Spider Dance (65 page)

“Iroquois, Huron, and Mohawk,” Holmes said. “All fierce North American tribes before there was a United States of anything. The Jesuit missionaries were mercilessly tortured for their pains. Martyred.”

“Crucified?” Irene asked, sitting up.

“In a way. The savagery of the West is only equaled by the savagery of the East.”

“And the savagery of the middle, known as the Inquisition,” Godfrey put in, his eyes glittering with courtroom indignation.

“The most savage man I knew,” Holmes put in, “was a butterfly collector. One who would catch, kill, and pin beauty can never be trusted.”

“What do you know about savages?” Irene asked him suspiciously.

Holmes smiled faintly. “I cabled your friend Buffalo Bill in Paris, where his Wild West Show still enchants visitors to the ongoing World’s Fair there. He and I are fellow ‘campaigners’ now, after the events of last spring. He and his able aide, Red Tomahawk, have answered my question about any links between eastern North American tribes and the Jesuits. As it happens, eight French Jesuits were tormented and ultimately murdered by the tribes they went to convert in the early seventeenth century. The most famous of these was the sainted Isaac Jogues, a French literature student turned Jesuit who had been savagely tortured. His fingers had been literally hacked and chewed off among other gruesome tortures.”

Irene was stunned, but not convinced. “The Indians tortured and killed those long-ago Jesuits. Why should one now do the same in the name of the Jesuits and the Ultramontanes?”

“Reparation for the sins of the fathers,” Holmes answered. “This modern savage is likely a devout convert, seeking to atone for his people’s past.”

“But he repeated it!” Quentin said. “Good God! He ended up torturing priests to death again. For what? Gold, not God.”

Holmes shook his head. “He believes what he’s told. I don’t know how or where these renegades found him, but they’ve made good use of him. The Indians called those early Jesuits Blackrobes. You’ve seen for yourself that this
shadowy group has adopted that dress. This Indian may take them for ghosts of the eight martyred Jesuits. Religious belief is a strange, almost hypnotic condition.”

“We humans can be an angry, vicious lot,” Quentin said, “no matter the clime or the breed. So what were these men really, Irene? Savage-masters? Political malcontents? Murderers? Thieves? And how could you persuade them to trust you?”

“A bit of all that, I think. They wanted to know what I knew. All about Lola. All of this is about Lola, really.”

“She’s dead, Irene!” I objected.

“Dead, but not forgotten. Isn’t that what we’d all want to happen to us?”

“Not I,” said I.

“Nor I,” Godfrey added.

Irene and Mr. Holmes kept amazingly quiet on the subject, and Quentin was too distracted to notice the byplay, perhaps by memories of Pink and her mysterious mission!

“So,” I asked, “who, exactly, were these men who fought so savagely in the slaughterhouse?”

Irene thought for a long while, a purely dramatic effect, I believe. “The heirs of the Ultramontanes, and the Jesuits, and Lola Montez.”

“Now,” said Godfrey, “there’s a union made in hell.”

“How,” Sherlock Holmes asked her, “were you able to communicate with them?”

Irene tapped the ash off her cigarette into a crystal bowl. “In German. Nell will recall that was the court language of Bohemia, if not the native one. It was also the language of Bavaria. I’ve sung in German and can speak it, not beautifully, but sufficiently well.”

“These were Bavarians?” Godfrey asked with some incredulity.

Irene nodded.

He paused to consider. “The current state of Bavaria is delicate, and the country is in great financial and political peril of being utterly consumed by the Austrian Empire. King Otto is confined to a madhouse. Prince Luitpold, the
regent, sits uneasily on the throne in Otto’s stead. People respect the late King Ludwig the First, despite his long-ago dalliance with Lola. In fact, they’re quite sentimental about his reign now, more than twenty years after his abdication. Yet the house of Wittalsbach is debased by the latter generations’ madness: Ludwig the Second’s castle-building mania, for instance, and rumors of syphilis behind the insanity. Some Bavarians recall Lola Montez as a liberating force. Others would burn her at the stake as a seductive sorceress. Still, her name has power. What did these so-called Ultramontanes want of her?”

“Money,” Irene said shortly. “They want the wealth they believe she took out of Bavaria and, ultimately, California: jewels and gold. I tried to convince them that the record shows that she auctioned off her jewels before leaving California. As for the gold they’re obsessed about reclaiming, they must mean the money she made in California with what they consider Bavarian capital. But who knows what became of it? Alva Vanderbilt with her balls and Fifth Avenue palaces had nothing on Lola. She spent like a sultan when she had the means, and more so when she didn’t.”

“Jewels and gold.” Sherlock Holmes made a great show of tapping the used tobacco from the bowl of his pipe into a crystal bowl.

Even I could see that something in this recital had struck a chord with him.

“And,” Irene added, “after speaking long with me and learning of my own quest, they were not averse to returning to Bavaria with an untainted heir. Or heiress, rather. One could argue paternal claims on the now-revered Ludwig the First, even if the maternal claims were on the notorious Lola Montez. An honest opera singer, an artiste even, rather than a faux Spanish dancer, held some appeal. The Bavarians were ever a musical people, and perhaps Lola’s lack of talent as much as her lack of morals enraged them.”

I sat bolt upright. “Irene! You let them think you were that heir? You let them think you were the daughter of Lola and
Ludwig? That you could produce the jewels and gold of Lola Montez?”

“Neither jewels,” Sherlock Holmes said, “nor gold. Isn’t that right, Mrs. Norton?”

