Spider Dance (54 page)

“So are your wife’s whereabouts at the moment, all too confidential. I suggest you forget discretion. I assure you that I’m not about to cause my brother, Mycroft, any problems. What you say here will go no further.”

“Then we’d all better save our strength and sit down.”

“Goodness, Godfrey,” I commented as Mr. Holmes complied. “Certainly Bavaria is not large enough to require a long-winded disquisition.”

“Bavaria, no.” Godfrey settled into a lawyerly explanation;
that is: informed, thorough, and a trifle dull. “It’s smaller than Bohemia and appears rather less important on the world stage. It occupies a scenic mountainous region in the south of Germany, with Munich its principal city. We all know from our recent adventures the past two years in Bohemia and Transylvania about the tussle such pocket kingdoms have had for years with the encroaching Austrian-Hungarian Empire. As in Bohemia, the line between church and state is muddied and contested by both parties. There is no Jewish question in Bavaria: there it’s the ancient struggle of Protestant against Catholic, although the Catholic was in the ascendency at midcentury.”

“Which,” I asked, “is why Lola Montez was always prattling of enemy Jesuits pursuing her?”

“Yes, and quite accurately, Nell. The Jesuits were entrenched in Ludwig the First’s ruling cabinet and all Bavarian institutions . . . until Lola came along and unseated them.”

“But,” I objected,“she was Irish-born and claimed to be Spanish. Surely she was Roman Catholic herself?”

“From what I have found, Lola had no graven images of any denomination before her, except her own perhaps.”

Holmes stirred on his chair. “So she was a political creature after all?”

“She divided in order to unite. I suppose that makes her highly political. You must understand King Ludwig, a dreamy, idealistic man of sixty. Wrote poetry. Poor chap had a perfectly boring queen, and the succession was assured. He kept a portrait hall of the world’s most beautiful women. When Lola appeared in his city, and at his court, she rivaled any painting in his private gallery, there in flesh and blood instead of oil and tint. She had by then stormed the Continent’s major cities, and beyond, all the way to Russia.”

“Just with some Spanish dances?” I asked. Despite the mixed reviews of her performances, I hadn’t been convinced that Lola Montez ever had anything special to offer.

“The dances were the least of it. She was, apparently, extraordinarily beautiful in person. I’ve seen Ludwig’s portraits.
She strikes me as a bit sharp-featured, but everyone who’d seen her in person spoke of how her eyes mesmerized, and no painting can capture the spell of a living glance.”

“No,” Holmes said, a bit too fervently for my liking, as if he was thinking of the same compelling living glance that I was.

“No,” Godfrey agreed, answering Holmes with a touch of complacency.

Was it possible that these two vastly different men were a bit jealous of each other? Jealousy is a wasted emotion, I decided. It was impossible to imagine that they were. Besides, Holmes had carbolic acid for blood. Sometimes I thought Godfrey had barrister’s ink for blood, but from Irene’s occasional unguarded comment, I was apparently wrong.

And Quentin, what did he have for blood? Perhaps . . . nitroglycerin.

I was, of course, taking notes in the tiny silver-encased pad on my belt-hung chatelaine during all of this, and many tiny papers it was taking up, despite all my assiduous abbreviations. Foreign diplomacy is always so taxing.

“So,” Holmes summed up, “Lola’s beauty, and politics, bewitched the king. That seems an unlikely combination of attributes for a femme fatale.”

“It’s not that laughable,” Godfrey said earnestly, sitting forward. “She had a knack for befriending powerful men, whether the relationship ever became romantic or not. She’d entertained some of the most advanced artistic rebels and political thinkers in Europe. She’d become their equal and convert, and a passionate one. She was a dangerous woman by the time she came to Bavaria and met its impressionable king. The Jesuits were right to fear her, and they did.”

“Ludwig is dead, and so is Lola,” Holmes said over the familiar bowl of his pipe.

Trust him to force Godfrey to a quick summation.

“Their names and their very different influences live on in Bavaria to this day,” Godfrey warned him. “They can’t be dismissed as overripe historical anomalies. Ludwig stood by
Lola, and her political principle, until revolution, stirred up by the disenfranchised Jesuits, threatened. She was forced to flee, almost over her own dead body, and Ludwig the First had to abdicate his throne in favor of his son, Maximilian the Second. Lola Montez did unseat some prominent Jesuits, earning the powerful international religious order’s undying enmity, but it was the liberal revolutions sweeping all of Europe in 1848 that unseated Ludwig. The Ultramontanes—”

“Yes, Godfrey,” I interjected. “What are these? Irene and I ran across that word many times.”

