Spider Dance (50 page)

“Young man! Stop that racket! This is a respectable establishment.”

I shrugged, too tired to lift my hand to mahogany again.

The door leaned in with me, and I stumbled through, utterly off-balance.

A firm hand grabbed my elbow and reversed my momentum.

I was still upright, to my great amazement.

“Good God. What have we here?”

I wasn’t sure.

Holmes had, when he liked, a peculiarly ingratiating
way with women
.
—W
ATSON IN
“T
HE
G
OLDEN
P
INCE
-N
EZ
”

“Perhaps,” said a strangely bracing sardonic voice, “you’d care to explain the burning cigar in your pocket.”

I blinked in the light of the paraffin lamp blazing beside me on a side table as I patted my jacket pockets in confusion. My right hand detected a lump. I reached for it dully, like a child roused in the middle of the night whose actions are clumsy and slow.

Another hand pushed mine aside and pulled out . . . not the candy my child self hoped for but Irene’s cigar. The lit end still smoldered, a dull red ember.

I regarded it with an odd mixture of disgust and anguish, and then to my eternal shame I burst into tears.

“That will never do,” Sherlock Holmes said. “Sit down.” He steered me onto the armless chair next to the table that held the lamp. He took several strides away and returned with a glass of water, which I greedily gulped down, only then realizing how terribly thirsty I was from my frantic journey uptown.

Since it was hard to sob and drink at the same time, this act stifled my tears. When I finished the glass, I took off my right glove and wiped at my eyes. All I could see before me
was the wavering muted tapestry pattern of the mouse-colored dressing gown Mr. Holmes wore. His voice came from above me, clipped and calm.

“You have been lurking about the lower town area with your partner in crime detection, Madam Irene. You spent some time near the Episcopal Club, and more time in and out of at least two hired hansom cabs on the way here. You stopped at Mr. Stanhope’s hotel, but found him out. I’m amazed that you didn’t next seek your American ally in dangerous stunts, Miss Nellie Bly.”

My sniffles revived at the mere mention of her name.

“Ah, I see,” he said after a moment. “The explanation for why you next came to me instead of her is not written on your trouser cuffs but in your face.”

“Irene is in terrible danger,” I finally managed to say.

“I know.” He stepped away again to refill my water glass, which he returned to the table. “Here is a handkerchief. If you can manage to wet your throat and dry your eyes for a few minutes, I shall be ready to return to the Episcopal Club with you.”

At that the mouse-colored dressing gown vanished from the outer room’s circle of lamplight like a theatrical curtain being drawn away.

I sat and sipped and sniffled as he had recommended. By the time I was composed again, he’d reappeared dressed in a caped ulster and a soft-brimmed city hat, all of it dark.

“You can tell me what happened in the cab,” he said, taking my arm to guide me out of the chair and to the door. “Pull your cap down lower and your scarf up higher around your chin. Madam Irene obviously dressed you for the dark. The lights of a hotel lobby will compromise your disguise, which was always unlikely.”

I was incapable of taking offense or arguing with him at the moment, so stuffed the handkerchief in the pocket that had held the cigar, which, left behind, now lay in state in a tray next to the paraffin lamp.

“What time did she disappear?” he asked as we awaited the elevator.

“How did you—?”

“It’s my profession to draw conclusions, and correct ones. Most unfortunate that Mr. Stanhope was out. Please, dear lady, don’t snivel at every mention of his name. He may have been out on Rothschild business. One must never underestimate what a foreign spy might be up to.”

“Quentin is not a foreign spy!”

“He is when living on American soil. Obviously the government we all share has set him to ensure that Miss Bly holds her tongue about a certain lurid affair last spring that involves several European countries.”

“So you don’t think that—?”

He was silent while he eyed what he could see of my face, I imagine a red nose and watery eyes. “Your personal presumptions may not be entirely wrong,” he admitted, at least refraining from putting my fears that Quentin was out late
with Pink
into so many words.

Still, when even Sherlock Holmes bothered to believe that there might be a
tendresse
between them—so much so that he also most uncharacteristically thought to spare my feelings by not stating that outright . . . well, I could have bawled like a baby again.

But I didn’t. And the act of refusing to express my tangled snarl of emotions—dread, disappointment, and chagrin, but mostly dread—served to stop my humiliating self-indulgence. I was dressed as a man; I would not sob like a girl a moment longer. I gave not a whimper as we entered the elevator and kept silent during our plummet to the ground floor.

“Hold your tongue until we are in the cab,” he softly advised me as the elevator operator unfastened our iron cage. We stepped out into the lights of the lobby.

Only hotel staff lounged about the scattered furniture and potted plants. I needed all my breath anyway to lengthen my strides to keep pace with his. Not until we reached the door to the street did a returning resident appear. This portly fellow, wearing an askew top hat and straining waistcoat, almost collided with us as he reeled in from a night of food
and drink and who knows what other overindulgences and entertainment.

“Watch yerselves, gents,” he advised as he bounced off the steel-spring figure of Mr. Holmes.

Holmes didn’t bother to answer, and I scuttled through the open door behind him, welcoming the concealing darkness of the street, which was soon the deeper dark to be found inside a hansom cab hurtling along Broadway at a fearsome clip, as instructed to do in no uncertain terms.

I flinched as the whip cracked for the fourth or fifth time.

