Spider Dance (49 page)

My overlarge leather gloves pinched her rough coat sleeve. “Quentin would have been a better partner tonight.”

“Quentin might ask questions I wouldn’t want to answer, as Holmes would. I’m not giving up the edge we have in the affairs of Lola Montez unless we have to. She is my mother. Maybe.”

With this I couldn’t argue. I knew where my mother was buried, as Irene might know, but most of all I knew my mother for a tranquil, loyal, loved parson’s wife. As Irene did not. Indeed, it seemed no one had loved Lola Montez as much as she herself had, and therein was truly a tragedy.

After a ten-minute stride (as I thought of our bizarre outing), Irene grabbed my coat sleeve and pulled me into the shelter of a dark doorway. We leaned against some abandoned building, which reminded me that this was a dangerous district.

“Take my cigar,” Irene said.

Striding through the streets was one thing; smoking was quite another!

“You don’t have to puff upon it. Just hold it. Let the little ember burn. You will look like a loiterer, whom no one will want to approach, and I’ll find you easily when I emerge.”

My gloved fingers took this loathsome object.

“I’ll go in, place the false diary, and hide inside the wardrobe.”

“How can you be sure someone will come searching tonight?”

“I can’t.”

“Then we’ll do this again?”

“If we have to.”

I had nothing to say to this grim prospect. And so she left me there: lifting my lit cigar before a rickety wooden door. The Statue of Liberty I was not.

While I waited I had much to contemplate. First I watched the shadow that was Irene dart to the side of the boardinghouse and men disappear around the back.

The screaming, milling Street Arabs of the day were at last asleep in their cribs. I suspected they would be up before
the dawn, hawking papers, heading for twelve-hour days in the tenement shops and factories, hanging on to their desperate mothers’ apron strings if they were less than five or six years old.

As a former governess, I felt the plight of these pathetic creatures as a stab in the heart. It was so easy to view the coddled offspring of the upper classes and dismiss the rest as hopeless guttersnipes. Yet even in the finest houses, a child was expected to answer every adult’s need: for quiet, for learning what was desired despite the child’s aptitude, for being seen and not heard, as the saying went.

What was one to do? Unguided, the young were little animals. Overguided, they were little automatons. I decided I was very glad that I was no longer a governess, for I wasn’t really good at that.

What was I good at? Assisting others, like my father, and then Irene. Being useful, although I was beginning to suspect that I was being useful at rather useless things. I was, according to Irene, a promising forger. I remember being cast alone together with Sherlock Holmes during the last dangerous times. How he had actually allowed me to assist him. And then called me “Huxleigh,” like the lowest servant. Or . . . like—? No.
The
man is too arrogant to give any woman the benefit of the doubt. Except Irene. He has the feet of a chocolate soldier there, all stiff and solid, but that melt at the first lingering touch of sunlight.

I glanced at my leather-gloved hand. The cigar still burned, though I did nothing to encourage it. Its ember was a small red star in the dark, and its scent disguised far more noxious ones.

I stiffened. I’d heard the scrape of shoe leather on stone.

While I watched, a man came down the deserted street.

His strides were long, as mine had been, but his were longer, stronger. And then I saw another man, perhaps twenty feet behind. And a third, another four yards behind the second!

They were strung out, like crows on a fence. Dark of habit, vague of motion. Each moving separately, yet in unison.

My heart began beating, and finding no confining corset to stop it, began thrumming like a Spanish dancer against the false front of my man’s jacket.

I sensed the trio noting me.

I didn’t move.

They passed on, dismissing me as some midnight lounger, a doorway lurker, an idle smoker.

I watched them take Irene’s same path along the side of the boardinghouse.

Despite the cigar, I clasped my gloved hands before me. What should I do? Rush forward to warn her? She was lying in wait for just such a committee. She’d be furious if I disrupted her charade.

But three men. Three dark men striding down the empty street, noticing everything. Had they really dismissed me? Or merely pretended to?

Oh, how I wished for Irene’s small lethal pistol . . . and then realized that she must have it with her.

I was so agitated that I actually put the cigar to my lips and breathed in. Nothing happened. Apparently cigars were for Irene and Lola and Godfrey but not for me.

I bit my lip. How long must I wait? If all went well, this villainous trio would depart with my handiwork clutched to their black hearts.

Well, they’d leave with my falsified diary. Perhaps to them their own hearts were merely gray. Ashen. Like the residue in the walled-up fireplace.

I waited. The cigar burned on, very slowly, as if holding its breath, as I did.

I waited. Was it minutes? Half hours?

No one emerged from the small space between the boardinghouses.

I waited.

As I’d been told to.

And then, I could wait no more!

I stroke out from my hiding place, across the damp, faintly lit street smelling of horse manure and human urine.

What wretched place was this? No place to leave a child
unattended. No place to leave a friend alone. No place to leave anyone!

