Spider Dance (64 page)

“I don’t expect to be alone long,” I told myself, not worrying a whit what he thought about overhearing me.

But my brave words came back to haunt me when the driver began taking darker and sharper turnings into the unsavory area that led to the docks.

I couldn’t imagine Nell Huxleigh going here, or Sherlock Holmes permitting her to do so.

Yet if the tall dark man who called upon her hadn’t been Holmes, it must have been Quentin. Yes, Quentin would be the more likely candidate to squire Miss Nell around at night . . . but why here?

When the driver stopped near a completely darkened building, I leaned out over the doors that kept me a passenger, reluctant to get out.

The area was utterly deserted, and had that disused atmosphere you find in abandoned buildings.

While a I hesitated, I heard the distant rattle of harnesses and carriage. Shortly after, a Gurney came grinding down the damp cobblestones, its horses straining as if overloaded.

“What on earth can that Gurney be doing here at this hour?” I speculated aloud.

My driver heard me.

“Doin’ what I long to do, Miss. Gettin’ the hell out of this nasty place.”

I still made him drive forward a hundred yards or so, though he swore that where we had stopped had been where he’d left “the gentleman” (that had to be Quentin, not Holmes; Holmes was too brusque to be taken for a gentleman) “and the lady off.”

There was obviously nothing here.

No lady, and no gentleman.

No Holmes, no Nell.

No Quentin.

I felt a bit like a jealous spouse trying to trail an illicit couple. Disappointed, and foolish.

I knocked on the trapdoor to let the driver know he could hie for the safe, electrically bright lights of Broadway again.

Whatever anyone had been up to in the dark of night, Quentin would be mine again in the morning.

Men for a little gain cross the seas, enduring at least as
much as we, and shall we not, for God’s love do
what men do for earthly interest?”
—SAINT ISAAC JOGUES’S LETTER TO HIS MOTHER ON
LEAVING FRANCE TO BE A MISSIONARY TO THE INDIANS
IN NEW YORK AND NEW FRANCE (CANADA), 1636

Luckily, the driver of the Gurney used to abduct Holmes had proved to be only stunned. He was groaning and sitting against the front wheel when we recovered our wits and gathered ourselves into a party.

A quite respectable party, if the light didn’t blaze upon our disheveled apparel: we were three men, two women, and a child, and could just crowd into the Gurney if Consuelo sat on my lap, and Irene on Godfrey’s, which didn’t seem to be an imposition to either of them.

First we returned Consuelo to her distraught parents, who had, in the meantime, hired half of the actual Pinkertons in New York to guard her and their house. Mr. Vanderbilt overflowed with thanks and promises of reward. Mrs. Vanderbilt simply snatched the girl’s hand from mine and marched her up those long, imposing stairs that so frightened the child. Alva Vanderbilt’s promise of an immediate bath sounded like a punishment. The woman knew nothing about cajoling and everything about enforcing.

Poor Consuelo had only been persuaded to return home
after promises from Irene and myself to visit. Irene was to teach her to dance, and I was to teach her to discus throw.

Given Consuelo’s social-climbing harridan of a mother, I believe that discus throwing would prove to be the more valuable skill.

Mr. Vanderbilt could not quite meet my eyes as I turned them from the staircase after Consuelo and her mother had disappeared.

“Very grateful,” he murmured to me personally. “I will show how much later, when things are set to rights here at home.” He glanced up the palatial staircase, fit for a Cinderella to flee down, as if he too feared the height.

Then we all five adjourned to the Astor House, where our state of clothing was the centerpiece of every eye in a lobby blazing with electric lights.

Safe and uncommented-upon in the elevator at last, we took final refuge in Irene’s and my rooms. Godfrey had ordered brandy as we passed through the lobby, by the bottle. Two of them! The man delivering them almost arrived at our door as soon as we did. He peered inward in rank curiosity while Quentin tipped him and accepted the heavy tray.

I surveyed my male escorts. Sherlock Holmes’s previously loud clothing now actually shouted with dirt and rips. Godfrey as Black Otto had apparently been caught in a buzz saw. Quentin, attired in the rags of a street beggar, now beggared description. Irene in men’s clothes was beginning to look commonplace to me, except her hair was an unpinned snarl and she looked wan and worn.

I myself was a sight, my hair half-undone, my gloves red with rust.

My weapon, it turned out, had been a disused pulley wheel, round and flat enough to pass for a discus, after all.

“Let go of that heavy, cumbersome thing, Nell,” Irene urged after we’d assembled in our hotel parlor.

“No. I . . . rather fancy it. One never knows what will come plunging down from the ceiling in New York City these days.”

“What was that thing on the office roof?” Godfrey asked
Quentin from his position presiding over the brandy. “Some sort of orangutang?”

“Slippery enough to finally elude me in the dark,” Quentin complained. “Perhaps a thing half-eel and half-man.”

“Nothing so exotic.” Holmes was seated in the damask chair, puffing away on his disgusting pipe like a London chimney. “Although his barefoot state was rather apelike. Let Mrs. Norton tell us about him.”

“I think you know.” Irene told him as her filthy fingers screwed a cigarette into her elegant enamel-and-diamond holder.

In fact, they all resembled a lot of chimney sweeps, a state I could hardly hold against them or savor, for I had the same, smudged appearance. And the odors that clung to us all from that unused slaughterhouse! For once I welcomed the stink of sulphur and smoke.

Godfrey brought Irene the first glass of brandy. She sipped, then set it aside. She had lost her man’s fedora somewhere, and her hairpins, tresses flowing like a girl’s, as Miss Bristol had described her. Nor had she been wearing gloves.