“They seldom touch horseflesh,” he said, pausing in the act of lighting his pipe. “The sound alone is sufficient to encourage speed.”

“Those whips must have ‘touched horseflesh’ once, or the poor creatures would not respond to the noise.”

“Well reasoned, but irrelevant now. I gather you are sufficiently restored to tell me what happened.”

“What? You can’t predict it from my appearance?”

“Miss Huxleigh, I’ve no doubt that the past hour or so has been exceedingly trying. I am, in fact, fairly amazed that you were able to maintain your guise and your wits to move so far so fast. But try to curtail your congenital annoyance with me. It won’t help her.”

Underneath the dingy scarf, which smelled of beer and tobacco, my cheeks may have flushed, whether with fugitive pleasure that he approved my recent actions, or sheer fury at his lofty arrogance, I couldn’t say then and I can’t say now.

What I did say then was, “Irene and I weren’t outside the Episcopal Club. We were outside a boardinghouse a few blocks away.”

“Which boardinghouse?”

“The one where Lola Montez died almost thirty years ago.”

“Ah, one-ninety-four West Seventeenth Street.”

“You’ve been there?”

“No, but I know the addresses associated with her in New York.” He rapped on the roof and called out the boardinghouse’s
address to the driver. “How long did you spend watching the building?” he then asked me.

“Only a few minutes. Then Irene went inside—”

“How?”

“She walked alongside the building to a rear entrance.”

“Out of your sight? What was she doing?”

“Inspecting the room.”

“What did she expect to find there?”

“She expected to find nothing there. She went to leave something for someone else to find.”

He drew deeply on his pipe. The side lamps from a passing carriage cast deep shadow on his craggy face for a moment, making his expression look bleak.

“If she is playing with the people I suspect she is, the danger is of the gravest.”

My hands curled into fists inside the thick leather gloves. For a moment I felt a pugilist’s fury. “We don’t need criticism; we need help.”

He glanced at my hands. “I don’t suppose you’re carrying Mrs. Norton’s small pistol?”

“No.”

“Was she?”

“I don’t . . . know. Perhaps.”

“What happened while you waited for her to come back?”

“Three men came down the street.”

“Looking—?”

“I don’t know! Dressed in dark clothing and hats. Not quite walking together, but strung out in a line. They went down the side of the building where Irene had gone perhaps ten minutes before. And then, nobody came back!”

“How long did you wait?”

“I hadn’t brought my watch. Perhaps another ten minutes, and again that.”

“Certainly long enough for Madam Irene to have left whatever it was she was leaving.”

“Ye-es. She had to disarrange the furniture to do it, though, so I didn’t expect her right back.”

“Did you follow the men to the rear of the building.”

It seemed less a question than an accusation. “No. I didn’t. She’d told me to wait for her where I was. I suppose I should have—”

“Absolutely not. You did the right thing. I don’t need your footprints in those ladyish boots cluttering up the ground the three villains have trod.”

“You think that they are?”

“Are what?”

“Villains.”

“I fear they are, villains of the most merciless sort. I have one poor man in Bellevue having his wounds tended even now. He was a frequenter of the Episcopal Club.”

“No!”

“How freely have you two come and gone from the premises?”

“Only twice. A few days ago and . . . yesterday.’

“Twice too many times is as bad as thirteen.”

“Oh, I tried to restrain Irene from this senseless search, but she would hear nothing of my objections.”

“I am sure you did, Miss Huxleigh. I didn’t mean that it was your fault.”

“And you! If it’s anyone’s fault, it’s yours!”

“I beg your pardon.”

“You
had to coming stalking after us into Green-Wood Cemetery.
You
had to disabuse Irene of the notion that the wicked Madame Restell was her mother. I was actually glad that you had produced the demure-sounding Mrs. Eliza Gilbert as a better candidate. Now we have been delving into the life and death of no one less than Lola Montez, and have paid a dear price for that.”

“I had no idea at that time that Lola Montez was at all involved in the matter.”

“Which matter?”

“The Vanderbilt case.”

“And now you do believe that she is?”

“Perhaps. To what extent isn’t clear. The woman has been dead nearly thirty years, after all.”

“What is the Vanderbilt case?”

“I don’t discuss such things. No doubt your associate has confessed the details of her audacious visit to the Vanderbilt mansion, and what she found there.”

“Poor Father Hawks! Yes, I did hear that, although I have no idea why someone would leave such a brutal souvenir at the Vanderbilt home.”

“Extortion,” he said. “What else can be the motive when a man of such paramount wealth is involved?”

“But how can the death of a lowly Episcopal priest serve to make a millionaire lose heart? Why Father Hawks? He was utterly harmless, save for his silly conviction about Lola.”

Holmes inhaled on his pipe, then let the smoke stream out the window. I almost felt that the ghost of Lola was present with us, and was vicariously inhaling the smoke he exhaled.

“What conviction did Father Hawks cherish about Lola Montez?”

“She repented quite dramatically of the excesses of her former life and character.”

“Deathbeds have that affect”

“Father Hawks had concluded that she deserved sainthood.”

Sherlock Holmes stopped in midinhalation on his pipe. “A saint? Lola Montez?” The incredulous words came out on puffs of smoke. “The old man was clearly cracked. This makes his death even more disturbing.”