“Not what but who, Nell. The word means ‘over the mountains’ and it referred to influence of Catholic Rome from beyond the Alps in the Italian states.”

“So Lola was against the Roman Catholic influence.”

“And especially the power of the Jesuits in Bavaria in restricting freedom of the press and suppressing free speech. Indeed, Lola’s influence on the king made Bavaria a leader in the move for conservative monarchies to make concessions to liberal parliaments. Yet it couldn’t forestall civil upheaval in Bavaria. Lola was an excuse for it. She was easily slandered, a woman bold about her love life and fiery in her political beliefs. Now Ludwig’s grandson, Otto, is shut away in a madhouse while a regent sits the throne. He’s quietly mad, with no notorious foreign woman to blame for the loss of his kingdom.”

“Godfrey!” I gazed at him sternly. “You rather admire that scandalous woman.”

“Indeed. Had Ludwig the First half the starch in his spine that Lola Montez had in her dancing petticoats, he would have hung on to his throne and provided the model of a modern liberalized monarchy.”

Holmes, for once, seemed to take my side. “‘The past is prologue,’” he said through the smoke he recycled from his pipe. “What is Lola to Otto, and Otto to her?”

“Very little,” Godfrey said. “Otto is the son of a man who’d become known as Mad King Ludwig, Ludwig the Second, grandson of Lola’s Ludwig. It’s rumored that young
Ludwig’s wet nurse had syphilis, explaining his mania for building extravagant palaces like Neuschwanstein.”

I swallowed a gasp of recognition, for I didn’t want to indicate that I had ever heard the dread word “syphilis.” To hear it said so cavalierly by Godfrey, and to know Irene’s secret fear that if her mother was Lola Montez and if Lola Montez had died of syphilis . . . It was all too dreadful to even think, much less say out loud. So I didn’t

“What is recorded,” Godfrey went on, “was that Ludwig the Second was utterly indifferent to his own mother. The syphilis rumor may have been manufactured to explain his supposed ‘madness.’”

“His mother, Queen Marie, was so averse to the word ‘love’ that she attempted to have her husband, Maximilian, replace the word with the term ‘friendship’ in all poetry published in the realm.”

“Now that is truly mad!” I exclaimed.

Godfrey smiled conspiratorially. “You have put your finger upon it, Nell. Love and friendship are both powerful forces in our lives but one can’t usurp the other.”

“Can’t they exist in tandem?” I asked.

“Sometimes,” he said with a smile. “Sometimes not”

“Ludwig the Second died three years ago,” Holmes noted from his corner.

“Exactly,” Godfrey conceded, “but not before beginning a building spree that is still the wonder of that part of the world. Ludwig was a lonely, isolated boy, reared by a father with very queer ideas and a mother who couldn’t love him. He became enchanted by the composer Richard Wagner. I find it fascinating that the dancer and Bavarian liberator Lola Montez died in January of 1861, while young Ludwig, Crown Prince of Bavaria, at the age of fifteen heard his first Wagnerian opera,
Lohengrin
, in February of that very year.”

“Nothing good will come of hearing Wagnerian operas,” Holmes declaimed through the pipe stem in his teeth, “but go on. In the stuff of legend lies the seed of truth.”

“Truth is very hard to find in Bavaria,” Godfrey said,
wincing. “The larger-than-life tales of the two ruling Ludwigs is like marzipan on pound cake: it hides the serious political maneuverings behind the Spanish dancer and fairytale castles. Bavaria had led the other German states in resisting unification, That role was weakened by the civil strife in the first Ludwig’s time. The second Ludwig’s obsession with Wagner’s operas and building grandiose palaces that bankrupted the kingdom ended Bavaria’s power, even though his mother had converted from the Protestant to Catholic faith in an attempt to unite the country. After the Franco-Prussian War in the early ’70s, Ludwig the Second invited King Wilhelm the First of Prussia to become the first emperor of a new united German state. Thus the most liberal German principality led them all into the highly conservative control of Prussia. This is amazing, given that the man was an eccentric recluse who amused himself rowing his seashell-shaped boat around an electrically lit grotto. He was declared insane and kept imprisoned, but three years ago was found drowned in the lake near his castle prison, along with his alienist. Of course the deaths were highly suspicious. With his brother Prince Otto just as mad, their uncle became regent. You can imagine the state the country is in to this day.”