I rushed along the building, my gloved hands pulling over each other against the brick like sailors drawing on a line, beyond my control, my hands and not my hands.

The stench of the broad alley between the backs of tenements met me like a wall of revulsion. I felt along the jagged bricks until my leather-padded fingertips found the indentation of a door.

It gave to my impetuous weight like a curtain.

I was inside, and smelled the stale aftertaste of corned beef and cabbage from before.

The room would be to my left now. The sinister side. Did I interrupt the unholy trio? If so, I would stutter an apology in the deepest croak I could manage and ask for Mrs. Kelly. I knew the landlady’s name. I could make myself seem a resident of this miserable place. I could make myself seem a resident of hell, if necessary.

The doors gave way before me, all unlocked, unguarded.

What a dire sign this was, but I was too overwrought to realize it.

The room I entered felt familiar, but the gaslights gleamed faintly against the walls. I saw a wardrobe I recognized, thrown half askew. A dark hole that had once been a fireplace.

I rushed to kneel before it on crushed stone, amid scattered bricks. The hiding place that had held Lola’s diary was empty. My forged replacement had found a home!

I rose and went to the wardrobe, pulling a twisted door open. Irene’s mad plan had worked.

It was empty. Utterly empty.

I was alone in the room. No diary, no three shadowed men. No Irene.

How nice it would be to be a man. She fancied she was one until she felt her body grow strong and hard. . . . She felt the great freedom opened to her; no place shut off from her, the long chain broken, all work possible for her, no law to say this and this is for woman
.
—
REBEKAH IN
FROM MAN TO MAN
, BY OLIVE SCHREINER

My pockets were heavy with the coins Irene had insisted I take along.
Weighty pockets
, she had said as we had set out (only hours before!),
are a hallmark of the man at large on a city street. You will walk more convincingly with coins to spend
.

I managed to hail my first cab with an imperious wave and a gold coin pinched between leather-clad thumb and forefinger.

The equipage stopped, to my astonishment. I leaped inside, thanking God that I remembered that name of the hotel to which Irene had sent messages to Quentin. “The Fifth Avenue Hotel at Madison Square, and a dollar tip if you be quick about it.”

He lashed the horses, as I cringed inside. I didn’t think he’d hurt anything—and then I didn’t think, but felt the wind lashing through the open windows I didn’t know how to raise. I held my cap down over my ears and thought furiously.

At the hotel, I gave gold for speed and the horses’ poor sweating flanks. “Rest them for an hour,” I muttered in a croak I regarded as masculine.

Inside the lobby, evening gaslights glared down on my poor figure like disapproving dowagers. I strode forward as best I could, and asked the clerk for Quentin’s room.

“Mr. Stanhope is out,” he said, with a supercilious glance at the tower of key cubby-holes behind his back. “He has been out all day. And night”

I stared. “He can’t be!”

“He is, and it is his business.”

“How much his business?” I demanded in my best imitation of Irene out in her walking-out clothes.

“I can’t say.” A smirk. “A lady was involved.”

“Brown hair? Extravagant hat? Tiny waist?”

He smirked again. “The gentleman is correct I can take a note for Mr. Stanhope and give it to him . . . in the morning.”

Who he thought I was I can’t say. The lady’s brother. A rival. He took me for a man and there was nothing to do but depart in that guise.

I stood on the dark street outside, watching the slower traffic of the city at night clop by.

Irene was gone. Quentin was . . . gone.

My composure was gone. How long I could range the streets in my decidedly pathetic guise, I didn’t know.

I thought of Nellie Bly, and wracked my brains to remember the address at which she resided with her mother. Her mother. She had one. I did not. Irene did not.

I lifted a weary arm and waved at a hack. He came over as if I held sugar for his weary horse.

I got in and told him where to go.

Forever after that awful night, the sound of horses’ hooves will be linked to the pounding of a Spanish dancer’s nail-studded shoe heels and toes in my mind.

My head was an anvil and each sound of the city a hammer that impressed itself upon my beaten brain. I was dazed beyond sleep by then, and stumbled out of the last cab, giving the driver a princely coin.

Another building to broach, another door to push through. An elevator, which I abhorred, to stand in like a corpse. My lapel watch was back at the Astor House, but it felt as though an aeon had passed since Irene had left me behind and blithely entered the stage set of her construction, the empty former room of Lola Montez.

When the elevator jerked to a pause, I shook myself awake.

The operator parted its accordion of metal bars. I stumbled down a passage, searching for doors. I no longer knew whether I expected Irene to be behind one of them or . . . Jack the Ripper.

At last I knocked on something that seemed faintly familiar.

There was no response.

I knocked again. I really didn’t want an answer by now.

Again, I knocked.

A neighboring door opened. A woman with her hair in kid-leather curlers looked out, glaring.