Spider Dance (56 page)

Could she indeed be the lost daughter of Ludwig the First? Why did such a thing never occur to me? Of course I’d been trained to shy away from scandal.

I shuffled madly through the piles of material Irene and I had studied.

“It’s true,” I said as I searched, “that the miserable Lola gadded about the globe, and back and forth between Europe and America. She was rumored to have met King Ludwig secretly, especially just after his abdication. And with her penchant for wearing shawls, and black, she could have concealed a . . . a certain delicate condition. But to have borne Ludwig’s child? And left it to a troupe of performers?”

“Where better to hide an heir who might be in danger?” Holmes pointed out.

“All rank supposition,” Godfrey objected at last. “We can’t sit here scouring these books of dubious history while Irene is missing. It’s fine to theorize about the past, but we must act in the present, and quickly.”

I nodded my agreement. Whether Irene was a pretender to
the throne of Bavaria was far less vital than where she was now.

“We have one incontrovertible clue to the matters behind these events,” Holmes summarized.

Godfrey and I waited, with bated breath. Breaths.

“The man who was kidnapped from the Episcopal Club by the same villains who were following Mrs. Norton has been raving with fever since I brought him to Bellevue. Some decent medical attention may have cooled his brain. It was he who alerted me to the fact of your wife’s involvement, Mr. Norton.”

“How?”

“He mentioned her name, as if he had been trying to keep it from his tormenters. Don’t bestir yourself; I believe he was successful, partly because I interrupted them before they could work the same deviltry they did on poor Father Hawks.”

Godfrey was standing despite the detective’s reassurances.

“We must see him at once.” Godfrey checked his watch. “Nine
A.M.,
soon enough for a hospital staff to be stirring.” He turned toward the table by the door that bore his hat, stick, and gloves, as well as Mr. Holmes’s.

“Coming, Nell?” Godfrey asked.

I hesitated, glancing at the telephone despite myself.

The man Holmes leaped into the gap provided by my missish hesitation.

“Miss Huxleigh should remain here, for the man’s physical state is gruesome. In this instance, she’ll be here in case word comes, or if Mr. Stanhope finally decides to make himself available.”

That last phrase stiffened my spine as no whalebone appliance ever made could have.

“I’ll go!” I dashed to the table to retrieve my hat. I pinned it on so swiftly that I nearly pierced two fingertips with six inches of steel hatpin.

Waiting was no longer a chore I was willing to perform, for anyone.

Mr. Holmes shrugged, but Godfrey reached out and squeezed my fingers before I could don my gloves. He understood my need for action after a long night of waiting up and wondering.

And . . . I had seen the poor victim of the Ripper at St. Sulpice Hospital in Paris last spring. Surely this man could not be in a more shocking state of mutilation than that pathetic woman!

Mr. Holmes strode ahead of us out of the elevator and was soon in the street whistling up a hansom with the confidence of a native.

I wondered what Godfrey thought about the detective’s leading role in the search for Irene, but there was no time for us to confer.

The lumbering coach drawn by two horses, called a Gurney, that the detective hailed held all three of us handily. Soon we were jostling toward Bellevue amid the crash and clop and infernal jangle of early-morning New York City traffic. The peddlers’ cries keened like the seagulls wheeling eternally near the port.

“What do you think of the city?” I asked Godfrey.

“I’ve not had a moment to notice.” He surveyed the street through the window. “I see that buildings reach higher here than in London or Paris.”

“Indeed, we’ve read of edifices as high as fifteen or even twenty-some stories being constructed.”

Of course saying “we” brought everyone’s mind back to the one of our party who was missing. Mr. Holmes slouched against his side of the carriage, packing his pipe with fresh tobacco and scowling at the street.

“What a contrast in elements this case offers,” he murmured as much to himself as to us. “Old World. New World. Old World jewels. New World gold. Events as fresh as last week, and as stale as forty years ago. Matters of church and state, united by violence and, presumably, greed. Victims in America, violators from Bavaria. And then there is the matter of the Red Indians.”

Godfrey and I exchanged glances. Mr. Holmes appeared to be raving as senselessly as the man he had placed in Bellevue.