“A sensational story indeed, but what does all this matter?” I asked.

Holmes answered me instead of Godfrey.

“Normally nothing, Miss Huxleigh. However, the most recent succession in Bavaria is tainted by madness, machinations, and a mysterious royal death. No doubt that’s why the Rothschild interests wanted you there,” he said to Godfrey.

“Yes. The regency of Prince Luitpold these past three years has threatened stability in the region. Bavaria had acted as a damper on the increasing militarism of Prussia. Now with the royal succession history, all sorts of political schemers are stirring up things in Bavaria. The Rothschilds’s supreme aim is peace in Europe. They’ve had admirable success, considering the endless outbreaks of revolution and war this century.”

“Why, Godfrey,” I said with some surprise and even wonder. “You are acting for the Rothschilds more in the way of a diplomat than a lawyer.”

Godfrey shrugged wearily. “A lawyer is a negotiator, Nell, and God knows these times require negotiations.”

“Or,” Sherlock Holmes suggested from his smoke-filled corner, “a spy, like our acquaintance Mr. Stanhope.”

I glanced at Godfrey, hoping for a denial, which was not forthcoming.

All he said was a lawyerly aphorism: “Complex political situations require complex approaches.”

“But what has all this to do with Irene and where she is now!?” I burst out. “The political history of Bavaria may be endlessly interesting to gentlemen who sit around fires and smoke cigars and drink brandy older than they are, but I want to know where Irene is, and why! I want to know what is happening here and now, not there and then! What on earth could . . . immoral Irish Spanish dancers and drowned kings and disenfranchised Jesuits have to do with it?”

Sherlock Holmes finally took the pipe stem from his mouth to favor me with a direct, and devastating, look.

“Everything, my dear Miss Huxleigh. Absolutely everything.”

For a full minute I could say nothing in answer, which must be a record for me. “Then Irene is in . . . extreme danger.”

“She is mortal,” Godfrey added, reluctantly.

“Indeed. As are we,” Homes noted. “Miss Huxleigh!”

I bolted to my feet, like one of Mr. Kipling’s subalterns.

“We will need your knowledge of Mrs. Norton’s state of mind and also of what trail she pursued that brought her to the attention of this sinister cadre.”

“Her state of mind? For one thing, she was determined not to impinge on your investigation involving the Vanderbilts.”

“Intentions are admirable, but she could no more do that than fly away from that boardinghouse. It’s clear that these two investigations are one. She suspected that, of course.”

“She never said anything—” I hesitated. “Irene is a woman of her word. She would do as she said: focus only on the trail of Lola Montez, her possible mother.”

“What?” Godfrey had not heard of this supposed relationship, for he stood frozen. “She cabled for information on Lola Montez, but I thought it had to do with the Restell woman from a recent murder case, not her own origins.”

“And,” I realized, “you left Bavaria before the mountain of letters she wrote you about the entire Restell affair had arrived. It’s clear we know nothing about what each other has been doing, or why.”

And so we adjourned to the round table at which Irene and I had spent hours poring over the works of Lola, which still littered the surface.

Godfrey’s flicking glance dismissed the collected books, articles, and illustrations. “I find it impossible to believe that Irene should be the offspring of such a disreputable hoyden.”

“The actuality of the connection is moot at this point,” Mr. Holmes said crisply. “It is what others believe to be so. Miss Huxleigh, I could use another bracing infusion of that acrid ambrosia called coffee.”

I rolled my eyes, quite within his view, but fetched refilled cups for both men.

“Quentin,” I said suddenly, after performing my maid’s duties.

Two sets of gray eyes regarded me, blank as schoolroom slates.

“He’s a spy,” I explained, “used to mastering foreign territory. He should join us.”

Both men nodded brusquely, so I felt released to fly to the telephone to call his hotel. Again.

But Quentin was still “not in.” I had to disconnect, unhappy and in no position to show it. What on earth could Quentin Stanhope be doing that kept him away from his hotel day and night?

I had the most dreadful sinking feeling that I wouldn’t want to know.