola Montez is in it, as are you.”

“Am I? Is the entry . . . actionable?”

“My dear Mrs. Norton, the entry is impeccable. You are—were, I should say—a supreme performing artist of the operatic stage. Despite the . . . smudged reputation that attaches to the performing sisterhood, I know for a fact that your personal and professional conduct has always been beyond reproach, if a bit misguided in the matter of foreign noblemen. After all, I investigated the matter myself.

“Lola Montez, on the other hand, was a traveling gypsy curse. She agitated against the state and church powers in Bavaria for libertarian reforms that brought down her sponsor, King Ludwig. She married early and often, and all too often did not marry. She did not divorce when she should have, the first time, and married when she should not have. That made her a bigamist. Her third husband was a Californian. She courted a possible fourth on a ship returning from Australia, but he fell, or jumped, overboard. She blazed a trail across the inhabited world, madam, that a blind man couldn’t miss. But she was known more for the noted men she briefly bewitched than any accomplishment of her own. A misguided force who ultimately destroyed herself, she could hold no interest for future generations other than as a laughable oddity, a scandalous footnote to a foolish time.”

Irene had gone very quiet during this speech, which had begun by complimenting her at the expense of a woman she despised on principle. Yet something had happened in the past few days as we unearthed bits and pieces of Lola’s admittedly tempestuous life, especially as we had read of her lonely and obscure death. And I felt it now too. We had begun to see her as less of a caricature from a newspaper cartoon and more as a real person, as young Eliza Gilbert fleeing an impossibly unsuitable marriage for one no better, then turning the only career she could manage, and herself, into a global sensation.

Irene reached out to collect the card and draw it slowly back across the table to her reticule.

Silence held.

“I beg to disagree,” she at last told our host, “at least in your conclusions about my possible and not very distinguished forebear. A woman on her own must do what she can to survive, and all too often she is abused for achieving that survival.”

I stood along with Irene.

Mr. Holmes looked off-balance, as if what he’d said had the opposite effect to what he’d intended. And in such cases, there is no use saying more.

No farewells were given and he did not escort us to the door.

We rustled down the hall in silence, and had to wait for a long time after Irene pushed the mother-of-pearl button to call the elevated car.

She bit her lip. “You’re right, Nell,” she told me, “reputation is far too easily lost.”

“But you don’t even like her yourself, Irene.”

“That’s not the point. The point is that the world will paint what picture its own low mind imagines no matter the facts. The Lola Montez who pasted sayings from the Bible around her deathbed was not the same woman who eloped with a captain when she was fourteen.”

“You don’t much believe in religion.”

“What I believe or don’t doesn’t matter. If Father Hawks was so impressed by her religious conversion that thirty years later he was agitating his bishop to have her considered for sainthood, she had changed. Or she had never been what the world said she was.”

“Mr. Holmes was actually complimenting you by the contrast. I admit he was clumsy and rather dismissive, but—”

“I will not rise because another woman falls, and that’s all there is to it. If there is a redeemable side to Lola Montez, and I’m beginning to suspect there is, I will find it.”

“And then what?”

“And then I’ll know. We’ll know.”

“And if Father Hawks’s death is part of some awful contemporary conspiracy that could endanger us?”

She glanced at me, a look of mischief only underlining the determination in her expression. “Then we will be well ahead of Mr. Sherlock Holmes on detecting it, won’t we?”

I reflected on the notion of a crucified man deposited on a billiard table in a Fifth Avenue mansion and decided that being well ahead of Mr. Sherlock Holmes, in this instance, was not necessarily a good thing.

Lola sat in a pretty garden, her hollow cheeks, sunken eyes,
and cadaverous complexion forming a remarkable contrast to the
gay flowers. . . . In fact, she had the strange wild appearance and
behavior of a quiet idiot, and is evidently lost to all further interest in
the world around her or its affairs. And so ends her eventful history!
—MRS. BUCHANAN, AUGUST 1860,
TWO MONTHS AFTER LOLA’S STROKE

Alas, Irene reacted as she always did when Mr. Holmes proved to be intractable: she charged ahead on her own investigations even more fiercely.

“You are right, Nell,” she told me in the cab on the way home from his hotel, “that is a singularly annoying man. One would think having provided the name of the victim in a case he is handling for the wealthiest man in America would have merited at least a polite round of applause.”

“Unless he really already knew the victim’s identity.”

“Bother! I suppose he could have, and might have chosen not to tell us, thus we were peddling yesterday’s newspapers. Or he simply wished to discourage us. Well, that has not worked.”

“I am quite discouraged.”

“You must stop that at once! This search for the last of Lola Montez is becoming quite intriguing, now that murder has entered the picture. Why would anyone slay such a saintly old cleric in that manner?”

“Someone who did not want Lola elevated to the ranks of Episcopal Church saints at any cost, I would imagine. I would number myself among that honorable society.”

“People no longer murder for theological issues, at least not in America, I hope.”

“Wasn’t Lola herself the object of what she called religious persecution?”