“I suppose I should explain myself,” Irene agreed.

“You could start with the hypnotism.” Holmes’s tone treaded on a sneer.

How nice, actually, to see him back in fine form. I’d guessed that his situation had been dire before Quentin and Godfrey forced his captors to turn their attention elsewhere.

“Hypnotism?” Irene shrugged. “No, more a pretense of hypnotism than the real thing. Those of us versed in stage illusions know how to appear as if from nowhere.” She eyed Holmes significantly. “We know how to command attention, and how to put people off guard with the startling things we might say.” Her eyes never left him. “So I wouldn’t call it hypnotism, would you, Mr. Holmes?”

He refused to rise to her bait and answer, so I did.

“You charmed them. Like a . . . lady leprechaun.”

“I may be Irish by birth, after all,” she said, pleating the
folds of her skirt in the manner of a schoolroom miss who has been up to mischief and is not one bit sorry.

Godfrey looked a bit alarmed by the declaration, and sat up in the armchair where he had lounged to cosset his brandy glass.

Holmes, I noticed, still left his glass untouched, as I had mine. At least he was abstemious with spirits.

“Irene,” Godfrey said. “Is it true? You’ve discovered your family origins?”

Her hand extended across the small space that separated their chairs and Godfrey met it with his own.

“Who knows?” Irene told him, and only him. “I’ve discovered a great deal, but nothing is certain when it comes to my family tree.”

I looked away. In all the rush and excitement, Irene and Godfrey hadn’t had time or privacy for a marital reunion. This reaching of their hands seemed to bridge an ocean and several weeks, as well as the few feet in a room.

So I looked away, and found myself looking at Sherlock Holmes looking away also. He appeared as I’d never seen him before, embarrassed.

“I suppose you know everything that’s about to be revealed,” I told him. Tartly.

This stirred up his annoying arrogance. “Indeed. But you might be better amused if the stage performer among us tells it in her own melodramatic way.”

Irene roused herself and took another sip of brandy.

“Let’s see. We leave our heroine on a surreptitious mission to visit an empty room, unaware of three sinister men on her trail.”

“Were you really unaware of them, Irene?” I asked.

“Absolutely. However, I’d finished my mission in the room and was on the back steps when I heard the terrible trio coming along the side of the boardinghouse.”

“Were they tenors?” Holmes asked suddenly.

“Tenors?” Even Irene was surprised by the question.

“If we’re to make a grand opera of it, I’d like the voices assigned, at least.”

She laughed. “Two bass baritones and a . . . basso. Hearing their approach, I flattened myself against a convenient arras—the other side of the boardinghouse to you who don’t know opera.”

“Naturally you overheard them,” Holmes pressed.

“Naturally.”

“And followed them. I saw the footprints.”

“And followed them. They were expecting to follow, which makes one careless about being followed.”

“Yes,” Holmes said, puffing away like a steamship stack, “I recall that error.”

Irene didn’t press her advantage in evoking the time when she had followed him home in man’s guise and he had been in such single-minded pursuit of her that he hadn’t realized that until it was too late.

Instead she smiled at Godfrey.

“They walked back to Broadway, during which time I overheard their plans to abduct the young Vanderbilt girl.”

“And?” Godfrey asked. “I’m afraid I know your conclusion.”

Irene nodded. “I suspected that they were the creatures responsible for the torment and death of poor Father Hawks. I couldn’t stop them alone. So—”

“You joined them!” Holmes summarized, triumphant.

He had always said that the signs showed Irene in command of herself, and apparently her would-be kidnappers also.

“Oh, I didn’t go along without a struggle, but I convinced them eventually that I had motives that made us allies, not antagonists.”

“Which were?” I asked.

Irene sighed and leaned forward to address me. “You have to understand who these men were, Nell. You have to understand that I’d encountered Lola Montez’s worst nightmare.”

“Ultramontanes?” I asked, to Godfrey’s and Holmes’s mystification. How pleasant to be keeping up with Irene when neither man could.

“In a way,” she answered me, “but that’s a geographical
and political description of thirty years ago. It always only meant ‘those from over the mountains,’ from the south of southern Germany, from the Italian and Catholic city states.”

“Jesuits!” I suggested next.

Irene nodded slowly, inhaling on her elegant cigarette holder. She exhaled with the relief of one who is home again.

“Perhaps. Perhaps not quite.”

“Who else,” I demanded, “save Ulramontanes and Jesuits would care about pursuing Lola Montez thirty years after her death?”

“Not to mention,” Holmes noted from his own smoky-pipe corner of the room, “Red Indians.”

“A Red Indian,” Irene corrected him. “How did you know?”

“I saw the bare footprints at the boardinghouse. Of course they were all over the slaughterhouse. I imagine such a one would go unnoticed during the hot August weather of a New York summer. All the street urchins are barefoot, and some of the more destitute adults.”

I was aghast. “An Indian? Like Red Tomahawk? An Indian was among these Ultramontanes and Jesuits?”

Quentin, who’d been watching us with sleepy eyes, stirred on the sofa.

“Not so amazing, Nell. I’ve learned something of the entire globe and its peoples in my vagabond existence as an imperial diplomat. The Jesuits have always been the Vatican’s spies and secret agents, boldly going where their Catholic kind faced burning at the stake, from England after Henry the Eighth to a holding action in European principalities like Bohemia and Bavaria. But they’ve also been dedicated and courageous missionaries. They came to America more than two centuries ago to seek converts among the native tribes.”