“The jewels were sold—for a song, unfortunately. I found that fact during Nell’s and my day of reading about the many Lives—I should say Lies—of Lola. I can’t go to California and reclaim them from their buyers, even if I could prove a legitimate interest in them. Gold is even more of a challenge. It’s heavy and bulky. It doesn’t travel well. Not by sea, without notice. From California to the East? How? Robbery was a constant threat along the routes to and from California. So. How was all this gold brought out, even presuming Lola had it? These pseudo-Ultramontanes are not Jesuits, from what I learned, but from among the college students who railed against King Ludwig the First and Lola for their liberalizing ways thirty years ago. They’re now latter-day dreamers. That doesn’t make them any less demented or lethal. They aspire to impose their old, long-lost order on today’s Bavaria. Assuredly, they’re responsible for the death of Father Hawks and the torture of Father Edmonds.”

Holmes nodded and exhaled smoke. “Father Hawks, as her deathbed confessor, was the last man alive to share the final moments of Lola Montez. He would be expected to know something of her ‘lost treasure.’”

“How awful!” I said with a shudder. “Innocents tormented for information they never knew.”

“Or perhaps never knew they had,” Holmes said. “Lola may have had more means remaining to her than anyone suspected.”

“Possibly,” Irene said. “She reportedly was eager to keep her mother from claiming any future inheritance. So Lola signed any other future income, beyond the twelve hundred dollars she left to settle debts and to the Magdalen Asylum, to the people of Bavaria.”

Godfrey shook his head. “Too vague to stand up in court.”

“So,” I realized, “these fiends aren’t completely mad to
dream of finding or claiming something. Still, to drive dagger blades through men’s hands—”

“Speaking of such horrors,” Irene said to Holmes, “how did you intend to avoid the fate of the fathers?”

I glanced at her, horrified. “They were going to torture a Pinkerton?”

“Indeed. Had you and Godfrey not arrived so fortuitously, and so noisily, we might even now be discussing this with Mr. Holmes in Bellevue.”

I stared aghast at the man serenely puffing away on a pipe. “But . . . you play the violin—though poorly, in my opinion. How could you risk your hands?”

“Apparently such a tragedy would have been a boon to amateur music critics everywhere.” He glanced at Irene. “I was assuming that Mrs. Norton would abandon her impersonation of a greedy pretender to the Bavarian throne in time to avert such an incident”

“And if she had not?” I demanded.

“I assume you lack faith in me, not your boon companion. I also had a trick or two up my sleeves, being alerted early to these madmen’s favorite form of persuasion.”

At that he made the gesture of a gentleman shaking his jacket sleeves down to expose the fineness of his cuffs, a strange act of vanity in one whose thoughts were always so lofty.

His action revealed two sharp steel blades on springs.

Irene laughed and clapped her hands. “You have borrowed a trick from my old tutors the card sharps. And I would have intervened, but was hoping I wouldn’t have to. As long as I appeared to have an interest in being one of them, Consuelo was safe.”

“How so?” I asked.

Irene shrugged modestly, always a dangerous sign. “Once I was accepted as the lost ruler of Bavaria, I told them, I would reveal Consuelo as my daughter, given at birth by Madame Restell to the Vanderbilts. Thus Bavaria would have a legitimately illegitimate claim on the Vanderbilt millions.”

“That’s impossible!” I said.

“Is it, Nell? Madame Restell committed ‘suicide’ in 1877, the year Consuelo was born. Who’s to say madame’s brutal death wasn’t murder, timed to conceal the fact that an infant was sold to the wealthiest family in New York at the same time.”

“Even more preposterous!” I continued.

“Yes,” Irene agreed, “but the mad Bavarian Ultramontanes believed it.” She sighed. “Haven’t we learned, Nell, in our recent investigations, that parenthood is an easy thing to feign?”

“Amen,” Quentin said. “Babies can be bought on the streets of New York for ten dollars and up. When one looks at the mental and moral state of first families here and abroad, one becomes certain that more among us are changelings than we might think.”

“How do you know this, Quentin?” I asked, but Godfrey answered for him.

“Look at Bavaria, Nell, with its reigning family gone to seed and a regent on the throne. Natural decay has brought on this insane attempt to reclaim glory days of three decades ago.”

“Mr. Holmes!” I never dreamed I would be appealing to him. “Surely all this can’t be so?”

“No, it cannot, Miss Huxleigh.” He stood, ready to take his leave. “I will shortly be able to tell you all just how much of it is so.

“Mrs. Norton.” He bowed in Irene’s direction. ‘It’s pleasing to learn that you’d rather shoot revolutionaries than see my humble self mutilated. I regret that your innate humanity cost you the throne of Bavaria.”

“Ah,” Irene said, waving her cigarette holder like a scepter, “I’d already lost Bohemia. What is one more minuscule European principality?”

He smiled. Tightly.

“I may call upon you all again, but this time it will be for the denouement rather than the climax.”

“Will you expect us to applaud?” I asked.

“No, Miss Huxleigh, I will expect you to be surprised.”

The character of the Spanish dancer, whose pas and pose
have been more than a mated for a Ministry, upheld by
all the influence of the Jesuit, is belter known man her
history . . . . Wherever she appears, she is in the
midst of an imbroglio
.
—
ILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWS, 1847

Godfrey, of course, retired that evening to Irene’s bedroom.

They rose very late the next morning.

By then I’d already availed myself of the hotel’s bathing facilities adjacent to our rooms.

Irene ordered hot coffee, tea, and pastries, then assigned me to accept them while she and Godfrey attended to their morning ablutions.

This left me fretting over cooling pots of coffee and hot water until they deigned to stroll back into our common parlor sometime after noon, both still wearing their dressing gowns.