Our conveyance stopped before an assemblage of buildings numerous and stately enough to be a university.

Mr. Holmes bounded out of the carriage, leaving Godfrey to assist me down and pay the driver.

I looked after Holmes’s vanishing figure, the ulster’s shoulder cape hem flapping like gull wings in the haste of his progress.

Godfrey took my elbow and we hurried after him into a building with bars on the windows. This, I feared, was the dreaded mental facility into which Nellie Bly had committed herself last year to get her most famous story, an exposé” on how harshly the mad were treated in America. And everywhere else, I would guess.

“Ten Days in a Mad-House,”
I muttered under my breath.

“What?” Godfrey asked.

“Nellie Bly has been here before us. She had herself committed for a newspaper story, then wrote a book about it.”

“I doubt we’re visiting the madhouse section. Holmes’s man is wounded and fevered, not insane.”

“I hope.”

When we caught up with Holmes, it was inside the facility, where he was arguing with a middled-aged woman in a blue-and-white apron and cap.

“The attending physician is not here,” she said as firmly as I had ever heard a woman address Sherlock Holmes, “I can’t allow you to see the patient without him. You are not kin.”

“My good woman, I’m the man who brought him here.”

“That may be, Mr.—”

“Holmes.”

“That may be, Mr. Holmes, but I am the day nurse in charge and I can’t have strangers cluttering up my ward.”

“I’m English, as you may note.”

“Yes, sir. Indeed so.”

“And I’ve brought a noted British consulting surgeon to see the patient, Dr. Norton.”

She gazed at Godfrey and myself with a skepticism I couldn’t blame her for, although Godfrey looked extremely Harley Street in his silk top hat and striped trousers.

“And also with us is Dr. Norton’s nurse, Miss Huxleigh,” Mr. Holmes went on. “She is a latter-day graduate of Miss Nightingale’s nursing corps, you know.”

“Miss Nightingale! Well, we are the result of Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell’s efforts to advance women in the medical arts here in the United States. Perhaps you’ve heard of her?”

“Indeed. My medical friends would consider it a great honor if we were permitted to see the patient we are so concerned about; not in the quality of care he has, obviously, but as to his mysterious condition.”

“Dr. Norton, is it? Miss Poxleigh? Do come along. We welcome inspection by visiting physicians.”

Well. It was certainly incumbent upon me to display no queasy tendencies now!

We clattered down the stone-floored passages, inhaling carbolic acid and other strong odors of medical purification.

The ward was half filled, and our quarry lay three-quarters of the way down the dreary rows.

We all approached with brusque efficiency, none of us as brisk or efficient as Sherlock Holmes. I wonder what the blue-striped nurse would think if I told her she was following the lead of a human bloodhound, not a man.

So we gathered around the plainly covered bed: two men, two women; three imposters, one actual nurse.

I gazed at the linen-pale face on the flat pillow, and felt the huge room spin, felt my senses reeling in a very unnurselike manner.

Apparently both men detected my suddenly vaporish state, for a strong hand on either elbow held me upright.

“Thank you, Sister,” Holmes said, though why he had addressed a nurse as one would an Anglican nun, I can’t say. And I didn’t much care at that chaotic moment. “We’ll examine the patient in our own way.”

Somehow his high, commanding tone drove her away after a few attempted demurring noises.

“Nell! What is it?” Godfrey hissed in my ear.

I had the pleasure of seeing Sherlock Holmes’s complete attention focused on me.

I inhaled deeply of the attar of carbolic acid and ammonia, which acted as smelling salts to a sensitive nose.

“I’ve seen this wretched fellow before,” I said.

“You know his name?” Mr. Holmes’s face was as close to mine as a Mesmerist’s, and as commanding.

“Not his first name—”

“Not needed.”

“It’s . . . Father Edmonds, who received Irene and myself in the bishop’s stead at the Episcopal Club not two days ago. What has happened to his hands? They were quite . . . graceful when he met with us.”

Mr. Holmes raised his eyebrows more than half-mast. That was the sole satisfaction I had of my surprising statement.

I did not require actual smelling salts, although I had some in a silver container on the chatelaine that hung around my waist.

