Spider Dance (4 page)

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. Mr. 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.”

“Mrs. Astor surrendered to placate her daughters and Mrs. Vanderbilt now is the hostess of the moment.”

“You show an alarming accuracy about the rivalries of New York society ladies, Mr. Holmes.”

His laugh of acknowledgment was as short as a bulldog’s bark. “I doubt they differ much from the rivalries of the Corsican
brotherhood, only it is blood feuds over ballrooms.”

“Well, Alva’s ball was six years ago and the Astor and Vanderbilt men are still outbuilding each other with larger and more extravagant seagoing yachts.”

“And the women?”

“Are still enriching the milliners and dressmakers and jewelers of the city and the Continent. It is a War of Millionaires.”

“I see.” He swept his cane and hat off the desk.

“That is all you wish to know?”

“It is. For now.”

“And what about matters that I might wish to know of?”

He paused before standing to take his leave. “I suppose I owe you pence for pound.”

Despite his warning that he would be a stingy source, I pressed on. “Have you seen Mrs. Norton of late?”

“Not of late.”

Was there the merest hesitation?

I went on. “The matter of Madame Restell was tragic and settled mysteries almost older than I am, but it resulted in no modern revelation suitable for the public print.”

“Such sordid matters do not belong in the newspapers.”

“I disagree there.” He had not quite denied the case’s relevancy to current events. “I’m investigating an offshoot of that unhappy history. It should cause quite a stir.”

“I believe that ‘stirs’ are what your profession seeks. I count myself successful when matters are resolved privately, or why else would a consulting detective like myself be called in?”

“Then you
have
been called in on some matter in New York beyond the crimes that surrounded the quest for Irene Adler Norton’s origins?”

He stood and smiled with that superior British aplomb I so loathe, looking down that arrogantly beaked nose at me.

“I am no more at liberty to discuss my possible cases than you are eager to reveal your possible ‘stories,’ Miss Bly. The only difference is that the results of your inquiries will eventually
see the light of public amazement in the papers.”

“Not always,” I interrupted, standing. “Sometimes I am gagged.”

“Then you understand my position. I don’t seek revelation but solution, and my clients seek discretion. Good day.”

It was not. I watched him leave with a swift step that was also annoyingly confident.

The whistled chorus of Stephen Foster’s “Nellie Bly” grew as deafening as a chorale of crickets. A nearing cloud of smoke almost asphyxiated me.

“Brit gent come a-calling,” Walters said loud enough for several men to hear. “You going to run off with some titled English bloke and leave us flat, Nellie?”

Speculation on my private life fired many a bull session at the
World
and I knew it. I was young, not unlovely, and somewhat famous. It was assumed I would wed the first good prospect that came my way. That is exactly why I would not.