Spider Dance (55 page)

When I returned to the table Mr. Holmes was moving the books and papers on Lola Montez around the table. “Norton,” he asked idly, “could there be a plot afoot in Bavaria to overthrow the regency?”

“There are always rumors, but that’s impossible! No progeny of the two demonstrably mad brothers would be tolerated. The Wittalsbach line ends with them.”

Holmes lifted the cartoon of Lola springing nimbly from Europe to the New World in a swan-prowed little boat

“Unless King Ludwig the First had a third child, an unsuspected third child by a woman with untainted blood. Perhaps that’s why someone is so interested in Madam Norton’s inquiries and also why the same forces might wish to abstract gold and gems from the Vanderbilts.”

“But what would the Vanderbilts have to do with Bavaria, or Lola, for that matter?” Godfrey wondered.

“I don’t see that thread of the web clearly yet,” Holmes admitted. “Perhaps it’s not Lola that these schemers are interested in but the offspring of Lola. Perhaps they seek a puppet of their own to replace the incarcerated Otto and his regent, Luitpold.”

“That would mean a lost heir,” I said, “possibly morganatic.”

“Or,” said Holmes, elevating another image of Lola, “an heiress.”

Oh, my sainted father! Then Irene might indeed be a candidate for queen of a European principality. Queen of Bavaria!

I wondered how the king of Bohemia would like that!?

I could still hear Nellie Bly, who had accompanied him during
the last leg of the rescue mission, calling him “my dear Quentin”
not an hour after our disastrous reunion, a reunion that was only
disastrous after certain, unforgettable . . . passages between us
.
—
PENELOPE HUXLEIGH, 1889 DIARY, IN
FEEME FATALE
,
CAROLE NELSON DOUGLAS

F
ROM
N
ELLIE
B
LY’S
J
OURNAL

How interesting it is to watch a foreign agent become a domestic spy.

“Why is it necessary,” Quentin asked, “for us to ‘buy’ so many babies?”

“I need to demonstrate how shockingly easy such an act is, and that anyone can acquire unwanted infants, for any purpose.”

“This has not been an ‘easy’ assignment,” he pointed out.

Dawn was just now warming the East River as we watched from the Battery.

“We pursued the rumor of an available infant from tenement to saloon to brothel to tenement,” he said.

“But this last one was just ten dollars, an even more shocking sum. Don’t worry, Quentin. I’ll have someone from the foundling home meet us there later today when we finish the deal. Even an orphanage would be better than the conditions that poor baby has the ill luck to be born into.”

“No doubt you see why two of the Hamilton infants died.
Most of these children are already ill. I suppose the more misery you can document, the more shocking your story will be.”

“And the more likely to raise public indignation so something is done about this shameless trade in babies. I must look for more available infants because I hope to find where all four Hamilton babies came from. Surely we may cross the path of someone who had been contacted previously by the lovely Mrs. T. Anna Swinton and her son, Joshua Mann. Only one person may have sold them all four infants. These wretched mothers are too sick or deprived to keep their children.”

“Your own mother might have resorted to such a thing, after your father died and his first wife’s children inherited everything but some furniture and a cow.”

“We were never that badly off. I saw to that.”

“You began supporting your family at an early age?”

“And why not? I was in my later teens. No one else would. My older brothers thought only about establishing new families for themselves.”

“Is that why you aren’t married, but live with your mother?”

“No. I’m not married because I have no need to be. And I live with my mother because she is a more interesting and less taxing companion than any man I have met so far.”

“How are we men so taxing?”

“You won’t let us women be. Be free, be what we want to be, which is not wives, if all of us would think about it. Not even Nell Huxleigh wants to be a wife.”

“Why do you say ‘even?’”

“Well, she is horribly traditional, isn’t she?”

“Hardly. You don’t know her at all.”

“Do you?”

He paused to consider it, then smiled. A most irritating sort of smile. “Not really.”

“It’s the unknowability of Nell that attracts you,” I said.

“Did I say I was attracted?”

“Well, you’re not attracted to me.”

“Ergo, I must be attracted to someone else. You’re an odd contradiction, Nellie Bly. Half suffragist, half flirt. All reporter.”

“Aren’t you ‘all spy?’”

He bowed his head in acknowledgment of my thrust.

Still, I felt I hadn’t touched him at all. Oh, these Englishmen! So self-sure, so remote. Such challenges.

“What will you do about the infants we’re offered after the story has appeared in the paper?” he asked next.

“My job is to reveal, not to heal. If I took personal responsibility for every poor soul I discovered on the streets of the city, I’d soon go mad. I do hope that the revelation of their plight will encourage some of the public to seek to adopt them. What I’d really like, what would end this story with a fine fillip—”

“Yes?”

“—would be to find an adult child that was farmed out by Madame Restell to a new family decades ago.”

“Nell’s told me about Madam Restell and her thriving abortion enterprise for women rich and poor, which also included finding new homes for inconvenient babies too advanced to be aborted.”

“Nell told you all that!?’

“Not in so many blunt words.”

“I’ll be homswaggled! I thought Miss Mealymouth was far too refined to deal with real life.”

“Not when it touches on her loyalty to Irene.” He turned from watching the water lighten to reflect the forest of masts in the river. “What you really want, Nellie Bly, is to reveal who Irene’s mother was.”

“That’s impossible. This trip abroad by our Parisian duo has revealed one thing: that Irene Adler was born in a trunk, as they say in theatrical circles, and reared by a committee of freakish but kindly variety performers. I’ve met some of them myself.”

He just smiled and said nothing.

“Damn it, Quentin! Do you know something I don’t? You want to keep me quiet about Jack the Ripper. Now you want
me to keep quiet about Irene Adler’s origins. Madame Restell’s history is too old to retell, but not if someone sensational is a graduate of her replaced-waif efforts.”

“Irene is hardly sensational. She doesn’t even perform publicly anymore. There’s more to it than what you say, Pink. You’re irritated with Irene for being first to see and pursue the Ripper, and then the Restell mystery. You want your front-page headlines, all right, and you want to benefit society. But most of all, you want to one-up Irene Adler. I’ll help you with the Hamilton story, gladly, for it’s appalling the way these newborn infants are bought and sold. But I won’t help you embarrass Irene, especially by making public revelations about her personal life.”

I said nothing. There was enough truth in his annoying little speech that I chose not to answer it. For now.

“And,” he added, “you do like to irritate Nell by monopolizing my attention.” He smiled his charming smile again. “Not that the pleasure of your company is not engaging, as well as very informative.”

A new, unwelcome thought stole into my mind with the dawn.

Why was Quentin Stanhope being so congenial about accompanying me day and night through the worst sections of New York?

Was he keeping
me
occupied, so I couldn’t keep an eye on Irene?

“You are truly devious,” I told him. “Now I can’t tell whether you are accommodating me with your company or misleading me.”

He bowed. “I have never received a more welcome compliment.”

For I am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner,
as all my fathers were
.
—
PSALM 39

Sherlock Holmes’s astounding theory about Irene’s parenthood involved the one forgotten figure in this imbroglio. Her father.