The shock of recognizing Mr. Holmes’s “victim” as someone Irene and I had met by daylight in quite ordinary circumstances wore off as if one veil after another were lifted from before my eyes.

Now that I had recovered from the shock of unwelcome recognition, Godfrey suggested that I near the poor man’s bed. We would get better testimony if the man saw someone . . . anyone . . . he knew, however slightly. Who can argue with a barrister on such a matter?

As he awoke, however, Father Edmonds appeared to know me far more than slightly.

“Oh, dear God,” he murmured devoutly. “I’ve died in your service and now meet you and your angel in heaven. You sent her to pave the way, as so often you did in the Old Testament. I tried to keep her face before me during the most arduous of my trials, and to keep the name of your sister angel from my lips, no matter what the emissaries of Satan demanded, or did.”

I was struck dumb with pity, guilt, and humility.

The man’s bandaged hands twitched on the plain coverlet. I remembered Holmes’s terse description of how he’d found him: pinned by the hands to a table, daggers through the palms.

Had any modern man suffered so?

“You are not dead, man,” Holmes said, “but I plucked you away from the hounds of hell. They now seek this . . . angel’s companion. You mentioned her name when I found you. Irene.”

Godfrey twitched beside me, but managed to keep silent.

Father Edmonds, perhaps prone to sermons from his calling, answered in another rush of words. His captors must have been most annoyed with him. “In pagan times,” he said,“to the Greeks, Irene was the goddess of peace. I remember her appearing before me, as beautiful as God’s shining sword, but her handmaiden shone softer before my eyes, a modest violet amidst a bouquet of tiger lilies.”

“I did say he raved,” Sherlock Holmes murmured to no one in particular.

I recognized my role when it was named: modest violet.

“My dear Father Edmonds,” I said, stepping to the bedside, and taking one of his mangled, gauze-wrapped hands in my own. “We had no idea the Evil One was so swift behind our steps. You are not the only man of God to have suffered at His”—ah, “hands” did not seem to be a useful figure of speech in this instance—“behest. You have withstood the worst admirably. But you must tell us everything, so we may end this villainy.”

“They wanted to know . . . it was Father Hawks this, and Father Hawks that. And the Magdalen. The Magdalen Society, and a woman named Lola. And a woman named Irene, who I of course recognized as God’s messenger.”

I doubt that Irene would ever be granted a more celestial role in her life, excepting the part of “heavenly Aida,” as the aria from Verdi’s opera put it.

Mr. Holmes would tolerate the patient’s delusions only so far as they would feed his inquiries. “What did they want with ‘Irene?’”

“Merely to know where she came from and had gone. I said ‘Heaven,’ of course, and they became most vicious.”

“And Lola?”

“They wanted to know what Father Hawks knew of her. I was unable to satisfy them on either issue. And then God’s archangel came screaming down from above and scattered them.”

I lifted my eyebrows at Sherlock Holmes, who shrugged modestly.

“How will his hands do?” I whispered to Holmes, for the poor man would not let go of mine.

Godfrey leaned in to hear the verdict.

“The doctor here says they’ll heal well,” Holmes said softly, “though with some loss of dexterity. The physician is most interested to study a very uncommon case, and will no doubt be diligent in the extreme.”

Godfrey leaned in to present the patient with a question. “Could you recognize any of them?”

“They were hooded. Cloaked. Like monks, I suppose. I thought I was having a nightmare of the Inquisition. Dark men, and I could see no eyes, but I knew there would be no pity in them. They seemed . . . devoted . . . to their fiendish quest. I pity any woman or angel who would fall into their hands.”

We all winced at that assessment, even though Father Edmonds seemed to equate women and angels.

“Miss Violet,” he said, his pale, haunted eyes finding mine. “Say you are all right. Say your friend is all right.”

“We are all right,” I said, patting his bandages. “You must concentrate on your own healing. We . . . angels will attend to those evildoers.”

He nodded, gazing up at us. “I see halos about all your heads.”

On that note we left him, although Mr. Holmes could not help noting that the electric lights above the beds had produced the effects of holiness, not our natures.